by Kate Gray
“You wanted to ditch me? That’s not what your hand was saying.” A big smile followed the Ss in what he said. “Little buggers.”
“About that.” I tried to say more, but he kept going.
“All I can say is you sure know how to confuse a guy.” He swept his hand over his forehead and combed his fingers through his hair.
“I’m really sorry, Alex,” I said.
“Forget about it.” His big hand waved the air, pushed the thought aside.
“No, I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t, I can’t . . .” I said. Now I was the one shaking my head back and forth. The reasons for wanting him and not wanting him, the reasons I couldn’t tell him about Crisco and who I was, the fears and apologies and admissions all stalled inside me.
“Be with me,” he said. He brought his head forward, off the wall, but his eyes were half closed.
“Yes.”
“You can’t be with me because there’s somebody else?”
An easy way out was something I hadn’t imagined. Here was an apology without vulnerability. Here was open water, no boats challenging, fans cheering.
“Yes,” I said.
“That somebody the other night?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky girl.”
Did he mean me? Did he see Crisco in the half-light of the parking lot, Crisco with her big muscles and boy-shape? The taste of beets, the way students would look at me, the way I’d be fired filled my throat. My hand reached for his knee.
“I am,” I said.
“You are,” he said. And his head swung back against the wall.
For a while there was nothing in the living room but the sound of the refrigerator turning on, the maples clicking outside in the cold. The wind had picked up, and it swept the cold from the lake against the stone buildings.
Without telling Alex how much I wanted to want him, how my hand on his leg in the car had been a way to keep hold of the living, how those smiles at school dinners and passing in the halls were like buoys along a racecourse. They kept me on a course, a course for which everything in my life had trained me. Tonight I wanted to apologize for the flirting, the start flag of a race, for the stops I made.
In this moment, Alex falling asleep on my couch, the wind and cold in a Delaware December, the buoys fell away. I had no cox’n to steer me, no boats in lanes on either side. The course was no longer what I tried to want. It was gone.
Song / Equal and Opposite
Hyo is all there is between parents and sons. Hyo can keep a boy in a country where his parents are, can make a boy leave a country to find honor for his parents. There is no word for parents honoring sons.
Mrs. Harney, Mrs. Courage and Honor, did what Kim didn’t get to do: Speak up. Asian women are bound by silence. Maybe Japanese women are different from Korean women, not as much shame beaten into them. Mrs. Harney spoke out loud to reporters. Her words weighed more than Mr. Harney’s, for she was the face that would sway the public. And she is Mother, the primal force. The district attorney, moved by her mass and action, dropped the case.
For Kyle, Mrs. Harney was iron, at one time malleable and soft, at another time magnetic, rigid, untarnished. She is the clash of culture. On her body is written the old Japan and the new Japan. The old Japan was collaborative, relational: no value without the family, no bonds without honor. The new Japan is competitive, self-actualized, driven by shame. As a child in Nagasaki, Mrs. Harney was caught by the world trying literally to forge itself new. The Western world tried to blast its way into peace, and the Eastern world tried to save its face. Mrs. Harney, with her yin/yang scars, the keloid markings of radiation, saves my face and her son’s face by speaking up, defying the role for Asian women, escaping the lascivious clutches of the media by speaking not what they wanted, but the truth: Her son died because we did not protect him. Kyle did not die because I touched him. I didn’t touch him.
What is the equal and opposite reaction of violence done to Kyle? Violence done to himself.
Mrs. Harney has iron in her spine to speak up. She made moot the old boy network. My honor saved by acts of two Japanese friends. Their actions contrast the sphere of influence my father and grandfather suffered. My two Japanese defenders resist the forces acting beyond my control; they are heroic, Newtonian, awesome.
To return to St. Timothy’s after two weeks, to drive through the reporters at the school’s entrance, there will be nothing but drag force on me. My velocity will meet the resistance of time and speculation and judgment in this formula:
Of course, I won’t be moving that quickly, but if I wanted to calculate the drag coefficient, I’d start here.
