by Deb Caletti
“We’re going to have to start saving for his college,” Trevor says.
“With her grades?” I say.
“His. Hers. Hermaphrodite Buddha,” Trevor says. It’s a compromise. We drive back to the visitor’s center, stand with the tourists, and watch the falls roar and crash. I sneak my way into the background of at least four videos, so that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the camera owners will have yours truly saved for posterity.
We lean over the railing, let our faces get whispered with water. “Where are all the places you’ve laid your head?” I ask Trevor. The question has been nagging at me, hangnail-like; every time I think I’ve forgotten about it, it catches on a thread. Maybe I’ve been mentally flicking it back and forth with my finger all along without realizing it.
“That’s a Funny question,” Trevor says. I can tell he doesn’t mean ha-ha funny, but Coyote funny. He knows she asks questions like that sometimes.
“Yeah. But I got to thinking. I haven’t been anywhere.”
“You’ve been to Hawaii to visit your Dad. I’ve never even been on a plane,” he says.
“Tell me your places,” I say. I put my hand into his back pocket and bring him closer to me, maybe because I feel a little superior in this regard.
“Home,” Trevor says. “And all those sleepovers when you’re a kid. Benjamin Cassova’s basement. I slept in the woods once. Stoned. Woke up with, like, a million mosquito bites.”
“Serves you right. I forgot about sleepovers.”
“Did you ever put someone’s pinky in a water glass while they slept ’cause it was supposed to make them pee?”
“Yeah. And Ouija boards. Oooh, ooh,” I say, making ghostly noises. I tickle Trevor, who grabs my wrists.
“East, west, home is best,” Trevor says.
“I think we’re limited human beings,” I say.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “That’s all I need. With you, there’s no limit.”
“How about I drive back?” I say.
“Oh, In, you know I love you. But you only made it to your eighteenth birthday because you didn’t have a car.”
“I’m an excellent driver,” I say.
“You took out an entire line of traffic cones in a construction zone last time I let you.”
“Two cones. Three. Big deal.”
“Forget it, gorgeous.”
Trevor takes me home. Me, Bob Weaver, and Ron the Buddha. My heart is still and satisfied. Wait, not still—that would be a bad thing. Calm. Calm and satisfied. There’s nothing else I desire right then—not a sweatshirt to be warmer or a T-shirt to be cooler or a Coke or a vacation or stereo speakers or one of those wacky sets of spoons from every state of the union. What I am is happy. And maybe that’s the closest definition for the word we can get, a life equation: An absence of wanting equals happiness.
I had stuck the plate of Mom’s pie in the Budweiser box, so Ron is holding it in her lap. Mrs. Denholm next door pretends to get her mail even though it is Sunday, peering my way and no doubt thrilled that she’s caught me in a shocking display of teen alcohol consumption. Trevor heads home; he’d promised his mom he’d fix the wobbly day care swing before she got sued.
I don’t see Bex anywhere and Severin is gone too, but I hear Mom talking on the phone in the kitchen. Actually, she stands in the back doorway, the screen door propped open with a toe. She has her eye on the backyard as she speaks. “No, I don’t want to do that,” she says. “Too scary. Then you got to pay it back at what, three hundred bucks a month?” Envelopes and papers are spread all over the kitchen table. Mom hears me, turns, and gives a puzzled look toward the box in my arms. I give her an I’ll-explain-later shrug, set it on the floor, and put the pie in the fridge.
“Quick, talk to Bomba,” Mom says, and hands over the phone. “That goddamned cat.” I can see what she’s looking at now. Freud, meowing pitifully from a high tree branch. He’s a sociopath toddler who’s just painted on the walls and is now trying to hide his purposeful intent behind innocence.
“Goddamned cat,” Chico says in his parrot mini-clown voice. “Goddamned cat. Goddamned cat.”
“Hi, Bomba,” I say.
“Is everything okay?” Bomba says. She and Mom both answer the phone this way, as if they’re on permanent crisis-car-crash high alert. Still, it’s great to hear Bomba—even her worried voice is as cushy and comfy as a beanbag chair.
