Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (2 page)

The first thing I noticed in the new neighborhood was the lineup of wimpy cedars with bobby socks and braces to keep them growing healthy and right. Our house sat on high ground halfway up the block, a red ribbon on the mailbox gaily proclaiming it SOLD BY GUNTHER REALTY! Most of the moving team was sprawled out and smoking on the lawn, looking even more hungover now that the time had come to hump our furniture uphill. My parents lined up at the sidewalk to take a full breath of their two-story home, likely comforting themselves with thoughts of the next flood, the shingled roof-islands of every house on the block but ours. Zach reminded them of the track star from Bettendorf who’d severely disabled himself while pushing a lawn mower up a schoolyard slope—a comment that only backfired. “They saved his legs,” my mom said, perking up. “There was even an article in
Reader’s Digest
. He’s back to hurdling again and he’s even faster than before. He broke a record at the Quad City Regionals.” My dad was already halfway up the driveway, scoping out every cigarette butt and Coke can tossed slovenly about his lawn. The movers staggered to their feet, knowing as well as we did that there was no point in pouting or putting up a fight.

I spent most of that first night in my new bedroom above the garage, arranging my furniture and unpacking my boxes, for the first time fully appreciating all those plain familiar faces in the hallways of St. Boniface High, the outlandish sermons of my philosophical wrestling coach who went a full six minutes against the Great Dan Gable, even our next-door neighbor Randy Baker, who’d been teasing me with the same worn-out redhead jokes since I was six years old. I ended up trashing half the knickknacks I’d collected over the years, including a monkey carved out of a coconut and several Pine Derby race cars I’d whittled during my time in the Cub Scouts. While I had been unwilling to part with these juvenile treasures the week before, that night I hardly noticed giving them up, even faced with a set of bare bookshelves. My best explanation for this was a sudden preoccupation with the notion that the FBI agent I’d spoken to was actually the perpetrator of the crime he’d alleged to investigate. I was also overcome by jealous imaginings about my best friend Kevin Ralston’s pornographic future with Eva Davis, the girl I’d had a crush on for five years and never even kissed. Around midnight I called Kevin as though he were still living just down the road. I could see him pacing a horseshoe path around his garage-sale water bed when he promised to steal his dad’s car for a joint Mardi Gras getaway. (In the coming weeks, additional calls to my wider group of friends suggested a theory that in the absence of extreme boredom or abandonment, nine times out of ten the egocentric adolescent mind will flippantly shun the continued building of the sorts of connective memory bridges that long-distance loyalties so critically demand.) The trip never happened, probably because Mardi Gras was still five months off, and Kevin’s dad was a firefighter and Eucharistic minister whom Kevin admired too much.

Two

St. Pius High School was only ten minutes down Seventy-third Street on a hodgepodge campus occupied largely by a series of sexless concrete structures with the low stances of elementary schools committed to cold war. Never before had I witnessed such institutional pride in pint-sized statues on man-made knolls, obviously part of an attempt to project a multilayered landscape of saintly scholarship. The sports complex was located half a mile down the road, a honeycombed monstrosity of hallways leading to small workout rooms crammed with fetishistic, wire-based weight machines. On one of its many surrounding playing fields, during the first day of training camp, Zach drilled a running back so hard and rendered him senseless for so long that the kid arrived at his locker the next morning to discover all his football equipment replaced by a single cross-country jersey hanging on a hook. By the time school began Zach had already been noted in a
Des Moines Register
football preview as the Central Iowa Metro League’s “defensive secret weapon,” which, combined with his claim to be an integral assistant to the FBI’s search for the strangler Nicholas Parsons (he built a mysterious sympathy for himself by bowing his head and wandering off anytime someone asked what he’d heard in the middle of the night at the Holiday Inn), was enough for a virtual petal parade of acceptance into the St. Pius inner sanctum. I, on the other hand, after two weeks of classes, hadn’t formed a single promising alliance. I even found myself victim to several note-passing offenses of the following nature:

“Your socks and sandals are sooooooo hot.”

“Please extinguish the fire in your crotch.”

