As Simple as Snow Page 8

  Claire seemed destined to be a bandoid, one of those people you never have anything to do with unless you’re in the band. They all stayed down in the school basement, way at one end, playing their music with the doors closed so they wouldn’t disturb anyone else. When you did hear them, it was at an assembly or a game, and they all sat together. When they were in regular class they always sat next to one another, or next to somebody from the choir. And what could you say to them, anyway? If you told them you liked the way they sang or played, they’d probably just laugh at you as Claire had done. That’s what I thought of her, if I thought of her, but Claire Maenza entered the ninth grade as a completely different person. We were in separate schools then, she was beginning high school and I was finishing junior high, but I saw her around. She was taller, thinner, and darker. She had dyed and straightened her hair, and now wore heavy black eyeliner and only black clothes. She had entered the uniformed ranks of the Goths. I didn’t even know it was Claire the first time I saw her; I thought somebody new had moved into town. Carl had to tell me who it was. It was a startling transformation, which changed everything. She stopped singing in the choir and stopped going to church altogether. She stopped playing the flute and stopped talking to adults. Before I met Anna, I tried to avoid Claire even more than usual. I never would have believed that we would have anything to do with each other.

  I walked home with Anna every day after school. Our usual way was south along the river, sometimes as far as the bridge at the edge of town. We would climb down the bank and sit on the concrete slope underneath the bridge, out of the wind and snow. It was always quiet there, except for the occasional rumble of a car passing directly overhead. It was cold, and Anna wasn’t dressed for the weather; she wore the same black jacket I had seen her wear the day she moved in.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked one day.

  “No,” she said. “I’m training myself not to feel it.”

  I imagined her in front of an open refrigerator or an air conditioner, or standing in the snow in a bathing suit, waiting to swim with one of those polar bear groups. I didn’t think any of it would work. Wouldn’t your body just get out of shape again in the summer?

  “I started with lukewarm baths,” she said. “I would submerge myself in them and stay there as long as I could, then I moved to cold baths, making them colder and colder. I put loads of ice in them now.”

  “How long can you stay in?”

  “I can hold my breath underwater for more than four minutes,” she said.

  “What are you training for, exactly?”

  “I might want to swim around the South Pole.” She gave me a mischievous look. “You never know. Or it could be that I hate the winter, and it was either convince my parents to move someplace where it never gets cold or learn to live with it.”

  She seemed quite comfortable in her lightweight jacket. I was the one who was cold. I had on a heavy coat and a scarf and one glove. Because of my splint, I couldn’t wear a glove on my left hand, and I couldn’t fit it into my coat pocket, so I wore a thick brown boot sock over it.

  “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” Anna said. “It’s like you have a stump.”

  “It does the trick.”

  “You could at least get a color that matches your other glove, or your coat.”

  “It’s only for a couple more weeks.”

  “I think you should keep it. Maybe wear a sock on the other one too. Have two stumps.”

  I pulled my right hand up into the sleeve of my coat and reached out toward her with my two stumps. She let out a quick shriek that echoed and amplified against the concrete of the bank and the bridge. A car stopped above and somebody yelled down to us. “What’s going on down there?” It was one of the Gurney twins, Derek or Erick. Anna seemed to think it was Derek, but I wasn’t so sure. People said you could tell the difference between the twins by the scar Derek had on the right side of his forehead, coming out from his hairline. The only problem was that you hardly ever saw either twin without his greasy green baseball cap. The caps had the word “Gurney’s” stitched on the front in yellow. Some people had taken to examining the grease stains on the caps in hopes of finding some differentiating detail, but that was pointless too, as the caps changed as more grease and grime were added, and besides, the brothers might have shared the caps. It was all a guessing game.

  We crawled out from under the bridge, and there was Derek or Erick, leaning over the bridge, trying to see for himself. His pickup was barely on the bridge, the door open. He must have gotten out of it in a hurry.

  “Everything’s all right,” I said. He had a smug expression of disbelief on his face. “It’s all right,” I repeated. What was I going to tell him? That I’d just been attacking my girlfriend with two pretend stumps? Anna didn’t say anything, but stayed in the background, watching.

  He looked at us for a few more long moments, and then back at his truck. You could tell that he was thinking it wasn’t in such a good spot: a car could come along and hit it. The look on his face suggested we would be to blame for that.

  “You shouldn’t be down there,” he said. “You might fall in the river.”

  “We’re just going on home,” I said.

  “See that you do.” He got back in his truck and drove off.

  “‘See that you do,’” Anna said. “Who’s he?”

  “We just got scolded by a guy who pumps gas, and we don’t even know which Gurney it was.”

