Short People (8 page)

But then I remembered how Jake went to the bathroom in the water and if he can do that I can do that too and, anyway, it doesn’t matter cause it’s like when you’re flying off the float and you go underwater, it’s like everything’s all the same thing so I thought that would be the same for poop too. And everybody pees in the lake so I don’t know what the big deal is. I wouldn’t have done it anyway if Jake didn’t say it was okay the other time and if I didn’t really have to go. And besides that I swam way far away from everybody before I pulled my swimsuit down and let my feet float up out of the water and stopped holding it in and stuff.

Jake was right, though. It felt like—I can’t even explain.

But then after I swam back, Jake started saying, “Hey, what’s that? Hey, hey, guys, look over there. What’s
that
?” and pointing behind me and stuff so everybody would look. I bet they wouldn’t even have seen anything if Jake wasn’t shouting and saying, “Look. Look. Evan just shit in the swim area.”

Cause then everybody swam really fast and climbed on the float and started yelling at me and everything so I turned around to look cause how would Jake know anyway cause it was supposed to sink to the bottom. He was right, though, there were a couple of pieces of turd floating around.

Everybody was all grossed out and they dived off the float and swam really fast to the beach to get away from the shitty water but Jake and Chewy stayed on the float to yell what a fag I am and stuff. And just to be mean Jake said, “How are we gonna get back to the beach now, Evan?” He said my name in this really mean way. “We can’t swim in shitty water.” And I couldn’t say everybody else did cause then they would have just been meaner to me. I chased after all the turds I could see and splashed them to outside the net but Jake and Chewy kept pointing and saying “There’s another one” every time so I would keep swimming around and around even when there wasn’t any left. Jake and Chewy were just making fun of me.

But even though I thought I was gonna cry, I didn’t.

I climbed up on the raft after that and stood there all slouchy like I didn’t care and I didn’t even look at Jake or Chewy, I just looked over at the other side of the lake like there was all kinds of important things I was thinking about that they didn’t even know. But even without looking, I could still sort of see them anyway and every time they said anything it was all mean and made everything else in my head disappear.

“That was real smooth, Evan.”

“What are you, stupid? You dense?”

“Pud.”

“What, did you think shit sinks or something?”

“Fag.”

“Pud.”

“Fag.”

“You stupid fucking fag.” It was Jake who said that.

And then they waited to see if I was gonna get all spazzy for them, but I didn’t, so Jake acted like he was gonna be nice to me and forgive me and stuff. He said it was too bad I took a shit in the lake cause guess what him and Chewy did yesterday after everybody went to sleep, they went out in a canoe and found those girls and they had like beer and stuff for them to party with and they stayed for like three hours and went out in the motorboat with them and everything. He said how they all went skinny-dipping and how the one girl was sort of fat but with really big boobs but the other two girls were totally hot and even prettier than any girls back home. “We’re gonna go back there tonight,” he said. “The prettiest one, Becky, whose house it is, is gonna steal a bottle of peppermint schnapps from her dad for us all to drink. It’s too bad cause she said she had a crush on you and we should bring you with us, but now what are we gonna tell her?” And I couldn’t even ask him what about his fake girlfriend cause I was too sad that I couldn’t meet Becky now.

Mr. Schultz came and yelled at us to all come in then cause the water was toxicated or something and nobody could go in it till it got fixed. And even though he didn’t say anything, I could tell I was in trouble cause it was all my fault and everybody must have ratted on me after they ran away from the beach.

Jake and Chewy and me swam in and Mr. Schultz made us all march back to camp and then he told them to go away cause “Evan has things to talk to me about.” And then right in the middle of camp where everybody could spy on us and see me getting yelled at he said how he called my dad to come pick me up and how I couldn’t even go to the snack bar or leave the camp till he got here and then I was gonna have to go home and all the grown-ups were gonna have a talk to figure out if I should get in bigger trouble like get my merit badges taken away.

I tried to explain to Mr. Schultz about Jake and everything but then I got yelled at about how you shouldn’t rat on other people and how he didn’t want to hear my excuses cause that’s like talking back and he knows what he knows and I have to learn how to respect my elders and he doesn’t even care about what happened cause I’m always doing stuff to get in trouble and it’s gonna end right here and now.

Even though I was grounded Mr. Schultz made me go get twigs when it was time for the fire and that’s when I escaped. Everybody was all busy filling jugs with water and cleaning out tents and stuff like that so nobody was watching me get the twigs. And there weren’t any twigs right by camp anymore cause we used them all up already so I said to Mr. Schultz, “We already got all the twigs by camp and the only ones left are still alive and stuff, so can I go farther away to get them? Cause getting ones that are still alive is against the rules.” Then, when he said okay, I went out all the way to where nobody could see me anymore.

