The Slide: A Novel (6 page)

And so I told her.

“You FUCK,” she yelled, and
now
she stood and pointed and repeated her charge for some time. I began slamming her door again. Soon she dropped the
you,
leaving only a series of
fuck
s ringing over the sound of the door.

“You!” I reminded her. “You! You!”

Before I could begin a fourth lap I was stopped by a series of white arcs drawn in the neighbors’ yard, dozens of unfurled white banners. They came from nowhere and trailed across house and grass, up into and through trees. I inched forward and saw dark figures moving efficiently through the lawn, launching rolls of toilet paper into the air, waiting, then launching them again. I admired their stealth. When my friends and I had done this, noise had always been our downfall. We could never suppress the hubbub of mischief and adolescent nerves. These kids were silent. Determined. The prank had evolved, grown more severe, and I was relieved to see it in such capable hands.

At some point that night at school, when we were too tired to go on, all the
fuck
and
you
s changed to
sorry
. It made sense; the fight was doomed from the start, constrained and defeated by its own parameters. We screamed and screamed, then crumpled on the bed like two dirty tissues. For a while, neither of us was willing to make a move. Then I touched a single finger to one of her toes.

“I am,” I said. “I
am
sorry.”

“Now what?” she asked. “What’s left? Who’s the asshole?”

“Come here. Just here.”

“No. No. You come here,” she said. “You come closer.”

One of the teenagers spotted me and communicated with the others in a signal I didn’t catch, but slowly the rolls of toilet paper came to rest. There were only four of them, four boys, though with their efficiency it had seemed twice as many. They exchanged nervous looks and it occurred to me that they’d come here because of the youngest Hoyne, the neighbor daughter who by now must have been in high school. I approached the closest kid and saw a face equal parts wholesome rebellion and magnificent fear. For a second I seriously considered punching him, to see if the other three would rush to his aid and beat me enough that I’d finally get some rest. The kid breathed loudly through a mouth ruled by braces. I reached out and we engaged in a prolonged handshake, long enough that by its end rolls of toilet paper flew again, leaving hygienic white trails that scaled trees and striped across the yard. I crossed back to my parents’ driveway and sat with my back against a tire of the 4Runner, hoping the kids would keep going through the night.

The lack of worthwhile rest began to complicate my interactions with the world. At times I delved into a fugue state and corners went fuzzy, objects floated by with no apparent destination. I grew suspicious of just about everything, including the queasy awareness that somebody knew me well enough to forecast within seconds when I’d want to eat breakfast. I began instituting little tests of my mother’s timing. One morning I stalled upstairs after brushing my teeth. This was no problem for her. The following morning I essentially sprinted from my bed to the kitchen, only to find her at the stove, angling the frying pan, toast-eggs sliding onto a plate. She was unflappable.

I waited until she was outside in her garden, then began searching through the cabinets below the phone. I moved my search outward, eventually going through every cabinet in the kitchen. I wanted the Yellow Pages, and this much was good: to want. Frustrated, I moved to the new computer room. And there it was on the desk, displayed as if the Yellow Pages were the whole purpose for building the new room. I split it open and turned to
temporary employment,
picked the largest ad, then called a small one next to it.

“We accept walk-ins any day of the week,” the woman explained. “We’re here ’til five.”

“You mean today? I expected some sort of wait. Maybe I should make an appointment for later in the week.”

“Walk-in only. Thank you for choosing ProTemps.”

I dug through a still-unpacked duffel to find my olive-green pants, a wrinkled white shirt, and the cleaner of the two ties I owned. I found my dress shoes and a pair of black socks from my father’s dresser. It took six tries to get the tie right.

Stuart phoned during my drive. “What is the worst injury either of you sustained in the presence of the other?”

“I broke a finger one night. Tripped over a bush.”

“Broken finger. Good. Afterward, did she care for you: A, tenderly; B, fairly; C, politely; or D, rudely?”

“She said I was an idiot for trying to steal a security golf cart. Then I don’t know. B? Which one was B?”

“Very good, Poot. That’s all I need for now.”

A woman behind glass slid me a clipboard with a pen attached by twine. I dropped it, picked it up, and took a seat between a teenage Latino kid with slick hair and a thirty-something black woman in purple stockings. The fourth of us was a young white girl, no older than me. She bit at her lip in concentration, pen in one hand while the other gently rocked a baby carrier in the next seat. I turned in the forms and was given a second clipboard, along with a small, solar-powered calculator. This was a rudimentary problem set of arithmetic and basic geometry I sped through without the help of the calculator. Clipped behind that was an alphabetization quiz. I worked rapidly, impatient to secure some sort of labor. I was ushered into a back room where I sat at a computer and typed a passage as quickly and accurately as I could, something about a woman named Sandra and sales projections. I was sent back into the waiting room. I found huge satisfaction in this evaluation; the whole sequence of movement and tasks was just what I needed. After a short wait, I was led through a door, down a short hallway, and shown into an even smaller room with one desk, a ficus, and two framed pictures hanging on colorless walls. The first showed a long bone-white beach, electric-blue ocean rippling onto the shore,
Acapulco!!
bright red in the sky. The other was puppies crawling out of a picnic basket in a field.

A short beefy man with a very big nose stood behind the desk and gestured for me to sit. I crossed my legs professorially and interlocked my fingers over my knee. I could feel my face bright with accomplishment. The nameplate on his desk said
Alex
Doggerty
.

“Potter Mays.”

“Here I am,” I said.

“Well, great. Let’s get right at it, shall we? I’ve got your test scores here, Mr. Mays. Tell me, what sort of work were you looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s why I came here.”

