Teach Me (12 page)

dishes make love

Night.

It’s when all the other things come out.

The scariest things, thoughts, fears.

Plans.

I’m trying to recognize myself.

Where does this massive anger come from? How deep does it go? How connected is it to my core, my center? Is it a part of me? Has it always been there? Waiting for something in my life to go insanely wrong?

Or does it come from somewhere else? Is this how I get rid of it, by bleeding it off, or will it always be there, waiting for the next time I need it?

I need it now.

Wilkie’s steering column crunches as I crank his tires around. I can see piney woods on the left side of the road here. The fence in front of me is topped with razor wire. The official-looking sign in the headlights says:

As much fun as it would be to play here, this is not the side I want.

I park and get out.

My war is across the road.

Across the road from the test range is the swamp where the beavers live. Eventually the swamp becomes a lake.

Sunlake.

The swamp is harder to skirt than I figured. Along the edges the water is reasonably shallow, but the muddy bottom sucks at my feet, threatening to pull my sneakers off. It takes fifteen minutes to wade to the back of Mr. Mann’s complex. Swamp water is amazingly cold, even this time of year. I’m terrified my toes will be eaten by snapping turtles.

I count the units until I know I have the right one. I can’t see his car from this side, but I’m pretty certain they are home. The lights are on.

Good.

I come to a place where the bottom under my feet turns hard and I nearly fall; chunks of limestone have been tumbled along the bank to prevent erosion. I’m standing in the lake. I climb out of the water and come free of the trees. Edge along the strip of wasted yard behind Mr. Mann’s building. This is where they hide the air-conditioning units, power transformers, curly black downspouts.

The apartment below his is dark. It won’t be that hard to get to the second floor. I step on the ground-floor porch railing and haul myself up, holding one of the support columns. I stand there, toes of my sneakers on somebody’s handrail, catch my breath. My legs are shaking a little—from the effort of balancing or the intense fear of what I’m doing?

Only crazy people and criminals do something like this. And me. Where do I fall on that spectrum?

Falling.

A really bad word.

This is the last possible stopping place. It would be a little weird getting caught hanging on to some guy’s porch, but climbing to a second-floor balcony, that’s off the scale.

But I’m going through with it, aren’t I?

Yes. Yes, I am.

No one around, not too many lights. Go.

I grab the spindles on Mr. Mann’s deck and start to haul myself up. It’s a little tough to boost myself from here using only my arms—my strength comes from my legs—until I get a toe between the railings. At last I swing my leg over and drop as quietly as possible to the deck.

I’ve done it. I’m here. I’m really here.

I wait a few beats of my screaming heart to decide if anybody has heard me. My teeth are dry, breath sibilant, mouth awful. When did I eat? When did I bathe? Who am I?

Nothing. Not a sound.

I look around. No curtains on the slider, but the room is dark. I scuttle over as slowly as a spider with arthritis in every leg. Crouch behind a rusty gas grill and peer through the glass. The living room is empty and dim, but the small kitchen beyond is glaring.

I wait, trying to breathe deeply. Are they here? Then I hear movement, voices inside. I nearly jump to the railing, but instead I force myself to be still. Strain my senses to the bleeding point and wait.

I want to see how they touch.

Mr. Mann shows up first, freezing the breath in my lungs. No shirt, and he’s scratching his shoulder near the armpit. I’ve rested my head there. We were watching
Random Harvest,
with Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson. Ronald Coleman had lost his memory. Greer Garson was desperately trying to make him remember how much he loved her—

Crap.

This is crazy.

Intellectually, I know it’s not likely they will come out on the deck at this time of night.

Emotionally, I’m completely freaked, scared witless. What am I doing here?

I’ve been here so many times, it feels supremely weird to be on the outside, watching through the glass. Everything inside calls out to me, says I should be able to stand, call out to him.

Rush into his arms.

Alicia suddenly moves into the kitchen with her back to me, making my heart drum. She’s tugging out plates and doing something at the stove. To help keep myself calm, I make observations: her hands are small, arms short, movements precise and compact; I wonder, does he kiss each finger as he kissed each one of mine? He leans across the short bar on his elbows, watching her work. I hear the rumbling vibration of his baritone but can’t make out the words. Alicia laughs.

