You Cannot Mess This Up

by Amy Weinland Daughters

  The pocket wasn’t big, so as soon as just the tips of my fingers were in I felt something. The smooth curls of the spiral top. I almost couldn’t believe it. I worked hard not to gasp, but didn’t succeed, sucking in air loudly enough for Kim to give me a bug-eyed look which crazily mirrored Little Amy’s face from the past.

  Trying not to be quite so obvious, I slowly pulled it out.

  I was elated, flabbergasted and amazed.

  It was the notebook. My freaking notebook.

  It was all there, my notes, my precious scribblings. Crap. Either all that crap had happened, really happened, or when I was hallucinating I had the forethought, or delusionary capabilities, or gifts, to write notes along the way. I was gifted, or not. The test scores said not so much. This damn notebook said absolutely.

  Fishing back into the pocket, I pulled out a pen. Only this time rather than an orange Bic ballpoint, it was a Uniball Vision Needle rollerball, an upgrade. There was small white sticker on the cap. It looked like it had been printed on a label machine. “YOU ARE WELCOME ” it read, almost chirping at me.

  Thanks, Mary. Then it hit me, what she had said, when she agreed that I could have my imaginary notebook back. She had said that it would “cost” her. Good Lord. What had it cost her? Did she have to pay something for my bubbling joy? And which did I want more, the notebook, my notebook, or for it not to cost her anything? If I could only know the price, then I could decide what I wanted.

  Opening the notebook to the next blank page, I uncapped the pen and happily scribbled, “GOODYEAR BLIMP BASE. Is anything left? Go on Google Earth and look at aerial maps. Drive around old site and take pictures.”

  “You guys remember the Goodyear Blimp base?” I said.

  “Yeah, why?” Kimber said.

  “I was just wondering if anything is left from when it was here,” I said.

  “I remember that!” Rick added.

  “Yes,” Dad said, “it was a big deal. It didn’t come to the area until after we moved out here in 1969. One of the pilots lived in Northampton,” he continued. “And once, I’m not sure where it was, maybe while I was playing tennis, he asked a couple of us to go up with him.”

  “On an actual flight?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “The guy had a certain number of training hours he had to complete, so he took us with him.”

  “What was it like?” Kim said.

  “Well,” he said, “it was a lot like that balloon trip I took in Africa.”

  “Did you go far?” Rick said.

  “Yes, I think, well, I think it was about an hour and we covered the entire area.”

  “What was the inside like?” I said.

  “It was a lot like you’d see on a ferry, like crossing the English Channel,” he said. “You know, theatre-type seating and lots of windows.”

  “I never knew that … That you went up,” Rick said.

  Kim and I both agreed by nodding. It made me wonder about all the other things we still didn’t know about the lives we’d supposedly lived and the important people we’d supposedly lived them with.

  Passing by the site of the former Bonanza, now the El Palenque Mexican Restaurant, I was shocked to see what looked to be a six-lane highway being built east-to-west, directly north of Spring Stubener, the little farm road we’d traveled to the mall on in 1978.

  “WHAT’S THAT?” I said.

  “That’s the Grand Parkway,” Dad said.

  I had heard of that, a plan for the next in a series of outer loops for the ever-expanding fourth-largest city in the country. First 610, next Beltway 8 and the Sam Houston Tollway, now the Grand Parkway.

  “Where does it go from here?” I asked as we passed beyond it. Looking to the west, I knew that out there somewhere, in the near distance, were the quiet rural confines of Northampton. It had already been linked to the massive Woodlands development to the north, but this, this road, could mean something totally different. It could mean Northampton was accessible by freeway.

  Crap. That was like science freaking fiction.

  “Well,” Dad said, “it’s supposed to cut in just behind Klein Oak and Hildebrandt.”

  He was referring to the two schools—the high school and middle school—I had attended. Even more astonishing was that these two edifices were located just across the street— Root Road—to be precise, from Northampton Elementary and yes, Northampton subdivision proper.

