Wayward

by Dana Spiotta

  4

  MH was guilty of something, that Sam knew, but of what?

  Meet me at 2 at the State Fair.

  In front of the Grange building.

  Sam arrived at the fair early and walked around. It figured this was MH’s idea, like going to the comedy open-mic night, another of MH’s field trips or safaris into the true and awful American soul. Gawk at the gorging and so on. It was Labor Day, the last weekend of the fair, and it teemed with people even though it was unseasonably cold and rainy. People trudged around in damp shorts and tank tops, ignoring the weather.

  The last time Sam had been to the fair was the summer before Ally started ninth grade. It was hot and crowded as she watched Ally and her friends go on the most nauseating rides on the midway. She remembered waiting on lines to eat a series of more and more preposterously unhealthy foods, from fried Oreos to melting, triple-loaded sundaes to fried hamburgers stuffed with mac and cheese, bunned with pancakes instead of bread, and then dipped into maple syrup (which she ate only one bite of). Nevertheless, Sam had always loved the fair, mostly because of the beautiful buildings of the fairgrounds, constructed in the early part of the century, with their celebration of agriculture and industry—a WPA-like focus on work and workers. Each building was a celebration of production: the Center of Progress Building, the Dairy Products Building, the Horticulture Building, the Art and Home Center, and the Grange Building. The structures inside were simply warehouses to stage expos, but the entryways had mosaic detailing and grand arches made of cast stone, iron, and painted wood. Interiors had industrial lights, but were also lit by decorative ornate windows, giving them a palace-like feel, or like the entrance to a foreign grand bazaar. When Ally was young, they had loved the fair traditions: the giant butter sculpture that changed each year, the five-cent cup of milk, the talent contests, and especially the rows of perfectly kept and combed animals, looking pampered and bored. Sam kind of loved the people too, the exhibitors with their 4-H old-fashioned Americana everything, and even the everyday fairgoers, around whom Sam felt she could muster a semi-tender feeling for the ordinary American. Here they were in XXL cargo shorts and T-shirts that had sports teams or corny jokes or MOR bands on them. Baseball hats and grandma in her “Rascal” wheelchair, little kids holding cotton candy that stained their mouths blue or pink, mom and dad getting quietly drunk off beer in giant plastic cups as they walked and ate things in the hot sun. Sam remembered thinking that these were the real people, the working class, the unpretentious majority, the non-elite who didn’t read The New York Times or buy wild salmon or pay for SAT tutors. Sam had prided herself on being non-snobby, on enjoying the handsome copper-haired Highland cows and the delicate white Japanese bantam chickens that the odd farm kids showed her.

  But all that had changed, hadn’t it? Here she was at the fair in 2017, this awful year, after all she had seen and heard. Everything read differently to her now. The working class of Syracuse (and the surrounding blue-collar suburbs and especially the rural counties beyond the suburbs) were the ones who’d voted for him. Well, the white ones, anyway. The crowds seemed more sinister to her, just blithely stuffing their faces, wearing their crudeness as some kind of emblem of authenticity, just like their fat president. She watched a scruffy guy walk by drinking a beer; she just knew he had a “Repeal the SAFE Act/NRA” sticker on his Jeep. She knew he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. He walked with his arm around his girlfriend, a tiny, haggard chick who looked at her phone while drinking a wine slushie. She didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton either, not even in the privacy of the voting booth. Of course not. Maybe Sam now saw what had always been there, and it seemed much darker than she remembered. The whole place was an obscene, smelly, cheap display of willful, unapologetic American stupidity and cruelty. Sam passed a Camaro with the opening lines of the Constitution airbrushed on it, along with some soaring bald eagles. And there was this year’s butter sculpture: two cops with holstered guns helping a kid milk a cow. A sign said the fair had a law enforcement theme this year. She passed a pull-up bar at the recruiting station for the Marines. And a mallet-striker, where you could whack the platform and a puck would shoot up a tower and stop at “Manly” or “Wimpy,” etc. There were cops and soldiers everywhere. Had it always been like this? There were even some hybrid police-soldiers: three burly men in camo pants, holsters and guns, sunglasses, high-and-tight hair, and Army-green shirts that read “STATE POLICE.” Plus everyone deferring to—parting for—the cop-soldiers. They had authority, they had uniforms, they had power.

