Loser Read online

All he sees is that he seems to have acquired the power to make people happy. The very sight of him brings smiles and twinkly eyes to his schoolmates. Spotting him, boys jerk to a halt, plant their legs as if straddling a motorcycle, thrust a pair of finger-pistols at him and bellow: “There he is!”

  Hands sprout like weeds to be high-fived.

  “Yo Zink!”

  As he comes to the dinner table one night, he stands for a moment at his chair. He thumps his chest with his fist, declares “Ahm da Zink!” and sits down.

  His mother and father look at each other.

  His sister Polly says, “You da what?”

  And then this too is over, and like the best friendship, it’s over before he knows it. In fact, it has never been quite what he thought it was in the first place.

  One day Zinkoff notices that, except for Katie Snelsen and a few others, no one smiles at him anymore. No one is high-fiving him, no one yo-Zinking him. He thinks about it, and he figures he knows why. Field Day is coming. And no one takes Field Day more seriously than fifth-graders. And that’s what Zinkoff thinks it is, merely a turning of attention from himself to Field Day. He has heard his last “Yo,” seen his last smile. Okay, he thinks, no problem, and he puts on his own game face.

  He brings chairs from the kitchen to the backyard and practices the weave-around-the-chairs race and the one-foot hop and the hiney hop. He goes out onto the sidewalk, and just as he did when he was little, he races cars to the end of the block, and it surprises him that the cars seem so much faster these days. He does jumping jacks.

  Meanwhile in school, Gary Hobin is rising to prominence, as he does every year around Field Day time. Field Day is still two weeks away when Hobin goes to Mrs. Shankfelder and asks her to pick the four teams now. “We want to have time to practice together,” he says.

  So Mrs. Shankfelder writes across the top of the greenboard:

  Then she writes each student’s name on a slip of paper and mixes them in a box. She calls Ronni Jo Thomas up front and tells her to turn her head away and pick a slip from the box. The first name out of the box goes in the RED column, the next name in the YELLOW column, and so on until each student is assigned to a team.

  Gary Hobin is a Yellow.

  So is Zinkoff.

  “Oh no!” blurts Hobin the moment he sees Zinkoff’s name go up under his.

  The teacher turns from the board. “Pardon me?”

  “We can’t be on the same team again,” says Hobin. “We’re supposed to be on different teams each year, to make it fair.”

  Mrs. Shankfelder frowns. “Don’t be silly. There’s no such rule.”

  Hobin snarls under his breath, “There is now.”

  Ten minutes later Zinkoff receives a note on his desk. The note says, “Forget Yellow. Join another team.”

  On the playground at lunchtime, Hobin comes to Zinkoff. “Did you get the note?”

  “Yeah,” says Zinkoff. “What’s it mean?”

  “It means what it says. You’re not a Yellow. Join another team.”

  “But I am a Yellow. Mrs. Shankfelder said so.”

  Hobin is taller than Zinkoff. He leans down until his eyes are locked into Zinkoff’s. Zinkoff can smell the hot dog on his breath. “Listen,” says Hobin, “you’re not gonna make me lose again. There’s no way you’re gonna be on my team. Y’understand? Forget it.”

  Zinkoff is confused. A week ago, Hobin was high-fiving him and calling him “The Zink!” And now this.

  “But I practice,” says Zinkoff. “I’m good now.”

  Hobin laughs. “You’re a loser. You lose. Go lose with somebody else. You’re not a Yellow.” He walks off, turns back. “And you can’t even walk right.”

  It’s in Zinkoff’s mind to say “But I got an A!” but he knows it will make no difference.

  Each team has a captain, Hobin, of course, being captain of the Yellows. In the days that follow, Zinkoff approaches each of the other team captains and asks if they could use a new member. Each one says no.

  Zinkoff does not know what to do.

  He is tempted to tell Mrs. Shankfelder of his problem and let her handle it. But he thinks better of it.

  He is too embarrassed to tell his parents, to admit that no one wants him on their team.

  He rubs his lucky pink bubblegum stone, hoping to change his luck.

