The Full Cleveland (21 page)

There was one other scene at school too, just not a restaurant one. I guess you'd call it a Dean Scene. Still to be avoided, though.

It was second semester. I had the Dream Machine, because, over Mother's not so strenuous objections, Dad had promised it as a kind of consolation prize for having to leave home again after Christmas and go back to boarding school. They had it delivered, because no one wanted me driving all that way in such an old car on my own.

It didn't arrive until after I was back at school after break. The humble assistant came to class with a note saying it was there, and where it was parked, and here were the keys and all. That's the kind of note you waste no time passing around. I was blanket pardoned for The Twins after that. In fact, even The Twins themselves enjoyed a surge in popularity due to the Dream Machine. They usually had to sit in back, but they sometimes got a window, and considering they had no chance of getting a ride, ever, to anywhere, until, at the eleventh hour, I came up with everybody's favorite car.

A strange coincidence happened the day the Dream Machine arrived. I got a postcard from Mary Parker. And oddly enough, it said,
Dream Big.
A cliché. And Mary Parker never sent clichés. That is, she had sent
You can't go home again
before Thanksgiving, right as I was packing to go home. But that was just her sense of humor. But
Dream Big
, clearly, was not. Sure, you could shrug and say it certainly went well with getting the Dream Machine, and maybe Mary Parker had decided this one time to send an old but sweet and relevant cliché. Except she didn't know I was getting the Dream Machine. I hadn't seen her at Christmas, and since even before that, my letters had been returned Addressee Unknown.

The last time I saw her was Thanksgiving, when I slipped out of the house at eleven-thirty at night and took the Rapid Transit downtown to meet her halfway, and we stood on the train platform and talked for just a few minutes before we both had to go back in the directions we came.

She was smoking a cigarette when I got off the Rapid and found her, dressed all in black, in the dark.

She sure didn't step conveniently into the light. She stood back and waited until I found her, in black, in the dark. If it hadn't been for the steady little glow at the end of her cigarette, I may never have found her at all. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I said when I found her.

“Really?” she said. “Did you have a turkey?” You could tell, maybe she thought a turkey was not a good thing. A bad one, actually, really no excuse for it, especially on Thanksgiving Day.

“Yes,” I said uncertainly. “We had a turkey.”

She blew some smoke and shook her head and looked up at the stars, which were all out tonight. “I guess we had one too.”

“See?”

She kind of shrugged, like maybe she did, then she flicked the cigarette onto the platform and walked over and killed it with her black high-top.

“So when I get back to school, are you going to send me a postcard saying,
Did you have a turkey?
Like,
Hey, How's your horse?”

She really smiled at that.

“Your postcards, Mary. Boy, are they mysterious. Sometimes it takes me weeks to figure one out.” When she didn't say anything to deny it, I added, “Short too.”

“Yeah, but frequent.”

“Yeah, but
short.”

She looked at me meaningfully. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Point taken. “I guess I should cut my letters down to thirty pages or less.”

“Nah,” She said. “Don't ever do that.”

We walked up the platform a little, to you know, see up to the stars, because the way they were out tonight, you couldn't not. I traced my finger to find the constellations Matt had taught me, connecting the dots, and she traced some too, but we didn't name them or anything, or say a word about that. Finally she sighed. “Good old Will.”

I thought she meant, you know, good old will. Like in your soul. Will like she had taught me. But then she pointed to the sky and added, “He would have something to say about this.”

And I realized. She meant good old Will Shakespeare.

I gazed up at the stars. I was a little worried though now, about good old Will, I guess, and things like Brevity is the soul of wit. I knew that one, who didn't, from Shakespeare class. It was catchy, for sure, but not up to Mary Parker's usual oblique standards when she was quoting stuff. And then I remembered her last postcard,
You can't go home again.
Maybe that wasn't intended as such a joke after all.

I looked at her sideways. “Yeah. Shakespeare. He was good.”

She snorted a little. She started back up the tracks. “It's all good.”

I thought it was another quote at first, just not a very good one. Except she didn't look like it was all good when she turned and looked at me, kind of looked me over and then looked up the tracks. I was still wearing my dress from dinner, and of course from after dinner, with Rey McDowell. I had my ski jacket on over that. She looked it all over, and looked up the tracks. I tried to see in her eyes, but they were brown and it was dark, and, anyway, she wouldn't let me. She just stared at the stars and said, “What are you complaining about? The experiment worked. You'll hammer the details out.”

