Lawnboy (19 page)

“Evan,” he called.

I turned. I fumbled inside my locker, pretending not to hear.

“Would you hand me that towel on the bench?”

The drain gulped down the overflow. His smile was shy, as if he were thinking something enormous, beautiful.

My toes clenched tighter into the concrete.

Many months passed before I again allowed myself to walk into Stan’s store. It smelled of torn wood, matches, grass seed, pesticides—a confluence of smells that I associate, to this day, only with that memory. In my pocket, I carried an arrowhead I’d found beneath an ice plant on the Metrozoo grounds. It was my talisman, my lucky charm. I’d attributed several minor miracles to its existence—the recovery of a $50 bill and the rapid healing of a fractured ankle. My plan was this: I’d leave it on his counter in an unmarked bag without note or explanation. He could do with it what he wanted. I knew it was hopeless, and I knew it was unreasonable, but the exchange had been hovering over me, a ruined black blanket, and I just wanted to get it off my mind.

Stan was back in the supply room. I leaned the lunch bag against the cash register, then turned to make my getaway.

At once he came toward me with a crowbar. He looked kindly and quizzical, as if he thought I needed help. Then all at once his brows drew together.

“Don’t I know you?”

My breathing went sluggish. I imagined him bringing the crowbar down across my forehead, splitting it in two.

“You were one of those boys,” he said. “Get out of here.”

“I didn’t—”

“I’ll call the police. Get out.”

I left the store without explaining myself. It was his pain and not the crowbar that frightened me. Even then, I knew that it wasn’t just about my indifference, but about every time he’d heard the word
faggot
muttered behind his back. That night, lying on the living-room sofa, I thought about the arrowhead in the lunch bag. It was a vacant, meaningless gesture that wouldn’t console him, I was positive. He probably even tossed it away. But there was always the chance that he kept it, and it’s serving him now, giving him luck, warding off anyone who’d hurl a word at him, or anyone who’d let it happen.

***

Hector and I leaned against a triple-loader at the outdoor Laundromat. We were working an entirely new look: our slacks narrow, our lashes smudgy with goo. Even our lipstick—glacial, white—coordinated with our jackets, tight vinyl numbers crisscrossed with zippers. We were space-age versions of Jean Shrimpton and Marianne Faithfull, right out of 1967. I looked straight ahead, trying to erase and assert myself at once. But I wanted to go further. More than anything I wanted to hammer through my shame, become enameled, incandescent like Hector—“Mistress Chevelle,” as he called himself today. Something was off, though. If I was going to do this, I had to do it right. I looked over toward the ladies beside the dryers, taking in their weary, sardonic scorn of us. Where was that transformation that was supposed to take hold of me, whisking me off to that other sphere, where I was too perfected, too highly evolved to be bothered, beyond bitterness or spite? Was I just another failed fag, a dumb cluck, an old stick-in-the-mud?

I wondered sometimes whether, out of sheer self-protection, I’d simply never allowed myself to develop a taste for things feminine. I walked around convincing myself I wasn’t the least bit interested in cooking or fabric swatches or interior decoration or figure skating, but was that the essential me? What about my predilection for finding myself in public spaces designated for women only? How many times had I wandered into a bathroom only to find an absence of urinals, only to hear a terrified voice rising over the stalls: “Is that a man in here? Oh my God, I think it’s a man.”

“Are you having fun?” I said to Hector. “I’m not having very much fun.”

“What kind of talk is that?” Hector said.

“Maybe it’s just not the right look for me,” I said, tugging at my cat suit.

“You might be right. Maybe you should have done the Mary J. Blige thing.”

“What?”

“You know, black girl, blonde hair. That would have worked.”

“I personally think I’m the Liv Ullman type. We
both
could have done it. Did you ever see
Persona?
”

“Is anything ever right with you?” he said, flustered. “Hand me that detergent.” And before I knew it he’d poured another half-box into the washer compartment. Our clothes spun wildly, suds flinging against the glass.

