Zen and Xander Undone

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  Adam charges across the street toward us, shaking his head angrily. “Damn it, Xander.”

  “Oh no,” Xander coos in a baby voice. “Widdle Adam is angwy.”

  Adam was little until about two years ago, when he shot up eight inches in ten months. Now he’s almost six feet tall, but if Xander and I ever want to really get him mad, we call him Widdle Adam. Really, all we’re doing is switching around his name: Adam Little. I think it’s the baby talk that gets to him.

  Adam has been our best friend for a decade at least, ever since he ritualistically beheaded Xander’s Barbie doll and we retaliated by electrocuting his G.I. Joe with Dad’s jumper cables and car battery. Adam was so intrigued by the way Joe’s face melted that we tortured to death his entire platoon, until we got caught by Dad, who, when he saw the carnage, made us sit in the basement and listen to all of his John Lennon albums. We bonded over “Give Peace a Chance.”

  Adam chucks his bat onto our lawn and marches up to Xander, crossing his arms over his bare chest. “When are you going to stop?”

  Even in the darkness I can see his eyes burning blue fire.

  “I’m sorry, Grandma,” she says to him, blinking, wide and innocent.

  “Who was that guy?” he demands.

  “Stinky Hanky.”

  “Franky,” I say.

  She sneers.

  “One of these days you’re going to get hurt, you know that?” Adam shakes his head. I’ve seen him mad at her, but tonight he’s positively seething. “I’ll come get you! How many times do I have to tell you that? Call me up.”

  “I don’t want to wake your mom,” she says.

  “Use my cell. Jesus, Xander! It’s not calculus. You don’t get in a car with a guy like that.”

  She looks away from him, pretending she doesn’t care what he says.

  Adam whirls around to face me. “And you!”

  “What?”

  “You weigh like a hundred pounds, Zen! A black belt doesn’t mean much when someone is a lot bigger than you.”

  “I weigh one twenty-five.”

  “I don’t care. Don’t take on these guys all by yourself. You come get me next time, do you understand?”

  “The big stwong man is angwy,” Xander coos. Adam turns around in time to catch her with her hands folded under her chin, batting her eyelashes.

  “Xander, one of these times you’ll tangle with the type of guy who won’t stop.”

  I don’t say so, but I think Frank might have been that type.

  “I can take care of myself,” she says. “I don’t need you.”

  He glares at her, shaking his head, his jaw clenched. “Well, I don’t need you either,” he tells her, and storms off.

  She wilts a little as she watches him. He picks his bat up from the yard and swings it a couple times before going back in his house. Xander blinks twice, and I almost see the beginning of tears, but she rakes her hands through her hair, and when she turns to me, she’s back to the same old stubborn, dangerous Xander. “When did he become such an authoritarian?” she says before heading up the porch steps.

  “You’re welcome!” I yell after her.

  “Thanks,” she says, almost sincerely, before going in the house.

  “Next time I won’t help you,” I want to tell her. But I don’t. You can’t tell Xander anything.

  And I’ll always help her, whether I want to or not.

  I march after her, rehearsing a lecture under my breath, but when I follow her into the kitchen I find her sitting at the table with Dad. They’re both dipping spoons into a carton of ice cream, eating slowly. Dad’s blond hair is so dirty, it looks brown, and it sticks up in jagged clumps only where it isn’t matted to his skull. Sabbatical has not been good for him. Without classes to teach or anywhere to be, he’s sunk into a scary depression, and nothing Xander or I say helps.

  “Nice to see you’ve emerged from the basement,” I say, taking a spoon from the open drawer behind Xander and dipping it into a chocolaty swirl in the Rocky Road. “Welcome to the surface of the planet.”

  “Thank you,” he says with mock formality. “Who was that outside?”

  I open my mouth to tell him, but Xander rushes to answer. “Adam. He’s lurking out there like the creep that he is.”

  “You two aren’t getting along lately,” Dad says distantly, as though he were commenting on the weather. There’s no curiosity in the statement, no question. He seems much more focused on the huge mound of ice cream that he’s sucking off his spoon.

  “Xander had an interesting ride home tonight,” I say, just to torment her.

