“Doesn’t your culture ululate for the dead?” Gunnar asked Hakeem Habibi-Jones.
“What’s 'ululate’ ?” Hakeem asked, making it clear that any cultural traditions had been lost in hyphenation. Gunnar demonstrated ululation, which was apparently a high-pitched warbling wail that was maybe meant to wake the dead person in question. All it succeeded in doing was chasing Hakeem away.
After that, it was just Gunnar and me. Even now, as we started pumping out poison in his yard, I was afraid Gunnar would talk about the death of weeds and find a way to relate it to himself, like maybe he was some unwanted plant targeted by the Weedwhacker in the sky.
He didn’t talk about himself, though. Instead he talked about me. And his sister.
I was all set to put a painfully ugly shrub out of its misery when Gunnar said, “You know, Kjersten really likes you.”
I turned to him, and ended up spraying herbicide on his shoes. “Sorry.”
He took it in stride, just wiping the stuff off with a rag. “You shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Not with that kiss all over the school paper.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “It wasn’t all over the paper. It was on page four. And anyway, it wasn’t really a kiss—it was just a peck. Or at least I think it was supposed to be.” But I couldn’t help but think about what Lexie had said. “Has Kjersten ... said anything about it to you?”
“She doesn’t have to say anything—I know my sister. She doesn’t kiss just anybody.”
There it was—confirmation from a sibling! “So, are you saying she Likes me, as in 'Like’ with a capital L?”
Gunnar considered this. “More like italics,” he said. Which was fine, because the capital L was more than I could handle.
“So ... are you okay with her liking me?”
Gunnar continued to kill the plants. “Why shouldn’t I be? Better you than some other creep, right?”
I wasn’t sure whether he was REALLY okay with it, or just pretending to be okay with it. The only similar situation in recent memory had to do with Ira’s ten-year-old sister, who was kissed in the playground by some twelve-year-old last Valentine’s Day. The second Ira heard about it, he assembled a posse to terrorize the kid, and now she might never be kissed again.
This situation was different, though. First of all, she kissed me, not the other way around. Secondly, she’s Gunnar’s older sister, so it’s not like he’s got to be protective, right?
“She likes you because you’re genuine,” Gunnar said. “You’re the real thing.”
This was news to me. I don’t even know what “thing” he meant, so how could I be the real one? But if it’s a thing Kjersten liked, that was fine with me. And as for being “genuine,” the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a big deal that was. See, there’s basically three types of guys at our school: poseurs, droolers, and losers. The poseurs are always pretending to be somebody they’re not, until they forget who they actually are and end up being nobody. The droolers have brains that have shriveled to the size of a walnut, which could either be genetic or media-induced. And the losers, well, they eventually find one another in all that muck at the bottom of the gene pool, but trust me, it’s not pretty.
Those of us who don’t fit into those three categories have a harder time in life, because we gotta figure things out for ourselves—which leaves more opportunity for personal advancement, and mental illness—but hey, no pain, no gain.
So Kjersten liked “genuine” guys. The problem with genuine is that it’s not something you can try to be, because the second you try, you’re not genuine anymore. Mostly it’s about being clueless, I think. Being decent, but clueless about your own decency.
I don’t know if I’m genuine, but since I’m fairly clueless most of the time, I figured I was halfway there.
“So ... what do you think I should do?” I asked, parading my cluelessness like suddenly it’s a virtue.
“You should ask her for a date,” Gunnar said.
This time I sprayed the herbicide in my eyes.
My advice to you: avoid spraying herbicide in your eyes if at all you can help it. Use a face mask, like the bottle says in bright red, but did I listen? No. The pain temporarily knocked Gunnar’s suggestion to the back of my brain, and the world became a faraway place for a while.
I spent half an hour in the bathroom washing out my eyes while Gunnar threw me a few famous quotes about the therapeutic nature of pain. By the time my optical agony faded to a dull throbbing behind my eyelids, I felt like I had just woken up from surgery. Then I step out of the bathroom, and who’s coming in the front door? Kjersten.
