Кейт Браверман - A Good Day for Seppuku

Scotty inhabits an alternative region. We’re remote and marginal to him. It’s a kibbutz, not a four-star hotel. Nobody gets life support here.

I’m a 13-year-old without a declared foreign language and 37 infected mosquito bites who lost her face in O’Hare. It occurs to me that Scotty Stoloff may not come back to Camp Hillel next summer.

The dinner bell rings and Spiritual Discussion is over. Rabbi just-call-me-Jeff and Dr. White have to rethink the format. During dinner, there’s a rumor bunks Golda Meir and Shimon Peres are not participating effectively.

Bodies have on/off switches and mine is jammed awake. Scotty isn’t in any of my activities. In fact, he sits in the lotus position in the empty Rec Center basketball court practicing calligraphy in his journal. Sometimes he plays drums and shoots hoops.

I leave my papier-mâché mask of a girl who removed her face before an Aloha flight to Honolulu. Her name is Lily and she hid her face in a potted Fichus tree next to an exhibit featuring states and their most significant minerals.

Scotty is in the lotus position writing in his journal. I sit on the warm wood near him. “Your answer was so cool,” I say.

“I liked yours too,” Scotty Stoloff replies. “Though O’Hare wouldn’t make my short list.”

It’s a floor of wooden boards like puzzle pieces. I begin counting lines in the grain and the nubs of nail heads. 74 nails and 12 separate lines of grain in each board.

“I prefer Asian airports. Chaos impresses me.” Scotty Stoloff closes his calligraphy book.

“What about an Aloha Airlines flight to Honolulu?” I ask.

“Hawaii is just another American state,” he explains. “It’s the next flight I like. Bangkok maybe. Or Hong Kong.”

“In Hong Kong the umbrellas have red Peonies and birds painted on them,” I tell him.

Scotty considers this. “Parrots?”

“No,” I say. “Cranes.”

Scotty nods. He opens his calligraphy book and writes Hong Kong=Cranes.Then I ask him what his foreign language is. I sit cross-legged. My yellow thighs’ sacs and infected scabs make me feel like a reptile.

“Spanish,” Scotty replies, determined. He lowers his voice. “It’s the language of drug deals and arms smuggling,” he reveals, whispering. “Want to move contraband, learn Spanish.”

When he asks what I’m taking, I say, “Canadian.”

In the burst of our laughter, I feel yellow as Orchids from Madonna’s dressing room.

Then we’re in the brutal glare of the dusty parking lot, waiting for our parents. We have our suitcases, backpacks, crafts projects, sleeping bags and pillowcases of dirty clothes in scattered piles. My crafts projects require an extra 2 cardboard boxes. I’ve made 16 papier-mâché masks of faces, and glued sequins and feathers on them. I’ve drawn black lines with arrows on their foreheads, indicating where the radiation should go. I suddenly realize my masks have no mouths.

Cameras, binoculars and Walkmen fall randomly on the gravel. Batteries and tubes of lip-gloss lay abandoned on bleached stones. I see my mother’s red Jaguar approaching and run to find Scotty.

“Are you coming back?” I look down at my sandals and count gray pebbles in the gravel. 46. I can count the brown ones next.

He shakes his head no. “I’ll be in Bolivia by next summer,” Scotty reveals. In the sun his gold earring looks like it would burn my fingers if I touched it.

Unexpectedly, he produces a sheet of notebook with his address in a script like calligraphy. He extends it to me and I take it. Then Scotty snaps my picture and says, “Hey, stay in touch.”

I can’t see his green eyes through his sunglasses. There is just his black Sex Pistols T-shirt and how he enters a dark SUV and vanishes.

My mother and Marty begin their interrogation. They talk and I fill in the blanks. It’s a multiple choice test. Camp Hillel exists to enhance me. Precisely how have I been transformed? My mother demands the first and last names of my bunkmates, in case she knows their parents. And the activities I selected? What new physical and artistic skills have I mastered?

Marty asks if I can make a horse jump over a fence. My mother wonders if I learned to play the flute. Was I invited to a villa in Lake Como? Am I going to the Brazilian rainforest? Did I try hard enough with the Goldberg twins? Will I be going to Cannes on their yacht? Most importantly, did I distinguish myself in a manner resulting in a certificate or plaque they can put in a frame?

My mother moves directly into the decision aspect. Am I going to stay with them? Of course, I’m going to choose Beverly Hills High over Alleghany Hills High, which doesn’t even have a computer lab, or audio-visual or theater arts electives. Girls are required to take Home Economics and demonstrate proficiency with meatloaf preparation, which is a blatant example of retrograde gender oppression. Not to mention the fact that they don’t even offer French, German or Latin. Chinese is not even on the horizon, not in my lifetime. They don’t offer Spanish either, anymore, because Mrs. Burdick is pregnant and taking a year off. I don’t mention this.

“English is a foreign language there,” Marty says, driving. “Grammar is considered exotic.”

“Like teeth. Know what a compliment is there? Nice tooth,” my mother says. She doesn’t smile.

I look at my sun blistered feet but there are no pebbles or pine needles to count. I begin adding up the number of lines in the leather floor mats. Then I start to count the small beige stitches.

“Look, darling,” my mother begins, voice soft. She turns around from the front seat to face me. She unlocks her seatbelt and leans closer. “Isn’t it time to get serious about your life?”

Her hair is dyed blonder than usual. She wears her blue contact lenses with Aegean blue eye shadow and Adriatic liner. Her lipstick is called Millennium. I have the same one in my backpack. It’s red with a sheen that sparkles when lamp or match light touches it. It’s a special imported blend that resists water and retains its minute glowing silvery flecks like recessed lanterns.

“I know your father told you things. And you probably told him we’ve become Republicans. That would inflame him. I understand the young automatically betray. And your father no doubt told you we ‘sold out.’ My mother laughs now. Her head swings back on her neck. “We didn’t sell out. We bought in.”

“My father didn’t say that. About selling out,” I tell her.

“What do they call it, then?” my mother presses.

“They say you found the right life for you,” I reply.

“Sweetheart, this is the right life for everybody,” Marty says. “Moses would throw his tablets down to come to this party.”

I write Scotty that night. I tell him I’m going to O’Hare soon, and I have to make my decision. I explain the history of my parents’ band, how I was born, and then my father, who played guitar and wrote songs, fell in love with Madeleine, the other singer and songwriter. And my mother, who played keyboards, fell in love with Marty, the bass player. The band lived as a commune and my father and Madeleine are the last ones left.

Marty became a producer and lawyer in Beverly Hills. I tell Scotty my father grows pot and Psilocybin Mushrooms under high intensity lights from Sweden in our barn in the Alleghany Mountains. Everyone in town thinks he runs an organic gardening business, but he actually sells drugs. I live in two places, but only feel at home in O’Hare.

I am suspended between mutually exclusive possibilities. I navigate encampments from tree level. I’m the girl on the high trapeze. My wires are disguised and I have my own gravity, rules and variables. I’m expected to cross regions with no bridges, diagrams or candles, no drum rolls or spotlights. And somehow I do in seizures of vertigo and fevers no one notices.