Hot Pink

  I was fined $2,500 and given three years probation and a one-year prison sentence suspended on the condition I underwent weekly urinalyses and attended a twice-weekly anger-management group at the locale of my choice. I picked Highland Park Hospital. It was nearby and I could piss in their cup on my way out. Plus, the brochures said it was behavior-focused, and I liked B. F. Skinner. I’d been reading him steadily ever since the Manx class.

  At the start of the first meeting, Jane Tell sat across the group circle from me. She kept her eyes on her knees, her hands in her lap, and her parted red hair fell thick past her shoulders. She scratched at her palms nonstop. Anyone else so slumped and ticky would have read timid, but Tell seemed spring-loaded, extra-alive. It was impossible not to watch her.

  The therapist, in his homemade sweater, spoke the stilted-mushy English of a Martian diplomat. He told us the meetings were broken in two. The first hour was experiential, meaning topics weren’t scheduled and we would talk to one another about whatever was on our minds. The second hour was instructional. “Not that I am some kind of pedagogical heavy,” he said, “but if you will be patient with me, I think I can teach you one or two things.”

  Aside from Tell and me, there were two women and three men, squint-eyed office workers in their mid-to-late thirties. They had imitation-leather day-planners and adenoidal difficulties. Their sense of humor was desperate, their jokes delivered in the voices they suppressed during staff meetings. They fell apart for the spoken italic. Indignant up-talking left them in stitches: the just… okay? punchline; the biting sarcasm of the yeah, right!? The last one of them to self-introduce to the group closed with the phrase, “And kicking the fucking copy machine when no one’s fucking looking, I’ll tell you what,” and they all laughed wildly at the enunciation of the second curse’s first syllable, the fluorescent overheads splotching oily patches on their over-pink faces, high shine in the spit-creeks of their off-white teeth.

  Tell said she was nineteen and had dropped out of art school. She lived in Deerfield with her mother and stepfather. She called her mother “Peggy” and her stepdad “the Otter.” She fought with them viciously, and they had threatened to kick her out if she didn’t get treatment.

  I told them I was a junior in college and I’d go to prison if I didn’t show up. A few of the office workers expressed discomfort. The therapist praised them for their openness and referred to me as a “mandated client.”

  “Mandated clients,” he said, “tend to be resistant to the group process. Helping them to feel a part of the group is one of the activities that can make the group stronger and more helpful to all its members. We welcome you, Ben.”

  During the break, Tell approached me at the refreshments table. She bugged her eyes out and nodded me toward her.

  “I’m Ben,” I said.

  She said, “I know your name. Don’t be such a Steve.”

  “What’s a Steve?” I said.

  “No,” Tell said. “Ask something braver.”

  “You want to hang out?”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “Elsewhere,” I said. “In the future. On a ‘date.’”

  “Don’t do it with air-quotes.”

  “On a date,” I said.

  “I’ve never been on a date.”

  “Few have,” I said. “Let alone with me.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “Denny’s,” I said. “Or the railroad tracks. Maybe even Denny’s and then the railroad tracks.”

  “That’s some fancy date.”

  “You…”

  “What?”

  “I’m a…”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to come up with something to make you laugh, but we keep saying ‘date,’ and I’m a mandated client, and I’m spending all this energy resisting the reflex to shoot for a pun.”

  “‘Let me take you on a really manly date,’ or something.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You deserve a lot better.”

  “That’s nice,” Tell said. “It’s a nice thing to say. Probably you can just skip all the funny now and offer me a smoke.”

  The designated area, on the parking-lot sidewalk, was a bus-stop shelter with columnar ashtrays. I sat on the bench and handed up a Marlboro—Tell remained standing. She bent toward my lighter, hair tucked behind her ears, cigarette lipped. She touched her fingers to my knuckles to guide the fire. Free from the dinge of those overhead fluorescents, I could see she was perfect, except for a round, red scrape on her cheek. Before I had a chance to say anything, she was standing up straight again, offering her hand. I took it, held on. She said, “It was nice to meet you, Ben.”

