It was unusual for a tenth grader at Wattsbury Regional to speak like this. Most academic parents nodded to the idea of meritocracy by concealing their handiwork, helping their children translate the ideas they’d given them for their schoolwork into plebeian English. The baldness of the parental involvement here was notable. But the truly remarkable thing was Khadijah’s composure. It was as if Nancy had not only dictated the content of her presentation but inhabited her the moment she rose to speak.
“. . . and therefore the creation of new words, an entirely new means of communication. Characters that had once been static in their meaning gained the ability to shift, taking on different meanings depending on their location among other characters.”
The visual aids she’d constructed were larger, I suspected, than cuneiform tablets. With the madness of an artist, she had created an exhibit that reached beyond the demands of the assignment. She’d decided that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek lettering each deserved a monolith made from four conjoined sheets of extra-large black poster board. When she was done speaking like her mother, she shouldered the massive charts and returned to her seat, her arms full, her head obscured. She leaned the time lines against her desk, and I studied them from across the room. At each notch, there was an empire’s outline, or a glyph, or the sketched face of an ancient despot. They were dark and chunky with effort. They were imitations of Nancy’s art, drawn by a hand that couldn’t move like Nancy’s hand.
• • •
The following Thursday, we had the day off from school to participate in the ABC Walk, which benefited the ABC House. ABC stood for A Better Chance. The ABC House was an old Victorian in downtown Wattsbury where poor black and Latino boys from New York City came and lived for four years, so that they could attend Wattsbury Regional. The method of collecting donations was to go door to door pledging to walk ten kilometers through the woods if your neighbor would give you ten dollars. Sophomores wound through the Robert Frost Conservation Center as a cold rain sprinkled the birches. Khadijah walked with two other girls fifty feet ahead of me and my friends—I could see her scrunchie, apricot today, through white branches.
I was walking with my father’s backpack held in front of me, bouncing against my knees. I’d left my own backpack at school the day before, so my father had told me to take his from the floor of the bedroom closet. Halfway through the hike, the social studies teacher placed in charge of us cupped his hands around his mouth and announced lunch. Rooting for a bottle of water, my hand closed around a minibar bottle of Sutter Home wine.
Burbling, abundant love for my father flooded my heart. I unscrewed the top as we sat on stones.
“You can have some of the wine my father gave me,” I whispered to my two friends, the straight-backed, dark-haired son of a Spanish literature professor in immaculate corduroys and the slightly obese son of an acupuncturist. “Just be cool about it, or people will freak out and tell on us.”
They each took a substantial gulp. We had a conversation about whose father was chiller about wine. After I’d wolfed my meatball marinara from Subway, I searched all the pockets and compartments in the backpack clinging to the hope my father had included a Subway cookie. In a pocket within a pocket, my hand closed around an unfamiliar form.
I drew out what looked like a hard candy imported from Europe. It was a round object in thick golden wrapping, with tiny writings on the side and the gleam of an elite continental sweet. I was even prouder of my father now; here was further evidence of his good taste.
I interrupted my friends and asked if they knew what kind of candy it was.
“I can’t open it,” I said, which was true. “Maybe you guys can figure out how to get this fancy foreign wrapping off. It’s most likely from France or Italy, or Prague, where they just try to make things prettier.”
The Spanish literature professor’s son held it first. Having lived in Barcelona, he liked to tell us of the superiority of things European, so when he bit away the golden wrapper, and his eyes opened wide, and his jaw snapped open and shut, I believed I had just revealed an object of great rarity and preciousness. He looked at my other friend, the acupuncturist’s son. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked him.
“No,” said the acupuncturist’s son. “It’s too good.”
Dread coiled through my happiness. They scrutinized the fine print on the wrapper.
“It is,” said the acupuncturist’s son. “It really is.” He raised it skyward in the palm of his hand, to honor it.
“Want to eat it, Josh?” There was a gentleness in their voices, an ambivalence. A note of I must immediately give you shit or it will be worse.
