Tilt (2 page)

The alarm. Seven a.m. Stan was somewhere in the mountains fighting off a band of terrorists intent on stealing all the mountain goats. They were falling to his broom handle, to his furious feet.

Then he was awake and stiff. Stiff as a guy wire.

It made no sense at all. He stared up at the gloomy ceiling waiting to unstiffen.

He lifted his knees so that the sheets would touch nothing. Emptied his mind. Filled it with dishes. Dust mops. Digging in the garden. Foot on shovel. Shovel in dirt. Worms wriggling in black earth. Limp, cold, squishy earthworms.

Ridgepole.

Stan got up. Ridgepole in his pajamas. Why?

He pulled on a sweatshirt, snuck to the door and glanced out. Silence, all clear. He eased down the stairs, keeping his weight on the outside of each foot.

“Stanley?” His mother was at the front door. Just coming in.

Stan sat on the stairs, pulled his legs together and the sweatshirt down.

“How's Gary?” he asked.

His mother fiddled with her shoes in the front hall. She never wore heels except when she saw Gary. And her dress barely made it halfway down her thighs.

“I thought you have an eight o'clock?” Stan said.

“I do. I do!” Now she wanted to get by him on the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”

Stiff as a poker. Erect as the Washington Monument.

“I just have a little stitch in my side,” he said.

“Oh, honey.”

“I'm going to sit here like this until it goes away.”

“Maybe you should walk around a bit.”

“I'm just going to stay exactly like this.” Stan squished over to the side of the step so that his mother could get by.

“Do you want some orange juice?”

“No.”

“Sometimes drinking something —”

“I'll be fine. You need to get going.”

She squeezed past finally. Stan went into the bathroom and stood over the toilet. From the upstairs he heard his mother say, “Oh, Lily!” again and again. He heard sheets being pulled off the bed, his mother's heavy footfalls, Lily's crying. His mother's voice became operatic. “I just don't understand. If you need to get up in the night, get up! I know you peed before — ”

“I just didn't feel it! I just didn't . . .”

Now his mother was calling down the stairs.

“Stanley, could you please handle your sister's sheets? I have an eight o'clock!”

Life was better down in the basement. It was dark and cool and the ceiling was low enough that Stan could almost bump his head. Maybe by Christmas he would bump his head. And quiet. No amount of opera from upstairs could leak all the way down into the basement, especially when the washing machine was running.

It only took a minute to dump in the sheets and soap and set everything going, but Stan stayed for the pure peace of it. He liked the smell of the detergent. House in order. He leaned against the machine.

Janine Igwash walked out of the darkness again right past him. She lingered near him in silence by the laundry table where the old spent sheets of fabric softener congregated along with little bits of tissue left in pockets from laundries past.

The temperature went up inexplicably. It was a cold-water wash but the heat was on. She was just by the laundry table, breathing. He leaned a little harder against the washing machine. She was bigger than him but not by much. She started to tug at her T-shirt. Arms crossed at the bottom the way women do. Breathing and . . . 

Stan stepped back. Leaning up against the washing machine! He opened the lid and watched the cold soapy gray water churn, churn, churn until it was safe to head upstairs again.

—

Janine Igwash sat four rows away from him in biology. She was wearing a red shirt that his eyes had trouble keeping buttoned, especially once he noticed a small tattoo at the base of her neck near her shoulder. He wasn't close enough to see what it was. She didn't look at him at all.

They were dissecting cows' eyes but there weren't enough eyes to go around, thank God, so they were in groups of four. Jason Biggs was handling the scalpel. Taking notes were the identical sisters Melinda and Isabelle Lafontaine who were each wearing jeans and pearls and running shoes. One of them was pierced in the left eyebrow, the other in the right. Stan could never keep them straight. They both had big watery eyes like this sorry specimen Jason Biggs was slicing apart.

“Stop now, Jason!” Left Eyebrow said. “I think we're supposed to sketch that.”

