As Simple as Snow (6 page)

My mother isn’t a terrible cook, although I remember my father sitting over a burned breakfast and muttering, “How can you screw up scrambled eggs?” She had a distinct propensity to make chicken breasts with cream-of-mushroom soup poured on top more than my father and I would have preferred, or more than anyone would prefer, I imagine. It had to be the world’s easiest dish: you put the chicken in a casserole dish, pour the soup on, directly from the can, and then make some rice and a salad, and there’s dinner. She also claimed to make an “exotic” dish, tuna curry. While the meal contained both tuna and curry, it wasn’t in any way exotic, unless your idea of exotic is a can of tuna, a can of cream-of-mushroom soup (a family staple), a spoonful of curry powder, and some instant rice. It tasted about as good as it sounds. My father ate oyster crackers at every meal. He kept a plastic container filled with them, which he would bring out from his den and set to one side of his plate. He would shove a handful of the little unsalted hexagons into his mouth after every few bites. Sometimes he would emerge from his den with cracker crumbs all over the front of his shirt or sweater, carrying his plastic bucket to the kitchen for a refill.

What my mother lacked in imagination, she made up for in presentation and arrangement. She served her dishes on platters lined with precisely arranged flowers or other garnish. She had elaborate tableware. When we had grapefruit for breakfast (which was frequently—it’s almost impossible to screw that up), a small black box would appear on the table, containing spoons with one serrated edge, designed specifically for removing the sections of a halved grapefruit. After breakfast the box would disappear, and the next morning, if we were to have grapefruit again, it would return to the table, the spoons lined up in their case, ready and precise.

My mother is a big fan of precision, and tries her best to maintain it. Unfortunately, her own incompetence gets in the way. Dinner is served, except when a can won’t open. That’s the way she is: fine unless something goes wrong and that minor obstacle becomes a huge wall she can’t scale. She becomes helpless whenever things don’t go smoothly, or exactly as she imagined them.

school

Anna and I had two classes together, history and math. We never sat together. Mrs. Bell had assigned seats in math, but you could sit anywhere you wanted in history. Anna always sat up front, her chair pulled away from the rest of us. She frequently slept in class, or at least she appeared to be asleep. She would put her head down on her desk and close her eyes, yet nothing was ever lost on her. She seemed to know more about what was going on in class than anyone else did. If she was ever called on, she would answer the question without lifting her head or opening her eyes. Once in history class, Mr. Morrison became so frustrated by her “attitude” that he demanded she sit up and “pay attention.” Anna sat up and began reciting Mr. Morrison’s lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr., word for word from the beginning, providing an impressive demonstration that she’d been paying attention all along. She went on for a good three minutes before Mr. Morrison dismissed her with a wave of his hand and her blond head slowly descended into the black sleeve of her sweater. It was said that all of the Goths could do the same trick, but I don’t believe it.

Anna and I spoke before and after school, and almost never once classes began, but we were in constant contact. She would leave notes and postcards in my locker, or send them along with one of her friends. I would open a textbook and there’d be a note from her, folded neatly and placed at the day’s lesson. I suspected that she knew a number of magic tricks, could pick locks and get into my locker and leave things there without my knowledge. They weren’t your usual notes. She would relate conversations she had overheard, interesting facts from class, stories from the newspaper, even other people’s notes. “Found this near my locker this morning: ‘I hate you. I never want to see you again. You said it wasn’t true but I saw your car outside her house. You lie, and I can’t take it anymore. I hate you. P.S. Call me later.’”

I was unprepared for her outpouring of energy and enthusiasm and attention, and at first it overwhelmed me. I thought that I would never be able to keep up with her, that she would be bored with me. Instead things became easier. Her energy was contagious and I wanted more of her attention. We talked on the phone, but she preferred to send text messages or, better yet, IM or e-mail, where she could reference websites and send me along a trail of other information. She was constantly changing her name on my buddy list, using people’s initials and making me figure out who they were: A.B.C. (Anna Belle Cayne), E.A.P. (Edgar Allan Poe), J.T.R. (Jack the Ripper), E.M.H. (Ernest Miller Hemingway), A.A.F. (Abigail Anne Folger), G.A.H. (Gary Allen Hinman), E.W.H. (?).

