by Federle, Tim
Mom didn’t actually drink and drive, by the way. She’s not that dumb. In the old days, whenever she had to confront something scary, she’d just get to wherever she was going and sit in the car and drink until she got up the courage to go inside. According to her diary.
I walk over to a dying potted plant, in this city full of potted plants, wedged in a corner of Heidi’s first floor lobby. Looking like nobody’s given it any attention or love in forever. If E.T. were real, we could gauge his health based upon this plant. This plant that he’d bring back to life, just ’cause that’s what E.T.s do, that’s what they’re good at.
When Libby and I stayed up the other night and studied the movie for my audition (her mom has a Blu-ray player), I’d forgotten that in the beginning of the movie there’s actually a lot of E.T.s, like a million, spread out all over that magical forest. And the funniest thing is, all they were doing was looking for plants. They just go to other planets to check out the scene and pick up a few ferns. I wish E.T. were here now and could make this sad plant sprout back up, pop out its planty chest, and make something of itself. I wish everything were healthy. I wish Mom could have just stayed home, back on Planet Jankburg. Could have let me ride out my trip in dignity. Daring myself to come back to New York when I’m old enough. I wish Mom hadn’t had something to drink.
My phone rings: 412. Oh, God.
“Hello?”
“Nathan Foster.”
“Hi. Hi, Dad.”
“Is your mother okay? Is she—is she there in one piece?”
“She’s okay, Dad. She’s here. I—” But I stop. He’s heaving for air.
“What in the Lord’s name were you thinking, Nathan? Going all the way, without our permission, to a place like New York City?”
“I know, Dad. I’m a rotten kid.” My throat closes like a fist. “I’m a rotten son. I—I’m grounded until Christmas break, at least. I know you’re always praying for me and I . . . I wish it were paying off for you. I really do.” I really do. “I was stupid. I’m the stupidest son you have, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve—”
“Nathan.” He swallows. Coughs. Grips the phone so hard, the plastic handset creaks. “It was some kind of brave, boy.” Click.
Brave?
“Hey, Nate,” from behind. I turn around and—oh, God—I guess I’m sobbing a teeny bit, or about to.
Freckles is in jeans now, and a T-shirt and a corduroy jacket and backward ball cap. “Come on, buddy, let’s get out of here for a little bit and get you some breakfast. There’s a good diner around the corner.” And just like that I follow him out onto the drizzly street.
I do that kid thing where I don’t say anything. I feel like anything I say will reveal how young I am or how much I don’t understand about adults, about my own confusing parents.
“Do you like waffles?” Freckles says, and I want to say, “Is Christine Daaé’s high note pre-recorded in Phantom?”, but it seems too early in the day for that kind of insider stuff (and only Libby’d laugh, because it’s her line anyway). So I just go, “Uh-huh.”
We order waffles. Well, I do. Freckles orders an egg white omelet (what?) and coffee and water, and about a thousand minutes go by before he says, “Well, that was awkward back there, huh?”
“Yes!” I say, and luckily the waiter comes over and sets down toast, for the table, because I can just stuff my mouth and not talk.
“This isn’t my business,” Freckles says. People always say that just before they try to get you to say secrets and stuff. “But has your mom shown up drunk to places before?”
“Oh, a long time ago.” I’m mumbling through a mouthful of horrible rye toast, toast that tastes like it was baked three years ago and set out in the sun. “It’s an old problem that she sort of has under control.” Or had.
The waffles appear out of nowhere—there must be some diner conveyor belt back there—and the waiter sets down a whole jar of syrup for me, in a real glass bottle that’s totally sticky and gross but, again, solely for me, which is cool. “Wow, this place is fast,” I say like an idiot.
Freckles yawns and drinks his coffee down in about a single gulp, and he giggles and points to lipstick on the rim, and we smile over that one.
“That isn’t from me, believe me, Nate. I haven’t worn lipstick since college.” He laughs at his own joke. “This place isn’t known for cleaning their germy dishes, but it’ll build up your immunities before you get home. You can go back to Jankburg the strongest little boy around.”
