The Museum of Intangible Things

by Wendy Wunder

  “Um, my dad?” I ask. As far as I know he’s been going to meetings and drinking the grapefruit juice for weeks now. But everyone in the neighborhood knows about his issues. He’s the closest they all have to a town drunk. “Oh, I guess you didn’t see,” Jen says, blushing.

  “And now who needs a filter, big mouth?” Karen says to her and then motions her fingers across her lips as if she’s zipping them up. “Don’t worry about it, pussycat,” she says to me. “It’s just a little publicity. And you know what they say about publicity. All publicity is good publicity.”

  But this I know cannot be true. I’m too embarrassed to ask them to spell it out for me, so I try to focus on selling at least the eight hot dogs I’ve cooked before packing up furiously and driving home.

  In my room, I rip open my laptop, google his name, and there he is. On YouTube.

  It’s from last night’s weather report. In the video, he is obviously drunk, his nose lit up like the clown that he is. And he is having a public breakdown for everyone to see. “I’m drunk,” he’s telling his audience. “And you know why I’m drunk? First of all, because I can perform this stupid job inebriated,” he slurs. “But mostly because these people won’t let me tell you the truth. The truth is that we’re screwed, and it’s too late to change anything because we’ve done irreversible damage to the climate. Because stupid-ass politicians won’t listen to science but pander to their idiotic constituencies. Because of some idiots who believe that everything in the Bible really HAPPENED, we are now headed the way of the dinosaurs. Ashes to ashes. Oil to oil.

  “That wind outside, people. That is not a normal wind. I’ve never seen anything like it . . .” He burps, and then the producer finally cuts to a commercial for trucking school. Which seems tempting to me for a second. I like to drive. I’ve probably made enough money with the hot dogs to go to trucking school.

  In the next link, they broadcast his forced, public apology: “And I hereby rescind my statement that the oil companies, one of whom owns this television station, have completely run this country into ruin . . .”

  It’s hard to say what I feel about this. I am numb with disappointment. And shame. I pull out my phone and call him, but he’s not picking up.

  I start clicking away again on the laptop, because it suddenly occurs to me I should check some things. I can feel a hot liquid terror rising through my body like mercury in a thermometer. I start furiously clicking away, paying what I can online from my mom’s account, before he can figure out a way to drain it. Mortgage, electric, car insurance. This begins to calm me down. Putting things in balance.

  It was two years ago when I started paying the bills for my mother. Things just started getting shut off. Gas, and electricity, and landlines. So I told her to give me all her passwords and account information, and I took over. I’m good at it. I enjoy a nice spreadsheet. It’s clean and pure. Nothing can hide in a spreadsheet. Which is why, realistically, I’m thinking a career in accounting.

  I write checks for the rest, signing her name in the perfect cursive they used to teach people in grammar school. I enter it all in a spreadsheet that makes satisfying cash-register noises when I enter a deduction. Reluctantly I open my own account for the hot dogs.

  It’s in the red. Twenty-seven fifty in the red. I hope I’m wrong, so I shut it down and reboot it. There was $2,466 in there yesterday. I take a breath and let the truth of the matter wash over me, but I can’t believe it. I slam the laptop closed, yank the cord from the wall, and hoist the computer out the window, letting out some kind of primal animal sound in the process. A roar? A squeal? A cry? A bellow. I think I bellowed.

  He took it all.

  • • •

  I find him at Mickey’s, and he’s still half in the bag. An old slang term for drunk that I learned from my AA friends.

  “You should call your sponsor,” I tell him in a flat monotone.

  “Sorry about the money, but I lost the job, and you’ll have to kick in to support the family,” he says. “That’s how it works—” He takes a last sip and slams his glass down on the bar. “In families.”

  “Is it?” I say. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, so now this is about you. Poor you,” he mock-whines, contorting his face into a grotesque red monster.

  “Call your sponsor,” I tell him. I’m numb with fury.

  “I said I was sorry. AA teaches you that.”

