Wonderland Page 5

  “So tell them to go to hell,” their mother said.

  “But what is he going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Ask him when he comes in. Ask him yourself.”

  This confession of his mother’s—that she knew no more than Jesse himself—stunned him. He stared at her. He felt perplexed, resentful, cheated. The food he had been eating was cold. What he’d eaten was a cold hard little ball in his stomach. The hell with food. The hell with breakfast, this breakfast table, these people sitting and staring at one another, their faces flushed and frightened.

  “All right,” Jesse said, “I will.”

  “You damn little loudmouth!” Jean said savagely.

  “Watch your mouth yourself,” their mother said. Her face was weary and yet bright, as radiant as Jean’s. It was as if she were dancing closer and closer to a central, furious heat, a core of brilliance she did not dare touch. Once or twice she glanced over her shoulder, to the window Jesse had been staring at. Did she expect to see his face there …? Yet when she looked back at them it was Jean she looked at. Always Jean. Jean, two years older than Jesse, with the figure of a small, mature woman, her lipstick too brightly red, her breasts pushing too aggressively against the front of her dress. Jesse felt how they excluded him, his mother and his sister. He hated Jean. He hated his mother too when she was like this—united in that fierce, sullen, silent understanding with Jean, the two of them selfishly shut off from everyone else.

  “If you’re going out, go on and go,” Jean taunted Jesse.

  Jesse got to his feet.

  “I hope he lays your fat mouth open,” Jean muttered.

  “Jesse,” said their mother.

  “What?”

  “Sit down.”

  He remained standing, his legs apart. He stared at his mother.

  “Sit down and finish your breakfast.”

  “Why?”

  “I said sit down.”

  “I finished it, I’m through.”

  “Don’t you go bothering your father, not this morning. Get it out of your head. He wants to be alone.”

  “I’ll ask him.”

  “I said not to bother him.”

  Jesse was so angry, so agitated, that a flame seemed to pass over his brain. He seemed to see his father’s face, right here at the table, an ordinary suppertime and his father’s reddened, muscular face, his cheeks bunched with food, his jaws moving with the effort of grinding up food—chewing, chewing, eating hungrily, eating fast, never getting enough—his neck not clean, lined with grease from work in the garage, the cords of his neck standing out strong and hungry.

  “Why?”

  Around the table in this kitchen, all of them frightened. Outside there was air so cold it might hurt. Inside, their breaths mixing hotly together, and Jesse standing above them, staring at them, around at the faces, looking from face to face, his own eyes powerful, as if protruding slightly from their sockets, pushed forward by an enormous angry hurt.… They were all quiet. Even Bob. Even the dog. Jesse wanted to shut his eyes and turn away from them. The hell with this, all of this. But something tickled in his throat, the beginning of a sob. He could not speak. He loved them and he could not speak. He did not want to see, so clearly, his mother’s tired, frightened face, the way her head lifted from her neck, birdlike and wary and sharp, as if listening all the while to that sound that was behind the static on the radio, the sound of someone’s boots outside on the crusty ground.… He did not want to see his little brother’s face, his silky hair, he did not want to trade looks with Jean, who always knew more than he did, and whose scared, bold, make-up face might tell him more than he wanted to know. He did not even want to look at Shirley—her dumb freckled face, her brown hair in snarls, her amazement at the way this breakfast had turned out.

  “All right, I’ll go live with Grandpa!” Jesse shouted.

  He had not known he would say this. He had never even thought about it before.

  But his mother accepted his words, his ugly shout, and with an ugly shout of her own brought the flat of her hand down hard on the table.

  “Go to hell, then, if that’s how you feel, go right to hell and get out of here!” she cried.

  Jesse ran out of the room.

  He went to the woodshed and yanked on his boots. His heart pounded violently. The tickling in his throat became painful. He began to cry soundlessly. Back in the kitchen his mother was saying something—her voice mixing with Jean’s in exasperation and anger. What had he said? But he would not go back to say he was sorry. Would not go back. No. He would go to school and get out of here. The stink of that gas stove! The stink of this woodshed, piled with junk, boxes and crates of junk, probably hiding the corpses of little animals that had crawled in here for warmth and died! And his mother’s anger, his mother’s fear.… He could not stand it.

  He ran out to wait for the school bus.

  Shivering. A light rain fell. In a few minutes Jean and Shirley trudged out to join him. Jean handed him his lunch bag.

  “Little bastard,” she whispered.

