Zen and Xander Undone

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  “Oh, okay.” He shrugs.

  “Iced tea?” I ask him. Xander forced me to make a pitcher ahead of time, insisting you should have something besides water and fermented apple juice to offer a guy. Now I’m kind of glad that she did, because it gives me something to say. I’m even more nervous now that he’s here, because I realize that it was the leisure suit that made him look ugly. His hair is shiny, his eyes a pretty hazel color, his skin perfectly even and tan, and he’s tall. Taller than Adam. Taller than Dad. I like tall. “It’s brewed, not instant,” I add, like any teenage guy would care about that.

  “Oh, lovely,” he says, and winces at his use of a girly word. “I mean, okay.”

  I lead him back to the kitchen, which looks pretty clean except for the floor, which is sticky on the soles of my feet. I have to lift the iced tea pitcher with both hands because it’s heavy and my back can’t take the weight. I pour two glasses and hand one to Paul.

  “Domo arigato,” he says before raising it to his lips.

  “De nada.”

  He chuckles, and that helps some of my nervousness fade away. As he drinks his tea, I look at him more closely. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of Gumby on it, and plain blue jeans. Not the expensive kind, but regular Levi’s, which I like. Guys who spend a lot of money on clothes are kind of a turnoff for me. He’s wearing the same Birkenstocks that he’d worn to the prom, and in the daylight I can see how broken down they are. I bet they’re his only pair of shoes. Or the only ones he wears, anyway.

  “Where should we do this?” he asks me as he wipes tea off his chin.

  “Backyard?”

  He looks out the kitchen window and nods. “Good light.”

  For a while, it’s all business. I hold up my fists, and I can even balance well enough to do a very slow side kick. Soon, though, I have to sit down to rest my back, and he takes a seat next to me on the bench in the gazebo.

  “Who’s the bird freak?” he asks me, his eyes on the dozen bird feeders hanging in the trees behind our house. With a pang I realize they’re all empty. Mom was the one who always bought the birdseed.

  “My mom was,” I say.

  “Was?”

  I look at his twitching mouth. “She died last year,” I say.

  He’s quiet as he takes this in.

  “I thought everyone knew.”

  “Why would everyone know?”

  “You know how bad news travels.” I watch as a raven circles over our house, high above. Or maybe it’s a crow. Mom would know the difference. “People talk.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear about that.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I say. “She was kind of a pain in the ass.” I wait to see what he does.

  He narrows his eyes at me, kind of amused, but mostly just thinking. “Really?”

  Something about the way he’s half smiling makes my jauntiness take a dive. “No. I just don’t like people feeling sorry for me.”

  “Okay.” He’s looking at me with too much intensity, and I want to move away from him. I need to.

  “I’m hungry,” I say as I stand up.

  “I know a place that makes great french fries.” He screws his lens cap on carefully, as though the camera is a beloved, delicate pet.

  “I’ll go get changed.” I turn my back on him. Even though he’s cute, and nice, and funny, I want to get away because he makes me feel too jumpy.

  I go up to my room and change into my date clothes. The jeans Xander wants me to wear are a little too tight for my taste, but I do wear the red shirt, which makes my skin look bronzed and sexy. I slip into my loose Levi jeans and dig through my closet until I find my most comfortable loafers. I pull my hair out of its ponytail and brush it until it’s shiny and smooth. That’s the only good thing about having fine hair—it’s glossy.

  When I come back downstairs, Paul’s eyes travel up and down my body, and I suddenly wish I’d worn a regular T-shirt. Am I sending the wrong signals? What signals do I want to send?

  Paul drives us in his little yellow car. It’s an ancient Beetle with rust crawling all over the doors, but it feels like a tank as we buzz down the street. It doesn’t have air conditioning, so we roll down the windows. The engine is so loud that we don’t talk, but I find myself smiling the whole way. His car is a junker, but it’s fun.

