Later

Sarah Terez Rosenblum

“Look at those sexy rollers!”

This is Ryan Jacobson. I’m going to wind up taller than him; my dad’s Lithuanian, Irish and Swedish, and some of those types get fucking tall. In the one photo I have of him, he’s backed up against a moving truck—his head clears the roof almost—and you can see mom’s shadow at his feet.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s dad’s the bald turd in those law firm commercials. Direct quote: “If you’ve been injured in a car accident, we’ll make sure you get all the pain and suffering you deserve.” You wanna tell me how no one caught that? Ryan’ll be lucky to hit five foot nine.

Maybe I’ll be behind an oak desk drinking whiskey. Ryan walks in and hands me his resume. And yeah, he’s all classed up in a navy suit and silver cufflinks, but I’ve seen him in his camp shirt and swim trunks. I know his knees point inward like gossiping birds. And maybe I give him the job, and maybe I laugh him off the premises. Depends how the chef made my eggs that morning; some days the yolk comes out too hard.

That’s Later though. Humans are the one species that know about it. The only thing spiders and zebras and iguanas understand is Now.

Ryan might not know about Later. He just told a whole mess of twelve-year-old girls that they’re sexy. He’s a counselor; he should know better, but now he’s whistling and applauding while all of them roll down the hill. Even Rachel acts like she loves it. That’s one point deducted, for sure.

“I’m gonna sit next to Kim tonight at bonfire.” Next to me, Walter’s making one of his lanyards. This one’s purple plastic. He seems really gay sometimes, except he’s obsessed with nailing Kim.

“Ambitious.” I watch Rachel and the other Habima girls brush themselves off and run back up the hill.

“Don’t underestimate me, asshole.”

Kim’s the girl counselor version of Ryan if they were both Sex Robots. All of the guys in Gavri have whacked off to her, probably at the same time. Just like the Habima girls pretend they’re kissing Ryan, when really they’re pressing their lips to the backs of their hands.

“Kim’s not that much taller than me.” Walter secures a knot at one end of his bracelet or keychain or whatever he’s making.

“Sure. Not when you don’t count her hair.”

Rachel’s hair is as jewy as Kim’s, but it’s brown, so she looks less like a lion sucking live wires.

“And so what if I’m younger?” Walter tucks and weaves plastic. “My dad says age is just a number.”

Rachel’s exactly my age, but Walter’s right. This is about levels or leagues. We tried to develop an overall point system last summer, but it was tough to account for all the variables. Take Kim. Right now she’s splayed out tanning on one of the picnic tables. She’s got the top button of her cut-offs open, her blue camp shirt rolled to her ribs. Meanwhile, Walter’s over here wearing glasses he broke the first day we got to Wisconsin, and he doesn’t believe in showers. All that should make Kim off-the-charts-inaccessible, but Walter’s got hair in his pits already, and Kim thinks ponies are baby horses, even though her boobs are the size of God’s head.

“The problem with you and Kim is systemic,” I tell Walter.

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Picture a turtle who wants to bone a dove.”

“Don’t act like your chances are better.” Walter watches me watch Rachel. “She’ll never forgive you for stealing her shit.”

“Your turn for the LoveScope.”

This is Hyperactive Chipmunk Girl. She’s not that important. All the camp girls do this thing where they touch forefinger to forefinger, thumb to thumb to make a heart-shaped gap between their hands. I’m just trying to eat sweet and sour chicken without choking, but Chipmunk stands behind me and makes me stare through the hole. I could shake her off, but I’m always on the lookout for a Template; life happens too quickly to process. Like, when Dad picked me up at the airport and we headed straight to Tilamook Falls.

That was last August. Mom said she was “frankly shocked” that he asked me to visit. “Your father loves you,” she said, “but the problem with marrying someone who rises to the occasion is they only know how to respond.” We didn’t even stop at his place to drop off my suitcase. Suddenly, I’m on a misty path and he’s taking my picture. Behind me, this Bilevel Hydroextravaganza, so close I can feel its drool on the back of my head.

