Leslie Johnson
My Pompeii
Tonight I was visited by a sudden memory of the paper mâché Mount Vesuvius I built in the basement of my family home when I was boy. Whatever became of it? Did my mother or dad happen upon it in the basement and toss it out when they downsized to their retirement condo? I found myself wondering.
Earlier this evening my husband Anthony and I were settled in our usual spots – me in the armchair with my laptop, Anthony sprawled on the sofa under the throw blanket with his iPad. He sent me a link for a tour of Italy’s most popular attractions, saying, “Here’s a good one. Even you would like Italy. Doesn’t everyone like going to Italy?”
We used to sit side by side, sharing my large-screen Mac, taking turns controlling the touchpad on virtual journeys along the Great Wall of China or up the Inca Trail of Machu Picchu or through turquoise waters of a tropical coral reef. This was during the pandemic, which now seems like another lifetime. We met at a New Year’s Eve party, Anthony and I, and dated for a couple months before Covid shut down normal life in Boston. He moved into my apartment; we cocooned together, then married at city hall. I made him exotic dinners inspired by the various locales he fantasized about visiting on our honeymoon once things were safe again. By the time they were, though, all sorts of distances had developed between us. We started eating out again, often on our own with our separate groups of old friends. We stopped comparing our different tastes in books and movies and politicians, which no longer seemed so amusing. We’ve both wondered aloud more than once – sometimes angrily, sometimes sorrowfully – if we were tricked by the emotions of quarantine, rushing into something that couldn’t last.
I still do most of my work as an insurance lawyer remotely from the home office I set up in 2020. Some things are hard to change back once they’ve been transformed. But Anthony meets plenty of new people through his job in guest services at The Langham hotel. I know this, but I don’t wish to hear about it. I’ve grown churlish and clingy at same time, trying to hang on while bearing grudges. What about that honeymoon trip we never got? We both deserve it. I’ve been egging him on, although now that we’re looking for a real destination, it’s clear that my appetite for traveling is more delicate than his. Beach resorts and Smithsonian tours appeal to me, while Anthony is drawn to Amazon rainforests and polar expeditions and camel treks through wasteland deserts. “We’re still in our thirties, for god sakes,” he snapped at me recently, “and you want to sign us up for a senior cruise.”
“I’m forty,” I corrected him. Nine years older than Anthony, who could pass for 25 with his thick curly hair and smooth complexion. Even doing the most ordinary tasks, he moves rhythmically, as if perpetually on the verge of dancing.
From my armchair this evening, I scrolled through the photos of Tour Italia!, admitting to myself that it would be nice to ride on a gondola in Venice or gaze up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or stroll down the streets of Pompeii once covered in lava thousands of years ago. And quite suddenly, I remembered my childhood creation of the ancient city buried by volcanic ash, waiting to be excavated.
I was in the sixth grade. It was the first Monday of the new month, October, and Mrs. Peck gave us an assignment for a do-at-home science project. We had two weeks, and we could work alone or with a partner. Kids in the class looked around, making eye contact, and I looked over at Denny, but he didn’t look back at me. At the bell I even hurried over to get close to him in the hall to ask him to be my partner. Hey, I called. Hey, wait, and he stopped.
Denny looked different this year. He was taller, for one thing. Our heads used to be in the same place, but now I only came up to his neck. His hair was parted in the middle; that was another thing. He was wearing a new Nike sweatshirt that day and his old basketball shorts. Those shorts used to be long on him, but now I could see his knees and little dark hairs growing on his legs. Denny noticed me looking, and it made my stomach tighten.
“Nah, probably not.” That’s what Denny said when I asked him to be my partner, shrugging as if it wasn’t even up to him, just something that likely wasn’t going to happen, like seeing a tree split in two by lightning, which we’d agreed would be really cool to see back in fifth grade when we used to be best friends. We’d started making a list one time, each adding things, and it couldn’t be something totally impossible, like the alien in ET, but something that could happen even if it would be super rare. Like finding a snake in the woods at the exact moment it was crawling out of its old skin. That could totally happen. We just hadn’t seen it with our own eyes yet.
“Probably not” still wasn’t no, and I called him on Tuesday after school. I waited till nobody else was in the family room by the phone and dialed. I knew the number by heart even though we’d never called each other much when we were friends. We would just find each other outside in the neighborhood or go to each other’s door and knock. I mostly blamed my parents for making us move to a new part of town where the houses were bigger and kind of fancier and farther apart.
But what I didn’t understand was why we weren’t friends at school anymore. Denny wasn’t mean to me, exactly, but he kept moving away from me during free time when I tried to talk to him like we used to about Zbots or Pokemon or the deadliest reptiles.
Denny’s mom said just a minute, Greg, and when Denny got on the line, I asked him again if he wanted to do the science project together because I had an idea about a diorama of the habitat of the Komodo dragon. Denny said he was probably making a solar system with Blake and Eric. Probably. That word again.
