by Federle, Tim
“Should I keep the kitchen light on?” she asks, shaking an old travel clock, distracting herself with an object like adults always do. “You going to be okay overnight?” She probably knows I’ve never really slept anywhere other than my room and Libby’s floor.
“Oh, sure,” I say, “thirteen-year-olds can sleep anywhere.”
“Ah, well, that’s good.”
She’s looking at me like I’m dying or she’ll never see me again. Both of which might be likely. It’s one thing to be old, to be forty or fifty with a broken heart, but it’s practically terminal when you’re thirteen. When you’re thirteen with a broken heart, I bet your valves aren’t even strong enough to mend themselves.
“I’m really sorry for causing you all this trouble,” I say, sitting up so I don’t fall asleep. “I hope Mitch didn’t fire you or anything.”
She makes a face. “How did you know my boss’s name was Mitch?”
“I overheard Freckles talking to you about it.”
“You’re very observant,” she says. “But, no, I’m not fired. It’s all good.”
“I found pictures of you when you were in the bathroom,” I say.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“There was a binder of old show photos, underneath the futon.” She rolls her eyes. “No, they’re great,” I say. “They really are. Freckles and I were making the futon up, and then I found them and started looking. You were really beautiful.”
She grunts. You’re not supposed to say stuff like that to girls.
“No, I mean, you still are. You just had so much makeup on in those photos. It was really something.”
“Yes, well—any help I could get,” she says, and a siren roars outside. I must have flipped my head around, really fast, because she says, “Don’t worry, happens all the time.”
“My friend’s step-uncle lives in Queens, too,” I say for some reason. “So it’s cool that you live out here. Seems like an amazing coincidence.” My head is getting heavy.
“Not such a coincidence,” she says, and now she picks up the binder of old show pictures. She’s tracing her initials, I can tell, into the leather cover. Distracting herself. “Everyone who almost-made-it-but-didn’t lives in Queens,” and she laughs to cover how pitiful she knows that sounded.
I gather the blankets around my waist and conceal a yawn, hugging a scratchy throw pillow, and then start into her. “Why do you say ‘almost made it’? You were luminous in Cleveland, according to Freckles.”
She laughs again.
“He told me at your restaurant. It’s an amazing restaurant, by the way.”
“Yeah,” she says, “the specials are really good on the weekends. And—” She catches herself, about to tell me there’s a drink named after her. About to repeat her routine.
“So why did you stop acting, for real?”
“Oh, Nate,” she says, and stands, putting the binder of photos underneath the coffee table, and then placing two hardcover books on top of it, and a remote control, and when that isn’t “hidden” enough, an ashtray on top of it too. “It’s just—this kind of lifestyle isn’t for everybody, you know? It’s tough and there’s a lot of rejection, and . . .” She looks at me hard. “You know that little hurt you felt today—or big hurt—when E.T. released you? It’s tough getting used to it.” My stomach drops; I’d almost forgotten about it. “I’m not sure you ever do.”
“Do you love working at Aw Shucks?”
“Do I love working at Aw Shucks? No, Nate, no I don’t. But I—you know, the tips are good and I believe in the product, and your friend Freckles keeps me company. It’s not a bad gig. While I figure things out.” Her voice catches.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Oy. Nate. The interrogation.”
I’m silent, which probably seems like a tactic, but actually I just don’t know what to say.
“I dated this guy, Troy, for a long time. I’ve been dating this guy, Troy, for a long time.”
“Well, that’s cool,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, looking at something on the table next to me. Maybe the cat leapt up, or a cockroach is about to attack me. That happens a lot here, Libby says. “Yeah, it’s cool. It would just be nice to know where it’s going.”
“You mean you’re not getting married?”
“Not yet, at least,” she says, tilting her head at me. “Yeah, he’s not sure about marriage. This is after seven years together, off and on.”
Seven!, I think. “You’re like Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, but your voice isn’t annoying,” I almost say.
“And there was a blonde-and-mysteriously-younger girl that a friend of mine saw Troy out with a few months ago, and he still hasn’t come up with a particularly satisfactory answer for that. So. Yeah.”
