Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (10 page)

“Why would I tell her I went to a college fair?” she asked. “I already know what colleges I’m applying to. What are you getting at?”

“I just don’t see Tino or Hads showing up, and Smitty’s said he’d be busy running the music. So it’s basically just me and you tonight.”

“So why would I need an
alibi
?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea. Do you need an alibi when you hang out with Hads or Tino? What about your free golf lessons with Jordan Pratt, or your
meditation for actors
with that guy from Drake?”

“You mean Tony, my teacher?”

“How would you like it if every time we went to a movie, I told my parents I was studying for the national French exam with Christina Walters?”

“You really want to know the answer to that?” she said, hardly braking as she turned into the Skate South parking lot. We pounced over a speed bump, drawing a shout of censure from the male driver of a station wagon packed with a group of skating youngsters. “You don’t understand anything, do you!”

Emily and I had never argued about anything that really mattered, and she’d certainly never yelled at me. But I found the inherent drama erotic enough that after we parked I decided to aggravate her even more. “If your mom knows as much as you say she does about all that’s happening around town, then she should know that I’m not your boyfriend. We’ve never kissed or even come close to kissing, and this crap about high school couples lacking the social skills to form new friendships in college, well, that’s nothing but Maureen Schell horseshit!”

“That’s not even the point. The point is that she has to know everything. But you’re
my
business and I’m not going to ruin it by sharing
you
with
her
!”

“Fine!” I shouted back, perfectly satisfied with her response, but feeling pressed to maintain my anger. Emily slammed the car door and stormed her way into the roller rink. After sulking for a few minutes, I bought a ticket and changed into my Rollerblades. I found Smitty in the snack bar, where we had a few laughs at a guy who’d shown up in flower-power bell-bottoms and couldn’t skate. When it was his turn to play DJ, I skated to the rink and started looking for Emily. For the next fifteen minutes I searched the arcade, the locker area, the snack bar, every corner of the building. Emily was nowhere to be found. Eventually I ended up checking the raffle registration that everyone signed after purchasing their entrance ticket. Emily’s name wasn’t on the list. My only explanation for this was that she’d hidden herself in the lobby restrooms, then slipped out after I’d passed inside. I changed into my shoes and walked out to the parking lot, just to be sure, but already knowing her car wouldn’t be there.

Eleven

In the following weeks of calculated noncommunication—I knew Emily’s potential for hardheaded detachment and did my best to match it—I consoled myself with the notion that no couple has ever learned the skills of forgiveness and reconciliation without first experiencing the sting of an insult by the person to whom they’ve given the power of their greatest trust. Whether Emily and I ever benefited from our first fight is hard to say, but of course our troubles eventually blew over, as it turns out during the course of the Iowa State Fair, where we spent the better part of ten days bouncing from game booths to bumper car courses, mini track races, grandstand musical performances, and all the variations of cattle competition ever invented. It was hard to hold a grudge while stuffing ourselves with deep-fried Twinkies, turkey drumsticks, and every meal-on-a-stick the Iowegian mind could fathom, especially with Katie stealing the spotlight by berating every fairgoer who stepped in the way of her crutches. In the buildup to the greased-pig and hog-calling competitions, she even demanded we check out a wheelchair from the first-aid tent in order to claim prime seats next to the ring.

“It all started with Judas Iscariot,” she announced, choosing a bout of downtime in the shade of the technology tent to slyly broach the dilemma behind the blowup just described. “He was a redhead. It’s proven. That’s why the older generations are so reluctant to accept them. There was a time when people were so ashamed of redheads they’d keep them locked up in the attic, tell their neighbors they only had two kids when they really had two kids and a redhead.”

Emily twirled her ice cream cone, licking it contemplatively and looking pretty upset about the whole nasty phenomenon. A group of inventors lined up onstage, one by one announcing their discoveries and groundbreaking gadgets to the sparsely peopled stands.

“Yeah, redheaded men really don’t make the grade in a lot of circles. Probably the reason why there’s never been a redhead on the Hollywood A-list. Not a guy, at least.”

“John Wayne was a redhead,” I said. “Hard to tell with all those black-and-white films and cowboy hats, but it’s true.”