“But I'm not complaining.” I shivered. It was Thanksgiving Day. It was cold out. “I just said your postcards are short.” Funny, I didn't think to tell her right then and there that I loved them in spite of, maybe because of, that. That I kept them in a stack.

“But I wrote you, first postcard.
The limits generate the form.
That's why they're short.”

Oh, I got it. The form. But what limits was she talking about?

Then, out of the blue, for the first time since I'd known her, since we were four, in fact, with a brave little smile, Mary Parker attempted to small talk. “So there's a lake at school?”

“We have a lake. I mean it's not Lake Erie or anything.”

She frowned. “You mean you have a pond.”

“Okay, it's a pond.”

She walked toward the edge of the platform and then stopped and then turned around. “Just. Cherish truth. Pardon error.”

“Okay, Mary.”

I knew the truth, a lake wasn't a pond, but what error was she talking about? And then I realized, Oh no, she's going, and she's not coming back. “What error?”

“I mean the way to be. The way to go.”

She was going, for sure. But I didn't want the truth, I wanted to see the million movies again, ride the Rapid with her, try another experiment, Gandhi or Einstein or whatever she thought. She had given me so much, no less than knowledge, and if a girl looked at it that way, then if she was going—then I was losing the love of my life.

She started looking the other way up the tracks, already looking for a train that would take her back toward downtown. “Where are you going? Mary?”

She smiled, a little impressed, I guess, that I knew. “Busman's holiday. Literally. Dad and I are taking The Dog. The Greyhound Bus. Remember?”

I remembered. That's what she called it, The Dog, because it was The Greyhound and all. I'd always expected a postcard about it. “But where are you going? And when are you coming home?”

But then a train was already coming. First I saw it in her eyes, and then I whirled around and saw its light, far away, just poking through the night. We had to hurry across the overpass if she was going to catch it. There wouldn't be another for an hour.

When we got to the other side and stood there on that platform, we could see the train pausing, making its solitary little stops along the way. I had a surge of affection for it, the stupid Rapid Transit. There was really nothing rapid about it. “When will I see you again?”

It took her a while to say it. “When you grow up, I guess.”

She must have seen in my face I would cry.

“Hey, that's not an insult. That's a huge compliment. You're going to do it. I'd stake everything on it.” And she added, “For sure.”

And then the Rapid arrived.

She was actually on the train, paying her fare, when I thought to ask her. I had to ask her fast, before the conductor closed the door.

“Mary!” And I sort of ran, up the platform, right up to the train, where she had gotten on. She turned to the conductor, to ask him to hold the door. That's the kind of thing that could happen in Cleveland. If you were young and it was important, the conductor would almost always hold the door.

She took a step down again, and I felt silly all of a sudden, as if my question weren't so terribly urgent to stop a train after all. “Nevermind.”

She looked at me like, uh, last chance, the conductor is holding the door.

So I asked her. “Why
Avoid restaurant scenes?”

She shook her head. She didn't know. She'd written it herself, and she didn't know.

“The note in the diary you gave me.
Avoid restaurant scenes.
What's it really mean?”

“Uh. Don't ever write a scene that takes place in a restaurant?”

“Oh. But why?”

“Talking heads, no action, no drama, no resolution, no information. Bad news.”

And then, did she smile. Maybe the best smile I've seen in my life. “Just a tip,” she said. “If you're planning to write it all down.”

And with that, she ascended again, and the conductor closed the door. So I don't know if she heard when I suddenly yelled it, screamed it, really, as loud as anything, as loud as I could, after the Rapid, up to the stars, into the night. “Thank you, Mary Parker!!!”

But I already said, the train was already moving, so I don't know that she heard.

And now it was second semester, and all that was left was the scene with the dean. I had my best Mary Parker postcard ever, because I had it all:
Dream Big.
And, of course, I had the Dream Machine.

So when the dean came to the door of the classroom in a new postholiday red suit with the same fake gold buttons and chains, I assumed it was to complain, in person, not even via humble assistant, how I'd broken some law she had recently written regarding the use of or care of or parking of my car.

