Cecily Von Ziegesar (11 page)

Professor Rosen was very passionate about the play. She said it was about the loneliness and isolation we all feel, and the ways in which we reach out to others to find meaning in an existence that is basically absurd, since we're all going to die anyway. It was actually sort of depressing. But Adam had been looking for a reason to spend more time on campus, and when Professor Rosen accosted him in the bookstore and begged him once more to try out, he gave in.

That she'd seen Peter written all over his face astounded him. When he looked in the mirror, he didn't see anything written on his face, not a thing, except freckles and a shadow of red stubble. Why hadn't she cast him as Jerry, the explosive lunatic who terrorizes Peter? Jerry was virile and alive, while Peter was robotic and uninteresting. Still, he liked the deliberateness of
acting, and it was nice to be someone else for a change, even if the guy he was playing was just as lonely and lackluster as he was.

This was their third rehearsal. Tom and Professor Rosen arrived together, Tom swilling from a gallon of milk. It ran down his chin as he chugged it thirstily. Would Shipley find that attractive? Adam wondered with dismay.

“All right, boys,” Professor Rosen began. “Are you both as excited as I am about the election on Tuesday?”

The boys nodded their heads dutifully.

“Good, good.” The professor removed her script from her purse. “Listen, I have a date tonight, so let's make this quick. There's less than eight weeks till showtime. I'd like you to read through the entire play, from start to finish. That way you can get a feel for the buildup of energy. Just get into the groove and let the words slide off your tongues. I bet you've even memorized a lot of it already.”

Adam pursed his lips. The only time he remembered getting “into the groove” was when he'd sat on his sofa at home holding Shipley's feet and fantasizing about what it would feel like to hold the rest of her.

Tom guzzled another few quarts of milk and cracked open his script. “I've been to the zoom,” he read.

“It's zoo,” Professor Rosen corrected him. “I believe it's been mentioned on numerous occasions that this play is called
The Zoo Story
?”

Tom ran his hands over his hair and gritted his teeth menacingly. “I've been to the zoo. I said, I've been to the zoo. Mister, I've been to the zoo!”

Adam glanced up from the script. Perhaps Tom was right for the part after all. Perhaps Tom was a more nuanced actor than he'd first thought. “You're a lucky man,” he muttered.

Tom looked confused. “Am I on the wrong page?”

“Just stick to the script,” Professor Rosen advised.

Adam cleared his throat and read his line. “I'm sorry, were you talking to me?”

Tom gritted his teeth. “I need more milk.”

Professor Rosen sighed and handed him the jug of milk. “Why don't you finish that off and start again from the beginning.”

Tom tossed his head back and guzzled the milk. He smacked his lips and wiped them on the back of his hand. “I've been to the zoo,” he began, sounding even more guttural and crazy than before.

Professor Rosen clapped her hands together. Her jade earrings jangled. “Yes!” she cried excitedly. “Yes!”

“Er. Ahem,” Adam coughed politely into his hand. At the end of the play he got to stab Tom in the gut with a plastic knife. He couldn't think of anything more satisfying. “Are you talking to me?”

W
hy take the job when she didn't need the money? Shipley wasn't sure how to answer that question. Perhaps it was a matter of fitting in—most of the students at Dexter had some sort of job—or maybe she just needed to do something on her own, independent of Tom. She hadn't even told him where she was going.

“Babysitting?” She could hear him chuckle as he tried to hide her clothes so she couldn't put them back on. “Fuck that.”

She shivered as she headed to her car, wishing she had worn a coat. It was five-thirty and already almost dark. She wasn't due at Professor Rosen's house until six, but because it was her first time babysitting, she thought it might be a good idea to arrive early and get acquainted with the baby before its parents left.

The car was in its usual cockeyed spot, keys on the tire. The same person who'd stolen it that first week of school had kept on stealing it, but they always brought it back when the tank was empty. Shipley's father had taught her to buy gas when the tank
was a quarter full, so she kept on dutifully filling it, only to see the car disappear once again. Of course she could have just kept the keys on her Dexter key chain instead of on the tire, but she was terrified of losing them, thus risking the need to call home. The years she'd waited for a car. The years she'd waited to leave home.

Sometimes the stranger left notes:
This car could use a bath
.
Wiper fluid!! Sorry, I smoked all your cigarettes. Left rear tire feels low
. Sometimes the stranger left a present: a particularly pretty pink leaf, a pack of Juicy Fruit,
DownEast
magazine, a Snickers bar. She liked to pretend the stranger was her ex-husband. She'd left him for Tom. Neither one of them wanted to give up the car in the divorce, so they'd decided to share it. He'd drive around, listening to her music, finishing off her old, stale coffee, missing her. And every hastily scrawled note or thoughtful little token he left behind was his way of telling her he wished he'd never let her go.

