So Much Pretty (18 page)

The cows were almost impossible to differentiate, and from where I was standing, even with a higher vantage point, I couldn’t see the end of the line. After an hour or so, you really don’t think of them as being alive in the same way other animals are. This is because they aren’t. They are made through artificial insemination
for the purpose of providing milk. And they are themselves constantly inseminated so that they will keep lactating. Haytes said the calves are picked up by a separate company that has contracts with a variety of businesses dealing in food and apparel. It is hard to look at something that has been created specifically to be a commercial product and think of it as alive.

Jim Haytes said the last time the cows were milked by hand must have been over thirty years ago. But people still liked the logo of the man in the straw hat sitting on a three-legged stool next to a cow. He had a lot to say about what the dairy had done for the town. How they sponsored the dairy parade, bought uniforms for the high school football team, how, way back, when his father did the first expansion of the herd, they gave money for the pool to be built. There were no girls’ sports then, and he joked that Daddy wanted to give the boys something to look at. But seriously, not too many farm towns got a swimming pool. He said that was one more way you could tell Haeden was a little different: the town had a lot of old money, the kind of history you might not know about just to look at it. Wouldn’t know about the country nobility or the country intelligence—hell, might not even know how to spot it if you came in from outside.

Haytes was like a block of wood who could talk. He had a loud clipped way of articulating his words and an almost mocking singsong way of discussing the town. It was close to impossible to tell if he was being sarcastic. He was one in a class of men I’d become familiar with over the years in Haeden, men who sucked attention toward themselves while pretending they were “stoic.” Men who alternated between loudmouth and sulking personas. There was something of the hysteric or the martyr in them. Too ignorant to read the culture they came from or the corporations that owned them, they presented themselves with no sense of irony as heroes of tradition who’d been smart enough to modernize, invest, sell, or simply look away, when the time was right.

While I was there, he bragged about little Bruce and then rolled his eyes at me while the kid watched, as if every nice thing he said about his son was actually a joke. I think me and the kid experienced a similar confusion about how to respond to any of Haytes’ comments. Neither of us said much that day.

Bruce was good at sports, apparently—but saying “All right, good job” to the kid resulted in one of Jim Haytes’s sighs and exasperated comments: “Yep. Might be even
better
if he lost a little
belly fat
—’course, it’s easy to make the time for playing ball when you don’t quite finish all your chores, isn’t that right, Moose?” The kid didn’t seem to hear a word. I regarded his round flushed face until he looked up at me and smirked. He was just too quiet. It was hard to tell what was going through Bruce Haytes’s mind or if he even had one. I remember thinking the kid was either just shy of taking the short bus or we’re going to find out in twenty years he’s a serial killer. His father had essentially poisoned the town his own family lived in for over a century, in exchange for a Range Rover and some golfing vacations. Their very property, according to DEC maps, was the epicenter of the contamination. Nothing that came out of that family would have surprised me.

Megan Osterhaus

HAEDEN, NY, 2007

I
T SNOWED IN
early October, a thin blanket covering the fallen leaves. Alice and Megan swung on the trapeze in the cold barn while Theo dug through boxes in the loft. They were bored. They were killing time.

Megan lived up the road, and the girls had shared a fort in the lilac bushes that separated their two properties when they were little, but Megan had strict rules, even though she was older and wasn’t often allowed over. This was irritating, as there were no other neighbors within biking or walking distance, and the girls had become close again because of swim team. Megan was a very sweet-looking girl and knew it. She also had a filthy vocabulary. She tried not to swear so much, but she liked to, and half the time it was by mistake anyway. Also, if you swear, people think you are making your own way. They don’t know you’re the kind of person who has an early curfew or a million chores. She was allowed to swear all she wanted at Alice’s, but somehow she never did as much. Things were confusing at the Pipers’. They all seemed like roommates or something, friends who lived together.

“Found them,” Theo called.

Alice jumped off the trapeze and stood with her hands on her hips, looking up at him. Then raised her hands.

“I’m not going to throw it at you, dummy—it’s the whole set.”

