Six Stories

Ears


The boy was swimming underwater. He was seeing how far he could go. Sometimes he got to the middle of the pool. He wanted to get to the opposite side. That would be so great, to go from wall to wall with a single breath. He thought one day he could, maybe. The boy liked how his chest felt as he was running out of air, the pained urgency of it. He pulled himself through the water, kicking a few more times, and then rose to the surface. As he came out of the water, the boy had his hands at the side of his head, and in one quick motion he tugged his hair down over his ears, to cover them. It was something he did, fixing his hair. He tried to make it look like nothing, like no big deal, as if he was just brushing water from his face. The boy’s ears stuck out. That was why he did this. He got teased quite a bit. Kids calling him Dumbo or whatever. He tried to act like it didn’t hurt. Sticks and stones, as his mother said. He never got that saying. The fact was, words did hurt. Maybe not like sticks and stones, but they still hurt. Sometimes they hurt a lot.

A kid was in the water nearby, bobbing. Why do you do that? the kid said.

What? the boy said. He knew exactly what the kid meant.

With your hair, the kid said. He motioned with his hands by the side of his head.

I don’t know, the boy said. He started to swim away.

It’s weird, the kid said. Weird was bad. Weird was the worst. It was disgusting. He said weird like the boy should really stop doing that. What was his problem?

This was in the ’80s. The boy had longish hair, parted down the middle, which he combed back in two broad feathery wings. A lot of guys had this hairstyle, but with them, their hair lay flat. That was how it was supposed to look, the boy thought. With him, with his ears the way they were, his hair stuck out, like little horns, or else his ears poked through, which ruined the whole effect.

The boy swam to the side and climbed out of the pool. His friend Kim was working at the front desk, checking IDs.

He went over and said hello, and Kim said hello back. He liked when Kim was working, even though he didn’t have much to say. He just liked seeing her, a friendly face.

Kim’s sister was there too. She was sitting on top of the desk, her legs dangling over the side. Kim’s sister was in high school and worked as a lifeguard. She was really tan. She was inspecting one of her legs, some blemish or pimple high on the inside of her thigh. The boy talked to Kim and then he looked at her sister. She was poking at something, squeezing it, intent.

Kim cleared her throat, and her sister looked at her like what?

He had been looking, but he hadn’t seen anything, nothing bad anyway. Just her bathing suit. It was bright blue, like the pretty fish in the salt-water tanks.

The sister hopped down from the desk and said she was going to get something to eat from the machines.

So, Kim said, and she slapped the top of the desk with both hands.

The boy harbored this idea that if only there was a celebrity who had big ears, and this celebrity combed his hair and it looked like his, with the hair sticking out, then it would be less awkward for the boy, because his hair would look like the celebrity’s, and then everyone else’s would be wrong, or weird. The boy spent time thinking who could this celebrity be and when would he come forward. He looked at pictures in the newspaper, actors at movie premieres, and so forth. He briefly thought Prince Charles of England might be a good candidate. The Prince was famous and he had big ears, but he didn’t have the right hairstyle at all, and so the boy just dropped it.

On the bus once, the boy got into a contest with a friend; they were seeing who could put their legs up the highest on the seat in front of them. His friend put his legs up pretty high. Then the boy put his legs over the top. His sneakers waved in the air. Nobody could get any higher than that. Mr. Jeff, the bus driver, saw him. He pulled the bus to the side of the road and stopped. The boy could see him in the rearview mirror, glaring. He looked away, out the window, and tried to think of other things. Mr. Jeff was coming down the aisle, and everyone turned to see who was in trouble now. He grabbed the boy by the ear and squeezed. You keep your feet on the floor, he said. Understand?

The boy did. Yes, sir, he said.

Another time, the boy was on a field trip with his class, and some kids were giving it to him about his ears. Just all the usual stuff. He had heard it before. Later, one of the kids’ moms, who was a chaperone, came up and talked to him. He was eating his lunch. He had liverwurst and crackers. The mom sat down with him.

You know, she said, you could get your ears fixed. She smiled.

Really? he said. He didn’t know this. It was like a secret had been kept from him. Everyone knew.

Oh, yes, she said. She sounded excited, eager. They just make a cut, she said. The doctors. She reached behind his head. Right here, she said. Then they tape them back, and in a few weeks— She shrugged. The tape comes off, and that’s it, she said. It’s a very easy thing to fix.