“John Wayne’s real name was
Marion
,” Emily joked.

Katie balled up in laughter. A feisty woman with oversized glasses pointed at the slide-show screen, listing the technical components of her biological food spoilage indicator. We watched a few more presentations, during which time I decided it best just to forget what Lauren had told me about Marcus Panozzo. There was no telling if the rumor was even true, or if there was any logic at all behind Mrs. Schell’s negative opinion of me. Soon enough Katie was bored again and making her wobbling descent down the metallic steps, drawing the unabashed distraction and shameful stares of the inventors. Back on the midway Emily joined the serpentine line for the Bungee Rocket. In the meantime Katie requested I push her to the nearby Butter Cow, which she explained was sculpted every year by a lady named Elesia Ellington, an artist from Riceville who worked her way up from papier-mâché and epoxy clay to dairy butter. (Her masterwork was a butter interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
.) I leaned down over Katie’s shoulder so she didn’t have to yell. She asked about Zach’s living arrangements in Iowa City, predicting that if he could keep himself in line, he’d provide the exact spark the Hawkeyes defense so desperately needed. I knew we’d end up discussing my troubles with Emily without discussing them directly.

“Talk about
macho
,” Katie said, chuckling at two shirtless body-builders strutting down the midway. “What kind of girls actually end up with these guys?”

“No idea. Whenever I see guys like that, they’re always walking around with
other guys
.”

“Reminds me of my uncles in Bolivar. Not that they’re big studs or anything, but my oldest uncle, he
walks
as big as a brick shit house. Speaking of which, did Emily ever tell you that when my mom used to visit her grandpa, and he had to take a crap in the middle of the night, he’d send her to the outhouse to plop her buns down to
warm the seat
!”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Hey, what’s the hurry? I’m here to soak in the atmosphere.”

“And people tell me I’m from the sticks.”

“You mean to say you didn’t have an outhouse in
Davenport
?”

“Oh yeah, Zach used to warm it for me all the time.”

“I have a feeling you’d be warming it for him,” she said, chuckling and covering her mouth. “Would you slow down!”

A minute later she was ordering me to speed up toward a shaded set of railroad ties facing the Bungee Rocket, where Emily was only halfway to the front of the line. The bungee jumpers were being catapulted from two cords attached to tall metal beams, slinging at least sixty feet up. When they launched, their faces went gaunt and ghoulish. “Tell me more about Bolivar,” I said, still considering Mrs. Schell’s unlikely path to the Wakonda Country Club elite.

Katie pushed herself onto the railroad ties. I sat down next to her as she rested her feet on the side of the wheelchair. “My grandpa was the big-time judge in town,” she said. “He was always talking about the importance of education . . .
for men
. The stupid thing is that everybody loved him, even though he covered the tuition for my uncles and didn’t pay a penny for my mom. Her younger brother, my uncle Steve, he went to college before she did, and he probably never read a book in his life. My mom was the salu-da-dicatorian!”

“Salutatorian?”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” she said. “So you know what my mom did then?”

“Picked up her
gee-tar
and went
a-wanderin’
?”

Katie pointed a strict finger at my face. “She got a job at the local café while she applied for scholarships to every college in the state. It took two years to get the hell out of Bolivar. And the only tip she got at that crappy café she worked at was,
Don’t get too big for your britches
.”

Katie slapped the railroad tie. She stared me in the eyes and scrunched her forehead and seethed. Despite myself, I was starting to like Mrs. Schell. “You’re passionate women,” I finally said, in a voice much more emotional than I’d intended. But I wasn’t joking and Katie knew it. She nodded to the bungee platform, where Emily was now taking her turn. Her spotter was a middle-aged guy, bald and musta chioed. He led her to the catapulting position and attached the cord to her harnessed vest.

“Do you mind me saying something, George?”

“What’s that?”

“You show your affection too easy.”

“I know.”

“But it puts you in a bad position.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, just as Emily shot into the sky, her body floating in a zero-gravity standstill before making its flailing earthbound descent. They shot her up three times, the third of which she looked like she could’ve easily done without. After thinking it over, I decided to take Katie’s criticism for what it was worth, a simple piece of advice on how to achieve a better balance of respect with her sister. (This turned out to be the last we ever spoke of such matters behind her sister’s back.) By the time Emily came stumbling our way and pressed a hand to my knee as she hopped onto the railroad ties, whatever tension that remained between us was washed away.