  Shivering, he could not stop shivering. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He would not let them see he’d been crying; the hell with them. The cat wandered over. Jesse took no notice. Shirley stooped to pick it up, crooning to it. Jesse looked back at the gas station—there, the windows boarded up, the sign that said Closed—a small stucco building at the corner of Yewville Road and the Moran Creek Road, with two gas pumps. Behind it a patch of land, gone over to dump heaps of motorcycles and cars, partly dismantled, a few jalopies on blocks, a pile of rubber and metal and lengths of wire. And, behind that, across a small ditch that had frozen over, the house itself—the house. Attached to the house a woodshed. Behind the house an old coop. In the driveway their father’s car, a 1930 Ford. Behind this was a clump of trees that divided their land from the Brennan land, at this end mostly trees and bushes.

  Was his father hiding in the Brennans’ woods? Sitting on a log, smoking, tossing down the cigarette butts and grinding them out with his heel?

  Jean said nothing to Jesse. He felt the stern, angry glare of her hatred tingling the side of his face and he did not look at her. The air was very cold. It seemed to pierce their lungs, to numb them. Hazy pale light radiated from the sun and could not penetrate the clouds. Jesse kept narrowing his eyes, sensing that Jean watched him. His eyes pinched at the corners as if ready to shield him from something he should not see. At the horizon, down the road where the school bus would first appear, a clump of thick dark clouds had formed. Jesse guessed it would snow that day.

  “Little loudmouth bastard,” Jean whispered.

  The school bus has appeared, has stopped, has taken them to Yewville; and now he is in school, safe in the warm stinking lavatory, safe and weak. He thinks still of that morning and the smell of oatmeal and milk. He thinks of his mother’s face. Why had he said that? Why those particular words? I’ll go live with Grandpa. He doesn’t like his Grandfather Vogel, hardly knows him, because there is bad feeling between his grandfather and his father. A fight over borrowed money, and over a motorcycle race that Jesse’s father had had once on the old man’s farm. He chooses his father over his grandfather, of course. His grandfather is a stranger to him. His father is so near that his face can explode in Jesse’s head, startling him with its intimacy, its power. He sees that face. The blood rushing into it, animating it. Sometimes, sitting around in the garage with his friends, his father tells jokes, they hang around out back, perched on motorcycles, their legs spread lazily apart as though they are content to sit for hours, talking, laughing with their short, hacking laughs. Jesse loves to hear his father talk to other men. Telling jokes. Kidding. Telling stories. His father’s voice rises with the men’s voices, wrestling with them, bringing them down. They are all mocking. They laugh a lot, mockingly. Jesse hovers nearby, not quite with them and not quite excluded. His father glances at him out of the corner of his eye, to see if he is listening. His father’s stories move
fast: And then I … and then I.… Stories of fist fights at country picnics, fairs, firemen’s outings; at Lake Ontario; at taverns on the highway. Stories of races, stockcar and motorcycle races … and Jesse can sense in his father and his friends, these unshaven, big-thighed, muscular men, with their stomachs a little flabby, their hair thinning, an excitement that has nothing to do with this back yard of junk, the odor of smoldering rubber from a fire that is perpetually burning invisibly, an excitement that shows itself most starkly in Jesse’s father’s face, which they all watch. Though he is sitting on the soiled, scuffed saddle of a motorcycle, his booted heels hard in the ground, his face is turned to the sun, the searing wind of a race, his eyes are narrowed as if sizing up his chances for coming out of a turn, beating out someone else. This face is not flat or soft, like the faces of other men. It is massive, somehow—the long nose rising eagerly out of its bluish depths, the shrewd, squinting eyes fixed deep in sockets and very quick, turning from side to side, having to see everything. A strange hard whiteness to the whites of his eyes. The dark part fierce, dazzling. He is urgent in his retelling of a fight or a race, talking fast, a little too loud. They lean toward him to listen. He draws them forward—their eyes, their nerves—his voice moving on imploring and hot and hard, while his wavy hair lifts above his forehead like a rooster’s comb, stiff with excitement. His arms are bare to the shoulders, where his sleeves have been cut off. Big arms, biceps, big shoulders. His shirt, opened at the top, shows tufts of dark curly hair. He is always checking a watch he wears on a black leather band, as if time is important to him, even shaking the watch to make sure it is running, as if he has other things he must do, other places to be right now, and his days were not these long sluggish afternoons of talk and beer.…

