Zen and Xander Undone

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  We hang a left onto Stump Road and follow it up between the trees. We pass by the neighbor’s place, where we see a new foal with its mother, both of them brown and shining in the sun. Their glossy coats remind me of the yearbook photographer’s shiny hair. What was his name? Paul. He was supposed to take my picture this weekend, but he never called.

  Aunt Doris is sitting on her porch waiting for us with Blue, her slobbery yellow Lab. She lives in our grandparents’ old farmhouse. She moved in with Grandma after Grandpa died in his sleep eight years ago. Doris took care of Grandma until she died of missing him, two years later. Then Aunt Doris just stayed in the house, and I can’t imagine her anywhere else.

  Xander honks when we pull into the gravel parking lot, and Doris bolts down the stairs and makes a run for our car. Aunt Doris is a little on the chubby side, but she can move like the wind. Blue follows, loping over, barking deep from his chest.

  “How’re my girls!” She jumps up and down while she waits for Xander and me to get out. I stand up carefully. After three hours in the car, my back is stiff.

  Doris seems confused about which of us to hug first, so she holds her arms out to us both and hugs us at the same time. “It’s wonderful to see such fresh faces!” she cries.

  Even though she is ten years older than my mother was, Aunt Doris looks younger than she is, probably because she grows her own vegetables and she doesn’t eat meat or cheese. She was a teenager in the seventies when people were still hippies. She looks like a hippie, with her long gray hair and brown skin, and her turquoise jewelry and flowing skirts and cotton tunics. She has about twenty sterling silver rings that she wears all at once on her fingers and toes, and you can hear her wherever she goes because her dozens of silver bangles rattle as she walks.

  I kneel down to pet Blue, who slobbers all over my arms, while Doris interrogates Xander. “So! Is it MIT or Caltech?”

  “I don’t know,” Xander says. Her eyes dart over Doris nervously. Everyone is asking her this question these days, and she doesn’t like it. I don’t know why she’s taking so long to decide.

  “Don’t you have to commit to them sometime soon?” Doris tosses a hunk of hair out of her face.

  “I have to give them my final decision on Monday,” Xander says. Her thin hand covers her stomach.

  Doris wraps an arm around Xander and holds a hand out to me until I take it. “Want to see what I’ve been working on lately?” She pulls us into her warm living room.

  Inside, all the windows are open because Aunt Doris doesn’t believe in air conditioning, but it’s all right because even though it’s a hot day, it somehow feels comfortable. We follow her through the living room of furniture slipcovered in light blue denim. Lining the walls are shelves full of hundreds of books and magazines stacked every which way. Her dining table is littered with scraps of fabric, a beading kit, small piles of the doll clothes she sews, and for reasons I do not want to contemplate, three mousetraps.

  We walk through the kitchen to the back sunroom, which is Doris’s studio. There are dozens of paintings leaning against the walls and stacked on the floor, and we have to weave through them to get to the canvases Doris wants us to see.

  Xander gasps.

  Aunt Doris has done a portrait series of Mom, at all ages, all based on family photographs that I recognize. The portrait of Mom as a little girl is based on a picture we have of her holding a sand bucket on the beach in Nantucket, but instead Aunt Doris has placed her on the surface of the moon, waving and laughing as the rising Earth glows blue over her shoulder. In another one she’s a teenager suspended on a bed of clouds tinged pink by the dusk. In the third she’s a young college student wearing amber beads and sitting on the rings of Saturn. In the fourth, she is a bride gliding over the surface of a comet. In the last one, she is sitting in her favorite wicker chair on the porch of our house, on Earth. In this portrait she already looks a little sick, but still beautiful, and serene.

  “I’m calling the series Marie, Forever,” Aunt Doris whispers.

  I feel tears hitting my chest before I realize I’m crying. I look at Xander, whose face is motionless, though I can tell there’s an ocean of feeling churning inside of her. Doris’s eyes are red and moist, and she says, “Maybe I should have warned you. I didn’t know how to show you.”

  “I love them,” I tell her. “Please don’t sell them.”

