7
It’s dead quiet in the house, which means she could have offed herself but I’m in no mood for discovering the body. I keep thinking about those babies in the foundling hospital in England in the eighteenth century. Some lord got sick of stepping over dead babies in the street so he guilt-tripped his rich cronies into coughing up for a foundling hospital. Starving women lined up to surrender their babies. The hitch was there wasn’t enough room in the hospital for all the babies. The women had to pick balls out of a sack to determine who got to leave their babies behind. A green ball meant you could hand your baby over immediately, never to be seen again. A red ball meant your baby was put on a waiting list, and a black ball meant your baby was back on the street. The mothers whose babies got in always gave the babies something to remember them by. It was usually a bead bracelet or a cheap charm or something, but some of the women were so poor all they had was a ribbon or a nut. They’d poke a hole through the nut so the baby could wear it as a necklace. The ghouls who ran the hospital never gave the trinkets to the babies. The kids never knew that it was hard for their mothers to hand them over, that they were loved and mourned. Half of them died in the foundling hospital anyway. A couple of hundred years later those nuts with holes in them are in a glass case in a museum. You have to pay to see them.
This is one of the problems I have with my biological mother wanting to see me all of a sudden. She left me no sign.
I check the mail since Drew doesn’t bother anymore. Bills, and the usual organizations asking her to send cabbage to help them save the world. No love letter from my devoted bio mum. That’s what would happen in the movies. Dear beloved daughter …
I grab some saltines and crack open a book about the Reformation for some light reading. All that killing over religion makes no sense to me. I guess the point is it wasn’t about religion but control. Look at old Cromwell, what a power junkie he must have been, the Lord Protector. What a wank. You have to wonder how the people put up with all that crap without TVs to distract them. Nowadays, with the one-eyed monster they can slip anything past us.
I like history, except for the fact that we don’t learn from it. I might even get a decent mark if it weren’t being taught by Mr. Swails. He thinks he’s an actor and is always pretending to be James II or something. He loves doing French accents, especially Mary Queen of Scots who was raised by Frenchies. He does a virgin queen version of Elizabeth as well as a dried-up-old-hag Gloriana. I figure he’s a cross-dresser. Anyway, it’s hard to get the facts straight with old Swails prancing about. All those wars and beheadings, forming and dissolving of parliaments. Swails gets giddy when he talks about the beginnings of democracy and all I can think is, what’s changed? The rich still get richer while the rest of us work for them. Maybe machinery doesn’t chew up our limbs as often, and we get days off. And at least kids don’t go down the mine, or become blind working long hours in factories without artificial light. Of course Third World kids go down the mine and become blind working long hours, but they don’t count.
Our galoot of a neighbour is at his drum set again, thumping along to tunes from the seventies. He’s an NFL flunky turned personal trainer. I don’t know who he’s personally training because he seems to have an abundance of time on his hands. He’s got four kids and a mute wife plus a Rottweiler he hits with a shovel, which stops the dog barking for about two seconds. The personal trainer never walks the dog, just lets it dump in the yard then shovels the doodoo into the schoolyard across the street. I should report him but fear repercussions. Which is what’s wrong with the world, I guess, all of us fearing repercussions.
After my persecuted-Jewish-girl phase, I got hooked on African-American slave stories. I’d always imagined lynching like in the movies, hooded Ku Klux Klan members carrying torches, dragging some black guy out in the dead of night and stringing him up. The fact is, up until the fifties, lynchings took place in broad daylight on weekends. Bus tours were set up so the out-of-towners could catch the action. Children were let out of Sunday school early so they could enjoy the show. Usually, after they beat the shit out of him, they’d tie the ‘nigger’ behind a wagon or a car and drag him around so the whole town could gawp at him. He only got lynched after he’d been tortured and spit upon. Some ninety-three-year-old man who escaped lynching because somebody, some white person, finally shouted that he was innocent, was quoted as saying the men in the Klan robes tormenting him were his neighbours. He recognized them through their masks. Neighbours he’d helped because he was a wizard at fixing lawn mowers.
