Ryan Laujinesse, Jayson Laujinesse and Jinny O'Muil
I am looking for the happy time in my life, because there doesn't seem to have been one.
It took me five years to graduate from the University of Colorado. That was more than enough time to get my degree in English and Engineering-a crazy ambition-and decide what I wanted in the world. Now it is a few days to the Big Day, and I am terrified. Fucking terrified. I wrote that down just now.
I am not a writer, I have never been a writer. I like other people's writings, and I was late to that. I was in college, a sophomore before I realized I liked books. I was reading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and that did it for me for some reason. I don't know why.
Then it was the other books. All the Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse and shit I could never read again probably. Here I was with all these fucking feelings and here someone had found a way to speak exactly what was going on in me. I felt like a bottle had been opened. I mean a Coke bottle, or a champagne bottle. Even though I don't really like champagne.
Anyway…
So I guess that was the happy time.
Not at parties, not so much at clubs, not messing with girls. Basketball used to be the happy time. I won't lie; a basketball scholarship was a happy time. Being popular was a happy time. Being liked was a happy time. But… there must be something else I'm talking about, something deeper than happy.
I think when I'm talking about a happy time I'm thinking of something that, when I feel bad, when I am afraid, I can take it out and look at it and remembering it, feeling it, I'll know that everything will be alright, that it all counts for something. That's the deep happiness, and that happiness only came when I was reading.
I need that happiness now, and something told me the way to.. not get it back, but to make up for it, to compensate, was to write, and not read this time around.
I am twenty-three. I will be a twenty-three year old graduate. I feel like twenty-three years was certainly long enough to come out with a game plan, and I've got no plan.
I feel a little bit like a failure.
I feel old.
I grow old
I grow old
I shall wear my trousers rolled
Gotta love the Prufrock.
If… If…
If I had thought about this when I first got scared, when the first grain of fear was in me. First kernel. See, I don't know if it's a grain or a kernel, and I'm turning into a self conscious writer. Someone who says, "the sky was grey, pewter, steely. It was stormy."
But last year, when I lay in my own bed, back home in Ohio with someone sleeping beside me, I did feel alone. And I did feel a kernel of something...
LAST THANKSGIVING...
THE DOOR OPENED WITHOUT CEREMONY or permission and Jayson Laujinesse swung in followed by: "Ryan," Cecile pronounced from the chair directly facing the front door of the O'Muil house.
Whatever he'd been about to say, he stopped when he looked at Cecile.
"Cecile Turner. Is that you?"
"It's sure in the hell not anybody else,"
"No," Ryan said, remembering her mouth, "it certainly isn't it."
Both Laujinesses bred goodlooking boys though it was easy to forget this about Jayson when he was being a pain in the ass, but not when he was beside his older brother. Ryan was reheaded, Jayson blond. Bother were sharp nosed, clear featured, fine boned with sweeping green eyes, hair in wavy burnished wings. No, the Laujinesse brothers had never been ordinary. Their mother wouldn’t stand for it.
"Cousins," Ryan said warmly. "Ef. Isaac!" He hugged everyone as he spoke their names. Ryan’s down ski jacket smelled of the cold outside.
"You're in the family," Ryan said.
"Yeah," Isaac nodded. He had just given Jinny the engagement ring the other night.
"Damn, I hoped you'd get away from the nuthouse. And Jinny--" he looked right at his cousin, "You look great."
Jinny took it in stride, smiling. Some people change over the years. There was no explaining when it happened. Somewhere along the way Ryan Laujinesse had turned into a good person who had sincere words. Every time her cousin came home, Jinny wondered what this guy had done with the creep she'd grown up with. He couldn't have killed him. This Ryan Laujinesse was far too nice for murder.
JINNY SPEAKS
"HEY, LUMPY OATMEAL, OUT OF THE WAY!"
As far as Ryan was concerned my name was Lumpy and the whole Oatmeal thing came out of the fact that when I was young I could never say O'Muil. I always said, Oatmeal which seems like a harder word to me now than my true one. My family was the Oatmeals. Anne was the same, but with me there was that cute little first name, Lumpy that went so well with Oatmeal. So even after the lumps were gone the Oatmeal remained. Isaac still calls me Jinny Oatmeal. I'm sure he'll do it even after we're married.
Ryan could always be counted on to say the bad thing. My mother and his mother were pregnant at the same time twice, with different results in gender. When I was twelve and in the seventh grade, and Anne and Jayson had just come to Saint Antonin's as first graders, I was rounder and more awkward than ever. Ryan, grew up pretty. and had been growing mean for a long time.
