The Cloaca (8 page)

To open every class the kids and Frances got out their sketchbooks and took up whatever utensil they wished, then closed their eyes. On an old boombox, Marilyn played a mix of vigorous and dolorous classical music or else plodding, whiny folk. Eyes clamped, the class responded. The point was to unfetter creativity, a stretch before a workout. Frances found it entirely useless, so she kept her eyes open. She watched the kids work. At times they would get so into the warm-up that their whole bodies bobbed and shifted, a blind wobble very close to the movements of Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. Frances had never been that committed to anything.

Keeping her eyes open reminded her of balking grace when she was little, being the only one at the dinner table looking, watching her step-mom's lips work as she prayed. Frances wasn't the only one who thought this granola free-for-all was bullshit. His eyes just visible over the line of binders, Derek was always watching.

Frances fancied that they shared an attitude towards the class, towards Marilyn, towards life. Over the weeks, the kids in the class had gotten to know each other, had formed friendships, but Derek had kept to himself. All the time he looked serious, insular, and brooding. He arrived without talking to anyone and left without talking to anyone. At the end of the night she'd watch for him in the parking lot, hoping to give him a lift like that first night. She wanted to pick his brain, if not crack it open and root around inside, just to get some clue of what his feelings about absolutely anything were. But Derek always managed to slip away.

Whatever was up that boy's craw, investigating it was enough to keep Frances coming back to class each week. She had pretty much given up on all the art stuff. Nothing she did would ever look like what it was supposed to be. More than anything, she wanted to get a look at the work Derek was doing. He drew much more intently, much more seriously than the other kids. There was lots of furious erasing. He would pause sometimes, stare seriously at Marilyn, as if for inspiration, and then set back down to work. Whether to sharpen her pencil or to go to the bathroom, Frances found as many excuses as she could to get up and pass over Derek, to sneak a peek at what he was drawing. But, hidden by binders, hidden by his hunched body, she could never get a glimpse.

That figure drawing lesson had spent what little patience Frances had left for the class. While the kids did geometry along with Marilyn, Frances imagined the conversation she would have with her after class: The world is not simple, she would start. If Marilyn had such a boner for unbridled expression, then the last thing she should be teaching these kids was that their lives are just a simple mingling of blunt pieces. For their lesson on drawing from life, Marilyn advised the class not to worry about getting all the details of a thing, but just the important ones, the ones that implied the other ones. Frances planned to tell Marilyn that all details were important, that real life was a muddle of detail, a fucking disaster of detail. To do justice to reality, the artist's job was to render the mess they observed, not pick and fucking choose. Maybe she'd throw a Goddamnit in there. Or maybe she'd fucking wink.

Impatient mothers outside the door brought the class to an end. Over the shuffle of bags being packed and zipped, Marilyn explained that their homework for the week was to choose one verb and, however they saw fit, draw its conjugation. Frances made a beeline for the teacher—she would address her as Miss Voss: “Listen, Miss Voss, about your class…” Or, “Listen, Miss Voss, about reality…” Or maybe, “Listen, Miss Voss, about your mammaries…”—but instead rushed out when she saw that Derek had already gone.

The evening before, Frances had been biking home from a book club where none of the members had read the book. Everyone had brought wine as their potluck contribution, and after discussing a glass more than she should have on an empty stomach, Frances consented to a haircut that came out too short, a pixie cut that made her look ten. A girl who annoyed everyone else in the group had picked up a curl of Frances's hair, puckered her lips, and made a mustache. And then everyone in the book club had mustaches, but started to feel sick and so dispersed early. Spotting Betsy coming up the street with a few professorial-looking friends on skateboards, Frances had cut into a park.

Rumbling along the grass, she found herself about to bike into the outfield of a baseball game. She dismounted and walked the long way around the diamond. Henderson's Waste Disposal was playing Bilson's Construction. On the Waste Disposal's bench Frances spotted a stressed mesh-back hat held together by a diaper pin that stuck out amongst the row of regular-sized heads. Coming up behind him, Frances pressed the button of Derek's hat with her thumb.

