Zen and Xander Undone

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  But I hate it. I hate what she’s saying.

  I watch a moth fluttering in the corner of the room, in the circle of light cast up by the lamp on the side table. What does the moth want, beating against the walls like that? Is it trying to get out?

  Or is beating itself the whole point?

  “I miss Mom.” The words seem to come out of the air, and I’m not sure who said them, me or Xander.

  I look at her. Her eyes are closed, but her face is drawn in grief. Maybe she said it.

  “I do too,” I tell her, every strand of my voice aching for Mom. I wish so much there was some bridge I could walk across, like the railroad bridge, and I could get to the other side of wherever she is so that I could see her again.

  If I ever had a really bad day, Mom and I would walk downtown and share a hot fudge sundae with nuts and whipped cream, and we’d talk about it. Being in the ice cream parlor, surrounded by the red and white striped wallpaper, and the chrome chairs, listening to the oldies station that they played there, I always cheered up. After she died, I was so sad that I went to get a sundae and I ate it all alone. It made me feel twice as miserable as I did before, and I haven’t gone back there since.

  Xander jerks awake all of a sudden. “What did Doris say?” Her voice sounds different, like she’s back to the old Xander.

  It takes me a second to switch gears, but I catch up. “She doesn’t know John Phillips, but she thinks if Mom ever dated him it would have been during graduate school.”

  “But Mom and Dad always said that’s when they were dating.” She rubs her thumbs into her eyes and yawns. “I suppose Doris isn’t the one sending the letters?”

  “Right. How did you know?”

  “I figured. When I found the pot I realized Doris would be a terrible person to send them. She’s too flaky.”

  This makes me worry. “She’s not a burnout, is she?”

  “God, Zen, she’s the most vibrant person we know!”

  This is true, but I do wonder if Doris didn’t smoke pot, would her paintings be hanging in New York galleries instead of Vermont coffeehouses?

  Does that really matter?

  I think about this until I fall asleep on the sofa, imagining portraits of my mother covering tall white walls.

  After Toking

  “I’M VERY DISAPPOINTED.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have smoked the pot.”

  “Now you’re going to be a stoner burnout with tooth decay and dreadlocks.”

  “Would you feel better if I told you I didn’t like it that much?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and I didn’t like the way my mind wandered. It made me anxious.”

  “Well, that’s good. It’s not as harmless as the potheads would have you believe. I think it’s why Doris never got married. Scared off all the right guys, and she was always so high, she let all the wrong ones stick around too long.”

  “She seems to like being single.”

  “She resigned herself to it a long time ago.”

  “Does Xander smoke it a lot?”

  “With her, I’m more worried about alcohol. And boys.”

  “Do you think she’s in love with Adam?”

  “Of course she is, honey. So are you.”

  “But it’s different with me. I think I have more like a crush. There’s something more serious about the way she feels about him.”

  “Well, I hope that’s true. He’d be good for her.”

  I get a sudden suspicion. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. “Did you make me go to the prom with Adam to make Xander jealous?”

  Her only response is a self-satisfied chuckle.

  I open one eye to see Xander lying in the recliner across the room from me. She’s snoring softly. I can hear the song of crickets through the screen door, and cicadas, and I remember something Adam once told me, that they make that sound because they’re looking for a mate.

  “Mom?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Who is John Phillips?”

  “Ancient history.”

  “I want to know. Did you have an affair with him?”

  She’s silent. It’s an angry silence.

  “You can’t blame us for wanting to know!”

  “Everybody has secrets, Zen. Especially parents.”

  “Did you have an affair, Mom? Did you cheat on us? How could you do that?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “Did you love him?”

  She’s silent for a long time. I imagine her floating through the dust particles that hover between Doris’s paintings. There’s a whisper in the air, and there’s such longing in the word that I almost hear it with my ears, not just my mind:

  Yes.

  Waffles and Letters

  “I SEE YOU’VE FOUND MY STASH,” I hear said before I open my eyes. Doris is holding her pipe, standing over us, lips pursed. I wouldn’t say she’s mad so much as pretending to be mad.

  “You’re a terrible influence,” Xander informs her. It takes her several tries to sit up. Doris plunks down on the ottoman just as Xander manages to heave her legs off it.

  “I’m going to pretend I don’t know about this, considering I don’t exactly have the moral authority to lecture you.”

  “Can we have waffles for breakfast?” Xander asks, giving Doris her goofiest grin.

  Wincing, Doris waves her hand in front of her nose. “After you brush your teeth. Twice. And shower. Geez. You smell like a bong.”

  I inch myself off the couch, moving carefully. I should not have slept here. My back feels like it has steel pins jammed into it.

  Once we’re cleaned up, we drive into the village to have breakfast at Willy’s, a tiny bakery that shares a building with a little grocery store. It looks junky from the outside because of the flickering neon sign and the empty milk crates that line the sidewalk, but once you get inside, it’s airy and pretty. The windows are covered in yellow checked curtains, and the tables are ancient farmhouse antiques whose wood has been rubbed smooth by decades of damp rags. We sit in the corner by the window, not even bothering to look at the menus because we already know what we want—waffles with real Vermont maple syrup, scrambled eggs, and a bowl of blueberries on the side.

