In Zanesville (13 page)

“Everyone is nervous when they’re meeting a boy,” Meg assures me.

Meeting a boy? Oh, right.

The bathtub is long and claw footed, with a wire soap dish that hangs over the side and an old-fashioned curved faucet that
I can get my head under. My meditative bath activity is to lay a washcloth flat on top of the water, poke the center of it
from underneath to make an air bubble, gather the sinking ends so it looks like an air-bubble bouquet, and then pull it down
into the water, forcing the air through the terry-cloth holes to make an explosion of tiny, fizzing bubbles. I do this over
and over and over, without thinking of anything but the air-bubble bouquet and its offspring. By the time I get out, I’m clean
and calm.

Meg has gone downstairs, leaving her book facedown on the bed:
A Tale of Two Cities,
which I haven’t read yet. She says it’s good, even though it was assigned for school. The cover is a black-and-white drawing
of an angry woman knitting, with a guillotine in the background. The guillotine is one thing, but I don’t know if I’ll be
able to read a whole book about a woman knitting. The detention monitor with her long tubular scarves; my mother, making a
pink mohair turtleneck for my Barbie; me, knitting a famous pot holder that actually conducted heat instead of absorbing it.
It was white with a blue edge and had a wooden ring crocheted to a corner, made at Bible school one summer, back when I was
religious.

Being able to conveniently remove Barbie’s head while changing her clothes is what made the pink turtleneck possible. The
book’s guillotine is crudely drawn, a slanted blade in
a wood frame. The notch at the bottom of the frame serves the same purpose as the two nails in the stump outside the chicken
shed: it holds the neck in place.

If only I were still religious. If something has happened already and you just don’t know about it yet, God would be the only
one who could turn it around. Not that he would—he being the creator of the guillotine, the chicken stump, the shotgun, and
several other devices that make it clear why people are always begging him for mercy.

Drying my hair makes me dizzy for a minute and I have to lie down again. Old Milly is getting supper in her kitchen, moving
back and forth between the counter and the table, carrying things and setting them down: a plastic butter dish, a bowl of
bright orange carrots, a container of cottage cheese, a white plate with flowers around the rim and a pork chop in the center.
Nothing to drink. After she sits down, she gets back up for the salt and pepper. Then she sets her elbows on the table, folds
her hands, puts her forehead against them, and stays like that for twenty seconds or so.

Dear God, please make my dad be out drinking right now.

Jesus I never really minded because of the way he appeared in Sunday school books, in a belted frock with a pleasant, beaten-down
expression on his face, surrounded by either sheep or children—not a person you’d think would invent a guillotine or a gun,
although he did turn one fish into a thousand, just to eat them. That’s not that holy, but those were different times, and
look who his father was.

My dad, on our family’s fishing trips, every Saturday during the summer, would prop his own rod and reel on a forked stick,
then work his way up and down the bank, baiting hooks with my brother’s worms, taking the fish off the line and
releasing them if they were small, putting them on a stringer if they weren’t, tossing them back up into the weeds if they
were bluegills.

Sunfish were what everyone caught a lot of, shiny and flat, like big coins; less common were the bass, with wide translucent
mouths, or the catfish, with long whiskers. The whole thing made me feel desperate, from the squeaking Styrofoam cooler of
worms in the backseat, to the lawn chairs that stuck to the backs of your legs, to the clouds of gnats, to the fishing hat
my mother wore, to the pair of needle-nose pliers my father kept on his belt and would use, turning away so we couldn’t see,
to get the hook back when a fish swallowed it. The little bluegills in the weeds would lie there forever, staring blankly
up at the sun until you were sure they were dead, and then they would flop again. What was it about bluegills that made everyone
hate them so? They were small, the size of my hand, not even blue.

Dear God, please. If you make my dad be drunk right now, I’ll do whatever you say.

I go back downstairs at some point and sit in the kitchen while she cooks dinner.

“You always think you’re getting the raw end of the stick,” she says to me, tenderizing a piece of meat with a pronged hammer.
“Half the time when I look at you, you’re pouting.”