Of course I probably wouldn't have been prepared for what the dean had to say anyway, so why blame it on the Dream Machine.

After I got up and came out of class to see her, the dean had me trail her a few paces down the hall. Then she abruptly veered around. “Miss Parkman,” she said, “what's wrong with your father?”

It was as if she'd been hiding her right hand under her red sleeve but then had whipped it out to suddenly slap my face, making my eyes sting with tears. “Ma'am?”

“He doesn't answer my letters. He doesn't answer my phone calls. And, more important, he's not paying your bills.”

I wished I could look at her then. But her bird's eyes were there and I thought I couldn't take it, so I looked at another clock on another wall. The bell rang. Girls streamed out of class, cut a wide berth around us, and walked on down the hall. I watched them go, then thought I better look back at her now. You know, look into her eyes, man to man.

She might have thought it was insolence. It wasn't. It was just hatred, for the way she'd spoken about my father.

“Tell him to get in touch with me, or you won't be able to continue at this school. I'm sorry. There is a thing called tuition.” And the dean left me standing there.

And that was all there was to it. You know, Quoth the raven,
Nevermore.

I walked down the hall, through the door, and sat in the metal stairwell alone. The other girls had all gone on to the next class. It was funny, almost, here I'd thought it was divorce that would truly bother me, but now that I had a moment to sit and think it through, I saw it was probably truly money. Nothing would work without the money. We wouldn't even know who we were. Rich and divorced sounded manageable. We didn't know how to be happy and poor.

That night I took a look at Dotti and Ditto when they were sleeping. I knew I had been lucky to find two nice people like that in one room. I'd write them a letter and explain everything. They were so nice they probably wouldn't tell everybody either. I wished I could kiss them good-bye, but I couldn't take the chance, so I just stood and looked for a while. Besides, it would be almost cruel to wake them, considering what they'd gone through to get to sleep and all.

Then, because I had the Dream Machine, I slipped out the fire door and simply ran away from school.

My idea was, I wouldn't see them. I would just drive home and look at the house, and see what I saw. Just see, you know, how bad the damage possibly was.

It was cold
, wintry Cleveland weather when I arrived.

The night of all nights you want to go home. But when I saw the sign in front of the house, I knew I could never go home again.

I decided right off when I saw it not to make a big deal about how all was lost. Mary Parker said a sportswriter once chastised a baseball team devastated about losing a World Series by scolding, “A child has not died.” So I decided not to act so tragic about it that it seemed a child had died.

On the other hand, I have to admit I felt rather bad. I just sat there in the Dream Machine and looked at the house for a while.

That so much information could be contained in such a discreet little sign. That is, there had always been the discreet little sign, at the end of the driveway under a low lamp, and the only words on it you really noticed were
PROTECTED BY.
But now those words were effaced by a kind of lopsided bumper sticker, with the new words,
SOLD BY.

So I took it philosophically, just thinking about the World Series for a while. Then Socrates also came to mind. Mary Parker said on the morning of his execution for teaching, his captors removed the chains from his ankles so he could walk about freely, as a sort of goodwill gesture, to make up for having to kill him later that afternoon. Socrates had terrible wounds from the shackles, and as he rubbed them, he began to think it was the most interesting thing, because he could not honestly distinguish from the pleasure of rubbing the wounds and the pain. Mary Parker said he was very happy to have made such a discovery on the day he died, and didn't complain that the timing was bad. In fact, he felt so fortunate to find out the truth while he was alive, I guess he blew his last day writing about it. Which I thought was terribly sad.

Anyway, I figured I was having a similar problem as Socrates, sitting there staring at the
SOLD BY
sign. I had lost my family, not to mention the house and, one had to guess, all the money, and that did give me pain. But I felt strangely exhilarated also. Sort of intensely interested, even thrilled. I hadn't experienced something on this level for quite some time. Never, to be honest with you.

I started counting the blank, darkened windows on the facade.

I started at the bottom left and added across. Four windows to the left of the entrance; I noted in case I ever needed the information that they were tall, grand windows, like large, paned doors. Then four just like it on the right. Two smaller windows apiece on the second story for each large one on the first. That was four times two plus two times eight, and add the big arched window over the entrance where I first saw Luke and Lucy come home from the hospital in Mother's arms, and behind that, the landing where I got caught for loving Rey McDowell, and in fact the whole house made me think of my grandfather, who was enriched by it by all of a dollar. But I made up my mind not to think of ancient history and such. The point was, there were twenty-five windows in all, on the facade.