“Antsy! Hi!” She sounded maybe a little more enthusiastic than she had intended to. I think that was a good thing. Then she looked at me funny. “Have you been crying?”
“What? Oh! No, it’s just the herbicide.”
She looked at me even more funny, so I told her, “Gunnar and I were killing plants.”
Kjersten apparently had a whole range of looking-at-you-funny expressions. “Is this ... a hobby of yours?”
I took a deep breath, slowed my brain down—if that’s even possible—and tried to explain our whole dust-bowl project in such a way that I didn’t sound either moronic or certifiably insane. It must have worked, because the funny expressions stopped.
Then Mrs. Ümlaut called from the kitchen. “Are you staying for dinner, Antsy?”
“Sure he is,” Kjersten said with a grin. “He can’t drive home with his eyes like that.”
“I... uh ... don’t drive yet.”
She nudged me playfully. “I know that. I was just kidding.”
“Oh. Right.” The fact that she was old enough to drive and I wasn’t was a humiliating fact I had not considered. Until now. As I thought about this, I could tell I was going red in the face, because my ears felt hot. Kjersten looked at me and laughed, then she leaned in close and whispered:
“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed.”
That embarrassed me even more.
“Well,” I said, “since I’m mostly embarrassed around you, I must be adorable.”
She laughed, and I realized that I had actually been clever. I never knew there could be such a thing as charming humiliation. Gold star for me!
Tonight Mrs. Ümlaut made fried chicken—which was as un-Scandinavian as hamburgers, but at least tonight there was pickled red cabbage, which I suspected had Norse origins but was less offensive than herring fermented in goat’s milk, or something like that.
It was just the four of us at first—once more with a plate left for Mr. Ümlaut, like he was the Holy Spirit.
Sitting at the Ümlaut dinner table that night was much more torturous than the first time. See, the first time I was desperately trying not to make an ass of myself, just in case Kjersten might notice. But now that she was certain to notice, it was worse than my third-grade play, where I had to dress in black, climb out of a papier-mache tooth, and be a singing, dancing cavity. I forgot the words to the song, and since Howie had spent half that morning whistling “It’s a Small World” in my ear, that was the only song left in my brain. So when I jumped out of the papier-mache tooth, rather than standing there in silent stage fright, I started singing all about how it’s a world of laughter and a world of tears. Eventually, the piano player just gave up and played the song along with me. When I was done, I got applause from the audience, which just made me feel physically ill, so I leaned over, puked into the piano, and ran offstage. After that, the piano never sounded quite right, and I was never asked to sing in a school play again.
That’s kind of how I felt at dinner with the Ümlauts that night—and no matter how attractive Kjersten might have found my embarrassment, it would all be over if the combination of fried chicken, pickled cabbage, and stress made me hurl into the serving bowl.
“I had a consultation with Dr. G today,” Gunnar announced just a few minutes into the meal. His mother sighed, and Kjersten looked at me, shaking her head.
“I don’t want to hear about Dr. G,” Mrs. Ümlaut said.
Gunnar took a bite of his chicken. “How do you know it’s not good news?”
“Dr. G never gives good news,” she said. It surprised me that she didn’t want to hear about her son’s condition—and that she hadn’t even accompanied him to the doctor—but then everybody deals with hardship in different ways.
“I may have more time than originally predicted,” Gunnar said. “But only with treatment from experts in the field.”
That wasn’t quite what he had told me, but I could see there were more layers of communication going on here than infomercials on a satellite dish—which, by the way, I am forbidden to watch since the time I ordered the Ninja-matic food processor. But I suspected that whatever treatments Gunnar was talking about were going to cost more than twelve easy payments of $19.99. Maybe that was it—maybe the cost of medical treatment was the elephant in the room here—although I’m sure that wasn’t the only one; the Ümlauts seemed to breed elephants like my sister breeds hamsters.
