The Yearbook (5 page)

After a while Danielle showed up and sat around reading the new
Vogue
. This time Lola didn't bother to hide the yearbook. Why should she?

“Reading that book from the garbage again?” Danielle said.

“I guess,” Lola said.

“What's so interesting about it?”

“The clothes.”

Danielle slid off her bed and came over to take a look. “You're right. Some of that's back in style.” She waved the
Vogue
at Lola. “Beads are in now. And that plunging neckline, I'd wear that.”

Lola turned to page 23 to show Danielle the picture of the stylish girls' glee club. Danielle traced her finger down a bear-like fur coat on one of the girls in the front row. She was a curly-haired girl, waving a pennant and laughing.

“They look just like us,” Danielle said. “It's a shame.”

“What is?”

“That all these kids are dead now.”

Lola felt like she'd been punched in the kidneys. She wanted to argue, but of course it was perfectly true to Danielle, to everybody else.

“I wonder what happened to them all,” Danielle said. “After they got out of school, I mean.”

They're still in school. Don't worry. I just saw them
,
Lola thought.

“Probably a bunch of them died in one of those world wars,” Danielle went on.

The words brought a sweat to Lola's forehead. She felt woozy and was glad she was sitting down.
No, they didn't die. They didn't.

“And diseases,” Danielle said. “There weren't any shots, you know. They all got polio and romantic fever. And that black plague. Probably that killed off a lot of them. About a hundred billion people died of that. I saw it on TV. Their tongues turned black and swelled up and then—”

Lola slapped the yearbook shut and stuffed it back in her knapsack.

“What?” Danielle said.

“I'm bored.”

Danielle sneezed. “Moldy.”

• • •

On Saturday morning Lola put on her ill-fitting uniform of yellow polyester—the pants too big and the top too small—shouldered her knapsack, and pedaled over to Golden Recipe Fried Chicken.

As usual, she took the back roads to avoid the municipal sports complex and its parking lot full of SUVs. She couldn't stand seeing the school cliques hanging around in their soccer or tennis clothes, taking pictures of each other, laughing, eating the kind of fun, crappy fast food it was her job to prepare. As much as she hated seeing them, it was worse if they saw her ride by in her ugly uniform. Her stomach squeezed into something black and hard then, and it took an hour for it to stop hurting.

Mr. Terry, the manager, saw her coming through the egg-shaped entrance and quickly checked his watch. His face fell when he saw she was on time.

Mr. Terry had been a schoolteacher, but for some reason nobody knew, he wasn't one anymore. Lola assumed he was your garden-variety pervert, but whatever the case, he talked of his teaching days as a lost paradise where he'd been respected and had wielded authority, and of the present as an undeserved purgatory among frozen chickens and smartass subordinates.

Today he was in a tizzy; the janitorial service had crashed its van and couldn't sterilize the restrooms until further notice. Terry could have picked any of the five employees to fill in, but he fixed on Lola. It was revenge, she figured, for her unexplained absence the week before.

“Let's shake a leg, people,” he said, striding uselessly about the kitchen. Mr. Terry never did any work himself; he just hovered and bossed. He had a way of standing ramrod straight and flexing his butt muscles inside his yellow polyester pants while he yelled at people. No wonder they wouldn't let him teach school.

Lola gathered her courage and flung open the restroom doors. Since their last cleaning, the stalls had been the scene of any number of biological and recreational events, and the grossness had reached a new high. The trashcans overflowed onto the slimy floor, and one of the toilets was stuffed to the brim with Golden Recipe wet-wipes—somebody's idea of a joke. Flies buzzed in the stalls. Lola held her breath and worked as fast as she could, blindly sloshing hot water and disinfectant toward spots that were too awful to be viewed by human eyes.

The rest of the shift was a blur of greasy chicken parts set to Muzak. At four o'clock she tore off her hairnet and went to get her paycheck. She found Mr. Terry in the stifling storage room he referred to as his “office.” It reeked of ammonia, chicken fat, and Mr. Terry's stale breath. She hovered in the doorway.

