Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (11 page)

Thirteen

I recall almost nothing of my senior year. Perhaps I recall some things, but only in pieces. I remember Emily telling me she was applying to Yale and other elite institutions out of my academic and financial reach. I remember considering myself an environmental hero because I spent three weekends with my physics teacher in the nocturnal, catch-and-release pursuit of crawfish frogs. I recall a float trip on the upper Iowa, but not much beyond the fact that it rained one night and we all crowded into a domed tent where Ashley kept whining about the hole in her sleeping pad and Hads demanded his money back for Tino’s cousin’s bunk weed and Smitty botched the ending of a long-drawn-out ghost story and when we finally went to sleep the top of Emily’s head was nearly touching the top of mine and her hair smelled like mixed fruit. I remember a reported sighting of Nicholas Parsons that amounted to naught. I remember Zach showing up in our front hallway as forlorn as a forced retiree, leaning against the coat closet while my dad waited at the edge of the kitchen and my mom paused halfway down the steps, admitting that he’d been kicked off the team for “drunkenness and other related infractions.” I remember Emily playing the lead in the school’s rendition of
Our Town
, a drama involving a marriage between characters named George and Emily. I remember the corporal vibrations of hunger and sexual aggravation rattling me in my sleep. I remember Tino bragging of his senior-year stamina after banging his girlfriend on the stairways and in the basements of half the houses still under construction out in Clive. I remember a stuttering twitch in my left eyelid that followed an unfulfilled evening with Emily Schell. I remember a sharp reduction in my powers of impersonation and concentration, the frightening realism of my dreams. I remember the torturous smell of steak smoke drifting through the back door and up the stairs and into my bedroom, which makes me feel I remember more than I thought.

One night I stole Zach’s car and arrived unannounced at the Schell house on one of those pre-winter nights when it was only seven o’clock but dark and it seemed like ten.
²
By this time I’d made some headway with Mr. Schell, who, when we were able to avoid the topics of Yale or his T-shirt business, proved himself a pretty decent guy. He never treated me like a potential date rapist and always made a point of asking about my parents in a warm way that didn’t strike me as superficial. But Mrs. Schell remained vigilant, even if she’d resorted to such petty insults as refusing to aim her glare at anything below my hairline. On the night in question she answered the door in a velour sweat suit that struck me as the only sweat suit in the world fancy enough to wear to a cocktail party at the Marriott’s revolving restaurant overlooking the river.

“She’s studying, George. She doesn’t have time to fool around this semester.”

“It’s mostly a business meeting,” I said. “Emily and I have a pop quiz tomorrow in economics. Can you just give us a few minutes?”

“How can it be a pop quiz if you know it’s tomorrow?”

“Mr. Dougal calls them pop quizzes, but he works on a kind of unconscious system that I’ve basically figured out. Third week Thursdays are almost a sure thing.”

“Emily’s really got to focus,” she said, like I’d just been yammering on about my disappointment that Guns N’ Roses had never made it to Des Moines. She checked her watch against the clock in the hallway, hinting that I was severely disrupting her night’s entertainment. “This year’s grades are even more important than last year’s. A lot of kids don’t realize that. Some of the colleges will ask for your grades right up to the end.”

“Mornings are the best time to study,” I said, as energetic as an excitable pony. “I read all about it. It’s proven.”

“Uh-huh. Where are
you
applying?” she asked, crossing her arms and treating herself to a long, histrionic blink.

“Iowa and Northern Iowa.”

“Uh-huh,” she repeated, relishing the thought of my humdrum ambitions.

“Can I just talk to her for a quick minute?”

Mrs. Schell responded by staring like she’d asked
me
a question and not the other way around. Then she told me to wait while she checked if Emily had a moment to spare. I sat down on the porch steps, watching a pile of leaves roll across the neighbor’s lawn and into the street. A minute later Katie stepped outside in a leather jacket with woolen lapels. It was obviously her dad’s jacket, probably the manliest thing he ever owned.

“What’re you eating these days?” she asked, making a face at the sight of my waistline. She took her time lowering herself down.

“A lot of salads. I can eat real food on Saturday.”

“Who do you wrestle next?”

“Valley.”

“Snobs.”

“They had a ringworm outbreak.”