“Short end of the stick,” I say.

“What did I say?” she asks.

“Raw end.”

“I meant short end. And why? Because you aren’t getting
what you want, is all. And that’s the action of someone spoiled. Do I like to tell you no? Do I like to tell any of my kids
no?”

“You never tell them no,” I say automatically. I don’t even care about this. I thought maybe when I came down here the dog
would be next to her bowl, waiting for supper, but she isn’t. “Where’s Tammy?”

“I do tell them no, not that it’s any of your goddamned business either way.” She slaps the meat into a skillet and puts a
lid on it. “She better not be upstairs. If she’s on my bedspread, I’ll kill her.”

A terrier is utterly loyal to its master, although it’s true the master is sometimes a tennis ball. My dad bought our terrier
for a dollar at a body shop in a little town north of Zanesville. She’s never gotten over it—even as a tiny white puppy that
he’d carried home in his pocket, she used to stand on his shoe and stare devotedly up at his knees. Eight years later, she
still tags him everywhere, and when he isn’t around, she waits by the door with a pair of his old socks, knotted together.
If something has happened to my father, I don’t know what Tammy will do.

“I think she might be in the basement,” I say tentatively, heart pounding. What am I saying? “Sitting outside the coal cellar.”

“Doing what?” my mother asks. She’s got a cigarette going and is staring into the cupboards.

“Just waiting at the door,” I say.

My mother whirls around, stricken.

“This is what I need now?” she cries, yanking the lid off the skillet and pressing her spatula into the meat. A cloud of sizzling
rises and is muffled by the lid, clattering back into place. “Another goddamned
mouse?
”

She hands me a stack of plates and I put them around the table without getting up. My heart feels like the meat. She goes
back to staring into the cupboards.

Silence.

“I don’t think it’s a mouse,” I say finally.

“Well, you’re going to find out, because I need a jar of green beans, if there’s a small one, which I don’t think there is.
Otherwise, yams.”

“I-I-I,” I say, “can’t.”

“Now you’re afraid of a mouse? You who tripped the traps?”

“I don’t know what yams even are!”

“They’re along the bottom shelf, dark orange colored but in chunks, not slices. The sliced ones are carrots.”

“I don’t like yams,” I say. “Why can’t we have something from up here?”

“I don’t have anything up here!” she says, her voice rising. “How am I supposed to go to the goddamned store with you sick,
your father drunk, and now
mice?
”

“I’m not sick,” I say.

She calls into the living room. “Who’ll run to the cellar for me?”

Raymond appears instantly, something all down the front of his shirt.

“What’s that?” she says, scratching at it with a fingernail.

“Not him,” I say. “I’ll get them.”

“My thing went upside down,” he explains.

“You sit right there,” she tells me.

I sit back down. “But not him,” I say.

She turns to Ray. “Can you get me a small jar of beans, and if there aren’t any, then yams?”

“Okay,” he says.

“Do you know what yams are?” she asks.

He nods.

“What are they?”

“They’re little yams, in the jars,” he explains, curling his fingers.

“Okay,” she says, sighing. “Help your sister set the table.”

She’s going down herself! Never in the history of needing preserves has she ever gone down there herself.

“Mom, wait!” I say quickly. “Just let me—I have to change the laundry.” And I push past her into the stairway and pull the
door closed.

On the landing is a case of pop and two cases of empty beer bottles, other trash, a broken yardstick. In the gloom at the
bottom of the stairs I can just make out the white dog, waiting.

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.

Dear God, please. Give me courage to go in there after changing the laundry.

All the bedding is wadded together against the side of the washer. I peel it out and stuff it into the dryer, clean the filter
and add it to the giant ball of lint I’ve been making, twirl the knob, push the start button, and then fold some stray things
on the Ping-Pong table. The phone rings and I hear Meg call for my mother.

Dear God, please. Now is the time to give me courage.

A river rock, an elm leaf, the door to the chicken shed.

