SWEETHEARTS by Jenny Irish
Over the radio, it was announced that a young couple in Austin, Texas have given the name Trout Fishing in America to their first-born son. He will be the second child known to carry that burden, though the first assumed the mantle by choice, legally changing his name from Todd, in October of 1985.
The assumed date of Richard Brautigan’s death is September 14th, 1984. His body was not found until October 25th, 1984. I was born on January 1st, 1979. My boyfriend, the only one I’ve ever had, eventually my husband, was born on the 27th of August one year later. High school sweethearts. People are always asking for the story of how we met.
The town of my childhood had two elementary schools, both clapboard, both quaint, one with gingerbread trim and monkey bars, one without, and which of those a boy or girl attended depended on where that child lived, and where any child lived was determined by the kind of money his or her parents were making.
So – there was no problem there, not for the earlier years, in keeping like with like, but come junior high all children were bussed to one brick building, and certain lines, previously marked, became uncertain, in need of being re-drawn.
Tracking began in the sixth grade – Honors Prep, Prep, or Remedial – and which track a boy or girl completed determined which courses he or she would take when entering high school: Honors, Prep, or Technical Ed. Based on high school courses, students then applied to private colleges, or to the various branches of the state university, or signed up for the service, or took hourly-wage jobs: changing oil, ringing up groceries, gutting rabbits, and began impregnating or giving birth, whichever their gender allowed.
The high school Honors courses were capped at twelve seats to a class, and the children in those seats were all the product of the local well-enough-to-do.
I was the exception.
In my house we had a phone, and its bill must have been the one that was regularly paid, because every afternoon at four my mother unplugged it, so my father, coming home from work, bringing with him a cold smell of butchering and a cloud of loose white fur, would not intercept any calls from the creditors who owned our lives and were owed all of our future earnings.
Is that enough? – these details that I’ve allowed, or should I lay it out further, more plainly? My family was questionable, and the life we mutually led was a shitty one.
About the town: there wasn’t a factory, but there was a small naval base threatened with closure, a rabbit farm with an adjoining slaughterhouse and packing plant, and a distribution center from which gourmet local foods – chocolate enrobed cranberries, smoked oysters, hand-picked crab, and the fresh hindquarters of pink-eye, snowy-coated, eight-week-old New Zealand Whites – traveled by overnight delivery around the world.
In the sixth grade I was put into Remedial Track with the other boy and girls from the intersecting roads between the distribution center and the rabbit farm. Our houses were shiplap and tarpaper and corrugated tin. In winter we burned wood not to freeze, and in summer slept with the doors wide open. The boys, neighbors through the woods or across the marsh, already held the low man’s justified suspicion that all direction contained condescension. Some would not continue on to high school, landing in juvenile detention, or dead instead. Some would drop out after their sophomore year, when they would be sixteen, and legally employable at forty hours a week.
They spent our classes playing quarters: a blood sport. One boy would fold his fingers against his palm, hand on the desktop, knuckles out, then another would use his thumb to flick a quarter – and later, heavy washers, notched for damage – sending it across the desk into the first boy’s knuckles. The goal was to draw blood. If skin was broken the flicker got another turn; if not, he put his knuckles down.
The class was mostly boys. There were two other girls, who sat together at the front of the room, painting one another’s nails with White Out. The teacher had had it long before we got to her. To try and excite us she would say, “This book! – This book we’re starting now? – is by someone from our very own state! Mr. Scott O’Dell spent his early life across the river from us!” But Scott O’Dell grew up in California exploring the beaches of the Pacific Coast. It was printed on the back cover of the book. Island of the Blue Dolphins – which we had all read before, back in our elementary school.
I spent class in the farthest corner of the room, quiet, with my own book in my lap, until the day the teacher, explosive in the way of ground-down women, charged up the aisle and discovered I was reading Jean Auel.
She opened and closed her mouth. Her face was red. She said, “That book is full of sex.”
I said, “Yes, ma’am,” because it was.
She said, “That’s very adult.”
It did not seem overtly so to me. “Ma’am,” I said, unsure.
Later in the day my teacher met with the teacher who taught Honors Track, and I was moved. We read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I cried for them – the mockingbirds, for Boo, and for Tom Robinson, and for Jem’s arm too, broken and forever bent – for the loss of things reasonably desired and unfairly denied.