  I said, “It was nice to meet you, too, Tell.”

  She started off toward the parking-lot exit and then she returned to me. “We should try that again,” she said, “with eye contact.” She grasped my hand, said my name a second time, and looked at my eyes. Then she walked away, but not back inside.

  Back inside, all the chairs were rearranged to face the wall. In front of the wall was a sketch-pad mounted on a tripod easel. In front of the pad stood the therapist. He said, “It’s time to begin the instructional portion of group. I think we’re still waiting for someone?”

  They’d all seen us walk out together and now they were staring at me like I’d done something to her.

  “Tell got sick,” I said. “She said she’d be back on Thursday and that she looked forward to it and hoped that none of you would feel insulted by her leaving early.”

  “Actually,” one of the men toward the other end of the chair-line said, “I do feel a little insulted. In fact, very insulted.”

  “That’s pretty fucken ridiculous,” I said.

  The therapist clapped his hands once and said, “This is a perfect opportunity to learn some anger-management skills.” He removed a pink marker from its slot along the bottom of the easel and uncapped it. He wrote:

  JAKE: Actually, I do feel a little bit insulted. In fact, very insulted.

  BEN: That’s pretty effing ridiculous!

  “We’ll come back to this exchange later,” said the therapist. “For now, while it’s still fresh in our minds, can we agree the transcription is accurate?”

  I said, “I didn’t say it with an exclamation point.”

  “Regardless of how you said it,” said the therapist, “that’s how it sounded. The third word you used signifies aggression. It’s important to know that—”

  “Signify sniveling for Jake, then,” I said. “I think we can all agree Jake sniveled.”

  A group shrug.

  “That’s a very subjective analysis, Ben,” said the therapist, “and we’ll explore it later.”

  I said, “It’s a context-based analysis. And that’s the only kind Skinner allows for. I just read about it in Verbal Behavior. Isn’t this a behavioral therapy group?”

  “It’s a cognitive-behavioral therapy group, stress on the cognitive, and you shouldn’t be reading Skinner,” said the therapist. “Skinner’s wrong-minded.”

  “Skinner’s a monster,” said one of the women. “He tried to make factories where you brought him your children and he turned your children into various types of professionals.”

  “Skinner’s an ingrate,” the man next to me said. “The guy just has no respect for the subconscious. He thinks we don’t have minds. And we do have minds and our minds are like computers.”

  “But really good computers,” the woman said.

  “The best computers ever,” the therapist said.

  “The problem,” Jake said, “is Skinner thinks thinking doesn’t matter. And that’s ugly, man. That’s truly ugly. Maybe it’s Skinner who makes you feel so angry all the time, Ben. Because, like, what happens to free will if thinking doesn’t matter? Because what’s will, you know? It’s free thinking. And, frankly, I freely think Skinner’s worldview is an insult to my humanity. For one thing, he should’ve quit making those rats salivate to buzzers, because it was c
ruel to do it to those animals. And he definitely should have kept his dumb ideas to himself. He’s harmful, actually.”

  “You’re a genius,” I said.

  The therapist wrote it down like this:

  JAKE: B. F. Skinner’s philosophy of human psychology is not only disempowering, but dehumanizing.

  BEN: You’re a (real effing) genius!

  After the meeting, I found Tell waiting in the bus-stop shelter. She took my hand and walked us to her truck in the lot by the cancer ward.

  “You missed the instructional portion of group,” I said.

  She kissed me—pressed me against the front of her pickup and kissed my neck fast, once, with licked lips. Then she tugged on my belt loops and kicked at my insteps. I was thinking: It is not as dark outside as you expected, summer is coming. I was thinking: This is the first time you’ve ever been kissed first.

  I had my hands in her hair, then on her arms, her hips. She squeezed the back of my neck and bit my mouth. Everything about us felt clean and susceptible. Her skin was warm—even hot—beneath my hands, but her face cooled mine like a hotel pillowcase.