  His father’s nearness unsettles him. That face caught in his brain, a face brought up close to Jesse’s own face. He can almost smell his father’s tobaccoey breath. Almost hear his hawkish laugh. He shakes his head to clear it. He examines the walls of this lavatory: words that have been scribbled everywhere, some of them fresh, some crossed out, rubbed out, scrubbed away. A drawing catches his eye, intricate and detailed and puzzling—a woman’s body seen from the bottom up, the legs muscular and very long, spread apart, the head at the far end of the body small as a pea, with eyes and eyelashes nevertheless drawn in very carefully so that they look real. Someone has added to the drawing with another, blunter pencil, making the body boxlike, the space between the legs shaded in to a hard black rectangle like a door. The arms have also been changed to walls and even the suggestion of brick added to them.… It is a mysterious drawing, two mysterious drawings, one on top of the other like a dream that fades into another dream, a nightmare conquered by another! Jesse stares at it. He has probably seen it before but he hasn’t bothered to examine it. It is freakish, it is somehow unsettling. Better not to look at it.… But why did the second boy make the body a house, with walls and entrances? A house or a barn or a warehouse. It is something you could walk into and lose yourself in, all that empty blackness.… And at the top of it that head, far away, that small round head, watching you patiently.

  Jesse thinks suddenly of his mother, of her anger. Why did he say that to her? He is a stupid fool, a bastard. A loudmouthed bastard, yes. I’ll go live with Grandpa. And she had shouted for him to get out, to get out—Sometimes, late at night, she shouted at his father. His father stayed out and when he came home there might be a fight. And Jesse would lie in bed, straight as a statue, listening. He knew that Jean and Shirley were both awake and listening, and Bob, in his parents’ room, was awake, whimpering, cringing in his bed. Jesse did not try to make sense of the fights. They stormed one way, then turned abruptly and stormed back. It was really like a storm in the house, gusts of wind that whirled and turned frantically. Once Jesse had seen his mother slap his father, a hard clapping blow to the face. She had been shaking a shirt of his at him, shaking it like a maniac, screaming … and his father had backed up, grinning stupidly, trying to make a joke of it. But that blow to the face, turning his father’s handsome high-colored face aside, making the eyes jerk to slits, the forehead furrowed, the thick dark hair rising like a crest!—that had not been a joke, no. No joke.

  So on those nights he lay straight as a statue. He thought of himself as a statue on the prow of a ship—thinking of pictures in the history textbooks of ships with figures on their prows, the figures of women, smoothed as if by the caressing of centuries of freezing water, the faces blank and calm and neutral, turned out into the storm of the sea. Unchanging. Jesse would lie in bed, his hands folded across his chest, his knees straight. He heard everything. He heard nothing.

  Listening.

  Not listening.

  This day is filling with bits of ice, he sees. He stands at the window, which won’t open any higher. The lavatory smells bad, it is overheated with a dry, stuffy heat. The radiators are always knocking. Jesse grunts, trying to push the window up higher. The frame is warped. At the bottom sill there is a thin crust of ice, a tiny drift of ice. Cold air blows in against Jesse’s cheeks. A relief, this cold air … air to turn the lungs into ice.… He should return to the auditorium, he thinks. His seat is vacant. Everyone will see that he is still gone. If someone is sick and stays away too long, they send someone else after him. A male teacher. Or Mr. Fuller himself. He should go back to the auditorium, but he is too weak. He should go home. He should go home.

  Before it is too late.

  He stands breathing in the cold air. It is clean, it refreshes him. He spits into the sink. He runs water from the rusty tap and tries to rinse out his mouth. The taste of vomit. This sink becomes the basin at home, with its scuffed, scoured bottom. Rusty brown streaks showing through the white. At the back of his mind is music, the sound of children’s voices, angelic voices, singing. Singing words he can’t hear. There is a slight rhythmical feel to the day. His eyes partly close, as if he were trying to hear those words, trying to hear the mystery in the notes, the relationship of notes, the percussive sounding of the rhythm. But he does not know anything about music, he doesn’t know what music is, he senses only its calming, caressing secrecy, its hypnotic power, the way it works to turn off the mind.

  The door of the lavatory opens suddenly.

  It is Mr. Fuller.

  “Jesse—?”

  Jesse whirls around, startled. Guilty. He feels as if someone has been spying on him all this time.

  “I was … I had to … I had to throw up,” he says.

  Mr. Fuller nods in embarrassment.

  “I’m all right now,” Jesse says.

  Mr. Fuller looks at him doubtfully. “Do you think you have the flu?”

