Waiting for Jason Lee
Jason Lee was the most handsome person I had ever seen. Tall and lean
with a tendency to stoop, when he walked he veered to the left as if he
was listening for his name to be called far off in the distance. His
eyes were bright and clear and the deepest blue this side of a dark
evening. The first day I saw him I was walking to school with my brother
James, and in those days I was a Jesus freak, so none of the
neighborhood girls asked me to walk with them for fear I might try to
convert them all to being Christians, and then they couldn’t smoke or
drink or play hooky, so James and I passed the time talking about what
teachers we had, what time we would meet after school. We lived less
than a mile away from our middle school, and we walked rain or shine. We
wished we had family to drive us, but since momma went to work about 7
am, there wasn’t anybody. In fact, if we hadn’t lived with grandma, I’m
not sure we would have gone to school at all, but she made sure we were
up and out and well-fed to boot and she wasn’t fooling around about
that.
None of us kids met Jason before the start of the school year, though
he’d come in July, so when I saw him walking ahead of us, I wanted to
say hello, but his sister made me nervous. Her clothes were strange. She
wore long white socks under a pair of knickers - which wasn’t how we
wore knickers at all - and wooden clogs that thumped like bass drums on
the sidewalk. Her sweater, too bulky for the sweltering fall weather,
had bright green, yellow and purple stripes, and she had rolled the
sleeves to her bony elbows, making donuts above her forearms. Her red
spiral notebook was stuffed with multicolored paper and pages hanging
out.
Jason and his sister followed the boisterous parade toward the middle
school as kids joined other packs of kids, everyone talking and
shouting. Eventually my brother moved off to walk with his friends down
the spooky path, and knew I’d better walk a little faster if I wanted to
walk with someone, too. James and his sister were right in front of me
as we entered the deep shade of the cut-through and they step-clomped
over the wooden bridge. Everyone threw a penny over the bridge on the
first day of school, which he didn’t know about, and as they walked over
the bridge without stopping, I felt I had to do something.
"Hey!" I said, a smidge too loudly. "You can’t go over the bridge
without throwing in a penny. It’s really bad luck. You’ll get bad grades
all year." Jason Lee stared at me, and I was sure my new bright red
pimple, exquisitely limp brown hair and so-thick-as-to-be-opaque glasses
would scare him half to death. It seemed he thought I was crazy; I
could see it in his eyes. His sister simply turned on her heels and kept
going, but Jason half-smiled and tossed in a dime.
"But it’s got to be a penny," I insisted and handed him the penny I
had saved for my brother. "If you don’t, I swear you’ll have a stretch
of F’s a mile long all year."
Jason Lee regarded me in that way he had, leaning to the left and
smiling, his mouth partially open, his eyes narrowed. He took the penny
and tossed it over the side of the bridge, then leaned over and watched
it float gamely to the bottom of the creek, where it was lost in the mud
among dozens of other pennies we had thrown in over the years.
"So now I get A’s?" He turned and winked, then walked up the short
hill leading to the high school. I wasn’t sure if I ought to follow him
or just pretend like I was just being a Good Samaritan and leave it
alone. Of course, I couldn’t let him walk to school alone, since his
sister had left him, so I jogged a little to catch up.
"I’m Eustace and I live a little ways up the street from you. Are you
new?" I said. Jason Lee grunted in that way boys have when they don’t
want to answer a question and here it is being asked anyway. He turned
and stared at me from at least four inches up and I could smell new
leather and roses and lavender, which must have been his soap mingled
with the flowers in the gardens up at school.
"I’m not much for friends, okay?" I could feel the heat start from
the tips of my toes and rise, like I had just drunk hot tea on a
sweltering, humid day, reaching up, up, up through my shoulders and into
my neck, bursting like fireworks on my cheeks. So I just walked past
him; what could I say? But I had fallen in love with him just then, and I
couldn’t say why. Maybe it was the way he said the word, ‘much’ or the
slight tilt in his head when he muttered ‘okay’ or it was the way he put
his wide, square hands in the pockets of his brand new jeans; to this
day, I couldn’t say what it was. All I know was that I wanted to know
him in the worst way, and not in a sexual way either, although in
hindsight I have to say there was an awakening someplace in that
physical area I wasn’t aware of until much later. And, like every girl, I
had some experience with wanting. I had drooled over Rob Lowe in Teen
Beat and written letters to William Katt from Greatest American Hero.
