Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (3 page)

“The floods only get serious every fifty years. What’s the point of living on the Mississippi when you can’t even see it?”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, taking a seat next to her, just as casually as if we were both waiting for the bus downtown. “Actually, I’m really sick of people giving us so much trouble about it. I was just saying that because . . . well, you know.”

“To beat me to the punch?”

“I guess,” I said, shrugging, perhaps even blushing. “I’m George.”

“I’m Emily,” she said, pushing herself against the seatback and out of her slump. Her gaze wandered to the pink paper-thin scar over my right eyebrow. Her eyes were no longer white and blind but soft hazel palettes—eager, intelligent eyes with big volcano centers. “You don’t meet too many teenagers named George.”

“It was my grandpa’s name. He drank a lot of whiskey and crashed a lot of tractors. He died of liver failure a few years back.”

The actress nodded along, rubbing her eyes again and taking my queer confession in stride. I had the feeling that she sensed my estrangement in the most exact way, understanding in a few words that I was a generally confident teenager suddenly friendless and questioning the purpose of his existence. Perhaps she sensed these things because I wanted her to sense them. But then I realized that she was only rubbing her eyes because she was smirking and didn’t know what to say. She was still smirking to herself when her mother arrived, nearly as frantic as the schoolboys in the first act of
Into the Night
. Mrs. Schell apologized for getting caught up at the hospital, then back-tracked by explaining that she wasn’t
that
sorry because she really had no choice in the matter. While her dainty black purse and matching pumps lent the impression of a cutthroat businesswoman much more than a doctor or nurse, she clearly acted like a nurse, wasting no time pressing her thumbs to Emily’s cheeks to better check the whites of her eyes.

“Did you use the dropper?” she asked, her tone suggesting grave doubt.

“They’re fine,” Emily said, struggling to her feet in spite of her mother’s pressing thumbs.

“They’re not fine. They’re bloodred. I still don’t see why you can’t
act
blind like everyone else.”

“I’m not the only one. Woody wore the contacts, too.”

“Woody doesn’t even show up until the third act. Woody doesn’t even have a line.”

“This is George from Davenport.”

Mrs. Schell turned to me, forgoing the customary smile or handshake in exchange for a brazen visual survey that started at my scuffed boots and ended on the red curls bunched up over my ears. “Hello,” she finally said. “Hello,” I said back, then returned her visual survey, though with much greater tact. My first impression was that Mrs. Schell was untrustworthy, despite being matronly attractive, particularly in terms of her high cheekbones and a long swan neck. She was digging in her purse for a dropper when two dapper junior girls—I slightly recognized them from various B-track classes—turned the lobby corner and circled in, congratulating Emily and greeting her mother. I was almost out the door when Emily broke from them and caught up to me. She handed me the plastic container for her blinding contacts.

“If you feel like it, you can try them for yourself. I’ve got a couple of sets. Those ones have never been worn, so you don’t have to worry about conjunctivitis or whatever.”

“Your performance was really exciting. I won’t forget it for a long time.”

“You didn’t show up just to see if I’d march off the front of the stage?”

“I don’t know why I showed up,” I said, feeling that I was finally starting to make sense. Emily looked over her shoulder to where Mrs. Schell was listing options for dinner restaurants, getting the girlfriends riled up. She turned back to me and sighed.

“I’ve got to go. Be careful with those, okay? I got pretty banged up during rehearsals.”

“See you at school?”

Emily smiled, and might’ve even bowed slightly before walking away.

I rolled out of bed early the next morning to test the contacts while the house was still quiet. Almost immediately I felled a standing lamp that woke everyone up banging against the fireplace brick. But I didn’t quit and next thing I was on all fours, bumbling my way into chairs and walls, petting empty patches of air, feeling more vulnerable than ever.

