“Get some sleep,” Doug says as he retreats into the living room.
The next morning, I’m stumbling around the kitchen, throwing open cupboards and drawers, feeling my way toward the cereal and the milk that I call my breakfast. I see a guy, a stranger, sitting quietly at the kitchen counter; he’s pouring over some papers that are spread out in front of him. He’s a dead ringer for Doug, except for the fact that his hair is combed flat and he’s wearing a collared shirt and actual shoes.
“Why aren’t you at work?” I ask him.
“I’m taking Marie back to the place. How come you’re not at work?”
“The club is closed today.”
“Closed?”
“Feldner is freaking out and doesn’t know what to do, so he shut it down until this thing blows over.”
Then Doug asks, “Has your grandmother mentioned anyone lately? I mean, anyone who might be taking her out of the place and driving her around?”
“Frankie Rey?” I suggest with a smirk.
“Yeah. Right,” he replies. “And I’m having lunch with Lady Gaga.”
Frankie Rey is Marie’s friend. She’s been talking about him on and off for years, and though I’d give my eye teeth to meet the guy, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. He’s imaginary. We believe that she’s assembled Frankie Rey from the bits and pieces of people she met while traveling around the world. For example, Frankie Rey was born in the country of Colombia, and when he was eighteen he became a ladrón de tumbas, a grave robber. He dug for gold and precious metals buried in the graves that were centuries old, and then he sold the stuff to local dealers for a profit.
“You’re kidding me, right?” Doug asked the first time she tried out this story on us.
“Oh, but he hasn’t done that for ages,” she informed us. “Not since he moved to Florida and started working at the automotive place.”
I have a theory that Marie invented Frankie Rey to make her life seem more exciting. After traveling the world, Marie is forced to spend day after day in a minimum-security holding environment for the elderly, and that must seem pretty dull by comparison. Who can blame her? Everybody deserves a Frankie Rey. Sometimes when my life in Florida feels flat-lined dull, I think, Too bad Frankie Rey isn’t real. He’d take me out of here. We’d go to South America and open up a hotel on the beach, where Marie could live and wander around without being a menace to the community. He’d teach me how to rob a grave, and we’d make more money than Doug ever dreamed of. Like I said, everybody deserves a Frankie Rey.
“So what kind of trouble you up to this morning?” Doug asks me as I head out the door to meet my friends.
“I thought maybe I’d go into town with my AK-47 and mow down everyone in sight,” I say offhandedly.
“Sounds good,” he replies without looking up from his papers. “Just be back here in time for dinner.”
The Food Shack is a burger-and-fries joint located not far from the golf course. It’s a popular hangout not only for the faithful of the Blessed Virgin Mary but also for the local policemen, traffic cops, rubberneckers, and the army of TV and newspaper reporters who are on top of the biggest story to hit Jupiter since Tiger Woods decided to build a house here.
Angela is pacing back and forth, talking into her cell phone, arranging her hair, and occasionally checking herself out in various reflective surfaces. I’m late, but when she looks up and spots me walking through the door, she pats the padded seat next to the place where she’s parked her stuff.
“Sit, sit,” Angela says. “I’ll be off the phone in two secs. It’s my mother. They still won’t let anyone onto the grounds of the golf course, and she’s thinking maybe we ought to move on from this town. You got any connections over there?”
“Not really,” I tell her. “I’m just a caddy. I could sneak her in, though.”
She gives me a shrug. I sit down and pretend to be listening to the conversation between Des and Crispy, who are nestled into the booth, but really I’m busy checking out Angela’s legs. Incredible to think that only a few months ago those legs couldn’t do squat, and now they’re as tanned and toned as a cheerleader’s.
“What do you think?” Desirée asks me.
“Uh? Think?” I mutter, trying to look as though I’ve been paying attention, but no one is fooled. “About what?”
“Don’t drag him into it,” says Crispy. “Just admit you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re repeating stuff you’ve heard in church.”
