by Jo Ann Beard
“You don’t have to put your arm in the toilet,” Felicia’s mom says, standing in the doorway. “There’s a brush.”
“I like to,” I tell her, scrubbing. It’s the only way you can really get in there.
“Well, it might not even be sanitary,” she says, continuing on her way.
There are several surefire ways of getting detentions: anything having to do with a fire alarm, destruction of school property, tampering with school property, misuse of school property, launching of projectiles, physical aggression, and possession of smoking materials. I wouldn’t mind committing any of the crimes, but I can’t bear the idea of being caught for them, after all the lecturing and disappointment we inspired getting the detentions we already have.
A less surefire way would be to skip a class, but we can’t hurt another teacher’s feelings, which rules out everything but Special Sports, taught by a traveling teacher, Mr. Pettle, who doesn’t bother learning people’s names from school to school, just calls everyone either Bub or Dolly. We don’t care any more about Pettle’s feelings than he cares about ours, but the fact is he doesn’t take attendance. Right now Special Sports is medicine ball, a gloomy game where we all lie on our backs in a circle and kick an enormous leaden ball back and forth.
“I’ll talk to you while you hurry,” Felicia says, stepping gingerly across the floor I’m washing to sit on the edge of the tub. She shouldn’t be done yet, but she is—one of the reasons you can write your name on every surface in this house.
“I think we should skip medicine ball and walk around in the halls until somebody catches us,” I suggest, rinsing the toothbrushes in hot water.
“I’m not getting more detentions,” she says testily, “and neither are you. We’re wasting our lives in there.”
“That one kid likes you!” I say. “He likes you. So if you want to forget it, fine with me.” I’m talking about the black-haired boy who tosses his head like a horse.
“The blurter?” she says skeptically. “I doubt it.”
“Well, I don’t! He stares at you all the time.”
“You’re just saying that because I said the other guy turned around and looked at you when you went by.”
“Well, was that a lie?”
“No,” she says.
“Well, if it wasn’t a lie when you said it to me, why is it a lie when I say it to you?”
“Because it is,” she says simply.
She’s right, it’s a lie.
“What’s his name again?” she asks.
“Jeff Nelson,” I tell her. “He’s in Dunk’s math class. I guess he’s smart but the teacher hates him because he’ll yell out the answer while she’s still writing the problem on the board.”
“Does Dunk like him?” Felicia asks.
“She doesn’t like any guys,” I remind her. “But if she did, she probably would because she said he was funny.”
“I like funny guys,” Felicia says, perking up. “Although not too funny.”
“Too funny stops being funny,” I agree, running a damp rag along the light fixture over the medicine cabinet.
“He isn’t that funny,” she says. “He’s not a clown. Stop dusting the lightbulbs.”
“Stop getting them dirty,” I say, looking around for the next thing.
“We didn’t get them dirty, it’s dust,” she says.
“That’s why I’m dusting,” I say. Next: desliming the bar of soap.
“Mom,” Felicia hollers. “She’s washing soap, tell her to stop.”
“Stop, honey,” her mom calls.
By early evening, I’m sick in love and Felicia isn’t far behind me. She’s on the floor with her feet up the wall and I’m slowly sliding upside down off the bed, inch by inch.
“I just remember that time he said, ‘God,’ and the monitor gave us all another detention,” Felicia reminisces. “He goes, ‘God,’ and she goes, ‘That’s another one for all of you,’ or something like that.”
“That was funny. Remember that time mine tried to run out at exactly four o’clock and the door was locked and he goes, ‘Everybody! Out the window!’ or something like that.”
“That was funny. I like mine’s hair,” she says.
“It’s shiny. Mine’s might be a bit girlish,” I say modestly.
“Not to me it isn’t,” she says. “So what’re we going to get caught for?”
Before we can review our options, the phone, which is resting on her stomach, rings. It’s my sister. I roll the rest of the way off the bed and take the receiver. I feel light headed from being upside down for so long.
“Get home,” Meg says in a not-unfriendly voice.
“I’m staying over,” I tell her.
“You can’t.”
“Did Mom say?”
“Yeah, she said to call and tell you to get home,” Meg explains.
“But why?”
“Hmm, let me think. How about because she said?” Meg says patiently.
“But why is she saying?”
“The end,” Meg says, hanging up.
* * *
Everyone’s yard light is on but ours, and next door, Curly is sitting very close to his apple tree. As soon as I hit the back walk, I can hear it: ranting coming from our kitchen.
“I’ll say this about that!” my dad shouts.
Curly’s chain is wrapped tightly around the base of the tree; that’s why he’s huddled like that. He looks miserable and harmless.
“I’ll say this about that!” my dad shouts again. It’s one of his famous drunk sayings, and he will repeat it anywhere from twenty to fifty-five times before my mother makes him stop.
Even though I’ve been told over and over not under any circumstances to get near Curly, I take a step into the dirt circle and look around. No human but Old Milly has ever seen the neighborhood from this perspective. There’s a root poking out of the soil that’s been gnawed on like a bone.
“I’ll say this about that!”