Processing is accomplished through memory, which is totally fallible, polluted by other, older memories. They wait like mom says your relatives do—in heaven to greet you, so by the time you’re through the gates, you’ve forgotten whether you liked them when they were alive. And emotions screw with everything. Trying to Experience something when you’re all stuffed with feelings is like riding a bike with a blanket over your head.

I don’t feel shit for Chipmunk, so I can actually Experience her arms around me. The fruity smell of her lip-crap or her hair. I can commit to memory the pressure of her fingertips, how her tiny boobs press my upper back. That’s why she makes a good Template. It doesn’t make me hard, cause I’m discerning, and also as a precautionary measure, I’m already thinking about damp books fully of moldy poetry, and dead things like ferrets and cats.

“Uh-oh,” Chipmunk says. “Guess who’s your destiny!” Through her heart hole, I see Rob, the guy who cleans our toilets. He’s at a corner table eating challah. Rob’s about seventy, and angry he never became a novelist. I can’t remember how I found that out. At camp there are things you just know.

What I know about Rachel’s stuffed dog is different, because she told me. Last October, right after everything. She felt sorry for me about my dad’s St. Christopher’s medal. I’d found it in my backpack over Colorado, when I was rummaging in the side pocket for a pen. My dad never took it off before that. You can see it in the moving truck picture. It’s the one thing consistent I remember. So, finding the medal in my pack had felt like a promise; dad telling me this time, he’d see me real soon. Then in gym class, they tried to take it away during the flag football unit, after it swung way out and gave this kid Toby Masterson a bloody nose. That’s why I got suspended when I got done punching Coach Jenkins. They couldn’t reach my mom, so Rachel’s dad picked us both up. He didn’t want to make two trips though, so Rachel ended up leaving school early too.

“Why’d you do it?” she asked. In the front seat, her dad talked loud about synergy into his fat car phone. If the guy on the other end wasn’t deaf, he would be soon.

“I needed it near me.”

“I’m like that with Germany.” Rachel pressed her finger into her foggy window.

“The country?”

“Spelled different.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about.” I didn’t even feel stupid saying it. I hadn’t really known what anyone was talking about since last month when we got the call.

“I’ll show you.” In her garage, Rachel popped open her seatbelt. “Wait here,” she said after I’d followed her into the back hall. Her dad pushed past me, talking now about paradigm shifts. He’s not who I’ll be Later. Even back then, when Rachel’s mom still loved him, he seemed feeble, always making some big splashing fuss about nothing, drowning in the sad pond of his life.

After I got tired of staring at Rachel’s galoshes and counting all her mom’s hiking boots, I wandered into the kitchen and checked the cabinets. I wanted some mixed, salted nuts.

“What are you doing?”

It’s stupid to think so much about one girl’s index finger. But I do. I think about Rachel’s all the time. She tapped me on the shoulder and I turned fast and bumped into it a little. It hurt in a good way when her nail scraped my jaw.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Here.” She held out a stuffed animal.

“Is that a lamb?” I reached for it, but she pulled it to her chest.

“German Shepherd.”

The dog’s nose was made of some kind of black leather padding with the yarny part busting through.

“I need him close to me. Not like I’m OCD about it, but when I was a kid I took him to school, even. Objects mean things, sometimes. They stand in for what you can’t have."

I glanced toward her cabinets.

“I’m showing you because of your necklace.” Rachel said it slow like I might be retarded.

“Do you have any mixed, salted nuts?” I asked, because Jesus Christ, maybe I was.

I obviously shouldn’t have read Rachel’s diary, but girls are impossible to get to know when it’s not summer. In the hall last winter, Rachel’s friends were human-shields, matching bookends. And in the classroom, everything stank of wet wool. I had this one other chance right before Christmas. Rachel was outside the bathroom in the Fine Arts building. I thought her glasses were fogged because that building’s full of the trumpet players’ exhales, but she was sniffling too and wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

I’m: “What’s wrong?”

