Читать книгу The Question Authority - Rachel Cline - Страница 17

At the end of the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Beth and I swore we would never, ever, ever become members of Rasmussen’s cult. (We didn’t have the concept of “cult” yet—this was pre-Moonies—but we knew that there was something more than nicknames that bound together the eighth-grade girls every year.) We were in Beth’s finished basement—a large wood-paneled room decorated with caricatures of her parents drawn at Grossinger’s Resort: giant-headed, tooth-heavy creatures skiing, golfing, riding on a speedboat. We sat at the bamboo-edged wet bar, a piece of sky-blue American Tourister hand luggage open on the counter between us. The case contained Beth’s mother’s castoff makeup collection and had a mirror mounted inside its lid. In my mind its contents present a perfect still life, a pile of very specific detritus that I can see as if it were a photograph.

“Do you think they actually do stuff with him?” Beth asked me. I didn’t have to ask who “they” or “him” were, even though we’d been actively recapping our respective summer vacations until that very second. “Gross me out!” I’m sure I responded, and I’m sure we giggled, because that was what we mostly did together, in and out of school. Beth had orange lipstick on her teeth. I watched her prime a cake of eyeliner with spit. I remember the sensation of having my eyelids painted, knowing the cool slickness was saliva but not minding, really. “You should wear this to school,” she told me. I probably said, “When chickens have teeth,” because that was one of our running jokes—a reference to the time in sixth grade when Beth had attempted to comment on an overly obvious plot turn in Encyclopedia Brown by rhetorically asking, “I mean, is the Pope Jewish?” Then we played Would You Rather.

Touch Bob Rasmussen’s penis or eat a raw hamburger?

Let Bob Rasmussen put his tongue in your mouth or spend a day locked in the first-floor broom closet with Mrs. Cashin’s farts?

Broom closet, I said, but it wasn’t necessarily true. The tongue thing would only last a second and I would kind of like to know what that feels like, although it would have to be over as soon as I said so. The closet would be hard for me, even fart-free. I get claustrophobic.

Beth and I often argued. In retrospect, the subject seemed to have always been a version of the same thing: what was the truth and which one of us understood it? Once, in Beth’s recently redecorated bedroom (which featured an “Expressionist” painting that precisely matched the colors in the olive-, turquoise-, and navy-checkered bedspreads), I pointed out that her new wood paneling was not real. Beth would more readily have accepted that the earth was flat. I didn’t know the term “particle board,” but I could see that the wood grain pattern repeated itself, and was printed on the surface rather than integral to it—I have always looked at things a little too closely. Another time, we stopped speaking for two days over a magazine ad for blonde hair dye, which showed a woman beside a “candid” photo of her supposed younger self, with identical locks. Beth believed this to be a real childhood photo of the model as a young woman; I was outraged by her naïveté. Later, we had an ongoing debate over whether or not Rasmussen “came from money.” He’d told our class that his family had been on food stamps, to illustrate that people’s assumptions about who was on welfare were racist and misguided. Beth said this meant he was “working class.” I said that was impossible, because he freely admitted that he’d gone to boarding school; she said he could have been on scholarship. And so on.

Later, the night of the pre-Rasmussen sleepover, lying in the twin beds in Beth’s bedroom with the lights out, we returned to the subject of our new teacher and our classmates and who would, and who wouldn’t, or might, and whether the girls from previous years really were having sex or just acting like they were.

“I can imagine second base, maybe.”

“I think further,” said Beth.

“Why?”

“How should I know why? I’m not doing it.”

“I meant, why do you think that they go further?” I waited a really long time for her to answer. I could tell she had something to say if she could figure out how to say it.

“I saw them in the art room once. Him and Tamsin. He had his hands in her pants.”

“Both hands? Did they see you?”

“No.”

“That’s so barfy!”

“Barfamatic!”

“I would never even let him touch me on the arm,” I said.

“Not even on the toe!”

“And if he gives me a stupid nickname I’ll tell him to shove it.”

“Did I ever tell you he was my teacher in third grade?”

“What?” I looked at her with real horror. How could she have withheld this fact?

“Mrs. Stark had her baby early and he subbed. Just for like a month.”

“You never said that. That you knew him already.”

“It was third grade!”

“So, have you been to his house?”

“Yeah. Once.”

“Does he really have a waterbed?”

“Nora! I didn’t go in their bedroom! It was the whole class. We did folk singing.”

“But you never would, would you? Go in his bedroom?”

“You’re so gross. Of course not.”

“Let’s make a pact.”

“Okay, no blood though.”

So it was a spit-swear—a step up from a double-dog-dare-you, but inviolable in my eyes. I still don’t really understand why I had to banish her so completely when she broke it, but banish her I did. And I guess I now have an opportunity to make up for that.