“Umm…” I look outside. “Freud’s in a tree,” I say. “Oh God, Mom’s standing on a lawn chair. Mom should never stand on anything.”
“Maybe you better go help her.” Bomba sounds nervous.
I watch. “She’s waving a flip-flop at him. He’s not moving. No, wait. Here we go. Freud’s found reverse. He’s backing up. Okay. He’s down. She’s…Whoa, hang on. O-kay. She’s down too. Incident over.”
Bomba sighs. “So, how are ya? How’s Trevor?”
“Everyone’s great,” I say. “Trevor’s car just turned three hundred thousand miles.”
“Man, I know how that feels. My body’s just turned three hundred thousand miles.”
“Come on, you’re a spring chicken,” I say. “Maybe you’re a summer chicken, there in Arizona.”
“I’m a summer chicken bored out of my skull. Do you know how annoying endless sunshine is? How’s school?”
“One and a half more months and I blow the joint for good.”
“As long as you’re not puffing any joints,” she says.
“Bomba! God. You’re not supposed to know about that stuff.”
“Right. I forgot,” she says. “The sixties never happened. I don’t know about sex either. Your mother and uncle were conceived by immaculate conception. No, wait. Actually, immaculate misconception.”
“Imagine trying to fly all that stuff by today? Sure, I’m pregnant, but it’s not how it looks. God did it, when I was just minding my own business. I was sleeping, yeah. I wasn’t even aware anything was happening. Ri-ight.”
“Covering up some hanky-panky, yesiree,” Bomba says. “Listen to us heathens. Lightning’s gonna strike.”
“Wait, here’s Mom.”
“Love you, girl,” Bomba says.
“Love you, Bomba.” I hand the phone back over. Mom’s forehead is sweaty. Freud saunters in all cool and swingy as if maybe we’ve already forgotten his panicky tango up there in the tree.
“Nice try,” I say to him as he strolls toward the living room.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” Chico says. But it’s too late. Freud is already gone.
Our house used to have a garage but didn’t anymore and that’s how we each had our own rooms. You walked through Bex’s room to get to mine. She isn’t in there, though, so I step over her clothes on the floor and her pj’s and her old stuffed dog, Syphilis, who she had since she was four, and her most recent school project, a diorama of a scene from Holes.
I lie on my bed, on this Mexican blanket my dad sent from some trip he took a few years ago. It has this mildly icky wool smell that I love. I’m lying there for, like, a second and then pop up because I’m already bored at being still. Being a waitress, everything goes so fast; normal life seems as fast-paced as government-access television.
I pick up my guitar case, unclick the buckles, and take my guitar out like it’s a sleeping baby, which it kind of is. It’s a beautiful old Gibson from the seventies—gold-toned, mahogany, and I got it cheap from Trevor’s cousin’s pawnshop. I wake it up slowly; try a little “Stairs to Nowhere” from Slow Change’s Yesterday CD. That goes all right, but when I attempt to play “Just Friends,” I mangle it so bad I get mad at myself. The thing is, it reminds me that I don’t have the inborn talent to be a member of Slow Change or any other band, not really, not if I face facts. Here’s a life truth: facing facts sucks.
Mom always says that no one should expect an eighteen-year-old to know what he or she wants in life, because, hey, most adults don’t know. Look at me, she would say. I work in a psychiatrist’s office because I
ended up working in a psychiatrist’s office, blown there like a weed. Or, when she was in a beat-up-on-Dad mood, she’d say instead, Take your father, for example. He’ll be eighty and still wondering if maybe he should get his Master’s in between renting out boogie boards.
