The Night Gwen Stacy Died (2 page)

Sometimes she would ask the coyote questions that she never had the guts to ask anyone
alive. The coyote regarded Sheila stiff lipped from inside its case. The last time
she had visited, Sheila had pushed her forehead flat against the glass and asked,
“How am I ever going to get out of here?”

The coyote knew things. You could just tell. Sheila wasn’t stupid enough to expect
a straight answer to a question posed like this, but she knew how to interpret signs.
This was how things were in the middle of the country. People believed in waiting
for signs. People believed that things happened for a reason, and Sheila was not above
this logic. She fixed her eyes on the still glass eyes of the coyote. The coyote was
past the point of escape, but in its eyes was something fleeting that belied a former
familiarity with the concept.

When you work in a gas station, people love to assume there’s something wrong with
you. That you’re not driven, or you’re lazy, or you didn’t have the grades in high
school, or you’re not all there. It makes them feel better about their own lives.
This was just a theory that Sheila was harboring. But it was a theory based on research
and observation. Behind the counter, she performed sociological experiments. Sometimes,
still red faced from her ride in, she’d sit behind the counter, out of breath, and
stare into space, sneak an occasional cigarette, or put quarters into the M&M’s dispenser
and listen to the stale candy turning around in her mouth like gravel under a wheel.
When customers would enter the station and find her gnawing on hard candy by the handful,
Sheila would receive cold, disapproving looks, especially from women, many of whom
were not that much older than Sheila. “Really?” their looks said, “Isn’t there something
sort of pathetic about this?”

Other times, Sheila would place her French vocabulary workbook on the counter. She
wouldn’t even open it, just let it sit there between herself and whomever she was
helping. The effect was remarkable. “What a great job for a student!” the same women
would shout. “You must get all your homework done here.” As she counted their change,
Sheila would smile in a demure, hard-working way and let them go ahead and think whatever
they liked. She was a student; she was a gas station attendant. Student. Gas station
attendant. A young woman with promise. A burnout at seventeen. She had observed women
around here long enough to see the way they sized one another up like that, always
a series of calculations to determine who would amount to something, who would amount
to nothing. So she liked to move the French book around and screw up their calculations.
She thought the whole town could go to hell.

Sheila was a decent student, actually. Not great—probably good enough to get herself
in to some college, but not enough to get scholarship money. Her father had told her
that he could help her out a little, but if she wanted to do college, she was going
to need to take out loans. The thing was, Sheila felt like she had a pretty good idea
of what college entailed; she had grown up in a town that bordered one of the more
modestly sized Big Ten universities in the Midwest. The boys wore white hats, backward,
and called each other
fag
as a term of endearment. The girls carried handbags to class in lieu of backpacks
and did not seem to own winter coats. On weekends during snowy weather, girls could
be seen in tight black pants and multicolored leotard-like tops, floundering between
bars in hordes to keep warm while buying gyros, safety in numbers against frostbite.
By the time she was about eleven, Sheila felt she had already been to college, and
she really hadn’t thought much of the experience. Instead, she was saving all her
money, and she was going somewhere she hadn’t lived her entire life.

Most of the teachers in her high school—themselves the products of a liberal arts
education—endlessly praised the benefits of applying to college straightaway, but
her French teacher was the exception to this rule. “Yes, let’s all rush off to school
and waste thousands of dollars before we even know what we care to study or do with
our lives!” Ms. Lawrence mocked the conventional wisdom that the guidance counselors
were doling out. When speaking in English, Ms. Lawrence had a habit of using the first
person plural like this and engaging in arguments with herself. She wore complicated
patterned scarves in her hair and had immaculate posture. She had been sighted kissing
a man—through the window of a car in the school parking lot—who looked about ten years
her junior and whom she referred to as her “boyfriend.” She would come to class on
Mondays and say things like, “Did anyone make it to the opening of
Mother Courage
this weekend at Hancher? My boyfriend and I went on Friday, and it was really exceptional—well,
if you’re in the mood for Brecht.” Ms. Lawrence had come to Iowa from Delaware, a
place far away enough that it might as well have been France. A humble state, modest
in size, that Sheila imagined to be full of lanky women with hairstyles and handwriting
as deliberate and meaningful as Ms. Lawrence’s.

