It’s a path that takes me through the neighborhoods of town, from the stately homes where the stinking-rich people live, to the smaller, more provincial houses like mine, something just slightly above a hovel. I walk from the shores of Lake Michigan inland, where the waterfront community becomes bucolic. I pass the schools, an elementary school, a middle school and a high school, all three lined in a row, three bland, light brick buildings that have to bus kids in from surrounding towns to fill the halls. The American flag flutters before each one, beating in the wayward wind like the webbed hands of a bat’s wings. The noise is loud; not a single bat, but a colony of bats. There are kids outside, on the playground, thronged together to keep warm, gym classes in uniform running laps around the archaic high school track. A fire engine soars by, lights and sirens blasting—the town’s volunteer fire department. I stand on the side of the road and watch it go, looking for signs of smoke in the distance, its four big tires kicking gravel up along the road. I hope Pops hasn’t managed to start our own house on fire. Thankfully they head the other way of our home.
I continue on, past the old Protestant church, the old cemetery, the new cemetery, the café. I lumber beneath power lines, listening to the electricity’s buzz; I tread past farms, past desiccated stalks of corn, stripped of produce and waiting to be cut down; past livestock farms with fat cows and thin cows and everything-in-between cows. It’s Michigan, the Midwest, our town right on the rim of the Corn Belt; you don’t have to walk too far in any one direction to see a farm. I walk in circles, having nothing better to do with my day. Work would be a blessing, a lucky break. But today I don’t work.
In time I find my way to the old beachfront carousel, closed this time of year. I wonder if, perhaps, Pearl will be here. She’s not, not that I can see. But I scale the partition, anyway, and take my place on the sea serpent chariot, some kind of mythological blue creature, part dragon, part snake. The seat is hard and cold, an ornate, Victorian design, and though now it’s still and quiet, I hear the tunes of Rogers and Hammerstein playing in my mind. That and a stranded aluminum can, one that gets propelled across the asphalt parking lot by the wind, making a racket. Hard to believe one can—lifted from the jam-packed garbage bin by the deranged November air—would make so much noise. And yet it does, lurching back and forth across the lot like a ship in a sea storm.
There’s a girl who lives there at the periphery of my dreams: a cross between Leigh Forney, the girl who stole my twelve-year-old heart, and a whole assemblage of girls I think I’ve been in love with, from Hollywood starlets like Selena Gomez to the weather lady on the Kalamazoo news. She’s part of the dream, too, this composite of a girl with an oval face and fair skin and close-set hazel eyes, eyes that sit right there at the bridge of the button nose. Her hair is light brown, like caramel, and smooth; in my dreams it glides on the surface of the wind, always drifting. Her smile is wide and airy. Carefree. She doesn’t reside in the deepest stages of sleep, REM sleep, where most of my vivid nightmares exist, the reoccurring dreams where Pops drinks himself to death, or burns the house to smithereens with the both of us trapped inside. Rather, she lives in the place of light sleep, where the variance between sleep and awake is often blurred. She lives with me in the moments before I fall asleep for the night, and in those moments that I wake up, coming to, pulling myself from sleep, this ethereal figure who strokes my cheek or grazes my arm, or pulls me by the hand, whispering, Let’s go...though always—always—as I become fully roused from sleep, does she decide to leave, dematerializing before my eyes. When fully awake it’s impossible to summon her hair or her eyes or her blithe smile, though when I close my eyes I know that she’ll be there, calling me, rallying me to leave. Let’s go...
When I was twelve years old I kissed Leigh Forney for the very first time. The very first and the very last time, right here, on this sea serpent chariot. It was summer, nighttime, and the carousel was—as it is now—quiet. The park was empty for the night. I’d carried my telescope to the park where, on the beach’s edge, we sat in the sand and stared through the eyepiece, me pointing out the Double Cluster, the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, and she pretending to care. Or maybe she really did care. I don’t know. Leigh was a childhood friend of mine, the kind I’d played kick the can with when I was five years old. She lived just down the street in a 1950s tract home like mine. I’d lugged that bulky telescope all the way from my house—arms burning by the time I arrived—with the promise I had something to show her, something cool. Something I thought she’d enjoy. Why we didn’t just look through the telescope at home, I don’t know. I thought this would be more special. And she did, for a minute or two, she did enjoy it, and then she said, “Bet I can beat you to the carousel,” and like that, we were off and running, feet sinking in sand, through the parking lot, and over the orange partition onto the sleepy carousel. We forgot all about the telescope and the nighttime sky. We fell, laughing, onto the chariot. I’d let her win as I had so many times before when we raced from her house to mine or mine to hers.
And it was then and there that she kissed me, the stiff, wooden kiss of two twelve-year-old kids. For me, not much has changed since that day. It’s hard to get good at something when you never practice. But I’m betting Leigh has learned a thing or two over the years.
After that we sat in silence, knowing we would never go back to being friends; something had changed with that kiss. If it could even be called a kiss, the way we sat, lip to lip, for two seconds at best.
By the time we made our way back to the beach so I could retrieve my telescope, someone else was there, a handful of jocks from the middle school’s basketball team, staring through the eyepiece at a couple making out farther down the beach. I peered over my shoulder at the carousel and wondered what else they’d seen. They had names for me when I tried to repossess the telescope from their hands: loser and geek. Faggot. They stood, three feet away, making me grovel for my own telescope. They told Leigh she could do better than me, and for whatever reason she believed them, because I remember that night, walking home sad and alone with my telescope in hand, while Leigh drifted away with those boys.
Even then, I knew my role in the social hierarchy.
Six years later, not much has changed.
Leigh is gone, those boys are gone. But I’m still here, sitting on the carousel all alone, chasing down some girl that’s unreachable; she’s far out of reach as are most of my dreams.
Quinn
Esther is a great roommate. Most of the time. I’ve hardly ever seen her angry, except for the day I rearranged the foodstuff on her cabinet shelf. Then she got angry, really angry, and by that I mean she nearly flipped her lid.
I didn’t rearrange her foodstuff, per se. I was looking for something, dill weed to make a seasoning for my microwave popcorn. A little salt, a little sugar, a little garlic, a little dill weed, and presto! It was one of my many obsessions. Esther was at school, a night class for her occupational therapy thingie, and I was at home, settling in to watch some show on the TV.
Esther and I each have kitchen cabinets that are our own. The ones with the bowls and plates we share, but the ones with the foodstuff we do not. There’s mine, packed to capacity with junk food galore, and then there’s Esther’s, complete with one-off cooking and baking supplies: kelp noodles and basil seed, dill weed, peanut flour, garam masala, whatever the heck that is. And Frosted Flakes.
I made the popcorn. I could have settled on salt, I know, but knowing Esther had the ingredients for my special seasoning, I dug through her spices and noodles and whatnot for the dill weed.
I didn’t think I’d made a mess, but Esther sure did. I was on the sofa with my delish popcorn when she returned from class, the volume on the TV quiet so as not to disturb Mrs. Budny down below, old Mrs. Budny, who I imagined often stood in the middle of her own home, her dough-like head wrapped up in a babushka, her skin an anemic white, upthrusting a mop with shaking, old-lady hands, pounding the ceiling to shut up Esther and me.
But not that day. That day the TV was so quiet that I could hardly hear. Esther came home in a fine mood, one which disappeared quickly when she reached into her cabinet for the Frosted Flakes and then said to me, “Quinn,” her voice a tad bit Hannibal Lecter–like when she appeared in the living room and snapped off the TV. Hello, Clarice.