Short People (12 page)
IV. And
After the TV was bought and the cable installed and the dog shit cleaned up—the dog itself in fact carted by Dad to the ASPCA against the rest of our wishes—after the broken phone had been fixed, and my sister and I had been marched across the street to offer the sheepish apologies that Suzy’s mother refused to accept, after our family gave up on chore lists and Mom went on Wellbutrin and Dad stopped trying to teach us right from wrong, and Mom and Dad stopped having sex, stopped spooning, even, clinging instead to their carefully apportioned sides of the bed—after all that, our family finally began to resemble something a lot like normal.
There were no more house fires sparked out of boredom. There was no more drawing on the living room walls with crayons. No more Bloody Murder. No streaking the backyard or sneaking off to see Suzy. We never exposed family secrets again. No, we became good little children, my sister and I, humble and meek and scared of our shadows. We walked in the light with our heads down.
Other things disappeared, too. Dad gave up taking us to art museums and orchestra concerts and the ballet. Homer and Tolkien disappeared from our bedtime rituals. The voices in Mom’s head seemed gone for good, as if pushed out by those that climbed into our house through the TV set. She gave up crying, but she also gave up smiling. We didn’t jump Dad and drag him down to our level when he arrived home from work anymore, instead we just shrugged and fought over the remote control.
We stopped hugging each other.
During the six years it took Mom and Dad to finally decide to separate, Mom watched TV like an addict. Now she does Human Resources, censoring the real-life soap operas in Atlantic Republican Bank’s credit-card department. Dad remarried immediately after the divorce. He and his new wife do not have children, but they do have a television set; his house is cold, as encrusted with frost as tundra. Denali came out of the closet three years ago, and though I wonder if what happened this day might have had some bearing on how she turned out, I haven’t asked. I don’t understand her. My mother, my father, I think I know them. From my sister, I am estranged.
Steele, BB u32.3691252
When she’s clean enough to reminisce, his mother will fill him with stories of his father’s rage at the powerful, elusive forces that had kept him down, of how he’d been haunted by what he imagined they’d eventually wring around his black neck. She’ll tell him how she was so afraid of loneliness she’d let his father take this rage out on her. And about how his father had left her without warning or reason anyway. When she’s not clean, she’ll barely speak to the boy. She’ll sway and nod on the sofa, half eyeing the television with the glassy eyes that look more fake than those falling off of his stuffed frog. Or she’ll throw things at him because he’s young, because he can’t do anything without help. He’ll be scarred here and there, mostly nicks—but this one time, playing caretaker, she’ll have a spatula slick with hot grease. She’ll be turning bacon, an entire package, turning and turning already burnt bacon, obsessively focused on the soothing repetition. He’ll tug at her shorts and ask what’s that smell. When she kicks him, muttering under her breath, he’ll say, “Mommy, it smells like burning and lookit, the smoke, and I’m scared, Mommy, maybe the building’s afire.” Turning and not seeing his moist wide eyes, she’ll bring the hot aluminum down on his back. Grabbing his nappy hair, she’ll bring it down on his back. He’ll twist and writhe as she keeps on smacking. A blow will hook skin with the tool’s blunt edge and then he’ll be bleeding like he’s just been knifed—four inches long right below the collarbone, it will look like they went for his heart and missed. He won’t be doctored but she’ll go to rehab, shocked straight from the sheer horror of it. When people ask, he’ll blame it on the father, who he’ll say had tried to kill him before taking off to find some other mess. He’ll tell the story so often that it will become true. Chilling one teenaged day, smoking a blunt in the park, he’ll tell it again to some sad-eyed old guy. He’ll like the guy. He’ll ask, what’s his name, sounds familiar—it will take a second, a delayed reaction, the blood hanging back so it can clot with rage. Sizing the old man up, he’ll contemplate murder but the sad eyes will sway him against it; there’s no way those eyes could rail against the world, hurt a fragile woman or stab their own son. The boy will save his urge for when he gets home, but by then he will have lost the nerve.
SHE RENTED MANHATTAN
The blue-and-white-striped sweatshirt, or the ribbed off-white sweater from the Limited, the Guess jeans or the short skirt with black tights, maybe the other Limited sweater—the one with the pocket sewn on at the hip—or the maroon lamb’s-wool one she got from Benetton for her birthday, she could wear it with the tan Banana Republic pants . . . but she doesn’t want to be too dressed up.
