by Jo Ann Beard
“Band people!”
From a distance Wilton seems small compared to his wife, and he keeps losing his balance and having to jump down from the bumper. Felicia is standing in a cluster of clarinets, but so far I don’t see any flutes, just an ocean of ill-fitting wool. Everyone I look at seems to be scratching their neck.
In the same way people can resemble their dogs, the flutes are a thin and tremulous bunch, led by Larue Varrick, a pale, cautious girl with red-rimmed eyes. I join them, somewhere in the middle, with the woodwinds right behind us. Felicia reaches over and taps my shoulder.
“This coat is itching me,” she says.
The cheerleaders and the football players are waiting for the band to take shape so they can get into formation behind us. They’re standing around, some with arms folded, some with hands on hips, watching the proceedings bemusedly, the same way grown-ups might stand in a doorway and watch a cartoon.
“What’s wrong?” Felicia asks me.
The giant kid on tuba straggles up, his pants dragging, and stops to apply Chap Stick to the bottom half of his face, chin and all. Two cheerleaders gape at him and then abruptly turn their backs to compose themselves. When they turn back they’re poker faced, deliberately not looking at each other. Suddenly I’m flooded with the same feeling of humiliation that I get when someone from school accidentally sees me with my parents.
“What?” Felicia says curiously. In the hat, she looks as tall as the Empire State Building. I can feel my ears standing out like tabs on either side of my head.
I hadn’t realized before, but now I do: We’ve made a terrible mistake. Band is weird.
I’d like to be the kind of person who can do something weird and not become weird because of it, but that’s out of reach for me—I am what I do at this point, and if I do this I’m done for. Once I march in their parade, I will be in it forever, uniform or not.
Felicia, unaware, has gone back to her spot. She’s been stationed in the very middle like a tent pole, and I’m on an end, where everyone in Zanesville can get a good look.
Help.
Drum roll.
Help.
Cymbals.
With that, Wilton sweeps his arms upward and then downward, sending the band shuffling forward, out of the parking lot and into the street, toward Elm Ave and the IGA parking lot, where the rest of the parade is forming.
Right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left.
The neighborhood looks haunted, with wet leaves clumped in the gutters and streetlamps creating cones of light high in the air. At the corner, instruments are lifted to lips and blown into, and a big misshapen sound comes forth. The song of the weirdos. Somewhere behind us, cheerleaders and football players follow along wryly.
As doom descends, panic rises, and a vampire motors past in a golf cart, smiling with plastic teeth.
* * *
In retrospect we probably should have quit band after the parade instead of during it.
“In retrospect, we never should have been in band in the first place,” Felicia says. “I was only doing it because you said to.”
“You played the clarinet when I met you!” I say indignantly.
“Remember I said, ‘I play the clarinot’?” she reminds me.
“Remember I said, ‘My playing is flutile’?” I reply.
“That’s when we first knew each other was funny,” she says dispiritedly.
We’re carrying our instruments and our hats. We tried to take the jackets off to be less conspicuous, but it was too cold. So we’re a block off Elm Ave, where there are no elms and where the parade is roaring along at one mile an hour, thousands of people lining the route, just as we feared. A car swishes past us and pulls up at the curb, and a man gets out balancing a pizza box and a six-pack of pop.
“The parade’s thattaway,” he says cordially.
“We know,” Felicia answers.
He stares at us for a moment, resting the pop against his hip.
“Which school is that uniform?” he asks.
“John Deere,” I say.
“I went to Walt Whitman way back when,” he says. “Worst years of my life—just kidding.”
Now that I’m not in the parade, I have nothing against it. We decide to cut over and watch it from the Grassy Knoll, a hidden spot about ten feet above the sidewalk, where a gently sloping hill meets an eight-foot retaining wall. From up there, if one were so inclined, cars going by on Elm Ave can be bomped with soft, rotting vegetables, preferably ones that splash, like tomatoes. We’ve never done it ourselves, but we know of certain others who have.
“I hope your sister and her friends aren’t there,” Felicia says.
