The Vast Fields of Ordinary Read online

  Her fraternal sister, Fessica, wasn’t quite as pretty. Her real name was Francesca, but sometime during her time in the Cedarville Public School System some smartass had started calling her Fessica as joke and it stuck. She had a nose that reminded me of a deformed mushroom and a mouthful of blue braces (“They’re not blue. They’re sapphire.”). She always wore her dull brown hair in a ponytail and slouched through the aisles of Food World or the halls of Cedarville High as if she’d just been resurrected that morning and in her death haze had forgotten to shower. She wore what Pablo called “typical nerd gear,” stuff like really tight stonewashed jeans and T-shirts with airbrushed horses bucking dramatically across her chest. Pablo liked to stop by the video department where she worked and tell her how unusual her name was.

  “What is it?” he’d ask. “French? Canadian? French-Canadian?”

  “I’ve told you,” Fessica would reply. “Fessica is not my real name.”

  “Well, Fessica is a very special name,” he’d say, taking her hand and bringing it to his mouth, “and you are a very special girl.”

  Pablo’s family had moved to Cedarville from Arizona at the end of our freshman year. By junior year he was student council secretary and the Cedarville Warriors’ star quarterback. Girls tended to swoon over him. A few even lamely referred to him as the Sexican. He was six feet tall with skin the color of a dirty penny and hazel eyes that were the main focus of my jack-off fantasies. He was dark and broody, not at all like the other jocks that ran around tackling each other and screaming each other’s bizarre nicknames down the hall. I saw him in the halls at school and occasionally we passed each other in the aisles at Food World, but we didn’t become friends until driver’s ed class when we were paired up for a presentation on centrifugal force. We worked on the project all night and then smoked a joint in his bedroom while listening to the Mexican hip-hop he was obsessed with. We were stoned and spacing out on his bed when he reached over and started fondling my crotch. I was sixteen at the time, and I knew I wasn’t straight. I’d known that for a fact since I was ten and my babysitter Kendra Kaufman let me stay up late and watch Night of 1,000 Werewolves, one of Johnny Morgan’s first films.

  “I want to marry Johnny Morgan,” I told her when the credits were rolling.

  “Kid,” Kendra said, “don’t tell your parents I let you watch that movie, and definitely don’t tell them what you just told me.”

  I always thought there was the distant possibility that I could maybe sleep with a girl, but I never found myself staring at them the way I stared at the guys running around the track at school or the shirtless models in my father’s issues of GQ. I practiced saying I was gay to inanimate objects around the house. I told the soap dish in my bathroom, the ceiling fan above my bed, the blue drinking glass I favored above all the others simply because over the years its entire family had perished one by one during various interactions with hard surfaces around the kitchen and I’d convinced myself our solitude was linked.

  “I’m gay,” I told these things. “I’m a homo.”

  I would then wait for the orphaned drinking glass to shatter, the ceiling fan to drop, or for the soap dish to let out a bloodcurdling scream. But nothing ever happened. The world went on as ever.

  “We don’t tell anybody about this,” Pablo said when we were finished. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, slipping a worn green T-shirt over his head. “Especially not Judy.”

  I never allowed myself to call him my boyfriend even in the silence of my own mind. Our sexual encounters always lasted less than five minutes and ended with him looking even more depressed and pissed off than usual. Afterward we’d lie there in silence and I’d wonder what would happen if I asked for something more even though I wasn’t exactly sure what more was. Despite it all, there were days when I entertained the idea of him and me somehow getting away from Cedarville and being together in some weird vacuum where the cigarettes I bummed him and the doors I held open were enough to make him love me.

  I didn’t have many friends at school. I spent most of my time in my room writing and listening to music. I wrote weird little stories and poems, pieces where boys floated out the windows of their houses and hovered over their neighborhood. If I hung out with anyone, it was with Pablo and his jock buddies, but it was an unspoken rule between us all that if Pablo wasn’t around, then I shouldn’t be either. I was the odd man out, the one that was only spoken to when someone needed to copy my algebra homework or borrow a dollar for the pop machine. When they did speak to me, they always called me Dave to piss me off. Sometimes they made fun of me for wearing polyester pants and T-shirts I’d found at thrift stores around town. They told me my hair was too long, that I tossed it like a girl. I was never allowed to say anything because then I was the crybaby, the one who couldn’t take it, and that would only prove a terrible point. It all came to a head one day during lunch when Bert McGraw, one of the line-men for the Cedarville Warriors, was going on about how, Mr. Stone, the art teacher, had given him a D.

  “That white-haired faggot,” Bert said. “What a frickin’ perv. I should go to Dugan’s office and tell him that his homo ass tried to fondle me in the darkroom.”

  A series of caveman chuckles rippled up and down the lunch table, and Bert high-fived the player sitting to his right.

  And then without thinking I said, “Mr. Stone is a decent guy. Go talk to him. He’ll figure out a way to help you raise your grade.”

  Bert stopped chewing and dropped his shredded beef sandwich onto his plate.

  “Who is this kid?” he asked the table like he’d never seen me before. His voice got louder as he spoke. “You think Mr. Stone is cool? You think that hippy piece of turd is cool? What, fag? Did you blow him after class or something?”