Mary can’t decide. There are too many choices. There’s no way to tell which one’s right. Although all the clothes in her wardrobe imply “Mary,” each item reflecting at least a tint of the bright attitude she tries to have toward life, there are minutely calibrated differences in how they affect her mood. The wrong combination of wardrobe and mood has her crawling out of her skin, thinking, “This is not me,” or “This is the wrong me,” or “This is an impostor—pay no attention—she’s just trying to give me a bad rep.” With the right combination she feels sexier than she believes she actually is, or smarter, or more fun-loving, or less afraid to leave the house.
She wishes she knew who would be at the party. Living outside the party loop, Mary usually doesn’t even hear about them until the Monday afterward. Stephanie said this one’s supposed to be big, but who knows, it might be an all-girl thing. If she knew there weren’t going to be boys, Mary would just wear a hooded sweatshirt and the new jeans that still need to be broken in. But how could there not be boys? The entire town knows that Sarah’s parents are in Florida and she has the keys to their lake house.
Mary’s nervous stomach tells her to dress defensively, just in case people she doesn’t want to talk to—like Justin—show up. She wishes she could wear her ripped jeans, a white pocket tee and the white leather vest that, when she bought it, seemed like such a risk, so capable of labeling her a girl not to be messed with.
But tonight, she remembers, it’s supposed to be cold. She returns to her closet. She starts from scratch.
Today is Mary’s birthday. At exactly 2:36 this afternoon, she turned sixteen. Except for the hour out to eat with her parents at the Olive Garden and the half hour during which Stephanie stopped over to deliver her present—a heart-shaped crystal jewelry box that Mary has already filled—she spent the day alone. She rented
Manhattan
and dreamt of being Mariel Hemingway all afternoon.
Mary loves
Manhattan;
those first few notes of
Rhapsody in Blue
draw her into a world so moody, both romantic and melancholic, that by the end of the film (it’s in black and white
on purpose,
so it’s a film) she’s convinced that if she were a girl from the Dalton School she would finally be a legitimate person. She’s always imagined that the refined and sophisticated Manhattan so casually captured by this film is far superior to the small Wisconsin town into which she has had the bad luck of being plopped down; Manhattan’s a place where life is not cheap and people are careful to insulate it with bubble wrap—visiting psychiatrists for extra padding and considering the effects of their every action before doing anything stupid. And
that girl
—to Mary’s blunt mind, a girl like the one in
Manhattan
could never experience the complete, disassociative wrongness that makes up Mary’s idea of herself. Yes, Mariel Hemingway is the epitome of everything Mary is not and should be. When she strolls through
Manhattan,
Mary knows it’s where she was supposed to live. This knowledge has a way of cheering her up. She is able to be less ashamed of not fitting into the mise-en-scène she belongs to, that of Goodrich High School.
Nonetheless, not fitting in is intensely lonely. Mary sometimes imagines that the only life she has is the one she vicariously experiences through Stephanie. Stephanie’s life is exciting. Mary often gets no phone calls for a week, but Stephanie’s phone never stops ringing—even the catty clique that decides their school’s public opinion sometimes calls her. She’s always chock-full of gossip, and no matter how bad Mary knows gossip is, she revels in her almost palpable thrill and shock as it’s invariably passed along. Listening to Stephanie, Mary almost feels bold herself; Stephanie isn’t afraid of anything; she talks about her dates more flippantly than Mary would ever dream of—Mary has gone out on a few dates, but they’re
never
as exciting as Stephanie’s; they’re always too fraught with emotion.
Stephanie sometimes drags Mary out into this larger world, and tonight she’s given her no choice. That’s how she phrased it this afternoon: “You don’t have a choice.” And Mary gave in. Anything—even a terrifying party she knows she’s not wanted at is better than moping around the house watching the seconds stand still on the kitchen clock and imagining how much fun the girls who go out with football players are having, how excited the skateboarders must be by whatever misdemeanor they’ve defiantly chosen to pull off tonight, imagining even that the ostracized, the hackers and computer game addicts, are together, celebrating a new CD-ROM with schnapps from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet. Mary can’t stand another night of that—not on her birthday.
