Into the Great Wide Open (6 page)

When his father left, Kenny put on the last of his clean clothes: tan corduroy jeans, a purple golf shirt with alligator, motley that his mother had bought him in the hope that he would turn out to be a social success after all, a popular student. Laundry time, he thought. His father sent his laundry out but Kenny did his own. He started to sort, white sock/black sock, then slowed down and finally stopped. He stared out the window, listening to the cars go by. It must have started to rain again: the streets were black, the noise of the cars exaggerated by water. He was thinking about his brother: lying in the next bed—they shared a bedroom in the old house—and watching
the shadows that the headlights made crawl across the ceiling, whenever a car would pass. Ray was asleep in Sydney, or eating breakfast, Kenny never could keep it straight. It was almost springtime there. If Ray was here, if Kenny was in Australia, they would be fighting about something—a pair of pants, what channel to watch, something, it was hard to remember but Kenny made himself remember. It was easy to get into some kind of daydream where everything would be fine and beautiful between them. And their father would be fine, their mother would return from Baltimore, the sun would shine and the birds would sing … Ray was just another boy, just another little dick. Kenny needed to remember this, not to make it worse by pretending it was different.

It was interesting, how much of adult life consisted of pretending. At the country club, for instance, where he worked the summer before, everybody did a lousy job of whatever they were supposed to be doing. The pool manager, for instance, forgot to switch the chlorine and filter kit on the Jacuzzi and two dozen people came down with an ugly skin rash. Kenny himself almost let a baby drown when he was lifeguarding stoned. The grounds crew ran over the sidewalks with the mower blades, leaving white scars in the cement. The Coke from the pool’s concession stand was flat. Nobody was fired, nobody was criticized. They all
respected
each other. Everything was fine.

Or the food, which Kenny got to eat at lunch, whenever he had an eight-hour shift and he felt like eating it. A table in the kitchen for the help. The food was cafeteria food, and at first Kenny thought they had some special shitty meals for the help but it turned out, no—they were eating the same as the people in the dining room, the ones who paid American money and lots of it, the ones who told each other over and over again what a fine meal it was. They said this to each other on their way to eat lunch; they said this on their way back to the car, or lying out by the pool, how the kitchen was getting
better and better. It was Tinkerbell again, he thought, but it was powerful. Nobody wanted to break the news.

When he was younger, fourteen, fifteen, and just starting to see the adult-world, Kenny thought this was all bullshit. He wanted plain speaking. He wanted honesty. Lately he didn’t so much.

When he went to visit his mother in Supported Living, for instance, and the attendant said how much better she looked, Kenny chimed in eagerly, though she looked no better and in fact a little worse than she had in the hospital. There were neatness issues. Nevertheless, he added his little voice and they all sang along together, the song about how everything was fine. Sometimes he was moved by it, this massive substitution of good wishes and hopes instead of the truth.

The part that bothered him … there were a couple. Riding his bike through traffic and seeing all the expensive, candy-colored cars, the Lexus in pearl white, like pearls in milk, you could reach your hand down into the finish … it just didn’t make any sense, the million different boxes with one person each. It seemed like pretending had gone too far then, like we were building a world in the shape of our own pretending, based on nothing. The office towers rising in Bethesda, for instance: what were they there for? Some dream of height, of the future, of progress. The dream, in itself without substance, was now clothed in glass and steel. This felt backward to Kenny.

Also: people pretended not to want what they wanted. Pretending tried to hide the will. That was the secret of adult life, the undisclosed motor of the whole thing. People wanted what they wanted. They did what they could to get it. It wasn’t complicated. Kenny knew that was the last step he needed to take before he could be an adult: he had to learn what he wanted, then had to learn to
want
what he wanted. He was too soft, he knew it.

Mrs. Connolly said, “What about it? Why do you think this story is told through two different narrators, Nelly Dean and Mr. Lockwood—who is a drip, right? Your basic nonentity.”

A surly silence, combined with the sound of dripping October rain, splashing down from the leaf-clogged gutters onto the concrete sidewalk. The smell of bodies, washed and unwashed, Kmart perfume and English Leather.

“This is strange, right?” Mrs. Connolly asked. “I mean, can any of you think of another book that’s like this? Can any of you think of a reason why it’s told this way?”

Even the front-row butt-kissers were stumped by the question, which hung in the air above their heads; one of the girls halfway back made a gesture, passing her hand above her head with a whooshing sound, that made her idiot friends giggle. We don’t know, we don’t care, you can’t make us, my mom and dad both make more money than you. This must be something she learned in teacher’s school, Kenny thought: the way she let the question hang like that. Which was supposed to do what? Kenny didn’t care enough to try to figure it all the way out, went back to the contemplation of Mrs. Connolly’s nipples, which were not quite visible under the cotton of her blouse.
Implicit
, Kenny thought; and though the jocks and the girls that hated her would say for certain that she wasn’t wearing a bra that day, you couldn’t really tell, or Kenny couldn’t anyway. He was trying to be polite, trying not to stare openly, make her any more nervous than she already was. Plus she was so small and small-breasted (her lithe little body, monkeylike) that it didn’t matter what she wore beneath; it was just the thought of her bare breasts against the cloth of the shirt—some kind of cotton or linen, a slightly rough weave—the thought of the soft skin of her nipples rubbing on the coarse weave of the blouse, gently hardening, a little irritated (nothing Kenny couldn’t kiss away), this was the thought he kept circling back to, until he looked up, to see if it was safe to stare at her, and found her looking straight at him.

“Kenny?” she asked.

