How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

by David Stuart MacLean

  “Are you a student of Dr. Nadler’s?” I asked.

  She turned towards me, her eyes widening by centimeters as she took me in. “Used to be. Before he abandoned us.”

  “He abandoned you?” It felt like my eyes were still in shock from the pink room. I was blinking a lot and I wiped at my eyes just in case there were any tears that could be misconstrued.

  She rose from crouching over her books and turned fully towards me, eager for the interruption. She had on a green cardigan which she had buttoned almost all the way up, except for the top two buttons which were missing—the little green antennas of the buttons’ former anchors reached into the room probing for their lost connections. She had hazel eyes and a brilliant nose the tip of which trembled as she spoke. “The guy was the best teacher I ever had. He had agreed to be my thesis advisor. And then school starts and he disappears. No one knows what happened to him.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I know what happened to him.”

  She looked at me again. “Who are you?”

  “I’m his son. Dr. Nadler is my dad. He just got a regular job in town.”

  “Why are you in shorts? It’s Alaska out there.”

  “I was running and went and saw a movie. When I came out, the snow had piled up.”

  “But how’d you get here? It’s like four in the morning.”

  “Brett brought me. He said someone here would drive me home.”

  “I thought he flunked out?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I really didn’t want to get too deep into the Brett situation.

  “God, he’s such an asshole.” She closed her book and hunkered down to give me advice. “When you go to college, don’t date the first person who makes you laugh. You’ll regret it. Because, you know what? That person is most definitely a first-rate clown.”

  I really hoped that the “he” she was talking about was Brett and not my dad.

  “So what kind of job did your dad get?”

  “A sales job at a manufacturer here in town. Custom containers for factories.”

  She looked at me like I’d said something obscene.

  “Does he still do philosophy?”

  I flapped my hands up and down and got immediately embarrassed by the immaturity of the gesture. “I don’t think so. He’s going through a whole thing with my mom right now.”

  “Is it your first divorce?”

  “I didn’t say they were getting a divorce.” My eyes still stung. It was like my entire body was crammed into the very front of my eyeballs and they were threatening to overflow.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to project onto your whole thing. I’ve been through three divorces. I just assume parents don’t stay together. We all make our armor out of the stuff that’s happened to us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I had nothing to add to that. I’m not a deep thinker. What I wanted to ask was about somebody taking me home but I was going to start crying if I had to do something as naked and earnest as asking for what I wanted, so instead I asked, “What’s your thesis about?”

  “Spinoza as homosexual.”

  “He was gay?” The guy eating his cereal was slurping the milk. It was as loud as the music thrumming through the door. I had only eaten candy and soda for the last nine hours. My stomach was doing the irritated thing that went straight to my head and made me woozy as well as terrified that I’d have to poop. I was not going to poop there. I made a pact with my body that I’d only poop if I was at my own home at the end of all of this.

  “Well, like people didn’t ‘come out’ back then, but I think through a grammatical analysis of his diction in the German, we find that he was totally flaming. Like do you know the story of why Spinoza left the Jewish faith?”

  I lied and said I didn’t. We hadn’t exchanged names yet. I really didn’t want her to know I was named after fucking Spinoza. It just seemed too embarrassing.

  “So he had these two friends, right? And they’re always ‘up late,’ ‘talking religion.’ If you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded like it was so like homosexuals to mask their activities with a cover story that lasted centuries and would finally be ferreted out by an undergraduate in Central Ohio.

  “So they’re doing their assignations. Sorry,” she interrupted herself and shook her head of chin-length rusty curls so that they sproinged up and down. “An assignation is a fancy word for like an affair. It’s like a sexy appointment.”

  “Oh. That’s a good word for the SATs.”

  She looked at me and exclaimed, “God. You are so young. I loved high school. So free! So uncynical!” She smiled an inward smile, like she’d just found something sweet and precious inside of her that she’d misplaced years ago. “Anyway. Spinoza, right? So after he spends this time with these ‘friends,’ they go and tell the rabbi all the stuff Spinoza has been doing and saying and he gets kicked out the next day. And what I am saying is that he didn’t get kicked out because of any heresy he was spouting, instead those little friends of his went and told them all the stuff, and I mean all the stuff, they’d been doing—like buttsex and oral—and they probably made it all sound like Spinoza assaulted them. So they wanted to cover their own asses by getting Spinoza kicked out.”

  “And there’s like evidence of this, diary entries or letters?”

  She deflated and sunk into her chair. “Evidence is where I’m having a hard time. It’d be so much easier if I spoke German.”

  “You don’t?”

  “This is where your dad was supposed to help translate stuff for me. He promised we were going to do this together for my senior year. And now?” She lifted her hands then dropped them on the table. “I’ve got nothing. I’m supposed to turn in a draft to my new advisor, who hates me but I don’t want to get into it, and I have 1,500 words of an introduction and that’s it.”

  “Have you read White Noise?”

  “How do you think I fall asleep in this insane house? I live with a white noise machine strapped to my ears.”

  “No, the Don DeLillo book that came out in the fall. It’s all about a professor who specializes in ‘Nazi Studies,’ a field he pioneered, and he doesn’t speak German either and he hides it from his colleagues.”

  She withdrew a pack of cigarettes from a pocket I didn’t know was there, took out a cigarette, tapped it twice on the table, then lit it. “Are you fucking making fun of me? You know this is my life, right? You little asshole. I should’ve stopped talking to you when you said Brett, Mr. King Jackass, brought you.”

  I tried to stumble out an apology but she’d already slapped her books closed and left.

  Brett tiptoed in as soon as she left. “She’s got a temper, that one.”

  “Were you listening in?”

  “I sure as hell wasn’t going to walk in when y’all were talking Spinoza. If I ever hear her talking about Spinoza again, I’ll have a stroke.” He held up two closed fists at my eye level. “Guess what I got?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He opened one of his hands and a set of keys was dangling from his fingers.

  “Your friend let you have them?”

  “God no. But he was asleep so . . . I mean I’ve got to get you home.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Plus we can go and do some doughnuts in parking lots.”

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  “Just a second. There are a couple of other babes stranded here at the P&J house who need a ride.”

  “When can we go?” My stomach contracted and I swear to God I felt my intestines—loaded with Whatchamacallits and Dr Pepper—twitch. I decided I would tell a lie to get us on the road. “My parents are going to be really worried about me.”

  The door to the living room behind me opened as we were talking. “Good,” Brett said. “You guys finally came up for air. I was worried I’d have to turn the hose on you two, making out like horndogs on a stranger’s couch. Shame on you.”

  “Baruch? Is that you?”<
br />
  I turned. It was Gurbaksh and Ottilie. He was tucking in his shirt and she . . . she was radiant. My stomach got worse by about 20 degrees.

  She came up and hugged me like she hadn’t just had his hands all over her boobs.

  “We’ve been stuck here all night,” she said. “We came to see that band Ugly Stick play at the coffeehouse and we’ve been here ever since.”

  “How’d you get here?” Gurbaksh asked.

  “I met shortpants here at the movies,” Brett said. “You should’ve seen him when he saw how much snow had fallen. Like a wet puppy, he was either going to be rescued or thrown in a pillow sack with his littermates and tossed in the quarry. You guys ready to roll?”

  “Shotgun,” I shouted.

  The car was a pale red Grand Wagoneer, pretty clearly an old family car that got sloughed off with the kid going to college. I had to clear all the cassette tapes off of the passenger seat. There were dozens already on the floor, which is where I put the dozen or so in the seat. My stomach didn’t know who was the real enemy: the candies and Dr Pepper, Gurbaksh and Ottilie, or getting ready to drive in a blizzard with a coked-up stranger who had within the last ten minutes compared me to a puppy in a pillowcase. But I was on my way home, where my toilet was.