The coal cellar will have one bare bulb hanging in the center, with a dusty string you have to pull. There will be the empty
worm coolers, nestled into one another, there will be the antique wicker basket with leather straps that the fish
are carried home in, there will be the shelves of jars with their murky floating contents. In the corner, under the black
grate where the coal used to be funneled down, there will be the shotgun and what it has shot.

Dear God, please. If you change what has happened, I will give you anything.

Why would God want anything of mine? He wouldn’t, and that isn’t how it works anyway—a bully only takes what someone else
wants. All I’ve wanted recently is Mr. Prentiss.

Dear God, if you make my dad be all right, I will give up Kevin Prentiss, the guy I was going to see at the game tonight.

The door at the top of the stairs opens and my mother’s feet appear on the landing. She crouches down so I can see her face,
excited and pale.

“Where are my beans?” she demands. “That was Kay on the phone and I have to go to Tuck’s. She said your dad just walked in
without a coat, not a dime on him, and they’re buying him drinks to keep him there.”

If there is a God and he truly is all-powerful, then he’s the one who arranged to get me off on a technicality—the call from
Kay actually coming in moments before I made my deal, thereby annulling it. While getting dressed I thought about it and thought
about it, coming to the conclusion that there’s a limit to what people can be expected to believe, which is why I’m at the
Grassy Knoll at the appointed hour, waiting for my friends.

Down below, the crowd shuffles along Elm Ave on their way to the stadium gates. Above, the sky is cold and sparkling, although
I’m not cold at all. Just the opposite, in fact.

All the boosters come out for the last game of the season, parent-aged people wearing white carnations tipped with magenta,
capping and uncapping flasks. Tonight the Zanesville Zephyrs are playing the Central Valley Voles, who always win, insulting
everyone in Zanesville’s idea of proper conduct for a school that is both poor and rural. They have rawboned, implacable players
who trudge out on the field like coal miners going to work, and solid, unlovely cheerleaders who wear pants. Their mascot
is technically not a vole but another tiny-eared mammal, the badger. I have no idea what to do if nobody shows up. Obviously,
I can’t go in there and be walking around alone; I’m supposed to be a sidekick.

How does my dad do it, going off by himself for a week, two weeks? The days, I can imagine—small-town bars where no one can
find him, dark clinking places lit by Old Milwaukee signs and jukeboxes—but the nights I can’t picture at all. Eventually
the bars close, don’t they? And then there’s just the big black Illinois sky stretching overhead.

Dear God, if you make my dad be all right, I will give up Kevin Prentiss, the guy I was going to see at the game tonight.

It’s like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear—it makes a sound wave, but not a sound. If there’s no one
to hear a promise, it can’t possibly count, can it?

Trees and stars, stars and trees. My feet might be getting a little bit cold in their sneakers, but in a pleasurable way,
like sticking them out of the covers on a winter night. I like sitting here on this grass, even if nobody ever shows up.

A stone, a leaf, an unfound girl.

“Hello?”

She came up the side way, past the Fertilizer Home and over the big hill, so she’s breathless, appearing out of the dark
in a plaid car coat and mittens. It’s like being trapped down a well and having a familiar face appear at the top. I haven’t
seen any real people at all for twenty-seven hours, ever since detention let out, and now here is my friend. Tears of relief
burn behind my nose. Hers is running and she swipes at it in her old, familiar way, then pushes her glasses up.

“We heard you were sick, so everybody just decided to meet at the gate,” Felicia explains. “But then at the last minute I
thought, what if you really were up here?”

“Never listen to my mother,” I say.

“That’s what I told them,” she replies.

She pulls me to my feet and we head out, through the trees and down the back way. It’s so beautiful tonight, everything washed
in stadium light, casting inky black shadows. Up ahead is the gravel path that leads to the side gates.

“How come you’re wearing glasses?” I ask.

“Stephanie kicked me, and my contact popped out of my head,” she explains. “It’s somewhere in that rug in front of the TV—blue
and green shag and it’s a green contact! Forget it.”

“Did she get killed?”

“She got taken after with a wooden spoon, but my mother never hits, she just brandishes.”

Her mother, my mother, her sister, my sister, her, me. You can see why somebody might go into a coal cellar and never come
back out.