  And he continues to practice. If anything, he practices even harder and longer. He is not home for dinner on the last day before Field Day, and his mother has to send Polly out to find him racing cars two blocks away. And even as he gasps for breath walking home, listening to Polly harp at him, he knows what he will do.

  He gets up as usual the next day and heads off to school, but he does not arrive. He veers and walks the other way. In the distance he hears the late bell, and he wants to run to it, but he does not. He walks the streets of town. He looks at his feet, trying to see what Hobin sees.

  The town is the same and not the same. The same brick housefronts and sidewalks, but no kids. He feels the picture he lives in has been tilted. He has never been so aware of air, the space around him. He feels like he did when he wandered by mistake into the girls’ room. (He is the only person he knows to have done so more than once.) A woman across the street in a flowery bathrobe leans from her front door to pick up a newspaper on the step. A yellow cat, emerging from an airshaft, studies him for a moment and darts back in.

  He tries walking the alleys, and that’s worse. He’s unhappy everywhere. He is nowhere. He wishes to be somewhere. He wishes to be with people. But he cannot go to school, and he cannot go home. Ultimately he walks to the nine hundred block of Willow.

  As he heads up the sidewalk he is comforted to see that the Waiting Man is there, even at this strange time of day. He waves to the Waiting Man and aches for a wave in return. It occurs to him to do a silly little dance, to see if the Waiting Man will smile, but he chickens out.

  Claudia, the little girl in the harness, is not outside today. He is tempted to knock on the door. “Can Claudia come out and play?” How silly would that sound? Him eleven years old.

  “Oh, mailman!”

  He turns. She’s across the street, leaning on the walker. He runs to her. He wants to hug her, he’s so happy she’s there.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” she says. It sounds funny, “Hi” coming from such an old person. He has the impression he could teach her to speak, like a talking bird. She reminds him of a bird, the thin legs sticking out from the bathrobe. School mornings must be the time of bathrobes.

  “Come on in,” she says. As if she knows he needs to be someplace. She doesn’t say, “What are you doing here, it’s a school day.” She doesn’t say, “What’s going on?” or “Where’s your bike?” She just says, “Come on in,” as if this happens all the time.

  He goes in.

  21. Something Hard and Thorny

  It takes her a long time to climb from the top step into the living room. “You can get the door,” she says. He closes the door.

  It is dark inside. Not as dark as his cellar, but dark for a house. No lights are on. “So…” she says. He waits for the rest, but that’s all there is: “So…” She repeats it quite a few times as she makes her way across the living room. She sets the four legs of the walker out ahead of her, then catches up with her own two feet. Six legs she has. It’s the world’s slowest gallop. And then she heads into the dining room. “So…” It takes her as long to cross the living and dining rooms as it takes him to walk to school.

  “So…what would you like?”

  What would he like? Not much, really. Take away today and his life has been pretty good. Then it hits him, they’re in the kitchen—she’s talking about food.

  “Snickerdoodle?” he says. It’s the first thing that comes to mind.

  She stops. He stops behind her. She cocks her head to one side. “Snickerdoodle? I haven’t heard that word in ages. My mother used to make snickerdoodles.”

  He tries to pict
ure the old lady with a mother. He can’t. “My mother makes snickerdoodles,” he tells her.

  “No, she doesn’t,” she says. “They don’t make them anymore.”

  “Well, she does,” he says.

  “No,” she says firmly.

  “Yes,” he says, equally firmly. He’s feeling a little annoyed.

  She seems to be staring at a leg of the kitchen table. She shakes her head but says nothing. She turns forward in the walker. “Well,” she says, “I don’t have snickerdoodles.” She continues on across the kitchen. “You’ll have to ask for something else.”

  Something else. He can think of many things he would like to eat, but he tries to remember he’s not in a restaurant and he’s not at home. “A sandwich?” he offers.