  We park outside the french fries place and a woman comes out to our car to take our order. Our town still has a lot of old-fashioned places like this. Drive-in movies, antique soda fountains, trolley cars, and even an old steam engine train that still runs. Al’s French Fries, a real drive-in diner, is my favorite. When the waitress comes out with our root beer floats and fries, and I smell the salty grease and taste the sweet creamy soda, I’m glad I live here, where people know how to hold on to the good parts of the past.

  “What year are you?” I ask Paul, just for something to talk about.

  “I’m a senior next year. Same as you.”

  “Are you planning on going to college?”

  “Oh, yeah. For sure.”

  “What do you want to study?”

  He stuffs a few fries into his mouth, looking at me wryly. “Most people regret asking me that.”

  “I think I can take it.”

  “Okay. I want to study theology.”

  “Theology? You mean about God?”

  “Yeah. And religion.” He says this defiantly, like he expects me to make fun of him.

  “Do you want to be a priest or something?” I ask, suddenly very disappointed. I hadn’t even noticed that somewhere along the line, I’d started to like him. As in like like.

  “God, no,” he says, then seems to hear himself and chuckles. “No. I’m just interested in the phenomenon of religion.” He looks through the windshield at the trees swaying in the wind. Right behind Al’s is a small stream, with tons of trees and bushes crowded around it to drink. I can hear the gurgle of the water through our open car windows, and it sounds just like a lullaby to me. I glance again at Paul, who seems to be thinking hard as he looks at the millions of green leaves. Something he’s thinking about seems to get him excited, and he turns to me, animated. “Did you know that every human culture has some form of religion?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “So either,” he says, jabbing a french fry into the air for emphasis, “either there’s an innate human need for some belief structure, or there really is a creator that we kind of sense somewhere up there, in the ether.”

  Xander would be throwing a conniption. She thinks that religion amounts to a fairy tale for children that people make up because they don’t want to believe they can really die. “So I guess you’re pretty religious, huh?” I try to keep the judgment out of my voice.

  “Not really. My family is Unitarian, but we don’t go to church every weekend. I just find religion fascinating.”

  So he’s not a fanatic, but still, something about this conversation makes my hackles rise.

  We eat our fries and sip our floats for a minute. I snatch little glances at him, watching his square jaw work at his food, his hazel eyes dance around. He’s not talking, but he’s thinking. I have a feeling he’s always thinking. “But you must believe in God,” I finally say.

  He thinks about this for a second, and I wait patiently. I don’t mind this about him, because I’m the same way. When someone asks me a big question, I have to take some time to think. Not everyone can stand the wait.

  Finally, he puts his float down on the tray between us. “Yeah, I do believe in God. I’m not sure what He—excuse me—She looks like, or is like, but somehow the universe seems to make more sense if there’s a . . . I don’t know, a cause behind everything. You know? Evolution explains how we came to be. But nothing really explains why. And that’s the question I want to study—why?”

  “You’ll never get an answer.”

  “I know.” He beams me with a brilliant smile. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”

  It see
ms to make him happy to be talking about this with me. It doesn’t make me happy, though.

  I lean my head back while I think about it. Dad quotes literature the way some people quote the Bible, and that always felt like enough for me. But when Mom died, I wondered where she went. An entire person, all her thoughts, her feelings, her personality, her sense of humor, her laugh, her being—could all of that really vanish? Somehow my mind can’t accept that. Xander would say believing in the afterlife is wishful thinking, but I’m not sure it is. I believe, or maybe I just hope, that there’s an afterlife of some kind.

  And what about that voice I hear in my mind? That’s real, isn’t it? I want it to be, anyway.

  Whether there’s a god making all the decisions, though, I’m not sure. If there is a god, he’s not the kind, loving grandfather a lot of people claim he is. If he were, I’d still have a mother. And people wouldn’t be allowed to die the way Mom died, in terrible pain, and hunger, and thirst, with no hope of relief except the end. The end of everything.

  I remember that Paul is still waiting for an answer, a slight smile on his lips as he looks at me. I clear my throat. “I think I believe that maybe a person’s soul goes somewhere after they die, but I guess I don’t really believe in God.”