“Ha,” I say. I like that, that single “ha.” I think I picked it up from Freckles and it’s fun to employ it so quickly.
Freckles gets a text and looks at this phone, and he says, “Just a sec,” and presses a button and steps away from the table and stands in the rain, the drizzle turning into a downpour. A woman walks by the window, and she’s wearing a catsuit, a whole catsuit with leather boobs and ears and everything. And that’s what’s so cool about New York, how much it can open your mind; I barely even did a double take, thinking catsuits were a total norm here, until remembering it’s Halloween, that she’s actually in costume. That said, I’m pretty sure I saw another lady in a catsuit, yesterday, and it wasn’t even Halloween then.
“Okay,” Freckles says, sliding back into the booth, “not to rush you or anything, but when you’re done, we’re going to go back home.” Home. I wish. Home on the futon. “Back to my place. Your mom is taking a nap, and Heidi wants to talk to you.”
Great. I think about ordering another round of waffles, just to eat up some time, and then remember that it wouldn’t be too effective—that’s how fast the food comes here. I bet they literally have a tree in the back that just grows waffles all day long. A potted city tree, of course.
I’ll buy time another way: Ask anyone over twenty-nine about their love life and you can stop the clock cold for fifteen minutes, minimum. (A famous and rare Libby theory.)
“Hey, Freckles,” I say—but I call him his real name, which I still haven’t told you because I don’t like it, so you can just stop wondering—“were you and Aunt Heidi ever boyfriend-girlfriend?”
He laughs and says, “No. Nope, Nate.”
“Oh, that’s cool.”
“Yep.” He’s scrolling through an e-mail on his iPhone, pretending to listen to me. Adults can never just talk to me without the distraction of some activity keeping them firmly in their own world. Unless I’m being reprimanded at school for forging sick notes from Mom. In that case, adults seem to have no problem at all shutting their phones off and describing what a miserable future a kid like me is setting himself up for.
“She’s really pretty, though,” I say to Freckles. “Don’t you think Heidi’s pretty? I think she’s really pretty.”
“She is, for sure.”
“Does she ever talk about a boyfriend?”
Freckles shifts on the banquette and sets his phone aside. “There’s some character who’s been bouncing around for a while, yeah. I’m sure Heidi can tell you all about Troy. Troy is—very special.”
“Like super nice?”
“Oh, like super elusive. Beefy and hunky but kind of drinks too much, and . . . I shouldn’t . . . it’s not really my place to talk about him.”
I clear my throat. “Maybe you could just date Aunt Heidi, then? And cut out the middleman?”
Freckles licks his lips. “Heidi’s not . . . really my type.”
“She’s so cool, though!” I say.
“She is cool, but I—I date other . . . men, Nate.”
Oh my gosh. “Oh, wow. Okay, that’s cool.” I don’t want him to feel uncomfortable or judged or anything, so I play it really cool. It’s nice that he’d trust such a huge secret to me, though.
“So, yeah,” Freckles says, and laughs.
He pays for the waffles and that weird white omelet, and I grab a couple handfuls of (free!) mints by the door (like completely free, and already unwrapped, too).
“It’s all going to be okay, you know
?” Freckles says, leading me back “home,” past dumpsters and a pizza place and a few business guys. I like it out here, this Queens scene. It’s like a slower, 1950s version of the real city across that cool bridge we cabbed over last night.
“Pittsburgh’s got a bunch of bridges too,” I say for some stupid reason.
“I remember,” Freckles says, “from that Chekhov play I did after NYU. We took publicity shots on a bridge.”
“Weird,” I say, stepping over an abandoned shoe, “because I didn’t think there were any giant bridges with sports stadiums in the background during the Holocaust.” There’s a lot of stadiums in Pittsburgh—like one stadium per every normal boy.
Freckles laughs about my Holocaust one-liner, and it doesn’t even sound like a condescending adult laugh. It’s, like, totally real.
Libby’d be so proud.
We get back to the lobby of his building and walk to the elevator, and I don’t want to face her. I don’t want to see Mom, who is everything difficult and set at a slower speed, everything forty-five minutes outside of Pittsburgh.
