Tilt (3 page)

“I know I sounded like a stammering clownface this morning in biology but what I was trying to get out was it's Saturday night. This Saturday. It starts at eight o'clock and I don't think I would stay past ten or so and we don't even have to dance if you don't want to. I mean, there will be music and such. But if you don't like to dance then we could just, I don't know, hang out.” She paused. “Feel free to jump in and say something any time about now.”

Stan considered his words. His mother poured herself another glass of wine not ten feet away and pretended she wasn't listening.

“We don't have to worry about transportation because my parents will be driving. I think maybe I mentioned this is their thing. Are you still there? You do talk, don't you?”

“Sure,” Stan said.

“Well?”

“I just, uh, I'm not sure why you're asking
me
?”

Stan's mother chopped something hard on the counter so that he dropped the phone. When he picked it up he said, “Sorry about that,” but it was into a dial tone.

At 2:17 a.m., after precisely no sleep, Stan
snuck downstairs, bypassed squeaky stair number five and, sitting in the den on
the couch near the window by the light of the streetlamp outside, composed the
following letter to Janine Igwash:

I know you think I'm an
idiot. But I have never been asked out before by any girl so I guess it's not
surprising I didn't know how to act. I've been training for
something . . . different and now that's been canceled and
sometimes it's hard to change gears.

Also, I'm not a usual sort of guy. I
feel like I'm older than that in some ways. Maybe when I
am
older I'll go completely off the road and behave just like a
teenager but right now I don't want any part of the stupidity that is
happening.

Maybe it's a drag your parents make you
help organize things like youth dances but at least that means they have their
own lives together. My parents are a complete mess. My father specifically
doesn't live here anymore.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm
trying really hard not to be 16. Does that make any sense?

One thing maybe it would be stupid to
tell you but here I am writing it anyway is that I do think of you from time to
time, and not
just because you tried to ask me out. I do think of you.

But I don't want to be physical until I
know how to be. Sexual I mean. I'm sorry for saying it.

I know you just asked me to a dance and
even then you said I didn't have to dance. So maybe instead we'd go for a walk
and I would tell you a lot of things. Maybe you have things on your mind too. It
doesn't mean at all we would end up being physical but the problem would be
afterward and mostly in my head but also in my body which is doing weird things.
I may look like something on the surface but underneath a lot of the time I'm
just barely clinging.

So going to the dance with you would be
a lot bigger event than maybe you're thinking about.

Now it's almost 4 o'clock in the
morning and I'm going to be a zombie if I don't go to bed. I'm sorry for my
handwriting. I'm sorry if I actually give you this letter. I'm having one of
those moments when I seem to be standing outside looking at myself wondering
what I'm going to do and not having the slightest idea.

Yours sincerely,

Stan (Stanley) Dart

Stan folded the letter — six sheets of his
miserable handwriting — three times, shoved it in the kitchen garbage, got
halfway up the stairs, then turned around and pulled the letter out of the
garbage. He took it upstairs to his room and stuck it under some papers at the
bottom of his own wastebasket which only got emptied once a month at most. Then
he pulled himself between the sheets.

Janine Igwash was instantly in his head, standing
quite close to him though turned slightly away, looking down. She had dropped a
button and was just about to bend over to look for it. Her black silky shirt was
almost falling open, and the little tattoo at the base of her neck nearly peeked
at him.

She was in his head like she was living there.
The black shirt falling so softly off her shoulders, undone. Shirt tails. Off
the rails. Light blue underwear the color of the sky. His heart hammering and
all he was doing was lying there, still as a board. Stiff as a post.

Holding up the sky.

Stan spied the tiny notice on the bulletin board outside the gym.
Tryouts for the boys' varsity basketball team begin Monday at 6:30 a.m.

How could information of such vital importance be so sparse in detail? Thin blue ink, easy to miss. Maybe Coach Burgess was hoping no one new would show up. He only had two spots to fill anyway.

Six-thirty in the morning!

But instead of driving people off, the awkward start time only seemed to pique more interest. Marty Wilkens, who could barely tie his own shoes, said he was going to come out. He'd grown six inches over the summer and so maybe he might be able to play basketball. Leonard Palin, a hockey player, announced he'd been working on a left-handed hook shot. “It's unstoppable,” he said in the hallway outside geography.

