Heft (10 page)

When I walked in that afternoon, mad because I’d had to take the train, I found her on the couch (she lives there now, it’s her home) and she looked very bad, even I had to admit. She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and showed me a rash that she’d never had before. I told her it was probably eczema. She told me her body hurt her all over.

You didn’t ask if I needed a ride, I said.

I thought you had practice, she said.

—You should have asked. It was canceled. I took the train.

God, I feel like shit, she said. She sort of propped herself up on her elbows. Honey, she said. Can you make me a Cuba libre?

She’s the last person on earth to call them that. Everyone else says rum and Coke.

This was when I still made drinks for her. Before she hid it from me.

The next day she didn’t go to school.

The day after that either.

For two weeks she didn’t go to school and that’s when I realized she wouldn’t be back.

We had to petition the town again to let me stay at PLHS because my mom didn’t work at the school anymore. Coach Ramirez took me with him to a school board meeting and told them, Here is a straight-A student with a very sick mom, and I dressed up in khakis and tucked my stupid shirt in. And I am a straight-C student if I am anything.

All this young man wants, said Coach, is to finish school with his friends and keep learning from the teachers who love him.

I guess they all felt bad enough for me to give me permission to stay.

A pretty woman, someone’s mother, came up to me afterward and said she just couldn’t imagine what I was going through and then she handed me a five-dollar bill. Literally just gave me a five-dollar bill. I didn’t know what to do so I put it in my pocket without even thanking her. I wish I’d given it back.

• • •

L
indsay Harper pulls into the spot next to mine as I’m getting
out of my car. She drives a Lexus that her dad gave her for her sweet sixteen. She’s tiny and built and wearing a field hockey uniform, the skirt of it rolled to show her hard tan legs.

Keeeeeeel, she says. She always says it like that, sweetly, sweetly, her voice descending from high to low.

She comes around the car and stands in front of me, her arms wrapped around each other shyly, wearing knee socks and rubber soccer sandals. She is unsure whether she is going to touch me. We both are. Finally I settle on grabbing her by the shoulders and pulling her in toward me, giving her a hard rub on the head. Owwww, she goes. She tries to wriggle free but I’m stronger.

Where ya goin, I say. I wonder if I smell like my house, like my mother in her damn
FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
T-shirt.

Lindsay pushes her little fingers into my side and I release her.

My hair’s all fucked up now! she says, combing it with her fingers, looking at her reflection in my car window. My shitty car. My mother’s shitty car that she hasn’t driven in two years. My driver’s ed instructor took me to get my license.

I start walking. I am unsure of myself around her in a way I have never been with any girl. Accidentally, sometimes, I am rude to her.

Hey! she says. You don’t wanna walk with me? Her bookbag is down by her feet and she scoops it up athletically and jogs toward me in one motion. It is what I noticed first about her: her hard determined striving for the ball, on the lacrosse field, at field hockey, on any field or anyplace, Lindsay is graceful.

I don’t get crushes on girls. It almost never happens. Mostly I am avoiding girls with crushes on me. When I was twelve it started happening: a girl would summon all of her courage and approach me or phone me or pass me a note as if she were throwing a message over a wall, and if she was one of the twenty—in middle school in Yonkers there were approximately twenty girls at any time considered popular or pretty or slutty enough to respectably pursue—I would say yeah, sure, let’s go out, and then we would meet up someplace, in a park, behind the school, and kiss, and give each other hickeys, and then the next day I would break up with her.

In high school the rules are different but the same. Everyone knows who can go out, who can hook up with each other. Risks are very rarely taken. There is something psychic going on, something unspoken. But I feel too noticed. All the girls I’ve gotten with in high school have known I think that I don’t have girlfriends. I have never had a girlfriend. By keeping it this way I can feel less guilty.