“I do too know what I’m talking about,” she says, practically spitting the words at him. “It means just what it says. It means to turn the other cheek.”
“Wrong,” Crispy says in a singsong voice.
“Then what?” she wants to know.
“During the time of Jesus, Jews were second-class citizens—slaves, really. And there was a law on the books that allowed Roman soldiers to slap a Jewish person, but only with the back of his hand.”
“This was an actual law?” Des asks.
And here he demonstrates. He’s the Roman, and I’m the Jew. He raises his right hand and slowly, very slowly, with his knuckles facing away from him, traces a path from his left shoulder to my right cheek. He’s totally showing off, but no one calls him on it.
“Boom. What Jesus was actually saying? If a Roman slaps you, you should offer him your other cheek, your left cheek. That way the Roman guy is forced to deal with you like an equal, with a closed fist. He actually has to punch you man to man.”
Crispy demonstrates again, but this time his right hand is bunched into a hard ball of bone and headed slo-mo for the left side of my jaw.
“Boom. It was a brilliant strategy. This is civil disobedience, people. Not some namby-pamby, hit-me-one-more-time crap.”
“Where’d you learn all that?” I ask him.
Angela sidles into the booth beside me, and once she’s settled I can feel her hip bone pressing against mine. I’m having trouble breathing.
“Just something I picked up,” Crispy replies, and then he disappears behind the cover of his sunglasses, where no one can read his expression. Even though we can’t prove what he says, it sounds credible enough.
Desirée’s phone blings a text message, and she says, “I gotta meet my mom at the golf course after lunch, so we ought to get going if we’re going.”
“Where we going?” I ask.
They all exchange a conspiratorial look.
“Well, we had this idea,” Angela begins. “Y’see, we don’t get to hang out at home so much these days.”
“In fact, not at all,” Crispy interjects.
“Laundromats, diners, motels, Internet cafés—but never home,” Angela continues. “And right about now I’d give my whole allowance if I could just take a bath in an actual tub with real bubbles.”
“We’re not going to steal anything,” Desirée insists. “Nothing like that. We just want to hang out in someone’s house, watch some high-def TV, maybe eat a sandwich. No one will even know we were there.”
“You mean break into someone’s house?” I ask, trying to keep my eyes from bugging out of my skull and my voice down to a whisper. “Here? In Jupiter? Are you nuts?”
“Well,” Crispy announces, “there’s always your house.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not going to happen. My dad doesn’t let me have people in when he’s not there.” And that’s the truth. He’s always reminding me that it’s Marie’s house and we have to respect her rights even though she doesn’t live there anymore and wouldn’t know the difference.
Angela leans in so close to me I can smell the sweetness of her lip gloss and feel her warm breath on my cheek. I watch her mouth move as she says, “(a) Want something” and “(b) Take a risk.” I imagine the two of us lying in a great big California king bed, making out, and maybe going all the way.
Then she turns to Des and Crispy and says, “What do you guys think? I mean, about Alex. You think he’s up for his first Virgin Club chal
lenge? Breaking and entering.”
The girls hustle themselves into the ladies’ room, leaving Crispy and me alone. There’s definitely excitement in the air, but it also feels a lot like fear. We could get in a lot of trouble, but the adrenaline that’s pumping through my bloodstream is trying to convince me that this would make me a hero in everybody’s eyes, so go for it.
Crispy and I step outside to hang on the hot pavement. I try to act as though we’re not a couple of juvenile delinquents with a plan that involves breaking and entering, but my leg is shaking like a flipped coin that won’t settle.
“Are you sure about this?” I ask him.
“No,” he replies as he nervously picks lint out of his pants pocket and sends the little bits of white fluff falling to the ground like fake snow at a Christmas pageant. “Are you?”
Neither of us can say no to Angela, and we both know it.
“Impressive, that stuff about Roman law,” I say to Crispy. “You made it up, right?”
“No. It’s for real. My mom did her dissertation on first-century Roman law. She wrote about its impact on the New Testament. She’s kind of an expert on the subject. Now she’s doing research on a book about the Blessed Virgin appearing in places like Jupiter. I’m here because … well, she had this idea that she and I needed to do some serious mother-son bonding.”
