by Kate Gray
“Back here,” he said. I couldn’t see.
“Phil, where are you?” My hands weren’t completely out in front of me, out to the sides a little.
He didn’t say anything. And the heat of him was close. The sweat of him was close. The sweat was old socks. “Here,” he said.
I didn’t know what his hands were doing or where to stand or what he wanted to tell me. His hands on my hands were squirmy, and his hands led mine around his back. And his hands around my shoulders turned me around, backed me against the wall of Mrs. Wishert’s classroom, and his body pressed me back, and his mouth was all wet on my face. My mouth found his mouth.
This was necking.
Phil Fenton and I necked every afternoon before carpool for two weeks. And then, one time there were hands and sweat and something more in him. My back was smushed against the wall, and he pressed against me harder, and there was a power that wasn’t there before. It made the room darker and farther away from English class and white chalk on the blackboard. I was smaller. My hair stuck to my neck, his mouth was wet on my neck, and his squirmy hands were rough. It wasn’t like necking any more.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. There was a feeling in my chest that wasn’t warm or cold. There was something rising in my chest.
“No,” I said. It came out really loud, like a school bell or something.
Phil jumped back.
“Damn,” he said. “What’s wrong?” His voice was sleepy.
“I don’t know. Got to go,” I said. My hands checked my shirt and pulled my shoulders on right. There was heat coming off Phil, and I went around him, out Mrs. Wishert’s door.
There was something so wrong in me it filled my chest. It was wrong all the way down the linoleum hall, down the sidewalk in the winter dark, into the warm car with Mrs. Harris driving home.
There was something wrong in this ride to this Delaware town, Alex driving a red Toyota Celica down the flat black driveway under maple trees, out the brick entrance of St. Timothy’s. On the highway to town, he pulled out the bottle. With one hand he held the bottle and the steering wheel, and his other hand twisted off the cap. The half-pint bottle made a tap on the steering wheel. Turning toward me, he made his eyebrows do Groucho Marx up and down. Then, he tipped the bottle and took a taste. He handed it to me. The whiskey bit my throat, but warmed me all the way down. The thing in my chest felt warmer.
Town wasn’t far, and it wasn’t big. The one family restaurant was Norma’s, and it served steaks with fries, biscuits and gravy, and real southern fried chicken. Every dish came with corn pone and coleslaw, like it or not. About the same time as the waitress in her orange-striped apron and tiara-type cap came to take our order, a man with polyester pants and blue floral shirt pushed onto the bench seat beside me.
“Mind if I sit for a minute?” the man with the polyester smile said. He almost sat on me. My legs were touching Alex’s legs under the table, and for me to move over, Alex had to turn sideways. “My name is Marshall,” he said, “Marshall Wayne Murphy.” And he stuck a hand across the table at Alex. His hand hung above the table until Alex shook it. “Pleased to meet you,” Marshall Wayne Murphy said. He didn’t offer his hand to me.
“I work for the Delaware Star,” he said. He put a pad of paper on the table. Alex and I looked at each other. Alex with his blond cropped hair, his chiseled jaw, his button down shirt, me in my St. Timothy’s blazer and khaki pants, my button down shirt. We were the bull’s-eye in his scope.
“I understand you work at St. Timothy’s,” he said. The pages of his spiral notepad flipped up as he licked his fingers to pluck them. The lined pages were light green, long and thin. He dug into his inside pocket to find a pencil.
“We have nothing to say,” I said to his notepad still flipping.
“Really.” He stopped plucking the pages and looked at Alex.
“That’s right,” Alex said. He looked at me.
“You have nothing to say about a boy hanging from the rafters and a teacher accused of abusing him? That’s fine.” He picked up the top cover of the notepad and slowly closed it. His hand had manicured nails, glossy, perfectly shaped.
What Alex looked like must have been what I looked like. Mouth closed, eyebrows crunched up, eyes shifting back and forth.
“What teacher?” Alex said.
Marshall Wayne Murphy was quick to open his notebook. “Oh, want to talk?” He looked up and grinned. “Oriental name. Let’s see here.”
