“Were there really alligators in there?” Sissy asked Lola, staring into the pit, and Lola said, in a voice slightly deeper than usual, “Yes, for sure. They escaped. No one knows where they are right now.”
She didn’t mention this had been thirty years ago.
The abandoned pit was overgrown with weeds. Stone troughs under a strange canopy that looked like an ancient mushroom. Lola, who was sixteen, and Sissy, half her age, held hands.
Sissy whispered, “How long do alligators live?”
And Lola, who had no idea, said, “Longer than people, Sissy. They have really good memories, too. They can remember people screaming at them and being mean to them and throwing things into the pit. I think they got out of here looking for revenge.” Sissy’s cheeks flushed pink and Lola pulled her forward toward the car.
Sissy had not quite gotten over the rats, the monkeys wearing helmets, and the snake in a suitcase—her recent nightmares, in succession. She’d wake up sobbing at two a.m. and run to their parents’ bedroom, babbling tearfully. Sometimes they let her climb into bed with them, as if she were a toddler. Lola kept her own bedroom door locked. Ridiculous, really. To lose all your confidence just because the lights went out.
A few years before, Lola had read Sissy A Rat’s Tale, by Tor Seidler, a fantastic book about the huge rodent civilization living in the sewers under New York City. Sissy didn’t seem scared at the time. She seemed to love it—rats talking and mingling, rats with pocketbooks and pillows, making plans, owning Central Park after sundown.
These days, Sissy had nasty dreams about sewers. In one, she dropped her own special pink purse through the hole and rats ran off with it. She slid into a sewer’s swirling torrent and nearly drowned, madly treading stinky water. Last week she had screamed in the night till their mother came running and found her covered with sweat. All she could say was, “Tell them no!”
Unfortunately, Sissy had recently seen real disgusting rats clinging onto a bird feeder, nibbling seed, through the window at her piano teacher’s house. The rats scrambled up a tree when her teacher rapped on the glass.
Sissy had never even considered rats climbing trees. Now she worried about them jumping onto her head when she walked on sidewalks. “I saw huge cockroaches running across Jenny’s kitchen floor, too. They have a very nice clean house and Jenny didn’t get that excited, but I wanted to go home right away.”
Around any corner, something creepy might be loitering.
Sissy was even afraid to open the cabinet under the sink to get the dish soap. Once a mouse had run out. At their uncle’s farm, they’d seen the glittering eyes of spiders in a field after dark when Uncle Jack fanned his flashlight across them. Terrible!
“I think maybe she should see Michelle,” their mother said to their father after supper, as Lola loaded the dishwasher, envisioning a city made of plates and glasses and cups. Her ears perked up. “She’s thinking disaster every single day now. What’s gotten into her? I don’t even let her watch the news anymore—one bombing scene and she can’t fall asleep till two a.m.”
Mangled metal. Crushed bedrooms of innocent children. Blood. African deserts, skeletal families holding out empty bowls. Everything in the world that might feed your nightmares was right there in front of you, anywhere you turned.
Michelle had been their parents’ marriage counselor, from the days when their father did nothing but go to work and train for long-distance bicycle rides. He’d fallen off his bike finally and they hadn’t needed counseling in a while. “What does Michelle know about rats?” he asked.
“Our health teacher said there are certain fatty foods that contribute to erratic sleep,” Lola said loudly. “Guacamole, for example. And ice cream. Maybe you shouldn’t let her have any avocados on her salad.”
Their mom sighed. “Avocados are her favorite thing.”
At this moment, while she was being discussed, Sissy was upstairs in her floral bedroom cutting pink and green construction paper into long strips for her science graph. She had a chair pulled in front of her closet door, which often opened in the night by itself. Lola dried her hands and went upstairs. “You’re going to therapy,” she whispered to Sissy.
“What?”
“Because of your bad dreams. Once you get into therapy they give you drugs, then you get hooked on the drugs, then it takes years to get off the drugs, and by then . . .”