  “No, I’m all right now.”

  “Does anyone in your family have the flu?”

  This man, Mr. Fuller, is edgy and embarrassed. He does not like to meet Jesse’s gaze directly.

  “No. Everything is all right. Nobody’s sick,” Jesse says at once.

  “You look a little … a little sick.… You look feverish.”

  Jesse feels his face. Yes, it is very warm.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, not knowing what he is saying.

  “Maybe you’d better go home,” Mr. Fuller says.

  “I have to work after school,” Jesse says.

  He wonders if these words have been too abrupt, if Mr. Fuller will think he is arguing with him. Jesse tries to smile. He thinks of how much taller, stronger, how much better his father is than Mr. Fuller. His own father a better man than this man, though everything he tries goes wrong. The gas station. Before that, a lumberyard. Before that, a diner on the highway. When Jesse was very small, his father had tried to raise chickens and pigs on a brokendown farm his parents had owned. In those days they had lived in the deep country, the real country, back on a dirt road, no electricity, no neighbors, “no nothing,” as his mother would say, speaking sourly of those years. Mr. Fuller lived in Yewville, somewhere near school. Nobody talked about him except to make j
okes. They mocked him behind his back. But to his face they were afraid of him, even the older boys were afraid. He had a stern, pale, pasty anger in him, a weak man’s anger, quick to be released. His voice, when raised, sounded shrill and alarming. He was all right in Yewville, because he had a job and everyone knew him. Everyone knew Willard Harte too, and didn’t dare to make jokes about him, but he wasn’t all right. There was something wrong with him. Something wrong. You couldn’t figure out why, what made the difference between these two men. There had to be a difference. If Willard Harte were to rush into this room, his hair wavy and stiff, his footsteps making the floor shudder, Mr. Fuller would have to step back; there wouldn’t be room for both of them. If Willard Harte were to tell one of his jokes, laughing and moving his big hands around, drawing shapes out of the air, Mr. Fuller would have to retreat, to cringe … that nervous smile of his would be no match for Willard Harte’s grin. Willard Harte was tall—about six feet four inches—and his shoulders were broad with a restless, urgent look to them, even under his clothes, and the cords and arteries in his neck looked urgent too, impatient with silence or with standing too long in one place. You had to keep on the move! Had to keep going! Out hunting, Willard Harte always took the lead. His friends’ dogs sidled up to him, bending their heads to him, panting to be petted by him, grateful when he rubbed their heads with the stock of his shotgun. Mr. Fuller, who had lived all his life in Yewville, who did not hunt and would have been frightened of a gun, would have to retreat in shame before Willard Harte. Shouldn’t Jesse feel pride in that?

  But no pride. Nothing. He feels shabby and meager in this man’s eyes—just a boy from the country in overalls, Willard Harte’s son.

  “There’s no need to return to assembly,” Mr. Fuller says.

  “Thank you,” Jesse says.

  Left alone, he feels relief; then he feels a peculiar looseness, a lightening, as if he has been abandoned. His face is very warm, maybe feverish. Maybe he is sick? It will be a relief to be sick, he thinks, to lie in bed and have his mother worry over him. He thinks of what he had to eat for breakfast that morning—but it is gone, vomited away, not enough left to make him sick again. He has a fear of being sick to his stomach in front of other people, but his stomach seems empty now, so he steps out into the hall. Strange, to be alone here. The corridor is deserted and he can do anything he wants. No one is watching. Up and down the narrow hall there are decorations for Christmas the girls put up—bells that open up, made of red crepe paper, slick paper cutouts of Santa Claus, angels made of tinfoil—and they wobble in his eye. He would like to tear them all down. He walks quickly to his locker, which is in the ninth-grade corner. Nearby, a picture of Abraham Lincoln, high on the wall, has been decorated with green and red crepe paper. Down the hall George Washington’s heavy ornate frame has been decorated the same way. Jesse puts on his frayed, quilted blue jacket, feeling that he was mistaken in thinking no one was watching him: the men in these old portraits are watching him. Kindly, abstract, surrounded by fuzz or clouds, these dead men contemplate Jesse with their pitying eyes and seem reluctant to let go of him. He yanks on his boots, noticing that they are beginning to wear out above the heel, where he has kicked them against the porch steps to get them off. Too bad. The hell with it. He puts on his mittens, which his mother had knitted last year, runs feverishly to the door, his boots flopping about him. No time to fasten them. He doesn’t care, he only wants to get out of that school, as if he senses he is finished with it.