  Soon she pulled my stupid hair and I opened my eyes. “We’re scratching the hood,” she said. “You want to see inside? I rebuilt the engine with my uncle.”

  She popped the hood and showed me some things. I don’t know what she showed me.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said. “In yours. I want to drive it.”

  Tell grabbed a Johnny Cash tape from the deck in her truck and we took my car to Denny’s. She put the tape in and drove fast. The first song was “Long Black Veil.” So was the second. She asked, “Why’d you decide to buy an auto-tranny?”

  I didn’t know what that meant. Then I knew, but it took a second: tranny was transmission. My car’s was automatic. She wanted to know if I could drive stick. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t. “You prefer a standard transmission?” I said, with that heavy stress on the standard transmission to suggest that what had stalled my response was pleasant surprise, not incomprehension, much less calculation.

  Tell said, “See, now, that’s why I like you. When you act like a Steve, it’s cause you’re being sweet and you don’t even know it—you think you’re working something. I’m gonna cut all your nappy hair off and make you famous. Do you have a little Jewish sister who looks just like you?”

  “Leah,” I said.

  “I bet she’s a knockout.”

  “I don’t remember ‘Long Black Veil’ being this long,” I said.

  “It’s my favorite.”

  Tell parked us at the far end of the lot, facing the Ford dealership. Before we got out of the car, she started kissing me again. Then we reclined our seats and the tape switched sides and “Long Black Veil” started up again and ended and started up again. We listened to it one more time, then walked to the restaurant.

  A few steps outside the entrance, Tell stopped. She said, “I know this’ll sound weird, but I want you to do something for me.”

  “Name it.”

  She said, “I want you to pick me up by the ankles and swing me face-first into the side of that dumpster.”

  “Ha! Fuck that,” I said, laughing.

  “Don’t curse at me,” she said. “If you think I’m too heavy, I’ll stay on my feet and you can swing me by a wrist.” At her waist she balled her hands like they were cuffed. “Pick a wrist.”

  “Quit it,” I said.

  She said, “I’m serious. I want you to.”

  I continued to refuse and she continued to ask me. I was crouching beside her, trying to light a pair of cigarettes—it had gotten windy and my lighter was dying—when a semi-truck pulled into the lot. A tall, pale man stepped out of the cab and walked in our direction. He offered me a friendly half-nod in greeting and met Tell’s face—she was winking at him—with a closed fist on the chin. Moaning, she fell back into the wall. I dropped the lighter and went forward to attack. I don’t know how to fight. I thought I’d punch the middle of the back of his neck. To make that happen, though, I’d have had to jump higher. I missed his neck entirely, barely grazed his shoulder. He spun around and whammed me a fast one to the jaw. The unlit cigarettes popped from my lips, and I sat where I’d stood, like any clown out of Hemingway.

  Pointing his finger too close to my eyes, he said, “Sometimes they like it.”

  “Thank you,” Tell told him. “Get away from us now.”

  He went inside the restaurant. My jaw only tingled. It hadn’t started hurting yet. I lay on my back and listened to the highway, the Doppler-shifting buzzings of passing cars. I didn’t have a thought. I could have fallen asleep. “Ben,” Tell said, and I opened my eyes. Her face was upside down over my own. Blood from her chin dripped into my hair.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said. “He was wearing a ring.”

  “We’re fine,” she said. “Just punched. Get up.”

  She pressed her lips to my swelling jaw and led me through diesel fumes across two parking lots. It did occur to me that Tell’s offhandedness was worthy of alarm, likely indicative of something bad, something wrong, but I didn’t feel even slightly alarmed. Her nonchalance detached me from my own observations, turned me academic. It felt almost as if I were reading about her, as if the person pulling on my hand were only describing Jane Tell to me.

  I was slow from getting hit and, just as I was summing words to form a question that would address the matter—one no more complicated than “What just happened?”—Tell edged us between the wall of the SuperTarget and the dollar-ride carousel next to the door where we fucked sitting up with our clothes on. That was the only time I got hit and it was the only time that fucking Tell, or fucking anyone, ever felt entirely right. What would normally have struck me as haunting seemed merely striking. Like when you first learn your body is made of cells, or your emotions chemicals. The first time you cheer for a gangster in a movie. Before you realize what you’re accepting.