The truth was we needed some diversion after the events of the week. Two nights before, the septic tank had overflowed, precluding us from doing our own laundry on the premises. Behind the office, a translucent stream flowed from the lid toward the mangrove banyans. The scent, to say the least, was less than pretty, prompting complaints from the guests.

I stared at one of the white-trashy women whose eyes had been fixed on us. “I don’t like the way she’s looking at me,” I said, loud enough for her to hear.

“Oh, get over it. She doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. She probably just thinks you’re some trollop.”

I fixed him with a level stare. My glance was high, my voice elevated. “Look who’s talking.”

“Slut.”

“You’re a joke.”

“Whore.”

“You’re a joke—a dirty joke from one end of this town to the other.”

We laughed, collapsing against each other. Our witnesses looked at us with a mixture of disdain and fascination. Hector clapped me hard on the shoulder. “There you go. Now you’re getting it down.”

A boy in a ripped T-shirt, dirty beret, and mutton-chop sideburns passed us, lugging a wash basket over his hip. His look seemed to be especially thought out, as if he’d spent a full ten minutes trying on various combinations in an effort to
seem
like he’d just thrown the whole shebang together. He had the look of someone who’d fixed a camera on himself, watching himself with every gesture, assuming that everyone else was doing the same.

“What do you think?” Hector said, nudging me in the side.

He kept staring at the boy with a flagrant, unnerving calculation. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Our church or theirs?”

I looked him over again. “Ours,” I said finally.

“No way, chica.” This was new: he’d taken to calling me chica in the last week.

“What do you mean?”

“Too sloppy.
Way
too sloppy.”

“Get out of town.”

“Listen to me,” he said, holding up his hand. “
Listen.
I’m going to teach you something. A fag wouldn’t do that. He’d shave the sides of his head. He’d keep it neat and severe around the ears, and he’d wipe off the mud from those shoes.”

“What mud?”

“And he isn’t looking around enough. Fags always look around.”

I looked at Hector, confounded. Where did this certainty come from? How could anyone possess such single-mindedness, such pigheaded belief in one’s point of view?

“Watch this,” he said. And before I could stop matters, he started speaking to the boy. “Excuse me, young man.
Pssst.
”

“Yes?”

“Could you tell me where you got your shoes?”

I slumped against the washer, stricken.

“Ben Southern,” he said. “Actually, they’ve got a giant sale going on. Thirty-eight bucks.”

“Really?”
Hector said. “They’re just the
sauciest
little numbers.” He swallowed demurely. “Would it be a terrible imposition if I asked you to let me try them on?”

My body temperature surged two degrees. Either he was going to punch us out or comply.

Seconds later, he was passing the shoes to Hector.

“Goodness, they’re
big,
” Hector said, looking down. “My feet are just
swimming
in them. I couldn’t possibly wear anything so
big.
”

“You know what they say,” he said shyly. “Big feet, big—”

“What’s your name?” Hector’s smile was huge and platinum, on the verge of ghastly. He passed back the shoes to the boy.

“Josef,” he said, glancing downward. “With an F. And yours?”

“I’m Mistress Chevelle. And this is my friend, Boca. But you can call her Big Pretty.”

Josef grinned back at us as he were in on the joke. He offered his hand to each of us and shook ours firmly. I was relieved. He was one of us.

“You girls from out of town?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Hector said. “Slave labor.”

He nodded, pretending to understand. He crunched his brow. “Well, have a good time while you’re here. It was nice meeting you.”

“Already?” Hector said wistfully.

“You watch yourselves, girls. Have fun on your trip.”

And then he wandered off, loading the silver washer with extreme care and attention.

“See?”
I said.

“See what. He’s not a fag, you dope. He’s fag
friendly.
He’s just a straight boy who’s comfortable with fags.”

“What?”

“There’s a big, big difference. You could get yourself into trouble.”

“Oh right.”

“The hair, dear, the hair.”

I pointed to my wig, suggesting the crew cut that lay beneath it. “I didn’t used to have fag hair.”

“You weren’t a fag.”

“Excuse me?”

“You weren’t a fag till I got a hold of you.” He curled up the issue of
Women’s Wear Daily
in his hand, gazed through it like a telescope. “In terms of style, at least.”

