Into the Great Wide Open (7 page)

Walking down the lines of lockers, the students streaming from class to class or rushing for the bathrooms, gossiping in the stairwells, every kind of human smell of bodies awoken too early in the morning and stuffed together, too many in a small space: the bodies washed and unwashed, coffee breath, cigarette smoke clinging to jackets, the sour smell of wet paper, dust, cafeteria cooking (taco meat for taco salad), Old Spice and English Leather, Kenny could close his eyes and maneuver his way by smell alone: the formaldehyde stench of the biology lab, burnt coffee from the teacher’s lounge, past the shithouse
stink of the boy’s room, down the stairwell under the portrait of Horace Greeley and under the one window that was always mysteriously open, a sweet smell of outside, escape, a kind of torment to Kenny always when he passed under it and remembered there was a world outside, people were making money and making lives and making love and just driving around going places while he was stuck in high school … but the thing was,
here
they stepped aside for him, they saw him coming and edged out of the way so that he moved through the slipstream easily, as if the others were only pretend, phantoms of the imagination, extras, they moved aside for him because they felt the pressure of his little magnetic field of trouble, his father’s trouble, his own, this morning’s fresh trouble with Mrs. Connolly, this was the only weight he had in all the world, the only power or force; and he only had it
here
, between these pale green walls, the last place he ever wanted to be …

Junie’s house was a long low ship of wood and stone, set back among trees and shrubs and stone Chinese lanterns, a little mechanical brook that ran through the yard, pools of koi. Kenny saw it for the first time on a slate October afternoon, four o’clock, after school. A suburban fairyland, where all the trees had been left standing, the houses trying to blend into the natural landscape. Not my house, Kenny thought, driving up in his father’s Reliant station wagon. Driving that car was like wearing your underwear on the outside of your clothes, but it was too cold to ride his bike, threatening to snow or sleet, indefinite mid-Atlantic gray. He left the Reliant parked in the street, but it was past autumn, the leaves had fallen, the bushes would not conceal it from the house, a faded, dirty maroon. Bruise. He left his schoolbooks on the seat, too. Too much evidence, the incredible shrinking man, boy, schoolboy. He was nervous.

Now he stood at the front door, rang the bell, nothing happened. This was a fool’s errand. Junie’s car sat in the driveway, a red
Accord. Girls who drove shiny, damageless Accords did not have time for boys who drove Reliants. Girls who lived in shipwrecked houses.

He rang again, and this time there were footsteps. A young man answered, tall, slender, with long elegant hands. “You’re looking for June,” he said.

Kenny couldn’t answer at first: he thought he was seeing Junie, couldn’t quite tell what he was seeing. The young man—it had to be her brother—wore a white dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes. His dark hair was short on the sides and back, long on top and drooping down over his left eye; a dandy in the English style, pale, slightly sinister. He was a year or two older than Kenny, older than his sister. A fag, Kenny thought—instinctive high school fear—then corrected himself: gay, maybe not even that. Kenny wanted to sympathize with any difference, anything but the big bland weight of the world, but this boy didn’t want his sympathy. He didn’t approve of Kenny, maybe of anything.

“She’s down in the sewing room,” the brother said. “You know where it is?”

“I’ve never been here before,” Kenny said.

“You’re looking for June?” the brother asked again, and Kenny nodded. The brother angled his head toward a corner of the hallway. “Well, the stairs are over there,” he said. “You can’t miss it, once you’re down there. If you end up in the garage, turn around.”

He nodded, having done his job, and walked away down a dark corridor that ran along the spine of the house. Kenny was alone in the flagstone hallway, a glimpse of the kitchen to his right. The house of homosexuals, he thought, with a little glimmer of fear (but fear was where the live thing was, he knew it, he wanted to walk right into it). The living room ahead was sunk down a couple of steps and dominated by a wall of gray fieldstone, a fireplace cut into a square in the middle of it. Everywhere were long windows framed in dark wood,
and through them a series of views of the garden. Even through the bare branches of late fall, there were no other houses to be seen, no cars, no swing sets. The house seemed to exist to bring the natural world inside, to welcome it, everything long and low and graceful. Like walking inside a piece of classical music, Kenny thought.
Beautiful
. He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not but he owed this house the word: beautiful. Lovely in its bones. He felt the contrast.

