Read What Strange Creatures Online
Authors: Emily Arsenault
Zach had spent a great deal of time in each section profiling not just the kids he featured and their daily lives in detention but their families and backgrounds. In the section about Dustin, he’d given a few pages to his brother, Trenton. Kim had marked most of it:
Dustin’s brother, Trenton, visits him every couple of weeks. On this particular Saturday, he’s telling Dustin about his telemarketing job.
“You have to decide if your approach is going to be aggressive or pathetic,” says Trenton, now nineteen years old. He attends the Salinsburg branch of the state college and works as a telemarketer on the evenings when he doesn’t have classes.
“That’s how you make it in that job. You grow a thick skin, first of all. Because every ten calls or so, you’re going to get people telling you you’re the scum of the earth. But beyond that, if you want to make any sales, you learn that you have to talk over people like an asshole or talk soft and sad so people feel sorry for you. Some people go with one or the other, always. But I do it call by call. From the moment I hear their voice. There’s something instinctual about it. When I hear the hello, I make a decision. Aggressive or pathetic. It keeps it interesting.”
Telemarketing was Trenton’s first job when he was seventeen. He was good at it, so he kept at it. Now he works that job in addition to one as a customer service representative at Medialink Cable Company—similar work, he says, though better-paying and less stressful.
“Anything but food service,” he explains to me. “Anything.”
Most of his earnings go toward his tuition at college, where he is now a junior, majoring in marketing. He shares a two-bedroom apartment with three other students, which keeps his rent low. The Barbieris occasionally help him out when he runs into financial difficulty.
He says he wished his brother were as lucky as he has been. He hopes he can help Dustin when he gets out of detention—after he himself graduates and gets a full-time job and a place of his own.
“Dustin—he had it tougher because this all happened when he was younger. But he’s old enough now to face reality. I wish I could help him with that. But I’ve figured out that that’s something no one can really help you do. You need to be ready to realize you’ve been bullshitting yourself.”
Admittedly, I’d only skimmed most of the parts of Zach’s book that weren’t about Zach himself. I didn’t remember these brothers very well.
And the last portion Kim had marked was this:
Dustin maintains his mother’s innocence all these years later—a position to which he attributes some of his difficulties with the Barbieris.
“They didn’t want me to ever talk about it. Or at least they didn’t want me to talk about it except in the way they wanted.”
By “they” he means “the social workers—and the families, at least some of the time. It’s frustrating to have to live with someone who doesn’t want you to ever say what’s on your mind.”
He says he finds that more people here in juvie are willing to listen to his thoughts about the murder than people on the outside are.
For one, there is Sharon Silverstein, who teaches English and history in the detention center’s high-school classes. She has encouraged Dustin to write about his parents. Usually he’s done so in the form of songs. He isn’t willing to share any of his songs.
“They’re shitty,” he says. “I need to hone my craft a little more. Maybe I can buy a guitar when I get out. My parents promised me one, back in the day. But obviously that didn’t work out.”
Another good listener is his classmate Anthony.
Dustin and Anthony are both sixteen. Though they don’t seem to acknowledge it, they are perhaps drawn to each other because they are two of the few inmates in this facility from a white suburban background.
“Anthony’s the only one I’ve told everything about what happened with my parents,” Dustin says.
Anthony and Dustin sit together in the dining hall at lunchtime.
“There were a lot of things the police didn’t want to pay attention to,” says Dustin. “They weren’t listening to what I was really saying. I was a confused kid. It’s their job as the adults to read between the lines and make sense of the story, not try to confuse me more and catch me in a lie. I’d just watched my father die. Then you’re gonna treat me like that?
“And there was other shit the police never followed up on. There was a holdup at a convenience store a few blocks away two nights before my dad was shot. A black guy and a white guy. Very unusual for our town, that kind of thing. Just like what happened at our house was very unusual. But that was real and ours wasn’t somehow. How does that make sense?”
Dustin pauses to shovel grayish peas into his mouth.
Anthony looks bored. He has clearly heard this speech before.
“You ought to take all this stuff about what your parents did and what you did,” he says to Dustin, “and when you get out of here, you write it down and you put it in some object. Put it in an old mug you used to drink out of. Or tie it to an old lamp that you used to have in your room. And you put it in your head that that story is that thing. And you throw that thing in a river, or bury it, or just toss it in the garbage somewhere if you don’t want to get all ceremonial about it. So then whenever you want to think of that story, you think of it like the mug or the lamp or whatever. It’s just a thing you used to have in your life. But that you don’t have anymore. You can remember it. But it’s not significant. It’s not a part of you. It’s not you.”