  (Watch the cops. Watch the boy, Aadil. Watch the pavement.)

  Was part of the problem that law enforcement attracted sadists and racists? Or did being a cop turn people into sadists and racists? Was it in them, in everyone, waiting to come out?

  A fucking cop butter sculpture?

  She saw MH before MH saw her. She had her usual swagger, but it impressed Sam more than usual: MH, the unrepentant emissary from the land of the unloved. (No longer loved, anyway.) There she was, lean and muscled in a black T-shirt and jeans, her expensive motorcycle boots artfully turned down at the cuff of her jeans. Jeans, Sam realized, that were extraordinary, the kind of jeans that cost three hundred dollars. (How could Sam even know that? You can just tell.) Her crew cut was also an NYC job, probably obtained at some manscaping salon in Brooklyn. Everything about her looked contrived, expensive, not legit.

  “Thanks for meeting me out here,” MH said.

  Sam smiled, nodded. “It’s a strange place to meet for a private talk.”

  “No one we know will be here, I assure you. It’s ground zero for the gunned-to-the-hilt, aggrieved white working class of upstate New York.”

  They walked. To be accurate, the fair wasn’t entirely white. Some Black and Brown attendees walked among them. But Sam did spot a number of MAGA hats and some seriously aggro T-shirts for sale in the kiosks. They said things like “TRUMP 2020 THE SEQUEL: Make Liberals Cry Again,” “LGBT (Liberty, Guns, Beer, Trump),” “Stand for the Flag and Kneel for the Cross”; one had an image of the American flag made out of rifles; and, of course, there were a number of “Hey Snowflake” shirts, including one that said, “I did not put my life on the line for My Country to have some SNOWFLAKE tell me how to LIVE IT!” (Which was super wordy for a damn T-shirt.) Some shirts made no sense to Sam but were alarming nonetheless, like “#notmetoo” over the image of a gun? Or “I stand for the anthem because I stand for something,” with rifles for the letter “I”? Totally nonsensical, just shit-splattered hostility for its own sake. These T-shirts hung right alongside the Jack Daniel’s, Fortnite, Star Wars, and mystical wolf-moon painting shirts. As if it were all normal.

  MH ordered gator meat on a stick and two beers. They sat on a sticky bench under an awning. Wind blew and the edges of the oilcloth clamped to the tables kept blowing up. Raindrops leaked in with each gust of wind. It was cold and miserable. MH offered her a bite of the tough alligator meat.

  “It needs a sauce or something,” MH said, chewing.

  “It’s the concept of eating a gator, I guess, that they’re going for rather than an actual culinary treat.”

  “Stunt food,” MH said.

  Sam nodded. She wanted to leave.

  “So what did you want to discuss?” MH said and then winked at her.

  “It’s not funny. What did you do?”

  MH took another bite of gator and chewed for a while, thinking.

  “It isn’t a complicated question, but I can’t seem to get an answer from anyone,” Sam said.

  “Isn’t it, though? What did I do to piss off so many people?”

  “Last time I looked at the petition, it was over a hundred signatures.”

  “Denouncing me,” MH said.

  “Yes. I have been asked—told—to denounce you.”

  “But you haven’t yet. Why not?”

  “I know you, and I kno
w you’re a good person,” Sam said, but the words already sounded naïve in her mouth. MH even laughed. “Are the accusations true? I don’t even know what the accusations are. What did you do?”

  MH looked to the side and then spoke.

  “I don’t want to deny or discuss. People are mad at me, and I accept that. I have crossed lines—I like to push people’s buttons, provoke people. I think my reading of things was different from how others read them.”

