Moo (26 page)

He made a small note to that effect for his knowledge and information paper.

M
ARY HAD
a fever of 102, and every time she tried to stand up, it felt as though chills were cascading down her body. So, she was lying in bed, covered up to her chin, with a cool washcloth on her forehead that Keri had put there as some sort of rural folk remedy. Nor would Keri allow her to take aspirin, hadn’t she heard of Reye’s syndrome? Only Tylenol, but they didn’t have any Tylenol, so Keri had gone to get some.

Otherwise Mary would have left the room and gone to the lounge, in order to avoid listening to Sherri whine over the telephone to her mother and father, who had just received her midterm grades.

She whined, “It’s really hard here. I wasn’t exactly prepared.”

She whined, “I did learn things. I haven’t been wasting time.”

She whined, “I know it costs a lot. Geez, I know exactly how much it costs, for Christ’s sake.”

She whined, “I’m sorry. No, I haven’t learned to talk that way from my roommates.” She looked over at Mary, and made a face. “I’m just frustrated, is all.”

She whined, “I know it’s a privilege you and Daddy didn’t have. Well, I am sorry.”

She whined, “I am. I really AM. I thought I sounded sorry. I tried to sound sorry.” A pause. “Because I AM sorry!”

Mary’s grades had not gone home, because she had gotten no F’s or D’s. She had even gotten a B– on her calculus test, which meant that statistically (in her calculus course, the computer grading system spit out a merciless curve) she was above the fiftieth percentile, which meant that more than 50 percent of the students had an even more tenuous grasp on calculus than she did, which was, in its way, almost frightening. At least it was if you had a fever of 102 and discrete, unpleasant ideas were rolling around in your head like steel pinballs, making a lot of noise and lighting up various feelings, all of them negative.

Sherri whined, “Well, it’s hard for everybody. Nobody did great, not even Diane. I don’t see why you’re so mad. Daddy isn’t that mad, and he’s the one who’s paying.”

She whined, “I know. I’m sorry. I AM sorry. I know. I know.”

Sherri had gotten two F’s and a C–, which meant that her grade average was .94, not even a D, and that if she didn’t bring it up, didn’t in fact double it, she would be out at the end of the semester.

Sherri whined, “Yes, my hair is red. I dyed it. Can we talk about that another time?”

She opened her little refrigerator and took out a pack of cigarettes. Then she brandished a mineral water in Mary’s direction, but Mary shook her head. An open one that she hadn’t been able to finish sat on the desk beside her bed.

Finally, Sherri whined, “Well, I AM going to do better, okay? I promise. I PROMISE. Okay, then. Okay, bye.” She hung up and went over to the window, where she lit her cigarette. Between puffs, she held it out the partially opened window. When Mary assayed a little cough, she said, “I know, I know. Tobacco is bad for the soil, bad for the workers, bad for the public health, and bad for the body. I’m a sucker.” This litany, made up by Keri, was something the other girls had employed to persuade Sherri to stop smoking, but so far it hadn’t worked.

She whined, “God! She just went on and on.”

Mary felt like her bed was rocking, or her head was sloshing. One or the other. One or the other. One or the other.

Sherri said, “You going to throw up again?”

“I don’t know.”

Sherri stubbed out her cigarette and ran for the bucket in the maintenance closet in the hall, where Diane had left it to dry after washing it out from the last time. She set it by the bed, then she felt the washcloth, which had heated up, and carried it over to the sink and wrung it out in cold water. She seemed to share this belief in the efficacy of the washcloth. She and Keri had been faithful and firm about keeping it on Mary’s forehead.

What with Mary’s virus and Sherri’s grades and some kind of snit Diane was in about Bob, the girls had been spending more time together and it hadn’t been so bad, really. Okay, Mary admitted, they were taking the opportunity to hide out in their room, to not go forth in the various ways that demanded bravery of them, or at least
fortitude. They were eating chicken soup made on a hot plate, and popcorn, and Cheez-it crackers, and tortilla chips with salsa. They were doing their hair and their nails and their laundry. They were turning down dates. Mary had even told Hassan not to come see her—he could give the stuffed grape leaves somebody in married student housing had made for her to Keri.

