by Wendy Wunder
“The lake has a smell?”
“Oh my god, do you notice anything?”
“I notice that you think you can smell water, or that you can smell love, for that matter, and I am the one they think is crazy. Anyway, it was bound to happen, you and Danny. But this is unfortunate timing. Because I have to go.”
I throw some things in the bag. My favorite jeans, a T-shirt, some underwear and a toothbrush, my phone charger, the shampoo that’s supposed to “volumize” my hair. Also, The Brothers Lionheart. I pretend it was written for me.
“What will we do for money?” I suddenly realize. “As you can see, the hot dog money has been depleted.”
“Of course it has. By him, right? And I’m sure you’ve already forgiven him.”
“Having a resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.” It’s a quote from AA.
“Whatever. Your father makes me feel good about not having a father. That’s what a jerk he is.”
“Yeah, well, he’s still my father, so it hurts my feelings when you say that.”
“The coins,” she says.
“It’s come to that?” I ask.
“It has.”
Deep in the bottom of her closet sit two heavy boxes of coins that her grandmother, because she doesn’t know about Coinstar, rolled all by herself, every night for two years while watching Jeopardy. Two thousand dollars worth of coins. Zoe and I were saving it for an emergency, and I guess this qualifies.
We go to her house first, and sneak into her room. The first box rips a little as I drag it out from her closet by a lid-flap. It is graffittied with Magic Marker sayings like BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, RESULTS MAY VARY, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, MAYBE YOU SHOULD WEAR A HELMET.
Zoe stares at it as if I’d just pulled a giant squid out of the ocean. “It’s really come to this?” she whispers.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “We’re kind of running away.”
We each hold one heavy box of coins as we waddle our way to the car and toss them into the backseat well with a satisfying thud. At least the coins will weigh us down if we get into a fender bender with an SUV. We settle in the front seat; I adjust the rearview and back the car out of the driveway.
“I didn’t get in to Parsons,” she admits with a sigh.
“Oh no.” I look her in the eye.
“Or FIT.”
“But if only they could see your new stuff . . .” I say.
“Too late.”
“I just registered at County. They have some design courses. You could come with me.” But I try to imagine her there. At a commuter college, where she is smarter than everyone in charge but too oblivious to know her place. Nothing good could come of it.
“County jail . . . County College. Same thing,” she says as she looks beseechingly toward the sky. She’s still clutching a corner of the cardboard box flap that ripped off the coins, and she begins to stroke it lightly across her wrist. “We. Are. Better. Than. That.” One stroke for each word. Better gets two strokes in an X. She believes this with a conviction rooted deep in her gut. I know because I can feel it. I can feel her feelings sometimes, like she can read my thoughts. It’s as if we’re some kind of Siamese twins connected at the soul.
I reach for the box flap and gently take it from her before it can break the skin.
A strange gusty wind blows through the open window, and her hair stands straight up and then whips across her face in satiny ribbons. She looks out the window, and a fat raindrop splashes onto her cheek, then she looks at me. “That’s a sign. We have to go,” she says, urgently. “Let’s say good-bye to your boyfriend. I’ll give you ten minutes.”
HEARTBREAK
I drive to Danny’s while Zoe pores over an old road atlas and creates playlists on my iPod at the same time. She’s talking to herself, but only a little, and waving what might be hallucinatory flies away from her face.
His house is an old converted mobile home in a neighborhood called Sun Valley or “Scum Valley” if you’re lucky enough not to have to live here. It’s your typical white ghetto with rusting car parts on the front lawns, underwear on the line, last year’s dead Christmas wreaths still hanging on the doors.
I hear the music coming from the half-light of the small basement window near the ground. A deep thudding, like the rhythm of my heart.
His mom works hard, when she can get work, and she’s working now at Casa Bianca, a gourmet restaurant, possibly mafia owned because no one can figure out why they’d put it here except to launder money or feed gangsters after they bury their debtors in the woods.
