Call Me Jane (3 page)

“You’re hot!” I said.

“What?” he shouted, staying focused on his guitar.

“Lucy says you’re hot!” I shouted.

Paul moved over toward me to hear me better and leaned toward me, still looking at his guitar. Lucy stood up from where she sat on the tiny little stand and leaned in, observing us closely.

“You’re hot!” I screamed one last time and I then poured the entire pitcher of beer over his head. He didn’t seem upset at all about it; in fact he laughed. The crowd cheered. Lucy glared at me while I walked back to where the keg was, my combat pants dragging and soaking in the beer puddles and cigarettes.

“Did you just do that?” Glinda said from right behind me. “That was pretty funny!”

Everyone was laughing and high-fiving me; even Ziggy from the wall finally looked away from the band and over at me. Raj, who never smiled, looked up from his bass guitar for the first time and smiled.

“That was great!” Krishna said, laughing.

FIVE

I woke up in a strange room. I sat up and looked around. As soon as I sat up, I regretted it. My head felt like a balloon. No, no that’s not right. It felt like it was split in half. The walls were grey-blue. I had been sleeping on a white futon mattress at the side of the room, and on the other side Glinda slept, her mouth open, drooling in her sleep. She also slept on a mattress on the floor.

There was a window that was only about six inches from the floor. I crawled over to it and lifted it five inches. The cold Wisconsin air cleared my head enough for me to think. I could see my car parked in the street. We were up on the second floor; otherwise I might have just crawled out the window and driven home… that is, if I could find my keys.

I looked around for my purse and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find my combat pants either. I was sleeping in the white T-shirt I’d worn yesterday. I couldn’t find the camouflaged jacket I’d been wearing either.

Great, I couldn’t find anything, and Glinda was so sound asleep she was drooling.

“Glinda,” I whispered.

Nothing.

“Glinda,” I reached over and tapped her shoulder. She mumbled an incoherent apology, and still had that soft voice, even in her passed-out, drunken state. Infuriating.

I decided to hunt around her room, lifting this and looking under that. She had a lot of interesting things in her room. Odd things. Things you wouldn’t see anywhere else. Things you had to stop and look at, and turn over in your hand, and examine from odd angles. She had a starfish. I had one of those in my room too. I had found mine a long time ago at the beach in Florida, walking with my dad, holding his hand. I was five or six, maybe seven. I had also found a sand dollar on that beach too. I remember being fascinated with it, mainly because it looked nothing like a dollar. I looked around to see if she had one of those too. Oddly enough, she did.

It was on top of her vanity, along with a lot of other things: unfinished sewing projects, woven baskets full of needles and thread, a beautiful gold pair of scissors, tons of miniatures.

Fascinating as the room was, and much as I tried to focus on finding my pants, jacket, purse, and keys, the desperate need to vomit rose up in me and sent me heading through the heavy drapes that substituted for a door. If a door had been there, it would have had to be double doors, because that’s how wide the entrance to her room was.

I leaped into a rather drably decorated sitting room, with a dilapidated couch and TV sitting on a wobbly table over by a set of windows, in which were set in a kind of trapezoid shape. If I didn’t make it to the restroom soon, I was going to throw up in that drab living room. I made a guess to go straight ahead into an open space just past the living room. There was no door on this room, so somehow I assumed that was the right way to go. To my left I saw a large, white freezer, and past that, thank God, the bathroom. I dived into it and lay my arms across the toilet seat, feeling its cold, comforting presence as I heaved into the bowl.

Once it was over, I lay on the floor between the toilet and the antique bathtub. I’m not sure how long I slept there, maybe just a few minutes. Maybe just long enough to find my bearings and realize where I was again. I tried to make it back to Glinda’s room, but now I couldn’t walk; I had to crawl. No, make that slither. As I slithered, I made it only about a third of the way back through the sitting room and collapsed again.

My eyes were glazed over, but open enough to see these big feet walking toward me. They stopped, stood there a minute, and then stepped over me. I looked up. It was Ziggy, Glinda’s brother.

