by Kate Gray
I have no message to give her back.
The path with leaves and bare trees spins. The path back to the main building is a chute I fall through. Crisco told me it would be hard.
This is hard, like catching my breath right after the finish line. This is hard like being dumped. But how hard can it be to do the right thing, to turn away from something I shouldn’t have done in the first place?
After the whiskey and the reporter asking about Song and then Alex kicking up gravel with his car in front of the dorm, after Crisco helping me inside, I pinned her against the wall. Crisco’s breath was strawberry and soft. My smell bouncing off her skin was the way the beach smells after the tide goes down.
Unlike walls in a dorm, walls in people are unstable. Booze or loneliness or loss can bore through them. Teachers are supposed to have walls. Solid ones.
Crisco did a head-fake-sideways move.
“Whoa, tiger,” she said, “You’ve had a little too much.”
“Too much what?” I said.
“Everything.”
The door to the bedroom was on the same wall, and Crisco’s big hands, with big rower calluses, took my shoulders and put me in my room, on the covers of my bed.
My hands on her forearms, my eyes in her cornflower eyes, my hands and eyes a question. Crisco said, “Not this way.”
Beets. The color inside me was beets, the bile rising in my throat, the rosary and Father M in the background.
“What an idiot,” I said.
“Idiot, you’re not,” she said. “Cheap date, maybe.” Her sunflower face was full and moved away from my face.
That night I had thought of trying to make Alex want me, thought that whiskey-burn in the throat could make my thighs feel slick and warm, thought Alex wanting me might make St. Timothy’s feel like a home I had never known. Alex might fill the crack in the middle of my chest.
And whiskey and driving and raging against the reporter worked. Alex wanted me, but I was still that girl caught between her mother’s voice and her body, my mother saying, “You just haven’t met the right man,” and “You’re just different,” and my body saying, “Wrong.” My blood through its veins dragged, the drag filling my body with weird energy. Attraction was great to take me away from school. Alex was good for that. But when it came right down to it, my body kicked in, the body with all its weird messages.
My head, with Jack Daniel’s, still knew that the way through schools with stone blocks this way and stone blocks that way was to find the right man, the right look, like Alex with his sinew-rope arms, his fresh-cut hair. But my body, weird with booze and flight, wasn’t held to dress codes and St. Timothy’s. My body, wanting its own thing, said, “Crisco.”
And my body wanting girls was prickly, the blood too thick for the veins. My mother’s voice, “You’re immoral,” and the way my insides turned beets.
“Carla” was not what my body said. Carla was beets and my mother’s voice and the silence when Sarah left my dorm room after I came out to her.
If I could kiss a student, I could show everyone how bad I was. But they already knew.
Carla / Tape #2, Side B
Kissing Donny Zurkus makes me go Gila monster. I want to lie in the sun and flick my tongue, and I want to swallow small animals whole. It’s both at the same time. He’s a jerk, but when we’re walking around, I feel monster big.
You don’t mind my hanging out with the guy who was the meanest to you. Sure, he’s a bully, but his mean is, like, kryptonite. People with power lose it around him. The loony bin was bad, but now I’m back, and all I can do is make these tapes, number them with Magic Marker. Mr. Hofmeister let me have the tape recorder from the library. No check out. Perks of being loony. And if my roommate walked in and heard me talking to you, she’d turn me in just like Alta. So, I wait till I know she’s in class. I don’t know if you’re listening. Give me a sign.
So, one time Alta saw me with Donny. It’s not that I saw her see us. I smelled her. Kind of. We were on the path back from the dining hall to her place, the only path, and me pressing Donny into the trunk of the tree, we took up the whole path. Somebody came toward us. Somebody turned and walked away. Flick. Flick. Gulp.
The weird thing about being back is no Jack. Gone the same two weeks I’ve been gone. If it were last year, we could have used two weeks together. Maybe we could have stayed two weeks in Rehoboth. Maybe we could have walked on the beach and cooked meals and taken showers together. Maybe we could have made up stories to tell people why both of us were away, but those stories, the ones we made up, they couldn’t possibly have been better than the ones that are happening this year.