There was only one teacher with an Asian name. My stomach with the whiskey in it was a cannon ball.
“Here it is,” he said. “Jack Song, Physics.”
“No,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” Alex said. The muscle of his jaw was sticking out.
“Another student gave great details. Told all about showers and this guy Song tucking the boy in.” He winked at us as if we shared secrets with him.
Alex was turning so red that his hair looked white. “What student?”
“Well, let’s see,” Marshall Wayne Murphy said. He licked his manicured fingers and turned pages again. “I know I’ve got it: Donny Zuckhaus. I think you call juniors ‘Fifth Form.’”
Alex bit down, turned his head to the wall. The jaw muscle flexed, released, flexed, released. My hands went to my forehead, my fingers digging into my hairline. Fiction makes fact look simple.
What could we say?
“The student lied,” Alex said.
“Can I quote you on that?” Marshall Wayne Murphy licked a finger, pushed pages aside, raised his pencil.
“Forget it,” Alex said.
The feeding frenzy of polyester and floral print reporters would hit Surrey tomorrow. More reporters. A lot more. A suicide was good enough for national news. A sex scandal was even better. Poor Jack.
“Excuse me, Mr. Murphy,” I said with a smile, “could you please move? We’re leaving.” I shuffled toward him on the bench, actually pushing him. I threw money on the table for the meal we wouldn’t eat.
His mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything, grabbed his pencil and his pad and moved off the bench. Once he stood, I was out the small space between his polyester pants and the table. Alex was right behind me.
On the way out of Norma’s, I didn’t look at the breakfast bar or the other booths by the window. The glass door with the metal handle across the middle, the decals of credit cards they accepted on the glass, this was the exit. Outside, the parking lot smelled like chicken fat. Five steps on to the blacktop, and I turned to Alex.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Holy shit.”
Both of us raised our hands to our foreheads and bent over, turned in opposite directions. We were in some weird Star Trek episode with sound waves crushing our eardrums. What we heard was too hard.
This must have looked great from the windows of Norma’s. I stopped.
“Oh God,” I said, “let’s go.”
On the flat drive back to St. Timothy’s, Alex and I didn’t say anything. My left hand spread flat across his thigh, his thigh warm, pressed into my hand. We passed the whiskey between us. The only sound was the radio, some Talking Heads song. The lights on the dashboard made the car red inside, and Alex’s hand giving me the bottle, me giving him the bottle, was like the black wand of a radar in some control tower moving back and forth. Intruders were entering our space from all around us. And there was nothing we could do.
At the brick entrance to school, Alex screwed the top back on the bottle, and wrapped it in the wrinkled, brown bag. We had finished it. Maybe Herbert Hofmeister was right at that faculty party on the lawn stretching down to the lake: If you’re going to teach, you’re going to drink.
Alex pulled around my dorm where the light over the parking lot was too bright. After putting the car in neutral, he reached his arm around the back of my seat and leaned toward me. His face big, I could reach it with my lips. Maybe his face was the forever place. Maybe his face could fill the crack in my chest.
Some part of me wanted to pretend, wanted to be a part of a school with stone blocks this way and stone blocks that way. I wanted to want Alex. I had led him to believe I wanted him. But the car smelled maple, the two of us large in the little car, close. The whiskey was warm in me. The smell of sweat and maple and chicken fat from the diner was too close. The ceiling of the car was inches above my head and caving in.
“See you, Alex. Thanks.”
“What about Song?” he said.
“Talk to him. Tell him that we know Donny is lying. Tell him he’s not alone in this.” The little handle was somewhere on the door. It was more like a D-ring than a handle, and I almost broke it off trying to get out. The ground felt farther away, and instead of blacktop, it was riverbed, uneven, changing. The pavement sloped toward my back door, and someone sat on my doorstep, the entry light orange above.
The Toyota sprayed pebbles as it pulled away. The person in my doorway sat up.
“Taylor?” she said. It was Crisco rising in my doorway, her big shoulders turning orange in the entryway light.
I said, “You’re here.”