  “Oh, no. I never will,” she says, studying the last one. “These are how I’ve been grieving.”

  Xander looks at her, surprised, as if she never thought there could be a way to grieve. I guess we all have our ways, though. Dad has pulled himself out of the world and spends most of his time in the basement in his new bedroom because he can’t bear to be in the bedroom that he shared with Mom for so many years. Xander has turned into a wildcat. I sit in Mom’s old room, in the chair she sat in to watch the birds outside her window, and drink too much mint tea while talking to her in my head.

  Aunt Doris’s way seems like the best.

  We spend the afternoon walking the property line along the crumbling fence that Grandpa put up when he first bought the place. Blue runs back and forth, stopping only to slobber on our hands before bounding off after a squirrel. I should take life-loving lessons from him.

  We stop at the neighbor’s fence to beckon the little brown foal, who stands in the middle of her green field, blinking her enormous eyes at us. Her mother saunters over, head down, and takes the carrot offered by Doris. Once the foal sees that, she trots up to us and takes a piece of apple in her big floppy lips. Doris smiles. “Apples are better for the babies. Softer.” She threads her fingers through the foal’s mane, seeming to be living inside that silky feeling. I reach my hand out to feel for myself, but the foal backs off and trots away. “She’s still shy,” Doris says. “It took two weeks before she’d let me touch her.”

  “Poor thing,” Xander says, mournful.

  Doris looks at Xander quizzically, which is probably how I’m looking at her too. I don’t know why she feels sorry for the little foal, who seems perfectly happy not to be touched.

  When evening falls we go back to the house and eat what Aunt Doris calls a ploughman’s supper of crusty bread, hummus, bean salad, fresh greens, sliced tomatoes, and honey cakes for dessert. It’s delicious. I don’t even miss meat when I’m staying with Doris.

  Once we’re all three of us stuffed and leaning back in our chairs, Xander raises her eyebrows at me and gets up from the table. “I think Venus is rising this time of year. I’m going to go check.” She wanders out the front door and onto the porch, stretching herself toward the night.

  Doris levels her steady gaze on me. “How are you, Athena?”

  “Not so great, I guess.” I know better than to pretend with Doris.

  “What’s going on? I know this isn’t just a social visit. I can sense it.” She squints through the front windows at Xander, who seems to feel her gaze and slowly walks off the porch and into the dark front yard.

  “Are you the one?” I ask her, and wait until her eyes land on me. “Who’s sending the letters?”

  “What letters?” she leans forward, instantly intrigued. I can tell already, she doesn’t even know about them.

  “Mom is having someone send Xander and me letters for certain occasions. We’ve each gotten them, one right after she died, a video at Christmas, and a second letter on Mother’s Day.”

  “That sounds like my Marie.” There’s such longing in her voice, I have to look away. We’re both quiet, in our own thoughts, but then I hear her sniff. “No, hon, I’m sorry it isn’t me. I expect she thought I’d be too disorganized to do it properly.”

  I look around the jumbled room, which I’ve always loved because it feels so homey, and I realize that Doris is probably the last person Mom would put in charge of her letters. She would probably lose them in one of her many piles.

  Doris cocks her head. “Why would you want to find this person anyway? Why not just let the letters come?”


  “Xander’s the one who wants to know.” I stop. I feel like I’d be betraying my mother by asking what we really came for. But I need to find out the truth about John Phillips. If I don’t, I’ll feel like I never really knew Mom, and that is too painful to live with. “We found out some stuff, and we’re—confused.”

  Doris’s bangles rattle as she crosses her arms. “What stuff?”

  “Mom seemed to have some kind of friendship with a man named John Phillips.”

  She shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so, honey. I’ve never heard that name. And your mother always told me everything.”

  I study her face. There isn’t anything about her round eyes or her full cheeks that suggests she might be lying. She doesn’t even seem concerned.

  “She left him one of her bird statues. The lovebirds.”

