In Zanesville (6 page)

“You want to act like a three-year-old? You can sit there until it’s gone,” she says, lighting a cigarette.

My troubles are accumulating. The dying kitten, waiting in the cobwebby dark for me to come and do nothing, and now the canary,
put to bed while it’s still light outside, trapped behind a dish towel, encased in the terrible fate of a bird who has never
flown, but who watches all day through the dining room window while other birds land and take off from the clothesline. Sometimes
he sings so elaborately and desperately that I have to put my hands over my ears.

And there’s no way Yvonne can take Miles with her to Arkansas; even if she felt like it, he wouldn’t be able to hold on. A
tiny boy in a bad diaper, abandoned in the backyard, fingers gripping the chain-link fence as it gets darker and darker, as
Lurch shoves his empty bowl around.

“She’s bawling,” Meg says, and gets up to remove the cloth from the birdcage. The canary resumes swinging and looking out
the window.

My father wakes up for a second, lifts his fork, and puts it back down. My leg starts shaking and I can’t get it to stop.
I start hiccuping, violently.

“All right now, that’s enough,” my mother says. She removes my plate and makes me a fresh bowl of cereal. “What’s the matter
with you?”

Felicia eats her dumplings carefully, not looking at anyone.

A half hour later, we have no trouble getting out of dishes or out of the house, although my mother calls me into the dining
room before we leave, to ask why sleeping in a canvas box is so appealing to me when I have a bed right upstairs. Also, she
doesn’t want me going over there and acting like nobody fed me dinner.

“And let me ask you this,” she says, whipstitching a hem, squinting against her cigarette. “Don’t you two ever get sick of
each other?”

“We’re sick of each other right now,” I say.

We stop at the end of her block to rest for a while, lying back against someone’s mossy terrace. It’s a stagnant Saturday
night in Zanesville, velvety black and hot. The parochial kid’s light is on and everything is visible but the boy himself—a
desk lamp, a picture of Jesus, the top of a cluttered bureau, part of a mirror with a palm frond behind it.

“His mother should get him some curtains,” Felicia says.

On a different Saturday night, back when I babysat for the
big quiet boy Daniel, his mother had shown me the new curtains she had hung in his bedroom. They were crisp white, with bright
farm animals appliquéd on them. They looked like they had been bought at a store, but in fact Lisa had made them herself.

“He loves anything from a farm!” Lisa had said, bending over Daniel in his railed bed, smoothing his curly hair. When he had
a cold, she had demonstrated how to clear his nose, using a pointed rubber ball and a warm washcloth.

“Okay,” she told him, pressing on the bulb to create a vacuum and then poking it into his nostril. “Big sniff!” she said in
a lilting voice, releasing the bulb and drawing out the contents of his nose, which were deposited in a tissue. It was actually
an interesting tool, but I never got good at using it.

If my kitten had ended up with someone like her, he’d be playing with a ball of yarn right now instead of dying.

“Hey, wait,” I say, sitting up.

The camper is dark and mostly silent. Felicia has a habit of sighing in her sleep, like her dreams are disappointing her,
and she does that now—sigh, sigh… sigh, sigh—on her back with one arm flung over the edge of the bunk, the inside of her wrist
untanned and vulnerable, and the other draped over her forehead. With the sighing, the theatrical arms, the occasional donkey
kicks, she has as big a personality asleep as she does awake. I, on the other hand, sleep like a sidekick—on my side. All
limbs are kept close to the body for safety reasons, and a tube sock is laid across my face, a holdover from sharing a bed
in childhood, when I had to sleep with a pillow over my head, then just the
pillowcase, then a hanky, now anything that symbolically makes me think I won’t be hurt while I’m sleeping.

Footsteps.

A foot of door is unzipped and Felicia’s dad sticks his head in to look around.

“Asleep,” he whispers.

“Poke them,” Phyllis whispers.

“I can
see
them,” he whispers.

They switch places.

“Girls!” Phyllis whispers.

Nothing, just the faint couplets of sighing.

“Girls!”

I startle up onto my elbows, my sock falling to the floor. “What?” I say, squinting. I can just see the shape of her upper
body and head, the moon shining through her teased, Saturday night hair.

