In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  Except I’m not going to the Art Institute of Chicago. At our house we don’t have one dollar, let alone eight.

  A lone feather? A human finger? An Easter egg? A doll’s head?

  The thing is, once you start thinking about surrealism, everything starts to seem both relevant and absurd. A pencil? A piece of twine? A fork? Air?

  Suddenly air seems like the best thing to have in the egg basket. Then I’m truly keeping my mind open to possibilities. The possibility of a bird. Should I say that out loud to Ringgold?

  I can’t explain it very well, but nevertheless, he slaps himself in the forehead. “See?” he asks me. “This is what happens when they look at art! Sure, you’re captivated by Ernst, but then you move beyond his sphere of influence into something your own. The possibility of a bird is more beautiful than the bird itself—although I’m sure your own bird is a great one—because it exists only in the imagination of the viewer. That means the bird becomes both deeply specific and universal.”

  I know what it sounds like, but when you’re in there talking to him, painting a whole row of white canvases white, it actually makes sense.

  My father goes missing somewhere in there, between the night when he’s downstairs roaring and the weekend. In a way this is good because it means my mother stops paying attention to her kids.

  “I’m staying at Cindy Falk’s on Saturday,” I announce.

  “You don’t tell, you ask.”

  “Can I?”

  She smokes a cigarette and pokes at a skillet full of hamburger and beans, the dinner she makes when she’s tired of people not appreciating her cooking.

  “I don’t care what any of you do,” she says finally.

  Felicia doesn’t show up for Van Leuven’s class on Thursday, but I pass her in the hall later that day and she’s wearing a vest I’ve never seen before. The front is a herringbone pattern and the back is plain brown; she wears it over a white blouse. Actually I may have seen it before, on Maroni. The skirt is familiar, bought at the Style with last summer’s babysitting money.

  “Hi,” she says as we pass each other.

  “Hi,” I answer.

  And that’s it.

  Friday morning, Gretchen Quist stops at my locker with the cheerleading jacket.

  “It your,” she says, handing it over in a paper grocery bag. She’s being followed by a football player named Richard Manfredi, who everyone calls Freddy Man. He’s carrying her books, leaving her free to flap around.

  “Thanks,” I say. It’s heavier than I would have thought, I guess because of the leather sleeves.

  “Bye, jackie!” Gretchen cries as I put the jacket in my locker, and she whirls off down the hall.

  Friday afternoon I get called out of gym to go to the office.

  “You’re not in trouble,” Mrs. Knorr says, using a razor blade to take tape off the window. “Just sit there and he’ll be out in a minute.”

  I sit.

  Mrs. Knorr gets a spray bottle and starts cleaning the glass. It’s not that great to be in the principal’s office in a gym suit; it’s cold, my legs are all mottled, and a kid running the mimeograph machine is just turning the handle and staring at me.

  The principal’s door opens and out comes Patti Michaels, followed by the principal.

  “So let’s keep cheering,” he tells her in a hearty voice.

  “We will,” she answers.

  “Above a C,” he says.

  “I know,” she answers.

  “Not for anyone’s good but yours,” he says.

  “I know,” she answers.

  “And you’re next?” he asks me.

  “This is the one with the math,” Mrs. Knorr reminds him.

  “Oh!” he says. “You’re not in trouble.”

  His office has tall windows and is known for looking out over the parking lot, where people skipping can be spotted. On his desk there’s a potted plant with an old ribbon stuck in the dirt, a wooden paddle that says EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE A TEACHER’S AIDE, and an ashtray filled with paper clips.

  “The paddle is a gag,” he says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Given to me by staff,” he says. “Which brings me to… our math staffer, Mr. Lepkis… would like to see us move you out of gifted and back into regular.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Sometimes with these so-called gifted programs, people don’t thrive as much as the powers that be would have you believe. So then you’re in the position of moving a student around in a way that could make them feel they aren’t smart. Or aren’t learning at a rapid rate, say.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because in a regular class, I have a feeling you’d be right at the top.”