  At this point, he was yelling. The lunchroom went from midday pandemonium to complete silence in five seconds flat. Everyone stared over at the table in the center of the Cedarville High lunchroom, stared at the table of blue-and-red-uniformed football players and the one outcast at the end in the brown plaid pants and the slim-cut cowboy shirt whose silver threading screamed queer louder than Bert’s booming apeman voice ever could. People at our school stopped everything to witness a good fight, and Bert McGraw raising his voice during lunch was a good sign that shit was about to go down. A few of the other players were red-faced trying to contain their laughter. One let out a sort of choking grunt of a laugh. Pablo glared at Bert from his place beside me.

  “Are you a faggot, Dave?” His voice echoed throughout the cafeteria. “It’s what everyone wants to know. Let’s clear it up once and for all. Are you a homo, homo?”

  His cheeks puffed with half-chewed bites of food. His eyes were crazed. Jessica Montana and Judy Lockhart and all the rest of the mall girls were craning their necks from a couple tables down. There were scattered whispers, muted giggles. Fessica stood up from the nerd table in the far corner of the lunchroom and stared. I looked down at my plate, at the undercooked fries and gray cottage cheese.

  “Dude,” I said to Pablo out of the corner of my mouth. “Help me out.”

  Bert turned to Pablo. “What, Soto? Is this little faggot your bitch?”

  One of the players at the far end of the table let out a sharp burst of laughter. The sound triggered something in Pablo, and suddenly he lunged across the table and grabbed Bert’s face with his left hand and punched him in the temple with his right. The sound was sick and fleshy. The lunchroom erupted with yelling and cheering as Pablo made his way over the table, bringing Bert to the ground on the other side. Principal Dugan and two of the security guards raced into the lunchroom, and I covered my face as they approached, covered my face until the two of them were being dragged out of the lunchroom, and even then I was just peeking through my fingers.

  Pablo and Bert both got suspended for fighting. People started talking more than usual. Someone wrote FAGIT! on my locker. The misspelling would’ve been funny if it weren’t so tragic. I left it there for the las
t month of school because there was the sense that wiping it off would only force something worse to take its place.

  I drove over to Pablo’s house to see him on the second day of his suspension. The front door was open when I got there. I could see him through the screen door sitting on the couch in his gym shorts. He was watching some trashy daytime talk show. I knocked and he pretended not to hear me. I waited a few seconds and tried just walking in, but the screen door was locked.

  “Dude, let me in.”

  He didn’t move, didn’t even look over at me. I kneeled and pressed my face up to the screen. His house smelled like incense and weed. He’d probably been smoking all day and now he was trying to cover up the scent before his mom got home from the hospital where she put in fourteen-hour days as a nurse.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” I said. “And to say thanks for standing up for me the other day. That was cool of you.”

  He didn’t move. There was a woman screaming on the television. Every other word was bleeped out.

  “Dude, come on. Let me in.”

  He looked over at me, kept his eyes on me for a second. He stood up and slowly moved toward the door in that lazy straight-boy swagger he sometimes had when he stood up, like he’d forgotten how to walk properly. He stared at me through the screen door for a moment before letting me in. We stood there looking at each other in the entryway.

  “People’ve been saying that Dugan may not let you walk at graduation. Is that true?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I was worried.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” I asked.

  “Worry about me. It’s stupid. I don’t need it.”

  “But I care about you,” I said.

  “Don’t say that to me.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “Well, don’t say it.” He looked out the screen door out at the single-story houses that made up his crappy neighborhood. Toys littered the unmowed lawns like bright dead animals. “I feel like this is like some thing for you or something.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You’re too needy. I already have a girlfriend. I don’t need another one.”

  “That’s so not true,” I said. I brought my chin down to my chest. I didn’t want him to see my face. We didn’t say anything for a bit and then I blurted, “I love you.”

  I peered up at him to see his reaction. He’d screwed his face up into a look of disgust. He moved forward and grabbed me, pushed me against the wall, and raised his fist back behind his head. He was ready to punch me. I thought back to the first time he’d touched me, of all the times he touched me, of the way he pushed my face away whenever I tried to kiss him and how that didn’t stop me from trying over and over again.

  “Take it back,” he said.

  “No.”

  He smacked me across the face. Hard.

  “Take it back. Now.”

  “I take it back.”

  He slapped me again.

  “Stop! I said I take it back!” He backed away and looked me up and down. For a moment I thought he was going to apologize, but instead he said, “Get your faggot ass out of my house.”

  Driving home I couldn’t cry even though I wanted to. I sat at an empty intersection and just stared at some power lines, at the way they looked against the trees, the black cords almost getting swallowed in the deep green of the leaves. Our entire relationship appeared in my mind as a glut of painful moments. I finally fully realized that my fantasy of making him fall in love with me was foolish, maybe even insane. He was a knot I could pull at until my fingers were raw and bloody, a knot that I could never untie.

  Chapter 2

  It was one week after graduation when I heard about Jenny Moore. I came in from mowing the lawn to find my mother leaning against the kitchen counter and watching the built-in television on the fridge. A freshly poured glass of Fresca sizzled on the counter next to her.