“Lola, is that true? I don’t want drugs!”
Outside an ominous cloud had split open. Massive raindrops plopped against the window. Perfect backdrop, Lola thought. “Maybe you should tell Mom and Dad your bad dreams have stopped. Just like that.”
Sissy looked dubious.
“They’re worried about you. You’re acting overly sensitive, you know. And really, you’re old enough at eight to ease their worries by acting a little tougher and stronger. If you wake up at night, for god’s sake cut out the screaming crap, just turn on your own light and do something creative. Write a thank you letter to grandma, don’t run crying to them. Then they won’t make you go. ”
“You think not?”
“I’m sure not. Therapy costs money. You know they’d rather save it.”
Sissy stared at her. “Thank you,” she said.
At breakfast the next morning, uneasy about the dumb mascara that kept smudging onto her cheeks and her expensive brown suede boots that made her trip, though she had begged for them, Lola said to Sissy, “Let’s go to the zoo after school. You want to? We haven’t been to the zoo in forever. Also the Japanese tea garden just reopened; we can visit the fish. And the alligator pit. Good idea? It will help you take your mind off all this stuff you’ve been worrying about.”
Fixer-Upper
When the hailstorm hit the city at two a.m., Danni woke to one thought: Knock our house down, please.
Kindly remove the roof, flatten the walls, don’t let anyone get hurt, but level it. She could picture her family plucked from the rubble by a giant crane, each saved by a perfect piece of weathered timber which had created an arc over every ramshackle bed.
Bam-bam, lemon-sized hailstones slamming the windows, the dented tin top. . . .
Maybe an insurance company would move them to the St. Anthony Hotel, where they could have room service for a month.
Why did some people live in elegant homes or sleek loft spaces while her family lived in horrible tilted nasty shacks, one after another, all their livelong days? She was sixteen and had lived in nine fixer-uppers. Lavaca, Riddle, Staffel, San Geronimo . . . at least the streets had good names. Now they lived on Sweet Street, but it wasn’t.
Her father, like an undercover agent in a black shirt and black jeans, tacked WE BUY UGLY HOUSES signs to telephone poles in the middle of the night. “It’s when I do my best work,” he always said. He bought houses sad people were desperate to sell, people on drugs, people whose sisters needed rehab, people who had inherited the shack from a psychotic great-aunt who never painted a room in her life. And Danni’s family lived in them one after another and worked on them. Paint cans and ladders in every corner. New drawer pulls in the bathroom. Danni despised the sounds of drilling and sawing. Every house they’d lived in was For Sale the whole time they lived in it. She remembered when she still imagined her father might really fix something up. It was ten years ago. All he did was cosmetic.
And when had she last had a friend over? You could not have people for dinner if you lived out of boxes. At Sylvie’s house on Madison Street, the English floral china on the table matched, and Sylvie’s mom rolled purple cloth napkins into shiny silver napkin rings. This almost made Danni cry.
Her own mom Frieda had striped hair, wore a white sweatshirt with holes in it at home, and thought she looked cool. Frieda ran the cafeteria at the courthouse and chatted with potential jurors every day. She imagined she had her finger on the pulse of the city. Every night, the same story, “I met the most fascinating person.” But they were never fascinating. The bald guy who fried pies at some chain place. The philanthrop
ist wearing a 1968 Gucci scarf. Frieda believed the jury system was great and fair, but Danni did not. She had seen her father in action. Full of slanted Big Talk, with nothing to back any of it up. Although he did not commit actual crimes that she knew of, she could hardly imagine him in a position to decide another person’s fate. He would think of the best deal. He would stretch truth, counting his pennies.
Something crashed in the kitchen. Danni got up, slipped into moccasins, and tiptoed to see. A tiny blue glass vase had fallen from the windowsill and smashed on the floor. She looked for a broom. It was always so hard to find anything useful. She wondered if it were safe to be that close to the window herself. GIRL BEHEADED BY FLYING WINDOW!
