Ahmed drops me off at home, and I head inside trying to focus on what happened after drama. I make a dash for the stairs, still fantasizing about tonight. Would we kiss again—or maybe more? The thought makes me feel like laughing, screaming, and jumping. It’s all busting to get out, so I start yelling and dancing around because I can’t help it.
The phone rings and I answer it slightly out of breath from some improv moves that would thoroughly impress Ahmed.
“Hello?” There’s no answer on the other end, and for a minute I wonder if it could possibly be Charlotte joking around. But then I remember she doesn’t have my home number.
“Hello?” The silence on the other end is broken by some muffled noise. I think I hear a voice, but I’m not sure.
“Hello?” No response.
If I were normal—if my life was normal—I would hang up. But because I’m me, I hang on to the phone and wait. I know exactly who it is.
“Mom? Mom, say something, it’s Charlie,” I say, though, of course, she knows it’s me. “Mom . . . where are you?” She still says nothing. “We’re okay. How are you?” Still no answer and I start to feel helpless. Mom’s done this before, and eventually she says something. “Are you coming back soon? We miss you.” And even though I say it, it doesn’t sound genuine, even to me. “Mom? Mom?” No answer. I stay on the phone for another couple of minutes trying to get her to say something, but she doesn’t, and I wonder how long I should stand here with the receiver to my ear, talking to myself. When she doesn’t respond, I start getting mad. I don’t have time to do this.
“Mom, I want to talk to you but I have to go. Just . . .” I sigh and curse myself for being such a shitty son. “Just take care of yourself and come home, Mom, okay? Come home.” No answer. I hang up and immediately feel guilty. Why couldn’t I just talk to her for another minute? Maybe she was going to say something the second right before I hung up. Maybe she was thinking of coming back and now she wouldn’t. And it would be because of me.
I grab my backpack and head upstairs. Maybe it’s because I just talked to her, but when I pass Mom and Dad’s bedroom, my mind plays tricks on me and I swear I see some blurry figure standing near Mom’s easel set up near their window. I stop dead in my tracks and go back to look, but nothing’s there. I go in and look around, but still nothing.
I look at the canvas still on the easel and the brushes with dried-up paint that no one bothered to clean up. I haven’t been in my parent’s bedroom since Mom left, which is why I haven’t seen her latest painting. It’s different than what she usually paints. The usual flowers, vases, and fruits are nowhere to be found in the grayish brown, black, and blue swirls. I stare at it. The streaks and swirls outline a head and face if you look hard and long enough, then there are two dark smudges where the eyes should be. No nose. No mouth. Instead there are ribbons of murky gray that explode all around the face, which snake around the neck. The ribbons look like they’re strangling whoever the person in the painting is supposed to be, which can only be Mom. This was a painting of herself. This is how Mom feels. I stare at it for a minute. I should’ve stayed on the phone longer. When I leave their room those swirls of gray, black, and blue stay in my head, tightening around Mom’s neck.
I hang around doing nothing, trying not to think about where Dad is or what he’s doing while I’m here, answering Mom’s weird phone calls and staring at her messed-up paintings. I hide in my room and then wander around the house. I hate that he’s not here because it means that I’m not enough and that Dad doesn’t care enough to stick around either.
I look in the fridge and can tell that at some point before he left, Dad went shopping and stocked up on healthy foods. There’s fruit and lettuce and fat-free dressing, but the last thing I feel like doing is fixing myself some stupid low-cal meal, slapping a smile on my face, and pretending it’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. I order a pizza instead, and when it arrives, I tell myself I’m only going to eat one slice. But I don’t and end up eating two. And then since I didn’t stick to my original plan, I grab a third. And then I’ve fucked up so bad already, I eat two more, which means there’s only one slice left which looks pathetic. It only reminds me how many I already ate, so I stuff it in my mouth. It doesn’t even taste good, but I eat it anyway because I don’t want to look at that slice all by itself in the cardboard box.
I stare at the empty box and feel even worse.
