by Kate Gray
“Sorry.” I jumped.
Carla raised both her hands to her mouth to quiet her laugh. She doubled over, collapsing in half.
“Damn it, Carla,” I said, “You scared me.” And I couldn’t help but smile. Everything was funny.
After she straightened up, she slapped her mittens on her thighs and doubled over again.
“And just what’re you doing out of the dorm?” I said.
“I asked you first.”
“I’m faculty.”
“And your point?” Carla was so quick. With beer and cold, I wasn’t keeping up.
“You’re supposed to be inside. What’re you doing?”
“Freezing my ass off, just like you.” Carla was curl.
“No kidding.” That’s what I’d say to a friend, not a student.
Carla walked up to me and raised both her hands to my shoulders. She turned me toward the light from one of the windows on the first floor where two girls were still up, each at her desk. I couldn’t see Carla so well, but she moved her face toward mine. Her face gave off heat, and she smelled like leaves and December. Her close was good close.
“Hm, has Ms. Alta been drinking, perhaps?” Carla held me with both arms, blocked my vision with her face.
“Hey,” I said. I twisted out of her hands.
“Oh, she has.” Carla’s smile was big, her hair kept back by her stocking cap. This Carla was the one before Kyle died, the one who was sassy the way Red Hots are, something more kick than anything.
This cold, this heat from a face so close was the cold the first time I kissed a girl. The summer before that movie with Sarah in college, I was eighteen and a Girl Scout counselor in a rundown Girl Scout camp in a rundown area of Nevada. Never before had I been a Girl Scout, in Nevada, at camp, or gay. It just happened. An older counselor looked out for me, showing me how to tie ties and put on pins and set up tents, and on the two days off we had each camp session, she took me to softball games, bars, and eventually, hotels.
One night in the first week of camp, we snuck out of our cabins and met on the banks of the creek that ran through camp. We weren’t supposed to be out in the mountains because there were cougars and bears and things a girl from New England knew nothing about. It was cold, the air was juniper, and she put her arm around me. It was easy to turn into her, easy to meet her lips, hard to know how the ground still held when I walked the next day. She was my first girl kiss.
The next day thinking of her lips made me dizzy. Thinking of someone finding out made me sick to my stomach. When I got back to college that fall, I didn’t tell anyone, especially not Sarah.
Turning away from Carla, I stepped under a tree. Less light. Carla followed, and we were both in the shadow of the tree, the building. The sky carried no moon.
“Were you out with Donny tonight?” I said.
“No way.”
“Who were you meeting then?”
“Whom.”
“Carla,” I said. I was rock on iced lake, boot through thin ice, boulder in pond.
“So what if I met him?”
“You could get in a ton of trouble.”
“Like sent away?” Those words were the ones I dreaded.
“Do you like him?” These were the ones I tried not to say.
“Sure,” she said, “he’s cute.” I had to hear those words.
“Cute? Donny Zurkus?” I turned away. “Oh, sorry.”
“Do I detect judgment, just a smidge?” she said. Her mitten raised toward my face. Her fingers inside were probably pinched forefinger to thumb.
I pushed her mitten away, but then I stepped into her, put my arms around her, pressed her down coat into my coat.
“Taylor,” she said. My name was a sigh.
Her dark coat and my dark coat and a night with no moon. I held her outside of her dorm, under a tree with no leaves, outside a window with no light. I held her, and we breathed in and out the same. I was there. Something must have happened to the anger, the flipping-off Carla that the nurse picked up that day when I turned her in. Some switch must have flipped in the hospital. What switch can happen to make someone live?
Before I pulled away, I squeezed her, down coat and all, as hard as I could.
“I have to go,” I said.
As I stepped away, she said, “Are you jealous?” Her arms were at her side.
“Of what?” I said. My steps backwards, away from her, were steps taken inside and out. “Good night.”
Song / Boundaries
and Bending
“Settle down, settle down, Misfits of Physics,” I say to the Second Formers. Can’t believe I missed the miscreants.