I shoved between them and snatched it. Cradling it in one hand, I inspected it with the other, trying to understand what I saw. This was not a dessert, as I had believed, but nor was it a condom—this much I knew. At any rate, it was not like any condom I had ever seen. It was a soft plastic ring, off-white, with a small spherical appendage. Inside the appendage there was a tiny, dark egg. Beside the egg there was a soft plastic switch, set to Off.
The acupuncturist’s son finally turned to me and placed a paternal hand on my shoulder. “It’s called a cock ring.”
With two fingers, I traced its contours, full of wonder. A strange thing happened: It leapt from my fingers, emitting a loud, steady, midrange buzz. I had hit the switch.
The former Barcelonan plucked it from the mud at our feet. He held it, still vibrating, behind his back with one hand, as he held me at bay with the other. He and the acupuncturist’s son passed it back and forth, under the wet pines, scholars.
As a circle of my classmates mustered around us, the acupuncturist’s son bent toward me and folded his arms. Our social studies teacher was studying the bark of a tree. Khadijah left her friends and came over to watch, from a respectful distance.
“Your parents are married, aren’t they?” the acupuncturist’s son asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then your dad”—he walked the student through the obvious lesson, for the benefit of the class—“has been trying to spice things up with your mom, or he’s got some hot ass on the side.”
“Clearly the former.” I strove to control my voice, to deflate significance.
The acupuncturist’s son, angry I had shoved him, held the toy in one hand, in the other its golden packaging. He climbed onto a boulder. The audience clucked at the immaturity of what was going on, but continued to watch. In order to free his hand and insert his fingers through the ring itself, he tossed the wrapper to the wind. The rain had stopped, and the clouds had begun to float away. As the buzz filled the air, the little square of foil drifted on the breeze, caught sunlight, and became a tiny golden bird.
4.
The Harp Player
“I want to extend an invitation,” my father said to me that night. He paused the videotape, Ma nuit chez Maud. My mother and sister had pronounced themselves tired ten minutes ago and left us, the Paquette men, to consume two pints of Häagen-Dazs ourselves. “Nancy Dunn and I got to talking at the office, and we thought it might be a nice excursion for you and Khadijah if we all went to see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in Boston, at the MFA.” He was wearing gym clothes, because he had just worked out on the rowing machine. In a white, sweat-stained T-shirt and short, purple Wattsbury College track shorts, he was regally unwashed, his already formidable air of authority strengthened by his immodesty. The sweat in his straight, dark hair made it stand in unpredictable spikes. “Do you have any plans for Sunday? Your mother is going to be taking Rachel to some Yiddish Book Center thing. I thought this might appeal to you more.” At leisure, he waited for my reply.
“Sounds cool,” I said, after a moment of frenzied reflection.
“Some hesitation, Son?” He swirled the melted ice cream in his bowl. “Do you harbor some ambivalence toward the Pre-Raphaelites?”
You owned a cock ring, I thought. My friends buried it beneath a copse of pines. But I raised my eyebro
ws and made a civilized response. “I love the ancient Italians.”
He winced. “Oof, Wattsbury High School. Oof, PC education. Teach the nuances of H. Rap Brown, but the Pre-Raphaelites . . . Sorry. I don’t mean to be snotty with you, your mother’s been on me about that.” He put down his bowl and massaged his temples. “Would you like some wine?”
I was barely able to contain my joy. “Don’t get up, Dad,” I said. “I’ll go to the kitchen and get a glass.”
When I returned he was lost in thought. He barely looked at my glass as he filled it, letting a little of the Argentine Malbec cry down the side. “Did you know Nancy was a far more radical youth than your mother and me?” He grinned. “Nancy was a hippie to be reckoned with. When the rest of us were practicing Buddhism, she was in this gaggle of non-Islamic Sufis, Emersonian Sufis. They sang and danced by Walden Pond until a different bunch of Thoreau-Whitman grad student types drove them off the territory through guilt-tripping. They argued they were destroying the silence, whereas the Sufis believed they were creating a microcosm of a peaceful society. Nancy was the appointed artist, very talented. She would draw these geometric patterns that corresponded to the peace dances. But once Khadijah was in the mix she got bit by the neocon bug. It was the times, you know; she rediscovered the middle-class work ethic. It’s like a little death that must come for us all someday.” He reached out and pushed Play on the VCR. We sank back into the black-and-white netherworld that was France.