Children are mean, but that's not all there is to it. I think we’d all be mean if we were allowed to go on unchecked. Hardship and experience checks us. Being overweight, being abandoned by parents, knowing we've hurt someone, this can check a child. Usually it is not the parents who check children. They can't help it, parents can't really see what's going on in the world below where kids play. And I love my Aunt Catherine, but she was so proud of having a beautiful child. Everyone thought Ryan was beautiful and talented and its not that telling a child these things gives him a big head... that's bullshit. It's that telling yourself these things about your child gives you a blind eye and then you can't see how in need of discipline he is.
So Ryan started off with the occasional mean snippet. I remember him being pretty nice up until about third grade. But meanness grows, and give meanness an inch and it will take a mile. By seventh grade Ryan Laujinesse was the meanest boy I knew. His testosterone was in overdrive. He was tall with that abundance of just the right length red gold hair, and the Catholic school pants that are innocent enough when a grown up sees them, but to a girl of thirteen are wondrously erotic in how much those snug navy trousers can show.
Almost as erotic as Isaac claims the short little plaid skirts we wore were.
There ought to be a law against all the sex in the Church.
But I'm off my point... maybe my rocker.
Anyway.
The day he was telling me to move out of the way was the day he and his friends decided to play baseball, not on the fields between Saint Antonin's and the boy's high school, Saint Jude, but on the blacktop between the school, the church, the convent and the kiddie playground. So wherever he chose to be was in his way, and if you were in it... you'd better get out.
"Hey Lumps, didn't I tell you to move."
There were a few chuckles.
"Lumps!” like it was the best joke they’d ever heard. And maybe it was. All those Catholic boys in their blue trousers and sky blue Izod Lacotts murmuring at me. Probably the reason I gravitated toward a Jew.
"Did you hear that, Efrem?" a new voice started, and then I turned around.
Efrem and Cecile, one in glasses, the other in pigtails were standing behind me.
"If my very own family talked to me that way," Cecile went on, "I wouldn't think they were much of a family."
Ryan sneered at her: "Who do you think you are?"
Efrem, who never bothered to speak to anyone really, put a hand on Cecile's shoulder and said, "She is my sister."
Cecile said, "I am the one who can put a foot up your ass."
"Oh, you're talking--" but this was Catholic school, you didn't know who was patrolling the playground, so he got up in Cecile's face and mouthed, "shit."
"That, I am not, and before you get in my face, you might want to ask yourself--Can you whoop my ass?"
Then, and here Efrem should never have forgiven her, she added, "Our ass."
To Efrem's credit, he didn't back away from being included in the possible debacle.
Ryan looked at me and then at Cecile and Efrem, then he looked around at his friends.
"Let it go," Kevin Nelson said, "Chill, Ryan."
"Let's go out to the field," Ryan said turning around.
"Yeah, where you should have been in the first place," Cecile shouted, folding her arms over her chest.
"Cecile," Efrem murmured, and she shut up.
He and Kevin looked at each other and shared a small smile. That was when I learned that they must have been friends of a sort.
I am a sophomore at Whitman. Sara and Amanda are at Little Flower and Cecile is there too, because she doesn't live in the Whitman district. She's a freshman. My junior year is the year that things fall apart. It is a long complicated story involving the fact that Cecile is really of no blood relation to Efrem at all. Efrem’s mother took her in years ago. Cecile’s real mother, i’ve never met her, pays for her school, and won’t let Mrs. Walker help. Not even when Mrs. Walker can pay and she can’t. Cecile ends up having to leave Little Flower.
"I'm not really too broken up about it." Cecile admits. "Let me ask Mr. Weaver if I can use his address and I'll transfer to Whitman."
"It's so out of your way," I tell her, though I'm happy as hell that we're going to school together.
"So is Little Flower," Cecile shrugs.
My junior year, her sophomore year, my best friend and my boyfriend, and I'm not pretty or popular but I'm pretty happy. Whitman's gone down hill in the last few years. Gun checks and all that crap, but then it was cool. At least in my memory. Even the fact that Ryan leaves Saint Jude's so he can play basketball at Whitman doesn't make it so bad.
Ryan is instantly popular and I am instantly resentful. He's what I deal with at home and at home he's only my cousin so he can't be nasty. I left his King of the Schoolyard behind when I left Catholic school. But here he is.
He makes friends right away, easily. They're all coming down the hall. He's holding court. They're laughing their asses off, and he stops when he sees me and Cecile at my locker.
"Hey, Jinny," he says, as plain as if he hasn't always been nasty.
"Ryan," I say to him.
