Revelations of a Resuscitated Mind
EJ DeSalvo
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Published by EJ DeSalvo at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 EJ DeSalvo
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The author, EJ DeSalvo, would welcome the reader's comments and questions, and can be contacted at ejdesalvo@gmail.com.
Cover artwork realized by Frederic Mateus Da silva (from an original concept by the author). He can be contacted at f.mateusdasilva@gmail.com.
Author's Note
This ebook is a work of fiction. Therefore, any names, characters, places, incidents resembling real persons (living or dead), locations, historical events should be considered unintentional or, at best, “inspired” happenstance. This ebook is a work of the imagination, and the imagination, a wily beast, can deceive - it can play tricks on the logical mind before devouring its prey.
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Blessed are the pure in heart
for they can comprehend the horror.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 6: Kindergarten Apocalypse
Chapter 3 9: Before the Melting Candle Melts
Chapter 8 19: Where Infinity Finishes
Chapter 9 20: The Miracle of the Vine
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Chapter 1
6
Kindergarten Apocalypse
That was one of the “Mouseketeers” singing. It wasn't the “real” Sleeping Beauty. The “real” Sleeping Beauty had long yellow Jell-O hair because she was a cartoon. The bland and blurry black-and-white photo of the warbling “Mouseketeer” sat on the back cover of the record album, in the upper left hand corner as if about to fall off of it. As if the side of your hand could wipe her off of it like a crawling bug. She seemed to be hidden in that position because she was “brunette” or maybe, in another sense, ashamed of herself. But her voice was beautiful. And the songs - what his mother called the “melodies” - you could be transported to Disneyland just listening to them! You could lift your legs and dance right there in the room. Even though the room didn't have a door on it yet. And, of course, the boy, Bryan Tillman, wouldn't want the whole family to be seeing him doing that. The same way they shouldn't see his mother's “swiped” silk scarf being worn like the costume of an actor and wrapped around his neck with the ends dangling down both sides of his body like weeping willow arms. Or like the short slender imaginary arms of his own shadow.
Soon the room would be painted and the floors refinished. The cracks in the floorboards were wide enough to act as trenches for his abandoned miniature plastic armies. He preferred the record player. He had asked for a blue room and had even pointed out the shade of blue he wanted. It would be his room, and the blue wouldn't be bright and white and ready to disappear, but a deeper, grayer blue, rather like the background cartoon color displayed on the Sleeping Beauty record.
Bryan couldn't tell if it was the voice or the songs that produced the resulting magic of the music. Probably both. Like Brenda Lee singing “I'm Sorry” but hopeful, not begging for every little thing. “I'm Sorry” was still his favorite record, but after listening to it forever, Bryan was sure that anybody out there would have already forgiven the poor thing. After all, she was sorry. Imagine having to apologize every minute of the day!
This new album was different: you could ride that Sleeping voice and Beauty songs all the way to the castle pictured in the distance. To all those towers - what do people do in towers? Why didn't the world have towers anymore - or any kind of castles? There was a drugstore in Mineola they sometimes drove past that looked “old-fashioned”. It was built with square stone blocks underneath dark heavy wooden beams, and even though there were flags and flowerpots decorating the upstairs windows, it was no kind of castle. It looked more like a bar or an “inn” for “peasants” where everybody sang and drank beer and then couldn't stop talking about how beautiful and “kind” the Princess who lived in the castle really was or was supposed to be. In Levittown, where they had just moved to from the Bronx, all the houses were like milk cartons with their little identical chimneys on one side of the roof to pour the milk out of. Who'd decided that houses couldn't look like castles? Somebody sure had made the wrong decision.
Inside towers, all the men wore black capes and all the ladies wore those long ice cream cone hats with silky scarf colors waving from the ends of them like melting ice cream, as if the cones themselves were dripping the silk milk right out of their tips. So all the ladies had their own flags to wave from the tips of their hats! The silk had to emerge from inside the cones, it couldn't be stapled on like Teresa Apfon's Halloween costume last year - so obviously a homemade cardboard cone with a red plaid winter scarf attached with a stapler. Really! The staples had mashed the point of the cone, by one o'clock it was bent and hanging like an elephant trunk, and everyone had been tempted to just pull the thing off of her head. If Teresa Apfon, with that brown “beauty mark” near her eyeball like a dead teardrop, was a princess, then Bryan Tillman could just as well be Gene Autry singing “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.
The houses in the Bronx were a better idea, or the houses from “the old Bronx”. There were more places to hide in the Bronx houses, more nooks and crannies, and Bryan didn't care that “the Island was safer,” “the Island was cheaper,” and “lots of families were moving now.” Okay, the Levittown yard had that long row of giant hedges planted a foot or two in front of the backyard fence where you could slip behind and sneak across, and there was also that tight niche on the other side of the garage formed by the corner of the fence and facing the Heinfleisch house, a little pocket you could climb out of and then immediately enter the front yard if you were being chased and needed to escape. Their babysitter, Rachel Heinfleisch, was caught smoking in that pocket when his parents returned home early by accident and then couldn't find her in the house babysitting. His mother said it wasn't “right” to be out there instead of inside where she was “supposed to be”, where she was “being paid” to be, and that she was too young to be smoking (she was thirteen), and Rachel was crying, actually moaning, that substitute sound you make when the actual tears won't come but you wished they would.
Then his mother stunned them with “Don't you realize your own mother could see everything you were doing from next door?”
Bryan's younger sister Carrie whimpered, “Rachel's in trouble,” but then Rachel said her mother was bowling, that her mother “always bowled”, and, to try and change the subject, she quickly asked, “Do you kids bowl?” This was all beginning to sound a lot like “moving your bowels”, which was how Bryan's mother referred to sitting on the toilet bowl, and then things started to calm down considerably.
Back in the Bronx, his father had built a long toolshed on the side of the house, a shed made from leftover doors - all the walls were made up of old doors and, it was funny, there was no real door to enter the shed! The doorway was just an open space. So if you use doors for walls, you must run out of doors! The light inside the shed was always low and strange, leftover shadows on empty spider webs behind rows of rusty tools that were probably used a hundred years ago when horses pulled wagons, when there were still cowboys and Indians. There was also a moldy atlas left on a bench that Bryan wouldn't even touch. There was something disgusting about wet books. He always forgot to ask whose it was. Maybe a “hobo” had wandered in and left it there. He had never seen a “hobo” in real life, but Shirley Temple did a lot of singing and dancing with them on TV. They seemed to be a lot of fun.
Two lawnmowers sat blocking the entrance like watchdogs. But these seemed to disappear once you climbed over them. But be careful of the “blades”, he was told, underneath there were “blades” you couldn't touch and where your feet “don't belong”. Beyond the “blades”, you could be left to yourself, and nobody seemed to ever follow you in there.
Except that which was already in there.
The same thing was true about the enclosed front porch of the house. Lined with oversized windows almost the size of the front door, this was always the coldest place in the house. There was only enough space for an old sofa covered with cat hair, plus there was a closet which nobody opened. And Bryan wasn't going to be the one to try and open it! He'd decided not to even ask questions about it because he didn't want to hear another reference to Lionel, the “original owner” who was related “by marriage” to his other grandmother's sister or aunt. He really didn't understand who this Lionel actually was. Once his Aunt Neddie remarked, “We won't see his kind again,” and this other grandmother (his father's mother) responded slowly because she was a slow person, “There was only one L-i-on-el….” Bryan's family was living with this “other grandmother” named Nana Gert, but she was easy to avoid. She was tall and stiff, the way skinny people seem stiffer than fat people, and real easy to run away from. The whole house now belonged to Nana Gert, and the way the name “Lionel” got stretched out and stressed seemed to sum up everything you could stand to know about him. Pointing to a painting of a windmill or a chair in the dining room now covered with a “beige” bedsheet for “protection”, or something “breakable” stashed away from children on a top shelf, someone might drone, “Oh, that must have belonged to L-i-on-el….” Bryan didn't like the idea that L-i-on-el was still somehow lingering, and that inside the front porch closet full of old coats covered in plastic from the “cleaners”, coats that needed to be kept clean even though nobody would ever wear them again, there might also exist some horrible Lionel relic he really didn't want to uncover. Bryan didn't want to be “taken by surprise”. He sometimes pictured Lionel as Abraham Lincoln, yet a slow, lumbering Lincoln in a long black coat and knee-high black boots, more like a Frankenstein Lincoln or like Nana Gert dressed up like a Frankenstein Lincoln, and when you looked at his lumpy sponge face you knew he wouldn't be somebody you'd sit with willingly on the front porch or somebody who'd be very welcome to encounter outside while all alone in the toolshed. But this was actually the temptation about sliding out to the lonely porch when nobody was looking or drifting into the gloomy neglected shed on any otherwise bright and sunny childhood day.
In other words, how much of Lionel could you handle?
Or was Bryan just calling “him” Lionel, and “he” was actually somebody or something else?
What was sure, as you wriggled and waited, or ran your finger down the handle of an abandoned hammer in the shed, or clumped together a tuft of cat hair on the couch and flicked it on the floor of the porch, was the immediate chill and stillness of these two places, and then you wouldn't be focusing on the lawnmowers or looking out of the porch windows to across the street where your best friend Craig lived. By then, He was already there, He'd already arrived. It never took very long. Suddenly you stopped seeing, things became blurry, like the TV screen when the “tubes” were warming up, because the message He was sending wasn't very clear, but what He seemed to be saying was that He wanted you to stay. This seemed to be the message. If you listened long enough, the sound seemed to come at you from inside your own head, a dull groaning that produced a flat feeling in your belly as if you had just swallowed a whole dinner plate like a vitamin pill. He was also saying that you didn't have any choice. In some ways, it was like going to church - but the wrong church. It wasn't peaceful, you just felt full of him. You lost your willpower in his presence, you just had to take it - wasn't that the reason you came in the first place? And then there was the feeling that He was coming closer, and then even closer like a shadow that fell out of your head instead of coming out of your feet - this phantom didn't want to sit next to you and tell a story nor was He getting ready to mow the lawn, by then He wanted to live with you, didn't He? He wanted to stay, to take over, moving his arms when you moved yours, copying your movements, sharing your life, sharing your toys, and that was when you knew you had to ignore him and “get the hell out”. At that point, you instantly substituted him with something else - was the cat in the room, was there a fly in the shed? A fat spider to focus on? And in the same second you thought of this-other-thing, just bolt out! The important thing was just to get somewhere else. Just fly!
Bryan never talked about “visiting” Lionel - it was like an agreement. The agreement went both ways - Lionel wouldn't want to be talked about or He'd probably have to find a new hiding place, if the front porch or the toolshed were to be considered his “hiding places”, and the rest of them, the family, wouldn't want to hear about Lionel because nobody would be able to see him. There was no proof. Lionel was supposed to be a memory, and then Bryan himself would be embarrassed or feel ashamed about describing the situations. They'd want to know why Bryan had “met” him when no one else ever had - and everybody knows you're not supposed to tell tales or make up stories. “Lionel” accessed that part of yourself you couldn't talk about, like getting “poop” on your fingers in the bathroom, or like when he'd been told that little boys don't grow up to be “ballerinas” because it wasn't “typical”, that most boys don't do that. What else would you like to be when you grow up? Plus Bryan himself seemed to erase Lionel even seconds after an encounter, which left only that full queasy dinner plate sensation inside of him. Lionel would promptly disappear until the next inkling, the next temptation. But Bryan understood he had a secret, Lionel was wrong, and he didn't really know why, and that to experience Lionel was probably the reason one had secrets, the reason one kept secrets. When his best friend Craig stole two pieces of bubble gum from the candy store down the “big street”, Craig had already pictured those two pieces inside his mouth to chew before he'd even stolen them. Two pieces in your hand was the same as two pieces in your head: in that way you could steal anything you wanted and that was why stealing was a secret. And in this rather circuitous way, Bryan could understand his own unmentionable connection to Lionel.
However, the family's final Christmas in the Bronx took care of Lionel, and the old ghost was totally gone by the time Bryan reached Levittown. That Christmas, they were all awake at dawn attacking the wrapping. Among other gifts, his older sister Eileen, then six years old, received a life-sized doll named Patty PlayPal who looked about as big, blank and stupid as some of her friends. Patty PlayPal had the same straight blonde hair as Eileen's friend Miranda who had once dropped Bryan head-first onto the sidewalk when she'd been carrying him (ironically, for protection!) because they'd all been running away from a “monster”, and this game called “Monsters”, in which everyone was screaming, being chased and fleeing out of control in four directions, happened to be everybody's favorite game. Afterwards, Bryan's head had ached the entire day (they'd even taken him to the doctor's) as if somebody kept cracking dinner plates on top of it, but “Monsters” was better than “Hide and Seek” because when you played “Monsters”, there was actually Something you needed to hide from. There was a real reason for all that running around.
For Christmas, Carrie received a mountain of coloring books, plastic jewelry, and a mini purple mirror that wasn't a real mirror because glass could break and become dangerous for babies, and you couldn't see anything in it except a moving spot and you were the spot. This was stuff only a baby would want, Bryan supposed, because babies don't know anything yet, and with the “help” of this mirror, they couldn't see straight either. Bryan received an electric train set, and his father was explaining with a great deal of emphasis why Santa Claus had brought this particular kind of train, and how Santa Claus understood that these were the best trains a little boy could receive.
“Why are they best?” Bryan wanted to know, and the box was long and flat because the train cars were separated and lying on their sides like a litter of sleeping puppies, and all the “detachable” pieces of train track were spread out underneath them like a bed.
“Look here,” his father said, and pointed to the writing on the box. “These are Lionel trains, these are the ones you want, these are the ones to get.” He announced again. “The Lionels.”
“What?” Bryan was on his knees and instantly leaned back, leaning away. The Christmas tree lights were glowing but his eyes went directly into the dark spaces beyond the bulbs and the branches.
“Lionel makes the best trains - they're stronger, they're not really even toy trains - even dads and grandpas've got 'em - and wait till you see how fast they run! That's the 'transformer', that little black metal box. You won't believe it. We'll set the whole thing up right after breakfast.”
“But I don't want his - I don't like his.”
His father listened and immediately looked puzzled, perhaps almost irked, the same look Bryan received when Bryan had sung the “Jack and Jill” rhyme and had played both the parts. When Jack and Jill fell down the hill, Bryan's arms and legs intertwined and his voice went from very high to very low to get “both” the voices running together as if falling helplessly down the hill.
“But you don't understand, Bryan - Lionel is the best - ”
“But I don't want his, why'd I get his - ”
His mother offered, “Whose? Your father's? They're not your father's. They're your trains - Santa brought these trains for you, just like you asked.”
“You know, kids shouldn't talk like that on Christmas,” his father added. “Santa hears all that, you know.” Sitting together on the floor, the man was as immovable as a tree stump, and his hefty, hairy legs (he was wearing boxer shorts) were bent behind Bryan like two logs hewn from the mass of that original tree.
“Don't want 'em - ” Bryan spit out. “Don't want old man trains!”
“What old man? Santa? Santa Claus?” His mother had a drooping frown, as if she had a mouthful of medicine to swallow. At the same time, even when confused and scared, Bryan could feel what she was saying, she was always feeling, or crying or cleaning, you could actually feel her idea of “clean” while she was doing the cleaning by the bunched-up and wrinkled configuration of her lips. But Bryan couldn't really feel his father unless he was “losing his temper” and you could see his two clenched lines of teeth. “Don't you remember last year,” his mother continued, “and this year too when we wrote the lists together, we wrote the Christmas lists, and sent them in a letter to Santa Claus, we all wrote letters to Santa about what we wanted for Christmas - ”
“I do!” Carrie cried out. “I did that!” Eileen wasn't listening because Patty PlayPal's arms were so long and stiff she couldn't get the doll's clothes off. Patty PlayPal was enormous, as if growing out of control, as if her clothes had been previously glued onto the long smooth stretches of plastic doll skin and thus, could never be removed. She whined, “You gotta push 'em up, the arms - she doesn't move, you can't do anything. Ma - I can't do it! ”
“And then we talked about Santa arriving on Christmas Eve with the reindeer and all the toys for you kids, all the ones you asked for, we left him cookies and cocoa on the kitchen table - we were having our own Hot Chocolates, and I explained how Christmas - ”
“LIONEL! Don't want - I hate him - don't want him - ” Bryan ran sobbing from the room and then let out a couple of high-pitched screams, and although panic-stricken, these sounds could lash out at Lionel, Bryan was lashing out. Maybe, finally, he could do something to Lionel. Charging upstairs, he screeched with finality, “No! No! NO!”
His mother remarked to his father (also named Bryan) that “it's your sister - Neddie must have been scaring the kids with stories about your old relative Lionel. Where else would he know that name from? That's what it is. That's what it has to be.” Then she paused and pouted. “That's the way it is around here, I guess, even on Christmas, even on Christmas morning….”
