Jumpstart the World

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I sat alone at a corner table and watched the melee of moving bodies and listened to the racket of voices.

  And watched the “Us” folks at the usual table.

  And marveled at the way everybody left us alone.

  Not like they accepted us exactly. More like, now that they’d labeled us, we didn’t need to exist in their world. If we didn’t do anything special to jump up onto their radar screens, I guess they really didn’t think about us at all.

  I saw Bobby glance over his shoulder at me about three times.

  Finally, he got up and came in my direction. Just Little Bobby. Nobody else.

  I jumped to my feet and dumped the rest of my lunch in the trash bin and tried to hurry out before he could get to me. But we just ended up meeting at the door and walking out into the hall together.

  “I hope you got my present,” he said.

  “Yeah, I did.” But it seemed really cruel to just leave it at that. I mean, since it was original artwork and all. “I like it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I like it a lot. I hung it over my sofa. It really adds a lot to the place.”

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “No. I really mean it. You’re talented.”

  He looked down at the floor and away to deflect the compliment. “Bob thinks so. But, you know. I think he’s prejudiced.”

  “Maybe. But he could also be right.”

  Long silence. We were still walking together. But I had no idea where we were going. I’m pretty sure he didn’t, either. Lunch wasn’t anywhere near over. We had no place we needed to be.

  “So,” he said. “Are we okay, then?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Sure.”

  It was both the least true and the least convincing thing I’d ever heard myself say.

  When I got home from school that day, I walked into my apartment and found somebody there. Sitting at my kitchen table. I think I might have literally jumped, and I let out an embarrassing involuntary scream.

  The murderous intruder jumped up and spun around.

  It was only my mother.

  Then she screamed, too.

  “What?” I said. “It’s me. Who were you expecting?” I mean, who was supposed to be surprised and invaded, anyway?

  I watched her face gradually change. It started out afraid of me, as if I were some total stranger. But instead of the relief of recognition, her new expression was hurt and ruined, as if she were about to burst into tears.

  Oh. Right. The hair.

  “I thought you were getting back tomorrow,” I said.

  “No. Yesterday.”

  “I thought it was tomorrow.”

  “No. It was always yesterday.”

  I saw a stack of the usual boxes and bags on the table. Typical birthday stuff. Don’t ask how I could know it was typical without opening it. But they mostly had that high-end-department-store-clothing-box look. Which was typical. She always bought me presents intended to turn me into the girl she thought I should be. Or to turn me into her. Or maybe I just said the same thing two different ways.

  Before she could even assault me about the hair issue, I said, “How did you get in? Did you keep a key?”

  “Of course I did. What if you were hurt or in trouble?”

  “Funny. You keep saying that. But I think that whole ‘hurt or in trouble’ thing is the reason why most parents keep their teenagers around the house.”

  “Why did you do that to your hair?”

  “I think you owed me the respect of telling me if you were going to keep a copy of my key.”

  “Was there an actual reason? Like something got stuck in it, or it got burned or something?”

  “I also think you should call if you’re going to come by. After all, this is my place now. You would be furious if somebody came by unannounced.”

  “Or were you just being willfully destructive?”

  Just so you know, this was not at all unusual. This two-simultaneous-conversations thing. My mother and I did this on many an occasion.

  “The latter,” I said. Just to shut things down once and for all. “Next time, please call before you come. You scared me half to death.”

  “I just wanted to tell you all about my cruise. And plan your big birthday party. Although this changes things somewhat. I’m not sure how we’ll … Oh wait, I know. I have a lovely cloche hat that would look like heaven on you.”

  “I frankly don’t want to hear about the cruise. And I’m not wearing your hat. And I don’t want a birthday party. Especially not now that I know that it was never really for me. It was always for my hair.”

  “Please don’t be like that, darling. Of course we’ll have a party.”

  “I already had one,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I think you heard. I had a birthday party already. With my friends. And they gave me nice presents, too. A stuffed cat and this nice leather bracelet and that painting of the irises that’s hanging over the couch. So, that’s it. Birthday’s over. You missed it. You can’t just change the date of a thing like that, you know. You either care enough to be there for it or you don’t.”

  “I think I’ll just give you a little time to think this over.”

  “Good plan,” I said.

  That way she would go away. And next time she called or e-mailed, I could just tell her my feeling hadn’t changed.

  “Are you sure you don’t—”

  “What happened to my time to think this over?”

  She sighed.

  She touched my cheek once as she was leaving.

  In her eyes I saw something potentially a little bit new. Like I might’ve really hurt her. Like maybe all of this was hurting her, maybe more than I knew. And like maybe I was making this bad thing worse for her instead of better.

  Except I really don’t think it’s my job to make it easier for her to abandon me.

  Then she looked back at my hair and the moment was lost.

  After she left, I opened my presents.

  I took a hard look at all the crap my mother had given me for my birthday. Shoes. A dress. A fur jacket. All stuff to wear. All stuff she would wear and I wouldn’t. All stuff that would make me look just the way she wanted me to look.