Then he looks at Cecile who is so pretty. All her black hair is curly and down her back, and her skin is caramel and flawless and her eyes are bright even though they're hard right now and Ryan says to her, "I remember you--" He jabs his finger at her and laughs.
"This girl," he turns and tells his friends, "once, back in Catholic school, when I wouldn't toe the line, she was gonna kick my ass!"
"That's Cile for you," said someone and they all laughed.
"Yeah," Ryan said, "I remember you."
"I remember you too," Cecile said, and there was no pleasure in her voice. Not that time.
I remember the day when she made Ryan toe the line, when she sent the boys off the blacktop and on their way. The boys are heading to the field, past the kiddie playground, and what sticks with me about that day is how for the first time I began to pick up on how it wasn't either-or, this and that in school. Or anywhere else. Efrem never talked to Kevin or most of the boys, but they were friends. Kevin hung out with Ryan. Almost followed him, but he could also tell him to chill out. Cecile was Efrem's sister, but not really... more of that later. And she was more than a sister. Ryan was my bitter enemy. But he was my family...
JAYSON JOINED ANNE ON THE roof that Wednesday afternoon. He was wearing a blue hoodie and he brought her a red one.
"What are you doing out here?"
"I came to pester you,” Jayson told her. “Jinny said you were up here."
"I was looking at the leaves," Anne told her cousin. "You know they're almost gone."
"Christmas'll be here in a few weeks," Jayson sat down beside her.
"Let's get through Thanksgiving first."
"Your mom and my mom have already started cooking."
"I wonder who all'll be here."
"Cecile and Efrem?"
"No," Anne said. "They say eating white peoples cooking is like eating papier mache. It might be just the Immediates. Unless Ryan brings Cecile as a date."
"What?"
Anne pointed down below them.
"I was looking at the trees, but I've been looking at the two of them for a while. They've just been walking around. They came up the corner about ten minutes ago. I never knew two people could make Bernard such a long street."
"You think they'll hook up?"
"Not today," Anne said. "Weren't they together in high school?"
"I think they tried," Jayson shrugged. "Or something. Don't we have something better to do than snoop around in my brother's love life?"
"I don't," Anne said.
But there was no hearing what was going on below them on Bernard Street.
"You really like being out in Colorado?" Cecile was saying.
"Aw yeah," Ryan told her. "It's not here. It's not home. I miss a lot of stuff."
"Like what?"
"Like," Ryan stopped and took in a breath to think. "The way you can see a horizon."
"What?"
"You can look out straight ahead of you for a long time here. Everything's flat."
"That's what they say," Cecile told him.
"No, I'm serious. Out west everywhere you look there's a mountain or a cliff to block your way. But sometimes it's great. You should come out sometime."
Cecile looked at him dubiously.
"What?" said Ryan.
"To see some mountains?"
"To see me, Cile," Ryan said.
Cecile’s face heated under her brown skin. "Oh."
Ryan wrapped an arm around her.
"Is that alright? Or will you rip it off?"
"Today, I'm feeling mellow. You'll probably go unmaimed."
"I'm so glad. You like Saint Clare?"
"I love Saint Clare!" Cecile told him, surprised at how serious she was.
"I never thought about going."
"Cause it's so small and it's the same place you've lived your whole life?" Cecile said.
"Yeah. I love being out in Colorado. I love the big school and everything. But I hate the struggle. I'm not saying you guys don't struggle. But it's like... You don't sweat it. You know? I miss friends. I miss home. I miss knowing what I wanted out of life."
"You graduate this May."
"Right," Ryan told her. "And then it's like now that I've left Ohio and I can't see coming back... What? Cile, this is my home and I can't see coming back to it. And I don't know where else to go."
Cecile was quiet. They were approaching the house.
"That is a problem," she said, and then started laughing.
"What?" Ryan began to laugh too.
"That is the stupidest thing I could have said," she said, and kept laughing. "I gotta go. Ef needs his car back."
In parting Ryan held her hand and didn't let her go just yet.
"Mr. Laujinesse?"
"Come to dinner tomorrow night."
Cecile prepared to open her mouth.
"Despite your hatred for the insipidness of all cuisine Caucasian, please come."
Cecile nodded and said, "I'll try to swallow some of that so called macaroni for your sake."
"That's all I ask," Ryan told her.
Aunt Catherine asked, "Who would like to ask the blessing. How about you, Gus?" she turned to her husband.
Uncle Gus grumbled, and Anne said Catherine looked around for a volunteer. In turn everyone ducked his or her head. Isaac was about to make the excuse that he was Jewish, which meant nothing, when Anne said, "Well, if nobody else will, I will."