But I swear that, following Freckles from behind, looking at his body in those jeans (they’re really, really nice jeans and they fit him really, really well), when we pass that little potted plant in the corner, there’s something different about it.
One of the leaves that was falling over—yellowed, dying, drooping like a waterslide that nobody’s allowed on—has pumped up a little, is climbing to the window.
Might even be alive.
Split Screen
“Nate, we’re so happy you stayed in town,” Rex Rollins the casting director says.
(There’s a part I skipped over where Mom sobered up.)
“To be honest, Mr. Rollins, I never planned on leaving,” I say, my legs not even shaking, rooted again on the centered x.
(There’s something where Freckles and I got home from the waffle place, and Mom was asleep on the same futon I slept on, and she murmured something about being happy that it smelled like “My Natey.”)
“Would you mind just waiting in the hall for ten minutes?” Mark or Marc says. “We’re running just a little behind.”
(Which might have been the nicest thing my mom has ever said about me. That she likes how I smelled. That she was overjoyed to see me again. That I wasn’t punished after all. That she probably just wants her ATM card back.)
“No problemo,” I say, “I’ve got no other plans.”
(There’s a part where Aunt Heidi and Freckles took me out, again, just as soon as we returned from waffles—not back to the diner, but for a walk around the block, to talk about Mom. The rain went away, and every other person was in a Halloween costume. All this, before the sun was barely up. Like New York is so ready for a party, full-on grown-ups are willing to go as Groucho Marx to work, to ride the subway in a scratchy fake moustache.)
“Jordan! I heard from my friend that you got a callback, too. It’s, like, the big news on Facebook.”
(I didn’t know who Groucho Marx was, but Aunt Heidi explained.)
“Oh,” Jordan says. “Hi, Nate.”
(There’s a part, on that walk past grown-up Groucho Marxes and little girls heading off to school in princess dresses, where Aunt Heidi told me I was going to stay in New York another night, because Mom wasn’t feeling too hot. Because Dad is with Anthony and the dogs, and might even take them on a guy camping trip. Even with Anthony’s calf muscle being torn.)
“Nate, could you just stand against the wall while we measure your height?” the blonde ringlet-haired casting woman says—with no boiling Starbucks in sight.
(There’s this part where Aunt Heidi said Mom and Dad had a big fight on their anniversary trip to the Greenbrier in West Virginia. And Mom’s distraught, and for the first time in a long time is actually asking Heidi for advice. But I didn’t want to get into all that here.)
“Absolutely I will,” I say, wondering why I need to be measured. “Would you like me in my shoes or out, when I stand against the wall?”
(Because after we’d finally circled their Queens neighborhood so many times that if we were the sun and Heidi’s apartment were earth, an entire month would have gone by, my Nokia rang.)
“Looks good. You’re four eight. He’s four eight, Rex.”
(And E.T. called. E.T. phoned me. Phoned home.)
“Come on in, Nate,” Rex Rollins says. “The team is ready for you again.”
(And the director “wasn’t satisfied with any of the female midgets they’d seen audition for the role of E.T.,” the casting director explained to Heidi—when I almost threw up on the sidewalk and she rescued the phone from my quaking hand.)
“Nice to see you all again!” I say, or scream-cry. “I’m sorry I’m auditioning in the same outfit.”
(But that they were “haunted” by my “explosive, nervous, stuttery energy.”)
“Would you like me to stand on the x again?”
(And while I’m not technically a midget or a puppet expert or a girl, Mr. Garret Charles, of all people, responded to my knee crawls, and could picture me “bringing to life an alien creature with a weird voice and an underbite and a waddle.” All the qualities back home that get me nearly killed could actually get me nearly famous, here.)
“That sounds great, Nate, and don’t worry about the outfit,” says Calvin, the nice assistant director with Ken-doll blond hair.
(And I’d be “reading for the Elliott understudy, too,” especially since I have experience covering big roles in the past. Who knew the vegetable pageant would be such a stepping-stone? And could I please come back in today, right away? And could I please be prepared to perform my same monologue for the team? And meet the official director this time?)
