Dairy Queen

  I ended up sitting in front of a mirror with all my wet hair, staring at my reflection and wondering if anyone that bad-looking had ever been in this chair before, while a girl named Mica, which she pronounced Meeka, which is good because who wants to be named after a rock, tugged a comb through. "So what do you want?" she asked.

  "Um, a haircut?" I managed to get out.

  She smirked kind of. "That's good ... Just a trim?"

  "I need it short. Because..." What did I have to lose, telling the truth? "The ponytail rubs against the football helmet."

  Mica/Meeka eyed me. "You play football?"

  "I'm, um, trying out."

  "Your school has a girls' football team?"

  I shook my head, which was dumb because she was combing my hair. "It's the boys' team," I said, kind of quiet.

  Mica studied me in the mirror. "You're kidding."

  I shook my head again.

  "Anyone doing that," she said like she was saying it to herself, "needs to look good."

  And I did in the end. She cut off a whole bunch of hair so it was sort of near my ears but in a really nice not-boy way, and she did this amazing thing using my cowlick so the hair came down around my face in this way that looked not very much at all like Red Bend and a lot like New York City. But in a good way that kind of showed off the little brown freckles on my nose, which before this I'd never thought were worth showing off.

  I was really pleased. You could tell because I couldn't stop smiling, and I kept looking at my reflection in the mirrors that were everywhere. Mica liked it too, and walked me up to the front desk and made a big deal about getting my name and address even though I wasn't going to be driving back for a trim anytime soon.

  There was this really cute guy standing next to me paying for his haircut. When he heard my name he asked if I was any relation to Bill Schwenk who played for Minnesota.

  "He's my brother," I said, even though it was hard to talk because this guy was so cute I couldn't really look at him.

  "Well," Mica added, "she plays on the boys' team at her high school."

  "Really?" the cute guy said, looking at me so much I couldn't breathe. "That would be something to see." And he smiled a big smile at me and walked out.

  And that smile kept me going for the next couple hours. It got me through the price of the haircut, which the girl at the front desk said like she said it all the time, which I guess she does, and which basically equaled the price of our dorm room and breakfast but which I paid because, well, I didn't have a choice and also, I told myself later, because the haircut was so good it was almost worth it. His smile got me through the awards banquet, which was just as boring as you can imagine, so boring I fell asleep, which was good because we were going to have to drive home that night seeing as I'd spent all our money.

  So after the banquet I piled Curtis into the car and off we went. "Did you have fun?" I asked once, just to make conversation.

  Curtis shrugged. He'd won an MVP award. The speaker kept joking about how big he is, which he hates but, well, it's hard not to notice. So we rode along, me drinking coffee and thinking about everything that had happened. Wondering if Brian would like my haircut.

  "Why'd you cut your hair?" Curtis asked. In the silence it was like a gunshot.

  I thought about what to say. One nice thing about talking to Curtis is that there's never any pressure for, you know, a quick response. You can mull it over. I decided what the heck. He was going to find out anyway.

  "Because I'm going out for football," I said.

  "Oh." He went back to looking out his window.

  We rode along for another couple hundred years, me thinking that it really was good that I told him because it sure gave us something to talk about—

  "Does Dad know?" he asked.

  "No!" I said it sharper than I'd meant to. I couldn't help it.

  Curtis kept looking out his window. I thought about all the things I could say right now, explaining why I was doing it, or why I didn't want Dad to know, or at least that we were driving home because I'd spent all Mom's money on my hair. But it wouldn't have mattered because Curtis, well, who knew what he was thinking because he sure wouldn't say anything back. And all of sudden this really bummed me out. And I started thinking about what Brian had said about Curtis being afraid to talk.

  I thought about this for a long time. And it occurred to me all of sudden that maybe, well, maybe it had something to do with football. For Curtis, just like it did for me. I was all excited about playing football because it was something I wasn't supposed to do. Well, Curtis was supposed to do it. How many times had we heard that Curtis was bigger than Bill at his age, or that he had a great arm, or how tough he was? He'd been playing football with us since he could walk, which was early. He split his eyebrow open tackling Bill once and Win carried him home, both of them covered in blood, telling him the whole time what a great football player he was, and he had to go to the ER and get eight stitches. But maybe Curtis had the same sort of really complicated feelings about football that I had. God knows I couldn't talk about how I felt; I couldn't even imagine Curtis trying to.

  "You know," I said, the noise startling both of us, "you don't have to play."

  Curtis turned to look at me.

  "Just because Win plays football, and Bill, and me if I make the team, that doesn't mean you have to."

  Curtis frowned, suspicious.

  "I'm serious. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, you know."

  Curtis studied his hands, and his new pants that Mom had bought him for the trip.

  "I'm just playing because it's, you know, something different," I explained. "And because it'll give Dad a heart attack." Which got him to grin.

  "I'm good at it," he said, really quiet.

  "So what? I'm good at flunking English but I don't plan to make a career out of it."

  That made us both smile too.

  "What do you really want to do?" I asked.

  Curtis studied his hands a lot more. "You'll laugh. It's stupid."