She put out her hands, "Let's hold hands."
"Oh, come on…" Jayson started.
"I said," Anne cleared her throat, "Let's... hold... hands."
"Merciful Father," she began, "we just want to thank you for your abundant gifts on this Thanksgiving, and we just want to praise you that we're all right here together and that you've seen us through another year safely. God, I just want to thank you for putting up with us when we don't appreciate your goodness, and when we don't want to put up with each other...."
"Like now," Jayson muttered under his breath, and Anne kicked her cousin under the table.
"Ow!"
".... And forgive us when we allow our tempers to get in the way of loving you. We ask all this through your Holy Spirit and in the name of your son Jesus Christ, Amen."
"Amen," they all said, and then Cecile added, "Anne, maybe you need to be a Baptist. Or at least a Black person."
"My spirit is Black," Anne stated.
"Your heart is black," muttered Jayson.
"I am so stuffed," Ryan said, patting his stomach and collapsing on the couch beside Isaac and Efrem. "Whaddo you say we all walk this off?"
"We should walk off the food," Isaac said, "and then go to the--"
"Ice Bucket," all three guys said at once.
"I swear that's what I miss about this place," Ryan said, running a hand through his hair.
Efrem noted: "It closes down for winter on Saturday."
When Jinny and Cecile came down the stairs Ryan ran the idea by them.
"Ice Bucket is right. It'll be cold as hell sitting outside," Cecile said.
"Good thing we have a car," Isaac reminded her.
"Let's go," Jinny, told Cecile, "You know how you'll be fiending for a Purple Cow around January, wishing the Ice Bucket was open."
"But right now it's November."
"Yeah, but you'll feel like hell knowing you could have gone one last time. Let's go get out coats."
"I've never been a fifth wheel," Efrem said. "I didn't even know they had them."
"What are you talking about," Ryan looked at him so uncomprehendingly, that Efrem didn't even pursue it.
"We better ask Anne and Jayson if they want to go," Jinny decided, going up the stairs.
"They better go in someone else's car," Cecile said, "Seven people in Ryan's Gulf? We're not clowns."
"Or Mexicans," added Efrem.
"I was trying to be P.C.," Cecile told him.
"We’re Black, we don’t have to be.”
Efrem drove Anne and Jayson because he was insistent on viewing Cecile and Ryan as a couple. Efrem was also the first to bail out of the evening, offering to drive Anne and Jayson home. Cecile eyed her brother for signs of fakery in his yawns, but they seemed real enough.
"Thanksgiving holiday is for sleep," he said, simply.
Jinny, Isaac, Cecile and Ryan sat in the night air, on the stone bench across the parking lot from the Ice Bucket, watching a few more people come and get their last cones and sundaes of the year. Then Isaac said, "It is cold. Cile, when you get finished with the Purple Cow twist, let's roll."
"Let's not go to bed yet," Ryan insisted. "What else can we do in Rhodes? Ef's a party pooper."
"We can go to the dollar show," Cecile said.
"What's playing?" Isaac said.
Jinny looked at her fiancé and said, "Who cares? It's for a dollar."
"They always clean up on popcorn and candy prices."
"But the popcorn is free refill," Jinny said. "That's why me and Cile always save the bags, put them in the refrigerator, and then use them over and over again."
"You do not!" Ryan cried.
Cecile explained, “The secret is to pay for your ticket, sit in the theatre for a few minutes before the movie begins, and then during the trailers, go out and get your stuff. They never say, ‘Hey, I didn’t see you buy the bag!’ We've had these same bags now for a year and a half.”
When Jinny and Isaac were dropped off on Aramy, and Ryan was driving with Cecile in the front seat he said, "I get the feeling people are conspiring against us."
"Or for us," she said.
"You want me to take you back home, or do you wanna come home with me?"
Conveniently there was a red light.
"Your parents--"
"Are fast asleep and so is Jayson," Ryan told her. "I'll drop you off at home in the morning. You can say no, and I'll understand."
Cecile kissed him quickly.
"You must have someone in Colorado," she said, sitting back and shaking her head. The light turned green. Ryan continued driving down Aramy.
"I don't have you.
“God, Cecile! We always almost have 'someone here' or 'someone back there.’ Who's the other guy? Why can't it ever work with us?" Ryan looked for a driveway and turned into it.
"What are we doing?"
"I'm turning around," Ryan said. "Your home's back that way."
"I thought we were going to your house," Cecile said.
