After a while they only started that game if a boy was absent and the lines would be unbalanced. Then they’d make me the official timer, handing me a stopwatch with the instructions on how to arrest the sweep of the second hand when the object had finally passed all the way down the winning line. Everybody laughed and shouted so much I had to turn my hearing aids off. The seconds swept by in silence.
I asked the clown one afternoon if he thought they played the game the same way when I was absent. Was Timmy made the timer, or Gary or Josh? He didn’t really know. I never told my parents or Cassidy about it. I just kept practicing my printing and my numbers; kept learning new signs; kept reading and listening to stories; kept putting all the new sounds into proper shapes before letting them out; kept scanning the ceiling for friends.
None of the girls in my class ever invited me to their house to play. That didn’t bother me as much as the way they went about making their plans to visit each other. They started, usually, during the lunch break. We sat together at a long table in the back of the classroom. Marci or Courtney or Dorey or Sasha or Lexi or Lacy would announce their new present. Dorey would say, “I have a new sheepdog puppy with a diamond collar!” The other girls would stop eating and stare at her in wonder. In a few seconds she would say, “Lexi, would you like to come over today to play with him? We can feed him cupcakes! He loves cupcakes!” Then she’d look at me and smile a little before continuing, now in a whisper so I, theoretically, wouldn’t hear, “His name is Bo Bo! I named him that!” “A puppy!” Lexi would reply. “I love puppies!” Then it would be Lexi’s turn to give me a wan and knowing look. In a whisper that hollowly echoed Dorey’s feigned concern, she’d add, “I’ll ask my mom if I can.”
I sat, quietly chewing my finger sandwich, reading their foul lips, never letting them see how sad they made me feel by pretending their whispers worked. For something so soft, a whisper can sting like a whip.
Most lunch periods I took to quietly counting numbers in my head. I went slowly, trying to see how each number looked when it was spelled out, stumbling over the eighties for weeks, somehow the alignment of letters never looking quite right, but eventually I could get way into the two hundreds before it was time to clear our trays and sit in a circle for a song.
I did have one friend, Tina, from my first classroom. She didn’t have as much trouble sitting still as most of the other kids there, but it was very hard for her to speak. She stuttered. It made Jeremy laugh. Even Ms. Whitney smiled a few times. “What is your name?” she asked her that first day of class. “T-T-T-T-T-T-T-Tina,” came the rat-a-tat reply. Jeremy rose from his seat, streaked to her chair, and stole the ribbon from her ponytail. “T-T-T-Tina!” he yelled, running and waving the ribbon so fast it seemed to blur to a pink cloud above his head.
Soon after I went to my new class, Tina’s mother called mine to arrange a Saturday playdate. Father drove me to their house. It wasn’t far from school. Close enough, in fact, that we sometimes walked there with Tina’s mom to play on the swings and climbing sets if the weather was nice. But that first day, we just stayed inside her house. Tina’s mother was a big woman with so much black hair I could see only the very center of her face. Her eyebrows and ears were hidden in a ringleted wave of shiny black. She reminded me of a raven with a smile. She had the warmest hands of any human being I have ever touched. She took my hand in hers as we walked from Father’s car, and it was like holding a hot bun right from the oven. “Are you a nurse?” I asked on the second step of the brick stairs going up to the front door.
“No, honey,” she said with a big smile of very white teeth. “I’m just Tina’s mommy.” It was an early October day, the kind that spreads sky blue on the city every autumn. The light was clear and made the fallen leaves shine yellow and orange. Every window in the house was open to the mix of scents from the earth. Tina’s father was in the backyard mowing the grass. It all smelled sweet as a bakery.
We played a while in her room. Her ceiling was flat and painted pink. There were no ridges in the plaster, but the overlapping roller marks left by the painter made dark rhomboids that looked like a puzzle to be assembled. We gave her dolls a tea party. Tina said very little. She let me do most of the talking. She did say once, “M-M-M-More t-t-t-t-tea?” to Raggedy Anne. And then she frowned and moved her lips quietly, “More tea? More tea? More tea?”