Just because I was a devout Christian didn’t mean that I wasn’t
interested in boys or sex, I just knew they had their place.
This was an altogether different feeling anyway, and it consumed me
from the moment I had it. I imagine it is a lot like stepping on a live
wire, or seeing someone you love get hit by a car, or maybe it’s like
losing your breath after staying underwater for too long and then coming
back up only to realize the air is so thick that it doesn’t satisfy.
Later, after days of questioning the sisters of friends and friends
of friends and following him home almost every day, except the days when
I had detention, I learned that he was seventeen, lived in the old
cottage in back of the apple fields - mostly because there used to be
lots of ancient crab apple trees in the yard - and that he was living
alone with his younger sister. Misty Franklin’s mother was a teacher in
the middle school where Minerva went, and Jason Lee had written himself
in as her guardian. Apparently their parents had died in a tragic car
wreck and as far as anyone could tell, he wasn’t able to drive, didn’t
work and had no means to support them, though he took the bus every
Saturday and Sunday morning and arrived home with two bags of groceries
on Saturdays and a bag of bagels and the newspaper on Sundays. The rest
of the days he walked to and from school with Minerva, spoke to no one
and did whatever was asked of him by the teachers in school.
As it so happened, my brother and Minerva became good friends,
although it was something I couldn’t understand from the beginning.
"How did you meet her?" I asked on Sunday, when he and I were
fighting it out over a good game of Galaga on Atari. I had a bowl of
chips to my right, and was lying on my stomach, where I had better
command of the joystick. James was sitting on the couch, his power
position.
"She likes art. We sit next to each other in art class."
"Does she really like art? She seems retarded." One of my ships is
sucked up by the mother ship and held in its beam. Then they become two
fighters, which seems like a good thing, but the second fighter gets
destroyed so easily.
"She’s not retarded, she’s different. Her parents are dead. Her
brother is a nut case." My last fighter is blown up, and James whoops.
My grandmother calls down from the kitchen. "Your grandfather is
sleeping. Shut up." Granny makes us crack up when she tells us to shut
up, pipe down, close your pie hole, that sort of thing. It’s like
spontaneous poetry.
I sit up, turn to look at him. "Nut case? He seems awesome. So cute,
but don’t tell her I said that. God, I’d die. Oh, sorry God. I mean
gosh."
"You’re a nut case, too, religious fanatic – you’re perfect for each
other." James’ last fighter dies and he throws the joystick down. "It’s
not any of your business, even if you are in love."
"What makes you think that?"
"He knows, I know, Minerva knows you’ve been asking about them. She
thinks you’re demented. He can’t be bothered. Like I said, you’re a nut
case."
"But what makes him a nut case?"
"What makes anyone a nut case? He’s not social, he doesn’t work,
doesn’t talk to anyone. He won’t learn how to drive, won’t eat eggs or
cheese, doesn’t like chemicals, and won’t take showers in hot water. He
won’t even ride a bicycle. He’s taken some kind of vow."
"What kind of vow?"
"Minerva doesn’t know. It’s like it changes every day. It gets worse
and worse; now he won’t drink water except at night, he won’t turn the
lights on when she’s not home. She wants to call their aunt in
California, but I think she’s too old to come out."
"Maybe we ought to help him. Tell someone in Guidance." My brother just shook his head and trooped upstairs.
I thought about James Lee for weeks on end, watched him and wondered
if he was getting skinnier by the day, but I couldn’t tell. He favored
clothes that hung off his shoulders, single color pastel polo shirts and
washed out jeans. He had one pair of hiking boots, torn at the toe and
worn down at the heel, and one day I saw he had a cut on the side of his
hand covered with a large gauze pad. I started to wonder if maybe he
was cutting himself out of some unearned guilt, perhaps over their
parent’s death, and thought I might help him. I had nothing to lose by
talking about Jesus.
