“This is my favorite time of the year.” Ms. Webster explained to her twelfth-grade honors English class. Heidi wondered why; it was the end of January. “Because we get to do group projects.”
Heidi stared at her notebook until she thought she would burn a hole through it. Group projects were the equivalent, she thought, of choosing teams for gym, and she was always chosen last. She couldn’t believe Ms. Webster would have such a tin ear for classroom politics. Whoever she wound up with, at any rate, she would be assured of doing more than her fair share—one, because anything less than an A was unacceptable to her, and two, because taking on more than her share had been the only way to present her as an appealing member of any group that didn’t consist only of the school’s downtrodden.
“Before you get all excited, I should introduce a caveat—I will be doing the pairing. I have taken the liberty of already pairing everyone with someone on the basis of your strengths and weaknesses so everyone will participate in the strongest groups possible. And, I have also chosen your topics.” Ms. Webster paced the front of the room, hands in her khakis. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. First group—Oliver Truitt and Heidi Polensky will do T.S. Elliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
There was a chortle from the left edge of class, where Oliver Truitt and Shauna Beck sat with the jocks and cheerleaders, and Ms. Webster frowned and continued reading the lists of groups and authors. But Heidi could no longer hear them. She snuck a glance at the back of Oliver’s curly head and considered whether she could ask Ms. Webster to change the assignments. Not that there was any way now, not without it looking suspicious or bad or crazy.
She didn’t know whether Ms. Webster simply paired the over-achieving Heidi with the clearly underachieving Oliver or whether she had some other sort of matchmaking designs in mind. Not that Heidi had a chance. Oliver Truitt, for a small-town hick, had a distinctly suburban style that everyone envied. His father, who was in upper management at the chemical plant in nearby Delaware, outfitted his family and his home handsomely. The Truitts often went on shopping excursions in Annapolis, Baltimore—even Philadelphia—to find the latest in designer fashions.
Yet Oliver could not be pinned down by a store receipt. He was a forerunner of “shabby chic” before people in town even knew how to pronounce “chic.” His curly hair grew over his eyes and ears like a shaggy mutt, although Stacey Benkin’s mom often referred to his coif as a “JFK Jr.” He wore ratty t-shirts under expensive Ralph Lauren oxford shirts that were left untucked underneath Merino wool sweaters. His jeans were ripped strategically at the knee, and his Adidas were always untying themselves. He was an effortless god of a boy, and Heidi had no more business having a crush on him than she did Robert Redford.
However, even if it was more out of cluelessness than chivalry (for a jock, Oliver was a real space cadet), he did not tease her like the others. In fact, he always acted as if she was a perfectly normal human being, deserving of polite and sometimes extended conversation. After class, Oliver walked over to her desk and punched her lightly on the shoulder.
“Hey partner.” He smiled. “I guess I lucked out, huh? You want to go to the library later today and get some source materials?”
“I could.” She nodded. She knew where everything was; it would certainly be the fastest and most efficient use of their time.
“So you want to me to pick you up, or do you want to meet there?”
“Oh—you meant together.” She felt a lump the size of an egg in her throat that she hoped wasn’t lasagna from lunch.
“Yeah. How about we go grab a bite to eat beforehand? I’ve got basketball practice, but I can meet you at six-thirty. How about Taco Olé?”
“I’ll meet you there,” she answered. Other than from Ms. Webster, Heidi had kept her house a well-guarded secret, fearing that Shauna and her friends would egg it, or worse. She insisted that her father take a long, winding route home from school every day, one in which she could tell, on the open country roads, whether someone followed. She never put her address on her backpack or in her books. And she would never let Oliver come to the house to pick her up, no matter how much she wanted to ride alone with him in his Mustang, show her father she was popular—maybe—or at least had friends, other than “the donut boy at the library,” as her father called Darren—“softer than an éclair.”
Oliver chucked her on the chin, almost knocking her to the ground in her weak-kneed surprise, and then jogged out of the room, leaving only a whiff of cologne behind. She stood up and didn’t bother to wait for the class to empty. She strode to her locker in a daze, the buzz of the hallways’ white noise around her, and when she climbed into the truck cab at 2:45, Stanley sat up straight in his seat.
“Well.” He lit a cigarette and muscled the stick shiftinto submission. “You’re late.”
“Dad, I need you to drive me to the Taco Olé tonight at six-thirty,” she said, ignoring him, asserting herself in such a way that her father snorted but, for once, kept his mouth shut. “I have work to do.”