“Maggie Whitcraft . . . third row, buckteeth . . . is looking for a lover/orthodontist.”

It didn’t help matters that somewhere in the move I lost my sense of humor and couldn’t remember anyone’s names. I also couldn’t overcome the sensation that my fellow classmates were all strangely dis proportional with oddly shaped craniums packed with perversions. I didn’t know any Germans, but Des Moines’s teenagers all seemed a little German to me. Even the homecoming play, a simple tale about a group of blind children lost in the forest, was written by someone named Eckhard von Wolf. Which brings us to the scene where this story should have begun: my entrance into a makeshift and acoustically ramshackle theater cramped with student nitwits pegging one another with pennies, the air glinting coppery for my initial sighting of the lion-haired heroine Emily Schell. After finding an open seat at the far side of the front row, I embarked on an immediate voyeuristic operation to pinpoint the exact location of her beauty. This effort concluded on the joint effect of her heart-shaped cheeks and the curve at the tip of her nose. Based on her athletic confidence and ease, I had no doubts about the impressive figure roaming beneath her amorphous black frock. She searched the proscenium (if there was no actress named Emily Schell, then there was no proscenium, either; it was a rectangular stage with pleated skirting and a knee-high guardrail), swatting imaginary mosquitoes and poking branches. She crumbled to her knees. “Boys!” she cried out. “Where are you, boys!”

Two waifs pawed their way from the peripheral darkness to the halo of light at center stage, cowering in their suspenders. The actress swung around and—her theatrical contacts rendering her as blind as her character—reached for the sound of their footsteps while accidentally leg-swiping a plastic tree. Despite the blunder she remained astoundingly in character, addressing the noise of the wobbling stand as though reacting to a roiling thunder deep in the heart of the forest. Laughter broke throughout the auditorium, beginning at the front row and rolling backward. I cackled urgently along, attempting to rein in the distraction so that I could quickly end it and we could return our collective focus to the simple movements of the blind actress whose bare legs were now shimmering long and white in the direct gaze of hot canned lights. She pulled her tawny hair taut over her forehead. When she squeezed herself for warmth, I put myself in that squeeze. I turned to a ferret-eyed classmate next to me, craving the actress’s name more than anything else, but too meek with loneliness to ask even that.

“What year is that girl?”

“Junior. Future class of nineteen hundred and ninety-five,” he answered, in a professorial whine, which I supposed was his way of suggesting that he’d only shown up for the extra credit, and that this theater crap had dragged on long enough. “What year are
you
?”

“Junior,” I said. “When does this thing end anyway?”

“Quarter to titty,” he replied, suddenly smitten by the performance and therefore upset by my interruption.

A recording of wailing winds and flashing thunder screeched through the auditorium. The actress’s fear was so real I was tempted to storm the stage, grasp her by the shoulders, and inform her that there was no place in this pubescent world for such honest and precise emotion. I swore I detected Zach’s voice among the band of idiots hooting and hollering a few rows back, but even they couldn’t break the performance. (While I can’t claim to have initially recognized how to interpret this play, after having seen it performed several times since in various theaters throughout the Midwest, I now judge it as either a dramatization of the fallacy of theocratic faith, or, conversely, the potential of atheistic hope. Either way, I considered the St. Pius production of
Into the Night
a brave and ambitious undertaking, especially in consideration of the venue.) In the final scene, as the heroine led the singing schoolboys to the safety of a convent, I experienced the dizzying notion that if I traced my personal history I’d find Emily Schell back in Davenport, crowding the memories of my childhood.