Curly looks at me entreatingly. His battered old face and his bowlegs, the thick, stubby tail: all he wants is a human to pat his head, to lead him around until he has all his dirt back again.
“I’ll say this about that!”
Suddenly Curly snarls and jumps at me, an orange blur brought up short by the chain. He twists and turns, trying to get out of his collar, wildly biting the trunk of the apple tree in frustration. By that time I’m all the way up the back steps and inside the porch, panting and trembling.
Now he’s snubbed even tighter, because of me.
“I’ll say this about that!” my father booms.
“Shut up!” I cry, slamming into the kitchen. My father is sitting slumped in a kitchen chair, baiting my mother, who is standing at the stove, pretending to ignore him.
“Hey,” she says sharply. “Who are you talking to?”
“Why did you make me come home when he won’t shut up?”
“That’s enough,” she says, handing me a spoon and putting me in front of the stove. “Stir.”
I stir while my dad stares at me dully, trying to figure out who I am. “Well,” he says quietly to himself. He’s in an undershirt, and she has somehow gotten his shoes away from him, which means he can’t go anywhere until he sobers up at least enough to tie a lace. It’ll be a while.
He opens his hands in a gesture of defeat and licks his lips clumsily. He recognizes me. “Honey,” he says in a pleading, blurry voice.
The thing I’m stirring is a dark broth with something very large bumping around in it. I try to bring whatever it is to the surface.
“Honey…” And he begins to cry in a soft, hopeless way. “Honey, I’ll… I’ll…”
The thing keeps getting away from me. “You’ll what?” I say finally, trapping it against the side of the pot and bringing it to the surface. It’s thick and gray, with bumps on the top. Slightly furled on the end. It looks familiar but I can’t quite place it.
“I’ll say thiiis about thaaat,” he brays, rig
ht at the moment I realize I’m stirring a tongue.
“She says one more outburst like that and we’re sending you to the mental home,” Meg tells me. She’s brought a plate with Jell-O, peas, and a warmed-up sweet roll for my dinner.
I can’t talk yet.
“It wasn’t human,” Meg says.
What around here is. I roll over and look out the window: Curly has been unwound from the tree and is staring mildly around. Down in Old Milly’s kitchen the Chinese checkers board is set up on the table, ready to go, all the marbles in the starting gates.
“She’ll probably let you out of here if you go down and say you’re sorry,” Meg tells me, stuffing a wad of clothes under her bed and shaking out the bedspread to cover them. Mister Ed is picking her up to go to a double feature at the drive-in movie with a bunch of other girls. It would be good, clean fun except that the drive-in movie theater is closed for the season, which none of the parents have figured out.
A car honks in the alley.
“She’ll probably let you out anyway,” Meg says, pausing in the doorway. She looks pretty in her navy peacoat and eye shadow.
Alone, I read for a while, a fat paperback I got out of the free box at the library. The Carpetbaggers, a book so squalid and overblown that it wouldn’t even stay bound: all the pages in the center have come loose and are out of order, so it’s slow going. When the phone rings I have to trace the cord from the wall to under Meg’s bed.
“Why did you have to go home?” Felicia asks.
“Family dinner,” I say.
“What did you have?”
“Jell-O,” I tell her.
“I know, but what did they have?”
“Some kind of Transylvanian meat,” I say. My grandmother’s second husband is a butcher, as crabby as he is bald. A tongue isn’t even the worst thing he’s given us.
“Lucky,” she says. “We had pork and beans and green beans. I said to my mother, ‘These are both beans,’ but she didn’t care.”
“What are you eating right now?”
“Girl Scout cookies,” she says.
“What kind?”
“A whole thing of Savannahs.”
“I hate Savannahs,” I say. Anything with peanut butter, actually. My mother told me that once when I was a baby, she opened a jar of peanut butter at the table, and when she looked over, I was gagging in my high chair.
“So,” Felicia says, crunching, “I can’t wait to get in trouble.”
The one-person fight takes off again downstairs (“I’ll tell you another goddamned thing! You better watch out!”) and I hang up just as there’s a knock at my door.
It’s Ray. He’s got two bottles of Pepsi and two glasses of ice that he’s managed to carry upstairs.
“I brung us pop,” he says.
We end up skipping medicine ball and not getting caught for it. We walk by the office, we walk by the hall monitor, we sit on the front steps of the school without our coats, we go back in and make the rounds of classrooms where we have friends and stand outside the closed doors, waving at them through the portholes. Nothing.
“We’re like ghosts who don’t yet know they’re dead,” I say to Felicia.
“Ha, ha, nobody can see us.” She pantomimes pulling her shirt up. “Waaah! Get a load of this!”
In the last five minutes of the hour we position ourselves down the hall from our friend Dunk’s math class. She said Felicia’s blurter, Jeff Nelson, turns to the right when exiting, so we will start walking toward the classroom from that direction when the bell rings. As the clock hops its last seconds before the bell, Felicia places her three-ring binder against her chest, folds her shoulders around it, and rests her chin along its top edge. It’s like watching time-lapse photography of a plant wilting.
