The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (13 page)

When I started kindergarten at five and a half, Father wanted me to play sports with the other kids. He saw how lonely I was in school. It didn’t seem right to him that I was always and only with Tina during breaks. He favored soccer over T-ball because of the bat, over bowling because of the ball. Mother went along mostly because she was so swollen with her pregnancy.

Cassidy was dead set against it. He was against it right after he asked me if I wanted to play “in the cold and the rain and the suckin’ mud.”

“It’s not the rain or the mud or the cold,” I truthfully answered. I extended my index fingers from my fist and brought them together side by side I cupped my right hand, palm down, and brought it up and down at waist level four times.

Cassidy scratched his head and struggled a moment with the sign. Then he said, “Same kids as in your class right now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tina and home are better.”

“Ford,” he told Father, “it’s not the best of times ta start this soccer stuff with Jess. With Kate and the baby coming soon, ya know, it’ll be a real chore getting her to practices and games. What d’ya think, put it off a year? I mean, five is still real young for starting in on soccer.” It was the signup weekend and he had come over to sit in on my morning ASL lesson.

“We’ll manage, Joe,” Father said, not even looking up from the form he was filling out. “About how tall are you now, Jess? Do you know?”

“No.”

“Do you know how much you weigh?”

“No.”

He eyed me up and down. “I’ll put forty-four inches and forty-four pounds. Nobody’ll check it.” He jotted the numbers and mumbled, “Brown. Brown. No. No. Yes.” He looked up again. “You’ve had your TB shots and measles, haven’t you?”

“There’s no shot for TB,” Cassidy said with a medical finality I’d rarely heard from my physicians.

“Says here there is,” Father said tapping a line on the form. “I’m sure you had all this stuff. I’ll write down a date when you were, like, one and a half. Nobody’ll check it.”

“Ford,” Cassidy said, “it ain’t right.”

“Joe, I told you: nobody’ll check it. And if they do, we’ll just correct the dates and numbers. I mean, Jesus, this stuff isn’t like zip codes or anything.”

“Not the dates and stuff, Ford. Soccer. It ain’t right. She don’t really want ta do it in the first place. And it’s the same group a kids as in her class right now. They don’t get along in school and kickin’ a soccer ball around isn’t going ta change that a bit. I think she’d do better visiting with Tina or being here with us than running around in the cold with a bunch of kids who . . .” He stumbled for words for a second, before concluding, “. . . who she don’t like.”

“Well, Joe, sometimes you just got to try something new.” He signed his name to the bottom of the third page with a flourish. “Let’s go!” he said like one of those soldiers in the movies when they begin to attack and die.

What really soured me on the enterprise was my clumsiness. I had terrible balance. I was okay if I walked slowly, like in school, but as soon as I started running, I would start lurching and listing. Then my arms would start to thrust wildly, like a tight-wire walker desperately trying to prevent a fall. Running, I looked as strange as Jeremy in the presence of a sounding phone. I worried about the merciless teasing certain to come from the kids. They had never seen me run before. Really, only Tina and her mom had, when we went to the empty school ground to play. Then, we’d chase each other, Tina in those early months joyously stuck in the shouted first groove of my name, “J-J-J-J-J-J,” as she tried to catch me in a two-person game of “a-a-a-a-a-it,” and me barely out of her reach, flouncing like a windmill mounted on a boat sailing herky-jerky in a gale. Tina, exposed to crazy Jeremy day after day, thought nothing of my spastic sprints. What my classmates would think, and more importantly what they would say, would be something else entirely.

As we drove to the first practice that Saturday, I imagined how the girls in my class would look running on the field. All I could see in my mind’s eye were their six shining ponytails, gracefully rising and gracefully falling with each lope, perfect tails going up and down with each perfect stride. My hair was cut too short for a ponytail. It didn’t even cover my ears.

Everyone in the class showed up to join the team, the fourteen of us. Our coach was Mr. Lester, the third grade teacher. He had a thin mustache that made him look like he was always smiling. Which was good, because he never really did. But he never yelled, either. He let the parents do that at the games. They hardly needed his help. Mr. Lester was nice.

We practiced that day. There were cut-up oranges and water so cold it gave me an ache in my eyes.