And she’s: “I didn’t get the part.”

And I’m: “Who did?”

And she’s: “Fucking Wendy.”

And I’m: “Why?”

“Because she’s the right kind of pretty.”

Rachel, nothing here is forever. Later is coming. It’s for people like us who can use our own words when we’re talking, we can spell, and we know things about God and the circulatory system. Ten years from now, Wendy won’t even be my secretary. She’ll be the girl my chauffeur nails with my car.

Except what I really said was, “How’s your dog’s name spelled if it’s not like the country?”

Rachel looked at me like I’d made everything worse and on purpose.  “It took you that long to ask me?” She wiped her nose and straightened her t-shirt. “I’m not telling you everything about me just because you’re sad.”

In homeroom, the next day she stayed tucked between her bookends. One of them caught me staring and said I was creepy, but Walter’s cousin is the kid who shot those two teachers at that Christian school in Virginia, so watching Rachel shower, which I’ve done too, is basically retro. Aren’t you nostalgic right now for all the girls you stalked?

Walter wears a fucking suit jacket to bonfire.

Wide-lapeled like he pulled it from a time-traveling dumpster. My dad had one similar. I asked mom if people used to get dressed up when they were moving, and she said the fabric smelled like sunlight and mothballs when he carried her across the threshold, and I said how are you defining threshold, and she said never mind. Dad’s also got a scar on his upper lip in the photo. Or the picture might be warped, my mom’s not sure. On the flight out to Oregon last August, I’d made a list of the questions I would ask him, but the trip went too fast, and I asked the wrong ones. I couldn’t even check on the scar thing, cause when dad picked me up he had a beard.

“Every guy out here seems like he’s grown one.” Beside me at Powell’s, he’d faced the book shelves. That’s how we were the whole weekend, me looking up at dad, while he stared at something—a book spine, a hamburger, the coast.

“When did you start it?”

“You don’t start a beard, you just stop shaving.”

I watched him pry a softcover from the case.

“What’s that?”

“Yeats.”

“Who’s he?”

“Dead Irish poet.”

In line to check out, dad said, “I’ll probably shave it. But I feel like I’d need to go somewhere. Then if I came back, it would be less of a shock.”

When I got home, I showed mom how dad got me Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn #1, and told her about the dead Irish guy, and she said, “Those are your dad’s priorities in a nutshell. He can’t leave a poetry book behind.” After that, I heard her rattling around in the medicine cabinet. When I was a kid, I used to think Valium was the same thing as volume, cause mom said she took it sometimes to turn her thoughts down.

“You’re shitting me with that jacket,” I say to Walter while we’re eating dinner.

“Don’t mess with me, asshole.”

“You look like you’re from the seventies.”

“You act like you’re the president, but everyone knows the truth.” Walter douses his half-eaten sandwich with Kool-aid. Maybe he has too many sisters. It says in Rachel’s diary girls do that so they won’t eat.

July 5: Kim taught us to diet by pouring salt or Kool-aid on half of our lunches. I said, but I’m still hungry, and she said “challah doesn’t taste as good as thin.”

In Rachel’s diary her handwriting is different than on the worksheets she lets me copy. Like only in private is it fully itself. There probably should have been a Temporal Pocket between discovering the notebook in her sleeping bag and opening it, big enough to hold some moral qualms. I’m picturing it like in these corduroy pants I’m growing out of. Each morning, before school, I’d load the pockets. Mom called me a magpie. All day, I’d imagine the buttons and guitar pics and my dad’s expired YMCA card all hobnobbing. I’m in math class, banging my snout on some long division, but in my pocket all the charms keep each other company, even though I’m out here all alone.

