The Full Cleveland (13 page)

Clarine was the first to come right out and say I was stoned to my face. On the second to last day of the experiment—the “penultimate” one, I had learned from reading the fat dictionary on the list—she found me sitting in the breakfast room with eight mugs lined up in front of me, and a pot of coffee in my hand. I had noticed that no matter how carefully I measured the water and the coffee into the pot, it never seemed to come out to eight cups. So I had decided to conduct an experiment of my own. I had poured four test cups, and didn't have much coffee left in the pot, when Clarine suddenly appeared at the breakfast room door.

“That's
coffee
you're playing with,” she said in a low, shocked whisper.

I smiled up at her. And tilted my head to the side like a cocker spaniel. After nine days on my Parallel, I felt like a cocker spaniel. A thin, brilliant cocker spaniel, but still a cocker spaniel. I must have worn a spaniel's expression of happy expectancy, and I still believe if Clarine hadn't entered the room at the very moment she did, I would have made an enduring discovery not only about the nature of coffee but also about the nature of reality as perceived by a small dog.

“That's
coffee,”
she said for a shocked second time. But I just whimpered and cocked my head to the other side.

She snapped her fingers in front of my face.

I put the coffeepot down and smiled up at lovely Clarine. She was tall and immaculate, as usual, and, in her white uniform, maybe not unlike a spaniel's vision of God. My eyes widened attentively, my ears lay back on my head.

She leaned over the table and peered into the cups. “You're not
drinking
it, are you?”

I pawed at a mug, managed to pick it up and offer it to her.

She scoffed at it, even though she had a bit of a coffee habit herself. “Explain yourself, young lady. You know you're not permitted to drink that trash.”

Trash. I shrugged into the cup.

Then something strange happened. While Clarine rattled off about a billion reasons why I wasn't supposed to drink coffee aka trash, including growth stunting, growth spurting, heart stopping, heart racing, suddenly her voice started sounding real slow and way way underwater. “Clarine,” I interrupted, “you sound really
southern.”

“What? Whas' the matter with you, girl?”

“See!?” I cried.

Then, what I did, I started sounding really southern myself. It was like when they say your life flashes before your eyes before you die, but they say it flashes really slowly, so slowly you have all kinds of time to look it over, and it gets so dull and boring it's like a three-hour movie but just not a good one, and you totally want to die. And they say that takes the edge off the actual dying. That's how slow I suddenly sounded.

Clarine gaped at me in astonishment. “Are you
mocking
me, girl?”

“I'm on a Parallel!” I blurted in my own defense.

“You're on a parallel,” Clarine repeated, nodding her head. “I see. Then I do see. You're on a parallel
what?”

“Jus' a Parall'l,” I mumbled, very southern, growing very worried that I'd let the secret slip. In the tradition of all great experiments, no one was supposed to know.

“Well, lemme see now. You on ‘parall'l'
bars?
You on ‘parall'l'
planes?
Or are you just on a ‘parall'l'
universe?
Huh? Just what type of'parall'l' do you think you mean?”

Now who was mocking who. Whom. I scowled up at her. “Just let me
think.”

While I did, I searched Clarine's beautiful brown eyes, not unlike pools of coffee themselves. Then, as if from a great, slow distance, the thought I had been waiting for suddenly arrived like a locomotive in my head. I had been waiting for it for over a week. It was the answer to a major philosophical question about the nature of reality, and when I had the thought clearly in hand, I grinned at Clarine and decided to give it to her as a peace offering. I started to speak, but no sound came out of my mouth. I looked miserably into a coffee mug and looked back up. A terrifying frown had now inhabited Clarine's face.

I started to speak again, but no sound came out again. I tried once more, but all that came out was a growl. I didn't sound southern anymore. I sounded like a cocker spaniel.

“What's the matter with you, child?” Clarine studied me with a look of amazement on her face, as if she had just noticed that I sometimes elongate or contract. Meanwhile, I kept forming very distinct yet soundless words with my mouth.

“Speak up,” she said, nodding her head, then shaking it sideways, as if encouraging an infant or an animal to try to articulate. “You sure look strange, and different,” she finally said.

“CLARINE!” I said, way too loudly. There.

“Clarine,” I said, modulating. “Did you know that all knowledge of reality … that if you take the empirical world … that is that pure logical thinking … that, that, that you can't
get
it that way?”

Rats. I blinked up at Clarine, feeling robbed.

Clarine drew herself up, waited, and delivered. “WELL, HOW DO YOU DO, MISTER EINSTEIN.”

Oh no.

“That who you think you are, Miss Smarty Pants?”

I adamantly shook my head. The last thing you wanted was Clarine saying she thought you thought you were Einstein.

“Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world.
Is that what you're trying to spit out, Miss Intelligence? I'm afraid that one belongs to Mister Einstein.”

Very surprisingly, “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world” was totally what I had been trying to say. I was quite taken aback that Clarine, not to mention Einstein, had said it first.

“I know that one. You've been acting so strange, I took a good look at those books you've got your nose buried in. You had the one about pure logical thinking highlighted in every color in the rainbow. It made it look like
mud.”

“That
isn't
what I was trying to say at all,” I lied imperiously.

Clarine leaned into my face, spent a good ten seconds searching my eyes, and concluded her investigation by pounding the breakfast room table with her fist. “Well, I've been doing some logical thinking for myself,” she said. “And you know what my logical thinking is saying to me?”

I shook my head no, but I was pretty scared to hear it.

“That you've been smoking reefer!
That's
what.”

•   •   •

Then she examined me. My eyes, my ears, my uniform. She grabbed my school blazer off the chair and went through the pockets. Luckily I hadn't yet rolled my ecru cigar. She dropped the blazer and frisked my jumper. Then she went for my knee socks.

Finally, she made a slow circle around the table, then suddenly came up from behind and lunged for my wrist. She picked up my arm. “Look here, how thin.” She dropped my arm. It flopped on the table.

She came around front again and started staring at it as if she couldn't stop. So I got interested in it myself and started staring at it too. There we were in the breakfast room, staring at my arm.

Finally, she picked it up again, and carefully turned it over, and over again. She looked into my eyes. I looked into hers. We both looked back at the arm. I think it was at that moment that we both realized: what we were dealing with here was the surprisingly graceful arm of a young woman, no longer to be confused with a choirboy, or even a choirgirl.

I felt an intense thrill of total recognition. The experiment had
worked.

As she put my arm respectfully back on the table, “Why baby, you're all grown up” was all Clarine said.

Not that that was the last of it. There followed an intense period of surveillance wherein I had to eat almost constantly while Clarine milled around with arms crossed and watched me stuff face, plus I had to convince both her and Matt behind closed breakfast room doors that I was not some kind of junkie. I think Matt had been called in for his supposed authority on the subject of “reefer,” which sure made the burden of proof a lot easier on me.

Guarding my best friend's secret, I explained away my unusual behavior and dramatic change in appearance as perfectly natural, considering my coming of age. That I billed as strictly time lapse, total rapid transit. What with my abstruse references to the tenuous nature of reality and the importance of redefining the empirical world, eventually, they both bought it. Although, to be honest, Clarine did outdebate me, and definitely Matt, on several key philosophical points.

In between bouts in the breakfast room, I headed to my bathroom to gaze at myself in the mirror. What I saw there, I really wanted to be real.

I was beautiful. No, not beautiful.

“[Boyce Parkman] was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms….” Almost verbatim the way Scarlett O'Hara's story was written.

It was only then that I began to fully appreciate the genius of Mary Parker.

Not only had she made me beautiful, she had made me brave. Fear, she had taught me, was the opposite of love. The heart and mind is will. All stories end in death or marriage. All happy families are alike…. And pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world.

It's summer
after such a sorry sequence of events I suppose I shouldn't even think about it, but I suppose I shouldn't have ended up looking like Lolita either. I've been sent to Florida for it, in the summer, and if that sounds pleasant, it's really just a polite way for Mother to say, Go roast in hell.

After Mary Parker's experiment ended, my lips kept on going. They grew fuller and fuller until I finally had to go to Mary Parker and ask, “Is this like a quirk?”

But Mary Parker said not to worry, that very full lips could be a very good sign, that they could signify the lush, outward expression of a flowering, inner expressive self. I thought that made my lips sound nice.

But Mother didn't think they were nice. First she accused me of pouting. Then she said I was trying my best to look like a “tart.” I had to ask her what a tart was, as I'd always thought it was either a rather attractive French pie, or a small turnover Clarine let you make from leftover pastry dough when you were little. Mother wouldn't answer me though. I had to ask Mary Parker. I wasn't too flattered when I heard the additional definition either.

I joked to Cabot that my lips seemed to be causing a “flap.” Of course I knew it wasn't funny when I said it, but that's the very reason Cabot was supposed to laugh. That's the way we do it, the way it had always been done. But Cabot just said she'd give me an even fatter lip if I didn't stop looking at them in the mirror. Matt, for once on my side, said I looked hot, except he said it a lot, a lot in front of Mother, and of course that wasn't too constructive. But that's just Matt.