  Afterward, I had the sense the sex implicated me in something. I assumed rightly that it was love and asked her to marry me.

  I drove Tell to the hospital to get her truck. On the way, I kept thinking I saw my thermostat needle creeping to the right, but then we’d get to a stop, and I’d look a little closer and see it was smack in the middle—it was fine. Tell’s truck, on the other hand, refused to start, so I drove us to her mother’s.

  My jaw was swollen by the time we arrived. Tell’s mother, giving it a squint and a head-tilt, said, “What a pleasure to meet you, Ben, now please leave my home,” and Tell ripped the fresh scab off the gash on her chin and bled on the rug.

  She said, “I’m moving in with him, and then we’re getting married.”

  “Like hell you are,” her mom said.

  The stepdad, watching Leno and eating baby carrots from a cereal bowl, spoke the word guffaw and slapped his knee. “Guffaw,” he said. “Guffaw, guffaw.”

  Tell handed me her scab. “Smoke a cigarette with my mother while I pack up my stuff.”

  I held out my pack and her mom took two. She tossed one to the stepdad.

  Tipping his head back, he leaned forward and caught it, filter-first, in his mouth. Then he clapped.

  “She’s done this before,” Tell’s mother said. I lit her cigarette. “You’re just the newest nice guy.”

  “Amen,” said the stepdad. “Hey. How about a light, Peggy?”

  “How about give me half a second, Steve.”

  “Your name’s Steve?” I said.

  “Stephen, actually. With a p h,” he said. “Steve means something else.”

  I took a look around the living room, a normal-looking living room: leather couch, reclining chair, steel-and-glass coffee table. A knickknack tray on an oldish-looking bureau. Framed photos in a line on a squat redwood bench. I found a clay ashtray on a speaker behind me, next to the television. Everything looked normal. I don’t know what I was expecting.

  “Look at me,” Tell’s mom said. “See the resemblance??
?? I looked. She was normal-looking, too. I didn’t see much of a resemblance, though. Maybe something around the eyes.

  She grabbed the meat of her gut and shook it. She tucked her head and pointed at the second chin. “This is what happens if you get her pregnant, boy-o. And you will. And then you get another one just like her, no matter how sure she is it’ll be a son. Shit. And then she leaves you because you’re not who you say you are and she goes and gets another one like him.” She thumbed the air in the stepdad’s direction. “And then that’s it. Two, three more lives wasted and another stupid kid walking around, spreading her legs for any guy who’ll listen to her sad stories and say it’s not her fault. It’s wretched. It’s wretched and it’s inevitable.”

  “That sounds rehearsed,” I said.

  She said, “I told you. You’re not the first one.”

  Tell returned with a duffel, a telescopic easel, and an expandable plastic box containing paints and brushes. She set the easel and the box at my feet. “I should grab a pillow,” she said. “I like a lot of pillows.”

  “You don’t own a pillow,” said the stepdad. “I own the pillows.”

  “I’ve got pillows,” I said.

  “I hope that’s everything,” said Peggy. “Because we’re changing the locks tomorrow.”

  Tell said, “I still have some stuff in my room I want to get. My truck’s broken down, though.” She opened my fist and took the scab back. She held it out to her mom. “You can keep this until I can get back here for my stereo and clothes,” she said. “And then you can change the locks.”

  “Why are you so disturbed?” her mom said.

  “Just please, Mom?” Tell dangled the scab for a second, then reached around her mother to set it on the edge of the coffee table.

  “Please!” her mom said. “We eat here.” She seized the scab between her pink fingernails and dropped it in the ashtray.

  Tell drew a set of scissors from a drawer in the bureau.

  “Those are mine,” said the Steve.

  The truck driver was a fluke. According to Tell, the beating he’d dealt her was cosmic evidence that everything was right between us.