Shame


They were practicing reading numbers. The teacher wrote some big number on the board, some number like 106,683, and then what they had to do is they had to say, out loud, one hundred six thousand, six hundred eighty-three. They were taking turns. The trick was they were not supposed to say six hundred and eighty-three, or one hundred and six thousand. There are, the teacher told them, no ands when you’re reading numbers. Don’t you put any and in there, she said. Just read the number how it is. That was the main lesson. He thinks this was in maybe the first grade? First or second, he’s not sure. All he remembers is being called on to read a number—say it was 106,683—and he read it. He read it exactly how he was supposed to, with no and.

The teacher shook her head. You said and. It’s just six hundred eighty-three, she said. Now let’s try again.

So he read it once more, with no and.

But again the teacher claimed that he’d said and.

I didn’t, he said. I really didn’t. Something in his voice must have sounded like he was saying and, but he wasn’t.

I heard you, she said. Try again. She pointed at the number on the board. She had long brightly painted fingernails and they clicked on the board. He read the number one more time, with no and.

You’re still saying and, she said. She sounded annoyed.

A bunch of kids in the class started yelling. He’s not, they said. He’s not saying and.

Quiet down, the teacher said. I heard him very clearly say and. Now, she said, looking at him. I want you to read the number one more time. No and.

He read it again. He was nervous. Students were turned around in their chairs, watching him. He didn’t want anyone to watch him. He wanted to be invisible. If he could’ve been a superhero and had any superpower, he would’ve wanted the power of invisibility. His second choice would be the power to fly, but first would always be invisibility. When he got to the place in the number where he’d supposedly said and, he paused and swallowed, then he went on. He finished and looked up at the teacher.

Good, she said. You did it just right.

He wanted her to move on, go to someone else. This girl Tiffany was sitting behind him. It was her turn next. Tiffany’s cousin Katie had recently told him that Tiffany liked him. Did he like her back? She would let Tiffany know, she said.

That was a hard question, and he put off answering it for most of a day. Tiffany was all right, but the truth was, he liked Katie a whole lot better, except Katie liked his friend Corby. In the end, he said he liked Tiffany, sure.

He liked to doodle and draw then. He drew a woman, very small, in the corner of a piece of paper, just her figure, her hips, the bare outline. Then he drew lines of perspective radiating through her, as if she was walking down a street, sketchy glass buildings rising on both sides. He looked at the woman again. The drawing seemed too revealing, like it said something about him. I shouldn’t be doing it, he thought, not in class. What if it were found? What if the teacher came by and asked him what he thought he was doing and then took it away? What if she showed the class? He imagined her walking up to the front of the room and saying, Would everyone like to see what he’s been drawing back there?

He decided to hide the woman. He covered her with lines, scratching her out, first this way and then the other. Then he scribbled in tight little circles. It looked like there had been an explosion in the middle of the street. But even then, even when the woman was completely covered over, obliterated, he could see her through the lines. The original lines were still there—and her hips. He could see her hips.

Objects of Desire


He was crazy about the girls in their argyle sweater vests. Seemed like they were all wearing them. This was junior year or senior year of high school maybe? They wore the sweaters with no shirt on underneath. Some of the girls had breasts you could see. One girl was named Lauren. She had a last name like his, except with a Russian ending. His father had always told him to watch out for Russians. His father was Polish. He’d been born in Poland and lived there through the war. They were interned in labor camps, he and his family. This was in a part of Poland that was caught between the Germans and the Soviets.

Russian names were like Polish names, but he had to learn the differences. There was this one math teacher, who taught the advanced math class. At first he thought she was Russian, but then she turned out to be Hungarian. Hungarians were okay.

Lauren had amazing breasts. She was tan with frizzy blonde hair—maybe it was permed. She had, he imagined, a whole closet full of argyle sweater vests. In biology class, he made a point of walking by her desk on some errand or other, to fetch a book off the shelf or sharpen his pencil, go to the bathroom, something. Any reason at all to walk by and just look at her. He was bored in school. He had a calculator, a Texas Instruments, and he typed in numbers, usually sevens or nines, and then he squared them repeatedly, until the calculator maxed out. Then he cleared the number and started again. He memorized pi to nine decimal places—3.141592654—and then he squared that. Another trick he did was he typed in this number that, when he turned the calculator upside-down, it spelled BOOBIES.