Janine Igwash turned and pulled her red shirt off her shoulder. Stan's mind could make her do that. But he still couldn't quite see the tattoo.

“Lapman canceled junior varsity for this year,” Jason Biggs said then.

Janine unbuttoned a bit more and pulled her shirt farther off her milky white shoulder and stepped toward him, parting the desks . . . 

“What?”

Her tattoo was something sinewy, coiled but not a snake, prettier and . . . 

Biggs snapped his fingers. “Canceled!”

Gray desiccated flesh hung off the pitiful eyeball.

“How can he do that?”

“He just did. They couldn't find another coach. Lapman is doing girls' JV this year. You'll have to try out for Burgess.”

Burgess, the varsity coach, ate juniors for breakfast.

“You can keep going, Jason,” Right Eyebrow said. “Let's get the cross-section.”

“Lapman's coaching girls' JV?”
Stan said. He felt his gut contract into a hard rubber ball.
No JV?
After he had trained on his own, night after night, month after month . . . 

“Weren't you the final guy cut last year?” Biggs said. “You should have made it, man.”

This felt like one of those bits of news that was going to take a long time to comprehend. Like when his father left five years ago to live with the twenty-three-year-old he had impregnated. That could not be understood all at once. Stan didn't feel like he understood most of it even now. It took time to soak down through the layers, like water working its way through clay.

He hadn't seen his father since.

“No way you should have been cut. Towers is a pretty good guard but he can't shoot. I've seen you shoot, man.” Biggs looked up like a doctor in the middle of some surgery and said to the twins, “This guy never misses. I've never seen him miss.”

“It's about time we had a junior varsity for the girls,” Left Eyebrow said.

Stan's hands flexed as if holding the pebbled grain of an imaginary basketball. Now what was he supposed to do? Varsity only had two spots open. Everyone else was coming back. Now there would be twelve from last year's JV competing for those two spots — all right, eleven. Collins broke his leg skateboarding. But what about all the seniors who didn't make varsity last year?

Suddenly Janine Igwash loomed above him. Completely clothed. Her tattoo was just a little red and black blob near the creamy white corner of her collar.

“What are you doing about the retina?” she asked him. Even though Jason Biggs was the one with the scalpel in his hand mucking about with the retina and who knew what else.

“We sketched it before we sliced it,” Right Eyebrow said.

“I didn't think we were supposed to slice it,” Janine Igwash said to him directly again. Her eyes were dark green with little brown blobs that flashed with light.

She looked down at the hatchet job Jason Biggs was doing, and back to Stan, and down and back again.

“There's this dance that my parents' youth group has forced me to help organize,” she said to Stan. “And I'm supposed to go and it's like there's no possible way out of it in any way and, there's this stipulation.” She shoved her hands in her pockets.

Was she really saying this? Stan went through a mental checklist. Everyone else was listening; she was wearing all her clothes. Probably it was real.

“Stipulation?” he said.

“I need to bring, like, a guy.” She stood very still and looked at him, her green and browns scanning his face. Jason Biggs was most of the way through the eye now.

Someone kicked Stan's ankle. It was Left Eyebrow.

“A guy?” Stan said.

Janine Igwash couldn't seem to say anything more. Left Eyebrow kicked him again.

“Ten minutes, people, before you need to clean up,” Mr. Stillwater announced. He was sitting at the front in the same blue shirt he wore every day, or maybe he had a whole closet full of blue shirts.

When Stan glanced at Janine Igwash again she was back at her station cleaning up. Her face was redder than her hair.

“You sure blew that one,” the twins said together.

—

The rest of the day slid by in jagged fragments, during which Stan heard again and again the unbelievable news about JV. Everyone seemed to know, maybe through Biggs, what the disaster meant to Stan personally. He thought he'd been secret about his obsessive practice.

But this was a complete crash and burn.