“How’s that going?”
“You seen her lately?” he asks, giving the statement an ironic lift. When I don’t respond, he adds, “Right.”
More snow from his pocket, and then …
“And what’s your story? I mean, for real.”
I give him the 411 on my life. I mention the fact that I once lived in Manhattan and also that my mother has been dead for years. He wants to know if I was in New York on 9/11.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “But we weren’t allowed to go back to our house. No one was. It was weird. They said it was because of security issues and health concerns and all that. But when we finally were allowed to go home, I saw why they’d been keeping us away. It was pretty bad. All that ash had gotten into everything, every corner. I don’t remember much, but I’ll never forget the sight of my home that first day back. The whole place was covered in white dust. Looked like a ghost of itself.”
I decide not to tell him the other part of the story, the part about how Kat died of ovarian cancer on the night of September 10, 2001, at 8:45 p.m. He wouldn’t be able to make sense of the fact that at the moment when the first plane struck the first tower, Kat’s body was already cold, lying uptown at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, waiting to be transferred to the funeral home on 14th Street, where she would be cremated and turned into a pile of ash and poured into an urn.
Neither of us have much to say after that. Crispy stands there chewing his lower lip, and I shift my weight from one flip-flop to the other. I can tell he’s thinking about things that have nothing to do with my mother or me. I wonder if he and I will be friends this time next year, or if he’s just one of those people who will pass through my life and not leave fingerprints.
“By the way,” I say, in an effort to wrap up my story, “my name’s Dylan.”
He looks at me as though he’s trying to see a Dylan where an Alex had been standing only a moment ago.
“Cool,” he says, and then withdraws his attention from me and puts it back into his pocket, where he picks more lint.
“My real name’s Crispy,” he says. “Actually, it’s Chris Pollard. But my folks’re both in AA. Their friends call them Molly P. and Tim P. So when I came along, I was known in the rooms as Chris P. The rest is history.”
The girls haven’t come out of the Shack yet, so I confess to Crispy that the only reason I’m involved in this Virgin Club business is because I’m hoping to get on Angela’s good side.
“Right,” Crispy says with a wry laugh. “And into her pants. Don’t sweat it. We’re all in love with her. And those who aren’t want to be her. Two days ago she kissed Desirée. On the lips.”
“Whoa,” I say, trying to slow my mind, which immediately has gone into a major girl-on-girl spin. “Did Desirée kiss her back?”
“What do you think?”
“You won’t say anything,” I plead. “I mean, about Angela and me.”
“Dude, it’s obvi.”
“Really?”
“Way.”
“We’re all set,” Angela announces as she and Desirée step out onto the sidewalk and into the blazing sunlight. And then she looks to me for instruction. “Where to?”
Naturally, Angela thinks of Jupiter as my home turf; she assumes that I know the best house to break into, a place that doesn’t advertise a major alarm system, or feature mad dogs waiting to take a bite out of our asses. But she’s wrong. Even though I’ve been living in the neighborhood for years, I’ve never considered this place my own, never bothered to learn who lives where and what they’re up to. Until further notice, I’m just passing through, a stranger trapped in an even stranger landscape. Jupiter is my continuing-care community without the care.
“Follow me,” I tell them. And they fall in line. How can I let Angela down?
We turn off the main drag and head toward a residential section that features the kind of houses I’m sure they have in mind—fancy houses that promise easy comforts like wide-screen TVs, sunken bathtubs, fully stocked refrigerators, and unlocked back doors. We walk without saying a word, but out of the corner of my eye, I check them out; they’re appraising the houses and the well-clipped gardens.
“When I’m famous,” Desirée blurts out, “I’m gonna have, like, four houses. One in Beverly Hills. A big apartment in Manhattan. A house in Atlanta for my mom. And one by the ocean, someplace maybe in the tropics.”