Before I continue, Peter Frankel jabs his hand in the air, “Mr. Song, Mr. Song.”
“Yes, Mr. Wrinkled Shirt.”
He looks down at his shirt and tries to smooth one side with the palm of his hand.
“Is it true that you’re related to Mrs. Harney?” Unabashed. Little air through little opening gives high pitch, but no hindrance.
“Let’s get right to the point, shall we?” The five boys left in the Second Form after Kyle, after Tommy Underwood left the school, and Maggie Anderson still here, lean toward me from the lab stools. “I am in no way related to Mrs. Harney. She is Japanese, and I am Korean. Now, to the lesson at hand.”
At the beach I had plenty of time to think about lessons, arrange them, walk through them, list the ingredients needed. Before pairs of students, a rope is coiled, a thicker half meshed with a thinner half. All ropes and materials are on the black lab table the students surround, the table donated by the Du Ponts, the table where Kyle was pinned. Good thing the Second Formers didn’t see Kyle as a specimen, a frog.
“Before you, you will find a rope. Notice one half is thick, one half is thin. In pairs, stand up. One person hold one end and the other hold the other end. Very good. Now. Reach back into your vast memory to our discussion of waves, and tell me what will happen if the person on the thin end starts a wave motion.”
Like kindergartners standing at recess, they hold the ropes between them around the table, each student a study in disarray. Of course, one student starts a different kind of wave, both arms extended above his head, his whole body bends forward as if paying homage to a god, and the next student picks it up, and pretty soon the wave of football games and mob scenes pulses around the class.
“Ah, yes, my little football fans, I see. A wave passes fluidly if unobstructed.” The students can hardly believe their cleverness. “But if you will notice the ropes in your hands, there is an obstruction, a boundary.”
Like criminals, the pairs raise one hand each in unison, as if the rope were shackles. Their enthusiasm is underwhelming.
Peter Frankel says, “You’re calling the end of the fat rope a boundary?”
“And what would you call it?”
Peter says, “A border or something.”
“Terence, what will happen if you start a pulse on your end of the rope?”
Terence looks at the rope in his right hand, and then he turns his face to me. There is nothing in his eyes, two marbles, no questions, no concern.
Maggie Anderson, Miss Subdued but Eager, says, “I know.”
“Miss Anderson, do tell.”
“The pulse will travel from his hand to my hand.” She points from Terence’s hand along the sagging rope to her own hand. The boys erupt.
“Way to go,” “Yank it,” and “Hubba hubba” are some of the comments between laughter. Maggie Anderson, forever the lone girl.
“Enough,” I say. “Clearly, you have not left the gutter in the two weeks I was away. Tell me, what is refraction?”
Terence speaks like giving a report, “What you told us, bending.” If he flattened his voice, if he chopped the syllable, he could Kyle-speak.
“Brilliant, young man,” I say. “Bending a wave. When a wave hits a boundary, the wave changes speed and direction. In this case when the wave hits the boundary from the thin rope to the thick rop
e, part of the wave continues and part of it comes back. In other words, boundaries change the wave, and some of the wave reflects. Try it.”
Two by two the Second Formers step away from each other and draw the rope taut. One whips the rope, and the other can barely hold on. Another just barely shakes the rope, and the other feels nothing. Terence and Maggie make machine motions. Jerk rope up, jerk rope down.
“Smoothly,” I say. “Make waves. Be waves. Make the ropes wave.”
Misfits of Science, they smooth out their motions. They try, and they try, and eventually, they see the little refraction of the wave.
“Cool,” I hear, “Awesome,” I hear, “No way.”
The rope between Carla and me is now slack. The boundary of age and propriety refracted the wave. Some came back to me, some to her. The rope should not have been between us. The wave in the rope between Kyle and me has no boundary, no drag. The wave will not end.
“Remember, my little scientists, there is nothing without Newton. There is no action without an equal and opposite reaction.”
“It’s done,” Mr. Oral Fixation says. “No charges. Donny Zurkus has retracted his statement.” These wingback chairs, the sun through the closed windows after classes, today’s tobacco makes me sick. Way too sweet.