There’s a heaviness inside me as I peer at that window and imagine him inside. I want to be with him there, underground forever, and melt with him into the earth. I’ve never felt so heavy and deeply rooted. I want to grow roots and vines from my body and ensnare him forever in my branches. No wonder we scare men away.
As much as I’m feeling a density and gravity and rootedness, a deep pulling need to stay and absorb him into my body, Zoe is feeling the opposite. She is feeling the flighty lightness from the adrenaline of her escape. “Come on,” she says from behind me, pushing me through the door. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Enough for a quickie.”
“Right,” I mutter. I tiptoe across the foyer toward the entrance to the kitchen and take a left down a dark hallway. It is home to a gallery of sepia-toned, sun-damaged school portraits of Danny and his sister at ages five, six, seven, and eight. I study him. It’s strange how he looks exactly like himself. How everything, the crookedy nose, the crinkly-eyed smile, was there from the beginning, just waiting to reach its full glorious Danny potential. I find an open door after “DANNY, AGE 8,” and it leads to the stairs of the basement.
“Hello,” I say into the doorway, but he can’t hear me over the music. “Danny,” I say a little louder.
I start down the stairs, sliding one hand down each wall as I go. I am about to bend over and peek beneath the ceiling of the finished basement when I hear it. It’s quick, but it is a distinct slurping, spitty inhale—air whistling around too many teeth, followed by a short nasally goose honk. Rebecca’s laugh.
I think maybe I’m hearing things. Maybe it’s just some improvisation in Jimi Hendrix’s Blues blaring from the stereo. I stay where I am on the stairs, but I get the courage to dip my head down so I can see into the dimly lit basement.
I see an old indoor basketball hoop arcade game surrounded by a net. I see an entertainment center along the wall with an old stereo and an even older television. The speakers on either side vibrate with the bass. I see a few basketball trophies on the windowsill, and then I dare to look at the plaid, skirted pullout couch along the wall . . . and there she is.
She has her feet on the couch with her knees bent up on either side of her, exposing her crotch to the room. Her crotch is clothed, though, in tight dark-wash jeans that come just to her pudgy hips.
She is very comfortable here. It is her couch, says her posture. The couch she and Danny have christened. And she sits like she has a right to it. There is no awkwardness. No wondering what Danny thinks of her. No newness to this relationship. It runs deep, and I suddenly don’t know what I’m doing here.
The intense anticipatory throbbing that I was feeling beneath my diaphragm and in my nether regions begins to climb. It moves up and pounds against my rib cage. Then it climbs higher and strangles my throat. It finally lands behind my eyes, where it stays and threatens to make me cry.
I let out a gasp and run up the stairs.
I keep running out across the sharp crackling thirsty dead grass and across the street to a wooded lot, where I bend down and try to catch my breath.
“Hannah, what’s wrong?” Zoe asks. She was sitting on the stoop looking at a road atlas with a tiny magnifying glass.
“Nothing.”
I can’t breathe. It feels like I’ve run twenty miles.
“What, Hannah?” Zoe places a hand between my shoulder blades.
“Nothing,” I say. A tear squeezes itself out of a tear duct, and some of the pressure is released. “Nothing,” I say again.
I know I told him to stay with her, but I guess I didn’t think he actually would. My shock and sadness take on cosmic proportions. I can feel my heart spin, getting denser and denser until it turns inside out on itself, leaving a black hole in the center of my chest. I wish Noah were here so I could describe it to him. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I say.
• • •
Zoe, because she experiences them (sometimes all in the same hour), understands the full range of human emotions. She is very sympathetic on the first leg of our trip. She lets me cry for a while, then buys me an Oreo Blizzard at Dairy Queen before we officially hit the road.
“Open up,” she says, trying to feed it to me with the big red plastic spoon as we sit in the DQ parking lot.
I shake my head like a toddler refusing strained peas.
