Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty Read Free Book Online Page A

pool’s concession stand was flat. Nobody was fired, nobody was criticized. They all
respected
each other. Everything was fine.
    Or the food, which Kenny got to eat at lunch, whenever he had an eight-hour shift and he felt like eating it. A table in the kitchen for the help. The food was cafeteria food, and at first Kenny thought they had some special shitty meals for the help but it turned out, no—they were eating the same as the people in the dining room, the ones who paid American money and lots of it, the ones who told each other over and over again what a fine meal it was. They said this to each other on their way to eat lunch; they said this on their way back to the car, or lying out by the pool, how the kitchen was gettingbetter and better. It was Tinkerbell again, he thought, but it was powerful. Nobody wanted to break the news.
    When he was younger, fourteen, fifteen, and just starting to see the adult-world, Kenny thought this was all bullshit. He wanted plain speaking. He wanted honesty. Lately he didn’t so much.
    When he went to visit his mother in Supported Living, for instance, and the attendant said how much better she looked, Kenny chimed in eagerly, though she looked no better and in fact a little worse than she had in the hospital. There were neatness issues. Nevertheless, he added his little voice and they all sang along together, the song about how everything was fine. Sometimes he was moved by it, this massive substitution of good wishes and hopes instead of the truth.
    The part that bothered him … there were a couple. Riding his bike through traffic and seeing all the expensive, candy-colored cars, the Lexus in pearl white, like pearls in milk, you could reach your hand down into the finish … it just didn’t make any sense, the million different boxes with one person each. It seemed like pretending had gone too far then, like we were building a world in the shape of our own pretending, based on nothing. The office towers rising in Bethesda, for instance: what were they there for? Some dream of height, of the future, of progress. The dream, in itself without substance, was now clothed in glass and steel. This felt backward to Kenny.
    Also: people pretended not to want what they wanted. Pretending tried to hide the will. That was the secret of adult life, the undisclosed motor of the whole thing. People wanted what they wanted. They did what they could to get it. It wasn’t complicated. Kenny knew that was the last step he needed to take before he could be an adult: he had to learn what he wanted, then had to learn to
want
what he wanted. He was too soft, he knew it.

    Mrs. Connolly said, “What about it? Why do you think this story is told through two different narrators, Nelly Dean and Mr. Lockwood—who is a drip, right? Your basic nonentity.”
    A surly silence, combined with the sound of dripping October rain, splashing down from the leaf-clogged gutters onto the concrete sidewalk. The smell of bodies, washed and unwashed, Kmart perfume and English Leather.
    “This is strange, right?” Mrs. Connolly asked. “I mean, can any of you think of another book that’s like this? Can any of you think of a reason why it’s told this way?”
    Even the front-row butt-kissers were stumped by the question, which hung in the air above their heads; one of the girls halfway back made a gesture, passing her hand above her head with a whooshing sound, that made her idiot friends giggle. We don’t know, we don’t care, you can’t make us, my mom and dad both make more money than you. This must be something she learned in teacher’s school, Kenny thought: the way she let the question hang like that. Which was supposed to do what? Kenny didn’t care enough to try to figure it all the way out, went back to the contemplation of Mrs. Connolly’s nipples, which were not quite visible under the cotton of her blouse.
Implicit
, Kenny thought; and though the jocks and the girls that hated her would say