Ryan looked at her, and she leaned in and kissed him. The pressure of her lips grew firmer, and then he responded and they finally parted when he thought that if anyone was awake in the house they'd wonder why someone's Gulf was still in their driveway.
Cecile pointed up Aramy, the direction they'd been going.
"Your home is that way," she told him.
THE MORNING LIGHT WAS BLUE-GREY in Ryan Laujinesse's room the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cecile's arm was over his back, her hand splayed across his chest. He kissed it and said:
"This makes me not want to go back to Colorado."
He lay on his back, and Cecile turned around to look down on him.
"I am hungry," he said. "Man cannot live on ice cream and popcorn alone."
"We'll get dressed and wake up Isaac and Jinny," Cecile said. "Then we can pick up Efrem."
"And go to I-Hop?"
"Or Wallace's or something like that," Cecile said climbing out of bed. "Shake a leg, sleepy head."
They dressed without turning on the light, and then Cecile said, "Peek out of your door to see if your mom and dad are up."
"They aren't," Ryan said.
"Peek," Cecile insisted.
Ryan grinned and shrugged, unlocked his bedroom door and looked up and down the hall dramatically and then, closing the door, stated, "Returned from reconnaissance mission. Mother and father negative."
"Good, I don't want Catherine Laujinesse giving me dirty looks and your daddy licking his lips every time they sees me from now on."
Ryan swatted her ass.
"I bet you think that turns me on," Cecile said in a voice that said it did not.
"Can I brush my teeth?"
"Brush 'em at Isaac's. I don't want anyone to wake up and find me here."
"You make it sound like you're a hooker... Or like I'm an embarrassment."
“Ryan, do you want anyone to find me here?"
"I'm going to get my toothbrush," Ryan told her, then added, heading out of the room: "But to tell you the truth, I'm not sure I give a fuck, Cile."
Since he looked a little upset, she told him, "You gave quite a fuck last night."
Ryan immediately turned red, and his head disappeared with the rest of his body down the hallway.
They felt like they were both in high school. Light was just beginning to come into the sky when they parked on Aramy in front of Weavers, and ran around the side of the store to the weedy backyard. Ryan grabbed Cecile's wrist and she said, "What?"
"Com' on," he hissed and pulled her to the gravelly alley. They began scooping up pebbles and then came back through the fence.
"Which one is Isaac's window?" Ryan said.
And Cecile pointed to the darkened one right above them, at the right corner of the back of the blue wooden former general store.
Ryan began tossing pebbles at the window and hissing, "Weaver! Weaver!"
Cecile looked at him, and then he said, "Your turn, you gotta join in too."
So she did, and in time, when the window opened and the skinny, bare torsoed form of Isaac Weaver had to duck the last pebble, he frowned, stuck out his bottom lip and then disappeared, and this time came back with his glasses, yawning and surveying them.
"Open the door!" Ryan said. "Let us in."
"Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin if you do that shit again," Isaac said. But he disappeared from the window, and then Cecile murmured, "Alliteration, approbation and contumnation."
"And fornication," Ryan added.
She looked at him.
"It does rhyme," he said.
Now the back door was opening, and Isaac's housecoat was on.
"You look like hell," Cecile told him.
"I'm sorry, I was only sleeping at seven in the morning. I won't do it again."
"Well, as long as you learned your lesson."
"Hey, man are you gonna leave us out here or let us in?" Ryan said.
"I'm thinking about it," Isaac told him, propped against his back door. But he cocked his head. The two of them came into the back of the house, and headed up the stairs into the kitchen before him.
"Hey, I bet we could cook," Ryan was saying. "We wouldn't even have to worry about driving anywhere. We can cook."
"I'd rather sleep," Isaac said.
"You can sleep in hell," Cecile told him.
"Wha?"
Cecile shrugged and said, "It's what my grandmother used to say when I didn't want to go to church on Sunday. She used to live with us."
"Where is she now?" said Ryan.
Cecile cocked her head and grinned, "Sleeping in hell."
Isaac refrained from scratching his crotch, and said, "Shouldn't we get Ef?"
"Oh, hell, Efrem's the one that tried to make us double date," Cecile said. "Let him stay in bed."
"I see it worked," Isaac looked from one to the other.
"Don't be crude," Cecile told him. "Where's your woman?"
"In my bed. Where I should be." Isaac yawned. "I'll wake her up so she can share in my misery."
"Wedded bliss," Ryan commented, and smiled.
