Read What Strange Creatures Online
Authors: Emily Arsenault
When Anthony was sixteen, he’d been involved in the beating death of a gay classmate.
In Zach’s interviews with Anthony’s mom, she talked a great deal about “the teenage brain”: how it was not fully formed and how teenagers often had issues with impulsivity. I wondered if she had seen the same
Frontline
on the subject that I had. It was probably a comfort to her—having scientific assurance that her son was possibly not a violent psycho in the long-term sense.
The story of Anthony’s crime was disturbing nonetheless. Supposedly his victim—whom Zach had renamed “Liam” in the book—had hit on Anthony at a party, and three of Anthony’s friends encouraged him to lure the boy out to his car for a “drive.” They drove to an empty parking lot behind an office complex and beat him until he was unconscious. Autopsies revealed that a particularly bad blow to the back of the head—likely sustained when one of the other boys slammed his head against the pavement—had probably killed him. Although Anthony had driven the car, he was not thought to be the main perpetrator of the beating. Anthony and two of his friends got lesser sentences, all claiming that their one friend “Patrick” had been the main aggressor—while they’d only intended “to scare Liam a little bit.”
Anthony was sentenced to two years in juvenile detention, to be released at age eighteen.
Kim had actually marked one part of Anthony’s section—again with her wavy blue squiggles—in which he’d tried to explain his thinking the night of the beating.
“I think that a big part of it was that Liam picked me out to harass. If he’d been harassing someone else, I think I could’ve been cooler about it, you know? If it happened to someone else, I’d have told that person, ‘Hey, just tell him you’re not interested. Or tell him to go to hell, if you want. And then walk away.’
“But since it was me, I somehow wasn’t able to do that. In the moment it felt very personal. Like, I was so sick of that shit. Just because you’re a little quieter, a little smarter, a little nicer, people think you’re gay.”
“So your friends wondered about your sexuality?” I try to clarify. “And you went along with them to put a stop to that?”
“I don’t know what other people wonder,” Anthony replies, a hint of impatience in his voice. “I just know I was angry. Not only at Liam. At the boxes people wanted to put me in. That night I didn’t want to be a nice guy. I wanted to tear the fuck out of that box, in a big way.”
“Do you wish now that you had told the guys no when they challenged you to trick Liam?” I ask.
“Well, yes. Of course.”
“Would you say you’re afraid of gays? Or they make you angry?”
“Neither. I’m not like that at all.”
“But do you think there was real anger in what you did? Anger at people different from you? Or was it just about the moment, about the other guys?”
“There was anger, yes. But it wasn’t at people different from me. It came from somewhere deep inside me, I think, and had nothing to do with Liam. I feel like I came to my senses, though, when I saw Patrick whaling away at Liam. Like, what have we done? How did I get here? But by then it was too late.”
“Do you think you are in control of your anger now?”
Anthony sighs before answering. “I hope so.”
Kim’s squiggly line ended there. In the margin she’d written
“April 12.”
I didn’t know the significance of the date. Maybe she’d figured out the date of Anthony’s incident?
This part of the book differed from the rest, as it was perhaps where Zach had asked the most direct questions. More often he quietly let the kids speak for themselves. Here it felt as if Zach were trying to get more remorse out of the kid than was going to emerge organically. If I were Kim, I’d hesitate to track such a person down. But then Kim didn’t strike me as a big hesitator.
I couldn’t remember news of a hate crime like this in Massachusetts recently. But the book had come out two years earlier, and Zach had probably done his research a year or two before that. And Jeff was right—I had my head in the sand when it came to current events. I was perhaps even worse back when I was married—back when I was working harder on Marge.
Without the real names of the victim or any of the kids involved, I couldn’t look up the incident.
I opened up a new e-mail to Zach.
“Hi, Zach,”
I typed. Then I realized how obnoxious I felt asking him for another favor. Instead I decided to put it in the form of a question.
“Thanks for the Sharon Silverstein contact. Just wondering—did Kim ever ask you for the real name of the kid ‘Anthony’ from your book?”
