Chapter 17
“What are you doing tonight?” Tyler had the cardboard center from a roll of masking tape, and he was hitting it back and forth from hand to hand. He was leaning back against the lockers while Ben contemplated what he actually needed to take home for the weekend.
“I’ve got that thing for my pop culture class—twenty-four hours of TV.”
“Oh, right. Did you ever get out of doing it with that girl?”
“No, but it’s all right. She’s not as bad as I thought she was.”
Tyler looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“No!” Ben said. “Not like that. Just, you know, tolerable.”
“A lot can happen in twenty-four hours.”
“Yeah, but not that. What are you up to?”
Tyler shrugged. “I don’t know. Megan’s going skiing with her family. I don’t know. I feel like I could really get faced tonight. You know, go all out.” He shrugged again. “But whatever, I’ll probably just watch a movie and blaze one by myself.”
“You can come watch TV at Ilona’s,” Ben said, half seriously.
Tyler sneered. “That’s her name? Ilona? Like a-loner? HA! That’s classic.”
Tyler had been his best friend since fourth grade. Ilona was a girl he barely knew. But Ben felt inexplicably defensive. “Ilona Pierce,” he said. “She lives right over on Hawthorne Street.” He knew the number but he didn’t give it, hoping that Tyler would forget he’d even half offered.
For a second Tyler looked like he actually might be considering it. “Nah,” he finally said. “Just text me if there’s anything good on. Or if she tries to break your ankles and tie you up in the basement.”
“Right,” Ben said and shouldered his backpack. He had spent a long time deciding what to pack but settled for a clean T-shirt and boxers, because it seemed like you should have those things, a toothbrush, and extra batteries for his hearing aids. He had already planned how he would change them in the bathroom and what time he would do it to be sure he didn’t get caught in a lapse. He had never even changed them in front of Tyler. Once he had tucked an extra battery behind a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the very back of the medicine cabinet in Tyler’s bathroom for backup. It was probably dead by now anyway.
He was actually kind of nervous about how the whole thing was going to go. Mom had flipped out when he explained what he was doing. She threatened to call Kapstein and demand that he be excused from the project on account of his health, and she only relented when he promised that he and Ilona had agreed to take shifts and actually get some sleep. So there had been an out after all—an easy out. And he hadn’t taken it. He wasn’t entirely dreading spending more time with Ilona, crazy mother and cats and all. It was weird, but there it was.
They met outside school after the last bell and walked, without saying much, toward Hawthorne Street. It was only three blocks from school. There were some big houses interspersed with multi-families. His mom always said no one wanted to buy so close to the school because of the noise and potential for break-ins.
Ilona’s house was surrounded by a high wooden fence with gray peeling paint and shaded by two enormous pine trees in the front yard. They walked down her driveway, which was heavily rutted with frozen puddles. Ben heard the scraping of a shovel on ice. Ilona exhaled loudly. “Jesus, I guess she hasn’t left for work yet. Well, at least I warned you.” On the porch, hacking away at the gritty snow frozen on the buckling wooden boards, was a woman in a navy blue leotard, pink tights, and knee-high snow boots. Ben only recognized it as a leotard because he remembered them from Shannan’s gymnastics days. This woman, who Ben assumed was the infamous Judy Pierce, was also wearing a pair of enormous yellow headphones with a metal antenna jutting out the back.
“What are those?” Ben whispered as they stood at the edge of the porch.
“Nineties portable music device. Judy pretty much stopped updating everything in the nineties—her clothes, her car, her social life. She’s, like, frozen there with Milli Vanilli and Ace of Base.”
“Who?”
“Exactly.” Ilona frowned. “Come on. I think we can just walk past her and she won’t even notice.” But as soon as they stepped onto the porch, the boards shifted and creaked loudly. Judy swung around, heavy metal shovel in hand.
“Hi, kids!” she shouted over the music that was piped into her ears. She pulled the headphones down around her neck. Her shoulder-length brown hair had an inch of gray at the scalp, and a single pink roller still dangled just above her shoulder.