Maybe people shouldn’t expect eighteen-year-olds to know what they want, but people do expect eighteen-year-olds to know what they want. Adults, they can accept the resignation toward the accidental in other adults, they can understand one another’s giving up on the Big Dream, but there’s no room for the unintentional in a teen. Heck, in a child. It starts about age five, right? What do you want to be? And even a five-year-old realizes they cannot just answer that they want to ride their bike around the neighborhood or collect ladybugs; they know they must choose something large with importance or bravery, a cowboy or a firefighter. There must be focus and determination, an arrow aiming toward the target. What are you going to be? You can’t say you’re going to be a good person, be interested in people, or be a waitress, even if you love to work as a waitress. What do you want to be, Indigo Skye? I can just see Mrs. Ford, guidance counselor for alphabet letters S through Z, asking me. I want to be a waitress, I would say, because that would be the truth, and Mr. Mulgoon, guidance counselor for alphabet letters A through F, would have to give Mrs. Ford CPR on the career center floor, right under the “CAN’T” IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD poster of the guy climbing a mountain.
“Be” means something you can write on a business card. “Be” is a one-word phrase, like “lawyer” or “engineer” or “accountant,” a word big enough to make college debt worthwhile and to put a sports car in the driveway. A word like “teacher”—nah, even that won’t do; even they’re not business-card-worthy for some whacked reason. “Teacher” would get you the clucks of sympathy disguised as admiration that people give do-gooders, the way you get a cookie after you’ve given blood.
And I didn’t have one of those big words to use—I couldn’t quite summon the largeness. I didn’t know what I wanted to Be. The not-knowing of that was giving me the restless pissed-offness that questions without answers give. A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. And maybe it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of three working in a psychiatrist’s office, or renting surfboards in a grass shack. I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win, two of the millions of runners-up in the Living the Good Life sweepstakes. What if fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to “succeed” at your chosen “direction” was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too.
Funny’s question rolled around in my mind, nagging. I mean, did I really want to be stuck here forever? Here, meaning in this place, living this life, with these people? Go to school here, get a job here, rot in my old age here? Here was not a place where TV cameras rolled, where a lifestyle was unfurled for all to envy, same as an expensive oriental rug. Here was anywhere. And anywhere was not somewhere. I put the guitar back into its case. I can’t even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there’s a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling. Besides, I can lick the bowl and feel satisfied. Thank God or Buddha or my mother for my good metabolism. And thank Trevor for not minding my slightly wobbly ass.
After dinner I ask to borrow Mom’s car to go over to Melanie’s. I still have this feeling, a sense of swirling water going down the bathtub drain. Mom was having a premenopausal episode at dinner—she was silent and snappish and stressed, and the vegetables turned out like someone left them on the porch during a heavy rain, and you could have strapped the beef onto the bottom of your feet and made your way across the desert. She’d devoured the pie before dinner too, another bad sign. The fork with crumbs still attached was in the sink along with a glass whitewashed from milk.
I hunt around for something slightly outrageous to wear to Melanie’s, because she expects it and because it gives her parents a nervous should-we-be-worried thrill too. When landscape lighting is a priority in your life, you need a good parenting crisis to stir up some excitement. I go for a black lace tank top and my bike chain necklace. On my way out, I see Bex sitting on her floor and at first I can’t believe my eyes and have to look again. She has this thick layer of coins spread out around her, some U.S. Treasury flying carpet.
“Holy shit, Bex, did you rob a bank?” I say.
“Watch your mouth, Indigo,” she says. “You’re supposed to be a role model.” She doesn’t look up. I can see only the straight line of her hair part on her head, the top of her rounded cheeks.
“Seriously, where did you get this?” I see her life flash before my eyes. Mom’s premenopausal episode turning to full-fledged menopausal meltdown. I see Bex grounded until she’s thirty, getting a better education than me, probably, from CNN and public television.
Bex holds up an empty coffee can, shakes it. Oops, not quite empty, a coin rattles inside, and she dumps it to the floor. The coffee can has a piece of construction paper taped around it, from the same stack of orange we got for my world studies project on Malaysia—I recognize the shade. She’d used a big fat marker to write on the side. PLEASE HELP is printed carefully in huge letters. I’m sure she’s just scammed the neighbors into giving her money for an Xbox that she’s wanted for years, and I consider going to Severin’s room to ask for some assistance in saving Bex’s life before we share this with our mother. I hear his voice coming through the wall, his talking-to-a-girl voice, which is lighter and more laughy and animated than it ever is talking to us. He won’t be any help. But then I see the smaller writing on the coffee can. TSUNAMI VICTIMS. She’s even spelled it right, and Bex is a lousy speller. That’s what twenty-four-hour coverage’ll get you.
