by Неизвестный
Leo wanted to see Surrealist sculpture exhibitions, merengue concerts, a séance. Sixteen-year-old guys feel weird going places alone. Especially when they like to dress up. They need girlfriends. I was the one—in a black-and-white checkered sundress and daisy barrettes. The one he said he loved, with a hoarse intensity that evoked a shovel on rocks. The one on whose knees Leo laid his crop-haired head and wept when he was scared. The one to whom, that June, he gave a pearl ring as a birthday gift, from that shop on the pier where oysters hissed in tanks; a customer picked out the one he wanted, a clerk thrust a knife between the shells, prized a pearl from slippery flesh and mounted it in gold.
The night shift was Leo plus four kids not from our town but from the rich town over the hill, where lazy pepper trees draped streets with names like Dapplegray and Roan in long shadows, and glass houses had stilts. The four of them did not need jobs the same way Leo did. They had money already. They just wanted more, their own, because the money they already had—the soft rolls their parents gave them, which rested like pistols in their jeans pockets and purses—was too dull, too easy, just too there.
“I feel dorky just having it,” said Jeff, folding his arms sharply, shifting his large square bottom on the seat at the coffee shop where we always went after the night shift.
“I get so embarrassed.” Alison cringed, hiding her face behind hands whose big freckles looked like spattered butterscotch.
Lisa unsnapped her wallet, gazing into it with large lavender eyes.
“It’s such a drag.” Showing her teeth, she snapped the wallet shut and flipped it into her white leather bag.
“I mean,” said Kit, “it’s meaningless.”
Kit fished his roll of cash out of his pants pocket and held it, scowling, at arm’s length. Flicking his wrist, he made the bills flutter, then rolled them tight again and jammed them back into his pocket. His narrow hips jutted like wings.
“I mean, man, ludicrous.”Kit laughed. Leo swooned.
Leo wanted a lot of things, but now he wanted only to be Kit.
Even scowling, and wearing a McDonald’s uniform, Kit shimmered gold and bronze and blinding white and glazey blue. The radiance of beaches. As if so much surfing merged his body with sea, sand, salt, sky.
Leo seethed, his own skin splotched with furious red, the rash that never left his too-round chin and flared across his small, vulnerable ears. His slim calves with their dainty ankles were mocked by plump sausage thighs that loomed above and would not firm up even after years of basketball, still wobbling when he walked. His shoulders hung. Leo had grown too tall too young. At sixteen he still stood like the hunched-over outcast at whom normal-sized kids had thrown ice and orange rinds in grade school, shouting “Jolly Green Giant!” and “Quasimodo!” He still flinched driving past the doctor’s office in town where his mother used to take him every two weeks, certain that her son had a tumor on his pituitary gland.
At sixteen Leo was almost accustomed to himself. At six foot five, he was not totally freakish for sixteen. He haunted thrift shops, draping himself in the clothes he bought there: bowling shirts and espadrilles, tuxedo trousers, sequined mariachi hats. This is what he liked to wear, going out with me. He was the guy in an emerald satin smoking jacket and cutoffs, eating with chopsticks; the guy with a girl.
But Kit looked good even in a McDonald’s uniform. So good, in the same yellow polyester that pulled tight on Leo’s thighs and made his rash flame, that strings of girls hung around all night, ordering diet sodas just to watch Kit grill. Sometimes he drove off after work with one of them, sometimes two, in his black ’65 Mustang. Sometimes, if they pouted at having to wait, he ducked out to the parking lot with them during his fifteen-minute break.
Leo did not have sex.
The priest said not to. Leo always sighed, I can’t, pressing his palm to his zipped trouser fly as to an ache. I did not tease; I did not ask him to. I wanted most of all to be away from home, where my senile grandfather lived in the back bedroom, seeing carnivals that were not there. See that midget? my grandfather would say. His name is Weems. He’ll guess your weight! With Leo, in the car, on the beach, his hand guarding his fly, I was not at home. Good.