After maybe five or six weeks, she stopped putting postcards in my locker and started sending them to me through the mail, along with letters and large envelopes filled with things she had found interesting, magazine and newspaper articles, or even random objects like a key (“I found this near your house. What do you think it opens?”), photographs (“Who are these people?”), and letters or notes she had found on the street or left behind in classrooms. It was a constant stream of stuff, and I didn’t know if she wanted me to send her things in return. Much of what she sent me I puzzled over for a while and then discarded (the key, for instance, looked as if it went with luggage or a briefcase, and I wasn’t going to sneak into every house in the neighborhood to find out which). I could identify some of the people in the photos, and she seemed pleased with what I could tell her. She didn’t seem to really care whether I had a response to what she sent or not—her enjoyment appeared to come from sharing the item with me and sparking some train of thought. I never sent her anything; I stuck to the phone or the computer, but even then there was no way to keep up with all the things she sent me. Everything seemed to interest her, and it made me interested as well. Sometimes her interests uncovered things that were secretive and personal. She sent me a handwritten note she had found: “I need help with Carl,” and in her handwriting asked, “What does this mean?”

carl

My friend Carl Hathorne was a drug dealer. “I don’t care,” Anna said when I told her, and then laughed. “It’s always the popular ones you have to watch out for.” Carl wasn’t like a superstore, big-box pharmacy dealer, though. You couldn’t buy whatever you wanted; he had a limited inventory. He sold whatever drugs he could easily get his hands on, which meant that he sold his younger brother’s Ritalin, and he sold his older sister’s Prozac, and his mother’s Prozac too. He would sneak into their rooms and swipe a few pills and then sell them around school. It was an easy way for him to make money, and he started going to the junior high school and buying drugs off kids, mostly Ritalin, and then selling them to upperclassmen. He would buy the drugs for no more than a dollar a pill and sell them for anywhere between two and five dollars. He didn’t sell drugs to anyone younger than a sophomore, but he had no qualms about paying nothing to the younger kids. I once mentioned that he was ripping off kids who didn’t know the value of what they were selling, and he lectured me. “Value is relative,” he said. “A quarter is a lot of money to some people, a quarter of a million is not to some other people.” Carl is the only person I knew who talked about things like “supply chain,” and “distribution models,” and concepts like “lifetime value of a customer.” I have no idea where he got this stuff—maybe he was born with it.

He made good money, but he never got greedy. He knew he had to be careful. There were too many ways to get caught. He could get caught by his family for stealing their drugs, he could get caught by the teachers or principal for selling the drugs, and he could get caught with more supply than demand, but that was hardly likely. There were too many kids who wanted drugs, even in our small school. I had asked him once if it was true that the Goths used drugs. “They’ve never bought anything from me,” he said, but you couldn’t take Carl at his word about that stuff. He was like a doctor protecting his patients’ confidentiality. Everyone seemed to know (or suspect) that if you needed something, you went to Carl, yet no one seemed to know who ever actually went.

He had one prime attribute going for him: Everyone liked him. Carl was the most popular person in our sophomore class; he might have been the most popular person in the whole school. He treated everyone with respect and appeared to genuinely like people. And all the teachers liked him, all his customers liked him, all his suppliers liked him. “It’s a service industry,” he said. “It’s just good business. Where would I be without my suppliers and where would I be without my customers?” He’s the only person I knew who talked about a moral code. “The Ten Commandments are okay,” he told me, “but Dale Carnegie’s better.”

Carl could usually be seen wearing a worn-out blue blazer, every pocket stuffed with scraps of paper. They were reminders of who owed him how much and when it was owed, or whom he had to meet to collect from or transact with. Everything was written in a cryptic code he had invented, some obscure shorthand that he could decipher in a second, but that no one else would understand. Each pocket even meant something; it was a whole system. “I’m on top of it,” Carl said. He certainly was. He carried
The Wall Street Journal, Fortune,
the
Financial Times,
and
The Economist
around in his backpack. He kept notebooks, detailed logs of all of his transactions. He would transfer the notes on the scraps of paper into his notebooks, which were filled with a different code. I sometimes wondered whether that’s why he and Anna got along—they each kept their own set of strange notebooks, tracking the town in their own ways, chronicling our lives from two different points of view.

