How was I supposed to ignore Mark St Pierre yelling at me to hurry up, there was a seat empty, everyone stood at zero on the scorepad and the game was about to commence? Christ!
I was still awake when the cuckoo clock in the parlor below me sang two o’clock. I got up, threw on my old tartan robe over my skivvies, and went downstairs. I got myself a glass of milk and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. There were no lights on except for the fluorescent bar over the stove, no sounds except for the sough of the furnace through the floor-grates and my father’s soft snores from the back bedroom. I felt a little nutso, as if the combination of turkey and cramming had set off a minor earthquake in my head. And as if I might next fall asleep around, oh, say St Patrick’s Day.
I happened to glance into the entry. There, hung on one of the hooks above the woodbox, was my high-school jacket, the one with the big white GF entwined on the breast. Nothing else but the initials; I hadn’t been much of a jock. When Skip asked me, shordy after we met at the University, if I’d lettered in anything, I’d told him I had the big M for masturbation —
first team, the short overhand stroke my specialty. Skip had laughed until he cried, and maybe that was when we’d started being friends. Actually, I guess I could have gotten a D for debate or dramatics, but they don’t give letters in those things, do they? Not then and not now.
High school seemed far in the past to me on that night, almost in another planetary system .
. . but there was the jacket, a birthday present from my folks the year I turned sixteen. I crossed to the entry and took it off the hook. I put it up to my face and smelled it and tiiought of Period 5 study-hall with Mr Mezensik — the bitter aroma of pencil-shavings, the girls
whispering and giggling under their breath, faint shouts from outside as the phys ed kids played what the jocks called Remedial Volleyball. I saw that the place where the jacket had hung on the hook continued to stick up in a kind of dimple; the damned thing probably hadn’t been worn, even by my mother to go out to grab the mail in her nightgown, since the previous April or May.
I thought of seeing Carol frozen in newsprint dots, her face shadowed by a sign reading us OUT OF VIETNAM NOW!, her ponytail lying against the collar of her own high-school jacket . . .
and I had an idea.
Our telephone, a Bakelite dinosaur with a rotary dial, was on a table in the front hall. In the drawer beneath it was the Gates Falls phonebook, my mom’s address book, and a litter of writing implements. One was a black laundry-marker. I took it back to the kitchen table and sat down again. I spread my high-school jacket over my knees, then used the marker to make a large sparrow-track on the back. As I worked I felt the nervous tension draining out of my muscles. It occurred to me that I could award myself my own letter if I wanted, and that was sort of what I was doing.
When I was done I held the jacket up and took a look. In the faint white light of the fluorescent bar, what I’d drawn looked harsh and declamatory and somehow childish: But I liked it. I liked that motherfucker. I wasn’t sure what I thought about the war even then, but I liked that sparrow-track quite a lot. And I felt as if I could finally go to sleep; drawing it had done that much for me, anyway. I rinsed out my milk-glass and went upstairs with my jacket under my arm. I stuck it in the closet and then lay down. I thought of Carol putting my hand inside her sweater and the taste of her breath in my mouth. I thought of how we had been only ourselves behind the fogged-up windows of my old station wagon, maybe our best selves. And I thought of how we had laughed as we stood watching the tatters of my Goldwater sticker blow away across the Steam Plant parking lot. I was thinking about that when I fell asleep.