How Did You Get This Number Page 10

  Hysterical Girl continues to be so. I roll down the window, and April leans over me and holds her hand, trying to calm her down, but it’s no use. She frenzies herself into a dull mumble, leans over my lap, and implores April and Jeff to get back in the car. She screams as though gathering the troops to retreat on the beaches of Normandy. I rub my ear. I am on the verge of slapping her, convinced it’s the humane thing to do, when she pauses and, with the support of a giant heaving breath, belts out: “What about the mama?!”

  They say if you give a monkey enough time, he’ll type Shakespeare. Presumably, you’d have to give him a typewriter as well. But that’s neither here nor there. Either way, the same is true for the neurotic. I whip around and blink at her, my bear bell following me.

  “She makes a solid point,” I say to April.

  When a squirrel makes a poorly timed highway excursion, I am not particularly concerned about its mother emerging from a tree to gouge my eyes out. A bear is another matter. This road cuts straight through a thick forest. Mama can’t be far off. And if the punishment for picking a wildflower is scalping, there’s no way crippling a cub has a lenient ending. April gets back into the car, her face red and scrunched. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. Jeff is still on the phone with the park service, looking out for nonexistent traffic.

  “Did anyone get the license plate?” he shouts.

  “958XPO,” I recite. Everyone turns and glares at me, possibly even the bear.

  “What?” I look around. “I grew up in the burbs. We were all afraid of getting kidnapped. I used to memorize the license plates of shady vans.”

  I may not know how to gut a salmon or BeDazzle a gun case, but I am not without my skills.

  Just then a car pulls up behind ours, and a man in a Navy Seals T-shirt and green fishing hat emerges. He adjusts the hat as he walks forward. He adopts a “What seems to be the problem here?” swagger that feels out of place. The problem is apparent, the picture painted: baby bear, injured, blood on pavement. The man and Jeff stand over the bear. The introduction of a stranger somehow reactivates the hysterics of the passenger to my right.

  “Oh my God,” she snorts. “What’s he doing here?”

  I don’t know, driving home? Making waffles? It’s his state, not ours. What are we doing here? I can feel the tingling in my hand as if I’ve already slapped her, so right does it feel. Before I left for Alaska, my sister told me to (a) fly safe and (b) watch out because “I hear everyone has a gun.” I glare at our sniffler. Now, I think, would be such a good time for that to be true. Although after her last revelation I wonder if she sees something I don’t. Perhaps danger has a color. Perhaps this man’s aura is flashing neon red and is visible only to unnerved women. Meanwhile, the conversation on the road is growing heated. I make a move to get up, only to realize I’ve had my seat belt fastened this whole time. By the time I unbuckle it, the man has taken a wide step toward the bear.

  “Hey,” I say, surprised at the sound of my own voice.

  The bear tries to get up once again, this time with less success and the bonus indignity of defecation. We are helpless as goldfish behind the SUV’s glass. The man lifts the back of his T-shirt to reveal a small holster. He removes a handgun and shoots the bear point-blank in the head four times.

  The blood goes black.

  Our bells are silenced.

  The sound of gunshots reverberates off the tree trunks and rocks around us. I wonder about avalanche triggers. There’s a collective whimper in the car. I have always wondered what I would do if I was in one of those movies where someone gets stabbed or eaten alive while I’m in the closet or under the bed. The last thing one wants is to be unprepared when one walks into the bathroom to find their spouse has been making toast on the ledge of the bathtub again. Now I know. I would do nothing. I would just stare. Make a note of it and replay it later.

  Which I will, and recklessly. I know each time I tell this story, I damage my memory of it. Each time it moves a little further away from what happened. The visuals are fading, merging what dead animal fur looks like and what I think dead animal fur looks like. I remember the polar bears in the zoo and think perhaps it’s just a bear-specific issue. All stories involving bears and blood are subject to literal and mental disfiguration. And yet I can’t resist the retelling. Look how real Alaska got. Look at the beauty and the beasts. More than one person will react by saying, “Nice how everyone in Alaska has a gun in their car.” Prior to my arctic excursion I would have dismissed this as a gross generalization. Now I nod. Yes. Nice.

