by Kate Gray
Kyle still stretched on the table. The same position. His face tipped away from me. His khakis dirty. His tie pulled tight to the side. One flap of his collar up. He could be a rag doll, nothing Kim would play with. Too dirty.
“Mr. Harney,” I say, “time to go.” The kid must be shaken. No chance against the others. Five Fifth Formers pinning him down. Almost torched his grease for hair.
“Okay, Mr. Harney, you can get up now,” but he doesn’t move. Inertia. He’s always pale, so this is nothing new. But he’s extra white. Better check.
I step up to the table, and the cold top presses against my waist. Black stone, the best Du Ponts could get for scholar boys taking lab science. Du Ponts know labs. These labs made perfect once Sam Omura graduated. Sam the wonder scientist, the best Tim-Tim’s produced. My hand goes for Kyle’s forehead.
“Kyle,” I say. My hand two inches from his forehead.
His eyes open, and my hand catches his forehead as he jumps. He starts up with a scream. A whole lung full of air shoved out his throat. It’s animal. Sweaty skin, I press his head down with my hand. I keep his head down. His head about to explode under my hand.
“Kyle,” I say in the middle of his scream. “Kyle, it’s okay,” and I have to get loud. His back straight, his legs kick out, bucking on the lab table.
Three screams, and he stops.
He falls back on the lab table, flattens. This time his face turns toward me to look, really look. His frog eyes open. He could be in formaldehyde.
“Come on, Kyle,” I say. That scream at any moment. “Time to see the nurse.” Kyle drags his torso up. An old man. Shifts his legs to the table’s edge. Waits. “As if,” Carla might say, “as if a nurse can fix him.” His legs dangle. A little boy. His feet not even close to the ground. He leans forward, his hands on the edge, his arms straight.
Kim and I, we sat at the edge of the pool, feet in the water. I threw stuff in the pool. She told me not to, Dad would get mad. Sometimes Americans thought we were twins, not two years apart. She caught on to English much quicker than I did. She swam in the pool more than I did, and when she got sick, I felt guilty for that summer I was so jealous of her.
“Kyle, let’s go,” I say. Third law. This kid can’t be touched without touching. He looks down at his feet dangling, and he says nothing, makes no funny noises. What if there were a way to have motion without resistance, a perfect surface on which an object could be propelled? What if there were no drag or imbalance? What if kids could grow that way?
Taylor / Ski Jacket
Buttons and Carla came and got me. They came to my table at dinner, the table with ten students and Jack Song. They were dressed more for practice than dinner, gray hooded sweatshirts and sweatpants, running shoes. The two girls knelt down beside me. Their breath was strange. They told me I had a phone call. They had to have been in my apartment to know I had a phone call. In my apartment. They thought the call had to do with my friend.
I ran.
In my skirt, the one that doesn’t let me run, I ran away from the mural with all the boys looking the same, and all the students in the dining hall looking.
The distance from the main building to my apartment was less than a race, maybe 500 meters, and my skirt almost ripped when I ran.
The receiver was upside down on my desk, the lights on in my place. The screen door slammed when I picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
Every time the phone rings, I think it’s you. I think you might say, “Just kidding,” or “I’m a covert agent, operating in the Soviet Union.” I keep thinking someone on the phone will tell me you’re fine.
“Taylor?” Your mother’s voice was long and smooth.
“Yes, ma’am.” My stomach was hollow.
“They found her jacket, Taylor, a mile downstream. With her wallet.” Your mother’s voice was Colorado-long vowels. Her voice was a lot older than it was two weeks ago.
“Her ski jacket, the blue one with the stripe?”
“Yes, her jacket and wallet. That’s it.” Your mother’s voice was an echo.
“Nothing else?” My stomach was a drop of water falling.
“No, honey, nothing else. But I want to ask you something about that, Taylor.”
“Ma’am?”
“You have to be honest with me about this.”
My stomach filled with ripples, and I thought about Mark cheating on you, and other things I hadn’t told. Maybe your mother knew that I loved you more than a friend loves a friend. Maybe she didn’t want me at the memorial. Maybe she thought I was bad for you.