The Knoll is on the far side of the RF Charity Home for the Infirm, where the old folks have been bundled up and put out on the sidewalk in their wheelchairs. Some of them are waving and clapping, some of them look angry, some have already faded into sleep.
When I was young, the RF was an actual house with tall, shuttered windows and a cupola, donated by Miss Jemima Rosen of the Rosen Fertilizer family after her death. It was a place for old schoolteachers and nurses, mostly, but then they tore it down and built a facility, low and brick. Once, years ago, a demented woman came up on our porch, knocked on the door, and, when my mother answered it, told her that they were trying to kill her over at the Fertilizer Home. My mother brought her in, put a housecoat on her, and called one of her friends to discuss it before giving up and reporting it to the home’s staff. When they came to pick her up, the old woman was at the sink drying dishes that I was running water over and handing to her.
I felt so strange about that woman, her dark eyes and cottony hair, the thin, pilled nightgown she was wearing. Off and on for a year afterward, I would ride my bike in their circular drive, watching for her, but she was never let out again.
The Grassy Knoll is empty and has a perfectly framed view of the parade route: A series of floats with macabre themes is under way, each appearing and then making way for the next, like Pez, followed by a cluster of boys on dirt bikes weaving in and out of one another in some kind of Boy Scout formation, one familiar kid in the middle of them, bigger than the rest and hatless. Derek Kozak, revving his engine. Before we can process that, we’re seeing our own majorettes, in their leotards and fishnets—from this angle they look young again—then Wilton with a whistle in his mouth, followed by the band, loud and brassy, and so tightly bunched that the two holes we left are gone.
The band members are indistinguishable under their hats and behind their instruments. Next the cheerleaders swim by in their neat cable-knit sweaters and short skirts, the football players following trancelike in their wake. Suddenly I feel desolate in my queer wool tunic and limp, electrified hair; I might as well be one of the zombies out there broadcasting Tootsie Rolls into the crowd. Two leather-vested women ride by on palomino horses with a banner stretched between them. Right as the horses clop past, one of them slows down, arches its tail, and churns out a road apple.
“Trick or treat,” Felicia says.
A half hour later, back at John Deere, people are getting their cases out of the gym and turning in their plumes. Wilton wanders through the ranks, exhausted and euphoric, blue coat open to the elements.
“Good work, girls,” he murmurs as he passes Felicia and me taking apart our instruments.
For just a moment, we think we’ve gotten away with it, until I glance over and see Varrick, the first flute, staring at me. Her nose is running from the cold, her blond hair wisping out of its long, sullen braid.
“Hey,” I say weakly.
“Hay is for jackasses,” she replies.
* * *
Detention is held in one of the science rooms, where there are lab tables instead of desks. Felicia and I walk in together but pretend not to know each other so the monitor will put us at the same table. She barely looks up from wh
at she’s knitting, something green and tube shaped.
“Do your homework,” she says to her needles. “If I hear talking, everyone in here will have another detention added.”
“God!” somebody exclaims, a hoodlum in a red sweatshirt and a jean jacket. He has a sneering baby face, with jet-black shiny hair that he tosses sideways, like a nervous horse.
“That’s talking,” she says. “So, one more for everyone in here.”
Another kid raises his hand as we take our seats. Knitting, she doesn’t see it until he clears his throat raspingly, several times.
“What do you want, Mr. Prentiss?”
“Um, I was wondering if I could not have more detentions added, because I didn’t say anything and if I get any more my dad is going to take away my dog, and all I did to get in here was nothing… I missed health class, but it was because I had a doctor’s appointment and I went to it, but my mom never called the office and I thought she was going to, and so I left without permission but I thought I had permission. It was to get my arm rewrapped.” He indicates his wrist, which is haphazardly wrapped in a dirty Ace bandage.
“Why would he take away your dog?” the monitor asks, looking over the top of her glasses at Mr. Prentiss, who isn’t quite cute.