“Really?” I ask. “How’re you going to get famous?”
“Singing, acting. And I’m going to have my own fashion line that I’ll design myself. And I’m going to be a spokesmodel for some kind of telecommunications company. And I’m gonna do a perfume. Just gonna call it ‘Desirée.’ But I’m still gonna go back on weekends to Atlanta in my private plane to sing in my church.”
“You got it all figured out, huh?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says with the utmost confidence. “I got plans. Know what I mean?”
“Sort of,” I tell her.
“What about you? You got a plan?”
I try to think of something I can offer that might sound like Desirée’s idea of a plan—at least for the moment—but nothing comes to mind. The idea of grave robbing with Frankie Rey seems like too far of a stretch—even compared to Desirée’s fantastic scheme. But I envy the fact that she has a plan at hand; she can believe in herself: she sees herself in ads and smells her future. I lost the scent of whatever it was I wanted to be or do a long time ago, and I’m just here in this world, stranded in the moment, hanging out with friends I don’t really know, and ready to break into a house that isn’t mine.
Years ago, Kat had a plan for me. When she was in the hospital, I used to climb into her bed, and she would imagine my future. The way she saw it, I was going to graduate from high school and then go on to a good college. I would marry a beautiful girl who was smart and funny. I would have children, and when the kids were old enough, I’d tell them that once upon a time they had a grandmother who wrote poetry. She made me promise to read her poems aloud to them. Whenever she talked this way, I’d change the subject. I wasn’t interested in a plan that didn’t include her. But she insisted and just plowed on. As the prospects of her own future diminished, it seemed as though her need to concentrate on mine increased proportionately. She put her whole self into creating a plan for me, and I suppose, by comparison, my future must have seemed like some kind of happy ever after, endless. But not to me. After she died, I tried not to think of my future at all, and a plan was out of the question.
“A plan?” I ask Desirée.
“Yeah,” she says, prompting me. “That’s how it works. You got to always be listening for a
plan. Like, for your future.”
I listen hard, but all I can hear is the burbling of a fountain from behind someone’s courtyard wall and an SUV whizzing by, its windows tinted against the sunshine.
A plan?
We pass a housekeeper, a middle-aged woman with the face of an Aztec lady warrior. She stands in front of a big stucco house watering a lawn. She’s obviously suspicious of us as we walk by, and her look is so accusatory that for a moment I think she might turn the hose on us.
“¡Hola! Hace tanto calor aquí hoy y tan temprano, ¿verdad?” Angela calls out to her.
I’m able to tell that they’re talking weather, but the minute they veer away from Spanish 101, I’m lost. To keep myself busy, I study Angela. When she speaks Spanish, everything about her changes—there’s a quickening of her whole self. Her eyes flash, her hands dance, her tongue clicks and clacks like a little cart happily traveling over a rough patch of a familiar cobblestone street.
Could Angela be my plan?
“Oh, my God,” she cries out, and clutches her head with both hands. “The sun’s too hot. Evil hot. I think it may be boiling my brain.”
“Yeah. I know,” I say, clutching my head in the same way. “Me, too.”
Crispy catches my eye and mutters, “Way obvi, dude.”
As it happens, we’ve stopped on the pavement across from Marie’s house. I think, Why not? It is, after all, a fancy place with a wide-screen TV, a sunken bathtub, a fully stocked refrigerator, and an unlocked back door. Doug will never know. Neither will my new friends.
And just like that I have a plan.
“This place looks good,” I say.
Meet Me in the Morning
Breakfast dishes are piled in the sink. Doug’s coffee cup, the skillet in which Marie scrambled an egg, my cereal bowl—they’re all sitting there like incriminating evidence. I’m scared that any minute the sponge or the toaster or the cutting board will betray me, that I’ll give myself away if I look at the kitchen as though it means something to me, as though I care about the place. I try to make my face go slack so that I appear as blank as possible. I’m a ghost just passing through a place where I once lived, not quite sure if haunting the house is worth the bother.
Virgin Territory Page 7