His father shrugged and said, “I'm gonna get the coffee going.”
“I don't know what gets into Neddie - what's the matter with her? These kids are only young once.”
She was calling up to Bryan, a loose, shapeless nightgown under a loose, terrycloth bathrobe, layers and layers of softness, her hand resting on the carved wooden ball that ornamented the ascent of the banister as if it were a little head. “Honey, the trains have nothing to do with our Lionel. Our Lionel is just like an old story, like an old movie you can see on TV. These are new trains - from Santa. Come on down now, it's Christmas. It's Christmas Day! Let's talk about it. Let's play. They're yours. You know they're beautiful trains, and your father's going to get them going for you, that's what he wants to do. Things'll change when you see how fast they go. Your father loves trains too, and he wants to set them up - right now! They are not Lionel's trains. Not our Lionel. These are new Christmas trains - brand new from Santa. Your father wants to play.” There was no response, no movement upstairs where Bryan had fled, now face down upon his bed and wondering if his mother would follow him up there. He felt miserable - angry, guilty, because now he could see that Christmas was not separate from the rest of his life, from the rest of the normal things he had to do everyday. In other words, Christmas Day isn't necessarily a perfect day. “And then we all have to get dressed, and get ready to go to Grandma's, and Nana Gert's not coming this year.” For the three children, there was a big difference between Nana Gert, whom they lived with, and their mother's mother whom they loved, the Grandma. For them, a “nana” was not a “grandma”. “Grandma's got lots of things too - she's got lots of other presents over there for you kids. There are more presents to open up over there. At Grandma's. Not here. Let's get ready to go to Grandma's!”
Eileen had now popped up behind her mother. “Ma, is Santa gonna get Bryan another toy, now that he knows that Bryan don't like what he got?”
“But Bryan hasn't played with what he got - first, he has to play with what he got before he knows he doesn't like it.”
“But will Santa give him somethin' else if he don't like 'em after he plays with 'em?”
“That's something for Santa to think about.” Spoken as she continued to stare upstairs where the light of daybreak had begun to quiver in the hallway.
“Cos I don't like what I got, Ma - I don't like Patty. I played with her and she's no fun. So if Bryan gets somethin' else, can you tell Santa I want a new toy too?”
Now in Levittown, Bryan didn't even remember Lionel or the trains. Plus the “Star People” could now be seen as a lot friendlier than he'd originally felt they'd turn out to be. That is, whenever he could envision his bedroom windows as a movie screen and could interpret their looping, looming, flying faces as part of a show. With the Star People staring in at the windows, the whole point was to prove to them how you were not afraid, even face to face, even if it meant pretending you were not afraid.
And forget about fear, Bryan was always busy with a new record. From Sleeping Beauty, he loved “I Wonder” and “Once Upon A Dream”. The Snow White songs were wonderful too, especially “I’m Wishing”, “Someday My Prince Will Come” (his mother's favorite) and “Whistle While You Work”, although Bryan couldn't whistle, could not understand how to whistle - where was the noise supposed to come from? - this often enraged him, and none of the songs, which he knew by heart, managed to make cleaning up his bedroom any easier. Another tune called, “With A Smile and a Song”, was especially special because Snow White got to sing it before she had any problems. This was sung at the beginning of the story, before the hunter dragged her into the woods to cut out her heart, and before she had to flee through the forest in the middle of the night while it was “thundering and lightning”.
Bryan was learning more and more about “problems” - in fact, playing records was probably the best way to forget that problems existed, to listen and listen and to hope that by the end of the album, the singer would have a secret to tell him, and then the problem would be solved. The first day of kindergarten at Summit Lane School had been a big problem, especially when the teacher, Miss Klapper, had turned to his mother and said, “Well, I don't know if he should stay.”
Summit Lane Elementary, flat and situated on one floor, was shaped like a hand with only three fingers. The kindergarten classes were situated inside the pinky finger annex. The gymnasium and “Principal's Office” seemed to collide at the school's wrist where the entrance was and where the whole hand got abruptly cut off. Miss Klapper, as tall and skinny as Nana Gert and with big protruding bone lumps on the sides of her wrists, seemed especially dumbfounded by Bryan's “behavior”. She said, “We can't have this kind of behavior in the classroom. Some of the other children, well, you know….”
When the two adults convinced the tear-soaked Bryan to go into the bathroom and “use the toweling to dry your eyes,” you can start enjoying yourself by drying your eyes, his mother simply disappeared. After that, he remembered screaming face down while kicking and punching the kindergarten floor for only a few minutes more. Eventually, he saw the outlines of a few of the other children emerging and looking down upon him, curious, bewildered, and one of the little girls named Holly Davidson was reaching out to him with a cupcake. Apparently, there were snacks at kindergarten, lots of crayons on the tables, huge “pickle jars” full of white paste for gluing, and you used wooden ice cream spoons to smear it on the paper like peanut butter. He hadn't wanted to leave his mother, to leave her alone; he hadn't understood correctly that going to school meant leaving your mother. He had wanted to stay with his mother maybe just one more day, the way you sometimes have to stay in bed and blow your nose with stacks of books and Kleenex and extra cookies nearby. Bryan was thinking of that when he fell down and started the “tantrum”. Why didn't the other kids want to stay with their mothers? What was happening?
The only times Bryan ever left his mother was when he went off with Grandma, but that felt like the same thing as being with his mother, or even better. Plus that other dreamlike day he and Craig, his old friend from the Bronx, had gone down the “avenue” all alone and without permission to the “candy store” and a smiling man bobbing above them, as intrusive as the cringing Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, had given them pennies for gumballs. He wanted to know where their mothers were. He had all the pennies, and he was doing all the talking. Afterwards, as if in a fog, the boys were found “way out on the highway” and a police car had to take them home because they'd both memorized their street name like good boys: Gunther Avenue. The back seat of the police car was rubbery hard like a ball with too much air in it, and a cage separated them from the cops.
