“How long did the marriage last?” I asked, turning to Katie.
She yawned and mentioned something about how Sharon and Rollie first met. In the middle of the comment her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes. I repeated the question, but Katie only rolled to her side and tucked her hands under her head. I’d never seen fatigue happen so fast. Emily walked over to the fuchsia plant on the windowsill and pruned a few dead leaves. A minute later she removed one of the pillows from under Katie’s head. I gathered the fast-food trash and pushed my chair back. It was strange just leaving without saying goodbye.
“Is she really sleeping?” I asked on the way to the elevator.
“Maybe. Sometimes she loses it pretty fast.”
Emily shrugged and left it at that. I wasn’t sure whether our visit had ultimately succeeded or not, but took it as a sign that it hadn’t a few minutes later when Mrs. Schell marched into the first-floor elevators as we were about to march out. (She was, however, wearing a silky yellow skirt and thin-strapped sandals that offered a perfect display of her waxy tennis legs and rose-painted toes.) She pressed the button for the eighth floor, failing to notice us as she reproached her husband for dillydallying when he was only waiting for an elderly patient to get a grip on his oxygen tank before his nurse wheeled him out. Mr. Schell was a thin guy with an intelligent oval face, looking tidy and somewhat childish in a pair of suave dock shoes and a powder blue Polo. He’d obviously seen Emily and me, but respectfully avoided any gestures that would give us up.
“Hell-oooo?”
Emily said, surprising me by quitting the game so quickly.
“Oh, Emily. Good. Is your gown in the car? I don’t know how we’ll shop for heels with you in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt.”
Mrs. Schell flashed me a smile that dropped off as fast as it came up. Her cheap politeness reminded me of the bitter insurance customers who occasionally showed up at my dad’s office thinking it the perfect venue to unleash the frustrations of their less-than-inspired lives. In noticing the grease streaks across my shin, she scrunched her nose as though she’d just become stuck in an elevator next to a patient with a rare, infectious rash. This made it all the more pleasurable when I stepped forward for a handshake, not even for a second acknowledging my dried-sweat presentation. Since Mrs. Schell was pressing the HOLD elevator button with her right hand, she ended up giving me her left, all the while smirking uncomfortably, as though under such circumstances this formality was not only silly, but dangerous. The buzzer went off just as Mr. Schell stepped inside, grinning as he reached and rattled my hand.
“Richard Schell. You’re George from Davenport, right?”
“Yes, sir. Nice to meet you.”
“Who won the game?” he asked, also noticing the grease mark.
“The other guys,” I lied. “Barely got us by one goal.”
“Roller hockey,” Emily said, helping him out.
“Sure, sure. I’m more of a quad skate kind of guy, but those Rollerblades are pretty slick.”
The elevator lurched into action. Mrs. Schell remained face forward, anxiously awaiting the blinking floor numbers on the digital display. “I didn’t know you and Katie were acquainted,” she said.
“We’ve only met once,” I told her, a moment too late to notice Emily’s attempt to sway my answer. “But we were going to B-Bop’s and thought it would be nice—”
“I’m sure she enjoyed the visit, even if you’ve only met once,” she said, giving me the feeling that she was sure Katie
wouldn’t
enjoy a visit from someone she’d only met once. Mr. Schell reached into his front pocket, soon producing a leather business-card holder.
“Oh, my God,” Emily said, burying her face in the corner.
“Hey, you never know. This guy’s an athlete.” He chuckled and handed me the card, acting as if he was only doing it to tease his first daughter. “Did Emily tell you that I had an uncle from Davenport? One time he took us to the Wharton Field House to see Red Auer bach’s Blackhawks during their first season in the NBA. Of course, the Blackhawks didn’t stay in
Moline
very long.”
Mr. Schell slapped me on the back. Apparently he thought the mention of such a place as Moline was a joke in itself. I smiled, but made a point of not laughing.
“Now we’ve got the Quad City Thunder,” I said.
Mr. Schell pretended to be impressed, but was still chuckling to himself as the elevator doors opened. Mrs. Schell started in long strides down the hallway, allowing an inadvertently generous view of her flexing calves (which, combined with the sight of her painted toes that I imagined stretched out under a cloth-covered banquet table, nudging at my crotch, made it well worth the ride back up).
