9
After first period history was homeroom. Mrs. Kennedy stood at the door to her classroom, ushering kids through. Between me and her the floors were like concrete playing cards. Each slab had thin metal rims and flecks that were putty-yellow and olive-green.
“Terrazzo,” Dad told us the first time he came to help Denny and me build sets for a play. “In Friuli, Italy, people used to take stones from the riverbeds to make paths. A couple of guys would stand on opposite sides of an alley, and saw back and forth, grinding down the high stones with a rock attached to a wood pole. Eventually Palladio adopted the style for country houses, using marble remnants in polished cement. Remember I told you about Palladio and the villas?”
My father was constantly sharing facts with us, telling us for instance that nutmeg can be a deadly poison, or that there are warts under the tail of the true descendants of the eighteenth-century Carthusian stallion Esclavo, or that Picasso painted “Guernica” in response to the Nazi terror bombing during the Spanish civil war in 1937. “You can never be sure what might turn up on a test,” he would say, demonstrating an overly high estimation of the educational system.
My father had been born during the Great Depression, and his mother had been widowed shortly after. Despite his intelligence, she had not been able to send him to college. Since getting discharged from the army, he spent every free minute reading anything he could find, from manuals on refrigeration to textbooks on the Constitution. “Lincoln was self-taught,” my mother would always say to encourage him. “And look what he managed to accomplish.”
“Lose something, sweetheart?” Mrs. Kennedy asked me.
“Oh, no, Mrs. Kennedy. I’m just looking at the floors. They’re beautiful.”
She looked down and smiled, which was nice. Smiles suited her. Mine is not a smiling face. Strangers on the street always say, Smile! But my muscles do not naturally go there.
Stephen Auchard was reading The New York Review of Books. Kate was thumbing through Glamour. We said nothing to one another, which was correct, because no one speaks in homeroom. Homeroom is an alphabetic grouping, having nothing to do with compatibility and everything to do with chance. It’s a random civic assignment, like jury duty.
The PA system squawked, and Mr. Martin, the assistant principal, started the announcements with a garbled Pledge of Allegiance. Before senior year everyone would stand and recite the Pledge. Those were optimistic times. Optimism is when you’re not sure where life is going to take you, so naturally you anticipate the best possible outcome. But by the time you are eighteen you have a hint already of what your life is going to be like, and if that hint is not so wonderful, you might as well just stretch across radiators and desktops and ignore the announcements, halfway thinking about the night before, halfway thinking about the day ahead.
Karen Baker usually slept through the Pledge. Karen was a cashier at Brooks Discount on Main Street. Every afternoon she wore a name tag pinned droopily onto a strawberry-red overshirt, the kind with snaps that ladies in Little Italy call a housecoat. Sometimes Jack and I would see Karen behind Brooks by the dumpster, on cigarette break. She smoked Parliament Lights, which Jack liked to say aren’t so much cigarettes as they are expensive toothpicks.
Eddie Anderson worked at Texaco on North Main Street. Eddie definitely could not be bothered with the Pledge. He wore pressed Bad Company T-shirts, though his fingers were stained purple from motor oil. The ratty hair on his head was neatly parted and tamed in such a way as to have the effect of a giant letter M. Every day after homeroom he took the bus to Riverhead because he wanted to be a boat mechanic. He went to BOCES—Board of Cooperative Educational Services, a trade school. Jack said Eddie would end up the richest guy in the class. “Better nail him now, Katie,” Jack would tease Kate.
Cheryl Bromley, who used homeroom to file her nails, was going to be a hairdresser and a makeup artist, so she also went to BOCES for training in—something, I wasn’t exactly sure what—hair and makeup probably, though that seemed an improbable course of study.
If certain people could not be blamed for a lack of enthusiasm in regard to the Pledge, it certainly didn’t feel right for the rest of us to leap up and swear allegiance to a nation that was already working out to be more liberal and more fair for some than for others.
I was making a drawing for Jack. Big Wednesday was playing at the Old Post Office Theater on Newtown Lane, and we were going to go see it Saturday for, like, the fifth time. It was about surfers, so I was drawing the interior of a wave with a little body riding it—the little body being Jack’s—when an object fell to the floor. It sounded like a pen. I checked around my ankles, thinking maybe it’d been mine, though of course mine was in my hand.
A voice said, “Sorry.”
It was Dorothy Becker. Her gelatin-soft body was tucked into the seat diagonally across from mine, one row over and up. She hung back to reach the pen but didn’t turn. Her arm flopped, and her fingers pinched at the air. She had those white, kind of noodley fingers without defined nail beds.
“I got it,” I offered, lowering myself to grab it. I slid the pen into her hand, and I saw the mark on her wrist. My eyes followed the path of the ridge. It was crooked and pale scarlet, a primrose crest longer than an inch, probably shorter than when the incision had been fresh. Her palm clamped limply onto the pen. I kept myself suspended in case she dropped it again. She thanked me, and I straightened, saying, “No problem,” which was true.
Scars help you get the point. There’s a difference between hearing that someone has tried to commit suicide and then seeing the evidence of work done to achieve that aim. I had a sort of scar. It ran under my left eye and almost parallel to it, though it could hardly be seen. It was not self-inflicted, so it passed on no practical information about me, other than that once I was unlucky and got a burn. When she was feeling affectionate, my mom would call me Apache Princess.
I examined Dorothy’s back, her hair, and her clothes. She used shampoo and soap and toothpaste, just like me. The main difference between us was that when she woke up, she knew that a shitty day lay ahead, whereas I could never be sure.
