So Much Pretty (14 page)

“I’d be proud to take you out to the movies sometime when you’re not working.” He tilted his head down and looked up at
her, raised his eyebrows. It was the kind of look your parents give you when you’re in trouble.

Her stomach fluttered. She could smell his aftershave; she looked down at the smooth clean cuff of his shirt. It was like he was some kind of Haeden nobility, asking her out for all the guys sitting there in their boots and flannels, guys she might have said no to.

“Uh, yeah. Awesome,” she said, and nodded, tried to sound like he was someone she only thought about as a friend. “That would be fun. I would love that. Yeah. That’d be fun.”

Audio File: Osterhaus, Megan, 4/18/09
Stacy Flynn, Haeden
Free Press

My name is Megan Osterhaus. It’s April 18, 2009.

Actually, you know what? I’m not going to talk about any of it. Okay? I just feel like even thinking about that kind of thing can’t possibly be good for the world. My concern right now is to make sure I don’t invite that kind of energy or fear into my life. And to pretty much make sure I can affect things in the moment. And keep breathing.

So I’m going to talk to you for maybe ten minutes. Okay? And then I really have to go. And this is off the record, like you said. Right? This is all off the record.

I graduated between Alice and Wendy and was not really a part of their everyday social lives. I knew both of them, of course, because of swim team, and yes, I know there are a lot of pictures of me and Alice together because of swimming.

All I can say is that I would never have lived the way they did or have done the things they did and that ultimately it’s up to the universe the way these things shake out. It’s karma. It’s karma, and in a lot of ways, it’s what people settle for. Because there’s no doubt you get what you settle for, and harsh as it sounds, some people settle for things that end in death.

I mean, with Alice, it’s a little hard to look at that way, because I spent a lot of time with her before I left for school and she seemed to have built so many good things in the world. But with everyone else. No, sir. No way. There was a lot of . . . a lot of, I guess . . . attracting negative energy. You know? And I think you need to look at it like kind of a flood or a tornado or something. It just builds and builds and it’s inevitable. That’s about the only perspective I can give you. The things we say and think about have bigger impact on the universe than we know.

There was nothing I could do about it then, and there definitely isn’t now. There is nothing anyone can do about it but live their lives right now. In the present.

As far as Haeden and all this stuff about the economy or the culture or whatever, I don’t think the place is different from anywhere else. Just smaller.

Not that I would set foot back there or set my thoughts back there, because it just doesn’t do anyone any good. And I’m seeing an energy practitioner right now to help me get clear, because I did have kind of a close proximity to the event. Not physically, but whatever.

Anyway. I had in many ways a real emotional proximity to Alice, and she made some choices that were a part of a spiritual path I don’t really want to intersect with.

As far as Wendy goes, I really really hope she has better luck and a lot of happiness now that she is not on the material plane. She was generally pretty happy in the material world, so I could see how this next phase of her existence, or nonexistence, would be a good one.

I am not going to say a thing about how she died. Because I don’t want to tie her to another second of that kind of pain, even in my thoughts and certainly not in my speech, not in anything that would be carried in my body or mind and come out of my mouth.

And if there is one thing I would say as a general statement that
should
be quoted, it’s that no one should bring that kind of . . . just . . . that kind of unhealthy thinking into their lives.

I did feel sad. I cried when they found her. I sent flowers to her mother and father, but I didn’t go back for the funeral. I didn’t feel that there was anything I could do. I built a really beautiful lantern for her out of brass and copper and glass, and I hung it off the front porch of my apartment. And I burned some incense and played some Gwen Stefani and . . . I’m sorry, just a minute. I . . . I think that’s a lot better than what happened in Haeden. Which, if I am not going to talk about Wendy, I am certainly not going to talk about that.

I’m not going to talk about Alice. She didn’t really know Wendy, you know? She was younger than us. But she was upset. I talked to
her briefly, and I talked to a couple of other girls from the team who were away at school, too.

We were all just glad we weren’t there. I think it scared a lot of girls who were living there. Which is a bad thing because there’s nothing you can do with fear. Absolutely nothing at all. There are studies about how fear and negative thinking affect the brain. And how we are all really connected at a kind of micro level, that our thinking actually creates the world. So again, I am not going to talk about it. Any of it.