But really that hallway was owned by the enormous Karl Brolin, six feet six, 220 pounds of senior orangutan who flicked illegal bounce passes to Ty Blake and Jamie Hartleman, the core of the varsity team. No teachers told them to take it outside. They ran, jumped, pivoted, ricocheted off the lockers while Stan and others let them pass.

That's the way it was with those guys. Once last year at lunchtime Stan tried to guard Karl Brolin when Brolin decided to play at the junior basket outside just because he could. Brolin got the ball and backed in — backed in with his big rump and his huge shoulders until he was underneath the basket. Then, as now, all Stan could do was give way.

Stan carried his Janine Igwash letter — he'd retrieved it from the wastebasket — in an outer pocket of his backpack where it was zipped and sealed secure. He didn't want her to see it and so he kept it with him at all times.

Janine walked past him talking with Katherine Loney. Janine was a head taller than Katherine, though she didn't slouch like some tall girls did. He held the fire door but Janine did not glance at him. She simply kept listening as Katherine said, “ . . . pieces of it everywhere, even in her hair!” If Janine had glanced over, Stan was prepared to say, “I'm sorry, I dropped the phone.” His jaw was relaxed, the words were lining up, then she was by. Coldly, Stan thought. Determined not to look. “But why in her hair?” Janine asked. Stan didn't hear the reply. He was headed in the other direction. Nearly running.

To hell with her.

In the break after first period he sat underneath the stairwell at the south end of the building and wrote in tiny script at the bottom of page six of his letter to Janine:
what we cannot know/in the chaos of control
. He looked at those two lines — minutes were draining away, he was going to have to head to biology soon — and finally he scratched out the lines and added,
Why is everything so difficult?

He didn't have a good sense in his head of how he was ever going to make the varsity team. There were too many good players. The players were too big, too strong, too experienced. All year he'd been imagining making his shots against the JV guys. But most of them were not going to make the varsity team, either.

In biology Jason Biggs said, “Tryouts for varsity start Monday at 6:30 in the morning!” They were supposed to be finishing their diagrams of the components of the eye. Janine Igwash did not look around once in the first ten minutes of the class.

“Six-thirty in the morning!” Jason Biggs said.

She was working on her diagram. If Stan's letter wasn't safely back in his locker he would have just walked up to her and handed it over. Simple as that. He felt like a man of action.

“Monday morning!” Jason Biggs said. “You gotta go, man. I've seen your jump shot. You never miss.”

Then he looked to where Stan was looking.

“Not Janine Igwash,” he said.

“What?”

“Everyone knows she's tilted.”

Mr. Stillwater stopped talking and looked directly at the two of them.

“What does everyone know, Stanley?” he said.

Stan's ears were burning. They always gave him away. Biggs looked innocent as grass.

“What does everyone know?” Mr. Stillwater repeated. All eyes were on Stan.

“Nothing,” Stan muttered.

“Everyone knows nothing?” Mr. Stillwater said.

Stan stayed silent. He sneaked a glance at Janine Igwash. Her face was pale, pale white, but her neck was red. Her hair was so wild he wanted to get lost in it.

What did Biggs mean by tilted?

“Stand up.” Mr. Stillwater's eyes never left Stan. Maybe this wasn't going to pass after all. Stan rose uneasily. “What does everyone know?” Stillwater pressed.

“That I'm an idiot,” Stan said. Janine laughed. She was the only one.

“Are you?” A little less heft in Stillwater's voice. The moment seemed suddenly open to comic possibilities.

“I'm talking with my idiot friend when I should be listening,” Stan said. Some giggles now. “That makes me an idiot, too. I'm sorry, Mr. Stillwater.”

Stillwater nodded slightly, his eyes narrowed.

“And sometimes I drop the phone when someone wonderful is on the other end,” Stan continued. He looked directly at Janine, whose eyes were dark now — how did that happen? Black jewels. “And I fail to apologize because of just how awkward everything is at this age.” Gales of laughter. Jason Biggs' desk nearly tipped over, Stan was leaning so hard against it. But Janine kept looking.

“That's enough. Sit down, Stanley!”

Stan sat down. Janine kept looking. He would not look away first. His heart was hammering. He was breathing like he was carrying a load of bricks up a tree for some reason.

Just because it had to be done.

Trumpets were blowing in the back of his head. He wanted to be at the dance right now.

To hell with varsity.

But biology wasn't over. Stan was in his seat. Janine Igwash was still across the room.

He had to wait while Mr. Stillwater filled the board with the definitions of the ciliary muscle, the optic chiasm, the lens, the iris, the fiber radiations.

