Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath

by Steven Goldman

  I have his attention. He has now closed The New Yorker and would be looking me in the eyes, if I actually looked up. He seems oddly alert, like a small rodent that’s heard a sudden noise. His nose might have twitched. He is really trying to figure out what it is I am trying to say. In class he rarely lets anyone finish a sentence. He gives the constant impression that he already knows whatever you were about to say and has already decided that it isn’t worth listening to.

  “I can tell you are trying to tell me something, or possibly ask me something.”

  “Ask. I was asking.”

  “And this film, about the book …”

  “It’s a sort of project.”

  “Instead of a paper.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.” He smiles. I stand there and stare at him. Seeing how I haven’t responded, he continues, “I like initiative and creativity. I’d be happy to watch a … Claymation …?”

  “Like Gumby. A cartoon, sort of.”

  “Sounds great. Do you have it with you? Because, whatever it is, it is still due today.”

  I pull it out of my bag. He looks at the cover and hands it back to me.

  “I can shift things around a little, why don’t we show it on Friday right after we wrap up the Grapes unit?”

  I’m not quite prepared for this reaction. “Do you want to preview it first?”

  “No, I trust you.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I say, and walk slowly back to my locker, thinking, “No. Don’t trust me.” I have made a seven-minute cartoon with naked clay figures being tortured in various ways and I am about to turn it in as an essay on Steinbeck. I don’t feel particularly trustworthy. Maybe I could change schools. Maybe I could convince my parents to move. We could go to a new state. Oklahoma. We could move to Oklahoma.

  “So what did he say?”

  M.C. seems to be standing between me and my locker. I am used to seeing her Post-it notes above my lock, which are her way of letting me know she expects David to give her a ride home, but I’m not used to seeing her stand here in person. I have never asked why I get the notes and not David, but I assume it has something to do with my being Carrie’s brother.

  “I’m thinking of moving to Oklahoma. Would you like to elope with me and live in Oklahoma?”

  “Too flat. What did he say?” M.C. arches her eyebrow. A clear physical question mark. M.C. may be one of the more animated people I know.

  “He said yes. He wants to show it on Friday.”

  “I knew he would, he’s so cool.”

  Has someone changed the meaning of the word “cool”?

  “It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to do it. I’m moving to Oklahoma.”

  “Not before Friday. It will be great.” M.C. does this little wiggle thing she always does when she’s happy. It’s like she’s smiling with her whole body. I can’t figure out why she’s enjoying this so much.

  “Gotta run,” she says, leaning into the words. “See ya.”

  I watch her walk down the hall. I have known M.C. for at least nine years. I know her family, the name of her goldfish, her PSAT score, and the colors of most of her shoes. I still have no idea what is going on behind her freckled forehead.

  Maybe I just don’t have any idea about what’s going on, period

  Louis is sitting with David at lunch. He has already appropriated David’s chips. David is defending his sandwich and apple by holding one in each hand and never placing them on the table. Louis looks up as if he is surprised to see me here.

  “Well, Mitch, Mitch Wells, join us. We were just discussing underwear.”

  I’m guessing David didn’t choose the topic. He waits for me to sit down and then tries to pretend Louis isn’t there. It is a strategy that never works.

  “I was thinking …,” David tells me.

  “Me too,” Louis interrupts. “Hurts, doesn’t it? I think there’s surgery they can do now to prevent that.”

  “I was thinking about talking to Wallman …,” David began again.

  “Not me. I was thinking about Ms. Kalikowski. Better legs than Wallman. In fact, I was having happy thoughts all the way through history class. Whenever she wears her tennis dress to class it always gives me happy thoughts.” Ms. Kalikowski, in addition to being our history teacher, also coaches tennis. Often she changes into her whites halfway through the day. She is youngish for a teacher, cheerful, and maybe even cute, but I don’t think she would be the object of so much discussion if she didn’t wear a short tennis skirt to teach American history.