“There’s no
rush
,” Emily complained, hurrying alongside her. “She’s sleeping.”
“What does your father do?” Mr. Schell asked, hinting that we ought to hang back and chat for a minute.
“He works at Faith Harvest Insurance.”
“Terrific. I’m sure we know some of the same people.” Mr. Schell paused and tapped his right temple, taking longer than he would’ve liked to come up with his next line, but giving me a little wink when he finally got it. “Together everyone achieves
s’more
.”
“Excuse me?”
“I made the T-shirts for their team-building weekend last spring. It’s a variation on the T.E.A.M. acronym, but with s’mores. I believe there was a big bonfire for the finale. That’s where the s’mores came in.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember something about that.” (I didn’t remember anything about that. Every once in a while my dad had driven to Des Moines for team-training excursions, but he didn’t feel the need to give us the details. I’m positive he’d never wear a T-shirt that said TOGETHER EVERYONE ACHIEVES S’MORE.) “I heard you make shirts for all the high schools.”
“Most of them,” he said, clearly wishing he had enough time to explain the reasons why he’d been unable to land the business of the remaining few. But we’d already reached Katie’s door and Mrs. Schell was waiting. “Well, welcome to Des Moines, George. Don’t get discouraged by our big-city ways. Des Moines folks just take a little time to warm up to outsiders. Ask Maureen, she’s from Bolivar, Tennessee.”
Mrs. Schell shined a final squinty smirk, like wouldn’t she love to tell me all about it, and perhaps even invite me to Bolivar for a bicycle tour around town. I gave Mr. Schell a farewell handshake, then stopped halfway through repeating the gesture with Mrs. Schell, choosing instead to nod and meet her eyes in a way that let her know how obvious it was that she didn’t enjoy shaking my hand the first time, and I didn’t plan to put her through it again. (I couldn’t help it, and for a long time afterward I was convinced that this was her official excuse for disapproving of me.) When we stepped back into the elevator, Emily was already apologizing without actually apologizing.
“Heels heels heels!”
she said, covering her ears. “Here’s an idea, maybe I’ll just go to the wedding on
quad
skates.”
I burst into laughter, then reenacted Mr. Schell’s “s’mores” commentary, which was thoughtless and eventually put Emily in an even worse mood. By the time she dropped me off I felt like a complete jerk, especially now that I was considering the parental dialogue that likely followed our exit from the hospital. I knew that Mrs. Schell would accuse me of bald-faced classlessness and I could only hope that Mr. Schell would prove himself magnanimous enough to defend me. Whether this ever happened remains in question, but for the moment it turned out that good fortune was on my side. The next afternoon I received a phone call reporting that Katie had been issued a series of encouraging test scores and an unexpected release from the hospital. According to Emily, her superstitious father, whom I somehow managed to like, despite his Des Moines snobbery and goofball self-promotion, was convinced that this stroke of luck was substantially affected by my surprise visit. What’s more was the jolt I received a few hours later in the form of an express delivery containing a five-page original comic book with cover art centered on a yellowed string of flypaper hung inside a dank sports closet, only the flies glued to the paper were actually prep school students in uniforms.
Jackknife Janitor
, it was titled, in gooey blood lettering, and signed by none other than Katie Schell.
I spent at least an hour huddled on the basement steps, paging through what read as the illustrated diary of a misanthropic janitor’s injurious pranks. While none of the drawings met the standard of detail set by the cover, the dialogue was hilariously grotesque, the student characters one-dimensional yet somehow convincingly real. What impressed me most about Katie’s work was the impending doom implied by the angle of the drawings, the point of view often through a missing ceiling tile or a telescope aimed from a duck blind in the woods. It even concluded with a promo for a follow-up series, doubly titled
The After-School Incidents, or Wipeout at Whitfield Prep
.