All I could see were his feet. He was still wearing his shoes. Tattered Converse high tops with holes in them, and Band-Aids on the front to hold them together. I tried to lift my head. He still wore the green army outfit, or garage mechanic suit, or whatever it was he had been wearing last night. My head fell back to the carpet, scratchy on my face. I could feel the cold that comes from being drenched in sweat. I fell into a bleak state where all you can do is stare with your eyes open.

I couldn’t feel his presence anymore, so I assumed he’d left. I’m not sure if I fell back into a dream state, but after a few minutes I heard Glinda mewling from behind the curtain saying, “I’m not much of a host,” so quietly I wondered if she were talking in her sleep.

A cold wet cloth was placed on the side of my face. It felt so soothing. Ziggy said, “Is the room spinning?”

I tried to answer him, but all that came out was a croaking sound. A few minutes later he spoke again. I must have fallen asleep again. This time he sat on the chair near the corner, so that I could now see his face if I lifted my head, which I tried to do.

Last night I could barely make out his face. It was just a silhouette in the dark. Now I could see that he looked sort of like Glinda, but not at all like Glinda. He was like an ugly version of her.

“Here, smoke this, it will make you feel better,” he said.

“I don’t smoke.”

“It’s not a cigarette. It’s medicinal. It will stop the nausea, I promise.”

He handed me the joint, which he’d already lit and taken a hit off. I was willing to do just about anything to feel better. I took a hit off it and started coughing immediately.

“Try to hold it in your lungs.”

I tried again, tried to hold it in my lungs, but I couldn’t; I coughed it all out again.

“Try this,” he said, and gave me a glass of tomato juice.

I sat up and took a sip.

“Oh yuck,” I exclaimed. “Not more alcohol.”

“It’s the hair of the dog that bit you,” he said, chuckling a little. “Trust me, it will help you feel better.”

I drank a few sips more and lay back down on the carpet. After a few moments, I fell back to sleep, and when I woke up again he was gone. I felt good enough to stand and go back into Glinda’s room to look for my things. I was able to walk instead of slither. I found my purse and combat clothes rather easily. I put them on and left through the wooden stairway, which formed a square spiral just outside the sitting room.

SIX

My bedroom door opened and my mom leaned her head in the door. “Telephone’s for you,” she said.

I walked all the way around to the kitchen. I really needed a door to my bedroom from the outside, and I wished they’d put one in. Even though I could talk to my mom from the bathroom window in my room when she was in the kitchen, it was the longest walk in the house for me to reach there.

Turned out the call was from Raj. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to an imitation Beatles concert with him. I said yes, of course, anything to do with the Beatles. But as far as Raj was concerned, I wasn’t sure how I felt about him.

So I called Lynn Bonner to find out what she thought about him.

“He’s really cute!” she said.

“I said I’d go with him to a Beatle’s thing.”

“You and your Beatles,” she said. “Do you like him?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s really cute, and he dresses really cool. He has the coolest clothes.”

“What do you think about Siegfried Sinclair? Glinda’s brother.”

“Ziggy? Yuck, he’s ugly. But that parachute suit he wears is really cool.”

“A parachute suit? You mean that suit that makes him look like a garage mechanic?” I visualized that outfit again.

“No, that’s a parachute suit. Isn’t it cool?”

Raj called again between the time he asked me to go to the concert and the night we were supposed to go. I would drag the phone into the dining room and stretch the chord as far as it would go and lie on the living room floor twisting it around as I talked to him. We talked about bands, which ones were good and which ones weren’t. I kept saying I was punk because I liked the Cars, and he said, “No, the Cars are not punk. They are new wave.”

Every now and then Krishna, who it turns out was his sister, would pick up the phone from the other room and sound totally disgusted that he was tying up the line.

He picked me up for the Beatles concert in a very nice, white car with red-leather seats. As soon as I sat in it and shut the door, he said, “Siegfried figured out where we know you from.”

“Where you know me from?” I asked, startled. “You know me from somewhere? I don’t know either you or Ziggy from anywhere. I just met you both.”

“Oh yes, you do know us. Both of us,” said Raj. “I knew you were familiar.”

