The Other Shoe Page 5
A summer passed. Karen entered high school without a friend in the world.
With just these few years ahead of her in which to become some kind of woman, she knew she could probably use a pal, and Karen thought that it was immature of her to not have one yet, but pep band and the like filled her with revulsion, and she knew that she must be revolting in her own turn, and the very situations in which friends were typically made were the times and places she could not abide, not when given any choice. There was always sufficient reason to not belong. Volleyball was out of the question because of the yelling involved, the yipping the girls did in that echo vault of a gym, and Karen wouldn’t think of basketball, knowing she was too clumsy for it, and her folks said their long Lent prohibited her running track. Karen did not join the glee club. She didn’t raise a sow to show in the 4-H barn at the fair. She was reliable in her studies, responsible about her homework, and invariably graded “Not Disruptive” in classroom deportment, but teachers did not call on her to answer. Karen knew she somehow willed this result. As a freshman she adopted the dress and swagger of the lumberjacks she’d found a generation back in family photo albums: Grandpa and Great-Grandpa on Jean’s side, standing rakish always on some freshly butchered sidehill. They held tools capable of such work, peaveys and pikes and two-man chain saws, big machines with malice for all and built to give no quarter, and these men seemed in every shot to be entirely satisfied. In their honor, or in honor of their contentment, she wore her denim pants spiked or cuffed, and she wore suspenders, and long underwear, and wool flannel, and the heaviest boots a girl could buy in her size, and it all proved itself again and again to be imprudent wear for the well-heated classroom, but she wore it anyway.
“All that girl wants,” Jean said of her, “is to be left alone. And I’ve got no kick with that. I’d rather have that than have one of these boy-crazy little brats on my hands—now that’d be a rodeo. One of these ones that’s always got their belly buttons hanging out? You just know that can’t be chaste—not in thought and deed.”
In her high school’s bleak hierarchy, Karen, when she was thought of at all, was thought to be a lesbian and coveted by no one, no one willing to announce themselves. Of too little consequence even to be persecuted, she ate her lunch in an exclusive and especially ugly corner of the cafeteria with her hair tied in the tightest knot she could form with it. Her hair, she knew, could be like field-ripened grain, but she kept it in a knot on her neck. Her whole range of expression consisted of tilting the slash she made of her lips, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, and behind this blank display she’d be crowning herself High Priestess of the Half-Moon. Her imagination flourished, but it was only to preoccupy and gave no real satisfaction. She wanted something, anything, that was entirely hers and that might be touched. She wondered if she was ever to learn anything of love. The girls at school, those girls she could approach near enough to overhear, talked of loving each other, they talked of loving Brad and Wesley and Tim Flowers and Louie Natrone, they loved their moms and dads, and even sometimes their siblings, “soooo much,” and they loved colts and cats, rain in the spring, pretty blouses, and they draped “love” on every scrap of pleasure or longing that blew by them, and even if they were mistaken, even if they were working it way too hard, love, or their constant mention of it, seemed to keep them at a level of enthusiasm Karen could not sustain.
She was not very interested in anyone of her acquaintance, and so, by default, by protracted accident, she fell a little in love with herself. She conquered the last of her girlish bashfulness about mirrors in less than half of one mild May upon discovering in them that she was good at any angle, in any light, but, as she had no prior reputation for beauty, it was hard at first to credit what she so furtively saw in the glass. She looked harder, longer, and still she liked what she saw, liked herself too much, probably, but at least now she had a better use for the extensive privacy that had always been her only privilege. In private, she let her hair down, and, as it wasn’t customary there, she was fully aware of its whispering friction on her shoulders.
