After Eli (5 page)

“Mr. Trossel,” I said.

“Those A’s in phys ed, I read they don’t mean anything when it comes to getting into college,” my dad said. “Colleges want the kids to play some sport, sure, but when they look at a GPA, all they want is the academics. The academics, that’s what counts.”

By which time I felt lower than a worm’s belly. He never said I was a failure straight out, but it didn’t take a genius to see what he was thinking. Like those canaries that can sense poisonous gases in coal mines, I could sense the condemnation in the air.

So that afternoon I took my bike out and went for a ride.

Walter says the only way to solve problems is to think them through in logical sequence, but I know that if you go far enough and fast enough on a bike, you can leave them all behind, at least for a while. I used to pedal and pedal until the muscles in the calves of my legs burned and my eyes teared up from wind, and then I’d feel things sort of loosen up inside, like they didn’t matter so much anymore. I always thought that maybe Lance Armstrong is such a great racer because he had a crappy dad and this terrible cancer and he knew what it was like to have problems to outrun.

I had two or three different favorite rides. One went up over the top of Turkey Hill, and that was the hardest, because it’s really steep, and when I first started riding there, I used to have to stop in the middle and get off and push my bike for a while. It was always worth it though, because coming back down was wild, as good as a roller-coaster ride, with the bike going about a hundred miles an hour and me feeling like I wasn’t on earth at all but was some kind of supermagic creature flying on the wind. Then the road levels out past the Monroe place and through the back end of the Pilcher property, where Jim has his blue-potato farm, and then out to the Fairfield Road and back home.

Or I’d ride out past the old Sowers place and take a left onto Scrubgrass Creek Road, which goes back through the woods and across this rickety little bridge over the creek. That was prettier, with dogwood and crab-apple flowers in the springtime, and all the leaves red and yellow in the fall, and it smelled better too. The Monroes have pigs, and those can be pretty repulsive if the wind is blowing the wrong way.

Anyway, that afternoon I rode out past the old Sowers house. Already it was looking different, now that it was being lived in again. There was a Volvo parked in the driveway, and furniture on the porch, and a hanging basket with a pink geranium. A lot of the hay had been cut down too, to make what was starting to look like a lawn.

Then I saw that right in the middle of the lawn was this girl lying flat on her back with her arms stretched out and her eyes closed, and next to her, flat out too, were the sword-fighting twins. Right off I thought of a horrible murder scene like in
CSI,
with bodies scattered around. I could imagine them all outlined in chalk, with one of those yellow-tape things that the police put up that says
DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE
.

But then the twins jumped up and came running over. Jasper was wearing a purple T-shirt that said
I AM THE EVIL TWIN
. Journey was wearing a purple leotard and one of those little ballet skirts and a pair of purple Crocs. It wasn’t often that I saw so much short purple all in one place.

“What are you two supposed to be?” I said. “Grapes?”

Journey shot me a look that said that if I was a fruit, I’d be a poison apple.

“Purple is our favorite color,” said Jasper. “People who like purple are witty and sensitive.”

“I used to like pink,” Journey said. “But Isabelle says that pink is a color stereotype. You know, like blue is for boys and pink is for girls. If Isabelle ever has a baby boy, she’s going to dress him in pink because she thinks color stereotypes are stupid.”

I thought that if she really carried through with that, she’d also better get the kid a set of brass knuckles and a crash course in karate.

“Right now we’re listening to the earth hum,” Journey said. “It’s Isabelle’s idea. She read about it in
Scientific American.
She read that the earth hums all the time like a giant bumblebee.”

“Like this,” Jasper said, making a repulsive noise through his nose.

Then Isabelle sat up and I forgot about the twins.

What I knew by then about Isabelle, due to the twins’ having no sense of privacy or discretion, was that she was fifteen and went to some fancy school for the arts back home, which was in New York City, where she had a boyfriend named Simon Dewitt Paxton, who was presently spending a multiculturally enriching summer living with a family in France. I also knew that if she were a bird, she’d be a vicious parrot; that when the twins were three, she’d talked them into eating a bar of Ivory soap; and that she disapproved of cowboy hats.