  David shakes his head and waits for more, but Louis appears to have finished his thought. So he starts again. “I was thinking …”

  “About kilts? Me too. I’ve been thinking a lot about kilts.” Louis pauses for our reaction, which doesn’t impress him. “You see, while I was having my happy thoughts about Ms. K bending over to pick up the chalk, it occurred to me that men should wear skirts. Women don’t need them, there’s nothing in their pants that needs extra room in the middle of class. But a man, now—for those twenty or thirty times a day a happy thought overcomes him, he needs some room to expand into. Some of us, of course, need more room than others. So, I decided, kilts.”

  “You’re going to start wearing kilts?” David asks, giving up.

  “Which is why I wanted to talk undies. Boxers under kilts? Boxer briefs? Kangaroo pockets? Or nothing at all? Yeah, nothing, right? I thought so. But do you think kilts rub—would the wool be rough? I hate to leave you with that thought, but somewhere there is a class where I am notably absent. And I have sworn to figure out which one it is before the end of the year. Are you going to eat that?”

  Louis points to the bag of cold leftover pasta that I have pulled out of my lunch bag.

  “All yours.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t want to think about Louis chafing under a kilt,” I say, after Louis and my lunch leave.

  “Not a pretty thought,” David agrees.

  I wait for David to ask, but he doesn’t, so I tell him anyway.

  “Curtis said yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s it—okay?”

  “What do you want me to say? Congratulations, you’ve scammed your English teacher.”

  “I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “So now I know, but I don’t get it.”

  “What don’t you get?”

  “For starters, why? You’ve worked your butt off all year to keep a decent grade in honors English and you risk it over a stupid five-page paper? Did you think about what’s on that disc?”

  “Why are you suddenly so serious about everything? It’s one assignment. He might even like it.”

  “Think, Mitchell. Think about what happens in your movie.”

  “Our movie.”

  “No. This is all you. I made a Claymation cartoon that was never supposed to make it out of the troll cave. You cannot blame any of this on me.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Balls, Butts, Puke, and The Grapes of Wrath

  Wallman on the ethics of double dipping:

  In the next forty-eight hours, several more people, each in their own way, point out to me that I may not have made the world’s most well thought out, reasonable decision.

  “You’ve got balls,” Wallman barks at me as David and I enter the film lab after lunch. It isn’t immediately apparent whether he’s complimenting me or he’s upset. David and I both stop in the doorway, unsure of what to do next.

  “You turned in the work you did in my class as an assignment for another class. That takes some major balls.”

  It had never occurred to me. I sort of hadn’t remembered that what we did in art counted as an actual class. For one thing, it was fun.

  “Well—,” David says slowly, thinking this out a little, which is very nice of him considering he isn’t the responsible party. I am still in the “oh shit” mode. “Yes, you are right, the same film is being considered as a project for two different teachers,
but in very different ways. You, Mr. Wallman, are looking at the technical aspects of the film, its artistic merit, its style and substance. Mr. Curtis is really only considering it as an interpretation of a novel.”

  “He’s a prig and will hate it,” Wallman says, laughing behind his beard. “Let me know if he has the guts to fail you.” Wallman wanders back toward his desk, stopping to look at some actual digital animation someone has looping on one of the computer screens. I guess the conversation is over. David and I edge our way over to the editing room.

  “Do you think Curtis will care that I made the film for another class?”

  “He must know. He told Wallman.”

  I sit down in front of the mixing board. “Thanks for the defense back there. You sounded very convincing.”

  “For something I was pulling out of my butt. At least Wallman doesn’t care.”

  “Do you really think Curtis will fail me?”

  David doesn’t answer. He gets out the storyboards for our new project and fiddles with his pencils. He’s caught between the need to reassure me as a friend and the urge to tell me one more time what an idiot he thinks I am. I can see the two sides quarreling in his face.

