Rules for being dead, p.5
Rules for Being Dead, page 5
“Is somebody there?” I’d stop and call out.
Now I know. They were the sounds of teachers who’d gone before, cursed to walk those halls forever in the high heels we couldn’t wait to get out of the minute we got home. The heels we’d kick off under our desks so the students couldn’t see our stockinged feet with the seams across our toes. (Surely there’s a joke in that: where do old teachers go when there’s nothing left to teach? When they’re dead? I just can’t think of the punch line, not yet.)
What had kept me from going to school, from doing my job, my last day on earth? It must have been powerful. I could get ready for school with my eyes closed; I didn’t even have to look at my lesson plans anymore. I just showed up and taught. That’s what I did. That’s what I was. A teacher. That’s all they saw me as; they didn’t see all my problems with L.E. They didn’t see me following him around at night. They didn’t see me …
What? Dammit! I almost had it.
They didn’t hear me cursing; that’s something a teacher never did in front of a student.
Did I leave some clue behind in my old classroom? My desk?
I think it, and there I am. Not therefore, but there. Not so much flown as teleported. Behind that beat-up old wooden desk, carved with names and soaked with wax, looking out at a roomful of fifth graders, a wall of low cabinets painted institutional mint green at the back of the room, a row of high windows above them. Blackboards, chalk dust, felt erasers, that little cluster of sticky gold stars I’d put on their tests or give out whenever someone needed a little boost of confidence. (And someone always needed a little boost.) I hope I taught Miss McLarty that in the three days she was with me, before I died. She was my student teacher, twenty-two, still in college, trying to figure out how to translate what she was learning in her college classroom into my classroom, a real classroom with living, breathing, hot-wired students, and she needed more confidence than the kids. The first day she was there I put a little gold star on her hand at the end of the day, and you’d have thought I’d given her the Miss America crown. Just three days together when … whatever happened, happened. That was barely enough time to teach her how to do anything except collect lunch money and take attendance, which had nothing to do with teaching. She’d been a willing student, soaking up everything I had to pass on. But did I pass on anything to her about how I was about to pass on?
Now that I’m gone, Mr. Walker, the principal, has already asked her to take over my class and finish out this year, and even stay on next year. She’s beaming. No teacher ever smiles like that over those stupid question boxes in the geography book—because no student can ever get all the right answers, and everybody, students and teacher alike, just ends up mad as a hornet—but Miss McLarty is smiling now. She knows she has something to come back to after the summer. She knows she has something to … live for? I’m happy for her.
Looking into the future, I can see the new dress she wears for the first day of school next year: a red and rust jumper kind of thing with one of those mod rib-knit poor boys under it. It matches her titian hair, and soon, it will match the autumn leaves falling all over the playground outside. She’s no Twiggy or Lulu; a poor boy and pale lipstick are as far as she’s willing to go to be part of the mod generation. She’s just an ordinary country girl like me. I can see her getting married and changing her name to Mrs. Roper, and the students getting mixed up for a while about what to call her: McLarty or Roper, Miss or Mrs. I see my boys at her wedding, drinking lime sherbet and ginger ale punch for the very first time. I can see her reading A Wrinkle in Time to her class and Clarke being the only one to stay awake enough after lunch to hear it while the others put their heads down on their desks and fall asleep. I can hear her tell them the world will never again end by flood, but it will end by fire. (I’m not too thrilled about that—not the fact that it might happen, just the fact that she’s telling fifth graders about it. Children shouldn’t have to worry about their futures. They already worry enough, the smart ones. And my children are smart.) I can see her having children and grandchildren of her own, and I can see her teaching much longer than I ever had a chance to. That makes me sad; I still had a lot more to give.
I can see everyone’s future but my own, but nowhere can I see the letter that I think I left behind in my old desk, a letter to L.E. that I had just started working on, explaining how I was going to leave this all behind.