He didn’t know Lauren. He probably never spoke to her. If he did, it was just a word or two. Lauren was popular. She was friends with cheerleaders. She liked football players. She was also rich. It was easy to tell the kids whose families had a lot of money. Lauren had this one friend, Kelly. Kelly was in his English class. He sat behind her. One day, before class, the teacher called the two of them outside to have a word, as she put it. The teacher told them this was very serious, what she had to say. She then accused them of copying each other’s work. He and Kelly were confused. They were good students, and the work was just some sentences. It was so easy. Every week they got vocabulary words, and one of the things they were supposed to do was write a sentence with each new word. That’s it. Apparently several of their sentences were a little too similar. The teacher pointed to one example, for the word launched. Both he and Kelly had written a sentence about a missile being launched. 

But what else were you going to write for the word launched? That’s what he said. It was so banal, so obvious.

The teacher frowned. No one else’s sentences were so similar, she said. And there were other examples too, she said, though she didn’t specify what they were. She was going to let them off, she said, this time. Consider this a warning, she added. They were to do their own work, going forward.

They had the Cold War on their brains. They all did. They knew about ICBMs and MIRVs, the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. They felt themselves targets, in the crosshairs, objects of some great unseen desire. They did drills, to prepare for disasters—fire drills, hurricane drills, and also bomb drills. One time, his grandmother was visiting—this was his mom’s mom—and he showed her a copy of the school literary magazine. It had come out that day, and he had some writing in it. His grandmother took it and that night she read it. The next day he heard her talking to his mom in the kitchen. She said, So many of the kids write about nuclear war.

He had written a detective story about some kid whose bike got stolen.

The next week, in English, Kelly joked about could he not do his own work? Could he please stop copying her? This continued, their joking, every week. They weren’t friends, but they had that joke between them.

One day, he got to class early, and he was sitting at his seat. Their chairs were attached to their desks, all one piece, and he was sitting with his legs slung over the top of the desk, spread wide open. No reason. He just felt like it. It was weird, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.

Students were filing in. Then Kelly got there, and he said hello. She put her stuff down and looked at him. That’s attractive, she said.

The Water


He was always something of a night owl, the boy. That’s what his father said. The boy just liked the house best though when everyone was asleep. It was the feeling that he could be alone and that everything was all right. He liked to watch David Letterman. He did his homework during Carson and then he went out to the den and watched Letterman. He lay in front of the television, close to the set, so he didn’t have to turn the volume up. Sometimes the boy talked on the phone with his friend. He used the phone in the kitchen. He found that if he stretched the cord, he could see the television in the den just fine. He still kept the volume low. He could make out what Letterman was saying through the phone. Because his friend was watching Letterman too. They all liked Letterman then. They made up top-ten lists and passed them around and sent letters to the show, hoping they’d get on viewer mail. His friend had a television in his room as well as his own phone line. He lived a ways away, in another subdivision, but they went to the same high school, he and the boy. Sometimes his friend got other calls, but the boy always said, Take it. He didn’t mind waiting.

In the morning, the boy’s father came into his room and turned on the light and said it was time to get up. He was standing by the bed, looking down at the boy. Sometimes he shook him, poked him in the shoulder or whatever. You need to get up, his father said. Now. I’ll be back to check on you. The boy opened his eyes and saw his father walking out of the room. He wore underpants and a T-shirt. Ropy legs, the boy thought. He has really ropy legs. Packs of muscles on the front. Thick tendons running down the back. The boy thought they were tendons anyway. His father also had these weird hairless patches around his calves.

The boy shut his eyes and slept again for however many minutes. His alarm clock was going off. He realized that. It was a talking alarm clock. His parents bought it for him because it was the most annoying clock they could find. That’s what they said. He needed the most annoying clock. Otherwise how was he ever going to wake up? In college, they said, when you get to college, nobody’s going to tell you that you need to wake up. His clock said, The time is six-oh-eight. It’s time to wake up. The clock sounded like a mean robot, like a man but with a robot voice. The boy had a way of incorporating the alarm into dreams. Sometimes people in his dreams spoke to him, but what they were saying was just whatever the clock was saying. Once, he was standing over a freeway, on an overpass. This was another dream, and for some reason in this dream he was counting trucks. As the alarm clock talked, he saw a truck approach and pass underneath. Then another truck appeared and another after it. The boy reached for the clock and felt around for the off button or the snooze.