Stan poked Jason Biggs on the shoulder.

“What do you mean she's tilted?” he whispered.

Stan borrowed some colored pencils from the twins. Pink for muscle. Yellow for ligaments. Blue for the iris, gray for the lens.

“She's a gwog,” Biggs whispered harshly. Stan wasn't sure he had heard properly.

“A what?”

Janine's neck was white now, her face red.

“Tilted,” Jason Biggs said again. “She's a tilted gwog.”

Mr. Stillwater stood beside both their desks, looking with too much interest at their diagrams.

“Mr. Dart,” he muttered eventually. “Did you never learn to color inside the lines?”

—

“So you're an idiot?” she said an eternity later, when they were outside biology.

“Total.”

She smiled. God. How had he ever stood up in class like that?

“The dance is at eight o'clock. My parents are driving. You're going to have to meet them. They're, like, organizing the whole thing. Unless you have your license?” Her voice held a hopeful note.

Stan had his learner's permit. That was all. Why didn't he have his license yet? He'd been sixteen for almost three months. Every couple of weeks his mother took him out in the back lot and ground her teeth while he wrestled with the gearshift. He had a lot of trouble balancing between the clutch and the gas. He'd be a snap with an automatic, but they didn't own an automatic. Why didn't they own an automatic? They owned a rusting old stick shift because they were poor, poor because of the divorce.

Because of the weirdness of his family he didn't have his license yet, and so he was embarrassed in front of Janine Igwash.

“I don't have mine, either,” she said. “But we have to go early because of my parents. Why don't you come by at a quarter after seven?”

Stan nodded. Why couldn't he speak around her? He tried to smile but it felt as if his face was cracking. He was holding his jaw in the wooden way of everyone in his family.

All the others were gone from biology now. Stan needed to go somewhere else, too. Where? He hadn't the slightest idea.

Why didn't he have his license?

“You know where my house is?” Janine Igwash said.

Stan nodded. Then she was gone and he was standing on his own with the whole world swirling around him. What day was it? Nothing was in his head, so he had to look it up. This was Day Five and he had just finished biology — he was doing the hell out of biology — and so the next period was . . . 

A note fell out of his grasp.

Why was he grasping a note?

The ringers rang. The hallway was empty. He was alone with his empty head, reading a note that said in Jason Biggs' stupid handwriting:
tilted=GWOG=goes with other girls=Janine Igwash=everybody else knows, ok?

Tilted.
Janine
Igwash liked girls. Nothing wrong with that. Stan liked girls, too. He liked
Janine. Girls with soft secret flesh, half-hidden tattoos. Visions of them
roaming around his head.

Tilted.

She wanted him to go to the dance with her. As a
front. An untilted front for her parents. That's as much as he could make
out.

Tilted tilted tilted
.
All the way home.

Where he met Gary lying in the dirt of the
driveway scratching something on the underside of his silver Audi with his
fingernail. His beige jacket had fallen open, as had his light blue shirt — it
looked like Mr. Stillwater's shirt. Buttons were open where his pink belly
peeked out like mushroom flesh starved for the sun.
Shroomis gigantis
.

In private his mother pressed herself against
this man's skin.

Gary twisted on his back, rubbed his elbow into
the dusty asphalt.

“Hey, Gary.” Stan stepped around his mother's
boyfriend.

“I caught something on that speed bump near the
auto wash,” Gary said.

The car was gleaming even more than usual.
Another stick shift. Stan wouldn't be able to drive it very well, either.

“I think my strut got bent,” Gary said.

“Tilted?” Stan kneeled down but he couldn't see
anything.

“It might affect the alignment,” Gary said. He
brushed himself off and for a moment the two were uncomfortably close.

Did Stan's mother really like that
aftershave?

“How's school going?” Gary asked.

“Just great,” Stan said.

—

Stan was helping Lily with her homework
before dinner. She was adding columns of numbers:

28

+17

3051

“I don't know how you're getting that,” Stan
said.

“I'm just following,” Lily said.

“Following what?”

“Two plus one is three,” Lily began. “Carry the
zero —”

“Wait, wait, wait! First of all, you start on the
right, not the left. Eight plus seven is what?”

“That's not what Ms. Hennigan said!”

“You probably weren't listening. The column on
the right is the ones column.”

“Eight plus seven isn't
ones
at all!” Lily said.