And as far as Haeden and Haeden High are concerned, to be honest, I barely remember anything from living there other than swimming and watching TV and playing Bigger Better. That whole period of growth, I think I just had to keep my head down and keep moving. Just keep swimming and pretty much stay in the art room as much as I could. Otherwise. Just. Forget it.

I would never tie myself to events there or to the things people said or did. Never. I couldn’t use it for anything, and I didn’t want to bring one bit of that with me to college or have it show up in my artwork. You just knew Haeden was a place that wouldn’t exist as soon as you left. It barely existed while we were there.

Constant

HAEDEN, NY, OCTOBER 2002

C
ON SAT WITH
Gene and Claire and Michelle, watching the children approaching, not knowing yet that they were being watched. He smiled when the two of them, lost in their own conversation, started at the sight of the surveilling adults, reclining on the grass near the barn, drinking out of big green bottles. The air was cool, and the maples shone bright yellow against the sky. Con was wearing a neon T-shirt, jeans, and dress shoes because he’d been late for the train to the airport and just slipped them back on after changing from work instead of looking for his boots. His hair was cropped close, and he was conscious of the luxury of not having shaved that day. Very happy to drink beer out on the lawn.

A light breeze blew, moving the brown heads of wildflowers and goldenrod gone to seed. From inside the house, the sound of the MC5 playing
Kick Out the Jams
drifted toward them, a muffled drum beating fast and regular like the crickets throbbing in the grass.

This was, Constant thought, a family reunion. Something very rare. Alice and Theo, so tall now and happy to see them. It fortified him, the idea that someone was so genuinely happy he was there. He stood as they approached, hunched over, and clapped his hands together in front of his knees, and they ran toward him. He caught them both and picked them up, squeezing them tight. They were starting to get gangly, nine and ten years old and all legs. They smelled good, like leaves and mud.

“Here!” he said. “Good thing you guys got here. We were waiting for the circus!” He kissed Alice on the head and then put her
down, but he hoisted Theo up on his hip to carry him around a little. He looked into the boy’s face. His matted hair had pieces of lint in it and looked like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. Con let the pity and disappointment at the boy’s parents—and at himself for not being more of a presence—pass through him, then he smiled big at Theo to make him feel tough and special. “Things going okay?” They nodded at each other. “Yeah? Well, okay, then.”

Depositing Theo onto the lawn, he watched and grinned as the kids took in the spectacle of Michelle, beautiful Michelle, who until that afternoon not even he had seen in a year. Micky who smelled like sweat and roses and honeysuckle. Who had lost ten pounds, who was so tan she looked almost orange brown. And the tattoos on her forearms and biceps—insects and numbers and an encircled capital A—had, like Gene’s tattoos, faded. The symbols they’d lived by blurred to blue. Michelle’s eyes were large and placid, her hair long and unruly, and she was wearing thick wool socks beneath her sandals. He knew she must look wild to Alice and Theo, who would have no memory of her.

The children stared, and Con admired her calm way, the respect she had for them.

“Oh my goodness,” she said, and reached out for Alice. “Would you come here, please?” Alice went to sit in her lap. “You look to me like someone very special.” She wrapped her arms around Alice, resting her chin on the girl’s head.

“You know Micky is the doctor who delivered you, right?” Claire said.

Alice nodded, looking embarrassed.

“It was a joint effort,” Michelle said. “There were two very good doctors and a women’s health advocate with an MD there.”

“Yeah, but she just swore the whole time,” said Constant. Claire laughed and shut her eyes, leaning back against Gene. Their faces glowed with the same light of memory.

Michelle gave Alice a kiss on the head. “Apart from all the cursing, it was not what you’d call a primitive environment.”

“Are you delivering babies now?” Gene asked.

“No, no, no,” she said. “We were in a health center right in Seleia, where we were dealing with a lot of trauma and wounds, but we got evacuated. Now I’m back in Zelingei, and mostly what we see is malnutrition and some mental-health issues because of the displacement. And the war.”