Thunder crashing crazily outside, and where was the rest of her family? How could they sleep through such a storm? She was the family brooder. They never let her forget it.
Her sisters, twins two years older than she, were counting down till graduation. The week after, on the fifth of June, they’d be moving together to Spain. Both swimming champions, already they had jobs at some sleek swim resort. What would she do without them?
They told her moving so often wasn’t that bad. “We get new neighbors—enjoy it!” They shared a bedroom while she was stuck alone. They made their rooms look cute and comfy even if their dad had found their enormous shared dresser in a trash heap on Guadalupe Street. Danni kept a trunk at the foot of her bed, also found at a dump, which she had painted with blue stars.
“And what about college?” she asked them, jealously. “When will you go? What if you like your jobs too much?”
“Later!” they said. “We’ll have adventures, make money, perfect our Spanish, find rich Spanish boyfriends, then go to college when we’re twenty! Everyone goes to college too soon.”
Danni stared out at the crooked back deck to watch hailstones banging against the cat’s bowl, the turtle’s tub. Where were the cat and turtle? She could hardly go outside to look for them—she’d get a concussion. What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?
To know exactly what you wanted to do after graduation?
To have a father with a normal job?
A biology teacher? Insurance executive? Vet?
Oh, how she wished her father were a vet! Fixer-upper Animal Bodies instead of Fixer-upper Houses. Right now he owned two houses on Vance Street, three on Echo, two on Theo. She would sometimes drive with him to check on their security. Ha! He asked her to plant yellow marigolds in an empty pot on the porch of a hut, thinking it might increase his chance of reselling it for three thousand dollars more than he had paid. She told him what she’d read—that frying onions or baking an apple pie in the kitchen, when someone was coming to look at your house, was the biggest boon toward a sale. It made people feel cozy and optimistic to smell those things. Like something good was happening. He looked thoughtful. She wanted to cry. How could you bake an apple pie without a stove?
Break
Shoes still wrapped in soft beige tissue in a box, black suede with a slick leather sole, ballet pump style. Her mother had mentioned the price being too high, but bought them anyway. Why hadn’t Lou worn them yet? Everyone else wore them. What was she saving them for?
Confidence, a quarter she used to carry in her deepest pocket. One day it just wasn’t there.
Hair, pulled back or braided. Maybe it was time for a big trim. At certain points things weighed you down.
She was not my teacher.
All her classmates were attending the memorial service for Ms. Vogt, but Lou had forgotten about it and arrived at school after the buses left. It was pretty amazing that an entire high school would shut down so everyone could go to the service in a very large church. Couldn’t they have conducted the funeral at the school?
Her dad had dropped her off. Lou didn’t remember what was happening, why the parking lot appeared so vacant, till she found no one in the front hallway and walked down to the English wing to find it deserted as fairgrounds after the fair had left. So Lou sat on a bench outside near the locked library and closed her eyes. The library door had a sign: LIBRARY CLOSED TILL TUESDAY AFTERNOON.
It was too far to walk to the church.
Lonely. Horrible. Ms. Vogt had fallen out the window of her second-floor classroom. Ms. Vogt had died at school.
This was why everyone was taking her death so hard.
What the heck was she doing?
No one was supposed to open the windows at school because of the air-conditioning, but there were stories about Ms. Vogt—she had asthma, hated refrigerated air, got too cold. Someone said she often stood in the old-fashioned tall windowsill of the class to demonstrate a point in literature. Could it be? What teacher would do that? Her students adored her—she loved dialogue and passionate literary interpretation more than the insulting standardized requirements of tests now dominating the world of public schools. Ms. Vogt wrote letters to the editor about how teachers were being disrespected. Why can’t teachers be trusted to know what’s most important to teach our students? Where are creative strategies, if everything is prescribed? Other teachers admired her. She didn’t seem afraid of being fired.
Just as she resisted clichés in education, it was widely known that Ms. Vogt hated clichés in speech and writing, which was why Lou felt relieved she had not been her teacher.
