Rivka Galchen - American Innovations - Stories

So he said that to me, about Roy, which obviously he shouldn’t have said. (Here, years later, I still think about the mystery of that plump vein, which seems a contradiction. Which occasionally makes me wonder if there were two Roys.)

“I don’t know what the story with the tooth is,” my dad adds. “Maybe it’s false?” And then it’s back to the mystery of Kojak .

I wander into the kitchen feeling unfulfilled and so start interrogating my mom about my Purim costume, for the carnival that is still two Sundays, aeons, away. The Purim carnival is in Tulsa, over an hour’s driving distance; I don’t know the kids there, and my costume never measures up. “And the crown,” I remind her hollowly. I’m not quite bold enough to bring up that she could buy me one of the beautiful ribbon crowns sold at the Medieval Fair, which we’ll be at the day before. “I don’t want,” I mumble mostly to myself, “one of those paper crowns that everyone has.”

* * *

Thursday night I am at the Skaggs Alpha Beta grocery with my mom. I am lingering amid all the sugar cereals I know will never come home with me. It’s only every minute or so that I am thinking about Roy’s hand, about how he called me sexy.

Then I see Roy. He has no cart, no basket. He’s holding a gallon of milk and a supersize Twizzlers and he is reaching for, I can’t quite see — a big oversize box that looks to be Honeycomb. A beautiful assemblage. Beautiful.

I turn away from Roy. I feel my whole body, even my ears, blushing. The backs of my hands feel itchy the way they always do in spring. I touch the cool metal shelving, run my fingers up and over the plastic slipcovers, over the price labels, hearing every nothing behind me. The price labels make a sandy sliding sound when I push them. He’s a monster, Roy. Not looking at him, just feeling that power he has over me, a monster.

My mom in lace-up sandals cruises by the aisle with our shopping cart. The lighting seems to change. Able now to turn around, I see that Roy is gone. I run after my mom. When finally we’re in the car again, back door closed on the groceries — when I turn around, I see celery stalks innocently sticking out of a brown paper bag — I feel great relief.

* * *

I decide to wash my feet in the sink; this always makes me happy. On my dad’s shaving mirror in the bathroom, old Scotch tape holding it in place, is a yellowed bit of paper, torn from a magazine. For years it’s been there, inscrutable. Now I feel certain it carries a secret. About love maybe. About the possessed feeling I have because of Roy.

It says And human speech is but a cracked kettle upon which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that—

Next to the scrap is a sticker of mine, of a green apple.

I look again at the quote: the bears, the kettle.

Silly, I decide. It’s all very silly. I start to dry my feet with a towel.

For the impending McDonald’s Saturday I resolve to walk right past my tattooed crush. I’ll have nothing to do with him, with his hi little sexys. This denouncement is actually extraordinarily painful since Roy alone is now my whole world. Everything that came before— my coin collection in the Tupperware, the corrugated cardboard trim on school bulletin boards, the terror of the fire pole — now revealed supremely childish and vain. Without even deciding to, I have left all that and now must leave Roy, too. I commit to enduring the burden of the universe alone. The universe with its mysterious General Rommels, its heady strait of Bosporus. I resolve to suffer.

* * *

Saturday comes again. My mom has already taken the burner covers off the stove and set them in the sink. I’m trying the think-about-the-Medieval-Fair trick so as to not think about maybe seeing Roy. I picture the ducks at the duck pond, the way they waddle right up and snatch the bread slice right out of my hand. I focus on the fair, knowing that time will move forward in that way, eventually waddle forward to the next weekend.

Buckling myself into the front seat of our yellow Pinto, I put an imitation Life Savers under my tongue, a blue one. When my dad walks in front of the car on the way to the driver’s side, I notice that he has slouchy shoulders. Horrible. Not his shoulders. But my noticing them.

“I love you,” I say to my dad. He laughs and says that’s good. I sit there hating myself a little.

I concentrate on my candy, on letting it be there, letting it do its exquisitely slow melt under my tongue. Beautiful. I keep that same candy the whole car ride over, through stop signs, waiting for a kid on a bigwheel to cross, past the Conoco, with patience during the long wait for the final left turn. In my pocket I have more candies. Most of a roll of wild berry. When I move my tongue just a tiny bit, the flavor, the sugary slur, assaults my sensations. I choke on a little bit of saliva.

* * *

When we enter I sense Roy at our left; I walk on the far side of my dad, hoping to hide in his shadow. In a hush I inform him that I’ll go save our table and that he should order me the milk and the cookies.

“OK,” he whispers back, as if this were just some game.

At the table I stare straight ahead at the molded plastic bench, summoning all my meagernesses together so as to keep from looking feverishly around. I think I sense Roy’s blond hair off in the distance to my left. In weakness I glimpse sideways; I see a potted plant.

“How’s the coffee?” I ask after my dad has settled in across from me.

He shrugs his ritual shrug, but no words except the question of how is your milk. Is he mad at me? As I begin dipping my cookies in anguish I answer that the milk is delicious.

Why do we say these little things? I wonder. Why do I always want the McDonaldland butter cookies and never the chocolate chip? It seems creepy to me now for the first time, all the habits and ways of the heart I have that I didn’t choose for myself.

I throw back three half-and-halfs.

“Will you get me some more half-and-halfs?” my dad asks.

He asks nicely. And he is really reading the paper while I am not. Of course I’m going to go get creamers. I’m a kid, I remember.

“I don’t feel well,” I try.

“Really?”

“I mean I feel fine,” I say, getting out of the chair.

* * *

Roy. Taking a wild berry candy from my pocket, I resolve again to focus on a candy under my tongue instead of on him. I head first toward the back wall, darting betwixt and between the tables with their attached swiveling chairs. This is the shiniest, cleanest place in town; that’s what McDonald’s was like back then. Even the corners and crevices are clean. Our house: even after my mom cleans, it’s all still in disarray. I’ll unfold a blanket and find a stray sock inside. Behind the toilet there’s blue lint. Maybe that’s what makes a home, I think, its special type of mess.

And then I’m at the front counter. I don’t look up.

I stand off to the side since I’m not really ordering anything, just asking for a favor, not paying for milk but asking for creamers. Waiting to be noticed, I stare down at the brushed steel counter with its flattering hazy reflection, and then it appears, he appears. I see first his palm, reflected in the steel. Then I see his knuckles, the hairs on the back of his hand, the lattice tattoo, the starched shirt cuff that is the beginning of hiding all the rest of the tattoo that I can’t see.

Beautiful.

A part of me decides I am taking him back into my heart. Even if no room will be left for anything else.

Roy notices me. He leans down, eyes level with my sweaty curls stuck against my forehead, at the place where I know I have my birthmark, a dark brown mole there above my left eyebrow, and he says, his teeth showing, his strange glowing white canine showing: “Need something, sweets?’ He taps my nose with his finger.