  “Okay.”

  “So from now on,” he consults a piece of paper, “you’ll have study hall, room 206, during gifted-math hour, and you’ll have regular math, room 103, during your current study hall time.”

  “Okay.”

  Out in the hall, Patti is lurking until the end of the period, so she walks with me back to the gym.

  “Were you in trouble?” she asks.

  “No, but I thought I was at first,” I tell her. “For keeping my admit slip the other day—they didn’t put my name on it, the date, or a time, and Nagy didn’t make me give it to her.”

  “Galen will buy that from you!” she exclaims.

  We peek in the gym door. They’re doing basketball drills, while Mr. Pettle sits on the sidelines, wedged into a student desk reading a paperback and pulling on his mustache.

  “They should have that guy as our principal,” Patti says.

  A pair of hand-me-down suede boots arrives unexpectedly on Saturday, in a box of otherwise wrong clothes given to my mother by someone at work. They get offered first to Meg, who tries to jam her big feet in there but can’t. Cinderella slips them on without any difficulty.

  “Crap, are those cute,” Meg says.

  Are they ever. Almost eerily so. The way everything seems to be working out right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up dead before the night is over. At the bottom of the box is a miniature purse containing love beads.

  “We could hang those from our rearview mirror,” Meg suggests.

  “That I can do without,” my mother answers, pushing the box out of the way but not getting up from the couch. You never see her just sitting on a Saturday unless she’s on the phone, and even then never here, on the couch. She looks around. “Where are my cigarettes?”

  “In the kitchen, probably,” I say, looking down at my new boots. In two hours I’ll take a bath and then put on my burgundy shirt, long underwear, blue jeans, the cheerleader jacket, and these.

  “I mean, where are they go get them,” she says.

  On the kitchen table, along with her cigarettes, is a tablet with my dad’s notes to himself, mostly recording the weather, certain birds at the feeders, and things reported on the radio, all set off by wild punctuation, underlining, double underlining, anything to fight the utter boredom of it.

  “Partly ‘Cloudy’ Overnight w/Snow SHOWERS (?) Likely By Morning*!!!!!!!!” [*!…Sunrise @ 6:10…!]

  Old Milly back from CALIFORNIA Gift for feeding “CURLY” {Orange Marmalade}!!

  “Gray SQUIRREL drives away ‘red SQUIRREL’ ~~ {But… only to Locust Tree!!!}”

  [~ Black-capped Chickadees ~ 14 15 in 1 minute!!]

  Out the back window, birds land on the empty feeder and take off again. Tammy stands at the end of her chain, watching the house. Next door, Curly sits alertly, also staring at our house. Everyone is waiting for my dad to come back.

  When the phone rings, I’m standing right there and I pick it up without thinking.

  “I was going to see if you wanted to come over to Luekenfelter’s and then go to that party,” Maroni says.

  All over the front of our refrigerator is grime. Fingerprints, smudged food. You don’t see it unless you see it, and then you can’t not see it. I get the dishrag and start scrubbing
on it.

  “What are you doing?” Maroni asks.

  “Scrubbing at stuff on the refrigerator.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well… I might not be able to go to the party. My mom is in a bad mood, but if I can get out, I’ll probably just go alone and run into people there.”

  “What do you mean, alone?” Maroni says. “By yourself?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “or… maybe with Cindy Falk.”

  “That honky bitch!” Felicia pipes up.

  “I knew you were on the extension,” I say.

  “How did you know?” Maroni asks.

  “Get off, Gina,” Felicia says.

  “Bye,” Maroni says, and hangs up.

  Silence. The refrigerator is spotless now. Raymond comes in looking for the cigarettes and I hand them to him.

  “You would never be going to a party alone in your life,” Felicia says.

  Silence.

  “You pretend to be shy and backward but you aren’t at all,” she says.