  “A sandwich.” She repeats his words so carefully he wonders if she knows what a sandwich is. He has never been this close to a very, very old person before. He wonders how much there is that such a person does not know. “A sandwich…a sandwich…” she repeats as she continues her frozen gallop across the kitchen. The back legs of the walker land first with a rubbery thud, then the front legs, then the catch-up shushing of her own slippers on the linoleum. Thud thud shush shush. “A sandwich…”

  He plops into a chair. He is almost woozy from slowness.

  She stops at a metal cabinet. “How about peanut butter and jelly?” she says. “Do children still like peanut butter and jelly?”

  He has long since outgrown peanut butter and jelly. What he really wants is a pepper and egg sandwich, like his mother makes, with spicy brown mustard. But he guesses this is out of the question. “Sure,” he says.

  She fusses in the cabinet, fusses in the refrigerator. She finds the peanut butter. “Can’t find the jelly,” she says. “Today we’ll have pretend jelly. How would you like that?”

  He’s ready to agree to anything. “Okay,” he says.

  She is so slow, so deliberate in every movement that he sees things he has never seen before. He had not known there were so many steps to the spreading of peanut butter on a slice of bread. Is this how things appear to the Waiting Man, a world in slow motion?

  After what seems like hours she heads for the table, pushing the walker with one hand, holding a plated sandwich in the other. When she lays the plate on the table and heads back for the second sandwich, he jumps up. “I’ll get it!”

  She transfers herself from the walker to a chair, and at long last they set to eating.

  “I’m pretending my jelly is gooseberry,” she says. She is the color of white mice: pink scalp showing through white hair, pink eyelids. Her eyes are watery, but she is not crying. “We used to have gooseberries on our farm. What’s yours?”

  “Grape,” he says.

  “Jelly or jam?” she says.

  He is stumped. “Jelly, I guess.”

  “Jam is easier to spread.”

  “Okay, jam.”

  “Are you sure? I always thought jelly had more taste.”

  “Jelly.”

  Not that it makes any difference. He really does try to pretend, but all he tastes is peanut butter and bread.

  He’s glad they’re in the kitchen. It’s not as dark as the rest of the house. The sandwich halves are in the shape of triangles. He likes it that way. It seems special. Before he knows it his sandwich is gone. The old lady has barely begun. She eats as slowly as she walks.

  She looks at him. She puts down her sandwich and with a grimace reaches for the walker. “I’ll make you another.”

  “No,” he says. He puts his hand on her wrist. Her skin feels like newspaper. “I’ll do it.”

  He gets up and makes himself another. “Don’t forget the jelly,” she calls over her shoulder. He spreads pretend jelly. He slices the sandwich catty-corner, into triangles.

  He tries to eat this one more slowly. They do not speak. He wonders about something to drink, but he’s afraid to ask.

  “Do you know the Waiting Man?” he says.

  She tilts her head and sniffs, as if trying to catch the full scent of the question. “Waiting Man?”

  “The man at the window, down the street? Nine twenty-four Willow.”

  She puts down her sandwich, the better to think. She shakes her head. “I don’t know any waiting man.”

  “He’s been waiting for a long time,” he says. “A long time.”

  He hopes she asks him how long.

  She looks at him. Her eyes are gleaming, but he is sure she is not crying. “How long?”

  Suddenly he realizes the number is not handy. His father had originally said “thirty-two years.” That was in second grade, he’s in fifth now. Three years. Thirty-two plus three…

  He stares at her. Like stones, he drops each sound into those uncrying eyes. “Thirty. Five. Years.”

  She does not seem impressed. She picks up her sandwich and takes a bite and chews for a long time. Her eyes drift away, toward the living room, the Beyond. “What is he waiting for?” she says.

  “His brother.”

  “Oh.” She says this matter-of-factly, nodding, as if that explains everything.

  There’s a clatter at the front of the house. He realizes it is the mail slot opening, letters being pushed through. His father is delivering. She doesn’t seem to hear it.

  “What’s his name?” she says.

  “Who?”

  “The brother.”

  The question surprises him. He has never wondered about the brother’s name, or the Waiting Man’s for that matter. “I don’t know,” he says.