“Judy,” Ilona said, “you’ve got a thing there.” She pointed to her shoulder.
“Don’t call me that, Ilona,” Judy said. She batted at the roller like it was an annoying insect that wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Why not, Judy?”
“Call me Mom. Your friends are going to think it’s weird. They’re going to think you don’t like me.”
“I don’t like you, Judy,” Ilona said.
Ben tried not to smile and shifted his weight back and forth between his feet.
“Ilona!” Judy squawked.
“Judy!” Ilona opened the door and walked through, leaving her mother standing on the porch with one hand on her hip and the other on her shovel. Ben smiled apologetically and followed her in.
The hallway was dark with two closed doors immediately on either side of the entryway. There was a long, threadbare oriental rug running the length of the hall, and overhead was a box-shaped chandelier with two missing panes of glass and a single browning bulb. At the end of the hallway, a staircase wound up to the left, and just below it was a big closet. As they passed, Ben recoiled at the sour smell of unchanged cat litter. Ilona pulled the closet door shut.
The hallway emptied into a large room that was part kitchen and part living room. The kitchen section was behind a large island with a sink and several cabinets. On the other side of the island, there was a light brown leather sectional facing an enormous flat screen TV. A huge long-haired brown and black cat waddled out of the room when they entered. A smaller black one sprung off the couch when Ilona hissed at it. Behind the TV, a wall of steamed-up windows created a small greenhouse space that was filled with plants. Ben set his backpack down and watched as Ilona pressed her fingers into the dirt and turned some leaves over to examine the undersides. She pulled a few browning leaves off and flicked them onto the floor behind her.
Then, for no apparent reason, she let out a string of expletives that made Ben’s eyes pop. “Judy!” Ilona yelled. “I’m going to kill your freaking cats!” Ben walked over to her and saw a grape-sized turd in the pot of one of the larger plants, something with thick green leaves and yellow and green striped stems. Ilona went behind the island and came out with a plastic bag. She proceeded to pull out the cat shit and tie off the bag, which she tucked into an oversized leather purse that was sitting on one of the stools at the end of the kitchen island.
“That’s disgusting,” Ben said.
“Yup,” Ilona agreed. “So,” she said, changing the subject, “what’s going to be our poison?”
“What do you mean?” A girl who put cat shit in her mother’s purse might seriously consider drinking Drano.
“What channel?”
“Oh,” Ben said, relieved. “I don’t care. You pick.”
“Whatever,” Ilona said. “It has to be a major network, and they’re all the same anyway.” She jabbed at the remote control with her thumb. At two thirty they began their twenty-four hour television binge. It started slow. There was a soap opera on, so Ben mostly tuned out, playing on his phone and paying attention only when he had to write down the commercials during the breaks. He agreed to take the first shift while Ilona disappeared down into the basement. After a little while, he heard the rush of water and thump of a washing machine. When she came up she was wearing only a black tank top and a pair of green boxer shorts with black dice printed on them. “Sorry,” she said, “all my clothes are dirty.” She threw herself down on the o
ther end of the sectional. He could tell she didn’t shave her armpits. At least the hair there wasn’t blue.
He decided he didn’t care. And it wasn’t really that weird. Girls at the beach wore less all the time. But of course they weren’t at the beach. He was sitting on the cracked leather couch with a girl he barely knew. The soap opera ended, and the first of several afternoon talk shows came on. He didn’t recognize the host, but Ilona seemed to think she had been a child star on some nineties sitcom.
Ben jumped when there was a gasp behind him.
“Oh, that’s Melody Waters from Family Diner!” Judy exclaimed excitedly.
Ilona gave him an I-told-you-so look. Judy had shed the leotard—apparently that was only for snow shoveling—and was now wearing hospital scrubs and a long beige overcoat. She had removed the pink curler from her hair. With her eyes still glued to the television, she walked over to where Ilona was curled up and dropped several twenty-dollar bills on her. “Make sure you and your friend eat some dinner,” she said.