“Nobody knows anything,” I tell Walter now. I’ve got Rachel’s pillow and her dog in my backpack, and I don’t know what to do about the diary. Maybe I should have left it in the cabin under my bed. All the Ryan stuff Rachel wrote makes me nauseous, or else it’s this mucus-y ice cream. She’s stuck on Ryan when it’s obvious he and Kim are dating, and everyone knows Sex Robots mate for life.

Maybe I’m the pilot of this international airliner. Kim’s a stewardess, and we thunder over the Atlantic. Ryan’s in Elgin working at a used car lot. He drinks soup from a thermos and it dries in the corners of his mouth. In Paris, my hotel has a fruit basket. No shitty pears like in the one from dad’s old college roommate. Also there’s some wine mom called “fancy shmancy,” and this rip-top can of mixed, salted nuts. Every night, Kim knocks on the door of my suite pretending she’s hungry, and then we do a bunch of shit I’m too gentlemanly to explain.

I wonder why I’m not married to Rachel though. Maybe that happens even Later than this.

“Holy shit.”

Kim’s dressed as Madonna. Outside the mess hall, she’s the first thing we see.

“It’s for the lip sync battle,” Kim tells the gaggle of girls who line up to praise her.

“My mom would never let me wear a corset.” A freckled ferret girl touches the hem.

“Kim’s boobs probably have to file property taxes,” I tell Walter. Waste of space, if you ask me.

Walter takes off his jacket and throws it in one of the big garbage bins. “Don’t even talk to me,” he says.

I know how excited Rachel is about the battle, so it’s weird that she’s crying when we get to the theater, which is really just a wooden platform in the middle of a field.

“The show must go on,” Chipmunk tells her. “I can totally do the lead part.” She pulls at her top like she’s always doing. I don’t know if she wants to show more of her flat chest or what.

On the wooden bench next to me, Walter takes out the purple Sharpie he carries.

“Like, if you’re too upset to remember the steps…” Chipmunk hovers behind Rachel.

“I can handle it.” Rachel says.

In her diary, Rachel wrote how everyone thought Chipmunk would get to lip-sync the main part. But then they held auditions and

I opened my mouth around each word like it was all some precious message and concentrated on how much each one mattered to the person who wrote the song. I wasn’t wearing these stupid Velcro sandals. I was barefoot like in a CK1 ad. When I was done, everyone applauded louder than they did for Meghan. Ryan looked at me like he’d finally noticed what I’m always waiting for someone else to see.

“Why’s she crying?” I ask Chipmunk when she drops onto the bench between Walter and me. He’s busy coloring over the purple K on his arm.

“One of the cabins broke in and took a bunch of our stuff and she’s being a child about it.”

“Don’t you care?” I ask.

Chipmunk smears on some lip crap. “Everything I bring to camp is—what’s the word?”

“Expendable?”

Chipmunk pauses like she’s considering. She takes down her pony tall and puts it back up.

Walter caps his pen, finally. “Wanna sit next to me at Bonfire?”

“I’ll have to get back to you,” Chipmunk says.

I never thought it would be me starring in Rachel’s diary, but she wrote a whole thing about Rob the janitor, and a bunch about this kid who had a seizure during Shabbat services, and we have this arts and crafts lady who’s balding—Rachel took up two pages worrying about her.

July 7: Does she like where she lives? It’s gotta be a studio. Last week when we made dream catchers, she played Tori Amos, so I think she has a lot of candles and maybe uses a smudge stick. Is there a man who could love her when she shows so much of her raw, pink scalp?

 Maybe I missed it. Maybe I was right there between dinner last month at her dad’s damp new apartment and all that shit about the lumpy skin she thinks is at the tops of her thighs.  

My dad’s apartment wasn’t depressing. It wasn’t an apartment at all. On my Grandpa’s acres, rich people bought up cottages, and dad kept up the property and the land. Mom had me thinking there’d be patched ceilings and toadstools pushing through the carpeting, but he’d made the trailer streamlined and tidy like a boat. The best part was the sound system; he’d rigged it so he could listen to the radio in every room.

