“What do you play down there … in the woods?” I asked Rick, as he gave me a sly grin and pulled a comb out of his back pocket, slicking back his bowl cut like we were at a ’50s diner.
“Well, our new game,” he said, “is pine cone wars. We fill the upstairs deck of the house with pine cones and then one person climbs up. The other two people stay on the ground,” he explained, “and they try to hit the person upstairs with the pine cones while that person throws theirs at the people below.”
I could picture the set-up perfectly even though I hadn’t seen it in thirty-plus years. As far as I knew, no pictures existed of it.
“That sounds awesome!” I said.
“Do you want to go see it?” he asked hesitantly.
“Sure!” I responded, “I would love that!”
He got up and leaned over the iron railing. “Mom! he yelled. “I’m going outside with Mrs … this lady!”
“OK,” Mom answered back from her bedroom. “Don’t be long, we’re leaving soon!”
As we paused to go out, Rick fumbling with the knob, I glanced into the utility room, seeing the washer, dryer and freezer (with a key lock, so nobody would steal our pork chops). Shockingly, I saw no dirty clothes, no clean clothes, and really nothing, other than the magnetic letters Kim had used in her instructional session before breakfast. Where was the laundry? I knew Mom hadn’t done any yesterday, because I hadn’t seen it, or at least I didn’t think I had. If that were the case, she was at least one full day behind in doing laundry for five people. Where was it? In fact, I couldn’t remember Mom doing laundry at all when I was here the first time, when I really was ten years old. WTF?
Putting my best Nancy Drew sleuthing skills to work, as I continued to follow Rick outside, I knew that if Mom was anything like me, all the laundry, clean and dirty, was hiding somewhere until the guests, those from yesterday and the one still lingering today, had left. It was likely pocketed all over the place, out of sight, but never out of mind. Next, I realized, again, for the zillionth time, that in my youth I had not done a good job of absorbing what was actually taking place. Come on, if you told me that one of my boys, thirty years from now, wouldn’t remember me doing loads and loads, and yes, loads, of laundry, I would be shocked, and offended and bedazzled. Absolutely bedazzled that they didn’t recognize, and validate, and issue an official commendation from the government that I, me, their mother, was the reason they wore sparkling clean briefs, every single day.
Surely Will and Matthew were better than me. It was my only hope for righting the wrongs of my misspent, unfocused youth. I pulled the notebook out of my pocket, still walking, and jotted, “Tell Mom, thanks for doing my laundry. Add, ‘I do laundry because I love you so much’ to the agenda for the next family meeting.” And “I SUCK!”
Walking to the far corner of the parking pad at the bottom of the driveway, Rick turned back, looking me quickly up and down. “You think you ought to go out in the woods in your nice clothes?”
Good point really.
“Yes,” I said in an authoritative tone, “I’ll be fine … very careful.”
“OK then …” he said. “Follow me!”
We stepped down to the trail that ran along the fence line, wooded on both sides with branches, weeds and bushes. Given that it was late November, the underbrush wasn’t as thick as it would have been in August, but there was still plenty to grapple with. The journey was shorter than I remembered, much shorter, but the feeling was so familiar that it jolted every one of my senses. I stopped briefly, only long enough so he wouldn’t notice, and literally sucked the air into my chest. God, how was I going to remember all this? I had screwed it up the first time, so how was I at fifty or sixty or even seventy going to be able to correctly recall this? Just this moment, that’s all I wanted. No, scratch that, I wanted all the good moments, all of them. I wanted my brain, or my memory storage, to have those delivered first, making me into the person I could be, the person I should have been all along. I pulled out the notebook again. “Where are memories stored? Can we control what we remember and how and when we recall it?” Crap. I should have listened more in school. I should have found out how all this worked before I got started. You always hear about how “babies don’t come with an instructional manual,” a statement that assumes that the parents are the ones operating the new gizmo they’d had sexual relations to produce. Maybe the baby should have the manual, and read it, from Day One, or before he or she starts using all the parts. Then they will know how to be whole when they are forty-five or fifty-seven, and everything is really good, but messy, but great, but confusing.
