A. Homes - Things You Should Know

A deer crosses the road. My wife swerves. The car goes up a hill, trees fly by, the car goes down, we are rolling, we are hanging upside-down, suspended, and then boom, we are upright again, the air bag smashes me in the face, punches me in the nose. The steering wheel explodes into her chest. We are down in a ditch with balloons pressed into our faces, suffocating.

“Are you hurt?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Are you all right?”

“Did we hit it?”

“No, I think it got away.”

The doors unlock.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see it coming.”

The air bags are slowly deflating — losing pressure.

“I want to live,” I tell her. “I just don’t know how.”

There are things I do not know. I was absent the day they passed out the information sheets. I was home in bed with a fever and an earache. I lay with the heating pad pressed to my head, burning my ear. I lay with the heating pad until my mother came in and said, “Don’t keep it on high or you’ll burn yourself.” This was something I knew but chose to forget.

The information sheets had the words “Things You Should Know” typed across the top of the page. They were mimeographed pages, purple ink on white paper. The sheets were written by my fourth grade teacher. They were written when she was young and thought about things. She thought of a language for these things and wrote them down in red Magic Marker.

By the time she was my teacher, she’d been teaching for a very long time but had never gotten past fourth grade. She hadn’t done anything since her Things You Should Know sheets, which didn’t really count, since she’d written them while she was still a student.

After my ear got better, the infection cured, the red burn mark faded into a sort of a Florida tan, I went back to school. Right away I knew I’d missed something important. “Ask the other students to fill you in on what happened while you were ill,” the principal said when I handed her the note from my mother. But none of the others would talk to me. Immediately I knew this was because they’d gotten the information sheets and we no longer spoke the same language.

I tried asking the teacher, “Is there anything I missed while I was out?” She handed me a stack of maps to color in and some math problems. “You should put a little Vaseline on your ear,” she said. “It’ll keep it from peeling.”

“Is there anything else?” I asked. She shook her head.

I couldn’t just come out and say it. I couldn’t say, you know, those information sheets, the ones you passed out the other day while I was home burning my ear. Do you have an extra copy? I couldn’t ask because I’d already asked everyone. I asked so many people — my parents, their friends, random strangers — that in the end they sent me to a psychiatrist.

“What exactly do you think is written on this ‘Things to Know’ paper?” he asked me.

“‘Things You Should Know,’” I said. “It’s not things to know, not things you will learn, but things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don’t.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “And what are those things?”

“You’re asking me,” I shouted. “I don’t know. You’re the one who should know. You tell me. I never saw the list.”

Time passed. I grew up. I grew older. I grew deaf in one ear. In the newspaper I read that the teacher had died. She was eighty-four. In time I began to notice there was less to know. All the same, I kept looking for the list. Once, in an old bookstore, I thought I found page four. It was old, faded, folded into quarters and stuffed into an early volume of Henry Miller’s essays. The top part of the page had been torn off. It began with number six: “Do what you will because you will anyway.” Number twenty-eight was “If you begin and it is not the beginning, begin again.” And so on. At the bottom of the page it said, “Chin San Fortune Company lines 1 through 32.”

Years later, when I was even older, when those younger than me seemed to know less than I ever had, I wrote a story. And in a room full of people, full of people who knew the list and some I was sure did not, I stood to read. “As a child, I burned my ear into a Florida tan.”

“Stop,” a man yelled, waving his hands at me.

“Why?”

“Don’t you know?” he said. I shook my head. He was a man who knew the list, who probably had his own personal copy. He had based his life on it, on trying to explain it to others.

He spoke, he drew diagrams, splintering poles of chalk as he put pictures on a blackboard. He tried to tell of the things he knew. He tried to talk but did not have the language of the teacher.

I breathed deeply and thought of Chin San number twenty-eight. “If you begin and it is not the beginning, begin again.”

“I will begin again,” I announced. Because I had stated this and had not asked for a second chance, because I was standing and he was seated, because it was still early in the evening, the man who had stopped me nodded, all right.

“Things You Should Know,” I said.

“Good title, good title,” the man said. “Go on, go on.”

“There is a list,” I said, nearing the end. “It is a list you make yourself. And at the top of the page you write, ‘Things You Should Know.’”

In the big bathtub in my parents’ bedroom, he ran his tongue along my side, up into my armpits, tugging the hair with his teeth. “We’re like married,” he said, licking my nipples.

I spit at him. A foamy blob landed on his bare chest. He smiled, grabbed both my arms, and held them down.

He slid his face down my stomach, dipped it under the water, and put his mouth over my cock.

My mother knocked on the bathroom door. “I have to get ready. Your father and I are leaving in twenty minutes.”

Air bubbles crept up to the surface.

“Can you hear me?” she said, fiddling with the knob. “Why is the door locked? You know we don’t lock doors in this house.”

“It was an accident,” I said through the door.

“Well, hurry,” my mother said.

And we did.

Later, in the den, picking his nose, examining the results on his finger, slipping his finger into his mouth with a smack and a pop, he explained that as long as we never slept with anyone else, we could do whatever we wanted. “Sex kills,” he said, “but this,” he said, “this is the one time, the only time, the chance of a lifetime.” He ground his front teeth on the booger.

We met in a science class. “Cocksucker,” he hissed. My fingers were in my ears. I didn’t hear the word so much as saw it escape his mouth. The fire alarm was going off. Everyone was grabbing their coats and hurrying for the door. He held me back, pressed his lips close to my ear, and said it again, Cocksucker, his tongue touching my neck. Back and forth, he shook a beaker of a strange potion and threatened to make me drink it. He raised the glass to my mouth. My jaws clamped shut. With his free hand, he pinched my nostrils shut and laughed like a maniac. My mouth fell open. He tilted the beaker toward my throat. The teacher stopped him just in time. “Enough horsing around,” she said. “This is a fire drill. Behave accordingly.”

“Got ya,” he said, pushing me into the hall and toward the steps, his hard-on rubbing against me the whole way down.

My mother came in, stood in front of the television set, her ass in Peter Jennings’s face, and asked, “How do I look?”

He curled his lip and spit a pistachio shell onto the coffee table.

“Remember to clean up,” my mother said.

“I want you to fuck me,” he said while my father was in the next room, looking for his keys.