Bryan had asked Holly, “Don't you want to be with your Mom?”
“Oh, I always see her.”
At the dinner table, they were having “cutlets” and talking about the tantrum.
“Miss Klapper is nice though, I like her now.” Bryan was convinced. “And Eileen - guess what? Miss Klapper's hair is just like your Midge doll.”
“In a flip, you mean?” Eileen responded. “Oh her - now I know who she is - the one from the playground. At lunch. She yells a lot at the big kids, in the fourth or fifth grade.”
His father cut in, “Bryan the Flip - that's right,” he laughed. “It's Bryan the Flip!”
“Dad, nobody's talkin' to you,” Bryan stated.
“Bryan the Flip!” The mocking continued. “That's Bryan the Flip!”
“Ma, can't you tell him to stop? I'm sick of it now.”
Then little Carrie mimicked her father, “Bryan the Flip!”
His mother interjected, “I'm just happy everything's working out now, that everything's settled. And that tomorrow school will go fine. Because school is something everybody does. I went to school too once, just like you kids. Your father - he went to school! And some kids even look forward to it - if you can believe that, for some kids going to school is the best part of the day!”
“Yeah - but they're probably the kids nobody likes,” Eileen muttered. “The kids who like school are always the weirdos.”
“Eileen - you'd do well to have friends like that - and then maybe your marks would improve!”
The tone his mother continued using was soft and comforting, but decidedly firm - it sounded like the last page of a storybook - the problem had been solved, the story was over, the book was closed.
Later on, Bryan approached his mother while she was having a dreamy, doe-eyed after-dinner cup of coffee. His father had the TV on, she was alone, it was already dark outside and even though the kitchen was brightly lit, whole corners of the room had begun to look like the soft dark parts of the backyard. You can fill up all the corners with cupboards, but you can't keep out the dark. There really were no walls, no solids after dinner. He asked his Mom why his Dad had kept calling him “Bryan the Flip”.
She didn't answer right away, and Bryan watched her circle the rim of her mug with a finger, and then this finger had a drop of coffee stuck to it. “Well, your Dad likes to joke, he's a joker, a jokester…and I think that when he heard that your teacher had her hair in a flip, he thought that sounded funny, or he was surprised, and after all, you were the one who started talking about flips.”
“No - it was Eileen. Eileen started talking about flips.”
She took a sip of coffee, and with a frown that had nothing to do with the taste of the coffee, she added, “Well, then maybe your father was reminded of a movie he had seen. Because lots of actresses are wearing their hair in a flip these days.”
“What movie? Toby Tyler?” The first film Bryan had ever been taken to see inside a movie theater was Toby Tyler, and though it had turned out to be very funny, it was also very shocking, confusing - the idea that a boy would run away from home to join a circus, the idea that some boys didn't have mothers, that a boy could live without a mother.
“No, no, not that, maybe something your father and I saw at the movies last week, when Rachel came to babysit.”
“What's the difference between 'joker' and 'jokester'?”
“I think 'jokester' is nicer, more familiar.”
“What movie did you see?”
“The one last week? That was just something I'm sure you wouldn't like with Robert Mitchum.”
“Who's Robert Mitchum?”
“He makes police movies and war movies, that kind of thing - things your father enjoys. You know the kind of thing your father likes.”
“Is Robert Mitchum bad - like Elmira Gulch?”
“Bryan, you know that Elmira Gulch is only a character from The Wizard of Oz. And Robert Mitchum isn't in The Wizard of Oz.”
“Does Robert Mitchum wear his hair in a flip?”
“Of course not - you know that men don't wear their hair in a flip. Only girls can wear their hair like that.”
“Well…does Robert Mitchum look like Miss Klapper?”
“Bryan, you know that your father doesn't know Miss Klapper. Some fathers never ever meet the schoolteachers. Lots of fathers don't have the kind of time for that. You're the one that has to go to school everyday - not your father.”
“Well, then I don't understand why he's calling me Bryan the Flip, and I don't like it.”
In wintertime, during the identically sluggish weeks following Christmas, Miss Klapper began making daily announcements. On the following Thursday, they'd be seeing a “filmstrip” with the other kindergarten class; the other “children's group” would be “coming in for a visit”, and it would be “a special afternoon”. For “the special occasion”, there would be “juices and some kind of treat”. She explained that the filmstrip was “all about Astronomy,” and then asked if anybody knew what that was.
David Meeb, who had once called Bryan a “crybaby” and a “sissy” in secret by the bookcase, by the “Kindergarten Library”, even as Bryan had noticed that two or three of the boy's fingers inexplicably had red nail polish on them, said that “Astronomy was the country AstroBoy comes from.” When Miss Klapper laughed and put her hand to her forehead, everyone realized that it was the wrong answer, so they all began to laugh at him, especially Bryan. David had lost the tooth next to his front teeth so there was a hole there when he smiled, and David wore a square gold ring on his middle finger with a letter scratched onto it. David's nail polish hadn't looked like a girl's (and neither did his hands) - it was more like dried-out blood spots after wiping a bloody nose.
Astronomy was the study of the stars and the planets, and the sun itself was a star “just like the ones you see at night”. Miss Klapper said that she had to start preparing them for it because a filmstrip gets shown while a record plays along, a record would explain all the pictures they'd be seeing, so nobody could stop the show for questions or “other problems”. She also explained that the Astronomy filmstrip used to be shown only to “the bigger boys and girls” in the first grade, but since the first grade now had a new astronomy film, they were free to use the filmstrip for the kindergarten classes. It was a “privilege”. However, it was also an “experiment”, because nobody knew if “kindergartners” would be able to understand it. Then she got excited, clapped her hands and shouted, “So get ready!”