“It is me,” Dustin insists. “Maybe less when I get out than before. But it’s still me.”
Kim had underlined and scribbled exclamation points next to the lines that said:
“There were a lot of things the police didn’t want to pay attention to,” says Dustin. “They weren’t listening to what I was really saying. I was a confused kid. It’s their job as the adults to read between the lines and make sense of the story.”
I thought that was interesting, given Kim’s history and given that both she and Dustin had likely been dealing with the same adult during the height of their difficult young lives: Donald Wallace.
I
was trying my damnedest to concentrate on Marge, reviewing a chapter that has always intrigued me. In several spots in the book, Marge tells little stories that, in her view, prove she has an occasional gift for prophecy. In this particular chapter, the priest-scribe who took down her story becomes a character in her narrative.
Apparently he was often testing Marge’s supposed gifts to make sure he wasn’t wasting his time documenting her life. On this occasion he was taken with a young man who had a sad story. He came from far away and had no money or friends. He couldn’t go home because he’d accidentally killed (or gravely injured, he wasn’t sure which) a man in self-defense. While the priest felt sorry for this well-spoken and good-looking young man, and felt he deserved his assistance, Marge predicted he was bad news: “For many speak and seem very fair outwardly to people’s sight—God knows what they are in their souls!”
The young man ended up borrowing money from the priest and taking off, never to be seen again.
It was one of many I-told-you-so’s in Marge’s book. What interested me most about it, though, was the glimpse it gave of Marge’s scribe. There seemed to be humility in his inclusion of that story. Still, many Marge enthusiasts wondered, as I did, how much of himself—or his opinion of her—ended up in the book without Marge’s knowing. Did she ever have anyone read back to her what he’d written? Did she have a sense of how nuts she sometimes sounded?
As I worked, I sipped on Malbec and played Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” from my iTunes. An hour into it, I heard a light knock on my door. Jeff didn’t wait for me to yell for him to come in, and I put down my glass when I saw his face. There was suffering in his expression. His eyes were red, his face slightly blue. I wondered if he’d given himself another nasty hangover.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ve got a nice chicken with garlic sauce for you in the fridge.”
He stared at me. There was something unrecognizable in his gaze. This was no hangover.
“Kim’s dead,” he said.
He collapsed on the carpet next to Wayne.
“What? Jeff—”
He took Wayne’s ear in his hand and stroked it. “Her body. They found it near Rowington.”
He pulled Wayne’s paws into his lap. His shoulders shuddered, and then he began to cry.
The few available details were grim.
Kim’s body was found near Highway 114, which was a rural highway about thirty miles from the hotel where she’d been staying. There were obvious signs of strangulation, according to the police statement. They wouldn’t say, though, if there had been a sexual assault. In fact, they didn’t say much of anything else. There would be an autopsy in a few days.
Jeff had found out about her death from another waitress at Kim’s job. Kim’s family had let them know down at Wiley’s, and a waitress friend of hers had come by to see how Jeff was holding up. She found Jeff at his apartment, watching MSNBC, oblivious. No one had contacted him.
As Jeff explained all of this, Wayne got up and wandered off. I wondered if he sensed the nature of our conversation.
“This whole time I was just waiting for her to come back.” Jeff drew circles in the carpet with his finger. “And cursing her. Saying terrible things about her in my head. Because she had lied to me.”
“You couldn’t have known,” I kept saying.
After I’d said it about three times, Jeff finally looked at me.
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “You don’t know even a tiny fraction of it. Of how much I was starting to resent her.”
I didn’t know what to do with this. I knew more than he realized, since I’d talked to Brittany.
“Do you want to explain what you mean?” I asked.
“No. Not right now.” Jeff stared at the carpet. “Maybe I could take Wayne home with me tonight.”
“What about the no-pets rule?”
“It’s for one night. They’ll never know about just one night.”
“He might bark.” What a dumb thing to say.
Just let him take the damn dog, Theresa.
“He probably will. But it’s just for one night.”
I didn’t say anything more. I fetched Wayne’s leash and his special-formula dog food. Then I found Wayne himself nestled on my bath mat, gnawing on a DVD case: the first season of
Homeland.