I didn’t even think of escaping from being grounded before that, but now I bet everybody knows I’m gone and I bet my dad’s already there to get me and they’re all mad and calling me a fag again. But I bet my dad’s mad at them for losing me and he’s making them look for me and saying how he’s gonna sue them and stuff. I bet Mr. Schultz is so scared he’s peeing his pants . . .

Since I escaped, I got the idea to go across the lake and see those girls and talk to the Becky one but then I thought Jake and Chewy might be over there too, and they’d get me caught. And the other thing is they probably already told the girls how I went to the bathroom in the lake and everybody would laugh at me, so I didn’t do that. I know what I’m gonna do now though and then they’ll be scared of me and have to be my friends again. What I’m gonna do is climb to the top of the tower and then take my Scout knife and cut off the foot parts of the ladder. Then I’m gonna tie them back up except not as good in like slipknots or something so after a few times of people climbing the foot parts will get really weak and then start to fall off and stuff. And then whoever’s climbing on it like Mr. Schultz or Chewy or Jake, I hope Jake, will fall all the way down sixty feet to the bottom and cry and feel bad for being all mean to me when I’m supposed to be his best friend and then after that I’ll come out from where I’m hiding and make him say sorry and I won’t even get in trouble from Mr. Schultz cause my dad will be there and Mr. Schultz never yells at you in front of your dad.

Who’ll be the fag then? Not me.

RED LOBSTER

Our father is in town for the weekend and has decided to take us all out to eat. We’ve been wigged out all day, racing through our houses in search of our favorite blue jeans and our dressiest sweaters. We are putting on our happiest faces and wondering if he will look the same as we remember him. We can’t wait to see him. We’ve starved ourselves so we’ll be ready to pig out. We don’t want to disappoint him. We must be ready to have fun—to laugh our heads off, which won’t be hard; our father is a very funny man. He makes us all laugh all the time—all except Timmy, who takes Dad’s jokes way too personally. When Dad calls Timmy “Tubby,” it’s funny. I’m sorry, it is. Timmy’s face turns red and he gets defensive, and this is funny too. Sometimes we wet our pants laughing, which only makes it funnier. After a while, Timmy starts bawling. He stops being funny when he does this; he becomes obnoxious. He thinks we’re laughing at him, but we’re laughing with him, we are. We can’t understand why Timmy can’t just be happy like we are to see our father—God knows he doesn’t breeze through too often.

Timmy, laugh a little. We’re laughing because we love you. If you can’t have fun, we should leave you at home.

None of the rest of us gets upset at our father’s jokes. We think they’re hilarious. He’s always got the newest one about the president’s wife. He’s got leper jokes, quadriplegic jokes, Helen Keller jokes, everything. You name a topic, and he’s got a joke. It’s an art to him. We’re all jealous; our jokes don’t match up. Stevie once tried to get him to pull his finger so he could auto-respond with a box on the ear, but Dad already knew that one; he pulled Stevie’s finger and hit him at the same time, yelling, “Gotcha, too slow,” as Stevie fell to the floor with a hand to his head. We all laughed, and Stevie laughed too. He said, “That didn’t hurt.” Later our father taught him how to knock people in the nose by pointing at a make-believe stain on their shirts. Stevie thought this was great and used it on almost everyone he met for almost a whole year. He was still using it the next time our father stopped into town, and they shared a misty-eyed moment over this; Stevie thanked Dad for his parental guidance and our father blushed and beamed, bowed his head.

Stevie gets Dad’s jokes, Timmy, and he’s three years younger than you, and your mom’s prettier. Don’t be such a baby.

He picks us up one by one in his new van. When we’re all packed in, he stops and dares us to dare him to do a wheelie. We do dare him, but then he hedges like maybe he won’t, like it might be inappropriate behavior for a man his age. Timmy, who’s a whiz with cars—auto shop is the only class he’s ever gotten above a C in— thinks it’s impossible; he thinks our father’s toying with us and he tells him so. Dad grins at him. His foot to the floor on the gas, he pops the clutch and, to our glee, we lurch into the air. Our stomachs tingle and we come down giggling. Even Timmy’s in awe of the wheelie; he hadn’t counted on all the motor work our father had done expressly to pull off this trick.

We beg him to do it again. We’d be happy to forget all about eating and just speed around town spinning out on the ice in the grocery store parking lots, burning rubber at stoplights, doing wheelie after wheelie after wheelie and listening to our father tell jokes all night.

He says no, though. We’re going to Red Lobster.