Soon, after she’s chosen her outfit, Mary will wait on the front steps of the duplex her family shares with the Hildebrandts for Stephanie’s Escort to appear down the street. She’ll watch the sky darken from blue to gray and fret about what might happen tonight.
When Stephanie finally arrives, Mary will immediately ask if the outfit’s alright. If it’s wrong, Stephanie won’t be afraid to say so. If need be, she’ll even wait as Mary changes. They both know how clingy Mary gets when she feels insecure. Then they wind up resentful, not speaking for days, both wishing Mary was less of the person she is.
But tonight, although Stephanie has minor qualms with the jewelry and thinks Mary’s makeup is a little too much, she will merely say, “Take off the hat and you’re perfect.” Baseball cap thrown into the house, Mary will amble back to the car and they’ll be off.
As always, Mary will jump, first thing, into Stephanie’s day, asking hundreds of questions, hoping to get every detail of every second since last time they saw each other. Normally, Stephanie savors the attention, spouting off the mendacities of her life like she’s a charming and charismatic world leader holding court to a worshipful audience on matters of global importance. Tonight, though, because Mary refused to come to Milwaukee shopping, and because it’s Mary’s birthday, Stephanie will want to hear about Mary’s day first.
Mary will play coy, like she would tell if she could, but she’s been sworn to secrecy, until Stephanie gives up in frustration, lightly teasing Mary and making her promise to tell all later. Mary will cross her heart and pray to God that Stephanie forgets about this, that her self-pity is allowed to wrap itself silently into the past the way guilty pleasures are supposed to. Then she’ll press Stephanie to get on with the litany.
She’ll listen raptly as Stephanie starts in on the traffic jam caused by some kind of accident involving a jackknifed semi on Highway 41. She’ll take mental notes as Stephanie rates, song by song, the cds that she bought at the Grand Avenue Mall. She’ll commiserate and say, “You’re not fat, though, it’s okay,” as Stephanie berates herself about the humungous salad, with mega-amounts of grated cheese and ranch dressing that wasn’t even low-fat, she ordered at T.G.I. Fridays—she ate the whole thing! Stephanie will describe every pair of clam-diggers and every designer t-shirt she didn’t buy for summer clothes with as much fervor as she lavishes on those she did, and Mary will passionately agree with her choices. She’ll shiver as Stephanie vividly re-creates all the details of the nagging, half-spoken argument her parents dragged from retail outlet to retail outlet, and then all the way home in the car.
Camping up her disappointment to heighten the guilt, Stephanie will ask Mary why she refused to come along. Mary won’t know how to explain that she has more fun listening to Stephanie describe what happened than she does when she actually goes out into that world, where she feels so heavily pressured to be spontaneous and fun that her self-consciousness clings to her like plastic wrap. She’ll meekly attempt to shift the conversation in a different direction.
And because it’s Mary’s birthday, Stephanie will begrudgingly let it go at this first sign of bristle. She’ll fly into gossip, reeling off names and vital information like who’s broken up with whom, who’s started going out with whom, and who’s likely to fight with whom over all these intrigues. The list will go on and on.
It will seem to Mary as if every single student at Goodrich High School except her is somehow involved in a steamy affair or a messy divorce. At first she’ll consider herself lucky as she attempts the impossible task of keeping all these sex lives straight, but the chart in her mind will quickly grow unreadable. Laughing, enjoying the geometry of the project, she will make Stephanie backtrack and retrace and define the length of each amorous line. Eventually, she’ll realize that everyone has been with everyone else and she’ll wonder how she was so sadly able to keep herself completely outside of the matrix.
She’ll wonder if it’s her own fault. Stephanie would say so. “Toughen up, you’ve got nothing to lose,” she’d say. They’ve argued about this before, and now Mary’s always sensitive to the possibility of Stephanie turning on her. It won’t surprise her—she’ll have almost been expecting it—when Stephanie’s grip on the steering wheel tenses in the extra-safe ten and two o’clock position and she lets the car coast to an illegally low velocity, as if preparing for falling rocks ahead.
Mary will allow the gossip to tumble away on the pavement behind them and wait deferentially—flinching—for the lecture that she sees coming.