Three

My next sighting of Emily Schell came the following Monday morning through a smudged attendance office window imbued with spidery shatterproof wire. She was standing in the middle of a long line, fanning herself with a stationery note. The time after that she was leaning out of her idling matchbox Volvo, sizing up one of the last remaining parallel parking spaces along the main entrance. It was a hot, muggy morning, the pavement afloat in its own blacktop reflection. I was taking a shortcut over the grass, having just reached the peak when I stopped to watch from my bird’s-eye perch as she made her sharp, minimalist maneuvers. It must have taken her five minutes to cut the rear end against the curb. At that point she began systematically nudging the Chevy Blazer behind her, then the Ford Escort in front of her, rolling forward and backward inch by inch, confidently, as though this method was in perfect accordance with the parking diagrams in the driver’s manual. By the time she cut the engine there was hardly enough space to slide a ruler between the bumpers at each end. I continued down the far side of the hill as she stepped out to survey her work, soon shrugging and nodding to herself as if engaged in an inconclusive debate. Just about the time I caught up to her, she turned around and headed for the main entrance, where she ended up holding the door for several seconds longer than common courtesy demanded. When I thanked her she smiled congenially, though with no sense of recognition. A month later she would deny this exchange ever occurred, which was somehow sweet considering her visit to my chemistry class that Friday, when she poked her head through the door at such a peculiar downward angle that the unseen portion of her body must have been balanced on her left leg while her right leg stretched waist-high across the hallway. After twice referencing her clipboard, she informed my teacher of an urgent message for George Flynn. I stepped outside to find her looking stern, with her lips pursed and a pencil behind her ear. Our second conversation was a beautiful, seamless act that couldn’t exist twice.

“Need your address, Flynn,” she said, pushing a pair of invisible glasses up the bridge of her nose. I noticed an Irish Claddagh ring on her right hand, but given our close quarters and her quick hand movements, it was nearly impossible to determine whether the crowned heart was facing inward or away.

“It’s near the hockey arena,” I said. “One hundred thirty Arling ton Street.”

“And your phone number? Just in case.”

“I’m not sure,” I said, digging for my wallet where I’d placed a r ipped-off matchbook cover with my new number. Emily let her clipboard fall to her hip. As soon as I start reading it to her, she snatched the matchbook cover, clucked her tongue, and wrote the number down herself.

“Tino Gomez will be picking you up for a party tonight at eight. Hadley will likely be riding shotgun and his car will likely be low on gas and I wouldn’t be surprised if he asks you to chip in. You might want earplugs. Tino is very proud of his stereo.”

“Who’s Tino Gomez?”

“The guy picking you up.”

“Are you going to be there?” I asked, getting ahead of myself, my giddy adoration echoing in each word. She dismissed the question with a no-nonsense flick of the wrist.

“I was informed that you were never contacted by your student ambassador. Is that correct?”

“I don’t know anything about a student ambassador.”

“There’s supposed to be someone to make sure you know your way around.
Your
ambassador is a lazy little guy named Marcus Panozzo. He’ll be in the car tonight, even though he normally wouldn’t.”

“Marcus Panozzo? Maybe I did meet him, on the first day. He told me there was a secret sauna for the wrestlers.”

“Shhhh. Whadareyoutryintado? Getusdisqualified?”

“Sorry.”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, as she raised the clipboard to her mouth to cover a delicate yawn. I’m pretty sure the yawn was only a gesture of the secretary character she was playing, who was much less tolerant of my mis steps than the girl I met in the lobby outside the auditorium.

“A final suggestion,” she said. “You don’t have to like everyone. But you have to like Tino and Hadley, and Lauren and Ashley, and of course Smitty, whose real name I won’t bother telling you because he never goes by it. Marcus and everyone else are up to you.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling I’d just received what would prove the most intimate tidbit of the exchange. “I meant to ask, were you really crying during the scene where that schoolboy wandered off on his own? Usually when actors cry it seems so fake, but for a while I thought, she’s
really
crying.”

Emily tucked the pencil behind her ear. I don’t think the way she pushed onto her toes and then down again was part of the act. (It could be argued that this movement was a precursor to her imminent and total break of character.) “The last time I cried was probably 1959, back when JFK got shot.”

“I thought he got shot later on. I thought it was in the mid-s ixties.”