  "It can't be that stupid. What?"

  Long, long silence.

  "Come on. I'm your sister. Please?"

  Curtis sighed again. He looked out the window at the trees flashing past in the night, the lights of a mall glowing somewhere in the distance. In the tiniest voice you ever heard, he said, "I want to be a dentist."

  I burst out laughing. And then I saw his face and realized like a slap that he was serious. And in that split second his face clamped down and I realized I would never, ever get him to talk to me again.

  Boy oh boy, did that make me mad. Because if you're going to go around saying you want to be a dentist, you've got to warn people. You don't just say it right out. If he'd said he wanted to be a tap dancer, it wouldn't have surprised me as much. Because that at least is physical. Those guys are jocks at least in their own way.

  So we drove along for another hundred years, not saying anything. I was so mad at him for making me laugh like that. And then I started having these thoughts, these little thoughts that came into my brain against my will, like he did warn me and I promised to take him seriously and it kind of was my fault. And I started thinking that this was just like what happened between Dad and Win and Bill and me, how someone said something mean and everyone just sort of froze in their angry mode, and seven months later we're still like that and we might be like that forever.

  Well, I didn't like thinking about that too much, so I started thinking instead about what Curtis had said. Now that I thought about it, it kind of made sense, him wanting to be a dentist. Because he always liked going to the dentist, and he takes really good care of his teeth and other people's teeth too, like Dad's false teeth. And he had all those skulls. It wasn't because they were skulls, I figured out like a bolt of lightning: it was because he liked to see the teeth fitted together. Now that I had time to really analyze it, in fact, I was kind of surprised I hadn't figured this out earlier because it was so obvious. Kind o
f like Amber and me. But I sure didn't want to think about that.

  And then I started thinking about what Brian's mom would say about all this, her being Oprah Winfrey and all. And it got to be a little conversation I was having with Oprah just like she was sitting there in the Caravan right behind me.

  "Do you think you should apologize to Curtis?" Oprah asked.

  "You know our family. We never apologize."

  "Do you think that's a good thing?"

  I didn't answer.

  "I think you need to say something to your brother," she said gently.

  I thought it over. Brian apologized to me once and it didn't kill him. It almost had but not quite. But he probably had a lot of experience, with his mom and all.

  "Is this how you want to live your life?" Oprah asked, just to jab me a little.

  I sighed. "Curtis?" I said.

  He didn't respond in one single way.

  "Curtis, I'm real sorry I laughed. That was a real awful thing for me to do."

  He nodded just the tiniest bit.

  "I won't laugh about it anymore. I promise."

  We rode in silence for a while. The more I thought about Curtis as a dentist, the more used to it I got. After a while, Oprah left. Maybe she changed the channel.

  "You know," I said, "I heard once about sports dentists. You could get a job with a hockey team or a football team just taking care of players' teeth. That would be cool."

  Curtis went back to studying his hands. "I like how Dr. Wilson is so nice to all the kids. Even the scared ones. He lets them touch his tools and stuff, gets them used to it so they're not scared. I always like watching him do that."

  Not only was this the longest thing I'd ever heard Curtis say, it was also the nicest.

  "Yeah," I said. "That's pretty great."

  "I was thinking next year about working at a camp maybe. Because little kids, they talk so much, they don't care if you don't."

  I squeezed his shoulder. "You say everything you need to say."

  That made him smile.

  After a while I was low on gas so we stopped at a truck stop and while we were there had dinner, a second dinner, and it was so much better than the banquet food. I spent the rest of Mom's money on burgers and milk shakes and sundaes too, and Curtis probably would have had a second sundae but I wanted to get back on the road. We didn't say too much but I did kid him a little about him being so tall at the banquet, which he didn't seem to mind, and then out of the blue he asked if I was going out for quarterback, which made us just fall down laughing. And then when we'd calmed down from that, he said, "Hut one, hut two" under his breath, and we both started laughing all over again.

  You know the strangest thing about that meal, though? The truckers at the other tables kept looking at me. Even when we weren't laughing. Kind of checking me out. No one had ever done that before. That was weird. It wasn't something I was used to.

  Although right now as I'm sitting here writing, it occurs to me that maybe it wasn't the haircut. I was just more aware of, you know, looking okay. Maybe—probably not, and even writing this down makes me blush and feel like I'm being some sort of showoff, which I sure don't want to be—but maybe guys always looked at me and I just never even noticed.

  23. Mom

  10:18. I sort of glanced at the alarm clock and then sat bolt upright because I was supposed to be up five hours ago! The milking! I pushed back my hair and had another heart attack because my hair was gone. My fingers were going along and then they fell off a cliff because there wasn't any more hair there. Then—whoosh—everything came back: the banquet, the haircut, the drive back from Madison and Curtis's talk about dentists, the truck stop, our arrival home at four a.m., both of us crawling into bed—

  I fell back, a little stunned. Curtis wanted to be a dentist? I mean, Amber was one thing, but this was totally out there. I lay there thinking it over. It was funny. It was downright hilarious, when you think about it. Curtis, of all people...