  Xander looks at me, telling me with her eyes to shut up. I shrug at her. I don’t really mean to tell Dad anything. He can’t handle even normal, day-to-day things, like brushing his teeth or changing into clean clothes. Basic parenting is beyond his abilities; parenting Xander would be beyond anyone’s.

  “As long as she’s not drinking and driving,” Dad says.

  “Good, Dad. Your fatherly duty is dispensed with for the evening,” Xander says, the smallest hint of bitterness in her voice. She pushes her chair back from the table and stands. “I’m off to bed.”

  She glares at me as she walks out of the room.

  I consider again telling Dad about what happened, but I don’t have the heart. He’d overreact, or he’d fade away. He certainly wouldn’t deal with it in any kind of useful way. So instead I lean over, give him a kiss on his bearded cheek, and say, “Good night, Daddy-o.”

  “Good night, Athena,” he says, staring into the center of a fudge swirl.

  I leave the kitchen, trying not to feel that empty ache I get around Dad these days. It’s not his fault, I remind myself as I round the stair banister. He lost his wife. It’s nobody’s fault.

  That’s the problem. Having no one to blame is precisely what gets me so damn mad.

  Mom

  “YOUR FATHER’S GOTTEN so fat lately,” Mom says to me at the top of our creaky wooden stairs. “I’m almost glad I’m dead.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  I talk to Mom a lot in my head, and she always answers back. I’ve gotten so good at listening for her, I’m almost convinced we really are talking to each other. Almost.

  “Have you seen his gut lately?” she asks in the snicking sound of my feet against the floorboards as I go into the bathroom. “It has its own gravitational field.”

  “He’s a little down.”

  “A little down? He’s like one of the mole people.”

  “He’s had a hard year. You shouldn’t criticize him.”

  “You shouldn’t kick people in the head,” she tells me while I brush my teeth. “Go get your father next time.”

  “The guy deserved it.”

  “I know he did. Just for that greasy hair alone.” I almost feel her slide her hand along my hair while I gargle. “And I know your father isn’t much help these days.”

  “Xander’s acting crazy and he barely notices.” I click off the bathroom light and we step into the hallway. I pause to look at the window above the stairwell. If I squint, I can almost believe I see Mom’s reflection standing behind me. It’s probably just the double-pane glass making two of me, but I want to believe I’m seeing Mom’s shoulder-length blond hair and dark eyes. Xander and I are both brown-eyed blondes, just like Mom. It’s the Vogel trademark. “Xander stays out all night sometimes,” I say to Mom in my head.

  “She’s trying to outrun her pain.”

  “What if she does something stupid?”

  “She most certainly will. And so will you. Stupidity is part of being young.”

  When she says things like this, I think the voice in my mind must really be Mom. I would never say anything so annoying to myself.

  I walk down the narrow hallway and go into my room. I leave the light off, and dive underneath my lilac-colored sheets. They smell funky. It’s time I washed them.

  I imagine her sitting on the edge of my bed, tucking her hair behind an ear. I clos
e my eyes, and she smiles at me. “You’re handling things pretty well.”

  I’m trying.

  “Better than your father is. He’s rather boneless these days.”

  “I wish you were here to kick his ass.”

  “He’s trying. It doesn’t seem like it, but he is.”

  “Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?”

  I don’t hear anything more, but I feel her in the room with me. It takes me a long time to relax. I lay in the dark, remembering days when I didn’t know Mom could die, and everyone was together, when the trouble Xander got in was harmless and funny.

  Salt and Sugar

  ONCE XANDER AND I sneaked into the kitchen early one morning and swapped all the salt in the house with all the sugar. Naturally, it was Xander’s idea.

  It wasn’t the prank that was so terrible; it was the timing. We did it right before Grandma Vogel came over for her sixtieth birthday dinner.

  Xander’s the one who nicknamed Grandma the Droning Crone, and we all call her that, even Dad sometimes.

  “Grandma doesn’t converse, she comments” was the tactful way Mom would put it.