We kicked the soccer ball to him a few times and he kicked it back. Then we did some drills. Timmy was made the goalie. His parents clapped and cheered, “Timmy! Tiiiimmm-eeee!” when he stepped in front of the net. They were eating potato chips from a big bag and were sharing a Diet Coke from a can. Timmy’s mother wore shorts. Each of her legs was bigger than my whole body.

I had been right about the girls. They ran beautifully. Marci was the best. She was so fast and could stop so easily and just as easily dart off again. All of their ponytails were well behaved, even Sasha’s, whose hair was kind of curly.

My turn came to run in the drill. Mr. Lester stood thirty feet away next to a brown rubber cone that looked like a toy volcano. Halfway between us, Courtney stood facing me. All I had to do was run, kicking the ball in front of me, past Courtney, all the way to Mr. Lester. He had a stopwatch in his hand and said, just like Father at home, “Let’s go!” I kicked the ball and ran after it and kicked it again and ran again. Then I kicked and missed far left and almost fell. I came back to the ball and kicked it hard, but it squibbled away to the right. I ran to it fast as I could and tried to kick it towards Courtney because she was in line with Mr. Lester. The ball rolled past her, and I had to run hard again. I kicked it three more times before, panting and dizzy, I got to the brown volcano.

“I think you’d make a good defender,” he said, looking at his watch. “Left side.”

My face was stinging hot from the running, and I was out of breath and still dizzy. I looked to the side of the field. Father stood smiling with his fist raised in victory salute. Cassidy looked down at the foot-worn grass with both hands in his pants pockets. Courtney passed me going to the starting point. “Dumbo. Your ears flap like baby Dumbo’s when you run.” She jogged past me, her ponytail burnished by the midday sun. The sight of the brown volcano made me want to vomit.

That night I stood on the toilet seat in my bathroom at home so I could see myself in the mirror, and I jogged in place. With each pounding step, my ear flapped down and a little forward due to the weight of the apparatus behind it.

I had seen the movie. Cassidy had brought it over when I was three and we watched it together a dozen times over the months. I loved that baby elephant, so brave and pure. What Courtney had said about me wasn’t untrue. I did look like him when he waved his big ears and tried to fly. Seeing that truth somehow took the sting out of Courtney’s snipe, and the anger out of my heart. On the coming Monday in school, when the new taunt from the ponytail herd began, “Dumbo, Dumbo, Dumbo,” I smiled at them and flapped both ears with my index fingers.

I counted all the more furiously during my soundless lunches. I was into the thousands now. The numbers, the words for the numbers, came in flocks, in herds, in droves that seemed to cover the backs of my eyes. I could make them whatever colors I chose. There were so many in my eyes I could see nothing else.

“What’s Dumbo thinking about?” Lexi asked me Tuesday. She had gotten her very own soccer goal for her backyard on Sunday, the day after first practice. “Are you thinking about flying?” The other girls giggled. “It would be faster than your running,” Courtney added.

“Fly, Dumbo, fly!” said Lexi.

I flapped my ears, flicking the switches that turned off my aids without looking up from my lunch tray. I said quite softly, “One thousand four hundred eleven.” I decided to call any group of five or more girls with ponytails a “lash.”

We had practice every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. We played five Saturday games against other teams. It rained on three of the practices and two of the games. The field was muddy where I was positioned every game and practice. It was windy and freezing cold in mid-October the fourth game, and I had to wear a sweater and a wool cap to keep warm as I stood, motionless, for the better part of an hour. I was so cold that day, the water I drank from the yellow jug at halftime didn’t hurt my eyes.

Timmy was an even worse player than me. He could barely move when the ball came his way. He blocked only two kicks the whole season, including during practices. The girls laughed at him almost as much as at me. The boys were a little better. I think they were afraid to make him mad. He had a temper. Lexi told him her opinion every time they were close on the field and away from the hearing of Mr. Lester. “You stink,” she said. Since I was positioned on the left as a defender, I was always pretty close to where Timmy stood. I could smell his damp creosote odor in the air all the time. It really didn’t stink. It reminded me of going to the beach in the summers and visiting the boats at the marinas. Timmy stood in front of the goal and looked like a moored boat—a tug or a ferry— ever so imperceptibly moving left, right, left, right to the swells only he could feel. His pink face got red just from the exertion of standing and rocking with the tiniest of excursions. “Next time,” I yelled as encouragement the first time the other side scored.