  “Baruch!” Ottilie said. She was sitting directly behind me and she snaked her arms around the back of my seat and hugged me. When I turned to thank her, I could only see Gurbaksh. He was glaring at me, which was kind of messed up seeing as how he had won. He got my mom and my girl, or, well, someone I had wanted really badly to be my girl. Hell, he’d even won his fight with Randy Colton. “Why in the planet Neptune are you out in this weather in shorts?”

  Brett laughed. “Yeah, shortpants. Let’s hear it again.”

  I said that I had run to the movies and that I didn’t know it was going to snow this badly. I said all of this to the dashboard. I couldn’t stand looking at Gurbaksh again. I hadn’t seen him since the fight, a fight I was more or less complicit in. Hadn’t I stood there and listened to Randy call him a ‘sandnigger’?

  “Don’t you follow the news, dum dum?” she asked. “It’s been nonstop with warnings and weather alerts. What’s that guy’s name?”

  “Who?” asked Gurbaksh.

  “The meteorologist, weather guy. On 4?”

  “Jym Ganahl,” Gurbaksh said. “Do you know he spells his name with a ‘y’? J-Y-M. I’ve never heard it before.”

  “That’s some redneck backward-ass spellings,” Brett said as he rocked the Wagoneer back and forth to get free of the parking spot. The snow grunted and squeaked its frustration with us. We finally moved into the white mass of the street. “Fresh powder,” Brett yelled as we inched down the street, gaining momentum. “Does this city even have a plow?”

  I grabbed a tape from the floor and slid it into the stereo, not wanting to actually risk further conversation with the backseat. As soon as the first notes of a-ha’s “Take On Me” played, I knew I had made a mistake.

  “Oh my God,” Ottilie said. “This is what we listened to that night! The one at your house? With the party? When your dad’s girlfriend wanted to show us how to huff gas!”

  Yes. The soundtrack to my failed date with Ottilie. The sound-track to . . .

  “This is what was playing when we first met, baby,” she said, and then there was silence in the backseat which could only mean more kissing.

  “Wait a second. Rewind the conversation,” Brett said. “Your dad’s girlfriend huffs gas?”

  I tried to act like I hadn’t heard him. We made a slow grunting turn onto Winter Street, one of the east-west arteries of traffic in Rutherford. All the stoplights swung in the wind, blinking their amber lights of caution.

  “It’s crazier than that,” Ottilie said. “We almost died that night.”

  I shook my head and she must have seen it.

  “Yes, we did, Baruch.” She leaned forward and put her elbows on the center console, her head eight inches from mine. “We snuck into the garage to have some drinks, right? And this woman tags along, which was weird but it’s a party and nobody really knows what’s weird at a party, so we’re drinking and we want to listen to the radio but Baruch doesn’t want to run down the batteries of the cars, so Gurby here decides to just turn the car on.”

  “I’m not sure it happened that way,” Gurbaksh said.

  “Who the fuck is ‘Gurby’?” Brett asked.

  Exactly, I wanted to say. Hearing her nickname for him was so much worse than seeing them make out. I don’t know why. Gurby was just awful. I was never going to get her from him if he was Gurby to her.

  The Wagoneer fishtailed violently as we made the turn onto West Central and Brett was too busy turning into or out of the skid to wait for an answer to his Gurby question. The skid pushed my side of the car up on the curb. We hung up for a moment as if the car couldn’t decide whether to flip over or not and then the car whoofed back down into the snow in a landing so rough the stereo spit out the cassette. Brett gunned the car and we fishtailed some but within ten yards he was back in control–ish. We left the stereo off.

  The city was eerily silent. We heard the furious ticktack of snowflakes on our windshield and the erratic muted howl of the wind. No one else was out. Not a cop, not an ambulance, not a drunk pack of college students out sledding. It was the apocalypse. We were the only living souls in Rutherford, Ohio, traveling. Just us and the snowflakes.