“Taylor, we need someone there who can identify her,” she said, “whenever they find her body. We would if we could, but we’re in Colorado Springs.” Her voice was a wind in a canyon, a sound tight and soft at the same time.
There was a white mass floating in the pool in my stomach. It was bloated, and it smelled. The bile built in me.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’ll do it? Good girl. I told her father you’d do it.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll talk soon. I’ll let you know if there’s anything else,” and then the phone line clicked. The sound after it was gray.
My skirt ripped on the way to my bathroom. My knees landed on linoleum. The bloated thing in my stomach burned on the way up my throat, out my mouth, my nose.
After the sink and water on my face, the hand towel to my nose and spitting, the cold of the bathroom linoleum against my calves, the cold of the bathtub against the blouse on my back felt iceberg. I wanted ice, to fall into blue and cold and sleep.
My legs stretched out in front of me, I ripped the rest of my skirt off. The rip echoed in the bathroom.
It’s been twelve days since your motor cut out. That’s when the straps that were supposed to save you, hanging from the chain link fence across the Schuylkill River, got caught in the motor of your launch, the launch you borrowed from the university to coach the girls, to coach them away from danger. Those straps hanging down from the chain link fence that spans the Schuylkill were there for scullers to grab and tie to, but since the water was so high, the straps hung farther in the water, perfect for snagging and stalling a motor. That’s when you panicked after you pulled and pulled and pulled the motor cord. You jumped into the river, only 750 meters from the falls in the river, the big falls that created a turbine all year long. You went over the falls. The girls in your crew watching from the dock, watching you who knew how to tend the girls in boarding school from the minute you stepped on the campus. They called you Coach, they called you Miss, and the names they used were the right ones. The rowers you tended didn’t see you come up. That’s what they told the reporters. That’s what everyone read. So it must be true.
Your mom told me you were wearing your ski jacket. It must have been heavy in the water. It was a good coat, warm enough for the cold two weeks ago in Philadelphia. It wasn’t supposed to be cold in September, but wind can change everything.
That jacket, midnight blue with a white stripe up one arm, across the shoulders, back down the other arm, stood out. Across the freshman quad, across the snow between the student union and the library, I could spot you all four years we went to college together.
It was your jacket they found a mile downstream, not you.
On the bathroom floor, sitting like a schoolgirl, legs together, hands folded in my lap, my back straight against the porcelain tub, my legs in stockings were as brown and unnatural as my mother’s.
“Stockings were invented by men,” my mother said in a rare moment to my sisters and me. “They are hideous devices to keep women from running away.” My mother never ran away. When my father moved out, she divorced but stayed “married in the eyes of God.” She wore stockings and heels and girdles and red, red lipstick and rouge and everything I knew nothing about. When I told her I wanted to row, she told me the last thing I needed was more muscle on my shoulders and back. When I told her you died, she said she wished I never rowed.
My
long brown legs, my penny loafers upright, my calves soaking the cold from the linoleum floor, I didn’t get up when the door opened.
“Miss Alta?” Buttons said.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Carla said.
“Be right there.” I rolled toward the toilet on my knees. My legs touched stocking to stocking and sounded like zippers as I got up. My ripped skirt stayed on the floor. Walking in pantyhose from bathroom to bedroom, the air between my legs, the swish friction of stockings, I was naked. From the entryway outside my bedroom the students couldn’t see me.
“Miss Alta, you okay?” Buttons asked.
“Just a minute.” My clothes all over the floor, I put sweats over the stockings, and my legs were prickly. With blouse over sweats and stockings in penny loafers, I walked out of my bedroom.
“Nice outfit,” Carla said. “Dress code à la Alta.” She was curl.
The taste of vomit, the bloated body that used to be you, the phone answered in my apartment, all went red inside me, and I couldn’t stop.
“Carla, what were you doing in my apartment? What were you and Buttons doing?” I stepped toward the girls.
Carla kept her face flat and shiny, but raised her eyebrows. Then, she smiled.
“You said we could?”