Gary and his mother were downstairs in the
kitchen getting dinner together. Stan heard Gary say, “I've never seen anybody
slice tomatoes that way.” Stan's mother said, “What way?” and Gary said, “Like
you'd rather be squashing grapes.”

It was a Gary joke. Stan didn't hear his mother
laughing.

“On the right is the ones column, and on the left
is the tens column. What's eight plus seven?” Stan asked.

“Fifteen! But then you carry the one to the other
side of the five.” She traced over the 51 she'd written on the page.

Stan took the pencil from her. “Don't make stuff
up. You carry the one up to the tens column, up here.” He made a mark by the
two. He was trying to stay calm.

“Ms. Hennigan has a different way. Just leave me
alone!” She grabbed back the pencil and started an elaborate doodle on the edge
of her page.

“You're going to burn the garlic!” Gary said down
in the kitchen.

“No, I'm not,” Stan's mother snapped. Something
smelled like it was burning.

“You are, you are!” A pan clanged and hissed.

“I wonder how old he is now?” Lily murmured,
almost to herself.

“Who?”

“Feldon!”

Stan's palm hit the desk. Lily jumped in her
seat.

“Don't
mention his
name!
”

“Feldon Feldon Feldon Feldon!” Lily said. “The
baby!
”

Quiet down below. Not even cupboards banging.
Stan remembered when his mother and father fought. The silence was the worst.
His father had a volcanic temper.

“Feldon is five years old by now,” Stan said.
“He's not a baby. Don't even think about him, or Dad, or anybody. All right?”
Stan took his sister's head in his hands and turned it back to the figures in
the notebook. “You start on the right, carry the one up here to the tens column,
add one plus two plus one. What's it come out to?”

As soon as he let her go, Lily's doodle turned
into a swirly
F
on the side of her paper. Her elbow
nudged the textbook and a folded letter stuck out.

“What's this?” Stan said. He grabbed the paper
and held it high so Lily could not reach it.

Dear
parents/guardian
. It was from the school.
It has
recently come to our attention that your son's/daughter's academic standing
has slipped below the acceptable school board
standard . . . 

“What have you done now?” Stan asked.

“Nothing,” Lily said.

Stan scanned the rest of the letter. The
principal was asking for a meeting.

“Is this about marks or something else?”

Lily laid her face on the open book now, clasped
her hands over her head as if expecting bombs.

Still not another sound from the kitchen. Stan
got up and listened by the bedroom door.

Silence was the very worst. He remembered his
father with his fists doubled . . . 

“
Mmm
,” his mother
sighed.

Great. Stan clomped down the stairs with the
letter in his hand.

The air was thick with the smell of something
burnt. Garlic? A stove element glowed red with nothing on it. Smoke curled up
from the blackened pan that was resting in the sink.

His mother and Gary stood guilty, clenched in the
middle of the kitchen, his upper lip and part of his chin smudged with her
lipstick.

“Did you see this?” Stan handed the letter to his
mother, whose face blanched. From upstairs he could just hear a tiny muffled
voice, Lily singing, “
And little baby Feldon was his
name.
”

“Shit for crackers,” his mother said.

—

At dinner Stan pushed creamy linguine,
only some of the garlic blackened, around with his fork. Gary wiped his plate
with the white Italian bread Stan's mother never bought unless Gary was coming.
Lily slurped the noodles until creamy sauce caked the wispy edges of her
dangling hair.

“Well, it's not the end of the world,” Stan's
mother said. “We've met with the principal before.”

“It's a different one,” Lily said. “It's a
she
.”

“Stanley will come with me,” his mother said. She
didn't have to say,
Stanley keeps me from weeping on
principals' desks
. She didn't have to say,
Stanley makes the family appear reasonable
.

Stan's mother lunged across the table and wiped
Lily with her napkin. Lily squirmed — Stan knew she would — and got even more of
her hair in the sauce. Water splashed from two or three glasses but Gary managed
to catch the wine bottle before it tipped.

“I just want to keep your hair out of dinner,”
Stan's mother said. She smiled at Gary — a frantic sort of near-mad gesture —
and Gary reached across and touched her hand. That was all. Somehow because Gary
touched Stan's mother's hand, Lily stayed still long enough to be wiped.

“You should wear your barrettes,” Stan's mother
said to Lily.

“Rachel Edmundson has them,” Lily said.

Stan's mother didn't take the bait.

“Then just tie your hair back.” She slid her
glass over a few inches and Gary topped it up.

