“Rose, so nice to meet you,” says his mother, putting the Pyrex to rest on a dish towel and wiping her hands on her jeans before reaching out to give me a hug. “Sorry, I’m a hugger,” she says, chuckling. “Hope you don’t mind!”
I’m not really a hugger, but obviously I’m not going to say that.
“Rose, pleasure.” Caleb’s father offers me his hand, which is so big that I momentarily picture it squashing one of the two-pound babies he probably deals with on a daily basis. He has the same, almost painfully firm handshake as his son.
“Thanks for having me…” I trail off, suddenly realizing that I have no idea what to call Caleb’s parents.
“Richard, and Valerie,” Caleb rescues me.
“That’s right,” says his mom. “We’re not fancy people around here.”
You wouldn’t know it from looking around the kitchen, which has obviously been remodeled with high-end appliances and granite countertops and one of those deep, white ceramic sinks. It couldn’t be more different from our old kitchen, with its mismatched appliances and warped drawers that are impossible to close without putting your full body weight behind them. This is not a kitchen that sees a lot of takeout.
“You guys want a Coke or something? Seltzer, OJ?” asks Caleb’s mother from the fridge.
“I’ll have a Coke,” says Caleb. “HD? What’ll it be?”
“Seltzer’s great. Thanks.”
Valerie grabs two cans from the fridge and passes them to Caleb. Leaning toward the doorway, she hollers for the girls to come take their meds. No response.
“Ladies! Meds time!” she repeats. Nothing. I glance at Caleb, who rolls his eyes.
“I’ll get them,” he says, sliding off the stool he’s perched on. I follow him into the playroom, where one of the girls is on the floor, braiding a doll’s hair, while the other is bowling on the Wii. Both appear to be willfully ignoring any interruption from the outside world.
“You heard Mom. Meds. Get a move on.” The one on the floor looks up at her brother and me like we’re utter fools. She crosses her arms and juts her little chin out at us.
“We’re on strike.”
“You’re on strike?”
“We have rights, you know.”
Caleb bursts out laughing. “You have rights? Oh really? Where’d you hear that?”
“Miss Robles,” says the twin who’s bowling, not even turning away from the game.
The one on the floor continues. “We’re learning about the Pullman railroad strike of eighteen ninety-three. People have the right to strike if they don’t like how they’re being treated.”
I look to Caleb, sideways. Good luck to him with this one.
“True,” Caleb says slowly, considering his next move. “But this is not that kind of situation. You’re not being paid unfairly for your work or something like that. No one’s taking away your health care. On the contrary, we’re trying to provide you with the things you need to stay healthy. Therefore, it’s in your own interest to do what I say, and take your meds.”
I like the way he talks to them, like they’re real people, not just kids. They’re listening now, processing his argument. The one at the Wii has put the controller down and leans against the arm of the couch, cupping her chin in her hands and tapping her cheek with one wiry finger.
“But what if we just feel tired of taking them?” asks the one by the couch. I really have no idea who is who at this point.
Caleb shrugs. “Listen, I hear you. It’s your lot in life. You gotta bite the bullet and do it, or you’ll have a pain crisis and you don’t like that very much either, remember. It would be more sensible to go on strike from your chores if you want to go on strike. But don’t tell the parentals I told you that.”
The one on the floor puts her doll down resolutely and nods. “Fine. We’ll do it.” Standing up, she leans toward Caleb with a stern look on her face and wags a finger at him. “But don’t think you can always get us to do whatever you want with logic alone.” Then she and her sister march off in tandem to the kitchen.
I turn to Caleb. “Did she just say, ‘do whatever you want with logic alone’?”
He laughs. “Yeah, they bust out with that kind of stuff all the time. I don’t know where they get it.”
“Is it always like that? Getting them to take their meds?”
Caleb sighs, nodding. “More or less, yeah. I mean, they go through phases. Sometimes they’re fine with it, other times they get sassy, other times they just kick and scream like babies.” He shrugs. “It is what it is, right?”