“I said you could skip dinner and answer my phone?”
“Yup,” she said. She spread her legs to make a solid base, put her hands behind her back, like she could take a blow and keep standing. Buttons’ eyes were down.
“What?”
“You said we could come see you anytime. We came to see you. You just weren’t here.” Her curls fell forward in her face, so her hand pushed them back behind her ear.
“So you waltzed into my apartment? What else did you do?” I hadn’t looked in my living room, in my kitchen. My legs rubbed nylon against sweats when I walked into the living room. No beer cans. No ash trays. No mess besides my own.
“Out,” I said before I turned around.
“Out,” I said when I turned around.
Buttons twisted from her hips and caught her balance with a hand on the wall. Then she reached the doorknob, and pulled open the door. She didn’t look back. She was out the door when she said, “Sorry, Miss Alta.” The screen door slammed behind her.
Carla didn’t move.
Carla squared her shoulders to me.
“You look so cute when you’re mad,” she said.
In two steps I reached her shoulders, dug my fingers into her upper arms and turned her toward the door. Her shoulders were muscle. Her height almost my height. She twisted back. Her face was swinging toward my face, her curls almost in my face, and the smell of scotch in my eyes.
“Get out,” I said. “Now.” I pushed her toward the door, but her body went lead. “Carla, get the fuck out of here.” My voice went high, like brakes on a train.
“Bad phone call?” she said. She covered one of my hands on her shoulder with her hand. I pulled back. “Bad day?”
“Carla, you reek. Don’t make this hard. Get out.” She didn’t move.
Carla’s back to me, I turned to the wall, walked up to it so I could rest my forehead on the white paint. My eyes closed. The wall didn’t smell. There was no sound, only the cool, hard wall on my forehead.
Carla started talking soft like someone telling a story at bedtime.
“That look you just gave me, it was like my dad. Just like it. My dad hated bugs. More than anything he hated the bugs in the peach orchards. He inherited those. Between petal fall and shuck fall, we walked the trees, checking for bugs, all kinds: stink bugs, oriental fruit moths, Japanese beetles, green June beetles, and western flower thrips.” She moved closer to me. My forehead was rolling on the cool white wall. What I wanted was to be paint, to be white on a white wall.
“Dad had his beating tray, and we pounded branches. He was sure our neighbors’ soybean fields were a breeding ground. My dad hated bugs.” All I could see was your jacket and its white stripe.
“I loved them. The best are green stink bugs. They have this shield for their body with little pointy heads, and they’re like emerald. They shine.” I turned my head toward Carla, leaned my shoulder into the wall. She made a point with the tips of her fingers over the top of her head, like a rooftop, like she was a giant girl sitting under a miniature roof. Then, she leaned her shoulder into the wall, and we were two feet apart facing each other.
“One time I’m nine maybe, and it’s June. My brother, Doug, sleeps in. He’s a teenager and way into cars, not bugs. That morning the ground smelled like wet grass, you know? Dad and his red-and-black flannel shirt.
“‘Come on,’ Dad says. ‘If you’re going to come, come on.’ He goes out the screen door without me.
“‘Wait, Daddy,’ I say. His black, curly hair bounces away from me.” I see Carla now, not your jacket, little Carla with curls like her dad’s.
“My yellow rubber boots make sounds when my feet finally go in like squeak, squeak. Running in rubber boots is hard, you know, but I run to catch up with my dad. His legs are long. The canvas beating tray is in one hand and a mallet’s in the other. I run and fall behind, run and fall behind. He keeps going. I’m little. The only reason I catch up is that he has to catch his breath. He’s a wheezer.” Little Carla with long curls bouncing up and down, running to catch up to her big dad.
“The dirt along the road is red. We walk along the orchard, the trees starting to bud out, the peaches about so long.” She held up her hand, her thumb and index finger open to an inch or two.
“Really cute. About halfway, he turns and walks in about three trees. To kneel down really close to the tree, he clears a place. Branches stick out. Where my mom cut his hair around his ears is white compared to the rest of him.” She squinted and looked away.