Everyone had an opinion about my lips, because nothing can happen at home without everyone having an opinion about it. Except Dad. Actually, he sort of had one too. After I got caught for using my new lips to kiss Rey McDowell, he had a talk with me in the library. But all he said was “Boyce, it's come to my attention that you're a very pretty girl.” Then he said it's best not to drink on dates. In the future of course. When it was legal.

Where I am is on a balcony on a kind of McMansion in Florida, where mostly what I do is sit in a deck chair at night and stare like a zombie at the full moon. It's out there now surfing on a wave, hanging ten, falling all over itself doing the old razzle-dazzle soft-shoe hard sell that it's supposed to be paradise here. Someone should put it out of its misery.

The McMansion is Mickey Knight's, and of course her father's, the brain surgeon. Mother got the idea to send me down here for the summer after she found out Mickey Knight was no longer my best friend; Mary Parker, the bus driver's daughter was. She also found out about skipping class and going to the million movies downtown. For that I will be sent to boarding school in the fall.

Meanwhile I'm banished here to the McMansion with Mickey Knight and her father, who's nicknamed “The General,” though nobody tells why. “The Admiral” would be more like it, since he spends all his time on a boat, killing fish. I have to go with him and Mickey tomorrow morning at five AM to kill some myself, and I'm so worried about all the carnage, I can't sleep.

•   •   •

So since I'm up anyway, I've been thinking of doing some thinking. Not logical thinking, of course. I'll think everything through illogically. Then I'll be all set for later in life and the real world, when I'm not banished to a McMansion anymore.

At the top of the list is Dad, like what's his story, and at the bottom, after Matt, is my lips. Frankly, I kind of liked the way Cabot said she'd give me an even fatter lip. I actually liked that. Of course I didn't tell her so, but I think of it sometimes. I miss Cabot and Clarine especially, and little Lucy maybe even a little more, and even Matt quite a lot come to think of it, and of course Luke. He's such a nice kid, and so eager and stuff, with his baseball mitt and his football and his big plans to go play the game, you couldn't help but miss Luke. I'm not sure I miss Mother, though. And Dad, I'm putting him in limbo, since he could have come to my rescue but instead had a Scotch.

Cabot said I was really missing what was actually happening with our family because I was blinded from looking in mirrors. It's kind of embarrassing to be told that. Even though I secretly liked the fat lip thing, I was sort of embarrassed about that other part of it. I mean, I was just looking. But maybe that's bad, and that's why I worked up this list for thinking tonight.

Dad did this strange thing in spring. He sold a blue Buick. I found out when Cabot came to my room and said in a tragic voice, “Dad lost a Buick.”

That killed me, when she said that. How do you lose a Buick? I knew what she was talking about, but I still made her tell me how you lose a Buick, like please spell that out for me, I'm deeply confused. Maybe it's still at the mall? Did you check the airport? She said it meant he had to sell it because he needed money.

So that's how you lose a Buick, I said. I have to admit, I was fairly sarcastic about it.

But Cabot still went around moaning that Dad lost a Buick. I told her she had too much imagination and all, that she better use it instead to sketch pictures of pictures of real people—that is, beautiful models from magazines—at which I already said she is very good.

Except the next time I found her sketching, she was doing ugly people, disjointed people, tormented people, with things like triangles for heads. She explained it by claiming she was “into reality,” though personally I thought the beautiful models more real. Anyway, the way she kept moaning how Dad “lost” a Buick, even if you didn't believe her, it might still make you plan to think about that.

Then something else happened concerning one of the cars. Dad accidentally sort of burned up the Dream Machine. It happened when he finally drove it to work in downtown Cleveland. Before that, he'd tried it out on little hops up the road, but on any errand of consequence, he'd still always defer to one of the two remaining blue Buicks.

But one Friday, he must have decided to form some sort of permanent bond with his father's old white Mercury, because he took off in it for work in downtown Cleveland. And he looked confident too, going down the driveway.

As he always did with a blue Buick, he parked in the Terminal Tower's underground garage. But he must have been a little ambivalent about the whole bonding thing, because just as he was about to climb out of the Dream Machine, Dad fumbled his cigarette. Then he neglected to pick up the part that was lit.

When Dad returned to the garage at five-thirty that afternoon, he was greeted by an exhilarated garage attendant with a smudged face and a charred jumpsuit who described in detail his heroic rescue of the smoldering car. They towed it home and put it back in its slot in the four-car garage. We all tromped out to see it. It looked like an ash.

After dinner that night, Matt told a little circle of us that Dad had tried to “torch” the Dream Machine. Wide-eyed, we asked what he meant. “I mean
arson,”
he said, blowing it out long, as if exhaling fire. “Your Dad's going nuts.”

Now he was
our
Dad. Classic Matt.

“Rrrrr-son,” Matt said again, extra long.

Cabot said, “Who are you? Satan?”

