When We Were Animals(81)

Except Marcie Klapper-Witt’s neighborhood watch must have seen me when I climbed in through the window of Helena’s house—because when I leave by the front door, the police are there waiting for me, their hands poised and ready over their holstered pistols, the lights on their car flashing pretty against the treetops.





Chapter 12




The name of my birth town isn’t really Pale Miranda. That would be a very fanciful name for a town, and most towns are named in the service of either commerce or heritage. The town where I grew up is of the latter variety, and its real name is Polikwakanda, which is an indigenous name—supposedly from the Abenaki tribe, though I have never been able to find any reference to the word in my research of Native American languages. I don’t know what it means, and maybe it means “town where monsters live” or something like that, but the only sense my young girl’s tongue could make of the word was Pale Miranda, and so that’s how I thought of the place where I was raised—even beyond the time when I was grown old enough to know better.

When I walked into the prom, there were banners everywhere that said, FAREWELL POLIKWAKANDA SENIORS!

Farewell, Pale Miranda.

*



Dances in the town where I grew up were curious events. In other towns, the school dance is an opportunity to break free and go wild for a little while. But because our wildness was routine, because we were reminded of it monthly in cut lips and bruised thighs, our dances were tame. People stood around in compulsory clusters. They talked about dull things. No one tried to sneak vodka into the punch. No virginities were lost underneath the stage or in the backseats of cars in the parking lot. Virginities were simply not things toppled by clumsy, drunken lunging. Instead they were seized and forfeited in clawing battles under full moons while the naked apparitions of your friends looked on, howling. So it was.

When people danced at the prom, they danced slowly, pressed together and rocking back and forth with the sweet romance of dispassion. The tissue streamers wafted to and fro like underwater weeds. The students chatted pleasantly with the adult chaperones. People yawned. They went outside and looked up at the sky because they missed the moon. They sat on curbs and waited.

The previous year, I had gone to the dance with Polly. That now seemed like a very long time ago. We had already started pulling away from each other even then. I remembered seeing her across the gym, laughing at some joke told by a boy who, we had both agreed, was ridiculous. I remembered wondering about the integrity of Polly’s personality, because I did not understand how people could go for so long being one thing and then, overnight, suddenly become something else. Such behavior seemed unnatural to me. A year later, though, I knew the difference between unnatural and unliterary. The natural world, it turned out, was not very literary. You could say it had poetry, but it was a rough brand of poetry.

So when I walked into the decorated gym, I entered alone.

What I realized was how far from normal my connections with other people had become. My interactions were based upon spite or jealousy or rage or strange hungers—but whatever they were, they were not dance-going relationships.

Some people said hello to me. Polly made brief conversation—and even Rose Lincoln, whose arm was still in a sling, wished me well in a way that made me think magnanimity was her newly forged weapon.

Somehow, without realizing it, I had become everyone’s odd cousin. I existed as a nagging, peripheral figure in their lives—recognized only in specialized circumstances. I had become occasional. To leave a conversation with me was to return to real life.

No one asked me to dance, and I sat for a long time on the bleachers, alone on the dark periphery of the gym, watching the figures of my peers sway back and forth in each other’s arms, hating them for all their pretty pretenses.

When a group of boys passed by, I could hear them talking about Mr. Hunter, who was supposed to be one of the chaperones. I hadn’t seen him all night, but these boys had observed him walking the grounds of the school, cursing aloud. He swayed as he walked, said one. He was drunk, said another. The boys laughed.

“Where?” I asked.

“What?” they said. They were startled to notice me there in the dark.

“Where?” I said again. “Where was he going?”

“I don’t know,” said one of the boys, shrugging as though to suggest he wanted no part of whatever freakishness Mr. Hunter and I shared. “Looked like he was going toward the football field.”

*



I walked down to the field, the crinoline of my pink prom dress rustling against my skin. The field was not lit, but a glow reached it from the school grounds behind me. I was conscious of looking ridiculous out there, where no one was.

I didn’t see Mr. Hunter at first, but I found him by the sound of a glass bottle being tapped with steady persistence against a metal rail of the bleachers. He was up in the very top row, gazing out over the field and the stars in the sky beyond.

“There she is,” he called out when he saw me. I hiked up my dress and climbed to the top of the bleachers.

“Do you want to hear a story, Lumen?” he said when I reached him. “Now it’s time for me to tell you a story. I quit my job. I quit it. I’m leaving. I’m going as far as I can go. Maybe Tibet. Have you ever eaten Tibetan food?”

“You’re leaving? But why?”