  I’m beginning to think that it would have been easier just to read the book.

  Carrie on the detrimental effects of pornography on impressionable high school juniors:

  “Mitchell, you can’t show this.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re naked.”

  “They’re clay.”

  “They’re naked clay.”

  “It’s Adam and Eve. They’re supposed to be naked. Anyway, I based it on a painting. The whole point was to have this medieval painting come to life. They aren’t really naked, they’re nude.”

  Carrie presses the pause button and points to the screen. “They are naked. You can see Adam’s wee-wee.” She presses play again. “And there, Eve, full frontal.”

  Carrie and M.C. had whined the whole way home about why I wouldn’t show the movie to them first. So eventually I gave in. Now I remember why “no” was such a better answer.

  “I think they’re sort of cute,” M.C. says. “Except Eve’s breasts are a little funny-looking. I think the nipples are too big.”

  I don’t look up at M.C. I know I can’t look at her and think the word “nipples” at the same time without getting flustered.

  “I think my favorite part,” M.C. says, stretching out her feet and resting them on the coffee table, “is when the snake eats Eve and Adam is … punished.”

  “You mean where he is strapped into the giant sewing machine that sews ‘sinner’ all over his back? I stole it … I mean, it’s a postmodern reference to a Kafka story. I thought that it was pretty cool. I used a real sewing machine. I don’t know why the film lab has one, but it does. Maybe for costumes or sets or something. I cut off a section of his back, placed a few ketchup packets underneath, and then covered over them with clay. I thought the spurting blood was very Tarantino.”

  “Definitely.”

  Carrie is less convinced. She fast-forwards and we watch the ketchup packets bursting again. She shakes her head.

  “You so jumped the shark.”

  My mother on parental responsibility:

  Eventually David goes home and Carrie and M.C. go off to do whatever it is they spend all their time doing. After verifying that there is not one thing I want to watch on any of the three thousand channels we get, I go look in the kitchen for something to eat. It’s almost the same process. There’s lots of crap on television, just nothing I want to look at. Our kitchen is full of food, just nothing I want to eat. I don’t feel like an apple, grapes, a cheese stick, baby carrots, or leftover roast beef. Actually the roast beef might have been all right, but it’s looking a little too left over. There’s cans of tuna or soup, but that involves cooking, or at least mixing stuff together. There’s peanut butter. In the vegetable drawer there’s a few stalks of wilted celery. I decide to make toast.

  “Dinner’s soon,” my mother warns from the living room, where she’s on the phone.

  “Okay,” I tell her. Maybe I’m supposed to stop making toast. But I don’t.

  I look up from the toaster to find my mother standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She’s getting ready to ask me something. It is the preparation-for-confronting-your-child-about-a-difficult-subject face. What did I do now?

  I turn to face her. She has wrinkles around her eyes and streaks of gray in her hair, but the twenty-eight years between us doesn’t feel as huge as it used to. She’s a fund-raising consultant, part-time, and when she is on the phone with a client her voice is assured and invariably cheerful. Friendly but determined; you might like her, but you don’t want to get in her way. Lately, at home, her always rightness is less a given, but I don’t know whether that’s because Carrie and I are getting older or because something about her is changing. Probably some of both.

  “Mitch,” she says, changing into her smile. Mom often calls me Mitch. I usually object if someone shortens my name, but she named me, so she can get away with it. “Your sister mentioned something about one of your Claymation projects—something you’re going to show to your English class.”

  “Curtis said it was fine. I have his permission.”

  “Maybe I need to see this … thing … before you show it in school. Your sister seemed to think it was a bit racy.”

  “Mom, I’m a junior. Don’t you think I’m a little old for you to be checking my homework?”

  She considers this. “You’re right, I should trust you.” I feel a tightness in my chest. That word again.

  “I mean, you can see it. I’m not ashamed of it or anything.”

  “I think I’d like to see it. You already showed it to Carrie.”

