CHEAP CALLIGRAPHY
When I was seventeen I drove a combustion harvester through my life. Well, to be honest, I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a combustion harvester, but if there is, that's definitely the sort of machinery I drove through my life.
It was at the end of June. The sky was overcast, winds were coming from the east, a little too strong to qualify as typical for that time of the year. There was a podium set up on the football field. In front of it sat countless acne-ridden, wide-eyed teenagers -- oversexed, undereducated -- as ignorant as the day they were born, but with less curiosity and more confidence in their sharpened intellect than ever. Some kind of music was playing through the speakers -- sentimentally engaging, patriotic music that is meant to bring tears of resolution to one's eyes.
Somewhere along the line it was my turn. I stood on the podium and reached out my hand for my high school diploma. My name floated through the air over the sea of parents spread out before me. The principal shook my hand, and I realized that he smiled as though with the help of some medical device pulling at the corners of his lips. His forehead was glazed in perspiration. An unfortunate string of hair had loosened itself from its position and now stuck awkwardly over an eyebrow. I was about to say something to him -- maybe some tactless joke to sum up our acquaintance -- but his eyes had already moved on, his hand was already reaching for the next graduate, and I drifted automatically across the stage as practiced earlier that day.
The diploma was rolled up and tied with a blue ribbon. While walking back to my seat, I glanced over to where my family sat, waiting for the ordeal to be over. My mother, father, older sister, and some aunt of mine I'd only met twice before all watched me as though I were a car accident by the side of a road. My mother gave a short sigh and then looked respectfully back at the podium -- bored out of her wits.
My family was a strange institution. Very often they seemed like some kind of a monstrous machine to me, cogwheels turning, levers moving up and down, steam being pressed from its sides. They seemed like a machine that mass-produced something very pointless -- like those huge Styrofoam hands that people in the audience of a football match are always waving around.
"Why didn't you smile?" my aunt asked, annoyed, as I walked up to them after the ceremony.
"Why should I have smiled?"
She drew back in disgust. "For crying out loud!"
My mom hugged me, congratulated me, photographed me, and then said, "Honey, I really wish you would have brushed your hair this morning, though. Or at least put on a bit of makeup. You look like you're ten years old. Oh, I have to say hello to Mr. Keiller!"
With that, she turned and jogged over to where the principal stood talking animatedly to a small audience of parents. They hugged and then she joined in the animated talk. The rest of us stood there for a few seconds, vehemently wishing we were not standing there.
"Good job, honey," my dad said after a while.
I said, "Thanks."
"We really didn't know sometimes if you'd ever get here," he added, looking at his watch. "I just want you to know how proud we are."
I said, "Cool."
We lapsed back into silence, and since there was nothing better to do, I slid off the ribbon from my diploma and rolled it open. It proved to be a marble- patterned paper, thick, covered in various signatures and writings -- and imprinted into its strong eggshell color, I found the name "Ronald Peterson" spelled out neatly in cheap calligraphy. With a lopsided smile, I let it roll back together again.
I was glad they gave me the wrong diploma. It sort of made up for the fact that this graduation ranked second to a pornography awards ceremony. Everything about it was so sadly hollow. Everyone who walked over that stage brought along their own little custom-made tragedy. Their shiny robes tugging in the wind, dwarfing them; their silly hats bearing all that significance, turning their proud smiles into sad deformities. It made me feel sick with a sense of sympathy. Not the typical Salvation Army type of sympathy that makes you feel all warm and special, but the kind that sits heavy and dark in your stomach. The one that gives you a feeling like you're drowning in blackstrap molasses.
Maybe all my feelings were entirely unfounded and the fact that my stomach was crawling up my throat only had to do with my own shortcomings. Maybe I had strange phobias. Maybe I had a vitamin deficiency. Or maybe I was just born under the wrong star. Who knows? And who cares? It didn't change the fact that every time I looked around myself, I cringed. It didn't help the fact that they all looked like pale, undercooked sausages, without a hint of a shadow of a clue in the world. They would be deep-fried without ever knowing it. The unfortunate ones would lead painful lives, dejected or jealous, watching their dreams being lived by others. The lucky ones would live their dreams.