  Just like I expected.

  Mother always wrapped the receipts with the packages, in case the size was wrong or something. And maybe, underneath that, so I’d know how much she spent. But usually I didn’t exchange it. Usually I just let it rot in a drawer.

  I took out all the receipts and looked at them. Totaled them up. Hundreds of dollars. And all from the same department store.

  I took it all back.

  I turned it all in for store credit, and then I bought a 35 mm camera, with two extra lenses—a close-up and a wide-angle—and a flash, and a tripod, and a light meter, and a book about photography.

  And I carried it all home.

  SIX

  How to Freeze the World in One Easy Lesson

  Next time I played Scrabble with Frank, I did a little better. I only lost that game by about 150 points.

  “I want to hear you guys sing,” I said as we were gathering up the tiles again. I think I was trying to move on to some area of life that wasn’t Scrabble. I was definitely outclassed in Scrabble.

  “No you don’t,” Frank said.

  “You really don’t,” Molly said.

  “No, I really do. After seeing how well Molly takes pictures and how well Frank plays Scrabble, now I want to see you guys do something you suck at.”

  “Well,” Frank said. “You asked for it.”

  They sang, “Happy belated birthday to you.” They were pretty bad. Not the worst I’ve ever heard, but bad enough.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That pretty much makes up for the Scrabble.”

  “We can dance, though,” Frank said. “We’re good dancers.”

  “What kind of dancing?”

  “Ballroom.”

  “You’re kidding.
How weird.” Then I realized I was being rude. “I don’t mean weird.” But it was weird. Really. In a way. “I just mean, like … you don’t see that a lot anymore.”

  “Ballroom dancing is still very popular.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe not with the high school crowd. Are we talking about like Arthur Murray stuff? Like in old Fred Astaire movies?”

  “Very loosely speaking.”

  “Can I see?”

  We moved the couch back to the wall, and they put on an actual vinyl record, the kind you need an old turntable to play.

  “Benny Goodman,” Molly said as she set the needle down.

  “Who’s Benny Goodman?”

  “One of the old original swing-band leaders from the thirties and forties,” Frank said.

  “You weren’t even born then.” Oh God. I hoped not. “Were you?” Then I realized how hugely dumb that was. Of course not.

  “No, but I still know good music when I hear it.”

  The record started playing, and it was like one of those instrumental big-band songs you would hear on the soundtrack of a movie about a big World War II army dance at the USO club.

  Then they danced for me.

  First, it made me uncomfortable. Because the minute they started dancing, they just totally focused on each other. Totally. They were looking right into each other’s eyes and smiling, and it was so clear and so real that they were a team. An old, practiced team. A team that nothing and nobody could get in the way of.

  Not that I had ever planned to try. But still.

  I’m not really sure why I do that. Or even how. Like when I want something not to be true, I sort of feel like it isn’t. Like I see this Frank-and-Molly thing on a day-to-day basis, but part of me doesn’t believe it’s really real.

  Only, at a time like this, it is.

  It’s right in front of your eyes, and then you not only know it’s real in that moment, you know it was all along.

  The kind of thing that can ruin your whole day if you let it.

  But after a while, I managed to focus off that and actually sort of enjoy watching them. Because they were good. Really good.

  I mean, Frank spun Molly around and they dipped and they came together and came apart like they’d been doing it for years. I guess they’d been doing it for years.

  “Can I take some pictures of you guys dancing? I think it would look cool.”

  Molly stopped dancing, and it was funny, because it took Frank just a moment to notice. He just sort of went on dancing a few steps without her.

  “I didn’t know you were into photography,” she said.

  “Well, I’m not. I mean, I am. But I haven’t been for long. I’m not into it like you’re into it. I’m just getting started.”

  “Film or digital?”

  “Film. I had to really insist on a film camera. The guy at the store kept trying to sell me on digital. Almost everything they had was digital.”

  I didn’t say why it was so important to me to go with film. I don’t think I had to. It was this sort of difficult, embarrassing truth that was right there for everybody to see: the fact that my interest in photography probably had its roots in admiring Molly just a little bit. Whether I wanted to admire her or not. Whether I wanted to admit it or not.

  I hurried up and talked over all that again.

  “But I know how to use the camera I bought. I didn’t just buy it and put it in the corner. I’ve been teaching myself how to use it.”

  “You should have told me. You could have asked for help. I would have helped you if I’d known.”

  “I was going to ask for help. I think. I mean, sometime I would have. You know. Sooner or later.”

  “You want to run get your camera?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but …”

  I wanted to ask something but it seemed a little gutsy. Like giving orders. Like running the show all of a sudden. But it felt like I really knew what I wanted and needed right then, so in a rare moment of pseudo-confidence, I just pushed through and said it. And it got said:

  “But come over to my apartment. I want to put up some kind of backdrop, so it looks like a studio shot. And you guys need to dress up more, so it looks real formal and all. And, Frank, you need a shave.”