Lou had become a walking, talking, hair-brushing cliché. Maybe it happened at fourteen, maybe fifteen. She wished she could pinpoint the moment and revise it, delete backward to a better self.
How could she ever find again what she had lost?
That freshness of early childhood, when she never fell into ruts of speech, never said “whatever” or “see if I care,” which she could blame on her cousin Andi, who was always saying it, as well as something stupid about smelling the roses, and what about that horrible memory of the day she realized she was simply a stooge?
It had been Activity Day on the playing field, everyone dressed for sports, high-jumping, long-jumping, running track—Lou’s favorite nightmare.
Her event, junior volleyball, was the fallback event for girls in her class who were not the least bit athletic. Lou was embarrassed at the way she often dodged the ball instead of punching it. The ball scared her. She didn’t want to break her wrist. And today they had to play with people watching.
Dad is a runner. Mom used to be a runner. What is my problem?
Lou was terrible at everything. Including, apparently, expression. When Ms. Vogt walked past her on Activity Day, buff in navy running shorts and a red tank, she smiled and said, “Hey there, when does your turn come?”
Lou said, “Oh, I’m just in volleyball; we’re last, last but not least, I guess.”
Ms. Vogt had said, “Oh my! Give up the cliché, dear—there’s a good habit to break right now. Good luck!”
She had reached out to touch her arm, smiled benevolently, and walked on, leaving Lou confused.
What had Lou said, exactly? She had to replay her own words in her mind, and was still feeling shaken when her event was announced.
On the volleyball court, she tripped, stumbled, and knocked one of her own teammates very hard with her elbow. At least she didn’t break anything. Her team lost and no one even slapped hands or said, “Good game” when it was over, because it was not a good game at all. Nawal Khan, her friend from Abu Dhabi who had played equally badly on their team, said, “That may have been the worst game in the history of sports.” She laughed, but Lou couldn’t laugh.
Later, any time Lou passed Ms. Vogt, she turned her head away.
It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
She thought about visiting Ms. Vogt at lunchtime someday to ask, “How does one avoid it exactly? The world of clichés? Because they are everywhere around us and they are very aggressive.”
But she was afraid Ms. Vogt would make fun of her.
So, how had such a confident teacher fallen out the windo
w of her own classroom?
This was not a clichéd death. It was an original one.
Are We Friends?
Callie stepped into a yellow taxi at the Chicago airport and gave the address of the hotel where she and her teacher would be convening for the Poetry Out Loud national finals. Her teacher had been concerned when they couldn’t travel together, but Callie wasn’t worried at all. She knew how to get places. She was using her dad’s frequent flyer miles and took a different airline. All the way she’d been saying her three memorized poems inside her head.
“Where are you coming from?” the driver greeted her. There was snow beside the road.
“Corpus Christi.”
Turned out he had once lived in the same Texas coastal town where Callie lived now.
She said, “That’s crazy! So, do you get back down to Texas?”
“I do”—he paused—“but the whole coast is ruined.”
They were stopped at a light. Callie thought he might be referring to smokestacks spewing residue, stretching suburbs, the shrinking shrimp population. . . .
He said, “They’ve built three mosques.”
“What?”
“And they work in all the gas stations and quick shops, too.”
She’d been in his car less than five minutes. His meaning hit her. That unattended “they.” He was driving a little too fast, too.
“You mean, Arabs? Muslims?” She could see his pale eyes in the rearview mirror staring at her.
He nodded.
She gulped and paused. “Well, my dad is an Arab . . . from a Muslim family . . . and he’s adorable. Not very religious in any way, but super sweet. You might like him.”
The driver swerved. Pulled to the side of the road, took his foot off the pedal. Callie thought he might be throwing her out. But he turned his head around.
“I’m so sorry! Please forgive me. Are you mad at me?”
It was strange. A man passed on the sidewalk with a poodle in a pink sweater on a leash. Callie said, “I’m not mad. . . . I guess I’m just sad, though.”
There Is No Long Distance Now Page 4