I scrunch my nose and blink a couple times.
“Well,” she says, “I’ve always got those old show photos,” kind of kicking the coffee table, and she takes her hair out of a rubber band and repositions it. Girls are so lucky because they have so many props. “I’m just going to be quiet now,” Heidi says, and stands, but even then she doesn’t really move.
“I wish I lived here,” I say. “I wish I could see you every day. I think we’d have a lot of fun and probably teach each other valuable lessons and somebody would write a movie about it. And we’d play ourselves.” She smiles and then snorts a little and that, finally, makes me smile, my underbite cramping. I guess I haven’t smiled in ages. “Yeah. I wish I lived right next door to you, or even on this futon.”
She grabs my big toe at the end of the bed, shaking it under the blanket. “I do too, Natey. You’re really sweet. It’s nice—it’s nice to see that you’re growing up so sweet.”
And suddenly she’s definitely crying.
“What’s wrong, Aunt Heidi?” I say.
She shakes her head and gulps. “It’s just like I’m seeing myself in you, is all. It’s just that I’m trying to remember what it felt like when even Times Square seemed cool, and not like just another mall.”
I actually love malls, but I think I know what she means. But boy, are malls fun.
“So what? Do you just work at Aw Shucks forever?”
“Gosh,” she says, squeezing my toe, “you sound like my shrink.”
So it’s true. People do stay up all night here—it’s after midnight and I can hear Freckles doing push-ups in his room, listening to vintage Madonna—and everyone has a shrink here. It’s no big thing, though. It’s just New York. It’s just what it’s like to be a New Yorker, it’s not that deep.
“I don’t know. I either work at Aw Shucks forever or Troy asks me to marry him and I have babies,” she says, laughing at herself. “Like, in the next twelve minutes”—she points to a wristwatch that isn’t even there—“I have a baby. Or I don’t. Ever.”
Freckles turns Madonna up a little louder, probably overhearing us. Probably sick of hearing Aunt Heidi talking about babies, which I bet you she does a lot.
“Okay, I’m going to bed. I’m going to bed, Nate,” and she turns off the kitchen light, reachable from the futon, and kisses me on the forehead.
“You’ll wake me up in the morning, before the bus?”
“Sure thing, Nate.”
“And Aunt Heidi?”
“Yes?”
“I think you should quit smoking.”
“Ha.” She rolls her eyes again, and retucks the blanket under my feet. “Anything else, Nate?”
“I think you should make up with Mom.”
She stops tucking and just sort of shifts her jaw at me, frozen. “Good night, Nate.”
Coat of Many Colors
I know you’re not supposed to write about your dreams.
Libby told me that it is a scientific fact that nobody, other than Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (hilarious songs in that one, by the way, and lots of girls in skimpy clothes for the dads in the audience), is interested in your dreams.
Thoug
h I bet Aunt Heidi’s shrink listens to Aunt Heidi’s dreams all the time, and I’m ninety percent sure they always involve babies, or Troy.
Anyway, overnight on the futon I had a pretty cool dream, but you can skip this paragraph and just go to the *section below, if you don’t care.
An amazing thing happened in this dream. I was in the bathroom back at Aw Shucks (all my dreams are literal; I would die to slay a dragon or be able to fly, just one night) and I got out and Aunt Heidi and Freckles were standing there, just like they were in real life. He was holding my cell phone and she had my bookbag, except instead of frowns, they wore grins.
“The casting office called,” Aunt Heidi said, in the dream. And I did the same thing as in life, except for spilling the Sprite on Freckles. In the dream, Freckles lifted me up and put me on his strong shoulders, and in the dream the Aw Shucks ceiling was another three feet high, so I didn’t hit my head. And Aunt Heidi stood atop my stool (you know it was a dream because girls after the age of eighteen always hate doing stuff like that, climbing stuff, and especially moms hate putting their heads under water at the Y pool after they’ve been to the beauty shop), and Aunt Heidi yelled out: “Listen up, everyone! My nephew Nate Foster is Elliott in E.T. The Musical!”