After breakfast, when the house was still filled with the smell of bacon, biscuits from a can, burnt food and eggs, they came to an agreement. Jinny and Ryan, who hated kitchen work because of some strange familial gene could change the bed sheets, and clean up Isaac's room, though Cecile said that she didn't know why a man would rather pick up another man's room instead of washing his skillet. But Ryan always cleaned anything but a kitchen. Even at his dirtiest, most macho period in high school, his room and every room in the Laujinesse house was immaculate. His weakness was housework.
In Isaac's bedroom, with a window open to look over the yard and to the next blocks where the last leaves were falling from brown branches, Ryan on one end of the bed sheet and Jinny on the other spread out the bedsheet.
"So, you and Cecile?" Jinny said. "Again?"
Ryan shrugged as best he could.
"Is it real this time?"
"I don't know," he sort of mumbled.
Jinny handed him the quilt that went under the comforter, and looked at her cousin directly.
"Do you want it to be real?"
Ryan frowned at her.
"My God, Ryan Laujinesse, is that a terribly difficult question? You've been courting her since high school.."
"Well, Jin!" Ryan and Jinny spread out the comforter. He was straightening the edges.
"I always wanted it to be real," he said in a quiet voice. "I think it's cause I'm white."
"That you want it to be real?"
"No," Ryan looked at her impatiently. "That she doesn't. Or that we never have anything besides..."
"The occasional lay."
"Thank you for putting it so gently."
"You're welcome," Jinny said. "Now hand me those pillows. And honestly," she said as Ryan handed them to her, "if you didn't always get it on right before you left..."
"I'm never here," Ryan told her.
"I know, and that's a low risk relationship. Isaac is always here! He's always here when he smells good to me and he's sexy to me, and he's doing the most amazing stuff in bed--which I know is more than you wanted to hear--he's here. And when he's moody and his breath is bad, and all we do is lay in bed and sleep cause we're too tired for anything else he's here. And that makes it real. You and Cecile. It's like, hey honey, before I leave can I break a piece off."
"Virginia!" Ryan never used her real name.
Jinny went on picking up the room.
"Look, Ry, I'm not saying that's what it is. But that's what it looks like, probably feels like. There are plenty of guys in Rhodes who would all love to date Cecile, or fuck Cecile and, frankly, have done both. I love the girl. I love you. But she's loose as diarrhea and you're not that much better, so.... You better look for something more than a one night stand to cement your relationship. If you want one."
Ryan stood in the middle of the room with his arms wrapped around his chest, looking cute and helpless. He blew out his cheeks and then said, "There's no one else, you know? Cecile's got her pick of Rhodes, and in the whole state of Colorado there's no one else I'm interested in."
"You ever tell her you love her?"
Ryan shook his head.
"Not even in bed? Not even when you all are...?"
"I...I'm not that kind of guy that says everything in bed. I want to do some things, say some things. I want to shout it out or murmur it, but I get afraid, you know? Of how she'll react."
"Well," Jinny said, shrugging. "That's a problem.
Ryan laughed suddenly.
"What?" Jinny looked annoyed.
"You really have been with Cecile a long time.'
Jinny still didn't get it. Nor did she feel obliged to.
JAYSON SPEAKS
I'm like the third party, the all seeing eye who's not part of the story. Only I
know better--I think. And now I know that if I start to tell someone else's story it'll go into my own. Especially in this house, especially if it's about my family. There are lots of things that I thought would be cool that don't do much for me anymore. My ambitions for cool are not what they used to be...
I was lying awake listening to the radio once when I heard the story of some Cuban
baseball player who was contracted to play for the Yankees--I think--starting at a million
dollars. He turned it down because he said that he already had a nice bed, and what the hell would he do with a million dollars? Get a better bed? He loved home. I thought-- I prided myself on it--that I was better than Rhodes. In fact, I've long held the belief that I am better than my entire family. It's in the Laujinesse blood and some of our cousins down south say it's in Brennan blood, my mother's family, that we're stuck up. I think we are. I was taught to be stuck up. My brother, Ryan, comes home in a few days from living the good life in Colorado, getting quality education out west. He'll be coming back burnt out as hell because basically Mom and Dad drummed it into his head that he
shouldn't stay here. Here was fine and good for Jinny too, but not their Ryan.
And I suppose not their Jayson.
Let me tell you something. If you tell a kid he's ugly for a very long time he'll believe it, and if you tell a kid he's pretty, the same thing. But one day the same thing happens. I'm sure of it. Whatever you've been saying has the effect of just getting on the kids nerves. It's their limitation, and then it drives them crazy and makes them resentful. Maybe one day he Or she picks up a photograph and wonders exactly where this ugliness or prettiness lies.