“You said it! You said, ‘More tea’ three times!” I spoke as slowly and carefully as I could, somehow warned by Tina’s tongue to be gentle with words. Still Tina had an innate talent in deciphering my voice and was able to understand me. Chew ed a-hit! Chew ed, ‘Umure tya’ tahree tayumes!
“N-N-No I d-d-d-d-didn’t!” she stammered. “I d-d-d-d-didn’t s-s-say any-th-thing!” Her face drained of color and tears welled in her eyes.
“I saw your lips say it. ‘More tea’ three times went your lips.”
She looked at me blankly and lipped again, “More tea.”
“You did it again!” I exclaimed. Tina started to cry. She covered her face with her hands. “Tina,” I started, “don’t cry. You don’t even have to try to talk to me. Just move your lips and I’ll know what you said. I just need to be looking at you.” I put my hand on her arm. It was warm like her mother’s, but tears had dripped down in wet streaks making it a little slippery. Somehow I thought of Jeremy’s head. “Is Jeremy still wild?” I asked, hoping to break the spell of sadness that had been cast. She uncovered her face and nodded.
“He’s c-c-c-c,” she tried.
I shook my head and lipped, “He’s crazy.”
“He’s crazy,” she lipped back. “Really crazy.”
“Really, really crazy,” I mouthed with my eyes spinning like crashing moons. It made her laugh.
We went downstairs. There was a jigsaw puzzle under construction on the dining room table, a Halloween jack-o'-lantern that was bigger than my bathtub. We worked on it for the remainder of the afternoon. When she wanted to tell me something, she tapped the tabletop with a piece so I’d look up. Freed of the need to talk, of the fear of her own uncertain voice, Tina didn’t leave her seat for two hours. Her mother looked in on us fourteen times. I counted.
“Good-bye,” Tina lipped in the driveway when Father arrived to pick me up.
“Good-bye,” I lipped back.
It was the start of my only real friendship with another child, one that would last the three years until I died. I’m pretty sure it was Tina who gave me the flu that December. She gave it to me when she shouted, spraying a little spit in my eyes, “I’m sick! I have a c-cold.” She said it with pride and near perfection. We were coloring Santas at the kitchen table in her house. Her mom had baked brownies for us. We ate them before they cooled, with the chocolate chips still mostly liquid. “I love brownies,” she declared with her mouth brown and full.
I never tire of watching that tape.
Father was the god of my nocturnal firmament. He expanded it year on year. In the beginning, there were single stars so lonely in the void they could have been the eyes of cast-off angels looking down on me. If, in the dark, I let my own eyes pass from glowing point to glowing point, sometimes it seemed one would blink. Then the rapid movement of my eyes back to the signaling star would seem to start others twinkling. Next, Father came with constellations. Before I fell asleep, I was content to lie on my back and decode the shapes he was gradually pasting there, trying to remember what had been present before and what new star had appeared in my heavens. In the bright light of day, the stars transformed the ceiling’s savannah to a rocky plain where egrets stood on boulders and rabbits threw stones from raised paws. It all made the clown laugh.
I was born in February, the month dedicated in antiquity to purification. I am Aquarius, the Water Bearer. My symbol glows above my bed, the two jagged parallel lines like tight waves in the sea. Father used a fluorescent paint for that. He tinted it the exact color of the ceiling so I couldn’t see it in the light of day. But I had no need to. In the day, my wh
ole ceiling sloshed like the eternal ocean. It befitted me.
When I started kindergarten at five and a half, Father wanted me to play sports with the other kids. He saw how lonely I was in school. It didn’t seem right to him that I was always and only with Tina during breaks. He favored soccer over T-ball because of the bat, over bowling because of the ball. Mother went along mostly because she was so swollen with her pregnancy.
Cassidy was dead set against it. He was against it right after he asked me if I wanted to play “in the cold and the rain and the suckin’ mud.”
“It’s not the rain or the mud or the cold,” I truthfully answered. I extended my index fingers from my fist and brought them together side by side I cupped my right hand, palm down, and brought it up and down at waist level four times.