Derek shook his head furiously and spun around, daggers in his eyes. The heads of Derek's team bobbled around to look, too.

“I'm sorry,” Frances said. She wanted to grab him by the face and kiss him.

“Oh. It's Fickle Frances,” he said flatly. “You cut your hair. And grew a mustache.”

“How many homeruns have you hit so far?”

Derek leaned toward Frances's body and sniffed. “I know that smell,” he said.

“Are your parents here, slugger?” she asked. She scanned the crowed of parents, standing and talking to each other, chasing younger siblings around, or sitting in lawn chairs reading thick spy novels. No one who looked responsible for Derek.

“No,” he said. “Tonight's wok cooking.”

“When are you up?” Frances didn't believe him, but whatever the reason his parents weren't there, it was sad that they weren't. In all the weeks of class she had been mystified and sort of annoyed by him, but she'd never thought to feel sorry for the kid.

“Next.”

“Oh good. Because I'm dying, right? Is the thing. And I was hoping you could knock one out of the park for me, save my life. How about it?”

“We'll see,” he said.

“Su-weet,” Frances said, pressing the button of his hat again.

Frances clanged to the top of the small metal bleachers and sat. Fixing a rolling paper between the pages of a book on cabinet making, Frances made a small joint for the remainder of her ride home. She peeled off her mustache and let it propeller under the stands with the cigarette butts and glass.

The batter before Derek put the ball into left field and loaded the bases. After taking a few practice swings, Derek shuffled to the plate, dragging his aluminum bat behind him like a toddler dragging a stuffed animal by the leg. The crowd, the ones who were paying attention, cheered. In place of a batter's helmet like the rest of his team had, the coach had wedged a glittering red motorcycle helmet onto his skull.

The first perfect pitch Derek ignored, and did the same when the second lobbed by. Come the third, Derek listed his head over the plate. The ball ricocheted off the motorcycle helmet and back over the cage. A fat woman tipped her lawn chair, dropping her novel, getting out of the ball's harmless way.

Beside her car now, Frances saw the bus pull up and Derek lumber on. “Follow that bus,” she said to herself, engaging the ignition and taking off after him. She was dead set on seeing where he actually lived. The extremes of her imagination had him in a mansion with a wealthy and cold family, or some violent, drunk uncle in a shack by the river.

Through a few intersections and stops that weren't his, Frances rode the bus's tail, but stomped the brake to avoid running over a cat that trotted languidly into the road. While the bus turned right, the cat sat down and licked its chops, the car's headlights shining deep into the green underwater caves of its eyes. Frances gave her horn a toot, but the cat only blinked dozily like it didn't understand what she wanted from it.

When she got out of the car the tabby bobbed towards Frances with the eagerness of recognition. She bent down and offered a finger, which the cat sniffed from a few different angles and gently nibbled at before thrusting its head into her palm. The cat had a tag with a skull and crossbones on it, and on the back a stamp of “Motherfucker.” The address was halfway across town.

Motherfucker continued to purr as Frances picked her up and placed her in the passenger seat. The cat took a few concerned sniffs at the mug of ash tapped out from Frances's pre-class hoot before crawling into the backseat to explore the rubble of books. As they drove, Motherfucker came back up to the front seat and looked out the window at the neighbourhoods rambling past, from time to time being caught in her own reflection.

A wealthy girl that Frances had gone to elementary school with had lived on Motherfucker's block. Frances had attended a birthday party there and cried until the girl's parents, apparently unable to contact Frances's parents and too drunk to drive her home themselves, called a cab. She was dropped off at an empty, locked house. None of the girls at Bad Service had been alive then, neither had Betsy, and Derek had been so far off. The Gadets, the neighbours to the right side of the house weren't home, and the Greens, to the left, terrified Frances. There were stories around school about the oldest son, Ronny, who supposedly went around stealing girls' private parts—whatever that meant. Hiding in a tree fort in the backyard Frances had cried, and pissed herself, and fallen asleep. She woke up in her bedroom the next morning with a twenty dollar bill under her pillow. From the Apology Fairy, her parents claimed.

