Byrd (2 page)

In the cafeteria he bites his ice cream sandwich into a different animal shape every day. People call out:
Giraffe! Elephant! Bear!
Addie calls out, but he never makes hers. Once he was making a rabbit so she said
Rabbit!
But then he changed it into something else.

She thinks his name sounds like a place. Roland Rhodes. A faraway place. One that would take a long time to get to, and once you did, you would never want to come back.

“The Rhodes woman came in today,” Addie's mother announces over supper, which is canned ham, canned green beans, and sliced cranberry sauce. “The new doctor's wife. Acting like a doctor's wife.”

Addie's father makes a face. “He's a chiropractor.”

Her mother laughs the way she does when something isn't funny. A small, sour sound.

Her parents do this every night, complain about people they know, or used to know, or barely know, or don't know at all.

“Roland's in my class,” Addie says.

“First time she'd set foot in the store and she wanted to take five dresses out on approval. Said her daughter didn't have patience for shopping. I wanted to say, What child does?”

Addie's mother works at the Carousel Shoppe selling expensive girls' dresses to mothers who don't have to work. Dress-up dresses: Peaches 'N Cream and Polly Flinders and Ruth of Carolina Originals with sashes and built-in crinolines and Peter Pan collars, stripes and plaids all perfectly matched at the seams. She can buy dresses for Addie because of her employee discount—the only part of her job she likes. As soon as Addie outgrows girls' sizes she plans to quit and get an office job.

“Roland has nice clothes,” Addie says. She closes her eyes and remembers his paisley shirt, the swirls of blue and purple and green.

“Your clothes are as nice as anyone's,” her mother says, and reaches over to cut up her little brother's ham.

After dinner their father leaves the table and their mother tells stories. “Tell the one about the birthday cake,” they say, and Claree tells about the time when she was a girl and baked a cake for her father, their grandfather. A sheet cake with lavender frosting. She hid it under her bed, planning to surprise him. That evening while she was cooking supper, her mother went upstairs and found the cake, slid it out from under the bed, stomped on it and smashed it flat. Then walked down to greet Claree's father, her shoes thick with frosting.

“Those big black orthopedic shoes,” Claree says. “She always had trouble with her feet.”

Addie and Sam laugh. They think the story is supposed to be funny.

Sam is four years younger than Addie, with eyes gray as nickels and hair so short you can't tell what color it is.

Addie has red hair, which she is not allowed to cut. Girls aren't supposed to cut their hair. Her mother's hair comes all the way to her knees, black with a long silver stripe, her birthmark. No one at Addie's school has a mother with hair as long as Claree's.

Addie's father works at Reliable Loan Company, in a building on West Fifth Avenue that used to be a house. The company has a billboard on the highway, a giant picture of a dollar bill, but instead of George Washington, there's Bryce Lockwood in his big square glasses and plaid sport coat. When the sign was new he would take the family for rides in the car just to look at it.

At school, Addie is the Dollar Man's daughter.

Bryce's gold velour armchair and ottoman take up the middle of the living room. He likes to stretch his legs while he watches TV. Their set has rabbit ears and thirteen channels on the knob. When it's time for a different show, Bryce makes Sam change channels.

“While you're up,” he tells Sam, “how about grab me another beer?”

Sam goes in the kitchen, brings back a cold can of Schlitz, hands it to his father.

“Come a little closer,” Bryce says. “I want to tell you something.”

“Don't,” Addie says. “It's a trick.”

But Sam doesn't listen. He never listens. He leans over, hoping to be let in on a secret, a joke, something Addie wouldn't get, and Bryce flicks him on the head with his middle finger, the way you thump a melon. Sam's head makes a sharp, hollow sound.

Their mother sits at one end of the sofa, leaning against the arm, her long black hair splayed out across the plaid upholstery. It looks clingy, like cobwebs. She watches TV as hard as she can.