  “No, you didn’t, actually. And I wish AA would teach you not to fuck up in the first place. Then we’d have something.”

  “Watch your mouth, young lady,” he says, raising his hand to me.

  This, for some reason, makes me laugh. I laugh until I’m doubled over, and my friend Obey, the ancient German shepherd guard dog, comes over to sniff at me and figure out what’s happening. I laugh until tears start running down my cheeks, and I keep laughing until I can’t tell if I’m laughing or crying. Obey licks my face. I try to catch my breath, and stick my fingers into the dog’s thick winter coat. I squat down and hug him around his enormous brisket while he keeps licking away my tears.

  • • •

  My body seems to move on its own after that. I am not inside of it but watching it move more fluidly than it usually does as it hitches the hot dog cart to my car and drives it to the boat launch by the beach. I do a three-point turn with the rig, which is no easy feat, and then I back it up to the cement ramp and I lower it slowly into the lake. First the mini tires, then the propane tank, then the chrome box with the diamond quilting effect on the side. The mini grill for toasting buns, and then the pans for the hot dogs, sauerkraut, and relish. I get out and wade around back in the frigid water to unhitch the cart.

  It releases with a heavy metallic thud, and I watch Hannah’s Hot Dogs roll deeper and deeper into the water until the only thing left to see is the yellow umbrella, which I left open. A little deserted island of what was left of my hope. “Fuck you!!!” I scream at it until that too, gets slowly consumed by the waves.

  I sit numbly on a bench and look out to the lake, and I’m reminded of that story about the frog and the scorpion. The one where the scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river. The frog is suspicious at first. “Why would I do that?” he asks. And the scorpion, sharp as a tack, responds, “Because if I sting you, I will die too.” That makes sense to the frog. He’s eager to please, because that is his nature, so he decides to give the scorpion a lift.

  The scorpion stings him, in the deepest part of the river, because that is in his nature, and together they sink to the bottom.

  “Bad day in the food service industry?”

  I can recognize his voice by the way it lusciously vibrates through my body. I don’t even have to use my ears.

  “Never mix business with family,” I tell him without turning around. “What are you doing here?”

  “Saw your car,” he says and comes to sit next to me. “Do you at least have insurance on that thing?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ve given it to my higher power. The lake. Is my higher power.”

  “That’s supposed to be a metaphor, right? You’re not actually supp—”

  “Have you broken up with Rebecca?” I blurt.

  “Well, I was . . .”

  “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t break up with her. You don’t want any part of this,” I say, swirling my hand in the air. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous or anything, but you seem to be testing the waters. And these waters are seriously polluted. With scorpion venom and Crown Royal and all sorts of toxic whatnot. Stay with Rebecca.”

  “But—” I hear him say as I get up, get into my car, slam the door, and drive away.

  Back home, I sit on the end of the dock letting the scratchy rough edges of the two-by-fours press into my calf meat. I just want to feel something, and this does the trick. For a moment I can un
derstand the inclination of cutters.

  The pain soothes me, and the lake soothes me, too. I can see how other people would find it creepy and dark—would be afraid of what lurks beneath the surface—but I’ve grown up with it. I can’t imagine living without it. To me it is soothing, and blue and clear. A baptismal font. A big life lozenge living in my backyard. Looking at it literally slows my heartbeat.

  A muskrat, slick and black like oil, floats back home to its nest beneath the neighbor’s dock. It ignores me and my problems, which I try to remind myself are First World Problems. Number one, nobody died. Number two, I’m not orphaned or starving. Number three, no one sold me into sex slavery. Number four, I do not live in a landfill.

  I try to put things in perspective, despite the whiny Zoe voice inside my head that keeps interrupting. “But who steals hard-earned college money from a teenager? Who does that?” it asks.

  My father, I guess, does that.

  I try to think of the story Danny told me about Colonel Sanders. How at the age of ten his father died, so he was shipped off to another farm to work and raise money to support his family. And when he was fired for, like, being ten, his mom shamed him mercilessly and shipped him off to another farm to try again.