The last morning there, Dad had it tuned to the ship report. I listened through water proof speakers, while I stood in the shower soaping my nuts. This might be gay, but I let the voices wash over me. It hit me like that Gregorian chanting mom listens to; to me those monks are just a bunch of sad mumblers. But in the shower, with dad boiling coffee, the ship report voices sounded like God.

“Why do they broadcast that?” I asked over breakfast. “Why do people who aren’t sailors need to know?”

My dad stirred his cereal.

“The ship report.” The whole visit, I’d been drinking coffee. On the sly, then bolder, ordering it black at the little kiosks that were everywhere, like part of the landscape; like all that rain grew them straight from the ground.

“Dad.” Now I poured myself a mug right in front of him. I guess he thought I was old enough. Mom would have said I’d stunt my growth.

“The ship report? It’s a necessity.” Dad shook out the newspaper. “In Chicagoland you have the traffic updates. The Dan Ryan and the El. Here, people depend on the harbor. We depend on commerce and oil and the tides.”

“Is that why you like it here?”

“Like it?” Dad flipped a page of the paper.

“Don’t you?”

Dad passed me the comic section. I read Marmaduke and Peanuts. I drank coffee till my guts boiled. In two days, school was starting. Tonight I’d be brushing my teeth in our boring blue bathroom, mom yelling at me to floss. After that, who knows when dad would even let me visit? Now was my Temporal Pocket.  Don’t you wish you’d seized every opportunity you had?

At the airport, dad popped the trunk. Our drive had stirred up its contents. The wipers kept swiping while in back he untangled my backpack from bungee cords and rain-gear and a tarp.

“Why are you here if you don’t like it?” I turned to slam the passenger door. One thing I wouldn’t miss was the rain.

“Cause of my father, cause of the land.”

“But grandpa owns property in Chicago too.” I’d already mapped the route to grandpa’s apartment units. If dad lived there, I could make it a few nights a week after school.

“I don’t do so hot in the city.” Dad handed me my backpack.

“That’s why you left?”

“Your mom used to cry herself to sleep next to me. I just figured…” Dad stood for a while looking off somewhere. I was pretty wet by then. Finally, he shook his head like a Gatorade commercial. Drops of water—in the commercial it was sweat—fell from his hair.

“You figured what?” I asked him.

“If I was going to make a woman that damn lonely, I might as well leave her alone.”

The whole flight home I reran the conversation. Here’s where I could have asked did he, per chance, own any unlicensed firearms; there’s where I could have made him promise I could come back next summer, but mom always says dad’s allergic to plans.

Kim’s on her back on the stage and she’s writhing.

I feel like a grown-up should stop her, but Rob’s the only option, and someone stepped on a peanut butter sandwich, so he’s busy behind the benches cleaning it up. Meanwhile, Kim flips her hair and Madonna sings about making it through the wilderness. Not in those fishnets, my mom would say. Ryan’s ancestry is definitely part Neanderthal. I can’t even look at Walter; I’m giving him privacy to come in his pants. When Kim’s done, Chipmunk and the other backup girl line up behind Rachel. She’s between them, but separate. I’ve seen her wear that exact expression. It’s how she looks when she thinks she’s alone.

“You have to stand up sometime,” mom said, when I was still in bed a week after Grandpa called. “I’m going to work, aren’t I? The hard thing about time is it doesn’t slow down.”

And I’m: You didn’t even love him.

And mom’s: I’m the one who chose him. I’m the one who watched him change.

Mom didn’t know I took walks when she was working. Front yards in our neighborhood, the grass grew 2.5 inches. Curtains guarded windows. Even the birds sang pre-approved songs. The alleys were different. After dinner, you could hide behind lilac bushes and hear dads roaring when they stepped on Legos, women whispering into phones in their kitchens, girls’ sobs echoing off bathroom tiles.