Oliver was late, and she was very early. Early enough to study the menu and see what she could get for dinner with a dollar ten, the amount her father had scraped from the pockets of his two pairs of pants. She could get one large taco and a cup of potato olés, but no drink. She spread her notebook and papers on the table and went through the basic outline of a presentation she had scribbled down at home. She’d read Prufrock many times, had jotted various plans of attack they could pursue. She could do all the work in a few days, complete construction visuals and Oliver’s own neatly written index cards, which he would merely have to read to the class.
But Ms. Webster had not assigned them together to do that—she had wanted Oliver to care about something other than baseball and cars and Shauna—to see the love of the world, of learning, through another student’s eyes. Or at least prepare him for the workload of college. And maybe, Ms. Webster figured, Heidi would taste a glimpse of the leisurely life of the senior class’s royalty, the non-shit world.
“You look prepared.” Oliver appeared, smelling like the soap in the high school locker room showers, clad in a t-shirt, running shorts, and flip flops, even though it was still a little chilly—January, to be exact. “You eat yet?”
She shook her head, suddenly not very hungry, and followed him to the counter, where he ordered three tacos, two potato olés, a large Pepsi, and one cinnamon chalupa.
“What do you want?” He nodded to her as she fumbled for the change her father had thrust into her hand, although with lint and a bent nail. “Don’t worry; I’m buying.”
She ordered a taco and a diet Pepsi, and Oliver added to her order a cup of potato olés and a cinnamon chalupa.
“God, I hate when girls don’t eat,” he explained as he guided the overloaded plastic tray to their table. “And then Shauna pukes it right out in the women’s room. You seem too smart to do that kind of shit, though.”
“Thanks for dinner,” she replied, not sure how to respond. It did not surprise her about Shauna, but if she was supposed to feel sympathy, she had a hard time mustering any.
“No problem. Ms. Webster is the one who deserves all the thanks. I mean, what did I do to get paired up with the smartest girl in the class?” Oliver opened his mouth and inserted half of a taco in it. He chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. “Not that I mean you’ll do all the work.”
“I have some ideas.” She moved her hand to her notebook.
“Let’s eat first.” He smiled. “We can work when we get to the library.”
She tried to eat her taco neatly, even though across from her, chunks of meat and lettuce and tomatoes frequently fell out of Oliver’s taco, remnants that he shoved in his mouth with his fingers, licking them between slurps of his Pepsi.
“So, your father still have that orange truck?” He asked, unwrapping his cinnamon chalupa. “I’ve seen him pick you up sometimes in it.”
“Yes.” She blushed at the thought of him observing her unnoticed.
“You know, I let the guys in shop work on my car. They put some really great struts in and added the racing stripe. You should have your father take his truck in. I bet they’d do some work on it…maybe free, for the experience.”
“Thanks. I’ll bring it up to him.”
“They had a really sweet Pontiac they rebuilt—a 1966. They only want a couple hundred for it, if you’re looking for a set of wheels.”
“I can’t really afford a car.” She carefully folded the waxy paper of her taco. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”
“Can you get a job or something? I know Buildaburger is hiring.”
“Shauna works there.”
“Yeah, she likes it okay.” He took a large, broken piece of taco shell and swept the remaining rubble of ground beef and shredded iceberg lettuce into a final bite. “I know the manager gives her a hard time about not working hard, talking to the customers too much. She can’t help she’s popular.”
“I don’t think Shauna likes me,” Heidi said carefully, taking a sip of her Diet Pepsi.
“Really?” He crushed the wax paper and arched his arms like a basketball player, aiming for the hole of the boxy trash can a few feet away. “I never noticed. I mean, Shauna is kinda bitchy, like most girls. I try not to get involved in that kind of stuff.”
The paper bounced off the rim of the trash can and settled on the floor. Oliver jumped up and retrieved it. Heidi blotted her lips with her napkin. She felt deep behind enemy lines, talking to a squirrel she had mistaken for the cavalry, while the enemy waited in the bushes, training its sights on her.
“You know, if Shauna is mean to you…” Oliver began when he returned.
“Don’t worry about it. I never said anything, okay?”
“Then I’ll talk to her about it. There’s no reason for her to treat you bad. All right?”
“Please…”
“Don’t worry; she’ll never know.” He winked. “I’ve got your back, Polensky. You ready to go to the library?”
