In Zanesville (29 page)

On my dresser is a neat stack of books,
The Tempest
on top, with a painting on its cover of a storm-tossed ship. The rigging looks as fragile as a ship in a bottle, the wave
rising up over the wooden deck like a gray petticoat. What I never saw before is the tiny man clinging to the mast, and all
the other tiny men sliding into the water.

The shouting never stops, so I have to sleep with Raymond, whose bed is filled with what seems like sand. I bring my art book
and he brings a handful of soldiers, and we keep the light on for a long time. I try to figure out what there is about the
skyscrapers that Ringgold is so enthusiastic about—they just look like buildings to me. Maybe if I had the eight dollars and
actually went on his field trip and saw them close up, but something
tells me they would still look like buildings. I fall asleep at some point and dream that I’m standing under one of the lacy
legs of the Eiffel Tower. Van Leuven is there, handing out valentines to everyone. “Sit down,” she says as she gives each
person a valentine. The girl next to me has hung hers from her ears. Stephanie is there, wearing my old blue pajamas, and
the deaf janitor’s assistant is there, carrying his bucket over his arm like a purse. “Look at the wonders the elevator has
wrought,” someone says, and then I’m in an elevator, going up very fast. Across from me is the girl with hearts hanging from
her ears. Suddenly everything starts shaking. “The elevator has
rot,
” she cries, and I know we’re going to die.

It’s Ray, pushing on me. “You’re dreaming,” he whispers. When I don’t open my eyes, he gets up and turns the light off, climbs
back under the rope, gathers up as many men as he can find, and then settles back down. When I open my eyes, the room has
been cast into eeriness, dark on top but bright along the baseboards. Silence from downstairs. On the other pillow, Ray sleeps
curled on his side clutching an army man next to his face, the plastic bayonet just touching his bottom lip. He used to be
in love with a stuffed reindeer with a vinyl face, which he carried everywhere. My parents finally reasoned it away by talking
him into storing it with the Christmas decorations one year. All spring and all summer he asked for updates on when it would
be Christmas, and then gradually, by sometime in the fall, he had forgotten. When the reindeer was finally lifted ceremoniously
from the box of balls and tinsel, Raymond held it awkwardly for a while, but you could see that something had changed, and
when no one was paying attention, he set it down and never picked it up again.

I wonder where that stuffed reindeer is. Back in the attic,
probably, with the gun and the hip waders and the contraption I saw once when I was cleaning up there with my mother—a pink
rubber thing that looked like a hot-water bottle with a hose that had a bulb on the end of it, stored in a flat white box
stamped with a sprig of lilacs. Lilacs are usually a signal that you’re dealing with feminine hygiene, but this looked more
medical than menstrual.

“Mom, what is this?” I said, carrying it to where she sat on an old mattress, smoking cigarettes and sorting through pictures.

She lifted the lid, took a look, and then set it behind her on the bed. “I’ll have to think about that and tell you later,”
she answered.

In other words, figure it out for yourself.

I’m tired of figuring things out for myself! Just tell me what the stupid contraption is. Just tell me why I look like this,
feel like this, behave like this. Why am I awake when everyone else is asleep, and what if that boy doesn’t know any better
and ends up liking me? The same way Patti didn’t know any better and invited Felicia and me to her slumber party, thereby
ruining our friendship.

The very word
slumber
makes you tired. The perfect combination of
slump
and
lumber,
something that is dead to the world. I wish I were dead to the world, or the world were dead to me. Something. Because recently
everything seems too alive, especially the boy Hector, with his naked what-seemed-like admiration. What if I end up marrying
him and on the wedding night my mother hands over the contraption in the attic?

The heat kicks on, the house exhaling its hot breath. Over there on his pillow, Raymond squints in his sleep, dreaming whatever
he dreams about, men crawling across braided rugs. Over here on my pillow, I’m finally starting to slide away from
it all, my body taking my head with it.
Hector.
It means something, but I can’t remember what.