  “I’ve heard,” Rick said, “that they are already building an overpass over Gosling … Just across the street from Dave’s Express.”

  “Really! Seriously?” I said.

  “Yes,” Kim said, “it’s near where my friend Tommy grew up.”

  I knew exactly where they meant, but I was having a hard time digesting it. It was almost like I’d sped ahead into the future after just visiting the past. Like the end of that first Back to the Future movie. It was too much. And I didn’t have a flux capacitor.

  My childhood, our childhood, really was well and truly over.

  Northampton as we knew it was gone and moving even further into an unrecognizable future. Why in the hell hadn’t I been allowed to video it in its prime? I couldn’t tell anybody about what I’d seen during my journey. I would sound like a crackpot. But a video, sharing a video would have allowed everyone to see what I saw.

  Pulling the notebook back out again, I jotted, “NORTHAMPTON – Does anyone have an old video? Look through Mom and Dad’s old eight-millimeter movies. Post in the Northampton Facebook page. Look online.” Then I added, “GRAND PARKWAY. WTF? Get maps, plans —drive the route to Northampton. What does this mean?”

  Looking up, I watched as the south part of the Woodlands began to zoom by.

  The Woodlands itself—now a booming city in its own right with over 100,000 residents spread over forty-five square miles —didn’t open up officially until 1974. My first memory of there even being something called “The Woodlands” was Dad driving us to see a sculpture that had been erected at I-45 and the Woodlands Parkway. It was brown, or rust colored, and modern, featuring a weaving of ribbon-like objects. I had Googled it once, way after the fact, and found out that it had been one of two original art sculptures installed for the grand opening. All I remember is Dad lining the three of us up in front of the towering edifice and telling us to consider the “craftsmanship” and “creativity” it required.

  Really, and even though I didn’t get what he was trying to do then, I should thank him for it now. As should my children, who I had recently lined up in front of an old Toll House on the National Road in Addison, Pennsylvania, dramatically imploring them to step back into history with me, to a magical land where you had to pay somebody, who sauntered out of their own house and hand-lifted a wooden gate, to take a public roadway.

  As we exited the freeway, I strained across the car to see a glimpse of the statue, now partially blocked by four lanes of traffic. It looked like it might be impossible to stop and stand quietly in front of it now, reflecting on its meaning. Instead, residents of the new millennium would have to settle for driving by at forty-five miles per hour, forced to bullet-point their innermost connections to the art and artist.

  “Remember that statue … over there.” I pointed across the lanes after we’d already passed it by. “You know, Dad … the one you made us go look at.”

  “What statue?” he asked.

  “The brown one that was all wavy, it was just as The Woodlands opened and you took our picture in front of it,” I said.

  “Vaguely,” he said.

  “I think you’re making that up, Amy,” Kim stated.

  “Yeah,” Rick added. “There goes her memory again.”

  “That actually happened!” I said, annoyed that these hooligans would question my grasp on the past. How could they not remember that? Surely there was a picture somewhere?

  Pulling out my notebook and then my iPhone, I scribbled down, “Find picture in front of Woodlands statue.” Then I pulled up the internet on my phone
and Googled “Woodlands statue” and scrolled through the images until I found it. Saving it, I went back into photos, selected it and texted to Dad, Kim, and Rick.

  “I just sent you all a picture of it,” I stated, smugly. Then it hit me. I had just found a picture of something that nobody could remember, an obscure item, in under fifteen seconds. That Wayne guy from last night might think THAT was a “pretty neat little deal.”

  That is, if he was still alive.

  OK, so I was glad I had the phone back, and Google, and, yes, Facebook, which I had also just checked. Seventy-three freaking likes on the picture I had posted before I left Dayton. The same one where I superimposed my face on the Statue of Liberty. Seventy-three likes, it wasn’t great, but we were going places. We surely were.