As the car falls to an inch-along idle, Stephanie, with a beleaguered look pulling at her face, will glance back and forth between Mary and the street. She’ll glance at the ranch houses lined with manicured saplings. She’ll sigh, shoring up her energy, and say, “So tonight, when you’re at the party—”
Mary will tense and search for a distraction—the hard plastic bow-tied koala bear hanging from the rearview mirror, the chewing-gum wrapper crumpled on the dashboard, the frayed, growing hole in the foamy hand grip tied around Stephanie’s steering wheel, the colon blinking between the hour and minute on the dashboard clock. She’ll cut Stephanie off—“No, I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll be good”—as she becomes transfixed by the blinking, the blinking, the blinking.
Stephanie will press the brake and the car will jiggle to a stop in the middle of the street. She won’t even bother to pull off onto the shoulder. She’ll contemplate the windshield and rapidly pop her jaw. Then she’ll turn and attempt to make eye contact.
Sensing Stephanie’s effort, Mary will focus more tightly on the blinking colon.
“I’m so serious, Mary,” Stephanie will say.
And Mary will try her best to ignore her.
“Mary. I know you’re listening, Mary. And just let me say that this is really stupid. This is really baby-ish. Because, Mary . . .” Stephanie will pause expectantly. When she starts up again, her voice will contain a tinge of whine. “Why won’t you look at me? You don’t even know what I was going to say. I wasn’t even gonna say anything bad.”
Mary will be drawn in by this. “Yes, I do know.”
“What, then?”
“That I better not act like a spaz.”
Stephanie will arch her eyebrows and say, “Well . . . but I wasn’t going to say it like
that.
” Trying to turn it into a joke they’re both in on.
Mary will turn to the window and study a sprinkler’s rotation across the lawn beside her.
“I was going to say it’s your birthday, Mary. Do you think I’d drag you to a party where nobody liked you on your birthday? I wouldn’t do that. People like you. You’re not an untouchable. Skanky Stacey and G. I. Joe, they’re untouchables, but not you. You just have to be yourself tonight, Mary, please? Just be . . . Relax and let things happen and don’t look at people like they’re like offending you when they say stupid shit. Just talk to them. They all want to be your friends.”
It will strike Mary that Stephanie’s being completely sincere, but she won’t acknowledge this. Instead she’ll remind herself of what she knows: that to be known is the biggest danger there is, to be known is to risk being hurt. She can’t prove this and there’s no way she’d share it with Stephanie, who would want proof, failing to comprehend how Mary or anyone else could know something simply by knowing it, as if by osmosis, without even an anecdote to back up the conviction. Mary will sink into the rhythm of the sprinkler, tuning out Stephanie’s pep talk. She’ll wait, frozen in place, until Stephanie gives up in frustration, revs the engine and squeals off toward the lake.
As she watches the houses grow farther and farther apart, gradually being replaced by alfalfa fields, Mary will skim backward through the events of her day until she reaches
Manhattan.
She’ll let herself wander into a game of compare and contrast, pitting herself against Mariel Hemingway. Mariel Hemingway would never find herself fighting with her best friend on the way to a party she didn’t want to go to in the first place. Mariel Hemingway would just refuse to go. She’d be too busy doing actually interesting things with exceptionally fascinating people: engaging in intellectual debates; going to the theater and watching real actors,
famous
actors, as opposed to the plant managers and town council members and mothers on view at the community theater productions Mary herself is privy to; reading books that were written by people she actually knows. And gradually, as this imagined life unfolds, Mary will replace Mariel Hemingway with herself.
Every light will be burning in the two-story house. People will be huddled in packs all over the lawn and especially around the keg on the back porch. A cluster of kids will be sitting on the dock with their shoes off, swinging their feet in the water, daring each other to be the first one to skinny-dip. Couples, thinking they’re hidden, will be necking in the shadows of oak trees and maples.
Stephanie will jump from the car and run around blabbing to everyone that it’s Mary’s birthday, and even though Mary knows she’s doing this to get back at her for the fit in the car, she won’t mind. No, she won’t have time to mind, she’ll be too overwhelmed by the reactions of her classmates. People will come to her of their own volition, just to say happy birthday, to find out what she’s been up to, to
chat
! And when Mary answers their questions with ambiguous, wholly uninformative responses, they’ll be satisfied. They won’t think she’s weird. They’ll accept her. Wow! She’ll smile, half embarrassed, half elated by the attention.