What We've Lost Is Nothing (13 page)

Best,

Pam Merriman

On Apr 7, 2004, at 10:15 a.m. “ErinsWorld1” [email protected] wrote:

S_Perez, what you say makes a lot of sense, and I agree with much of it. I've always been skeptical of diversity assurance (and affirmative action). But it's also imperative to remember the historical, institutional and socio-economic racism that Diversity Assurance was born out of.

On Apr 7, 2004, at 9:05 a.m. “S_Perez” [email protected] wrote:

I think we need to separate what happened on Ilios Lane from how we feel about diversity assurance. As a minority, I am thrilled that someone from the majority culture allows this debate, and welcomes a variety of people and views.

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7. This week's Iraq War protest MOVED . . .

Posted by: “Pauline Shuman” [email protected] Pauline Shuman

Wed Apr 7, 2004 11:39 a.m. (CST)

PLEASE NOTE: This week's protest against the illegal Iraq War will begin at Unity Temple at 9:00 a.m. sharp on Saturday, April 10. Please attend if you can, and if you believe the Bush Administration has broken international law with this invasion. All are welcome!

For further information, contact:

[email protected]

708-555-6447

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Messages in this topic (1)

12:10 p.m.

M
ary took her finger and thumb and broke off a minuscule piece of cookie. She'd eaten two bites of salad before the thought occurred to her that something terrible, something
green
, might well lodge itself betwixt her teeth and ruin,
absolutely ruin
, her chances with Caz, who sat next to her on the white, plastic bench in the lunchroom, his hip touching hers. She was utterly frozen in place. His hip. Her hip. Her underwear went soft and wet the minute he sat himself casually down, not
across
from her, not
inches
away from her, but so close that his hip touched hers. Her entire body zinged from her toes up. How could she have held herself together through composition and social studies with Caz sitting just two desks behind her all this time? With his hips so alive, so
charged
. She was grateful that she hadn't, until this moment, known of his electric hips, though she felt a vague but growing fear that she would never again be able to concentrate on the
Mistakes Made During
the Vietnam War and the
Miscarriage of Justice That Was
Watergate and the
Tactical Long-Term Brilliance of
the Marshall Plan, knowing that Caz and his hips were just two rows back.

“Salad and cookie,” Caz was saying, “is like totally yin-yang, ya know? Like the balance of all things. Like how one keeps the other one in a kind of circle—no, like a hug or something, right? Like it all equals zero, nothing and everything.”

Caz was blazed on a fatty of pure Hawaiian gold. Mary had an inkling about this, though she wasn't paying much attention to what was coming out of his mouth with his hip being
so
near hers. She had no idea what he was talking about, except a vague admiration for her choice of foodstuff.

“Nothing and everything,” she agreed. “Yin-yang.”

They went silent and Mary's mind buzzed trying to think of how to fill the void. She nibbled a chocolate chip. Caz did not play sports. He was not interested in cheerleading. He did not join clubs or participate in extracurricular activities, and he had a reputation for having purportedly passed only one class: small-engine repair. She could ask him about ecstasy, but even that as a diversion was so new to her she knew almost nothing about it, except how warm it made you feel and how much fuchsia buzzed around the periphery. He'd slept with dozens of girls, if one was to believe the stories, and so to be able to hold on to Caz for as long as a month, as Jenny Nellinger had, was a feat of intrepid and heroic proportions. Jenny'd been popular ever since, her 32B cups canonized in photocopied, black-and-white pictures on lockers all over the school. Not like Cindy Hamilton, caught at a house party with his dick in her mouth and her top around her waist, camera phones flashing like paparazzi, and she'd eventually had to get the administration
and
her parents involved in keeping the pictures from endless e-mail loops. She was thirteen years old then, and two years later she tried to kill herself. Mary, like everyone else who hadn't been there at the time, agreed that Cindy was a stupid slut who had it coming to her by wearing braless tank tops and short shorts and screwing loads of guys all the time starting when she was eleven years old, because otherwise why had she allowed so many pictures that night? Eight, ten, twelve camera phones captured the moment—Caz's head thrown back, eyes closed and grinning, and Cindy kneeling in front of him on her knees, her eyes closed, too. Caz had said he was doing her a favor, letting her blow him. She'd begged him, he said, and Mary, like everyone else, had said it was kindhearted of him when you really thought about it, to take an unpopular—smelly!—girl such as Cindy and let her have a piece of him.