Her face was taut as an apple, square but not mannishly so, and her color ran from bronze to khaki depending on the current warmth of her blood. Her skin was clear. Her breasts were successful, she thought, or should have been—ready little monuments to reproduction. She had a golden brow, a kitten nose. With high school came more excursions, and Karen found herself more often among strangers, shopping with Jean in other towns, swept up in field trips or field trials or whatever she was being forced to attend that day, and as she passed among strangers now she saw that she caused sudden, deep interest in them. The boys. The men. Everyone, really. And it was so very strange that in these strange places she’d got such power when at home and in those places where she was most familiar, where she had been so ordinary for so long, Karen was still nothing special. Her blooming passed unremarked and largely unnoticed there.
Jean’s notion of her daughter, a notion she published to anyone unable to avoid her on the subject, was that her Karen was the guileless fawn, a creature so delicate of spirit she needed more than anything else to be left alone. “She’s out there talkin’ to the ravens, and that’s how she likes it. Girl’s half-wild herself. All she wants, all you ever got to give that Dad is a little toast and plenty of breathing room.” Of course Karen was not at all the feral nymph her mother wanted, the innocent chipmunk. She was just a girl too often alone, and like any such girl, she was bitter about it. Too often alone, too often cold, and she spent far too much time in that tiny tract of personal wilderness that could be lit by her parents’ yellow yard lights. After nightfall, she did not explore. She would stand out by the henhouse listening to the sage dialogue of nesting, dreaming hens, and wondering still, “What have I done?” She was ashamed of herself without knowing why.
“Remember,” Jean would say. “Remember, remember, remember, ’cause these are the good years, Dad. These years here might be the best ones you’ll ever get. Remember.”
But, for a very long while, nothing memorable occurred. Karen was a freshman, then a sophomore, reduced to playing chess with pimpled and humped Tana Holt. The girls said, “It just flies by, doesn’t it?” They’d say, “We have so much fun.” Karen could detect little momentum, but she did become a junior. For weeks on end she’d get by on the utterance of a few dozen words. She brought her lunch in a sack to avoid standing in line for hot meals. She rode the bus sitting right behind the driver. She read Black Beauty twelve times. On Friday nights, Jean let her make popcorn and a powdered fruit drink. Karen endured like a weed in drought, having learned nothing useful so far but how to wait. She did what each day required of her.
▪ 3 ▪
AT FIRST, MRS. Ashcraft gave her a choice: Karen could ride on the class float, or she could go to detention with the noodle-heads. She might want to try wasting time in company with Keith and Hans Boethcher and Mr. McFeely and his son, the slavering Gabe; she might like to see how much she’d enjoy scraping fossilized gum for a couple hours off the undersides of desks and heat registers. But then Mrs. Ashcraft reconsidered, and she said that, no, there was no choice—this was homecoming. Karen was to report immediately to the rec room and have her face painted. “I’ll be there in five minutes, too, so you’d better not try sneaking off to chem lab or the sick room or somewhere. You can show your support like everyone else, Miss Dent. Loosen up for once.” Karen admired silliness very much but could never join in it, for she had no personal dignity to spare, and she wanted no part of anyone’s parade, not even to watch. There would be flags and cars and silly ways of walking; there would, she expected, be some horn honking.
The school was nearly empty. A locker slammed in another part of the building and echoed for seconds down the halls. Tennis shoes slapped linoleum, and Karen heard two shrilling boys as they ran together into, and then explosively through, the eastern exit. The big door echoed in the following silence, where it seemed at least that no one had be
en hurt. She read a butcher paper scroll rolled out along a ceiling, a thing she’d read many dozen times before—HAWK’S EGGSELL—WE RHAWK AND ROLL!!!—and she took very short and very slow steps but reached the rec room in under a minute, and there she joined a short line of waiting girls, and there the vice president of the Hawk Chics, Darlene Mews, gave her a sponge heavy with paint. “Blue, okay? Everywhere there’s skin showing, make it blue. You have to do it by feel at first, ’cause Yvette needs to use the mirror. Jannie Fay puts your finishing touches on you when you get to her. Okay?” Darlene spoke to her as if she were an exchange student or a special-needs student, and though she was herself notoriously stupid, Darlene, as a cheerleader, had to wear only a decal on her cheek, and a little eyeliner, and the lavender ribbons that coiled so prettily in her hair.