“Come on in,” he said, poking away at his adding machine. “What can I do you for?”

Lola took a step toward Mr. Terry and noticed, as she had on other occasions, how he seemed to be steadily turning yellow—his hair, his skin, the whites of his eyes—to match the wallpaper, the buttermilk biscuits, the ancient oil in the deep fryer. “I'd like my paycheck, please,” she said.

Mr. Terry didn't look up. “Paycheck?” he repeated as if trying out a new word.

“It should be fifty-eight dollars, more or less, by my calculations,” Lola said.

“Your calculations, you say.” The yellow man chuckled, gesturing for Lola to sit down on the lone metal folding chair that faced his desk.

Lola ventured into the room with creeping dread. The manager's tone, the office setting, reminded her of the times she'd been kicked out of school. She sat down and squinted at him across the desk. He got up and shut the door. She tensed. Maybe he was about to try for a grope session, in which case she was fully prepared to knock his yellow teeth straight up through the roof of his mouth.

Mr. Terry sat down on the corner of his desk, way too close to her chair. His thighs seemed to hover right in her face. The polyester gripped the contours of his crotch in a way that would be good for a nightmare or two later on. He plucked a pencil from his desk and tasted the eraser. Lola caught a glimpse of the slimy underside of his tongue and shivered.

“Let me tell you a little bit about
my
calculations, Lola,” he said.

Now she understood: Despite the crotch in her face, this wasn't entirely a perv thing. He was drawing out the delivery of some yummy nugget of bad news and savoring her discomfort.

“You broke a light fixture last month. Remember
that
?”

“It fell and almost hit me,” she shot back.

Terry raised his eyebrows in fake surprise. He sauntered around his desk and sat down. His chair groaned as he leaned back and folded his arms behind his head. “Hmm. How I remember it is that you threw a biscuit at it and broke it.”

She had thrown a biscuit. That much was true. But it was only to let off some steam and to demonstrate the cement-like texture of Golden Recipe baked goods to a new coworker. She had missed the light fixture by a foot at least. The next day, when the same light fixture fell, Mr. Terry blamed the “delayed seismic reverberations” from Lola's biscuit attack. She never dreamed he'd take it this far.

“It cost us seventy-nine ninety-nine to replace that fixture. So the good news is you'll be done working it off by the end of next week.”

Lola felt every muscle in her body contract. She wanted to scream, to commit murder. She would have leaped across the desk and administered a tracheotomy with a flexible drink straw if it hadn't been such an obvious felony.

But then she saw him watching her, his mouth open, his teeth bared, his eyebrows raised, in anticipation of her protest, her tears. She smiled blandly. “That seems more than fair, Mr. Terry,” she said. “Yes, indeed, it certainly does.”

His chair brought him bolt upright with a shriek. He was startled speechless. Lola had popped him like a balloon. His day was ruined.

“Okay, then,” he blustered. “I hope you've learned your lesson.”

“Oh, I have . . .
sir
.” She wanted to add, “By the way, I quit,” but felt this would only tickle the old butt-flexer. So she quit without saying it. He'd figure it out when he was short-handed during the next lunch rush.

On the way out, she paused in the employee break room just long enough to jimmy open the manager's locker and remove two crisp fifty-dollar bills from Terry's wallet. Sixty dollars was for her work and the other forty for the emotional distress she'd suffered in the putrid closet. He was getting off easy. She slipped the empty wallet back into his pocket. Gag—the operation had called for contact with the seat of Terry's tan chinos. She replaced the lock carefully so that it appeared untouched. Skills acquired in juvenile hall so often came in handy.

On the way home she stopped at the Dollar Store and bought a magnifying glass. Her plan was to rush upstairs, shut herself in her room, and spend the afternoon alone with the yearbook. She had looked at it all Friday afternoon and into the evening, and had held it tight against her as she slept. She had carried it to work in her knapsack and taken a peek at it on her break, out back by the trashcans, after cleaning the bathrooms. With a magnifying glass she could see the object that might be her cap more clearly, and maybe she could make out a few more faces.

