Rivka Galchen - American Innovations - Stories

That candy, I had forgotten about it, and I move my tongue and the flavor — it all comes rushing out, overwhelming, and I drool a little bit as I blurt out, “I’m going to the Medieval Fair next weekend.” I wipe my wet lips with the back of my hand and see the wild berry blue saliva staining.

“Cool,” he says, straightening up. He interlaces his fingers and pushes them outward, and they crack deliciously, and I think about macadamias. I think I see him noticing the blue smeared on my right hand. He says then: “I love those puppets they sell there — those real plain wood ones.”

I just stare at Roy’s blue eyes. I love blue eyes. Still to this day I am always telling myself that I don’t like them, that I find them lifeless and dull and that I prefer brown eyes, like mine, like my parents’, but it’s a lie. It’s a whole other wilder type of love that I feel for these blue-eyed people of the world. So I look up at him, at those blue eyes, and I’m thinking about those plain wooden puppets — this is all half a second — then the doors open behind me and that invasive heat enters and the world sinks down, mud and mush and the paste left behind by cookies.

“Oh,” I say. “Half-and-half.”

He reaches into a tray of much melted ice and bobbing creamers and he hands three to me. My palm burns where he touched me and my vision is blurry; only the grooves on the half-and-half container keep me from vanishing.

“Are you going to the fair?” I brave. Heat in my face again, the feeling just before a terrible rash. I’m already leaving the counter so as not to see those awful blue eyes, and I hear, “Ah, I’m working,” and I don’t even turn around.

I read the back of my dad’s newspaper. They have found more fossils at the Spiro Mounds. There’s no explanation for how I feel.

* * *

How can I describe the days of the next week? I’d hope to see Roy when I ran out to check the mail. I’d go drink from the hose in our front yard thinking he might walk or drive by, even though I had no reason to believe he might ever come to our neighborhood. I got detention for not turning in my book report of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I found myself rummaging around in my father’s briefcase, as if Roy’s files — I imagined the yellow “Confidential” envelope from Clue — might somehow be there. Maybe I don’t need to explain because who hasn’t been overtaken by this shade of love? I remember walking home from school very slowly, anxiously, as if through foreign, unpredictable terrain. I wanted to buy Roy a puppet at the Medieval Fair. One of the wooden ones like he’d mentioned. Only in that thought could I rest. All the clutter of my mind was waiting to come closer to that moment of purchasing a puppet.

So I did manage to wake up in the mornings. I did try to go to sleep at night. Though my heart seemed to be racing to its own obscure rhythm, private even from me.

Friday night before the fair, my bedroom alien and lurksome, I was hopeless for rest. After pulling my maze workbook down from the shelf, I went into the brightly lit bathroom. I turned on the overhead fan so that it would become noisy enough to overwhelm the sound in my mind of Roy cracking his knuckles. The whirring fan noise: it was like a quiet. Sitting in the empty tub, I set the maze book on the rounded ledge and purposely began on a difficult page. I worked cautiously, tracing ahead with my finger before setting pen to paper. This was pleasing, though out of the corner of my eye I saw the yellowed magazine fragment— cracked kettle— and it was like a ghost in the room with me, though its message, I felt sure — almost too sure, considering that I didn’t understand it — had nothing to do with me.

In the morning my mom found me there in the tub, like some passed-out drunk, my maze book open on my small chest. I must have fallen asleep. I felt like crying, didn’t even know why. I reached up to my face, wondering if something had gone wrong with it.

“Do you have a fever?” my mom asked.

When she left, assured, somewhat, I tried out those words— Human speech is like a cracked kettle —as if they were the coded answer to a riddle.

I was always that kind of kid who crawled into bed with her parents, who felt safe only with them. If my mom came into my classroom because I had forgotten my lunch at home, I wasn’t ashamed, like other kids were, but proud. For a few years of my life, up until then, my desires hadn’t chased away from me. I wanted to fall asleep on the sofa while my dad watched The Rockford Files , and so I did. I wanted couscous with butter, and so I had some. Yes sometimes shopping with my mom I coveted a pair of overalls, or a frosted cookie, but the want would be faint, and fade as soon as we’d walked away.

* * *

We had left the house uncleaned when we went to the fair that Saturday. I was thinking about the wooden puppet, but I felt obligated to hope for a crown; that’s what I was supposed to be pining for. I imagined that my mom would think to buy me a crown for my Queen Esther costume. But maybe, I hoped, she would forget all about the crown. It wasn’t unlikely. What seemed like the world to me often revealed itself, through her eyes, to be nothing.

I had always loved the Medieval Fair. A woman dressed up in an elaborate mermaid costume would sit under the bridge that spanned the artificial pond. People tossed quarters down at her. I thought she was beautiful. She’d flap her tail, wave coyly. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that she was considered trashy. Farther on there was a stacked hay maze that had already become too easy by late elementary school, but I liked looking at it from a distance, from up on the small knoll. I think every turn you might take was fine. Whichever way you went you still made it out. It was upsetting, being spat out so soon.

We saw the dress-up beggar with the prosthetic nose and warts. We crossed the bridge, saw the mermaid. A pale teenage boy in stonewashed jeans and a tank top leaned against the bridge’s railing, smoking and looking down at her. Two corseted women farther along sang bawdy ballads in the shade of a willow and while we listened a slouchy man went by with a gigantic foam mallet. The whole world, it seemed, was laughing or fighting or crying or unfolding chairs or blending smoothies and this would go on eternally. Vendors sold wooden flutes, Jacob’s ladders, feathered mobiles. In an open field two ponies and three sheep were there for the petting and the overseer held a baby pig in his hands. We ate fresh ears of boiled corn, smothered with butter and cracked pepper. My mom didn’t mention the price. That really did make it feel like a day in some other me’s life.

But I felt so unsettled. Roy’s tooth in my mind as I bit into the corn, Roy’s fingers on my palm as I thrummed my hand along a low wooden fence. I had so little of Roy and yet he had all of me and the feeling ran deep to the most ancient parts of me. So much so that I felt that my love for Roy shamed my people, whoever my people were, whoever I was queen of, people I had never met, nervous people and sad people and dead people, all clambering for air and space inside me. I didn’t even know what I wanted from Roy. I still don’t. All my life love has felt like a croquet mallet to the head. Something absurd, ready for violence. Love.

I remember once years later, in a love fit, stealing cherry Luden’s cough drops from a convenience store. I had the money to pay for them but I instead stole them. I wanted a cheap childish cherry flavor on my tongue when I saw my love, who of course isn’t my love anymore. That unrelenting pathetic euphoria. Low-quality cough drops. That’s how I felt looking around anxiously for the wooden puppet stand, how I felt looking twice at every blond man who passed, wondering if he might somehow be Roy, there for me, even though he’d said he wouldn’t be there. Thinking about that puppet for Roy eclipsed all other thoughts. Put a slithery veil over the whole day. How much would the puppet cost? I didn’t have my own pocket money, an allowance or savings or anything like that. I wasn’t in the habit of asking for things. I never asked for toys. I never asked for sugar cereals. I felt to do so was wrong. I had almost cried that one day just whispering to myself about the crown. But all I wanted was that puppet because that puppet was going to solve everything.