“Oh, nothing, honey,” she whispers. “We were just back and wanted to make sure you were here and all.”

“We’re here,” I say sleepily, and crawl farther into my sleeping bag.

Zip.

One, two, three, four, five.

A creak and a snap as the back door opens and shuts.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Flea kicks off her sleeping bag.

“Nice sighing,” I say.

Three minutes later, we let ourselves inside the dusty blackness of the vacant garage and wait. A soft thud and the padding
of paws, a meow. Blacky Strout. After a moment, a muffled clatter. Ruffles.

Silence.

He’s always come to me, no matter what, as soon as we stepped inside. I sit down right where I am, on the mangy dirt. Oh,
please, he can’t be dead; he cannot have died alone in a jumble of roofing supplies and empty motor oil cans. My legs have
started trembling like crazy again.

In one final sweep of the flashlight, we find him, up on a shelf jammed with rusted paint rollers and empty jars. He looks
tiny and moth eaten, blinking into the light.

“Whew,” Felicia says.

We have to go eight blocks, through her neighborhood, through my neighborhood, and then into Monroe Park, a neighborhood where
the shrubbery is denser. Any potential benefit of this—for people who might be out after curfew, carrying a cardboard box
full of cats—is more or less undone by the fact that a number of teachers live in Monroe Park. I don’t care to see teachers
anywhere except in their classroom and perhaps the hallway outside it; in Monroe Park I once saw my fourth-grade teacher on
a step stool, painting a downspout while her husband stood there talking to her, drinking a beer. Another can of beer sat
on the stoop, next to the open paint. Everything pointed to its being the teacher’s.

It isn’t that I don’t know they’re regular people with regular lives; it’s that I find it confusing to think of them that
way. A case in point is the time when I was a second grader and went to my friend’s house for lunch and her mother was in
bed with the mailman.

Me and Dee Jurgenmeyer, walking into her mom’s room to ask what there was to eat, and there was the whole confusing
scene: the messy-haired divorced mother in a pale blue nightgown, sleeping in the middle of the day, the mailman’s familiar
face with strangely red lips like a woman’s, and the mailbag itself, hanging on the bedroom door. For a long time afterward
I would suddenly think, Dee’s mother takes a nap with the mailman, and I’d feel strange about it. And yet a mailman would
get tired too, just like anyone else. Maybe more tired, with the bag.

We trade off carrying the box. Felicia is starting to cry a little. We have no idea how we ended up dragging these cats down
with us—they were perfectly happy in their garage when we met them. Now one is dying and the other two are frantic. Everything
we go near gets ruined. Somewhere there’s a boy with a damaged hand and a mother possibly riding a motorcycle to Arkansas,
a bowlegged baby teetering on a top step. Before putting Blacky Strout in the box, Felicia had taken a long time saying good-bye
to him.

She’s crying pretty hard now, which somehow makes me feel better.

“Don’t cry,” I say kindly, lugging the box. Inside, the kittens are sliding around.

She is silent for a while, walking along. “I’m not,” she says finally.

The house is low and composed, with green shutters, all dark except for a faint light way back in the vicinity of the kitchen.
On the porch is a basket of trailing ivy, a white wicker chair with a cushion, and an antique crank-type doorbell. We creep
up and set the box on the porch floor, untie Ruffles from his T-shirt, close the flaps loosely, and tiptoe away. Along the
edge of the yard, in the black shadows, Felicia stops so abruptly that I run into her.

“What if they’re on vacation or something?” she whispers.

Vacation! While we’re pondering this, there’s a thump and the cardboard box starts moving. A paw pokes through the flaps,
thrusting around in the air; then a head squirms through alongside it and Ruffles is out, scrambling across the porch, up
and over the railing, into the night.

Gone.

“Shite!” Felicia hisses.

She shoves me forward and I dart across the lawn and up the steps. On the dim porch, I can barely tell the remaining kittens
inside the box apart, which one is dying and which one is running for sheriff. From this view, Monroe Park looks exotic and
sinister, with its moonlit teachers’ houses and overgrown bushes. There’s a narrow garage next door, made of crumbling brick,
with ivy framing a small, dirty window. From here I can see that the side door is ajar, and that’s where I direct Felicia.
Over there, over there. She run-walks across the lawn and shimmies inside.