Keri had turned into the mom, and that was okay, too. She made the soup and the popcorn, picked dishes off the floor and washed them, took Mary’s temperature, called Student Health for advice, set the example of how to huddle in close quarters by keeping her bed made and her clothes folded and put away. She had bought the mineral water. Soon she would be back with the Tylenol. The cocoon was warm and comfortable and private. Outside it was chilly and gray. Mary closed her eyes.

Sherri went over to the window and lit another cigarette. She held it out as far as she could, but it was starting to rain. She bent down and put her nose to the crack of the open window. The moist, cold air felt good on her hot cheeks, but she didn’t want to go out into it. She didn’t want to do anything but smoke and sit around. That was her problem. She could see that Mary was falling asleep. It would be a perfect time to go over to her desk and at least read her English assignment, a relatively painless activity compared to the others. But she couldn’t move, except to bend down from time to time and feel the outer chill. She knew this sloth was a sin, a sin to match all the others she had committed since coming to school—lust (she had slept with three different near-strangers, one of them twice), gluttony (she had gained at least five pounds going out for pizza after supper), covetousness (one of the guys she had slept with was going with a girl from her high school, and she’d only gotten interested in him because Doreen had always dated the cutest guys and made a big deal of it, which pissed her off), anger (every time her mother called), envy (she kept it quiet, but it circulated—Keri could eat anything, Mary had great clothes, Diane, at least until lately, had fallen into this great sex thing), and pride. Well, pride. Pride was what kept you from admitting you had any problems, even when everybody knew you did.

The thing was, whether or not virtue was in fact its own reward, it did seem like sin was its own punishment.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t think about changing her ways. She did.
But the thoughts came to her idly, without conviction. Just as now she thought idly about reading her English assignment, she often thought idly about stopping smoking, which she had, in fact, just started, and didn’t like all that much, she thought idly about going to classes, she thought idly about going to the library, she thought idly about going to her computer station and accessing her geology problems. She thought idly about not taking two desserts when she went through the dinner line. The food in Dubuque House was good—everyone helped cook and one of the rewards of multiculturalism was a spicy and delicious diet. The thing was, she had let down completely. The thing was, every thought of her family served to show her a way to let down even further than she had suspected was possible. It seemed like every brick wall that she ran into, that was supposed to hurt her enough to shake her up and give her some conviction, just turned into a door and she passed through it into deeper inertia. She stubbed out her cigarette and lay back limply on Diane’s bed.

The thing was, one day last week when she’d gotten to her English class, the teacher and some of the students who always sat in the front row were laughing about a memo the teacher (whose name Sherri still wasn’t quite sure of) had gotten in which the students were called “customers.” Now it was true that Sherri had come in late, and also true that she owed the teacher two papers, so she hadn’t wanted to attract the woman’s attention any more than necessary, but she’d found the laughter confusing at first, then aggravating. When the teacher tried to widen the discussion by asking what the others thought about the difference between “students” and “customers,” Sherri had maintained the same appearance of benign ignorance and noncommittal good will that the other freshmen had, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have an opinion. In fact, they all had the same opinion, which they expressed to one another after class—if they were paying all this money, then they must be customers, and if they were customers, then why was that particular English teacher so bo-o-o-o-ring? Factory reject? Candidate for manufacturer’s recall? Obsolete model? Was the total tedium of their class due to mechanical failure or pilot error? Well, it had made them all laugh afterward in the hall outside of class. But now, limp on her bed, Sherri decided it wasn’t funny. The fact was, she wasn’t getting what she was paying for, which was—what? She couldn’t define it, exactly. But she knew this limp,
irritable feeling well enough. It was the sensation of consumer dissatisfaction, and it was soooooo annoying.

The sound of Mary rustling and gagging roused her. She jumped up and ran across the room, managing to catch the washcloth before it fell into the bucket. She held Mary’s forehead and patted her back and tried not to look at the bucket.

