by Ty Roth
My confused expression betrayed that I understood the physics but not the point.
“Some of those stars are dead—in what we mistakenly think is the future because of our perspective but is actually the past—but as far as we can tell in the present, they are still putting off gas and heat and light. Do you get it?”
“Sort of,” I lied.
“You see, if astronomers just knew what the signs were inside of the particles of starlight we’re currently looking at, maybe they could identify which ones have been long dead, which ones are still pumping, and which ones still have eons to burn. You following?”
“I guess. But what does all this have to do with talking to girls?”
“Oh, Keats.” He actually draped his arm around my shoulders. “You just aren’t paying attention.”
“No. I am,” I said, a little too enthusiastically, for fear of Gordon’s cutting the lesson short.
“With girls, I can read the signs. I don’t know how, from where, or why I can, but I can. It’s kind of like, why can one person sing so prettily or jump so high or solve complicated math problems in ways that most people can’t, when they don’t look any different from anybody else?
“When I meet a girl, I know instantly whether or not she’s doable. What I don’t know is whether or not I will do her. That’s in the yet-to-be-read pages of the script and outside of my control. My role is simply to show up every day and play my part. But either way, it isn’t to my credit or fault.”
My head spun as he walked me back to my desk next to Shelly’s. “What about Ms. Yancey? Is she?”
“What? Doable?”
Gordon didn’t answer. Instead, he smiled, grabbed his denim jacket, walked to Ms. Yancey’s desk, leaned over and whispered something, and then left the room.
After a few moments of hard thinking, I got up to go, but was stopped by Shelly’s ambiguous comment. “He’s good.” She said it with just a tiny hint of jealous longing clinging to her voice. I hadn’t noticed her return from the darkroom cot, but she must have been watching.
“You really believe that?”
“Yeah. I mean … Gordon can be shallow, narcissistic, even destructive, and he tends to eventually piss everybody off, but … I don’t know … there’s just something … necessary about him. He makes things … interesting. You know what I mean?”
“No,” I lied. “I don’t, and you shouldn’t make excuses for him.”
She shook her head. “Don’t you see? He’s a kind of measuring stick. He’s a guardrail, a Mr. Bad Example. He’s a flashing red light, a siren, a warning bell … the scarecrow.” She threw up her arms to pantomime a scarecrow in cruciform position as she finished her exercise in metaphorical free association. “We need Gordon. Without him we couldn’t fantasize or define ourselves or know when to stop or when to seek shelter. He’s the stove on which we burn our hands. He’s the almost that counts.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Hang around long enough, and you will.”
“What I really don’t get is the way he treats you. He completely ignores you, when you’re clearly the most interesting girl in the room.” My previously unspoken—hell, unthought—thoughts completed an end run around the filter separating my brain from my mouth.
Shelly took her eyes from Gordon’s exit stage right in order to look at me for the first time in the conversation. Her unkempt long black hair spilled from underneath the rainbow-colored horizontally striped toboggan that she slipped over her head the minute the final bell rang each day, along with the matching fingerless gloves. The look in her eyes couldn’t have been more different from the longing one I’d watched her give Gordon a thousand times; it wasn’t condescending so much as it was appreciative.
It sucked.
I wanted to puke.
“He ignores me because he loves me.”
I paused to consider that unwanted pearl of wisdom before I said, “That makes a lot of sense.”
Ms. Yancey was gone by Thanksgiving and was replaced by the reluctant Mr. Robbins, a senior English teacher already overburdened by club advisory positions. It left Shelly with the job of putting out the fall semester’s edition of the Beacon almost entirely on her own. Apparently—at least according to the rumors that ran amok in the Trinity community—a night janitor, who, unbeknownst to his bosses, occasionally used the darkroom cot for napping, was an unobserved spectator one night when Gordon turned on the lurid red light and led a coy Ms. Yancey into the darkroom. The janitor wasn’t discovered until Ms. Yancey and Gordon, both shirtless, tumbled onto the cot and on top of him.