Stan had a memory of his father pouring wine, and
then he and Stan's mother got up and danced slowly in the middle of the living
room still holding their long-stemmed glasses. His mother's face fit perfectly
into his father's shoulder.

They were happy sometimes. It wasn't all scream
and sulk.

“She's a girl principal,” Lily said.

“That doesn't mean you can just go along making
up answers to all your assignment questions,” Stan said, unable to hold himself
back. “At some point you have to deal with reality.” Stan looked to his mother
for support, but she seemed to be at the end of her energy for coping with
Lily.

“Sometimes reality is overestimated,” she sighed.
She could go that way, become limp and unparental in the flick of a moment.

Stan studied his plate and decided to stay quiet.
They ate in unbearable silence until finally Gary made a point of asking Stan
what was happening at school. So Stan told him, in as few words as possible,
about the cancellation of JV.

“So you're a basketball player,” Gary said.

Stan's mother chimed in. “Stanley used to play
hockey but then suddenly that was all over. Now it's basketball.”

She said it as if she'd really forgotten why he
gave up hockey.

“I used to play basketball,” Gary said
improbably. “I did, I did! We should play horse sometime. I've got a wicked jump
shot.” Gary stroked the air with his meaty hand. His belly rubbed against the
table, and Stan grabbed two of the water glasses before they could spill
again.

“You two should play!” Stan's mother said. She
pressed Stan with her eyes, the way that she did now a hundred times a day over
everything from wiping up the kitchen to taking out the garbage to helping Lily
wrestle with the world.

Stan and his father used to play hockey. After
school in the winters, out on the frozen rink in the park in the next
neighborhood over.

Stan had not played hockey, had not skated, in
five years.

But now Stan allowed that he would play Gary at
horse any time. Gary said that he would like that, and Stan's mother's eyes said
that she would like that, too.

Then Lily said, “Feldon is coming next week!”

Silence. Lily's eyes gleamed the way they did
when she'd just scored big at crazy eights.

“Lily,” Stan's mother said. Her eyebrows
flattened. “Lily.”

“It's true! Daddy told me!”

His mother twirled her fork, wound nothing on her
plate.

“He called me and he told me!”

“Feldon is not coming. Your father is not
coming,” his mother said icily.

“He talked just to me and he said how would you
like to meet your younger brother, sweetie? And I said he could stay in my room
and Daddy said that would be fine!”

Silence, like after the ship has sunk and water
is rushing in and you are going down and down to the bottom.

Gary got up suddenly and started stacking plates.
Stan's mother hated anyone stacking plates at the table. Stan got up then too
and carried away a serving dish. Soon Gary had the water running in the kitchen
sink so it was hard to hear. But not impossible.

“Lily, darling,” his mother said. “I want you to
listen carefully. I know people in your head tell you things. That's fine. It
happens to all of us.” Stan went back into the dining room to pick up glasses.
His mother had taken Lily onto her lap, was holding her gently.

“But he calls me!” Lily said.

She stroked Lily's hair. “I'm here, or your
brother's here. We would know if your father —”

“But he gave me my own phone!”

Lily was crying, the way she always cried about
her most ridiculous tales.

“I've been too indulgent with you, and I'm sorry
for that. I'm sorry, Lily. You can't keep —”

“He came to my school! He —”

“Stan doesn't have a cellphone. You don't have a
cellphone. We can't afford it, and your father certainly can't afford —”

“He gave me one! My own, he did! He told me not
to tell you!”

Stan's mother's face was washed-out white. “If he
gave you one you go upstairs right now and get it. All right?”

Lily gulped, then climbed down and clomped off.
Her footsteps resounded up the stairs. Two doors slammed — her bedroom, then her
closet.

Gary stood in the doorway between the kitchen and
the dining room. He had tied on a red and white apron that read,
I lost my
~
in Sam's Deli
Disco!

“Maybe he did give her a phone,” he said.

A gaze like smoke from Stan's mother.

“She's going to be up there fiddling in her
closet for the next three hours. And when I ask her, ‘Lily, honey, where's the
phone your father gave you?' she's going to tell me something about a rhinoceros
in the park.”

Gary scratched the Deli Disco part of his belly.

Welcome to the nut house, Stan thought. It's not
too late to save yourself.

But Gary didn't seem to be going anywhere.

“I'm not sure where the noodle strainer goes,” he
said finally, before heading back into the kitchen.