Once he caught sight of Janine Igwash at her locker on the second floor reaching for something on the top shelf amidst a bird's nest of squashed papers and other items. She certainly didn't need his help reaching the top shelf. But if she turned in the next second and a half he was sure he would stop and accept her invitation to the dance, if in fact it had been an invitation. When she did turn he was already almost past her.

Then later at lunchtime in the cafeteria lineup he pretended to be extremely interested in the new student mural of various androgynous figures playing sports such as hockey, soccer, volleyball and even basketball, although the basketball player had one arm longer than the other and his or her elbow was definitely out of alignment given the shoulder angle of the jump shot if in fact it was a jump shot that the artist was trying to depict, and what did it matter anyway now that JV was canceled?

Then there she was again at the end of second period in the afternoon, tying her shoe right in front of him as he was trying to make it to English and nearly tripped over her but fortunately his reactions were swift and he managed to miss her completely although she did look up at the last moment to see who was bearing down on her with such speed.

“Hey,” he said as he flashed by.

It occurred to him that if he stopped he might say even more than that, but what?

In the hallway Coach Lapman didn't meet Stan's eye, probably didn't even remember who he was.

At home after dinner he was reading the same assigned passage of
The Catcher in the Rye
over and over when his mother approached. She sat quite close to him on the sofa so that he had to pull out his earbuds and turn off his music.

“Aren't you training tonight?” she asked.

“They canceled JV basketball,” he said. Under questioning he explained the hopelessness of the situation.

“Well, you could try out for the varsity team anyway, couldn't you?” she said.

Stan knew that if he just stayed quiet she would eventually drift away and he could get back to not reading his novel. Anyway, Gary would be calling soon.

She squeezed his knee in a motherly way.

“How are things on the other side?” she asked.

“What other side?”

“The social side of things. Any . . .” His mother hesitated so he knew she had probably been planning this segment of the conversation all along. “. . .  cute girls, you know, you're interested in?”

“Cute girls?”

“You know what I'm saying, Stanley.” She stretched flat her brow furrows with her fingertips.

“I guess,” Stan said.

“What do you guess?”

She was almost finished her wine. Gary was going to call any minute. Or Lily was going to need help with her homework. If he could just stall a bit longer . . . 

“We haven't had any good conversations about all this,” his mother said. She waved her hand vaguely. “I'd like to think that you feel free enough to ask me anything. You're entering such a rich and . . . confusing time of life. And your father isn't here to help. It's just me. You know I grew up with sisters, so I really don't know the male perspective . . . I know men, of course . . . I know I'm terrible with them. I'm really not much of a role model for you. But if there is anything you want to talk about . . . you know, the mechanics of . . . how it all works.” The words were sputtering now. Not even the wine was helping. “You do know the mechanics?”

He couldn't avoid the direct question.

“We had a . . . mechanics section as part of health,” he said.

“But you haven't . . .” She squeezed his knee again. Her hair was falling all in front of her face.

Where was Gary when you needed the guy?

“Haven't what?” Stan said finally.

“You know . . . you haven't actually . . . I mean, you do go out at night sometimes. And I know I'm away more than I should be. I mean —”

She was asking if he'd —!

“No!”
he blurted.

She looked startled. Surprised and relieved and perhaps disbelieving.

“It's all right if you do. I mean, eventually, when you love someone. I mean, not now, but in the next few years you're going to be entering an age when the feelings are overpowering and . . . there's the whole thing about the adolescent brain.”

“What?”

“I was reading about this. The center for consequences is underdeveloped . . . I mean, in the adolescent brain . . .”

At last, the phone! Stan felt his shoulders ungrip. But it wasn't his mother's phone, it was the home line.

Lily picked it up then screamed, “Stanley!”

Nobody ever called him.

“It's for you!”

It was Janine Igwash. Stan didn't recognize her voice at first and was convinced someone was calling from across the continent to try to sell him something — tickets to a dance. But she wasn't selling, she was asking.