  See? I could open my mouth and just say things. And also, another moment to note that the “Us” guys were totally full of shit. Frank needed a shave.

  I moved almost all the furniture out of my living room and tacked two ironed sheets to the far wall.

  It was quite a production.

  When Frank and Molly came over, Molly was wearing a black dress, like an evening dress, with a full skirt, and Frank was wearing a gray suit and a blue tie. I’d never seen them so dressed up before.

  Frank looked so nice in a suit. Too nice, really.

  Molly helped me with the lighting. She said I needed a lot of light because they would be a moving subject. So I’d need a fast shutter speed. And I had to decide between tripod and handheld. Tripod, they’d dance in and out of the frame. Handheld, I might have trouble with my composition. I told her I might try a few of each.

  Then we realized we didn’t have any music. They danced anyway. Molly just hummed a tune, and they danced, and I used up a whole twenty-four-exposure roll of film, and then reloaded and shot some more.

  Molly gave me a tip on a good developing lab. But she promised that later on, when I was a little deeper into my learning curve, she’d help me develop a roll. Show me some of the tricks you can do when you develop your own.

  When I got the pictures back, I found out I’d made a lot of mistakes. A lot of them. Photo after photo, they were half dancing out of the shot. My focus was bad a lot of the time. But I took almost fifty photos. So maybe by the law of averages, about five of them were really good.

  I laid them out on my kitchen table.

  Frank and Molly looked like they’d danced right off the screen of an old movie. I was so proud. I thought, I did that. Not just pointed the camera. I saw something I knew would make good photos, and I staged a photo shoot, and I got what I wanted. I saw now, on my kitchen table, what I’d seen in my head when I asked permission to shoot them.

  In the best one, Molly’s skirt was just a little bit blurred by the way it was spinning. Just enough that you could really feel the frozen action of the shot. And the looks on their faces were caught just right. You could see them loving dancing and loving each other. The expressions just said it all.

  It was so nice to look at. I was even able to stand outside the fact that it was Molly and Frank and enjoy the look of love on their faces. Love always looks nice. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t enjoy it when they see it. Anyone who doesn’t, I don’t really want to know them.

  It was only five photos, and they were good almost by accident. But next time it wouldn’t be an accident. Next time I would know a lot more.

  I heard a knock at my door. I thought it was either Frank or Molly. I ran to the door because I was so happy to show them my pictures.

  I threw the door open wide.

  It was my mother. I think she could tell I was disappointed.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She looked hurt. “I came to visit you.”

  “I thought you were going to call first.”

  “I knocked. I thought you just wanted me to knock.”

  “Next time call first. Please?”

  She sighed and swept dramatically over to my table and started looking at the photos. I really hadn’t invited her to look at them. They felt a little private, in a weird way. Not that there was anything wrong with them. But there were lots of parts of my life that I wasn’t anxious to share with my mother. Plus, I was really itching to go over and show them to Molly and Frank. So the whole thing was making me feel a little grumpy.

  “What are these?”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Well, they’re photos, of course, but who took them?”

  “I took them.”

>   “Using what for a camera?”

  “Using my camera for a camera.”

  She leveled me with a disapproving look. “If you’re receiving expensive gifts from someone, I should know.”

  “You bought me the camera.”

  “When did I do that?”

  “For my birthday.”

  She just stood quietly a minute, and I felt like I could see wheels turning in her brain. “Oh,” she said, as if someone had just defaced a Michelangelo, “all those beautiful clothes.” Long, semitragic pause. “I didn’t even know you were interested in photography.”

  “Probably because you don’t know me anymore at all. Which is probably because we don’t live together.”

  “You’re being unnecessarily cruel today, Ellen. Who are these people?” She pointed to the photos.

  “My next-door neighbors.”

  “Ah, yes. That nice little man. So you’re getting friendly with them?”

  “Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I suppose. I just thought you’d make friends your own age.”

  “I have friends my own age.”

  I purposely neglected to mention that I was barely speaking to any of them.

  I felt another one of those moments coming on. Where I knew exactly what I wanted and needed. But it was hard to say.

  But I was about to say it anyway. Against all odds.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I sort of have something planned. I’ve been learning about photography from Molly next door. And the next thing I was going to do is go over there and show her these pictures. Which is why I would really appreciate it if you’d please call first. Next time. You know. In case I have plans.”

  She stomped her foot suddenly on my hardwood floor.

  It was unexpected. And kind of funny, actually. Like a three-year-old who can’t get her way by using words.

  “Elle, I think you’re being very unpleasant to me.”

  But I really hadn’t intended to be. I really hadn’t said any of that to hurt her. I just wanted to go on with my day.

  “No unpleasantness intended,” I said. “But like it or not, I have a life now. I think maybe you thought you could have it both ways. You know, like, drop me here to live on my own and go off on a cruise with Donald first thing, and still have it be just like it was before. But it’s not like it was before. It’s not. In any way. And it never will be again. And I think you might just need to accept that.”