Assignment: You are to rewrite the story you have chosen to revise from the point of view of another character in your story. It is risky to choose (1) a pet’s point of view, (2) the point of view of a piece of furniture or a fly on the wall, (3) the point of view of one of your character’s alternative personalities. These and other tricks have been tried before and have, invariably, failed. Your goal is to enrich your portrait of both the old point-of-view character and the new one. You have a certain amount of leeway in changing the plot of your story, but it should be recognizably the same story.

Oct. 25, 1989
Monahan, FW 325

“The Boy,” version #3

a story by Gary Olson

Although he kept quiet about them, and he was only eight, Larry had some extra powers that he didn’t really understand. For example, he could see around corners, and he could remember his whole life, all the way back to being born. He didn’t let himself remember the early part of his life very often, though, because it made him too sad. That was when his mother, Lydia, had been younger and prettier and thinner and happier. That was when his father had come home every night right after work to have dinner with her and play with him, Larry. They were a happy famly then, and Larry missed that now. The extra powers seemed to make him see things that made him sad rather than happy.

“Lydia and Larry”

a story by Gary Olson

Larry knew he had lost his mom—she had been taken away one night by the police, and an enormous fat woman who didn’t love him had been supplied in her place, a real screamer. They had also supplied another child, his supposed sister, Allison, but in fact Allison came from another family entirely. Larry thought it was very weird that his father, Lyle, hadn’t noticed the switch, but Lyle was very busy in his job, and often worked two shifts, so he didn’t notice much of anything.

Some days, Larry tried to get the new mom to admit that she wasn’t Lydia, and he never really did, but she always started screaming at him, and that was a dead giveaway. His real mom had never screamed at him, and he could remember many times when he would be lying in her arms, looking up at her, and she would be smiling down at him, and he knew he was going to get to suck her breast

“Lyle”

a story by Gary Olson

Lyle Karstensen often wondered whether it was him who was really to blame for what had happened to his wife, Lydia. He knew now, looking back ten years to their years at college, that he hadn’t really appreciated Lydia, and that she had stuck by him in spite of the many ways that he had ignored or belittled her. For example, he remembered how he would make her sleep in filthy dirty sheets until she made up her mind to wash them. He remembered how he had let the pizza boxes stack up in his room, even though his roommates had thought it was disgusting. And he remembered how jealous he had been of his roommate Larry, whom he thought Lydia was paying too much attention to. That was why, after Larry was killed in a terrible accident, trying to save some elderly people in a fire, Lyle had named his firstborn son after Larry.

The fire had taken place in Los Angeles, where Larry was directing his first movie at the lowly age of twenty-five. He had written the script, too, and everyone was very excited about the project. But he lived down the street from a group home for elderly people, and
when, in the middle of one night, the faulty electric wiring started to burn, Larry had thought nothing of

Mr. Monahan—

I have worked very hard on this paper. I really have been working every day, like you said, for forty-five minutes or an hour, and rewarding myself for it, trying to build good habits. But I am not getting anywhere. Here are my beginnings, just to show you that I
HAVE
been working. I hope you will not grade these. I will try again for next week.

E
VEN THOUGH
Bob Carlson was of absolutely no use to her, Diane found that she was taking a surprisingly active role in pursuing their relationship. This was clearly not a good idea, since it implied a certain attachment on her part that did not conform to her plans. This did not mean that she didn’t date other guys—she had dated a Theta Chi, a Sigma Chi, a TKE, and a DKE. All four had taken her to fraternity parties where she had witnessed her future made present, and honed her social and flirtation skills. All four dates had been big successes, but each of the four boys she had gone out with had been a trial. They only wanted to kiss when they were drunk, and then their kisses were overabundantly wet. They didn’t want to actually talk to her, just to have her on hand while they talked to their fraternity brothers. Worst of all, when she resisted getting particularly drunk herself (in the interests of further study), their attention shifted to other girls in the room who were moving more rapidly toward unconsciousness.