They did made Jesse take Family Living; he showed me his egg. Sometimes you have to wonder who decides this stuff.
“I was thinking maybe I’d get a hollow one,” he told us at lunch. “I think my mom has some plastic ones left over from my brother and sister’s baskets last Easter. I could get one of those little corn snakes they sell in pet stores and put it in there, and let it hatch when Ms. Vinson comes around to check them.”
“Oh my God, that would be totally cool.” I stared at him with admiration—you have to like a mind like that. “You have totally got to do it.”
“Nah,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It would have been funny when I was seventeen,” he said.
“Um.” So now he thought I was immature. “So, when you’re nineteen, you just think stuff like that up, but you don’t actually do it?”
“Life is calmer that way.”
Lily said, “When my dad was in college, he put a frog in a salad bowl at a fraternity party.”
Jesse snorted.
“My mom yelled at him and put the frog in her purse and took it back to the river. That’s how they met.”
“I’ve got to tell Ben,” I said. “That’s a ‘meet cute’ if I ever heard one.” Movie people are always trying to think up adorable ways to get their romantic characters together.
“Be my guest,” Lily said. I couldn’t help thinking about whatever it was my mom didn’t want him to use. It’s bound to be worse than frogs in the salad.
The bell rang and I groaned; Driver’s Ed right after lunch is not a great idea. Mr. Howser always starts us off with a gruesome car wreck video to get us in the right frame of mind.
“Before next week, I have to drive two hours with Mom or Ben,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Driving with Lily doesn’t count—it has to be with an adult.”
“I’ll take you out,” Jesse said to me. “The ‘adult’ just has to be eighteen. I remember. We can take my egg for a ride.”
“Both of us?” I asked.
“Sure. I can borrow my mom’s car. It’s an automatic. The only thing I can’t handle with the damn leg is a stick. How about it, Rudolph?”
“You bet,” Lily said. “My dad talks about our dependence on fossil fuels the whole time I’m driving. I don’t know why he doesn’t just sign off the hours, but he’s overly honest about things like this.”
Jesse nodded. “Outgrew his frog period. It happens.”
So we all went driving on Saturday and had such a blast. We went out to the East End where there isn’t much traffic, and Jesse handed the car over to me. I was a little nervous because it was his mom’s car and what if I ran it into a tree?
“Want some music?” he said while I put it in gear.
“Yeah.”
He turned the radio on and we all sang along to everything while I drove.
I did all right, though, and when we came to where somebody must have been having a party because there were lots of cars parked along both sides of the street, Jesse insisted I practice parallel parking.
“She’s awful at it,” Lily said, leaning between us from the back seat. “And we don’t know these people.”
“All the more reason to practice on them,” Jesse said. He showed me how to line the car up with the car in front of my space, and then just when to cut the wheel back over, and I actually got it in the spot without backing into anybody.
“Atta girl!”
He had me do it twice more until he decided I had the hang of it. After that we drove all over the East End, and Lily got her driving time in too, and we ended up going for pizza at Delmenico’s. Lily and I had decided beforehand that we would take Jesse out to thank him, and we weren’t going to let him pay for any of it.
We started to sit at our usual table at the front window, but Jesse pointed toward a booth in the back.
“What do you like?” I asked him when we’d settled in.
“Pizza.” He grinned.
So we ordered our usual garbage pizza with everything on it, and a pitcher of root beer, which, it turns out, Jesse shares my secret passion for. Lily doesn’t care what she has to drink as long as she gets pizza. Her parents are vegetarians—they don’t insist on Lily being one, but pepperoni and sausage are not household staples for her.
“Oh my God this is good.” Lily took a huge bite and pinched the cheese strings off with her fingers.
“You guys are the most,” Jesse said. “I can’t get over it, you taking me out for pizza.”
He sounded like he thought we were cute, and maybe about five, but I didn’t care.
“Nobody ever took you out for pizza before?” Lily asked.
“Not for a long time,” Jesse said. He looked sad. His face can change in a heartbeat, so that he looks like somebody else.
“You’ve been neglected,” Lily told him. “We’ll adopt you.”
I like adopting Jesse. He’s funny and he knows stuff, not just because he’s older, but stuff that no one at school is interested in. Like, for instance, why the oaks look like something might be living in them.
We were working on decorations for Homecoming out of leaves and papier maché. He was making a face out of his leaves, sticking them on wet papier maché and smoothing them down so it looked like a tree person’s face.
“That’s way cool,” I said.
“He’s the Green Man,” Jesse said. “He’s really old. He’s from Europe, but I imagine he lives here, too.”
“What does he do?” I asked. “Live in the woods?”
“He is the woods. He’s one of those pagan things the church spent a lot of time stamping out, and then they just gave up and turned him into the harvest festival.”
Around here there are lots of overlapping layers of belief like that. This time of year, the people from Mexico go to the cemeteries right after Halloween and clean up the graves and put marigolds and candles on them, then they have a picnic and tell their ancestors the news. They call it El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The church calendar calls it All Souls Day. Grandpa Joe says it’s because the Aztecs believed death and life were really part of the same thing, and that this is the time of the year when the borders between the worlds are thin. The Church adapted that, the same way it made room for Easter eggs and Christmas trees. People make altars on the Day of the Dead, and put all the stuff their dead relatives liked to eat and drink on them. They make skeleton decorations and dress them up, and if you’re a little kid you get a sugar skull with your name on it, just like you would a chocolate Easter egg.
“Got a date for Homecoming?” Jesse asked me, smoothing a leaf onto the Green Man’s nose. Homecoming is on Halloween weekend.
“Nah. I’m too weird.”