“Because,” he begins slowly, thinking it through, “my dog… was given to me by my friend’s brother… this guy who found him down running along the river when he was fishing, and for some reason no matter what my friend’s brother did, this dog…”
“All right,” she says shortly. “I don’t want to hear about a dog and I don’t want to hear talking, period. Starting right now, anything I hear will lead to another detention for everyone.”
The original kid raises his hand. She looks at him.
“God!” he exclaims.
“One detention for everyone, thanks to Mr. Nelson,” she says decisively. Mr. Prentiss waves his hand again, clearing his throat, but she ignores him, stabbing away at her project.
Felicia has her head bowed over her math book, writing carefully into a notebook. She tears the page out without looking up, folds it and turns to a new chapter, begins writing again. The folded page disappears and then materializes on my lap. I open my English book and thumb through my binder, finding my assignment, which I unfold and place in front of me, where I can read it. It says:
THAT GUY LIKES YOU!!!!!!!!!!
I work on my assignment, fold it, and send it next door, where it is found to say:
NO HE DOESN’T!!!!!!!! (WHICH ONE???)
She sighs, flips around in her book, and then settles down again, yellow hair swinging forward. She tears a corner from her page and rolls it absentmindedly as she reads. Two seconds later, a tiny scroll lands in front of me.
DOG ONE, it says.
I write in my notebook and then push it far to the side to make room for my grammar book. Flea glances at the open page, which is next to her elbow.
RED SWEATSHIRT ONE LIKES YOU!!!!!!!
Eyes on the monitor, she reaches over and erases the r in sweatshirt.
I don’t know why she said that guy liked me, because he doesn’t, but just having had it said and then seeing him every day in detention makes it seem vaguely true. To my knowledge, I’ve never had a guy like me before.
“Rodney Feldsquaw,” Felicia reminds me, ear to the door. We’re in her room, hiding from her mother, who has a Saturday off and is making her way through the house in a robe and rubber gloves.
Rodney Feldsquaw materialized last summer, at her outdoor family reunion, when I got cornered by an uncle who took me aside to show me how to throw a horseshoe. According to this uncle, he couldn’t stand watching somebody who didn’t know what they were doing… in anything, not just a game. The uncle had taught people things I couldn’t imagine—one person, how to fix a merry-go-round that had a slight hitch in it.
“This was over at the state fair,” he explained. “It wasn’t dangerous, no, but it sure as hell wasn’t right. The guy didn’t have a tooth in his head, and I just said, ‘Listen, hobo, get a wrench and I’m gonna show you something that will help you.’ ”
At that, the uncle had held a horseshoe directly in front of his face like a hand mirror and glared into it. “You go like this…,” he said to me, sweeping his arm backward, “then you go like this,” and he let it fly. The horseshoe landed in the dirt right where he had gouged out a mark with his heel. He handed me one. “Now I want to see you do that,” he said.
I wanted to see me do that too—for being not good at any game or sport, I am nevertheless very competitive. At one point in my youth I was stopped from playing the big neighborhood games that required running and tagging because I would get short of breath to the point of reeling. Everyone thought it was from asthma, but it wasn’t. It was hyperventilation brought on by losing.
The uncle’s coaching had no effect, but he kept me there practicing and listening to tales of how he had successfully demonstrated other skills to other people. “I said to the guy, ‘Don’t stab at it. Rather, you put the shovel under it and pry…’ ”
Eventually horseshoes broke up and Felicia came to rescue me.
“I have to go,” I said to the uncle.
“We’re done here anyway,” he answered.
As I went to walk away, he loomed for a moment, tall and thick, with gold frames around two of his teeth, and asked me one last thing. “Now, you have a boyfriend, don’t you?”
That tutorial I couldn’t begin to fathom, so I just nodded.
“You better!” he said.
“I do,” I lied.
“What’s his name?” he asked.
While he stood there expectantly, I stared at him, my mind as white and flat as a bedsheet pinned to a line. Name. Name?
“Rodney Feldsquaw,” I said.