I sat on the mat with him and stroked his soft head. He growled at the threat against his new plastic possession. I removed my hand and talked to him gently for a few minutes—about his mistress, about grief, about being good and quiet and gentle with my brother tonight. Then I was silent. After a couple more minutes, he dropped the DVD case and twitched his eyebrows at me.
“Ready?” I whispered. “Good puggle.”
I brushed my teeth, then found Sylvestress and deposited her on the bed next to me. I didn’t want to sleep alone, and watching her clean herself always cheered me up. She performed sweeping, dramatic licks to each long lock of her luxuriant fluff. It was more elegant and more entertaining than the quick, businesslike manner of my shorthair cats.
Once Sylvestress closed her eyes, I slid my laptop onto my lap and noodled around online for a while. When I felt ready, I typed in the address for Zach’s class blog. First I glanced at the syllabus: Nabokov, Annie Dillard, Maya Angelou, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr. Fun stuff. It was the sort of class I’d never gotten to teach, as I’d always toiled away in Composition 101. But then I’d never published a book or won any awards.
There were seven written assignments for the semester. Each time one was due, students got to pick between two prompts Zach had written. The prompts were sometimes clever, sometimes cheesy, sometimes academic:
Recount one story shared orally that has come to act as central “myth” for your family.
Write about a “first” that was significant to you in some way—e.g., first job, first kiss, first day of school.
Write a conversation between your present-day self and a younger version of yourself.
There was something for everyone—from the jaded junior English major to the senior citizen auditing night classes. I admired Zach for the effort he’d put into the course. I’d had trouble when I was assigned the more diverse night classes. My assignments were always too easy or too hard, and someone was always either rolling their eyes or having a panic attack.
I randomly clicked on a midsemester assignment.
How did you mark time as a child? Illustrate how you marked the passing of time through one specific memory from your childhood.
OR
Describe a transitional moment in your childhood or adolescence.
The student responses were alphabetized by last name. I didn’t feel quite ready for Kim’s yet. So I clicked Jeff’s first and found this:
When I was five and my sister was four, our father worked long hours and our mother worked two jobs. Our babysitter, Mrs. Vernick, would always watch
The Young and the Restless
right before she’d walk me to the corner for the afternoon kindergarten bus.
I was young and restless myself, always fidgeting on the couch and trying to think of ways to engage Mrs. Vernick, to pull her gaze away from the television. I’d start knock-knock jokes or try to touch my nose with my tongue or pull my turtleneck over my face, but no dice: Vernick had seen it all before. One time I looked down at my feet and noticed that my white socks were quite visible below my red corduroy cuffs.
“Hey, Mrs. Vernick,” I said. “Look! My pants are getting short. It must mean I’m growing.”
Mrs. Vernick barely glanced up from the couple smooching on the TV and replied, “Your pants aren’t getting short. They’re the same size they always were.”
“But I’m growing,” I repeated.
“Yeah, you’re getting taller. Sure.”
I beamed at this surprisingly positive reply. And as I stepped onto the school bus that day, I pointed to my ankles and announced to the driver, “Look at how short my pants are! I’m really growing.”
I don’t remember the driver’s exact response, but I recall that it was enthusiastic.
Of course, I’d been told up till then that I was growing. Kids grow. Everyone knew that. A little tiny bit every day, so you didn’t usually notice it while it was happening to you. But this was the first real, tangible dramatic evidence I’d seen of it. The pants came halfway up to my calves, practically! It was like magic, it was so true.
I pointed it out to my teacher and all my friends: “I’m growing!”
The statement became more and more exuberant as the day went on.
I’m growing. Growing! GROWING!
When my mother got home after supper that evening, she announced she needed a Diet Coke.
“Can I get it for you?” I asked excitedly, feeling very grown up indeed.
“Sure.” My mother shrugged.
I hopped up and got her a glass and poured her soda from the ever-present two-liter bottle in the fridge. I handed her the red plastic cup and watched her sip tiredly, put down her cup, and wipe her mouth, then her eyes. I thought of telling her, as I’d told everyone else that day, that I was growing. But she seemed the one person I didn’t need to tell. She was my mother, after all. Of course she already knew it.
My mother took another sip and studied me. For a gleeful second, I thought she was going to observe, too, without my having to prompt her, that I was growing. Growing. GROWING!
“Why are you wearing your sister’s pants?” she asked.
I looked down at the pants. They were red, just like a pair of mine. But I noticed now that the button and fly were a little different than I’d remembered them.
I’d spent the whole day wearing my little sister’s corduroys.
“Oh,” I said.