I’d end, knowing it’s huge.
Carla / Tape #2,
Side B, Continued
This might be kind of disjointed, Kyle, but I’m pissed. Totally. Like Shrinko said, I have to make choices. I choose to talk to you.
So, there we were, out in the spot in the woods past the cornfields, the place where Donny and Rambo and I go sometimes.
“Shut the fuck up, Donny,” I said to him.
Total loser.
“Fuck you, Carla,” Mr. Mature says back to me.
“I’m not the one who went to the press. What were you thinking?”
“Hey, not my fault.” Donny’s voice goes girly.
“Oh, well,” I say, “some other guy called the reporters? Some other guy blamed Song?”
“You don’t know. You weren’t there.” Now he’s up from the fallen log, the sacred circle of logs around the upright flashlight, the beam going straight up into the canopy of trees. He’s tall enough to be one of those trees. What a waste of a good body.
“And where was that?”
“In the fucking dorm.”
“No shit.”
The stairwell smells of soggy paper bags, the door to the hall opens thick like a vault door, and Jack’s door to the right is black and shiny. No way do I know the dorm. Right. But I haven’t told you that part, yet. That’s history.
“I saw them.” Donny puts his fingers into his black hair, pulled it straight back from his forehead, held on to it like he could pull it off.
“Saw them how?”
It was cold out there. Midnight sucks in the woods on the far side of the cornfields. December totally sucks.
Donny turned his whole body toward me, his elbow still out, his hand still pulling his hair.
“One time Kyle was in the hall, all curled up on the floor and shit, and Song was touching his foot, just sitting there with his hand on the little guy’s foot. It was weird.” Do you remember that? Did you think it was weird?
“Oh, total abuse. I see what you mean.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re kidding, right? You did this whole thing because Song touched Kyle’s foot?”
“Wait. One time right before curfew I see Kyle slip out of Song’s apartment, make sure the door didn’t slam, look all around.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This proves what?”
“Wait! You were the one who told me Song cared too much. You told me he went too far.”
“Oh, great. You went off that? I didn’t mean Kyle, you moron.”
“What do you mean you didn’t mean Kyle?” Donny looked right at me, and I didn’t make a move. “Quit screwing around. Song is a perv, and everyone knows it.”
“Like who?”
“The guys.”
“Why?”
“Think about it. No girls. He’s how old, not married, no dates. He’s a perv or fag. Same thing.”
The beam of light made Donny’s forehead white since he was leaning toward me, his arms out in big gestures, as if his long arms could make me believe him. Loser.
“He’s not like that.”
“Right.”
“No, really, he’s not like that.” At this point, I’m grasshopper, wings tucked.
“How do you know?” Donny stepped toward me. He was so
close I couldn’t see his face any more.
I could have saved Jack. I could’ve told him.
“You asshole. You just want to get back at him,” I said.
Startling is a great defense. In Mexico a tiny black-and-white grasshopper has crimson wings. Predators run scared when it startles.
“Do not.” Mr. Mature came back.
“Ever since he caught you, you’ve tried to get back at him.”
“He got me suspended.” Suspension can mess with all kinds of things, like college, like career, like Daddy.
“Yeah, like you had nothing to do with it.”
“I’m out of here.” Donny leaned over and grabbed the flashlight. The beam went sideways, and off he went down the path, the beam of light all crazy in the trees.
There’s nothing like midnight in the woods with no moon and no stars. Awesome. The leaves were down, and I waited so long I could see the gaps in the trees. I waited long enough I could hear nothing, what nothing is.
Out there so long, I wondered if I waited out there long enough, would someone find me? Jack is gone. You’re gone. Taylor is all I have, and she doesn’t get me. I had Jack. Jack had me. He wasn’t after boys. He’s not like that. And he’s not the other kind, either. Since I was eighteen when he did the thing on the couch, and since, anyway, he stopped. He’s no perv.