When you’re in high school, you’re no stranger to death, especially if you live where kids drive and roads are bad and drinking is a way of life. In tenth grade, two couples from school got killed when they hit a telephone pole on Route 114, and the school planted fig trees by the driveway. It was sad, but I was confused by the way girls like Coco and Pip and Breanne got hysterical, though they had never once been nice to those kids.
Coco kept saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”
Though she did not elaborate, I thought I knew what she meant. I thought she meant, It could have been us. She definitely did not mean, I wish I’d had the chance to know them better. If those people had popped back to life right in front of her, she still would have been mean to them, same as always.
It’s confusing how you’re supposed to weep over people who die recklessly, but you’re supposed to be disgusted by Dorothy. A calculated decision to die seems less disrespectful than putting yourself in a position to depart accidentally. Was Dorothy weak, or brave like crazy to have sliced herself? And then to survive the damage, and then to have to return to school because anything was better than staying home? It was that double failure that moved me the most—the failure of her life and the failure of her attempt to end it.
I wondered if her early end was inevitable but had been temporarily postponed. Maybe a suicidal person is like a lame animal in a healthy pack, dragging a limb, trailing blood. Maybe you cannot stop death from coming to those who have suffered some unseasonable blow or experienced a reversal of instinct, who feel that living is worse than dying.
It must require a massive exertion of consciousness to reach a conclusion that is in such direct opposition to nature. Unless, of course, that conclusion is not oppositional at all. For who can be certain that suicide is not just one particular doorway to death—death being in and of itself irrefutably natural? Why should those who take their lives at once be any more criminal than those who do it tediously, with noxious living, with dope and vodka and nicotine, with junk food and sexual compulsion, with behavior that hurts people other than themselves again and again?
And yet, there are those who endure agony to live. Trapped beneath collapsed buildings or imprisoned in filthy cells, they sing or pray or write microscopic poetry on scraps of paper to sustain themselves. When the will to survive is present, it is so sure, so clear—but what if that determination is not clear? What if a person has been made weary before their time?
I asked Jack about it one night. We were at Georgica Beach. “Do you think suicide is a tragedy?”
“No,” he stated. “It’s your life.”
“Aren’t you obligated to people who love you?”
“If you love out of obligation, it’s not love.” He was carving ridges and craters in the sand with a stick. “Besides, you’re alone from birth.”
“But you’re born to your parents. To your mother.”
“You don’t enter the bond with your mother when you’re born; you leave it. Birth is the point of departure from the only real communion you’ll ever know. Everything else is invention. Your happiness depends on how well your parents handle that. You know, the fact of separation, the fiction of attachment. Reattachment, whatever.”
“So you owe your parents nothing?”
He shrugged. “I don’t. Maybe you do.” He scraped a platform in the sand. “Most parents don’t want the kid or each other. They’re just carrying out some brain-dead social functions. They marry because it’s time, start a family because it’s time. They do it for fear of becoming outcasts, fear of acting on an original f*cking thought.” My name materialized in the sand in large loopy letters. He drew a heart around it. “If abortion had been legal seventeen years ago, I wouldn’t exist. That’s what my old man told me.”
“I can’t believe he said that.”
Jack said, “Believe it.”
“You could have jumped when you were climbing,” I said.
“But I didn’t.”
“Because of me, you said.”
“Because of you.”
“So you’re not alone,” I said. “You have me. You owe me something.”
“You—that’s right. By choice, not by obligation. And if that ever changes,” he posed gravely, “I’ll do whatever I feel like.”
“And would that be my fault?”
“No,” he drilled. “It would be my choice.”
Though I knew he meant what he said, I also wondered if it was possible to isolate a final choice from all the choices that preceded it. Romeo made a choice when he killed himself, but his choice was made meaningful by prior choices—Juliet died first, or so he thought.
“How about lost potential?” I said. “The art van Gogh could have continued to make.”
Jack shook his head. “Lost potential is irrelevant. How can anyone feel cheated out of something they were never entitled to in the first place? The loneliness van Gogh felt was the loneliness he felt, whether it led to paintings or to suicide. Life may be sacred, but maybe his wasn’t sacred. In fact, it’s well-documented that his life sucked. If people didn’t know how to care for him or his art when he was alive, or convey to him the sacred sensation of sacred living, f*ck them after he’s dead.”
I suppose it is narrow to wish someone had lived longer in order to enrich your life more. Jack had a point—the irony of mourning people who kill themselves is that the rush of love manufactured for the dead did not prevent them from dying in the first place. If suicides result from a longing to be understood, or reached, maybe it’s not inappropriate for those who remain alive to feel forsaken, to be forced to endure a somber feast of years.
Jack launched his stick into the ocean and watched it migrate. Moonlight seemed to seek him out. My eye trailed from sand to sea to sky, noticing the way his luminescent form touched down upon each, making me think of the relationship between solitude and infinity.
I knew what he was thinking. I tried to acknowledge the breadth of his despair without judgment. I tried to be moved by the enormity of his vision without feeling small in relation to it. If I could not accompany him to the places he needed to visit, I could at least honor his need, because what Jack said was so, is so—love is born of choice. He reminded me of that choice, and he asked me to make it again, despite the risk I took, which was the risk of losing him, and the risk I presented, which was the risk of his losing me.
My face met his shoulder. I wanted to remind him of something—but what? I knew only that at that moment, when he was there and I was there, I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone.