by Jesse Ball
Why don’t you put on a record, she said. Something quiet. I said okay, I’ll put on a record. I’ll go do that.
I found a record. I put it on.
I came back across the room, and behind me the record was just starting, behind me there was hissing and hissing and as the first few notes came, scratched out of the dark plastic by the needle, I looked for her in the chair where her body was, but I saw that she wasn’t there.
The Wentworth building stands at the end of a big avenue. You can see it from a mile away. Matter of fact, it’s like the hand of a clock, because when the sun is shining on some parts of town, other parts get nothing because they are in its shadow.
I decided I was done with people. Even good ones—they can’t do much for you.
Lana and I pretended to be going to some office, and we got to the roof of the Wentworth building. The elevator doesn’t even go all the way. The last five floors are these majestic stairs. I guess it was a place for captains of industry or some other hateful types. This beautiful staircase comes to a huge double door that is cobwebbed and dirty. I kicked at it and Lana rammed it. Then we saw there was another door on the side. We kicked at that, and kicked at it. It opened and we got out onto the roof.
The sudden expanse was—surprising. The thing about distance is, it feels complete. Maybe it is the opposite of complete, but it feels so finished in its endlessness.
We walked out toward the edge.
Wait.
I’m not afraid, I said.
Afraid of what? Wait up.
I walked right to it, as if I were walking on a sidewalk. I mean, my toes were hanging over. My body swayed forward, then back, then forward. I looked down, and I felt nothing.
Asshole, get back here.
No, you come over here.
I sat down with my legs hanging off. The roof was warm, real warm, and I could feel the warmth all through my legs. The breeze was stiff and cool, and it came now and then.
Lana crept to the edge and sat next to me.
You asshole.
We looked down over the town.
It is so hard, she said, to take it seriously. Matter of fact, I refuse to. Long as I live, I won’t take anything seriously. What do you say?
I said I would agree, for me and for my aunt, too.
Lana was quiet for a while.
She’s dead, isn’t she?
Yeah. How’d you know?
Your eyes are swollen. Was it yesterday?
Yeah.
Crazy old bat. I don’t want to live that long.
Me neither.
I want to die in the afternoon—when it’s just stopped raining and no one’s around.
How would you do it?
I would walk out into the middle of a public park, some beautifully trimmed lawn. People would be starting to leave their houses. From every direction they’d be coming toward me, but they wouldn’t be there yet. Because by the time they got there, they would find that I was dead. No matter when they did come, I would just be a corpse in a park.
…
We sat for a while.
What would you do? she asked me.
I think I would go to the top of a building with a friend, and then I would leap off, jump all the way to the ground and be crushed against it. The ground isn’t dangerous. It’s just the ground, but somehow when I touched it, I would be crushed against it. No matter how delicately I reached out my hands, my feet, I would be crushed flat.
Shut the fuck up. Do it then.
Oh, we laughed and laughed, Lana and me.
Everyone should just crush themselves to death.
Yeah, everyone should do that. Why not?
I can’t think of a reason.
Wait, wait. No. No, I can’t either.
Let’s throw something off.
Like what?
To sum up, let me tell you: I’m not one of those nihilistic types who thinks there is no meaning. I guess, I don’t think there’s meaning; there’s definitely no meaning, but not in a nihilistic way. I don’t find it exciting the way they do. I think you could as well be a bug or a sparrow or part of an antler, or the back of someone’s pocketknife.
There’s a story someone told me, a friend of my aunt’s who came to the funeral. She said, your aunt was at the soup kitchen and a guy came in and he wanted a bowl of soup, but there wasn’t any soup. We call it a soup kitchen, but more often there are sandwiches, or burritos or whatever. Soup is kind of messy. But he wants some soup. So, my aunt gets him a sandwich and she sticks it in his bowl and hands it to him with a spoon and she says, soup for one. Apparently all the people at the shelter liked this a lot. They would always say, soup for one. Soup for one. One guy even tattooed it on his leg. Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it’s like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?
LETTER
Well, I got back to my aunt’s place, and I stood there looking around. It felt pretty bad, I have to say, being in a place like that. I stuck most of my things in an army bag and put it by the door. That made me feel a little better. Then I noticed an envelope that was on the kitchen table. Somehow I hadn’t seen it.
—LUCIA—
It was addressed to me—a letter from my aunt. She must have left it out the day before. She was probably waiting for me to find it. That’s the kind of thing she would do—and did, all the time.
I opened it. There were two letters inside. One was from Hausmann. It was an acceptance letter.
I sank into the chair. Then I realized I was sitting in the chair where my aunt died and I started to stand up. But, I decided, why not. I might as well huddle there with her death, so I curled up and looked at the other letter.