“Gross,” she said, setting one crutch over her knees. “Every time I hear that word, I picture worms crawling under my skin.”

“You coming?”

“I’ll be there, but you’d better win this time.”

“The last match you watched was against the guy who won the Cedar Falls tournament. His name is Shane Weiss and he’s pretty tough.”

“Shane
Wuss
. You could’ve beaten him. He just muscled you. Everyone could see that.”

“Maybe. He kind of psyched me out, too. Before the match, he barked at me. He shook my hand and barked, real soft.”

“What a creep.”

“Yeah, but it worked,” I said. Katie nodded along, but she didn’t like it. “I’ll wrestle him again in Ames.”

“You’ll beat him. If you weren’t cutting so much weight, you’d be state champ for sure.”

“A winning record would be a good start.”

Katie leaned back to take in the view of the swaying branches, acting like she didn’t hear me. “Yeah, you could be state champ.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s your brother doing?”

“He’s designing a new bachelor pad in my parents’ basement. He’s working up at Gordo’s again.”

“Ouch,” she said. “Tough break for such a cute guy. I can’t figure out why he never settled down. He could get any girl he wanted.”

“You looking to be set up?”

“Maybe. Got any shower photos?”

“I don’t even have a camera.” Emily came out bundled up in her biggest woolen sweater. She plopped down, hugging herself and rubbing her temples. “Let’s go for a drive,” I said.

She laughed a series of short huffing hoots. (Emily’s laughter had become highly communicative, and was now her most developed theatrical tool. “Wrong button!” it said. “But don’t worry, because you’ve raised the exact issue I was hoping to discuss.”) “Three nights in a row!” she complained. “All I want to do is rent a movie, and each night after dinner she gives me this big sad face and says,
Why don’t you just stay home tonight? I don’t like you driving at night.
Since when has anyone had a problem with driving at night?”

“Lots of deer accidents,” I said.

“It’s tragic,” Katie said, “though they
are
overpopulated.”

“She’s getting worse.”

“Sí,”
I said. “As long as you’re not talking about me.”

Katie leaned forward to face her sister. “I don’t get why she’s making you study so much. I’m
obviously
the brain in the family and you’re
obviously
the little actor. You need to concentrate less on the books and more on your
bod
.”

“I swear the next time I leave the house I’m driving all the way to the real Broadway to see
Kiss of the Spider Woman
. I don’t want to wait until I’m twenty-five, after all the best actors have won awards and moved on. Who’s up for a drive to New York?”

“It’s my senior year,” I said. “No time for fooling around.”

Katie slapped her thigh and clapped, more than displaying her appreciation. “Speaking of
fooling around
,” she finally said, tugging at her leather jacket lapels, “do you think Dad had a lot of girlfriends back in the day? He used to be a lightweight boxer, you know.”

“It’s not exactly clear if he ever won a fight,” Emily said.

“I’m going to dig around Grandma’s attic and see. I bet I’ll find a trophy or two.”

I nodded optimistically, despite having a hard time picturing Mr. Schell hitting anything other than a telephone pole while backing up in his Beemer. Emily started pacing between the front porch and the driveway, stretching stiff-legged from one stepping-stone to the next.

“Did Katie tell you she’s got an admirer?”

“Shut up. I do not.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s someone from your Spanish club.”

“He’s not an admirer. He’s just some kid who only talks to me when my symptoms are out of whack. He’s creepy.”

“He just wants to help,” Emily said. “That’s his in.”

“It’s still creepy. Even if he’s the only guy in the school who actually listens when someone else is talking.”

“What’s his name?” I asked, surprised by my own anxiousness.

Katie slumped and threw her hands at the sky. “It’s Thomas Staniszewski. He’s nobody. Just some weirdo with a perm and a name no one can pronounce.”

“A
red
perm,” Emily said, hopping toward us and raising her eyebrows. “He’s got red hair.”

“No he doesn’t,” Katie shot back. She grabbed her crutch and pushed herself up. “God. My shows are coming on. See you later, George.”

“See you at the match.”

“You seemed to pronounce his name just fine,” Emily said, smirking and hopping to the next stone. Katie paused at the door and leaned back around. “You know, she can be really immature sometimes. It’s kind of sad, especially knowing that she’s my
older
sister and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You can buzz off,” Emily said, “that is, if you have any interest in me taking you for a driving lesson when Mom and Dad head out to dinner tomorrow night.”