  No one sent me off to work on a farm.

  And if they had, it would make me stronger. Colonel Sanders got strong and famous and finger-lickin’ good at everything after that. So, this is a test.

  But I didn’t have to push Danny away. I don’t know why I did that. The pain of that finally sinks in. I’m without him. I’m worried about what to do about Zoe. I slide slowly, toes first, scraping my whole body against the dock, as it slithers soundlessly into the frigid water. I let it envelop me like an amniotic sac. And when I burst free, breathless, I hope I can figure out how to start over.

  FREEDOM

  Inside, my mom has left a note on the kitchen counter, as if it suddenly mattered to me where she was. “At the gym,” it says, and then, “On a date!” That’s wonderful, I think somewhat sarcastically and head to my room to change and try to stop shivering.

  I walk right into my closet without turning on the lights. I strip down, peeling off my wet clothes. I throw a towel around myself and sit at my desk. I erase the entire Wiener Meter and draw a new black outline of an empty hot dog.

  “Why is the Wiener Meter set to zero?” says a voice behind me.

  I spring out of my seat and back myself into my bedroom door. Zoe is sitting on my bed, her long legs tied into a jegging-colored pretzel. Her hair, a matted black curtain, hangs in front of her face as she tries to untangle it a strand at a time.

  “What the hell are you doing here?! How did you get in?” I ask her.

  “The fake rock. With the key in it. You should maybe scatter some other rocks around it. It looks a little conspicuous sitting out there by itself. What happened to the wieners?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “What happened to the long nap?”

  “I woke up.”

  “Did your mom let you out?”

  “Define let,” she says.

  “It’s a three-letter word for allowed,” I say, wrapping my freezing hair into a towel turban.

  “I allowed myself out, I guess,” she says, paging through a magazine I left near my bed. “Why are you soaked?”

  “No reason. Rebooting, I guess.”

  And then she explains how before she snuck out for a cigarette break—

  “Cigarette break? You don’t smoke,” I tell her.

  “Everyone smokes on the inside,” she says, as if her bedroom were some kind of prison, and then she tells me how before she snuck into the woods during a cigarette break from her suicide watch, she turned her room into an intangible-thing installation: an exhibit on freedom. She wrote the Bill of Rights on a roll of toilet paper, carved the Statue of Liberty out of a bar of soap. Drew the DON’T TREAD ON ME snake on one of the walls, and folded her sheet, origami style, into a bald eagle. She hoped her mom’d ponder that and start to treat her with more respect.

  “She was trying to help you, Zoe. How did you get here?” I ask her.

  “Hitched,” she says, sticking out her bony thumb and pulling it to the right. “Karen and Jen picked me up. Those two are nuts.”

  “Okay, well, we should tell your mom where you are,” I say. I stand up, walk over to the bed, and hold my hand out to help her up.

  “No, I can’t deal with her right now. She doesn’t get me. You get me, Hannah. She just wants to keep me in a box. She thinks if she can box me in, I’ll someday become like her, and Karen and Jen. I can’t be like them. It’s not that I’m crazy; I just have slightly bigger ideas than most people.”

  “It’s okay to have big ideas,” I tell her. “‘It’s okay to have two dads. It’s okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub. It’s okay to be small, medium, large, or extra-large . . .’” I continue, quoting from our favorite picture book that we read to Noah when he was little.

  But I’ve been doing some more reading about bipolar disorder. The grandiosity. The inflated self-esteem. And the paranoia that can sometimes accompany a manic phase. The suicidal depressive stuff. I’m learning that it might not be “okay to be bipolar” unless you’re on medication.

  “Maybe you should go talk to someone, Zo. A doctor.”