What I didn’t know, because the twins hadn’t bothered to say in spite of the fact that they have the verbal version of diarrhea, was that she was beautiful.
Beautiful
was not a word I usually used about girls, but it was the only word for Isabelle.

Walter says that we are attracted to potential mates because of large differences in our major histocompatibility complexes, which are a bunch of genes that have something to do with making us immune to disease. Attraction is purely genetic and instinctive, Walter says, though I can tell you that if Walter does not learn to shut up about this, he will never have a potential mate.

Anyway, I did not think about disease genes right then. What I thought about was how I’d never seen anybody as beautiful as Isabelle. And how Isabelle made Amanda Turner and her halter tops look too bright and loud, like those plastic dolls you win for throwing baseballs at ducks at the Fairfield County Agricultural Fair. She had straight, silky dark hair and skin like cream and these blue, blue eyes, the color the sky gets on a really perfect October afternoon. Everything about her was slim and crisp and elegant. If you’ve ever known a truly beautiful girl, you’ll know what I mean, and if you haven’t, I can’t explain. It was just everything that Isabelle was.

That day she had on a white skirt and an old soft blue shirt and she wasn’t wearing any shoes. And she had this beautiful smile that just sparkled at you, that made you feel special, as if you were the person she’d been most hoping to see.

And there I was, all sweaty from riding my bicycle, and a pimple starting on my nose, and I probably smelled.

“You must be Danny,” Isabelle said.

She patted the grass next to her and said, “Come listen with us,” and where I would ordinarily have thought about the red ants and deer ticks and Lyme disease, right then I didn’t. For a chance to be next to Isabelle, I would have laid down on a bed of nails in a crocodile swamp.

“It’s a very low-pitched hum, so you have to be quiet,” Isabelle said. “It’s like a giant heartbeat. The heart of the planet.”

“Babies inside their mother can hear their mother’s heart,” said Journey. “They can hear their mother reading to them too. When Jasper and I were inside, our mother used to read to us, which is why we are so intelligent. She read us poetry and philosophy and
Winnie-the-Pooh.
”

“Hush,” Isabelle said.

“I don’t hear anything,” Jasper said, squirming.

“That’s because you’re talking,” Isabelle said. “Close your eyes and hold your breath and listen. Concentrate.”

So we all closed our eyes and held our breath and listened, though I couldn’t concentrate very well, being so close to Isabelle. I hoped right then that Simon Dewitt Paxton would never come back from France. I’d read somewhere that there were wolves in France. Maybe he’d get eaten by wolves. Or run over by a taxi on the Champs Elysées, which Walter told me later was a lot more likely.

Then for a minute I thought I could hear something deep, deep down in the ground, like a huge old string bass with strings as big around as your arm.
Thrum.

“Hey!” I said. “I think I hear it.”

Walter says the earth really does hum but that nobody can possibly hear it because it’s a sound way too low for human ears. It’s somehow caused by changes in planetary air pressure. We’re lucky we can’t hear it, Walter says, because it’s a really boring hum. It’s the cosmic hum equivalent of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

Isabelle reached over and put a hand on my arm and squeezed.

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

Of course it could just have been the blood beating in my ears, because what with Isabelle right next to me, and now with her hand on my arm, my heart was going about a million miles a minute.

Journey said, “I don’t hear any hum.”

“You have to be
quiet,
” Isabelle said. “You have to feel the earth around you and be one with the grass and the ground and the rocks.”

The twins were quiet for maybe six seconds.

“This is boring,” Journey said.

“If Journey was a hum,” Jasper said, “she would be a high whiny hum like a malaria mosquito.”

Isabelle took her hand off my arm and sat up.

“You don’t deserve to live on this planet,” she said. “Neither of you.”

“I am from a more interesting planet than this,” Jasper said. “On my planet there is purple light and very little gravity.”

“Great,” Isabelle said. “Scram. Go out behind the barn and watch for the mother ship.”

The twins took off in a flash of purple, giving us more poison-apple looks.

