Tammy

Down here the soot-dark shacks stood in rocks and dirt and mud, hemmed in by the river and the hillside.

But at the top of the hill, hidden from view, the houses were well maintained, their pretty lawns tumbling out onto the broad boulevards of M, L, and K streets. There were tall trees all around up there: Douglas Fir and Ash and Maple and the ubiquitous Linden. The neighborhood at the top of the hill was bursting with white chokecherry blossoms and white and pink and red crab apple flowers.

Down here a broad woman in a house dress sat in a rocker just inside her open door, expectorating into a spittoon on the falling-down porch, and watching the traffic. The little rag-stuffed windows hindered the light, and the walls were blackened with ancient smoke.

Tammy Pierce was descending the four steps from the stoop to the mud, holding her schoolbooks under one sundark arm. She wore no coat over her cotton print dress with ruffles on the shoulders. The dress fit snug, the ruffles riding above her shoulders, the material stretched thin about her middle. Two spring buds, like those of a honey locust, pressed pugnaciously against the worn fabric.

The woman muttered, and Tammy climbed back up the stairs to the stoop. She kissed the woman solemnly upon her head. The woman slapped her behind. She laughed when Tammy arched her back in surprise. Tammy scowled.

Town kids said the Pierces had lived here longer than anyone. They had all sorts of stories about the Pierces.

A pickup sat on blocks in the mud before the stoop. A rooster had winged and hopped up to the hood, where he stood observing the yard. Tammy climbed into a Chevy rumbling at the fence line.

‘Who’s that driving?’ I asked Pinkie.

‘That’s her cousin Rocky. He’s alright. You like her?’ Pinkie smiled at me and raised an eyebrow.

Rocky spun the tires in the dirt and roared onto the highway behind us, spitting gravel and mud. I could see Tammy scowling in the front seat. I smiled at her, but she didn’t look at me.

‘I always thought a girl like Helen Mecklenburg was more your speed.’

‘I really don’t know, Pinkie. There are lots of girls I sorta like. I don't really know if I like Tammy, or if I'm just afraid of her. Helen might not like me back. But Tammy Tammy might just punch me out.’

Pinkie just kept looking at me. I started to feel uncomfortable. ‘Is that all you’re afraid of?’

‘What do you mean, Pinkie?’

‘Look Joey - you’re a smart kid. You know people talk about the Pierces. Are you sure you aren’t afraid of what people might say if they knew you liked Tammy?’

‘Well the thing is ...’

I trailed off because I was actually afraid to articulate the thing in front of Pinkie.

'What is it, kid?'

'Maybe it would be embarrassing if the kids knew I liked Tammy.'

Pinkie gave me another long, regarding look, but this time it wasn’t so much that he thought I wasn’t being honest as that I had just revealed something about myself without meaning to.

‘Little brother, Tammy is a geode just like you. Her spikey shiney heart was forged in Tartarus's blast furnace - same as yours. She's got her joys and sorrows, her earthy desires - same as you. But Joey - a girl's heart is precious. Don't ask for it if you're not ready to guard it. If you're worried about what your friends are gonna think you definitely aren't ready for a girl like Tammy.’

I hung my head.

‘Little brother,’ Pinkie put his arm around me. ‘Little brother it’s ok. Learning about girls is the hardest thing for most guys ever to figure out. No one expects a kid to understand about girls yet. And maybe I should have kept it to myself.’

‘Well, how do you know so much about girls, Pinkie? You aren't so much older than me.’

‘It’s simple, little brother. I don’t like girls that way. So, it’s easy for me to see them as people.’

Rocky swerved into the left lane behind us and accelerated to pass. I glanced over and finally caught Tammy’s eye. She had rolled down her window and the cold wind was blowing her short black hair away from her smiling, laughing face. A horn blared, and peering through Father's cab we saw a truck rapidly approaching in the lefthand lane. Rocky's engine screamed as he forced more fuel through her cylinders, Pinkie and I felt our bodies thrust hard against the cab as Father pressed the brakes. Rocky and Tammy swerved back into the right lane in front of us as the big truck barreled past in the other direction.