  “So, Aunt Doris,” Xander says through a mouthful of berries, “how can we find out who John Phillips is?”

  “Did you do a search for the guy on the, um . . . Internet?”

  Xander nods. “There are only about five thousand John Phillipses in the United States.”

  Doris sips at her coffee, her expression very serious. She holds the mug with both hands, warming her knuckles against the thick stoneware. “Are you sure you want to know, Xander? Really?”

  “Do you think Mom was—” I begin, but I can’t finish.

  “I don’t think so, sweetie,” Doris says. She reaches across the table and pats my hand. “She loved your father very much. I know she did.”

  “Then why would she hide this guy from us?” Xander cuts an enormous bite of waffle and edges it into her mouth.

  “I can’t fathom.” She sets her mug down on the table. “But I do feel that if Marie wanted to keep him a secret, we should respect her privacy.”

  Xander swallows, audibly, and looks at me. For once nothing in her manner is playful. I fold my hands in my lap. Suddenly my waffle looks inedible, and my stomach feels like it’s full of mud. I imagine Mom slipping out the door of our house, leaving Xander and me with some babysitter, or, worse, with Grandma, while she runs off to have a tryst with some stranger. It makes me want to throw up.

  Doris sips at her coffee, looking back and forth between Xander and me. “You girls will always wonder, won’t you?”

  Xander nods. I keep my silence.

  “Well, your grandma kept some of your mother’s notebooks and papers from graduate school. Maybe we’ll find something up there,” Doris says, but she seems
very worried. “I just want you to remember, girls, that she was still your mother, whatever we find out.”

  “I know,” I say, silently fuming at Xander. Just like the robin’s egg we found all those years ago, she wants to crack everything open and look at what’s inside. She couldn’t see that the egg was beautiful as it was.

  We finish up breakfast and drive through the town. Main Street is full of little kids playing, and parents standing around in groups talking. We stop at a red light, and I watch a very tall man and a short blond woman walking their puffy little white dog. He prances along ahead of them, stopping to sniff at something, and then jumps ahead again. The man puts his arms around the woman’s shoulders and whispers something in her ear. She laughs loudly the way Mom used to, but that’s not why I feel so empty watching them. They have something that I don’t have. They have something that Adam wants to have with Xander. No one has ever wanted to have it with me. And until very recently, I never really wanted it either.

  Or maybe I just didn’t know I wanted it.

  Once we get back to Doris’s house, we climb the stairs to her sweltering attic and we start sifting through boxes of old stuff. Detritus is what Doris calls it. It turns out to be a treasure trove of leftovers from Mom’s life. We lose two hours looking through Mom’s papers from high school. It’s so strange to see her writing as a girl. It was rounder, more flowery, like she was still trying to figure out who she was on paper. For a while she even dotted her i’s with little check marks. Xander laughs, but it gives me a deep ache. Mom was so many people. Once she was a teenager, like I am now. Then she was a young woman, dating men, hanging out with friends. Then she was a wife. And then she was a mother. John Phillips knew her as one of these people. Or maybe, for him, she was a different person altogether. Someone I didn’t know.

  Finally Doris finds the box full of Mom’s notes from graduate school. We sift through piles of typed essays and spiral notebooks full of scratched notes about James Fenimore Cooper, Willa Cather, Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe. I pick up a term paper she wrote about a poem by John Keats called “Ode to a Nightingale” and start reading. The language is so technical, full of words like chiaroscuro and pentameter, I’m lost before I finish the first paragraph. I skip to the last page and see that she got an A, and a note from her professor that said, “Not only does this essay show a depth of thinking beyond what I’d expect from a master’s candidate, but it is written with a fresh and engaging voice. You should consider applying to a Ph.D. program, Marie. You clearly have a talent for criticism.”

  I had no idea Mom was doing so well in graduate school. She always acted like Dad was the star. But Mom was very smart. Her professor thought so, anyway. Why did she downplay her intelligence and build up Dad instead?

  This is another of hundreds of questions that I can never, ever ask her.

  I toss the paper aside and start digging through a stack of notebooks, searching for some clue about who Mom was. Maybe a draft of a letter to John, or a note for a date in a day planner? I pick up a pink notebook with a cracked cover and see written across it in block letters ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY, the class where she met Dad. I open it to more scribbled notes. Mom favored blue ink ballpoints, but in the corner of one page is the black ink of a felt tip, the kind Dad likes. It says, in his angular, squarish writing, “Why so glum?” That’s all.

  Mom and Dad must have been sitting next to each other in class, and Dad wrote a little note to her in her notebook. I imagine him doing it, smiling shyly with his large brown eyes, raising his eyebrows, hopeful. I wish I could know what Mom answered. If she did answer, she probably wrote it in his notebook. I start looking through all the pages, searching for more notes from Dad, when Xander startles the hell out of me.

  “What did you just throw away!” She’s holding the term paper I’d tossed aside, her face white with surprise, her dark eyebrows slashed down. “Are you blind?”

  “What?” I yell.