Three years later, when I was fourteen and a freshman in high school, the Honors English teacher was a famous man. There were two things. The first was his beautiful wife. She was Indian – a Native American – not local from the reservation, hanging around the bottle depot in a jean jacket asking for change, but imported, from Arizona or New Mexico, somewhere far away and different. Mysterious and gaudy, her arms were circled from wrist to elbow with silver jewelry. She wore a bantam feather tied into her hair with a length of rawhide bootlace. I thought she was ridiculous, shameless, drawing attention to herself, and if I could have looked like anyone in the world, done a body swap, I would have chosen her hands down.
The second thing the teacher was famous for: he was supposed to keep a row of joints, a box of matches and a roach clip in the top drawer of his desk. That he kept the drawer locked – it was tested every time he left the room – was treated as certain proof.
I never did believe it though. It wasn’t that drugs were taboo, but rather that they were so common. Whose father didn’t smoke a joint in his truck as soon as his shift was over? It seemed unfitting habit for a man who read so many books. Then, one time it happened that the teacher hugged me, brought me against him, his arms around me for a slow sigh of time, and with my body so close to his, I recognized the heavy green pungency of marijuana.
And life is full of all types of disappointments, but some are harder.
Something that may help in understanding this story: I was the volunteer. The first time the teacher asked, I raised my hand, and I raised it every time after. I raised my hand until the teacher stopped asking for volunteers, because he knew he didn’t have to, because he knew he had me.
Alone together, the two of us. Teacher and student. Hours in the storage closet. We had to crack each book and shake it by the covers to check the glue in its spine. How badly were the pages falling out? Every book – we had to check. There was one window, a tiny box of shivering rain-colored light. We didn’t have to whisper, but it felt like we did, so we did. And sometimes, as we made repairs, me holding a page in place as he smoothed a line of tape with his thumbs, our knuckles touched.
Hours and hours.
Picture it: this quiet gray work. Air full of dust and sweet mustiness. A young girl, an older man – what a scene is being set.
Would anyone believe me if I said I didn’t know?
On the bottom shelf of the book closet, beside two stacks of Ordeal by Hunger, were three copies of In Watermelon Sugar, the one with a blue cover with Brautigan and the smooth-haired girl – and it’s all in their eyes, isn’t it? – standing one in front of the other, staring out like they’re seeing, as if their photographed eyes actually functioned on paper, and under their picture the words: In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
The teacher held the books to his chest, arms folded over them, his eyes closed, rocking back on his heels.
When he opened his eyes, he said a word that was mostly sigh, then held the books out to me. “You should have this,” he said. “You should have these. You take two and I’ll take one.” He put two books into my hands and then put his own hand on the cover of the top book he’d given me, the third still held to his chest. “I could never teach this,” he said. “Not that they would let me, but I could never teach this. There isn’t rhyme or reason to it. There just is. It’s like – ” He pushed his bangs, which were too long, off his forehead and he looked right at me – just a space between blinks, then he blinked, and I blinked, and it was over.
“What?” I asked, because he hadn’t finished. “What?”
He laughed. “I’ve gone and forgot,” and he turned away.
An essential detail: the teacher, my teacher, he had two sons with his beautiful wife. One was named Casey. I never knew the other’s name. But he doesn’t matter anyway.
It was the same year, when I was fourteen, a freshman in high school, that a terrible crime was committed in Florida. The body of a child – four years old was the guess – a little girl, was hooked by a fisherman, dragged up through the brown water of a backyard canal, then set under a spotlight. The girl hadn’t drowned, or been pulled in by an alligator, or been wading under her mother’s watchful eye when a jet ski came out of nowhere and flattened her like a squirrel on the highway. Somebody pitched her, a little body, already dead, weighed down by cans of stewed tomatoes duct-taped to her arms and legs.
It was all over the news. She had her own theme music. Every channel was doctors being interviewed, explaining aspiration, and later on, when divers found the Marlins mini bat, rectal prolapse. Aspiration, though, was how she died – suffocated while vomiting. When a person swallows water the wrong way, it gets pulled into their lungs, then they cough and it’s cleared. She couldn’t clear her throat. It was clogged with hair. Her intestines were full of it. Starving to death, she’d been eating it as if fell out.