Still they haven’t touched. What are they talking about? I can’t stand it anymore—my miserable curiosity overcomes my terror. I extend my arm under the grill to the nearest edge of the slider. An imperceptible pull and it gives. With obscene patience, I tug it open a few inches, then take my hand away again.

“Wish it could be another way,” Mr. Mann is saying. The words roll through me like medicated steam.

“But I’ve always had my own account,” Alicia says as she pushes things around on the stove. “I’ll go first thing in the morning and set it up. You’ll see. It’ll be easier to organize that way.”

Mr. Mann’s shoulders sag. “Your mother—” he starts, but stops himself. “But I like to keep things together. It’ll be so complicated to keep up with it if we divide them up that way. I have enough trouble balancing one. Won’t it be too complicated?”

Alicia turns, spatula in the air. “No, silly, it’ll be easier. I promise. You just have to be sure to use the right checkbook. We’ll get them in different colors. Color coded! Green for you, blue for me. And maybe a third account—we’ll make it red—only for yearly expenses. You know, onetime things like car tags.”

I watch them eat.

My heart drops into my stomach—I’ve never had a real meal with him, something cooked and put on a table. Just like that, she’s that far ahead of me already. It looks like stir-fry. Alicia rakes vegetables from a black pan onto a couple of plates. Mr. Mann sits. As he dips his fork to the plate and lifts it to his mouth again, I study the muscles moving in his back. I’ve tasted him there.

Alicia eats across from him. She stabs and eats her food with the fork turned upside down. Efficient and European. My fingernails dig into the wormy deck. I didn’t expect this. The domesticity of the scene is worse than catching them in bed. Worse because it shows they have all the time in the world for making love. It has its place in their lives, can be as huge or small as they need, not the central axis on which everything turns.

“So are you sure you want to switch majors again?” Mr. Mann says.

“I’m sure,” Alicia says, collecting the plates. “I’ve tried it for three years. I’m sick of all the math and chemistry. I’ll never get through it. I’ve got enough credits to be a junior, but it doesn’t add up to anything.”

“But nursing? Won’t it be like starting over?”

“A lot of what I already have can be used as electives. Plus I really think I’ll like it. I’ll be happier, I really will. I like people, not numbers.”

Something inside me, a throbbing, insistent fear, eases a bit—so she’s been to three years of college. That puts her in her twenties, at least. I feel guilt wash in with the letting go of the fear—there is something so amazingly wrong about overhearing a conversation like this. It’s harmless, but it’s not harmless. But I can’t stop, not now.

They clean up, load the dishwasher; she pops him with a dish towel while he pretends not to notice. If they turn on his music, I will set fire to the building.

They flick off the kitchen light, head up the short hall. All is quiet, show over.

Now.

I turn my entire body into an Ear and listen for several more minutes. Nothing. Then, just when I’m about to give up and leave—as if on cue—I hear Alicia giggle horribly. A black fury rises up in me, overwhelming anything else.

I brace for sexy laughter. Nothing. I can smell the heartbreakingly familiar cheap carpeting in the exhalations of the room mixed with a hint of ginger. And Him. His scent is there too. I can never forget it. I close my eyes a moment and let the air from inside wash over my face.

Big thump.

I tense, scurry back on my heels. Was it the bedroom? My face feels as if it has been injected with novocaine. I’m not sure I can move the muscles that control my lips, my eyes. I get closer again and force myself to wait. The numb tightness travels down my shoulders to my arms and hands.

Are they? Could they?

No. Not with me here. It’s too evil.

The bathroom door suddenly swings open, throwing a rhombus of yellow light across the hall. I’m frozen. I hear the oceanic sound of flushing. Mr. Mann pivots on his heel, still zipping up.

“!”

He doesn’t say a word, but he’s seen me through the door.

I scramble away in horror. In two steps I catch my leg over the rail and I’m spinning in space, free falling. I land on my side with a terrible
whump
on the soggy squares of unanchored sod. Then I’m up, limp-running toward the swamp.

I don’t remember getting into Wilkie Collins, starting his popping engine, driving away. I remember Mr. Mann’s face. The shock and hatred on it.

Why, why, why?

