Suicide's Girlfriend (5 page)

The question lodged in his chest, hot as the heart shown by Jesus Christ in the room Gloria Dei Church loaned for practice of English conversation. Oyekan looked at the plump Mexican girl—so strangely sexual and sexless in her silly clothing, one leg extended before herself, as if she imagined herself in a magazine of American fashion.

Peggy Dixon brought her face close. She stood, perhaps, thirty centimeters taller than his betrothed, her eyes of green flecks almost on a level with his own. She resembled no one, anywhere.

But one learned to deal with such terrible questions in America, and, with the sleeves of Lee Hillis's old shirt rolled above his biceps, his feet springy on their cushion of socks and running shoes, Oyekan felt . . . almost American. He found an American grin. He asked Peggy Dixon, “When?”

Peggy Dixon covered her mouth with her fingertips. “Don't you mean
‘who'?”

Still grinning, Oyekan shook his head, no. But this made Peggy Dixon look away, her eyes suddenly sad. “There's Mr. Scotty,” she murmured. She waved at Scotty Hillis, down on the lawn, a set of colored wooden mallets and balls in his hand. “You're getting burned, y'all!” she called. “Better get that head covered!”

Mr. Scotty nodded and smiled. To Oyekan's relief, Peggy looked back at him, laughing.

“Mr. Scotty enjoys a small consequence,” he said.

“He's a sweetheart,” said Peggy.

“He's a bear!” Mrs. Scotty, coming up from behind, put an arm
around each. “And don't you two make a handsome couple!” She flushed, widened her eyes, as if she, too, were startled by her words. “With Oyekan's haircut I mean! I can't quite get used to it! How'd Joe's turn out, Peggy? I haven't seen him yet.”

Peggy Dixon smiled at Oyekan as if she had not even heard the embarrassing words of Mrs. Scotty! “Well, Joe wanted something different,” she said with a laugh, “and different he got. I don't doubt but the boy'll be a big hit in Truk, or wherever they send him off to!”

Mrs. Scotty laughed at this, also, her face tilted up to the sunshine. “So!” She rubbed her hand briskly up and down Oyekan's arm. “Scotty says I'm not to pester you, Oy, but I'll bet Peggy and Joe agree you should stay!”

“Oy?” Peggy Dixon leaned forward and squeezed his hand.

Perhaps she did indeed remind him of someone from home, and he had not recognized this until she put on the traditional skirt? But no, it was the smile he recognized, so sleepy, so secret. And not from home at all: the smile offered Joe in the photograph in the recreation room. The smile after the kiss. For him now, Oyekan.

“Mr. and Mrs. Scotty are most kind,” Oyekan said, his voice no more than a whisper.

Down on the lawn, Joe held a handful of the wire hoops that Mr. Scotty bent to press into the grass. Mrs. Scotty was saying to Peggy Dixon, “I guess I don't have to tell you Oy's like family,” while Mr. Scotty was talking to Joe. Mr. Scotty lifted his red face to point in the direction of Oyekan. Mr. Scotty waved and smiled, and Joe looked up also, his face white as tooth, bone.

Perhaps Joe meant to smile, but could not. Oyekan himself could not smile. Teeth pressed together, he looked at Peggy, at Mrs. Scotty—both of them waiting to be happy, already weary with waiting, their smiles veiled with the wait.

“Oy?” said Peggy Dixon.

He backed into the line of people traveling past the many bowls of food, gathering baked beans and brownies and salads. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me, please.”

The door to the big house stood closed. On the small pane of glass that allowed those inside to look out at callers was a note that read, “Picnickers: Please use bathhouse loo!”

Oyekan pushed open the door. He stepped inside. Darkness and the chemical cold of conditioned air filled the house, a shock after the bright afternoon. Quickly, he passed through many rooms of beige carpet, brick, wood. He meant to convey acquaintance with the house should anyone see him, but to his surprise all of the rooms stood empty, quiet, curtained against the sun.

In the end, he sat down in the single chair of a small room he took to be a kind of study, walls lined with books and, too, dolls from foreign countries: an Asian doll with a load of twigs on his back; a Spanish dancer with wide skirts of orange and red and pink; a Scotsman playing the bagpipes. Oyekan fitted his back to the chair. He took deep breaths to calm himself. In, out. Out. The sound of the picnickers reached him as a kind of rustle, a small and uniform wave of gaiety that washed against the outer walls of the big house.

He sat in the chair for a very long time, long after he had grown used to the dark and come to see that the shadow caught in the room's pale curtains was not a fold of the curtain's cloth, but the Mexican girl from the swimming pool, and that she was in hiding, too.