After much pleading from Ms. Yancey and “good old buddying” by Byron, the janitor compromised—largely for fear of losing his unsanctioned napping privileges and station. His conscience and state law demanded that he report the incident, but he’d swear that all that he had seen was the two of them kissing if they’d say nothing of his napping.
Ms. Yancey’s contract with Trinity was immediately terminated—something about a morality clause. A criminal complaint was never filed nor a report made to the state board of education (of course, to avoid the publicity and the embarrassment for Trinity).
Gordon and his mother were called to Mr. Smith’s office, where the principal apologized profusely for Ms. Yancey’s having “taken advantage” of Gordon. Mr. Smith pleaded with them (for Gordon’s sake) not to seek litigation or in any way go public with the incident. Coincidentally, they were told, Gordon had just recently been chosen as the recipient of the newly instituted Novitiate Scholarship to be given annually to the most promising transfer student of the year. It would cover full tuition and fees for the entire duration of the recipient’s years at Trinity.
Mrs. Byron hemmed, hawed, and made a good show of righteous indignation, but in the end, she more than gladly took the scholarship and ran.
7
“Nice ride,” Gordon said, checking out the red interior of the Trans Am. I wasn’t sure if he was being sincere or sarcastic. With Gordon, it could be nearly impossible to tell.
“You know, I never would have guessed,” he said.
“It’s not mine. It was my dad’s car. I think he loved it more than me.” I should have known my whining would fall on unsympathetic ears.
“I don’t mean about the car. I never understood why Shelly liked you, but I’m starting to get it. You’re all right, Keats. Nowhere near as much of a loser as I thought.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“It is.”
“Then, thanks.”
“Put the disc in,” Gordon said.
I laughed and pointed to the dash, where the original eight-track player mocked us.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said. “What is that?”
“An eight-track player. The car’s more than thirty years old. What’d you expect? Look in the glove compartment.”
Gordon reached inside and pulled out a handful of eight-track tapes, holding them as if he were handling recently unearthed dinosaur bones.
“Got them five for a dollar at a garage sale. Put one in.”
“Which one?” Gordon asked. He read the titles: “Foghat? REO Speedwagon? Styx? Lynyrd Skynyrd? Or Journey? Dude, I know Journey.”
“Put it in.”
“How?” He took a few stabs and flipped the case over a few times before it took.
“ ‘Just a small-town girl,’ ” the song began, and we joined in singing what may be the most cheesy yet somehow poignant song ever written, yelling as much as we were singing—“ ‘living in a lonely world’ ”—while bobbing our heads in rhythm. I couldn’t help but think of Shelly as that lonely small-town girl, and I wondered what, if anything, I could have done differently.
The song played through. The lyrics’ incongruous mixture of despair and hopefulness washed over and soaked us through in one of those moments that two people share, each knowing that he is experiencing the same thing as the other guy without h
aving to say a word.
As I turned left onto Sand Road, aptly named for the fine layer of the stuff that perpetually coats it, and the small dunes that form sporadically along it, we entered the Strand. I pretended to be transfixed by the bay waters on my side, which lay as flat as I’d ever seen them, but I was actually hiding my reddened eyes and muffling occasional sniffles that, thankfully, were drowned out by the nervous drumming of Gordon’s fingers on the passenger side of the dashboard.
Finally, I decided to break the tension. “What’s your favorite Shelly story?”
“Oh, man.” A smile broke across Gordon’s face. “There are so many.” He hesitated. I imagined him pressing the Main Menu button in his brain and scanning the scene selections. “You know about the skinny-dipping?” he asked, followed by a sidelong glance and a stifled laugh into his balled right fist.
“Yeah. Shelly told me.”
“What about Johnson’s Island when we were kids?”
“She talked about that too,” I said.