Putting Little Petey in his lap to turn the wheel, our father asks Lisa to crawl down between his legs and push the pedals with her tiny hands. He shouts commands, and we bounce, in their creaky control, toward the restaurant. Half a block down the street, Lisa gets confused between the clutch and the brake. She stops abruptly and knocks her head on the steering column, but she doesn’t complain and she doesn’t give up. She corrects her mistake quickly and has no problem the rest of the way. When she climbs out, we can see that a slight bump is growing under her hair, but she waves our attention away with a laugh. “No pain, no gain,” she says. We think that’s not bad for a six-year-old who has yet to break her first bone, and we laugh along with her. When Stevie teasingly taps the welt, she refuses to flinch.

Before we go in, our father has something to tell us. It’s nothing bad, he says, but he wants to get it out of the way before we’re so swept up in fun that there’s no room for serious stuff. He corrals us into a corner of the parking lot and waxes ambiguously about the new mystic faith he’s been trying to apply to his life. He says it’s helping him get himself together. He says he’s accepted that he’s a simple man who’s made mistakes and has many regrets, that he’s learned to forgive himself and keep moving onward, that he’s learned to live with the fact that life will never stop being confusing. He’s not very specific about what all this means, but it somehow relates to the guy with the funny Arab name he keeps mentioning. We don’t get what he’s saying—it sounds like a twelve-step program to us—but it doesn’t matter. We sense how important this stuff is to him and his words are like silk; we tangle ourselves up in them, writhing ecstatically. He finally says something we all understand: he says if he could make all his mistakes over again, he would. We know he means us. He means that he loves us. We can’t remember him ever trying to say it out loud before. He says he’s going to try to make sure he sees us more often from now on.

Timmy, I’m going to punch you if you don’t watch out.

We’re all wistful now. Tammy is pale; her body sways like she’s about to pass out or run and hide, something she does often when she’s very happy or very hungry. Stevie smiles smugly, convinced that our father was looking at him alone. Lisa rubs her welt and giggles with every wince; she’s already fond of the memory. Little Petey jumps into our father’s arms, where he’s bounced benevolently on the same hip we each felt safe against when we were younger.

Before we can sink into deeper realizations about how soon he’ll be gone again, our father raises his fist in the air and yells “Charge!” sending us off like a handful of marbles to ricochet through the restaurant doors.

It takes the staff a good fifteen minutes too long to pull enough tables together for us to be seated. We’re impatient. Our fun’s too important to be slowed down like this. Stevie, unable to get a freebie, rattles and almost breaks the gumball machine between the outside doors and the inside doors as the rest of us squirm, some on the floor and some on the bench by the hostess stand. It’s a good thing that our father is already lecturing the manager—calmly but sternly—about how to run his restaurant, because we could easily cause a real scene.

Despite the manager’s many yes-sir-right-away-sirs, by the time we’re all seated and bibbed our father’s face is flushed with anger. He has a right to be upset; he made reservations and they should’ve been expecting us. Even though most of us will be ordering off the kiddie menu, the bill for this meal is going to be huge. They better go out of their way for us from here on out if they expect to get a tip.

Our father silently mulls over the menu. We can’t tell if he’s really reading it. Afraid he is sinking, we no longer squirm. We sit up straight, flush against our hard-backed chairs. The worst thing that could happen would be for our father to begin to suspect that we’re disappointed. We know how much time he’s spent thinking about all the fun we’ll have tonight. He’s imagined every second and if anything goes wrong we’re sure he’ll dwell on it until he’s convinced the night’s a fiasco. Instead of trying to make us laugh, he’ll snap at us and at everyone else. We’ll all feel responsible. It’s already started to happen.

We wish we could think of a joke that would bring him back, but we know that we can’t. If any of us tries to talk him out of holding a grudge, he’ll only clutch it tighter. There is nothing we can do for him. We are his tiny yes-men and we can’t disagree with his moods; they’re too delicate for us to carry anywhere he hasn’t already carefully placed them. The youngest among us instinctually knows that all we can do is sit up straight, avert our eyes and wait for him to pull himself out of it.

“Okay, gang,” he says with a forced, fun-loving tone that strains to keep up with his words. “You can order anything you want, but you have to clean your plates. If you don’t, you’re gonna have to pay for your meal yourself. I don’t make enough money for us to be wasting it . . . I’d give you everything I have in the world but if you throw it away, it won’t come back. I’m not a money tree. I don’t want you to feel like there’s anything off-limits, though. I love you guys—and girls . . . so order anything you want.” He smiles wanly.