“Why are we gonna play in the cold and dark, anyhow?” Megan asked.

Megan was often afraid she would get in trouble for playing with them. She never knew what the rules were there. Or if there were any.

Theo and Alice’s parents let them sleep over at each other’s houses, and one day last summer, when it was really hot, Megan went to Alice’s and no one was home but her and Theo, sitting in the bathtub naked, reading comic books. They had dumped a bag of ice in with them. It was like they didn’t care. Like it didn’t matter that they were naked or anything. It wasn’t sexy or anything. It was, like, boring. They were really bored, and it was too hot. She put her feet over the side and sat there talking with them. They read out loud from the comic books in funny voices, but the whole time she was afraid somebody’s parents would come home. For some reason it made her even more uneasy when she found out their parents didn’t care. Also, since Theo had gone away to school, he smoked cigarettes right in front of everyone, and no one said a thing. And she thought it was kind of gross the way they still played Circus, and once she heard them talking in a made-up language. There was something dirty about the whole thing. Like Alice and Theo were brother and sister but also in love and they didn’t even know or care that other people thought it was weird.

Theo walked down the steps with a big square metal suitcase, set it flat upon the floor, and then opened it. Inside was an old wooden croquet set.

“Do we have the lighter fluid?” Alice asked.

Megan watched them from the trapeze.

Theo smiled. “Indeed we do.”

“Do we have the soccer socks?” she asked.

“Why, yes, we do.” He picked up the paper bag at his feet and dramatically held it at arm’s length.

Megan slipped off the back of the bar to hang by her knees, dropped to the floor, landing on her hands, then folded at the middle to stand up straight. “I have to go home,” she said. “It fucking sucks, but I have—”

“Okay,” Theo said to her quickly.

Megan had wanted them to ask her to stay and was slightly
hurt. Alice and Theo were already choosing their mallets and pulling the wickets out of the canvas bag.

They walked out of the barn; the yard shone in the moonlight, and squares of light from the windows of the Pipers’ house patterned themselves across the ground, making the snow sparkle.

Alice poked the edges of the wickets through some ratty tube socks, then wound the socks tightly around the arc of wire, handing each one to Theo, who ran to various places in the yard, jamming them into the ground and pouring lighter fluid over them.

“I guess I could stay for a little while longer,” Megan said.

“Good!” Alice said, grinning at her excitedly. “This will be fun.”

Theo came back and stood with the girls and retrieved his mallet and a ball, which he also sprayed with lighter fluid. “Ready?”

“Do it!” yelled Alice. “No, wait!” She scrutinized how he held his mallet. Then said, “Okay, now.”

Theo lit a match and dropped it on the ball, which shot flames higher than they had anticipated. He quickly knocked it with the mallet, sending the ball through the first wicket, which caught fire. In the darkness, it shone blue and yellow.

Alice ran and set the other wickets alight, the pale gray cloud of her breath visible, illuminated by the fire’s yellow light. Then she went through the course, disregarding the rules, eventually setting her mallet on fire and balancing the handle on the palm of her hand while she walked around the yard. Megan watched silently. Had they never heard of barn fires? Didn’t they realize how close they lived to the woods?

She tried to see what they saw. The fire was beautiful against the dark and the snow. So bright and mysterious and blue at the center. But she didn’t feel good. It was like Alice and Theo understood something about what they were doing that wasn’t even there. Something she didn’t know. And they knew she didn’t know it. That was how they made her feel at school, too.
Dumb. They never said anything mean. They always asked her to play, but that was how she felt. Slow.

She looked over at the house and saw Gene and Claire watching them from the window with mugs in their hands. Watching. Just watching the little fires in their own yard as they grew.

Wendy

NOVEMBER 2008

S
HE WAS NOT
in Dale’s truck when she woke up, and she was not in her bedroom. She thought maybe they had been in an accident. Her body hurt, her arms and legs and back hurt, and her mouth was dry. It was too dark to see anything, and she was facedown on cold cement, no stones or grass, and it smelled like mold. Her head throbbed. She touched her body. She wasn’t wearing her clothes. She was wearing something. A shirt. It felt like Dale’s shirt—there was a collar and a couple buttons at the top. A shirt and underwear. Wet underwear. She had peed her pants.
What had happened to them?