That’s true, obviously, but it doesn’t seem fair to be so young and have to deal with so much, to be always on the cusp of pain. Not that “fair” even means anything, really. But still, Caleb’s sisters are so hilarious and smart and silly, it seems like they should be allowed to just be their hilarious, smart selves for a while without having to deal with heavy stuff like keeping a chronic illness under control. At least for now.
“Food’s up, youngbloods!” Caleb’s dad calls from the dining room, and we troop in and find our places around the long farmhouse table.
“So, Rose,” Valerie says, passing me a colorful salad, “Caleb tells us you’re a dancer.” She smiles at me warmly. The girls giggle.
“Caleb tells us a lot of things about you,” says one of them through her laughter.
“Caleb’s like, ‘And another thing about Rose, and another thing about Rose,’” the other one adds. They fall all over each other, hysterical. Caleb glares at them.
Valerie chuckles. “We may have heard a few things. Only good ones, of course. So, you’re a ballerina? Our girls love ballet, too.”
“Yes, the evil twins take all kinds of dance,” Caleb says through his teeth.
“Um, well, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a ‘ballerina,’” I say. I can’t quite reconcile myself in the dance studio—sweating, decked out in my faded black leotard with my feet bleeding into the inside of my pointe shoes—with the frilly word “ballerina.”
“Come on, you dance practically every hour you’re not in school. If you’re not a ballerina by now, you should probably consider throwing in the towel and pursuing something else. You’d make a good librarian.” Caleb’s got the sarcasm down to a science, but there’s something in his tone like maybe he’s still a little nervous around me, too.
“A librarian?” I say, raising an eyebrow at him.
“It suits you.”
“So, where do you dance?” his mother asks, interrupting our little flirtation, or whatever it is. “I work in Cambridge, so I’m familiar with some of the schools around there.”
“New England Youth Ballet. It’s downtown, actually, near Boylston Street.”
“That’s wonderful. What are your plans for next year? Are you looking for a school with a strong dance program?”
Ugh, next year. The question every high school senior dreads, and me probably more than average.
“Ma, maybe you could lay off the college interrogation until the second time you meet Rose?” Caleb says. “You think?”
“No pressure, Rose! I’m just curious! It’s the mom-slash-college-professor in me.”
“No, I don’t mind,” I say, stammering. “I just—I’m not sure yet. We’ll see.”
“Mom, we’re learning about the Pullman strike in school, and Caleb says we should go on strike from our chores to practice!” one of the twins interrupts. Caleb tosses a balled-up napkin at her, which she bats away with barely a glance.
“I told you to keep your mouth shut about that, narc,” Caleb hisses.
Valerie rolls her eyes at her children and asks me to pass her the breadbasket.
“Ladies, you know, strikes are usually about low wages or poor working conditions or things like that,” Caleb’s dad says.
“Yeah, and we work for free!” says the other twin.
“We don’t pay you for your chores because you do them as a part of the family. We all contribute. And your working condi
tions are excellent, I might add,” Richard says as he piles some chicken breast on his plate. “The Pullman workers did not have a Wii to return to when they finished working on the rails.”
The buzz around the table continues all through dinner. There are three conversations taking place at any given moment, side chatter, giggling, platters being passed back and forth and forks crossing from one plate to another, grabbing the things one person likes and someone else hates—“Lemme get your avocado,” “You can have my tomatoes.” I sit in a sort of stunned silence for most of the time, smiling every time I catch one of them looking at me inquisitively. It really is nice, all the chaos. Dinners at my house are never like this. And you’d never know, really, that three of the five people in this family are—and will always be—sick.
