My Life in Dioramas

by Tara Altebrando

  “So why the summit?” Naveen asked.

  “I’m having a hard time a) finding fecal matter and b) figuring out how I’m going to make the house smell bad without being caught.”

  Stella arrived and jumped off her bike.

  “You were right,” I said as she came to sit next to me. “I’m having some trouble with my plan. The open house is tomorrow at ten and I’m going roller-skating with my mom since we can’t be home. So how can I make the house smell if I’m not there? Also, do you want to come skating?”

  “Sure, I’ll ask.” Stella was winded, her cheeks flushed. It was sunny, warm. Like the first official feeling day of spring. March was being true to that whole lion and lamb thing for once.

  Naveen said, “No need to get the stuff if you can’t figure out where you’d put it and how. I think you’ll have to do some kind of double back. Like, say you forgot your skates or something?”

  “That could work,” I said slowly. “So I have to hide the stinky stuff somewhere that I can grab it really fast, but then where do I put it?”

  “You need to think in terms of maximum stinkage potential,” Naveen said.

  “Yes. Maximum.”

  “You know every inch of that house.” Stella sounded bored. “If you can’t figure it out, we’re not going to be much help.”

  “I could hide it in the fireplace?” I said.

  “Too obvious.” Naveen shook his head. “They’ll find it right away. Unless you’re going to somehow rig it so that it’s dangling down the chimney out of sight.”

  “Sounds complicated,” I said. But I filed the idea away for later.

  A couple of ducks were making lazy circles on the pond. I took a mental tour of the house room by room, like a possible buyer, then decided to focus on the living room and kitchen area, where I figured people would spend the most time. The loft over the kitchen was just outside my bedroom door. All that was up there, though, was a desk my dad used and a beanbag chair.

  “My beanbag chair!” I said.

  “Huh?” Naveen said.

  “I can put it in the beanbag chair.”

  “Oh, man,” Stella said. “I love that chair.”

  “Sorry.” I laughed. “But there may have to be some casualties. I’ll open up the stitches in the bottom of it today. And tomorrow, when I slip back into the house, I’ll shove a bag of stink inside the chair.”

  “I have to admit,” Naveen said. “I’m impressed.”

  “But where are you going to keep the stuff overnight?” Stella now sounded more annoyed than bored.

  It had to be close to the beanbag chair. But I couldn’t exactly stink up my own room.

  “I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ll figure out a way to just hang the bag out my window overnight.”

  “I’m a little scared by how good you are at this,” Stella said.

  Naveen was nodding his head. “As am I, ladies. As am I. So you’re all set, then.”

  “Mmm,” I said, wincing. “Not exactly.”

  They waited, looking at me—Naveen eagerly, Stella skeptically—and I wondered how many more times we’d be here, the three of us, like this.

  “Because now it’s time to collect the stink,” I said. “And I need your help.”

  Stella stood up and stretched. “I’m outta here.”

  “Don’t go!” I tugged on her jeans. “You can just be the lookout, okay?”

  She groaned.

  “Where we headed?” Naveen said.

  I took a deep breath and let out my best moo.

  Depler’s Orchard, home of the two cows—Daisy and Maisy—that mooed my family awake on sunny mornings, was our nearest next-door neighbor just up the road past the woods at the far end of our yard. Naveen suggested we stop at his place to get a tennis ball so we could pretend we were retrieving a ball we’d been playing with if we got caught. I’d brought the spatula, a couple pairs of rubber gloves, and some plastic grocery bags, which prompted Stella to say several times, “I am not going anywhere near any cow turd.”

  The house where Mr. Depler lived was set pretty far back from the road, and the cows lived in an area away from his front door. The odds were in our favor that he’d never see us. His car was in the driveway, so he was home, which was less than ideal, but there was no point in backing out now. If we got caught, we got caught. So I said, “Time’s a wastin’. Come on.”

  Naveen and I abandoned our bikes on the side of the road, and took big strides down to the fenced-in area where the cows were hanging out, tails wagging lazily with their backs to us. It was a post fence, one you could slip through if you weren’t as big as a cow. I had my eye on a huge pile of cow turd that was easily within reach. I headed for it with the spatula in hand and slid it under—so gross! It actually squished—and lifted some into the bag that Naveen, also wearing gloves, was holding.

  “Man, that reeks,” he said.

  “Indeed it does. You think that’s enough?” I asked, studying what was left of the pile. A few flies were hovering, buzzing.

  “Should do the trick.” He looked around and I almost laughed at how serious he looked, though, of course, I was pretty serious about this mission, too. “Anyway, plenty more where that came from if you need it.”

  One of the cows mooed and we both jumped.

  While speed-walking back toward our bikes, I hurled the soiled spatula into the woods between Depler’s house and ours. I couldn’t imagine ever letting my mother flip an omelet with it again anyway.

  Stella was already on her bike when we got close to her and she took off, calling out, “I’ll text you later!”

  And she was gone.

  Naveen and I got on our bikes—with the bag of stink hanging off my handlebars—and rode over to Big Red.

  “How am I going to get it up to my room without them noticing?” I asked. We’d stopped in the driveway.