Beautiful and frightening—any trouble that Junie had, it started here, he could feel it. Why? A faint bitter smell, maybe nothing more than kitchen cleaner. Mr. Clean, Formula 409.

He wore his black high-tops, black jeans, a red plaid shirt unbuttoned over a t-shirt. He felt like he had wandered into a concert, an art gallery by mistake.

Downstairs, then, before he lost his nerve. Mexican statuary on shelves cut into the wall, obviously expensive, there to be touched, handled, dropped. A goddess giving birth to something, hard to tell what, squirting it out like a watermelon seed from big coarse vaginal lips. Something to look at every day. Another hallway downstairs, lit by an overhead window shining through plants; a dim, underwater place, shifting light. The doors were all closed. Kenny tried them, one by one, until he found himself in the garage. Then he knocked on the opposite door.

“We’re busy, Kyle,” a woman’s voice said. “We’re talking. What is it?”

“It’s me,” Kenny said. “It’s, uh, Kenny Kolodny.”

“Oh, Christ,” the mother’s voice said—it had to be her mother. She said, “Come in, I’m sorry,” and then, as he came into the room and saw three faces looking back at him, “We were having a little conference.”

The room was dim, felt like it had been carved out of solid granite with the dark wood shelves and drawers fitted in around the living rock. That same underwater light, and it took Kenny a moment
to sort out the faces: Junie, looking angry next to the window; her mother, unmistakable in the family resemblance but a little harder, a little sharper than Junie; finally a surprise, Jinx Logan from his high school, who was famous that year for getting pregnant and deciding to carry the child. They all looked caught, embarrassed, and in Junie’s case angry besides.

“This is Kenny,” Junie said, “a Liberal Religious Youth. I met him at the beach.”

She said it like she was throwing him at her mother, trying to catch her off guard; and the mother cast a quick sharp glance at Junie before she turned to him and nodded her head. “It’s good to meet you,” she said. “I’m glad to meet Junie’s friends.”

She made no move to shake his hand, to acknowledge him at all except for a quick inspection. She was younger than he expected, still pretty in a hard way. The glasses she wore made her look quite severe, no makeup, and her clothes were natural and plain in the way that the house was. Something pursed about her mouth, drawn up. If you were my age, he thought. Beautiful/unattractive. The element of sex had been lost, which wasn’t always a thing you could tell about other people’s parents but Kenny could tell with her. Kind, probably, and pretty in pictures; but not sexy.

“I really like your house,” he said.

“Oh,” the mother said; flustered, like nobody had ever told her before. “We like it, I suppose. It fits us.”

Junie looked at her, angry again. “Why don’t you just get it over with and tell him?” she asked her mother, then turned to Kenny: “This is a Frank Lloyd Wright house, you know who he is?”

“Sure.”

“It’s not one of the famous ones but he designed it. The other thing is, it’s a fake.”

She kept her eyes away from her mother, who was the obvious target. So far Kenny’s sympathies were all with Mom. So far Junie was acting badly.

“It was never sold as a Wright house,” the mother said. “I don’t know if
fake
is the right word.”

June explained to Kenny: “I was looking through a book about him in the library downtown and I came across plans for the house, and then a picture, which was very weird—I mean, the furniture was all different, the stuff outside the windows. It was a picture of the living room.”

“Did you see the living room on your way in?” the mother asked.

Kenny shrugged, sure.

“It’s a very nice room, I think. But it’s meant to be photographed as much as, maybe more than, it’s to be lived in. There are a lot of inconvenient touches.”

Some kind of competition, Kenny thought, with himself as the audience; though he had the feeling that any audience would do. He was
fungible
. Neither of them was looking at the other, neither of them was exactly looking at him. That faint bitter smell. The thing that felt odd to Kenny was that there was no attempt to smooth things over, keep the ball rolling. They both seemed to be itemizing some long internal list of disappointments, one by one. Jinx Logan, six or seven months pregnant by now, sat forgotten by the window, staring over the transom at the bare leaves outside, the gray sky. She had that inward look, like she was listening to Mars on her dental work. He hadn’t seen her for a while at school, not that he was usually paying all that much attention. He wasn’t stoned today, though.