It’s not like I feel good about not reporting the personal trainer. But the way I see it, all the authorities would do is ask him if he shovels dog feces into the schoolyard. He’d say, ‘Heck, no,’ and they’d get back in their government cars.
The thing about history is that it shows you that stuff keeps repeating. It looks different because of technology and all that, but it’s the same stuff. Like all the privatization that’s going on. Pretty soon we’ll be buying air from the corporations who are polluting it. That’s after we bail them out, of course.
I close the window but I can still hear the drumming. What keeps a noddy like that going? Waldo, the security guard at the mall, works out about eighteen hours a day. When he isn’t pumping iron, he’s hanging around the counter asking for ‘free licks.’ According to Waldo, life’s one big disappointment. He’s always yammering about how he got ripped off or let down by somebody or other. After boring me for an hour with the details of his disillusionment, he’ll say, ‘But hey, what’re you going to do? That’s life.’ Which is a valid question, what are you going to do? Sit around eating crackers? Which is what I’m doing. Stuffing entire crackers in my mouth and sucking the salt off them.
Alberto with no more ice cream is probably in bed in a group home. Who takes off his leg brace and tucks him in? Does anybody read him a story? A social worker was stabbed by a kid in a group home. Everybody thought they had a good relationship because they walked in parks and the kid confided in her. The social worker thought the kid was making progress. You have to wonder about that, what we think we see versus what’s really going on. Which is another reason it’s hard to believe in anything. The way I see it, man came up with the God concept because he was sick of being disappointed in man. God doesn’t disappoint because he lives in your head, so you can make him into anything. Believing in God has to be better than sitting around eating crackers, thinking about dead conquerors and monarchs.
Rossi fakes orgasms because she wants the boy to feel good.
‘That’s like lying to yourself,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t bother me.’
‘How’s he supposed to learn to give girls real orgasms if everybody’s faking it to make him feel good?’
‘That’s not my problem.’
‘It’s everybody’s problem. Fake orgasms, fake smiles. How are they supposed to know the difference?’
She flicked her hair the way she does when she thinks I’m being juvenile.
‘It’s no wonder,’ I said, ‘when girls say “no” guys keep shoving fingers into them.’
‘Gross, please, spare me the details.’
‘They figure “no” is just token resistance.’
‘One day, Lemon, you’ll grow up and we’ll talk.’
I witnessed non-consensual sex while I was sitting in a tree last week. This boy pushed a girl on the grass and his hands were under her shirt and down her pants and she was saying ‘no’ and he kept at it. I wanted to shout at her to grab the dweezle by the balls and give them a good twist. She just lay there, probably because she didn’t want him calling her frigid or a dyke. What’s sad is these girls grow into women who fake it. And the dweezles grow into men who think that women who don’t let them do whatever they want and look ecstatic about it are bitches. People call me a bitch because I ditched Doyle. The one time I let him put his fingers up my snatch, all I could think about was when did he last wash his hands? When it started to
hurt I told him I had to piss, which put a hold on the groping. Next I made like I had major menstrual cramps and had to locate some Advil.
I’ve been thinking maybe I should write that play, not to please the crawlers who’ll probably give me shitty marks anyway, but to shed light on this crucial topic: the perils of faking it. I mean, if you fake it long enough you must lose sight of the real thing. Faking gets you places but then you have to lie there with your legs over your head oohing and aahing for like, forever. Maybe you stop expecting to feel anything. Maybe it becomes normal to spend all your time making somebody else feel good.
8
Old Huff has us reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream again. I’m doing Helena who’s got to be one of Shakespeare’s all-time most boring characters. Personally, I think the bard must have had a problem with women because they’re all either chasing after some guy, doing flirty-flirty with some guy or trying to get some guy offed. Then there’s the saintly, virginal types who don’t have a live nerve in their bodies.
‘Who can tell me something about Helena and Hermione’s relationship?’ Huff queries. Everybody tries to look busy because nobody wants to tell him anything.
‘They hate each other,’ Kirsten says. ‘That’s obvious.’