  Naveen studied my house, where my bedroom windows sat atop the porch roof. “I may not be particularly sporty. But even I can throw that high.”

  I considered the windows, the angle of the porch. “We only have one shot. Because if I can’t catch it and it slides into the gutter and clogs it, I’m sunk.”

  “Not to worry,” he said. “I am cool under pressure.”

  “You’re the best.” I handed over the bag of stink, leaned my bike against the front gate, and went inside.

  My mom was in the kitchen, chopping something or other, and I said “Hi” as I went up to my room. I opened the window nearest the door to the loft and then backed away and closed it. I’d completely forgotten about the wasp’s nest out there. My dad was supposed to call a guy to get rid of it but he kept putting it off. I went to the other one, the one I usually kept open a crack on warm nights, since it was closer to my bed. Tonight, it would be shut for sure.

  I opened the window and popped out the screen and set it aside and knelt down, hanging out as far as it felt safe. “Ready?” I called out.

  “Ready.” Naveen took a few sort of running steps and hurled the bag up at me.

  I caught it, barely, by the ties of the bag.

  “Yes!” Naveen pumped his fist in the air.

  “You’re the best!” I said.

  “Good luck.” He got back on his bike. “Keep me posted!”

  I watched as he rode off. Was a crush supposed to feel like this? With Naveen, I could be myself in a way I wasn’t with anyone else, not even Stella. But I was pretty sure that was just a special kind of friendship and that a crush was supposed to be different. Naveen waved from the corner where he turned toward home.

  8.

  “Whatcha doing?” my dad said. I was “reading” in my beanbag chair. He’d come up, on my mother’s orders, to tidy the desk, which looked like it had been attacked by wolves.

  “Just reading.” I turned a page to make it seem official. Was my mother ever going to leave the kitchen and let me get on with it?

  My dad basically shoved everything that was on top of the desk into a drawer, move
d a lamp a few inches, and stepped back, impressed with himself. “Can it wait?” he asked me. “I could use your help out in the shed.”

  Right then my mother went into the laundry room, so I said, “Can I just finish this chapter?”

  “Sure.” He looked tired and sort of sad.

  “I’ll be out in five minutes?”

  “Great.”

  As soon as he left, I got up and flipped the beanbag over and cut through a few stiches on the bottom seam. I was pretty sure I’d be able to sew it closed again, no problem, if it ever recovered from the stink. I put the scissors back in my room and went out back, adrenaline pumping through me.

  My dad was standing outside the shed, both doors wide open, scratching his head. I went to his side and took in the view. Skis and snowboards and a boccie set and a croquet set and the badminton net and more, all crammed in there. Behind them—pushed up awkwardly against the back wall—were my old pink plastic table and chairs. The curtains my mom and I had made together were faded from the sun.

  “Remember when this was your clubhouse?” my dad said.

  “I do.” I just hadn’t thought about it in ages.

  “I’m not really sure what your mom expects me to do with this stuff.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t about to give my father any brilliant ideas on how to make this shed more appealing to people. “Seriously,” I said. “It’s a shed.”

  “Exactly!” He closed the doors and latched the hinge.

  But when he turned to go, I opened the doors again and took another look. My cousin Ellen and I had spent one afternoon out here, making dresses out of construction paper and modeling them over our swimsuits. And one night, my dad and I camped out here, or tried to, until I got scared and we gave up and went up to Big Red instead. I used to sit on the edge of the doorway, watching my parents play croquet with their friends while I slurped an ice pop. I thought I had outgrown that pink desk, those flowery curtains. Now I regretted ever feeling that.

  I usually spent some time on Saturdays at the ballet barre in the barn, practicing pliés and stretching to keep myself limber between classes, but today I just wasn’t in the mood. All this stuff about dance troupe competing was really exciting. But it was sort of a new thing to stress about. And Stella’s attitude wasn’t helping. Anyway, she’d see. I’d postpone the sale just long enough and make it to Dance Nation and everything would be awesome.

  I went upstairs and texted Stella. Skating?

  She wrote back, Affirmative.

  I shouted down to my mom from the loft. “What time are we going skating? Stella’s coming.”

  “Tell her we’ll pick her up at ten.”

  “Hey, Mom?”

  She looked up at me from the kitchen.

  “You could just drop us off if you want.”

  “Thanks, Kate.” She huffed and looked away. “That’s thoughtful.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I thought we’d do something together, just us two, is all.” She was sautéeing onions. Angus was curled up near where she stood.

  I sort of felt bad, but not really. This whole forced family fun during open house idea bugged me. “I can cancel,” I called down.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Have you cleaned up the crafts room?”

  I didn’t even answer. I just walked downstairs.

  But I didn’t clean up.

  Instead, I found another shoebox.

  I lined the walls with cream-colored paper and cut blue rectangles for windows. I found some flowery paper and cut little curtain shapes, then made a small pink table and chairs. I started to make me and my cousin Ellen, dressed in tiny paper dresses. I missed her and my other cousins and my aunts and uncles. Did any of them know we were selling Big Red?