Alice and Theo listened intently. “Were there lions there?” Alice asked.

“Not really.”

“Oh!” said Theo. “Then it wasn’t that dangerous.” He looked up at Con and nodded as if that would make him feel better.

“Not in that way, no,” Michelle said to him.

“I can’t imagine it,” said Gene.

“You can’t. Really. I have yet to see or read anything here that could give you an idea of the magnitude.”

“There’s psychiatric staff there?” Con asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course. The place is a mess every which way. But that’s not for talking about now.” She had begun braiding Alice’s hair.

“Remember that ‘street psychiatrist’ when we were living over on St. Mark’s?” Gene asked.

“Oh my God!” Michelle yelled abruptly, startling Alice. “And his orgone accumulator!”

“Oh Jesus,” Claire said. “That thing was made out of particle board.”

Con began to smile.

“What?” Alice and Theo shouted in unison. “What did it do?” Claire spat her drink out on the lawn from laughing, and then Gene rolled her up in the picnic blanket. “Should have put
you
in the orgone box!” he said to her, putting his face close to hers. Michelle watched them and smiled, but when Con tried to catch her eye, she looked away.

“That part of our long-term plan is going remarkably well, at least,” Con said, nodding toward Alice and Theo as they lost
interest in the adults and took off for the barn. Michelle stared at his shoes, his three-hundred-dollar shoes, then meaningfully into his face. Gene nudged her to stop.

Then with a squeal, the barn door slid open, and Theo stood in front of them wearing his shorts and no shirt and a dog mask made from cardboard, masking tape, and round black buttons. The first bars of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” sounded too loudly and then were quickly turned down by an unseen hand. The dog’s voice was muffled, but he said dramatically, “Today we will be showing
Dog in the Manger
.”

Con laughed, and Michelle smiled genuinely at him, looked warmly into his eyes for maybe the first time since they had arrived, and it made him feel how small his world had become.

“What will you pay us to enter our Russian-trapeze antigravity theater?”

“How about if we pay you nothing?” Gene asked.

The dog shrugged. “Okay,” he said. Then he looked over his shoulder and nodded before gesturing expansively toward them. “Come in. Come in. Come in, won’t you?”

The adults entered the barn and sat next to one another on a straw bale. The space was cool and smelled of mold and apples and motor oil. Earlier that week, Gene had raised the trapeze high above the barn floor, so Alice could learn to swing onto the loft and practice hanging tricks. She was standing on it now, balanced on the bar, confidently holding tightly to the ropes at her sides. She was wearing a white swim cap and a short white dress that she’d made from a sheet.

Michelle and Con exchanged an incredulous look. She seemed far too many feet off the ground for them to concentrate on the play.

Theo looked up at Alice, and as the clarinet solo began, he climbed up into the loft. “All right!” he announced again dramatically. “This is called ‘Dog in the Manger’!”

Con smiled. He knew the phrase from Ross; it was one of
his favorites for describing businessmen and politicians. It was obvious how much time these kids spent with him, and Con was glad they were there to hear the old man’s stories, and that Theo had Ross to watch out for him.

“I thought it was ‘Peter and the Wolf,’” Micky said. “Don’t you need a net?”

“No!” Theo shouted. “This is
Dog
. In. The. MANGER!”

Alice pumped her knees and swung on the trapeze, leaning back to get higher as Theo flopped down on a straw bale.

Gene began to laugh quietly again, and his eyes filled with tears. Con had seen this before. One time when he’d accompanied Gene and Claire to a play at Alice’s school, Gene had to walk out twice because he couldn’t stop laughing whenever she spoke, tears just rolling down his face. “Sorry sorry sorry,” he had told them, still laughing as they waited for Alice in the parking lot afterward and then heaving a shaky sigh to try and break the absurdity. “God! I love her so much.”

Theo lay fitfully on the straw, pretending to be a dreaming dog. He scratched his ear, feigned running in his sleep, and then moaned and howled, chewed at his shoulder. The full orchestra was playing as Alice swung back and forth, nearly touching the ceiling. Michelle cringed every time she leaned out over them, but Claire and Gene looked on, happily indulgent.
They must watch these things every day
, Con thought.