Near the end of the afternoon we returned Katie’s wheelchair and ambled happily to the parking lot, all three of us smirking to ourselves, knowing we’d be back the next day, rain or shine, for an afternoon fiddle fest and hoedown. At one point I threw my arms over the Schell girls’ shoulders, promising them a fanciful summer of champagne dinners, country club banquets, and Caribbean cruises. I pulled them close and felt bigger than ever, proudly engaged in a three-way love affair, the biggest man at the Iowa State Fair.

But that wasn’t the official end of our outing. Before we left, Katie directed us to the eastern end of the lot and the statue of historian James Wilson, where she recited his stone-etched quotation in such an instructional way as to confuse the exiting fairgoers into thinking she was performing a daily ceremonial duty. Her voice invoked singers of national anthems, fallen soldiers, the great unseen statesmen of Old Time Radio. Her solemn tribute concluded with the following proclamation:

“No one meets and mingles with twenty thousand Iowa men, women, and children on the fairgrounds—the only place they can be brought together—without growth of sympathy. This is the most valuable effect of the state fair. The fraternizing, humanizing consequences of
BRINGING OUR PEOPLE TOGETHER!
”

Twelve

It need not be explained that rising humidity can be cruel to a young man nearing the summit of his physical strength, in love for the first time and desperate for that love to coalesce into a perfectly brazen and impromptu carnal awakening. In Iowa’s golden tassel summer Emily was a squinting cowgirl, deliciously cherry in the shoulders and the very tips of her nose and ears. From time to time she’d search me with her big brown eyes and such guileless affection that I felt on the verge of crumpling to my knees and giving up every aspiration I’d ever known. She’d just stare, sometimes smiling and sometimes not, but in a way that made me feel she could see our entire futures. Then she’d usually say something like, “You know, if I wasn’t mooching all your time, you’d probably have a couple of girlfriends by now” or “You wouldn’t run off to some other girl, would you, George? Even Christina Walters?” We still hadn’t kissed or even held hands, but after logging hundreds of circuitous country road miles and exchanging enough bright-eyed glances on dead-end nights beneath the Thirty-fifth Street Bridge, I understood that Emily needed me, even if it wasn’t in the same urgent and blistering way that I needed her. It was a romantic summer if only for the fact that we fell asleep so many times on the beach at Saylorville Lake that we thought nothing of waking to a sky hailing with every tinge of paint on the palette. In greedier moments I overstepped my boundaries. I slipped my arm around her waist in the mall, acting like her long-established lover in an attempt to trick her into making out with me as a mere matter of course. I picked things out of her hair that weren’t there, just to get close, letting my lips hover in front of her face, hoping something might happen. Once I made an obvious assault on her right breast in the complete darkness of a Magic House exhibit where the challenge was to drop to all fours and feel your way through a maze of blind tunnels. It was the greatest goblet of garmented flesh I’d ever known, so warm and vivacious that my palm clung to what it sensed was an essential absorbent force. “
That’s
not the way,” she’d said, half sniggering and squirming as she delivered my hand back where it belonged.

While these misplays no doubt upset the balance Katie had warned me about, the scale tipped in the other direction at the last moment when the August sun had nearly winked its last and Emily purported her own desire with a series of conciliatory but inarguably amorous kisses on the neck. It happened at a freestyle tournament at Valley High, after I’d been instantly pinned by a five-point throw, my body generating such a resounding smack against the mat that the audiences of all the other matches looked over to mine, reacting with a guttural symphony of “Oooooooh!” and “Ouuuch!” if not merely laughing like cut-rate comedians at my wheezing, breathless embarrassment. While these kisses only piqued my desire and thus sharpened my suffering, in the moment of feeling her lips on my skin I moved from experiencing one of the most emasculating public humiliations to sensing that I’d just struck a debilitating blow to those disgraceful forces of nature that for one reason or another place love in the hearts of those who will never know it requited.