(And I sat on a fire hydrant and had a mild hyperventilation. And Freckles and Heidi laughed and laughed and hopped and hopped, looking like two nice people going as two nice parents for Halloween. Parents of one good kid who gets a lot of things wrong, most of the time, back home, but might be getting everything right, here. A kid who might have found someplace where he doesn’t have to change anything about himself, to fit in.)
(A kid going as himself for Halloween, but the best version, the ultimate.)
A better Nate than ever.
After the Audition
“Libby-dibby?”
“Natey-the-greaty, what blows?” She’s trying out new catchphrases again. I kind of like this one.
“I got a miracle callback this morning! I got a callback and I’m here, now. I just left the room and they told me to wait in the hallway, so my aunt is buying me a Vitamin Water to celebrate!”
From Libby’s end of the call, I can hear familiar locker slams (my heart speed racing in auto-response), and Libby says, “I’ve only got a sec before last period’s over, but I’m so proud of you. Like, beyond. I’m in the science lab hallway, and several people, in fact, are asking me why I’m jumping up and down, and I’m not telling them.” She’s yelling by the end.
Jordan Rylance comes out of the audition room and sits down next to his leopard-coated mother, who is eyeing me, appropriately, like I’m a gazelle who she’s going to drag into a tree and chew the head off of.
“It’s been nutso, that’s for sure. My mom showed up drunk to my aunt’s this morning—not kidding.” For some reason I say this loudly enough for Mrs. Rylance to hear. Like it’s a badge of honor.
“What happened in the audition?” Libby always knows how to skip through the murk of a story.
“I met the director, and they made me do my monologue, and—get this—I did the bus speech from the Greyhound Station. And they loved the—I think they said—‘the sense of immediacy and place,’ which sounds amazing, whatever it means.”
“It means I’m an incredible writer and you should always perform my monologues,” Libby says, and some girl passes her in school and calls her a fat-girl name and Libby doesn’t even respond to her, that’s how into this conversation she is. (I don’t have the heart to t
ell Libby I ended up changing parts of her Greyhound monologue. To make it my own.) “It means,” she continues, “I’m meant to be your speechwriter when you run for President of New York.”
“I can’t disagree, Ms. Libby Jones.”
“Did you do the scenes again? Did they ask you to read the sides?”
“Yes, only this time I read for E.T.! For E.T. the alien! That’s the crazy part. I did all these wacked-out lip trills and blips and blops.”
“Like from our animal seminar?” Libby says.
“Exactly like that. I channeled the duck you made me play when we were working on lowering my center of gravity. And, in fact, the director told me to pull it back, that I was so physically expressive, I’d have to make sure I didn’t actually kill anyone.”
“Rock star.”
“And they asked if I was afraid of enclosed spaces, because the makeup and bodysuit for E.T. is evidently going to be very, very thick, and I laughed and said, ‘Enclosed spaces? I’ve practically lived in toilets and lockers for the last three years. I have highly developed, like, cooling-off mechanisms and am perhaps even more comfortable being compressed, than not.’ And then I lied and said I was going Trick-or-Treating as a Mummy, tonight, for that very reason, and they all howled.”
I can almost hear Libby shaking her head in disbelief. “Rock star, Natey. Boss Rock star. So what’s next?”
“Well, they just—thanks, Aunt Heidi”—I uncap the Vitamin Water and inhale it—“asked me to wait in the hall while the team talks things over.”
“Eeeeek! Hot Doonesbury, Nate.” (A musical based upon a famed political cartoon your grandparents read; big ol’ bomb.)
A clanking school bell rings all the way through the phone, nailing my eardrum, and Libby says, “Stay with me. I’m going to sit in the front of the school bus with the losers, and keep talking to you.”
For the record, Libby always sits at the front of the bus, being, as am I, a loser.
“There’s news here, too, Natey-pants.”
“Shoot, cowgirl.” I’m trying on all sorts of personas today. Wild West Nate! Feels great. Somebody get me a pen: I’ve even got some ideas for a new autograph.