“Well, where then? Maybe the Y dances?”

“No, I never went to those lame dances, and neither did Ziggy.”

“Krishna did, though, and so did Glinda.”

“I know,” Raj said. He had already pulled out of my driveway, turned left, and was driving down Bowen. I noticed he did everything as a driver perfectly. He signaled just the right amount of time before the turn. He checked both his rearview mirror and looked over into his blind spot before he switched lanes. He signaled before switching lanes. “Krishna and Glinda both used to go. We used to make fun of them for going.”

“Well, where did you know me from then?”

“You are Janey Lou from the chess club at the library on Wednesday nights,” he said, smiling and watching for my reaction, which was odd, because he rarely smiled.

I stared at him for a moment. Then I had that odd sensation where you flash back and realize you do recognize the face, and have recognized it all along, both his and Ziggy’s. Only back then everyone called him Siegfried.

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, cupping both my hands over my mouth. “That’s right! That was you!”

Way back. Way before the 8
grade dances, my dad used to take me to the chess club on Wednesday nights.

The club was held upstairs at the library. We had to walk up a wide, spiral staircase with black, metal railing. There were spaces between the steps, and I remember thinking at the time that they looked very modern. I would bend down with my head near my feet to look through them, my dad holding me by the hand to keep me from falling. He would take me into the room, which was lit with bright, florescent light that reflected off the long, white tables. Chess sets lined the tables. There were mostly adults there, but I remembered Raj and Siegfried—both of them about age thirteen—and I was ten. I went there for a long time, and so did they. I saw them every week.

Both of them were chubby. Both of them were completely disgusting. Raj had long, black hair down to his shoulders, and so did Siegfried. Siegfried’s was tangled and curly. Raj’s was curly too, but not as curly as Siegfried’s and nowhere near as tangled. They looked very similar to each other in their manner of style and dress. They acted the same. They both were very sarcastic and made fun of how I played chess. They both wanted to play me, and always won. They both loved KISS and the Beatles, and argued all the time about which was better. Siegfried preferred The Beatles. They became pretty heated about this, and it seemed to be an ongoing debate between the two of them that was never quite settled.

In fact, one particular night at the chess club stood out in my mind. I wasn’t playing either one of them. I was playing a kid from my school, actually. A kid from St. Mary’s named Vladimir. Vladimir and I had fun playing at the chess club, and used to giggle during our games. We never spoke to each other about the club or about anything else at school though. We never even acknowledged each other. No one would ever have known we had this whole secret world at the chess club. Anyway, Vladimir and I were playing, and somehow I had gained Siegfried and Raj’s attention that night, big time. I had brought a purse, for one thing, and it was full of all kinds of things that I kept bringing out. Things like combs to put in my hair, and at one point I put a comb at the top of my head, gathered up all my hair and stuck that comb in it so that I looked extra ridiculous. I modeled my new hairdo for Vladimir and he laughed. Then I turned to Raj and Siegfried to make sure they saw it too. The both immediately pointed at me and said that I looked just like Gene Simmons of KISS. This made them start again on their argument about KISS. The argument went on during my entire chess game with Vladimir, which in and of itself was going on and on and on. We each had a few pawns, a king, and rooks on the board, and were just moving randomly, which kept causing Siegfried to lean over and make some mocking comment about how bad both our moves were, and that neither of us should win the game.

“Move the rook,” Raj said to Vladimir when it was his turn.

“Stop giving him advice,” I said.

“What else have you got in that purse?” Siegfried asked, and grabbed my purse and began looking through its contents. I stood up from my chair, knocking my king over, and reached over to grab my purse back, but he held it way up in the air, laughing.

“You knocked your king over,” Vladimir said with excitement, pointing at my white king lying on his side. “That means you resign.

“That doesn’t count,” I told Vladimir. I stopped fighting Siegfried for my purse and stood my king back up.

This was too much for the club director, a distinguished-looking man who my father had told me was a chess master. He looked sternly at me and said, “Janey Lou, you need to be quiet at the chess club. People are thinking.”