I cleared the table as she cleaned up the kitchen. Once I had all the soiled surfaces wiped down, I crossed back into the kitchen where she was leaning casually against the countertop. “What are your people in Ohio doing today?” she asked.
“Well,” I answered carefully, not wanting to come across like it wasn’t a big deal that I was gone for a holiday, because it was. “They will likely hang out at the house, watch TV and maybe put the Christmas tree up.”
“Put the tree up?” Mom said. “Good Lord, it’s not even December!”
I hadn’t thought about how we would have waited until well into December to even start talking about trees in this house, in this decade, in this millennium. In fact, I couldn’t ever remember putting a tree up before the middle of December.
“Umm, yeah,” I said. “Sometimes we get things started early up there.”
“Good God, I guess so!” she said, looking down at the linoleum and then backup. “So, did you have a good time last night?”
“Yes!” I said, half lying and half being truthful, an approach I was familiar with. “You have some wonderful friends around here.”
“Yeah, they’re OK …” her voice trailed off. “I just hope they all had a good time, you know, and that everything was … well-received.”
I totally got what she was saying, in a way that almost shocked me. It’s not just that I understood where she was coming from. I had come, and would continue to come, from that same place. For me, and her too apparently, questions like “How do you think it went?” were only the tip of the iceberg. What wasn’t said, the real thick stuff that was nearly impossible to melt, were things like Do you think I made a fool of myself? Could people tell I was drunk? And Was I even good enough to be at my own party?
We were more alike than I had thought, deep down where people didn’t compare notes. It was comforting and terrifying all in the same breath.
“No, no,” I said, trying to sound confident and authoritative, for both our sakes. “It was great and I think everyone had a wonderful time!”
“You are so brave,” she said. “Walking into a strange place with people you don’t know and flitting around talking to everyone like old friends. I wish I could do that.”
“The drinks definitely help,” I said.
“You remind me just a little bit of our Amy,” she continued, more thoughtfully than I ever would have given her credit for. “Not completely, or anything specific, but it’s like something is there. Maybe it’s a distant relative thing, something genetic.”
“Hmmmmm …” was all I could manage in response, because really what in the hell was I supposed to say to that? Should I dramatically flail myself in her direction? Cornering her between the harvest-gold sink and refrigerator, whispering into her ear, “Mom, it’s me, AMY! Amy the Flute. I’ve come from the future, I’ve come from 2014, I’m married and I have two kids. Mom! Look, here, I can prove it, on my knee, it’s that scar I got when I ran through the plate glass door at New Waverly. Oh crap, wait, that hasn’t happened yet …”
“I hope our Amy will be like that someday,” she continued, looking away to the back of the sink, where a window should have been. “Confident, sure, and fun to be around. I hope she’s very happy, like you.”
Again, I could say nothing. What was I supposed to say? And again, I was as disturbed as much I was comforted. She truly loved Little Amy. It was written on every inch of her face and dripped from every word that came out of her mouth. But, she didn’t like her, or she did. Layers. More freaking layers. Questions. More freaking questions. I couldn’t freaking believe it, Mary had been right.
Then, abruptly, as if she sensed the need for this bizarre, but wonderful, but death-defying, but ever-so-simple conversation to end, she headed toward the breakfast room. “I’m going to get ready to go,” she said as she went down the two steps into the sunken family room. “Dick will want to get out of here before the traffic piles up.”
Heading back upstairs to give the appearance that I cared about my ’70s appearance, I focused, again, on not registering anything that was happening emotionally. Because it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real. Suddenly, Little Amy burst out of a closet at the back right of the second-floor game room.
“Hey!” she sputtered, breathlessly, her eyes bulging like a shih tzu’s. “Come and see my office!” Her office? I had totally forgotten about her/my/our “office” located conveniently just steps away from the bumper pool table.
Following her into the closet, which had previously seemed huge, Amy motioned toward a chair located in front of her “desk” for me to sit in. She went around to the other side and sat down in a yellow executive’s chair, a discarded reject from Dad’s office in town. Surrounding her on all sides were a bank of TV tray tables containing a wide variety of office supplies: an old goose-neck lamp, a metal file holder, a flip-style Rolodex, a faux-wood pencil holder and a bunch of “signs” scratched out on spiral notebook paper.
“So,” I said, “what kind of operation do you run here?”
“Well,” Little Amy replied, with weird excitement, “I do several things here at this location—I have a photography business, I find money, and I take bets on Major League Baseball games.”
“What do you call your business?” I asked, already knowing the embarrassing answer.
“Well, I mostly go by ‘The Betting Machine’ but sometimes it’s called ‘The Amy Weinland Co.’ Co.,” she explained, pleased with her technical command of business-school abbreviations, “stands for company. That’s very official.”
“Wow!” I said, wanting to make her feel legit and important. It was the least I could do while I was in town. “How do you generate funds, well, you know, how do you make money?”
“Oh, I know what funds are,” she said confidently. “That’s what we deal with here. The first way we make the funds is we look for money under couch cushions, under the washer and dryer and in drawers.” This was the loose-change angle.
