The State We're In

WHAT MAGICAL REALISM WOULD BE

The summer school assignment, the fucking fucking summer school third paper of ten, and if you didn’t get at least a C on the first nine, you had to write eleven papers, the fucking teacher wadding up her big fat lips so they looked like a carnation, her lips that she’d use to pout at your inadequacy… this paper, to hold their interest, was supposed to be about Magical Realism, and although you didn’t have to read all of the Márquez book the teacher sooooooo loved, she had distributed several paragraphs from the book in which weird things happened, and your paper was supposed to go on forever, like the writer, then have the clouds howl, or something. “Not a metaphor! Or, not merely to be thought of metaphorically!” she’d exclaimed. “The psychological state has to matter. You have to embody emotion in the stretch you make.” She gestured with her gangly arms. The woman was at least six feet tall, every bit as tall as Jocelyn’s uncle. Writing essays was retarded. It completely was. Summer with her aunt and uncle was torture, from start to the yet-to-come finish, which would end when the days were no longer long and when the flowers began to droop and the water was totally too cold to swim in at the York Harbor beach, where summer brides who were way too old to get married came out onto the lawn and stuff blew all around them, their veils, their hair, their bouquets, everything airborne. One bride sprained her ankle running after her stupid pink lilies and baby’s breath — she went down like Humpty Dumpty and a seagull swooped up the bouquet and dropped it, but too far out over the rocks for anybody to retrieve it, although the best man tried. But that — real life — you couldn’t write. You had to write Magical Realism, in which no doubt the seagull could recite Latin proverbs while it was being philosophical about the flowers not being fish.

Now was the hour: Uncle Raleigh would look at what she’d written and offer advice and encouragement, while she mentally corkscrewed her finger outside her ear and pitied him because he had no job, and he limped, and he was a nice man, but also sort of an idiot. In any case, he — her mother’s brother — was a lot nicer than his dim wife, Aunt Bettina Louise Tompkins, whose initials were BLT. Hold the mayo.

“Lovely evening on the porch. Sorry you couldn’t join us, but what you’re doing is more important,” Uncle Raleigh said. “You know, you have an intelligent expression, you’ve got those expressive eyes of your mother’s. I never doubted your intelligence for a second, from the day you were born. You do have all my sympathy for not being able to be with your friends this summer, but you’ll show ’em all, including Bettina, who’s been on your case for nothing, I know. You want to cornrow your hair, what of it? Not like you’re coming home with ‘Satan’ tattooed on the back of your hand.”

“I’m afraid of needles. Thanks for saying something nice to me.”

“That’s because I believe you deserve niceness, Jocelyn. Well — Bettina’s insisting I scan your essay, so if you don’t mind, could you print it out, because I can’t read that little screen, as you know. And as I tell you every single night.”

She got up from his office chair, where she’d been slumped, writing and picking at her pedicure. She turned on his printer. When it printed out, it was not quite two pages.

“Yesterday’s was three pages,” he said immediately.

“She’s tired of reading long papers.” Jocelyn lied to Raleigh and Bettina — certainly to Bettina — and to her sort of best friend, who was lucky enough to be in Australia this summer, even if it did have to be with her family and her retarded — really, actually retarded — brother, the challenged Daniel Junior, who picked his nose right in front of you.

“Looks good to me,” Raleigh said, nodding in agreement with himself. “You see that colon, though. I thought that was the punctuation mark when you’re going to have a whole list of things, and you’ve only got one, so maybe you could say, ‘Such as a turtle’ rather than ‘Such as: turtle.’ ”

She made the correction. His bad leg was the result of a motorcycle accident when he was in his twenties, not much older than she was now. At least somebody in her family had done something.

“Can I borrow the car tonight for an hour? Some kids from the summer program are getting together down at the beach at low tide. There’s no drugs, alcohol, or sex. We’re all too depressed to bother.”

“I don’t see why not, though Bettina certainly will,” he said. “I’ll tell her once I hear the ignition start. Remember, though: an intermediate license means none of your friends can be in the car. A word to the wise is that I’d head out of the driveway pretty fast.”

He was scanning the second page of the essay (damn!). “Well, it gets a little drifty in the last paragraph, which is supposed to sum up what you’ve said before, isn’t it?”

“No. There’s new thinking about that now. You don’t repeat yourself.”

“I see. But it’s not grammatically correct to say, ‘Desideratum were what this field of flowers was.’ I don’t even really know what that big word means.” He looked at her. “Not nasturtiums, you don’t mean?”

“The purply flowers everywhere,” she said. She was holding his keys now.