“But that’s three people,” I said. “It’s supposed to be partners.”
“Whatever, man.”
The way Denny said it made me feel weird. “Okay,” I said, and he hung up.
I forgot about the science project. I didn’t forget about it exactly, but I tried not to think about it, and then not thinking about it seemed to work until Mrs. Peck reminded the class on Friday that the presentations would start on Monday.
I waited till Sunday to tell my mom. She looked at the crumpled assignment, retrieved from the bottom of my backpack. I figured she’d be really mad, and I waited for her to yell at me. I was ready for it. But then she didn’t. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the assignment packet, flipping through the stapled pages, shaking her head.
“I signed up for the volcano,” I said, just to break the silence. I hadn’t signed up for the volcano because you didn’t have to sign up for anything; you just had to pick one of the six projects in the packet and bring it to school on Monday. It was too late now for the diorama because I didn’t get a library book about Komodo dragons and I didn’t know where they lived. I just knew they were poisonous. Now it was Sunday, and the library was closed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She was smoothing out the pages, trying to flatten them with her hand.
“I forgot.” I was standing behind one of the kitchen chairs, and my mom looked up at me like I’d turned into some kind of unusual zoo animal.
“Sit down, Greg.”
Her voice was all serious and soft, not like her regular mad voice at all. I sat down and picked up the pepper shaker that was a rooster and shook out some black flakes that sprinkled from its red coxcomb into my palm.
“Stop that.”
She sounded irritated now, which was what I was waiting for. “I forgot, okay?” I let my voice get louder. “People forget things sometimes. It happens.”
I wanted her to yell back at me about being irresponsible and disorganized, so I could yell back, too, but she just looked at me again, making a wrinkle between her eyebrows.
“This isn’t like you, Greg. You’re not acting like yourself lately. You haven’t been for some time.”
I looked down and moved the rooster like a chess piece on the plaid tablecloth, white square to blue square.
“Dad thinks you’re still getting used to the new neighborhood, but that’s not it. Is it? Because you quit the baseball team before we even moved. And your new room is super cool, right?”
I licked at the pepper on my palm. The flakes tasted terrible and made my eyes water. I heard Mom sigh, like she did when she was trying to be patient.
“I just want you to know that you can tell me if something’s wrong, Greg. Because life can be…really confusing…when you’re going through changes and –”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“I didn’t say anything was wrong with you, Greggie.”
I wiped at my eyes, smearing pepper specks in my left one by accident. It burned. “Sorry I forgot about the stupid science project and I don’t get perfect grades like Megan and I’m not on the baseball team like stupid Blake Finnegan. You probably wish he was your son.”
It felt good to say that, to say anything, to get her to stop talking about changes.
“You know I don’t think that.”
“Dad does.”
“That’s not true.”
She leaned her elbows on the table, put her chin on her hands. “Don’t cry, sweetheart.”
“I’m not crying. Geez.”
She took a paper napkin from the holder on the table and waved it at me like a flag. I wanted to take it to wipe my eyes, but I didn’t. I wrapped my arms on my stomach instead. She dropped the napkin on the table between us.
“Okay. Let’s see.” Mom flipped through the first few pages of the packet till she got to the volcano. “We actually have everything we need here. You can get the newspapers out of the trash. I can pour out the rest of my Fresca for the bottle, I guess. Baking soda, check. Dish soap, of course. Vinegar and food coloring, check-check.”
She stood up quickly, like she just got zapped with a live wire, and cleared the table. “So the volcano. That’s definitely the coolest one, right?” She was nodding at me like a bobble-head toy, and I could tell she was waiting for me to agree, to get excited about making it.
But I was the only kid in the class without a partner, and years later, I still remember this moment, stuck in the memory of my body, as being filled with shame. It wouldn’t have occurred to me at that age to think the word “shame” or connect it to the vague aches that were spreading in my gut, my chest, and the pits of my arms as I looked at my mother who was smiling with such encouragement.
At the time, I just felt furious with her even while she was helping me. I stomped to the garage and kicked at the big blue trash bin. When I got back with the newspapers, she’d already spread an old vinyl tablecloth, and I waited till she got everything set up. It took awhile. She found a box and cut the sides with an X-Acto and fastened the empty soda jug in the middle with the hot glue gun she used for her crafts. I helped her wad up pieces of newspaper – that was my main job – and she taped them around the bottle till it looked kind of like the shape of a mountain. She mixed glue with water in a baking pan, and we dipped strips of newspaper and stuck them all over the mountain till the tape was covered up.