Maybe I should have told mom I wasn’t actually newly agoraphobic or something. Instead, I just tensed up my back muscles to repel her, but mom’s fingers kept kneading my shoulders. Between my chest and the mattress, the medallion pressed my sternum. Counterfeit currency. Dad buying my silence while he just went further away.

I’m skipping past how Rachel did in the lip sync contest.

What I care about is Rachel’s face when she sees I’m the one who stole her stuff. Is she relieved or angry? I wish you could separate out emotions—it’s like if you have cancer, and you still get a head-cold; it doesn’t seem right we should have to feel so much at once. I thought this summer would be different. I thought I’d have more than one chest hair, for one thing. I thought I’d read books where there are adventures and the quality of the knots tied in ropes are factors in the outcome. But that was all before dad blew a hole straight through to the back of his head.

So now I’m standing over Rachel—our cabin decided that to win back their shit, the girls have to kneel down and serenade us—and when Rachel sings hitchananti al nafshi, her eyes say things I don’t want to hear.

“I didn’t steal your diary on purpose.” I say when she’s finished begging. Her cabin mates have all headed off to roast marshmallows, but she’s in the grass looking stunned.

One of the really barbaric things about camp is the pranking—like we’re The Lords of the Flies or whoever, and not this disparate band of droopy Jews. At the same time, the pranks are sanctioned; the adults make us do them. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? It would be one thing if they were meant to get us tougher, but the camp director says they’re for morale.

“It’s a journal.” Rachel picks at the grass.

“What’s the difference?” I don’t like how I’m looming over her. But she’s wrapped her arms around her bony legs now. In her diary she said her mom won’t let her shave.

“I know you’re private,” I tell her. “That’s why I chose you.” I’d figured if she was going to get invaded, it was better by someone she knows.

I crouch and pass her my backpack.

“Did you read it?”

“Your pillow’s a weird material.” I look straight ahead like what’s out there is really important, while Rachel pulls her pillow and Germanie from my pack.

“I asked you a question,” Rachel says.

I’m picturing some distant horizon, but what I really see is Walter. He’s got this screwy expression. Like the time last summer he pissed on Ryan’s bed.

Rachel pokes me with that index finger.

“I just wanted to know more things about you.”

“The things in a journal are private.”

“But those are the things I want to know.”

“The pillowcase is satin.” She’s picking at it, and our shoulders are touching, like we’re watching a movie, only the movie is Ryan. His knees sure do face inward, but his legs are longer, so he gets to Kim before Walter, and slings his arm around her shoulders. But Walter keeps coming, twirling his lanyard like a lasso.

“Rachel,” I ask, “what do you want that you can’t have till Later?”

“Later after bonfire, or later like, ten years?”

Ryan turns Kim’s head like he’s gonna kiss her, same time Walter slides the purple lanyard over Kim’s fingers. Then Kim and Ryan’s Sex Robot mouths start mashing, but Walter keeps inching the purple plastic upward, over Kim’s hand-meat, around her wrist.

“I hate right now, mostly.” Rachel sounds more sad than certain. Like dad’s poem where the best lack conviction. And then there’s a whole thing about falcons, which I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

In Oregon, dad probably didn’t even notice me drinking coffee. The problem with not Experiencing something when it happens is you just keep on Experiencing it after it ends. That’s why I was careful that time watching Rachel. In the shower, she tipped her head back. Slick and domed like a sea lion. From behind the lilac bush in her alley, that was most of what I could see. I’m not some sex pervert. I just thought when she opened her eyes she’d see me. I thought she’d say, Max, when we have a kid, you won’t leave him, no matter if you can’t help how you change.

Now, Rachel’s upper arm presses mine, maybe accidentally. We watch Walter knot the ends of that lanyard. When Kim turns, she’s got one of those mid-air-expressions: Love left over from Ryan; hope for the future, and fear.