Palo Alto: Stories (7 page)

We were back in the kitchen, and I got a glass from the cupboard and took some water from the sink. He took a sip. Then he took another one. Through the kitchen door I could see Pork talking to Adam and some other guys. They were looking toward me and laughing. Adam made a gesture and smiled. I turned back to Ryan.

“You feel better?”

He nodded. He did look a little better. He finished the water. I took the glass and put it in the sink.

“Follow me,” I said. I took his hand. We went upstairs. I led him down the hall to the twins’ parents’ room. He didn’t say anything. I told him to sit on the side of the bed. I told
him to lie back and he did. His feet were on the floor. Then I undid his pants. I pulled his boxer shorts down to his feet. I did it for a while. He made sounds.

I stopped. I said, “Do you want to do anything else?”

He said, “No.”

After it was finished, he pulled his pants back up. I sat on the side of the bed next to him. I asked him if he liked it.

We went downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs I stopped and he kept walking. The party was dying, but there were still people there. These people seemed slow and drunk and smiley and evil. I went into the kitchen to get some water. I went to the sink and picked up the glass Ryan used before. There was some water in it and someone had put a cigarette in it. I cupped my hands and drank right from the faucet. I turned off the water and walked out toward the living room, where I had seen Adam before. Now Ryan was sitting on the couch with Adam. Adam was laughing. Ryan was laughing too in a shy way.

When Stacey died no one knew what happened. It was after the homecoming dance.
Of course
Stacey was sophomore princess. She was that kind of person. A cheerleader. She was going out with Casey McDonald, and it was weird because it seemed like Casey really liked her. They were going out for six months. I saw them over the summer, at Steve Olds’s, and one time at Lake Tahoe during the Fourth of July. It was crazy. We were at a huge party. One thousand people at one house. Tosh Masuda was there with Adam and all those guys.
Tosh had a gun, and when the fireworks started going off, Tosh started shooting the gun in the air. It was really stupid; the bullets could have fallen back and hit someone.

And Casey and Stacey were there, and it was so weird because Casey actually looked happy. Before Stacey, he hated girls. He and Byron would just fuck them and treat them like shit. He was in Roberto’s club, the Dirty Dozen. They all competed to see who could fuck the most girls. Sometimes they videotaped it.

But there he was, with Stacey, watching the fireworks. Both were holding red keg cups, and they had big smiles on their faces, even when Tosh was shooting the gun. And I had never had that. I had never had a boyfriend. I had never watched fireworks with anyone.

Homecoming was just like every other dance, it wasn’t a big event. We weren’t in Texas. The twins and I got pretty drunk and we stood in the corner of the gym and snuck apricot schnapps from my purse and laughed at the idiots. I didn’t see Ryan. I wanted to call him but I didn’t have his number. I saw John Olds and I asked him where Ryan was. He said that Ryan was out of town for the weekend.

After that I wanted to leave. The ceremony was going on. Stacey was up there with the other princesses. Then they had the Royal Court Dance. Stacey ditched her sophomore prince and danced with Casey. His eyes were closed and her eyes were closed. I guess it was their last dance. Guns N’ Roses were playing.

I went outside to have a cigarette. Adam was out there smoking. He was drunk. He told me to follow him, and we
went to the pool. We walked to the place in the fence behind the diving boards where the barbed wire is fucked up. He climbed the fence and jumped over.

He told me to climb over. I threw my purse to him and I climbed, but it was harder than I thought. My heels kept getting caught. I should have taken them off. When I got over I was tired.

He wanted to get into the pool and I said no. He took his clothes off. He had a swimmer’s body. He was very good-looking. Like an Israeli hero. Freshman year he was too pretty; he looked like a girl. Then he became a man.

He jumped in the pool and he was in the pool, swimming around naked.

“Get in the pool, Emily.”

“No.”

“Get in the fucking pool.”

“No.”

Another night I would have, but it didn’t seem fun that night. It was old and familiar. Adam was mad because he could tell I was changing.

“You can be a real cunt, you know that?”