On the practical side, I decided what I should do is drive back to the Oasis Motel on the Ohio border where I'd spent the night before, and take a ride with the motorcycle guy who hung out in the coffee shop there. He'd come up when I was checking in, as the check-in counter and the coffee shop counter were one and the same. He wasn't at all shy about it; he smiled and said I could just call him “Jet.” At first I thought he said “Jeff,” and that wasn't so interesting. But then it turned out to be “Jet.” He was quite good-looking in his black tee shirt and leather jacket. He offered me a ride on his Harley, assuring me that it was a very fast bike, and we would ride at full speed under “a blanket of stars.” I found that interesting as well and though I didn't take him up on it then, now I saw no reason not to do so, and maybe after, we would have sex.

Then Jet would hang out in the coffee shop at the Oasis Motel and I'd become a waitress there. I would probably have to support him, but I didn't mind. I know, it was an odd thing to think of when you've just been summarily orphaned like I had, that you'd like to reconsider the ride with a motorcycle guy who hangs out in the coffee shop at a border motel. But I did truly like the “blanket of stars.” I would have to write Rey McDowell a letter and explain how it wouldn't be right to see him again. Rey just seemed like a rich kid now. It's not nice to dismiss people because they are rich or poor, I'm sure, but that's one of the very first things I started doing when I saw the
SOLD BY
sign. You know, separating the men from the boys.

I also decided if I ever ran into my parents in the future, say at a shopping mall near the Oasis or something, I wouldn't believe them if they said they'd been planning to come by boarding school in a Buick and tell me how they'd sold the house and taken everybody else and moved away. I promised myself I'd
act
as if I believed them, I'd nod my head as if I completely understood, I'd say no problem, all is forgiven, but I would never believe them in my heart, never.

And if they asked me out to dinner, I'd accept, but when the check came, I'd pay for it myself with my Platinum American Express card. Then maybe I'd ask them for coffee at the Oasis Motel. But maybe not.

So that was the philosophical part of my reaction to the
SOLD BY
sign. Kind of a dull reaction, really, except for the sex part of it. It was as if I'd known this was going to happen, it was almost old news, even though I still found the situation intensely fresh and interesting. I didn't start crying, I hardly ever do except in the million movies, and that day fishing in Florida, and all the other times. Anyway, I simply sat there thinking of baseball and Socrates and sex for the longest time.

Were the shutters shiny black before, I felt like asking, except then I realized, there was no one to ask. Cabot, she would know, she kept track of such things, but I hadn't a clue where she could be found. There was simply no way to find out if maybe the shutters hadn't once been green. I could have consulted the Dream Machine, it had been a witness to our entire lives, to every paint job, renovation and minor repair, but I really didn't feel like asking a car. I suppose I was self-conscious about going crazy, like before when I tried to warn all the cars in the garage that the barn was burning and get out of there.

I started counting windows on other people's houses. I had never sat down and taken the time to do it, and now I almost wished I had. Also, it was easier than doing our house, because the others had lights on inside.

It was really quite a neighborhood, when you looked at it all lit up like that. Clarine once told me Shaker Heights wasn't even a neighborhood, it was a realm. I'm not sure she meant it as a compliment though. She grumbled something on another occasion about wall-to-wall palaces. She also said, and more than once, that small houses, especially shacks, had true character. So I sat there trying to see it, the comparative lack of character and all, and work up some timely contempt for the place, but all I could see was that it did resemble a realm, very pretty actually, sort of a fairyland in a way, with the lamps lighting assorted driveways and the lovely green manicured hedges, in which you could sometimes see fantastic shapes like animals if you were in that kind of mood.

So my attempt to look at the bright side utterly failed. I guess I just couldn't get philosophical about it at the moment. In fact, the philosophical part of my reaction was essentially over. A child has not died, and I was getting the feeling to get out of there soon. I knew I should wait to see if anybody came, I looked around for more windows to count, but suddenly I didn't feel like hanging around anymore. I forgot to even glance back at the house for a brain picture when I turned the key in the ignition and took off.

I guess I could call it the ride of my life.