— CLARKE —
SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1966
Every week since Mother died, I’ve gone back into her old classroom and asked Miss McLarty if I could clean out Mother’s Instructor magazines in the cabinets at the back. I like touching them because they have plays in them and I want to be an actor when I grow up, but also because Mother’s hands held them when she used to read them to find out how to be a better teacher. I try to guess which pages her fingerprints are on, or maybe if she got a paper cut and left blood on the page. I hold them up to the light from the back windows to look for brown splotches, from where the blood might have dried. When it’s in your veins it looks blue and when it comes out it’s red, but when it dries it’s brown. Miss McLarty probably thinks I’m weird, but she’s getting used to it. So far I’ve gone to her room seven times, once for every week Mother’s been gone. I’ve moved the magazines around so many times, arranging them in their right order according to date, that their pages are falling off. I got them all in order the third week I went, but I pretend they’re still messed up so I can keep coming back. Miss McLarty has probably figured that out.
Yesterday was the last day of school for the year, so I went to her room one more time to thank her for letting me come in so often. I asked her if there were any of Mother’s old pens left in her desk, because the red one I’ve been using from her purse is running out of ink. She looked at me funny, and sad, which is funnysad, which I guess is better than funnyweird. Then she looked in the drawer.
I could smell my mother when she opened it; all the old smells she used to carry around, like the smells she left at the bottom of her purse. Perfume and powder smells.
I took an extra breath to get Mother in my head, and Miss McLarty looked at me funnysad again.
“Hmmm … I don’t see any red pens,” she said, moving around some papers. “Here, I can give you this one. It’s all I’ve got left from when she was here. It’s black ink, but I think she used that too.”
“No, you should keep it.” I decided it wasn’t fair that I’m the only one who got to keep stuff from Mother since she knew so many different people. Then neither one of us said anything for a while. I didn’t want to leave, so I asked her if I could come back during the summer to keep organizing.
“I wish you could, Clarke, I really do, but it’s not up to me. The building will be all locked up. But … maybe it’s good to take a break from the magazines for a while and just run around and play.” She said she hoped she’d have me in her class next year because seeing me would remind her of my mother who taught her so much about how to be a good teacher, even if it was just for three days. She said I could look at the magazines all I wanted to then, but maybe I wouldn’t need to anymore.
“Sometimes it’s good to let things stay messy, like the magazines used to be. Sometimes it’s good not to organize so much, just to … let things happen.”
I knew it was my turn to talk then; that she wasn’t really talking about magazines. But it was easier just to leave with the crumbling Instructor I hid under my shirt while she was digging in the desk.
She gave me a hug goodbye and I thought maybe she felt it sticking out of my waistband, and I got so scared I called her Momma by accident. I apologized, but she said it was okay and hugged me even tighter. (I’m going to whisper it to myself now: “Momma.” It’s a soft word, softer than Mother, even though I can’t use it anymore.)
Now, every time I leave the house, I carry the magazine so I’ll have a part of Momma with me. I had it with me when Daddy took us to lunch at Shaw’s Café today, to celebrate school being out for the year. He said not to get used to it because we won’t be eating lunch out every day this summer. He said he didn’t know what we’ll do yet.
When Daddy’s food came, he tucked his tie into his shirt so it wouldn’t drag in the ketchup. He has a whole rack of clip-on ties that Mother used to pick out for him to wear, but now I pick them out for him every morning before he goes into work. At first he said my colors were too loud because he didn’t want to “scare away the customers.” But lately he’s been saying, “The more color the better.” He seems happier while Corey and I just seem … hungrier? What’s the word for when you don’t understand everything and all you’re thinking is, “Who’s going to make us lunch this summer?”
Then this lady came in and Daddy quit eating. He pulled his tie back out from between the two buttons on his shirt so it would look normal. He said, “Uh, boys, this is, uh … I want you to meet …” Then he stopped and looked at the new lady like he didn’t know what to say next, but he tried to anyway. “These are my boys. My sons. Corey,” he said, putting his hand on Corey’s head, “and Clarkie.”
He was making honey words again. I hate it when he calls me “Clarkie.”