“You coming, George?”

“I’ll be too hungry to go driving while I’m thinking about what your parents are ordering for dinner.”

“Poor George,” she said, shaking her head as she stepped inside. Emily hopped over and sat down again. It would be another month or so before the first snowfall, but it was a dry breezy night, already swirling with the crisp cologne of winter.

“Any word on
Bridges of Madison County
?”

“Not yet. It probably won’t get released until the summer. Anyway, they cut out a lot more footage than they use. The camera only faced my direction a couple of times.”

“Everything okay?” I asked, watching her heel at the cement, realizing she was more upset than I thought.

“I just wish things were different. My mom and I used to have a good time together. Let’s face it, Katie got her sense of humor from someone, and it wasn’t my dad. The only time he’s funny is when he thinks he’s being serious. But every time I feel like opening up to her, she says something rude that makes me want to punch her in the nose. And she always strikes when I’m in a good mood.”

“Maybe she doesn’t notice what she’s doing? I mean, maybe if you two had more conversations about normal things, it wouldn’t come off so badly when she gave you advice.”

Emily was already shaking her head and kicking at the cement again. “She makes it impossible. The other day I was complaining about this guy in the play who didn’t know anything about Shakespeare. I’m talking like, this guy probably thought
Macbeth
was the name of a new breakfast sandwich. We pay all this money to study with this bigwig writer, and my partner can’t even remember his lines. So I start complaining, and then my mom turns beet red and calls me a snob. I mean, I know my dad makes a lot of money, but am I really spoiled? Do I act like a rich little snob?”

“You’re not a snob. Jan Lewis is a snob. Even Ashley’s a bit of a snob. Your mom is a total snob, and probably a
prude
, too.”

I laughed a queer little laugh, like I was just giving her mom a hard time in order to make her feel better. A second later, when Emily searched my eyes, I swore she found every petty thought in my head. I might as well have punched her in the stomach.

“So am I, huh? A
prude
.”

“You’re Emily Schell,” I said, like that was the best achievement anyone our age could expect, like she was perfect.

“Emily Schell is a tease.”

“I don’t care about that. My problem is that you’re my best friend, and you spend more time with me than anyone else, and I’m still jealous. I don’t even know
who
I’m jealous of. But you’re the only actor I’ve ever known and the only actor I ever want to know.”

“All right,” she said, ending my little ode with a big wave to her neighbor who was pulling up into the driveway next door. The woman stepped out of the car, shining us a smile as she grabbed her briefcase from the backseat. For some reason this made Emily laugh (“Distract me,” the laugh said). My stomach growled like the long woeful chirp of a paralyzed cat.

“You’ve got to eat, George. This one-forty business is ridiculous. You should be wrestling at one-fifty-two, at the least.”

“If I wrestle at one-fifty-two I’ll be the only senior on the junior varsity squad. Colin Franzen wrestles at one-fifty-two, and I’ve never come close to beating him.”

“You could try. You don’t know until you gain some weight and give it another shot.”

I knew in that moment that Emily would rather have talked about anything other than the details of our sexless relationship that no one, including ourselves, knew how to interpret. We talked about her workshop for a while and then I drove home, recognizing that while our classmates were fretting over SAT scores and potential careers, my only real ambition in life was to love Emily in the same fierce and noble way I’d loved her from the beginning. I’d nearly told her how I felt.

Fourteen

While I’d never considered myself a competitor in any radical sense of the word, by midwinter of my senior year something changed, and I can’t help but think the new intenseness I discovered in myself came as a direct retaliation against my established mode of circuitous and biddable wooing. At this point of the season we were all scrapping dogs wrestling on death metal and invented egos, tapping into any and all sources of energy that might stave off our hunger, distract our better instincts, and prove our warrior-like worth. I was cutting more weight than anyone and any lines of weight-loss methodology I’d previously vowed not to cross were summarily erased. I practiced in a rubber suit, chomped laxatives, binged and purged. The severe effects of such a regimen included mood swings, headaches, dizzy spells, and lapses of short-term memory that might’ve bested Katie at her recidivist worst.