“Come on, Hannah, it’s a Blizzard. It’ll make you feel better. Want some whipped cream on it? Wait. I’ll go get you some whipped cream.” She gets out of the car, pops the plastic lid off the Blizzard and then tilts it toward the cashier and points to the top of it. “Whipped cream,” I hear her say, and then she hands her two extra quarters that she peels from our first roll of emergency coins.
She hands me the cup, and I take one bite. It does make me feel a tiny bit better. The cold is soothing the lump in my throat.
“So you’re crying for two reasons,” Zoe says. “The first one is because your dream is squashed, and that’s a valid reason for crying. The second is because you feel like a fool. And that one is not valid. You deserved him more than anyone. You deserve better than him, obviously, if he gave up on you so quickly. He is the fool. Not you. Say it out loud,” she says as she wipes my tears with a scratchy DQ napkin.
“What?”
“He’s the fool.”
“He’s the fool,” I mumble through my whipped cream.
“No, say it like you mean it.”
“He’s the fool.”
“Now yell it out the window.”
“He’s the fool!” I yell. But a new tear comes to my eye, because Danny is really not a fool at all. He’s smart. And grounded and ambitious and hardworking. Like a perfect working-class Jerseyan hero in a Bruce or Bon Jovi ballad. And I’m the one who pushed him away. I’m the fool, I think.
Zoe thinks I’ve recovered enough to start driving, though. And I’m really ready to get out of here too at this point. Who cares if we ever come back. Really, all those great songs about New Jersey were about getting the hell out of it.
INSOUCIANCE
Zoe has an idea for the first stop on our adventure, and it requires getting to Exit 13A on the Jersey Turnpike. Believe it or not, we don’t know how to get to the Jersey Turnpike from where we live. We’ve never been on it. Even on the rare occasion that we drive to New York City, we take Route 80 east. If we go to the shore—which we rarely do because we live on a huge lake that provides us with our summer entertainment—we take the Parkway. The turnpike, she is mysterious to us.
We hear she is mostly gaseous, like Saturn. And that the gases swirl around you in fluorescent ribbons. We hear it smells like propane and pickles and manure, a vinegarish primordial swamp.
And the rumors, they are true enough. We find the turnpike in spite of having turned off our phones and the GPS. Zoe says we need to be entirely off the satellite. Off the grid. In case they start looking for us. She even makes me rip off the E-ZPass detector on the windshield. We’ll have to pay the tolls with our coins, listen to FM radio or sing to ourselves.
After we pass Newark Airport and I try to race some of the landing airplanes in my old LeMans that’s shaped like a roller skate, I see where Zoe is probably bringing me: IKEA. The closest we can get to Sweden on the New Jersey Turnpike.
It looms ahead of us, a bright blue and yellow beacon surrounded by flags. Something solid among all the gas. Land ho. “Is that where we’re going?” I ask Zoe.
“How did you guess?”
“We don’t really have room in the car to bring anything home,” I say.
“We’re not bringing anything home. We’re going to make this our home. Just for a night.”
“We’re sleeping here?” I had heard of people having dinner parties at IKEA just to see if the kitchen they picked would suit their lifestyle. IKEA is like that. It wants you to try things out. It wants people to be happy. It wants you to believe you have a “lifestyle.” It also fosters self-reliance. You pick your own stuff, you check it out, you build it. You take responsibility for your own design. “I didn’t know they let people sleep here,” I say in a dreamy sigh.
“Define let.”
“It’s a three-letter word for allow. We’ve been over this.”
“Sometimes you just have to take what you want. Park over here in the corner so no one will see the car.”
“No, Zoe.”
“Trust me,” Zoe says, staring at me.
“Have you read the diagnostic symptoms for bipolar disorder? You’re flagrantly displaying some of them.”