Having a father who had a crush on the mother of an interesting girl was actually kind of awesome. In some sense, it didn’t matter what the Dads were up to, what mechanisms they were using on each other. They were taking Khadijah and me to Boston, to stroll through a museum at their heels. I knew that using us as cover would work. My parents had mentioned the Silverglate-Dunns in passing any number of times, so there must have been some friendliness between our families; my mother would see nothing objectionable in a trip to Boston with kids in tow. The Dads would stand with heads cocked dreamily to one side and whisper intelligent things to each other about non-Italian paintings, never suspecting that Khadijah and I would whisper intelligent things to each other about them.
The next morning, after homeroom, I made for the hall where Khadijah took French. She whirled around the corner a moment after I arrived and reflected my look of amazement back at me.
“Sorry about your dad’s . . .” She formed a ring with her hands. She made the ring vibrate.
“We’re all going to a museum. Like a family.”
“Come with me.” We twisted through the crowd, never touching, never speaking, never drawing so close that anyone would think us in league. She took a sharp right in the midst of the hard science hallway, and we were in a short passage with a blue door at its end. She banged through it, and I followed her into a closet of retired Apples. Their cords dangled like viscera from the shelves. She had a nose for corners, recesses, empty spaces.
“Are they insane?” I asked her. I could see in her face that she felt what I felt: the thrill at discovering the Dads’ misbehavior, the fear of losing them.
“The brazenness of it, Josh.”
I considered that brazen was probably an SAT word.
“It looks so much more wholesome if we come,” she continued. “We’re like a disguise. It’s obvious. The Pre-Raphaelites are baby unicorns and shit. And of course they picked the big Yiddish Book Center Open House day, because it puts my dad and your mom out of commission.”
“Why would you go see baby unicorns with somebody you have a thing with?” I asked.
“You know the painting on the cover of Reviving Ophelia? That’s the Pre-Raphaelites.”
I thought of the mad, cream-skinned girl lying prone in the river. “Superbrazen,” I agreed.
She made her hands into triumphant claws and shook them at her sides. “So fucking brazen.”
“I feel bad for my mom,” I said. “And I hate your mom.”
Something warm passed between us. “I hate your dad,” she breathed, almost whispering. “As always.” She reinstated her backpack on her shoulders, and we parted.
• • •
It might have been the way Khadijah and I had begun to speak to each other, but the Pre-Raphaelites seemed to me to make pretty art. After we’d wandered fifteen minutes in beauty-nauseous silence, my father brought our party to a halt by a little Rossetti, in which a woman in her mid-twenties plucked a harp. She stared away from the instrument at an apparently sublime object out of frame, her eyes narrow, her mouth open. She was in love or lust or religious rapture, or all three. Down the hall, people swirled like water moccasins around the drowning girl in a brown and green dress, so we had a little row of non-Ophelian Rossettis to ourselves. I counted four long-haired harp-girls.
“Feminist Art Historian,” said my father to Nancy, “what say you? Is he remotely palatable? Or is his thing with pretty young muses just too creepo?”
My father wore an art outfit: a loose black jacket, a black T-shirt, gray jeans, his white Converse sneakers. Nancy cocked her head to one side, as I’d imagined she would. All I knew about the term neocon was that it denoted a new kind of conservative, but it nonetheless seemed clear to me that Nancy was neocon in matters of dress, if not in matters of state. She wore a loose white sweater over a purple collared shirt that looked like it could only be dry-cleaned, a string of pearls barely visible against the long neck Khadijah had inherited. Her beige, boot-cut slacks were creased. She was old-fashioned with no frills, old-fashioned gone efficient, like the word con, which was conservative with the extraneous cloth sliced away.