T
HOUGH SHE
.
HAD
hardly known it back in 1951, Gwen Vander Schaaf had been in love with Randall Decker. She had known, of course, that when she sat behind Randall in homeroom, she'd studied the way his close-cropped hair made an opalescent sheen across his perfect skull. And that when Randall leaned far, far back to look at her, and laid his head right upon her desktop, she often found a way to touch him—sometimes with the provocative pink nipple of a pencil eraser. Still, along with all the chores Randall Decker had had to perform on his father's farm, he'd had to bear himself up under the gray burden of Decker family life, and so the socks that hung around Randall's ankles had made Gwen think of the just-loosened ropes of hangmen, and there were his dazzling blue eyes—one or the other always in some state of blackening. Too, a great oozing patch of scab often marred that perfect skull of Randall's. And all of this together meant that the fact of loving Randall never knocked loudly enough at the gates to the world Gwen Vander Schaaf proposed for herself in 1951.

So maybe it wasn't love anyway? Maybe not?

Gwen had dated Thom Muller back in 1951. Twelve years ago now.
When she and Thom Muller had danced together in the Morrow gymnasium on Friday nights, Gwen made her breasts high and tight, but did not allow Thom Muller to press his thigh against her own, and thus she garnered a reputation as that most desirable of girls—one both passionate and pure—though, in fact, she knew herself to be neither with regard to Thom Muller, and could never understand all the work she and the other girls did to secure places in the hearts of a town they dreamt only of escaping.

The whole of high school, Randall Decker had gone to just one dance: senior prom. Without a date. All that night, Gwen felt as if something magical were about to happen, Randall would put down the bottle of Coke he nursed over by the door, push himself off the gymnasium wall, and, with one of his long, fine fingers, tap on Thom's shoulder. But the prom drew to a close. Thom guided Gwen toward the door. There stood Randall, blowing hollow notes across the top of his empty bottle. As if she were gorgeously amused, did not see Randall at all, Gwen threw back her head in laughter. Randall reached out to her, then drew his finger down her bare arm and whispered, “You girl,” words that dropped over Gwen like a silver net, cold and beautiful and impossible to escape.

“What'd he say?” Thom wanted to know.

“He said my hair looked pretty.”

And Thom said, “It looks the same as always.”

In 1951, Gwen wore her hair in a pageboy, rolled each night around a fresh sanitary napkin pad: an extravagance, and an outrage against decency, which her Dutch Reformed father did not allow a place at the breakfast table.

Suppose she had turned back to Randall that night—the way she wanted—and she had ended up married to him? Suppose even
one
of the reunions she imagined over the years had actually come true? Would she have brought Randall luck and happiness?

Gwen thought of all this now, looking out the wavy glass of the teachers' lounge window, as Randall's little daughter, Lily, climbed down from the school bus and walked toward the elementary wing of
Morrow Consolidated. Last off the bus. Small for a fourth grader. Perfect braids, one hung over the right shoulder, one hung over the left. Proceeded precisely down the middle of the walk. Careful to avoid thawed muck. Looking back as the bus pulled away as if perhaps someone called her name.

No one there. Just the houses and then the hills.

When the small students of Morrow Consolidated drew horizons upon sheets of manila, those horizons ran straight from one border to the other, broken only by a piece or two of subject matter: a cozy house curling smoke into the sky, a horse, a dog barking at a ferocious, oversize tulip. The true horizon of Morrow, however, was hump after hill, each rise swollen, sliding behind the other like racks of bread, waves, the regular, repetitious beauty of delirium.

Now that spring was coming, the more ambitious fields—plowed the fall before—lay black and ready against the hills' even sedge. In the dimples of the hills, the last tucks of snow appeared pure white, though at close range they were honeycombed, speckled with dirt.

From Morrow's hills, the town's leafless but plentiful branches of oaks and lindens and maples moved in the wind, seemed almost a swarm above the houses; white, most of them, with a single car garage set off to the back of the lot. The wet gravel streets were the color of coarse mustard and—pulling onto the stretch of highway that slowed for Morrow—local cars and school buses and trucks drew a wash of gravel onto the highway's asphalt, left behind twin fans of ochre at every intersection.

The highway ran by the school yard. There, children gathered at their appointed doors to enter for the day. The oldest students—girls with hair ratted and sprayed in imitation of what they saw on trips to Sioux City; boys dreaming of joining the Navy in May—moved into the senior wing in orderly fashion. They ignored the photographs that hung in the halls: their grandparents, young themselves in those days,
standing on the steps of the original schoolhouse, torn down in 1919 and replaced by the flat-roofed building that now housed Elementary.

One shrewd teacher in that pre-Depression community had suggested that the school install a peaked roof, and situate its hallways along the north side of the building; this, she contended, would prevent the school's looking like a factory, save electricity, and buffer the classrooms against winter winds. Other parties, however, favored the symmetry of industrialization. They opted for a flat roof and the dark, central halls through which Elementary's children currently stumbled:

Elementary's janitor, Mr. Menecke, had forgotten to turn on the fluorescents before going up on the roof to hack at the ice that accumulated there every winter and—melting—seeped down, dark as tea, into the sickroom below.