“So, it can be undone,” I say into pipe smoke.
“I’m not sure what you mean. Let me just say I pulled every string, called every trustee. Trustees called every connection they had in the DA’s office. Alumni called newspaper rooms across the country to quell the story. The only thing we could hope for was some distraction like, I don’t know, satanic worship at Hotchkiss or some god-awful thing. Your friend, Sam, was a key ingredient. Good heavens, man, wise up.” His words came out sideways since his pipe was in his mouth.
“And what have we done for Donny Zurkus?” I say.
Earth on us, the word that isn’t hyo, earth on son, but related. In loco parentis.
“What have we taught him?” I say.
The pipe is placed carefully in the ashtray.
“That little ne’er-do-well?” the King of Compassion says.
“What’ll he learn?” I say.
“Frankly, Song, I’m surprised at you. After all we’ve done to clear your name.” Mr. Headmaster pulls out his tobacco pouch, taps the pipe, fills the bowl.
“Mr. White, it was the misguiding of youth that brought attention to St. Timothy’s.” Two boys misguided, misguided as vectors of light, their waves speeding out of the atmosphere unimpeded.
“I don’t think I like the implication, Song,” he says into the pipe. His face close to the desk. Flames bend from the lighter into the bowl as he sucks the pipe.
“No, I’m sure not. These are boys, and as long as I am able to teach here, I will protect them. Donny Zurkus is mean, sneaky, and misguided. But he should be taught.”
“Too late, Song. His father has had him picked up, and that’s it. Donny’s out.”
My hands on the arms of the leather wingback chair, I hold on.
“Another child we’ve lost, Mr. White. Two this fall. Shame on us.”
Losing children in Korea is worse than losing limbs. Kyle was inyon, soul of my soul. Donny was a negative valence, but his negative keeps electricity flowing. Donny was doing all he could to avenge himself, to protect his pride. His choices were decisions we could have discussed. As parents, we were supposed to help.
Through the window behind Oral-Fixation White, the light is at its December angle. We are as far away from heat as we will be, and we will spin into the new year as far away from our responsibility as we’ll ever be.
Shame on us:
Taylor / River
Joni Mitchell’s “River” isn’t the best song to play in December. My mother hated her.
“Shut that crooning,” she yelled from the bottom of the stairs up to my room. One of my five records, Blue, played until the grooves wore out. My older brother had tired of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and a few others. So the used records, with the scratches I knew, became ropes to hold my siblings close after they left for boarding schools and colleges. After my father left, I played the records to keep my mother out of my room. In the whole house, it was just the two of us.
“She’s Canadian, Mother,” I said down the stairs.
“Oh,” she said, “shut the Canadian crooning.”
December light came in one wall of my apartment. Maybe it was the lake or the cornfields, but the light was more rust-colored. It was the color of Wyeth’s Christina’s World, a painting my mother hung in her bathroom after my father left.
Saturday at St. Timothy’s meant grading exams and preparing lessons. On weekends St. Timothy’s is a wasteland. Students packed off in vans to local malls or studying in groups in the library or on weekend passes to God knows where.
It’s hard to believe it’s been three weeks since Kyle died, one week since Alex stumbled into my apartment and said “Lucky girl.”
Since Kyle died, Tommy Greenwood and other boys left. Terence still wakes up screaming, and Maggie Anderson carries a journal she won’t let go.
Since Kyle died, the U.S. survived the airing of The Day After and the Soviets going on full alert thinking NATO was going to attack, but St. Timothy’s didn’t watch the TV show. Herbert, the librarian, is sure we’re going to all die from Soviet missiles, but his drinking might keep the Soviet threat and state alive.
Since Kyle died, Jack Song is back, and Donny Zurkus has left. Carla no longer tows a boy into the dining hall.
Since Kyle died, I can’t sleep.
Every time I open a door, I think I’ll see him swinging.
