Saturday Mornings

Revised

    They all just sat there, watching him. He’d prepared for this: spending all weekend with his nose plunged deep in oceans of dusty books, cramping his hand from annotations and outlines, and gotten up before dawn that morning to practice in front of the mirror while still in his pajamas. But now, standing at the cheap podium in front of the class, Nathan was having a crisis of self doubt. He cleared his throat.
    “Crows are very misunderstood birds. People think they are all dirty and evil, but they are not really. Crows can learn people’s faces and remember if someone was mean to them or nice. They are very smart, and take care of their families even when their parents get old and sick.”
    Nathan’s hands held his report in a vice grip. He tried to read a line and look out at the class to make eye contact like his teacher had told him to. Most of the kids were looking at him, but far fewer were actually listening. He looked at Wendy Jackson, and his words immediately fell and gathered on the floor in a puddle.
    She was staring at him, and smiling her perfect smile with pristine teeth. He felt soft and hot in his guts. She waited patiently, but he was stuck now. The words on the paper were in some language he couldn’t read, and now he was sweating. Wendy smiled wider, and tucked her taut black hair behind her ears. He was hypnotized by her. Drawn into her caramel skin and those perfect smiling teeth.
    “Booo!” Dylan Cowells bellowed from the back. The class snickered.
    Nathan looked over for help from the teacher, but her desk was empty.
    Wendy’s smile stretched back to her ears.
    “Crows…” He tried.
    “Boooooo!!!”
    Nathan dropped his report and it fluttered to the ground. Now he just stood there: the immoveable student. His skin was slick and hot, but he felt a strange vulnerability, and when he looked down he saw that his clothes had vanished. He stood in front of the other eighth graders cupping his young manhood as they all began to laugh. They were all turning into little monsters. Dylan Cowells grew ragged horns from his head. Patrick O’Neil turned himself green and pustuler. Angie Whitaker(the shortest girl in class) grew giant scaly talons that tore her sneakers apart and jutted out in front of her desk. Nathan ran to the door, desperately trying to contain himself as he did, and turned the knob with one nervous hand. It was locked, and in a fit of panic he grasped it with both hands and pried at it while his dignity swayed and shrunk beneath him. They all got out of their chairs and slowly crowded around him, pointing as their laughter reached a crescendo. They were a tight circle around the naked boy, and some of the monsters reached out and flicked him in his pink insecurity. Nathan started screaming, and as hot tears rolled down his cheeks, the faint sound of his alarm clock pulled him upright and sweating in his bed.

    He breathed quickly in the dark. He calmed the pistons in his chest and laid there staring into the middle distance while he slowly came back into himself.
    It was early. The light that shoved its way through the edges of his thick blinds was dull and lifeless. Nathan calmed from the dream, and felt the thick molasses of tranquilizer sediment dragging through him. They gave him nightmares, the big blue pills, but without them there was no sleep at all.
    He clicked on his nightstand lamp, and after the momentary squints, got out of bed and put on his slippers. He brushed his teeth, staring blankly back himself in the mirror. His face had grown old and ragged, though he couldn’t remember when these changes had happened. There were deep lines around his eyes, mouth, and forehead, and salted stubble over the crest of his chin and cheeks. His hair was thinning, and his once strawberry blonde hue was reduced to a rusty sienna.  
    Nathan went downstairs to eat breakfast and called his mother over coffee.