The girls in line ahead of Karen had already daubed themselves with this paint, which was in truth nearer black than blue, and it had made some of them almost unrecognizable, and their faces flexed to work against flesh suddenly, interestingly inelastic. Though at first touch it burned, and though it smelled to her of mold, Karen wet her whole face with it, and it almost instantly dried, leaching oil and sweat from her skin. The mix became a desiccated crust, and she looked and felt like the end of a mud puddle.
Her head still hurt when Jannie Fay Palmer filled the hollows of her eyes with orange and wrote SPIRIT in orange on her forehead. Mrs. Ashcraft completed her look by giving her an inflated inner tube to wear as a sort of belt. “Now run,” said Mrs. Ashcraft. “Run. If you move it you should still be able to catch up; they’re leaving from down by the bus barn.”
The juniors had been assembled and were milling near an old overturned section of wooden bleachers. Mold and moss clung to its feet. As soon as Karen joined them there, Dennis Frame drifted to her edge of the crowd. He began to hitch his Levis very high so that his squashed privates were raised to press at his lower abdomen and bulge in relief behind the denim. He narrated the move each time, “Pres-to Change-oh. Wheeee.” Karen was, except for Dennis Frame, the only person on earth who found this funny, and no matter how awful she happened to be feeling, no matter what company they were in, he would seek her out to give some performance like this, and she would laugh for him, and then everyone would continue to think them creepy, which she supposed they were, and so Karen turned her back on Dennis Frame and went to stand among a little clutch of religious girls where she knew he would not follow her.
Dingy Bergson was holding forth to the gingham crowd, and she knew her audience, “Teen Renewal, that’s the program. That’s where I met him, and now we get to see each other every Thursday. Justin’s so responsible. He’s putting a motor in one of his dad’s old cars. Or he wants to. If he could find the right size. I think he was way too godly to need high school. Do these boys here know one psalm by heart? No, not one of them does. And he’s mine, you might say, and it’s because of Teen Renewal.”
At last the word was passed to load up. The junior float this year was nothing more than a flatbed truck, and mounting it, Karen happened to see in a rearview mirror that the paint had caused her face to swell in lumps, and the whites of her eyes were pink, shot with electric veins, and she would, of course, be hideously allergic to something that was for everyone else just fun. Ugly, she rode at the front of the truck, to get it over with, being seen this way, and when the parade turned down Main Street and into a wind predicting early winter, the additional sting of it made her eyes boil up in tears she dared not wipe away. Underclassmen led afoot, marching in loose order and throwing penny candy to spectators and to places where spectators should have been. The band followed in a bus, desecrating “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Sugar, Sugar,” every tune broken on the same thready pulse, and the whole band blared in vain against Elston Cannon’s more persuasive drumming. Elston, a free agent, a sort of thief, staggered to carry a bass drum he’d taken from the music room, and he stroked it with the heaviest mallets to be found there, a three-beat phrase, inexhaustible, Boom Boom Boom. And they shouted “Let’s go Hawks!” over and over, and in undertones the wits were whispering “We’re no good, we’re no good,” for the Hawks had yet to win a game that season, and the drumming, the whispering, the perfectly genuine hatred for people they knew only slightly if at all, kids with similarly dismal prospects whose only fault lay in matriculating at the next hick high school down the state highway—all of it was born instantly away in that wind which also burned the cheerleaders’ knees the color of strawberry ice cream. Elston’s drum sounded inside and outside Karen’s beating skull, and it carried down to push at her stomach as she rode along, stretched low and wretched over the cab.