  I took one hundred thirty-two photographs in Alaska, one hundred of which are of icebergs. Sometimes you can see otters or fishing poles in the background. Sometimes you can see the Ghost Forests, betraying their vampire-like nature by showing up in pictures. Mostly it’s a lot of ice. I blind people with iceberg photos. Here’s an iceberg from far away. Here it is again, up close. Here’s a chunk of it floating in the water. Here it is from the boat, from the shore, from the side, give me cold, give me big, you’re chiseled like an ice sculpture, you’re a cube and the ocean is your glass. Brrr, baby, brrrr. The pictures are frustrating.

  What I want to say is: Here is a country that is ours but not ours. A crazed landscape of death and marriage with designated bells to acknowledge both. Here is the longest breath of fresh air you will ever take, the bluest stream you will ever dip your hand in, the humane thing to do. Here is my friend, who I miss so much. I may have found new people with new novelties, perhaps even better suited to my own. But none to go kayaking on the Hudson with me. None to look up more than they look down. None to remind me that this is, and has always been, the real world as long as people are here to witness it. Why does none of it show up on film? Maybe I just need a better camera.

  If You Sprinkle

  So shines a good deed in a weary world.

  -SHAKESPEARE, VIA Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  I had little red circles stuck to my chin, cheeks, and forehead when Zooey Ellis warned us that Rachel Hermann was going to be joining our slumber party. We sat in a circle as Zooey instructed us to be extra-sensitive because Rachel was new to school. And because she had two mommies. No one, under any circumstances, was to bring this up. Nor were we to acknowledge this abomination of a situation by encouraging Rachel to bring it up. Giving credence to this unnatural and—let’s face it—unfashionable union would risk making Rachel “feel the shame a child of her age should never have to feel.” Zooey’s parents were Republicans.

  I nodded in unison with the rest of the girls, memorizing Mrs. Ellis’s words as they funneled forth from a miniature version of her pouty mouth. One of the red stickers came loose from my chin and fell on the carpet. I plucked it up, pinching it in my nail bed, but when I went to put it back on, I saw that its minuscule circumference was already covered with carpet fibers. So I sat on it instead. The sticker, meant to double as a “zit,” was part of a board game called Girl Talk, an early-’90s version of truth-or-dare, designed to sanction prepubescent cruelty via laminated cardboard. Accompanying the board itself were zits peeled from an adhesive sheet and doled out to those who refused to participate in dares. Imagine the karmic opposite of candy dots. Girl Talk was the main reason I wound up enrolling in a college without a Greek system.

  The game began by spinning a plastic arrow so cheap and lopsided that you didn’t “spin” it so much as flick it very fast. The arrow touched down in one of four pie-shaped categories of clairvoyance:MARRIAGE

  CHILDREN

  CAREER

  SPECIAL MOMENTS

  The whole concept of forecasting and fortune telling was very en vogue at the time, often taking the form of origami finger puppets that told you when you’d lose your virginity and where you’d live when you grew up. Soda-can tabs predicted the first letter of your future husband’s name, candles melted to reveal secret scrolls, moods were exposed depending on the temperature of your ring finger. The future was everywhere, and it was all very illuminating
. Girl Talk simply did the grunt work for you, its forecasting preprinted on triangular cards that fit into the board like the courses in TV dinner entrées.

  To its credit, Girl Talk was downright empowering compared to Mall Madness, a game of fiscal responsibility that encouraged girls to buy everything in sight until they found a boy to do it for them. Girl Talk was also strangely complicated, a layered enterprise with rules complex enough to make the ancient Chinese game of Go look like Candy Land. Before you put your fate in the hands of a plastic wheel, you had a choice. You could either tell the truth or pick from a series of dares. These ranged from the coy (“Call a boy and ask him who he likes”) to the suspect (“Act like Pee-wee Herman for one minute”) to the dehumanizing (“Lap up a bowl of water like a dog”).