  Silence. Chickadees landing and taking off.

  “This is so sad,” Maroni says.

  “Gina, get off,” Felicia says in a strangled voice, and then one by one we all hang up.

  “I wish someone would stay home here tonight,” my mother says, watching while I search everywhere for first my mittens and then my scarf. There it is, under books on a dining room chair, just a corner of its purpleness showing.

  “I can’t,” Meg says.

  “I can’t either,” I say.

  “No, nobody can,” my mother says, sighing. Raymond is sleeping over at a kid’s house and Meg is supposedly going to a surprise party, although that’s not what it is—I know from hearing her talk on the phone.

  “Are you taking a present?” my mother asks.

  “We don’t take presents, Mother,” Meg answers. “People just say Surprise, and then Happy Birthday, and that’s it.”

  “Well, will someone bring a cake?”

  “That, I doubt,” Meg answers, staring at herself in the shaving mirror hanging by the basement door.

  “And I don’t even know who this girl is you’re staying with, or where you got that coat,” my mother says to me. “Why don’t my kids tell me anything?”

  “We tell you but you don’t listen,” I say. “This girl is really nice, but a little quiet. The coat was given to me by another girl who wanted me to have it. What else do you want to know?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” she says, staring out the window toward the garage. It’s nighttime, though, and the window is black. All she can see is her own kitchen.

  The sky is immense and beautiful, more so than usual; it might have something to do with my boots. I sing while I’m walking in them, one of my old favorite songs:

  Ooh, child things are gonna get easier

  Ooh, child things’ll get brighter…

  At one point, Felicia and I liked this song so much that we named a rag doll after it. This was the rag doll that, if Felicia ever cleaned her room and made her bed, would be set picturesquely against the pillows. During moments of high hilarity, we were known to attack Ooh Child, kicking her around the room like a soccer ball.

  The other song we liked was “Ben,” a lullaby to a rat. If you were trying to get your rodent to fall asleep, that was the song to sing to him:

  Ben, the two of us need look no more,

  We both found what we were looking for.

  Cindy Falk lives on the other side of Monroe Park, through the teacher part with the shrubbery and through the part where you have to walk in the street and through the part where you have to cut across three broad, manicured yards to arrive at a little lane leading to several houses on a bluff, including Cindy’s, rambling brick and glass, which is supposedly shabby on the inside but turns out not to be at all—it’s just extremely messy. Her dad is tall, with a straight spine and very short hair, like an army colonel.

  “They’re in her room playing records. Go on up and knock. You can just kick those to the side,” he tells me as I try to step over dirty laundry that it looks like someone has dumped over the banister from upstairs. The part of the house that isn’t messy is everything from head height to the tall canted ceilings—a large, airy space that makes you think of Chicago or Philadelphia, or some other place that isn’t Zanesville.

  Upstairs is a long corridor with closed doors, but I can hear where the music is coming from. I started a joke which started the whole world crying.

  “Get in here,” Cindy says, shutting the door behind me.

  Huge, the room is, and clean, or cleaner. A canopied bed and a rocking chair, a vanity with a three-tiered mirror and a cushioned bench, a built-in cabinet with a stereo and records, a window seat, and its own bathroom, which Gretchen is in, peeing.

  “Hi!” she calls, waving.

  In the middle of the room, a grizzled wiener dog sits atop a basket of laundry. The rocking chair is filled with stuffed animals, and from one of the bedposts, toe shoes hang from pink ribbons. I’ve never seen toe shoes in person before; they’re sturdy looking. The wiener dog hops down and comes over to greet me.

  “What’s your name?” I ask him.

  “Heinzie,” Cindy answers, sitting down at her vanity. “Do you want perfume? Because we’re putting on perfume.”

  “No, thanks,” I say.

  “Me do!” Gretchen says, emerging from the bathroom. She’s so cute it’s unbelievable. Her hair is literally gold.