Bryan was counting the days. His mind became full of the stars; each planet seemed to have a separate color, a separate face, and they were all blinking in the sky, smiling in the sky, blinking their eyes, winking with swaggering mystery (in this way, not unlike Bryan's enigmatic “Star People”) and then they combined together like a lit Christmas tree with the giant yellow sun perched on the top, crowning the top of this tree that reached as high as “outer space”.
The feeling all this evoked was the same as staring down the street from his bedroom window when he should have been fast asleep at Christmastime. In the middle of the night, he'd prop himself up, get lost in a Christmas vision, and not even remember falling back upon his pillow. All the houses (except their own because his father kept snorting, “Maybe next year!”) were covered over with melting, oozing holiday lights and colors. The shiny snow reflected red and green, but there were also bright blues, and the ballooning Santa on the Brown's rooftop already seemed to be soaring on its round-the-world Christmas Eve course, the faraway stars decorating the sky like a giant polka dot “pullover” that maybe God the Father was wearing, that maybe God the Father had received as a Christmas present from the Holy Ghost! Everything was so cold, yet everything was so warm. The stars stood out like snowflakes that might have fallen down and joined this white Levittown Christmas if they weren't so completely frozen up there. Bryan could picture himself outside in the warmth of the colors of the cold, sliding in his slippers along Eagle Lane singing “Joy to the World” or “Jingle Bell Rock”.
The morning of the event seemed normal. Two years ahead of him in school, Eileen tried to convince him that she had already seen the filmstrip because “it wasn't scary”, that a few men wearing glasses kept pointing to a blackboard full of numbers with “pointer sticks”, and that only “the Saturn planet has the rings.” And Carrie was mad because she couldn't get to go to school and see anything. When would she be old enough to go to school? When his mother responded “next year”, Carrie wanted to know when that was. Had Bryan ever been so young and uninformed? His diluted coffee went down so fast that he almost asked for another cup but he knew beforehand that he couldn't have another one so he didn't ask.
Miss Klapper seemed nervous about “having guests”. Moving tables, actually stooping over and pushing tables into the four corners, her tall, thin body now seemed as flexible as Gumby's, and her thin arms seemed to roll out like lengths of garden hose able to extend the normal distance of any yard or classroom. She looked “overheated”; her hair flip was flopping down. She wasn't happy. The class phone kept buzzing, at one point she even held it away from her ear but exclaimed directly into the end of the receiver, “that, I'm afraid, may not be possible, Dr. Carlson.”
And then two big boys came in five or six times with probably fifty metal “folding chairs” to spread out in the middle of the classroom.
She made a dull never-ending announcement: “You are now to continue with your Planet Projects - however, I do not want to see only simple circles for the planets. No sim-ple cir-cles. Use your imaginations - all the planets should not be colored with the same color. Not every planet should look like our yellow sun. As always, the best pictures will be posted afterwards on the bulletin boards for everyone to praise - until the Valentines Day projects. Yes, Valentines Day is coming up fast so start thinking of what a perfect Valentines Day would be. Everybody knows that Valentines Day is one of the best days of the year! Who will be your Valentine this year?” There was one more reference to red hearts and then she was on the telephone again, now turning her back for privacy, as she emphasized, “Well, there is an auditorium.”
Bryan was putting black tiger stripes through Jupiter, surrounding it with red lightning bolts, and then, for more inspiration, decided to get the book he'd been looking at the day before at the “Reading Station”. He found himself facing David Meeb who was holding a “picture book” about tractors and farms. On the cover of it, a faraway farmer was waving from a yellow tractor, and the rest of the photo looked like miles and miles of empty dirt. David then moved near enough to Bryan's ear to make his whispering sound like a normal voice. But Bryan could feel the breath of him with every word, and this wasn't normal. Something was going wrong.
“I wanna punch you.”
“What?” Bryan stepped back, and David stepped forward.
“You crybaby - actin' like a girl,” David groaned.
Bryan was startled, then blurted, “But I'm not a girl!”
Back in his seat with burning eyes, the lightning bolts were getting longer, and his face felt hot and red. He was scared, embarrassed. He was “blushing”. He didn't want to look up from his drawing. And the drawing was violent, threatening - had Bryan really drawn all those spears of lightning? Was everybody looking at him? His mother had advised, “You should ignore the people who won't go away,” but even his mother had said she didn't like being left alone in the house. Bryan started drawing again, Jupiter was getting a double, then a triple outline, dark stripes began surrounding Jupiter, and then Bryan realized that he had turned it into Saturn. The constant class noise was like the flapping ocean waves that every summer crept around your bare cold feet at the edges of the beach. They kept lapping at your feet, lapping, nipping - something in the water was biting his feet.
Mrs. Baines had just arrived from the cafeteria maneuvering two food carts, pushing one and pulling another. Sometimes she would kick at the cart she was pushing in an effort to get it to move more quickly. She was wearing sneakers. She was wearing a plastic hat, something like the bathing caps Eileen and his mother used at the beach to protect their hair from “the elements”. At Halloween, Mrs. Baines had also come into the classroom, that time with milks and “something fresh”. That time, Mrs. Baines had introduced herself as if waiting for applause, as if she was just as important as any of the teachers, and had then begun to tell them about “the right kind of lunchroom behavior” because “that's where you're going to be eating lunch everyday before you know it.” She had brought apples and mini-doughnuts but only Cindy Ricker had wanted an apple and all the rest had wanted doughnuts, which Baines ran out of in about two seconds. A couple of girls were crying, nobody was listening after they'd found out there wasn't going to be enough doughnuts, and then David Meeb, one of the lucky ones who'd received a doughnut, suddenly threw his against the decorated window after taking only one or two bites, muttering, “This ain't no real doughnut!” The flying doughnut hit the cutout of Casper the Friendly Ghost in the head - which David had probably aimed for. Mrs. Baines said, “Throwing food is always wrong, it's not the right thing, it's not the polite thing for a student to do, and so is talking back to the Cafeteria Monitors because you couldn't do that at home with your own parents, could you?”