Gordon hadn’t noticed, but Shelly and I had grown close during our countless hours of compiling editions of the Beacon. Maybe it was the two-year difference in age (teen years are like dog years: seven teen years to one human year), or maybe it was the difference in social classes—if so, it was my problem not hers—but we never hung out anywhere else or at any other times. We were friendly and all in the hallways, but we never stopped to talk. In a way, it made our time in the media center special.
The best times were the nights when we’d stay late and order pizza delivered. She always paid, and I always apologized and promised to get the next one. We’d get sodas from the machines in the cafeteria, sit cross-legged on the floor with the pizza box between us, and play “What If? Past, Present, and Future.” It was a stupid game we’d made up. We each had to answer the three questions in a series.
For example, Shelly would ask, “What if? Past.”
I’d answer with something like, “What if I’d been born to different parents?”
Then she’d say, “What if? Present.”
“What if … I lived next door to you instead of Gordon?”
“What if? Future.”
“What if … I die before I do anything that matters?”
You know, she didn’t patronize me as if I were being irrational when I hit her with that one. She knew I meant it, and she respected my intuition. I really appreciated that. I guess it’s kind of ironic now.
Then it was my turn to ask the questions. “What if? Past.”
She’d begin “what if” riffing about her childhood with Gordon and Augusta. Before long the pizza would be cold and the soda warm. That game is another reason why I know as much as I do about when they were kids. Now that I think about it, I never got to ask her the “present” and “future” questions.
Gordon was continuing his internal probing of his catalog of Shelly stories. “How about, do you remember at the beginning of my and Shelly’s junior year, your sophomore, when she went all sixties, protesting Trinity’s sports team names?”
* * *
That incident occurred shortly after my father’s funeral. My mom had gone off the deep end, beginning the process of willing herself to death. Tom and I were taking turns staying home from school, babysitting her for fear of what she might do. (That was when Tom was still relatively healthy and taking classes in radiology at a nearby branch campus of the Ohio State University.) My father had died in September. Nothing dramatic. One morning, he just didn’t wake up.
I remember calling goodbye to my parents from outside their closed bedroom door as I did every morning before leaving for school, even though, typically, I’d receive no response. By then, my dad had already lost his ability to speak, and my mother—well, let’s just say that she’d never been the communicative type. That day, however, she returned my goodbye. It struck me as odd, and I sensed that something was wrong. But I immediately dismissed it and went on about my day.
By the time I got home from school, he was gone, both body and soul.
“Your father’s dead” was the extent of the explanation my mother offered through the exhaled smoke that rose from the lowered right corner of her bottom lip as she pressed a half-finished cigarette against the metal ashtray on the kitchen table. “Tell your brother. I have to go and meet with the man at the cemetery. I don’t know how we’re going to pay for this,” she mumbled without once looking me in the eyes. Life insurance, by the way, is one of those things I mentioned at the beginning that many poor people don’t do.
And then she left.
I stood frozen in the kitchen while she ignited the tired engine in the rust-covered piece of shit we called our “family” car and backed it out of the driveway. Alone, I aimlessly toured the entire house: downstairs and upstairs. Nothing had changed; he was just not there anymore. I peeked through the opening in my parents’ nearly closed bedroom door, but I didn’t go inside the room. Instead, I went to my own, lay on my bed, and waited for Tom to come home.
No obituary was placed in the Reporter, just a listing under “Death Announcements.” There was no wake or showing of the body. No funeral mass.
A Trinity school van was parked on the winding drive when my mother, Tom, and I arrived at the Ogontz City Cemetery (think permanent public housing). I had imagined that there’d be trees and tombstones. There was neither, just row after row of bronze-colored grave markers lying flat against the earth. The hearse parked behind the van. Through the tinted windows of the hearse, I saw Principal Smith; Father Fulop; six senior football players, all dressed in school-issued black sport coats; and Shelly. They stood in a solemn row near the canopy over the green-tarp-covered hole that was to be my father’s grave. I was both moved and mortified.