*****

As a sixth grader, and born in the spring, I was one of the older kids at the school, especially now that I had recently celebrated a birthday and I was now 13. I’d been attending the school since kindergarten, so I had seen every aspect of the place over the past seven years. I walked these halls with confidence and pride. With only about a week of school left, the experience had taken on a sort of valedictory air: my last Field Day, my last school assembly, my last reading comprehension exam.

I felt that confidence this morning, holding my kid sister by the hand, walking her into the building. When she was younger, I used to walk Dottie all the way to class, but now, toward the end of her second-grade year, she was anxious to be rid of my hand as soon as we entered the airlock between the two sets of heavy doors, and Father could no longer see her. As I pushed the second door open Dottie ducked under my arm and dashed into the foyer, the administrative offices to our left and the kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms letting off the hallway to our right. Dottie was already marching down the little kids’ hallway.

The hallway connected the two wings of the building. It was lined with tall windows on the south side, looking out onto the courtyard now filling with kids waiting outside their classrooms. Soft southern light relieved somewhat the eerie, flickering, cold fluorescent ceiling lamps the school installed in the past year, replacing the old incandescent bulbs.

The library stood closed to my left, locked behind a blond oak door. I peered through the window of rectangular safety glass above the brushed stainless handle. Northern light gleamed through the windows. I could just make out the playing fields on the other side. At odds with the gloom of the hallway, the large north-facing windows gave the library a spacious feel. At this time of day, the sun still low on the horizon, the light glowed around the edges of the long beige-industrial metal racks, and around the books lining the top two shelves, taller than any others, because they contained the 800 series, which was Mrs. Elmer’s particular pride. She was the witchy old disciplinarian who served as both the 6th grade math instructor and the school’s librarian.

Mrs. Elmer enjoyed a fearsome reputation among the kids. Stories circulated of deep malignance. The stories were supported by her personal appearance. Her high collared shirts and long skirts, her black hair gathered in a bun, Mrs. Elmer appeared to have stepped out of the 19th century. Her breath was so awfully redolent of something rotten in her throat that kids would stand back and look askance when summoned to her desk. Mrs. Elmer enforced a strict silence within her library. And yet, I doubt any public-school library, let alone an elementary school, offered such an enchanting selection of literature, even for kids well beyond the sixth grade. I don’t think the principal allowed Mrs. Elmer such latitude from an exalted view of a public school’s responsibility to prepare young minds for participation in liberal society so much as out of a business-minded benign neglect. If Mrs. Elmer took an interest, and was willing to do the work, as her husband Clark had apparently explained to Mr. McGinnis over smuggled beers at the Elks, then why not let her administer the space any way she saw fit, provided she didn’t exceed her budget?

The 800 series had become my scree field. I kicked up favorites my parents were familiar with like Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Red Badge of Courage, and Heart of Darkness. I unearthed Zane Grey’s monumental and diverting western melodramas. I found Song of the Lark. I had never considered, before then, that Colorado could serve as a compelling backdrop for storytelling, and somehow Willa Cather helped me to feel less a stranger within San Luis. Among some of the newer literature, I found The Good Earth, a tale I have often returned to since my boyhood.

Yet on this morning it was less the 800s than the 500s which I was anxious to explore. Because Father had driven us into town I had about ten minutes before the first bell would ring, so I was happily surprised when I turned the handle, and the library door gave way to my push. Mrs. Elmer was standing at her rolling book cart, jotting something down in her scrupulous hand. I imagine she hadn’t realized that she’d left the door unlocked when she let herself in early this morning, perhaps to put away some books and to appreciate the peace among her cherished stacks. She turned her head querulously and narrowed her eyebrows, drawing herself up to her full, impressive height.

‘Mr. Tzel, the library is not yet open,’ she said in an imperious tone. I shrank inside myself and turned back to the door. ‘Wait,’ Mrs. Elmer commanded. ‘What brings you in this morning?’