  Chapter Thirty

  THE FITTEST RED BIRD EVER

  We continued down the Woodlands Parkway until we reached Six Pines, taking a right toward the mall area. Crossing a bridge, we turned right on Lake Robbins and then took an immediate right into the Fidelity parking lot. Approaching the entrance to the building, we were stopped by an elderly man dressed in khaki pants and a blue blazer. “Are you a Northampton Family?” he asked.

  “Yes,” my dad answered. “We are … Or, we were.”

  “I thought I recognized you, we still live on Bayonne, I’m Ray Frontain,” the man said.

  “And, I’m Dick Weinland,” Dad said, introducing himself and then each of us.

  Though by sight alone he was unrecognizable to me, his name was unmistakable. He was my childhood friend Elaine’s father. She and I had been through all of school together, from kindergarten to graduation. I remembered her from our senior prom, an event that was now hazy in retrospect. I could only recall little glimpses: going to the mall (Greenspoint, again) with Kim to have my makeup done at the Clinique counter, getting my shoes dyed to match my dress, feeling awkward and ridiculous in my huge pink taffeta gown complete with sleeves the size of my head. The darkness and elegance of the Greenspoint Wyndham ballroom, the well-lit Ficus trees and the white lattice partitions covered in fake ivy. The real highlight, or lowlight, came prior to the festivities when my “date” and I, Eric (a junior from my chemistry class), went to the Glass Menagerie restaurant to eat. This was a super fancy-dancy place in an older part of the Woodlands. I was following Eric as he descended the long, steep stairway into the restaurant when I stumbled and fell down the last ten steps. Though I didn’t injure myself or any of the other diners, including my date, it was impressive.

  The reason I remembered Elaine more clearly than the actual event, even now in the Fidelity parking lot twenty-eight years later, was because of a snapshot I had kept in an album. She was wearing a gorgeous yellow gown while sitting on the lap of our mutual friend Tom. Perhaps that’s where we draw many of our memories from, photos of actual events that we don’t really remember.

  Unlike what the overeager younger version of myself would have done, I waited to fill everyone in on how I knew Elaine until after the discussion between Dad and Mr. Frontain died down. A week ago, I wouldn’t have realized how far I had come from being the hyperactive experience I once was. But even though I had matured and improved, I also realized that she, the younger version of me, had qualities that I had suppressed, wrongly assuming that every bit of the naïve version of us was discardable. Seeing her, all of her, made me understand that it simply wasn’t true. There was as much goodness in her as I thought there was in me. Maybe there was more.

  I hoped she was proud of me.

  “I was friends with your daughter, Elaine,” I finally said.

  He told us that Elaine was in New York City, with her two little girls, her husband and a job as an executive in television. I knew that because of Facebook but acted like it was all news to me. It made me realize that, for the supposed evils of social media, there was something inherently good about it.

  Social media was kind of like suburbia. Both got a lot of bad press, perhaps rightfully so, because both made things look shiny, landscaped, and perfect on the surface. Though this insinuates that something terrible lurks behind the shiny wrapper, most of the time reality is more a mixture of both the good and the bad.

  Regardless, “real” life isn’t fairly depicted on social media, nor is it on display on the neat suburban streets with their rows of tightly locked doors. In both cases, we only see what people decide to show us. On the flip side, we only show people what we want them to see. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a post on Facebook that was hauntingly one hundred percent authentic? My husband is a dick, he’s mean and drinks too much, or My kid has an F in chemistry, sucks at all sports and refuses to flush the freaking toilet, or I don’t like myself right now and I am really hurt.

  Along the same lines, how many household fights do you see spill out onto the streets in places like McKinney, Texas, Anaheim Hills, California, or Centerville, Ohio? Sure, you might hear some shouting, but nobody really knows what’s going on in there, behind the locked door.

  And the ultimate question, what we really need to ask ourselves is—does it really matter? What if you knew that somebody else was hurt, or what if you told the world that you needed help?