In middle school everyone has to take P.E. The girls wear starchy blue gym suits with snaps down the front. Sally Greer, the first in their class to develop, is always popping out of hers. Sally tells everyone she's dating Roland Rhodes. “We made out under the bleachers,” she says.

After school, Shelia's mother, Betsy, makes them glasses of Tang, the drink of the astronauts, with Tang ice cubes. Betsy knows how to make everything better. She works the early nursing shift at the hospital and gets off before school is out; by the time Shelia and Addie get home, she's changed out of her white uniform and into her afternoon clothes: baggy shirt, pants, unlaced brogans—old clothes her husband, Shelia's father, left behind. He's been gone for years. Shelia doesn't remember him.

“Staying for dinner, Addie?” Betsy ties on her apron, reaches under the cabinet, and lifts out a white coffee-can-sized can with no label, just MEAT in big black letters, which she plunks on the counter. “Could be pork chops.”

“Sure,” Addie says, “I like pork chops.”

Betsy has short hair, which she cuts herself and dyes yellow. She is loud like a man, and likes to whistle.

Addie rolls a Tang ice cube over her tongue and lets it plunk into her glass. “What's ‘make out'?” she asks Shelia.

Shelia frowns; her eyes wobble.

“It means,” Betsy says, and slings a spoonful of Crisco into her frying pan, “you get by on what you've got.”

Bryce gets paid on Fridays and takes the family out to dinner. Afterwards, he stops in the VFW for a drink. Addie and Sam wait with Claree in the car. Addie slides down low in the back seat in case anyone walks by.

“I would never do this to my children,” she says. She is thirteen.

“You don't have children,” Sam says.

Claree, facing the windshield, says what she always says. “He won't be long.”

“This is yours to keep.” The health teacher solemnly hands each girl a pink booklet. “Take it home and read it.”

The other girls roll their eyes. They've already started. They don't need pink booklets. Shelia has started. Addie is the only one who hasn't. She rolls her eyes along with them, but secretly she can't wait to get home and read her booklet.

It has line drawings. The writing is clear and direct. “During your cycle,” it says, “you may feel bad about your body. Pamper yourself. Take a scented bubble bath. The water should be warm but not hot.”

She memorizes her favorite parts. “Warm but not hot.”

High school.

Girls huddle in the hall talking in whispers, pretending not to notice when people eavesdrop. They wear makeup. They wear halter tops and hip-hugger jeans that show their navels. They carry little purses for their lipstick and lunch money and cigarettes. Boys love and fear them. Addie sometimes wishes she were one of them. She wishes she were one of anything.

She reads. She reads
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller, and
Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger. She believes Franny and Zooey have something to teach her, even if they're high-strung and always talking in italics, even if the things they call phony, things that
really get under their skin
, are things that only privileged people or New Yorkers ever have to deal with. She recites Franny's Jesus prayer. She goes on Franny's cheeseburger diet. She doesn't have a mystical experience, but the ritual is comforting. Eaten every day, even a cheeseburger (she likes hers with pickles and mayonnaise) can be holy.

She reads
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A Separate Peace. Huckleberry Finn. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. To Kill a Mockingbird. A Clockwork Orange. Light in August. Brave New World. Mrs. Dalloway. In Cold Blood. The Stranger. All the King's Men
. She reads
Daybreak
by Joan Baez and
Tarantula
by Bob Dylan, a book that makes her decide to write poetry because she sees how you can write anything and call it a poem.

She and Roland have one class together, an elective called “The American Counterculture” taught by Mr. Saraceno, a young teacher with horn-rimmed glasses and black hair that curls down onto his shoulders. He wears jeans and blazers with patched elbows and comes from “places too many to name.”

They read the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs. They talk about sex and drugs. They can't believe they have a teacher like Mr. Saraceno in Carswell, and figure he'll get fired when their parents find out what he's teaching.

