My Life in Dioramas

by Tara Altebrando

  “You’ll have to take a break for cake at some point, eh, Stella?” I said.

  Maggie smiled. Sara laughed.

  “Ha ha,” Stella said. “Very funny.”

  Then the bell rang and we had to hurry to Gym, where we were playing kickball, a game that I found to be fun for the three seconds it took to kick. Otherwise it seemed there was a lot of waiting around. Unless you got picked to “pitch” like Sam Fitch did, mostly because he was better than anybody else at actually getting the ball to roll over the plate.

  At one point, at least, I ended up waiting in line to kick with Naveen next to me.

  “So.” He seemed amused. “You going to the big party?” He waved his hands like he was a crazy person.

  “Right? It’s not just me?”

  He nodded a few times, slowly. “She’s excited, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m her best friend, so I’ll be there. You?”

  “Totally.” He nodded then flashed his sly smile; one of his front teeth was just slightly crooked. “I bet you don’t know this about me, but I’m a pretty good singer.”

  “You’re pretty good at everything, Naveen.”

  “I take offense to that!” He nudged me. “I excel at most things. I’m pretty good at a few additional things.”

  “What are you going to sing?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. I’m going to spend some time considering the options. They have them on the website.”

  “Cool.” I hadn’t managed to even peek at the list the girls had at lunch so I had no idea what I would sing.

  “How about you?”

  “I don’t know.” I really didn’t understand the whole planning ahead thing. “Maybe some eighties hair metal. My dad’s way into that stuff so I know a ton of lyrics.”

  “That’d be awesome.” Naveen nodded.

  “Right?!”

  We both laughed.

  “Did you get your food stewing?”

  “I did.”

  “Awesome.”

  But then Naveen looked sort of faraway and sad, and I said, “What?”

  “You know you won’t be able to keep it up forever.”

  “I know.” It felt like a bubble popping between us.

  “It’s pretty sad to think somebody might knock Big Red down,” he said.

  “What are you even talking about?”

  “I looked it up. The listing for the house. The ad said it was a fixer-upper or possible partial teardown on amazing property.”

  I felt sick. “A teardown?”

  “They said something like ‘possible reno to suit your vision’ but that means teardown.” He took my elbow and we both moved forward in the line. “Sorry, Kate. I figured you knew.”

  It was my turn to kick. I fouled out twice and then, on my third kick, I nailed it. But it flew right at Sam Fitch, and he caught it. Pop fly out.

  “Sorry, Kate!” he called out as I walked back to the end of the line.

  “Not your fault!” I said, feeling my palms start to sweat.

  What was that even about?

  At home that afternoon, when I saw my parents were both distracted by their own tasks, I got my Tupperware out of the pantry and walked down to where the old composting bin had ended up, overgrown behind the garden. I opened the lid, placed the container inside, and closed the bin.

  With any luck it would reek by Saturday.

  Then I went up to the computer and found realtor.com and looked up my address. The listing loaded, with photo after photo of my house. I clicked on the picture of my own room, the ballerina print still on the wall, the paisley of the bedspread looking lovely. When had they even taken that picture? It felt weird how much they’d done behind my back.

  I opened the pop-up slideshow so that I could study the pictures more closely. Everything looked funny. Like my parents had hurriedly cleared off surfaces and moved chairs to get better shots. Probably Bernie had come to help. Probably when I was at school.

  I exhaled so hard that my hair moved.

  The picture of the old bathroom with the claw-foot tub was especially lovely. Then there were pictures of the stream, the garden, and the barn. I tried to imagine what I’d think if I were someone shopping for a house, but it was impossible for me to separate out what I knew.

  I scrolled back up and read the description:

  Just minutes from the Shawangunk Mountains and surrounded by apple orchards is this 1900 farmhouse on a country road. A 1998 post and beam addition, including a stone fireplace, brings charm, warmth, and style together all in one sweet home, and is in great shape. Older farmhouse section needs TLC or possible reno to suit your vision. Outbuilding has great guesthouse potential. Original wide board floors, beamed ceilings, eat-in kitchen, and two staircases. Enjoy the private backyard from the walk-out lower level with a small seasonal stream and grape arbor. A rocking chair front porch is just one of the special characteristics still evident from yesteryear.

  I actually said, “Oh, give me a break,” out loud.

  Because: “Yesteryear”?

  Was that even a word?

  TLC, I could totally see. Especially since my parents had sort of let things go recently. But the idea that someone might tear down the old section seemed crazy.

  Then I saw another note that made my skin feel tight. “Great potential as a second home for city dwellers. Only 90 minutes from the heart of NYC!”

  So someone could buy our house, our home, and then not even live in it.

  I looked at the price: $285,000.

  That was a lot of money. But it wasn’t a ton of money, like a million. Still, we should be able to buy a house with that. Another smaller house, right? Why weren’t we doing that? I clicked around and found a few cute-looking, two-bedroom houses for half the money. Why did we have to move in with my grandparents at all?