  What if I went on social media and told people I had lingering issues with my mom. That I had memories but mostly feelings that before this, I couldn’t verify? What if I posted about how I was worried about my son, who was trying to discover his own identity while I was smothering him?

  At least in my case, I would feel like every “I’m praying for you” and “I’ve got your back” comment posted in response would be matched by a dubious smirk and a text message to a mutual friend followed by a discussion, at Panera Bread, between other friends who couldn’t believe I’d post that kind of personal information.

  But really, that’s me just assuming the worst in everybody again, including my supposed “friends.”

  What’s the point of authentic living?

  Perhaps it comes down to giving the rest the world the satisfaction, and unfathomable reassurance, that they aren’t the only ones living a screwed-up, beautiful, horrible, amazing real life.

  Maybe these were the questions Mary was talking about. The ones I obviously did not have.

  The second-floor meeting with the attorney and financial advisor brought me fully back to the land of adulthood, where I not only wondered what all the words meant, even though I nodded along dutifully to everything that was said, but also wondered if Willie and I would ever reach this level of readiness.

  As the meeting wrapped up, Dad and the financial lady—a stunning thirty-something-year-old who reminded me of the 1978 stickpin clerk from Foley’s—went out to make copies. The big difference was, as similarly shiny as the two women were, the 2014 version was also pulling in 175K and driving an Audi. That left the three of us sitting there, like adolescents in adult clothing, waiting for our father to come back and tell us what to do next. We really were adults, in real life, just not here, at Dad’s meeting.

  Pulling the notebook back out, I quickly wrote, “What did women sales clerks make in 1978? How much money is that in 2014 dollars? What is the average amount women made then vs. now? Is there another mall planned for north of Houston? Send Elaine a message on Facebook. What would I do if I saw someone in trouble online? Would I seriously do ANYTHING?” and “Would Little Amy be proud of me?”

  It was quiet, presumably because we were all trying to absorb this glimpse into our shared future, when all these plans would be in action, when Mom and Dad were really gone. We all knew what was going to happen. It was a history book that had already been written. It was just a matter of the when and where, and then the how. Spending a couple of bizarre hours with my dead grandparents had made me realize that. As slow as this was all going, as slow as this meeting was, it was all furiously ticking toward a predictable ending. Dick and Sue were going to die, and we were going to deal with their money. We, the three kids, were going to handle this really big crap.
Maybe that’s when we’d really become adults, when we dealt with the crap. The death crap.

  And maybe as important as it was to get the financial part right, it was even more crucial to get all the emotional dots connected. Only there were no “Death Camp” weekends, no important business meetings, no folders and calculators provided to somehow, someway, connect memory with reality, or some form of it that would make us look back and only smile. Because what was the point, really, of looking back if you couldn’t feel good about it?

  We couldn’t control what had happened in the past, even something as simple as the car ride over to this meeting, but we could definitely decide how to react to it. No matter what had happened. Did it really control us, or were we just letting it?

  Who had the key to that door and who was really in charge of all of that crap?

  Looking over at Kim and Rick, who were both reviewing their phones for any important updates, I wondered how weird it would seem if I attempted to ask a philosophical question. Though I couldn’t tell them that I had just hallucinated myself into our shared pasts, I could still ask questions. It was tricky with this group, not so much the asking, but the timing of the question itself to garner actual thoughtful responses. We were still a weird mixture of immaturity and adultness, of silliness and wisdom. What had fostered our three-way relationship (don’t get any ideas, we mostly kept our clothing on), and kept both sides of the equation fresh, were the annual “brother-sister” trips we took every summer when I was in Texas for my boys’ terms at Camp Olympia. We picked a different location each year and spent two nights playing cards, talking crap, being mildly obnoxious and basically just being together. We had accomplished everything from serious discussions on religion, relationships, and Mom and Dad’s sex life to having our photos taken at J.C. Penney wearing rubber animal heads. Most trips involved a visit to a local Goodwill, or other thrift store, where we chose outfits for a photo shoot or evening event.