In his class, Addie is outspoken, brazen, always raising her hand, always arguing. “Why weren't there any women Beats? It's not like women hadn't already been part of the literary scene. Look at Edna Millay in the twenties. She wrote better than any of these guys. She was a bohemian. She was sleeping with everybody in Greenwich Village while Jack Kerouac was being fussed over by his mother and all those Catholic nuns who thought he was some kind of saint.”

“There were women Beats,” Mr. Saraceno says.

“Spectators,” Addie says. “Disciples. They sat around listening to all that crap poetry, snapping their pretty fingers. They cooked and cleaned and had sex and helped their men get famous. And ended up in mental hospitals, hanging themselves. They didn't write, and if they did, why aren't we reading it? They were nothing like women now. Look at Joni Mitchell. She's a poet
and
a painter
and
a musician.” She pauses to catch her breath. “You know, Mr. Saraceno, American counterculture didn't begin and end with the Beats.”

Roland, sitting in the desk behind hers, leans forward. “Tell it, baby,” he whispers. She can feel his breath in her hair.

Smokers congregate at the wall outside the Language Arts building after class and light up. The guys walk out in a row, three or four across, bent-kneed, jeans scraping the ground, long hair fanning out over the collars of their denim jackets. They lean against the wall and shake cigarettes out of Winston and Camel and Marlboro packs, cup their hands around matches, narrow their eyes, lean back, blow smoke rings, flick ashes.

Addie sits on the ground, the brick wall warm against her back, her composition book open on her knees, her long red hair falling around her like a curtain.

She tries to write like Edna, like Joni, with rhythm and rhyme.

When she writes, the rest of the world disappears. She doesn't notice when Roland sits down beside her.

“Can I see?” he says.

This is the first time he's ever sought her out. He barely knows her, though she knows everything about him. He's a musician, a guitarist. He has a Fender Stratocaster strung backward so he can play it left-handed. His favorite thing to talk about is music; his favorite music is the blues. Duane Allman is his hero. He is still mourning Duane's death.

When he talks about music, people flock to him. When he talks, he's a star.

He doesn't wear his hair long. He doesn't wear T-shirts or jeans to school. His mother, Pet, won't allow it. Pet is famous for her rules. Roland has to wear corduroy pants, shirts with collars.

He doesn't complain or apologize when he talks about Pet; he talks about her like she's a character in a book. His Pet stories make him popular. Because of her, people are kind to him. Girls especially.

“I mean, if it's okay,” he says to Addie. “I don't mean to be presumptive.”

“Presumptuous,” she says, and hands him her notebook.

He reads slowly, moving his lips. His bangs fall in his eyes. He pushes them away and they fall again. He pushes them away and looks up. “Have you ever tried putting your words to music?”

“No. I'm just trying to write poems.”

“This is good,” he says. “This is good enough for a song. I play guitar, you know. I've got lots of ideas for tunes but no lyrics. Maybe we could write something together.”

“Maybe,” she says. They've never had a real conversation and here he is, asking her the most personal thing imaginable.
Write something together
.

“What are you doing this afternoon?” he says. “I'll be practicing, if you want to come over.”

This is how Roland's mother greets her: “Is Roland expecting you?” Pet has a sharp face and beauty-parlor hair—frosted, with tight curls. She doesn't offer Addie a drink—no Tang or iced tea or lemonade or tap water—even though it's a warm afternoon and Addie has walked a long way.

The Rhodes house is in Country Club Hills, a brick house with green trim—not grimy-schoolroom green like Shelia's, but a clean, pale, yellow-green Roland's mother calls celery. Everything inside, too, is celery—walls, carpets, countertops, vinyl floors.

“Roland's in the basement,” Pet says, and leads Addie to the stairs.

What Pet calls the basement is actually a giant sun-filled room with sliding glass doors that open onto a patio. There's a wet bar and a fireplace and a TV and a console stereo and all the furniture you can think of, plus Roland's guitar and amplifier, and still so much empty space you could turn a cartwheel across the floor.