Très bien!
Ms. Lawrence would write in the margins of Sheila’s homework.
Fantastique
. And staring into the neat, narrow letters that Ms. Lawrence’s pen had produced,
Sheila felt a temporary relief pass over her like finally here was someone with whom
she could communicate.

At the station, Sheila had a few consistent patrons. Ned, a Vietnam vet, came in daily
to purchase a pack of Pall Malls with change that he accumulated from bottle returns.
Five cents for empties in Iowa. He’d stuff his hands deep into the pockets of his
jeans and pull out fistfuls of change—he started with the pennies and stacked them
up in tidy piles of ten on the counter. Sometimes Sheila would tire of counting and
say, “Ned, they’re on the house today,” but Ned didn’t want her charity.

There was a guy who bought gas sometimes, or sometimes a pack of Camel straights.
The first time Sheila checked his ID—state law for anyone who appeared under twenty-seven,
although he hardly did—she barely registered that his name was Peter Parker, but she
wondered about it later. Peter Parker didn’t talk much. The first couple of times
she offered him the wrong pack of cigarettes he looked away and said, “Straights,
no filter.” So she thought he was a bit stuck-up. Once she started getting it right,
she’d have the pack waiting on the counter for him before he asked for it; sometimes
she’d give him the cigarettes for free. She could tell Peter appreciated her generosity,
but he never let on. He wouldn’t even say thank you, just sort of tip his head.

The gas station was on the same highway as the exit for one of the biggest malls in
Iowa. Cars would pull off Interstate 80, cars from all over the state. There were
vans and minivans and pickup trucks. They were filled with people, kids with faces
pressed against the windows in the back seats. The men all came into the station and
bought a pack of gum or a soda and asked her how much farther to the mall, just straight
ahead, was it? Was it true that the mall had a carousel inside? A movie theater? An
ice-skating rink?

They would pile their families into the truck and start driving blindly. When they
reached the gas station they knew they were on the right track, but the kids had become
restless, they needed gum to quiet their running mouths. Their mothers needed a fresh
pack of Ultra Light 100s, their fathers needed confirmation that they were almost
there.

“I hear this mall’s got twenty restaurants inside,” they’d say.

“At least,” said Sheila. “There’s a whole food court.”

“Just straight ahead, then?”

“Yep.”

Peter Parker stood in line once behind one of these families, smirking. When he reached
her register he put on a voice. He made his eyes all big and pushed his dark hair
off his brow. He said, “I hear this here mall’s got a full casino on a riverboat floating
in the basement, and the parking lot is paved with gold.” He leaned into her across
the counter, and Sheila felt her stomach rise in her chest as the distance closed
between them.

“Absolutely right,” she said. It was the first time they had spoken more than the
few words necessary to exchange money for cigarettes or gasoline.

“So what time do you get off?” Peter said. “Sit at the blackjack table with me and
we’ll throw some cards around. What do you say? We’ll make a killing.”

“I get off at eight,” Sheila heard herself say.

In her mind, the slot machines glittered. Coins spilled from them to the floor. People
threw up their hands. People raised their glasses. When she closed up the station
and started to ride her bike home, she was a little hurt that he never showed, though
obviously he had no intention of doing so from the start. She had to reason with herself
on the ride home—that casinos were desperate and lonely places, that she wasn’t even
old enough to gamble, and that anyway, the place didn’t exist!—to stop conjuring an
image of Peter playing slots alone, to stop thinking of the fact that he hadn’t come
back for her.