After dinner, Caleb’s sisters give me a grand tour of the house—which in this case actually merits the expression “grand tour.” They show me the bedroom they share (apparently by choice, not for lack of space) and various bathrooms, the room where they practice the piano (“The parentals gave up on me. No rhythm,” Caleb confesses when I ask him why he isn’t required to play an instrument like his sisters), their parents’ offices, and the finished attic space that holds a faded leather sectional and a huge flat-screen.
Finally, Caleb manages to free us from their admittedly very cute clutches, and takes me out to the back porch with his sketchbook and two thick pencils. I’d almost forgotten that I was originally brought here under the pretense of his art assignment. Outside, the air is brisk and smells like someone has their fireplace up and running nearby. I breathe it in deeply.
“Your family is cool,” I tell him.
“By which you mean, these people are nuts and I’m never coming back here?”
“No, seriously. I’ve always wanted a sister. Someone to take the edge off with the parents.”
Caleb laughs. “Yeah, they do serve that purpose, that’s for sure. No time to overfocus on me.”
On the back porch, we sit on a big, wooden bench with a faded canvas seat cushion. The porch light makes a low buzzing noise, and I watch bugs hover around the bulb. The air is cool now, and I’m glad I wore a scarf with my jean jacket, even though Gram commented that it was “too thin to be much use” before I left the house.
“You want me to just sit here?” I ask.
“Do whatever,” says Caleb, picking up his sketchbook. “Just try to pick one thing and stick with it, if you don’t mind.”
I settle on a position that seems like it might be comfortable for a while, shifting my body toward Caleb, my back against the bench’s armrest and my knees pulled up to my chest. I wrap my arms around my knees and rest my chin on them. Hopefully it looks reasonably non-awkward.
“I feel like the nice thing about siblings is that they’re other people in the world who just get it, right?” I say after a minute. “They get where you come from, what your parents’ issues are, that stuff.”
He nods, shifting his gaze quickly between me and the sketchbook as he draws continuously. “That is true, indeed.”
“Not that your parents seem like they have issues. They seem very … normal.”
“Try living with them!” he snorts. “‘Normal’ isn’t exactly the word I would choose. They are truly bizarre individuals.”
“I saw zero evidence of bizarreness,” I say.
“They were on good behavior. Get to know them a little better. They’ve been known to sing show tunes while cooking.”
“That’s nothing.”
“In pig latin.”
“All right, so they’re a little quirky. That’s where you get it from, huh?” I flash him a smile.
“Yes, I won that particular genetic lottery.”
“I’d say you won a few genetic lotteries, frankly,” I say.
“True that,” he says. “True that.”
“So, your mom can work full-time, even with sickle cell?” I say, after a few minutes of silence except for the sound of his pencil scratching the paper.
He stops drawing. “Yeah. She’s pretty hard-core. She hardly ever misses class, unless she’s having a really bad crisis.”
“How often is that?” I ask.
Even speaking of his mother’s pain looks like it pains Caleb a little bit. “Often enough.”
I wonder what it’s like to have a mother whose illness you can’t see. She could be suffering and covering it up, and he wouldn’t know. At least my mother can’t hide her pain.
Caleb frowns at his sketchbook, twisting his head first to the left and then the right, looking at the picture from different angles, I guess.
“What?” I nudge his leg with my foot.
“Nothing. I just can’t get this line quite right.”
He works at it for another minute or two, while I sit there in silence.
“So what’s it like?” I ask finally, jump-starting the conversation. “Knowing you’re never going to get what they’ve got?”
He taps his pencil against the notebook. “Don’t know, really. I guess I’m used to it. I mean, they got me tested as a baby. I never didn’t know, know what I mean?”
What would that be like, just being used to this big ugly thing in your family, having all the information about it right from the start. Never knowing anything different, or better.
“What about you? Do you want to know?” he asks.
“I want to know, and I don’t want to know … you know? Sometimes I feel like I already know I’m going to get it.”
“Yeah, but you don’t. That’s just you being pessimistic. You’ve got a fifty-fifty shot of being totally healthy.”
“Yeah, and dying some normal way like cancer or a heart attack.”