Then, as if that wasn’t enough, an entire new herd arrived. Mr. Ümlaut came home.
***
I always hear people talk about “dysfunctional families.” It annoys me, because it makes you think that somewhere there’s this magical family where everyone gets along, and no one ever screams things they don’t mean, and there’s never a time when sharp objects should be hidden. Well, I’m sorry, but that family doesn’t exist. And if you find some neighbors that seem to be the grinning model of “function,” trust me—that’s the family that will get arrested for smuggling arms in their SUV between soccer games.
The best you can really hope for is a family where everyone’s problems, big and small, work together. Kind of like an orchestra where every instrument is out of tune, in exactly the same way, so you don’t really notice. But when it came to the Ümlaut orchestra, nothing meshed—and the moment Mr. Ümlaut walked through the front door everything in that house clashed like cymbals.
It started with the dinner conversation. From the moment I heard the key turning in the lock, all conversation stopped. I glanced at Gunnar, who stared into his food. I turned my eyes to Kjersten, who turned her eyes to the clock. And when I looked to Mrs. Ümlaut, she didn’t seem to be looking at anything at all.
Mr. Ümlaut came into the kitchen without a word, noticed there was a guest at the table, but didn’t comment on it. He took out a glass and dispensed himself some water from the refrigerator door.
“You’re home,” Mrs. Ümlaut finally said, bizarrely stating the obvious.
He took a gulp of his water, and looked at the table. “Chicken?”
Without standing up, Mrs. Ümlaut reached over and pulled out his chair. He sat down.
I took a moment to size the man up. He was tall, with thinning blond hair, small glasses, and a wide jaw that Gunnar was starting to develop. There was a weariness about him that had nothing to do with sleep, and he had a poker face that was completely unreadable, just like Gunnar. To me that was the most uncomfortable thing of all. See, I come from a family where we wear our hearts on our sleeves. If you’re feeling something, chances are someone else knows about it even before you do. But this man’s heart was somewhere in a safe behind the family portrait.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said to me.
His cool gray eyes made me feel like I was on a game show and didn’t know the answer.
“Antsy, this is my dad,” Gunnar said.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, then silence fell again as everyone ate.
I don’t do well with silence, so I usually take it upon myself to end it. My brother says I’m like the oxygen mask that drops when a plane loses air pressure. “People stop talking and Antsy falls from the ceiling to fill the room with hot air until normality returns.”
But what if normality is never going to return, and you know it?
I opened my mouth, and words began to spill out like I was channeling the village idiot. “Working today? Yeah, my dad works on Saturdays, too. We got a restaurant, so he’s always working when people are eating, and people are always eating—of course that’s different from being a lawyer, though—isn’t that what Gunnar said you do? Wow, it must have been hard work becoming a lawyer—a lot of school, just like becoming a doctor, right? Except, of course, you don’t gotta practice on dead bodies.”
I was feeling light-headed, and then realized I had said all that without breathing. I figured maybe I should have put my own oxygen mask on first before helping others, like you’re supposed to.
Gunnar didn’t say anything—he just stared at me like you might stare at a car wreck you pass on the side of the road. It was Kjersten who spoke.
“He wasn’t at work,” she said, almost under her breath.
“More chicken?” Mrs. Ümlaut asked me.
“Yes, please, thank you.” But even as I tried to plug up my mouth up with food, I couldn’t stop myself from talking. “My dad had one of his recipes stolen by a restaurant down the block and he says he should sue—maybe you can be his lawyer, or at least tell him if it makes sense to sue, because I hear it costs more money than it’s worth, and then there are like fourteen thousand appeals and no one ever sees a penny—of course I could be wrong, you’d know better than me, right?”
He seemed neither amused nor irritated. I would have felt much more comfortable if he were one or the other. “I’m not that kind of lawyer,” he said flatly, between bites of food. Gunnar continued his car-wreck gaze, although I think by now it was a multicar pileup.