Isabelle pulled her skirt up above her knees and stretched out her legs in the sun. She had great legs, and I kept trying not to stare at them. It was hard with Isabelle to find a place not to stare at.

“My mother took fertility drugs trying to get pregnant with them — can you imagine?” Isabelle said. “And then she had to stay in bed for six months with her feet up. And look what came of it.”

I thought that sounded nice, actually, that Isabelle’s mother had gone to so much trouble to have a baby. My uncle Al once let slip after a couple of gin and tonics at a family-reunion picnic that I’m only here because of a disastrous failure in a contraceptive device.

“When they were babies, every time I went near them, they’d scream,” Isabelle said. “I think they did it on purpose. They were diabolical. I was always getting blamed for abusing them.”

“My brother said the first thing I did when I came home from the hospital was puke on his Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt,” I said. “He always said it was the start of a beautiful relationship. It was years before I figured out he was being sarcastic.”

“I heard your brother died in the war,” Isabelle said.

Immediately I had a whole lot of shameful thoughts. First I thought that maybe Isabelle would feel sorry for me, knowing I was bereaved, since girls are often softhearted that way, and that maybe she would want to comfort me in my bereavement and we could go for long walks on Scrubgrass Creek Road where the little bridge is and we could talk and hold hands. I thought that maybe it made me interesting, being bereaved, and I started trying to look bereaved while sneakily staring at Isabelle’s legs at the same time. Then I thought what a disgusting creep I was to think thoughts like that.

What I said (brilliant, Danny) was, “Yeah.”

“It must be glorious, in a way,” Isabelle said. “To be brave enough to sacrifice your life for what you believe in. Like Sydney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities,
going to the guillotine in place of his friend Charles, who was married to the woman Sydney was in love with. He gave up his life for her happiness. His last words were, ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.’ Don’t you think that’s romantic?”

Romantic
was always one of Isabelle’s words.

I remembered when Eli was reading
A Tale of Two Cities
for an English-lit class he took in college. He said it sucked except for the creepy old lady who sat there knitting and watching the chopped-off heads fall into baskets.

Then I thought how if Sydney Carton had had the sense God gave a chicken, he would have let Charles go to the guillotine, like he was supposed to, in which case Sydney could have lived happily ever after and gotten the girl. That’s what I would have done if I’d been Sydney. But I couldn’t say that to Isabelle.

“I don’t know that he thought it was glorious,” I said. “He was all upset about Nine Eleven. He was angry that anybody would kill innocent people like that.”

“Nine Eleven was so terrible,” Isabelle said. “A girl in my class, her dad got killed in one of the towers. And I used to have nightmares about those people jumping with their hair on fire. For a long time I wrote only very dark poems.”

We were quiet while Isabelle thought about dark poems.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me about you.”

So I started telling her about where I went to school and what teams I was on, but she stopped me somewhere in the middle of junior-varsity soccer.

“No, darling, that’s what you
do,
” she said. “That’s not who you
are.
Tell me who you
are.
What do you love? What do you hate? Whom do you admire? If you could be a month of the year, what month would you be?”

That pretty much stopped me cold, so Isabelle talked instead.

If Isabelle could be a month, she’d be July, because of fireworks and lightning and thunderstorms.

Things she loves are peppermint ice cream, silver earrings, Johann Sebastian Bach, full moons, tigers, amethysts, merry-go-rounds, and Emily Dickinson; and things she hates are fast food, Barney the purple dinosaur, shopping malls, tattoos, hair spray, paper plates, Britney Spears, and the oil-based economy.

People she admires are Buddha, Jesus, Amelia Earhart, and Langston Hughes, who quit Columbia University and got a job on a boat to Europe and threw all his textbooks into the sea because he wanted to write poems.

I didn’t get the textbook thing.

“You know those books cost two hundred bucks a pop?” I said.

“It was a grand romantic gesture,” Isabelle said.

“Well, sure,” I said hastily, though to tell the truth I didn’t get it. Eli always said you could get good money for those books from the textbook exchange. I thought how that would maybe have bought Langston Hughes a lot of sandwiches and ballpoint pens.