Today the note on the front seat read,
Needed: 1 pair wool socks, 1 heavy wool sweater or fleece, 1 pair warm gloves, 1 wool hat. All size Large.
Shipley stuffed the note into her pocket. The car smelled like cinnamon buns. She turned the keys in the ignition. The gas tank was so empty the warning light was on.

Professor Rosen's house was only a mile or so away from the farmhouse she'd happened upon the first night of college. It even looked a lot like Adam's house, except less quaint. Weeds grew out from under the worn porch steps, and the screen door hung from the door frame at a jaunty angle. There were no animals, only a fenced-in vegetable plot that had already been dug up and mulched for winter, and a terrifying scarecrow with red button eyes and red yarn hair. The scarecrow was dressed in a billowing white sheet, with a black trash bag cape and a black witch's hat.

Shipley mounted the porch steps and pulled open the screen
door. The wooden door behind it was ajar. She knocked on it softly and pushed it open. The kitchen table was strewn with the remains of the baby's mashed peas and brown rice dinner. Soothing strings played on a portable radio. The baby cooed in another room. A nervous lump formed in Shipley's throat and she considered leaving.

“Hello?” she croaked.

Some woman who wasn't Professor Rosen came into the kitchen with a fat baby slung over her shoulder. The baby had thick black hair, black eyes, tan skin, and wore a light blue terry-cloth zip-up footie suit. The woman was freckly and blue-eyed, with frizzy blond hair. She wore a multicolored crocheted dress and fringed suede moccasin boots.

“Shipley, thank God.”

“I meant to get here early, but I had to stop for gas,” Shipley explained.

“Don't worry about it.” The woman put down her jam jar full of white wine. “Darren's on campus rehearsing her play. I'm Blanche, otherwise known as Professor Blanche. I teach English at Dexter too.” She held the baby under his armpits and offered him to Shipley. “And this is Beetle. Beetle, Shipley. Shipley, Beetle.”

“Hello.”

Blanche frowned as Shipley clumsily laid Beetle down in the crook of her elbow and cradled him against her chest the way she'd held her dolls as a child. Beetle's shiny black eyes glared up at her. His fat brown face was pinched and angry. He whimpered and hiccupped and thrashed his little hands and feet.

“Um, he prefers to be upright, you know, like looking over your shoulder when you walk around?” Blanche suggested.

Shipley hiked him up onto her shoulder. He didn't feel anything like a doll. He felt like a furless, pajama-wearing puppy or a breathing bag of warm, wet sand.

Blanche stood behind her, talking to Beetle. “See? She's a nice girl,” she crooned. “You big mama's boy. You big fart machine. You big whatchamacallit.”

Shipley bobbed up and down, hoping Beetle wouldn't fart on her.

Blanche walked around them so she was facing Shipley. “We'll only be gone a few hours. Here's the number of the restaurant. It's in Hallowell. He's had a bath and dinner. All you need to do is have fun for about an hour, change him into his pj's, give him a bottle, and put him down. Bottle's in the fridge. It's shaped like a boob. He probably won't drink it all though, since he was such a hungry man at supper.” Blanche pressed her nose into Beetle's flabby cheek and breathed in, as if she couldn't get enough of the smell of him. “Just make yourself at home with little old rubberbutt.”

Shipley wanted to ask what exactly Beetle liked to do for fun and what he was supposed to wear to bed, since he seemed to be wearing his pajamas already. Wasn't that what babies wore pretty much all the time? She also wanted to ask if he still wore diapers, and how she was supposed to put him to sleep, but she didn't want to seem unprofessional. Beetle belched and she felt something warm and wet seep into the cloth of her sweatshirt.

“Whoops!” Blanche handed Shipley an old stained dish towel.

Obviously this household didn't use paper towels and recycled everything, including jam jars. It was also a household in which women lived together and adopted babies from Mexico or wherever and gave them very un-Mexican-sounding names like Beetle. There was absolutely no way for Shipley to make herself at home. She was galaxies away from Greenwich.

“Just so you know, that's regurgitated baby formula all over your shoulder, not breast milk. Can't breastfeed when you adopt,”
Blanche explained, tossing back the dregs of her wine. “So we'll see you around eleven or twelve.” She gave Beetle one last kiss on his little forehead and swished out the door in her fringed boots. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge if you get hungry!”