What does
hector
mean? I ask the unknown somebody. No answer, but then just as I’m falling asleep another memory floats up from the long-ago
visit to Red Rock Farm: Being last in a line of kids trooping past a pen full of pigs, and there was a boy in there washing
them, using a broom dipped in soapy water. He had jumbled teeth, red hair, and, when he turned, a hand-lettered sign pinned
to the back of his coat.
BULLY,
it said.

It’s embarrassing to think about now, but when I was in about second grade, my parents held my birthday party at Prospect
Point, right in the shelter where this Saturday night’s beer party will be held. I have a picture of it, all little girls
wearing dresses and patent leather shoes, our hair frizzed and held down with bows and headbands, everyone smiling with me
in the middle, posing the way I always did back then, grinning into my own shoulder.
I know I’m not cute,
that pose seemed to say,
but I’m still having fun at this party.

If only I could resurrect that attitude, put it on just for the night, like Gretchen Quist’s cheerleader jacket. It’s how
Martha Van Dalle lives her whole life—our most popular girl, who is wild and tubby and likes everyone, including herself,
it seems. The thing is, you
should
like yourself if you’re Martha Van Dalle, a girl who first of all ran a pair of giant underpants up the school flagpole and
second of all turned herself in when someone else got caught for it.

I was framed,
Hector said, about being sent to Red Rock.

Me in my little blue dress with the see-through sleeves.
I’m still having fun at this party.

*     *     *

Ringgold breaks the news to me on Thursday that I can’t use my real bird as part of my art project. I’m hiding out during
lunch, helping him prep canvases for the eighth graders to paint on.

“I thought I argued it pretty successfully, but in the end, it was no,” Ringgold says regretfully. “It turns out there’s a
rule about having animals in school.”

Somebody should tell that to the frogs in the science closet. The flat white paint we’re using to prep the canvases is called
gesso. I’m learning everything from Ringgold, good old teacher who lets me hang around his room even when he isn’t here. Not
that other teachers wouldn’t—they all get excited if they think you like their subject—but who would want to hang around a
civics room or a science lab, when you can come in here and figure out what else to put in the wire egg basket you’re going
to hang from your painting. If it can’t be my real bird, can it be a drawing of a bird? A picture of a bird cut out of a magazine?
The word
BIRD
written on a piece of paper?

“Why not for now just keep your mind open to possibilities,” Ringgold says. “Remember, in a little over a week you’ll be seeing
things in the Art Institute of Chicago that could—or actually
will—
trigger new ideas.”

Except I’m not going to the Art Institute of Chicago. At our house we don’t have one dollar, let alone eight.

A lone feather? A human finger? An Easter egg? A doll’s head?

The thing is, once you start thinking about surrealism, everything starts to seem both relevant and absurd. A pencil? A piece
of twine? A fork? Air?

Suddenly air seems like the best thing to have in the egg
basket. Then I’m truly keeping my mind open to possibilities. The possibility of a bird. Should I say that out loud to Ringgold?

I can’t explain it very well, but nevertheless, he slaps himself in the forehead. “See?” he asks me. “This is what happens
when they look at art! Sure, you’re captivated by Ernst, but then you
move beyond
his sphere of influence into something your own. The
possibility of a bird
is more beautiful than the bird itself—although I’m sure your own bird is a great one—because it exists only in the imagination
of the viewer. That means the bird becomes both deeply specific
and
universal.”

I know what it sounds like, but when you’re in there talking to him, painting a whole row of white canvases white, it actually
makes sense.

My father goes missing somewhere in there, between the night when he’s downstairs roaring and the weekend. In a way this is
good because it means my mother stops paying attention to her kids.

“I’m staying at Cindy Falk’s on Saturday,” I announce.

“You don’t tell, you ask.”

“Can I?”

She smokes a cigarette and pokes at a skillet full of hamburger and beans, the dinner she makes when she’s tired of people
not appreciating her cooking.

“I don’t care what any of you do,” she says finally.

Felicia doesn’t show up for Van Leuven’s class on Thursday, but I pass her in the hall later that day and she’s wearing a
vest I’ve never seen before. The front is a herringbone pattern and
the back is plain brown; she wears it over a white blouse. Actually I may have seen it before, on Maroni. The skirt is familiar,
bought at the Style with last summer’s babysitting money.

