Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (5 page)

I draw closer to the scandal in question. Despite my desire to ask Emily to the homecoming dance, I didn’t, mostly because our budding relationship seemed dependent on her unspoken trust that, unlike a number of my classmates, I wouldn’t suddenly profess my undying love, then describe all the lovely nasty miracles we’d discover on the fifty-yard line at Valley Stadium, or under the Thirty-fifth Street Bridge, or for that matter on the roof of our only skyscraper at 801 Grand. My hesitation came back to haunt me when Emily reversed her vow of unrestrained freedom by accepting an invitation from Peyton Chambeau, who even Ashley and Lauren thought she’d erased from her field of hypothetical dates. (I ended up accepting an offer from Jeannie Gammet, who had swim team practice at six o’clock every morning and always slept during homeroom and woke up one day to ask me to be her date. Even on the night of the dance she suffered from chlorine-lashed skin and crimped hair tinted algal green. I have grave doubts whether this date deserves description, though I should probably mention a notable “Lady in Red” slow dance when, while pressed against happy-go-lucky Jeannie, I succumbed to an unmanageable erection at the sight of Emily’s peach-firm buttocks bursting with little sparkles that lit up in sequence as Peyton spun her in his jazzy, selfish sort of way, adding unnecessary little flares precluding any possibility of a shared rhythm.) The point is that Peyton and Emily attended an after party hosted by Heidi Sneed, a senior who’d shown up to the dance with a pack of female roamers, downed a bottle of Southern Comfort, then embarked on an impromptu mission to poach as many of her rivals’ dates as possible. This goal reached fruition around four in the morning when she invited five juniors with passed-out dates to her backyard gazebo. By all accounts she gave each of them blow jobs, including Peyton Chambeau, who reportedly engaged in further discourse after the others had left.

Of course by the following Monday this episode was widely spread, often in combination with the news that earlier that evening, Peyton and Emily had locked themselves in the master bedroom for over an hour. With this final fact in mind, over the next two weeks the St. Pius community divided itself into camps based on their beliefs concerning Emily’s habitually referenced purity. Meanwhile, Peyton spent most of that time chasing her from classroom to classroom arguing his integrity. His pleas were met with oblivious silence and an eventual suspension when he finally quit begging and stomped across the school lawn shouting, “You’re sick! You’re really sick!” before dive tackling a young birch tree dedicated to a sophomore who’d rolled his Jeep on a ski trip to Fun Valley. Emily pretended not to care about the situation, and perhaps she didn’t care. While she neither confirmed nor denied the rumors of her lost innocence, she did surprise everyone by resigning as editor of the school newspaper, a rash decision that in the fallacious mind of the St. Pius community closed the debate. As for my own estimation, while I may have arrived at the same conclusion as my classmates, my opinion was based less on Emily quitting the newspaper than on the fact that in all the time we spent together, she never once mentioned Peyton’s name.

Six

I first met Katie Schell in mid-October at the Whitfield Preparatory Academy, the most expensive school in Des Moines and the only nondenominational private school in the city. The academy was brand-new (as was everything else in Clive, at that time the west ernmost suburb of the city), but built in the old tradition with a long, snaking driveway that arrived at a gardened roundabout designed for mothers of the nouveaux riches to vie for prime idling spots, encouraging them to arrive earlier and earlier in order to prove to teachers and fellow parents their superior nurturing intellect. But on the day in question Mrs. Schell had a USTA doubles match with a rival team from Ankeny who Emily explained were known to feign minor third-set injuries (1) as a technique of rhythm-breaking, (2) to exploit their opponents’ sympathy, and (3) as a preemptive justification for losing. Emily and I arrived at around four in the afternoon when only a few students remained, wandering in circular self-reflection, practicing card tricks, kicking at their backpacks, etc. Katie was sprawled out on the squared sod next to a glimmering metallic crutch, sulking in the sun, staring daggers into Emily’s tires as we curved into view. “Looks like her engine’s running a little hot,” Emily said. “Left
all alone
with the future drug addicts and whores.”