It seemed like a lot of trouble for only $40, especially an hour later, after fun time. Fun had consisted of Shipley putting Beetle down on his feet so he could walk around, and watching him topple over onto the carpet like a badly made toy. It hadn't occurred to her that he wouldn't know how to walk. Of course Beetle had begun to cry, and he'd been crying ever since. She carried him around for a while, walking from room to room, opening cabinets and drawers, reading the spines of books, checking out the contents of the fridge and generally snooping. She learned that Professor Rosen and her partner, Blanche, liked to eat things like tahini, tempeh, and quinoa. She learned that they used something called Dr. Bronner's Magic Liquid Soap to wash everything—their dishes, their clothes, their hair—and that instead of Advil and Tylenol their medicine cabinet was stocked with little vials of homeopathic remedies with names like Nux Vomica, Belladonna, Gunpowder, and Cypripedium Pubescens. She learned that they slept on the floor, on a futon covered in natural-looking cream-colored sheets, and that they owned only six dresses between them. She learned that they used organic bleach-free tampons. There was no caffeine in the house and no television, but the pantry was stocked with case upon case of wine. Their favorite authors seemed to be Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and Jeanette Winterson. A Clinton-Gore banner was displayed in the living room window. They had two large Maine coon cats who ignored Shipley completely. The house was cozy, full of plants and pillows and throws and furniture salvaged
from thrift stores, but it was so completely alien Shipley wasn't comfortable enough to sit down.

How had they come to live this way? she wondered as she paced the dusty wood floors with the crying baby in her arms. Were they raised in a house like this? Had they always eaten tempeh? Had they always preferred women to men? And if not, when did it happen? When did they know that they wanted to be mommies together and raise a little boy without caffeine or television or meat or bleach? How did they know they preferred Clinton-Gore over Bush-Quayle or Ross Perot? Was it something they learned in college?

She couldn't help but wonder what would happen to her after four years of exposure to such people. She might experience a slight alteration, or she might be completely transformed. Would she stop shaving her legs and using deodorant and write the word “women” with a y? Would she forgo leather and refuse to eat meat? Would she grind her own wheat and get fat and grow a mustache?

Beetle kept on crying. Finally she laid him down on his back in his crib. His face was no longer tan, but red. His diaper needed changing—it had been swelling by the minute—but she couldn't very well change him when he was so hysterical. Maybe he'd wear himself out soon and fall asleep.

But the baby continued to cry.

Shipley stared at him. She reached through the slats of the crib and poked his spongy arm with her finger.

“Hush. You be quiet now,” she murmured and stuck out her tongue, as if this were only a game they were playing and her helplessness was just an act. Beetle's shiny jelly bean eyes widened and the intensity of his howls increased. She left the room, hoping he would cry himself to sleep.

Downstairs she lit a cigarette and poured herself a glass of white wine from the open bottle in the fridge. She ashed into the sink, gulping the wine between puffs. Upstairs Beetle's cries grew louder and more desperate.

A worn Home phone book lay on the kitchen counter. Shipley snatched it up and without even pausing to think, turned to G for Gatz.

“Hello? Is this the Gatz household with two teenage kids—a guy named Adam with red hair, and a pretty girl with long dark hair and a strange name that I can't remember—
Philosophy?
” she asked desperately.

“Is this some kind of poll?” the woman on the other end replied.

“No, I just…Is Adam there?” She and Adam rarely saw each other on campus and they never spoke. Shipley wasn't sure why, but ever since she and Tom had become a couple, she'd avoided Adam completely.

“Adam is at the college, rehearsing his play.”

“And what about…his sister?”

“Tragedy?!” the woman bellowed, her mouth away from the phone. “Who may I ask is calling?” she said into the earpiece. “Someone named Soon Yi!” she bellowed after Shipley had given her name.

The phone clattered against something hard and then Tragedy picked up.

“Hello?”

“Tragedy? I don't know if you remember me. This is Shipley.”

“Of course I remember you,” Tragedy huffed. “Do you have any idea what it's like to live with Adam now? He hardly talks or eats or even looks at anyone. He's like a ghost.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know,” Shipley said, wondering what all this had to do with her. “But please, I just need someone to—”
She explained the situation, her voice shuddering on the verge of hysteria. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “He won't stop crying and I don't know what to do!”

“Okay, Jesus. Calm down.” Tragedy sighed impatiently. “Listen, take a deep breath and make yourself some chamomile tea or something. I'll be there in a sec.”