Today, she wasn't “dressed up”. Last time, there'd been the tight black plastic belt that had made the bottom part of her dress fan out like the Liberty Bell. Last time, Bryan had been fascinated by her formalized presentation - you could see that she had “rehearsed”, had wanted everything to be perfect. But today, it was just the plastic cap, a dirty apron like the ones you see at McDonalds or Wetsons, and “tennis shoes” his mother “wouldn't be caught dead in”. From her ongoing repetition of that phrase, it was clear that Bryan's mother wouldn't be caught dead in lots of things. One of the food carts was full of drink cartons and there was also a box of straws while the other cart held pyramids of Brownies or something black in individual Baggies. Mrs. Baines wasn't in the room five seconds before she shouted like a football player, “Can I have a head count?”
At the same time, Miss Klapper continued gushing on the telephone - like telling secrets she couldn't get out of her mouth fast enough, like having only two seconds in which to say a thousand things. Miss Klapper was choking on secrets. “Listen, gotta go, the cafeteria's already gonging the gong - but no one's even here yet, I can't believe - dis-organization. Excuse me - Mrs. Baines?” She remained at the desk but continued holding the telephone receiver, and then she started using the receiver as if to help her communicate, moving the receiver back and forth as if to underline certain phrases, to emphasize everything Mrs. Baines needed to know. Miss Klapper's hands were “dainty”, but the telephone was like a fist. “I can't assist you - as you can see, Mrs. Baines, we're expecting large numbers, Mr. Carlisle hasn't even confirmed - ”
“Don't know anything about that - they told me to roll this in and make sure - ” And she interrupted herself to snap part of her plastic cap above an ear.
“I can't possibly give you a head count without Carlisle's confirmation - have you spoken with Miss Ratner who has confirmed - or up front with Dr. Carlson's secretary, Debbie - because if you haven't, we're really not going to be able to communicate very well - I don't know what you know.”
By now a hubbub was obvious out in the hallway. Then the room began filling up with children. One girl with an “eager beaver” look and a wobbly weightless ping pong ball kind of head had squeezed through first, or she was the first one Bryan had noticed bouncing into the room. Her intent yet dazed expression resembled the man who wouldn't leave Craig and Bryan alone at the gumball machine, his fat fingers sifting through a handful of nickels and dimes and picking out the pennies for the penny gum. Then suddenly the screaming started. Everybody came running forward, and the folding chairs began scraping the floor or falling down in a clatter. Mrs. Baines was caught in the middle of the “uproar” and slapped a boy's hand as he reached for a Baggie. Then another boy with incredible freckles like a smudged checkerboard rushed by and tripped over one of Baines's sneakers. She yelped, “Ohmigod!” The “eager beaver” was now holding two chairs and shaking them to keep others away from them until a redhead with about ten “barrettes” in her frizzy hair arrived so they could sit down next to each other. Then a man in a gray overcoat appeared in the doorway and barked, “Who's in charge?”
Putting their heads together, the three adults - Baines, Klapper and the overcoat - now wheeled the food carts back outside of the classroom and then disappeared. Before the door closed, Miss Klapper was heard questioning the man in the overcoat, snapping at him. “Ratner or Carlisle - who are you substituting for, and the coat - you're wearing a coat - where do you think you're going in that?” Now Bryan could understand what Eileen had said about Miss Klapper yelling her head off on the playground.
When the teachers reentered the room, there was more of everybody else. Another class came swarming in, and presumably the small lady with the red lipstick and the high, vacant forehead was their teacher. Every strand of her hair had been pulled back tightly until her forehead glistened with the strain. She looked like the Wicked Queen from Snow White, and she was probably Miss Ratner. It was comforting for Bryan to know that she wasn't his teacher. Plus an old man in dark blue “overalls” (just like his father's work uniform) was steering in the film projector on another kind of cart. The old man wasn't wearing blue jeans because blue jeans aren't considered “uniforms” and everybody knows that you're not allowed to wear “denims” to school, work or church. The Ratner teacher, older and much shorter than Miss Klapper and, for that matter, the Wicked Queen, had a heavy, jangling charm bracelet, and she was using this arm with the bracelet to point out the remaining empty seats to stragglers who apparently couldn't see straight. Bryan felt she was making the noise with the bracelet on purpose just to attract attention to herself, to seem special. Yet her red lips stayed mushed together - that red lipstick seemed to be gluing her mouth shut. And though she was only pointing with it, her arm seemed angry - like the bells at church when you show up late and God understands that you really don't want to be there at all. Suddenly you understand what God understands, and He's always known that you've never wanted to go to church. In fact, maybe Bryan's problem at school with David Meeb was a God thing. Remember when Eileen and her friend Madelyn had used up all of their “donation” money at The Doughnut Man instead of dropping it into the church basket, instead of even going to church? Eileen had announced as if she'd even understood something God hadn't, “There's always church - you don't have to go every week. And what do they need all that money for - isn't that church big enough to get enough money?” Maybe all of Bryan's problems had started when his mother had stopped accompanying them to church.
A grimly silent Miss Klapper now stood posing in front of the classroom like a statue with its hands on its hips. The “overcoat man” had been positioned in the corner by the restroom. Miss Klapper's voice had gone cold. She addressed the nonstop roar of the children. “I'm waiting.”