Nobody told me Jack was removed. A loony bin is a separate planet. No space stations. No communication with earth. How could anyone think Jack touched Kyle? No way. Sure, I hurled the idea at Jack. Why not? I was like a grasshopper under stress. That’s what they do: vomit to discourage predators. My vomit was an accusation. It was a defense, not a truth. I vomited at Jack.
Jack is tiger swallowtail, yellow and black. He flew away from me, but he did the right kind of flying away. The teacher-thing, adult. He wasn’t creepy weird like my dad. He didn’t do me because he couldn’t go against his grain. That Asian honor thing. He was there for you, there in a way that no one else was: adult. Jack Song did nothing to you.
Song / Angle of Re-entry
Mr. Oral Fixation says before he hangs up, “Stand firm, man. Buck up. We’re working this from every angle, and we’ll take care of it. Our people are talking to the Zurkus people. Trust me.” There’s no platitude like those of the uncomfortable to the inconsolable.
The white phone with the note taped to it doesn’t ring very often, and when it does, the news isn’t great. After two weeks of living in this beach cabin, I’m ready to blast out of here. No teacher can relax. Always more papers to grade, more lessons to prep, changes to our field of study. Here I am without a library, without my lab books, with nothing but notes taped to every cabinet and drawer. One black-and-white TV with rabbit ears and one station. This cabin owner? The queen of skinflints.
Angle of re-entry is what Kyle never got right. He was a rocket ship, trying to come back to earth, to the mother ship. His mass traveling from space back to earth had to accelerate to a certain speed and hit our atmosphere at a certain angle, descending between 30 and 35 degrees. Less than 28 degrees and the traveler bounces back out into space. More than 38 degrees and the traveler burns up.
Kyle hit it just wrong. Young Sir Nihilist, he couldn’t make us understand the perils of nuclear bombs, couldn’t protect himself from predators, couldn’t face being in one place in one time. More than 38 degrees. His place and time were other, were motion, and entering the realities of this world, which is what the young men and women of this nubile age do in boarding school, put too much drag on his system. Reality burnt him up.
That’s not to say our guilt has been expunged.
Two weeks in this beach cottage, and I’ve folded every beetle, bug, and bird I know. Give me a sheet of paper and a half an hour, and I can fold just about anything. The skinflint cottage owner keeps wrapping paper in a trunk in the attic. Pretty and thin and musty. Each crease will make spider webs of creases. Each fold must be considered. No margin for error.
So far I’ve filled half the trunk.
Every morning before sunrise I walk the flat shoal of Rehoboth Beach, the tide changing each day, the low tide so low it expands the land mass of this isthmus by half. On one side the Atlantic, on the other the bay. There’s always someone out there, someone with a dog, the dog alert to gulls and its master. Carla and I never walked the beach in the morning.
By lunch time I’m inside folding or reading or writing something down, something for a class if I ever get to teach again. Mr. Finished at finishing school.
By afternoon I’m walking the shops, finding the Satsumas or the fresh scallops or stargazer lilies. No one knows my name despite the earnest greetings by the shop owners.
Back at the cottage, I nap, wash the fish, cut up vegetables, arrange the flowers. A single man cannot afford to skirt domestic chores. After a nap, something I’ve learned to do in the last two weeks, I turn on the news from the black-and-white set. That voice on the news is the first I’ve really heard all day, the first I want to hear.
Tonight I hear my name on the news.
Taylor / River, Tide, Ocean
A day in the life of a boarding school teacher is race to breakfast, one set of clothes, race to class, another set of clothes, race to practice, another, shower, race to dinner, another set, back to the dorm, relax, grade, check the dorm, relax, grade, bed, another set of clothes. My bedroom is piles everywhere. My living-room-part-kitchen is books and papers and folders and dishes. My TV is rarely on, except to catch the news with Dan Rather. Tonight I’m not assigned dorm duty, and masses of sophomoric examinations of revenge versus justice weigh down my knees. Pen in one hand, a cold beer in the other, and the local news get me focused.
Channel 6 Action News anchormen come on too loud with their exaggerated voices, statements sliding up to questions. The field reporter is interviewing someone familiar, a couple, one man gnarled and old, the woman with scars on her face. She looks through a drooping eye at her husband, both surrounded by reporters.
She says, “We are confident that he was in no way responsible.”
Channel 6 Action News reporter says, “Mrs. Harney, how do you know?”
“My son would have told me.”
“Did he say he was harmed in any way?”
“Yes, he did.” She turns to look at Mr. Harney. He straightens to meet her look. At the same time without saying anything, they break their gaze at each other and look down. The reporters push their microphones toward her.
“Kyle told us about other boys pinning him down, punching him, playing tricks.” The reporters interrupt, jabbing their questions. Mr. Harney turns to shield his wife from the reporters.
She says, “Boys are not kind. He wrote us about that. He wrote us about Mr. Song teaching him good things. The day he died he wrote us.” Her voice a whisper and the reporters a mob.
“What did he say?”
“Did he say who did it?”
“The school did nothing?”
“He said he was better off, that Mr. Song tried. We know that Mr. Song had nothing to do with our son’s death. There will be no investigation. And that’s all I will say.” She backed away, held up her hand as if her hand could ward off judgment, could mete out justice. Mr. Harney stepped toward her, took her hand, put his arm around her. They turned away from the reporters.
Pushing off from my chair with the papers pressed to my thighs, the beer still in hand, like a hunchback, I cross the living room and reach for the knob to click off the TV. Still hunched, I backed to the chair with my papers pressed to my thighs. My living room was books and folders and the refrigerator kicking on. My left hand was wet with the warming beer. In three gulps it was gone.
I was rock on the lakeshore. I was rock under ripple. I was ripple.
All these papers about Hamlet and Claudius and Sir Francis Bacon, and I saw how much Donny Zurkus learned about power. His father, Union Textile, and his words about Song brought the country to St. Timothy’s. Donny, his lanky limbs, locked in desks built for Second Formers, walked into that dining room last night with Carla like he was Claudius, the sweet taste of revenge on his lips, his own form of justice, at once private and public, to repay the injustice he believed Song caused him for his suspension and sure rejection from the most elite colleges.
Now, justice played in someone whose wounds were not green. Kyle’s mom did not seek revenge. She sought to clear Song’s name and Kyle’s name. She didn’t even want to blame the boys who picked on Kyle.
Mrs. Harney is river. Mrs. Harney is tide. The ocean is as big as her grace.
After Channel 6 Action News at 5 p.m. and the same news at 11 p.m., I was reading Sir Francis Bacon and Freud and Shakespeare quoted and regurgitated in some Fourth Form jumble like the BeeGees playing Mozart. The spring in the screen door stretched before there was a loud knock on my door. Papers fell from my lap and fanned out. After 11 p.m. meant lights out and locked dorms, and Carla couldn’t possibly be standing there.
And Carla wasn’t there. The white print on the black label spelled “Jack Daniel’s” through the windowpane of my door. Alex Jeffers was pointing his big, rower finger at the bottle and grinning into the door. The whiskey splashed in the bottle that Alex held. He had started a while ago.
“Jack for Jack,” he said. He walked in when I opened the door.
“Come right in.” He brushed by me.
“Can you believe it? You saw the news, right?” My sweats and socks and unwashed hair, my eyes blurry from reading papers, I blinked at his ebullience.
“Sure.”
“We should celebrate.” He looked at the kitchen side of my living room. “Glasses?” he said.
The way he talked, the words had more Ss than they needed. “At it awhile?”
“A bit.” He spun toward me. “Caught the early news.” Over six feet tall, the muscle-bound man shrugged, looked six years old. Spinning toward me was a movement too quick, and he kept spinning, leaning on one leg.
“Easy, big guy.” I stepped toward him. And the momentum he had when he spun kept him moving, and his arm wrapped around me. He folded me into his chest. My face slammed into his pecs, and I breathed in the smell of cake frosting from the whiskey seeping out his pores.
“Mmm,” he said. My head turned to the side so I could breathe. My arms dropped. I had papers to grade, and the questions he might ask about how I kept my hand on his leg during the drive to and from town, why I scrambled out of his car, and who the woman was on my doorstep the other evening were pieces of debris floating in the wreck of the last few weeks.
“Alex,” I said, “you have to go.” When I leaned back, he didn’t let go.
“But this feels so good.” His chin sank farther down my neck.
“It’s late.” His hug felt good the way sun feels good in winter. He was the big man who tried to save a Second Form boy and the boy died. He was that kind of guy, the one who rushes toward a fire when other people run away. There were lots of reasons to want his arms around me.
“Don’t you like this?” His arms moved in circular motions on my back, the bottle somehow landing upright on a table. Last week this hug might have been a door, a place to enter the St. Timothy’s world and prove I belonged. Last week I wanted his hand on me.
“Yes, but,” I said.
“But what?” His head left my neck, and his hands took my shoulders, and his eyes in my eyes were too close. “What?”
“Nothing.” Going farther with Alex might have made the dress code, the drinking, the implicit agreements of boarding school make sense, but in this past week, every code broke.
“You don’t like me?”
“It’s not that.” My head bowed to keep my eyes from him, and his hands squeezed harder to keep me from backing away. “You’re, this, great,” I said. The six-year-old in him, blond and pink cheeks and dizzy.
“You’re special, too,” he said with way too many Ss.
“Thanks.”
We stood there in my living room, and he folded me inside his arms. And when he swayed, I held him in case he leaned too far, and the two of us were warm in my living room with papers and books, an old TV, and my empty beer bottle. Outside it was December cold, the branches of the maples clicking. For a moment the last twelve weeks stopped splitting apart the crack in my chest. For a moment the cold stayed on the outside and didn’t make a draft inside me. I wanted to stay in this moment of someone taller and stronger and acceptable wrapping around me.
His hand was big on my back, his enormous hand, moving slowly, pressing my sweatshirt, my sweatshirt turning circles. When his hand moved under my sweatshirt, under my shirt, I reached around and pressed his palm flat to my back. “Not a
good idea,” I said.
“What?”
“This,” I said. I pressed his hand for emphasis.
“What?” He pulled his hand away from my hand. “What?” he said and reached farther up my shirt. The smile on his face was in his words, his head higher than my head. Alex, as strong as he is, could take what he wanted if he wanted, could turn my apartment into a desert with the two of us the only people for miles. Lucky for me, Alex was more boy and more drunk.
Stepping away from him, I pulled his hand from behind my back and brought it between us. With my hand I held up his hand, as if it were a rabbit from a hat, and with my other hand, I pointed to it. “This,” I said.
“Oh, that little thing,” he said. “If I’ve told it once, I’ve told it twice.”
“You’ve told it a thousand times,” I said, and the old line became trick and charm and truce.
“Hands have a mind of their own,” he said. “The little buggers.”
With my hand on his wrist, Alex started to fall. I grabbed his hand with both of mine, and leaned away to slow his descent to the couch. “Sorry,” he said, “guess I needed to sit down.”
“Guess so,” I said and knelt down on the carpet in front of the big man leaning back in the too-soft couch, the couch where Terence had slept the night when Kyle died, the couch where Carla insisted she killed Kyle. “You okay?
“Fine, thank you, and you?” Alex said in a perky St. Tim’s voice. His head rested on the wall behind the couch, and his eyes were closed. He rolled his head back and forth.
“Can I tell you something?” I said. On my knees I wanted to apologize for the signals I sent.
“Anything,” he said, “as long as you don’t expect me to remember it.” His big hand covered his mouth as he yawned.
“About the other night.”
“After the diner when you ditched me?”
“I wanted to,” I said.