We breathe a collective sigh of relief. If we show him we’re happy, he might snap out of it. Our eyes scamper over the menu as we do our best to find the dishes that taste good but are also expensive. Most of us settle for compromise: the little kids give in to their honest urges for hot dogs or spaghetti; we who are older go for tuna and salmon, shrimp cocktails all around; Stevie, just over the cusp of the kiddie menu, his new adult status still struggling to control the child inside him, settles on a chicken breast sandwich with a side of potato chips and a Shirley Temple—dry. Only Timmy takes Dad’s game at face value; grinning with pride, he asks for the most expensive item on the menu—the one that goes by the pound at “market price”—a fresh lobster. He gets to choose it himself from the tank.

That’s the way to do it, Timmy. Pick the biggest one.

Our father’s eyes twinkle mischievously as, at his bidding, we catch him up on our lives. He listens with an ear to the punny opening, sometimes interrupting the first sentence of our heartfelt explanations of the confusion we feel at sixteen (or six) to twist fart jokes or pull double entendres out of the few words we’ve managed to say. Except for Timmy, who protests by pretending that his life is perfect, none of us is too disappointed by our father’s lack of interest in our, we admit, trite struggles. He picks up a lot despite himself. Last year, when Tammy admitted to sticking her finger down her throat after every box of Corn Flakes she ate, he may have had a joke for every orifice and a lot of funny anecdotes about women and weight gain, but he also, over the course of that long weekend, went out of his way to force-feed her well-balanced meals and whisper in her ear how beautiful she was, all of which helped her try to kick the habit; she’s failing, but she’s added raisins to her diet and she openly credits him for this. We like him this way; when he laughs at us, he forces us to laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t take us long to tell Dad our sagas. They are pretty uneventful; nobody’s going through any major turmoil right now. Two months ago, he would have had his hands full with Stevie’s suspension from school for the throwing stars and hit list that were found in his locker and Little Petey’s escapade through his mom’s underwear drawer, but these things have already been cleared up; spring is coming soon and, even if we did have problems, we couldn’t be happier than we are this weekend.

Our father launches into stories about his life, which is much more interesting to everyone. His job—somehow related to business or science or medicine or something; we’re not sure; each time he explains it, it seems to be different—has taken him all over East Africa. From what he tells us, the people there do very funny things. He says he once saw a car full of government bigwigs in Kenya drive a full mile in reverse before they bothered to turn around, and then they were still on the wrong side of the road! He teaches us the Swahili words for fart, asshole, whore and fuck you, which are all the Swahili words he knows, he says, but he’s going to learn more when he goes back next month.

Enraptured, we almost forget to eat. He never runs out of stories, and without the bits of reminder that periodically fall to his plate, we’d be forced to snarf down cold fish when he decided it was time to go. Our baked potatoes would be waxy with recongealed butter. Instead, we chomp along with him, and by the time he’s run out of safari tales, all our plates are empty. Lisa, who ordered spaghetti, has even licked hers clean.

Thinking our father might take us to a movie or have a surprise adventure planned for after dinner, we’re antsy to leave now. For some reason, he’s dawdling. He asks for a refill of coffee. With the tip of his knife, he absently stirs designs in the rosemary-sprinkled grease that’s left on his plate. The way he puts off asking for the check convinces us that this is it, that he doesn’t want dinner to end; afraid of the separation, he wants to savor us for a while longer before bringing us home.

He takes a short sip of coffee and—his eyes beginning to twinkle again—folds his hands under his chin. Gazing mischievously at Timmy, he says, “You gonna finish that?”

“I did!” Timmy says, as if he knew this were coming.

“Are you sure?”

“I did. I did finish. Everything’s been ate!”

“Because if you don’t clean your plate, you have to pay your own way. That’s the agreement we made.”

“I cleaned my plate!”

Pretending to be deep in thought, our father rubs his chin. “Well, okay. I can ask for two checks if you want.”

Timmy tips his empty shell toward our father.

“Dad, look, it’s all gone! What do you want me to eat?”

Our father doesn’t answer. He straightens in his chair and pretends to look around for the waitress.

Timmy has begun to shake. “Unless you want me to eat the shell!” He looks through glazed eyes at the rest of us. He thinks we are all against him now.

“Look, I don’t want to argue with you, Timmy.”

Our father can’t get the waitress’s attention, but he doesn’t really want to yet.

“I can’t eat the shell.”

Ignoring this, our father stands up. He cranes his head around as if he’s worried that the waitress has disappeared, though she’s still less than halfway across the room.

Timmy, don’t be an idiot. Hide the shell under the table now, while he’s not looking—that’s
why
he’s not looking! Then, when he looks at you again, lick your lips and laugh and tell him in detail how great it was. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you, Timmy.

Realizing our father’s stopped paying attention, Timmy gives up his whining. He stares at the shell and periodically blinks away tears. We watch his Adam’s apple jump in his throat as he steels himself against the outside world. In slow motion, he picks up the shell, squeezes his eyes shut tight and bites.