The heat off the dryers was making me swoon. I pictured my knees buckling, my face crashing flat to the floor. “Oh, is this some nasty remark about my sense of style?”

“No, it’s not some nasty remark about your sense of style,” he mimicked. “You were making some bad choices, that was all. You looked like some sorry-ass straight boy with your hair flopping all over your ears. No wonder you weren’t getting any dick.”

I could have throttled him. We weren’t going to get any dick looking like this, either. I stared at the front loaders, fixing my gaze on them, as if they were fireplaces—the fireplaces of Florida. I needed to turn off my thoughts. We might have been captive in Hell’s Laundromat, with pool table, raucous music, bar, free popcorn, and huge TV screen across which Morton Downey, Jr. hovered. I couldn’t help staring at the well-dressed, middle-aged woman beside the soap machine. She looked around nervously, with a barely suppressed panic. Her face carried all the doubts and anxieties of an aging flight attendant, the look in her eyes saying:
Where is my beauty? Why is it disappearing from me?

And I’d worried that
we’d
been out of place.

Hector was sitting in the yellow bucket seat, right leg crossed over the left knee. It was amazing: beneath his exterior, he still seemed butch, even butcher than usual. It troubled me that I’d actually been attracted to someone in an A-line miniskirt.

I gestured across the room toward Josef. “How would you know?”

“I
know,
” he said, pointing to the place between his eyes. “You have it, I have it. It’s just a question of whether you want to pay attention to it or not.”

But it was never that easy. I thought about Ross-Bob Vittori, a boy from my high school, who lisped with abandon, collected Jean Seberg memorabilia, and was in possession of the longest eyelashes this side of a Maybelline model. Despite these factors, he was still one of the most popular boys in school, with no shortage of dates, asking out a different girl each weekend, most of whom had called him first. Any number of people didn’t fit the bill, challenging expectations, resisting typecasting, but how could I begin to explain this to Hector? I knew him well enough: that brain was impossible to perforate.

I was thinking about one of the first boys I’d ever had a crush on. It was months before William. I ran into him every day at three o’clock, on my walk home from school, on my shortcut past the U of Miami Art Building. Invariably he was sitting within the shadow of an Australian pine, nibbling at a cream cheese and olive sandwich on white bread. I presumed he was an art major. But that in itself wasn’t the thing. There was something about him, a locus of energy that suggested a fiercely complex internal life. He wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world, and he couldn’t have been further from my type, which tended toward road thugs and serial killers, or more precisely, those who looked like them. But there was something about him. Maybe it was his chin whiskers—brown, downy—or the sketches in his notepad—fractured, strife-ridden, built from dashes, stars, and blips. I wanted nothing more than to save him from his pain. Soon enough, I was nodding to him, then he back at me, then we were actually mumbling hello, initiating that period of mutual recognition and appreciation.

It was a muggy, overcast day in early November when I walked into Bonita’s Glaceteria, a little place on Coral Way, to buy some lime-ice to cool down from the heat. I was actually in a light, cheerful mood—odd considering that I’d just been accepted to Yale, and the prospect of college unnerved me to no end.

When I looked to my right, I saw the art boy, Arden, smiling at me.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” I answered back.

We stood there for a stunned moment, staring at each other, not knowing how to proceed. Whole epochs might have passed. Then, for whatever reason, I crept to a table by the window, covering the left side of my face with my hand. My hairline pearled up with sweat. Here, I’d had every opportunity to sit down and chat, casually, without complication. I sat there sucking at my paper straw, looking for all intents and purposes like a moron, wishing that he’d get the hell out of the place, knowing that the mere fact of his existence was just further evidence of the universe’s essential cruelty and indifference.

To my dread, he stepped toward my table.

“Do I know you?” he said earnestly.

His accent was rounded, wide, as if he’d just stepped in off the prairie. He looked at me with luminous, grey-green eyes, a shade I’d never quite seen on anyone else. I’d never felt more defeated and desperate in my life. Then, as if somersaulting into a river of burning lava, I said: “Would you like to go to a movie with me this Saturday?”