I have been told over and over again that I am handsome and too good for Rhodes
and that I will go far and that I am brighter than other boys and better and I don't know if
that's true or not, but I know it hasn't done anything for me. I do know that I don't
necessarily want to go anywhere or fly very high. That's what I know. I want to stay home
for a while. I want to be an underachiever. I want to shop at Wal Mart. My God, what the
hell is wrong with that?
The grown-ups are gone, and when I am thinking that I realize that, technically, we're all
grown ups. In a few days Isaac will marry my cousin Jinny. He's twenty-four, and so is sheand so are Efrem and Cecile. Anne and I are eighteen now, grown up enough--though I don't feel it. Cecile is twenty-three, and she is in the kitchen with Jinny.
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah,
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah...
I forgot how the rest of it goes....
bows, bows, bows!
Us, the guys, and Anne, an honorary guy, are sitting zazen in the carpeted living room of my aunt and uncle's house on Bernard. Zazen, lotus position, meditation, right hand under left, eyes half closed, hopefully with a smile on your face. You are to find a point of meditation on the floor. You should have a mat. If you are a Buddhist, but we are Catholics and this is not a meditation hall so we are in a circle. Isaac and Efrem do this kind of stuff all the time which has always made me think they are the coolest guys on the planet. They just don't care what anyone thinks, and they're always bursting out with something metaphysical. So even though you're supposed to be meditating on a spot on the floor, and counting breaths, I am not good at either and watch Efrem and Isaac. They make me calm. I could watch them forever. They look like a Black Buddha and Jew Buddha, same expression, same smile, same glasses almost and I think, "They get It" whatever It is. They have never thought they were better than anyone else or been compelled to prove it or burnt themselves out being badasses. This is them, Isaac and Efrem, Efrem and Isaac, meditating, looking like two halves of the same cookie, both of them wildly different and yet I don't know two guys more like each other.
I would not admit, for so many reasons, that Anne is the same way, that I admire her. She is the closest thing I have to a little sister and to an evil genius. We are two months apart, me being born two months earlier. I admit that she is much smarter than me. At one time I would have said she had more intuition, and meant that I ran intellectual circles around her, but I know that's not true. Her grades were never that good because she never studied that hard. But she's a professor's daughter who has a whole library in her house to go through, and she has.
When we were real young and I was in Little League she would read the
encyclopedia for fun. It was an old World Book with cream covers, speckled with gold and impressive paints and pictures. When she was twelve, her parents traded it in for a current one. She was so excited until she saw it didn't have the same pictures. It wasn't as nice as the one from the 1950's.
"But it's current," Jinny told her trying to impress all the power of that one word on Anne.
"But I wanted to read about Socrates and Pericles and History," Anne told her. "And nothing's changed about them in the last thirty years."
Anne was--Anne is--an ancient history fanatic, and a Bible whizz. She used to wrap herself in red and pink blankets, and put on Passion Plays and Jesus stories. She'd be all of the characters. Perhaps the strangest thing I will ever see is my cousin Anne as the Sinful Woman, wiping up her own feet with her hair, and telling herself, "Go and sin no more."
And then she found ancient history, and though she called Pericles Peraculs, and
screwed up some of the names, she loved Athens. When we were ten she spent the whole
summer in a toga. Years later when I told her--to be nasty--that women weren't allowed to
come out of doors and men did everything in Athens she said that it was because the men
were all homos--which turned out to be right. And then she said that if she'd been alive back then she would have just been a prostitute cause they could probably go anywhere. And then I found out she was right about that too.
"Not a common hooker either," she'd gone on with her plans. "But a kept woman.
A rich woman."
"You're not that pretty," I told her, coldly. That was the worst thing for a Laujinesse. But Anne isn't a Laujinesse, and she said, "I know." then broke out into a smile.
"But I've got personality, and that means I can make people think I'm pretty."
In my house being good looking was what mattered, being a heartbreaker, and a
talented one was important, knowing how to swagger in front of guys and make them listen to your every word mattered, and knowing how to make a girl swoon was what mattered too. Coolness matters. And coolness means that everyone knows you are cool.
When you go to the O'Muil house it doesn't matter. It's supposed to be girls who
have to ber beautiful, and guys who don't care, but in our family it's different. Jinny and
Anne never seemed to care, and never seemed to be anything special to look at.
"When they need to be beautiful," I heard my aunt say to my mom one day, "They
will be."
And then one day I looked up, and Jinny was a bombshell, and Isaac had cleaned
himself up and she was hanging from his shoulder. And now I look and Anne is something I can't describe. Not pretty. She's someone a guy would stop for on the street, though.