It was fucking cold out there. The trees out there, round pieces of dark, different than midnight dark, are all secrets. It was just me and those trees. Are you in those trees, Kyle?
Song / Consequences
Not Kyle spinning on the lab stool, once, twice, three times. Before I open the door to the Marsh Road Diner in Wilmington, the breakfast counter is framed in the diner door. A compact man with no gray hair faces the controlled chaos in front of the grill, the waitresses reaching and cooks flipping eggs and orders hanging from clips. No one else sits at the counter, and Sam’s not charming Nancy at the moment.
“Sheila forbid you drinking coffee?” I take the stool next to him at the counter. Start with family. Work toward harder topics like Tim-Tim’s, like Mr. Bad-Boy’s dad.
“Can’t get service,” Sam says. His shoulders go up when he turns toward me, and that’s when I notice the backsides of the waitresses lined up. All the aprons are tied with perfect bows. I never could tie an apron on Kim with a bow like that. Nancy is two meters away, and ten galaxies.
“Not even water?”
“Nada,” Sam says. He faces the line of bows.
“Hey, Nancy,” I say to the bow, second from the right, “How about coffee for your favorite professors?” When she turns part way around, her right hand holds a Mr. Coffee Thermos, but the steps she takes move on a vector away from us, around the end of the counter, to the booths. No smile, no wisecrack, no how.
“It seems that bad press overshadows good,” Sam says. He spins toward me on the stool.
The Taiko drum hits me inside. “Suuu,” the drummer yells. My parents walk every day to the grocery store, my mother chatting to the clerk as she rings up fish and vegetables. Will the clerk in San Diego know the news? Will the clerk close her line before my mother unpacks her cart?
“How could they,” I say more to the counter than to Sam, “think such a thing? Nancy knows me.”
“What do they know, Song? You’re a customer, that’s all.” Sam lines up objects near him on the counter. The napkin dispenser. “And you’re not from here.” Salt. “And you’re a Jap.” Pepper.
“Right. I forgot.” Teacher of teachers, Sam grew up in Delaware, grew up next to Tim-Tim’s. He knows how people think. In Delaware, all almond eyes are Oriental eyes. And he doesn’t say the other thing, the thing the waitresses think but don’t say to us. The women turned away from us do a syllogism inside: Song touched boy. Boy killed himself. Song killed boy. If one piece is fallible, the whole is fallible. The only true part of their syllogism is the middle one: boy killed self.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sam says.
Without our usual goodbye to Nancy, we leave Marsh Road Diner. There’s a McDonald’s down the street, and the bright orange and plastic inside are perfect for a couple of guys who don’t want to spend time in the place. We take a booth.
Nancy and those waitresses contain the wave in them. The wave does not pass through. They are the middle of the rope suspended between two bodies. The wave continues to undulate, and they do not break its pattern.
“Sam,” I say, “I’m sorry you got dragged into all this.”
“Me, too,” he says, “I like that place. Good sausage.” His dark eyebrows rise when he looks across the orange table at me.
“Maybe Sheila will thank me.”
“Maybe.”
“How was talking to Charles Zurkus III?”
“A lot like eating broccoli,” Sam says. He takes the salt shaker and shuffles it between his small hands. Back and forth, the glass bottom on plastic table, lots of drag.
“Did you know him at Stanford?”
“Not much, but enough. And you know how that goes, alumni stick together. Besides, his company does some work on the side for our company.” CIA Sam doing covert work with Zurkus III. Textiles and engineering somehow saving the U.S. from the Soviets, and both forces colluding to protect one man’s son and one man’s friend. Sam’s force exerting more influence than Charles’ force. No science can explain relationships.
“What did you say?”
“The truth, that his son has an active imagination.” The salt shaker was more hockey puck, back and forth.