“Something to drink, Antsy?” Mrs. Ümlaut asked.
“Yes, please, thank you.” She poured me a tall glass of milk, and I quickly began to drink—not because I wanted it, but because I knew that unless I was a ventriloquist and could make words come out of somebody else’s mouth, drinking would shut me up for a good twenty seconds, and maybe the urge to blather would go away like hiccups.
It worked. Once the glass was drained, my words were drowned. The rest of the meal was filled with an unnatural silence, in which no one made eye contact with anyone else, least of all with Mr. Ümlaut. I made it through the meal listening to clinking silverware, and the ticking of the clock, until Gunnar finally rapped me on the arm and said, “The dust bowl awaits.”
I had never been happier to get away from a dinner table, and it occurred to me that this was the first time in the Ümlaut home that it felt as if someone was dying.
It was dark now, with nothing but the back-porch bulb to light up the backyard. We sprayed until both drums of herbicide were empty. Gunnar had brought with him the silence of the dinner table. It drove me nuts, because, just like with his father, I had no idea what he was feeling or thinking—and although I swore to myself I wouldn’t bring it up, I couldn’t leave without asking Gunnar the big question.
“So what’s the deal with your dad?”
Gunnar laughed at that. “The deal,” he said. “That’s funny.” And that’s all he said. He didn’t tell me that it was none of my business, he didn’t tell me to go take a flying leap. He just brushed it off like the question had never been asked.
He took a quick glance at the instructions on his herbicide canister. “Says here that the plants will all be dead in five days, and then it should be easy to pull them out.”
“We could sign over two extra days of life to the plants if you want to wait until next weekend,” I said, and laughed at my own joke.
“That’s not funny.”
“Sorry.”
To be honest, I had no clue what I was and wasn’t allowed to laugh at anymore.
The moment was far too uncomfortable, so I tried to salvage it. “Hey, by the way, I think there are still a few people at school willing to donate months, if you still want them.”
“Why wouldn’t I want them?” he asked. “As Nathaniel Hawthorne said, 'Scrounging for precious moments is the most primary human endeavor.’”
He w
as always so matter-of-fact about it, you could almost forget what was happening to him. Like the end of his life was just an inconvenience.
“Does it ever... scare you?” I dared to ask him.
He took a while before he answered. “A lot of things scare me,” he said. Then he looked at his unfinished gravestone in the middle of the dying yard. “No doubt about it—I’m going to have to start over.”
***
Before I left, I stopped by Kjersten’s room. She was sitting at her desk, doing homework. I suppose she was the type of student who would do homework on a Saturday. I knocked even though the door was open, because there’s this instinct we’re born with that says you don’t walk into a girl’s room uninvited, and even when you’re invited, you don’t walk in too far unless, of course, you’re related to each other, or her parents aren’t home.
“Hi,” I said. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Chemistry,” she said.
“Are you studying whether we got chemistry?”
She laughed. I have to say, this whole you’re-attractive-when-you’re-embarrassed thing was great. It was like a free license to say all the things I’d never actually have the guts to say to a girl, because the more embarrassed it made me to say it, the more it worked in my favor.
She turned her chair slightly toward me as I stepped in. Still riding on the fames of my chemistry line, I thought I might actually dredge up the guts to sit on the edge of her bed . . . Then I realized if I did, I wouldn’t be much for conversation, because the phrase My God, I’m sitting on Kjersten’s bed would keep repeating over and over in my mind like one of Christina’s Himalayan mantras, and I might start to levitate, which would probably freak Kjersten out.
So instead of sitting down, I kind of just stood there, looking around.
“Nice room,” I told her. And it was: it said a lot about her. There was a NeuroToxin concert poster on the wall, next to a piece of art that even I could recognize as Van Gogh. There was a mural on her sliding closet doors that she clearly had painted herself. Angels playing tennis. At least I think they were angels. They could have been seagulls—she wasn’t that great of an artist.
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