  When you’ve done something she doesn’t like, Grandma makes her withering pronouncement, then scrunches her thin lips together and looks off to the side. She wears silk flowers in her hair, and she is so hung up about proper behavior that it’s like she’s got a copy of Miss Manners clenched between her butt cheeks.

  But there’s one thing about Grandma Vogel that isn’t prim and proper: she can’t control the volume of her farts. It’s very awkward, because she pretends it doesn’t happen. She doesn’t even say excuse me. And since she has no sense of humor about it, we all have to pretend we didn’t just hear her butt hit a high C.

  Outside of that, she’s no fun, and we don’t really like her.

  Xander and I thought our salt and sugar joke would ruin Grandma’s special birthday dinner, and her cake. We didn’t realize the trick was also being played on Mom, who slaved in the kitchen to make beef bourguignon, and candied carrots, and a huge salad with homemade vinaigrette. She also baked from scratch a double-layer Belgian chocolate torte with raspberry sauce.

  We watched Mom salt the roast with sugar, and candy the carrots with salt, and add a whole cup of salt to the cake. Xander and I started to get a little nervous. We sneaked into Xander’s room, and I said, “We should tell her what we did.”

  “No way!” Xander grabbed the back of my hair and held my head so I’d have to listen to her. (This was before I knew karate, and it’s also why I learned it.) “She’s already mixed everything. We can’t tell her, or we’ll get in huge trouble.”

  I punched her in the ear, but I did see her logic. So we kept quiet and waited for the birthday dinner to begin.

  I watched as Grandma cut her first bite of the roast, raised it to her lipsticked lips, took it into her mouth, and chewed it. I stole a glance at Xander, who was holding her breath.

  Grandma swallowed, took a sip of her wine, and said, “I must say, Marie, this beef is quite . . . scrumptious! What did you do? Is this an Asian recipe?”

  Mom took a bite, chewed the beef slowly, and nodded. “You’re right. This turned out pretty good!”

  The meal was yummier than yummy. The sugar made the beef a little crusty and sweet, the salt made the carrots a little savory, and the crispy salad was salty-sweet and tangy.

  Dad’s chest practically burst out of his dress shirt, he was so proud of Mom. He kept saying, “My little gourmet,” and toasting her with his wine. He could see Grandma approved of Mom for once, and that made him happy.

  Mom seemed ecstatic the meal turned out so delicious. She even laughed at the story Grandma was telling about how the Church Ladies were fighting with the Church Vicars about how to divvy up the surplus from the collection. Mom tossed her head back, her bouncy hair flashing in the candlelight, and laughed loud and wide. Mom had great big teeth, and a wide mouth, and when she laughed, the whole room seemed to whirl around her.

  I looked over at Xander as everyone ate, and I could tell she was just as relieved as I was. We’d even begun to relax when Mom brought out the cake.

  It was beautiful. Stripes of raspberry sauce flowed like burgundy rivers through the rich chocolate frosting. Mom put six candles on top, one for every decade, and we all sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” because Grandma hates the birthday song. She thinks it’s hackneyed.

  Grandma’s face puckered into a smile. She blew out the candles (farting a little in the process) and clapped. She actually clapped for Mom. Then she stood up, holding her wineglass, and made a speech: “Well, Marie, this meal has meant the world to me, and I just want you to know that I think you’re a very special daughter-in-law to go to all this trouble for a bitter old broad like me.” (Grandma would never have said this if she wasn’t drunk.)

  Then Mom, her smile practically blinding everyone at the table, cut up the cake, giving the biggest piece to Grandma. Xander and I took huge bites, because by now we were sure that somehow we’d discovered a magical cooking potion, so of course the cake would be perfect too.

  Oh, but it wasn’t. It tasted like bitter chocolaty mud. It was revolting.

  I spit mine out right into the palm of my hand. Xander gagged. Dad dribbled the cake in a brown mess onto his plate. Mom actually swallowed her mouthful, but her eyes watered like crazy and she drank an entire tumbler of milk. Grandma primly spit hers into her napkin, narrowing her eyes at Xander and me.

  What started out as a rare tension-free evening between Mom and Grandma turned into a screaming match. They weren’t screaming at each other, though. Oh, no. They were screaming at us.