Corey said, “Are you going to make us lunch this summer? Are you our new babysitter?”
“Not unless you need your baby shoes fixed, or covered with bronze.” She laughed and spun Corey around on his stool at the counter.
“Mrs. Cobb fixes shoes. Next door. She fixed my shoes. Well, actually, she helped me get new shoes, since I’d worn my sole out.”
“You can say that again,” the new woman said and winked at Daddy. “You boys ever have a shoe emergency, I’m the woman to see.” Then she winked at us too and ordered a coffee to go. She winked the way I blink, like she was making herself remember something.
“She really did save my shoes,” Daddy said after she left, after he watched her walk out the door. “I’d be walking around barefoot if …” Then he stopped again.
“We can go barefoot now that it’s summer,” Corey said, still spinning.
“You boys. What am I gonna do with you? Corey, stop, you’re gonna make yourself sick,” Daddy said, but not in a mean way. He unclipped his tie and rolled it up in a ball and stuck it in his pants pocket, like it had done its job and he didn’t need it anymore.
Then we went to see What’s New, Pussycat?, and Corey started making drapey things on my face with his fingers and calling me “Cobweb,” like Mrs. Cobb’s name, and which the Ritz probably has a lot of because they never clean. I called him “Pussycat” and made purring noises. When we got home, he helped me glue the movie ad in my scrapbook. He likes letting glue dry on his fingers, then plays like it’s old man’s skin and pulls it off and eats it. “Look, I’m eating old man’s skin,” he says, then sticks out his tongue so I can see it. Tonight, he stuck out his tongue and said, “Cobweb, cobweb, I’m eating cobwebs, like that lady. Mrs. Cobb.”
“Pussycat, pussycat,” I sang back to him, like Tom Jones does in the movie, “I love you.” I went up high on “love,” then did the rest, “Yes—I—do, whoa-oh-oh-oh.”
When Corey went up to the living room to show Daddy his gluey tongue, I took the tie I had stolen out of his pants pocket and covered it with glue and hid it under my bed so Daddy couldn’t ever wear it again.
— CLARKE —
SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 1966
I’m sick of being nice to everybody when they’re not nice to me, even though they don’t know they’re not being nice. That’s why I loved Village of the Giants so much today, because it shows what it will be like when I’m a teenager who turns mean, who eats goo and becomes a thirty-foot giant. That’s what I want to be right now, bigger than everybody else, so big they’ll have to do what I say or else I’ll step on them and crush them like the Ice Age is going to crush all of us when it comes back.
I told Daddy we have to buy extra sweaters for it, but he just laughed. He’ll see how funny it is when he’s freezing to death and running down the street trying to warm up and escape a giant iceberg. Then he can laugh all he wants, but I won’t hear any of it because he’ll have ice stuck in his throat and no sound will come out.
The drugstore man who said Mother had all those things wrong with her will see what it’s like when I take one giant step on his store and crush him under my foot. All the Stelazine in the world won’t fix him then.
That new lady at Shaw’s Café who winked at us will find out what it’s like when she keeps spinning Corey around and he throws up on her.
But mostly this strange kid I met where Daddy works will see what it’s like when I hold him up in my giant fingers by his ugly red hair and drop him onto Daddy’s crummy furniture and appliances. He’ll crash, and I won’t pick him up. I’ll wait and see if Daddy does, so I can figure out who he is, because Daddy won’t tell us. Just like he won’t tell us how Mother died.
He was playing with Daddy at the store, calling him “Freddy” when his name is “L.E.” “Freddy” doesn’t fit him at all, even more than L.E. doesn’t fit him.
“Hey, Freddy, let me ride on your back.”
“Hey, Freddy, can I play with the TVs?”
“Hey, Freddy, you should buy this lawnmower for Grandma.”
He was missing half his ear; not like somebody tore it off, but like he was born without it, like he drank the chemicals from Village of the Giants and now he’s a mutant who’s calling my father the wrong name.
