“Um … yeah,” I assure her. “I mean, I guess. Actually, I didn’t know about … um … the club. But I heard. Naturally.”
We stand there while the sun rises and then sets and then rises and then sets, moons wax and wane, seasons change. A century passes. The world does its thing, the ozone thins, the globe warms, a billion species become extinct, the planet whirls through space, and the whole time the two of us are still staring at each other without knowing what comes next.
“So do you want to join the club?”
“Yeah. I mean, I guess so. I dunno. Sure. Yes,” I say, trying to disguise the unexpected panic that was creeping into my voice. “Oh. But wait. Hold on. Question: do you have to, y’know, be a virgin in order to join the club?”
Once again, she throws her head back and laughs. Her hair flies wild, and she grabs her sides as though they actually might split. She doesn’t hit her head on the wall this time.
“What?” I say. “What’d I say? What’s funny?”
Angela and I are touring the grounds of the golf course. She wants to know the ins and outs and ups and downs of my workplace, because as she says, “You never know when useless information will come in handy.” I’m talking like a big know-it-all who owns the place while she gazes out across the long stretches of mowed grass and clipped hedges. I can see her trying to make sense of what I’m saying. At the first green, she peers over the tops of her sunglasses, points into the near distance, and asks me, “What’s the story with that?” I explain the pin with the fluttering flag, the sloping fairway, and the tricky sand trap. Then just as I’m telling her the difference between a bogey and birdie, she kneels down, brushes the short, spiky grass with her open palm, and says: “This doesn’t feel like grass. What is it?”
I give a short lecture on how the grass was developed by some laboratory about twenty years ago because they needed a more rugged type of grass to survive the hot Florida summers with its searing sunlight and lack of rainfall. I’m making the whole thing up. She listens inattentively, and then when I’m finished, she looks at me again, but it seems as though she’s seeing right through me while straining hard to pick up radio waves from another dimension.
“A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands,” she recites.
“How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
“I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
“Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?”
She laughs. I guess she’s surprised by her own ability to remember the words. And then she collapses with her outstretched arms flung to either side of her and her face looking up to the sky. I can’t help noticing that her breasts are perfectly shaped.
“Wow,” is all I can think to say.
“Walt Whitman,” she replies. “Once when my father was in jail, he passed the time by reciting the poems he remembered. The prisoners loved him. So I thought, I’d better learn a few poems. Y’know, just in case.”
“You planning on going to jail?” I ask her, taking my place beside her on the grass.
“Definitely,” she says. “I just haven’t decided what for.”
Angela and I sit for a long time on the grass without saying anything. I can feel “the hopeful green stuff” digging into the undersides of my arms and legs. It hurts, but I don’t care. This is heaven.
“My mother was a poet,” I tell her.
“Lucky you,” she says, and maybe that’s a cue for me to change the subject, but I can’t stop. I want her to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about her.
“Do you know Bob Dylan, the singer?” I ask her.
“No,” she says, shaking her head and giving it a tilt. “Should I?”
“I’m named after him. My mother named me after the guy because he was such a good poet and all. He wrote a ton of songs. When I was a kid, my mother used to sing his songs to me. Especially one of them. She’d come into my room and I’d be lying on my bed not wanting to wake up. She’d sing right out loud. Just kept going till I gave up, till my eyes were wide open and I was awake.”
“How does it go?” she asks. “Can you sing it?”
Then, without thinking, I say, “Goes like this,” and I sing for her …
Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand
I got all the love, honey baby,
You can stand.
I been meek
And hard as an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear
If you want me, honey baby,
I’ll be here.
She’s nodding her head approvingly, while we both sit there feeling the buzz of the lyrics and letting the melody linger in the bright morning air. I don’t have much of a voice, but I can carry a tune, and even without the help of my guitar I can stay on pitch. Angela looks out across the grass and smiles; she seems pleased, her eyes opened wide.
“So where’s she now?” she finally asks without looking over at me. “I mean, your mother.”
“Oh,” I reply as though it’s no big deal and I’m totally over it, “she died years ago. When I was a kid. I hardly remember her. I’m only telling you that so you know why my name is Dylan.”
“Dylan,” she says, and it sounds like something I could get used to. “But I can still call you Alex, right?”
I fall back and lie there so that I can fully enjoy this new feeling. This is great, I think, just great. Alex. I pretend the grass isn’t killing Alex. I decide to forget that Dylan has a job, and I tell myself that his fellow workers aren’t wondering about him back at the clubhouse. But then slowly, very slowly, the guilt creeps in like poison into groundwater, and I start to feel Dylan choking Alex to death.
“I’ve got to get to work,” I say as I get up and brush my pant leg. Even I’m surprised by the announcement, but it’s getting late, and the shadows on the grass are shortening at an alarming rate.
Angela pulls her whole head back and gives me a sharp look. “Just like that?”
“Got to. I’m late. And I can’t lose this job, or my dad will make my life miserable.”
“Give me your number.”