But after this day he rarely missed one of her shifts. Peter made it a point to sit
with her for a few minutes in the station, long enough for a cigarette and a conversation.
After he’d been coming in for a while, Sheila asked Donny if he knew of any Peter
Parkers. “Sure I do,” Donny said. “Spider-Man.” No, not Spider-Man, Sheila had explained
patiently. Just some guy. “Some guy who thinks he’s fucking Spider-Man,” Donny said.
But Peter Parker was just a guy who drove a cab at night and who would stay for five
or ten minutes when he came into the gas station if he was between fares. Sheila was
supposed to discourage patrons from loitering like this—there were some shady characters
who drove up and down the Coralville strip after nine—but she liked Peter Parker.
He had nice hair, dark, overgrown, with strange waves that fell into his eyes if he
leaned in to look at something closely, like if he was spilling the contents of his
pockets on the counter, searching for a five. There was always dirt under his fingernails
when he rested his hands on the counter, and his hands were broad and calloused, like
maybe they served him in a particular way that had nothing to do with gesticulation
or the exchange of money. Donny was probably wrong about Peter Parker. It was a common
enough name. Anyone could have it. But it gave Sheila a welcome diversion to reroute
her brain in the direction of secret identities and second lives. It seemed a fine
way to pass the time to imagine that the dirt under his fingernails was residue from
saving the world.

“I’m home!” Sheila called through the house after slamming the door behind her. She
walked into the kitchen, and her mother appeared, standing over the sink with a sponge
in her hand, Sheila’s father beside her with a towel. After thirty years of marriage,
they still washed the dishes together every night. They took turns being the one to
wash, the one to dry.

“Hi honey,” her mother said. “We’re just cleaning up from dinner.”

Sometimes they waited for her to eat on the evenings she worked in the station, but
if she got off too late, they’d save a plate of whatever dinner had been for her to
heat up in the microwave.

Her parents hadn’t wanted her to take the job at the Sinclair station. Her mother
thought it was a job for a man—the tire grease, the cigarettes. Her father thought
gas stations on the strip weren’t safe at night.

“Some crazy idiot could come in and rob the place,” her father had said. “And then
what are you going to do, a girl alone in a gas station?”

“I’d give them the money,” she had said. “And I’d call the cops. Same as you would.”

“You just better hope that’s all you’d have to give,” her father said, “in a situation
like that.”

“Like what else?” Sheila had asked, but her father said nothing. Was the implication
that she would be sexually accosted or attacked? Was this why it was irresponsible
for a teenage girl to take an evening job at a gas station? Because the possibility
existed that certain men couldn’t resist whipping out their genitals and making demands
of other people? One always needed to suspect! One needed to be steadfast, vigilant!
Especially girls like Sheila who were charged with
applying
themselves. For example: the option of college was made available to girls like Sheila
by generations of struggle, and now she wasn’t even going to
apply?
She was going to work in a crappy gas station to save money for some ambiguous plan?

“Good thing I’m almost eighteen,” Sheila had insisted. “Old enough to make some of
my own decisions, I’d guess.”

But of course she was living at home. Her father was always quick to bring up that
fact. She was living in his house. None of it mattered anyway, Sheila had liked to
tell everyone, because by the end of the year she’d be fluent in a completely foreign
language, and living in another country as well.

“This country’s not good enough for you?” her father had asked recently. He had caught
her making French vowel sounds in the hallway while carrying a basket of laundry up
to her room.

“That’s right,” said Sheila. “Too many rules.”

“Because the French don’t have any rules,” her father said.

Sheila shrugged her shoulders. “Je ne sais pas.”

She didn’t know, not really. That was why it was so difficult to have an argument
about her plans. When posed the question of what exactly she would be doing in France,
Sheila was hard-pressed to generate a response that sounded acceptable to most of
her adversaries. The truth was that her goals were somewhat modest. She imagined she
would have a job in a shop or behind a counter somewhere. She imagined she would rent
a room with a window that opened onto a street with traffic. Maybe there would be
friends, some sort of community, but mostly she saw herself negotiating the city streets
with a bicycle, its basket filled with the vegetables whose names she knew how to
pronounce. The point was only that this place existed, and she could get to it. The
point was only that for a time she would be there, and
there
was not here.