I was the only one in the world who knew Leo had never had sex, because I was the one with whom he would have had it but did not. He made me swear never to tell Jeff, Alison, Lisa, or Kit. Especially not Kit. As if I’d tell.
One afternoon Leo took me to the Neptune Motel and bought two hours in a room so that later, on the night shift, he could tell his new friends with an offhand shrug, We went to a motel. While we were there he memorized the details of the room so that later, offhandedly, he could say, Huh, there was a burn hole in the headboard and hairs in the carpet and a sign that said, Do Not Gut Fish in Rooms, a Paint-by-Numbers picture of a seahorse. He did not say, later, that he lay beside me writhing on the tight spread of the still-made bed, hand on fly, dark head flipping back and forth, snorting I can’t! Or that I got up, sat in the orange corduroy chair across the room, and watched the clock, hot wands of sunlight dancing on the floor.
He did not tell them that, checking in and then checking out, he’d signed the register in Kit’s name: Kavanaugh J. Saunders, in a pointed scrawl.
Afterward, we went to Denny’s, where Leo told a waitress what Kit always told waitresses: Sheepherder sandwich, please. Two buns and a piece of ewe. A piece of you! He smirked. She looked at me, mouth sour, hands on her hips. Not at Leo, but at me.
Leo was late picking me up one morning. We were going to the beach. I waited in the front room with Grandfather, who was watching wrestling on TV, smoke from his cigar drifting like veils over Pepe the Pirate and Monster Max. Monster Max is on the turn-buckle! Grandfather rocked in his chair. Goldie, he said, calling me by someone else’s name. Did you see that geek eat the live chicken last night?
Leo beeped, finally. On the driveway he bounced in his seat, beaming. Pulling out onto the road, he plinked the steering wheel like playing drums. He was changed, floaty.
“Lisa called,” he said.
I straightened in the seat. “Lisa? From work? Called you?”
“Yeah.” Plink. At a stoplight, Leo smiled idly at the giant plaster shark bolted atop the bait shop. “She said she needed to talk to someone.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh.” Leo mimicked me, his voice going high but dull, like a penny striking cement.
“So she just called you,” I said, “out of the blue.”
“She says I’m sensitive.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I am!”
“Uh-huh.”
It turned out Lisa had a problem. She was pretty sure she wasn’t pregnant, but there was a chance she might be. Her period wasn’t due for another two weeks, so she wouldn’t know till then.
“Was it Kit?” I said.
“How did you know? Maybe—or else this other guy . . . she was . . . a lifeguard called Chad.”
“And she told you because . . . ?”
“Bee-kuzz.” He mimicked me again. “Bee-kuzz she feels extremely close to me, she says. Bee-kuzz she says I’m sensitive. Which I am. Bee-kuzz if she has to— uh—get rid of it, she wants me with her. In the waiting room.”
“You.”
“Yeah.”
“The priest is not fond of those kinds of waiting rooms. Anyway, why doesn’t she bring Alison?”
“She says I understand her better.”
“Alison’s her best friend. Since third grade.”
“Well.”Leo shrugged. Plink. “Time’s not everything.”
He pulled into a parking space. The beach shone like a scythe.
Her period came while she was drinking a Yoohoo and watching a Brady Bunch rerun. She ran out of the bathroom wiping her hands on her trousers, and called Leo.
He was watching TV too. He always sat next to the phone because, those days, Lisa was calling all the time.
After that first call, two weeks back, she called him every
day, sometimes several times a day. Leo was glad to talk. She told him how Chad had grunted, Baby you’re so foxy pleeease. A silence welled between them on the phone. He could not ask, How many times? With him? With Kit? But Lisa guessed, and said, Yeah, only once.
Then she said Pink Floyd was cool. He said so too. Their conversations stretched to hours, dotted with taut silences. Sometimes she broke a silence to sigh, shuddery, I’m so afraid.
What if I’m—
She made up new words for it: pregeggers, pregno, negprant.