I followed him to school earlier than usual, mostly because he had
started to notice me and leave earlier, too. I thought I might be a
nuisance to him, but in that fevered, unknowing passion I had - so that I
was dreaming of our wedding on a secluded island in Fiji or a deserted
church in the middle of a Maine wood - made me reckless. Minerva walked
with James now, so I had nothing to worry about there and only had to
run just a little to catch up to him. The gardens were just beginning
to wilt and die, the golden trees drooping with heavy seeds and the deep
loamy scent of molding wet leaves seeped from the ground; I wanted to
share it with him, the glory of the season, the excitement I felt for
the coming holidays, how much I loved Halloween, and more, that soon I
would be fifteen and I believed as no other teenager did that my ugly
duckling stage would be behind me. I had hoped and prayed for my
fifteenth birthday for as long as I could remember, hoping on that day I
would lose 30 pounds, my skin would clear and my eyes would sparkle and
simmer with long, black lashes and emerald green flecks.
I caught up to him just as he went onto the narrow path, and I was
forced to walk behind him, so that I felt like a mouse chasing a cat.
"Hey Jason Lee," I called, mostly out of breath. I tripped over an
unearthed root and nearly landed on my face in the green brambles beside
the path. He turned slightly to acknowledge me.
"So, what happened to your hand?" He looked at it and sighed, then stood to face me on the path, regarding me.
"Why am I so important to you?" Jason Lee dropped his book bag on the ground. "I don’t get it."
"Well, I guess I am in love with you, and that’s about all there is
to it. I wish I wasn’t because then I could go on with my life and stop
thinking about you all the time, but I can’t. I never met anyone like
you before and I think I won’t ever again, so before I lose this chance
to tell you how I feel, I wanted to make sure you knew and I hope you
won’t think I’m an idiot because that would break my heart and I am too
young to have my heart broken, besides I know I am not that pretty, but
when I hit my thirteenth birthday I am going to change."
Jason Lee whistled low and blushed bright red, like apples in the sun
on a cool fall day, and he smiled so that it reached through his eyes
and into mine. "That was some speech. You’re only fourteen?"
"Yeah…" What else could I say after that? I wanted to sink into the ground like a puddle of water, get lost in the creek.
Jason picked up his book bag and sighed, slinging it over his
shoulder and tightening the bandage with his teeth. "What do you think
happened to my hand?"
"Want to know the truth? I was thinking last night that maybe you cut
yourself like those priests in the middle ages as a kind of
purification ritual for your parents death, that somehow you thought it
was your fault and then you –"
He turned on me then. "Who told you my parents are dead?"
I blanched. "Well, I asked around."
"They’re not dead. They’re drunks. My mother is in prison. She killed
my brother in a DUI. My father is in a long term rehab. He had a stroke
last year from too much booze and now he’s got a brain like a rotten
vegetable. Screw them." Jason kicked a rock and sent it skidding into
the creek. "Shit."
"It could be worse, right? They could be dead and you’d never see them again."
"That’s the whole point. I don’t want to see them. Everything I do is so that I can make it on my own and take care of Minnie."
"Minnie? Really? That’s what you call her?"
"What else?"
"She just doesn’t look like a Minnie to me."
"She’s only Minnie to one person. Me."
"Right." We were at the steps of the school now, our classmates and
friends pushing past while he and I stood aloof and locked in a strange
sort of goodbye that held everything and nothing all at once. "I’m sorry
about your parents, really. And I feel stupid about everything I said,
even though it’s true. I wish I had written it in a letter or something.
I’m a freak, but at least I know it."
"That’s okay. I get it." Jason turned and walked up the stairs to his
homeroom, and as I headed downstairs to mine, I knew that was the
beginning of my learning all about Jason Lee Mansfield.
***
We walked home together every afternoon. He met me at the school
steps and we took the path slowly. He didn’t talk much at first and we
walked silently to my house, where I would see James and Minerva eating
crackers and cheese they’d scrounged from grandma’s refrigerator. I’d
have to wait downstairs until they were done eating before we could eat
our milk and cookies, mostly because there were only two chairs in the
upstairs kitchen, and too because Minerva made me nervous.