“Then,” she said with a twinkle in her eye, “we take bets against the line on Houston Astros games.” She motioned to a messy stack of folded sports pages behind her. “I put the money here,” she said, pointing to a plastic orange replica of the Houston Astrodome with the top crudely cut out. “And pay out the winnings based on the score in the paper every morning.”
“How many customers do you have?” I asked, knowing Dad was the only one who faithfully visited, putting pennies on each game.
“We stay really busy, especially on the weekends.”
“Oh,” I said. “It sounds like a great business plan.”
“Yes,” she said, becoming quite pleased with herself again. Leaning back in her chair until she almost tipped over, she crossed her legs dramatically and continued, “We do pretty well here … yes we do.”
“How about the photography business?” I asked, relishing the operational overview I was receiving. “How does that work?”
“Well,” she said, with grim seriousness, “that’s just getting started. I am interviewing people to be my assistant and I’ll make my decision soon.”
“Who are your applicants?” I asked, again knowing the answer before she replied.
“Well, Kim and Rick have both talked to me, you know, here in the office. Kim even wrote me a letter about the job, on Mom’s orange typewriter. See …” she continued, pulling the important document out of a file on her foldable desk and shoving it under my nose.
DEAR AMY,
HAVE YOU DECIDED IF I CAN BE YOUR
SECRETARY? PLEASE CONTACT ME IMEDIATELY WHEN YOUR
DECISION IS MADE. PLEASE NOTE
THAT I WILL CONSIDER A PAY. THINK ABOUT
THIS IS YOU WILL. IF YOU DO NEED ME
SEND ME A LIST OF THE THINGS YOU WILL EXPECT ME TO
DO ALSO INCLUDE THE BUSSINESS YOU WILL BE
GOING INTO. PLEASE TRY TO WRITE ME BACK
TONIGHT IF POSSIBLE.
SINCERELY,
KIM WEINLAND
“No,” she said, “I think I’ll go with Rick, because he’s the only one with a camera, and it’s a photography business. Also”—apparently she had deliberated on this decision for more than twenty seconds—“he’s better at finding change in the couches. Kim doesn’t like doing it, says it isn’t worth it.”
“Will Kim be upset?” I asked, not so much caring about Kim’s feelings but instead wanting to know if little me cared.
“Probably,” she replied. “When she gets mad she’ll get Rick to start another business with her in the downstairs coat closet.”
That was the better of the two locations, really. It was right by the front door, but the big drawback was Mom made you clean it up more often because everybody could see what you were doing.
“Last time she opened ‘K & R Crafts,’” Little Amy continued. “They made stuff, but mostly they just had a big cardboard sign with their name on it that they carried around the house.” Looking thoughtfully into the distance, bug-eyed, she dramatically flourished her hand across the sky. “It will never last though … They don’t really care about having an office.”
What they did care about, clearly, was not being a total freak.
“Well,” I said, rising from my folding chair, “I had better go up and get ready and you better get changed into whatever you need to wear.”
“Wait!” she said. “I need to put you in my new electronic directory.” It was a proud moment for her, adding an adult friend to a battery-operated Rolodex that held the names of her Camp Olympia friends, her grandparents, her siblings, her BFF Catherine and her Aunt Susie and Uncle Chris.
“What’s your LAST name?” she asked, stressing the “last” in case I didn’t understand how address filing worked.
“Daughters,” I said slowly, enunciating, knowing she was a crappy speller.
She looked up with huge smile and pressed the D button on the device, the wheel quickly turning to the appropriate part of the directory. Reaching inside, she carefully removed one of the small plastic cards, which was affixed with a sticker.
“OK,” she said, “Amy Daughters, what’s your information?”
It suddenly occurred to me that she couldn’t get a hold of me at home, in 2014, no matter what I said. Should I give her my actual address and phone number, and just hope she never tried to use it, or should I make some stuff up? I thought about what Mary said, that I couldn’t mess it up, no matter what. With that in mind, I gave her my actual details, the home phone number, the address and then, in a total lapse, I said, “Do you want my email and my cell number too?”
“What?” she screeched, looking up from her messy writing. “DO I WANT YOUR WHAT?”
“Oh, my bad,” I muttered, trying to figure out what to say. “That’s work stuff, things people need for my writing.”
“Oh,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should get those things here at my work.”
“You will someday,” I said, with a certain level of confidence.
She genuinely appreciated this, it made her seem quite legit. Which she certainly was, at least in her own head. And that’s all that really matters, not just when you’re ten, but when you’re forty-five.
As she finished her scrawling, I thought about how unfortunate it was that she couldn’t contact me back in the future. What if she needed me after I went back? If she needed help, or somebody to talk to, I wouldn’t be there.
“I wish I could meet your kids, my other cousins,” she said, breaking the silence. “I bet they are nice.”
“Yes, me too,” I said, holding back the tears that wanted to well up but weren’t welcome. “They would love you.” Looking around the room I continued, “They would love your office … This place is amazing. You’ve done a good job. Keep up the good work!”
Again, she was supremely satisfied. I was glad about that. Maybe it would all work out the same, like Mary said, no matter what I did, but it felt damn good, amazingly good, to make her feel good about herself. The only feeling I could compare it to was watching the pride come over my own boys, in sheets, when they received a heartfelt compliment.