“What, exactly, have you been doing today?”
“I rode my bike to Albertsons. They let me borrow a card table, and I sat there and collected donations.”
“Wow, Bex. Wow.” I can’t think of what to say. I have a few fleeting worries about her just getting money from people. Like, is it that easy? Did you need some kind of permission for that sort of thing? But I refrain from interrogating her. She looks so serious.
“Now, would you shut up?” she says. “I’m trying to count.”
Mom had the kind of car that should have been embarrassed going into Melanie’s neighborhood. The Datsun was that shade of yellow they don’t make anymore, some color that went out of fashion and that’s bound to be back twenty years from now when the car’s a thin layer of metal in a garbage heap. Her windshield had acne, pockmarks from when she drove behind a dump truck and got flecked with pebbles. It had a tape deck, back from when tape decks were a big deal, and it didn’t have cup holders, from the days when people went places without a perpetual liquid pacifier. It had been through a whole forest of those Christmas tree air fresheners, since Freud peed in the backseat about a thousand years ago when he was ticked off about something, who remembers what. It still smelled slightly tangy in there, but you had to know what you were smelling for.
Anyway, it’s a Car o’ Shame as it curves up the hillside to Skyview, where Melanie lives. I picture all the other cars of the neighborhood peeking out from their garages and getting nervous and thinking because it’s yellow and is an old Datsun, it’s there to commit a crime.
I pass the faux mansions with their trimmed hedges and pots of snowman-like topiary that seem to be a requirement for residence here. The yards are the gardens of Mom’s crunchy-geraniumed dreams—flowers, watered. Lawns, mowed. These are the kinds of houses where the furnace filters are changed on schedule, the gutters are clean. Garages are not made into bedrooms, but are nearly empty, sometimes carpeted; tidy caverns that hold cars with rain-sensor windshields and don’t-you-dare-eat-in-here leather. These are houses where whole rooms exist just for display. It’s the land of living roo
ms no one lives in.
I push Melanie’s doorbell, which rings in chimes. I listen to the mini-concert that sounds large and hollow, like church bells. It makes me want to do it again, so I do. Melanie comes running to the door. I can’t see her through the leaded glass windows, but I hear the thwap, thwap of her feet.
“For God’s sake, Indigo, quit ringing the doorbell. My dad’s trying to watch the game.” Allen was always trying to watch the game, no matter what time of the day and no matter what season. I always wondered about “the game.” Was there one game? Did everyone know what “the game” was? Who knows what he was really doing. He was probably buying skin cream off the Home Shopping Network.
“If I park on the street, will one of your neighbors call the police?” I ask.
“Go to hell,” she says. Typical Melanie greeting.
You wouldn’t match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn’t gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we’d have matched us up either. I’m not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining and low maintenance the way someone very different from you can be. When one person is fast food and the other is a gourmet meal, there’s no use trying to be something you’re not. Might as well relax and be who you are, and this is possible as long as each really doesn’t want what the other has. We didn’t compete with each other, is what I’m saying, I guess, and that makes friendship easy, clear of all those weird psychodynamics that can sometimes happen. Besides, I felt like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie’s world, though I think she felt the same of me.
I have to take off my sandals at the door. There’s a whole row of shoes by Melanie’s door, all different styles, though she’s an only child. Her mom and I must wear about the same size (Melanie has huge feet), because there are my-size leather slip-ons and a pair of white boots that remind me of Trina, and a set of heels and jogging shoes. Mini–shoe store minus the boxes and the creepy foot fetish sales guy. I put my sandals with the others, so they can play too.