Freckles doesn’t seem to be breathing. I put one finger under his chin, and his head seems limp. But then he lifts it toward
me without opening his eyes, and I lean into the box and kiss him. As he settles himself deeper into the towel, I give Strout
one last pet and close the flaps. I ring the doorbell and sprint, down the steps and across the lawn.

The garage is junky but it smells good, like gasoline. I squeeze through the door and grope my way over a fallen bicycle to
the dirty window, just as the porch light goes on and Trent comes out, wearing a pair of striped pajama bottoms and nothing
else. He looks down at the box and then
toward the street, shielding his eyes from the light. Lisa comes through the screen door then, in a white nightgown and bare
feet, her hair loose and curly on her shoulders.

There are cobwebs all around us, one of them stretched like a shroud across my face. Felicia has a death grip on the bottom
of my shirt. The garage has a dirt floor; anything could be living in here, including a snake.

Lisa kneels and lifts each of our kittens out for a moment and then sets them back inside the box. Lisa and Trent talk quietly,
at one point both of them pausing to stare penetratingly out into the night.

When Strout pokes his head up and starts looking around, Trent lifts the box by its flaps and carries it inside while Lisa
holds the screen door. She starts to follow and then changes her mind and walks to the edge of the porch, shielding her eyes
and looking out toward the silent, empty street.

Her nightgown comes to just below the knee and seems made of gauze; in the porch light we can see right through it. Her eyes
are dark and calm, like Daniel’s. She gives a little wave, out into the summer dark, and then turns and follows her husband
inside.

We can’t bring ourselves to go back to the camper. Too dank, too claustrophobic, like being zipped into a gym bag for the
night. Instead, we lie on someone’s terrace and look at the sky. There are a million stars, and it’s warm. On the other side
of the street, the parochial kid’s window is open and there’s a low lamp on somewhere in the room.

It was strange seeing Lisa and Trent like that, in their pajamas.

“They were definitely letting it all hang out,” Felicia says.

The only signs of life I ever saw in their bedroom were the tracks the vacuum cleaner left in the pale blue carpet. Nothing
in the drawers but folded clothes, nothing on the nightstand but an alarm clock, nothing on the dresser but a cluster of glass
grapes and a padded jewelry box. Nothing to alert you to their nighttime selves, his bare shoulders and chest, the precise
line of hair running down his abdomen, disappearing into the waistband of his pajama bottoms, the dark smudges visible through
her gown, the frank way she looked up at him, kneeling. You could somehow see that it wouldn’t be that big a leap from them
inspecting a box of kittens together to an activity closer to what Yvonne and Chuck might be involved in.

We lie there for a while on the sloped terrace, looking up at the black sky. This is how poor Daniel would look up at the
ceiling, no matter where you put him. Just gazing upward, chin wet with wonder. I hope they take him outside sometimes, in
the warm months, because this is so interesting, the immense galaxy looming overhead—billions of stars, ringed by the oak
trees and slanted roofs of Zanesville.

Felicia cracks her knuckles, one by one, while an airplane blinks its way across the sky. We both know the Kozak family has
won. At least we’ll be getting a raise.

“We’re just finishing out the summer,” she says finally. “And then no more babysitting, ever again.”

I’ve always mentally kept track of them by cataloging the whole clan in descending order: Chuck, Yvonne, Derek, Renee, Stewart,
Wanda, Dale, Miles, Lurch, whatever snakes they’ve been able to round up, and the tarantula.

“If you’re doing size, Lurch is bigger than Miles,” Felicia points out.

She’s right, it should go Lurch and then Miles, but I hate to see Miles followed by a snake. “I’m doing it by species,” I
say.

“Oh,” she says.

I’ll be able to pay for the things I’ve already laid away plus new things that haven’t even arrived in the store yet. Besides
what I’m going to wear to school once it starts, I wouldn’t mind having a new nightgown, something delicate and gauzy.

In the future, I want something more interesting to happen than normally happens to me. “I’m sick of being a late bloomer,”
I say.

“Ha,” she says. “You should be.”

“We both are, according to your mother, who said it to my mother,” I inform her.

“I hope she doesn’t mind getting her head smacked off,” Felicia says to the sky. “I mean mine, not yours.”