The sleepover was unscheduled. In fact it supplanted Jeremy’s habituated Wednesday expectations of a supper his dad called “fiesta pasta,” which incorporated together noodles and chili from a plastic bottle and rudimentary tacos, served like everything else in his home with boiled carrots or broccoli. He and his dad ate around a circular table which was far too large for just them two, but those proportions congealed in Jeremy’s mind as “normal” so that when he ate at any other table, like in the school cafeteria or at another boy’s home, he felt a mixed buzz of enticement and horror at the intimacy, the feeling of encroachment. When dinner ended, there was homework and then TV (by strict ordinance it was never TV then homework), after which came a delicate and multifaceted process called “washing up.” During washing up Jeremy would steam the bathroom and undress, then he would occupy the fog for some minutes before wandering into his freezing bedroom where he lingered until he needed to revisit the heat, first fog then bedroom then back to the fog. In each station he rubbed the skin on his arms and his belly to the point of redness implying pain, and slapped on his thighs and butt arythmically, like searching for the perfect slap whose noise and stinging sensation totally corresponded. Impossible. When he had exhausted this exercise he bathed and brushed his teeth and then went straight to bed, since brushing your teeth is the finale. That night, however, his whole routine was interfered with and he was sent to sleep over at Sammy Devoe’s house.
It is a mistake to think that third graders do not have schedules. They certainly exist, although their activities and time-boundaries are mostly unintelligible to adults and can change from one crack in the sidewalk to the next, like the whiplash of an untied shoelace on a small dirty sneaker. Nonetheless everything is penciled in and happens accordingly. Jeremy’s dad usually acted as his secretary and today had initiated this change of schedule. That was not in itself bothersome to Jeremy, since Sammy was alright and he enjoyed sleeping out; what troubled him was his father’s orchestration.
Jeremy first noticed something strange in the morning when he awoke to a much cleaner house; no scattered clothing or dishes adorned the counters, the stairs; the books which his dad relentlessly heaped in the living and dining rooms had disappeared, perhaps to a basement closet; his Playstation controllers, untangled through a miracle charm, rested in the cabinet beneath the TV in the den; and most ominously, all floors and surfaces glistened, which had not happened in over four years. His dad burst into the kitchen and intoned, “Slept well clean your room it’s going to be a great day!” without bothering to differentiate between question, command, and prediction. Later, after school, he slapped himself on the forehead and said, “Oh! I forgot to tell you! I arranged for you to sleep over tonight at Sammy’s house, ok?” And then in the car on the way to Sammy’s house, Jeremy saw his dad’s face shaved closer than ever, like with a surgical laser, and smelled his aggressively perfumed neck which choked out the conversation. To Jeremy it seemed like trying to conceal the fact that he was a man, which was an understandable thing to do in general, but still mysterious in particular. On top of all that, his dad smiled in the car and giggled falsely and expressed some excitement about the “impromptu sleepover.” Somehow this irritated Jeremy, the use of the word impromptu which he did not understand and automatically disliked, and especially the shapes of his father’s cheeks and lips as he pronounced it. It menaced him, embodying in obnoxious syllables a fresh emerging existence in which he could no longer comprehend his dad.
“Have fun tonight,” said his father as he carried the boy’s things to the door and knocked. “Sammy’s mom will drive you to school tomorrow – I packed your things for tomorrow in your bag, ok? – so I’ll see you when you get home from school. Love you Jer, don’t stay up too late, ok?” A tall woman opened the door swiftly and Jeremy returned his love to his father. As he walked past Sammy’s mom into the house he hovered upon a child’s thought, one part affection and one part vengeance, of how lonely dad would be at the circular table by himself without his son or piles of books or even his stubble.