“Lupine,” he said. “Loves to grow wild, but you get it into your garden, most of the time it won’t take. It keeps to itself and that’s how it prospers. A metaphor, to your teacher’s way of thinking. I shouldn’t make fun of her. I never knew so much until this summer.”

“I’ll change it when I get home. I promise.”

“Fine, then. But tell me, what exactly does that big word mean?”

“It means, ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste,’ ” Bettina said. She was standing in the doorway, wearing her apron with the chicken head on it. She had two years of college and had worked for city government. She had about as much fashion sense as Jocelyn’s mother, which began and ended with an underwire bra. Both of them were quite overweight. Jocelyn and Uncle Raleigh weren’t, which gave them at least something in common beyond the fact that both of them were trapped in the house, except for his stupid golf night.

“So you got the keys to the car, you be careful. Only people with beach parking stickers can park on the paved road, I’m sure you know that. I don’t want to pay any fifty-dollar fine,” BLT said. “Raleigh okayed your essay?”

“He loved it,” she said. He smiled benignly at his wife. He didn’t look in her direction.

“On the way home maybe you could pick up a pizza at River Bend,” she said. “They’re open in the summer until ten, and I can phone it in at nine thirty. I don’t feel like ice cream, I feel like a small regular pizza,” she said. She’d had a cancer scare at Christmas. Since then, she’d gained considerable weight and often made announcements about what she wanted. Among these things was Neutrogena soap at midnight, so all she could do was have Jocelyn order it for her from Amazon Prime. Which her mother had already made clear she was not going to subscribe to anymore, once they raised their rates. That would last about a week. Her mother even relied on Amazon for crackers.

“You know,” Raleigh said at the front door, “sometimes, to my way of thinking, big words just stick out and they’re like a red flag in front of a bull. There might be a much simpler, straightforward way of concluding. Something to think about when you get home.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said.

“What your aunt was talking about with that definition, I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’ll check the dictionary. The real one, not Google, like the one you find things on in five seconds.”

“You can even spell it all screwed up and it corrects it and you just click on the correction.”

“I’m not going to say anything that will make me sound old. I’d be depressed like you young people, then. Best not to verbalize every feeling.”

“Don’t you want to get out of this place sometimes?” she said, twisting the loose part of her hair she’d dyed pink the same day she cut bangs.

“I have a secret life. I’ve broken almost every commandment,” Raleigh said. “As your mother will be the first to tell you. Thing is, I’ve run out of steam.”

“You don’t get to admit that if you’re my age,” she said over her shoulder on her way down the steps. He turned on the porch light for her, though it wasn’t dark yet. Now they were on the downside of the longest day of the year. Soon the days would be like riding a roller coaster. She’d taken one of Raleigh’s Tylenol 2s once and given it to T. G., the cutest boy, whose taste ran more to simple things, like Red Bull and vodka to wash down a few antihistamines. He was really peculiar. Still, he’d appreciated the gesture. She wouldn’t dare steal another. Bettina probably had hidden cameras in the house, she was so possessive. It was totally awesome that Becca had gotten to go to Australia and even went out on a boat to the Great Barrier Reef, which her father had dived into. While everyone waited for him to surface, Becca had thrown up in a bag. Jocelyn had no update, because her mother was totally opposed to her texting on vacation and had turned off the messaging on Jocelyn’s phone.

* * *

Down at the beach, only the pretty girl, Angie, and her constant companion, Zelda, were standing where the water met the sand, Zelda with one of those dramatic Indian scarves her mother bought blowing from her neck like someone asking to be hanged. It was white with some sparkly things sewn on, she saw, as she came closer. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Angie said. One of her strategies was to pretend she wasn’t extremely pretty and that she was happy to see other girls. She was the same whether or not boys were around.

“Cool scarf,” Jocelyn said. “How many of those do you have, Zelda?”

“They’re mostly my mother’s. She like hates to actually give one away so I just borrow them all the time. I’m tired of all of them. I don’t wear blue anymore, anyway.”

“It is so boring in that house,” Jocelyn said, stepping out of her flip-flops, tossing them behind her on the sand. “I’m sure they haven’t had sex for forty years. My mom told me Bettina almost went into a convent when she was a teenager. I don’t know how he stands being there. He says he’s tired.”

“Me, too,” Zelda said. “I slept five hours last night. I am completely living for the last day of class. I don’t care if I never go to college, all I want to do is get out of this town any way I can, waitress, stripper, like I care. My mother’s writing this person she knows at Yale, like Yale takes losers who get C pluses on their essays. Makes sense to me.”