  Doris’s eyes freeze on me. “Now, that’s odd. I thought she wanted you girls to have all of them.”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her the final details, that the statue was worth six thousand dollars, and that he couldn’t have given it to her until well after Xander and I were born, but I stop myself. Why should Aunt Doris feel as troubled as I’ve been feeling?

  I can see, though, that she’s already troubled.

  “That’s very odd,” Doris says again. “I can’t imagine why she’d give it away. She loved that statue.”

  We’re both silent, mirroring each other’s worried faces.

  “Your mother always told me everything,” Doris says again, leaning back, thinking. “But there was one period in her life when she seemed to pull away from me, when she was in graduate school with your father. I wouldn’t hear from her for weeks, and when I’d ask her how she was, she’d say she was fine in a very distant way, and she’d only talk about her classes.” Doris’s face darkens, and she says, her voice throaty, “If she was hiding a man from me, that would have been when she did it.”

  “Why would she hide a man?” I ask, because I desperately want Doris to come up with an explanation other than the one I’m imagining. That not only was Mom cheating on Dad, but it started way back in graduate school. Mom might have cheated on us for years and years. I try to dismiss the thought, but I can’t. Everything we find out just makes it worse and worse.

  Doris shakes her head. “The only reason she ever hid anything from me was because she was ashamed.”

  Getting High with Xander

  XANDER STILL HASN’T COME BACK, so Doris and I do the dishes alone, which takes a long time because she doesn’t have a dishwasher. I kind of like doing dishes the old-fashioned way because the warm water feels good on my hands.

  “Hand me that blue dish.” Doris nods toward the table behind her.

  I give her the one with the lilacs painted on the rim.

  “No, the other one,” she tells me, and points toward the dish that held the honey cakes. It’s painted with blue cornflowers.

  Doris likes to wash her dishes in a particular order because she displays them in her china cabinet in a certain way. She is sloppy about everything except her dishes, probably because she’s spent such a long time collecting them. They’re all different because she buys them one at a time at garage sales. They’re each hand-painted with a beautiful pattern, and she chooses them carefully. There’s something very comforting about eating on an antique plate. It reminds me of how many people there really are, and how many there have been, and how many of them must have eaten their dinner from this same plate. Each plate is like looking at a different side of forever.

  Xander likes Doris’s plates as much as I do, but she always eats from the same one. It’s a green and white plate, and on it is a painted picture of ducks flying, and a hunter with his dog, watching them. She likes it because the hunter isn’t shooting at the ducks. He’s letting them fly away, holding his gun down at his side.

  “Well, honey,” Doris says, stretching to put away the last plate in her cupboard before closing the door. “Blue is hanging his head, and that always makes me sleepy.” I look over at Blue, who is panting in the corner, his eyelids sagging over eyes that are glued to Aunt Doris. “Stay up as long as you want.”

  She brushes her hand over my hair and smiles into my eyes.

  Even if I can’t ever see Mom again, at least I have Aunt Doris, who loves me almost as much as Mom did.

  I don’t feel sleepy yet, so I’m looking over Doris’s bookshelves for some bedtime reading when I hear the screen door creak open. Xander is standing in the doorway, a devilish smile on her lips. In her hand she’s holding a pipe of some kind. “Ever dabbled in wacky tobacky?”

  I stare at her, confused. She cocks her head, and I follow her out onto the porch.

  “What is that?” I ask her.

  “Oh don’t tell me you’re surprised to know Doris smokes weed! Hell, she probably grows her own!”

  I can’t help the shock on my face.

  “Come on, Zen!” Xander whispers. “The woman wears a mood ring for god’s sake! Of course she tokes!”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Upstairs. She had the pipe in plain view on her dresser!”

  “But, you’ve been outside the whole time!”

  “I climbed up the trellis and snuck in through her bedroom window while you were doing the dishes. Blue sucks as a watchdog.”

  She walks across the lawn and opens the car door, beckoning me to get in. She pulls a lighter out of her hip pocket and holds it over the pipe. The fuzzy stuff in the center starts to glow red, and Xander inhales deeply. Through a closed throat she says, “Do it like that.”