The neighbourhood was a mix of ivied, pillared century homes with newer houses crammed onto what used to be the spacious single lots. Motherfucker's address turned out to be one of the old, elegant houses, though when Frances pulled up to it she spotted vines of old Christmas lights winding along the eaves and a pot leaf flag hung in one of the top windows.

Motherfucker's soft motor kept running in Frances's arms as she got out of the car, but as soon as the house came into view the tabby started to squirm, fidget, and grumble. Frances struggled with Motherfucker like she was too many bags of groceries, until the cat swatted and caught her nose. Frances opened her arms to let her drop.

Motherfucker hit the ground running and galloped away into the dark.

“Motherfucker!” she wanted to call out into the night after it, but didn't, though the light in the window with the pot leaf in it came on, as if she had.

Frances was taking a break from pot, so she was getting drunk on her day off. All afternoon she had been dismantling an old rotary phone and gluing the guts of it onto a slate of wood she found in the shed out back. She was always coming up with plans for that shed. Clear it out and turn it into a workshop, or a small gallery for local artists, or it could be a jam space where she could learn the accordion already, or a rival karate studio, or a detective agency just to see what would happen. She could learn how to fix bikes—she had a book on bikes from the library that was about half a year overdue—and then she could fix all the bikes that had been abandoned in there over the years by her many roommates, and give them away. Frances had gone out to the shed to start on one of those plans before class that night, but found the phone and the wood in there and did that instead.

Break the phone down into its smallest pieces and then present the individual simplicity of this complicatedly simple machine by naming each doodad, thingamabobber, and whatchit by its right name. That was the idea. Except Frances had no idea what any of the pieces were actually called so she quit. With time still before class, she tucked into another bottle of wine, changed into her gi, and fell asleep on the couch watching a VHS of
Golden Girls
episodes.

Ringing woke her up. Briefly, Frances stared, groggy and amazed, at the eviscerated phone on the coffee table. The living room had been practically aglow when she fell asleep, but was blue and eerie with streetlights now. More awake, Frances picked up the cordless next to her art project. On the other end was the noise of a bad connection.

“Hello?” a small voice ventured out of all that wind.

“Hello?”

“You weren't in class tonight.”

“Derek?” There was surge of complicated clatter.

“It's my tenth birthday this weekend,” the little voice said. “I handed out invitations tonight. You weren't there.”

“I guess I was sick.”

“So do you want to come to my party? It's Saturday. At my house.”

The address Derek gave was only a few blocks from her own, on the opposite side of town from where she had dropped him off.

“There'll be prize bags,” he said, and hung up.

Frances dialled the number back. She let it ring until someone picked up.

“Derek?”

“This's Ben,” the someone said. In the background, a clatter and cheer, and the incoherent sound of music being played too loudly. “Who is this?”

“Frances?”

“Want to come bowling, Frances?”

“Ben?”

“Yes, Frances.”

“There isn't a redheaded kid there with a head the size of a boulder, is there?”

“Don't see one,” Ben said.

“Okay. Never mind.”

“Frances?”

“Yes Ben?”

“I was on my way to go pee and this phone was ringing so I picked it up and I answered it.”

“Thanks for answering, Ben. Have a good pee.”

“You too, Frances. Come bowling. Everyone's here.”

Frances hung up and decided to go to the alley and find Ben. She pictured him in his mid-twenties, gel-spiked hair and too much cologne; a polo shirt and khakis guy. They would hit it off but they wouldn't keep in touch. The night would just be this weird, remarkable, fun thing that happened to the both of them, on a lark. Then she would join a bowling league. She would book Sunday mornings off from Bad Service for games. The owner would understand. She would buy custom shoes, and one of those wrist guard things—whatever those things were. She would get her own fancy ball, maybe sparkling and vibrant like Derek's batting helmet. And she would get to know all these men she would not otherwise know. Men with big, hard stomachs, and mustaches. And she would get to know their lives, and their families, and she would start playing softball with them too. They'd start her off in the outfield, but gradually she would work her way up to becoming the star pitcher—Fireball Frances. Scouts would start showing up to games, watching her closely, whispering to one another, making cramped notes in their little notebooks.