He was swimming toward the side of the pool like a shark. I started backing away. He got out, naked; I knew he was going to throw me in, and I had my dress on. I ran but I was in my heels. At the fence, I looked back and he was coming, his dick was flapping. I tried to climb, but he grabbed me off the fence. I screamed. He carried me over his shoulder. I scratched his back and bit his shoulder. He kept walking, and then threw me in.

Once I was in, he started putting his clothes back on. I was yelling at him and trying to splash him so that his clothes would be wet too, but I didn’t get him. My dress came up around me like a silver-pink jellyfish.

When he was dressed, he climbed the fence and left. I floated for a while in the black water and then I climbed out. My purse was by the fence. I picked it up and took out a cigarette and sat at the edge of the pool and let my legs dangle in the water with my heels on.

There was a moon and it was on the water. A miniature moon rocking on the little waves. I always see nice images like that but I don’t know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.

I smoked the whole cigarette and then flicked it into the pool. I lit another one and stood up in my wet dress and walked to the fence. I took a drink of apricot schnapps. I took my heels off and threw them over the fence. I climbed and this time the fence hurt my toes and feet. I picked up my shoes and went back to the dance, dripping water as I went.

The two mothers at the door gave me a funny look, but I walked past before they could say anything. Inside, everyone was dancing to Dr. Dre. I saw Adam on the other side of the gym with Byron and Roberto. Adam’s hair was still wet and slicked back. They were laughing. I walked around and walked up behind Adam and I poured my apricot schnapps over his head.

Roberto made a noise like “Ooooooooo.” All the schnapps
hadn’t come out before Adam turned around, so I started flinging it in his face. He tried to grab my arms. He grabbed the left one, the one without the bottle. I kept splashing it in his face and he couldn’t get my right arm to make me stop. Roberto was laughing a lot in the background, and everyone around made a circle because I was yelling and calling Adam a Jew motherfucker. Finally he slapped me across the face. I swung the bottle and it hit him above his eye. Then I dropped the bottle and it broke on the floor.

That was when Mr. Forest, the dean, tried to break it up, but Adam had already grabbed me. He threw me on the gym floor. There was a squeaking sound, like basketball shoes during a game.

They sat us in the medic’s room, where the athletes usually go, and called our parents, but my mom didn’t answer. They kept me there until she answered. One hour later she answered and then she came and they told her what happened. We drove home and my mom wasn’t very mad at me.

Later at home, my mom and I were smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table. All the lights were out except for the one in our little kitchen nook. The place was filled with smoke. Then the phone rang. For a second I thought about Ryan, but my mom said it was Adam. I walked over and hung it up.

“You don’t want to talk to him?”

“He’s an asshole, they all are.”

“Are you going to break up?”

“He’s not my boyfriend!”

We sat and smoked. It was dark except for the overhead light, which was brown-yellow. Everything seemed yellow: the
fridge, the kitchen table. The living room rug was a dirty yellow. My mom’s face, and the camel on the box. I saw me and my mom from outside my head. Two yellow-haired women sitting across a yellow table in a yellow kitchen full of smoke.

My mom went to bed and I smoked some more cigarettes.

A while later there was a tapping at the door. At first I didn’t think about it because it was really soft, but it was constant and regular so I became aware of it.

I knew it was Adam. I sat at the table and it kept going, soft and steady. The door was in the darkness outside the circle of light in the kitchen. God, I didn’t want to open it.

It felt like I could sit there forever, and the tapping would never stop.

We all went to the camp.

We were twelve and thirteen years old. Me and Ivan and Howard and Ute and Ed. Jewish, Russian, Jewish, Italian, and half Korean/half white. I had turned thirteen in April.

It was a YMCA water-ski camp. There was a husband and wife who ran everything, but the husband was the head counselor. The husband had well-manicured dark hair and a clipped beard that fit his face; the wife had blond hair to her shoulders. He was in his forties and she looked younger. A pleasant, Christian-looking mom and dad
.

He wore a tan explorer’s hat with a floppy brim and a string that hung down under his chin. His wife did the
roll call and made sure everybody was where they should be. They both led the songs around the campfire at night, but she led more of them. Sometimes he would play his guitar. We sang many different songs, and sometimes the husband told ghost stories. It sounded like he had told the stories a million times, but that he was trying to make them exciting each time. I think he was very proud of them and thought they were good just because he had told them so many times. At the end we always sang “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

It was so dirty around the fire and I’d always get smoke in my mouth.