In an attempt to prove myself conscientious and gentlemanly (everything that Peyton Chambeau and his doggish cohorts were not), I stepped out of the car to give Katie the front seat. At this point she paused in reaching for her crutch, a combination of curiosity and accusation crossing her brow when she realized that Emily wasn’t alone. I had the feeling Katie was counting to herself a moment later as she made the transition from two knees to one knee and one crutch, then one knee, one crutch, and one foot, and so on as she pushed herself awkwardly upright. She made a slow and deliberate path across the lawn with her school bag swinging from her shoulder, her back erect and head high, now and then sidestepping to protect her bright white tennis shoes from the occasional pool of week-old rainwater or thicket of fallen leaves.

While I would likely never have marked the Schell girls as siblings, whatever resemblance there was between them was clearly evidenced in their nobly heightened foreheads and the grave angle of their eyebrows when they squinted. Katie was at least Emily’s height with feathery brown hair, bright boyish cheeks, and a prominent adult nose she had yet to make her own. As she neared the sidewalk she brusquely tucked her crutch under her armpit, lending the impression of an athlete making the showy case for her full recovery. Becoming aware of my ornithologist-like attention, I turned to the schoolyard fence and beyond it to the Clive water tower and the harvested cornfield littered with shredded stalks. I was just glancing back to the sidewalk when Katie’s right leg quit, buckling at the knee and tipping her upper frame sideways. I shouted and threw my hands out like a crossing guard, unable to jump forward quickly enough to catch her. She crumpled hard to the pavement. By the time Emily ran around the front of the car, Katie was rocking and gripping her elbow. Two hive splotches blossomed on each side of her neck. A thin strip of blood began its course from her knee down along her shin.

“You
moron
,” Katie mumbled, tossing her crutch into the grass like it hadn’t done its job. There was something unintentionally funny about the comment that added an extra uneasiness to the situation. Emily took no more time than necessary checking the damage. “I
don’t
like blood,” she said, rolling her eyes and grimacing in the face of her rising nausea. I felt foolish just staring at Katie and almost made the mistake of treating her like a child by bending her elbows and knees as a way of assuring her that nothing was broken. She was embarrassed and wouldn’t face me. I ended up retrieving her school bag from the curb. Katie grunted with all the lassitude of an overworked field hand as Emily helped her to her feet.

“That crutch has been trouble since day one,” Katie said. “The little bitch.”

“Oh lovely,” Emily said. “You kiss your mom with that mouth?”

Katie flicked her head in my direction in a way that seemed to relate her impression that I was the reason Emily was late, and that Emily being late deserved even more blame for her fall than the crutch. “Profanity’s good for your circulation,” she said. “Who’s
he
?”

“
He
is the new guy from Davenport, and his name is George Flynn. You can stop pretending you don’t know all about him.”

“George Flynn?”
Katie repeated, still wincing but also trying to appear quite certain that she’d never heard of any new guy from Davenport named George Flynn. When she finally faced me, she jutted her chin out and threw me a fast nod, which I took as an instruction to hand over her school bag and get hopping into the backseat. During our ride through West Des Moines she communicated her remaining frustrations by incessantly fidgeting with the armrest power buttons. For ten minutes it was all groaning windows and changing winds, the electronic clap of doors locking and unlocking. Despite that, Katie’s stubbornness reminded me of Emily in her dealings with Peyton the week after the dance; I was sure she’d tapped into a much deeper and more hostile source.

“Katie’s working on a comic book,” Emily said, half-shouting into the wind in an attempt at congeniality that, however unintentionally, came off as akin to the third-person praise often showered on shy toddlers. “It’s all about a dysfunctional high school. Recently Katie’s been dropping a lot of pianos on people, but when Katie drops a piano on someone, it’s usually a player piano that kills them and then plays the most perfect farewell song.” Emily turned to Katie, thinking for some reason that she might take over from there. But Katie only opened the glove compartment and started rifling through it, like she wasn’t hearing a word. “Anyway, she’s got this mean math teacher character, and in one scene he yells at his students about how math is the most important subject, and how mathematicians have to be more responsible than regular people because mathematicians who make mistakes can accidentally blow up the world. Then all of a sudden a piano comes flying down and kills him and starts playing ‘One Is the Loneliest Number.’ ”

“It’s not funny if you don’t know the song,” Katie protested, barely loud enough for me to hear.