“Of course, I’m here.” I missed a step and fell forward. Crisco caught me, leaned back, and spun me off my feet. Her body was tight, held me like a fitted sheet.
“What’re you doing here?”
“No news like bad news,” she said.
Carla / Tape #1, Side A
Test. Test. 1-2-3.
Awesome.
So, if you’re listening to this, then I’m dead, too. We’re together again in our cornfield. You shouldn’t have left the way you did. That totally sucked.
I haven’t listened to your tape. I’m sorry. No can do.
So, anyway, can you see where I am now? Fucking nut ward. Fucking Alta. Unbelievable. Group therapy three times a day. Meds twice a day. Individual therapy once a day. The shrink who’s kind of okay gave me this totally old tape recorder, like huge, ancient, and she said I have to get stuff out, stories and stuff. With all the meds my mind goes fluffernutter, but talking to you, that works. All I can do in group is picture you in the cornfield, hanging in the dorm, your greasy hair. And I imagine the one-liners my brother, Doug, would make to the kids in the group, like “Shut up” or “Life’s a bitch,” to the loser kid who flubbed his suicide. Missed his brains and shot his ear, van-fucking-Gogh. Or the Whiner whose momma never pays attention to her. Bor-ing.
You’d like Doug. You two were kind of alike. He and I had this pediatrician growing up, all pasty white and crew cut. Like the shrink in charge here: Dr. Do Little. He’s sitting across the circle from me, tweed jacket and bow tie. Dr. Do Little turns to me in group, his round glasses all smudged, and I’m like, “I don’t know,” to everything he asks. He’s always asking what I feel. The way he says “feel,” it sounds gross and slimy.
Do Little says I should let it out. He doesn’t say what “it” is. In the prison cell they put me in, hospital room, they give me a journal, no lines, and a tape recorder with a blank tape. Bonus. I can’t help but think that they erased somebody from the tape to use it again. I haven’t said a word to anybody anywhere so far.
Okay, there was one time I talked. Had to.
That time the Whiner, sucking on her gross hair, is next to Do Little, her body all stretched out, like she’s a board somebody propped up against the chair. The loser, van Gogh, is talking about his miserable life in this nasal voice. I hear him say, “wah wah wah nobody cares about me wah wah wah, poor me.” So, I don’t know, I just lose it. These kids are like Tim-Tim kids, stupid and spoiled.
“You know what’s funny?” I say out loud, and the room goes dead. Dr. Do Little pushes his glasses up with his finger and looks at me.
“Carla?”
“No, Mabel,” I say.
So, I start in, and pretty soon the Whiner isn’t sucking her hair, all wet and gummy, and van Gogh’s jaw is dropped.
“Yeah, so, I figure he got me alone for like eight years and did whatever he wanted with me out there in the peach trees and in my room at nap time. Trouble is I don’t remember a thing about exactly what he did. All I know is afterwards, I had big bruises. I remember those. But later I got cool things, like a car.”
Do Little says something nerdy, “Your brain protected you and compartmentalized the experience.”
Whiner tilts her head, keeps her soggy hair in one hand. “What kind?”
“Mustang.”
“Awesome.”
I don’t know why I blabbed. Had to show them up. Dad must have done it to Doug too. Dad was totally fucked up.
I remember this one time in the summer, it was so humid that we were dripping, standing still. Doug and I kept sticking our heads in the fridge. Mom yelled at us, so we pretended to help her in the kitchen.
“Here, Mom,” Doug said, “I’ll get the butter.” And he had that shaggy brown hair in his eyes, but his eyes were crinkled with that big smile on his face. The light from the fridge made his eyes black, his nose long, his neck forever. His hand on the fridge door. The cool came from the fridge in waves, like someone breathing winter, and he stood there.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said, “I’ll get the eggs,” but I was too little to reach that shelf.
“Kids,” Mom ended up saying, “out of the kitchen.” Mom cooked when she got hot, cooked in the stinking heat. Flour made her hands doll hands. She pushed her hair back with her forearm, and her hair stuck there.
It was Dad who called us from their bathroom.