 
MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, — you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

I’m horrified that I am. One of those people—you can see it in their eyes. You might be doing something simple, just going through the grocery store; you come to the next aisle, and there they are, not ready for you. The way they are torn up inside— they’ve let it show on their face, even if only for a moment; it pops out, and you just happen to accidentally be there to see it— the way they feel deep inside, completely open and exposed. How ripped apart they are, how close to death or even worse than death—close to losing their minds. It is pushing right up to their eyeballs and leaking out, so that the only way to get relief, the only way, is to let it all come screaming and tearing out sometime when you think nobody is looking, right here, right now, in the goddamn cereal aisle at the grocery, but when you do—

Am I madness? Do I need to be chained?

big black blue

Home.

In the driveway, I can’t get out.

I’m shaking all over, lying on my hurt side, my face on Wilkie’s dusty seat. Land of a Thousand Butts.

I realize with a plunging horror I’ll never be one of those Great Souls you hear about. Like Mother Teresa. I’ll always be a girl who can be just as good as the world is to her. Like Bill Clinton or Madonna or Sammy Sosa or my next-door neighbor.

For the first time I see nothing ahead, not even the chance to hurt him. As dull as it sounds, I see blackness. Not an absence of light, but an absence of a path, a direction. The blackness is a barrier. A blockage, a foulness in a pipe.

This is not the Nothing that exists before everything or the Nothing that exists after all is gone. This is a definite Something, but it comes from somewhere outside my experience. This is what people must feel when they enter the hospital for the last time or take too many sleeping pills.

A noise.

I can’t let my parents find me like this; what will they think?

I pop up painfully just as a black car passes, menacing, interminable, the interior lights blinking goofily on and off. Surely no car can be this long. It’s a limousine. Some of the windows are rolled down. Screams of laughter.

Prom night.

How could I forget?

I stumble into the house, slip into my room, and change my wet clothes before Mom can see me like this. She’s watching
Wheel of Fortune
in the den. I want to lift the TV and throw it through the window.

“I thought you were at work,” she says.

“No.”

“Nine, come here.”

“I don’t feel so good.”

“What is it? What’s wrong, honey?” She forgets the clacking wheel, clacking contestants, ageless Pat Sajak.

“Nothing, Mom.”

“Schuyler called.”

“Great.”

“Aren’t you going to call him back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“And what’s wrong with Wilkie? Doesn’t that boy ever want to come meet us?”

I laugh, and it’s an awful laugh. Mom looks at me and blinks.

“I made him up, Mom. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Wilkie Collins is my car. I got tired of you asking about boys and the prom, so I made him up.”

“Well.”

I can’t tell if she wants to laugh too or maybe just cry.

“Well,” she says again. By then I’m moving to the bathroom. I haul my jeans down and check my hip in the mirror. In the morning it’s going to be black and blue.

Dad meets me in the hallway when I come out:

“One week to go,” he says. “Countdown. Final sequence check.”

He says this as if sensing something. Only Dad can’t sense. He can watch and estimate and measure, then make an educated observation.

“I guess,” I say.

“Can you believe it?”

“I don’t know what to believe these days, Dad.”

He doesn’t seem to be listening, but sometimes that is when he is listening the hardest.

“Today, at work, a single man lost the entire CRPS database,” he says.

“That’s nice.”

“Nearly a year’s worth of NASA budgetary figures.”

“No backups, huh?”

“He lost the database performing the daily backup.”

“Oh.” My eyes can only see what’s in my imagination: Mr. Mann. Accusations. Shame. Disgrace. “I hope they fired him. I hope they threw him out on the street.”

“No,” Dad said. “He still has his job. He’s a good man.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

“Because everybody can make a mistake. Sometimes very big ones. You don’t throw a good man out because of that. Then people get afraid to take risks.”

I don’t know what to say. Is Dad channeling my teacher? Or is he talking about me? I start to speak, close my mouth.

He smiles and touches my hair. “I’m so proud of you, honey.”

“I don’t deserve it. Seriously, I don’t. I’m no better than anybody else.”

“Modest, too. What’s for supper?”

“I’m not feeling all that well. I don’t know.”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m tired, Dad. Just let me go.”

“Okay.”

I turn on my computer and watch Niagara Falls at night. Nothing but darkness flecked with a few tiny lights.

But the falls are still there, roaring.