“Hi,” she says as we pass each other.

“Hi,” I answer.

And that’s it.

Friday morning, Gretchen Quist stops at my locker with the cheerleading jacket.

“It your,” she says, handing it over in a paper grocery bag. She’s being followed by a football player named Richard Manfredi,
who everyone calls Freddy Man. He’s carrying her books, leaving her free to flap around.

“Thanks,” I say. It’s heavier than I would have thought, I guess because of the leather sleeves.

“Bye, jackie!” Gretchen cries as I put the jacket in my locker, and she whirls off down the hall.

Friday afternoon I get called out of gym to go to the office.

“You’re not in trouble,” Mrs. Knorr says, using a razor blade to take tape off the window. “Just sit there and he’ll be out
in a minute.”

I sit.

Mrs. Knorr gets a spray bottle and starts cleaning the glass. It’s not that great to be in the principal’s office in a gym
suit; it’s cold, my legs are all mottled, and a kid running the mimeograph machine is just turning the handle and staring
at me.

The principal’s door opens and out comes Patti Michaels, followed by the principal.

“So let’s keep cheering,” he tells her in a hearty voice.

“We will,” she answers.

“Above a C,” he says.

“I know,” she answers.

“Not for anyone’s good but yours,” he says.

“I know,” she answers.

“And you’re next?” he asks me.

“This is the one with the math,” Mrs. Knorr reminds him.

“Oh!” he says. “You’re not in trouble.”

His office has tall windows and is known for looking out over the parking lot, where people skipping can be spotted. On his
desk there’s a potted plant with an old ribbon stuck in the dirt, a wooden paddle that says
EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE A TEACHER’S AIDE,
and an ashtray filled with paper clips.

“The paddle is a gag,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

“Given to me by staff,” he says. “Which brings me to… our math staffer, Mr. Lepkis… would like to see us move you out of gifted
and back into regular.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Sometimes with these so-called gifted programs, people don’t thrive as much as the powers that be would have you believe.
So then you’re in the position of moving a student around in a way that could make them feel they aren’t smart. Or aren’t
learning at a rapid rate, say.”

“Okay.”

“Because in a regular class, I have a feeling you’d be right at the top.”

“Okay.”

“So from now on,” he consults a piece of paper, “you’ll have study hall, room 206, during gifted-math hour, and you’ll have
regular math, room 103, during your current study hall time.”

“Okay.”

Out in the hall, Patti is lurking until the end of the period, so she walks with me back to the gym.

“Were you in trouble?” she asks.

“No, but I thought I was at first,” I tell her. “For keeping my admit slip the other day—they didn’t put my name on it, the
date, or a time, and Nagy didn’t make me give it to her.”

“Galen will buy that from you!” she exclaims.

We peek in the gym door. They’re doing basketball drills, while Mr. Pettle sits on the sidelines, wedged into a student desk
reading a paperback and pulling on his mustache.

“They should have that guy as our principal,” Patti says.

A pair of hand-me-down suede boots arrives unexpectedly on Saturday, in a box of otherwise wrong clothes given to my mother
by someone at work. They get offered first to Meg, who tries to jam her big feet in there but can’t. Cinderella slips them
on without any difficulty.

“Crap, are those cute,” Meg says.

Are they ever. Almost eerily so. The way everything seems to be working out right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended
up dead before the night is over. At the bottom of the box is a miniature purse containing love beads.

“We could hang those from our rearview mirror,” Meg suggests.

“That I can do without,” my mother answers, pushing the
box out of the way but not getting up from the couch. You never see her just sitting on a Saturday unless she’s on the phone,
and even then never here, on the couch. She looks around. “Where are my cigarettes?”

“In the kitchen, probably,” I say, looking down at my new boots. In two hours I’ll take a bath and then put on my burgundy
shirt, long underwear, blue jeans, the cheerleader jacket, and these.

“I mean, where are they
go get them,
” she says.