He slept then, and his father returned. Get up, his father said. You’re going to be late again. This went on for a while. The next time his father came back with the water. A cup or a glass, the boy wasn’t sure. His father poured the water on him, on his head, and then he told him to get up already. It seemed like a lot of water. The boy’s pillow was wet, and his hair too. Water ran down his face. The boy yelled about the water. You didn’t have to do that, he said. Jesus. I was awake, he said. I was fixing to get up. His father said that was what he got. Because he didn’t wake up. He had told the boy over and over again to wake up and he didn’t wake up. So he got the water. You left me no choice, his father said.

In Memoriam


After lunch, the boy and his friends went to view the wrecked car. It was a white sedan, crushed in the front and windowless. Bright yellow rope cordoned it off. The assistant principal was standing to the side, passing out pamphlets about the dangers of drunk driving. He had a way of projecting authority and contempt while also appearing tired. He was ex-military.

The boy saw this girl he liked, and he drifted in her direction. She was gawking at the steering wheel. Is that like hair? she said. She looked at her friend. That’s totally a hunk of hair, she said. Her friend made a face like gross. Word about the hair spread in whispers. Someone else was pretty sure he saw blood. Students moved closer.

The boy asked the assistant principal how many people had died in the wreck.

The assistant principal frowned and stared off. He wasn’t sure, he said.

Where was the wreck from?

He didn’t know.

Did anyone die? the boy said.

The assistant principal studied the boy. Drunk driving kills people every year, he said. Thousands, he added. Thousands and thousands. He held out a pamphlet.

The boy took it and then went to find his friends. A bell rang, fourth period. The day was half over.

The girl he liked was in the same grade, but they had all different classes. The boy knew where her locker was and walked by. She was talking to a friend and didn’t see him. She was tall and had long hair. She was like lines. She was from India, or her parents were. His friend had told him he should ask her to the dance—he had to. It was his duty. The boy laughed, and his friend said he was serious, man. The dance was coming up. The boy put off asking her. Then he heard from mutual friends that she was going with a group of people, so that was that. He just wouldn’t go to the dance.

When the yearbook came out, everyone got a slip of paper on which were printed the names of classmates who had died. There were two, a girl and a guy. In Memoriam, the paper said. You were supposed to cut the names out and tape them into the yearbook, as a dedication. Some people did this—the boy did it with his yearbook—but a lot of the slips ended up on the ground.

The girl who had died was someone everyone liked. She was one of those happy girls, friendly, never snobbish. Nobody knew she had anything wrong with her heart.

The guy was this stoner dude. A lot of rumors attached themselves to his death. One was that he had been partying with friends at the bayou. Another was that his mother buried him with two tickets to the Mötley Crüe concert he never would get to attend. There was a fair amount of talk about those tickets, how this guy was laid to rest, his hands folded across his chest, and the tickets stuck between his fingers.

Like this, the boy’s friend said. He crossed his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. For all eternity.

His friend told him he had half a mind to dig the body up and get those tickets. It’s such a waste, he said.

On the last day, everyone threw out their schoolwork. White drifts of quizzes and spelling tests, book reports and math homework littered the halls. Outside, paper blew across the street and into the parking lot of the dentist’s office. Pages stuck in trees and wrapped around signs. Students tore pages from their notebooks and tossed them from the buses, laughing. The boy thought this was a shame. All this knowledge, or whatever. Was it useless? The boy kept his work. At home, in his room, he put the papers into a three-ring binder. He wrote out a table of contents page. On the cover, he wrote ninth grade or tenth grade, whatever it was, then he put the binder on a shelf with the rest.

Grief


It was late when the phone rang. He heard his mother pick up. Then he heard her crying.

She was sitting in the dark, on the edge of her bed, and he sat down beside her. His cousin had died, she told him. She pronounced the words as if she couldn’t believe them. He was playing basketball, she said. He was just playing basketball, and he collapsed.

He put his hand on his mother’s back. She was crying again.

At the funeral, he sat with his mother in the pew reserved for family. When the service ended, they all left together. His aunt walked ahead of them. He looked at her back, at her dark suit, everyone in black. He had been sad, of course, but something struck him right then, and he started in crying—loudly, wailing really, crying with his whole body. His aunt turned and glanced over her shoulder, and, just like that, he stopped, embarrassed by his noise.