  I propped the mini-me and mini-Ellen up on the chairs and left the room.

  9.

  Xanadu or roller derby? was Stella’s first text in the morning.

  I’d introduced Stella to Xanadu a few years ago. My mother said it was her absolute favorite movie ever when she was little, and since then Stella and I had spent a number of sleepovers making fun of the clothes, the music, and the plot—where a roller-skating goddess pops out of a mural and basically inspires a failing painter to turn an old movie theater into a roller rink. I sort of loved it, too, in all its totally outdated bizarreness.

  So today, I picked Xanadu.

  I was feeling more like trying to skate my way out of my life and into some other magical realm than I felt like “AlterKate-r,” my roller-derby persona. Why we felt the need to dress up whenever we went roller-skating, I have no idea.

  I threw on some tights, some pink leg warmers, and a white flowing dress with big sleeves that Stella and I had found at a secondhand shop in town. Then I took the leg warmers off. Maybe I’d come back for those as part of my double back? I had a feeling my mother wasn’t going to let me leave the house without my skates so I needed a fallback plan.

  Downstairs, a bright-eyed, middle-aged woman with curly red hair stood by the oven, holding a sheet of frozen pieces of cookie dough. “Hello there,” she said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Bernadette.” She opened the oven door and slid the sheet in, seeming so at home that anyone might have taken her for an aunt. “The realtor. And you must be Kate.”

  “What’s up with the cookies?” I said.

  “We want the house to smell homey.”

  So she was, clearly, my enemy.

  “People really fall for that?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I walked past her and into the dining room, where my parents were clearing stuff off the table in a frenzy.

  Bernadette followed me and said, “It’s okay for it to look like people live here. You don’t have to go crazy. The place looks great. I’m feeling confident.”

  “Oh good.” My mom was wearing leggings and an oversize denim button-down shirt. She grabbed her car keys. “Then I guess we’ll leave you to it.”

  I followed my parents and Angus out the front door with my skates in hand and waited for them to reach their cars before I said, “Oh! My leg warmers!”

  “It’s not cold out,” my mom said.

  “It’s a fashion choice,” I said.

  I went back through the house and past Bernadette, who was arranging flowers in a vase on the kitchen table.

  Which was a problem.

  Because from the kitchen, you could see the loft, where the beanbag chair was.

  I hadn’t factored in the presence of the realtor.

  “You may want to check for dead flies in my parents’ room,” I said.

  “Dead flies?” Bernadette studied me.

  “Yeah, something died in the roof or something,” I said. “The flies are getting into my parents’ room and also dying. They don’t even notice it anymore. Dustpan is in the laundry room. I’ll show you.”

  Bernadette followed me to fetch the dustpan and hand broom. Then she headed for my parents’ room and I bolted to my room, retrieved the cow pie, which smelled just as bad as it had yesterday, and returned to the loft and shoved it into the beanbag. It had the smell of chocolate chips to contend with but I figured that was a good thing. They’d think maybe the cookies were bad? Or that something had died behind the oven?

  Bernadette was standing at the door of my parents’ bedroom with a dustpan full of flies when I reached the hall with my leg warmers. “Thanks for the tip,” she said.

  “Any time!”

  It felt weird to be leaving her there, alone at Big Red.

  Out front, a car had already pulled into the driveway, where a FOR SALE sign with a yellow balloon had appeared, but I looked away. I didn’t want to see who they were, what they were like. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand it if there was a girl like me, a girl luckier than me, who might inherit my house, my life.

  My parents were both in my dad’s car waiting for me. I got into the backseat. With Angus. I didn’t understand why we weren
’t taking two cars. “Dad, are you coming roller-skating?”

  It was my mother who answered. “Well, you’re bringing a friend, so why shouldn’t I?”

  I snorted. “Dad’s not your friend.”

  Dad said, “Of course I am.” He looked out the window as we stopped at the end of the driveway and he reached over and squeezed her knee before pulling onto the road. “I’m her best friend.” Then he smiled. “Remember that when I let you start dating when you’re thirty.”

  “Fine by me,” I said, thinking about Naveen. But maybe all of Stella’s nagging about crushes was just getting to me. “I’m in no hurry.”

  “Atta girl,” Dad said, and I smiled.

  “What are we going to do with Angus?” I reached over and rubbed behind his ears. He looked half-asleep beside me.

  “Dropping him off at Joe’s for a few hours,” my dad said.

  We did that every once in a while, like if we were going to my grandparents’ for a long visit. But today it felt especially sad to be sending poor Angus off to somebody else’s house. When Angus climbed out of the car in front of Joe’s and walked up onto his porch and laid down, I sort of wanted to go with him, and just wait out the open house, napping in the sun.

  At the rink, Stella and I laced up as far away from my parents as we could.

  “My dad would never go roller-skating,” she said.

  “First time for everything,” I said.

  “No, there isn’t. Not for my dad. Your parents are just so cool.”

  I looked at them, trying to find cool things about them and failing. Why couldn’t they get their act together and just be more grown-up and make more money and be more smart about things and not have to ruin everything?

  “At least your dad has a job. That pays the bills,” I said.