  I went into the old bathroom and started to fill the claw-foot tub. It was the middle of the day, but I didn’t care. Then I added some bubble bath to really make it worth my while—also to hide the blue lime stains near the drain—and got in, careful to close the doors so that they actually stayed shut.

  The wall I was facing was covered in old-fashioned patterned blue wallpaper that had roosters and tall grasses in its design. There was a long-standing joke between my father and his friends about him liking roosters. Like someone spread the word that he liked roosters as a joke and it stuck? Hanging there on the wall were a bunch of framed cut-paper silhouettes. One of me, one of my mom, one of my dad—all of them made at some colonial village we’d visited when I was about seven—then two of my grandparents. They looked good there, old-fashioned. I hated to think they wouldn’t always be there, that the new owners would probably tear down the rooster paper at the first opportunity. That the old tub, which had lasted THIS LONG, might end up in a landfill somewhere. Or worse, taken outside and converted into a flowerbed.

  I sunk down so my ears were underwater and swished water around with my hands.

  “Kate?” My mother’s voice penetrated the water. “You in there?”

  I said, “Yup!” and sat up a bit.

  “Are you in the bath?”

  “Yup!”

  “Kate.” She poked her head in. “You’re going to be dirtier now than you were before. Did you clean it first?”

  I sunk back down. “Nope.” There were probably some dusty bits floating around, but the bubbles hid them pretty well.

  She sighed and shook her head and closed the door.

  Mom was unwrapping trays of food in the kitchen, rearranging, putting some in Tupperware, when I paraded through with just my towel on.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  She was at the Tupperware drawer, looking around.

  “Leftovers from a conference,” she said, still looking. “Where’s that good square Tupperware with the red lid?”

  “Sorry, Mom.” I pictured my food festering in it out back. “I don’t really keep track of the Tupperware.”

  “I can�
��t find the spatula either. Do you think someone stole them? Like at the open house?”

  “That would be pretty weird. Better get Bernie on the case.”

  “Anyway,” she said. “Everything was delicious, we just had too much of it. Should get us through the week.”

  “Leftovers all week,” I said. “Yay.”

  I got dressed in comfy clothes and was going to do homework in my room but then I heard my mother on the phone talking to my aunt Michelle, best I could tell, and it sounded like she was crying. I heard sniffling, and “I know, I know,” and “yeah, maybe,” and “but you know me, I don’t even like to take Advil.”

  It was hard to be angry after that.

  When she hung up, I went back downstairs to do homework at the dining room table. My mom was there, on her computer, probably just emailing. I wanted to be in the same room with her.

  “Mom?” I said after a while.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a lot of money, right? Two hundred and eighty-five thousand?”

  “How did—?”

  “It’s called the Internet.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Won’t that sort of make us rich? Like we could buy a house that cost a little less than that and still have money left over.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that, honey. And you really shouldn’t be worrying or thinking about any of this.”

  “So I’m supposed to pretend it isn’t happening?”

  She sighed. “We paid more for the house than we’re trying to sell it for is the long and short of it. The market bottomed out and we hit the bottom, too. And we borrowed against the house at one point. So we need to sell and pay down some debt and then start over.”

  I didn’t entirely understand how mortgages worked. But it didn’t sound good.

  “So we won’t actually have any of that money to spend.”

  She shook her head.

  “How did that even happen?” I asked.

  She got up and said, “I need to lie down.”

  I followed her a few minutes later, and climbed onto her bed. I wanted to apologize, but I also wanted her to apologize. I wanted everything to be different, to be like it used to be.

  “There.” I pointed at some knots in the wood beams overhead. “An owl in flight.” I looked around some. “And there, a deer head.”

  My mom sniffled a bit beside me.

  “Over there,” I said. “An upside-down dog.”

  Then she started crying really hard.

  “It’ll be okay, Mom.” I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  She bit her bottom lip and nodded.

  15.

  My mother mentioned over breakfast that Bernie was getting a ton of calls and wanted to have two open houses this weekend instead of one. If Bernie was escalating things, I had to also. I asked Naveen if he could come over to consult on where best to put the rotting food and he said yes.

  My mother was working that afternoon, so I texted my dad to ask if Naveen could come over to study and he said, Sure thing.

  I coasted through the school day, just counting the hours until it was done.

  There was a chalkboard over the kitchen sink where my parents and I left notes for each other. When I got home, I saw my dad had written, Running a few errands. Back in twenty.

  Which was typical of my dad. There seriously weren’t any errands you could run around our house that would take only twenty minutes. It took ten minutes to get anywhere. Also, he hadn’t written down the time he left. Had it already been twenty minutes ago?

  It didn’t matter.

  I knocked off a few pages of homework with Angus lying by my feet, and then I heard the sound of bike wheels crunching on gravel and went to the front door.

  I’d just gotten off the bus with Naveen a few minutes ago, but he’d changed clothes and looked like a completely different person. In school, Naveen had the “star student” look—white shirt tucked into khaki pants—but after school he was more of a goof. Today he was wearing orange jeans and a shirt with a Wookiee on it. I liked both versions of him.