It was from my aunt. One thing about her that you should know—her handwriting is perfect. It looks like the work of a Victorian handwriting machine. She writes on paper without lines and all the words are perfectly laid down, everything symmetrical. I think it has to do with her posture.
Anyway—this is what she said:
LETTER
Lucia, dear girl,
It is of course your decision and I will respect whatever it is that you choose to do. However, you should know that opportunities do not come so easily as the years pass, and that therefore, when one is young, it can be a savvy choice to obtain what you may as freely as you may. If these people will house you and give you a place to grow—you do not even need to learn what they want you to learn. You can continue your own education in the midst of these circumstances, which, you must admit, appear quite lovely. It is also true that you might find people there to talk to. It is always a pleasure to have people to talk to, people of real worth. We have always had each other, but I am sure that you will soon be alone—and then what?
However any of this might be, I want you to know that I am quite overcome with pride—not that you have managed to be admitted to this school, but that you have not failed to be the person I have always hoped you would be. It is a sad thing for me that I imagine I will not live to see you become utterly her—become her whom you will be inalienably. That person, I feel, will be someone to behold.
Goodbye for now,
Your strongest supporter always, Lucy
LETTER
Well, I cried for a while, I don’t mind saying. I folded the letter up and stuck it in my pocket. The one from Hausmann I put in my bag. I stood up and looked around the room and it was as if I had never seen it before. My eyes moved over the various objects and I truly felt at that moment as if I had never seen any of them, as if I was for a moment, entirely new. I wondered what I would do.
That’s when I noticed it. On the back wall—something was missing. My aunt basically owned nothing, you know that already. But, she did have an old wedding dress and an old suit and the old wedding dress and the old suit, they hung together on the back wall of the house—like a costume exhi
bit. Next to the old wedding dress and next to the old suit there was a framed picture. In the picture, there were two people. One of them was a man. He was wearing the suit, but in the picture it was not an old suit. The other was a woman, a pretty young woman, and in the picture she was wearing the wedding dress. That woman was my aunt.
The picture was gone; the dress was gone; the suit was gone. There wasn’t even any reason for someone to take that stuff—some useless old clothes. It had to have been just some creepy whim.
But, I was pretty sure I knew who had done it.
Next thing I knew, I was on the front steps. I banged on the glass. Nothing. I banged on the glass. Nothing.
The landlord came to the door. Maybe I mentioned him to you before. 1. He hates me. 2. He hates me.
He opened it, looked down at me. I could tell he knew I knew.
What do you want?
There was just enough room, so I brushed past him into the house.
I know what you did.
He yelled at me to stop, but I ran into the next room, I guess it was the kitchen. There, on the counter, I saw it in a big pile—right there on the counter he’d stuck the dress and the suit and the framed photo.
Asshole!
I grabbed the stuff from the counter and turned around. He stood there, blocking my way.
He said something about my aunt owing him money.
I said the clothes weren’t worth anything anyway. He’d better let me go.
He threatened to call the police.
So I put down the stuff. I could see that he thought he’d won. His expression changed, and became if anything, even uglier. The wreck that age had made of his face, which is usually something I like to see—I admire it—in this case made him look like a vile clown. His mouth was practically spitting at me in his supposed victory:
Now get out of here, he said.
I went to go by him and he grabbed my shoulder. I tried to get him off, but he pulled me along and tossed me out the door.
I ran back to the garage and just sat there sobbing like a weak little wretch. For some reason it was too much for me. Someone like my aunt, she venerates this stupid clothing that she wore a million years ago, just because her life is a train wreck and for her sometimes thinking back on one of the few good things, her ultimately fruitless wedding, could make her feel good—and what happens? When she’s dead, even this dumb little display of her ordinariness—even that doesn’t get respected. It gets taken by the landlord who likes collecting quaint worthless shit. I wonder how long he had his eye on it.
I felt right then that I needed to get as far away as possible from this, from the beginnings of my life. If I could get some distance away, I was sure I could make something clean and cold and clear. Someplace else, not here, I could be the inheritor of my aunt’s, my father’s ideas.
Two minutes later, I heard the sirens.
A minute after that, the noise came: people in the garden.
Someone was saying something, maybe the landlord’s nephew.
Another voice said, we’ll take care of it. Just hang back.
Then another voice: hang back.
There was a knock at the door. I went over and opened it. There must have been ten people out there.
Turns out the old man was claiming I shoved him and threatened his safety inside his own house. I don’t remember it that way, but I guess it could have happened.