  “So you made mistakes, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Less-than-innocent mistakes, I would say. Anyway, it is liberating, if you want to know the truth. You are judged, found wanting, but then on the other side of it, you are still you. You survived.”

  Sam shook her head. MH just called herself a survivor! What if you did something awful, or if someone told you that you hurt them. Maybe you discovered that something you thought was okay was not okay. And instead of remorse or making amends or changing, you were just like, yeah, that’s me.

  MH swiped at something on her wrist. It wasn’t a continuous glucose monitor measuring her blood sugar in real time. Sam had seen that, it was a disk stuck on the back of her arm. This was some kind of microchip, actually visible just under the delicate skin of her inner wrist.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “I can’t discuss it. It’s out of a private biohack subreddit—grinder, meat-morphing stuff. What I can tell you is that I am beta-testing a nanochip implant that measures cortisol and epinephrine. And this conversation is stimulating a biphasic stress response—the whole thing is really tanking my equilibrium. Oxidizing my organs. Way beyond any hormetic benefit, I might add.”

  “Is it true that you have a house on the lake in Skaneateles?”

  MH started laughing. “I’ve disappointed you, is that it? You, the sanctimonious gentrifier with your fixer-upper house, your expensive mattress, and your husband slash boyfriend slash sugar daddy?”

  Sam was ready to leave. “You are disappointing. But I have bigger concerns at the moment.”

  “So what happened with your report to the CRB?”

  “Nothing yet. They are investigating. OPS is investigating. And the state attorney general’s office is investigating.”

  “I told you that nothing—”

  “I’m not interested in hearing your ‘I told you so,’ actually. I have to do what I am doing, and I have to do more.”

  “It will only make you a problem. A target.”

  Sam wanted MH to stop talking. “Look, I have to go.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yeah. I know you aren’t a predator or a monster. But I do think you are full of shit.”

  MH nodded, half-smiling with pursed lips. She got up.

  “Goodbye, Sam,” she said. She held up her fingers in a peace sign.

  “Goodbye,” Sam said, getting up. “Thanks for trying to help me. I appreciate all of that.” MH nodded and Sam turned and started to walk away.

  “Sam!” MH came up behind her and touched her arm.

  Sam spun around.

  “How do you know I’m not a predator?” MH said. “How can you be so sure that you know who anyone is?”

  Sam didn’t hate, but intensely disliked MH in that moment.

  “Your problem,” MH said, “is that you think you can redeem yourself from all your shit, all this shit. And by saving yourself, you think you’re saving the world. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, none of it matters.”

  Sam folded her arms and frowned. “What about all your ideas, your political actions and groups? Why do any of that if you care so little for the world?”

  They were both getting wet in the now heavier rain, but they stood there. Sam continued (why not just say it all). “I know you’re the one printing up the little letterpress flyers. Who else would have the time or the resources or even the inclination to do that? Why bother with the flyers if you don’t care?”

  “Care? That the catastrophe that was human civilization is dribbling out? Why would I care about us? The planet will change and go on without us. What makes us so precious? Why can’t we face our extinction? My notes were so we can face—even accept—our future. We are not as crucial as we think. We were a blip, a mistake, a failure.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  MH shrugged and sort of waved Sam away with her hand. Then she turned and walked off into the crowd.

  I don’t agree. Standing there, at the fair in the rain, despite everything, Sam did care about the humans, the coming extinction. The idea that the world—the human world—would cease to exist came at her in a new way that seemed real and tragic. It was at these fairgrounds and in her house and everywhere around them still. The promise and life in all the buildings and paintings and books. The photos and the films, the music and the letters. Handwritten, saved, tied with ribbons. The jokes, the plays, the dances. The child’s drawing folded and tucked into a wallet, yellow with age. The churches built, the stories told, the meals prepared, the gravestones attended, all the little and big rituals. Poignant, tragic even, but not ridiculous. Beautiful in their totality. Weren’t they? Maybe we were going extinct, but did that make it all a failure, all meaningless? No, it did not.