  “We lucked out,” I said. “My parents aren’t even home. My dad could be back any minute now, but hopefully we can figure this out fast.”

  “I’m ready,” Naveen said. “Give me the tour.”

  “You know Big Red.”

  “Ah, but I don’t know Big Red. I mean, like, secret passageways, old staircases. Anything like that? We usually hang out outside.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Sort of.”

  I took Naveen downstairs—Angus followed—and showed him the closet under the stairs, the room where my dad kept his tools, the old staircase to nowhere in the craft room, and finally, the bar. “This is the tail end of the tour, right?” he asked. “So people are probably not spending most of their time here.”

  “Good point.”

  We went back upstairs to the main floor, where I showed him the laundry room, which had a bunch of exposed pipes for a ceiling, and I took him upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, where I explained again about the flies—ten more dead ones on the floor.

  Naveen took a minute to walk around.

  “This house is so weird,” he said.

  “I know. That’s why I love it.”

  He poked his head into the bathroom. “What if you put it way up on that top shelf?” There was a tall rack for towels and toiletries in canvas bins way high behind the door.

  My parents always told this story, about the time I’d had a friend over for a playdate when I was maybe six. At that point, I was sleeping in bunk beds that the previous owners had left behind in the room adjoining my parents’ room that was now the walk-in closet. My preschool friend, Kayla, had somehow found the car key and had been playing on the top bunk. She left it up there, on top of the wall of the room. My parents had looked for the car key for hours before they thought to send me up to the bunk bed to look on that ledge.

  I told Naveen the short version. “I’ll use smaller pieces of the food in smaller bags and put them on top of the walls of all the rooms without ceilings.” I turned around in the hallway, looking at all the air up there. “It will make this whole floor reek!”

  “That sounds like an excellent plan.” We high-fived.

  We went down to the kitchen and made a snack—melting cheddar cheese onto tortilla chips—then talked through the logistics of how I’d store and plant the stink.

  “What’s with all the dioramas?” he asked when we were done.

  It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about, that he’d have seen them all downstairs.

  “I don’t know. Just something I’m doing. It’s making me kind of sad, actually. But somehow making me feel better, too.”

  “Can we go look at them?” He ate another chip, one with a ton of cheese on it.

  So we went back downstairs and I showed him the diorama of the clubhouse, and the weeping willow, and my parents’ room, and my room. I lined them all up alongside each other. I hadn’t actually realized how many there were.

  “Kate,” Naveen said. “These are amazing.”

  “Thanks. I want to do the old bathroom next. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to make a miniature claw-foot tub.”

  Maybe I could use one of the boats I’d made out of milk cartons and straws at a school craft fair a while back?

  I climbed up on a chair and dug around through some crates and found them. They didn’t look quite right for my diorama but they appeared to be possibly still seaworthy.

  “Want to race boats in the stream?” I asked Naveen.

  “Absolutely.”

  There were some bees flying around the top of the back porch stairs but I took a deep breath and walked quickly past them and down to the stream. We walked along it toward the tennis court and went out onto the boards that formed the bridge into the woods. Kneeling down beside each other, Naveen and I each took a boat and held it just above the water. It was running slow and s
teady. Perfect for racing.

  “On your mark,” I said. “Get set.” We smiled. “Go.”

  We put our boats in the water and got up to walk alongside them as they were carried down the current.

  “Go, go, go!” Naveen screamed.

  “Easy does it,” I said, as my boat went over a rock but managed to remain upright.

  They were neck and neck for a while, but then Naveen’s boat got caught on a branch and mine hit the small waterfall near the pear tree too fast and capsized. Naveen’s broke free from the branch and he called out, “Here she comes!”

  He stood beside me as we watched his boat weather the waterfall perfectly.

  “Woohoo!” I said. “She made it!”

  “Doesn’t that mean you lost?” Naveen laughed.

  “So?”

  “I swear, Kate. You’re like the least competitive I person I know.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” I was feeling a lot of competition with Stella lately. But it was mostly in my head. Or was it in hers?

  “No,” he said. “It’s just . . . unusual.”

  I retrieved my boat with the help of a nearby stick, and Naveen and I walked downstream to see where his boat had ended up. After we found it, we sat on the bench under the pear tree.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Naveen said. “If you end up leaving, I mean.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  We both knew it would happen eventually.

  “I’m going to miss hanging around Big Red, too,” he said. “But mostly you.”

  “Aw, thanks, Naveen.” My heart felt strange, like someone had just grabbed it with a fist. “I think maybe I don’t like change very much.”

  “Nobody does.” He flicked a bug off his leg.

  The wind blew and some leaves skipped across the grass in front of us. “Do you think maybe it’s because I’ve never really had any?”

  “I haven’t either.” He flicked another bug. “Not really.”

  I elbowed him. “What’d those bugs ever do to you?”

  I heard the sliding door open and turned toward the house.

  “I’m home!” My dad looked so small up there on the back porch. “Hi, Naveen!”