    “How have you been feeling, Nathan?”
    “I’m ok Ma, really.”
    “Now you wouldn’t lie to your mother, would you Nathan? You know I only have your best interests at heart.”
    His head started to ache.
    “I know Ma, I wouldn’t. I’m fine, really I am. Things have been going really well.”
    Nathan even felt himself believing this for a moment.
    “You are still going to see Dr. Spelling? You know the trouble I went through to get you accepted at his practice.”
    “I know. I go every Friday. I like his glasses.”
    “Are you getting out? Getting some exercise? You know it’s not healthy to stay indoors all day long. Very bad for demeanor.”
    “I take walks Ma, early in the morning when there’s nobody out on the street yet. It’s like I’m the only person alive.”
    He twisted the phone cord around his thumb until it turned purple.
    “And your pills? You certainly haven’t forgotten those? You know how important it is you stay regular with your medication.”
    He felt the throb in his brain turning into blades. He didn’t turn to look, but knew that they sat staring at him from the windowsill. A bright orange bottle with bright purple ovals inside. It looked so disgustingly happy, as though the bottle itself was smiling at him. It was filled to the brim next to the half empty tranquilizer bottle.
    “Yes Mother.”
    “Oh, you’re father’s calling from the parlor. The Beasleys are over for the afternoon. I’ll have to cut this short, Nathan.”   
    “Can I talk to Dad?”
    “Darling, he’s preoccupied.”
    She said it so matter-of-factly. The Beasleys probably weren’t even there. They probably didn’t even see them anymore. Nathan imagined his father in the parlor, wearing his smoking jacket and reading the paper while he begged for him from the other room. He could remember standing there hundreds of times as a child, looking on at the statue in the chair, and turning to go play outside alone.
    Nathan slammed the phone on its cradle and glared at it.
   
    Wendy Jackson surfaced in his mind. She appeared to him out of the nothingness of his breakfast nook, flecks of gold and shimmering light undulating out from the chair opposite him and giving way to the image of the small thirteen year old sitting and smiling at him. Nathan felt drowsy. She smiled her perfect smile, and crossed her arms over her chest. She tilted her head as if she was looking behind him. Nathan turned, a plastic smile plastered on his face, but there was nothing but the drab living room behind him. When he turned back, she was gone.
    He thought about this for a minute, and felt a tremor of excitement run through him. Maybe, she’s sitting somewhere alone right now just like me, and wondering whatever happened to that skinny boy she had class with. He started to gain confidence, to find footholds on the mountain of his meek character. Maybe I can find her, his mind flashed.
    He showered, and even found the audacity to whistle to himself.
    He dressed in the best clothes he owned, which were still faded and had small holes along their hems. His mind was churning, creating happy images of him and Wendy sitting together to watch TV, or eat a meal, or even take one of those imaginary walks in the morning, where they could both be the only person in the world. He was building futures with her in his imagination, but his logic stumbled on a tiny snarl: He couldn’t remember what school it was that he and Wendy had gone to together. He knew they both had to have been young, junior high age, but when he traced back his massive rolodex of memories everything turned grey and was covered with a thick fog. He dwelled on this for a moment, but let the detail go and thought more about how she would smile when she saw him again.
    In the living room on a squat secondhand end-table there was a phonebook. After he dressed, Nathan hopped down the stairs and made a beeline to it. He flipped quickly past the beginning alphabet, noticing that the book seemed thinner than it used to. Maybe a lot of the people have died, he reasoned. He found the J’s, and studied the list of Jackson’s carefully as he descended down the page.
    Wendy L. Jackson, 311 Pear Street.
    He clapped his hands together and squeezed, and then tore out the page, oblivious to the dozens of other ripped edges where listings were missing. He saw only Wendy and her perfect smile.
   