  I look at the pipe a second before taking it from her. It feels warm and heavy in my hand. I pause to wonder whether I really want to do this. “What if I get addicted?”

  “It’s weed! Not crack,” Xander wheedles. “Beer will mess you up worse.”

  I have to admit to a certain curiosity, so I raise the pipe to my lips and draw in deeply.

  I feel like I just inhaled burning-hot nerve gas. All the blood rushes to my eyes and I cough and cough until I feel like I’m going to have a stroke. Xander taps my back, saying, “It’s harsh the first time, but you get used to it.”

  “I’ll never get used to that!” I say when I can finally speak.

  Xander roots through the grocery bag on the seat between us and pulls out a bottle of water. “Drink.”

  The cold is wonderful against my throat, which feels like I swallowed a mouthful of sparks. I drink until my lungs feel almost normal, and then I lean back and close my eyes. “That was awful.”

  “Next time it’s brownies for you.” Xander smiles and takes another hit. She doesn’t even cough, and I wonder how often she does this.

  “You know, that’s not good for your brain.”

  “I have IQ points to spare.” She looks around Doris’s yard, still smiling to herself. “You know, I really love this place. Do you think Doris will leave it to us?” She wiggles her eyebrows devilishly.

  “Mercenary,” I say. I notice a muffled feeling creep over my brain. I blink my eyes, and it seems like suddenly I can see very clearly, even in the dark. “I don’t want Doris to die,” I say from far away, and add for good measure, “I think I’m high.”

  “That’s no lie,” she says.

  I chuckle. “I feel like I could fly.”

  “Don’t even try.”

  “There’s a sty in your eye.”

  “Your vagina is dry.”

  “You think you’re so sly . . . but you’re not,” I sputter, and burst into hysterical laughter. A tiny part of my brain questions why I think this is so hilarious.

  Xander is snorting and holding her stomach. She has the ugliest, most obscene laugh of anyone I know. But I love it.

  We sit there giggling until we run out of breath, and we trade swigs of water until it’s all gone, then Xander tears into a bag of Doritos. “You know, you’re more fun without those numchucks you keep up your ass.”

  “It’s a throwing sta
r, if you must know.”

  She spits out corn chips, she laughs so hard.

  We finish all the Doritos and the other package of Ding Dongs, then go back into the house and sink into Doris’s furniture like a couple of boneless worms.

  “That’s good weed,” Xander says. “Doris is connected!”

  “She’s totally going to find out,” I say, and this becomes the most horrible thought I’ve ever had. “Oh my god, she’ll never forgive us! We have to put the pipe back right away!” I look out the window, searching for the police who must be creeping up to the house.

  “Calm down, you’re paranoid. It’ll be fine.” Xander leans back in the big fluffy chair, staring up at the tin ceiling, which is covered with chipped white paint. Her breathing seems to even out, and I think she’s falling asleep, but then she murmurs, “I wonder what Adam is doing right now.”

  This gets my attention, and suddenly I’m awake, though I hadn’t noticed I was falling asleep. “Adam? Why do you bring him up?”

  She pinches the bridge of her nose and screws her eyes shut. “I don’t know. I’m high.”

  I roll my head against the back of my chair and look at her. She seems so small, lying there like that. For once she’s not darting around, just out of my reach, challenging me, egging me on. She’s still, letting her mind wander where it will. Interesting that it should go to Adam.

  “You love him, don’t you?” I say. There’s a little hint of despair in my voice, but I find now that I’ve said it out loud, it’s not such a painful truth to face up to.

  Xander pretends to misunderstand. “Of course. He’s our oldest friend.” Her voice is too light, too casual.

  “You know what I mean. You do, don’t you?”

  She sniffs. Her eyes travel over the chipped paint on the ceiling, and then drop to the crack in the plaster wall. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she says.

  I’ve never heard her sound so thick, so weighted down.

  “Why doesn’t it matter?”

  “Because. After this summer, that’s it. We’re leaving. And it’ll never be the same again.” She says this like it’s something she accepted a long time ago.