Is it possible that she likes me? I decide to believe it until further notice. I walk backward, calling out my digits. I’m totally cool and completely in control. Almost immediately, I trip on the sprinkler spigot embedded in the grass, go flying, and fall flat on my ass. Despite the fact that I’m back on my feet in a matter of seconds, the harm’s been done. She’ll never call me, I think, not in a million years. Two seconds later, my phone rings.
“Hello?” I say to the person on the other end.
“That was hilarious,” Angela says in between laughs. “Did you do that on purpose? Because if you did, that was genius.”
“I did. I totally did that on purpose.”
The Speed of Light
Marie disappeared earlier today, so Doug and I are driving around in his dented Explorer, looking for her.
“She runs away one more time, I’m buying her one of those ankle bracelets,” Doug announces. His jaw is tight, and he’s wearing shorts, a button-down shirt, and a beat-up Dolphins cap.
Marie lives in a continuing-care facility known as the Crestview Center for Continuing Care and Senior Living, but for some reason Doug and I never call it by its name. We call it the place. Marie has been living there for almost three years, and by now she has become an expert at “slipping the knot.” Early on she complained that the people who were assisting her were always telling her what not to do: “You cannot go beyond the gate.” “You are not allowed to leave your clothes in the ga
me room.” “You may not have visitors in your room without signing them in at the reception desk.” So “slipping the knot” is also known as “slipping the not.”
“Is that her?” Doug asks.
“That?” I ask, pointing at the mailbox on the corner. “No.”
Doug is hunched over the steering wheel, on the lookout.
“I’ve heard stories about people who are abducted by aliens,” I tell him. “Maybe Marie was abducted by aliens.”
I’m careful to keep my voice flat and even. I don’t want him to think that I’m trying to get his attention by saying stupid stuff like I used to do when I was a kid. I’m just relaying facts as they were reported in a psychology magazine I found in the dentist’s waiting room last month.
“Just keep your eyes open,” he says.
“It can happen,” I reply. “One day a person goes out to buy a quart of milk or something, and pfft, they get sucked up into a spaceship for observation. But according to reports, they’re always returned to planet Earth.”
“What is this? Something that happens in one of your online gaming rooms?”
“No,” I tell him. “I’m talking real life. I read it in a magazine.”
“Yeah, well, in real life, Marie doesn’t drink milk,” he reminds me.
Doug doesn’t even look over at me. His eyes are glued to the streets and sidewalks. He’s like some kind of suburb-dwelling animal doomed to search for its lost mother. I feel sorry for him, but it’s once removed, like watching the Discovery Channel without the sound.
“It’s a well-known fact that baby zebras can pick out the stripes of their own mothers in a herd of a hundred other zebras.”
“You’re full of all kinds of good news today, aren’t you,” he says to me. But this is not really a question, so I choose not to respond.
Marie isn’t in any of her usual spots—the marina, the taxi stand, the bus shelter, the park—but we aren’t that worried because she always turns up—eventually. Most of the time she’s found wandering the halls of Crestview. She never remembers where she’s been.
“I’m thinking that maybe you know where she is.”
Doug looks over at me, terrified. His eyes are bugged, and there is a glob of spit gathering in the corner of his mouth; it’s threatening to balloon into something impressive. If only he could see himself. “What?” he asks as though he hasn’t heard me right.
“I mean, maybe you’ve got a hunch, or a feeling where she is. Maybe you should just go with it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s different from being able to pick out her stripes in a crowd.”
“Whatev,” I say, indicating that if he doesn’t want to take my advice, then he’s on his own.
We drive for a while in silence. It’s dinnertime, and the houses shimmer in the early evening light. Except for the grass that is being automatically watered from spigots embedded in every lawn of every house, there are no signs of life. I imagine that inside each house, a family is sitting down to a meal together, saying grace, and talking about the day. No one has been abducted by aliens, and everyone at the table is recognizing everybody else’s stripes.
About five years ago, the doctor diagnosed Marie with Alzheimer’s. At first, Doug refused to believe that it was true; he maintained that older people are naturally forgetful and that if Marie got lost every once in a while, it was no big deal. If the cops found her down by the marina or sitting alone at the Dairy Queen, they’d try to figure out where she lived, but she never remembered. Instead, she gave them a big speech about how it was a free country, and everyone was entitled to have a bad day. Never mind that she was in her bathing suit and flip-flops; she had a perfectly reasonable explanation for wandering around at two in the morning looking like that—if only she could remember what it was. The cops took her into protective custody, she resisted, there were tears, and eventually Doug came down to the police station to rescue her. That was the drill.
After Marie was settled into her assisted-living situation, Doug said that we couldn’t just abandon her and move back to New York. Not yet. Then Doug started saying things such as, “When we used to live in New York”; that’s when I knew for sure that I was stuck in Jupiter. For a while, I sat around plotting my escape, but every scenario ended with me being dragged back to Florida against my will by a state trooper wearing stretch pants and a loaded gun.
“This is hopeless,” I say, referring to the search for Marie, but also it pretty much covers everything that’s happened in the past five years.