“You scored genius on your math SAT,” Angie said. “Eight hundred. Fucking eight hundred! Nobody does that. My brother’s a biologist, and he scored seven hundred forty or something.”

“Big deal,” Zelda said. “I got another C on my last English essay.”

“I don’t think you were meant for English, I think you were meant for math,” Angie said.

“Sure. Maybe I can teach it at Yale.”

“You are so down on Yale!” Jocelyn said. “Do you realize how many times you bring it up?”

Zelda shrugged. The scarf blew across her face and probably got some pink lipstick on it. She didn’t really try to keep up with Angie, but most nights she applied one thing: one night mascara, another night lipstick.

“So what did you write about?” Angie said, her eyes downcast. “I can’t even believe this is what we have to talk to each other about. I guess we could just shut up and not say anything.”

“I thought T. G. was coming down tonight,” Jocelyn said.

“Tell her,” Angie said to Zelda.

“What? Like you can’t? He’s in the ER getting his stomach pumped. He texted me. He put down a bottle of Ambien, or something, and barfed it all up on Stoli. The dog was licking his face when his father walked in.”

“No way,” Jocelyn said.

“Your boooooooyfriend,” Zelda said. “Or at least, one of the few guys in the class who isn’t a sociopath, or something. That kid that cuts himself? Way gross! All that blood getting flicked around under the desk. We could get AIDS.”

“The ER,” Jocelyn echoed. “Wow.”

“He’ll text when he’s out.” Zelda shrugged.

“Should we visit him, or something?” Angie said suddenly.

“They don’t let friends visit each other in the ER,” Jocelyn said.

“Well, I would,” Zelda said. “It would be good for morale.”

“That’s the Army or something,” Angie said. “Mo-raaaale,” she drawled.

The stars were out over the water. Jocelyn thought the slight heavy feeling in her stomach might be because she was about to get her period. Her mother had had a hysterectomy. It was one of the reasons she’d sent Jocelyn to her aunt and uncle’s. She felt so weak and sick. And Bettina had made such a pitch for the “accelerated” summer program. What did that mean? Like you never put on the brake? If she could, she’d pull up a hand brake. Just WHAM! and even with the seat belt she’d be nose to nose with the windshield, the car would stop so suddenly.

“I wrote about Lupine,” she said. “I couldn’t get the Magical Realism part about them, though. I’m also so retarded, I got the wrong word, but my uncle knew what flowers I meant. I think I’m going to figure out a way the whole field can lift up and become the sky, or something.”

“It gets Raptured?” Zelda said.

“And it would turn out that we’re really walking in the sky and then there’s this flash of Earth, and then the planet revolves, or something. I mean, she’d go with anything, if the grammar was correct.”

Zelda laughed. Jocelyn noticed that she’d painted her toes pale green.

“When I was little, my parents had a sleeping porch. We’d all three of us be out there in July and most of August. Then my father closed it in,” Angie said.

“My mother’s worried about losing our house. She says she’s getting a reverse mortgage, but Uncle Raleigh says she is not. He’s trying to find a job. He quit the other one because he had to stand up all day, but now he wishes he hadn’t.”

“What age are those people?” Angie asked.

“He’s like ten years older than my mother. He’s sixty.”

“Sixty. I can’t even imagine my parents at sixty. They had me when they were twenty, so they’re thirty-six. Sixty!” Angie said. “I guess people live longer now.”

“That’s Cassiopeia,” Zelda said, twining her scarf around her throat, then tugging it down. “Why wouldn’t the Big Dipper be out?”

“It’s too depressed. It’s at home, writing an essay: ‘My Life as the Big Dipper,’ ” Jocelyn said. “I’ve got to fix the end of my essay. I said I’d be back in an hour. That gives me how much time before I have to go?”

Zelda checked her cell phone. “Twenty-five minutes, more or less,” she said. “I didn’t notice exactly when you came.”

Jocelyn thought she might just drive past the hospital. She could go in and ask if he was okay, even if they wouldn’t tell her anything. When her own mother was hospitalized, they wouldn’t tell her anything. They’d only tell Bettina. And Raleigh, too, though he was never at the hospital because he had an anxiety thing if he walked into one. He had to carry smelling salts in sealed packets, like substitute sugar. She and Raleigh had gone to matinees — he was pretty great about that; he’d watch anything — and they’d eaten wherever she wanted, so she’d ordered a lot of really fresh, tasty stuff at Chipotle, and then they’d bought takeout for BLT, which always leaked out of the container, though neither Raleigh nor she could ever figure out how that happened every time.

“My parents were married on the beach in Nantucket,” Angie said. “There was a string quartet, with my cousin playing cello and worried all the time about sand blowing into it, apparently. I was inside Mom. I was attending as a fetus.”