  Imagine, if you will, the legal repercussions of a game manufactured today in which underage girls are encouraged to call strangers’ homes in the middle of the night. Or to leave the house sporting a “silly outfit.” It’s all fun and games until someone winds up in the back of a cop car, clutching a Cabbage Patch Kid. In hindsight, I am proud that I declined to imitate a convicted child molester or assume a doggie position in order to win a board game. As if all this wasn’t enough, you needed “household” items to play, including shoelaces, a short-wave radio, and a blindfold. Were we preparing for our future fiancés or the apocalypse? Or both?

  The Special Moments cards were far and away my favorite. Even as kids, we recognized the dated presumption that all our special moments would have to be found outside the colored wedges of Marriage or Career. Nope, no joy there. Cue the visual of grown Girl Talk players, seeking out their “special moments” by going on shopping sprees beyond their means, binge-eating their children’s Easter candy, and sitting on dressing room benches, trying on La Perla underwear and weeping....

  It’s easy to point at the past and say, “Can you believe we ever thought this was okay?” It makes one wonder what contemporary nuggets of idiocy we’re producing. What we call “normal” now will eventually be viewed as cultural carbon monoxide—the silent killer of logic and good sense, imperceptible until we all wake up in ten years surrounded by photos of women wearing sunglasses sized for bullmastiffs on their way to stick vials of stroke medication into their eyebrows. Looking back, I can’t decide which makes me cringe more—that I avoided speaking to Rachel Hermann about her home life or that I participated in a game that predicted the number of babies I would one day expel from my body as dictated by the first digit of my area code. That would be nine. Who wrote this shit? Mormons?

  If I had been permitted to ask Rachel questions, I’m not sure what they would have been. But what I can say is what they wouldn’t have been. They wouldn’t have been about the devil’s musical stylings that were the Indigo Girls. Or hemp. Or why one of her mothers wore gym shorts in the middle of winter. I wished I could spin an arrow and it could land on a new category called Reality. I wondered: What was Rachel’s life like? What did she make of us? Did she have to put stickers on her face and drink from a dog bowl where she came from? If you have two mommies, can you still play one parent off the other? Were you saddled with two bad cops or blessed with two pushovers?

  “Hey”—one of Zooey’s minions poked me in the biceps—“I think you’re missing a zit.”

  She bounced her index finger in close proximity to my face, counting my battle scars. Then she consulted the rule-book, searching for a punishment for the intentional smuggling of fake pimples.

  For all its many flaws—and there were many—at Girl Talk’s core was the single lesson that prepared me for truth-or-dare. Which prepared me for “I never.” A thread of advice that strung through all the drinking games of New England and, subsequently, life as I know it. I learned that if you want to get out of something, it is always better to tell the truth. Not because it is the moral option, but because nine times out of ten, it’s less work. The path of least resistance. Turn the pockets of your past inside out, beat your peers to the punch, expose yourself, and bore the people around you into leaving you be. Two-mommied Rachel knew this, too.

  When she arrived after dark, it somehow made sense that she would be dropped off later than everyone else, that her parents parented differently than ours did. Not so much because there were multiple sets of breasts involved, but because Rachel had just moved to the East Coast from California. What the time difference didn’t account for, the Berkeley mentality did. “Seven p.m.” was more of a suggestion than a fact.

  Rachel was tall for our age, lanky, with wide-set eyes that would be identified by any modeling scout as “Jackie O-like” but which were identified by our peers as Kermitlike. She had already begun to hunch. If I have ever come to the defense of a celebrity who claims to have been called Olive Oyl or Skeletor as a child, Rachel is the reason. But for all her physical discomfort, she had a sense of calm about her. Her voice, which never surpassed a certain octave, made me conscious of keeping my own exaggerated squeaks to a minimum. She seemed a bit older and a lot wiser than we were, the way people who have lived elsewhere seem when you’re twelve years old. If I could make a graph of our miniature society, charting how much Rachel spoke, how many stories and crushes of her own she shared, how many times she complimented other girls, Rachel would fall exactly in the center. Over the next few years, she landed in this spot with apparent effortlessness. Whereas my endeavors to fit in were always soaked with effort. Alas, taking stock after each chauffeured trip to the movies and each sleepover, I calculated too many failed jokes, too little volume control, or too much forced mysterious silence on my part. Or, worst of all, zero attention from Zooey.