It may have resembled the same old ride, the one taken with Mother on many former Holy Days of Obligation, the traditional after-church tour, except now I was doing the driving, and I wasn't doing it in a Buick. The Dream Machine and I started ricocheting around the old neighborhood like a light beam taking a few final turns on its way to the Milky Way, and beyond.

First we flew toward Rey McDowell's house, and slowed up to sixty just long enough to pass. For one brief moment only, I indulged in an image inside. It was Rey, home from basketball practice, sitting at the kitchen counter, keeping his sweet old former nanny company while she reheated what was left of the dinner his parents had already had. A bead of sweat was dripping right off the end of his old nanny's nose. I felt a pang then for Rey, more because he loved his old nanny than because he loved me, but I made up my mind that that would have to be the end of that.

We sped by the next house down. I couldn't see over the towering flat-topped hedge, but I knew which light in which upstairs window was on. Mickey Knight would be at her vanity table, transforming herself for a future date. Maybe not tonight, but someday, with Rey McDowell. She would win him sooner or later. Maybe they would marry each other, I thought, but probably not. It was hard to imagine Mickey Knight as the girl next door, or even Rey as the boy. In any case, I wished them both luck, and pounced on the gas.

Up the road, on the right, we sped by the other Mickey's house, the impressive old Tudor with the Monet painting on the master bedroom wall. Poor Jo. Her natural-born beauty had proved too much of a position for her to defend. One by one, Mickey Knight had picked off her boyfriends, and then moved on to best her in every course and every sport at school. I felt sorry I wouldn't be there for the rest of her life to run interference for her, she'd never survive Mickey Knight now. But my remorse vanished almost as soon as we passed.

We hung a right and a right, and raced over toward the Academy. I couldn't go by the place without remembering Mary Parker as a preschooler, enacting her early experiments in irony. But there were others too, teachers and coaches and friends. I thought of the smooth-skinned English instructor whose cheeks flushed a deep red, rose color when she taught the Shakespeare class. She believed in me, wanted the best for me, I tried hard to please her, and then she was dismissed for an indiscretion that was never disclosed. But we all knew the parameters: she'd fallen deeply, hopelessly, and illicitly in love. Passing the Administration Building, I could still see the pallor on her face the last day now.

I swung a left in the Dream Machine, careened down the hill toward the playing fields, stopped the car and jumped out and ran up the path.

As far as you could see there was green. No matter what happened to other grass in the Midwest in winter, it was always green here. Splendid, spent, sunlit days flashed before my eyes. Night transformed to afternoon and the stadium benches are suddenly filled with parents and fans. The field is covered with breathless girls in navy blue shorts. The Greek girl, Sappho, she gets hit hard in the ankle with an opponent's stick and you can hear the crack over the crowd. I stop running to watch her make a neat flip in the air, a position she will miraculously maintain forever in my mind.

While she flies, I have a premonition about what courage is, and I'm right, because after Sappho lands, she scrambles to her feet and runs down the field and makes the goal. Later the doctor said she had broken her ankle during the fall.

I knew even then there was a lesson in that. Sappho was the most gifted athlete on the team and Mary Parker the smartest girl in the school. I knew these were the reasons they were there, allowed to come without the money to pay the tuition, but I was betting the mystery ran deeper. Mary Parker said a writer said, “I've been rich and I've been poor and rich is better.” But writers are so often wrong.

Though I wanted to run at full speed down the field like I used to, instead I made myself hold my ground. It took all my might not to do it, but I was trying to learn something here. So I watch Sappho over and over, breaking her ankle and jumping up to make the goal, convinced that if I tried harder, threw everything into it, for one clear moment, I would know what matters most. But she was beyond me, just inches out of reach, so I had to settle for building a frame around her, thinking of her for all it was worth, and snapping the picture. Then I ran back down the hill, knowing that at least I had something to take away for all time.

When I turned at the bottom of the hill and looked back up at the green, I couldn't be sorry that once we were rich. I would never apologize, say it was wrong. Without money, I would never have known the genius who created my self, or the great athlete who made the goal. I wouldn't have been admitted without the money, they don't let you in on your looks. If it took money to get me in there, then I was glad. As I got in the car and drove away, I only wished all poor kids had been rich kids too. Everyone deserved one free run on a green playing field.