“You coming?” I heard Rick shout from up ahead. I hurried on, toward the only reality I could find at the moment. Coming to a small clearing, I approached the glimmering cedar playhouse. The sun shone through the top of the trees in an almost heavenly way, the new, unfinished wood gleaming like bronze. It was beyond beautiful.
As towering as the playhouse seemed during my first trip through 1978, it was tiny this time around, only a foot or two taller than me. Rick stepped up onto the little porch, unhinged the front door and went inside. “Come on in!” he shouted, peering out from the window. Crouching almost completely over, I managed to squeeze through the door and into the small space. Inside were two windows with plastic panes and a small picnic table.
“Welcome!” Rick said, waving his hand around.
“Wow,” I said, hunched over like the Big Butt of Notre Dame. “It smells wonderful, like fresh cut timber.”
Exiting, with me following, struggling to get back out, Rick went around to the left side of the house, to a short ladder that stretched from the ground to the upper floor. “I’ll go up,” he said, “but you better stay here, you probably might not be able to do it.”
“No!” I barked as if he had told me I couldn’t finish my big beer. “I can manage, I want to go up.”
“OK,” he said. “Go on up then, little lady.” I could remember him referring to people like that, when we were kids, but didn’t get how out-of-place it would have sounded to a stranger. Despite that, it was funny and I loved it.
I mounted the tiny ladder with my heeled sandals and slowly crept up the few rungs. It wasn’t very far up, which was definitely a good thing, but when I got to the top I realized that the entry to the second floor was a small, square hole cut into the railing where people—kids or extremely small people—crawled through.
Looking down at Rick, who was smiling in a knowing fashion that made him look like Kim, I knew I had to get myself in there. I had to do whatever it took.
Squeezing myself through the hole would only result in a tragedy that would involve my petite—well OK, even if it wasn’t technically petite—upper body making it through the opening, while my value-sized butt and thighs got stuck on the other side. This option would result in the rest of the family trooping dramatically down the pathway, following an alarmed little Rick to view the spectacle at the new playhouse. Then Dad would try awkwardly to assist me through, one way or another, while the rest of the Weinlands stood and watched in utter disbelief.
Mom would be on the phone with somebody, maybe Lisa or Joyce, later tonight after I’d left, saying, “You won’t believe it, she tried to climb up the ladder and she got stuck, right there in the woods. What was she thinking? She could have broken something, or fallen on little Rick. Who does she think she is? And she made the biggest mess out of my third-floor toilet … and who will clean it up? Dick? NO! I will …”
Since going through the hole was obviously out, I did the only other thing I could, other than slink down the ladder in utter defeat, making little Mr. Bowl Cut positively right. Since we couldn’t have that, I braced my hands on the railing, swung my right leg over and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as big of a drop as I had anticipated and my leg buckled, sending my knee crashing dramatically into the rough wood floor and my backside up into the air. Grabbing the railing I steadied myself, pulle
d the other leg over and stood up, looking like a freaking jade-green giant standing on top of a regular-sized house.
“I did it!” I said, totally overzealously, my hands over my head in victory. “Now throw me up some pine cones and we’ll have a little battle!”
Rick looked up at me with a genuine smile on his face. “OK!” he sang. “Here we go.” After he’d thrown about twenty pine cones up, soft tosses, he retreated back to the trees and screamed, “GO!”
The only way I could take cover was to get behind the railing, which was only about four feet tall, so I fell flat on my stomach and waited for the barrage that I knew would come. Rick laughed as he launched cone after cone in my direction. I was getting pelted. It was a good thing he was so young, otherwise I could have gotten hurt. His throws were accurate, just not overly hard.
When he stopped, I peeked down and saw him collecting more ammo. Sensing my opportunity, I popped up on my knees and peppered him with three good hits. Screaming, he darted off into the woods, delighted that I had such skill despite my perfectly proportioned features. It was the same kind of thing he would think when he saw me in 2014.