  “Are you watching this?” she asked me. “This little girl disappeared while playing in her backyard.” She walked over to the sink and lit her cigarette on the apricot-scented candle burning on the counter. “Last name’s Moore. They say she’s autistic. God, how horrible. Can you imagine what her parents are going through?”

  I couldn’t, but I didn’t say so. I took a bottle of water from the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen table. My mother cracked the window open and let the smoke creep out into the humid afternoon. Outside the window, the sky stretched like uncharted territory over the skeletons of the mansions they were building off into the distance on what once had been farmland.

  “God, I miss the summers on the farm,” she said. She rubbed her eye and ashed her cigarette in the sink. “Why is this making me so sad?”

  A newscaster was interviewing a neighbor of the missing girl. She was asking how anyone could do this. Hopefully they would find her safe and sound.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said, “That really sucks.”

  “Do you think they’ll find her?” my mother asked.

  I took a drink of my water and looked out the patio door toward the pool. She turned on the faucet, put her cigarette under the water. Neither of us answered her question.

  I had dinner that night with my father at the Cedarville Country Club. He was trying this thing where just he and I had dinner together one night a week. We’d put on our ties and we’d get into the Audi and he’d say, “Well, where should we go? The country club? ” and I’d say sure and then the next thing you know we’re eating sea bass in silence on the deck of the Cedarville Country Club, while below us drunk old men wearing ugly pants puffed on cigars and sped around in their golf carts.

  “The sea bass is better than it was last week,” my dad said. “That comment I made to the waiter last time must have really gone straight to the top.”

  “It’s not really sea bass,” I said. “I saw this thing on TV where they said that what restaurants call sea bass is actually some other fish. I think real sea bass is, like, almost extinct.”

  He shot me a look and went on chewing his food with tiny controlled bites. I took a sip from the vodka tonic he’d ordered me and prayed for time to speed up. He was so different now than he had been when I was a little kid. I had images of him with long hair sitting on the porch of our farmhouse while he laughed his way through “Puff the Magic Dragon” for me on his guitar. I remembered when there wasn’t age in his voice.

  “So,” he said after the waitress took our dessert order. “Are you excited to start at Fairmont?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I remember my days at Fairmont. There’s nothing like it. You’ll have the time of your life. And Michigan is beautiful in the fall. And in the winter too. Hell, it’s always beautiful.”

  “Yup. Can’t wait.”

  “You know, it’s sort of your last summer at home. Actually, in a lot of ways it’s your last real summer.”

  He’d uttered basically the same sentence every week for the last month. The rapport between us was sad enough behind closed doors. It pained me to put it on display in public.

  “I don’t feel like it’s my last real summer,” I said. “There’ll be other summers. Next summer.”

  “Well, next summer hopefully you’ll have an internship or a job of some sort,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, picked up his scotch. It was a position he often took when he thought he was bestowing some sort of wisdom upon me. “Jack McDuffy’s got that law firm in Chicago. You remember Jack. I’m sure I could get you a job filing or something. Chicago would be nice in the summer. You’ve got the lake.”

  “That’d be cool.”

  He looked out over the golf course. “I’ll make some phone calls.”

  “Cool.”

  I didn’t know what was worse, us talking or not talking. I took a big swig of my drink and followed his gaze onto the course. A golf cart had turned on its side. The old man riding in it climbed ou
t and stared at it with his hands on his hips as if it were a dog that wouldn’t sit.

  “Have you decided on a major yet?” my father said, his eyes still fixed on the overturned cart.

  “I want to write,” I said. I’d answered this question dozens of times before, but he kept on asking like he was hoping my answer would change. “Probably English lit. At least for now.”

  My father nodded slowly. He looked out at the man on the course, who was now kicking his golf cart. My father shook his head in disgust, brought his attention back to the table. The sun was setting behind the grove of trees on the west side of the course, and the sky was a mess of blues and purples with gauzy clouds pulled across it.

  “It might rain,” my father said as if I’d stated something to the contrary.

  The waitress placed two pieces of key lime pie on the table. She was our waitress every week, a chipper girl named Cindy who wore sparkly barrettes and electric blue eye shadow. She had a voice like a parakeet, and my father waved her away before she could put it on display.

  “Listen, Dade,” he said. I knew something big was coming by the way he leaned forward in his chair, by the way his eyes met mine. He usually never looked me in the eye. My first thought was that somebody had died. But when? And how? “You know I love your mother very much. Hell, you know I love you very much.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time he said he loved me. I put my hand in my water glass and played with the remaining ice. I thought about taking each piece out and pitching them over the edge of the patio to distract myself, but I didn’t. I told myself that I had to be there with him. He told me there was a woman named Vicki that he’d met at his poetry class.

  “What poetry class? When did you start taking a poetry class?”

  “A few months ago,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “It was something to do. Your mother is always trying to get me to be more creative, so I signed up for a Thursday night poetry class at the community college. I didn’t want to tell anyone. This is just for me. I saw how you seem to get so much out of locking yourself away and writing your feelings down. I thought I’d do the same. Doesn’t that make you happy?”