And John Williams, who wrote the awesome movie score, happened to be at the bar, slurping on an oyster, and he leaned over to me and said, “You’re not missing anything; these oysters taste like a flipper.”
Then John Williams began conducting the amazing flying sequence, of E.T. going across the moon on the bike. I’m not sure where all the instrument sounds came from at the bar, but still. It’s a freaking dream.
The clearest part is that Freckles lowered me to the floor, behind the bar, and gave me The Heidi—the fizzy adult drink I wasn’t allowed to try—just because finally being on Broadway: Basically I was an adult anyway. And he started shaking my shoulders and saying, “You know what this means? It means you don’t have to face those boys back at school. It means you don’t have to go back to classes that you daydream through. It means you never have to throw another basketball in another mandatory P.E. class. It means you don’t have to suffer through your dad asking you if you’ve met any cute girls yet.”
And I took a big fizzy slurp of The Heidi, and hiccupped, just like in life but less related to how upset my stomach was, and Aunt Heidi flipped me around and shook my shoulders too, shouting, “I’m so proud of you, Nate!”
And that takes us to *the present.
“Nate! Nate!” I can’t remember the last time I woke up with a smile, Aunt Heidi’s long hair sweeping my forehead, my body wrapped in a hundred old blankets, swirled around me like soft-serve. I must have really tossed and turned, and (for the record) the one thing Western Pennsylvania has over New York is a better bed situation. Yikes, futons suck.
“Nate!” She’s shaking my shoulders, just like in my dream, except instead of John Williams’s score playing, there’s sirens in the background, again, and the tick of a coffee machine.
“Eh?” I sit up, practically head-butting Aunt Heidi.
“Get up, right away,” she says, and I blink a bunch and say, “Is it time already?”
“I’ll explain in a second.” She’s listening to somebody shouting through her cell phone, and jogs away from me back into her bedroom.
I swing my legs around (futons are really low to the ground, so that’s one asset for a midget like me) and stand up, my knees cracking. A rite of passage! It’s like New York has grown my joints up, if not my feelings.
Heidi calls out, “Hop in the bath, quick,” and hurries me in. I pass the kitchen and see 3:44 on the microwave, and that just seems weird. Gosh, we’re up early.
Ten minutes later, when I’m through with the scrubbing routine (she and Freckles share a lot of really cool bath products, including a whole Kiehl’s thing that’s made out of kale and lye, according to the packaging), I towel off and look in the mirror. And if I’m not mistaken, I catch sight of a teeny tiny moustache. I don’t want to get all worked up about it—there’s the chance I forgot to wash my face and this might just be a rim of chocolate from the hot cocoa Aunt Heidi made me before bedtime last night—but it’s nice to see what I might look like in a few years.
Oh, wait, a zit. Great.
Knock knock from outside. “Hurry up, Nate, I need you to get dressed.” Yikes, girls are pushy before sunrise.
I slip on a fresh pair of undies and dig around in their medicine cabinet (there’s basically nothing more fun than a harmless peek at someone else’s toiletries, right gang?) and Freckles has some cool, exotic Arm & Hammer deodorant that I decide to try. If it works for someone as friendly as him, I might as well give it a test run.
Just as I’m barely exiting the bathroom, Aunt Heidi hands me a glass of orange juice and tells me to sit on the futon. “And stay there. And be ready to go.” That part she’s really clear about. “Pack up your phone and everything.”
I grab my lucky rabbit foot and hold tight. Heidi looks like she’s about ready to explode.
The sky is still Pepsi-black, and I wonder if Libby’s asleep right now, if she pulled an all-nighter decorating the porch for Halloween tonight. Her house is famous for its dramatic displays, but I’d bet they’re scaling back this year, with Mrs. Jones so sick.
I bet when I get home and Dad chops my head off with an axe, I could go as my dead self for Halloween if he throws my face on ice quickly enough. At least I’ll get a little candy before they bury me.
But nobody better hand out any Reese’s Pieces.