Cassidy scratched his head and struggled a moment with the sign. Then he said, “Same kids as in your class right now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Tina and home are better.”
“Ford,” he told Father, “it’s not the best of times ta start this soccer stuff with Jess. With Kate and the baby coming soon, ya know, it’ll be a real chore getting her to practices and games. What d’ya think, put it off a year? I mean, five is still real young for starting in on soccer.” It was the signup weekend and he had come over to sit in on my morning ASL lesson.
“We’ll manage, Joe,” Father said, not even looking up from the form he was filling out. “About how tall are you now, Jess? Do you know?”
“No.”
“Do you know how much you weigh?”
“No.”
He eyed me up and down. “I’ll put forty-four inches and forty-four pounds. Nobody’ll check it.” He jotted the numbers and mumbled, “Brown. Brown. No. No. Yes.” He looked up again. “You’ve had your TB shots and measles, haven’t you?”
“There’s no shot for TB,” Cassidy said with a medical finality I’d rarely heard from my physicians.
“Says here there is,” Father said tapping a line on the form. “I’m sure you had all this stuff. I’ll write down a date when you were, like, one and a half. Nobody’ll check it.”
“Ford,” Cassidy said, “it ain’t right.”
“Joe, I told you: nobody’ll check it. And if they do, we’ll just correct the dates and numbers. I mean, Jesus, this stuff isn’t like zip codes or anything.”
“Not the dates and stuff, Ford. Soccer. It ain’t right. She don’t really want ta do it in the first place. And it’s the same group a kids as in her class right now. They don’t get along in school and kickin’ a soccer ball around isn’t going ta change that a bit. I think she’d do better visiting with Tina or being here with us than running around in the cold with a bunch of kids who . . .” He stumbled for words for a second, before concluding, “. . . who she don’t like.”
“Well, Joe, sometimes you just got to try something new.” He signed his name to the bottom of the third page with a flourish. “Let’s go!” he said like one of those soldiers in the movies when they begin to attack and die.
What really soured me on the enterprise was my clumsiness. I had terrible balance. I was okay if I walked slowly, like in school, but as soon as I started running, I would start lurching and listing. Then my arms would start to thrust wildly, like a tight-wire walker desperately trying to prevent a fall. Running, I looked as strange as Jeremy in the presence of a sounding phone. I worried about the merciless teasing certain to come from the kids. They had never seen me run before. Really, only Tina and her mom had, when we went to the empty school ground to play. Then, we’d chase each other, Tina in those early months joyously stuck in the shouted first groove of my name, “J-J-J-J-J-J,” as she tried to catch me in a two-person game of “a-a-a-a-a-it,” and me barely out of her reach, flouncing like a windmill mounted on a boat sailing herky-jerky in a gale. Tina, exposed to crazy Jeremy day after day, thought nothing of my spastic sprints. What my classmates would think, and more importantly what they would say, would be something else entirely.
As we drove to the first practice that Saturday, I imagined how the girls in my class would look running on the field. All I could see in my mind’s eye were their six shining ponytails, gracefully rising and gracefully falling with each lope, perfect tails going up and down with each perfect stride. My hair was cut too short for a ponytail. It didn’t even cover my ears.
Everyone in the class showed up to join the team, the fourteen of us. Our coach was Mr. Lester, the third grade teacher. He had a thin mustache that made him look like he was always smiling. Which was good, because he never really did. But he never yelled, either. He let the parents do that at the games. They hardly needed his help. Mr. Lester was nice.
We practiced that day. There were cut-up oranges and water so cold it gave me an ache in my eyes.
We kicked the soccer ball to him a few times and he kicked it back. Then we did some drills. Timmy was made the goalie. His parents clapped and cheered, “Timmy! Tiiiimmm-eeee!” when he stepped in front of the net. They were eating potato chips from a big bag and were sharing a Diet Coke from a can. Timmy’s mother wore shorts. Each of her legs was bigger than my whole body.
I had been right about the girls. They ran beautifully. Marci was the best. She was so fast and could stop so easily and just as easily dart off again. All of their ponytails were well behaved, even Sasha’s, whose hair was kind of curly.