We were too old for the camp.

Jane was our counselor even though we were all boys. She was the daughter of the head counselor and his wife. Jane had blond hair like her mom. Later she told us that she was the black sheep of her family.

Another counselor was Hulk.

Hulk was very tall and big, like a bulky potato shape, fat but really strong. He had huge calves that were red from the sun because he wore shorts all the time. His shorts hung to his fat knees and he had them in all ugly colors, like pink, and they were dirty and worn from the woods. Or fluorescent orange with swirl designs, or cut-off denim. He wore big brown Timberland boots without tying the laces. He had a curly mullet and a goatee and he wore Vuarnet sunglasses. The Vuarnets were a single lens that went across both eyes and reflected rainbows in the sunlight.

Ed and I had had him for a counselor the first time, when
we were eight. That was for a different camp in a different set of woods, but Hulk was the same then.

Howard was Jewish and I was Jewish because my mom was Jewish. I never went to Hebrew school but I was circumcised.

When I was a kid my friend Nick and I made a potion together. Nick was French; his dad had a pointy beard and spoke with an accent. We got a big rectangular plastic tub and put snails in it and red pyracantha berries, which were poisonous and made the blackbirds drunk so they flew into the windows and died. And we took cat poo from the sandbox with a plastic shovel and put it in the soup. At the end we peed in it. My penis was like a mushroom and my French friend’s was draped in skin, like a monk’s cowl.

We tried to get my little brother to drink it but he wouldn’t. We left our potion in the backyard in the rectangular tub. One day I found a dead rat next to it.

In fourth grade Mr. DeFelice was my teacher. He was younger than all the other teachers. He said his name meant he was always happy. He told us he ate pizza and drank beer at Luigi’s in Mountain View. That was the next city over, but far for me. He said he was good at Top Gun on Nintendo. He could get to the space level. A jet in space doesn’t make sense.

*   *   *

In ninth grade we watched a lot of Holocaust stuff. We saw pictures and then a film of the naked bodies being bulldozed. Penises on the men and vaginas and breasts on the women. They didn’t seem like real penises. I looked close. Some were big.

I had a cat named Toby. He was put to sleep at the vet’s. Gassed? Buried? Incinerated. Way of all flesh and fur.

Ed was at my very first Y camp when we were eight. He was half Korean from his mom, and his dad was a big, white, bald dork. One morning Hulk took us to the lake. It was so cold. We had our towels around our shoulders. Mine was
The
Incredible Hulk,
Ed had
The Dukes of Hazard.
There was a Confederate flag on the side of their car.

Hulk said we were all in the Polar Bear Club. He was the whale of the club.

We took our shirts off. Nobody had muscles. Hulk said he would give a Coke to whoever went in the lake naked.

One night in ninth grade we were drunk and wandering around the neighborhoods in a pack. There were some girls with us too. There was nowhere to go and no more alcohol.

We walked through Mid-Peninsula, the school for bad kids who got kicked out of other schools. They were allowed to smoke cigarettes during their brunch break. They were mostly white and they wore a lot of black. One year a kid brought a gun to school and shot his ex-girlfriend at brunch because she
had a new boyfriend. Then he shot the new boyfriend. Then he shot himself. The girl didn’t live, but the new boyfriend lived.

We never had any black friends. Not before high school and not in high school. But we liked black rappers. Dr. Dre, 2Pac, DJ Quik, Too $hort, and the Geto Boys.

At water-ski camp there was a black girl, Angela. She had no friends at camp because she was weird. She would talk about aliens. She said she and her brothers saw aliens, but it sounded like her brothers were her only friends and that her brothers were the ones who came up with the alien idea.

We dared Howard to make out with her in the back of the bus. He did one night. On the way back to the campsite he kissed her, but it was messy, like two lizards. We were in the seat in front of them and we saw him feel her small breasts, and under the towel he felt her vagina. We looked back and saw it all. It was a purple towel with nothing on it. He was the first of us to do all that, but it was with the black alien girl.