Don’t worry, he said. I know he said it, and the way he did, because she called when I was there. He curled up on the couch, cradling the phone, crossing his bolster thighs. Don’t worry. Shooting a sharp look across the room at me that said at once, She called me, I didn’t call her and This is private, so stop listening.
Don’t worry, he said, scratching his nape.
I know.
I know it is.
I will.
A day later he gave me a present: a tight tank top like one of hers.
Those days he kept mentioning her. After we saw Jules et Jim, he said, “Lisa has been to France.”
“Of course she has,” I said. “She’s rich.”
Ordering turtle steak in a restaurant, he said, “Lisa thinks I’d like it.”
“Sure.” I sipped my Coke. “Your little friend.” Watching the sun set, he said, “Lisa says sunsets are so romantic that sometimes they’re too intense.”
“Ah, what a slut.”
“Why do you act so mean? Lisa’s not mean when she talks about you.”
“Lisa talks about me?”
“Sure, but not mean.”
“Lisa. Talks about. Me?”
“She only said—what was it?—that you ‘aren’t exactly Einstein.’ ”
“Lisa says I’m dumb?”
“You got a D in algebra.” He turned and saw me sitting stiffly in the car. “Hey.” He patted my knee. “I love you.”
The day she called Leo and breathed, Guess what? Good news!, in a fierce whisper like the sound of soda flying from a shaken bottle, he had just come home from shopping at Goodwill. Wearing a tartan wool cape and a Foreign Legion hat, he wept at her good news because Lisa was crying too.They cried together, with relief. I never was so glad to see a Kotex, Lisa sobbed. She said it was a miracle how what Chad or Kit had done had brought her closer to Leo than to either of them. He told Lisa that what really mattered in life was talking, listening, becoming true friends. Those guys are scum, Lisa said. Guys are scum. Screw them.
Screw them.
Yeah.
Looking down at his vintage Howdy Doody watch, Leo saw that it was still two hours before the time at which he was planning to pick me up and take me to a Chinese opera. Lisa said, I never could have gotten through this without you.
Sure you could’ve.
No—I might just have killed myself.
But you saved me.
You’re sensitive.
Well, bye.
Her voice floated, lightly, like a tassel.
Telling himself what the heck, Leo leaped into his Dart. Telling himself he had two extra hours anyway, and that friends celebrated happy times together, he drove to Sav-on and bought a box of Almond Roca and a friendship card. He drove to Lisa’s.
But she wasn’t there.
A thought struck Leo as he drove along the street under the pepper trees.
He drove to Kit’s.
And found her.
She was in the background when Kit, blinking at the light, opened the door a crack. Hey Leo dude, he laughed, not a good time. Over Kit’s golden shoulder, pukka shells gleaming around the firm brown neck, Leo saw Lisa not quite naked. She still wore a pair of black shorts and a sandal. Her hair hung over her eyes. She didn’t push it back.
Kit shut the door.
During the Chinese opera, Leo kept time with the drums and gongs, bobbing his head sharply, circling his foot. The actors vaulted, trailing silk streamers the hot pink and yellow of jelly beans. Afterward, in his car, Leo wanted to have sex. He announced it in a voice like cracking glass. But when it came to it, he sat there fully dressed, still zipped, his hands gripping my shoulders as if giving me a benediction. Now!, he cried, but no one moved.
“Look,” I said quietly. “You want her.”
He shook his head wildly from side to side, his ears like small pink dials. “No,” he said in his shovel voice. “I love you.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. But you want her.” By now I was out of the car.
“No!” Wet maps of sweat made his bowling shirt sag.
“Yes,” I said.
He sounded submerged. “I love you.”
“Right.” I was backing away from the car. I’d left my opera program inside. It flapped on the seat, pink. It jerked to the floor when Leo jammed the engine into gear.
Leo left streaks, the Dart’s exhaust making me cough. He drove around the block once, then down to the turn for Channel Street, then doubled back and drove to Lisa’s house. She was there this time. He stayed.