Sammy, a blonde, lumbering child who in 3rd grade was almost five feet tall, greeted him and led him upstairs to his bedroom. There were two beds side by side with matching green plaid covers, though Sammy’s bed had a wooden frame and headboard and straddled the wall whereas Jeremy’s occupied a questionable zone; it was placed mid-room unattached, a bulk of loose furniture for which it was impossible to find any organizing logic or association, besides the inexact parallelism with Sammy’s bed. Jeremy recalled how a year before when the class took a roller skating trip, Sammy, with his clumsiness and puffy eyes, spent two hours clutching the wall of the rink along with most of the girls and occasionally toppled himself nonetheless, while the other boys including Jeremy flung themselves recklessly into the huge central void. Jeremy made the satisfying discovery that his temporary bed had wheels.
Soon the Devoe family plus Jeremy assembled for dinner. When Jeremy and Sammy came down into the kitchen, Mr. Devoe was already seated at the table with Sammy’s 13 year old twin sisters, who sat upright and had straight strawberry hair but were differentiated by the colors of their braces, which incrementally straightened their teeth. Mr. Devoe was a round man with lots of dark hair, not just on top of his head but also surging upward from beneath his collar front and back, and with patches on his knuckles. The boys sat across from Sammy’s sisters as a short woman of Hispanic complexion brought out steam-emitting dishes of chicken breast, roasted potatoes and stir-fried tofu with vegetables.
“Hi boys,” said Mr. Devoe in a low but enthusiastic voice. “How are you Jeremy? Please, take food. We have plenty, what would you like?”
“Where’s mom?” asked Sammy, pouring himself diet iced tea.
“She’ll be down in a second, I think. Women, huh?” chuckled Mr. Devoe at the uncomprehending boys. He then added to his daughters, “Don’t worry, you aren’t women just yet. Still my little girls.” Mrs. Devoe soon entered magnificently. She strode in with perfect posture and wearing jewelry on her hands and ears. The lipstick she wore was a severe maroon, and Jeremy abruptly caught her fine artificial scent which caused him to inhale deeply, involuntarily. He watched her with wariness and meditative eyes.
The discussion was generally incohesive, and as far as Jeremy was concerned he chatted mostly with Sammy about bugs (Sammy had an unusual interest in insects and Jeremy was his most cooperative listener, so that naturally became a pillar of their friendship), a friend’s antics during recess, and a show on Nickelodeon. The housekeeper wandered in and out of the room, transporting various objects to and from the island at the center. Jeremy contemplated her position. He sensed that she belonged to that island and it belonged to her, which was appropriate because he knew she was foreign and perhaps tropical or Caribbean, so the kitchen island must entail a semblance of home. At any rate, she seemed most comfortable in its proximity.
Jeremy was a true lover of food, and tonight’s was good. Like all such true lovers he was able to shift into a focused eating, wherein his tongue commandeered the system and became the dominant body-muscle; he could thus, undistracted, more completely savor the meal. Jeremy was in this state when he was visited by a violent disruption. The agent was Mrs. Devoe. Just as he was putting a potato-laden fork into his mouth she seized it from him and then, employing with devastating efficacy an ancient martial art, she wrapped one perfumed palm around his chin and twisted his head to face her while, with her free hand, she rubbed a napkin harshly over his little cheeks and lips, stretching them monstrously. She then quickly inverted the napkin to show him the ugly proof, look how dirty it is, and said flatly, “There you go, now you are all clean.” He would have smiled but for his bewilderment and dry-faced pain.
When Mrs. Devoe twisted his head his large brown eyes were directed to a kind of apparition; it was not her face that he saw, since she had swooped from above and was crouching over him, but rather the broad sheet of her polyester whitish blouse; underneath, her breasts were boldly delineated forming a frightening pair of convex canons, the kind that were operational throughout military history, as Jeremy had learned in school about the arsenals of the Revolutionary War. For easier mobility these weapons were unstrapped, which made them deadlier, and at the centers her nipples characteristically protruded like bayonets affixed to rifle-barrels. It was characteristic because Jeremy had long been aware that Mrs. Devoe was something of a stickler, always immaculately polished and thorough and intolerant of minor flaws; she also had a peculiar way of saying Samuel (never Sammy), somehow turning it out with four syllables. Being a child, Jeremy lacked a clinical psychoanalytic or psychosexual vocabulary so he could not label her anal retentive or even O.C.D., but he had learned a word in his advanced reading class from his teacher, Mrs. Sullivan – fastidious – at which point he had the epiphany that Sammy’s mom was a fastidious woman.
