Wonderland (5 page)

The high school principal, Mr. Fuller, is standing at the doors. Jesse whispers that he doesn’t feel well, may he be excused? But Mr. Fuller can’t hear him and so he has to say aloud, in his raspy, hoarse, frightened voice, “I feel sick … may I be excused …?”

Mr. Fuller nods gravely, suspiciously. But he does not allow Jesse to open the door himself; he goes to it and opens it wide, so that Jesse must pass through close to him, half stooping beneath his arm.

Jesse hurries down the corridor. His heart is still pounding, his face flushed. The skin of his face is almost painful, it is so flushed. Behind him the choir is singing now of a little town that is filling up softly with snow, its music misty and unreal, fading now behind the closed doors; outside there is hail, real snow, violent and wild. Jesse stares out a window. The sidewalk is trod upon by a thousand angry feet—invisible feet; there is a raucous ringing to the air that drowns out the choir’s song for Jesse.
Bethlehem. Christmas
. His mind jumps from high school and Yewville to the highway, to his home, his father’s gas station and the house a hundred yards behind it, off the highway, meager and dull in the storm. The gas station is now closed. Closed permanently. Jesse’s father had closed it, boarded it up, just the day before.

Closed:
a sign Jesse’s father had painted himself with old black paint.

Jesse helped him nail up the boards without being asked. He wanted to say to his father’s angry, silent back: “Why are you hammering so hard? Why are you making so much noise?” Nails struck deep into the wood, nails struck sideways and bent, twisted helplessly … nails dropped and lost in the tall grass.… But Jesse said nothing. He helped his father board up the little gas station, with lumber from an old pile behind the house, and his father hammered the boards in place, in a row, then crisscrossing on top, as if there were thieves who might want to break into this old place, cunning thieves who might be watching them right at this moment, plotting. Jesse wanted to say to his father gently: “But nobody will break in
here.…
” He wanted to ask, while his father hammered so loudly: “Why are you so … why are you so strange today?”

Why are you so strange?
he thinks now.

The high school is seven miles from home. Out there, at the intersection of the highway and the Moran Creek Road, the gas station is boarded up,
closed permanently
, and behind it is the old jumble of
wrecked cars and motorcycles and lumber and tires, and behind that the small frame house is gleaming with a sudden freakish burst of sunlight, hail bouncing on its roof.…

He must leave school and go home. Closing his eyes, he imagines the house: the gleaming roof, the hailstones, the rotting lumber pile. His father had bought the gas station, but he had built the house himself over the years. Hard work. There were a few sheds, and a garden ragged from late fall, a few trees. Wild bushes. Then the fence of rusted wire and the beginning of Mike Brennan’s farmland … but it was not Brennan’s any longer, it had been sold to someone else, a stranger, who did not live in the area or even in Yewville. A stranger. Everyone talked about this stranger for a while, wondering when he would show up. Jesse’s mother said, “It’s somebody with money to throw away, that’s for sure. What would he want with that old dead farm!” She always spoke of other people’s farms and businesses with a certain haughty, mocking look.

Jesse can hear her voice plainly.

She is seven miles away.

School will be dismissed in another hour, but Jesse won’t be able to go home then. He has to work at Harder’s, then get a ride home with a neighbor at five o’clock. That is four hours away. His heart pounds, seems to lunge in his chest.… He thinks of his mother: her light, red-blond hair, her eyes almond-shaped and clever and frank. He takes after her, people say, more than after his father. But he is thinner than either of them. He is very thin, his feet long and narrow. He is quite tall for his age—five foot seven—taller than his mother now.
Did she hear Jesse’s father go out this morning so early?—out the back door and into the woods, alone?
If anyone talks about Jesse’s father she smiles and looks away, something passes over her face, quickly, cleverly, and she is silent. She hums under her breath. She sings out loud, meaningless snatches of words. Her hair is curly and tumbles untidily down to her shoulders. Sometimes she is pretty, and Jesse and his sisters are proud of her. At other times, strolling through Yewville, she is sloppy and critical of things in store windows, she talks too loudly, and Jesse and his sisters are ashamed of her, wishing she would stay at home.

That September, not long after school started, Jesse’s sister Jean told him a secret. “What do you
think?
She’s going to have a baby!”

“Who?”

“Oh, you dope! Ma, of course!
Ma
is going to have a baby!”

Jesse stared. He could think of nothing to say.