Doug swerves the car off to the side of the road and then grabs hold of his whole head, as if it’s going to fly away from his shoulders if he isn’t careful. I’m like, What the …? He starts lecturing me. My problem is that I have too much attitude. I’m not focused enough on my future. I spend too much time online. The Internet has made me into a loner, a freak. And this is not going to help me later in life, not one iota.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this speech. Whenever he gets into a state, he tells me what a mess I’ve made of things, and how he’s done his best, and how every single day he’s tried to do everything in his power to ensure that I grow up to be a normal, loving person capable of contributing to society. And yet, despite his best efforts, things are out of control.
“It’s okay,” I tell him.
This is what I always tell him when he gets like this, but he never buys it.
“No!” he says, opening his eyes very wide without looking directly at me. “No. It is not okay! That’s my point!”
His real beef is that I don’t have a clear picture of how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. Why can’t I just tell him what I want to be when I grow up? Why can’t I just choose one thing and stick to it? An orthopedic surgeon? An investment banker? If I would just say it, he tells me, he’d be more than happy to help me achieve that dream. Do I want to be an artist? He’ll buy me art supplies, send me to a special school. A musician? He’ll do whatever it takes to get me started in whatever profession I choose. Plumber? No problem. Everybody needs a plumber. But I have to start applying myself, he tells me. I have to at least make an effort.
I tell him that I’m more interested in living in the now: that’s my goal. I read a book at the beginning of the summer that said that the present reality was all that really exists, so we might as well get used to it and try to live more fully in the moment. But Doug is not convinced, not for a minute.
I hear him use words like college and SAT scores and financial-aid package. I watch his mouth move, but I don’t hear a thing.
“All I know is,” he says, as a way of wrapping up his big speech, “if your mother was alive, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
We rarely talk about Kat anymore, so whenever Doug starts in on what our lives might look like if only she were still alive, I’m out of there. Whenever he tells me how much happier we’d be as a family, how we’d still be living in New York, how Kat would’ve published her poems by now, how I would know what I want to do with the rest of my life and how I’d be moving toward it full steam ahead—that’s when I know he’s just talking crap, and I refuse to be a party to it.
“Where’re you going?” he calls after me.
He says this as if I have a plan, but as he knows better than anyone, I don’t have a plan; I never do. I just need some distance between him and me, so I pretend that I’m the planet Pluto, and I’m drifting away from a solar system that refuses to recognize me for who and what I am. I am entering the Oort Cloud, a place so far away that no one has actually seen it with their own eyes.
“Good-bye!” I call out to Doug.
“I’m not going to tell you again!” he yells back. “Get in the car!”
I’m walking along the sidewalk, wondering if the concrete was poured right here on the spot, or if the slabs were brought into the neighborhood ready-made and then pieced together like a puzzle. Either way, it seems as though someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create a sidewalk in a plac
e where there isn’t that much foot traffic. Occasionally, you can spot a lone jogger or a woman who’s out for a walk with her tiny dog, but mostly the walkways are just for show. If people go out, they go out in their cars.
“Get in!” he yells. Then, “You just gonna ignore me? That it? Am I going to spend the rest of my life just driving around looking for family members who have gone crazy? Haven’t I gone through enough already today without you giving me crap?”
Why does everything always end up being about him? Never mind. I focus on the plant life. Most of the plants in Florida are pointy and sharp. Even the flowers will poke you in the eye and blind you if you dare to get too close.
“Look,” Doug says. “I really don’t have time for this.”
He’s inching the car alongside the curb and at the same time leaning over to talk to me through the open passenger-side window. He’s steering with one hand, looking up ahead to make sure he isn’t mowing down anybody’s mailbox. Every once in a while, his tires scrape the curb. I keep moving forward as though I’m having a wonderful life.
“I’ve got an idea,” he offers, trying a new approach. “How about we find Marie, and then we all go and eat somewhere. The Dairy Queen. How about that? Wouldn’t you like to go to the Dairy Queen?”
There. I’ve done it. I’ve gotten him to stop thinking about our nonexistent future. He’s in the moment, making sense, thinking about dinner. I am no longer Pluto.
I pause to look at a perfectly twilit Jupiter. I don’t know much about the future, about what I might do or where I might live when I grow up, but I make a promise to myself: I will never live anywhere that looks like this. Why? Because this whole town is a fancy trick to make you think that everything’s fine when we all know that everything’s not fine. And even if everything is fine, it only seems that way. If you wait a minute, it won’t be. In a flash, everything will change, and you will be so shocked by the suddenness of the change that you will never get over it.
After an hour of riding around and not finding Marie, Doug is speaking to the police on his cell, reporting her missing. This is what we do. Mostly, it’s him who makes the call, but I’ve done it once or twice. We’ve become regulars, and the cops keep pictures of Marie in their glove compartments. We know a few of them on a first-name basis. Today, Officer Mike tells Doug that there’s nothing else for us to do but wait, so Doug hangs up and we continue eating our dinner at the Dairy Queen, just the two of us. We down our burgers and black-and-white Blizzards, and when the time is right, I ask Doug to drive me to the Spring Hill clubhouse.
Virgin Territory Page 4