Carl’s notebooks never left his room. He locked them in a gray two-drawer file cabinet beside his desk, and unlocked the file cabinet and removed the ledgers only to record the scraps into the notebooks’ orderly columns. “You’ve got to keep them balanced,” he said. I asked him why he was so sensitive about them, since they were all in code anyway. “You have to do everything to protect your customers,” he told me. “Besides, any code can be broken. It just takes time. It also makes me feel important.” Carl was important, by the look of the number of notebooks he kept locked up. He showed me one once. Of course it made no sense to me, but he pointed to the column where he tracked the money he had collected. “A perfect record,” he said. “I’ve never lost a penny.” It could have been true, knowing Carl. He had a way with people. His notebooks aligned perfectly with the world. He was in control; the columns confirmed it. People asked, Carl gave. Carl offered, people accepted, on his terms. Everything was an agreement.

Carl’s other constant was a blue Notre Dame visor, with the interlocking ND removed, so you could see only the darker blue shadow where the logo had been. He had bent the bill of the cap, but then blunted the left side (his left) so that it pointed skyward. “I had to have it trending up,” he explained. His father wanted him to go to Notre Dame. “He’s going to be disappointed,” Carl said. “But that’s all right, he’s used to that.” When he first said this, I thought that Carl was referring to other disappointments, not related to him, but now I’m not so sure.

Carl was practically the only friend I had, and we’d been friends almost since birth. He used to live a few blocks away and his mother looked after me during the time my mother was working. They moved to a different house, a mile outside town, but we still see each other at school and hang out whenever he’s not taking care of business. Sometimes I think that Carl is my friend only because we’ve been friends for so long, that if we met for the first time tomorrow he would never be my friend.

I was worried about telling him about Anna and me, especially because of his reaction the first day we saw her. I told him about a week after the football game. By then he already knew. “Good for you,” he said. “You’re definitely one of the more interesting couples in school. Just don’t let me catch you wearing makeup.” Carl knew me better than that.

 

 

 

When we were younger, my mother used to pick Carl and me up after school, but that stopped when I was in the fourth grade. “You can walk home,” she said. “It’ll be good for you.” Carl’s mom picked us up sometimes, but that couldn’t be relied on when she started having trouble at home, and then stopped altogether when they moved. Carl had business to take care of now anyway. I don’t know what my mother had to take care of during the day. She talked on the phone with her friends, maybe, or ran over to Hilliker, about ten minutes away. She used to hang out with Mrs. Hathorne during the day, and frequently she would do things with Mr. and Mrs. Hathorne (my father rarely joined them, preferring the sanctuary of his den), but they stopped being friends. I thought it was Mr. Hathorne’s fault.

He was a drunk, that was the start of it. Carl’s father wasn’t one of those guys you had to go and drag out of the bar or anything like that. He would drink by himself. He would drive his car to the liquor store in Hilliker or Shale and then find some back road and park his car and drink until all the bottles were dry.

He sold cars in Hilliker, and his wife first suspected something when there was a noticeable decrease in his monthly paychecks. He wasn’t making the commissions he used to. She would call the dealership and he wouldn’t be around. Then he would come home late, smelling like alcohol. She told him that it was a problem. He said he would quit. He didn’t.

He missed more work and finally was fired. Still he didn’t quit drinking. Finally Mrs. Hathorne asked my mother to help. She must have been desperate. My mother took the initiative for once and called a bunch of his friends and family together, and a few of Mrs. Hathorne’s friends too, and they held an intervention. They all told him that he had a problem and that he needed to get it taken care of for his sake, for his family’s sake. A couple of days later he went down to Joplin and spent three weeks in rehab.