Jean clapped her hands. “It’s a secret right now but she told me … I’m not supposed to tell anyone else.…”

“… going to have a baby?”

Jesse felt panic. A baby? Another baby?

Bob, the five-year-old, ran over to them and Jesse was startled, thinking for a moment that this was the new baby. Jean picked Bob up and swung him. The flesh of her upper arms was solid and warm. “There’s a surprise coming, a surprise coming,” she crooned. She winked at Jesse over the boy’s squirming shoulder. “Remember, it’s a secret,” she said.

Her happiness stung him.
His mother was going to have another baby. In this little house, all of them crowded together
.…

“How do you know?” he said angrily. “You think you know everything!”

“I know because Ma told me,” Jean said.

“Why did she tell
you
?”

“Because she trusts me. Because I’m a girl.”

“I suppose she told Shirley too?”

“No, not Shirley. Shirley would blab it everywhere.” Jean let Bob down and Jesse saw that her face was hectic with this news, as if the baby were her own. He felt a pang of jealousy at the look of her face, that bemused female secrecy; as if conscious of his feelings, Jean lifted her chin so that she seemed to be eyeing Jesse over the full curve of her cheeks, through her thick brown lashes. “Listen, kid, don’t say anything about it right now. Pa doesn’t know that Ma told me. He’s mad.”

“Why?”

“Because he doesn’t want a baby.”

Jesse stared. He wanted to turn away in panic and disgust—as if Jean had exposed him to something ugly, opening a door and exposing herself, exposing a secret of womanhood he did not want to know.

“There’s trouble over money. Again,” Jean whispered.

“What trouble?”

“Oh, to pay the doctor, you know, the hospital … buying food and all that.…” Jean said vaguely. “You know how Pa gets.…”

You know how Pa gets
.

Jesse put his hands to his head. Confused. Frightened. He felt the
hard substance of his skull beneath his wavy hair. He could remember the soft, delicate skull of his little brother, when Bob had been just a baby … so precarious, so dangerous.… And now another baby. Why another baby? Why was she having another baby? Jesse knew what to expect; he could remember everything from last time: his mother would waddle around the house, enormous and self-pitying and tender, her eyes filming over with pain and love, her hands dropping onto her belly, caressing herself. That baby had turned out to be Bob.
Robert Harte
. He himself was
Jesse Harte
. He had two sisters, Jean and Shirley, and soon he would have another sister or brother, all of them crowded into this house, this shanty, with its two back rooms and its “front room” and its kitchen. Jesse wanted to yell into his sister’s rosy, pleased face that they were all crazy—

Instead, he tried to smile.

“Yeah, isn’t it great?” Jean said at once. “I kind of like babies. I told Ma I’d help her with it, you know—get in practice.…”

She giggled and Jesse laughed with her breathlessly.

“It’s going to be next March,” Jean whispered. “I want to take the whole week off from school. I’ll take care of the house and make all the meals.”

“Next March.…”

“Don’t look so strange,” Jean said, poking him.

Jesse smiled shakily. There was still something about Jean’s face, her expression, that alarmed him. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips, moist and pink. Secrets. Whisperings. Sometimes Jean and their mother whispered together, and if Jesse came near they would go silent. Whisperings, secrets, then silence. Were all the secrets about this new baby, or about other things …? He wanted now to ask Jean about the baby. He wanted to know more. And why was their father unhappy, what was the trouble about money? Always there was talk of money, of not having enough. The gas station was not making enough money, there was a mortgage on it, and before that there had been other ventures—a partnership in a lumberyard, a partnership in a diner on the Five Bridges Road. Jesse had heard the word “mortgage” often.
Interest payments. Partnerships
. If his father and mother whispered together, it was often about these things, kept secret from Jesse.

And now, on this Wednesday, on the day before Christmas recess,
Jesse stands in the corridor of the high school, miles from home, and hears this conversation again. It is so clear to him, so strangely clear. Will he never forget it? Jean’s terse whispered words:
Because he doesn’t want a baby
.

He will never forget it. He will never forget this Wednesday.