“I’m not flagrantly doing anything. I could actually be a lot more flagrant. I am showing some restraint, actually. And you need to be more flagrant. You need to be flagrantly insouciant. You care way too much. And because of that you will be paralyzed for life and miss out on everything. Please. Open the door and de-LeMans. Our first lesson is Insouciance.”
We walk across the emptying parking lot beneath the swooping, even at ten at night, gulls. They peck at discarded chicken bones on the pavement, grab some, wave them around, and then toss them aside.
“Look at them,” Zoe says. “Do you think they care about making a mess of the parking lot? They just get their needs met and move on. Insouciant.”
A plane lands on the other side of the highway and drowns out the competing noise of the road. We sneak into the exit door beneath this blanket of sound and are immediately comforted by the panacea of a climate-controlled box store. Away from all the movement outside, the kinetic energy. Inside, everything is still and solid. Furniture can at least be depended on for that.
Most everyone has left the building, and the management is flashing the lights and asking people to bring their purchases to the self-checkout lines. They have already turned off the big escalator that leads up to the showroom. We sneak into the heavy doors of the Marketplace and follow the arrows on the floor that lead us to the warehouse. We wind through a maze of dishes, pots, Tupperware, utensils, garbage cans, textiles, pillows, lighting, prints, frames, candles, and plants. In the textile section we hide behind some shower curtains, and Zoe, as if she’s the Ghost of Christmas Present or something, points to a couple taking their time deciding on a bathroom rug. Their backs are turned to their three children, who are cackling and throwing pillows all over the floor and jumping in their dirty sneakers from big pile of rug to big pile of rug.
“Do you think they care that their children are destroying property?”
“Obviously not.”
“Because they came here to get a bathroom rug, and this is the only time they have in their busy schedules to get a bathroom rug, and they can’t afford a babysitter just to go out and buy a stupid bathroom rug, and so they don’t really give a shit about their kids tearing around the store or the employees who will be late getting home because they can’t decide between the tangerine or the electric blue.”
“Insouciance?”
“Yes. It’s the art of not giving a shit. And you need to foster some of it.”
She’s right. It’s true that I care too much. Things stick to me and I cannot shake them off. And so I should stop caring. Insouciance. Go F yourself.
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An IKEA employee in a yellow polo shirt saunters over and asks the couple to make their choice and make their way to check out. He picks up a juice box and some crushed Goldfish that the rogue children have left on the floor and shakes his head.
Zoe and I slowly and quietly step back so you cannot see our sneakers beneath the row of shower curtains. Zoe holds her finger to her lips as if I needed a reminder to keep quiet. Her shower curtain has patches of transparent plastic in its design, so she finds a clear spot and smooshes her face against it, trying to make me laugh.
When the final customers pay and leave, we hear the employees lock the doors, and someone turns up the stereo. I wish it were Take a Chance on Me by ABBA, just to complete my Swedish experience, but it’s not. It’s Green Day.
We wait for some yellow-shirted, potbellied blokes to sweep through our department with a push broom, and when the lights turn even dimmer, the stereo turns off, and the intermittent employee chatter subsides, we sneak out from behind the curtains. We still don’t talk, but Zoe signals me to follow her in silence. We sneak like soldiers toward the staircase that leads up to the cafeteria. Zoe runs, hunched over, to a corner, looks around, and then signals for me to follow her. Eventually we slingshot this way to the stairs. We stay close to the wall in case there are cameras in the center of the stairway and sidle our way up.
We practically crawl behind the chrome tray rails to the kitchen part of the cafeteria. Zoe pulls open a big stainless steel freezer and points into it. Bags and bags of Swedish meatballs. She finds me a plate, dumps about twelve of them out, and sticks the whole thing in the microwave. She only heats one plate. She takes it out before it beeps and very quietly narrates what she’s doing in “Swedish Chef” language (“snerkin smorkin snerkin smorkin”) as she scoops some lingonberry jam onto the plate, with a little parsley for garnish.