‘Geodes,’ I said, looking still at the door handle. ‘551,’ Mrs. Elmer replied simply, returning to her work. When I still stood unmoving for a moment she added ‘Look for Shand, The Study of Rocks.’ I checked out ‘Study of Rocks’ along with a neighboring book ‘Field Guide of Common Rocks and Minerals’ by Loomis, adding them carefully to my satchel.

I reported to class just as the morning bell rang. The first 45 minutes of the school day were reading time. I was pleased, my two new books weighing heavy in my satchel.

Geodes are nodules, which, when broken open, are found to be hollow and the cavity lined with one or more minerals. They represent a special case of minerals in a cave. There was in the first place a cavity in the surrounding rock, usually of sand or clay. As the water leached through the surrounding rock, it became saturated with one or more minerals and then coming into the cavity, deposited the minerals, either as crystals, or as a non-crystalline mass, lining the cavity. Thus, the inside is often a beautiful cluster of bristling crystals, or it may be simply layer on layer of chalcedony of any color. Before this process had gone so far as to completely fill the cavity, erosion had dislodged the mass, and it has been found. One usually recognizes that it is a geode by the fact that it is far too light to be a solid rock, and then it may be carefully broken. They are characteristic of certain formations; so that having accidentally broken the first one, others can be carefully opened to display the beauty of the interior. - Field Guide to Common Rocks and Minerals

I guess there are at least two sorts of kids sitting at the front of a sixth-grade classroom in May. There are those who bring a great deal of motivation to their school career and who have learned that the best place to be certain never to miss a thing, and always to command the teacher’s attention, is from the front row. And there are those, like Tammy, her head resting on the desk before her, for whom the teacher still holds out hope that they might learn something, if only they would apply themselves.

Tammy’s arms extended from her sleeveless cotton dress. Her sharp, dark elbows hung beyond the edge of her desk, her forearms, covered in a soft black down, creating a pillow for her head. Her arched back straightened the stitches running down the spine of her dress.

Cotton nubs shone in stark relief under the unforgiving classroom flourescents. Her shoulder blades strained the overwashed material, creating a sheen in the light. Tammy’s dark, straight hair was cropped short, like a boy. The hair swirled about the nape of her neck, and it grew richly on the high knobs of her vertebrae above the neckline of her dress.

I thought about Tammy coming down her steps that morning, scowling as she descended.I recalled the rooster standing sentinel on the old truck. And I thought, ‘thus the inside of a geode is often a cluster of bristling crystals’.

The bell rang, but Tammy didn't seem to notice.

‘Tammy,’ I said, ‘passing period.’ Tammy started. Her crackling lips a bristling, peeling heart beneath a red chapped cupid’s bow.

She wasn't like other kids, raised with a sense for respectable behavior, which manifested as a surface sensibility everyone shared, creating a sort of commons all could interact within. It may not be very deep in the commons, but if you observed the pool rules no one would drown. I had known this instinctively before. But now I realized Tammy didn't share in our commons. Pinkie forced me to realize how deeply I feared for my own tenuous claim to that shared space. It had not yet occurred to me that Tammy may not be interested in me at all.

Sitting beside Tammy all year, I realized now that I had never really seen her before. My own conception of where we fit within the commons had prevented me from recognizing her. But now, Pinkie’s observations fresh in my mind, I gazed into that fearsome visage, and in the clamor of kids pushing back from their desks and lining up at the door for the passing periods, Tammy held my gaze. Then she spat on the tile between us. Tammy stood, and she walked to the classroom door without a backward glance.

Informed by the conventions of the commons, my taste in girls had always run to the pretty daughters of K, L and M streets, dressed in their stylish clothes and coiffures. Now, afflicted by this magical geology which I hadn’t known existed a day before, I felt a fierce determination to express my deepest yearning to Tammy irrespective of what the kids might say. These internal changes allowed me finally to see the cold hard fury of a stary trapped and burning in Tammy’s eyes, and I wanted to see more, even if it meant impaling myself upon her bristling crystals.