  “I’m pretty sure that was Derek.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  get drunk

  From the beginning of our relationship, Anna had put things in my locker, or sent things through the mail. On Columbus Day she sent me a postcard with a portrait of the explorer and wrote, “Most people think he went insane, or was insane all along. He had to be dragged back to Spain in chains. He was convinced that his life had been prophesied in the Bible. He thought the earth was shaped like a breast. He argued all his life that he had landed in China and not some new world. He advocated the enslavement and slaughter of the native people. He was a lucky man.” Many of the postcards I received were the same ones she had on her bedroom walls. She always wrote “Where?” on the cards she sent me, and I would have to put the cards on my walls in the same spots she had placed hers. I would tape each card up and take a picture and e-mail it to her. “Not even close,” she would reply. “You’d better come over and pay attention.”

  She also sent small boxes filled with objects, an empty prescription bottle, a single glove, a shoelace, discarded letters and notes. These items might be arranged in a collage or tagged with annotations (“Found near the south bridge, November 1”). Other items contained instructions (“Please send to Claire Maenza immediately”; “Send to someone you don’t know. Don’t delay”). Some messages were anagrams, acrostics, cryptograms, some were in foreign languages, Esperanto. I always had to cheat and go search on the Web to find out what the hell I was getting. “That’s not cheating,” she said, if she said anything at all. If I didn’t mention the mail, she wouldn’t either.

  Once she sent me an envelope with a single sentence written over and over on it, except for the small block where my name and address appeared in large red letters and numbers. When I opened the envelope, I found the same sentence written over the entire inside—she must have taken the envelope apart, written on it, then folded it back together—except with all the letters backward. The sentence was: “There are realms of life where the concepts of sense and nonsense do not apply.”

  One of my favorites was a charcoal-and-ink drawing of her silhouette, with dotted lines around the edges, like outlines of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with instructions on each of the sections. “Mail this to Claire Maenza,” was written on one. “Put this between pages 104 and 105 of the book Literature of the Supernatural, edited by Robert E. Beck, in the school library,” was on another. If you cut the sections along the dotted lines, her silhouette was transformed int
o another silhouette, mine. I didn’t follow any of the instructions. I had the drawing hanging on my wall, but took it down whenever Anna came over. I didn’t want her to know that I hadn’t done what she asked.

  She made her own stamps. She would take pictures, or find them, and manipulate them into templates she’d gotten online or created herself, and would then print her own stamps. Almost everything she sent me had her handmade stamps: presidents and movie stars, writers and artists, faces of people in town, her father, a few of herself. You can imagine my surprise when I saw one with my own picture. I don’t even know where or how she got the picture. Maybe she took it herself, in her room or at school. I didn’t remember it at all, but there I was, at middle distance, looking straight ahead, a little droopy-eyed, my hair slightly in my eyes. Nothing unusual, except I didn’t remember that picture’s being taken.

  “They never notice,” she said about the post office. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a letter returned. It must be the computers—they can’t tell the difference between a real stamp and one of mine. Besides, Archie doesn’t care.” Archie Wilkes was the mailman in town. He lived down the street from us. He didn’t have that many stops, he drove his own car, and you never saw him wear a uniform. He delivered the mail whenever he had time, it seemed. He would show up in the evening, or on Sunday morning. It was all very casual. The real work was done in Hilliker, at the central mail facility, where the computers sorted everything out. Once it cleared there, Anna’s stamps were as good as the real thing.

  It was a game to her. Everything was a game, or a piece in a game only she knew the rules to. Every day there was something new, something surprising.

  I now wonder how much of it she planned and how much of it just happened.

  I thought that Anna should meet Mr. Devon, take a class from him, or we could go visit him after school one day. She was against it.

  “I heard he’s a creep.”

  “I don’t think so. Everybody seems to like him.”

  “He’s not for me, then,” she said. That was the end of the conversation.

  Anna didn’t like talking about Mr. Devon. She didn’t like him, although she never said why. I always thought they would get along. Mr. Devon was the second most interesting person I knew. You don’t have too many football coaches who also teach drawing, sculpture, and photography. He was always friendly, maybe because he was young. He was the only male teacher who still had all his hair, and one of the few who didn’t have any gray yet. Instead, he had an overabundance, an unruly black mop that looked like he cut it himself. It was often crooked and asymmetrical, as rumpled as the rest of him. He wore faded blue jeans or paint-splattered khakis, and work shirts, mostly denim. When you saw him in the hallway he always had a tie, but he never wore one in class. We always tried to figure out where he had it hidden in his classroom, and then one day when there was a fire drill and we were lining up to leave the classroom and the building, Mr. Devon calmly opened his desk drawer and pulled out his old, wrinkled tie, and slipped the large loop over his head and tightened it under his denim collar. “It probably wouldn’t burn anyway,” he joked. “Besides, you have to look respectable for the fire-men.” The only time he dressed up, without any holes in his shirts or pants, and no stains, was for football games.

  All the girls (except Anna) liked Mr. Devon, because he was handsome, in his rumpled, rugged way, and because he was an artist. A lot of girls asked him to paint their portraits, and he just laughed. “Would you settle for a photograph?” he’d say. The guys liked Mr. Devon because he was a jock, and he seemed like one of the guys. Senior players would go to his place after home football games and drink beer. I always thought that if I could be any adult in town, it would be Mr. Devon. He appeared to really like what he did, he always had a good word to say, and he was popular and respected. There didn’t seem much wrong with the world of Mr. Devon.