  Here was another thing. The MAGA hats were being sold, but she had seen no MAGA hats on actual people here. Yes, the horrible aggro T-shirts hung in the kiosks (someone making money off the mood in the land), but few were on bodies. Mostly, Sam guessed, they didn’t vote. Mostly they watched sports, ate crap, got drunk, worked on their diabetes, didn’t follow the news very much. She had seen one jackass in a pro-gun shirt, but mostly just clueless, careless people, same as always. Ignorant if not innocent, same as she was. And continued to be, in her own self-justifying way.

  The rain had let up to a summer shower. People were streaming into the fair. Sam walked to the exit near the parking lots. Just getting out of here would take an hour. But she didn’t feel angry about it. Just weary.

  As Sam rounded a corner and came into view of the entrance kiosks, Ally walked into the fairgrounds. Sam stopped where she was. Her Ally, standing there in leggings and an oversized T-shirt.

  Ally hadn’t spotted her. For a second, Sam thought she was alone, but then she saw. Ally was with a man. An older man. They were fifty yards away, but Sam could see that they were holding hands and studying a map. They didn’t look up. Sam stared at Ally’s face, astounded by how beautiful and foreign she looked. Even more so than that angry flash of her in the comedy club. Sam fell into her old blindness problem (could she ever really see Ally, see her the way the world did?), but it had been so long since Sam had actually looked at her that even as she felt all her love and longing for Ally come flooding in, she barely knew this nearly adult woman. A nearly adult woman with a fully adult boyfriend.

  Wait. Sam knew this man. He was Joe Moreno, the developer. Matt’s client.

  They laughed about something, and then Ally leaned in and kissed him, lips pressed against lips. Sam flickered over revulsion about his age, about Ally and sex, about Ally’s secrets and safety, the clear inappropriateness of the power difference between them. Not long ago, Sam would have had a freak-out, a stop-the-presses meltdown. But today she couldn’t muster any outrage about this sighting.

  They were about to look up, about to see her. Sam ducked out of their view.

  Something had left her. It wasn’t that she didn’t care or worry anymore—she did. But she had many things she cared about, worried about. Ally would be okay. She would weather this asshole, this whole experience. Ally had everything she needed to land safely.

  She waited until they were well past her. She walked toward the exit gate. There was one other thing: Ally looked happy.

  5

  Ally had every right to her privacy. Ally should block her, really. By rights. If intentions mattered, Sam had done her best. B
ut what if your best was not all that good? Sam had done much worse than shame her daughter for her body. Much worse than secretly follow her around Destiny mall, spying on her beloved child (a child she held in such esteem, yet she couldn’t let her make her own mistakes, couldn’t let her feel growing pains). She had done worse than stalk Ally online, read Ally’s emails and texts, use a parenting tracker to see where she was, turn on notifications so she would get a banner alert for when Ally moved from one place to another. All of that was rudimentary.

  Her mothering had really gone off the rails when she’d argued with the emergency room nurse-practitioner and wouldn’t back off. Which led to the Child Protective Services debacle. It was embarrassing what she had brought down on Ally, and then for Sam to use it for fodder in her performance, to treat it as if it were a joke, was even worse. It wasn’t funny or even not-funny in a provocative way. All of Sam’s good intentions mixed with her intense needs and her lack of restraint. Sam was a force of chaos in her daughter’s life.

  The CPS investigation had been painful for all of them, but especially for Ally.

  They both had to go down to the CPS offices to be interviewed. The investigators separated Sam and Ally and questioned them about everything multiple times. Sam knew it was just part of the protocol. But poor Ally—at fifteen, inhabiting the world as your body changed was confusing enough without weird questions from strangers looking for issues. They were cleared, of course, but it was hard not to feel as if you were guilty of something. Then as they were leaving, a social worker handed Ally a package. In the car on the way home, Ally opened it. Inside was a teddy bear, some chocolates, and a quilt. Someone had hand-stitched the quilt and donated it, thinking it would comfort an abused or neglected child. Ally looked at it, and then she began to sniff. She covered her face. Ally never cried.