We stood back. It looked lumpy and lopsided, but Mom said that’s how volcanos were supposed to look. I could see part of President Clinton’s face near the bottom looking up at me. My mom gave me her blow dryer and went to do laundry, and my arm got tired aiming the hot air on all the sides. Instead of making chicken and peas, my mom ordered pizza and we got to eat in the family room on trays and watch TV. After pizza, the volcano was still soggy, but my mom said good enough and got the poster paints and brushes from her supplies. We ran out of brown toward the end, so we switched to green. Mom used a funnel to pour in the baking soda and some dishwashing soap and water through the top of the plastic bottle in the volcano’s middle, and then she let me add five drops of red food coloring. She put a half-full bottle of vinegar in a plastic bag in my school backpack. “So, when you pour in the vinegar,” she told me, “that’s what’ll make it fizz up. Like a regular Mount Vesuvius.”
“What’s Mount Vesuvis?”
“Vesuvee-us. It’s a famous volcano. The one that destroyed the city of Pompeii a jillion years ago. Anyway, it’s too late to try it now. But it’ll work.”
“Okay.” I could see places where the newsprint and tape were starting to show through the paint as it dried.
She gave me a halfway smile, like when you feel sorry for someone.
In the morning, I rode the bus beside my volcano, protected in a black plastic trash bag. At school the projects were lined up in the hallway outside of Mrs. Peck’s door. After pledge and announcements, she pulled four of the popsicle sticks with names from the turn-taking can. My name wasn’t picked, but everyone would get their chance, Mrs. Peck said, by Friday.
Melissa Doane and her partner Becky went first. Their project was so big that Melissa’s dad had left it in the office on a rolling cart, and we were all going out to the courtyard where there was more room for the presentation. The class filed out and gathered near one of the picnic tables where the custodian lifted the project off the cart and placed it on the table with a grunt. It was a gigantic volcano on a huge wooden base that Mr. Doane probably made in his woodshop. My volcano was as tall as the Fresca bottle, which at home had seemed pretty big, but the girls’ looked at least three feet tall, painted black and gray with a clear coating of varnish that shone in the sun. Melissa did all the talking while Becky stood behind her with her hands on her hips like a security guard. Melissa used words like magna chamber and conduit and secondary vent that I didn’t know anything about. Then Mrs. Peck directed groups of students to step up for a closer look at the model before Melissa and Becky would make it erupt.
I leaned in, looking at the landscape around the bottom of the volcano, with green felt grass and sandpaper ground and glued-on pebbles, and all these tiny trees and bushes that they probably bought at Craft Corner at the mall. There was a river made with crinkly blue paper, and glued into the waves were miniature plastic dolphins. I touched one, lightly, with my little finger. Then Mrs. Peck was telling our group to move on.
Blake Finnegan – the stocky, redheaded captain of the Little League team – elbowed my back and said, “Faggot.”
I heard a few kids laugh. I didn’t want to turn around to look, but I couldn’t help it, and Denny was one of them. One of the people laughing. I looked away quickly in the direction of Mrs. Peck, but she was just waving on the next group of kids. I had an urge to yell out to her to tell – Mrs. Peck! – but that would be crazy. Unthinkable. I stumbled along with the rest of the class that formed a semicircle around the volcano.
“Everyone stand back,” Melissa ordered. “Stand back!”
Bright orange lava suddenly exploded from the top of the volcano with a loud hiss, bubbling higher and higher before flowing down, and then yellow and pink started spraying out from two more holes on the sides. Becky jumped up and down, clapping her hands like a little kid, girls squealed, and even most of the boys made a sound like whooaa.
I wanted to go to the bathroom and put water on my face but if I raised my hand to ask then people would look at me, and I could tell my cheeks were probably still red. They felt like it, anyway. I didn’t know. I told myself it didn’t matter. It was just asshole Blake. But it was Denny, too.
After school I waited by the lockers till all the busses had been called. I took my project from the hallway and snuck it away, taking the shortcut through the Town Hall parking lot and the wooded area behind it toward my neighborhood. The bulky bag wasn’t so heavy, just kind of awkward, and I shifted it from one side to the other as I walked. When I got to the trees, I tossed the bag on the ground and kicked at it, breathing hard. I was crying, just a little. I looked over my shoulder and up into the branches, as if someone hidden might be watching me. But of course there was no one. I thought about climbing onto a nearby boulder and jumping down on the stupid volcano, smashing it, then throwing it into the woods. But I didn’t.
I carried it home. I knew there was nowhere to hide it in my room where my mother didn’t clean, so I figured the furnace room in the basement was the best place. That’s where my parents stored the extra patio chairs and Christmas decorations and boots when it wasn’t winter. If I went through the kitchen to get to the basement stairs, though, my mother would see me, so I used the hatch door on the back of the house. I’d never tried opening it before – I’d never needed to and didn’t know if I could – but after sliding the latch, I pulled up the metal door with no problem, and I climbed down, closing the hatch behind me.