“When people think of Rossetti,” she replied, “they think of the scenes from Shakespeare, from Le Morte d’Arthur, tragic angels, enchantresses. And he must answer for any number of those. He painted Elizabeth Siddal as an idealized sprite, not quite human. But take this one.” She directed us to The Harp Player, A Study of Annie Miller. “It’s demystified, for me, it’s better. She’s just a woman playing an instrument. She’s got the epic hair, and the instrument is a harp—which is angelic. But her face isn’t angelic. She’s not consumed with lust, she’s not abject, like the star of the show over there.” Nancy gestured with her head toward the Ophelia crowd. “I like this one because he hasn’t plunked her in medieval times, or in a river. He lets her be awkward, stare at the floor. She’s not part of a story he needs to tell.”
When we pulled away in the Subaru, Nancy sighed so forlornly I could see her straighten in her seat as she took in breath and slump as she let air leave her body. My father asked her what was wrong.
“I just don’t know how my life came to be located so far from these beautiful things.”
My father’s arm flashed out to stroke her hair. She leaned into him, willing to be consoled. And then they remembered that Khadijah and I were sitting behind them. My father yanked back his hand as if Nancy had bitten it. Nancy jolted in her seat as if she’d been punched.
In the back, I tried to hold Khadijah’s gaze, to exchange a meaningful look, but she was gazing out the window, at the rain. The Dads glowered at the road. No one spoke as we waited at the tollbooth emblazoned with the Mass Pike insignia, a sapphire pilgrim hat tipped at a jaunty angle.
Khadijah nudged my sneaker with her clog. Using her index finger, she wrote in the moisture that had accumulated on the interior surface of the window, in dripping capitals: THEY HATE US.
5.
Pig Question
The next day was Monday. After a meeting of the Russian Club Vecherinka Banquet Celebration Planning Committee, I walked outside and passed Khadijah, who was leaning against a tree with a black paperback in her lap. I slumped against the bark, beside her. The title of her book was written in white, stencil-style capitals: The Anarchist’s Handbook.
“Do you want to blow people up and be lesbian, like Emma Goldman?” I asked. Last year, I had read half of Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow. I knew what anarchists did.
“Pig question,” she said
.
I must have looked confused. She referred me to page four. “A pig question,” she read aloud, “is a question that might be asked with ill intent by someone from outside the movement who pretends to be interested in joining the movement.”
“Are you attempting to overthrow the government?”
“Pig question.”
“Are you willing to kill for your cause?”
“Pig question.”
“Are you a lesbian?”
“Almost a pig question. No.”
I noticed something. “Is that nail polish?”
The question was rhetorical. Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn, in defiance of the subcultural rules observed by girls who carried apple green pens and got A’s, had painted her fingernails black. She wore a pair of the imposter Doc Martens sold at Payless, jeans, and a thick gray sweatshirt. Her hair was down and uncombed. Khadijah, I now understood, was wearing an anarchist outfit.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s nail polish.” She reached into her purse and withdrew a large stone, flat and smooth. An A inside a circle was drawn on it in Sharpie, the horizontal shaft stretching beyond the ring. It was a symbol I’d seen on the prows of skateboards, and on a Dumpster behind the Wattsbury College Cinema Theater.
“I’m going to throw it through the window of that Bank of Boston on South Pleasant,” she said, “once it gets dark tomorrow night.”
I couldn’t tell whether this was something that Khadijah would actually do. Khadijah and I were kids who didn’t throw things. But given that my father and her mother were not who they seemed, maybe Khadijah and I were not who we seemed either. Maybe if I threw something, too, I would become more my true self than I was now. There was also this: If Khadijah and I threw rocks at a bank and were caught, the Dads would be distressed, and it would be a punishment for what they had done. Or if they weren’t distressed, then they would be revealed to be bad parents, unparent-like parents. There were not many ways to find out who one’s parents really were, but this was one of them. And if we could find out who the Dads were, throwing that rock, we could know better who we, their children, were. Besides, maybe throwing rocks at banks was a virtuous act, if Khadijah, a top student, thought it was.
Good Kids: A Novel Page 3