The football players were members of Trinity’s Joseph of Arimathea Society, a prestigious service organization that provided pallbearers and a touch of dignity for the homeless or for those who die without able-bodied friends or relatives to serve in that role. Joseph was the man in the New Testament who surrendered his own tomb for the burial of Jesus after the Crucifixion.
When the hearse stopped, the Joeys, as they’re called at school, moved in practiced precision to the rear of the hearse, where they met the funeral director and extricated the coffin as we walked to the graveside accompanied by Father Fulop and Mr. Smith. Shelly met me there, took my hand, and stood silently by my side throughout the brief prayer service.
I felt oddly happy.
I walked Shelly to the van as Mr. Smith and Father Fulop paid final condolences to my catatonic mother. Inside, the Joeys had turned on the radio and were roughhousing, the way guys like that do.
I stopped about ten feet away from the van. “I don’t want to die,” I confessed to Shelly. It was the second time I’d shared my grim, irrational obsession with death with her.
Shelly didn’t laugh dismissively or tell me I was being silly. She simply said, “Write something.” She squeezed my hand, then squeezed herself inside the van among the Joeys, who, in their continued horseplay, remained indifferent to her company.
Afterward, not much, if anything, changed. Tom returned to his college classes, Mom kept to her cigarettes, and I kept to my anonymity with a greater resolve to make some mark of my existence, which, along with Shelly’s urging, prompted me to compose the following poem. It appeared in that semester’s edition of the Beacon.
WHEN I CONSIDER TIME
When I consider time and its short lease,
I wonder why I’m granted life at all.
So little time to snatch the Golden Fleece
Before answering Death’s unerring call.
Considering the mark I want to make,
Poetry seems to be my only course.
The magic, rhyme, and rhythm it creates
Lives only in the wonder world of verse.
And what of love? Don’t I deserve its charms?
To possess someone and be possessed myself.
To lie and
love in sympathetic arms—
Only a day—for me would be enough.
Fully to live, to write, to love will be
Priceless pleasures not provided me.
I didn’t tell Gordon any of that; I just shook my head and said, “No.” But, of course, I’d heard about Shelly’s protest. She had even asked me to be part of it, but I’d turned her down for fear of … well … for fear of lots of things. Instead, I made sure I wasn’t in school that day. Telling the story, however, seemed like it would be somehow therapeutic for Gordon, so I played ignorant and let him tell it.
“Aw, man,” he began. “You know how she loved Indians, right? Even when we were kids, if you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d say an Indian.”
I nodded.
“I mean, the Warriors makes no fucking sense for a goddamned Catholic school anyway. We should be the Peacemakers or the Apostles or at least the Crusaders or something like that. Anyway, Shelly had already collected signatures on a petition, written that article for the Beacon about the persecution of Indians and the bigoted use of tribal names by athletic teams, and took her cause to a board meeting. Because of her dad, the school board humored her, allowed her to make a proposal, and politely listened to her demand for a name change. But, in the end, all she got was ignored.”
Gordon lost himself in the retelling.
“Then one day, during lunch, she walks into the cafeteria carrying her book bag. Without saying a word to anyone, she pulls her shirt off over her head and steps out of her uniform skirt, which gets all the guys screaming shit like ‘Take it off!’ Shelly ignores them like only Shelly could. So, she’s standing there in a one-piece buckskin Pocahontas costume or something—I think she wore it for Halloween in, like, the seventh grade. It barely covered her ass. Anyway, she pulls out of her bag a white bedsheet on which she’s written in black paint ‘Down with Bigotry’ and starts to walk up and down the center aisle of the cafeteria with her arms spread wide, holding that sheet like a goddamned ring girl, making sure everyone gets a good look, but all anybody is really looking at is her in that outfit. I don’t mind telling you, dude, although Shelly is—I mean, was—like a sister to me, she looked good. She got a whole new type of respect from the boys that day, even if it wasn’t exactly the kind she was hoping for.