She could make you buy her a drink, my dad would say.
I don't know what I could make someone do. I swear I am so tired now and I'm only eighteen. I can't imagine a whole life stretching out ahead. I can't imagine competing and jockeying for attention, and playing alpha male anymore. It's starting to get to me. Actually, I think seeing what it did to Ryan is starting to get to me. Right now, sitting on the living room floor with my cousin and Isaac and Efrem, breathing, is enough.
FOR THOSE DAYS BEFORE THE wedding the O'Muil house and the Laujinesse house are in an uproar, the Weaver bookstore, not so much. None of Isaac's mother's family will be attending. All of the Weavers, mostly non-practicing Jews-will be there. Some are a little amused to see Isaac getting married at St.Antonin's. There are a few, however, who have been through this before themselves. married Catholics, married Methodists, an occasional Scientoligist. Had to keep families happy. They know how it is.
Efrem and Cecile's graduation is not a big deal for the households, but it is for Mrs.Walker and all of their friends. So Jayson and Anne are there along with Jinny and Isaac. When Jayson looks for who is family, the only person present for Efrem or Cecile is Mrs.Walker, who isn't even Cecile's blood, but if you ask who is present for them the truth is they have more friends, more loved ones than probably anyone else. They are covered in hugs and kisses and made the belles of the whole ball. Everyone talks to them, all hang on their words. Except, Jayson notices, clapping his hands at some random announcement from the valedictorian, Ryan is not here.
While the graduation party is being held in St. Agnes hall, Jayson and Anne sneak
outside and roam the campus.
"It's pretty in spring," Jayson says.
"It's pretty all the time. Wanna see the lake?"
Anne guides him through the red brick halls, past the thick grassed quads. The
whole place is wrapped in trees, hidden from anything else. They climb a hill and pass
through a screen of trees and Jayson takes in his breath.
"Oh my God, this is beautiful," he says. "It's better than anything they've got at
Mc.Cleiss."
"You bet it is," Anne nods appreciatively and smooths the folds of her dress, daring to sit down in the grass. Jason, in his black trousers and white shirt sits beside her.
"The lake looks like a mirror, doesn't it?" Anne says. "The trees all in the water, and the sky looking right back up at itself."
Jayson says nothing. He just nods and Anne points to their right.
"See past those trees? That's the nun's cemetery. Where they used to bury the nuns... When they had them."
"The way you talk," Jayson said, "you should be going here in September and not
me."
"Oh, I think I am," Anne said.
"But you said--"
"I know what I said," Anne knew Jayson was talking about her being a nun. For the last year she’d had a sort of convent fever that began with watching over and over again the first half of The Sound of Music or The Song of Bernadetter and ended in her attempt to digest whole the works of Saint Teresa of Avila.
“I know what I said,” Anne repeated, “and I haven't even chickened out like most people. I just haven't seen what I like, and I get this feeling I won't see it by looking for it. I know what I want to be even if I don't have a name for it. And I know where I want to be." Anne tampted the ground around them: "Here."
"We'll be together!" Jayson emotes, completely out of character, before his cousin
turns him a look and he goes red. He knows he's given himself away. Jayson Laujinesse does not get excited, especially about his cousin.
He sighs, as if it doesn't matter that this jig or any other is up.
"I was never like you," he says.
"Really?" Anne's voice is devoid of sarcasm as she lays down in the grass beside her cousin.
Jayson presses on, tearing a little bit of grass from the earth and
threading it through his fingers.
"You always saw the world and you were always into nature and sunsets and I don't think I've ever paid attention to the world. Not in my whole life. I've paid a lot of attention to things and books and culture and me... a lot of attention to me, and to thoughts about the world, you know, theories. But I never paid attention to IT."
He looked down at Anne: "Does this make any sense?"
"A little," she said.
"It's like... I'm always concerned about why are we here and not just the fact that," he copied Anne and hit the ground, "we are here. I'm always going on about how it's useless or life is pointless or either it does have a point and la la la, but never about the fact that regardless if our being here means anything we are here... so enjoy it. Live in it."
"You sound like Isaac," Anne told Jayson, grinning up at him.
"I sound like you," Jayson accused.
"I'm corrupting you. Making you earthy and shit."
"I think you're trying to make me spiritual."
"I don't know there's any difference between one and the other," Anne said.
"But why am I like... I am?"
Anne said, "Cerebral?"
Jayson checked in his mental dictionary to see if this were the right word and then he said, "Yeah, that's it."
Anne sat up now and shrugged. She pronounced, "It's because you're a man."