“Feldsquaw?” he asked. “What kind of name is that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Well, he sounds strange,” the uncle said.
He would have to be, wouldn’t he? And even stranger is the fact that once I conjured him up, R. Feldsquaw wouldn’t leave. Blurry and unspecific, he lounged around the edges of my daydreams, admiring me.
Unlike Rodney Feldsquaw, Mr. Prentiss at least has the sense to not pay any attention to me. All he’s ever offered me is the back of his head, which, the more I look at it, the more I realize how attractive it is. The silky brown hair that kinks sideways in one spot, the way he puts it behind his ears before talking and then shakes it loose again when he’s finished. The army jacket with a ballpoint design on the back, possibly made with a Spirograph, the flannel-shirted shoulders, the sneakers mended with duct tape.
“He looks at you,” Felicia insists. “When you walk by, he swivels around and watches you.”
“It’s the gargoyle effect,” I say.
Meanwhile, we were only given five days of detention and we’re down to the end, unless I can think of a way to get more.
“I actually don’t want more,” Felicia says.
Her closet door has a mirror on it and there’s another mirror above her dresser, so if I stand on a chair I can see what I look like from behind. A knock on the door. Felicia flattens herself against the wall.
“Who is it?” I say.
“Stephanie,” Stephanie says through the door, and then sniffs, a loud, loose sound that makes me feel like going home.
“What?”
“You guys are supposed to help, my mom said.”
“I’m busy,” I tell her, staring into the mirror. I feel a surge of affection for the back of me, trim and unsuspecting in its pink sweater and corduroy pants.
“Doing what?” Stephanie asks.
“Lookin’ at me arse,” I reply.
“I’m telling,” she says automatically. And then, because she can’t help herself: “Where’s Flea?”
Felicia throws the door open and yanks her inside. She resists, just for the sake of it, and is pulled across the carpet, stiff and grimacing.
&n
bsp; “Did I hear you say Step On Me?” Felicia asks her.
“No,” Stephanie says primly, shaking herself loose. Before we know what’s happening, she whirls and starts kicking wildly, which is her new thing. The whole younger generation is suddenly into kung fu fighting, inspired by a TV show.
“Get out of here, you little skrizz,” Felicia says, stepping back.
“Ha!” Stephanie cries, kicking inefficiently in all directions. “Now you’re scared of me!”
“I’m scared that you’re an idiot,” Felicia answers, closing the door behind her.
The back of Mr. Prentiss and the back of me seem like a perfect couple. If relationships were that easy, we’d have it made; instead, I have to somehow get a padded bra.
“That’s what books are for!” Felicia insists. “You walk in holding your books across your chest. You look at him. You smile. You say hi.”
She stares at herself in the mirror and then smiles, to demonstrate. “Can you do that?”
“I can do the books-across-my-chest part,” I tell her.
Just at that moment there’s a commotion, yelling and the sound of a clattering bucket. Her mother has had it. Even my name is being taken in vain: if I’m not willing to help clean up this house, which I was more than willing to help destroy, then maybe it’s time for me to go home. She bangs open the door.
“I’ll take the bathroom,” I say quickly.
I love cleaning; it gives you time to think. There’s nothing better than thinking. Thinking about detention mostly, how romantic it is: The rustling sound of note passing, the way the monitor periodically lifts her knitting high in the air to loosen another length of yarn from the skein, the clock jumping along, the science smell of sulfur and dissected worms. Mr. Prentiss’s foot in its sneaker, hooked around the bottom of his chair.
What if he just spontaneously started talking to me and I just started talking back? What if I talked to him first and he started talking back? What if he said something to me and I went completely dormant and didn’t say anything back? What if I said something to him and he didn’t say anything back? What if I go in clutching my books and smile and say hi and he is sickened and embarrassed? What about when I was a kindergartner and had on my favorite little hat with yarn pigtails and a face embroidered on the back, and a sixth-grade boy who I was enchanted with started teasing me by speaking only to my hat? What about how I sobbed until he begged me to stop? What if I do something like that again?