There were models and diagrams, and everywhere, pictures of the body bag, sagging in the middle as it was carried up a bright green rise, palm trees and the shine of water in the background.
It made it hard to eat. It made it hard to comb hair. It made it hard to swim, to sit out in the sun, to have a crush, to keep a secret, to masturbate, to live at all.
Cleveland, Ohio, is the central hub of the child sex trade in America – the authorities said so. There were nightly news specials about the things that happen to very young girls at truck stops. But there was no outraged, grieving family, only, as days passed and passed and passed, footage, more footage, new exclusive footage of the girl’s funeral. It was played over and over and over again. Her little white coffin, bought with donations, carried by hulking, hunky, weeping policeman to its little dark hole in the ground. It was shown from every side, from every possible perspective.
She was all anybody could talk about and all anybody would talk about. Details were forever being released. Her left wrist was broken, she’d never seen a dentist, her ears were severely infected, she was severely underweight. Everywhere, in every room, on the street, in the supermarket, in the drugstore, in line at the ATM – people gasped and said, “How? How could anyone do it?” They loved the feel of that word – how – in their mouths. It was all anyone could say, “How could anyone do that to a child?”
How could anyone do it? What does how matter when it’s done? How, it seemed, should be the very last concern.
But I thought about it all the time.
I may have told my teacher how I felt. He may have nodded. He may have said, “You really see the world.”
Or it could be that he told me those things, and I thought, Yes, really he sees the world, and then I repeated his words until they became my own and our positions were reversed.
Or it may be that I wanted something like that to happen so badly that after so much hope and time, I’ve come to believe it did.
I was with my teacher in his classroom, helping check in copies of Titus Andronicus. The books weren’t from my class. It was something he’d done with his seniors. I read the numbers penciled on the inside of each cover, and he copied them down
It was winter. They’d let us out for Christmas Break the day before. My teacher’s classroom was on the second floor and just outside the window, the flag, stiffened by frost, curled slow and snapped. It was quiet enough that we could hear the metal pieces ringing against the metal pole, and I said the numbers quietly, and he said them back to me, nodding on the last number of each sequence. Check, he said, and I said, Double check – and his pencil on paper sounded like a mouse chewing wires inside the walls.
Another teacher came into the room then. He said my name. He dragged his fingers through his hair. This other teacher was dressed in everyday clothes: a Metallica t-shirt and jeans. It was embarrassing for me to see him like that. I knew him as khaki pants and a button-down shirt and a tie. He was much younger than I thought. He wasn’t so much older than me. He didn’t look like a teacher. He looked like a townie, like he should be shivering, sitting on the curb outside the music store.
My teacher made a motion with his hand. He looped it through the air, a get-on-with-it gesture, and the other teacher said, “It’s Casey.”
I expected to be dismissed to the hall, but neither of them looked at me. My body felt huge and numb. They’d forgotten I was there. I kept waiting for them to notice. I kept waiting for them to be mad.
The other teacher cleared his throat. He said, “There’s a problem.” He reached out and clapped my teacher hard on the shoulder, one of those man-to-man punch-touches used in place of a hug, but it was too hard, and the world was so quiet the sound – blunt, flesh into flesh – hung there.
The room was very cold. When the school was out, my teacher had told me, the furnace was turned way down low, only enough heat to keep the pipes from freezing and bursting. He cautioned me, the day before, “Dress in something warm.”
“Okay,” I had said.
“We don’t want to have to huddle.”
The teacher’s son, Casey, had died of a heart attack, a compli-cation of chronic bulimia. He wrestled in college, something I think I’d vaguely known, and his self-inflicted but accidental death was all tied up with weight classes and national trials, team oaths.
When school started again after winter break, the other teachers were saying there’d been signs. They stood, mouths close to ears, whispering in the hallways. It was always Casey’s name I heard. Mine was there too, quietly passed back and forth.
“Do you know who he was with when he found out?”
“No.”
“You do.”
“No.”
“The two of them.”
“Alone?”
“Together.”
A year later, we were together, alone in the book closet again. The teacher had pulled me out of trigonometry class, brought me there, and locked the door behind us.
“Trig,” he was angry. “Why aren’t you in calculus? You should be in all advanced classes. Don’t you want to go to college? Don’t you want to be somebody?”