“No, go like this!” I hiss, standing up straight, thrusting my chest forward. Her eyes bug out, but she does it, just as the bell goes off above our heads, a bone-rattling blast. When the door springs open he’s the second one out, muttering to himself and tossing his head sideways. Blue stretched-out sweater, a textbook stuffed with papers, and a knock-kneed walk that I never noticed before.
I veer ever so slightly, herding Felicia into his line of vision. He’s still talking to himself, but then—he looks at her. For an instant, nothing, then there’s a faint pursing of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes, and a subtle but deliberate tipping of the head backwards.
“How far backwards?” Dunk asks. She has short, wild red hair and wears little round glasses.
“Three inches or so?” I say, and then demonstrate. When you do it yourself, it definitely feels like something. Perhaps not an actual nod, but an acknowledgment. I open the bun they just gave me in the lunch line and remove the brown flap of hamburger.
“Really?” Felicia says dreamily, adding the flap to her own sandwich and handing over her spare pickles.
“Weren’t you there?” I ask her. Now I have chocolate milk, a bun filled with pickles, and a jelly-flavored long john.
“I thought he more or less just went like this.” She narrows her eyes and purses her lips.
“He did. And then like this.” I tip my head back about three inches. “Sort of mocking.”
“Like this?” Dunk asks, squinting, pursing her lips, and tugging her chin forward. I know Dunk from when I used to go to church; she’s the one who talked me out of believing in God, pointing out that he was basically a ghost and they even call him one.
“Not like trying to loosen a necktie,” Felicia says, finishing her last bite of hamburger, “but more of a lolling of the head. It was a mocking loll.”
The cafeteria is almost empty of kids. The famously testy la carte lady is closing her counter, lifting a tray of buns and using her hip to push open the bumpered door into the kitchen.
“Good luck,” Dunk says, and then vacates the table.
Felicia wads up the paper her sandwich came in.
I wad up my paper too.
When the la carte lady walks back through the swinging door, we stand and throw. One wad hits her smack in the chest and the other lands in the hot dog vat.
“Launching of projectile?” my mother exclaims. “You have got to be kidding me. Sit the hell down right there.”
They made me bring a note home this time, to be signed and returned. It’s a form with a space for the number of detentions given (five), a list of crime categories with boxes next to them, and then a space at the bottom where Mr. Jaggermeyer, the corrections officer who also poses as a civics teacher, has scrawled a message: “Your daughter seems to be at a crossroads: This is her 2nd infraction in under 3 weeks—after what we consider nearly excellent comportment. Perhaps undo influence of another is partly to blame.”
I sit down at the kitchen table.
She fumes, smoke trailing from her nostrils, while my dad is summoned from the bathroom. He comes to the table in his undershirt; it’s Monday night and he’s as sober as he gets. My mother hands him the form to read, and lights another cigarette off the burner.
She can’t believe it! They are heartsick over this, they don’t know what is happening to me. They could understand if I were deprived, or if I were some kind of mental case. But I’ve had every opportunity, every benefit of every doubt whenever it was called for, every type of discipline and support parents could reasonably be expected to give their kid. I ask for a dress, somebody sits her ass down and makes me one. I ask for a nightstand to keep my books on, somebody hauls one down out of the attic and puts a coat of paint on it. I want to spend every goddamned minute over at some house six blocks away, hanging around with a girl who won’t open her mouth when you talk to her, but then suddenly this same girl who can’t say boo is willing to behave like an idiot “launching projectiles.” Whatever the hell that means, and it better not mean what she thinks it does. Talk.
“I…”
“Shut up for a minute. What do you think?” she asks my father, who has placed the form facedown on the table and is shaking his head a
t the floor.
“I don’t know until she tells us what happened,” he says sadly. “I do know they misspelled undue, not that it makes a difference, but they did.”
“Let me see that,” my mother says. She reads the form and then puts it, faceup, in front of me. “I don’t care what they spelled how, you better talk.”
I clear my throat.
“Well,” I say, “first of all, this whole day started out bad. I had a history test that I studied and studied for, and I was terrified I wasn’t going to pass it—and it was really hard!—but then it turned out that I not only passed, I did perfect! And then I was at lunch right after, in such a good mood, and then Debbie Duncan got up and was carrying her tray to the belt, and I said, ‘Hey, Dunk, throw my stuff away,’ and so did Felicia, and I was in such a good mood—over the history test—and Flea was too, because she had a test she did well on (we studied together over the weekend!) and so we threw our hamburger papers, trying to land them on Dunk’s tray, and we went overboard, is all. And mine didn’t hit the lunch lady, it went in the hot dogs.”
“That’s what they mean? You threw trash at a cafeteria worker?” She stares at me in disbelief, and then at my dad, who is starting to look like he could use a drink.
“Mom! If I threw a feather, it would count as launching a projectile—you can’t go by the categories!”
My mother looks pointedly at my father.
“Honey,” he says, staring at his hands. “Those people really work hard in there, cooking and cleaning up and I don’t know what all, for you kids.” He sighs and shakes his head. “Boy, oh boy. Something like that is really, really…” He trails off.
The stove clock ticks. Tammy sidles into the room, checks her dish, takes one piece of kibble, and tiptoes out with it. I wait for a second, then get up to follow her.