    Nathan walked north six blocks to the supermarket. He stared mostly at his feet, making sure to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk. He didn’t want any bad luck.
    The crowd of weekend suburbanites and their screaming children were almost overwhelming to Nathan. He hurried through the store to the floral section, and handed a brilliantly colored bouquet of flowers to the cashier.
    She stared him down with a half-lidded resignation, chomping slowly on her gum.
    “Cash or card.”
    Nathan recoiled, and slid a crumpled handful of 1’s across the counter.
    She gave him his change, and he hurried to the bus stop across the street.
    He took the Crosstown to 58th and Main, and transferred onto the Northwest Bypass Express after missing the Highland Hills bus altogether. There was only one other rider, just an old woman and her giant purse. Nathan sat down across from her at the front of the bus. She smiled at him the whole trip, and there was a familiarity in her face, but Nathan felt the same fog wash over him when he tried to place her in his past.
    “Hello.” He said.
    She reached over the aisle and patted his knee. 
    They passed over the Hawkins Bridge and climbed the steep hill that led to the older side of town, where houses were crumbling and sagging into the dirt. He imagined the perfect palace where Wendy must live amongst all these others.
    Nathan got off the bus at 40th and Central West. He tried to straighten the unrelenting creases in his pants, and then started up the hill that led to Pear Street.    In his mind, there were vivid images of Wendy dancing with him under lattice archways laced with green vines and bright string lights. They were surrounded by a tuxedoed orchestra, playing songs written just for the two of them.
    Nathan kicked a rock along the asphalt.
    The sun dipped behind a cloud, and light drained from the nieghborhood. He turned onto Pear Street, and counted the wonderful numbers that led to 3-1-1.
    Her house was certainly not any brighter or better than those of the surrounding neighborhoods. It was a dull brown color with tan trim, and sat squat and hunched at the end of the block. The lawn was all but dead, with great leprotic patches of burnt brown grass and piles of dogshit. There were bars on the windows and the front door, and a beat up Volkswagen in the driveway. Nathan could only see a quaint little house with a cute hatchback parked in front.
    He floated up the crumbling concrete steps that led to the front porch, inspecting the flowers tucked into the crook of his arm. He adjusted a few, and felt a pang of detrimental emotion well up and then quickly dissipate as he looked at the flowers. He shrugged it off and knocked on the door.
    The woman who used to be Wendy Jackson opened the door. She filled the doorway, and wore a bright teal t-shirt that stretched over valleys and hillocks Nathan did not remember. Her hair was dyed a urine yellow, with inches of dark roots on display near her scalp, and it was wrapped up in a tight bun. She looked at him with a cold, dead fish stare. Her teeth had yellowed, and her once excited eyes were dull and lifeless.
    “Yeah?” She muttered.
    “I’m sorry,” Nathan staggered back, “I must have the wrong house.”
    He turned around and left.
    The held the bouquet limply with his fingertips, and stared at the tiny pin point that was the bus stop, some three blocks away. He know longer worried about stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. Nathan was confused, even worried that his perfect plan had not come into fruition. How could that have been Wendy? It wasn’t his Wendy, just some inadequate imposter that was filling in. But what had happened to the real Wendy?, he thought. The images of dancing under arches broke apart and sunk into the dim fog of his protective subconscious.
    He got back on the NW Bypass Express, and it started to rain when he sat back across from the old woman. Nathan felt another cerebrum tremor while he studied her, sensing something just beyond his grasp. As he stood to get off at his stop, she waved to him and said, “See you next Saturday?”.
    Nathan was starting to feel sick, his stomach churned and his tongue was thick and dry in his mouth. He took his return bus home, and reached his apartment after a few stops along the way to dry heave.
    He was beginning to lose faith in his mind as he opened the door, but a calm wave of reassurance surfaced from beneath and washed over him in amniotic safety. He opened the blinds, letting grey light in, and smiled to himself. He tossed the bouquet on a huge pile in the corner of the living room, where over twenty bundles of flowers were decayed and dried and dead. He kicked a few stray petals towards the pile, and made a mental note to throw them out in the morning.

Reviews

[Sammie]

This was a great read. And like David I particularly liked the ending.

[DavidRyanM]

Ha. Dig the ending. The way life changes, but memories don't. Everyone frozen in this capsule where their best attributes and most memorable quotes are what define them even years later. Sorry I didn't get to this sooner...been working a lot. Your character looks in the mirror a lot, by the way. Don't know if that has a deeper meaning or if it's just something I happened to notice.