“And Daddy agreed?” Hard to imagine a parent backing down so quickly. Puffy Zurkus III, all bluster, no bite.
Sam looked through his bushy eyebrows at me, “That and a little reminder that I’m in charge of the contracts his company has with us.”
“You didn’t threaten him.”
“No need.” Sam shakes his head.
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“Again, no need,” Mr. Magnanimous says. The salt shaker stops in his right hand. My eyes move to his left hand out of habit. “The boy, the one who died, he’s the one you told me about, correct?”
“Yes. And you know,” I say.
“I know you did nothing,” Sam says. “His mother? I saw her on the news.”
“Yes, Nagasaki.”
“Terrible.”
“The boy was adopted, but he had hyo. One boy army trying to save his mother from another atom bomb. Trying to save all of us.”
The salt shaker still fitting the palm of his hand, Sam says, “That’s a lot for a little kid.”
“Too much.”
The Big Macs come in their orange baskets, and Sam is licking his fingers and attacking his fries before I have picked out the pickle and tossed it away. After finishing his fries, he looks at mine until I push my basket toward him.
“Help yourself,” I say, and he does. He finishes my fries, and I finish my Big Mac, and he asks questions about Tim-Tim’s and what the Whites did for Kyle and what they didn’t, if they knew about the bullying when it was happening and if they took steps to stop it. He shakes his head about the Second Formers still at the school, about the press conferences, about the rat maze cubbies that house those boys. Neither of us has answers, but we both know that kids away from home are earth on us, earth on the school.
“Next time let’s get a real meal,” Sam says, and we pick a day to meet next month. We’ll find a new place to eat, some place with omelets that hang off the plates and plenty of sausage.
Taylor / Kinds of Cold
Teachers are not supposed to be outside the students’ dorms. Teachers are not supposed to be drinking on school nights, either. Maybe I’m not supposed to be a teacher.
It’s easier to be outside than in. My living room still has papers and books all over, and I can’t be there. The cold out here, almost Christmas cold, is a make-you-walk-straight kind of cold. There’s nothing like rowing-on-frozen-lake cold.
One time in college, cold came early in
autumn. The varsity crew was out on the lake where we practiced, but this afternoon our coach cut the ice with the motor from his launch. Every stroke was supposed to be a glide up the tracks, but splashing from the oars had filled the tracks with freezing. We had to pull ourselves over the bumps of ice. And then, when we exploded on the catch, we broke the ice. Every time. And our hands? No gloves. With gloves we can’t really hold on to the oars. Without gloves our hands froze, and we couldn’t hold on to the oars. Oars were flopping around and splashing. Each splash was a slap to the face. Water froze on windshirts in front, sweat condensing on the backs.
You were trying to keep us going. I broke the rowing protocol of no talking in the boat, not ever, and started singing “My Favorite Things” really loud.
Everyone joined in.
In our wood-composite shell in the middle of the lake at the beginning of winter, eight rowers and a cox’n were singing at the top of our lungs from The Sound of Music while ice formed in the tracks.
Sarah’s head turned to the left, and I could see the corner of her smile.
But she’s not here, and I’m not looking for her.
It’s December 1983, and I don’t know what I’m looking for.
From the outside, a dorm looks like a cruise ship, something huge and looming, most windows lit up and music leaking out closed ones. There’s a world in there, people acting in their stories, allegiances and vengeance and plots within plots, whole countries won and lost, and I’m outside looking in. But it’s so late right now there aren’t many lights on.
Carla’s room is upstairs, the corner room with the lights out.
Maybe Jack is right. I haven’t been here, not really. Crisco said that I couldn’t reach the students from so far away. Since Sarah died, I haven’t been anywhere. Maybe I was too far away to see Carla just trying on the idea of suicide rather than ready to do something.
Maybe I can be here for her now.
“What’re you doing out of your dorm?” A voice trying to be low came loud behind me.