I called the Schell house immediately afterward to thank and congratulate Katie, but only reached the answering machine, which always made me feel like a phony performing for Mr. and Mrs. Schell. I hung up a few moments after the beep, suddenly struck by an undeniable guilt in having co-opted Katie for the purpose of winning her sister. I confronted this guilt over the following weeks of idle afternoons with the Schell girls—Emily was now Katie’s and my official a fter-school chauffeur—when I challenged myself to militant avoidance of less than sincere questioning, or laughing, or any variation on those themes. Even as the autumn leaves reached the stride of their sleepy downfall, when Katie relapsed and was rendered more or less bedridden, I never resorted to platitudes or false tenderness or pity. When I visited Katie in the hospital I visited her because I was inspired by her truculence in the face of her pockmarked doctor and his know-it-all assistants. I visited her because I didn’t feel the need to make a fraud of myself in order to win her ease and affection. I visited her because most of the time I managed to distract her enough to make her laugh, and my response to this laughter was one of the cleanest sentiments I’d ever known.
So now can I admit the pride I felt in winning Katie Schell’s approval and implicit support in pursuing her sister? The hope I gleaned from the knowledge that I’d passed a checkpoint where even Emily’s closest girlfriends were stopped short? I won Katie’s favor to a degree that Emily was soon asking my advice on how to better encourage her sister to comply with her doctor’s instructions and stop threatening to replace him with a bee venom therapist. She even started loosening the reins on her infamous self-discretion (which I somehow related to her walking and talking much faster than before), giving me hope that we’d soon engage in a less ambivalent course of romance. Of course Mrs. Schell still remained an obstacle, but whatever efforts she made to discourage our friendship probably only pushed Emily even closer. At least it added an element of danger to things, which in my mind made our courtship even more bittersweet.
Eight
That first winter in Des Moines I grew a final inch and a half, cut fifteen pounds, and by some feat of smitten bravado outwres tled my four main competitors for a slot on the varsity squad. I credit much of this success to Emily’s techniques of thespian vicariousness that allowed me to wrestle as a man more muscular than myself.
“Who are you?”
she would ask me. “The Great Dan Gable,” I’d answer. “The greatest there ever was. The lightweight from Waterloo who won state three years in a row.” But most of my free time was dedicated to Gable-esque training routines and even my lazy afternoons with the Schell girls were forced to the fringes. Weeknights were occupied by three-hour practices that left us so drained we could barely make the steps up to bed, while weekends were dedicated to tournaments and Saturday-night celebrations relegated to team movies and celery sticks, the “negative food” that supposedly took more calories to digest than it contained. I wrestled at one hundred forty pounds, despite a natural weight of one hundred fifty-five. Half my mornings before school were spent in a rubber workout suit riding a stationary bike. On match days I transferred the same routine to the sauna in order to lose as much water weight as possible before the afternoon weigh-in. Occasionally I’d receive a note from Coach Grady excusing me from French, which in view of the emphasis on crepe-making and Gérard Depardieu screenings, was considered a faux pas subject for wrestlers. When Grady noticed too many of us appearing fatty-jowled and energetic, he’d shut off the water fountain at some secret underground source, then post an OUT OF ORDER sign so no one could accuse him of mistreating us. The wrestling room thermostat was often OUT OF ORDER as well, cranking itself up to ninety degrees in synch with his fantastical temper. Grady even taught a geography class for wrestlers that he split between rote statistical memorization (capital populations, square footage of city centers, percentage of religious minorities, etc.) and film review of the previous week’s matches.
We were a tightly glued unit, if not by our hunger, then by the chorus of our coach’s cries for a return to the furious days of national champions and Olympic contenders that our team had known under his own tutelage in the seventies and eighties. But unlike Smitty—my undaunted comrade, bound to the sport by filial duty—my reasons for sticking with the program had greatly changed since the early Davenport days when it was enough just to view myself as a scrapper and socially esteemed brute who didn’t turn his back to anyone. Given the new dedication required of me, my expectations of the sport swelled in proportion with its demands. I now required answers from my opponents, considering each of them an unwitting host to a particular question related to my quest for futuristic certainty. “Will I ever hump that older Perkins hostess and reputed emotionally detached cherry-popper who’ll teach me all the tricks for expert sex with Emily Schell?” I’d puffed my chest out and throw my chin in the air as I marched onto the mat. “You tell me, Anthony Turner. You Mason City son of a bitch.”