Daddy was letting him play on the riding lawnmowers that run down the middle of the store. He never lets us play on them. They’re set up on platforms that are covered with fake grass so you’ll think it’s real, but only a mutant with half an ear and red hair and freckles would think that.
“That grass isn’t real. It’s fake. You can’t cut it,” I said.
“You can so cut it,” the kid with the weird ear said. “It just won’t grow back.”
“Like your ear?” I said, but he didn’t hear me.
I went to the back of the store with Corey, where we play with the typewriters and tape recorders after our movies. I always leave my secrets and questions on them, and now I have a big one. I told Corey to go get Daddy while I turned on one of the tape recorders. The wheels started turning, moving the thin brown tape from one reel to the other.
“One two three, one two three,” I whispered into the microphone.
I pushed RECORD as soon as I saw Corey coming back, and I put Corey in front of me so Daddy wouldn’t see that the tape recorder was on.
“Who’s that kid?” I asked.
“He hangs out here. His parents buy a lot, so I have to be nice.”
Even Corey was bugged. “But he got your name wrong.”
“Don’t you think I look like a Freddy?” Daddy made a goofy face so Corey would forget that he hadn’t answered him.
The tape was getting it all, except for the goofy face.
“He said you should buy a lawnmower for ‘Grandma.’ Who’s Grandma? And anybody can tell that grass is fake.”
“Number one, Clarkie, don’t make fun of people, it’s not nice, especially about something they can’t control. Number two, you fool people into buying things by making them look like what they aren’t. That’s your first lesson in business. Follow that and you’ll be a rich man.”
Take things without paying for them and you’ll be richer, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I just did it. I took the tape recorder home. It’s not stealing; it’s investigating. I’ve got a lot of questions now, and I can’t leave them behind on a tape recorder at Daddy’s store for complete strangers and an even stranger kid to listen to, who couldn’t hear them anyway because he just has one and a half ears.
That’s why I want to crush everybody today, because my father’s name is L.E., not Freddy. And I’m Clarke, not Clarkie. That’s a kid’s name in a store where something funnyweird is going on, but nobody’s laughing except that mutant kid.
— CREOLA —
Oh, Clarkie, I wanted to say—he never minded when I called him Clarkie—don’t you get it? What’s going on? Why I wanted to take us away? Because there’s not room for two women in your father’s life, and there was barely room enough for me? For us? Can’t you read the signs? I taught you to read before you went to school. I took you to the movies. You’re smarter than most kids. You know things. Grown-up things. Just think.
But then—do what? What did I want my son to do about it? Finish what I couldn’t—which was what? What had I tried to do? That’s what I can’t remember, and I’m not getting to heaven until I do.
I know I saw her, before I died. I remember that much. I followed L.E. back to work one Saturday, after he came home for lunch, to see where he was going. Trip after trip to Cobb’s Shoe Store. No man needed that many pairs of shoelaces. I stayed out on the sidewalk and pretended to be window-shopping.
She wasn’t bad looking; she looked like a young Bette Davis, and that made me feel bad because I loved Bette Davis. She wore more make-up than I ever wore; her eyebrows dark brown and arched, definitely with a pencil. A touch of turquoise eye shadow. Her hair was thinner than mine, whipped up like a cloud of cotton candy on top of her head. Dark brown, like her brows, a lot of hairspray holding it in place and giving it a perpetual lacquered sheen. About my height, with a little extra weight. But it looked good on her, natural. My thinness didn’t look like the result of being in shape; it looked like someone being eaten away from the inside. Not from cancer—at least I don’t think I died from cancer—but from, well, life. Hollow and drawn. And that was before I was dead. Mrs. Cobb looked like a woman who knew she wasn’t getting any younger, and that made me feel worst of all. We were the same in that department. She looked like a woman who did what she had to do to survive.
I could tell all that just from looking at her from outside on the sidewalk. I was too afraid to actually go in the store. At first. I did, later. I sort of remember that. But then—what did I do? That’s what I can’t remember.