Luke said, “You're scaring me, Matt.”

Lucy, highly offended, said, “Maybe
you're
nuts.”

Me, I stayed out of it. I thought he might have a point.

Then Dad sold his concert grand Steinway piano. But Matt didn't claim he was crazy and Cabot didn't claim he did it for money. We all knew the real reason why. His friend Mr. Carter had died. I would have sold the Steinway too. Anybody would have.

Mr. Carter had been coming Saturdays in his old Ford to visit Dad since we were babies. He came to play the saxophone while Dad played the piano. I had fallen in love with him when I was two, the minute I first saw him. Every time he came to the house carrying his sax, I would run and jump on top of him. If he sat down, I would crawl onto his lap. If he stood up, I would cling to his leg. If he tried to go, I would drag behind him, attached to his hand, his coattail, whatever I lucked onto that day. When he played his sax, I sat next to my father on the piano bench, gazing up at his fabulous friend, my feet kicking in time over the edge of the bench, my hands alternately reaching for his shiny brass instrument and plunging deep into the folds of my dress.

“She's developing an ear for music,” Dad told Mother proudly, his fingers dancing all the way down the keyboard.

But Mother knew better. She repeatedly made the trip to the end of the living room to lift me off the piano bench, or pry me off Mr. Carter. Finally she squeezed my arms and looked in my eyes and ordered me to no longer glue myself to our guest. From then on, I spent Saturdays piled in a heap at his feet. And now, fourteen years later, he had died.

So we knew it was in honor of Mr. Carter that Dad sold the Steinway. But it wasn't just Saturdays that were quieter now. Dad was. He went to the library every night after work and had Scotch. But then he'd come out for dinner in a pretty good mood.

The moon has now hopped off that wave and is sitting on top of a palm tree down the beach like a smug white coconut.

Reclining here every night on my deck chair on my bedroom balcony like this, I'm kind of hoping I look like I've rather had a breakdown. I have a summer lap blanket tucked over my legs and the white curtain from my room billows out from the door, fluttering loose like an unhinged sail. My hair, now way past my shoulders, flies in the wind. I'm hoping if anyone passes by on the beach and sees me, they'll think I've been sent here to recuperate, to breathe the salt air from a deck chair and stare at the open sea as if I've just come out of a coma. I'm hoping they think, Too tragic, too young.

I got caught for kissing Reynolds McDowell after the spring dance at the Shaker Heights Country Club. Rey is Matt's friend who lives up the street. I've known him since he came to my crib and gave me a ball peen hammer to play with. Now he's tall and cool and has blue eyes that widen when he talks, but especially when you talk. I think his expanding eyes kind of give him away, like he's not so cool as you think, which personally I think is extra cool. I know I love him now, but I still say it was Mother's fault I had to keep kissing him to find out for sure. Mother had always said when the man you thought you loved first kissed you, you'd feel this very definitive electric shock. Sort of a zap. And that's how you'd know.

The dance was outside because of spring and there were heated tents and live music and old chaperones who sat in the dead white men's portrait room in the clubhouse drinking themselves under the table. Outside was for junior members and their friends and one friend of Rey's was a southern boy named Calhoun who wore a seersucker jacket with battered jeans and made mint juleps in the parking lot off the back of his rusty blue pickup truck. So Rey brought a couple of Calhoun's special drinks. Then we slipped away from the pickup, and took off our shoes for the grass.

When Rey kissed me on the golf course everything was slightly out of focus and distant and pretty, the lights strung along the inside of the white canvas tents and the music and the feel of his mouth on my cheek.

That was the problem, only on the cheek. Rey has a reputation for being what's sometimes called a lady-killer, but that's all he tried to lady-kill me. So I kept touching my face, trying to decide if I'd felt the supposed very definitive electric shock, and therefore was truly in love.

After we took our shoes and went back to the tent and the whole rest of the dance too, I kept trying to decide if I'd felt the very definitive electric shock, or what. I realized Rey would have to kiss me again or I would never be sure.

We were quite late coming home. Rey drove me, and then parked his father's Oldsmobile five hundred feet from the entrance to our driveway, behind the azalea bushes. But he still didn't lady-kill me. Instead he killed the lights, slowly and mysteriously put a finger to his lips, and opened his door. “What is it?” I whispered. “Why are we stopped way over here?”

“Why else. Your mother.”

Oh. Then this was actually a very good idea. This way, Mother, who waited on the front stair landing every dance for me to come home, couldn't possibly hear the car. I could just slip in the back door and up the back stairs and go to sleep, and if when I woke in the morning I found Mother still on the landing, I could just say very sleepily and very innocently, “Gee, Mom, why are you hanging out there?”