Oh God. Where was Dale? Something happened to Dale!
She crawled forward and bumped her face on something, put her hand in something slippery and cold.
What was it? Oil, soap? It smelled like mold, like bleach
. Maybe she was dreaming. She sat up on her knees and tried to stand, but partway up, something hit her head and she fell forward. Her stomach lurched, and she felt like she was going to throw up. She lay still for a moment with her heart racing. “Hello?” she yelled, and her throat was raw and sore. It felt like she had swallowed something hard, felt like it was still there. Blood, maybe? There was a taste in her mouth like metal. “Hello? I need help. IneedhelpIneedhelp,” she whispered to herself.
They had been in a car accident. That was the only thing that could explain it
. She hurt all over.

She closed her eyes again and lay still until her stomach settled. Then she tried feeling her way forward. Put her hand into something soft and scratchy, cloying.
Insulation
. She knew it from her
father’s work. It made her heart race to touch it.
What’s going on? What’s happened?

There was an accident, and she was somewhere safe. She was in someone’s shed—they had brought her there, but they didn’t know she was conscious. Dale was fine, or he wouldn’t have given her his shirt. That was it. That had to be it
.

Alice

HAEDEN, NY, 2006

A
T THE WHISTLE
, she was off the block and out over the water. She was smaller than the other girls and thinner, but she could tell she had more air, breathed better, cut through the water faster. She was smaller because they were varsity swimmers and she was still in middle school. The other girls had broader shoulders. More weight. Breasts. They were like sea creatures. Seals and manatees and selkies and mermaids. She flew through the sink and rise of the butterfly as if the water had a different weight for her than for anyone else.

Their coach, Mr. Dunn, was an enormous fat man whom they had never seen get into the water. They could only assume, since he knew what to tell them, there must have been a time when he could swim.

“Coach is a fucking fat blob,” Megan told Alice quietly on the bus to their meet in Elmville.

“Coach is an incredible example of buoyancy to which we can all aspire,” Alice said, raising her eyebrows a few times.

“They should have called that thing you won the verbal
dis
advantage,” Megan said. “’Cause nobody can understand a fucking thing you say.” She grinned to let Alice know she didn’t mean to be mean. Megan loved to talk shit.

The girls on the bus started singing that Gwen Stefani song “Hollaback Girl” and clapping. They were getting ready to beat the Elmville girls to a fucking pulp. Eventually, they were just shouting the song at the top of their lungs and bouncing on the seats of the bus. If they got too carried away, Dunn would tell them to shut up, but they also knew he liked it when they got pumped up to win.

They sang the chorus over and over, almost in a trance:
A few times I’ve been around that track, so it’s not just gonna happen like that, ’cause I ain’t no hollaback GIRL. I ain’t no hollaback GIRL
.

Alice had never seen the video for this song, but she’d heard it on the radio in the locker room and she loved it, whatever it meant. It was the song that made them win. And they always won.

Now at practice, she was swimming like a fish, happy in the blue pool surrounded by the echo and the rush of her blood in her veins and the feel of her heart in her wrists in the cool water.

At lap twenty, a cramp started in her belly and a weakness, almost an itch or a vibration, in one of her knees.
Fuck!
She had four more lengths before she could get out of the water, and she had not brought tampons to practice. She sped up but felt a little sick to her stomach. She crossed her fingers and willed herself not to bleed until she’d finished the next four. And somehow she managed it. She pulled herself out of the water quickly at the blocks. One of the seniors—a fleshy blue-eyed girl with a strong back and shoulders—had reached the blocks, too, and looked up at her, read the anxiety on her face. She pulled herself up and hopped out of the water and then waved and yelled to Dunn, “Have to use the bathroom. I’ll be back.” She bumped her arm against Alice’s shoulder. “You need to go?” They didn’t towel off but walked right into the locker room. Just inside the door, Alice felt the release of blood hot against her cold skin, and it saturated the crotch of her bathing suit.