  “That was clearly a mistake. Do you want to see it now?” Do you want to watch it and tell me that there’s no way you would let me show this thing in school, then make me read the stupid book and write the paper?

  “No, I think I’d like to wait so your dad can watch it too. He’s working nights right now, so maybe on a weekend? We’ll make some popcorn, have a film festival.”

  Nothing simple. Can’t just watch a movie. Now it’s a film festival.

  “We could invite your grandmother.”

  Oh, good.

  Chicken—it isn’t just for dinner

  After dinner, the same Carrie who told me there was no way I could show my film in class declares me chicken-shit for even mentioning the possibility of reading the book. It was just a casual statement like, “You know, maybe I’ll try to read The Grapes of Wrath after all.” Panic had begun to set in. Carrie’s point was that if you have decided to screw up your social status, your grade point average, and any hope of ever attending a reasonable four-year university, you might as well have the satisfaction of having done it with conviction. It would seem that I now have some sort of moral obligation to fake it.

  I take The Grapes to bed with me, but I can’t make it past page 23. No matter what is written on the page, the only word that I hear in my head is “nipples.”

  I really do try not to puke on the carpet

  By Thursday, I am past chickenshit and into a full-fledged panic. I wake up in the morning with an honest-to-god stomachache, complete with mild fever and vomiting. Simply nerves, all psychosomatic, but the vomit is real enough and Mom agrees to let me stay home. My dad, who claims to have a medical degree, looks at me lying there and says simply, “Try not to puke on the carpet.”

  I stay home from school. Mom goes off to work, Carrie to school, Dad to the hospital. I am now too old for anyone to take time off of work and sit with me for something as minor as a migraine (Dad’s conclusion, based on the fact that I have them regularly and they often make me throw up) or the flu (my mother’s theory, because it’s going around) or being a chickenshit wimp (my sister’s more accurate diagnosis). So they leave me sitting up in bed in my bathrobe, with my bedside trash can lined with a plastic bag
(just in case), a sick seventeen-year-old who can stay by himself. I may be seventeen, but no one wants to be mature and independent when they feel sick. When you’re sick you want someone to fuss over you, make you chickie star soup (Campbell’s, from the can), prop you up with pillows, and drag the television in from the playroom.

  I don’t get up and drag the television in. I don’t make myself chickie star soup. In a fit of utter despair and self-loathing, I read the entirety of The Grapes of Wrath. Not well, mind you, I’m not that fast a reader, but cover to cover if you don’t count eighty or so pages in the middle, which I mostly skip.

  “That’s pathetic” is Carrie’s only comment when she returns at 4:30, M.C. in tow, to discover me on the couch, absorbed in the last chapter.

  M.C. is a little more diplomatic. Tossing her backpack onto the ottoman, she finds a perch on one of the green vinyl stools, plucks an apple from the bowl on the counter, and smiles at me. “Did you at least enjoy the book?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “How’s your stomach?” asks Carrie, still in the doorway.

  “No more puke.”

  Carrie seems convinced enough to enter the den, but chooses a seat well away from me in case I develop a sudden urge to projectile-vomit across the room. I consider faking it, but I’m afraid it might bring the real thing back up. Carrie eyes me warily. “Are you going to school tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. I’m going.”

  “And …?”

  “I think I might write the paper.”

  “You suck,” Carrie declares at my forehead, since I won’t lift my face and look her in the eyes. “I can’t believe how badly you suck. You’re going to chicken out. What a complete wimp. I can’t believe you.”

  Unable to face my sister, I shift my attention to M.C., who is still smiling. She has a piece of green apple skin stuck between her teeth, right next to her left upper canine. I start to tell her, then get embarrassed, and decide instead that it goes well with the freckles on her nose. Something about the freckles and the apple she is chomping on makes me think of Tom Sawyer. M.C. looks out of place in our living room. She should be out convincing someone to whitewash a fence.