Then it was time for them to leave. Ian shook my hand. He said: Stay cool, kiddo. He also shook my mom’s hand, but my mom said oh phooey and put her arms around him. He said hey thanks man. Then he went and sat in the truck while my mom and I took turns hugging Tash in the front entrance.
Again, Nomi? she’d say. Oh my god. We all laughed. My dad stayed in his bedroom. For a very long time, in the dark. He didn’t come out even for Hymn Sing.
I went into the washroom and took my first Pill out of its Monday slot. My body was now in the early stages of believing it was pregnant. I thought about the name Credence for a baby girl. It was way better than Nova. By the time she was in school CCR would have bitten the dust and it would be okay. Credence.
I lay on my bed remembering conversations and agonizing over things I’d said or hadn’t said until I heard my dad coming back upstairs and going into his room to his own large bed. We took turns lying on our beds, sneaking out at night, driving around in the dark, and pretending certain things existed just beyond our reach. I lay there imagining what it would be like to have another human being growing inside me. Would it panic? I heard my dad begin his special brand of snoring that sounded like he was being choked but refusing to die, all night long. It reached a frightening crescendo and then he stopped breathing — I counted to seventeen before he exploded back to life — and then started from the beginning again. I got up and went into his room and rolled him over and told him: Seventeen seconds this time Dad, you need to have that adenoid operation. You’re making me mental. Sorry, sorry, he said. But he was sound asleep. He lay there on his side curled up like a Cheesie with his hands stuck between his knees in prayer position. I pulled his blanket up around his shoulders. I noticed that he had some hairs growing on his shoulders. I imagined him living at the Rest Haven. I put my face next to his and whispered: Seven. Teen. Seconds. I sat on the bed and watched him for a while. I looked at the bird on his dresser. It had stopped dipping for the night. I looked out the window. I told myself those lacy white curtains would need washing someday. They were the same sad grey as the floors in my school. And as the artillery of teeth in The Mouth’s mouth.
It was two in the morning, maybe, or three or four, and Travis and I were bobbing around in the moonlight on an inner tube at the pits talking about how it feels to go crazy.
I think it’s a gradual loss of peripheral vision, he said. Oh no, I thought. I knew he wanted me to say something almost as brilliant, but not quite. What do you think? he asked. I know you’re not sleeping.
I opened my eyes. Is there something wrong with just bobbing? I asked him.
What do you think? he asked me again.
How it feels to go crazy? I asked.
Yeah.
I don’t know, I said. Sad and easy, I guess, like losing a friend? You say a few wrong things, you ignore the obvious, you act stupid in an unfunny way. Travis told me that Kafka or someone like that had said insanity could be defined as the attempt to reconcile one’s overwhelming urge to write things down with one’s overwhelming conviction that silence is the most appropriate response. Oh, I said. Okay.
Travis told me how one spring his Aunt Abilene went nuts and after her funeral The Mouth said that like children and retarded people who were not capable of making an informed decision to ask Jesus into their hearts, Abilene, although she’d not attended church since she was sixteen, would automatically make it to heaven. Wild eh? asked Travis. They stayed up all night seriously discussing, like they knew, where Abilene would park her ass for all eternity. So wild, wild ’s not the word, I said. Poor Abilene.
We drifted around in the darkness and quietly tried to harmonize on “Delta Dawn” which got stuck in our heads from talking about Abilene’s own mansion in the sky. Travis told me I had a loose commitment to the melody. I was preoccupied with the meaning of the lyrics, I told him. The line about walking to the station. I didn’t tell him I’d just had an awful feeling that the song was really about me. And then Travis said: Hey, it’s like you, Nomi. And even though tears in my throat were starting to suffocate me, in the nick of time I remembered Travis telling me once that I was boring when I was offended, and to be boring was the ultimate crime, and I put my head back and made a laughing sound. And I splashed him. And he splashed me back, conveniently, so that all the water on my face looked the same.
After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hands. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together.
nineteen
It was still early, my dad was asleep, and I didn’t so much want the night not to end as I wanted the next day not to begin so I walked over to Second Avenue to The Trampoline House, which was next door to the boarded-up bus depot, a disastrous experiment that had resulted only in people leaving. If you threw a dime into this coffee can they kept between the doors and took your shoes off you could jump for a while, at least until the next person with a dime showed up or until the family woke up.
It felt good to be alone, jumping, while the rest of the town remained unconscious, and I tried with every bounce to go higher and higher without knocking my head against the hydro wire. I tried to sort out my problems by putting them into categories. Travis. School. Environment. I wasn’t pretty enough to be the complex, silent girl and yet I never knew what to say. I didn’t want to be the ugly, quiet girl. There was no such thing as the ugly, mysterious girl. I could be the tortured, self-destructive girl. But where does that lead? I remembered a conversation I’d had with Tash on the same trampoline a hundred years ago when it only cost a nickel.
Tash: What do you say to a boy you like when he passes you in the hall?
Me: Hello?
Tash: Nope.
Me: Hi, how are you?
Tash: Nooooo.
Me: Okay. Bonjour?
Tash: (says nothing, gives me a look)
Me: What then?
Tash: Nothing.
I jumped up and down, hands at my side like a punk until I heard the Trampoline House people open their door and take their can with my dime inside which meant they were closed. I had to go to school in two hours and write a fifteen-hundred-word story that included a triggering point, a climax and a resolution. On my way home I came up with my first sentence: The administration passed her around for beatings like a hookah pipe at a Turkish wedding.
Which got panned by Mr. Quiring. No…no, he said. He tapped me hard on my forehead. He didn’t even bother reading the rest of it. So far in English I was not allowed to write about Kahlil Gibran, Marianne Faithfull lyrics, marigold seeds, Holden Caulfield, Nietzsche, Django, Nabokov, preternatural gifts for self-analysis, urges, blowtorches, and now Turkish weddings.
So what should I write about? I asked him. He sat on my desk and crossed his legs and clung to one knee with both hands like it was hurting him. I stared at his belt buckle. Hmmm…he said. Let’s use our imaginations. What do you see when you close your eyes? Nothing, I said. He frowned. Are you not upset when you get your paper back and everything is underlined in red, he asked. No, I said, not really, in the Bible the words of Je—