Mary did not want to remind him of any other girl at that moment, especially Cindy, who (it had to be pointed out) had never once sat in the lunchroom with him before the eyes of everyone. When Mary thought about it, she could only remember Jenny sitting near Caz at lunch. Not one other girl. Until now. Until Mary herself.

But the silence was killing her.

“So here's a question,” Mary chirped finally. “You have to answer the first thing that comes to mind.”

He looked at her sideways, nodded in slow motion.

“What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

He stopped chewing his pizza. Mary instantly wished she'd asked something else, something about music. Yes. That would have been the subject. Hadn't she heard a rumor somewhere that he played the drums? She turned her head away and picked between her teeth with a fingernail.

“What the fuck kind of question is that?”

Mary blushed. Suddenly, Arthur's theory began to feel flimsy and inconsequential. She remembered her father telling her once that the key to sales wasn't what you said, it was the confidence with which you said it. She tried to keep her voice steady. “Can you answer?”

“I can. But why the fuck does anyone want to talk about the worst thing that ever happened to them?”

Mary stared at him. His eyes were glassy and his long hair smelled like smoke and cheap shampoo. That was the key to Caz, she thought, the answer to that question, getting him to confess, to reveal himself. He may not have answered her, certainly; didn't boys keep everything inside? Wasn't that what she'd heard? But knowing there was a secret there at all was something. Even Jenny Nellinger probably didn't know that. It was enough depth for one lunch period, Mary recognized. Don't get all philosophical on him. Guys didn't like it when girls were too smart. When they were too emotional. Keep it light. Keep it silly. She pushed her cookie away from her.

Caz broke the silence. “So you were, like, totally home when that dude broke into your house? Like, he could've seen you, right?”

“No one knows if it was a man or not.” Coy. That's how she'd play it.

Caz laughed. “Burglars aren't chicks. They're dudes.”

“Chicks can be burglars,” Mary said, aware of this being her first attempt at the vernacular use of the term
chicks
in conversation.

“Name me one chick burglar. Just one.”

“You name me one dude burglar.” Mary wondered if he believed the burglaries were the worst thing to ever happen to her. She supposed they were, though all the stolen items belonged to her parents, and if the burglaries hadn't happened, she'd never have been sitting here, right beside Caz's hip with the whole lunchroom watching. So it'd be a hard point to argue. Helen Pappalardo had it bad, Mary thought. Helen was freaked-out, and her house had been turned into a disaster zone.

Caz laughed hard, harder than her retort had earned, and she snapped back to the moment, to her hip touching his. “Right on,” he said. “But Al Capone was a dude.”

Mary was aware of being watched. The whole lunchroom, she felt, was collectively
watching
and
trying not to watch
as Caz and Mary Elizabeth McPherson sat hip-to-hip laughing. Mary hoped people were noticing her
not
eat. And noticing how it was Caz laughing, rather than her. Translation: Mary Elizabeth McPherson was the source, as opposed to the brunt, of jokes currently amusing Caz Zaininger. This moment, she thought, could change
everything
for her.

“Bonnie and Clyde,” Mary said. “Bonnie was a chick.” Then she added quietly, “A girl.”

She felt something in the small of her back: Caz's hand. He leaned toward her ear and whispered, “I didn't know you were so cool.” His voice was low, sensual, a voice she'd never before heard come out of him. An
intimate
voice.

She felt the hairs on her neck stand up. She could not respond. She could not move. Her only sensation, beyond the quiet buzz of his voice and the heated cloth below his hand, was the smell of ketchup and hot dogs that persisted in their school cafeteria.

“Dude,” he whispered to her, “you're making me so hot I could stick you right now.”

Caz was a year older than Mary and was known for his epic parties, the various apartments he'd lived in over the years crammed to capacity with beer and bodies, and thus he'd long had a rather limitless supply of available girls. His experiences had started young and remained bountiful. He lived with his father, who was a truck driver and therefore only home every few days. Caz had more or less fended for himself since he was ten years old. It took Mary a moment to understand what he meant. A terribly antiseptic word for
it
flitted through her brain . . .
i n t e r c o u r s e
. Her body went imperceptibly slack for a moment and she slumped back toward Caz's hand just the tiniest little bit. No one saw it.

But Caz felt it.

And he caught her.

11:40 a.m.