This was the signal to quiet down, and then Miss Ratner clapped her hands about ten times. With her charm bracelet in full swing, it sounded like she was banging on a tambourine. Bryan now noticed that there were actually two bracelets on that arm, and that they were jangling together. This tambourine banging was another signal.
“I'm not going to compete with all of you, and I'm speaking to all of you in all three classes.” There was still noise, someone sneezed because it was the middle of winter, and then there was giggling - even the sound of a sneeze could be uproarious. “Enough - can I have your attention please?”
Another quick clap and jangle from the bracelets.
“Mr. Glenlecker has arrived from the Audio-Visual Department to present today's filmstrip. And I have a few things to announce before we begin. Now listen carefully: the only reason to leave your seats is to use the restroom at the back of the classroom. For those of you who are new to us, Mr. Carlisle's substitute teacher is standing back there by the restroom right now - that's where the bathroom is. Please remember to turn the sign on the bathroom door to red when you enter the restroom so nobody comes in while you are in there, and then remember to turn the sign back to green when you leave so that the next child will be free to enter. Remember: red when you enter, green to leave. The green lets everybody know that nobody's still inside. When you see green, you can enter the bathroom. And remember to flush - but one flush. If you continue to flush, the toilet will flood. And create a possible emergency. That's our problem here. In this classroom. One flush. Please understand that there is only room for one person in the restroom at a time. It's not a place to have a party. Does everybody now see Mr. Fred? Mr. Fred, who'll be with us today for the filmstrip, is the substitute teacher for Mr. Carlisle. Mr. Fred, would you be so kind as to demonstrate the sign? Could you show us the difference between the red and the green? Do you have the same signs for the restroom in your classroom? Are there any questions?”
Mr. Fred, who'd unbuttoned his overcoat, flipped the sign over; the sign was actually made from a ping pong paddle hanging by a string with a red circle pasted on one side and a green circle on the other. His coat had flapped wide open, and it spread apart like a cape where one might hide beneath or even be hidden as you were ridden on horseback to a darkening castle that grew darker and larger the closer you got. This was when David Meeb asked about snacks without raising his hand. David suddenly blurted, “In those Baggies over there, are those cupcakes?” This started a rumble among the children. “Are they for us?” he added, so the bracelets had to be used again. Then Ratner stood looming over David's desk just in case there was another “outburst”. There were to be no more “outbursts”. Bryan hoped that David would finally get into trouble - he didn't own the classroom, did he? Right now, Bryan could see David's head bent down on his desk, resting glumly on his fists, the ass. “Ass” was what his father had muttered to Bryan when Bryan had accidentally buried the black plastic bags underneath the pile of autumn leaves he'd been learning how to rake together into a mountain.
His mother once explained that there was a big difference between losing your temper and losing your patience. His father was singled out as the type who lost his patience, which was “a normal everyday thing. You kids do it too - and don't I know it!”
“Mrs. Baines from the cafeteria has not forgotten us! Refreshments will be served after the presentation because Mr. Glenlecker cannot stay with us today. He can't join us for snacks. Mr. Glenlecker has informed us there will be absolutely no interruptions because - ”
“Only for dust on the phonograph needle, only dust,” Mr. Glenlecker interjected. “Because the record sometimes skips. Because of the dust. The dust collects on the needle.” Bryan noticed how the old man's gray whiskers were crawling across his face and right into his ears, fuzzing up like dust, like the stuff you could pick out of your belly button when nobody was looking.
“Okay, thank you - now you've heard it yourselves from Mr. Glenlecker himself, no interruptions because the upper grades are also going to need his assistance, and he needs to excuse himself earlier than the rest of us. Have I made myself clear?”
The lights were turned off, there were a few screams, which the bracelets attacked, and the record player immediately began beeping. There was a “narrator” and the beeps. But the beeps weren't outer space music, they were the signals for Mr. Glenlecker to turn the knob located on the side of the projector and thus move ahead to the next picture frame being projected onto the screen. That's the difference between a filmstrip and a movie - you have to do it all yourself. When the impatient Mrs. Baines standing near the doorway and guarding the carts cut in with, “Can I leave now?” she was hushed with a rattle of the bracelets as if she were one of the children.
Bryan was disappointed that the filmstrip didn't go directly to outer space like John Glenn or one of the monkeys did. Like his sister had warned, the men with the pointer sticks took over, but what she didn't mention was their red faces. One of his favorite toys had always been Mr. PotatoHead, but these guys were TomatoHead! There were lots of moons following “larger planet bodies” and then the man-in-the-moon was compared to a hole in the ground! That's all he was! This was especially disappointing because on a bright night the man-in-the-moon could appear like the head of a mummy. Then “little Mercury” became the baby, but the far-off planets were able to “flee the sun's rays” while growing “enormous in the outer orbits”, always growing, like rolling a snowball into the body of a snowman. There were moons and more moons, planets “mothering moons”, one planet had ten, Neptune had “even more”, most of them bigger than “our own Mother Earth”. And all of them, all the “celestial bodies”, like a long, long song you'd never be able to remember the words of, were following the other bodies on an invisible path, an endless black line of planet balls like bowling balls all rolling away and rolling together to this place called “infinity” where “computers can't count”, and where apparently, the whole ballgame just stopped. In fact, the whole thing was beginning to sound like church, the angels were bowling, and that beep from the record kept waking the now-dozing Bryan like thunder. But Bryan's eyes opened wide when he heard about “the black hole”. It was called a “vacuum” but was that the same thing as “vacuum cleaner”? Was there a black hole in outer space that worked like a vacuum cleaner? And you couldn't ask questions, you mustn't ask questions, because another beep would just take you somewhere else and presumably even farther away.