The farthest thing from Mrs. Devoe, Mrs. Sullivan was a gray-haired, squat woman with a soft, crackling, perhaps sickly voice that often put children to sleep at their desks. Likewise, her breasts were diplomatic and peaceful objects which continued harmoniously from the rest of her body. Having never seen them and possessing an incomplete understanding of certain anatomical facts, Jeremy doubted that hers had the pointed parts at all, whereas Mrs. Devoe’s bayonets always protruded fastidiously. Because of the inherent contrast between these two women as well as his almost non-existent exposure to other adult females, Jeremy naturally transmuted them and their bodies into diverging archetypes of femininity. His child-mind produced a thought which distressed him: that one day in the future he would have to make some impossible decision between them.
Nobody at the table apparently thought anything of Mrs. Devoe’s maneuver; the dirty napkin justified everything. But while Jeremy’s head was turned like that, with his neck bent and his face displayed in profile like a pyramid drawing of the Boy King, he was able to see beyond Sammy’s mom to the island where the housekeeper sat, leaning on her pudgy elbows. She was staring at him. Her eyebrows were exceptionally thin and waxy; beneath them her eyes were luminescent; slowly she curled her lips into some kind of kiss. Jeremy detected in her face a look of understanding, an assumption of community, yet it was all interspersed with some perverse mockery. He shut his eyes.
Sammy turned off the lights so the room was illuminated only by the sporadic blueness of the TV. It was late and a school night. The tall boy was cursed with shrunken pajama pants – a fact made obvious upon his climb into bed – and his white calves glistened among all the darkened objects of the room, until they were wrapped in the blanket. Next to him Jeremy lay in his haphazard cot. The two waking boys kept silent for a few moments, gazing intently at the nearly mute TV and rubbing their bodies into their sheets trying to reach that point of perfect comfort, to acclimate to being horizontal and smothered in fabric.
Then Jeremy, with his brown eyes fixed on the ceiling and his left arm dangling off the side of his bed, rotating as if he was turning a door knob, said, “What do you think your sisters are doing?” Both were acutely aware that the twin girls, being older, could stay up later and this basic injustice stung them just as it does nightly to perhaps a half billion children around the world.
“I dunno, probably talking on the phone,” replied Sammy.
“Both of them?”
“Yeah, probably. They talk on the phone like all the time, it’s so annoying.” He did not explain what, in particular, annoyed him about it, and it was doubtful if he could summon a reason had Jeremy asked simply “why?”; more likely, just the idea that they were on the phone all the time irritated his sense of self-importance and, also, it frustrated his little mind to be habitually denied half of conversations that were by all appearances and sounds hilarious. Luckily Jeremy posed a different question.
“How could they both be on the phone at once?” he asked. “I mean, well they aren’t talking to each other–”
“They have cellphones,” said Sammy firmly and definitively, as though this fact answered all possible questions. Jeremy, for his part, took it that way too; the lives of these girls had just then ceased to be comprehensible, all their methods impenetrable, it was no use to ask. But these compounded brutal reminders of his own childness – like measuring sticks placed in front of roller coasters at parks and like the feeling of the gym floor against your butt when you sit with the other kids at a school assembly and, especially, the words single file – stirred within him a semi-dormant mischief, the backlash of the immature. So upwards floated an idea.
“I have an awesome idea,” Jeremy introduced with his shrill voice, utterly tone-deaf, masterless, so he could never sing innocently and instead often faked song with his lips (and gesticulating eyebrows, as he had observed to be integral to everyone’s singing) when he was in company. “Let’s do Mrs. Sullivan.”