  “I’m across from the grocery store,” I said.

  Brett looked for a moment like he was going to remind me that we were going to do doughnuts in the parking lot but he swallowed it. He was shook. This wasn’t so much an adventure. It was something to be endured. And like it or not Brett was going to have to be an adult, something he probably chafed at in his personal life, something he probably thought was a virtue to chafe at in the past. He was in his early twenties and we were fourteen, not a learner’s permit among the three of us. He had volunteered to get us home safely and now the world was daring him to make good on his promise.

  “Aren’t you even going to ask how I’m doing?” Gurbaksh asked.

  “C’mon, baby,” Ottilie said.

  “No, I get stomped on by the biggest guy in school not two feet from this guy and he doesn’t call me, doesn’t do anything to make sure I’m fine.” Gurbaksh shoved my shoulder. Then he shoved it again. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

  The tears that had been promised since I’d been in the pink room finally came out, stinging my frozen cheeks. “I figured you had my mom to take care of you.”

  And that was that. It was too much, like cauterizing a paper cut. The car was silent.

  I wouldn’t say that Brett had become an adult in the process of this drive but it seemed like this was the first day he was able to conceive of himself as one, which was a little cruel considering he’d have to go home and have his parents scream at him for being such a tuition black hole. But on this drive home, the nascent stirrings of responsibility were testing whether it was indeed safe to emerge.

  “You can stop here,” I said. “You don’t want to get stuck in our driveway.”

  Brett rolled up to the side of the road and put his blinkers on, which was a little much since we hadn’t seen another car out there the entire night. But I liked that safety had been scared into Brett.

  “Thanks a million for this. I don’t know what I would have done without you bringing me home,” I said, willing myself not to look at the backseat.

  Brett nodded.

  I said goodbye to the backseat and caught a glimpse of Gurbaksh and Ottilie holding hands. This night was probably the crucible for them as a couple. Like tempered steel, they were stronger now. I slammed the door and tried to be happy that I was home, that I could actually go to the bathroom, that I could put this night behind me. There were lights on in the house. Dad was awake. Probably furious. I’d be grounded until I was sixteen. If his anger could allow me to go poop first, I’d be fine with whatever punishment he h
ad for me.

  I was already wincing as I climbed up the porch steps. I went to unlock the door and it was yanked away from my hand.

  “Baruch!”

  My mother pulled me violently into an embrace. She was crying so hard that she pulled me down to the ground with her. I was still in the doorway and the wind was going to wrench the screen door off of its hinges but we stayed on the ground, my mom crying and me saying over and over, “It’s OK. It’s OK. I’m fine.”

  It’d been since the party my dad threw for himself that I’d been held by my mom and I resented how eagerly I lapped up her attention. She was holding me so tightly it was almost like she wanted to pull me back inside of her, like a fourteen-year-old fetus that wasn’t done cooking yet. Half in and half outside, we hugged and cried for what seemed like forever but which couldn’t realistically have been more than ten minutes.

  Finally she released me, gasped at my bare legs, and asked, “Where’s your father? Didn’t he bring you home?”

  CHAPTER 19

  We got a call the next day from the hospital. Dad had been in an accident.

  When the snow started falling and he didn’t hear from me he called Mom and asked her to come over to wait at home just in case I came home while he was out looking for me. He and his girlfriend got into his two-wheel-drive Corolla and latticed the town for me. He’d gone by the theater twice but never checked there. He hit some black ice on the highway, spun out, and flipped over the guardrail. Luckily a tow truck driver saw all of this and called it in before sliding down the bank and checking on them. They’d come to rest near the water treatment plant.

  He had three broken ribs, a shattered femur, broken nose, a concussion, facets snapped off of three vertebrae, and frostbite on his face, toes, and fingers. His girlfriend was dead. Neither had been wearing their seat belts.