Nathan Hill - The Nix

Soon it’s their turn in the toilets, and Faye sits on the tile floor feeling miserable. Though the moment passed without incident, Faye was ready for an encounter with Margaret, and her body still registers that tenseness. She’s one big exposed nerve right now, her insides still squawking. She had been so ready for a fight that it seems as if she actually had the fight. And it does not help that Margaret is here with her, in the bathroom, is sitting in the neighboring toilet stall. Faye can feel her presence almost like an oven.

The toilet in front of her is spotless and white and shiny and smells like bleach — the work of home ec girls in here moments before. The teacher paces behind them explaining the perils of an unclean toilet: scabies, salmonella, gonorrhea, various resident microorganisms.

“There is no such thing as a too-clean toilet,” she says. She hands them new scrubbing brushes. They crouch on the floor — some of them sit — and they wash the bowl, jostling the water, foaming the water. They scour and cleanse and rinse.

“Remember the handle,” Mrs. Schwingle says. “The handle might be the dirtiest of all.”

The teacher shows them how much bleach to use, how to contort their arms to most effectively clean under the lip of the bowl. She tells the girls how to keep their inevitable future children healthy, how to stop colds from spreading by keeping a clean bathroom, how to prevent toilet germs from infecting the rest of the house.

“Germs,” she says, “can be propelled into the air when the toilet is flushed. So when you flush, close the cover and step away.”

Faye is scrubbing when, from the next stall over, Margaret speaks. “He looked cute out there,” she says.

And Faye doesn’t know who she’s talking to, finds it unlikely that Margaret would be talking to her, so she keeps scrubbing.

“Hello?” Margaret says, and she knocks lightly on the wall. “Anybody home?”

“What? Yes?” Faye says.

“Hello?”

“Are you talking to me?”

“Um, yeah?” Then Margaret’s face appears beneath the john wall — she’s leaning over, she’s almost upside down, her huge blond curls hang comically off the top of her head.

“I was telling you,” she says, “that he looked cute out there.”

“Who?”

“Henry. Duh. ”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

“I saw you watching him. You must have thought he looked cute.”

“Of course,” Faye says. “Yes. That’s what I was thinking.”

Margaret looks at Faye’s necklace, on which she’s wearing Henry’s ring. His big opal-stoned class ring. She says, “Are you going to put that ring on your left hand?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you two were really serious, you’d wear it on your left hand. Or he could get another ring. And then you’d have one for your neck and one for your left hand. That’s what Jules did.”

“Yes, right.”

“Jules and I are very serious.”

Faye nods.

“We’ll be married soon. He has a lot of prospects.”

Faye keeps nodding.

“A lot.”

Their teacher notices the chattering and walks over, hands on hips, saying, “Margaret, why aren’t you cleaning?” and Margaret gives Faye this look — conspiratorial, like We’re in this together, that sort of look — and disappears behind the wall.

“I’m cleaning it mentally, Mom,” Margaret says. “I’m visualizing it. I’ll remember it better that way.”

“Perhaps if you were as focused as Faye here, you’d be going to the big city too.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Your husband,” Mrs. Schwingle says, louder now, talking to the whole group, “will expect a certain level of household cleanliness,” and Faye thinks about the posters on the classroom walls, husbands with their big demands, husbands in hats and coats storming out the door when their wives can’t meet basic womanly requirements, husbands in advertisements on television or in magazines — for coffee, how he’ll expect you to make a fine pot for his boss; or for cigarettes, how he’ll want you to be hip and sophisticated; for the Maidenform bra, how he’ll expect you to have a womanly figure — and it seems to Faye that this husband creature is the most particular and demanding species in human history. Where does he come from? How do the boys on the baseball field — goofballs, clowns, clumsy as chickens, unsure of themselves, idiots at love — ever become that ?

The girls are excused. They return to the classroom to summon the next wave. They sit back at their desks and look, in boredom, outside. The boys are still at it — some are dirtier now, having found reasons to dive or slide. And Jules is up, that gladiator of a boy with a sugar-cookie face. Margaret says, “Go honey! Go baby!” though he can’t hear her. Margaret’s exaltation is for the girls in the class, so they’ll watch. And the grounder comes in at Jules and he moves for it, moves so fluidly and easily, his feet so fast and sure, not slipping in the dirt like the other boys, as though he moves on some other, more tactile earth. And he plants himself in front of the ball, arriving in the correct spot with so much time to spare, relaxed and effortless. The baseball bounces toward his glove and — maybe it hits a rock or a pebble, maybe it strikes an odd indentation in the dirt, who knows — the ball suddenly shoots upward, unexpectedly and crazily, bounces up fast and strikes Jules square in the throat.

He drops to the ground, kicking.

And the girls in the home economics classroom find this hilarious. They giggle, they laugh, and Margaret turns to them and yells, “Shut up!” She looks so hurt at this moment. So ashamed. She looks like the women in the posters, their husbands abandoning them: frightened, damaged, rejected. That feeling of being unfairly and cruelly judged. Margaret looks like that, and Faye wishes she could take Margaret’s vulnerability and embarrassment and bottle it, like deodorant. Like cans of germicidal spray. She’d give it to wives everywhere. She’d shoot it at grooms on wedding days. She’d throw bombs of it, like napalm, off the roof and onto the baseball diamond.

Then the boys, too, could know how it feels.

FAYE SITS ALONE, outside, after school, a book in her lap, her back pressed against the school’s warm, gritty wall, listening through the wall to musicians idly playing: a trumpet runs up a scale to its highest, loudest peak; a xylophone is plinked on its smallest bars; a trombone makes that splatty-fart noise only a trombone is capable of. The students of the school orchestra seem to be on a break right now, fooling around between numbers, and so Faye waits and reads. The book is a thin collection of poems by Allen Ginsberg, and she’s reading the one about sunflowers again, for maybe the hundredth time, each time becoming more convinced that the poem is about her. Well, not really. She knows the poem is really about Ginsberg sitting in the Berkeley hills, staring out at the water, feeling depressed. But the more she reads it, the more she sees herself in it. When Ginsberg writes about the “gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery,” he might as well be describing the ChemStar plant. The “oily water on the river” could easily be the Mississippi. And the sunflower field he describes could just as well be this Iowa cornfield in front of her, separated from the school by a rickety barbed-wire fence, the field recently tilled and planted, a rippled blanket of black, wet, slippery earth. By the time school resumes in the fall the field will be busy with big-shouldered plants, spine-straight, corn-armored, and ready, finally, to be hacked down, to crumple weakly where they’re chopped at the knees. Faye sits and waits for the orchestra to begin playing again and thinks about this — harvest — and how it always makes her sad, how the cornfields in November look like battlegrounds, the chopped-down plants blanched and bonelike, cornstalks like femurs half buried and poking sharply out of the ground. After that, the chilly approach of another Iowa winter — the late-autumn snow dusting, the first November frost, the desolate January tundra this place becomes. Faye imagines what a Chicago winter would be like, and she imagines it would be better, and warmer, heated by all that traffic and movement and concrete and electricity, by all those hot human bodies.