Polite sign-off, then more tapping the tabletop as I waited for my answers. I distracted myself from the dead silence by going onto Zach’s class blog. Scanning through a couple of Kim’s pieces, I found one with the name “Jenny.”
“Dreams” by the Cranberries
Whenever I hear it—and I really try not to, but the most painful songs have a way of snaking into your car and your consciousness, into the background of every other bar scene of every other movie you’ve ever watched—I think of my old friend Jenny.
The three of us would dance to the Cranberries—Jenny, Missy, and me.
We got “Dreams” from Missy’s older sister. Missy’s older sister was cooler than mine, although I was cooler than Missy. Figure that one out.
I would lip-sync, and Jenny and Missy would do backup and dance. I was ten, and they were eight and nine. So I was in charge, always.
Jenny would do an exaggerated swirling sort of dance with a sly smile—what Missy’s sister called “an interpretive dance.” We didn’t know what that meant, except that it was funny. While Jenny would interpret, Missy would just hop up and down, pumping her skinny little arms. We would do this for hours in Missy’s garage after school that fall.
Jenny was pretty.
Probably if she’d lived to the double digits, she’d have been beautiful.
But when you’re nine, pretty is all there is. Pretty is where it’s at. And Jenny was there. Blond hair to her butt. Bright blue-green eyes. Light skin, but with a healthy pink glow across the cheeks. She always wore a shiny pink-and-silver jacket to match. Remembering her now, it feels like she was doomed from the start. Girls like that get snatched up, don’t they?
Maybe you don’t believe that. But it’s what happened to Jenny. She disappeared one Wednesday, and they found her body on the following Sunday. The details aren’t important. We all know what happens to girls like that when girls like that are snatched up.
Where would she have gone from there anyway? Such girlish perfection?
Jenny was so pretty and Missy so small and so innocent. Jenny didn’t know what a pimple was, and she never would. Missy didn’t know what a French kiss was. I have to believe now she does. Can’t be sure. A year or so after Jenny, we stopped being friends.
Oh, Missy and Jenny with their “-y” names, so delicately feminine. Next to those lullaby names, “Kim” felt like the crank of a wrench or the sound of a broken metal appliance being thrown off the back of a pickup truck.
Sometimes Jenny and Missy didn’t feel real to me—even back then. Sometimes I was afraid of them knowing me. Me: a whole year older than Jenny. Two years older than Missy. A lifetime. I wasn’t shocked by parents fighting or dogs humping couch cushions or older boys who threatened to kick each other in the nuts.
When Jenny died, I felt it was meant for me. I realize, of course, how self-centered that was, but I was ten, so I try to give myself a pass.
I was the one things happened to. I was the oldest. I was the one who told them things. Now Jenny knew more than any of us ever should. “Any” in the universal sense.
I guess this is more about three girls than about a song. More about one girl than a song.
When I hear “Dreams” now, I don’t hear the words. I don’t hear its upbeatness or its optimism. I don’t really even hear the woman singing it. The song dissolves into a memory of three girls—and then, ultimately, of one girl.
There is, in the end, only Jenny. Pretty like a girl on TV. Pretty like a girl who won’t last. Old as I was at ten, how is it I didn’t know that? How is it that of all the things I told her, I couldn’t tell her this? How is it that I didn’t open that door?
There is only Jenny dancing.
Interpretive dancing.
I can’t interpret her dance. All these years later, I still don’t know if I want to.
For several minutes I stared at the line
“When Jenny died, I felt it was meant for me.”
It gave me a chill.
Still no answers to my e-mails. I glanced at Jeff’s piece for that same week’s assignment. The prompt was about a childhood or an adolescent memory associated with a song.
“Stranger on the Shore”
Occasionally, when I was in high school, he’d let me drive before I had a license—to the grocery store for his cigarettes and honey cough drops. And then, later, I’d take him out for lunch once a week. And occasionally I’d let him drive. Well into his eighties, he still drove. Technically. It was a swervy, slow-motion, white-knuckle kind of experience, but I owed it to him.
My grandfather always played gentle instrumentals in his car. There was a particular clarinet song that came tootling over his speakers every so often and turned my insides into vanilla pudding. I’d stare out the window and think about sharing an umbrella with my future wife, flying kites with my future kids, drinking beer at bonfires with my retirement buddies. I missed them like they’d already happened.