  He squints at me, bemused. “No one has ever told me that.”

  “What?”

  “That they believe in an afterlife, but not in God.”

  I shrug. “It’s just, I think if there was really some perfect being who could fix things, the world wouldn’t be so miserable, you know?”

  “I know what you mean. If God is supposed to be such a great guy, why do little children starve to death?”

  I nod.

  Most of the time when I tell believers I don’t believe, they get angry, or defensive. But Paul doesn’t. He chews on his straw for a while as he thinks about it. Chewing isn’t quite the right word. He grabs it in his teeth and pulls on it really hard, as though he’s trying to stretch it. Once he knows what he wants to say, he pulls the mangled straw out of his mouth. “I guess I think of God like my fifth grade substitute teacher snogging the principal of my school.”

  “Okay,” I say, in all seriousness, “that’s weird, Paul.”

  He laughs. “No! I’ll explain. When I was in fifth grade, we had this substitute, Mrs. Evans, filling in for our regular teacher who was having some kind of surgery. Mrs. Evans was tall, like at least six feet, and kind of big. Not fat, I guess, just a large, beefy woman. She had superlong hair that hung past her butt, and she had the kind of nose where you can sort of see inside her nostrils. Anyway it came out later that year that she’d been schtooping the principal. I guess the school secretary caught them necking in his office one day. She was a total gossip, and she told a few mothers, and before you knew it the entire school was abuzz about it. Mrs. Evans and Mr. Sloate acted really embarrassed too. They’d slink around the hallways while all the kids whispered about them.”

  “And this has to do with God because . . .”

  He shakes his head, like there’s a train inside it and he’s trying to bounce it onto the right track. “Um. Incomprehensibility. I could not imagine, could not begin to wrap my mind around the fact that they’d ever touched each other, because she was so big, and he was so . . . He was bald. I didn’t tell you that part. Bald, and he always had bloodshot eyes. To me, they were both so old and ugly! Anyway, I finally asked my mom how two such ugly people could find each other attractive enough to do that.” He wrinkles his nose in mock disgust. “Mom just said, ‘You know, Paul, all I can say is it’s a grownup thing.’” He stops, looking out the windshield at all the fluffy trees, quietly nodding to himself.

  “I’m still not getting the connection.”

  He gives me a sly grin, and that makes me smile. Somewhere along the way, my hackles went down. I like this Paul Martelli. I really do.

  “Last year I saw Mrs. Evans in the supermarket,” he says, his voice low. “I didn’t talk to her or anything, but I did get a good look at her. Now that I’m older, I can see she’s kind of a pretty woman. I’m not a kid anymore. I went up a level, and now I understand someone wanting to snog her. Know what I mean?”

  “Kind of,” I say, because I don’t want him to think I’m a moron. I’m trying to follow what he’s saying, but I’m a little distracted by a small chip in his front tooth, which is amazingly sexy in a way I cannot describe.

  “It’s like God is a grownup and we’re all fifth-graders,” he says. He sees the new way I’m looking at him, and now he’s looking at me in that way too, and his voice is softer, as though it’s being slowly caressed by his breath. “The bad stuff He lets happen, to Him it’s a grownup thing.” He fixes me with a level gaze. “Just like I couldn’t imagine Mr. Sloate’s reasons for wanting to do the nasty with Mrs. Evans, I can’t understand God’s reasons either.”

  We look at each other for a long time, slowly smiling.

  The Phone Call

  “EITHER HE’S REALLY DEEP, or he’s really weird,” Xander says. I’m lying on the living room couch, she’s perched on the armrest, and we’re dissecting my date. At least, she is. “So he didn’t even act like he wanted to kiss you?”

  “I don’t know if he wanted to kiss me, Xander. I’m not a mind reader.”

  “There are signals.”

  I get so sick of her explaining guys to me, as if they are that complicated. Either they like you or they don’t. It’s not like Paul is a sports car I have to hot-wire.

  “Did he look at your lips a lot? Did he lean in? Did he—”

  “Oh, spare me!”