When I reached out to him, he let me take his hands. I squeezed them in mine. He said – a breath, no clear word, then, “Goddamnit.” He took his hands back from between my curled fingers. He pushed his long bangs off his forehead, and they fell into his eyes, and I wanted to touch him so badly, but I didn’t.
What happened, is what happened.
He did it, and so did I. I could not say then, as I cannot say now, what was wanted or unwanted, where it is that one thing becomes another, only that what is done, is done, and that we were partners in its doing.
Dominoes – all the events of a life lined up, each one hopelessly dependent on another. People struggle with this, with the idea of fate or destiny, whatever it might be called – following the trail of ifs back through time unending. See? How each moment hinges on the next? It’s ridiculous, but when a butterfly in Africa unfolds its wings a child in Iqaluit slaughters his family as they sleep, and teenagers everywhere question their existence.
Two years after the nameless little girl was hooked and landed, I was a junior in high school. I was sixteen years old, and my English teacher was a woman with thin lips and a turkey neck. She held a meeting with each student in her class to determine who would be passed on to Honors the following year.
A coincidence: My mother worked for this teacher’s husband. He was a doctor. She did his filing part-time. They had dinner together, often. As friends, my mother said, when she and my father fought about it. What was she supposed to do, she asked, say no to her boss?
The turkey neck teacher, she did not like me. From the moment she set eyes on me and registered my name, she could barely stand the sight of me.
At our meeting, the teacher did not drill me on vocabulary or the plot of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I was moving to sit down, pulling out the chair across from her. She told me I would not be going forward.
She knew I would not make a fuss about it, and that my parents would not either. The workings of the world.
There were others, she told me, more qualified, to whom the space should go.
My name was not on the Honors’ list. The papers from the Guidance Office showed I would be in Preparatory classes.
But on the first day of school the following year I found I was enrolled in Senior Honors.
My former teacher, gray-haired with over-long bangs, whose helper I had been freshman year, had taken over as the Honors Program coordinator.
We passed in the hallway. “Hello,” I said, “how are you?”
He stopped, stepped close. He said, “I have a book you’d like.”
“No,” I said. “Thank you. No.”
That year, in Senior Honors English, I sat beside the boy who would become my boyfriend. Later in that same year, the two of us, driving in his car with the radio on. The day after Christmas and it was snowing, everything softened, gray and green. The music faded out into a DJ reading a weather report, and so I spun the dial and watched the orange plastic marker climb the frequencies until it rested on a song: on his bed roll just like richard brautigan . . .
My boyfriend turned in his seat, asked, “Who the fuck is Richard Brautigan?” He had one hand on the wheel and the other hand on the radio dial, and the car jumped the road and plunged, coming, finally to rest, wedged between two pines.
Pine needles and broken glass and snow and blood, chickadees singing chicka dee dee dee in the branches above us, and my boyfriend’s face, his lips pushed flat, his wet-slow breath. His front teeth were broken, snapped off up near the gums.
Looking at the mess of his mouth I could not speak or move. I watched him lift a hand, fingers curling toward his lips, watched them straighten and tremble, held just above what was destroyed, not touching. I watched the blood run down his chin following the curve of his throat. I watched his eyes widen and his hand lower, and I watched him reach for something between us, a pale square. I watched him bring it to his burst-open lips, as if to fit into his broken mouth and I moved then and I spoke – I clawed at his fingers. I was screaming, “That’s glass! That’s not a tooth! That’s glass! That’s glass!”
“And she saved my life,” my husband says.
“Not really,” I say.
“She did,” he says, significantly, and everyone is meant to understand he does not mean the wreck, but much, much more. The wreck is only how we got there.
We’re famous for it: the couple with that great car-wreck story.
After the punch line – such as it is – someone always asks, “But who’s Richard Brautigan?”
Then the person who decides to answer will begin, and whoever they are, what they say is always the same, in that it’s always wrong. They say, The deeds of my life, or, Again and again is my life done, or The deeds were done as my life is done and as I am done –
They never get it right. We never get it right. Not even when it’s one of us, not even if it’s me telling it, is it ever right.
Jenny Irish is the author of a forthcoming story collection, Common Ancestor (Black Lawrence Press). Her stories have appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, and Ninth Letter.