A GENIUS FOR SAUNTERING
Thatcher Heldring
“Got no money and you got no car then you got no woman and there you are.” —Young MC
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.
Walk with me. Love, Greta
Greta
That’s it. Those are the words I wrote for Ben in the copy of Walden I was going to give him on his sixteenth birthday. The quote is actually from Walking by Thoreau, which as a title may have been more fitting for Ben and me—considering how much walking we did, and how much we did while we were walking— but when I saw the weathered old book in the bookstore and held it in my hands, it immediately reminded me of faded jeans and autumn, two things I’ll always associate with Ben. Holding the book felt like holding hands with the last two months of my life and smelled like every memory Ben and I shared. Memories we never would have had if we hadn’t been two sophomores without cars or any other way home. When I opened the book, I half expected a leaf to fall out from between the pages. I didn’t need to think about it, and I didn’t ask for a receipt—not when I’d found a way to give a gift that wasn’t only a part of myself but also a part of the person to whom I was giving it. Or so I thought.
The first thing I noticed about Ben when he walked into English class and sat down across from me was his jeans. Picture this. In an Abercrombie world of vintage boot cuts, cargo pants, and flat-front khakis, Ben walks in with a pair of 501 slim fits. Now, usually I don’t do this. I really am not the kind of girl who talks about someone’s pants like that. But Ben, let me help you. With a smile you could light a room with and eyes that always made me feel as though I’d already said what I was going to say, I think it’s fair to say Ben wrecked me at first sight. Although technically it wasn’t first sight because we were in the same class all freshman year. But sometimes you can see someone every day and there’s nothing and then all of a sudden your heart skips a beat and everything is different.
I realized right away that any guy who couldn’t get himself to the mall to buy a decent pair of pants wasn’t going to make the first move. I could bat my eyelashes and drop my pencil and shake it in front of his desk until graduation, but if the boy isn’t going to pick up on it, sometimes you just have to put the writing on the wall. Not literally, though. The last thing I needed was a written note falling into the wrong hands. No, paper trails were not acceptable. I had to get him alone somewhere soon, which, as it turns out, was not as easy as it sounds. Ben may be a bit fashion challenged, but he is not the brooding loner in the corner with the extra Creed ticket. He was, however, always in the middle of a pack of guys. Never a woman in sight, mind you, but also never alone. From the moment school started until they all went off to soccer. I’m not a stalker, by the way, just observant. Which is ho
w I happened to observe that Ben liked to sit on the bleachers after soccer practice, when the rest of the team had gone their separate ways.
The first time I told my best friend, Lillian, about Ben, we were sitting on the grass by the soccer field after practice, watching the boys run their mile and talking about nothing much. I guess I must have spaced because Lillian called me out.
“See anything you like, Greta?”
Busted. “Why? Am I drooling?”
“Practically. Who’s the lucky boy?”
Basically, this was the point of no return. I knew once I spoke Ben’s name out loud, my crush would go from a fantasy to something real, something I wouldn’t be able to take back. I fingered the flower I’d plucked and spoke directly to the ground. “Ben.”
“From English class? Cute, smart . . . quiet, bad jeans but sometimes that can work. Now all you have to do is talk to him.”
Ben
As usual, soccer practice ends with five laps around the field—a full mile, but most guys cut corners while Coach isn’t looking, so it ends up being a little less. In the beginning I try to stay honest, but after three laps I’m following the crowd, cheating here and there to make the run go faster. It’s not like I’m going to need the extra stamina standing on the sidelines. Coach says, “Ben, pay your dues and your chance will come.” Whatever. The truth is, I only turned out for soccer because my friends are on the team and it keeps me busy. Plus, the varsity girls practice on the other end of the field, and even though we’re three weeks into October, the weather is still warm enough for sports bras. Which is all I see as I make my way down the first leg of each lap. I don’t even see faces. Just legs and bras. And then, of course, it isn’t enough to see them in sports bras: I have to torture myself by trying to picture them naked. Anything to pass the time.