‘Why is it that obvious?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Huff says, ‘why is that obvious?’
Kirsten twirls her hair, thinking hard. ‘They want the same guy.’
‘Is that a reason to hate somebody?’ I ask.
‘They’re rivals, duh,’ Kirsten says.
‘Do we always hate our rivals?’ Huff inquires. ‘Don’t we respect them?’
‘Not if they’re after your guy,’ Nicole explains.
‘What if the guy lets the girl go after him?’ I ask. ‘Shouldn’t he take some responsibility?’
‘He’s a guy,’ Kirsten says as though this explains everything.
This concept that boys are ruled by their gonads really irritates me. ‘How does his being a guy free him of responsibility?’ I ask.
‘That’s obvious.’
‘How is that obvious?’
‘He’s a guy,’ she says like I’m stupid.
‘Hermione doesn’t hate Helena at the beginning,’ I say. ‘Helena hates Helena.’
‘Why does Helena hate Helena?’ Huff asks. As usual he’s leaning on the back of his chair, looking as though he’s about to make some profound statement. He never does.
‘Why does anybody hate themselves?’ I ask.
‘Interesting question,’ Huff says. ‘Why does anybody hate themselves?’
Megan, this fat girl, says, ‘Because their parents don’t love them.’
Everybody tries to absorb this. Huff narrows his eyes to suggest that he’s in deep contemplation. Being parentless, I can’t comment.
‘Do we know that Helena’s parents didn’t love her?’ Huff inquires.
‘She’s totally ugly,’ Kirsten explains. ‘She hates herself because she’s ugly. That’s obvious.’
‘Who says she’s totally ugly?’ I ask.
‘She does,’ Nicole says.
‘No, she doesn’t, she just says she isn’t short and cute like Hermione.’
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ Megan says, which is truly outrageous as she never says anything. Personally, I think if you don’t think you’re beautiful, nobody else will. I know this from experience as I happen to think I’m hideous even though this Greek plumber who shows up for Cookies ’n’ Cream tells me I’m ‘gorgee-ous.’ He says it repeatedly, licking and dripping, ‘You are a gorgee-ous girl. Howcome you not married, what’s a-matta with boyz deese days? They got no cocks?’ When I tell him I’m only sixteen, he does this Mediterranean shrug like there’s no better time to get hitched. The point is, him telling me I’m gorgee-ous doesn’t make me feel any less hideous.
‘You’re suggesting that she suffers from low self-esteem,’ Huff says.
Low self-esteem is a term used to excuse rudeness, laziness, meanness. Any time there’s a problem at school the likes of Blecher blame it on low self-esteem. I bet Blecher figures old Hitler suffered from poor self-esteem. The rude, lazy and mean types don’t get any less rude, lazy and mean after Blecher’s pep talks. The old sense of entitlement kicks in. They want it all, and everybody knows the fastest road to power and riches is guns. Guns are a big self-esteem booster.
‘She’s got a crush on a guy and he hates her,’ Kirsten says. ‘That would depress anybody.’
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘I mean, why would you want somebody who hates you? It seems to me, if you had half a brain, you’d go read a book or something.’ That’s another thing I can’t stand about Shakespeare. He’s always making people chase after people who hate them.
‘It’s not about brains,’ Nicole says.
‘That’s obvious,’ Kirsten says.
What they mean is it’s about sex, something I – a frigid dyke – wouldn’t know about. Huff’s getting a little red around the ears with all this hormonal activity. The bell goes. I beat it.
Rossi won’t come out of the bathroom because she’s discovered that Kirsten and company have been texting about her, describing demeaning sexual acts she allegedly performs to try to be popular. They say she’ll let a guy shove anything up her snatch, including small animals and snakes. I tried to make like this is so ludicrous it’s funny. I did a fake laugh - me who despises fakery - hoping to keep Rossi from taking the slander too seriously. Ha ha ha. That’s when she went into the bathroom. I can’t see her taking pills or anything so I’m not too fussed. Her mother yells at us from the bedroom again. It’s not actually yelling. She’s not mad at us, she’s just worried because there’s nothing in the fridge for us to eat. She can’t eat because she’s got a serious stomach problem and doctors had to cut out most of her stomach. All she can eat is special gruel in cans, which means she forgets to buy real food on the way home from her bank job. After standing all day, she lies on the floor in her bedroom and rests her legs on the bed so the fluid drains from her swollen feet back into her body.
