The Vast Fields of Ordinary Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  After

  Advance Praise for The Vast Fields of Ordinary:

  “Nick Burd’s The Vast Fields of Ordinary is bold. Engaging. Heartbreaking. A book worthy of attention.”

  —Ellen Hopkins, New York Times bestselling author of Crank

  “The Vast Fields of Ordinary is a wonderfully engaging and satisfying book about all kinds of growing: growing up, growing together, growing apart. Dade Hamilton and his family and friends (and enemies) are all vividly and complexly imagined and realized, and I loved spending time with them. Nick Burd’s extremely accomplished and beautifully detailed prose reanimates the usually moribund American suburban wasteland; like an alchemist, he finds the wonder in the ordinary.”

  —Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

  “Nick Burd’s debut novel unfolds like the summer vacation it chronicles: in the beginning the vista seems limitless, but as the pages turn and the days pass the plot thickens and the end comes way before you’re ready to put it down. This is a mysterious, funny, wise, generous story, and its main character is someone you need to know, and you’ll never forget.”

  —Dale Peck, author of Martin and John and Sprout

  “Who can resist a kid who survives his senior year of high school despite having been given the nickname ‘Vagisil’? Not I . . . Dade Hamilton’s coming-of-age tale with a Midwest twist is devastatingly real—but it’s also funny, touching, and ultimately quite hopeful.”

  —T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes

  DIAL BOOKS

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Nick Burd

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burd, Nick.

  The vast fields of ordinary / by Nick Burd.

  p. cm.

  Summary: The summer after graduating from an Iowa high school,

  eighteen-year-old Dade Hamilton watches his parents’ marriage disintegrate,

  ends his long-term, secret relationship, comes out of the closet, and savors first love.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05080-4

  [1. Coming out (Sexual orientation)—Fiction. 2. Homosexuality—Fiction.

  3. Coming of age—Fiction. 4. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.

  5. Family problems—Fiction. 6. Iowa—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B915985Vas 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008046256

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my mom,

  my dad,

  and my sister

  Acknowledgments

  Endless thanks to my agent Nicole Kenealy and my editor Alisha Niehaus. Words cannot express how grateful I am for your guidance, support, and unwavering faith in this book.

  I’d also like to thank Nicholas Job, Robbie Imes, Jane Beachy, Brian Rothman, Heather Kaufman, Jared Hohl, Zachary Woolfe, Jason Napoli Brooks, Caroline Rabinovitch, Dale Peck, Jim Freed, Jackson Taylor, Kathryn Musilek, Brian Fender, Ryan Day, Sheala Hansen, Caroline Cazes, Eric Luc, Cameron Honsa, Karolina Zarychta, the staff of PEN American Center, and my family.

  “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”

  —e. e. cummings

  Before

  I spent a good part of my senior prom drawing DH + PS in a giant heart in the last stall of the Cedarville High boys’ bathroom. It covered the entire wall and took two red markers and almost an hour to complete. Every now and then, groups of guys would come in and piss in a line at the urinals and talk about how they were gonna get lucky with their dates, but for the most part it was just me and the marker stink and the muted sounds of crappy hip-hop coming through the walls.

  When I was done I went back to give it all one last look, to tell it good-bye and head home for the night. My black-tuxedoed and frilly-dressed classmates were standing around the dim gymnasium, their voices striving to rise above the thumping beat of the music. I was wearing a powder blue tuxedo that I’d found at a thrift store just three days before. The prom theme was “Out of This World,” and there were silver cardboard stars hanging from the ceiling and a twelve-foot tall green blow-up alien behind the table where the punch and cookies were all spread out. Principal Dugan was dressed like an astronaut and making the rounds, saying hello to students who inevitably rolled their eyes or flicked him off as soon as he passed.

  I stood at the entrance and thought, Good night, everyone.

  But I didn’t go. Instead I went over to the bleachers, where a few other dateless losers were sitting and watching. They were all scattered at a safe distance from one another as if their loneliness was contagious. I saw Fessica Montana sitting in the very top row. She was wearing a hot pink dress and glittery eye shadow, and her hair was overcurled. She saw me and gave me a little wave and a shrug as if to say, Here we are. I waved back and looked out at the crowd.

  It was then that I saw Pablo for the first time all night. He was in the center of the dance floor with a few of the other guys from the football team. He was moving his shoulders just slightly, too cool to really dance, but far too popular to get away with just standing around. He and the other players were not-so-subtly passing a flask back and forth. A few feet away, Pablo’s girlfriend Judy and the rest of the mall girls were shimmying into one another, screaming and laughing and in love with being watched.