I go to the kitchen and open the fridge for something to drink, but there’s only water, which at this point seems about as stupid as a diet soda. I know I should stop, but I can’t. Fuck it.
I run down to the basement where I know Mom always keeps a few liters of soda. Grape, Orange, or Cola. I can’t decide. It’s been so long since I felt the fizzy comfort of any of them. I open them and take a big swig of each. My stomach feels like I’m going to explode, and just when I am, a huge belch hisses right out of me. Pieces of pizza come up with it, and I start to gag. I think of all the food sitting in my stomach, and I can picture Fat Camp Ramona with frosting around her mouth when I had come up on her hiding in the woods. She was eating cupcakes when we were all supposed to be on a nature hike. It was pathetic. Imagine what I must look like now. The soda bubbles up like Alka-Seltzer, and it makes the pizza become an effervescent trail of chunks coming up my throat.
I run to the basement bathroom and make it just in time. It all comes up, clumps of food kerplunk in the toilet with such a thud that the water splashes up on my face, making me gag even more so that the rest of it all comes up. I kneel there, the pizza in the toilet and watery grossness dripping from my nose. I’m spent, exhausted, disgusted, but I feel empty. I feel like all those words I hold in and stuff down came up, too, and are swirling around in the bowl with the rest of it. I can just flush all of it down and get rid of it. Like it never existed. Like nothing happened.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I change my shirt, brush my teeth, wash my face, and head to Charlotte’s. Even though this is monumental and very likely the best thing to happen to me in my whole life since our kiss, I feel like crap. All I can think of is that stupid phone call and painting. Why did she have to call today, right at that moment? Why couldn’t she wait until tomorrow so I could at least enjoy tonight? Why couldn’t Dad be there to answer it instead of me? But now, I won’t be able to enjoy tonight because all I can think about is Mom and how she could be dead. Maybe she called me as she was dying and that’s why she didn’t talk to me. Maybe the blurry figure I thought I saw in her room was her ghost. Maybe Mom is dead right now while I’m on my way to Charlotte’s house, and Dad is somewhere with some other woman. What if Mom is looking down at us right now and thinking how glad she is to be dead and far away from the worst husband and son?
I get to Charlotte’s house, and I’m not even sure how I got there so fast. When she answers the door and says hey the same way she always does in drama, my thoughts of Mom still don’t go away. I mumble hi and smile and meet her mother who is in the kitchen and looks like an older version of Charlotte. She’s baking cookies—actually baking cookies—and looks really dressed up like she just got home from work. She flashes me a big red lipsticky smile and says, “Nice to meet you, Charlie. Hope you like cookies. They’re made with the best Belgian chocolate!” She seems very cheery and immediately makes me think of chefs on cooking shows and how they talk into the camera. I nod because I don’t know what to say, and she flashes me another huge smile.
Then her smile suddenly fades when she turns her attention to Charlotte. “Oh honey, why don’t you pull your hair back? I can’t stand seeing it in your face that way,” she says, shaking her head.
“It’s fine, Mom,” Charlotte says with a sigh.
Her mom studies Charlotte, then begins scooping little balls of dough on a baking tray with a mini ice-cream scooper. “It looks neater pulled back, Charlotte. I always say that but you never listen.” She looks over at me. “Charlotte here can be a bit of a slob.” She winks at me. I fe
el weird. I didn’t see anything wrong with Charlotte’s hair, so I don’t say anything.
“Mom, I swear, why can’t you just—”
“Charlotte,” her mom says with an edge in her voice, “not in front of your guest.” Then she looks at me again and asks, “Don’t you think she should show off her pretty face, Charlie?”
I don’t know what to say and luckily I don’t have to say anything because Charlotte yells, “Fine!” Her mom raises an eyebrow. Charlotte lowers her voice and says, “Okay, Mom. You win.”
Her mom seems to ignore this and says why don’t we go upstairs and she’ll bring up the cookies when they’re finished.