‘It’s okay, Mrs. Barnfield,’ I shout back. ‘We’re eating Triscuits.’
‘Isn’t there some cream cheese in the fridge?’ Mrs. Barnfield yells. ‘I thought for sure we had some cream cheese.’
‘It’s okay, Mrs. Barnfield. Get some rest.’ I don’t tell her about Rossi locking herself in the bathroom because she’s got enough problems. There’s been another bank merger and people like Mrs. Barnfield are getting downsized. Already the bank has cut back on her benefits, which is a major problem because she has to take all kinds of expensive drugs for her stomach problems. Her husband’s no help since he’s dead. He was a video poker addict who took off for South Carolina where they used to have video gambling machines in every convenience store and gas station. When he couldn’t get any more cash from his credit cards, he locked himself in his car and set it on fire. So Mrs. Barnfield and Rossi haven’t had it easy.
I’m thinking of making Rossi the star of my groundbreaking play. I started writing it last night when I couldn’t sleep courtesy of the personal-trainer drummer. My main character’s name is Lillian and she’s been laid off from a bank and dreams of starting a hat-making business, only she keeps getting sidetracked by a soap opera called Truly Loved starring liposuctioned model types who jump in and out of the sack.
‘I never for one second forget that I’m dying,’ Tora says. I’d forgotten she was there. That’s how she survives in school. Nobody notices her.
Lillian, my main character, hadn’t known that soap operas are about beautiful people humping. So there she is surrounded by hat felt and feathers, getting distracted by naked men and women going at it between the Dust Buster commercials.
‘I wake up,’ Tora says, ‘and I know it’s only going to get worse.’
‘What?’
‘Everything.’
‘Maybe you’re depressed,’ I say. ‘Maybe you should go on one of those drug trials they’re always ad
vertising. The ones beside the ads for premature-ejaculation recruits. They pay you for that stuff, all you do is take the drugs.’ I’ve considered applying only I don’t think I’m actually depressed. Sometimes I want to kill people but I don’t think that qualifies as clinical depression. Athough it really got me down when I read about the British giving the Indians bits of blankets infected with smallpox. There was old King George stuffing himself with pheasant while the Indians were opening gift boxes stuffed with contaminated blanket.
‘You should come out, Ross,’ I say through the door. ‘You don’t want to worry your mum.’ She doesn’t answer. I’ve looked in their medicine cabinet. There’s only Tylenol in there, and nasal spray. Mrs. Barnfield keeps her heavy-duty medications in the kitchen. Melody Pasternak tried to kill herself with Tylenol and ended up barfing black stuff for days. Rossi knows this so I can’t see her trying it. Melody even wrote a suicide note about how she couldn’t stand the loneliness and how Byron Whitehead had broken her heart. Byron Whitehead is supposed to be an intellectual, he edits the school paper and writes really fascinating articles about scientific studies nobody gives a goose’s turd about.
‘Ross,’ I say. ‘There was this woman who lived in the eighteenth century. Her name was Mary Wollstonecraft and she was fed up with women having to follow men around all the time. And she was fed up with old Rousseau who wrote about how women should be breeding and breastfeeding. Basically she was fed up with dickheads telling women how to be women. This was way before the suffragettes or anything, I mean women weren’t supposed to even have brains before the nineteenth century. Anyway, Mary wrote a book about women’s rights, insisting that they should be equal to men’s, and that it was high time girls stopped being raised to think that the most important thing in life was to please men. That’s how people thought in those days, that a woman’s duty was to please some dolt. Pretty soon everybody was saying nasty things about Mary because she was challenging the status quo, so there she was, all alone in some attic, writing down what was important to her.’
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