I didn’t know till after my grandfather died what the song was. He left me his black Buick Regal Grand National with all his cassette tapes still in it. I listened to them all, and it was the one marked “Acker Bilk.”
I was strangely relieved to hear it once I found it. Without lyrics to quote, how would I ever have found the song online? By Googling “clarinet song that sounds like a long-remembered Hawaiian honeymoon”? The song might have been lost to me forever.
But now I had it whenever I wanted, should I ever want it: “Stranger on the Shore,” by Acker Bilk.
For a time I listened to cheer myself up whenever I was down—about a lost job or a lost girlfriend or wasted opportunities—to remind me of my grandfather, who lived through the Depression and the war and never seemed depressed about anything much.
It didn’t work. It only reminds me that I am not him. That I wasn’t smart enough to ask the secret to being him while he was still here. That there is no secret anyway. That his way of being had begun to fade before I was even born.
Now I reserve the song for whenever some famous old dude dies. Some famous old dude I thought would always be there. Johnny Carson. Andy Rooney.
I got an ulcer when Dick Clark died, because I knew I’d be lost on every New Year’s from then on.
I might get another when Jim Lehrer dies. Or Bill Cosby. Or Jimmy Carter. Or Paul Simon. God help me then. Because I’m not sure how many more times I can listen to “Stranger on the Shore.”
This sounded to me like Jeff talking after about three drinks. It needed some editing. I looked up Acker Bilk on YouTube and began listening to “Stranger on the Shore.” Thirty seconds was about all I could take. It made me think of our grandfather at my wedding, struggling to eat a slice of fancy cake with a shaky hand. Worse was the reminder that my brother’s and my hearts seemed to break in all the same odd places.
I refreshed my e-mail. Nothing.
There wasn’t much time left till I had to meet Nathan at Stewie’s, and I still had to decide what to wear. My fanciest date clothes were all mashed into a pile at the dark end of my accordion closet. I sorted through them until I found my translucent black V-neck top with the shiny gray lining. Front and center it looked rather conservative, but when you moved, the trashy underlayer whispered sexual possibility. It was brilliant fourth- or fifth-date attire.
This was only a first date, of course, but these were desperate times and I wanted to get into Nathan’s place as quickly as I could. I slipped it on with my jeans and glanced in the mirror. Apparently Geraldine had also recognized the beauty of the blouse, as it was hairy across the left shoulder and boob. I took a sticky roller to it, put on some lipstick, and headed out.
I tried to keep the Marge talk to a casual minimum, but Nathan kept asking questions. I’d meant to tell only a light story or two, about a few of Marge’s many adventures in Venice and Rome, on her way home from the Holy Land: The hunchbacked Irish beggar who escorted her from Venice to Rome and put up with all her crazy shit until she decided to show her devotion to God by giving away all her money, including some she’d borrowed from him. (“Yes, she borrowed from a beggar,” I said when Nathan gave me a funny look.) The woman who had a Jesus doll that she’d let other women dress up and kiss—appropriately nutty company for Marge. And the German priest who understood her English and whose German she understood in turn, not because they knew each other’s languages but miraculously, through the power of prayer.
The conversation grew long when I mentioned that it was at this point in her journey home—in Rome—that Marge had her vision of her marriage to Christ. Nathan had a fair number of questions about that.
“So it was, like, a divine union, then? Her nirvana in a way?”
“I wouldn’t say that, no,” I replied. “It wasn’t like Marge’s self dissolved into the divine. It was a wedding fantasy, with Jesus as her groom. And there’s no feeling that the post-wedding Marge is any more enlightened or less egocentric than she was before.”
I described how she envisioned a wedding attended by all sorts of saints and angels. And after the wedding Marge began to smell sweet smells in her nostrils, hear sweet songs in her ears, see delicate white flecks dance in front of her eyes, and feel a burning warmth in her chest. These she considered “tokens” of God’s love. And in a very suggestive passage, she explains that God tells her:
You may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband . . . and boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head, my feet as sweetly as you want.