He walks quickly down the hall. Strange, to be the only person in it. On either wall there are lockers, dented and rusty, and everywhere the smell of wet wool, wet rubber. Galoshes are lined up on the floor. Someone has kicked a pile of them around. The floor is slightly warped, but it has a smooth, pleasant, dreamy look to it, as if it were hundreds of years old. High above, the ceiling is cracked in many places. Spider webs of cracks. They are dreamy, too, the kind of frail formal pattern that dreams suggest. An editorial in the
Yewville Journal
complained about the high school being a firetrap. Jesse thought that was an interesting expression:
firetrap
. Every week, at odd times, the fire bells rang and all the students filed out into the halls, down the stairs, and outside onto the walk, preparing themselves for a real fire. It was exciting, a rowdy half hour. But no real fires ever came.

Many of the girls had decorated their lockers for Christmas. Cutouts from magazines of Santa Claus, cutouts of Christmas trees and angels.… Jean’s locker, at one corner of the hall, was decorated in green and red ribbons, pasted onto the locker in the form of a Christmas tree. When Jesse saw his sister around school he was startled—her adultness, the authority of her firm little legs and her frizzy red hair, her lips, her eyes, her manner of being in a hurry, always amused, always with other girls. If she dawdled after school with a boy, other boys teased them, hung around them, but Jean paid no attention. Jesse heard boys whistle at his sister on the street, but Jean paid no attention. She would turn away gravely and stare at something distant, sighting it along the curve of her cheek.

In the distance the chorus is still singing. A song Jesse can’t recognize because the words are blurred this far away, and only the hypnotic, light sound of the music itself comes to him.

He hurries to the boys’ lavatory. The smell of this place makes him gag; suddenly he knows he is going to be sick.

Yes, he is sick.

He gags and chokes, his eyes closed. Tears stream out of the corners
of his eyes. Hot, everything is hot, stinking.… He spits into the toilet bowl, trying to clean his mouth. The bowl is not very clean. Oh, everything stinks, everything is dingy and pressing upon him, stretching his skull out of shape.… That morning his mother was sick. Vomiting into a basin. The sharp acrid smell of it: now he is vomiting himself. He spits again and again, running his tongue around his mouth over the hard ridges of his teeth. Tiny particles of vomit, like particles of food. Slimy, clinging, a film inside his mouth.… When he is finished, trembling, he reaches up to pull the chain and the water begins to flow noisily, lazily. He has a moment of panic, thinking the vomit won’t flush away.

Jesse has not been sick for years, so this is a surprise to him. Nausea: the internal trembling, the weakness, the panic. A panic located in the stomach. He does not remember having felt so sick before, ever in his life, so helpless and frightened. Shirley is often sick to her stomach, and their mother takes care of her in the kitchen, with the basin. It is too cold to go to the outhouse to be sick. Too nasty there.

That morning, by accident, Jesse came upon his mother when she was being sick. She was hunched over and, turning to him surprised, her face was pale, her thin, arched eyebrows too severe in her delicate face; she seemed a stranger, with a forlorn, witch-like beauty that struck him. Her beauty. Her face. The odor of vomit, a streak of vomit on her bathrobe. Both she and Jesse were embarrassed. She said quickly, “There’s more privacy in the barn with the cows!”

It was an expression of hers from her girlhood. Barns and cows. Her father owned a farm.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse said, backing away.

That had been about seven-thirty in the morning. His father was still out walking.
Don’t you know, don’t you want to know, where he has gone? Why he can’t sleep anymore?
But he said nothing, standing aside for her to pass, and followed her out into the kitchen. More bickering there—Jean and Shirley. Jesse sat at the table. Bob was snuffling, his eyes watering. Talk around the table was edgy, musical, teasing. Jean was always teasing someone. There was a kind of rhythm to her teasing—a cruelty, then a tenderness. She had a quick, high yelp of a laugh, which was a surprise in her because it was boyish and abrupt. But her smile was slow, teasing. Bob was asking when the Christmas tree would be put up, and Jean was saying there might not be any tree this year. “If
you’re bad, there won’t be any tree,” Jean said. “Just because of him?” said Shirley. “Why him? He’s not the only one that counts!” “Be quiet, baby,” Jean said. Jesse thought with pleasure of the Christmas tree. His father would bring it home, tied to the front fender of the car. It would be put up in the front room, inside a small metal tripod with a basin of water beneath, and they would decorate it with things from the two big cardboard boxes kept in the attic—very light glass globes, spirals that looked like icicles, strings of frizzy silver material, colored bows and papers, and figures in Biblical dress. Two or three birds, with feathers that seemed real. An angel. A star of tarnished gold. Candles drawn on cardboard and colored in crayon, which Jesse himself had made years ago. Beneath the tree they would put their presents for one another.