LANA
Next thing you know, I was sitting with Lana in her car outside the police station. My duffel bag was in the back with what I guess was everything I own. I was filling Lana in on what happened:
What happened was this:
The old man claimed I was trespassing. I thought he meant trespassing in his house when I went to get the wedding dress. Not so. He meant trespassing by being on the property. Turns out he had already filed a complaint against my aunt and me, just in case, for squatting in his garage. They pulled that out and it looked pretty bad. So, presto—that was that. The police officer told me the old man would drop the charges if I’d stay away. I said I would and that was that. When I started to talk about the wedding dress, which I did, I mean, I really started giving a shitty little speech, everyone shut up for a second in that part of the precinct, and that’s when I realized that I sounded totally fucking crazy. A wedding dress from 1940? Who cares? So, I stopped talking and walked out and no one stopped me. I guess I had already been processed.
Ten minutes later, Lana picked me up. I told her my side of the story and we drove away. She was madder than I was. In general I think sadness kind of takes the strength away from anger, or maybe they just waver back and forth. I don’t know. All I know is most of the time I am one or the other—that is, angry or sad. We get offered so few real victories. It’s a question I can’t even really answer: what is the victory I want?
MONDAY
That was a Friday. The fallout didn’t come until Monday. Over the weekend, I tried to sneak back into my aunt’s to get a few more things, but there were new locks on the door. I stayed at Lana’s the first night, then at Jan’s Saturday and Sunday. Monday I went to school.
I got pulled straight out of homeroom and sent to the principal’s. Of course, I know that terrible room pretty well by now. What I didn’t know was, the principal evidently knew someone who knew my aunt’s landlord. I guess everybody I hate knows each other, like some kind of club.
So, in a thirty-minute harangue I was told by the principal, who was red-faced (he even swore three or four times), that he was going to make damned well sure nothing went well for me at the school going forward and that I should consider dropping out. Matter of fact, I should more than consider it. He said he didn’t have the power to kick me out, but he could make it tough for me if I stayed, and he would.
I headed for the door.
I’m not done, he said.
I told him he could fuck himself.
He said something like: he could see my whole life stretched out—failures and failures and failures. We tried to help you, he said. But you can’t be helped.
That was enough for me.
GOODBYE WHISTLER
And there I was, standing in the hall. Let’s not be romantic about it. I hated the place from the get-go. And so, that was the end of my sojourn at Whistler High.
Nothing left for me to do but take the licorice I’d socked away in my locker, toss my textbooks on the ground, and waltz out the grand front entrance like I owned it. So, I did that. The hallway felt enormous, I don’t know why. It’s almost like—we don’t see things most of the time, but every now and then, BAM—your sight gets defamiliarized, and then everything looks new, like you’ve never seen it before.
A few kids were trailing in late to first period, and I could see they were confused by my behavior. A teacher tried to stop me—asked where I was going.
I just laughed.
That didn’t go over well.
Listen, either you’re a student or you’re not. And if you’re not a student anymore you can’t be on school grounds.
I get that. I get it. That’s why I’m walking this way. Do you see what direction this is?
The people at Whistler High are a real mixed bag.
I crossed the street, and went up into the woods a bit. I’d thought about going up into those woods for a while, but I had never done it. There were some fallen trees and I sat down on one. From where I sat I could see the whole high school building opposite. Different scenes were framed in all the windows, and along the arterial of the front drive, cars came and went. The whole thing was a vulgar facsimile of something useful, but a false version, one that does no good. Imagine if someone would show you a beehive that doesn’t make honey. What’s the point of it, you say? Oh, it’s just to keep the bees busy. We love it when they learn to like what’s given to them. That’s what the voice would say if it decided to reveal itself to you. But usually it keeps quiet.
LANA
The next day, Lana came to Jan’s place a
nd told me Beekman wanted me to call him. She gave me his phone number on a piece of paper.
I don’t really like him, she said, but he seemed pretty mad at the principal, so I guess he’s all right.
Weird. I don’t really know why it matters so much to him.
Don’t ask me.
Can I use your phone to call?
Lana said we needed to get me my own phone. I said didn’t I know it.
The phone rang for a while, then Beekman answered:
1. He was sorry about my aunt dying. I said it was probably the best thing for her, which is essentially meaningless, but I discovered it is a good way to end conversations like that.
2. He was mad at me for quitting school. He said the principal was bluffing about ruining things for me there. There isn’t much a principal can do even if the principal hates you, he said. The teachers wouldn’t stand for him just victimizing students. I said, what’s done is done. I wasn’t learning anything anyway. He didn’t say anything to that.
3. He asked if I had been arrested for assaulting an old man in his home. I said it was complicated and gave him my account of things, which basically took forever. Lana kept shaking her head at me.