“I never want to get married,” Zelda said. “Quote me on that if I say I’m engaged.”

“I will,” Angie said. “I think we should both skip the whole marriage thing and hope we turn into lesbians.”

“Ugh,” Zelda said.

“Maybe I’ll give Uncle Raleigh a break and head back early,” Jocelyn said. “He’s really been supernice to me, especially considering how oppressed he is.”

“Maybe you can marry us before you go. People do it with just some certificate they get over the Internet, anyway.” Angie grabbed Zelda’s hand. Zelda pulled her hand back. “Say, ‘I marry you, I hereby marry you. You are now married,’ ” she said.

“What is that country where you can say, ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you’ and it’s true?” Jocelyn said.

“You made that up,” Angie said.

“No, really. It’s true.”

“Because NPR said it, or something?” Zelda said, taking Angie’s hand. “Oh, darling, NPR says we’re divorced!” she said.

Jocelyn laughed and toed a little wet sand toward them. It was their ritual: they’d send some wet sand in the other’s direction, sand like instantly appearing wrinkles, or like a pug dog’s scruff. Angie’s mother had two pugs. They snorted all night and kept everyone awake. Angie could do a very funny imitation of everyone: her distraught mother, talking to the dogs; her father, throwing them out in the middle of the night; the pugs, snorting.

“Okay, well, you ace it with your story about flowers in the sky, your ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ story,” Zelda said. She hated for people to go. She always said something to keep them. She toed another bit of wet sand in Jocelyn’s direction. It looked like shit. That was what it looked like, wet and more brown than gray.

* * *

She drove through the parking lot of the hospital, but didn’t go in. She turned on the radio and heard that rain and thunder were predicted later, and also the next day. Maybe it would rain out her uncle’s golf game.

She almost forgot the pizza, it was such a stupid thing to do — eating another dinner at almost ten o’clock at night. She made a U-turn and pulled into the parking lot, but she wasn’t the only person who’d forgotten. The owner’s son was sponging off tables, saying that nobody’d phoned in an order. She wondered if she should just ask for a small plain pizza and get points with her aunt, but she decided no — her aunt could really do without a pizza. She bought a ginger ale in a bottle that exploded all over her when she unscrewed the cap. “Shit!” she said, which brought the owner to the counter. His son shrugged, acknowledging what had happened, but making no comment. “So what’s this? Did you shake the bottle?” Mister Rogers said. It wasn’t his real name, it was his nickname, behind his back, because he always said “Beautiful day” to adults, and T. G. had pointed out that Mister Rogers said, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” Or, at least, the guy who imitated him on the old Saturday Night Live did.

She shook her head. A question like that didn’t even deserve a response. The guys did that, sometimes. Would she do it? A girl?

Then came the very loud sound of shattering glass. She ducked, thinking a car was coming in right through the front windows. Mister Rogers and his son ducked, too, and the sponge flew across the room. Mister Rogers quickly got out of his crouch and ran toward the door.

There stood Ms. Nementhal. In a halter top and blue Bermuda shorts, Ms. Nementhal was wincing, her arms clasping her shoulders, her mouth agape. Someone had thrown bottles out of a car window, lots of them, it turned out. Could it have been on purpose? Who littered that way anymore? One had made a huge crack in one of the front windows. “Oh, Jesus,” the owner’s son moaned. “Are you okay?” he said to Ms. Nementhal.

“What was that?” she said, hysterically. “WHAT WAS THAT?”

“Trash. Every year it’s worse trash,” Mister Rogers said. “You’re all right, ma’am? Is that a little cut on your leg?”

“Shit, shit, shit,” the owner’s son said, tapping his cell phone. “That was probably that pond scum, Winston Bales.” He turned away. Behind Ms. Nementhal were several broken bottles, their necks scattered in one direction, glass strewn across the parking lot. There was a cut on her leg. She was bent over, examining it, her long hair obscuring any expression, and she hadn’t responded to the question. She hadn’t said one thing, though everybody knew she could monologue for hours. The owner must not know who she was. How would he? Some kid from Yale with her first summer job (as the newspaper report would later inform everyone), a volunteer in a program for troubled teens. They were not troubled! They weren’t! Jocelyn had not had the program advertised to her that way. What, exactly, was she troubled about?

One thing would be having to finish her essay, trying to write in a way that was credible about Earth being reversed with the sky; flowers sparkling instead of stars, the stars all fallen around everyone’s feet. A detritus (was that too big a word?) of stars. What would she be going for, though? Was that just another C-plus idea, or would something like that be Magical Realism?