“‘Carla,’ he says, ‘come here, hold the tray.’ He puts the canvas beating tray under the lowest branches of the tree. Dad uses a painting he doesn’t like, flips it over and uses the backside for a tray. It’s an awesome bug catcher.” She’s little in the story, in this room where the phone rang and she answered it and came to the dining hall and got me.
“‘No matter what falls,’ he says, ‘hold tight.’ He looks at me with the look that says, ‘I mean it.’ It was kind of like the look you gave me just now.
“The grass doesn’t feel good under my knees, so I push my ankles out and sit back on my boots. But then I can’t hold the tray very well. I sit back up on my knees and lean on two sides of the tray. I hear his thick breathing. His shoulders go up and down even when he’s kneeling still.
“Dad takes a branch in one hand and raises the rubber mallet with the other. ‘Ready?’ he says. He gives me that look again.” She reached out with one hand as if holding the branch, and used an imaginary hammer with the other.
She looked at me as if I were little Carla in the story, as if she were her dad.
“He whacks it three times. Two bugs go plop, plop on the canvas. Nothing else drops except a couple of leaves.
“I bring the tray up. The bugs are slow and emerald. The light on their shields makes them glow. I bring my face close to the tray so I can see them. ‘Two,’ I say.
“‘Just two,’ he says. ‘Are you sure?’ He never believes me.
“‘See?’ I say. With a hand on both sides of the tray, I lift it up, but he’s bending down at the same exact time. Bam! goes the tray, and the two bugs fly up in the air.” She’s pantomiming the whole thing, and I’m there in the orchard on my knees with her.
“‘Damn it,’ Dad says, ‘damn it to hell.’ And he takes the side of the tray, and he shoves it, and his arm catches my head, and I fall and roll over. I’m like a potato bug and curl up.
“‘Look what you’ve done,’ he says. I look. The beating tray is red and dirty.
“‘I didn’t do it, Daddy,’ I say. And I’m still on the ground.
“He turns, and his face is red, red like stoplights. ‘What did you say?’
“’Your hand hit it.’
Dad’s head blocks out the sky. “‘Don’t you talk back to me,’ he says, ‘ever.’ He puts one hand on my shoulder and rolls me into the dirt. He pushes my shoulder down hard. My cheek scratches against the grass and dirt.” She rolls her cheek into the wall as if the wall were the ground.
“’Yeah,’ I say. And my cheek is smooshed.” Her mouth flattens against the wall.
“‘Say yes,’ he says. His big hand presses my shoulder into my ear. Dirt and sticks press hard into my ear and cheek.
“I say, like, nothing. He stands up. But then, he leans down, and his hands move fast. One hand goes between my legs, pushing my legs open, his whole hand on my butt, and one hand grabs my shoulder, and my body goes up in the air. Like, really fast.
“‘Get up,’ he says. I go up above his head, and stay there for a second, like he’s thinking whether to throw me, and then I go down, and he puts me on my feet. His eyes are big holes. The place between my legs stays achy. His voice is like thunder.
“We do it again. Tree after tree. Lean down, take a branch, whack, whack. We find bugs. Green, beautiful bugs. Each time we pound the branches, he says, ‘Damn it, damn it to hell’ like there shouldn’t be any bugs, like I have done it wrong.”
Before me was a little girl. Before me was a girl shaped by a mean parent. It took a few moments for Carla to return to my apartment. It took seconds for me to remember you. I can’t handle all the meanness, all the want.
“I’m sorry, Carla,” I say, “you have to go.”
The step she takes back looks as though I hit her with the beating tray. She turns on one foot and reaches the door. The sucking sound of the door opening came before the screen door slammed.
The sound after the slam came from the place at the top of the throat, but deep. It started little, like a kitten cry, and I covered my mouth with the palm of my hand. My other hand covered my mouth, too.
The bottle Alex had brought me to celebrate the first day of classes, to apologize for being a jerk the first practice, was unopened in the cupboard over the sink. The whiskey was still the only thing in the cupboard. Carla and Buttons hadn’t gotten it. The scotch on Carla’s breath came from somewhere else.