  “But he did drive you home?”

  “No, Xander, he kicked me out of his car and made me walk four miles with a sore back.”

  “Wow. What a jerk,” she says, just to get on my nerves.

  “He said let’s do this again. So maybe he’ll kiss me later.”

  “Or maybe he just wants to be friends.”

  Xander can’t handle ambiguity, and I guess if my afternoon with Paul was anything, it was ambiguous. We talked for hours about God, religion, our futures, and then he drove me home. It felt friendly in the car, and breezy. I didn’t feel all knotted up the way I usually am when I’m around a guy I think is cute, maybe because I could see the side of Paul that doesn’t depend on him being attractive. He parked under the big maple tree that shades our lawn. He said, “Let’s do this again.” Then, the feel of his fingertip on my skin, and I got out of the car.

  “Well—” I begin. But then I think better of it. I shouldn’t tell Xander anything.

  “Well what?”

  I sigh. Judging from the way she’s sitting, with her elbows on her knees, leaning forward, staring avidly into my face, there’s no way she’s going to drop this. I may as well give her what she wants, and what she wants is details. “I guess I didn’t give him a chance to kiss me because I got out of the car pretty fast.”

  She throws up her hands. “God! Zen! You need girl lessons, I swear to god!”

  “But before I got out,” I yell so she’ll shut up, “he touched my arm. Very lightly. Sort of in the crease of my elbow. With one finger.”

  She stares at me, deadpan. “That’s so sexy I’m about to climax right here.”

  “Shut up. It was nice.” He waited for me to open the front door before he drove off. I liked that, though I know Xander would see this as unimportant. To me, it’s very important. Every guy wants to touch, but not every guy waits to make sure you get in okay. “He wasn’t grabby. So what?”

  This seems to satisfy her. “Okay. Good. You’re on track.”

  “On track for what?”

  “On track for no longer being a hopelessly virginal martial arts geek.”

  “Like being a slutty martial arts geek is something to shoot for.”

  “You’d be better off, believe me.”

  “Whatever.”

  She slaps her hands together and rubs them like she’s at a hoedown and the roast pig is ready. “Oka
y. You wanted to call what’s-his-bucket. So let’s do it.”

  Even though I’m lying down, this makes my stomach plunge. “I thought you wanted to go there without calling.”

  “I checked in to plane fare, and I can’t find any tickets for less than six hundred dollars.” She picks up the phone from the end table behind her. “Come on. Let’s just do it.”

  “It’s too late to call right now.”

  “Not in Wisconsin.”

  “I don’t want to do it.”

  “Okay. I will.” She cradles the phone on her shoulder and punches the keys, but just as quickly hangs back up. “I can’t.” She starts chewing on the corner of her fingernail absently, a signal she’s thinking extra hard. She narrows her eyes at the window. “We need a man.”

  “That’s what you said last week when you and Margot were making out.”

  “Ha-ha.” She sticks the phone in my face. “Call Adam.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Adam can pretend to be Mr. Blackstone following up about Mom’s will. About the statue.”

  “Call him yourself. I’m not going to be your go-between.”

  She glares at me like she wants to belt me as she eases into the red armchair that Mom used to always sit in. The room is dark, but there’s lots of light filtering through the thin curtains. She’s sitting so still, thinking, blue in the moonlight, if I blur my eyes enough, I can almost believe Xander is Mom, like I’m looking at a ghost. And the ghost is terribly sad.

  Xander breaks the spell when she clicks on the table lamp at my feet, lifts the phone, and dials Adam’s number. “Hey. It’s me . . . Xander, you asshole. We need your help . . . Well, Zen needs your help . . . Apologize for what? . . . I’m giving you the silent treatment? . . . Fine, Adam, I’m sorry you have the emotional maturity of a zygote. Can you please come help us? Now? . . . Fine. Bye.” She jabs at the phone to turn it off, and throws it into the easy chair across the living room. It bounces onto the floor with a loud crack.

  “Hey! If you’re going to throw things, go outside!” Dad calls up from the bowels of the basement.