  Cindy sprays her on the neck and then turns to me. “Give me your wrist,” she orders.

  I get sprayed on one wrist, rub it on the other, and then, when they’re not looking, rub both on my pants. For some reason, I can’t stand perfume—I’d rather smell a garden full of puke. All my other friends know that.

  “Hey, Heinzie,” I say, but he wanders back over to his basket and hops in.

  They put their coats on and we look at ourselves in Cindy’s mirror. Two extremely good-looking girls with me in the middle. Before we leave, Cindy tries a stocking cap on my head but then takes it off again, and I have to refluff my hair by bending over and swinging it down and then swinging it back up, leaving me with the sensation I had earlier in the week, of my hair floating around above my head.

  “First we go into the living room, where my dad is, and then we go to wherever my mom is,” Cindy says. “And whatever I say, you agree with. Just nod, don’t even talk. Okay?”

  We nod.

  We’re walking on a limestone path under the cold stars, taking the back way along the bluff to Prospect. The path gets skinny at one point and we have to go sideways, holding hands, until it widens again. I’ve seen this from below, the sheer rock face with a fringe of trees at the top, like a crew cut. It would be impossible during the day, but this is night and nothing is real. We creep along the rock’s hairline, Minonk Road and the river roaring along somewhere below, and those two engaged in a conversation about how Jon G. treats Kathy Liddelmeyer like dirt.

  “He alway make Liddy-biddy cry,” Gretchen says.

  “She makes herself cry,” Cindy says.

  I know one thing: this path is perfect. Wherever it leads, you want to follow. The trees, the pale strand we’re walking on, the voices of the girls ahead of me. It’s like passing through a black bead curtain, giving yourself over to the night, the sky. As soon as you do, things happen. Freddy Man materializes on a converging path, scaring us half out of our wits.

  “Freddy, shit,” Cindy cries.

  Behind him is Tommy Walton, who nods at me.

  “Hi,” I say. He sits behind me in history.

  “No boys allowed, Thomas,” Cindy says primly. Sometimes they like each other and sometimes they don’t.

  “No boys!” Gretchen cries, running around behind me and peering over my shoulder at Freddy.

  “What about men?” Freddy asks.

  “Let us know if you see any,” Cindy says, and pulls Gretchen and me along.

  We have to go down a slope and through a froze
n bog, the boys following, then up the other side of the slope, where a bonfire and a lot of flickering people come into view. Suddenly my shoulder is tapped.

  I look back and Freddy Man points his thumb at Tommy.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Tommy says. “How’s the Magna Carta?”

  We don’t really talk in history, but occasionally he’ll poke me with his pencil eraser and, when I turn around, show me things he’s done to the pictures in his textbook. I never know what to say, just like now.

  “You tell me,” I try. “You’re the one listening in there.”

  “I’m never listening!” he protests. “You’re listening.” And then Tommy Walton, the second-most-popular boy in our school, tugs on my hair.

  People are just their faces and the fronts of their coats, whatever is lit up by the bonfire, nobody I know yet. Then we’re there and it’s like entering a dark forest except the trees start talking to you.

  “Hi,” says a girl I’m partners with in gym sometimes.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” says someone else.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” says Jackie Lopez. She’s hanging on the arm of Whitey Pelletier, who moved to Springfield but is frequently seen back here. “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi, hi,” I say.

  “She saw me the other day with pie on my shirt,” Jackie tells Whitey.

  “Did it look good?” he asks me, and Jackie punches him in the arm.

  “Ow,” he says.

  “Hey, where is everybody?” says Deb Patterson. She’s wearing eyeliner and a hat like the one they tried on me. It looks good on her.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi. Where is everybody?”

  “Through there.” I point to a knot of people, and Patterson shoves past me and into them. They scatter for a moment and then move back to where they were. One looks over, a girl in my Shakespeare class, and waves. In her other hand she’s holding the same paper cup a lot of people are holding.