“I’m pretty sure it was ’fifty-nine,” she said, repeating the up-and-down motion. “And I would know because I’m an actress. It’s our job to know pretty much everything about everything.”

“Were you a child actress or something?” I said, as Emily stroked her chin and sharpened her gaze, as if on the verge of deciding that there was something very off about me. “I mean, it’s obvious that you’ve found your calling, but it must take a long time to get to the point where you look like
even you
forgot that this is all a play, and these lines aren’t real, and you’re really just pretending.”

I still don’t know why I followed this statement by offering her both hands as though pleading for a Middle East peace accord, but in all likelihood it was only a reaction to the great pride I felt in having won Emily’s startling, and completely denuding, disbelief. She eventually shook my hands, during which time her expression changed from that of a frightened first-time small business loan recipient to that of the banker who’s just issued the loan, whose day was finally yielding the results she’d expected of it. I smiled but Emily did not. Apparently there were still a number of compatibility issues to assess, unknown chemical elements to add and subtract, human factors that deserved a firm and honest attention.

Four

That first night I met Tino and Hadley, they showed up almost two hours late, dragging a trail of muddy tire tracks that stretched from an Urbandale kiddy park through my neighborhood and up my driveway. On the way to the party Tino’s fuzzy mop flopped side to side as he bobbed his head and waved his arms as he expounded the legality of claiming a doe left dead on the road. Hadley was ruddy and mostly silent, with feline eyes that didn’t miss a thing. He spent most of the ride knocking back a mixture of Everclear and Kool-Aid, more or less ignoring my presence except to glance into the side-view mirror whenever Marcus, my backseat companion, made some grand claim I was probably better off not believing.

As soon as we crossed the plane of Pat Downing’s backyard, Tino and Hadley grabbed their beer cups and disappeared, leaving me subject to Marcus’s urgent task of pointing out all the girls he’d supposedly laid. Almost everyone was smoking. Whenever Marcus left to refill his cup, I’d lurk the perimeter of seemingly affable conversations involving classmates with the least asymmetric craniums. (I’d turn slow circles with one hand stuffed coolly in my pocket, the other scratching athletically at the rear of my neck, often checking my watch, alternating hand positions, attempting to appear pleasantly bored while focusing my sight line on safe targets like slow-leaking garden hoses and empty bags of birdfeed balled up in wire fences.) But as soon as I’d build the courage to invite my way into a conversation, inevitably Marcus would dance forth just in time to scare off my prospective new friends. It started raining. I started drinking. Eventually everyone crowded under the back porch and into the garage, where our loudmouthed host (a fine example of the heavily browed Germanic element so prevalent in Des Moines) was pumping death metal on a boom box splattered with dried paint. This is where I finally found Emily Schell, who’d just been deserted by two dissatisfied girlfriends resolved to change the music and who was now humming to herself while propped up on a stack of drywall, looking bored. While I attempted to approach her with only a minor affect of rebelliousness, I ended up cocking my head in a brash, jerky way that I somehow felt entitled to blame on my brother.

“Hey there,” she said, perking up only long enough to realize I was half drunk and flying solo. “Where’re your friends?”

“Probably in Kevin’s basement, back in Davenport.”

“Your
new
friends. Tino and Hads.”

“Somewhere out back,” I said, like I hadn’t thought about those guys in a while. Emily shrugged, acting like she’d done her part and it was my life to live in complete friendlessness if that’s what I wanted. She leaned forward to read my T-shirt that depicted a muscle-bound oaf urging students to get BACK TO THE BASICS: READING, WRITING, WR ESTLING!

 

“If you’re planning to wrestle at St. Pius, Coach Grady will expect you’ve been keeping in shape over the summer at freestyle tournaments, Greco-Roman tournaments, all that stuff. Practice for you guys starts in a couple of weeks.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked, taking a few nonchalant gulps of beer. Emily shook her head, like I needed more help than she originally thought.

“That sort of talk won’t get you very far around here. Maybe you should consider joining the newspaper instead. You could start off by writing an article about yourself. You know, clear up all the rumors and give us the straight scoop.”