Ilona picked up the money. “This is a lot of cash, Judy. Are we supposed to get some strippers too?”
“Ilona!” Judy said, sounding exasperated.
“Judy!” Ilona mimicked her tone.
“I’m working the overnight, so behave yourself, both of you.” She paused for a minute and watched as Melody Waters offered a tissue to a woman who had just learned that her father wasn’t her real father. “Your parents are okay with this?” she asked Ben without moving her eyes from the screen.
Ben nodded. “It’s fine.”
Judy looked relieved. “Okay, well, you have the money for dinner and—”
“Just go, Judy,” Ilona interrupted. “You’re going to be late.”
Judy left and then came back in one more time for her purse. Then it was quiet in the house. “Is she a nurse?” Ben asked.
Ilona snorted. “Judy? No. She works in a halfway house for girls who are crazy. Like, crazy-crazy,” she clarified. “Like they hear voices and shit. It’s pretty ironic, actually, since Judy is a half step away from batshit herself. Kind of like the blind leading the blind.” Ben felt himself bristle the way he always did when any kind of disability was mentioned as part of regular conversation. Ilona cocked her head as though she’d noticed his reaction. He pretended to study a framed print of some flowers on the wall behind her head, and she didn’t say anything.
About halfway through Dr. Phil, Ben felt his eyes begin to glaze over. He realized something else as well: this project would be incredibly easy to fake. All he and Ilona would have to do was agree to check the TV every few hours and write down whatever crap was on, along with some made-up commercials. It was easy to see who they were marketing to. During the soap operas and talk shows, the commercials were all for cleaning products and diet foods. Later, during the basketball game—a bright spot in their evening lineup—it would be all beer commercials and trucks. How hard was that to predict? But he didn’t suggest it, and neither did Ilona.
At the end of Dr. Phil, the first round of the news came on, and Ilona got up and started tending to her plants again. Ben was impressed by the care she took in inspecting and pruning each one. She carried a quart-sized yogurt container with her, and this time she dropped the dead leaves and twigs into it. Each plant got doused with a spray bottle of water—first the roots, then the leaves. There had to be twenty or thirty different plants in an eight foot by eight foot area. He considered this in comparison to Ilona’s treatment of her mother. He still wasn’t sure what to make of it—how much was an act meant for his benefit? Down on her knees, prodding at the dirt inside a large orange plastic pot, Ben noticed the tattoo on the back of her upper thigh.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What?”
“Your tattoo. What is it?”
Ilona pulled the leg of her boxers up so they hugged the right side of her butt. Ben tried to just look at the tattoo. It was a moon rising over some kind of field.
“Tsukino,” Ilona said. “It means ‘moon field’ in Japanese. My dad’s half, so I’m mixed. It was his mother’s family name before she got married.” Ben was surprised even though, now that he looked more closely, her eyelids did have a smaller fold to them and her skin was slightly browner than most for this time of year. “I went through a phase,” she added by way of explanation.
“Well, at least her name didn’t mean, like, ‘pig’s ass’ or something.”
Ilona gave him a look as though he had said something unexpectedly clever. “Good thing.”
“It looks cool. Tyler and I talked about getting one. Maybe this winter sometime.”
“Huh,” said Ilona. “You’re not going to get the same one, are you?” When he didn’t answer right away, she said, “Ugh, don’t do that. Just don’t do that. I don’t even think married people should do that. Although I’m not exactly an expert on what married people do, having spent very few of my formative years around any of them.”
“I don’t know. I mean, we hadn’t really decided anything.”
Ilona looked over her shoulder at him. “A tattoo is an individual decision. I mean, there’s nothing more individual than your body, right? Why would you want to mark it up exactly like someone else’s? I mean, what’s the point of that?”
“Is that why you have blue hair?” Ben asked, stung for some reason. “Because you’re such an individual?”