  It didn’t take long for Pablo to notice me staring at him. The moment his eyes met mine I thought of the previous afternoon in his bedroom, the lights out and his mother moving around upstairs and our hands traveling frantically over each other’s bodies like we were in a race against time. I waved at him. Pablo let his gaze linger for a moment longer and then turned to Bert McGraw. He grabbed the flask out of his hand and danced off toward Judy. I understood that this was his way of saying that I no longer existed to him.

  I stood up to go. I looked at Fessica. She was staring at me, her sadness somehow pointed at me now. I wonder if she’d seen what had just happened, if she knew. She looked like she was about to come down and say something
, but whatever it was, it wasn’t going to fix anything, so I turned and left.

  I drove home with my windows down and my yellow bow tie unraveled on the passenger seat. Outside the car, the night hummed, quietly alive. I moved unnoticed through town, first past the strip malls and the office buildings and then through the residential maze that made up the periphery of Cedarville. I felt like a galactic traveler who’d landed on some ghost version of Earth where all the people had disappeared. When I reached my subdivision it was dark, save for the globe-shaped lamps that stood at the foot of every driveway, and I noticed that ours had gone out. It was nothing more than a gray sphere on a black metal rod. In the absence of its light our front yard had become shades darker than the rest of the yards on our block, and later that night I dreamt our dead lamp grew arms and legs and lurched down the street like a robot.

  Chapter 1

  My father, Ned, ran Cedarville’s only luxury car dealership, and my mother, Peggy, was an art teacher at St. Jude’s, the smaller of the two Catholic schools in town. When I was thirteen we moved from the country to Cedarview Estates, a new housing development in the eastern part of Cedarville. The houses were all painted safe colors. Taupe, beige, and dusty blue. At night their windows glowed with a soft golden light. My mother hated it there.

  “It’s like a village of futuristic lighting fixtures,” she said. She was out on the front porch smoking a rare Marlboro Light. “Sometimes I feel like if I stare at them for long enough I’ll start to see them moving real slow. Like glaciers.”

  My parents had initially moved out of Cedarville and into the country when they found out they were having me. My mother wanted to raise her kid in a farmhouse. She wanted an unnamed cat and a few chickens that she didn’t know what to do with. She wanted the space and the sunsets, the weird bugs in the yard. I spent my days wandering off the porch into the cornfields that ran behind the house. I would stand in the middle of the field, close my eyes, and spin myself around to try to make myself as lost as possible. One evening at dinner my father told us that he’d heard good things about the new Cedarview Estates being built in town and that maybe we should think about moving.

  “It’ll be great to move back into town,” he said. “We’ll be closer to everything. Plus, a guy from work knows a couple of the guys behind the development. He said it’s going to be gorgeous. Real state-of-the-art living style.”

  “I don’t see anything gorgeous about cracker-box houses,” my mother said.

  “Well, we’re not twenty-five anymore, Peggy,” he said.

  She slammed her silverware onto her plate and asked what that had to do with anything, and I took my food up to my room so they could fight in peace.

  The house in Cedarview Estates was too big for us. We had three extra bedrooms and a huge basement that my mother had taken over with art projects. Headless mannequins painted blue. Black stick figures acting out Biblical scenes on shattered mirrors. There was a fireplace we used one Christmas Eve and a stainless steel refrigerator with built-in flat-screen television. We had a pool out back and a man who came to clean it once a week. There were stereo speakers installed in the walls, and sometimes the house would sing.

  I didn’t mind the house and our new neighborhood. It took some getting used to, but before long I saw it as I saw the cornfields that ran behind our old place in the country. It was a space to be explored and to disappear in. My parents, on the other hand, fought about the house all the time, about what it meant and what kinds of people it made them. My father thought it represented a new level of adulthood and affluence, like it was a giant arrow indicating that they were moving in the right direction. But my mother saw it as a surrender to normalcy, a rejection of the fantasy where she created sculptures in the barn and heard the voice of nature in the black silence of the rural Midwest evening.

  One night my father and I were reading the paper in the living room when my mother’s voice came through the intercom on the wall.

  “I just want you to know that I’m in the master bathroom using the bidet. I can’t believe this. Dade, if you can hear me, never, ever let yourself become this.”

  My father looked up from the sports page and gave a dismissive shake of his head before going back to reading.