“Exactly. Or a car accident!”
“Death by polka dot–itis!”
We laugh for all of a split second and then return to silence.
“Let’s face it,” I say finally. “There are more ways to die in this world than to not die. There are exactly zero ways to do that.”
“You are a very odd person, HD. One in a million, I’d say.”
“So you’re saying there are like seven thousand people on earth exactly like me?”
Caleb throws his head back and scoffs. “Oh, man. I cannot get one past you, can I, HD? Correction. You are one in seven billion, to be exact.”
“Thank you. It’s true, though. There are zero ways to avoid death.”
“It is true,” Caleb concedes. “You’re going to kick the bucket at some point. So the question is, if you had a choice of knowing how you were going to die, or having it be a surprise, which would you choose?”
He phrases it like a rhetorical question, but it isn’t rhetorical, not for me, not really. Sure, I could have the mutation for Huntington’s and still get hit by a bus before I get sick. But assuming that one freakish stroke of bad luck is enough, I’ll probably go the HD way: slowly and painfully, and as a huge burden on my loved ones. Everyone likes to say the people they love aren’t burdens when they get sick, but that’s bullshit.
“I don’t know what I choose. Is ignorance really bliss?”
“Maybe if you have complete ignorance. But you don’t. You have uncertainty. It’s different.”
“True that,” I say, breathing in the smell of burning wood again and smiling at him. “True that.” The sound of his pencil against the sketchbook gets louder in my ears for a minute, competing only with the buzzing of the porch light and the bugs around it.
“HD,” Caleb says, “you’re giving yourself a wrinkle between your eyes.”
I relax my forehead, which had furrowed itself into a little knot. He’s right, I’ll have a permanent wrinkle by the time I’m twenty-five if I’m not careful.
“Let me see.”
Caleb turns the sketchbook toward me. On the heavy paper, scrawled in strokes of pencil, is a girl with dark hair falling over her eyes, a scarf tucked around her chin and wrapped almost up to her ears. Her features are narrow, angled; her brow is t
ensed.
She doesn’t look much like me, but she’s beautiful.
WINTER
Rule #2: Falling in love confuses everything (so don’t do it).
Ten
I think every ballet dancer in the world would tell you that they dread The Nutcracker. It’s not The Nutcracker’s fault, per se—it’s a beautiful ballet. It’s just that we all do The Nutcracker, every year, just the same as the year before. I loved it as a little kid. It’s always the first real show you get to do, the first time you get to dance on the big stage with the big kids, in front of a real audience, and there’s something magical about it. There’s the snow falling onstage, and the giant Christmas tree, and of course there’s the glamour of watching the senior girls do their own makeup and break in their fresh pointe shoes in the dressing room. But by the time you’ve done it for ten years running, that stuff has more or less lost its luster. Now it’s just the annual holiday slog.
At least I’m not dancing the Arabian Coffee again this year—I did that part three years in a row; it was my first part once I graduated out of the ranks of Snowflake #6, Party Girl #3, Polichinelle #10. I never did dance Clara; Georgia always managed to snag that role. Now that we’re the big girls, Georgia is dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy, of course, and I’m dancing Dewdrop.
My phone vibrates in my bag as I’m returning to the dressing room after running my solo for the fifth time. I slump into a chair by the mirror and put my feet up on the counter, stretching out over my legs for a few counts before I check the message.
“WHEN. CAN. I. SEE. YOU?”
No one’s around, but it still makes me blush. I do feel a little guilty for having disappeared into Nutcracker craziness without adequately warning Caleb. It’s been two weeks since I had dinner at his house, and we haven’t hung out again—I’ve just been on autopilot from school to rehearsal to bed. If Lena weren’t in half my classes, I’d never see her, either. This is why none of my ballet friends have boyfriends. Just when you think you’re getting a little taste of normality, you remember that ballet comes first.
Rules for 50/50 Chances Page 9