  You know how on TV sometimes they have that bit about the good angel and the bad angel? Well, right then and there my good angel, which I didn't even know I had, said to me that if I ever made fun of what he told me I would go straight to hell. Which is true. And I just want you to know I will never do it. So I guess that good angel did her job.

  As I lay there thinking about all this, there was this little squeak in the hall and a knock on the door and Mom said, "Dorrie, are you awake?" It occurred to me later that she might have been pacing outside my room for hours, and that squeaky floorboard might have been what woke me up in the first place. But I didn't think of that at the time.

  "Can I come in?"

  "Okay," I said, even though I wasn't much in the mood for company.

  So she came in and settled on the edge of the bed. "How'd you sleep?" she asked, looking at me. Only she didn't look at me because if she had she would have noticed that most of my hair was gone and I looked totally different. She wasn't looking at me at all. She was in some completely different place.

  "Okay," I said. But I had the feeling that I could have said, Not a wink, and she wouldn't have noticed.

  She sat there for a while rubbing my knee through the covers, not saying much.

  Finally, I asked, "Is everything okay?" Because I was beginning to wonder who died. Maybe she had some news from Win or Bill she needed to share.

  "Oh, it's fine," she said, looking out the window like she'd never seen it before.

  So I started looking out the window too, just for something to do, at the frilly curtains from when I was eleven and Mom decided it was time to redo my room. "You're not a little girl anymore, you're almost a teenager," she'd said, which was something I wanted to hear only slightly more than that I was about to get a lobotomy. And she'd put up this flowery wallpaper and white curtains, and fixed up Grandma Joyce's sewing table for my desk, and a couple other things that, well, they weren't me then and that aren't me now. I stared at those curtains, thinking that maybe I could slip them under the bed. Just have shades like the boys do.

  "I remember when you were born," Mom said, making me jump. "I was so happy to have a little girl." Then she didn't say anything else, letting that just hang in the air.

  "Oh," I said.

  "I didn't have a little girl for long." She smiled kind of sadly. "I don't think you know how proud we are of you. Your father, he's told me at least a dozen times in the past six months how proud he is." She looked at me again—looked at me without looking at me, if you know what I mean. "If it hadn't been for you, we would have had to sell the farm. Did you know that?"

  I shook my head. This was getting heavy. The problem was, I didn't know where it was going. She was saying some amazing things, but I was so busy waiting for the But that I didn't have anything left to appreciate them. They were just wasted.

  She sighed again, rubbing my leg like it was a magic lamp or something. "I just want you to know that you don't have to prove anything to us. To me or Dad. We love you so much."

  Again: what was coming next? Because you don't just say words like that just to put them out there. Not those words. Not in my family, anyway.

  "You don't have to play football for us."

  "What?" I asked, sitting about a foot higher in bed.

  "Your trying out, it makes me see how we haven't been appreciating you enough. But you don't have to—"

  "How do you know about that?"

  Mom eyed me. "Jeff Peterson came to the Board of Ed meeting last night to give us a heads up."

  "Oh," I said. "I didn't know about that."

  "Neither did I," she said, probably sharper than she meant to.

  Ouch. I mean, there you are, acting principal, and the football coach stands up and says your daughter wants to play football? Of course everyone would look at you, and you'd look pretty stupid when you said you had no idea. The last thing I wanted was to make her life any harder than it already was. Here she was, stuck between Dad and Win and Bill, with Curtis not talking, and i
t wasn't fair for her to go around thinking I was losing it too. I didn't mind Dad thinking that, but it wasn't fair to her.

  Finally, just to say something, I blurted out, "It's got nothing to do with Dad." I tried to find the words. "It's just that I spent all summer feeling like I was doing everything I was supposed to, and seeing everyone around me doing what they were supposed to, and no one seemed happy. They just seemed caught. And I was so unhappy I tried to find something that made me happy, and then I had this idea of playing football. And that made me happy. So I thought I'd try."

  Whew.

  Mom swallowed. "Do you think I'm unhappy?"

  Oh, boy. Out of the frying pan into the fire. "No," I lied.

  "Because I really like my job."

  "But it takes all your time," I said.

  "Well, teaching and administration, that's a lot."

  "But you're never home," I said.

  Mom looked away. I had this feeling she was doing everything she could not to lose it. "It's just," she said, "that there's not a whole lot for me at home right now."

  That hung there in the air for about a million years. What do you say to that? Maybe Oprah would know what to say Maybe if we were driving back from Madison I could come up with something. But I didn't have two or three exits to work it through. I had only my crummy old bed, and that wasn't good enough.

  "They offered me the job," she said, so quietly it took me a couple moments to register. "The principal job. Give up teaching and just do that."

  "Wow." I chewed on that for a little bit.

  "What do you think?" She asked it like my opinion really mattered to her.

  I thought about her saying how much she liked her job. Just visiting her office, you could see how happy it made her. "Go for it."

  She burst into this huge smile and threw her arms around me.

  Finally, just to get her off me, I asked, "Are you okay with me playing football?"