Everyday Psychokillers (2 page)

That afternoon I walked home from the bus stop in the rain and sat at the kitchen table with a towel on my head, feeling like it'd been a long time since I did something like have a strawberry fight, or glue cardboard and toothpicks to a matchbox to make a little carriage for an imaginary person. I hadn't played for a long time. What for adults becomes conversation I suppose, or art, or sex.

In the spring we'd moved from states away. Then the summer: shove, shove, through the heat. Then the teachers' strike, and for three days, while my mother was at work and my father was in the city, I sat in the apartment on the sticky carpet, watching mildew collect on the cardboard covers of record albums that leaned against the wall in the living room, listening to the radio for clips of news between commercials and songs by singers I'd never heard before. A bedsheet hung over the window for curtains, and light struggled with the giant orange flowers. Everything glowed in an extremely weak and filtered way, and I waited for the end of the strike so I could go to school and find my new life.

By three days in, once school had started, I found a girl who was in all my classes, and although I didn't know how to talk to her, by that third day after the three days of waiting through the strike, I knew to follow her from class to class so I wouldn't get lost. Then a girl got slammed against the beam in the basement of the gym, and I felt a bit clonked on the head myself.

My mother was asleep in the living room when I came home, wet. I changed into one of my father's enormous undershirts, put a towel over my hair, and put my clothes in the dryer in the kitchen. I spent the afternoon at the kitchen table with a box of fine-tipped magic markers, filling index cards with intricate patterns I thought were perhaps African, perhaps Navajo. Aztec, even. Something ancient and obscure. In movies, kids are constantly casting spells accidentally, reading from a dusty abandoned book, pronouncing sounds that make words they don't know. I must have looked like a funny little monk, with the green-and-brown towel draped over my head, bent over my work in the dim afternoon, drawing rows of circles and zigzags, tiny coils and dots. I could accidentally cast a spell, writing in a language of symbols I'd copied from someplace in my unconscious mind, my encoded memory. You don't know what you're saying. People say that to one another on soap operas. I could have been thinking of that. But actually, as I remember it, I filled the index cards with colorful patterns and thought about the girls and their blue jeans in the locker room. Like Victorian girls pulling the strings of one another's corsets. Like Chinese girls, foot binding. Intimacy and mutual betrayal at once. I knew it, if not in so many words. I knew enough to be frightened.

Then I opened the back door, and put one and then another card under the gutter waterfall. I watched the colors separate from each card like a ghost from a body, swirl for a moment, and then disappear into the grass. I imagined being a piece of paper that small under that much pounding water. Back inside I patted the cards dry with paper towels and admired how nicely muted they'd become, how soft.

Twelve, thirteen. Those years. Between home and school I walked to the bus stop along a canal lined with eucalyptus trees. What complicated trees they seemed to me—the texture of the bark, how springy and skinlike, how papery and velvety, like a pony's muzzle, how reddish, and softly gray, ragged, folded, dusty, and taupe. I was a little afraid of eucalyptus trees. Anything could hide in the layers and sloughing bark. Some of the trees were wrapped with stringy vines thicker than my arm, but the leaves I liked a lot because they smelled so nice. Some days, I did not want to go to school so much that I put eight or ten leaves into my pockets thinking I'd crack them and smell them any time I felt bad through the day. They dried out quickly, though, and the smell was distant once the leaf dried. I'd want to take the leaves into the bathroom at school to see if I could get any more scent from them—the urge was strangely strong and embarrassing—but in the bathrooms girls smoked cigarettes, or they gathered in circles and one girl would hyperventilate and another girl would grab her around the waist from behind and lift her until she passed out. There'd be a circle of girls to spot, like we'd learned in gym. One time I went in and the bathroom was smoky but empty, except then I saw a girl squatting in the corner by the row of sinks. She had a tourniquet around her arm. I panicked and rushed out.