Outside, the light through the trees along the lake is diagonal. There’s no rowing, no one out there. The lake is filling with ice. Overhead a goose calls. With each flap of its wings, it calls into the sky.
Kyle is gone.
Sarah is gone.
I can’t eat. I can’t run.
Too many evenings a six-pack helps me sleep. A six-pack of Hamm’s and a walk very late at night get me from awake to no-dreaming asleep. Delaware cold isn’t like New England cold, but the crisp air and the white of my breath fill my lungs with something besides the sound I want to make, a yell louder than what you might yell when you’re lost. “Anybody there?” is chilled out of my lungs.
One night about three in the morning, I stood outside Carla’s dorm, which was lit up like a cruise ship. The maple was light on one side because of Carla’s desk light through the window. That maple outside her window is old, and without leaves, its trunk and branches are a sea monster crawling out of the water. Carla looked up from her desk and stared out the window; she stared and stared like the glass could tell her something. Her lips didn’t move. She didn’t ask it anything. She just stared.
But then she leaned closer to the glass. She leaned so far she had to get up to get closer. She put her hands on the desk, but she wasn’t close enough. Up on the desk on her knees, she cupped both hands around her eyes, put her hands on the glass.
With her face up to the glass, she might have seen me in the moonlight, but I stepped back against another sea-monster maple. Three or four times she put her hands to the glass and then leaned back. There was something in the crook of the branches in front of her window. She looked around her room. Maybe she was trying to see if someone else could see what she was seeing.
The next night the tree outside Carla’s dorm room was dark on both sides. At four in the morning I knew no one would see me, so I climbed up to see what caught Carla’s eye. The cold in my lungs, the thick branches, the way you leverage your weight between feet and hands to climb high, it was good to climb a tree in the middle of the night.
And what I found I could barely see in the moonlight. It was yellow. It was paper. It was soft from the dampness that night and other nights, but it held its shape. And someone had left it for her, high in this tree. I left it where I found it.
Carla, who lost her dad and brother, lost Kyle, ha
d someone who sent her a sign, a bright, folded paper, that only she would see. Someone folded the figure, climbed up this tree, caught Carla’s eye. Someone wanted her to keep looking in trees, to keep looking for bright things, to live. A yellow crane in a tree was a sign.
A knock at the door sends the papers on my lap flying on the disgusting carpet in my living room.
“Come in.”
The door opens. “Anybody home?” The voice is a Christmas choir, a sunflower, spring.
“Crisco, no way.”
“You can run, but you cannot hide,” she says. Her smile brings butter light into the Delaware day. She wraps her arms around me, and I sink into her. If Christmas had come, I wouldn’t have noticed. If spring had come, I would have bloomed right there.
“You’re such a loser,” I say. “Nobody leaves Philadelphia for Delaware.”
“From what I can see, you’re not doing so hot.” She lets me go and takes a step, leans into my bedroom where clothes are in piles, takes a step to the edge of the papers and folders and books hiding my living room floor.
“Busy,” I say.
“Bull,” she says. “I’m getting you out of here.”
“This isn’t a prison, Crisco. Thanks. You don’t have to spring me out.” I can see her dark turtleneck, dark pants, dark stocking cap and gloves. She’s got a sack over one shoulder, and she’s hunched, looking out windows to see if the coast is clear. She takes big steps, raising her knees, placing her feet on tippy toes, better not to make sounds.
“Listen, pal, you’re stuck here. I get that you made a commitment, but we have to get you unstuck. I don’t know all of what’s going on, but it’s no good.”
“Thanks, really, but we just have one more week. I can make it. You know, ‘just ten more strokes.’” Rowers know the worst thing a cox’n can do at the end of a race is tell you how many more strokes there are left, so you pull your guts out for that exact number of strokes, and then, they say, “Just ten more strokes.” You hate it, but you reach inside yourself some place and pull out some strength you didn’t know you had for exactly ten more strokes, and then, they say, “Just ten more,” and you think you may die. Rowers have no idea where endurance comes from or how much they can endure.