But now there is Lindsay Harper—Lindsay with long dark hair, Lindsay with dark eyebrows and very light eyes. Every part of her body is firm and round or straight and slim. Her hands are smooth and tan, her nails are crescent moons. Holt Caldwell had a famous crush on her when she was a freshman and he was a senior and she even more famously didn’t like him back. We have never been friends until now. She was not part of my group until this year and then suddenly she was, and now we’re very very good friends, better than friends you could say. For the last four weekends we have gotten together and hung out with nobody else there. I have not told anyone, not even Trevor, for fear of breaking it. Every Friday I call her after school and say Hey, what are you up to? And she says Nothing! very quickly, before I have finished speaking, and then there is a pause on her end—here I can tell she is waiting for me to gather my bravery and suggest that we meet—which usually takes me around five seconds, and usually comes out uncertainly, like Maybe we could meet up tomorrow night? or Maybe I’ll pick you up at your house?

I don’t know if I am imagining the little bit of disappointment that has started to make its way into her voice. I want to make her happy but I’m not sure what she wants. A date, a real date like adults go on? I have never done such a thing with any girl. It frightens me to think how expensive something like a date would be. Mostly all my friends just get together where we can drink or smoke in peace. Sometimes we see a movie. I guess there are some boys, boys like Preston Hutton and George Bristol, who do take girls on dates, who do the unthinkable thing of asking out girls from other grades who they otherwise do not know. Girls they meet in class. As if they were in college. Boys like them drive very nice cars and have picked up their strange style of dating from watching movies about rich kids in the 80s. There are a lot of boys who love movies like
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
and
Say Anything
and
Pretty in Pink.
George Bristol, who was voted
Best-Dressed
this fall, actually wears blazers with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Fortunately for him he is very good at football so his weirdness is thought of as cool rather than ridiculous.

But I don’t know how to be like those boys. I like what Lindsay and I do: we get together and go to the mall or the movies, or else we just drive around. We drive around and talk about stuff, or we go to the McDonald’s drive-through the next town over or anyplace, a parking lot, it doesn’t matter.

We have not kissed or even held hands. She has touched my arm three times that I can recall. I have a secret question about whether Lindsay has actually gone all the way. There are rumors about her just like there are rumors about every pretty girl at school about their sluttiness or the opposite. With Lindsay it’s the opposite. But I don’t want to know. Or I guess I should say I don’t want to know from anyone but her. I want her to confess it to me. I have a vision of her confessing it to me as a private breakable thing. I want to be the only one who knows it. I am not jealous, never have been, but I feel a pang when I think of anyone knowing Lindsay the way I do. Which is not to say I know her well, but I do know her—differently. I know her secretly.

This past weekend, at a movie, she rested her heavy head on my shoulder. I looked at her out of the side of my eye. Her hair fell across her face. She was dreamy and tired and close to me as she could be. I could not move for I was frozen. She’s the best girl I’ve ever known.

She’s walking beside me now, past the tennis courts and the green perfect fields in front of Pells High. We are walking up the cobbled pathway to the school. It’s the first time we’ve done this together. Lindsay waves happily to Cleary O’Connor who is also wearing a field hockey skirt and green knee socks.

GO GIANTS! says Cleary, a short frightening girl with thighs like support beams. Then she looks at me curiously. Hi Cleary, I say. It’s the first time I’ve ever called her by name and she softens immediately and smiles at me.

Hi! she says, and it seems as if she wants to go on—she opens and closes her mouth twice—but she can’t think of anything to say.

Lindsay is friendlier than I am. She says hello to everyone and when she stops to talk to her friend Christy I tell her I’ll see her later and slip into school, relieved in a way to be alone again.

Trevor’s waiting for me at my locker. You and Lindsay Harper, he says.

I shrug.

You and Lindsay Harpeeeeer, he says. He punches me gently in the gut. Then walks away.

• • •

M
y earliest memory is of my father who is also called Kel.
Our last name is Keller. He gave me his name and he gave me his baseball and then when I was four he left and moved to Arizona. And I am still Kel Keller.