The bus stop was on the main road, called Griffin. In real life, a griffin has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. They are hounds of Zeus who never bark, with beaks like birds, who guard gold. In this place where we moved, yellow panthers lived on the edges of the civilization, and eagles did, too. And a pelican, one of the birds you might see any day, poking around in a pond or a marshy pasture, has a thick claw on the end of its beak. So it seemed possible until you saw the road itself. Griffin Road was one long straight line, one of perhaps ten identical gridlines that crossed the entire peninsula, speeding past a few orange groves with a few strip malls, slicing the land from the beach in the East to the West, where it turned into an unmarked sand road that disappeared into the Everglades.

The bus stop itself was next to a parking lot that served a building with windows that had wire mesh between the panes. Maybe five or six cars were parked in it by the time I arrived in the mornings, and it got pretty full by the time we returned in the afternoon. I don't know what they did in that building or what it was for. All kinds of extravagant plants grew from cracks in the cement and hung from the limbs of trees. I didn't know the names of any of them. A lot of things no one bothers to know the name of unless they want to buy one. When you're a kid, walking around in a world that's nameless does not always seem like a problem. You're used to things being mysterious. A lot of things just don't matter. It's sort of like being what they call
carefree
. But not really.

So I stood outside that building every day for the whole time I went to that school. It was a building to stand in front of. It had a bit of an overhang at the front doors for when it rained. The boys hid broken-down cardboard boxes around the side and when I arrived in the mornings they were already taking turns spinning on their backs with their ankles crossed, showing each other what they could do. Break-dancing. Even when it rained and the boxes were ruined, we'd gather by the entrance to the building and they'd lay their raincoats down and try spinning on them.

They looked like pill bugs. I imagined myself a giant over them, turning them on their backs and flicking their feet so they'd spin, sometimes trying to ease into more elaborate acrobatics. The boys had enormous respect for each other's efforts. They all looked idiotic, but they marveled at one another. Even perpetually small and clumsy boys enjoyed a kind of hands-off policy, a respect in the face of what they all longed to do and none did well. They spat tobacco into triangular cups folded from notebook paper, and once you were on the bus you had nowhere to go if one of them wanted to throw his cup at you. No other girls used my bus stop.

So it was a relief when, for a week, I didn't have to ride the bus home, because for one week a year, the students who'd tested into special classes were invited to stay after school for a series of advanced lectures to be delivered by Mr. Freedman, our science teacher. His wife, Mrs. Freedman, our history teacher, ran the slide projector, and after the lecture each evening, she sat in the parking lot with the students until their parents arrived, while Mr. Freedman packed the slides into boxes and hid them in the lab somewhere.

In the parking lot, Mrs. Freedman sat on the edge of a cement planter that held a palm tree, and the kids sat on the sidewalk in front of her. They talked about the lectures, which explained a lot of the mysteries about the Egyptians, proving how they must have had batteries and helicopters, and how there existed actual remains of such technologies, and photographs of those remains in gilded entombed boxes, slides of which Mr. Freedman presented to them. The kids felt what it must be like to be real scholars, discussing with Mrs. Freedman, whose great bubblelike eyeglasses seemed to float around her face, what it had been like to be listening to Mr. Freedman, whose gray beard brushed against his collar as he spoke, and whose kind eyes lit brightly as he lectured about the ancient people and their science and their culture—brighter even than they'd seemed earlier that day in fifth period when he taught them to produce brilliant colors by sprinkling chemicals over Bunsen burners. You could tell by the music in his voice through the shadows of the lab, and the shadow of his hand with its pointer that pointed like the pointer of an orchestral conductor at here and then here on each slide. They felt what it must feel like to be professionals, listening to and admiring another professional, thinking “That one knows something I'd like to know,” and “Now we are thinking about what we all know is important.”

He said the batteries we saw there in their ancient gilded boxes, their own little tombs, were indeed containers themselves, that they contained the energy of history, as our bodies are containers for our minds. He talked about the regal nature and privilege of knowledge, how we were like electronic jewels. We imagined our brains in our skulls, vibrating with color.