  My mother’s fellow teachers referred to her as The Hippie. She had long sandy blond hair and always wore flowing peasant skirts and gauzy tops that revealed the teenage girl slimness in her arms and shoulders. Her eyes lit up when someone told a clever joke or when she noticed that one of the flowers she planted in the backyard was beginning to bloom. But there were many days when the light behind her eyes went out and it seemed like the world she saw left her hopeless and disappointed. We’d been in the house for a year when she made an announcement at the dinner table.

  “I’m going to start seeing a psychiatrist,” she said. “I just wanted everyone to know. It’s no one’s fault. I’m not blaming anyone. It’s just something I need to do.”

  My father stopped chewing his veal cutlet for a few seconds and studied my mother’s face, maybe waiting to see if this was some sort of joke. My mother looked over at me and gave me as warm a smile as she could muster.

  She said, “How’s the veal, honey? Is it good? Do you like it?”

  The doctor prescribed her some pills, and over the next few months it seemed like she was refilling her prescription as often as the pool guy was stopping by. She’d spend hours on the sofa watching old movies on cable. Other times she’d lock herself in her meditation room with an expensive merlot and play Fleetwood Mac albums all day, “Everywhere” and “You Make Loving Fun” at hostage situation levels.

  “Life is good at the capitalist compound,” she said one day on the phone to her sister in Phoenix. She was standing at the kitchen sink and looking out the window at our yard. “The garden’s in bloom, the sprinklers just kicked on, and the pool boy will be over any minute. Oh, and I just took a Klonopin. So yes, life is good. Life is very good.”

  She started lying by the pool during the summers like some zoned-out starlet. She went unconscious in the sun and then murmured things that didn’t make any sense. At dinner she sometimes talked about adding on to the house, but suggestions like these always had an edge, like she was trying to spite her former self, the one that never wanted to move there in the first place. But soon her feelings about our new life faded, or at least moved beneath the surface of it all, and she and my father began to fight over stuff like why she bought Mountain Mist scented detergent instead of the Spring Breeze my father preferred and whether a lawn should be watered in the daylight or the dark.

  My parents were always going on about wanting me to have a good work ethic, so we spent the day after my fifteenth birthday driving around and getting applications from every fast-food joint, movie theater, and grocery store in town.

  “It’ll be good for you to make your own money,” my father said. “And when you get your first paycheck, I’ll take you down to the bank and we’ll open you your own checking account.”

  I nodded and stared out the window at the passing strip malls and restaurants. I found the idea of work terrifying and depressing. I saw the way my father sometimes looked when he came home from the work at night. He’d shuffle into the kitchen with tired eyes and a loosened tie. He’d grab a beer from the refrigerator and lean against the counter as he downed it, as if each drop of beer went toward erasing his day and put something better in its place. Then there was me sitting at the kitchen table, eating potato chips and flipping through a music magazine, the idea of going to my room and downloading porn a vague notion in my mind as always.

  “How was your day?” my father would ask me.

  “Fine,” I’d say. “How was yours?”

  “Oh, fine. Some private school girl threw a fit when her dad wouldn’t buy her the Mercedes she wanted and I thought I was going to have to call the cops, but other than that it was fine.”

  I tried not to look at him as he finished his beer. Sometimes I�
�d get up and go out to the pool and leave him alone. Other times I’d put on my headphones, turn up the volume, and hope that the music leaking out of them would be enough to send him to another room.

  My dad was a loner. It was one of the few things we had in common. He golfed alone, went to movies alone. He had colleagues at the dealership, people that could probably be considered friends, but he rarely associated with any of them outside of work. He stayed at the edges of parties, blank-faced and silent with a sweaty glass of scotch, but ready with a smile and a line about the weather whenever someone approached him. He was handsome enough, an ex-jock who’d somehow held on to his solid physique and unremarkable charm. You could tell that somewhere inside him was the genuine desire for a connection, something to pull him out of his self-imposed isolation, but the fishing trips and tennis games he suggested to other husbands always went unfilled in the end.

  I ended up getting a part-time job at the Food World supermarket by the mall. I started out as a grocery bagger and by senior year I was working as a stock boy with my friend Pablo and a few other guys that went to my high school. We spent most of our time smoking cigarettes in the milk cooler and talking about how we were underpaid or pretending to be interested in the twins—Jessica and Fessica Montana—that worked in the video rental department.

  The twins were a year younger than us in school. They were both just five feet tall, with chipmunk cheeks and wide blue eyes. Jessica had a smile so constant that after the senior play my father asked me if the girl who played Ophelia had some sort of personality disorder. She kept her hair dyed a sunny blond and enjoyed a status at our high school as one of the minions of Pablo’s hyperpopular girlfriend, Judy Lockhart.