In Zanesville Read Online Free PDF Page A

childless now, and unemployed.
    My mother looks at me, cigarette held above her head with the elbow cupped in one hand. “I’ll bet you ten bucks they didn’t
     even bother disciplining that kid, did they?” She exhales and the top third of the room swirls with smoke.
    “Did they?” she asks again.
    After the dishes, I’m heading over to Felicia’s to stay overnight; we’re going to make a pan of fudge and try to figure out
     how to get our clothes out of hock. I press my spoon into a bowl of red Jell-O, carving out a big shimmering piece for myself.
    “That’s fine, but it isn’t your whole dinner,” my mother says.
    I’ve had other bad babysitting experiences, once locking a scratching girl in a bathroom, once eating five jars of blueberry
     buckle baby food and claiming to the parents that their baby ate it, and for several months being the Saturday night babysitter
     for a four-year-old named Daniel who couldn’t move or talk—a large, beautiful child with creamy white skin and black hair.
     Before they went out for the evening, his parents, Trent and Lisa, would carry him out and place him on a stack of quilts
     on the floor in the living room so he could stare at the ceiling while I watched TV. I did have to change his diaper, which
     was disorienting at first because of how big he was, but eventually it was just the same as changing a baby—even easier, because
     he never struggled at all, just watched me with his wide, damp eyes.
    Anyone would have thought it was the perfect job, but it began to get to me, the way his slim, pretty mother, who looked exactly
     like Daniel except for her lipstick, would hug him and arrange his legs on the quilt, then the long evenings of television
     shows, broken only by me kneeling next to him on the floor, checking for drafts and dabbing his mouth with the soft bib that
     was snapped to his collar. They bought specialfood for me, each week something different—boxes of Ding Dongs, bags of corn chips, cookies—and would send what I didn’t eat
     home with me. They paid me more than anyone ever had. “Daniel just loves you,” Lisa would say insistently, as I stared uncertainly
     at the cash.
    After a few months I began to feel a terrible skin-prickling loneliness as soon as they left, in the shadowy house with nothing
     but a bowl of Bugles and the champagne music of
Lawrence Welk.
I was unable to quit and needed my mother to do it for me, but she wouldn’t. It was just the idea of hurting Lisa’s feelings—of
     her thinking I didn’t love Daniel as much as he loved me—and the thought of her there every day, all day, in her sneakers
     and apron, hair tied in a bandanna. The last time I babysat for them, I got so lonely and upset that I called home so my mother
     could hear how unraveled I had become, but my parents were at the tavern—it was a Saturday night—and so my sister walked over
     in the dark and kept me company. We sat eating caramel corn out of a bucket-size tin until the parents’ headlights swept across
     the ceiling, at which point Meg got up and put her shoes on, leaving through the front as they were coming in the back. We
     passed her when Trent drove me home a few minutes later, a tall girl in a white blouse, walking along in the dark.
    “At least these ones weren’t retarded,” Meg says now, of the Kozak kids, dumping silverware into the rack and spraying it,
     and me, with scalding water. Meg’s style of dishwashing is all sleight of hand—swishing, spraying, and summoning clouds of
     steam to confuse my mother.
    “The dad is,” I tell her. That’s all I’m willing to say. She can take my own arm and beat me with it, but right now she’s
     inneutral mode, which is where she’ll remain until her girlfriend arrives to spend the night, at which point she’ll switch over
     into mean.
    I actually like her friend, Edwina, a girl with an extraordinarily long face and shiny, palomino blond hair. Grown-ups call
     her Edwina, Meg and