“Good, Potter. We’re glad you did. No need to panic whatsoever. At ProTemps we pride ourselves on the ability to find work for everyone, from the highest skilled down to those we call ‘legs’ or ‘hands.’ So you have nothing to worry about. Now before we begin, is there any chance at all that you might have, accidentally or on purpose, either way, any chance that you shall we say embellished your educational background?”

“None chance,” I said, and he made a note, looked at me, and made another note.

“Okay then. That’s terrific. Let’s have a look.” He opened and spun the file so I could read it. “We’ll begin with the math. Not your strongest suit, but I’m sure you knew that by now. Incorrect answers are marked in red.”

The paper looked like it had been mauled. Nearly every problem was marked incorrect, blood-red lines scrawled from top to bottom. And worse, upon further review they actually were incorrect. Long division, multiplication, simple subtraction; I had failed awesomely.

“Also, there are a few hiccups with the alphabetization,” he said, and I’ll give him this much, the word
alphabetization
caused him no trouble at all. “Here you’ve got Peterson in front of Parvenik? And here, on the one-through-ten sequencing. You put the four next to Kennison, the five next to Jacobs, and the six next to Harris.”

The puppies in the grass tussled with their gleeful little puppy snouts. I was almost sure Alex’s tie was a clip-on. He tapped his pen on the desk and held a steady grin.

“But typing, my goodness. Seventy words per. That’s something, I should say. Something.” His voice went flat.

“I wrote,” I said, “a lot of papers in college.”

“Ah yes. Of course.” Holding his pen like some brand-new and intimidating piece of technology, he scribbled a note on the pad of paper in front of him. “We’re going to find you work, Mr. Mays. You might not believe it now, but I promise. And though basic knowledge of arithmetic and the alphabet is crucial to most office work we staff, that doesn’t mean we won’t succeed in placing you in a just great job. So keep that head up, alright, hoss?”

I remembered something.

“I believe
hoss,
Alex, came into usage as a bastardization of horse.”

“That’s great!” He stood and extended a hand. “Thank you for choosing ProTemps. We’ll be in touch just as soon as something comes up.”

I shook as firmly as I could, then turned and carefully left his office. I walked with both hands out in front of me, completely distrustful of my spatial relationship to earthly objects. The baby was staring and the secretary was quite possibly laughing as I sped through the office, back out into the spiteful glare of an impossible and disastrous summer day.

june

four

s
everal days later I came home to find a second package waiting on the kitchen island. White box, flat and rectangular, sent from abroad.
Par avion.
I shook it and listened. I set it down and glared at it. My mother entered through the side door, her hands caked with dark brown earth and face like birthday candle flame, a shade of red stretching well beyond this single moment.

“Sonny boy. That came for you today.”

She went to the sink to wash her hands. My mother’s feelings for Audrey were less than clear. The natural wish to see her only son made happy set against the stealthy undercurrents of rivalry, and the protective factor, the inevitable distrust. With my father it was perfectly simple: he liked Audrey. Adored her. That first dinner together, all the questions he had prepared for her, and how his face alit at every question she offered back. From that first visit between freshman and sophomore years, Audrey was exceedingly good at this. She knew to ask about the additions to the house and to ask about law, funnel what she knew of public health into a series of questions about first Richard’s legal practice, then about
SLH!
once he took over as director. And she knew enough to never ever ask about Freddy.

I watched my mother use the small brush to get underneath her nails. Now she handed me a steak knife and stood on the other side of the island. She could, if she so chose, stand there forever. I cut through one end of the box and removed a single rectangular object encased in bubble wrap.

“A picture,” she said.

Dammit, she was right. A picture of the two of them outside a beautiful European chateau on top of a hill above this green-yellow tableau of trees and hills and fields and far far in the background the gray pinprick of a farmhouse. The whole scene illuminated through Jesus Christ cloud break, just so nicely beautiful it might have been painted. The picture was set in a hand-carved frame of some dark ancient wood, intricate squiggles and beautiful tiny flowers. I examined closely the setting, the margins between chateau and sky, looking for signs of forgery or enhancement. But the colors were real. Scenery: real. Girls: beautiful. And one of them: bisexual.

My mother found her reading glasses. “Who is that with Audrey?”

“Carmel,” I said.

“She’s very pretty,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “And a robot.”

Before Audrey and Carmel’s friendship, I knew Carmel as everyone else knew her, the gorgeous and lithe girl from Long Island, olive-skinned and enchantingly standoffish. She spent that first year running through boy-men, obliterating them. I saw three of my personal friends fall by her hand, crumble into pathetic heaps and then take months and more to claw their way upright. Women, once her interest in women became known, fared no better. She was not wicked and she was not cruel. She was not governed by malice. All she was was immune to what anyone might call humanity. She was a robot.

The photograph’s subject was more the terrain than the girls, but the delicacy by which they’d been set toward the bottom right corner was worrisome. For someone had taken this picture, some person with whom I was now irrevocably linked, the photo-taker a surrogate me, and I surrogate him. Or her. Or him.

Audrey’s other friendships remained loose affairs with little given or taken. She had her family at home and me in her bed. By the spring of sophomore year, Carmel had become the third. For a time I had to remind myself that Audrey having a friend this close was a good thing. But there was something almost promising about this variety of selfishness. Clutching at her like a boy in a sandbox unwilling to share his favorite toy, I demonstrated my love. Add to this the manner in which we moved on from the cheating, confident, recklessly confident, and were made
stronger for the experience
. Mounting evidence that this, Us, was to be celebrated. Later, once things between us were descending into something not very good at all, I would think back to my reluctance to accept her nascent friendship with tousle-haired Carmel, razor-blue-eyed robot, and wonder what I might have seen then, briefly, before my eyes fell shut in the peace of alleged love.