  “Girls, keep your tone civil, please!” Doris says from the corner where she’s sunk into a big box full of clothes, half asleep. “You’re freaking me out!”

  Dramatically, Xander holds up the paper and reads the first page out loud: “Marie Lillian Porter, Romantic Poetry, five May nineteen eighty-eight, Professor John Phillips.”

  Dartmouth

  THE TRIP BACK HOME IS QUIET.

  Xander is all red-rimmed and tapped out. She’s squeezing her fingers around the steering wheel like she’s checking to make sure it’s still solid. I think she’s even more freaked out than I am. John Phillips taught the Romantic poetry class where Mom and Dad met. All the time she was dating Dad, she was diddling the professor, and lying to Dad about it. She must have been. There’s no other explanation.

  Doris kept insisting that nothing proves they slept together, but then Xander told her what I wouldn’t, that the statue she gave Phillips was worth six thousand dollars, that he’d given it to her in 1995. By the time we left this morning, Doris was as upset as we were.

  I thought I knew who my Mom was, but now it’s like she’s a stranger.

  “Hanover is practically on the way, you know.”

  It’s been so long since Xander has spoken, I’m jolted in my seat. My back is killing me. I couldn’t sleep at all last night, and I’m sore and exhausted all through my body. “Fine.”

  I knew she’d want to go to Dartmouth to look for Phillips. Why fight it?

  Xander flips the turn signal when we reach the exit to Hanover. I hear a little sniff, and I catch a tear glistening in the corner of her eye. She dabs at it with her thumb.

  “It’s going to be okay. She’s still Mom,” I tell her, even though I’m not sure I really believe this anymore. “Besides, your birthday is in a week. You’ll probably get another letter.”

  “I know,” she says, her voice scraggly. “I’m just emotional because of all the pot I smoked this weekend.”

  It’s true, she smoked again last night after Doris went to bed. I asked her about it, but she just shrugged like it didn’t matter.

  “You should be crying,” I tell Xander. “I don’t know why you have to always know everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says through a voice that sounds slit down the middle. “I shouldn’t have started digging into all this. You were right.”

  My anger shrinks away at this First Ever Admission of Guilt from Xander Vogel. I should record the date and time, because it’s not likely to ever happen again. She’s so dejected that I want to offer her an olive branch. “We’re committed now. There’s no use fighting about it.”

  She chuckles. “You sound like Mom.”

  We pull in to Hanover, a little New England town a lot like all the others, with handsome old houses and churches with white steeples, only this town has fresh paint over everything, and shiny windows, and well-kept lawns, and lots of pretty people walking pretty dogs. It’s easy to see that there’s a lot more money here than in our town, but I like our version of New England better, chipped paint and all.

  We follow the signs to Dartmouth College. Xander brazenly parks in the faculty parking lot, and we get out and walk across the perfectly manicured lawn to the first big building we find. It looks like a church, made of red brick with a tall white spire, but it turns out to be the library, and just inside the door is a little pamphlet stand. Xander grabs a campus map, and we scan it, looking for the Department of Comparative Literature.

  We have to cross the campus, weaving between big buildings that look like huge mansions. Most of them are made of red brick with white trim, but some of them are painted a sparkling white, and their windows seem black by contrast. There are flowers of every size and color planted across campus, though it’s summer and there are hardly any students here to enjoy them. A man carrying a large pile of books zooms by us, and Xander turns to watch him go. She isn’t so sad anymore. She seems excited, and I realize that soon she’s going to be in a place like this.

  The thought catches me cold. “Xander
! It’s Monday! You have to let the universities know today!”

  She looks at me blankly. “I called before we left Doris’s. You were in the shower.”

  “Whoa! And you didn’t tell me?” I grab her elbow to slow her down. “Well?”

  She looks sad, like she doesn’t want to tell me, so I know where she chose.

  “You’re going to Caltech?”

  She nods, her face mushy like she’s going to start crying again.

  “Why?”

  “They have a more theoretical program, and I want to go into research.”

  “But it’s so far away!” Tears slide down my cheeks, and I press my palms against them. The motion makes my back seize up, and I wince.

  “Zen, even if I went to Boston, you’d never see me. I’d be working too hard.”

  “You could come home for long weekends!”

  “But I have to do what’s right for my future. Caltech is better for me.”

  “You just want to get away from us so you can turn into a total slut!” I yell at her.

  Xander turns away and starts walking again, her feet plodding through the short green grass.

  I’m too upset, and in too much pain, to care that Xander feels bad.

  We finally get to the hall where the Department of Comparative Literature is, and Xander holds the heavy door open for me. Once we’re inside, I realize how hot it is today. The air feels cool on my cheeks, and I take deep breaths to calm myself down. This is turning out to be the second-worst summer of my life. When Mom was dying—that’s still number one.

  The lobby is dark, and we can see through the little windows in the doors that all the offices are empty. We climb some worn stone stairs up to the second story, where we find only one door open. A plump woman is sitting at a tiny desk, surrounded by what looks like a national disaster involving office supplies. She’s humming as she sorts through nametags and fastens them to hundreds of black folders. “Excuse me,” Xander says.

  “Oh!” the woman cries, startled. “I didn’t see you!”