She couldn't seem to leave the yearbook alone. It was the thread that connected her to that place where she was foreign, interesting, more beautiful than the stars, the place where a young scientist had waited beside a bronze mermaid. How long, she wondered, had he waited there for her?

In the parking lot of the Dollar Store, Lola decided not to go straight home. Graham might be lying in wait for her with the new chore rotation. And Danielle was meeting Beth again for a Brent Gaynor worship service. There was Hershey to consider as well. She had an annoying habit of popping by and scrutinizing her like she was trying to read her mind. It always left Lola feeling guilty, whether she'd done anything or not. She had to go somewhere else, a place she'd be left in peace.

She rode around randomly for a while, coasting through the better neighborhood with the new condos and then heading through Fairview, which just got worse and worse. So many of the houses were vacant, or had their front porches falling off or a beat-up dishwasher dumped in the front yard or rancid beach towels hung up where curtains should have been. Ashfield had prospered once as one of Ohio's main steel and quarry towns. But that was ages ago, and now entire boulevards were taken up by abandoned factories, weedy lots, and windowless saloons that hid behind dirty brick facades.

Sometimes when she rode through Fairview Lola found herself wondering why she couldn't remember living there. It had been three or four years of her life, but it was a blank slate. Even the memories of her mother were so faint now that she couldn't be certain they weren't her own inventions; she wasn't sure whether to be angry she couldn't remember or glad. She spun past the public library. As usual, all sorts of dumbasses were hanging out in the parking lot; a fat guy in a velour sweatsuit yelled something at her she couldn't make out while the others laughed. After a while Lola stopped to rest in the one halfway decent place she could think of, Ashfield City Park. It had cannons, a few flower beds, and a couple of granite monuments. She found a nice place to sit on top of one of the cannons, right next to a sign that read,
DO NOT SIT ON CANNONS
. She had just begun to unzip her knapsack when she felt raindrops. Her first thought was to protect the yearbook. She knew the devastating effect of water on old paper. Her tattered knapsack wasn't equal to the job.

Lightning flashed and the sprinkle became a downpour. She had to find shelter. Across the street were a few junk stores she'd never noticed before. She grabbed her bike and made for the closest one. The sign on the door read,
YESTERDAY BOUTIQUE
.

Lola entered a wide carpeted space like a lobby and guessed that the building had once been a movie theater. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, her guess was confirmed by a rinky-dink museum dedicated to the building's past. The first exhibit was a snack bar with an antique popcorn popper, vintage candy boxes, and a big brass cash register. A few steps beyond, an ancient movie projector and a row of plush red seats were displayed behind a velvet security rope. Lola crouched to read a sign hanging from the rope:
These original furnishings were salvaged from The Grand Theater, which opened on this spot on Memorial Day, 1915, and closed Dec. 21, 1974. Modeled in a combination of French Baroque and Rococo styles, the theater was designed to resemble opera houses and palaces of Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was an important social hub in Ashfield for many years. Although most of the contents of the theater, including its Mighty Wurlitzer organ (built 1919), were sold at auction in early 1975, the Ashfield Historical Society obtained these few pieces for the benefit of posterity. Please do not touch.

Lola stood back up. Several black-and-white photos of the theater in its heyday hung on the wall behind the seats. She leaned over the rope for a closer look. One picture showed a line of patrons snaking away from the ticket booth.
THE SHEIK
, the marquee read, starring a certain Rudolph Valentino. He was dressed in Arabian robes and had a woman in his arms, tipped backward in a suffocating kiss. Lola was studying the kiss when a terrific thunderclap sounded overhead. The lights flickered.

“Ah, Valentino.”

Lola jerked around.

A small old lady in a psychedelic floral pantsuit and a crooked, honey-colored wig stood close behind her, peering over her shoulder. The lady pulled a pair of big square glasses from her pocket for a closer examination.

“And of course when he died in 1926, one hundred thousand people attended his funeral,” the woman said, giving Lola the odd impression that they had been standing there chatting about Valentino all day long. “Pola Negri was so overcome with grief that she fainted right into his open casket—several times, in fact.”