In the half-circle of kids that gathered around Mrs. Freedman in the parking lot under the palm in its planter with its trunk like a batik dress and the moon rising behind it, Julie and her best friend—I was her best friend, already not new anymore—sat next to each other with their legs stretched out in front of them and leaned on each other's shoulders, still fuzzy and happy because they'd sneaked into the storage room and sniffed white-out among the white plastic jars of chemicals, microscopes, and beakers. They'd crouched between the metal shelving units in the fluorescent light, clapping their hands over their mouths, and then they'd sneaked back through the flap-doors into the dark classroom where the slides flashed blueprint-style drawings of a pyramid surrounded by biplanes. They'd looked at each other in the dark, in the deep blue and gold glow of Tutankhamun's treasures, and then later, in the parking lot, leaning against each other's shoulders and gazing up at Mrs. Freedman's gigantic glasses, with the early evening stars spitting through her palm frond crown, the cement still warm from daylight and thousands of children's feet, the girls clasped hands meaningfully when Mrs. Freedman told them that Mr. Freedman's research was revolutionary and therefore unpopular, and that they should be gadflies like Galileo and Socrates, because that is where greatness comes from.

It comes from the stars, from science and from history. Julie and her best friend could feel it, could feel the pull of greatness. They felt it like gravity, like the pull of the earth.

Because of her leather skirts, Julie was on the edge of getting kicked out of special classes even though she'd tested in. She'd told the assistant principal, “If you don't like it don't look.” A bruise the shape of a peanut shell faded along her cheekbone, and Julie thought, fuzzily, about what it would be like to get on a motorcycle and ride to California. Mrs. Freedman's words sounded like they were coming through water. The air itself felt tingly and particulate, and Mrs. Freedman's words swam toward her, easing like a fleet of tiny spaceships through millions of tiny asteroids. She could feel how tiny her friend's fingers were. Like a little bird, she thought. I could snap it like a bird, but I won't, because I love her.

That evening the girls spent the night at Julie's house. Julie's father dropped them off and then went somewhere else. They ate ham and cheese sandwiches at the kitchen table. Then they listened to music in Julie's room, on Julie's boom box, and then after a while they turned the patio lights on and sat in the lawn furniture between the house and the hedge, where they could still kind of hear the music as long as they kept the sliding doors open with only the screens shut for bugs. A shaft of air-conditioned air pushed through the screen, and occasionally they could feel it brush by on the edge of a breeze. A boy from next door came over, shaggy, aching, trying hard to seem mysterious, skinny and keeping his weight low in his hips when he walked. Everyone knew he had a thing for Julie but Julie wouldn't have him even though he went to high school. He emptied a baggie of pot onto the glass table and the three of them poked around in it and separated the seeds.

The boy rolled a joint and gave it to Julie. Julie said, “Thanks, you can go now,” and he did. The girls went back inside and Julie put the joint in her jewelry box and then they lay on their stomachs on Julie's bed and watched TV with the sound off so they could keep listening to music. They worked on Julie's lists of her favorite bands: an overall best list, a best song list and a most promising list. She wore a nightshirt that was basically two British flags sewn together.

There's a scene that comes up in a lot of movies where little girls play dress-up in their mothers' closets and then later they give each other lessons with makeup and hair. I'd lie on my stomach on Julie's bed and watch her at her dressing table. She'd show me how one kind of lipstick looked on her compared with another. She'd explain what each shade was good for, and in what ways it failed. She'd rank them. She'd mark her wrists with parallel lines of color. Her mouth would be smeary and she'd roll her eyes at herself and make sure I knew that I wasn't seeing the full effect because she wasn't even using liner, and really she'd never put them on practically on top of each other.

Maybe once or twice she said, “You want to try?” into the mirror, and in the mirror I shook my head, completely content. Despite the noise, and how we must have talked and talked, and how I can see the motion of our breathless chatter like a current in the remembered room, it's a serene and quiet memory. For one thing, memory tends toward quiet. When you do it, remember, you feel quiet. You feel quiet
now
, and that seeps in. The history of the depiction of memory is of quiet depiction, which catches on. It seeps into the tone of your own memories and you have to work hard to hear in the face of it.