In less time than it took for the auditorium lights to warm up, most of the audience had already shoved their way out the rear exit. While the cast gathered at the front of the stage to receive the congratulations of their teachers and friends, I wandered the penny-and-gum-wrapper perimeter. My lackadaisical floor perusal soon drew the attention of a beady little priest and part-time administrator I’d met during my admissions interview (which was conducted as if St. Pius were a competitive institution that chose its students based on criteria above their ability to reduce the burden of its perennial financial crises). After pressing me to admit to whatever contraband I was obviously searching for, he asked my opinion of the performance, then skipped over my response in order to relate anecdotes of his own lovely acting days. He was midway through an animated description of an autistic prop master when I noticed Emily Schell emerging from backstage in jeans and a form-friendly T-shirt that claimed ELVIS
GIVES
. She shared a fast laugh with a few fellow actors but kept moving along, all the while rubbing her glazed eyes with the butt of her palms, appearing much more worldly-wise than her persona onstage. Whatever compliments she was offered over the next few minutes were received while she folded and stacked chairs alongside the stagehands, a few of whom shot me glances suggesting that if I enjoyed the performance enough to attempt mingling with the cast, I might at least lend a helping hand. The priest, obviously exempt from such labors, was soon pacing alongside the actress, offering her a long-winded criticism of the auditorium’s poor acoustics. She took his comments in stride, inserting a polite affirmation here and there, but hardly saying a thing. Despite having just watched her perform for two hours, I was already desperate to hear her speak again, to gather as many clues as I could about the girl behind the mask. To this end, I decided to encounter her at the chair racks near the storage room, where we’d inevitably end up stacking two chairs at once, and they’d bang together, at which point one of us would say, “Excuse me,” and the other would say, “No, really, excuse
me
,” and soon we would be conversing. But after more than a dozen ill-timed trips, I lost my patience and saddled up next to the priest—interrupting prattle about his favorite playwrights—and improvised.

“Who was your muse?” I blurted out, much louder than I intended.

“Are you asking him or me?” she asked, glancing over to the priest, giving little hint of an initial impression beyond confusion. I was certain she didn’t realize that I was a new student, which is to say a foreigner and a person she’d never laid eyes on until that very moment. But I was getting used to this sort of treatment and proceeded more or less undeterred.

“Muuuuse?”
the priest groaned, loud enough to share his doubt with the entire cast and crew. “A muse is a Greek goddess. A muse is a myth.”

“So if it’s not a myth, it can’t be a muse?”

“Of course not.”

“Did Homer have a muse when he wrote myths?”

“What could you possibly be talking about?”

“The theater,” I said, as though reaching a grand philosophical conclusion. “It really is a whole other world. A magical one.”

At that, I thanked him and made a beeline for the farthest row of unfolded chairs, realizing along the way that I hadn’t given the actress even the slightest glimpse of attention beyond my initial approach. For the next fifteen minutes I folded and stacked chairs at twice the speed of the stagehands, several of whom went missing and later resurfaced reeking of menthol. Then Emily left and I realized that I was basically the only person still working and I quit. But on my way out of the building I discovered her plopped down on an old church pew next to a willowy guy with long gesticulating fingers, likely waiting for her ride. (I guessed Zach had driven home without me, an action he’d likely excuse by the fact that I’d befriended the theater crowd, which signified it was time for me to fly on my own.) By then the lobby had mostly thinned out, though there were still patches of students huddled in circles, mostly arguing over where to waste the rest of the evening. Without breaking my stride, I looped around in the direction of the actress, picking up the odd scrap of paper or pen cap, unsure if it was even me cleaning up or some obsessive new personage developed instantly for the task of industrious loitering. I continued for the trash bin just past the pew. By the lull in their conversation I sensed that one of them was nearly on his or her way. I stalled at the water fountain across from them, drinking and waiting.

“Are you new or something?” the gesticulator asked. I took my time turning around and wiping the water from my mouth, feigning a pleasant aloofness when I finally nodded in affirmation. “We’ve got janitors here,” he said, chuckling to himself, clearly aiming to co-opt the actress. But she was squinting at the clock down the hallway, appearing less in the process of checking the time than decoding it. Soon enough the gesticulator dragged his way back into the auditorium. The actress turned to me, still squinting, rubbing her eyes, and waiting.

“Where did you transfer from?” she asked.

“St. Boniface. It’s in Davenport.”

“What’s Davenport like?”

“You don’t have to lock your doors,” I said, wishing I’d mentioned the nighttime riverboat tours, but feeling it was too late and I ought to balance the comment with something more critical. “Everyone says we need a flood wall. Apparently we’re the biggest city on the Mississippi without one.”