As he ran around between the trees, I continued my attack, never noticing that he was filling his arms and moving in closer. Suddenly, he whizzed in front of the playhouse and made a brilliant shot on a straight line. Though I tried to spin around and avoid it, I was a second too late and the cone grazed the side of my head. Reaching up, I felt the slightest evidence of moisture on my cheek. First blood. It was just like Rambo. “Great shot!” I shouted from the prone position, where I had returned quickly enough to make the entire house shudder dangerously.
The game went on for about ten more minutes when we finally called a truce, realizing it was probably time to go inside. Lumbering carefully over the railing, I gingerly made my way back down the ladder and landed with a small—well, OK, large thud. Rick was waiting for me, carefully sizing me up. We were both grinning.
“Thanks!” I said. “That was great! Just wish it could have lasted longer.”
“What happened to your face?” he asked, somewhat alarmed. “You’re bleeding!”
“Oh,” I said, laughing, “that’s from that great shot you launched when you ran in front of the playhouse. You sure did get me.”
“I sure did!” he said, without a hint of apology in his voice.
“You better tuck your shirt back in,” I advised as we hurried up the path.
“Yeah, and you better brush yourself off,” he said.
I was covered in pine needles, pine cone parts and a light fairy dusting of dirt. It felt amazing, right down to my smoke-colored knee highs.
“Yeah, right,” I said, “I’ll zip into the little bathroom when we get back inside.”
Following Rick down the path, I joined him at the edge of the driveway where, again, he waited for me. “I loved that SO much!” I said, fighting the urge to either emotionally embrace him or tell him who I really was.
“Yeah.” He smiled back, before I could do anything stupid. “I’ve never played with a big lady before.”
Walking toward the house, I looked down at him and smiled. His facial expression was similar to what I had seen yesterday and, again, he was winking and churning his arms up and down. For a second time, I saw the striking resemblance to his youngest son, Finn. It was almost like we were walking, my nephew and I, on just another ordinary, normal day back in regular life.
Maybe the past does repeat itself, over and over again. Maybe we do go back in time, only not all at once, but instead, in little bits. Only we don’t notice, because we’re too busy to see it, or too obsessed with other important stuff. We can talk about it and get all philosophical, but changing it seems almost impossible. Unfortunately, ADT doesn’t sell a security system to keep human nature from busting in and messing everything up.
Chapter Twenty
U TOTEM
I headed for the half bath while Rick went on into the breakfast room. Shutting the door behind me, I looked in the mirror and realized that my hair had also been compromised. Repairing as much of the damage as I could, I swabbed my oozing wound and began the tedious work of removing all the debris from the greedy pantsuit fabric. I wondered if the scratch on my face would still be there when I went back, back to the time I was supposed to be living in.
Suddenly, I thought about the last time I had stood in this bathroom. I had just been sexually accosted by P. Plum. Though it had happened only hours earlier, it seemed like a year ago. That was the good thing about not talking about it. It made it go away quicker.
Were there really upsides to acting like something had really happened? Sure, you could “deal with it,” but what does that even mean? Do you talk about it at great length, looping around endlessly like the baggage carousel at the airport, until you realize you’ve started back at the same point over and over again, still lacking a solution? And what good does it do, really, to be reminded that you can’t fix something, make it un-happen or even understand why it happened? Isn’t that worse than just leaving it? That despite the fact that it crackles under the surface, waiting to explode, disguised as an overreaction to some other, unrelated issue?
How do you draw that fine line between talking about something enough to understand that yes, it happened, and yes, it was bad, and yes, it affected me; and the realization that talking about it makes it even worse?
Coming back out and around the corner I was met by Kim, who looked dazzling in her 1970s finery, stylish jeans, again tucked into her long, leatherette boots. This time she topped it off with what looked like a men’s tuxedo shirt with puffy sleeves and a little tie around the neck. It was ruffly and cute, and she knew it.
“Rick said you guys had fun,” she said confidently.
“Yes, it was good!” I replied. “You should have been there!”