“Kenny,” Junie finally said, “come on. I want to show you my pictures.”

“Thanks. It’s good to meet you, Mrs. Williamson.”

Junie started to laugh.

“What?” Kenny asked.

“Mrs. Williamson,” Junie said. “Everybody calls her Jane. I haven’t heard anyone call her Mrs. Williamson for a long time.”

Jane Mrs. Williamson—as Kenny now thought of her—rose to the bait. “There’s nothing wrong
in itself
with trying to be polite to others,” she said. “There’s nothing necessarily false about it.”

“I didn’t say there was,” Junie said. “It’s just that nobody calls you Mrs. Williamson.”

“They call me
Doctor
Williamson at work. That doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”

“Why are you so worried about it?” Junie asked, and left before her mother could reply, pulling Kenny along in the eddy behind her. He was actively wishing he hadn’t come. As naked as he felt himself with his shabby car and schoolbooks, he wasn’t prepared for the family drama of Junie and her mother. Why couldn’t they just keep it quiet? Her mother seemed like a perfectly reasonable person, Kenny thought. And the worst part, to him, was how schoolgirl Junie’s bad acting seemed, how eighth-grade. He thought he had found a mystery at the Girl Scout camp, half-girl, half-woman, as tall as he was. Now he wondered if he had just gotten in the way of a bad mood. Incredible Shrinking Junie.

Out of place as ever and maybe worse, in his cheap clothes, he followed her up the stairs and past the Mayan goddess; stuck halfway through the birth, condemned to the most painful part forever. Or maybe past the pain, simply out of it. Kenny thought longingly of the joint in his backpack in the backseat of the car.

“I’m sorry,” Junie said. “More family shit.”

“If you figure out a way around it, let me know.”

“The thing is, you liked her, right? Everybody likes her. I like her myself. I’m the only person in the whole world that can’t get along with her.”

They were in the front hallway, but she spoke like they were in private, like there was no chance of being overheard. He thought of the brother, the mother, the pregnant friend; though he had never known Junie to be a special friend of Jinx’s. Really, he didn’t know anything.

“I just feel stuck sometimes,” she said. “Most of the time. You know, when you’re doing something and you want to stop and you can’t seem to?”

“No, I know,” he said.

“You just want to break things,” she said. “Let me know when I start apologizing again, unless you think I ought to.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have the magic words,” he said. “You know, the words where you just say them and everything’s all right again. I keep trying to find them, you know, with my father. I always end up saying the wrong thing, too.”

“It’s just embarrassing. Do you want anything? A glass of juice, coffee, beer, a glass of wine?”

“What are you having?”

“Chamomile tea.”

“I’ll try that,” Kenny said; though he would rather have had a beer, by a mile. He had a feeling there were tests he had to pass: purity, cleanliness, single-heartedness, devotion. Was he making this up? He sat at the kitchen table—teak, slate, granite—and looked out at the bare winter bones of the garden, while Junie fussed around with the kettle, the teapot.

“She’s a doctor?” Kenny asked.

“A pediatrician,” Junie said. “Injuries and diseases of children. She only works half-time these days.”

“What does your father do?”

She tensed again. If there weren’t magic words to make things better, there were certainly ones that made things worse:
Mom. Dad. Happy family
. Incantations for the nervous life.

“He’s a lawyer,” Junie said. “He was last time I saw him, anyway.”

“He doesn’t live with you?”

“No, I mean, he does,” she said. “We just don’t see him all that often. He shows up, tells us all what to do, then he goes away again. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Well, bitch bitch bitch. I mean, I have a family, you have a family, right?”

“More or less,” Kenny said.

Kenny looked up from the photographs scattered on the table in Junie’s room, and saw the first wet flakes of snow falling. They came down slowly, fat as parachutes, and melted in the black street. “I might have to go pretty soon,” he said. “I don’t want to get stuck in this.”

“Whatever you think,” she said. She wasn’t going to try to get him to stay; wasn’t even going to ask him. Not quite indifference; a matter of pride. Whatever she wanted was hidden down in the layers of camouflage.

“I just need to keep an eye on it,” he said.