  She starts in on the second half of her sandwich—he has long since finished his. He feels her staring at him as she chews. He is uneasy. When he looks at her for more than a second at a time, he discovers her skin is almost transparent, like thin ice over a December puddle. He feels he is looking into her. A thought pops into his head: The moment she stops chewing she is going to ask him his name.

  He does not want her to ask. He does not want her to call out “Oh, Donald!” or “Oh, Zinkoff!” He wants to be “Oh, mailman!”

  He must say something, quickly, create a diverting action.

  “I can spell tintinnabulation,” he blurts. And he spells it for her. He has been waiting for years at school for someone to ask him. “T-I-N-T-I-N-N-A-B-U-L-A-T-I-O-N.”

  Her mouth drops open, her eyes bulge. She is astonished. She is amazed.

  “And I got an A once. In Geography. It was the only A in the whole class.”

  This time she seems not so much amazed as pleased. She nods and smiles. She is not surprised. She knew he could do it. “Congratulations,” she says.

  The echo comes in his parents’ words: One thousand congratulations to you! And suddenly he remembers the day in the hospital when Polly was born, making a deal with his mother for two stars whenever he really needed them. Could he ever need them more than today?

  “Do you have stars?” he says.

  She looks at him funny. “Stars?”

  “Those little paper stars? Silver? That you stick on—” he is about to say “your shirt”—“paper and stuff?”

  She nods. She gets up and goes to a drawer in the cupboard. “Stars…stars…” she mutters as she roots through the drawer.

  She hauls the walker off to the dining room. He regrets he asked.

  “Stars…stars…”

  She returns beaming. She’s holding up something, but it’s not a star. It’s a turkey sticker, the size of a postage stamp, the kind Miss Meeks put on a paper of his once or twice. She hands it to him. “How about a turkey?”

  A turkey is perfect. He sticks it on his shirt. He can’t tell her how happy that turkey makes him feel, so happy now his eyes are watery too, and his breath flutters in his chest and something hard and thorny goes out of him and he tells her everything. He tells her about Field Day and why he isn’t at school. He tells her about his two favorite teachers of all time, Miss Meeks and the Learning Train and Mr. Yalowitz who said, “And the Z shall be first!” He tells her about
his giraffe hat and Jabip and Jaboop (she laughs out loud at that) and the giant cookie for Andrew Orwell and Hector Binns and his earwax candle. He tells her about Field Day again and what the clocks said and what Gary Hobin said and he tells her about the goal he scored for the Titans and what happened when he closed the door behind him in the cellar with the Furnace Monster which, heaven help him, he still half believes in.

  On and on he talks, scooping the fruit out of his life and dropping it into her lap. He gives her his lucky pink bubblegum stone. She rubs it against her dress and gives it back. Through his tears she is blurry, ghostlike. Her white hair sits upon her head like a puff of cotton.

  The kid he has always known himself to be seems to be napping nearby. When he wakes up he is on the sidewalk. The lady is calling “Bye, mailman!” from the step and the sun is bright beyond the rowhouse roofs. School is over: Knapsacked kids are racing home. The air feels cool and new, the air feels good upon his face.

  22. Boondocks Forever

  The Yellows won big.

  Zinkoff finds this out the moment he arrives at school next day. All the Yellows are wearing gold medals around their necks. The medals are really made of plastic, but they look exactly like Olympic gold medals and they hang from their necks on red, white and blue ribbons.

  Gary Hobin did great things at Field Day, and for the remaining days of the year he is King of the School. Some days he laughs a lot and is friendly to people whose names he doesn’t know. He is never the first one to speak. He has learned that if he holds his tongue, someone will congratulate him. In fact, so many congratulate him that he finds himself surprised when someone does not.

  On other days he is serious and is seen stretching and touching his toes during recess and during slow times in class. On these days he does not seem to notice other people. His eyes are focused on the Beyond—certainly not the Beyonds of Binns or the Oh Mailman Lady—most likely the Golden Beyond of Olympic Glory. After a day or two the other Yellows stop wearing their medals to school, but Hobin wears his every day, right up to and including Graduation.