“You shut up, Dumbo,” he shouted back, rocking, rocking, relentlessly rocking. “You stink, too.”

I asked Mother to let me grow my hair longer like the other girls. She said it was a cute cut, like a pixie. Besides, I didn’t need to handle a brush with such short hair.

The season ended in early November. We went one and four. The one game we won I had to miss because of my cardiology appointment. It was at that office visit that Eileen Marshall concluded my heart’s leaks and squeaks would need a surgeon’s touch to cease, after all. It would be safe to wait another year or so, but it would have to be done to protect my lungs from the constant slosh of extra blood flow. We drove home in sad silence that seemed all the more oppressive for the fall foliage around us, dressed up in gaudy colors, reds and oranges and yellows. A leaf now and then would fall onto the windshield of our moving car and be pressed to the glass for an instant before shooting away. The bugs had put tiny holes in some. I wondered out loud if I’d find a message there in the leaves if I studied the patterns. Mother said no, it’s just the insects. Father drove in silence. Cassidy, in the front seat with him, said, “My Ma used ta read tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. Lot of good it did her. I wouldn’t be lookin’ for any leaves with messages, missy. Just read your books.”

The next day, Tina and I collected a bucket of leaves from her backyard. We sat with them in her kitchen, holding them up to the ceiling lights one by one. On most there were just five or six random holes. Some, though, looked like parts of the constellations I had studied. There were half a dozen with holes exactly like Cancer the Crab, and a few that could have been the body of Pegasus. I found what I was really looking for near the bottom of the bucket. Two leaves with punctures forming the stellar outline of Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. They were big brown oak leaves, each with a neat semicircle of eight holes. We glued them onto two of Tina’s plastic headbands and put them on. We sat regally at the kitchen table gluing the rest of the leaves with assembled holes onto pieces of stiff construction paper. I told Tina about the book I was reading with Cassidy, the one with all the Greek gods and myths. I told her how Princess Ariadne, who was the sister of the Minotaur, wore the golden Northern Crown when she married Dionysus. It was Cassidy’s favorite story.

“Who is Dionysus?” she lipped.

“Dionysus was the god of beer and whiskey.” Cassidy had told me that when I had asked him the same question.

“Have you ever drunk beer? My mommy drinks it. It makes her b-burp!” I considered the question for a second before answering. “No, never tasted it.” It was not a lie.

“Let’s make cocoa,” Tina mouthed.

“Good,” I signed.

“And who’s Minotaur,” she asked, handing me the milk. I slipped three fingers into the opening of the plastic handle.

“He’s a man who is part bull. He got made with the wrong parts so he has a bull’s head and big sharp horns and a tail and the rest of him is a man. He’s very bad, and he kills people who get put into the place where he lives, which is like a giant puzzle where nobody can find the way out. But someone does and that’s who kills Minotaur.”

“Someone brave,” she said aloud.

“Someone very brave and very smart,” I echoed back, impressed by the lack of stumble over the difficults and
b.
“His name was Theseus. Ariadne showed him how to find his way out of the puzzle, but I could find my own way out. I would count my steps from turn to turn in the puzzle, and count the turns, too. All I would have to do is remember the numbers of steps for each turn, and I would find the door. I could do just what Ariadne did and help Theseus slay the Minotaur. “

She stirred in the cocoa and put the cups in the microwave. “Who made Minotaur?” Tina lipped.

I hadn’t really thought about who had made him. Cassidy had answered my questions about him so quickly, so matter-of-factly, I had assumed the Assembler had done it a long time ago when He was just starting out putting people together. “God did it when He was younger.”

“When he was in kindergarten?” she mouthed.

“Preschool,” I said with a knowing nod. It was too big of a mistake for kindergarten.

Jeanine was born on Thanksgiving Day of my kindergarten year. I woke in the morning to the stirrings of my animals in the gray shadows on my ceiling. I said good morning to them all, though the clown still slept, and went down to the kitchen. I found Cassidy frying bacon and singing a song about fairies on the misty mountains. He sang that a lot when he was happy. I heard it in the car whenever he took me places. Now he yelled it to the meat in the frying pan.