Later that night in bed, she carefully unwrapped the chalupa she’d saved and ate it quickly, licking her fingers and the wrapper. She wondered if she would develop an eating disorder, like bulimia. Anorexia seemed to fit more with their budget. All she knew was that she had been a complete fool with Oliver at the library, and a next step down the slippery psychological disorder slope seemed imminent.
It had started with such promise. He had sat next to her at the study table, not across, and gentlemanly, he turned his head away from her to burp softly, excusing himself. He asked what schools she had applied to (Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, NYU), what she wanted to do when she graduated. She told him she was considering pre-med or art history, and he surprised her by wanting to major in history and asking if her father was a veteran. He was interested in military history and sometimes talked to the old men at the nursing home where his grandfather lived. Oliver invited her and her father to the nursing home next Saturday to meet his own grandfather—it would be cool, he figured, if both men had a buddy from the older days.
She even confessed, swearing him to secrecy, that ‘Lil Cindy was her mother.
“But country music stars are rich, aren’t they?” He tried to reconcile the facts of her situation with what he knew about life.
“Yeah, but we’ve never seen any money,” she answered, picking at the spine of one of the books. “My parents were never married. I don’t even know if she knew anything about me. My father said he sent school pictures, but I never met her…my father didn’t even tell me about her until the night she died.”
“Don’t cry.” He put his arm on her shoulder as she sobbed. “They’ll make us leave the library.”
“You don’t understand.” She shook her head. “Your mother wanted you.”
She had stayed in the library bathroom, bawling, until her father came, drunk as usual. He dented the mailbox at the corner of the library with the front bumper of the truck as it shuddered to a stop and then left rubber on the road in front as he gunned it for home. She wondered whether she would be allowed back, her lending privileges suspended.
She had retired to her room with her leftovers, content to eat herself half-satiated to sleep. But her father’s step was heavy, unsure, on the stairs. She stuffed the chalupa wrapper under her pillow and pulled the sheets high. Her father tied one on frequently, and his favorite—his only—audience for his boasts, laments, and insecurities was Heidi.
Sometimes, if she pretended to sleep, he’d leave her alone. His face would dip uncomfortably close to hers, the sweet-sour aroma of whiskey penetrating her nostrils as she tried to keep her face from an involuntary twitch or sneeze, and he’d whisper “Heidi” at a decibel that most would not consider a whisper. Sometimes, a sprinkle of spit would coat one of her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. She would lay still, and the mattress would rock violently as he stood up and clomped out of the room to his own.
“Heidi.” His hands grabbed the edge of the sheets near her face and shook. “Heidi.”
“Dad, I’ve got school tomorrow.” She launched herself to her side, where his emphysemic breath just went into her ear.
“Heidi, this is important.” The bed rocked as he settled himself and his books. “I’ve been doing some research into the family’s…history.”
“Can’t you tell me after school?”
“No.” Apparently her father thought that his powers of elocution existed only when he was shit-faced drunk. “Listen. My mother, she emigrated from Poland, you know. She brought a lot of knowledge about herbs and stuff, always rubbing something on our chests for colds, awful-smelling pastes on our cuts, powders in our tea. Anyway, before I enlisted, she gave me an herb—burnette saxifrage. She told me to eat it, and that it would save me during the war. It would make me immortal.”
“Did you?”
“No.” His weight shifted on the bed a little. “I gave it to my buddy Johnson. He got his leg blown off by a mine. I put it in his mouth and made him chew, and then the medic came. Here’s his picture.”
“Did he live?” She looked at the black-and-white, so old it was grey-and-white, photo of a slight, blond man with a wrinkled forehead and kind eyes next to a well-built, taller man with dark hair and a square face. They were leaning on the rail of a warship, cigarettes dangling from their smiling, crooked mouths. They could have been the seniors at Mount Zion who graduated the previous year.
“No—he was dead when I ran off. The shelling was something fierce. Not only were there mines everywhere, but they were shelling the trees…it all came down on you. A lot of men died that way. Spent four months in the dead of winter hugging trees, trying to keep away from that shit.”
“So the herb didn’t work.”
“I didn’t think so. But I took some with me. Don’t know why—pulled some out of Johnson’s mouth before I left.”
Her father stood and flipped on her desk lamp. The orange inverted triangle of light that filled the corner of her bedroom set her father’s face in sharp relief. He almost looked like a prisoner in a concentration camp, she thought. The years, the alcohol, the war, her mother, had consumed him. He sat back on the bed and pushed a shriveled brown mass in a sandwich bag toward her.