“What do you mean?” said Sammy, who was often puzzled by one thing or another and therefore had a hard time realizing when his puzzlement was justified. That is always the most immediate concern of such a person, not to resolve the jam but to justify and, if possible, corroborate it. An uncorroborated puzzlement at that age is a trauma, nothing less.
“I mean like how the fifth graders did Mr. Castellis, they flipped over his desk and spilled out all the papers and then taped the papers all over the walls. Every spot on all the walls was covered, like wallpaper.” He reveled in this story, which was of course mostly myth seeing as Mr. Castellis was known to be a cold, unfeeling man who didn’t hesitate to punish and fail students, and it didn’t help that he resembled a Frankenstein with his partial onset of Bell’s palsy plus a general squareness in his neck. The fifth graders for all their valor were not suicidal. But Jeremy particularly loved the pattern of the prank, its movement from order to disorder and back via reconstruction.
“Did they get in trouble?”
“You didn’t hear about this? No, they didn’t get in trouble. No one knew who did it, so they all just got a speech, I think.”
“Oh.”
“Wanna do it to Mrs. Sullivan? I mean, we should do a different one, but let’s do something good.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Let’s think of something.” The conversation, being unsustainable, dropped and Jeremy groaned contemplatively while flipping over onto his stomach. He attempted to reach downward, actually to dig, all the way to the floor but his arm was too short; his shoulder hugged the edge of the bed and his fingers remained suspended over the wooden floor like icicles in a cave. Would Sammy’s gigantic arm have reached? The underbelly of the temporary bed felt abrasive as he fingered his starched mattress. A few minutes later he said, “I have an idea. You know how she drinks coffee every day from a Styrofoam cup? We could poke a hole–” Wherever this was going, it stalled. He knew that in Sammy’s house Styrofoam was a terrifying word, almost as bad as the other S word and really worse because his mom said it causes cancer. And anyway Jeremy noticed with dismay that his companion had fallen asleep. He was beyond reach.
For Heaven’s sake, Jason, if not me then who? His father? I just don’t see who could take care of him. Is Samuel going to teach him? Huh! And his mother – even when she was alive – you think he learned a thing from her, like how to function as a normal person? The same woman irresponsible enough to get behind the wheel completely intoxicated when she has her kid in the car? My God, Jason, get with it. How to get a D.U.I., that’s what she taught him. Studies have shown that terrible habits are passed down genetically…Do you have any idea what the statistics–
The night, the heat, began to harass Jeremy. He threw off the covers and initiated a series of motions that had no real explanation: first he pushed his chin down into his throat forcing his neck into a contortion; he then wrapped his forehead with the fold at the front-side of his elbow, bicep to temple; he crossed and uncrossed his calves and shins, took off his shirt, then squinted tightly as if trying to compress the room. All of these actions, as well as many others, are normal ridiculous tactics of those who cannot fall asleep. And how could he, when nothing in his developing heart was settled? Nothing. Plus his mouth was parched.
After an hour or two, measured in excruciating night-hours, some governing body inside him issued the order and – in total compliance, a child soldier – he got out of bed. He capered up despite the fact that he was not wearing a shirt and had already brushed his teeth. Across the hall as he passed the master bedroom he heard a muffled commotion and Mrs. Devoe’s strident voice articulating something, nearly yelling. No noise came from the twins’ room but, tauntingly, yellow light escaped from under the crack of the door. He crept down the stairs.
Upstairs there had been carpet for Jeremy’s sockless feet but in the hallway downstairs, which was now dominated by a dense blue darkness, the tiles were cold and didn’t give. He groped himself into the kitchen, a desolate place compared to earlier but also, somehow, much more beautiful, more seductive; just as a ruin, which in whatever ancient time it stood, undamaged, was hardly admired, it was simply there and the local ancient souls did not drop their jaws in continuous wonderment at its beauty, and yet in our modern world when that very same structure is crumbled or decayed, a remnant which is actually a mess, our aesthetes find it breathtaking and millions of tourists worship it to pieces. Something of that was in the kitchen, as Jeremy saw it, in its beautiful darkness and wasted glory. His child’s mind took him to Indiana Jones though he did not feel like a discoverer, nothing of that bravery, and not even the joy of having dug out, unearthed, an artifact. Instead he felt the tremor of encroaching on sacred kitchen ground. He leaned his weight onto the island which served as a sanctuary in the middle of the room.