My turn came to run in the drill. Mr. Lester stood thirty feet away next to a brown rubber cone that looked like a toy volcano. Halfway between us, Courtney stood facing me. All I had to do was run, kicking the ball in front of me, past Courtney, all the way to Mr. Lester. He had a stopwatch in his hand and said, just like Father at home, “Let’s go!” I kicked the ball and ran after it and kicked it again and ran again. Then I kicked and missed far left and almost fell. I came back to the ball and kicked it hard, but it squibbled away to the right. I ran to it fast as I could and tried to kick it towards Courtney because she was in line with Mr. Lester. The ball rolled past her, and I had to run hard again. I kicked it three more times before, panting and dizzy, I got to the brown volcano.
“I think you’d make a good defender,” he said, looking at his watch. “Left side.”
My face was stinging hot from the running, and I was out of breath and still dizzy. I looked to the side of the field. Father stood smiling with his fist raised in victory salute. Cassidy looked down at the foot-worn grass with both hands in his pants pockets. Courtney passed me going to the starting point. “Dumbo. Your ears flap like baby Dumbo’s when you run.” She jogged past me, her ponytail burnished by the midday sun. The sight of the brown volcano made me want to vomit.
That night I stood on the toilet seat in my bathroom at home so I could see myself in the mirror, and I jogged in place. With each pounding step, my ear flapped down and a little forward due to the weight of the apparatus behind it.
I had seen the movie. Cassidy had brought it over when I was three and we watched it together a dozen times over the months. I loved that baby elephant, so brave and pure. What Courtney had said about me wasn’t untrue. I did look like him when he waved his big ears and tried to fly. Seeing that truth somehow took the sting out of Courtney’s snipe, and the anger out of my heart. On the coming Monday in school, when the new taunt from the ponytail herd began, “Dumbo, Dumbo, Dumbo,” I smiled at them and flapped both ears with my index fingers.
I counted all the more furiously during my soundless lunches. I was into the thousands now. The numbers, the words for the numbers, came in flocks, in herds, in droves that seemed to cover the backs of my eyes. I could make them whatever colors I chose. There were so many in my eyes I could see nothing else.
“What’s Dumbo thinking about?” Lexi asked me Tuesday. She had gotten her very own soccer goal for her backyard on Sunday, the day after first practice. “Are you thinking about flying?” The other girls giggled. “It would be faster than your running,” Courtney added.
“Fly, Dumbo, fly!” said Lexi.<
br />
I flapped my ears, flicking the switches that turned off my aids without looking up from my lunch tray. I said quite softly, “One thousand four hundred eleven.” I decided to call any group of five or more girls with ponytails a “lash.”
We had practice every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. We played five Saturday games against other teams. It rained on three of the practices and two of the games. The field was muddy where I was positioned every game and practice. It was windy and freezing cold in mid-October the fourth game, and I had to wear a sweater and a wool cap to keep warm as I stood, motionless, for the better part of an hour. I was so cold that day, the water I drank from the yellow jug at halftime didn’t hurt my eyes.
Timmy was an even worse player than me. He could barely move when the ball came his way. He blocked only two kicks the whole season, including during practices. The girls laughed at him almost as much as at me. The boys were a little better. I think they were afraid to make him mad. He had a temper. Lexi told him her opinion every time they were close on the field and away from the hearing of Mr. Lester. “You stink,” she said. Since I was positioned on the left as a defender, I was always pretty close to where Timmy stood. I could smell his damp creosote odor in the air all the time. It really didn’t stink. It reminded me of going to the beach in the summers and visiting the boats at the marinas. Timmy stood in front of the goal and looked like a moored boat—a tug or a ferry— ever so imperceptibly moving left, right, left, right to the swells only he could feel. His pink face got red just from the exertion of standing and rocking with the tiniest of excursions. “Next time,” I yelled as encouragement the first time the other side scored.
“You shut up, Dumbo,” he shouted back, rocking, rocking, relentlessly rocking. “You stink, too.”
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Page 10