  “Doctor? Don’t you remember last time? If I had one idea of my own, they’d call it noncompliance and then take things away like showers and phone calls. My IQ is exponentially higher than every one of the doctors’ and nurses’, and yet they would control my entire fate. If I cried one tear out of frustration, they’d label me ‘depressed’ and increase my medication. It’s barbaric, Hannah. What I need . . .” she says, hanging on to the last syllable so I can tell that she wants something from me.

  “What?” I ask her. “What do you need?”

  “Don’t let them make me a lab rat, Hannah. I need to get out of here.”

  She is getting agitated again, and she stands up and begins straightening all the stuff on my shelves. My books, my trophies from third grade, my matchbook collection.

  “What do you mean, ‘out of here’?”

  “Road trip. You need one too, obviously. Your life is in the shitter. Everything gets better when you get out of town.”

  “I need to deal with some stuff here,” I tell her.

  “I saw the video. That’s exactly why you need to get out of here. You need to stop rescuing his ass. Let him figure it out for himself this time, Banana. Plus . . . everyone will be talking about it at school.”

  “Well played,” I tell her. She knows how hard it will be for me to face the people whispering about me behind my back. If she wants me to get out of town, that’s the reason I would go.

  She gets up and hugs me, and I cry a little onto the shoulder of her T-shirt.

  “Your shoulder bone just poked me in the eye bone. You’re doing the not-eating thing.”

  “I don’t need food right now. I need to get out of town. Till after Thanksgiving. That should be enough time.”

  “Enough time for what?” I had forgotten about Thanksgiving.

  “Stuff,” she says.

  “Well. This is bad timing. There were some developments. In the Danny Spinelli department. You slept through them. I had to talk about it with the soccer moms.”

  “I’m listening,” Zoe says.

  “Things were going well, and then I kind of sabotaged it.” I pace back and forth with my forehead in my hands. “And I can’t miss school tomorrow. I have a math test, and the school newspaper is going out. So we’ll have to deal with your shit here. In town. Because I have shit to deal with too.”

  Zoe finds a nail file in my drawer and begins scraping it against her thumbnail. “‘Why think about that, when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you
glad you’re alive to see?’” she asks distractedly.

  “Walden?”

  “Nope. On the Road. Jack Kerouac. I memorized it.”

  “The whole book?”

  “I have newfound abilities.”

  “You need to talk to someone. You said yourself, the socks won’t work. It’s sort of stupid to think that they would keep working.”

  “Fine. I know what I need to do. It came to me while I was sleeping. I need to hit the road, and I’ll go with or without you.”

  “Fine, go,” I say, waving her away.

  “You’re calling my bluff.”

  “It’s okay to call someone’s bluff.”

  “No it’s not.” Zoe says, sticking out her bottom lip. “Hannah. Come with me. Please,” she begs. “Just for a little while. We’ll go talk to Danny right now. I’ll explain to him you’ll be back in a day or two. What harm could forty-eight hours do? You’ve been waiting to kiss him for six years. And . . .”

  “And what?” I ask.

  “And she signed the papers.”

  “What papers? Who?”

  “My mom . . . The commitment papers. She’s putting me in.”

  “No. I told her not to, Zo . . .”

  “Well, she’s like a mom and a nurse, and you are a seventeen-year-old hot dog vendor. She probably felt like she didn’t need to consult you.”

  “She really did it? Are you bullshitting me?” I’m astonished and hurt that she didn’t talk to me about it.

  Zoe unravels some documents she’d folded back and forth into a paper fan.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  “Now you’re talking. Pack a bag,” she says. “We’re going on an insouciant adventure. Insouciance. That’s your first intangible thing.”

  “I don’t need intangible lessons,” I say. “I feel things.”

  “Yes. But you feel the wrong things. Trust me. We’re leaving now,” Zoe says. “Packy packy!” She sweeps around the room looking for a bag to put some of my stuff in.

  I think of him while I smooth out and fold the ice cream sandwich wrapper he gave me and tuck it into my back pocket. “I think I can smell that he likes me. Danny,” I say. “He smells different. There’s a depth. You know how the lake smells different where it’s deepest?”