3.
They Just Try to Make Things Prettier
In the days after the vow at the Thing in the Woods, I thought of the darkness under the table at Gaia, with the light that snuck under the kente cloths. I wanted more of Khadijah. I especially wanted more of Khadijah in hiding places. But I thought it might be better to wait to initiate further contact until after I had made myself less ugly. I ran every night, and lifted my father’s boxed, multivolume Churchill biography over my head, watching my insect forearms in the mirror, waiting for them to change.
I monitored Khadijah in class. We had other star students, but Khadijah was a person conditioned exclusively for school, for this activity and no other. When she raised herself from her desk and took the floor to deliver a presentation, she came into an intellectual inheritance. She became a person who was not who she usually was. She became, I now understood, her mother.
She must have given her speech about ancient writing to Nancy several times, rehearsed it to excess, before she gave it to our class.
“Before the development of the alphabet,” she almost shouted, in Nancy’s clear, high voice, “a particular logogram had to depict a particular object, a particular object always signified the same concept. Alphabets enabled the meaning of characters to shift, depending on context.” She seemed to have memorized every sentence, every syntactical gambit.
It was unusual for a tenth grader at Wattsbury Regional to speak like this. Most academic parents nodded to the idea of meritocracy by concealing their handiwork, helping their children translate the ideas they’d given them for their schoolwork into plebeian English. The baldness of the parental involvement here was notable. But the truly remarkable thing was Khadijah’s composure. It was as if Nancy had not only dictated the content of her presentation but inhabited her the moment she rose to speak.
“. . . and therefore the creation of new words, an entirely new means of communication. Characters that had once been static in their meaning gained the ability to shift, taking on different meanings depending on their location among other characters.”
The visual aids she’d constructed were larger, I suspected, than cuneiform tablets. With the madness of an artist, she had created an exhibit that reached beyond the demands of the assignment. She’d decided that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek lettering each deserved a monolith made from four conjoined sheets of extra-large black poster board. When she was done speaking like her mother, she shouldered the massive charts and returned to her seat, her arms full, her head obscured. She leaned the time lines against her desk, and I studied them from across the room. At each notch, there was an empire’s outline, or a glyph, or the sketched face of an ancient despot. They were dark and chunky with effort. They were imitations of Nancy’s art, drawn by a hand that couldn’t move like Nancy’s hand.
? ? ?
The following Thursday, we had the day off from school to participate in the ABC Walk, which benefited the ABC House. ABC stood for A Better Chance. The ABC House was an old Victorian in downtown Wattsbury where poor black and Latino boys from New York City came and lived for four years, so that they could attend Wattsbury Regional. The method of collecting donations was to go door to door pledging to walk ten kilometers through the woods if your neighbor would give you ten dollars. Sophomores wound through the Robert Frost Conservation Center as a cold rain sprinkled the birches. Khadijah walked with two other girls fifty feet ahead of me and my friends—I could see her scrunchie, apricot today, through white branches.
I was walking with my father’s backpack held in front of me, bouncing against my knees. I’d left my own backpack at school the day before, so my father had told me to take his from the floor of the bedroom closet. Halfway through the hike, the social studies teacher placed in charge of us cupped his hands around his mouth and announced lunch. Rooting for a bottle of water, my hand closed around a minibar bottle of Sutter Home wine.
Burbling, abundant love for my father flooded my heart. I unscrewed the top as we sat on stones.
“You can have some of the wine my father gave me,” I whispered to my two friends, the straight-backed, dark-haired son of a Spanish literature professor in immaculate corduroys and the slightly obese son of an acupuncturist. “Just be cool about it, or people will freak out and tell on us.”
They each took a substantial gulp. We had a conversation about whose father was chiller about wine. After I’d wolfed my meatball marinara from Subway, I searched all the pockets and compartments in the backpack clinging to the hope my father had included a Subway cookie. In a pocket within a pocket, my hand closed around an unfamiliar form.
I drew out what looked like a hard candy imported from Europe. It was a round object in thick golden wrapping, with tiny writings on the side and the gleam of an elite continental sweet. I was even prouder of my father now; here was further evidence of his good taste.
I interrupted my friends and asked if they knew what kind of candy it was.
“I can’t open it,” I said, which was true. “Maybe you guys can figure out how to get this fancy foreign wrapping off. It’s most likely from France or Italy, or Prague, where they just try to make things prettier.”
The Spanish literature professor’s son held it first. Having lived in Barcelona, he liked to tell us of the superiority of things European, so when he bit away the golden wrapper, and his eyes opened wide, and his jaw snapped open and shut, I believed I had just revealed an object of great rarity and preciousness. He looked at my other friend, the acupuncturist’s son. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked him.
“No,” said the acupuncturist’s son. “It’s too good.”
Dread coiled through my happiness. They scrutinized the fine print on the wrapper.
“It is,” said the acupuncturist’s son. “It really is.” He raised it skyward in the palm of his hand, to honor it.
“Want to eat it, Josh?” There was a gentleness in their voices, an ambivalence. A note of I must immediately give you shit or it will be worse.
I shoved between them and snatched it. Cradling it in one hand, I inspected it with the other, trying to understand what I saw. This was not a dessert, as I had believed, but nor was it a condom—this much I knew. At any rate, it was not like any condom I had ever seen. It was a soft plastic ring, off-white, with a small spherical appendage. Inside the appendage there was a tiny, dark egg. Beside the egg there was a soft plastic switch, set to Off.
The acupuncturist’s son finally turned to me and placed a paternal hand on my shoulder. “It’s called a cock ring.”
With two fingers, I traced its contours, full of wonder. A strange thing happened: It leapt from my fingers, emitting a loud, steady, midrange buzz. I had hit the switch.
The former Barcelonan plucked it from the mud at our feet. He held it, still vibrating, behind his back with one hand, as he held me at bay with the other. He and the acupuncturist’s son passed it back and forth, under the wet pines, scholars.
As a circle of my classmates mustered around us, the acupuncturist’s son bent toward me and folded his arms. Our social studies teacher was studying the bark of a tree. Khadijah left her friends and came over to watch, from a respectful distance.
“Your parents are married, aren’t they?” the acupuncturist’s son asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then your dad”—he walked the student through the obvious lesson, for the benefit of the class—“has been trying to spice things up with your mom, or he’s got some hot ass on the side.”
“Clearly the former.” I strove to control my voice, to deflate significance.
The acupuncturist’s son, angry I had shoved him, held the toy in one hand, in the other its golden packaging. He climbed onto a boulder. The audience clucked at the immaturity of what was going on, but continued to watch. In order to free his hand and insert his fingers through the ring itself, he tossed the wrapper to the wind. The rain had stopped, and the clouds had begun to float away. As the buzz filled the air, the little square of foil drifted on the breeze, caught sunlight, and became a tiny golden bird.