I’d write in my journal or read, and wait for Jason Lee to call and
invite me over, which he started to do once he saw I wasn’t going to
blab to the whole world about his family. At first we sat outside in the
warm fall sunshine, and then, when it got too cold, he would light a
fire in their small stone fireplace and we’d sit in front of it. I
couldn’t tell you what we discussed, books, friends, teachers, classes.
He told me stories about his parents, where they’d lived; it seemed like
hundreds of places, how little they’d had to eat growing up, how he’d
had to steal and forage when they were homeless or living in their
mother’s car. But still, through it all, they’d gone to school clean. It
was the main reason he felt contempt for them. If only they had been
dirty and ragged, the school would have taken them away, but his parents
were smarter than that, and made sure no one knew. He and Minerva were
threatened not to talk, and they didn’t despite being hungry and tired
and cold all the time.
They had come last from a trailer park in Virginia, but he couldn’t
tell me how long they had been there or why they had left. He guessed
his mother had run out of unemployment money and his father wouldn’t
look for work. It was all the same to him, the failure of his parents.
He expected it, planned for it. He had yet to visit his mother in jail,
although she wrote to him constantly. He figured it was just for money
and never opened the envelopes.
Their cottage was a one room caretaker’s shack, part of an estate
that had been parceled off and made into a development. It was set back
from the road and hidden by a hill so you couldn’t see it from the road.
The white paint was peeling, the windows were all cracked and split,
and the roof needed repairs. The concrete step leading to the crooked
front door was crumbling and the doorbell was falling out of the
doorframe. When you stepped inside, the smell of burnt wood and old coal
hung in the air like a wet blanket and the furniture, which came with
the place, leeched it out. The floor was made of painted pine and gapped
in spots large enough to put Jason’s foot into, the dirt underneath
cold and black, like tar in spots. Just opposite the door was the brick
fireplace, their only source of light and heat. Jason was afraid to keep
a fire burning while they were in school, so when he got home there was
ice on the inside windows and their pipes were frozen. It got so that
they wouldn’t turn the water on in the winter and took warm birdbaths on
mornings when Minerva heated the water. The cottage was paid for by his
uncle in Connecticut, and he sent them a little extra from time to
time, so at least they had money for emergencies.
They ate mostly what they could buy with food stamps, since Jason
knew how to work the system to some degree and he could make due with
whatever anyone gave him. He was a vegan and ate only what was easiest
to buy, rice and beans, canned vegetables whatever was on sale. There
was not much else for him to do, being on the limited budget, and he
swore he would, when he graduated high school, get into community
college and somehow find a way to earn a living so Minerva could finish
high school and get her diploma, too. That seemed to be his driving
obsession.
As I began to spend more time with Jason, I could see the merits of
his lifestyle. Rice and beans were fine for me, as was vegetables and
tofu and polenta; who didn’t like pasta? But there was more to it; he
lived in a world of deprivation even I couldn’t go to, despite living in
near poverty at my grandmother’s. James and I knew what it meant to be
broke and we watched our mother work three jobs to support us so that I
had ballet lessons and we both got new clothes and birthday parties. We
ate what our grandmother served us and we had heat and hot water; Jason
had none of those luxuries and it seemed as if he didn’t miss them the
way James and I would have. He didn’t expect the normal luxuries of life
and that was what made him much different from me. I wondered if he
would ever expect something better from his life, he was so resigned to
the dinginess of it all.
In a strange way I was proud of him, too, that instead of letting the
state take him and Minerva away to a group home or foster care, he was
taking on the whole burden himself, which takes a lot of courage, and he
was sacrificing a lot to do it. He could work or leave school
altogether, he could have been a mechanic or a clerk, or worked his way
up in some state job, but he didn’t. He had dreams and they meant
something to him, which was one of the reasons I liked him so much.
That winter I didn’t see much of Jason, though it was a lot harder
now not to see him, since we had grown so close. Whenever I stopped by
the cottage, trudging through some of the deepest snowfalls we’d had in
years, I was turned away at the door by Minerva with some excuse, no
heat, no water, Jason was sleeping, and on and on. Jason always smiled
on our walks to school, said he was feeling tired, overwhelmed, but I
didn’t believe that either. There was more to the story and I was
determined to find out. One afternoon I left school early, pretending to
be sick and getting a note from the nurse. I walked to the cottage,
just to have a look around. I knocked, hoping the door would swing
open, but instead it was locked. I turned to walk away, but then the
door opened.