Charlotte gives her mom a look, which her mom also ignores, and then Charlotte grabs my arm and pulls me out of the kitchen, through the living room, and up some stairs that lead to a loft. I sit on the couch while Charlotte goes down the hall and returns with her hair pulled back. “Sorry about that,” she says. But I don’t know why she’s apologizing because it’s not that big a deal.
“It’s nice your mom comes home from work and bakes cookies for you,” and is alive, I feel like adding. My mind returns to Mom’s eerie phone call.
“Oh, she doesn’t work,” Charlotte says as she turns on the TV. “She’s here all the time.” She mumbles something else, but I don’t hear it. Home all the time? I can’t relate. I sink into the couch and look around. Here I am with perfect Charlotte VanderKleaton in her perfect house with her perfect mom baking perfect cookies, and yet, I can’t shake off my shitty mood. Why can’t I be able to enjoy this?
“What’s wrong?” Charlotte asks after her mother brings up a tray of warm cookies stacked high on a plate with a couple of drinks. I look at them like they’re grenades because they’re that dangerous. If I scarf one, I’ll end up eating them all. My stomach is growling because I barfed up the pizza and the cookies smell amazing. I cross my arms across my chest so my hands can’t reach for one and so I can make the growling stop and Charlotte won’t hear it. But, at least that’s not much of a worry since another gratuitous explosion from the action movie Charlotte put on blasts loudly from the TV.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I answer. I know my current mood isn’t her fault, but I can’t keep the irritation out of my voice. She stares at me for a minute before shrugging her shoulders and biting into another cookie. Fucking cookies.
The movie Charlotte chose is pretty horrible. It seems like the only things going on are explosions and martial arts/bar fights by a group of ninjas in business suits and . . . are those aliens? It doesn’t help that Charlotte is a real talker while she watches movies. She’s constantly asking questions and making comments, and if you don’t answer her or comment on her comment, she just repeats herself until you do. After the first half hour, I’m ready to chew my arm off. I thought for sure she would have chosen some artsy movie from a little-known director that was really deep, not the latest action flick to go to DVD. I wonder if she picked out this movie because this is what she likes, or because she thinks this is what I like. I look over at Charlotte, her eyes glued to the TV as she asks me if I think that burly guy who just kicked some ninja’s ass is somehow a CIA agent or, “Wait! Cool, I think the aliens morph and take on different forms. Right? Right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
She goes back to watching the movie, but I give up and start looking around Charlotte’s well-kept home. It makes me think of a time when I saw a house being built that only had all the beams and partial walls up. It looked like nothing more than a bunch of empty little wooden compartments. I imagined the family that would move into the house, how they would go from room to room for the rest of their lives. Sleeping here, sitting there, and eating over there. Then they would leave for a while and come back to move from little compartment to little compartment all over again. It looked too small to live a life in. It made me sad to think that’s how we spend our lives—in little rooms....
My thoughts get cut off when the movie finally ends. Three brawls, a car chase, and a sudden appearance of a mafia king later (who may or may not actually be an alien), Charlotte declares it a four-star flick. I agree because I don’t want to spend our time discussing how much it actually sucked—no plot, no story, and I could give two shits that anybody got their head blown off because the characters sucked too.
But right now I don’t care too much about her terrible taste in movies because I’m happy enough sitting here next to her and seeing her smiling back at me. Now that the movie is over, Charlotte’s house is quiet, except for the comforting sound of her mom washing dishes in the kitchen. It’s nice, not like the lonely quiet in my house.
Maybe one day she’ll tell me she loves me. I wished she loved me. I look over at her. Am I someone worth loving?