In my memory he is throwing me the baseball and I am catching it cleanly in my little glove. In my memory he is huge, though in pictures I have seen of him he’s smaller, not much bigger than my mother. There is one whole photo album that exists of us as a family before he left. There are thirty or fifty pictures in it and they are all of my father and mother and me. My mother has always been a picture-taker. We have albums of just the two of us, albums with ridiculous frilly covers or the word
Family
going across the front of it. Pictures of my birthday parties in Yonkers when I was little. Others filled with my school photos, my baseball photos, my friends. Grandma and Grandpa and me at the beach. Of all of them my favorite is the earliest, the only one with my dad in it.

I have looked through that first photo album so many times that I can see it without seeing it. I can tell you the order of the photos and who is doing what in each. On the first page my father is mustached, skinny, wearing ripped ridiculous jeans and a Black Sabbath T-shirt. Next to him is my mother who is extremely pregnant and wearing a long dress. They are standing outside a house I don’t recognize. Now that I am older I can tell how young they were. There, in the next one, is my mother, unrecognizable, her bangs one long strand that covers an eye, lying back on a hospital bed with me in her arms. She is sweaty-headed and smiling. My own face is turned in toward her. I can see the outline of my cheek. My father is next to us: black hair to his shoulders and that faint mustache, which makes him look younger rather than older. To be honest with you he looks ridiculous in this picture. Not much better in the rest.

More hospital pictures. In one he is holding me in his arms, not smiling. My mother’s parents are standing behind him, also looking stern. There are no pictures of his parents. There are pictures of me growing. My parents bathing me in the sink. This is the only picture in which my parents look happy together and I wonder who’s taking it. My father has his hand on my belly. He has a young-buck look.

There are pictures of me at my grandparents’ house. Me in a swing in someone’s backyard. Me eating in a high chair, blueberry something all over my face. Me and my mother and father at a beach. There are several more in this album but they are all of me and my mother and grandparents. In one I am turning five, judging by the number of candles on the cake. Three adults stand behind me as I blow them out. My mother has a hand over her mouth as if she is surprised or upset.

When I was a kid I kept this album under my bed and looked at it at night when I was feeling scared, imagined desperately that he would come back even though when he left he did so without a word. I have not heard from him since.

My mother does not speak of him. I used to muster up my courage several times a year to ask her a question about him. Where are Dad’s parents. Where was he born. Does he have brothers. She would always answer them, but the look on her face was so full of hurt that after a while it wasn’t worth it to me. I became a scavenger, looking for facts about my father in other places. I know they met in high school. I know they had me when they were married, but very young. My mother’s still young: twenty years younger than some of my friends’ parents. She was only twenty when she had me which makes me wonder if I was an accident. A thought I try to shut off quickly.

Things I have found in my house that I believe belong to my father: a box in the basement with baseball stuff in it, a Mets pennant and some cards, mostly Mets players. I discovered it when I was seven and it caused me to get into several fights with my friends, because of course I immediately declared myself a diehard Mets fan, and my friends liked the Yankees. I didn’t care. I fought them. Also in the box were several trophies from Yonkers High, where he and my mother went. My mother made me go to a different high school than they did, and the worst part, at first, was that I had been looking forward to going to the school my father had gone to, perhaps seeing his name on a banner or meeting a teacher who’d had him. I imagined that if I could do very well there at sports he would hear about it somehow. I was stupid. I also found some men’s razors in the back of a drawer in the bathroom when I was twelve, before I ever needed to shave, and I ran one over my chin and cut myself. They were rusty. The last thing I found is the most embarrassing: a stack of
Hustlers
under an old couch in our basement. I don’t know whose idea it was, my mother’s or my father’s, but someone decided to put a rough-edged carpet in one corner of our cold unfinished basement. On this carpet is the couch in question, a footstool, and a little table and a TV that doesn’t work but probably did once. And under this couch I found the
Hustlers
. It felt as if my father could be someplace else in the house. There were his things. Just lying around. Of course I took them for myself because I was thirteen or fourteen and they were the most amazing things I’d ever seen. Discoveries like these gave me false hope when I was a kid that my father would come back for me. He should have known when he was leaving that I would find them at a tender age and that they would hurt me. He should have known.