Maybe the worst of it all is that after eighteen years on this earth, their dreams amounted to shit. Everyone wanted to personify the life of a TV sitcom, to be as desirable as the people whose intense grins represent the many magazines that lie next to toilets, on coffee tables, and in the waiting rooms of dentist offices.
Life would pass them all by. Every one of them.
"See, now there's a nice smile," my aunt whispered, nodding at a graduate who happily posed for a picture, holding his diploma high in the air like some kind of tae kwon do trophy.
"Everyone knows that young man is going places. They can hang that picture up on the wall and be proud, because he looks happy -- he doesn't look like a train just drove over his right foot."
She gave me a meaningful, dark look.
"Can't argue with you there, Aunt Emma."
Aunt Emma hated it when someone didn't want to argue with her.
We stood around a little longer, looking like a herd of uninspired cows, until eventually my mom returned and we all followed her to the car.
"Honestly, you could all learn how to mingle a little," she said, like it was starting to be a drag the way she had to be the backbone to this family of retards.
The prom hadn't been much better, by the way, except that I accidentally set off the fire alarm by smoking right underneath it. I hadn't intended to cause havoc -- I hadn't even intended to be there at all, actually, but my mother insisted I go. For her, it was the most unthinkable thing in the universe that a girl would decline to put on a dress and watch all the undercooked sau-sages moving around the dance floor with mock sentimentality. I wasn't about to put myself through all that, and I did try to get out of it, but I really didn't stand a chance.
"Mom, I really don't want to go," I had told her as we drove home from the dry cleaner.
She looked at me with a dead-serious twitch of her lip. After a black silence she said, "Did nobody ask you to the prom?"
"It's not that," I said, locking my eyeballs firmly on the glove compartment to keep them from rolling. "I'd just rather not go."
"Don't worry. We'll get Larry from next door to go with you. You can't let on that anything is the matter when you get there. Prom is the first and probably the most crucial point in one's life. Larry is in college, so you'll probably even be one up against the others."
Oh Lord.
"Trust me when I say that success in life is based on your prom in more ways than you think," she added after a thoughtful pause.
"Maybe for some careers it would matter," I said, doubting what I had just said in a serious way, "but I don't think it would make a difference for me."
"It matters. It always matters."
"What if someone wanted to be a professional surfer?"
She looked at me sternly. "That's not funny."
"Okay, I'll go," I simply said. "But why do I have to go with Larry?"
"Because, if you show up at a prom alone, you are done for right there and then. You're better off just dying in a car wreck on the way there."
"Well, I'll just call George, if you don't mind," I said, a little bewildered. "He asked me to go with him a while back."
She looked over. Her eyes were large and bright and looked like they were illuminated from the inside. She couldn't have looked more ecstatic if she'd had a religious revelation.
"So you were asked!"
"Well, yeah, but I told them all I wasn't going."
"'Them all'? Plural? Oh, that's wonderful. You have no idea how wonderful that is!"
And that is how it came that I sat in George's car in a purple prom dress that evening. He was nervous, and I felt sorry for him. He tried to have a conversation and I fucked it up in various ways. I thought I was just breaking the ice, but I guess you've got to be careful where you lodge that ax.
"So what made you change your mind?" he asked as we pulled out of the driveway. "I thought you said you weren't interested in going to the prom."
"Well, it wasn't so much that I changed my mind on my own account. You see, my mom is apparently part of a strange cult that worships the 'wholesome American way,' and if I would have refused to go to the prom, they'd have excommunicated her."
He tried to laugh and said, "Yeah, I know what you mean." And I was considerably surprised that he knew what I meant.
We drove down a block in silence before he apologized for not having commented on my dress.
"I wouldn't have commented on my dress either if I were you," I said.
"No, but I should have said something."
"Why?"
"You just look really beautiful, and I should have said that earlier," he said very earnestly. "I want you to know that that was the first thing I noticed, but I forgot to mention it because your mom was saying all those things, and I was listening to her, and then I thought for a second that I locked my keys in the car, so I was just distracted. But anyway, I really meant to tell you as soon as ...