On the roof, Mr. Menecke swore vilely. Mr. Menecke threw broken ice over the eaves, sometimes without even looking to see if a child might pass below. Back then, people did not count on bad luck and disaster the way they would learn to do in the years to come. Mr. Menecke regularly set the schoolgirls in his lap and kissed them in a manner that many of them did not like, but did not know how to protest. Elementary was full of asbestos and a fire trap besides. In the dark hall, the children moved like potatoes spilled from a bag. They bumped against one another's legs and arms. They galloped and scuffled—

“You ignoramus!” So cried Lily Decker to a boy with a broad, flat face, and she pointed at the shoe she had, until then, managed to keep clean by great efforts—crisscrossing the muddy lane that led from her grandparents' farmhouse to the main road, avoiding other children on the bus.

“Biggy wow, Lily,” the boy called over his shoulder, “a little mud!”

“Clod! Piker!” These were names Lily's grandfather called her father. Ignoramus. Lazy lout. Plus things you should not repeat even
in your head. Like last summer, when Lily and her mother and father had first moved from Massachusetts onto her grandfather's farm. Lily had been given a dish towel to shoo flies from the peaches not yet put into jars. Not much of a job, which was why she was looking out the window at her grandma's bean plants at just the moment her father ran across the burnt yard and crashed into the dark kitchen from the bright outdoors. Close on his heels came Lily's grandfather, who paused in the doorway to scream a terrible name, then pitched an entire crate of peaches at Lily's father's back.

What terrible thing had her father done that day? Bent three tines of something her grandfather called a “disc.” And what had he done after her grandfather went back outside? Sat in one of the kitchen chairs and wept.

Now Lily crouched, rubbed at her smeared shoe with the piece of tissue her mother always tucked in her pocket before school.

“That's quite a getup, Lily. Birthday party today?”

Miss Vander Schaaf. Elementary's secretary. Lily did not like Miss Vander Schaaf, who wore short-sleeved sweaters that showed too much of her chubby arms, and always smiled as if they shared a secret.

“My dad's coming to take me today.”

“Ah.”

Lily did not watch the woman back into the lounge. Everyone in Morrow turned pink and red when Lily mentioned her father's name, as if she should pretend he did not even exist. She tugged on the tips of her gloves to remove them, little tugs that did not make the gloves end up inside out. Her mother had taught her how to do this. Almost everyone said her mother resembled the beautiful actress Loretta Young. How Lily's father could have left such a kind and pretty woman was a grave mystery.

Red gloves with green vines and white flowers with a yellow French knot in the middle. Lily's grandparents did not believe in celebrating Christmas, but Lily's mother had given her the gloves, anyway. The right one had a pocket on its back. The pocket held a lucky penny and a chip of blue and white porcelain. Over breakfast on
Christmas morning, Lily's mother had explained that the penny and chip were lucky pieces because she had turned them up in the garden the day she learned she was pregnant with Lily. The story had made Lily's grandparents lift their full cheeks, stare at each other, chew hard on the fried potatoes and eggs.

The chat with Lily Decker left Gwen feeling breathless, the way she had felt after her last trip to the city when, stopped at a red light, forgetting that red lights were not the same as stop signs, she pulled into the intersection and was almost crushed between cars speeding at her from the left and the right.

So. She rapped together a stack of multiple choice tests for Third. “So,” she said to the lounge's only other inhabitant, Dale Mulford, “so, that Decker's coming by today for his girl.”

“Mm.” Dale Mulford was the principal, a slender man with a cockade of brown hair atop his head. He frowned to indicate preoccupation with the task at hand: cutting a wedge of peppermint cake from a pan on the table. He did not like gossip, but he knew the basic Decker story. The man had moved his wife and child from Massachusetts to his parents' farm, then abandoned them for some Sioux City woman. The citizenry of Morrow couldn't get enough of the Decker story and, as if to oblige, over Christmas, the girlfriend had stabbed Decker in the back. How many times? Some said three, some four, no one said two, which Dale Mulford eventually learned was the correct answer.

Dale Mulford came from Sioux City, and held the firm opinion that no one in Morrow ever accepted a thing at face value. Everyone in Morrow went about crabbed with guilt and discomfort and a ridiculous sense of the superiority this conferred, like a woman proud she managed to cram her foot into a shoe several sizes too small.

“So, Gwen, did you try this lovely cake Floria brought?”

“At eight in the morning?” Gwen gave him the locals' wide-eyed
look of incredulity, swallowed it with some show, as if she believed such dramatics constituted good manners.