  Grandma: “Do you realize what it means to turn sixty years old? [fart] My two granddaughters who are supposed to love and respect me sabotage my party! Is there not a shred of [fart] humanity in either of you?”

  Mom: “I worked so hard all day on this meal and you watched me! [sniff] You stood there with smiles on your faces! [dabbing at tears in eyes] All my hard work! All that time spent on that beautiful cake! I should have known something was up when you wouldn’t lick the spoon!”

  Dad just sat at the table, laughing as he finished the bottle of wine.

  We were grounded and stuck in the backyard during the height of summer for one full month. We never sabotaged Mom’s cooking again, but ever since then, she always put a little sugar on her beef bourguignon, and extra salt on her candied carrots.

  And years later, whenever Mom would tell this story, she’d laugh her head off.

  Xander’s List

  IT’S NOT EVEN EIGHT O’CLOCK when Xander barges into my room with Mom’s first letter to us in her hand. “I say we find this person.” She plops next to me on my bed and bounces up and down. Already she’s showered and dressed in her holey jeans and a baby-doll T-shirt with a picture of a baby doll on it. It’s way too small, and I can clearly see even in the dim light filtering through my curtains that she isn’t wearing a bra.

  Mom would never let her dress like that, not even at home.

  “Find who?” I ask as I rub my eyes.

  “Whoever has Mom’s letters!” She waits for this to sink in, and when my eyes meet hers she smiles slowly at me. “I can see in your placid little countenance that you want to.”

  “For a hussy you sure talk pretty,” I say before burying my head under my pillow.

  “You bet your magnificently muscular ass I do.”

  It’s true that I kind of do want to find the person who has the letters. Waiting is practically torture. On Christmas we got a video of Mom wishing us a Merry Christmas. Since then it’s been five long months of waiting. A couple months ago Xander and I searched the house top to bottom, and then we stole Dad’s keys and ransacked his office at the university. There was no sign of any letters, so we’re sure Dad doesn’t have them. If he knows who does, he’ll never tell. We asked once, and he was outraged that we’d pry into Mom’s final wishes. We should leave it at that, I kno
w, but I’ve started to wonder if the person forgot about the letters, or died or something. We might never get another letter again.

  Xander gets up from my bed, and I hear her rooting through my desk.

  “Stop that!”

  “What? Afraid I’ll find your porn?”

  “No, I just like my privacy.”

  “Ooo, bubblegum!” she warbles. “Grape. My favorite.”

  “Leave it!”

  “Where are your pens?” She practically shoves her nose in the top drawer of my desk, fishes out a stubby pencil, and licks the lead. She turns Mom’s letter over and starts to write on the back of it, but I leap out of bed and snatch it away from her. “Don’t write on Mom’s letter, idiot!”

  She grins. “Knew that’d get you out of bed.”

  “No one likes a manipulative bitch.”

  “People like me because I’m manipulative,” she retorts.

  This isn’t exactly true.

  “Paper,” she demands of me.

  To stop her from ransacking my life, I reach under my bed, pull a page from my biology notebook, and hand it to her.

  “Take a shower. I can still smell Hank on your foot,” she says.

  “Frank,” I say as I stumble across the hall into the bathroom.

  “Frank stank,” she yells after me.

  “And he does crank,” I call back.

  “Then he gives his weenie a yank!” she screams at the top of her lungs.

  “Hey!” Dad yells from downstairs. “Both of you! Stifle!”

  “Or you’ll get your rifle?” she yells back.

  “And I’ll throw you off the tower of Eiffel!” he snarls.

  Rhyming is kind of a Vogel thing, not that we’re particularly good at it.

  I step into the shower and let it pummel the sleep out of me. I wait until I can feel my bones warmed up before I start rubbing the soap into my washcloth. I love how regular soap smells. I don’t need any of this fancy herbal crap Xander’s always bringing home. Plain white for me.

  I stay in the shower a long time, hoping Xander will lose interest in her mission. But when I come back to my room, wrapped in my fluffy green robe, she lifts up the paper she’s been writing on and waves it in front of my face. “I’ve got four strong possibilities!” she announces.