“Kids, get in here.” His voice was Father-Knows-Best and Elmer Fudd, both.
Doug stood there so long in the fridge light the waves didn’t come out any more, and his eyes went away from mine. His shoulders went down, the way a dog goes down when it knows it has to do something it doesn’t want to do. His face turned toward Dad’s voice. “Coming,” Doug said.
Our parents’ bathroom was huge, bigger than a bedroom at St. Tim-Tim’s. The spray on the tiles was all the sound there was in the room, and Dad was wavy behind the shower glass. He was moving all around like some shadow in cartoons. The glass door popped open. He was in there, his hair flat not curly, the khaki pants sticking to his legs, his shirt wet paper sacks on his chest. His way of getting cool around him.
His big voice, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
Doug bent over to take his shoes off, and Dad grabbed him by the waist, pulled him in, butt first.
“Shit,” Doug said, “shit, shit,” and Dad let him say “shit” because the water was cold.
“Come on, Carla,” and both of them held out a hand to me.
I jumped in with my shoes and clothes, and the three of us squeezed into the shower and jumped around. The cold felt good, and we arched when the spray hit us. Then Dad had his arms on either side of Doug, his hands flat on the tile, like a bull hooked his horns in him, and Doug couldn’t move. Dad blocked the spray with his back, the spray bouncing in my eyes, and I couldn’t see Doug. The water hit my head and made two rivers around the front of me, my T-shirt was my skin, my sneakers soggy by the drain. The smack of the water wasn’t as loud any more. Dad stood like a bull does, before it charges. I know that now, Kyle. But then, I went around him and got between the two of them, did a little Ring-Around-the-Rosy dance. Doug’s head was the height of Dad’s armpit, and Doug turned in circles right where he was, little tight circles, his eyes closed, not touching anyone.
That was weird. Creepy weird.
So, I guess the point of a nut ward is to keep you living your miserable life. Like van-fucking-Gogh is supposed to be boring, and Whiner is meant to whine. Doug’s still in his lock-down place, you’re dead, and I’m stuck for eternity at Tim-Tim’s. That means walking those freezing halls with fucking Jack Song and that pathetic Alta and that echo of where you used to be.
A gray moth.
A lump in the cornfield.
Origami animals out my window.
Doug would like you.
If I could be the tie around your neck, I’d rip. Ev
ery thread would snap and curl. The tie would tear across its stripes, and you’d thud down on the floor of your cubby. You’d still breathe, and I’d be the tie piece, hanging from the rafter.
And the cornfields would be good. Uh-oh, I better be quick. The tape is squeaking.
And I could look out my window and see something besides cranes.
Song / Sneaker Wave
Waves transmit energy over distance. They travel through the medium but do not displace the medium. So, through a dorm room wall, people can hear others talking, but the wall is not affected by the sound. The speed of a wave depends on the medium through which it travels. Rumor through media moves faster than rumor through people. The speed of a sound wave through air is generally 343 m/s under normal circumstances, but increase pressure and intensity, and one has headline news.
Mr. Zurkus was in my parents’ living room in San Diego within minutes of the news release, his muscle-boy body in a new suit riding up the screen. My parents never fix their vertical hold. Bad-Boy Zurkus, his new suit flapping as he walks through reporters.
Today I’m sitting in Oral-Fixation White’s office. Suspension from teaching means house arrest. I walk inside the apartment in circles when students go to class. Bad-Boy Zurkus says I killed Kyle by touching him.
Today White is a smoke machine. Back and forth, back and forth in front of the windows. Far below is the lake. On the lake the water is the medium for waves. The wind causes energy to move through the water.
“You must have done something.”
White stops, puts both hands on the back of his wingback chair.
Virginia tobacco. Not enough air in the too small office.
“The teenage mind is untoward,” I say.
My parents will not answer the phone today. My parents will not leave their kitchen. No visitors. My mother will fill the rice cooker, and steam will rise from the bubbling pot. The pot will rattle, and the switch will flip when the rice is done.
White, King of the Phone Calls, his secretary holds calls while I’m grilled. School attorney calling every five minutes.