“I don’t play such childish games anymore,” she said, sounding almost like Marsha from the Brady Bunch during the episode when she believed she was having a torrid affair with the family dentist.
Before we could continue, Mom and Dad entered the room, Mom wearing an objectionable lavender pantsuit while Dad was in another pair of snug pants and a blue sport shirt with a penguin on it. Everything was tighter on Dad than it was on Mom.
“Where’s Amy?” Dad asked, counting heads.
“I’m coming!” Little Amy screamed from the bottom of the stairs, rushing in through the dining room like the Freak Express. As she came to a sudden and violent stop, I nearly gasped. First, there were her jeans, which were (1) entirely too small, hugging tightly everything that shouldn’t have been hugged tightly, and (2) a good two to three inches too short in length. Think high waters meet camel toe.
Up top was the worst part of all—a maroon, short-sleeved Texas A&M t-shirt with a huge A&M logo plastered across the front. The rest of the shirt was pockmarked with other Aggie symbols, everything from the profile of a half-cocked sergeant with the strap on his hat tucked up underneath his overstretched lower lip, to a series of cartoon thumbs. To seal the deal, squelching all question as to who owned the noxious frock, the back had “AMY” spelled out in bold, white block letters.
Holy crap.
Thrusting both arms straight in front of her, she stuck her thumbs up with a motion that looked like she was flinging out switchblade knives. After a painful pause for effect, Little Amy looked me straight in the eye and said, “Gig ‘Em, Aggies!”
It was the most shocking and devastating moment in both my lives, the one here and the one back in 2014. This couldn’t be happening, it was not real. There was no such thing as time travel or magical carpet rides to a far-off Whole New World. I was a proud graduate of THE Texas Tech University, a devout Red Raider football fan, a certified non-Aggie. I laughed at the sight of the long, brown leather boots worn by the A&M Corps. I walked on the un-walkable grass on the Aggie’s College Station campus. I thought male cheerleaders in white Dickie jumpsuits were categorically ridiculous.
&nb
sp; In the future, I had told my children they could attend the college of their choice with one big exception: Texas A&M. It was a directive they likely wouldn’t ever have to worry about heeding, because thankfully our SAT scores were too low.
Who had taken this small, impressionable child down to the t-shirt shop in Tomball, Texas, and allowed her to pick this combination from among the large files of iron-on decals? Surely there were Houston Cougars logos, Holly Hobbie silhouettes, Donny and Marie doo-dads … Anything, even a Dallas Cowboys themed tank top, was better than this.
It was irresponsible, it was disgusting, it was—
“Amy,” Mom said. “Go upstairs and change into something appropriate for the mall and quit showing off.”
Good Lord, my mom had football-fashion sense after all. We were on the same page, finally. Only, wait, didn’t she hate the Longhorns? What was going on?
Amy looked devastated.
“Listen to your mother,” Dad added.
As she sulked off through the kitchen, Kim’s voice followed her. “Hey stupid, you have to dress up to go to the mall, it’s a very fancy place.” Rick found this funny, because, well, it was.
So—it wasn’t about the A&M shirt being indecent—even though it certainly was. Instead, it didn’t meet the standards for a day out at the mall. Amy had put it on to impress me, an idea that went horribly wrong on all counts.
After Amy left, Mom followed behind her. I remained behind with Dad, Kim, and Rick. Sensing a moment to bedazzle me, Kim asked me if I would like to see the family’s Avon bottle collection. As if I could have said no, or even wanted to refuse, I followed her to the bookshelves in the breakfast room.
“See,” she pointed out, with an air of dignified intelligence. “We have lots of them.”
Continuing, she motioned with fanfare but no undue drama. “First, we have lots of cars. There is a golden antique car, a green car with a plastic top and a blue car that’s newer, but still old.”
Pulling down the blue car, which looked like a 1960s-model sedan, she showed me how the trunk could be removed to reveal a bottle opening with a screw-on cap, safeguarding precious ounces of a rare, manly scented fragrance—Wild Country Cologne.
You Cannot Mess This Up Page 20