“I know the song,” I said, sliding to the center of the seat. “It’s Three Dog Night. My dad used to play their albums all the time, especially on the drive to my uncle’s place in Cedar Falls.”

“You don’t keep any Band-Aids in your car?” Katie said, slapping the glove compartment shut. I noticed that the splotch marks on her neck had almost cleared.

“Saa-haar-reee,”
Emily said, heading south down 128th Street, obviously deciding it best to drop her sister off before me. But as soon as we reached University Avenue Katie started explaining what little homework she had, and how she thought she remembered running out of skin repair lotion, “the stuff that works like a miracle and that you’ll never find on your own because it comes in a small tube they usually hide in those big Walmart bins filled with a bunch of non- skin care products [
deep peasant sigh
], and the bottom line is that you might as well keep driving, I’m sure there’s a Walmart nearby wherever
George Flynn
lives.” Emily didn’t argue, even if she wasn’t exactly with us anymore when Katie started flipping through radio stations at a pace just slow enough to leave me believing that each turn of the dial was her last. After scanning the entire FM selection she turned it off, opening the glove compartment and dedicating the following minutes to tender compact disc massage, invoking a frozen quietness that she commanded like a general’s silence for his mutilated soldiers. After adjusting the bass, treble, and volume controls, she chose her track and was already lounging and perfectly relaxed when we heard the first twinkling notes of “Riders on the Storm,” in my opinion the greatest road tune of all time. Emily changed lanes, looking over her shoulder and meeting my eyes just long enough to let me know everything was all right. She reached over and pinched her sister’s thigh.

“You sure
aloe
is the best thing for a cut like that?”

Katie didn’t answer. She was busy feeling it with her eyes closed and the wind in her hair, playing Ray Manzarek on the keyboards, the bony fingers of her right hand dancing over the dashboard where I could see them perfectly timed, tapping the notes just right. I caught her checking my reaction in the side mirror, peering out behind thinned eyes and draped lashes. I had the feeling if I proved myself to Katie Schell, I’d never have to prove myself to anyone ever again.

Seven

In the face of such an authorial tag team of feminine artists, armed with respective Old Soul wisdom and modern savagery, my first reaction was to eschew all sentimentalities in order to reinvent myself as an avant-garde realist, or at least a scientific-minded critic, both of which assumed a departure from my past as a quixotic bush leaguer always swinging for the fences. But I already sensed Emily’s faith in me—a gift uncommonly bestowed, especially in light of her recently battered sense of male trust—and yearning to bring me into the fold of her privacy, which at this point I imagined was real estate well lorded over by her younger sister. While I had little intention of according Katie more power than she already possessed, I admit a brief attempt to prove myself the sort of radical, older friend who’d never pull a punch for the sake of courtesy, the kind of guy who understood that people who described themselves as “physically challenged” were just gimps surrounded by obtuse, run-of-the-mill optimists. I spent a good deal of the following month attempting to arrange three-way dates for such edgy entertainments as underground thrash concerts, irate poetry readings, or midnight cult films at Billy Joe’s Picture Show where you could smoke, eat, and drink, and where half the nights ended with waitresses posting themselves at the emergency exits to prevent underage drunks from ditching their bills. But every time I informed Emily of these plans Katie was always resting, or catching up on homework, or “booked today from dawn to dusk.” While I took these excuses as my hint that Katie had no intention of playing the romantic middleman, the real story was that she was much sicker than I knew, and Emily more worried than she ever admitted. She finally told me the truth one Saturday morning after spotting me along Sixtieth Street on the way back from a roller hockey game. I was hobbling along with my blades slung over my shoulder, looking like a hobo jock who didn’t realize that anyone with skating skills would take to the ice like a real man. Emily was puttering along at about ten miles an hour in a no-passing zone, characteristically unconcerned by the delay she was causing the three or four cars lined up behind her. She suddenly hit the brakes and leaned over the passenger seat, mildly hydroplaning as the car following her swerved over the yellow lines.