“So, I guess I’ll see you in drama,” she says. We get up from the couch and head outside, where we stand awkwardly on her porch. It feels nothing like the previous night. My heart sinks. I know the night’s been a bust. It’s my fault and I wish I could explain everything to Charlotte. Maybe I should tell her why I’m in a funk. Maybe she’ll understand. Maybe she’ll lean in and kiss me and make everything else go away. But I know it’s too much to lay on her. It would be wrong to taint Charlotte’s perfect world with mine and everything associated with me. She’d never understand, and even if she did, who wants to be around somebody else’s crap? Even now, she must think I’m some kind of depressing leech that sucks the fun out of everything. I look down at the floor, wondering if maybe I’m just reading this all wrong.
“Okay,” she says, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, “so, see you Monday?”
“Yeah, right. Monday,” I say, even though I want to reach out and hold her. I want to kiss her, just like last night, but everything’s changed since then and I don’t feel the slightest bit like the idiot dancing on the sidewalk last night, so I turn and leave, thinking I’ve just messed up the only good thing I had going.
On Saturday, I wake up thinking about Mom. Dad calls and I almost tell him about the call yesterday, about how I’m worried she might be dead, but then decide against it because what does he care? He left. But I really want to forget about it, so I grab a bag of old stale chips from the back of our pantry and sit down to watch some brainless reality TV.
After the chips, I eat a yogurt and five fudgesicles. They’re supposed to be a low-cal once-in-a-while treat, but like there’s anyone here to know. Anyway, after all of that I feel like a big fat loser. My jeans dig into my waste, and I can hardly breathe. I feel my stomach expanding like rising dough. I think about last night and how I made the pizza and soda come up, and I wonder if I can do it again. One minute it was there, and then—poof—it was gone, just flushed down the toilet like it never existed. It was so easy.
I go to the bathroom and lean over the bowl. I can do this. I stick my finger down my throat and gag a few times. I can do this. My eyes get watery. Come on, come on. I stick my finger down farther, my stomach contracting with each gag until I feel the food churning. A minute later, it makes its way out of my stomach, up my throat, and finally out of my mouth. I get that instant feeling of relief again and feel better. I go back to the couch and tuck a flannel blanket around myself supertight, vowing not to eat anything the rest of the day.
Later, I go to Ahmed’s because I can’t stand being in my house anymore. When I get there, Ahmed’s mom answers the door.
“Hello, Cha-lie,” Mrs. Bata says. Her black hair is parted down the middle and worn in a bun at the nape of her neck. “Come in,” she says in her Turkish accent.
I step into their house that feels warm and smells like sweet cinnamon.
“You are just in time, Cha-lie,” she says, pronouncing each word carefully and deliberately the way she always does. I like the way she says Charlie without pronouncing the r.
“I made baklava today. I will give you some. So delicious,” she says and heads to the kitchen. “Ahmed!” she calls, “Cha-lie is here!”
I think
of the junk I’ve already eaten today, but not really. It doesn’t really count. I follow her to the kitchen.
The kitchen smells so good and except for a couple of dishes in the sink, is in complete order. The tray of baklava sits in the center of the Batas’ yellow kitchen table.
“It is still warm,” Mrs. Bata says. I sit down as she grabs a knife and cuts into the crunchy, flaky, syrupy sweetness in front of us.
“Hey, what’s up?” Ahmed says as he comes into the kitchen.
He looks at his mom and me, and I suddenly feel as guilty and sheepish as if Ahmed had just caught us in a long, passionate kiss. But he just looks at the baklava and grabs a piece.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to eat this,” he says, shoving it into his mouth.
“Oh, sorry, Cha-lie. I know you are very healthy now. That’s good,” she says, cutting one of the squares in half for me. Ahmed grabs another piece. My face turns red. Even though Mrs. Bata has seen me at my heaviest, I still feel embarrassed whenever my weight comes up.
“Ahmed!” she chastises as he reaches for another. “Not so much. You need to be healthy, too, like Cha-lie,” she says.
“You know, baklava tastes very good with fruit,” she says as she grabs a banana and starts slicing it up. She puts it on a small plate, along with the tiny half of a baklava square. She sets it in front of me and pats me on the head. If I were a cat, I think I’d be purring.
The Downside of Being Charlie Page 9