He froze; he didn’t want to make things worse.
Please don’t:
he sent the thought her way but she kept bearing down. Maybe she had caught him staring, stealing her body, maybe she thought he had the answer. A quick flush of shame crossed his face, a hot, angry knowledge.

“Kenny?” she asked again.

“I didn’t read it,” Kenny said, in a soft surfer’s monotone. He wasn’t stoned but he sounded stoned. A quick burst of laughter followed what he said, and eyes meeting eyes around the room: did you hear that? Did you hear that?

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Connolly.

Because I’ve got better things to do
, he thought, embarrassment flowering into anger, at her, himself, anyone handy—and then out of his anger, he said it: “Because I’ve got better things to do.”

A wave of nervous giggles, poopoo-caca laughter. Kenny’s anger spent itself, as soon as it was released. Mrs. Connolly looked puzzled, lost. She had not expected Kenny to let her down. She was what?—ten years older than Kenny maybe, twenty-seven or so, and in her confusion she was the same age. I’m sorry, he thought, and almost said it; but it was too late. He could feel the waves of anxiety and anger rippling around the classroom,
get him, get the slacker
from the butt-kissers up front,
you can’t make me
from the jocks by the window,
I didn’t read it either
rising out of the sleepy untroubled middle, wondering what this fight was about. A sudden eruption of real feeling, against the rules.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Connolly said. “Maybe you should be doing those better things.”

Kenny shrugged, caught, sheepish.

“Meanwhile,” she said, “why don’t you wait out in the hallway? You’re not going to do anyone any good sitting here, not if you haven’t read the book. OK?”

She was angry with
him
, Kenny realized—him in particular, for
no reason he knew about. And this baby punishment, sit-out-in-the-hall, this was meant for him alone; and Mrs. Connolly was momentarily visible, human and mysterious, before the eyes of the class got through to him and he realized they were watching.

“Sure,” Kenny said, and gathered his things, and went out into the hallway; and both of them knew, as they passed each other, that this wasn’t what they were talking about, this wasn’t what either of them meant. Events, they couldn’t be unmade. Put the toothpaste back in the tube. Mrs. Connolly looked at him finally as the door closed: I’m sorry.

And then he was spread out with his ratty raincoat and his gasmask bag on the floor of the hallway, legal unless he moved, and Kenny wished for a cigarette.

And then, out of the two thousand one hundred boys and girls in this high school, it was Junie.

“Shit,” Kenny said to himself, and sat there stymied, trying to wish himself invisible.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Black dress, a giant red imitation ruby (or stolen from Mom?) dripping at her throat, black Chuck Taylor All Stars, high-tops. Oh, you, he thought. What are we doing here? I don’t go to high school, I don’t have parents, I came from the sea to be your husband.

“I’m being punished,” he said, “for failing to read
Wuthering Heights.
”

“You didn’t like it?”

“I just didn’t read it,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“You’d like the book,” she said, and Kenny felt himself shrinking. He flipped the cover around of a book he was holding, casually he hoped, so that she could read the title:
On the Road
. I am not an ignoroid, he thought, and beamed the thought in her direction—I am a person like you, just a little smaller here.

“Yourself?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be studying something, somewhere?”

Her turn to avert her eyes. Next: Blushing and Stammering. “I’m off to be counseled,” Junie said. “I’m being shrunk.”

“By who?”

“Some idiot,” she said. “It’s automatic—you do a certain thing and they have to send you to counseling for so long, you know, punch the clock. It’s punishment, but they don’t call it that.”

She was being bright, cheerful as she could, but she was unhappy. A certain thing, she said.

“They made me see a counselor for a while,” Kenny said. “It was bad.”

“For what?”

Oh shit, Kenny thought, don’t make me say it. “It was a drug thing.”

Junie frowned. “What?”

“It was nothing real,” he said. “It was just, they asked everybody who came in for advising who they thought smoked dope and so on. And, well, I guess my name came up pretty often. They called my dad in and so on.”

“He was pleased.”

“Actually he was drunk,” Kenny said, measuring out the words, watching her reaction. Pity was poison. But he hadn’t felt it from her, not so far. “He was having a bad week himself. He has never quite forgotten, though. To have a son voted Most Likely to Smoke Dope by his whole class, well.”

“A proud parental moment,” Junie said—but she was still standing, staring down at him, calculating his worth. A suburban girl, out for a little adventure with the class loser. A
little
adventure. Maybe not; he wanted to think better of her; but it made him angry, if she was interested in him because he was broken himself. Suburban girls were easy that way, they wanted anything but what they already had (safety, money, good clothes, an uneventful life), which made them sitting ducks for a boy like Kenny. The usual transactions involving Camaros, tattoos, bad
dope. He felt himself losing the frequency, called himself back: so far she was innocent.

“I’m going to be late,” she said.

“I want to see you,” Kenny said. “When can I see you?”

The words surprised her, as Kenny had surprised himself.

“You can come over,” she said. “People seem to.”

“What does that mean?”

“Only my mother. You’ll see. She has a somewhat more active social life than I do, at least with the high school crowd.” Her mouth screwed down around the words, a secret core of bitterness.

“She likes your friends better than hers?” Kenny asked.

“I don’t have any friends,” she said, still twisted. “I have my
problem
.” Then, at the last minute, when he had nearly given her up, she raised the back of her hand to her forehead, stared into the distance and sighed. She said, “Poor me!”

“You look OK from here,” Kenny said.

Phantom: she dropped her hand, quickly, secretly (PDAs were against the rules, ugly besides, passionate freshmen and pimply Christians behind the fountain), and touched his upstretched hand, left the memory of her own fingers on the tips of his as she left, tall, somewhere between awkward and graceful, both of them mixed together, he thought. Everything all mixed up.