  ASIDE FROM THE TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD FRESHMAN, the most unrealistic aspect of teen movies is how conscious the upper echelons are of their own status. Whereas in real life, such hyper-awareness of group dynamic would only damage one’s social standing. Cafeteria tables may be as delineated as nation-states, but the borders remain invisible at all times. Getting caught muttering Shakespearean monologues about one’s plans for coup-staging would make you seem schizophrenic. When it comes to pointing out middle-school injustice, it’s not just impolite to point—it’s unproductive. At the time I thought we were all conscious of this system, undetectable to the naked eye as it was. As it turns out, the bird’s-eye view of grade school is not to be found at the top of the tree. The altitude of popularity actually makes you a little stupid.

  I know this because in adult life, I am friendly with a girl who would have been portrayed as a Queen Bee in any teen drama but at the time clearly thought of herself as, say, an affable ladybug. A Marie Antoinette figure who unconsciously abused and misunderstood her position. Oblivious to the system, she assumed that the populace of other cliques was composed of people who shared different interests, who she just didn’t know as well. Recently she said to me, “Can you believe it? Craig Marcos got divorced.”

  I scrolled through the contact list in my head until I produced an image the approximate size and shape of someone named Craig Marcos.

  I said, “Craig Marcos got married?”

  The blithe assumption that I kept tabs on her friends, that I’d be invested in their contemporary lives, would be insulting if it wasn’t so flattering. She viewed her world not in cliques but as this borderless mass of fun where the only reason she might not see you at a secret party was because you were across town at an even better and more secret party. It was downright touching. How can you not want to hug Marie Antoinette just a little bit when she suggests replacing bread with cake? It’s made of sugar and flour. It’s not like it’s a bad idea.

  Zooey was a different animal. One got the feeling she was abnormally aware of her power within this falsely inclusive echelon. But she would never wield it against me. Not because I had done anything especially cool to warrant my turn skipped in that great Girl Talk game of life. I simply had too much on her.

  The incident had taken place in fifth grade, a time when I was regularly raising my hand and asking f
or the bathroom hall pass during math class. The “pass” was a normal-sized key with a wooden block the size of a brick attached to it. This was meant to broadcast the administration’s lack of faith in our ability to hold on to small objects. Still, I would rather clutch in my hand that corroded block, which every child who didn’t wash his or her hands had just clutched, than spend half an hour writing numbers on a blackboard. Afflicted with the plight of the right-brained, I had no gift for percentages or protractors. I raised my hand for the hall pass with increasing frequency.

  I’d wander around the school grounds, kicking acorns on the concrete beneath the basketball net and stopping to appreciate the big mural outside the auditorium. Little did I know I was about two pee-break excursions away from my math teacher calling my mother and my mother calling a doctor, who would quiz me on my frequent urination habits. I felt at once empowered by and guilty about the perception my teachers and parents had of me, that of a child whose devious acts were not the stuff of white lies but the stuff of white coats. Surely there must be some terrible force beyond my control causing me to skip class. Testing negative for everything, the doctor left me with the suggestion that I “wipe more thoroughly,” a piece of advice that has stayed with me to this day, despite the fact that I was being misdiagnosed at the time it was given.

  What I had was an acute case of procrastination. When Mattel released its infamous “Math is hard!” Barbie doll, the woman cut to the core of me. To my mind, the only flaw in her design was that she didn’t say “Math is hard!” and then spontaneously raise her hand via some battery-powered mechanism in her plastic rotator cuff. (I think she also said something to the effect of “Let’s go shopping!” But the math crack was so insanely sexist, Barbie’s minor faux pas got lost between the cracks of the Dream House floorboards.)