An extremely fair-skinned woman got up from the couch. She went to find her coat, because she had brought it with her and because her thin black dress hardly covered her torso, let alone limbs; it would not be enough out there. In her late 30’s with elevated cheek bones, she was not thin but pretty. She was explaining to a man how exhausted she was after the wonderful taco dinner he had cooked and how early she had to go to work the next day. With his eyes he, of average height and about her age though he looked older, conveyed an entreaty: But stay. She saw his look and nearly capitulated; ten years ago she would have submitted to such a gaze – all women would have and do on a regular basis. Tonight, however, she held tightly onto her coat which rested across her sleeveless arms and with that gesture reinforced her adamancy. Tomorrow was work, she repeated. Her schedule just didn’t allow. She kissed him in that subtle way some women have of communicating multi-paragraph memos through a long kiss, which he thought he received. She left and the man, who was on the verge of disbelief, seated himself at an enormous circular table. Later when he was alone in bed he would wonder, investigate her face in his memory and then re-wonder – God knows what she was thinking and is in on the joke. Did he in fact see it, the fear, the recoil, a part of her glance that revealed a thought, Do not get entangled in this with him? She didn’t want him. That was part of it. The second part, especially decisive: she could not become a mother de facto. All those ever-rising agonies he tortured himself with later, in bed alone, but just then when she left he was enchanted, sheltered, by the wet and personal kiss which stayed longer than she.
By now completely caught up in this fantasy, which he was only partially conscious to, Jeremy approached the fridge like an object of deep mystery and treasure. Most amazingly the fridge cooperated because when he pulled open the giant metallic door a pure swath of light overpowered him, tumbling from the container exactly like the thing in Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was scarier than darkness. Jeremy had always thought the light inside the fridge – as well as the gurgling noises it sometimes made, the smells it emitted, and especially the strange and incredible magnetism of its doors – implied that it was a thinking creature, a kind of steward of the kitchen. Tonight he stood before the shining open door in a stupor, utterly forgetting he wanted milk. The room behind him was now half-lit, except for the inflated superimposed shadow shape of a small boy looking for milk.
After a few long seconds he stood on his toes, with the points of his heels wiggling in the air, and stretched for the 1% gallon of milk which he had found on the top shelf. He left the door open and swung around to the island. While swinging that way he experienced a terror, since he noticed to his right a vague figure sitting at the table, almost entirely obscured but for the indirect light of the fridge. It was a ghost, or a Nazi – it was the moment of impact, the deployment of an airbag and the throttling abrasion of his neck against a polyester and nylon seat belt. But then a sweet feminine voice spoke to him, unexpectedly not in German. She spoke in rhythmic Spanish. He faced the housekeeper and walked toward her; he was now at the edge of the table. She uttered another phrase in her tongue, and though Jeremy did not comprehend at all he tried to recite it in his mind, internalizing the exotic movement created by the ~ accent placed over the n. Tucked within her voice he detected the scent of whiskey, naturally revolting to him but also strangely alluring. The enigmatic glass bottle sat there on the table.
“Sorry,” he said quietly, “I just wanted some milk.”
Jeremy went back upstairs without even drinking anything. Sammy’s parents were dead quiet, apparently sleeping, but the light in the girls’ room was still there under the crack, so they were at whatever secret business teenage girls do which boys like him are never apprised of. His temporary bed welcomed him from its spot in the middle of the room. With his face to the wall and his long back facing Jeremy beneath the covers, Sammy cautiously opened his eyes.
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