And then, sitting here on the futon, I hear Aunt Heidi’s cell phone ring again from her bedroom, and she runs to an intercom thing by the front door (very cool, very space-age) and presses a buzzing button. She steps out into their hallway, leaving the door an inch ajar.
The heck?
What follows is a growing mumble, two voices starting polite, quiet, like when a lady buys stamps at the post office and gives the minimum amount of respect required to the teller. And as I’m fondling the rabbit foot and making sure my fly is zipped up and wondering if we woke Freckles, out he comes from the bedroom, wearing pajama bottoms and—oh, how funny—no shirt.
“What’s up?” he says, rubbing his eyes. Gosh, nobody back home is built like him, other than the varsity swim team. But he’s so much older than them, like some animated character: AdultBoyMan, with a high schooler’s fatless body and a kind adult’s face.
“I dunno,” I say, “I think Aunt Heidi’s having a fight with someone in the hallway.”
He kind of cocks his head back, processing the whole thing, his hair a mess, and yawns. “Why are you dressed?”
“I think to go to the bus station.”
“At four a.m.?” he says. He knows something’s up, like when Feather could tell we were going to have that one, famous Pittsburgh tornado, and kept knocking Mom’s Sleepless in Seattle commemorative plates off the wall with his tail. I still swear it wasn’t an accident, it was like Feather’s warning.
Now Freckles goes and peers through the crack in the door, and steps back, and looks at me, and then peers through again. “Oh, God,” he says, and then he jumps out of the way and the door flies open, unhinged.
And there she is.
“Nathan Evan Foster, wait outside.”
And Mom—Mom!—walks right up to me, stumbling over herself, simultaneously surveying Aunt Heidi’s tiny apartment. It’s an apartment I’ve already grown defensive of, loving the fact that, in only five hundred square feet (Freckles and I talked dimensions), there’s no chance a burglar is hiding in the attic, waiting to kill you.
Mom grabs me by my wrist, the rabbit foot flying away from me like some crazed infant squirrel, and she flings me across the room, the coffee table dancing behind us. She’s a wreck. And it’s almost completely my fault.
Also, she called me by my middle name, which I hate for you to hear.
“Get downstairs,” she says, “and wait in the Grand Caravan.
I’m—I’m serious.” Except imagine all of that more slurred. “How could you do this to us, Nathan?”
“I did it for me, Mom. Not to you.”
“We were terrified.”
“You don’t—you can’t know how bad it is in Jankburg. For someone like me. You don’t know the words they call me. It gets worse every da—”
“I’ve got some words for you. In the car. Now.”
I can feel Freckles holding his own breath.
“I hate you,” I say, rushing past Mom to the hallway. And when I think she’s going to call out after me, to remind me that “I’d have killed you if you’d gotten yourself killed,” she doesn’t. She says—so quiet I can barely make it out—“I’d have died if you’d gotten hurt.”
Aunt Heidi’s still outside the door, her face the color of a robin’s chest. Not red, like you might think, but bright amber like a Technicolor fire.
And as I zombie-walk to the elevator, she just touches my shoulder.
“You’re not going anywhere with her.”
Lobbies Are Just Lobbies: A Weak Metaphor
A minute later I’m in the lobby, and it’s really nothing special. It’s really just a basic plain lobby, and lemme tell you: If you think everything in New York is high class, like the inside of a yacht or something, it isn’t. Sometimes it’s just another hallway; sometimes it looks just like your junior high school.
Aunt Heidi’s lobby looks like the guidance counselor waiting area back home, a bulletin board here advertising exterminators instead of basketball tryouts; a garbage can overflowing with the New York Times instead of the General Thomas Junior High Gazette.
(Anthony used to write a sports column for the Gazette, when he went to my junior high, but as soon as he left for high school, they lost advertisers. Like, for real.)
Well, the whole thing upstairs is clear.
Just as soon as Mom heard from Heidi, she must have packed up a dusty bottle of booze, jumped in the minivan, and time-warped to New York. She’s a heck of a driver, Mom is, when motivated.
I guess her A train wasn’t running local this morning.