Ilona put down her bucket of plant clippings and came over to the couch. The spray bottle swung in her hands, its nozzle hanging on one finger. “You don’t like my hair?”
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t know why some people have to try so hard to be weird. To be different,” he corrected. The news went to commercials, and for the next six minutes they stared at the TV. Ben pretended to be really focused on writing down what they were and tried to ignore the hot feeling in his head and his chest. He could always leave, he reminded himself. This project could easily be faked.
When the news came back on, Ilona held up the spray bottle like a gun and said, “Why are you trying so hard to be like everyone else?”
“I’m not!” he said. “I mean, I don’t mean that I’m not trying. And if I am, so what? I’m not like everyone else, and I just think that if I could be—I mean, if I were like everyone else—I would be happy with that.”
Ilona narrowed her eyes. “This is about that?” She gestured to her ears. “Jesus. I mean. I thought I was a freak about some stuff, but you are, like, way beyond me. You really think your hearing is what makes you different from everybody else? You think, like, you’re over there in the weirdo category and everyone else, I mean everyone else with no obvious abnormalities, is over here feeling all normal and good about themselves?”
Ben didn’t say anything. She was pissing him off, but at the same time, he wanted—no, he needed—to hear what she was going to say. “You are deluded,” she continued. “We are all freaks. Everyone.” She lay back on the couch. “And the sooner you figure that out, the sooner you can let yourself off the hook for having ears that don’t work exactly right or whatever. Or if it really bothers you that much, don’t wear the things.”
Ben huffed.
“Seriously, you can hear a little, right? So don’t wear them and then see if you feel all perfect and fulfilled inside. Do what you want, but accept it: there is no normal.” She sprayed him with the squirt bottle. A jet of water hit him smack in the middle of his chest. “Bull’s-eye,” said Ilona, and she blew on the top of the bottle like it was a gun.
Ben pulled at the damp T-shirt and sniffed it. Just water. Who the hell was she to talk about normal? “Are you going to put some clothes on?” he finally asked.
“Nope,” Ilona said. “I’m going to stay just like this, with my weird blue hair and my boxer shorts. Deal with it,” she said, and grinned.
Chapter 18
After the evening news they smoked their first bowl. It was a blue-green glass pipe, and Ilona packed it like a pro. Then they giggled their
way through Jeopardy and a celebrity news show, which managed to show about three minutes of content for every five minutes of commercials.
“Who watches this crap?” Ben complained.
“Shut up,” Ilona said. “I want to know Michelle Obama’s trainer’s top ten tips for toned arms.” They both snickered as the impossibly fit blonde woman in the bright red dress tried a series of arm movements while another woman in fitness gear talked her through it. “What do you think aliens would think if they were watching this? I mean, what do you think they would think about our planet?”
“Uh, that we’re shallow and incredibly stupid,” Ben said.
“And that we have impossibly toned arms!”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed, “that’s like the goal of our entire society. The people with the best arm definition get all the money and live like kings.”
Ilona snorted. “That’s good.”
He liked making her laugh. He liked that she was lying on the sofa and that her shirt was riding up a bit, showing her stomach, and she didn’t care. He liked that a few minutes ago she blew her nose really loudly and burped without saying excuse me. “I’m hungry,” he said. “How long did they say for the pizza?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“But that was like an hour ago,” Ben complained.
“Uh-uh, it was like five minutes ago. You can check in the cabinet to see if there’s anything edible.” She pointed behind her head at the tall cabinet at the end of the island. Ben pulled himself off the couch, threw the clipboard with their notes to Ilona, and found the cabinet. An orange and white striped cat sprung out at him when he opened the door and sent his heart racing. Inside there were a few cans of tuna, a large can of baked beans, and a pretzel bag with only a few pretzel sticks swimming in a mound of leftover salt chunks in the bottom of the bag. He shook the bag for the rattling sound.
Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature Page 12