As the parade came abreast the Buck Snort Saloon, Karen saw Henry Brusett in the parking lot of Paulson’s Dollar Store, a business that had been dead for as long as she had any memory of it. Mr. Brusett was turned away from the passing noise, stroking at a metal casing with a wire brush, and she recognized him by the top of his head, knew his pickup. He sat on its tailgate, surrounded by a dozen pieces of chain saw, and when he took up one of them, a part no bigger than a pea, and when he held it near his eye and compressed his lips in concentration, she realized how much she had been missing him, if not precisely why, and before she could think better of it, Karen made her way to the edge of the flatbed, sat on it, and pushed off. She felt the inner tube catch behind her, and this pitched her forward so that she landed on the balls of her feet and the heels of her hands, which she sacrificed to the asphalt to save her face from the pavement, and she bounced up bleeding, glancing back at Mr. Pingre, the junior class adviser, who had chosen to pretend he hadn’t noticed her leaving.
Neither stealth nor speed was possible for a painted girl in an inner tube, but she ran as best she could, bent at the waist, and she took cover behind a beer truck and waited there until its driver came out of the Buck Snort with a keg on a dolly and a very puzzled look at seeing her there, crouched near his truck. He nodded to her. Karen nodded back and went on. The parade had advanced another block by then, and she felt free to move away from it as she liked. She crossed the street to Mr. Brusett, and as she approached him, Mr. Brusett looked just to her left, then just to her right, and then, as she closed on him, he became transfixed by her stomach. The inner tube. Karen raised a bloody palm. “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. Remember me?” She hoped he’d recognize her voice.
“You in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m Karen. Jean’s girl. Karen Dent?”
“You okay?”
Karen considered the heels of her hands. Black pebbles were embedded in them and they were leaking blood and some other fluid, something clear and viscous. “I’m fine. You wouldn’t believe how often that happens to me. I just go down. Skin myself up. Graceful, I’m not.” She could think of nothing else to say, no reason that might make any sense to him, or to her, for her being there. The air around him smelled of solvent.
“It’s homecoming,” she said.
“So I figured. We used to have that, too.”
“They make you, oh . . . you know, do stuff. Did you even know who I was?”
“Yep.” Mr. Brusett fitted steel rings onto a piston.
“I didn’t know if you could tell,” she said at last.
“Sure.” With the tip of his tongue visible between his lips, Mr. Brusett slid the piston into its sleeve in the little engine block. He secured it to a wrist pin.
“I also didn’t know if you’d remember my name. I wasn’t sure you ever even knew it. They never call me that at the house, so . . . I didn’t know. It’s been a long time since you quit coming out.”
Mr. Brusett caressed the saw’s teeth with a small round file.
“I wish you would’ve kept coming,” she said. “Those other ones drive me crazy, the ones my dad rounds up. We had one of ’em wet his pants last Sunday.”
“It’s quite the crowd they gather out there.”
“So, why don’t you? Come?”
“What?”
“Of homecoming,” he specified.
“Are you kidding? Me?”
“I thought that might be why you were in that getup.”
“This is not,” she said, “what the queen wears.”
“No, I guess it wouldn’t be. But you’re not . . . I saw you kind of . . . you’re sure you’re not in trouble?”
“Would you help me out if I was?”
Mr. Brusett filed at the saw, every stroke a sigh. Shifting foot to foot, Karen watched him. Her stomach had settled but her head still hurt. Mr. Brusett blew at the file and a shimmering rode on his breath, tempered steel made stardust. She could hear the pounding and horns honking down at the baseball field where the school was rallying.
“Is this what you do? You fix saws? I never really knew what you did. You didn’t talk about that. But I guess you never said anything about anything.” He had been her speculation. He’d been, mostly, whatever she wanted or needed him to be at the moment, and it occurred to Karen that it might be better to leave things that way. To truly know someone, she suspected, could be hard on a friendship.
“I ran into Sandy Dean in the hardware section of the drugstore, and he wanted to know if I can get a saw going for him. Told him I’d take a look at it. All it actually needed was cleaning. Which he probably knew.” Mr. Brusett’s voice was like an old toy, something enduring but fitful in its operation; this was so much more than he’d ever said before.