The man at the door was about 60 years old, stooped and blonde, with
streaks of grey throughout his hair. His eyes were wrinkled and tired, a
little out of focus, as if he hadn’t had to look at something specific
for a long time. His hands trembled on the edge of the doorsill and he
gripped it tight to hold himself up. He wore a long terry cloth robe,
red slippers and his legs were bare. I smiled and looked away, not sure
what to ask or say.
"Is Jason Lee here?" I scratched behind my ear; the striped wool hat
my grandmother had given me for Christmas itching, making my ears sweat.
"No, he isn’t." The man coughed and brought up phlegm and spit it
onto the woodpile next to the door. I thought how completely disgusting
spitting was and why people felt they had to do it, and my mind wandered
to people who spit tobacco and on the sidewalk, and who spit gobs of
green mucus on the sidewalk and we had to look at it as we walked to
school.
"Are you his dad?"
"Who wants to know?"
"I’m a friend of his and if you are his dad, he’s told me a lot about
you, and I am glad you are here and maybe you’re getting better after
your stroke and all, and I hope things aren’t too crowded in there, but
maybe now you can move into a better place –"
"No, I’m not staying; I just came for a quick visit. I have to go
back to the hospital. They won’t let me stay out long. At least not
where I am." He cackled and I saw all of his teeth were missing in the
front and it made him look brittle and weak. I wondered if he had false
teeth, or if he hadn’t bothered replacing them. I wondered why on earth
people would let their teeth go rotten in their mouths in the first
place, and how painful it must be to feel them get holes and go black
and then fall out, or have someone pull them out for you because you
can’t to eat anymore with those rotting bones in your mouth. My mother
had always made us go to the dentist twice a year, no matter how broke
we were, because she couldn’t stand the thought of us having crooked,
rotting teeth all our lives. Thank God she did, because crooked teeth is
one sign of poverty, and she didn’t want us looking broke.
Suddenly his father looked up from the frozen ground and saw Jason
behind me, and I froze, not thinking or wanting to think about what he
would think about me snooping around his house. But instead of getting
upset about it, he pushed past me and said, "You might as well come in."
His father laid down on Jason’s old grey Army cot and threw the one
blanket Jason had over his bony, grey legs and closed his eyes. Within
minutes he was snoring. "That’s pop." Jason leaned against wall. His
eyes searched mine, and I smiled. "He seems nice."
"He’s sleeping it off."
"How did he get here?"
"Took a cab, I guess. He’s been here a while; three sheets to the wind when he got here. "
Within a second Jason kissed me; he had been staring at the counter
one minute then quick across the kitchen the next; his lips were soft
and smooth; he was the perfect kisser. I was spellbound.
"I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner."
"What?"
"I love you. You’re a great friend, and I just wanted you to know that."
"Thanks. I love you, too." I said. My mind was spinning. Then, I
didn’t know that was the last time I would ever see him. If I had known
that, I would have clung to his shirt like a cat scared out of a tree
and never let go, but he wasn’t one to talk about what his plans were,
or to tell a soul where he was going. Even Minerva kept a tight lip with
James before they left. I spent a lot of time pining over him, wishing
he had given me a chance to say good – bye, and for the longest time I
wouldn’t date anyone else, until my mother got to calling me the soul of
stubbornness, and wouldn’t I ever get over this Jason boy. I thought I
never would. Even in college, where everyone thought I was strange
because I wasn’t boy crazy, and I never had a date. Somehow I had this
strange feeling he was coming back, that in the end he would find me and
we would run away together, like I had seen in so many day dreams.
Over time, I became a teacher, met a man who was willing to wait, and
eventually we got married and had kids, but I never stopped thinking
about Jason Lee, the way lovers do, and no one ever kissed me like he
did.
*
Aimee Henkel has lived many lives, and although she wasted the first few on bad living, the rest have been mainly productive. She studied fiction and poetry at NYU, Manhattanville and the Sleepy Hollow Writer’s Project and has been publishing in literary journals since 2010. She lives two lives at the same time now as a writer and a mother to two small children.