The furnace room was crowded with stacked boxes and a few pieces of furniture covered with sheets. Under one of them was the small desk from my old bedroom set. I took my volcano out of the trash bag and placed it there. It was dented where I’d kicked, but it didn’t matter. Nobody but me was going to see it. I looked at it for a few minutes. Then I got some Sharpie markers from my mom’s craft supplies. My neck felt hot under my chin as if I were doing something forbidden. On the cardboard base of my volcano, I drew streets of cobblestone like they probably had in an ancient city. I took the poster paints and brushes and covered up the see-through places and added some yellow and orange globs for lava. When it was close to dinnertime, I covered it up with the sheet and left the way I’d come, through the hatch, and walked around the side of the house to the front door. When Mom asked where I’d been, I told her just hanging out, and when she wanted to know where, I said, “With Denny.”
“That’s terrific, honey. I’m so glad.” She tried to hug me, but I pushed away.
At school the next day during study hall, I went to the library and wrote a sloppy handwritten report on the Komodo Dragon and dropped it on Mrs. Peck’s desk. Written reports for half-credit in place of projects were for the serious slackers or the kids with bad parents who wouldn’t buy them any supplies, but I didn’t care anymore.
For the rest of the week, when I got home from school, I’d head straight to the basement to work on my volcano. I took bits and pieces from Mom’s craft boxes – mini pom-poms, pipe cleaners, squares of colored foam that I cut into shapes – not too much of any one thing so she’d never notice. I’d lose track of time down there, building a jungle thing on one side of Vesuvius and a city, kind of, on the other.
On Sunday, near the end of the day, I became aware of Mom’s voice yelling my name. Greg? Where are you? Greg!
I wiped my hands, sticky from tape and Elmer’s glue, on the old sheet, stepping back from my project. The dinosaurs I’d made by twisting pipe cleaners around pieces of putty looked like weird bugs with antennas, and the pom-pom trees like nothing more than random fuzzy blobs. An army of Z-bots, picked from the collection in my room, were glued down in a formation. Nothing about it looked like an ancient city about to be covered in lava, but I didn’t mind.
I covered it quickly and climbed up the hatch and raced around the house to the front door and into the kitchen for Sunday shepherd’s pie with my parents and my sister Megan. None of them had any idea what I’d been doing all day since church, and in a weird way I wanted to tell them about my Pompeii. But of course I couldn’t. Mom would know I’d lied about my presentation, and Megan would torture me with days of teasing.
The next week at school there was a special assembly for the DARE program in the gym. We had to sit in homeroom line order in rows of folding chairs set up in front of the stage. Denny was in the row right behind me, a few seats from the aisle, and when I turned around in my chair, we looked at each other. I didn’t turn around to see Denny; I was looking at everyone, mostly at the other sixth graders from other classes who were still filing in. But then right when I looked at Denny by accident – or so I told myself – Denny looked at me, too. His forehead pinched above his dark eyebrows and his lips pressed together. It was a wince – a wince of remorse, as I remember it now, although at the time I never could have articulated those words in my mind. But we looked at each other for several long moments, and I recognized what he was feeling. That he was sorry for laughing at me, sorry for the way things had to turn out between us.
When I got home from school, I climbed down the hatch and started moving across the dusty cement floor toward the furnace room as usual, but my feet slowed to a standstill. I thought about how I was going to stop coming down here pretty soon. I knew I wouldn’t be working on my Pompeii much longer. I wasn’t sure why, or how I would know whether it was actually finished or if I just didn’t want to do it anymore. But I could tell it was getting close, and a sadness flowed slowly down on me from my head to my feet.
Now I close my laptop and stand. “I’m going up,” I say to Anthony. “To read or something.”
He reaches for the remote. He watches Netflix without me, the reality shows that he knows I abhor. He holds it in the air but doesn’t click it yet. He’s studying me. “You know, we can still travel together,” he says. “No matter what happens. Whatever we decide. We could still go places together now and then. In our future lives.”
I pause by the stairs.
“You know. Just for fun?” He smiles up at me sadly.
I’m remembering now, as if it were yesterday, the feeling of elation that washed over me as a boy, like a fresh, clean wave, when I pulled on the cord of that light bulb in the furnace room, illuminating my secret Pompeii.
“We could,” I say to Anthony. “Probably.”
Leslie Johnson’s fiction has been broadcast on NPR and published in anthologies and literary journals such as Threepenny Review, Puerto Del Sol, december, Third Coast, Cimarron Review, and Colorado Review, among others. Her work has been awarded the Pushcart Prize (also appearing in Love Stories for Turbulent Times, a “best of Pushcart prose” anthology from Pushcart Press) and the 2023 Three Sisters Award in fiction from NELLE literary journal. She teaches writing at the University of Hartford and lead workshops for the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