D
ara and Sary sat next to each other in the fluorescent-lit break room at FedEx. Of the residents of Ilios Lane, they were the only ones besides Susan to have gone to work as usual the day after the burglaries. Sary had again asked her eldest nephew from uptown to come over with his two younger brothers and stay with Sofia. It hadn't occurred to her to call the landlord. It was the house
she
lived in, the house
she
had failed to protect. Responsibility, she believed, lay with her and Dara. Though she could not speak for the rest of her neighbors, she knew exactly why they had been victimized, which was subsequently why she and Dara sat knee-to-knee in the break room having a quiet, imperceptible-to-the-outsider argument.

“We cannot do it,” Dara was telling Sary. “
I
cannot do it.”

“You must,” she fumed. “You must build it.”

Dara was frustrated. Sary refused to let go of her beliefs. Beliefs that to Dara seemed ancestral, outdated.

“Neaktu had no home,” Sary said. “He
must
have a home. Think of your family. Your daughter. We have failed to keep her safe.”

Dara felt a growing agitation between his shoulder blades. How many times would she say this?
Neaktu had no home
.
Neaktu had no home.
Dara wasn't even sure he believed in Neaktu anymore. He tried a new tactic. “Neaktu does not come to America. He stays only in Cambodia.”

Sary scoffed at him. “Don't be a fool! Spirits are not contained by our land boundaries. We
must
build him a home or it will be worse next time. Think of it, Dara. Think of Sophea home alone while we are at work. She is vulnerable. She is unsafe.”

This thought, Dara had to admit, chilled him. His only child, alone, while Neaktu the destroyer hovered around her. The real trouble, Dara knew but could not admit to Sary, lay with him. He feared he could not build the kind of spirit house that a protector such as Neaktu would find beautiful and welcoming.

In Cambodia, men learned to make such spirit houses from their fathers and grandfathers. They were made of wood or cement, with horns on the roof and seven-headed naga snakes atop hand-carved walls. The roof had intricate, singular tiles laid one after the other. The windowsills and doorways had Sanskrit or Pali prayers carved into them, the languages of ancient Buddhism. In Cambodia, he'd been a pharmacist. Even the pharmacy had a small spirit house for Neaktu, to keep the sickness in their customers outside the shop. Without a beautiful house to entice him, Neaktu would never stay outside where he belonged. He would enter Dara and Sary's house, anyone's house, unless he was given a home of his own with offerings of fruit and money and incense, things to keep him satiated in the spirit world.

In America, no one had spirit houses and yet people were, for the most part, safe. Even when there were car crashes, Dara knew that Americans believed them to be accidents, rather than from the guiding hand of an angry ancestor. He wanted to believe the way the Americans believed. He wanted to believe his life was wholly under his control. But he'd grown up being told otherwise, believing that spirits were around him all the time, in the tops of trees and the doorways of unprotected homes, in intersections and in lakes and in rivers and in buildings. In cacti and flowers, in rice and wind. The spirits controlled the human world, and the humans had to tend to the needs of those who'd passed into the spirit world. Perhaps Sary was right. Perhaps Neaktu had visited them, taken just a cell phone, just a token, as a cautionary word, a sign to let them know he was unhappy. Be careful. Be cautious. Be mindful. Be warned.

A coworker nicknamed Grimace walked into the break room and sat at a Formica-topped table just down from theirs. He kept to himself, mostly, but had nodded when he'd walked in. His face carried scars from an earlier life Dara and Sary knew nothing about, scars that had earned him his nickname. He popped open a bag of Doritos. In the quiet room, the sound was oversize. Beige lockers spanning the length of the wall behind Grimace created a tedious backdrop, reminiscent of a kind of industrial incarceration. Grimace pulled a magazine from his back pocket and began to read. Dara saw blond women draped over motorcycles.

Sary stood to let Dara know their break was over. Her face was tight, furious and sad at once. He'd only seen her that way before when they first learned Dara wouldn't be allowed to work as a pharmacist in America without redoing school. They didn't have the money for him to redo school, and even if they had, both Dara and Sary knew it would go toward Sophea's schooling, not her father's. But that angry, sad face had been
for
Dara then, wanting to fight for him, wanting to take on his own disappointment, his own dream of something different and better in a new place. This time was different. This time, Sary's expression was directed
toward
Dara. In his lower back and in his knees, he felt the fatigue of standing too long, the weight of what he knew he had to do. For his daughter. For his wife.

“Okay,” he told Sary. “I'll try to build something.”