  “I hear he’s got false teeth,” Anna said.

  It’s hard to look at someone the same way after you hear that. You’re constantly looking at the person’s mouth.

  “What does that matter?” I said.

  “It wouldn’t matter with anyone else, but he’s as fake as his teeth.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never talked to him.”

  “Let’s keep it that way, all right?”

  Anna and I were walking together after school one day when Mr. Devon pulled up and asked if we wanted a ride home. “Sure,” I said, and went toward the car. Anna didn’t move. I looked back to her and tried to get a sense of what she was thinking. Finally she followed me to the car and got in the backseat. She wasn’t happy.

  Mr. Devon drove to my house, even though it would have made more sense for him to drop Anna off first. I could see him glancing in the rearview mirror at her. He was probably wondering why she was in such a foul, quiet mood. When he pulled up in front of my house, Anna got out of the car with me.

  “I can take you home too,” Mr. Devon said.

  “That’s all right,” she said.

  He nodded and drove away.

  “You like him, don’t you?” she asked me.

  “He’s nice to me. Why don’t you like him?”

  “It’s not important,” she said.

  “I want you to like him. It’s important to me.”

  “It only seems important. I’m not telling you to stop liking him. That’s why I’m not telling you why I don’t. I see him one way and you see him another way, that’s all.” She moved on to another subject.

  I’d first met Mr. Devon in junior high school. He was new in our school when I was in the eighth grade, and there was some tension and nervousness about what he was trying to teach us and how. He had probably learned somewhere, either as a student in his own required teaching classes, or as an on-the-job teacher somewhere else, that there was no use trying to teach a group of seventh- and eighth-graders much technique or form in drawing, painting, sculpting, or whatever. So our class had more activities than art lessons.

  There were things to do, which is a radical notion in school. Usually you just sit there and listen to the teacher tell you things, instead of actually getting a chance to do them yourself. Mr. Devon, however, erased that step and had us immediately drawing and painting, and even trying a little sculpture and pottery. Surprisingly, a lot of the kids hated doing stuff. Maybe they wanted to sit around and have Mr. Devon lecture us on the proper way to hold a brush or draw. I liked his class. You didn’t have homework and you didn’t have to take notes or read a textbook. Best of all, very little attention was paid to a right way or wrong way to do anything, and most of the activities were fun. For instance, Mr. Devon would put a large block of drawing paper on an easel and have one of us go up and draw something on a section of one sheet—a third or fourth or fifth of it, depending on how he had folded it—without letting the rest of us see it. Then another person would go up and, still without knowing what the previous person had drawn, continue the drawing, and then another person would do likewise, and so on until the sheet of paper was filled. The image was always strange, funny, startling, unexpected. After we had done a number of these drawings Mr. Devon explained that the technique had been made popular by the Surrealists. He then showed us some examples of theirs.

  Mr. Devon started teaching in high school my sophomore year, and one morning before school he came up to me. “Maybe you can help me out,” he said.

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “I have this sculpture in my truck that I need help bringing in. It’s a little too heavy just for me. Do you think you could give me a hand for a minute?”

  I looked up and down the hall, hoping to find a football player who could help Mr. Devon instead, but there was no one.

  “I guess I can help you.”

  He had an old beat-up Chevy that looked as if it had driven through the woods in a straight line, hitting every tree in the way. It was caked with mud, and the passenger side of the front windshield was cracked from top to bott
om.

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Devon said. “My car’s in better shape. I use this for hauling stuff.”

  In the bed of the pickup was a wooden crate about the size of a thirty-two-inch TV. It was a lot heavier than that, though. I was sure I was going to drop it any minute, but I was afraid to stop.

  “You need a rest?” Mr. Devon could tell that I was about ready to drop the crate, and whatever was inside was going to smash to bits on the sidewalk. I kept hoping someone would come along and help, but nobody did.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and tried to move faster.

  Somehow we made it to the back door of the school. From there it was about thirty or forty feet to Mr. Devon’s classroom. We had to put the crate down in order to open the door, and then we dragged it through the doorway.

  Mr. Teller, one of the custodians, was coming down the hall. “Hold it right there,” he shouted.

  “I think we’re in trouble,” Mr. Devon said.

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” I said. He laughed.

  “Don’t kill yourself,” Mr. Teller said. “Let me get a handtruck and haul that thing out for you.”

  “Actually, we’re coming in,” Mr. Devon told him. “This goes in my room.”

  “All right. Same thing. Just go on about your business and I’ll bring this into your room. There’s no reason to break your back when I’ve got a handtruck right around the corner.”

  “Why didn’t you think of that?” Mr. Devon looked at me. “Come on, let’s go inside and wait for Mr. Teller.”