Those types of things seemed so small, taking a moment to say something positive, but maybe they were bigger than buying a trampoline or even booking a fancy hotel room with a pool.
Maybe that’s the meaning of life, along with Kim getting the chips and dip because she was the first one to erupt out of Mom’s lady parts.
Reaching down, over the tray table, I shook hands with Amy. This pleased her so much that she dramatically pulled an old brown briefcase out from under her desk, opened it, and inserted Kim’s letter.
Changing the combination lock to keep the highly critical documents safe, she followed me out of the small closet. “I’ll need to look over Kim’s letter one more time before I decide.”
She made me smile, especially when I didn’t think she would.
Chapter Nineteen
FIRST BLOOD
Realizing that there was nothing more I could do to be any breezier, I went back down stairs, discovering Rick in the living room. He was sitting almost formally, as if he was about to have his portrait painted, on one of the two gold velour armchairs. “Is anyone else ready?” I asked.
“No, I’m the only one,” he said, politely.
He was dressed in powder-blue denim jeans and a long-sleeved western shirt with blue-bandana accents. Sitting down in the chair next to him, with the massive brass birdcage between us— the one Dad had purchased, while boozy in Reynoso, Mexico—I lamely asked, “So, how’s school?”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I get to ride my bike every morning now, with Amy, because I’m in the second grade.”
“Wow,” I said. “Is it a long ride?”
“Yes,” he responded, “but we go together every day, unless one of us is running a temperature or it’s below forty degrees outside.” He had a clear understanding of the rules of biking to school in Northampton.
“Sometimes Amy goes really fast, but she never leaves me behind.” That made me happy. Rick and I had always been close, had always had our serious talks, even when we were younger. I wasn’t sure if that had started up yet, the deep conversations, but at least Little Amy put someone, anyone, first.
“What kind of stuff do you like other than school?” I said, trying to steer away from the same questions adults always ask kids, especially if they don’t know them well. It was ironic in this case, because here was the little boy I had grown up with, the kid I had spent endless afternoons with, but from an adult perspective I realized I didn’t know much about the younger him.
In the future, in 2014, Rick was a combination of this little boy, loving and hilarious, gifted with insanely accurate comedic timing, and a full-fledged adult—serious and almost brooding. I had never thought about it before, but that’s exactly what I was seeing here, the same thing—the funny ha-ha guy who winked at adults he didn’t even know and then the controlled, almost overly-adult child—sitting maturely on the formal chair.
I had always thought that was the grown-up adult him, carefully playing both sides of his personality when suitable and necessary. Apparently, this had been going on for way longer.
So the adult Rick wasn’t a new guy, he was the same guy. Only, he had replaced Mom’s Sears-Best fashions with his own cool, vintage look. At least there was that transformation to appreciate.
“I like Star Wars, and baseball, and playing outside, and you know … all kinds of stuff. We just got a new playhouse in the woods. It’s two stories and has a real front door and a ladder to the upstairs!”
“Oh, that sounds cool,” I said, having forgotten about the playhouse our parents surprised us with. It was a generous gift, one given for no particular reason. They had built up momentum by saying that they had something “important” to discuss. Retreati
ng to their room, but eyeing us a little too closely, they shut the door and proceeded to talk as loudly as possible, tempting us to stand outside the door and eavesdrop.
Their plan worked perfectly.
“I DON’T KNOW IF WE SHOULD TELL THE KIDS, SUE!” Dad said loudly enough for the neighbors to hear.
“YES, DICK,” Mom said, with that tone of voice she reserved for when she was supposed to be keeping a secret. “IT IS SUCH A BIG S U R P R I S E.”
This went on and on until we almost wet our pants. The way I remember it, they extended the anticipation even further by bringing out a giant coloring book and telling us that it was the “big surprise.” I remember being at least quasi-impressed with it, but after the adults went back inside the room for more yelling, Kim informed us that there had to be something more. She could see it in their eyes.
Perhaps she did know something that the rest of us didn’t.
Eventually, they must have told us about the playhouse, but I don’t think it came that day. I think we had to wait for it to arrive and then to be erected. It, not the erection but the waiting game, made me think about how Amazon Prime has changed everyone’s expectations as much as the internet itself. Think about it this way, let’s go back in time, to 1978 or 1958 or 1988 and tell somebody that they could order something, anything that Kmart or Walgreens or any other retailer carried, or didn’t carry, from the comfort of their rattan chair on a Sunday night, and it would be delivered to their own front door, guaranteed, by Wednesday.
Need Blubber by Judy Blume? Bam. It’s there. How about a set of electric curlers? Bam. Delivered. The complete Cagney and Lacy series on DVD or VHS or Betamax? Bam. Thirty percent off the list price and free shipping. Hell, you could probably even order a playhouse, a wooden one, and it would be there and erected—you guessed it, on Wednesday.
Dad had the playhouse set up deep in the woods. I’m not going to lie to you, it was badass. It was accessed either by a narrow path that went up the fence line—past the burn pile—or straight through the thick trees and brush.
You Cannot Mess This Up Page 19