“I tried to burn this not too long ago…with all of your mother’s stuff. All this…past, it isn’t doing us any good. But I couldn’t burn it. It refused to be burned.”
“What do you mean?” She wiggled up to a sitting position and looked at the bent, dried stalks and fragile white flowers molded into a shape resembling a dog turd.
“I mean I squirted it full of lighter fluid and it didn’t burn. Maybe there’s something to it after all. I tried to do some research at the library, but there’s not much about burnette saxifrage. It’s also called Pimpinella saxifrage, and it grew in the area where she said she and her mother lived in Reszel. She also told me and the other children that she grew up playing with a witch. We always thought she told the stories to scare us—of course, Cass and Thomas never believed any of it, but I used to sleep with Julia or Kathryn at night after your grandmother got done talking about the baba yagas. Heh—I still get a shiver now.”
“How come I’ve never met any of my aunts and uncles?”
“Would you like to? I’m sure you must have cousins or something.”
“I don’t know.” She drew her knees up to her chin. They would probably be blonde, blue-eyed starlets. “So, did you ever figure out what happened to Johnson?”
“Over the years, I’ve wanted to. After I stole you from your mother, I really couldn’t do much traveling. But when you graduate high school and go to college, I’m thinking about traveling to Ohio, where he’s from, and DC, to look into the Veterans Administration records.”
“Wait—you stole me from my mother?”
“She didn’t want you, baby.” He reached over to grab her shoulder but missed, his palm landing on her pillow. “I babysat you on the road—she never wanted to go home. Always one more gig, one more radio performance, one more thing that would make her famous. And I guess she did all right for herself. But one day, I decided I didn’t want to be her nanny anymore, especially since you weren’t even…well, anyway, I couldn’t leave you there. You needed stability, not formula in a hotel room at four o’clock in the morning.”
“Is my father…still alive?”
“I imagine.” He sighed, looking at his hands. “I imagine you could find him.”
“I don’t want to find him…I mean, you’re my father.”
“Well, it makes me feel funny to hear you say that.” He smiled. “I mean, you were pretty free with your words when you was little, but as an adult, I’m sure you wonder how you got to be so unlucky.”
“I feel lucky fine,” she said, although she certainly did not feel lucky all of the time.
“Listen, I got this diary.” He pressed an old datebook from the drugstore into her hands. “It ain’t much, but I been scribbling down my memoirs and what I remember of my family. I’ve been wanting for you to know your roots.”
“What about the herb?”
“I’m giving it to you. Don’t ever feed it to me in the event of my demise—I don’t want to find out if it works. I want to die as soon as I am eligible for its benefits. But maybe you can use it somehow—a science experiment or something.”
“You’re giving me an immortal herb for a science experiment?”
“This is all I’ve got.” He put the baggie and datebook on her night table. “I know it ain’t no Corvette. I got to take a piss.”
He ambled out of the bedroom like some wounded animal, hanging on her doorframe until she thought he might pull the house apart from the inside. When he was gone, she turned off the light and tried to sleep. Her father’s drunk stories were always crazy, and this one was no different. She picked up the baggie, wondering if the dropout who lived in a van by the zoo had sold her father a dime bag of pot outside the liquor store. She opened the baggie and smelled it. It smelled burnt and stale, not what marijuana was supposed to smell like. Maybe it was oregano. She put the baggie in her school backpack, wondering whether she could sell it to Melanie Huber, the girl who listened to the Happy Dead or whoever that druggie band was, for a little spending money, and held the datebook in her hands. Did she really want to know the true extent of her father’s instability? She heard that train barreling down and opened the datebook, resigned to her position on the tracks.
When she got to school the next day, she noticed Shauna looking at her from across the room in Calculus class, her face placid and not twisted in its usual contortions when she met Heidi’s eyes. She wondered whether Oliver had laid down the law already, if he took her aside before school, where they hung out on the bleachers with all the jocks and cheerleaders, sneaking cigarettes and sometimes pot, and told her to knock it off, maybe all of them, in his detached, no-nonsense way, taking a swig from a bottle of chocolate Yoo-Hoo, and speaking no more of it.
Mr. Davis, the math teacher, walked in and began to write derivatives on the chalkboard, silencing the chatter in the classroom. Then it started, Shauna and her girlfriends, like frogs: “Mid-get mommy, mid-get mommy, mid-get mommy.”