“You aren’t weird,” he said encouragingly. “You’re artsy.”
“Are you gonna go?” It was nice that he thought I was artsy.
“Can’t dance,” he said. “And I’m weirder than you are.”
“I guess I could go with Lily,” I said. “Lots of girls go stag. But that felt kind of stupid in middle school, so I think it would feel double stupid here.”
“And you’re too old to trick-or-treat.” He shook his head and looked sympathetic.
“Yeah. Lily and I went last year, but we got a lot of dirty looks.”
“Want to come with me, to take my little brother and sister?”
“Is this the booby prize? Are you feeling sorry for me?” I asked.
“Nope. I just don’t want to take the little monsters by myself.”
“Are you going to wear a costume?”
“No, but you can.”
I grinned at him. “What kind of get-up would embarrass you the most?”
“Can’t embarrass me.” Jesse looked like he was daring me to try.
“Can Lily come too?” It wasn’t fair to abandon her on Halloween.
“Reindeer? Sure.”
5
I spent some time trying to think up a good costume, and finally set
tled on La Llorona, who is a famous weeping woman in Mexican folklore. She wears a long black dress and mantilla, and drowned either her children or her husband in the river. Every night she goes back to the river, and either looks for them or drowns them again. There are a lot of variants in folklore.
“ ‘Long Black Veil,’ very cool,” Jesse said when we knocked on his door, adding yet another variant to the possibilities. Lily had on reindeer antlers. “This is Angie and Rudolph, guys,” he said to the two little kids who were waiting with their plastic pumpkins. “Angie and Lily, this is my mom and dad.”
His parents shook hands with us very formally and his mom smiled. “It’s nice of you to help Jesse take the little ones out.” She tugged at Jesse’s pant leg where it was bunched over the artificial leg. “You won’t walk too far?”
“He’ll be fine,” his dad said. “He’s supposed to walk.”
His mom shot him a look. “In your judgment. Which I have learned not to trust as blindly as I used to.”
“Come on, guys.” Jesse shooed the little ones out the door. They had masks on but I assumed Batman was his brother and the princess with the wings was his sister. “I hate it when they do that,” he said.
Lily gave him an appraising look. I’d told her what Mom had said about Jesse’s dad signing him up. “Are you the oldest?”
“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “They had a kid after me, but he had one of those genetic diseases and he died when he was a baby.”
“Oh man, I’m sorry,” Lily said.
I wondered how much awfulness one family could take. His mom might have had her limit.
Jesse said, “They had a lot of testing before these two. That’s Michael under there, and this is Sarah.”
“I’m Batman,” Michael said.
“And I’m Princess Sarah.”
“Good wings,” Lily said. “I’ll trade you for my antlers.”
“Princesses don’t have antlers. Except unicorn princesses.”
A lot of kids were out in the first dark, escorted by parents and older sisters, their flashlights making little circles of gold light. Most of the houses had their porch lights on, so the kids were going to get a good haul.
“Come on, guys. Loot,” Lily said, beckoning Michael and Sarah toward the first house.
“Mom’s had a rough time,” Jesse told me while they went up to the door. “I wish she wouldn’t snipe at Dad, though. The army was my idea.”
“I guess she can’t snipe at you,” I said.
Michael and Sarah came bouncing back down the walk and we went on to the next house. Lily was prancing and making what were supposed to be reindeer noises. Jesse chuckled. “She’s really getting into it.”
I saw that he wasn’t walking as fast as Lily and the kids, so I slowed down to match my pace to his. He noticed, and grimaced. “Mom’s right. The leg hurts me, but I hate it when she fusses.”
I thought it was hard to tell when being nice stopped and fussing started. And how much was it okay to talk about it? “Will it get better?” I asked. “I mean, will you get to where it doesn’t hurt?”
“Supposedly. I’m supposed to get another one that’s even more high tech. I already feel like a robot.”
“High tech?”
Jesse stopped and pulled up his pants leg. I don’t know what I was expecting. One of those pink plastic legs, I guess. This one ended in a real-looking foot—I could see it under the cuff of his sock—but the rest of it was made of metal and looked like it could take off on its own.
“I can get one that’ll let me run marathons. Or play tennis. Or snowboard,” he said. “If I did any of those things.”
“You might.”
“There’s a computer in the knee. You tap your toe three times or whatever, and it changes modes. My counselor at the vet center told me about it. It’s called a C-Leg.” He let his pants leg fall as Lily and the kids came running back.
“Look! We got Snickers!” They took off again.
By the time we’d crisscrossed the neighborhood, their pumpkins were overflowing. Lily insisted we get in her car and go over to the Arbolada, where she said the candy was even better.
“Mom won’t let them eat this much candy as it is,” Jesse said.
“We can take it to the battered women’s shelter tomorrow,” Lily said. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
Batman and the princess were jumping up and down, so he said okay. Lily had extra bags in the car (Lily is always prepared) and we drove across the valley. The Arbolada is an old neighborhood full of big oaks and winding streets with no sidewalks, but no one ever drives very fast, so it’s okay. We could see lots more flashlights and hear shrieks and laughing. Lily parked the Volvo next to the old cemetery. It’s a little scruffy-looking, with wrought iron fences around it and tall marble angels and obelisks. There are even Civil War veterans buried in it. The little kids grabbed Jesse’s hands, one each, and power-walked on past it.
“Good choice,” I said.
“Adds to the ambience,” Lily said. “You want them to have the full experience.”
The white stones looked shiny and ghostly in the moonlight. I wondered if I had any ancestors in that cemetery. Lots of people in the valley are descended from the old Spanish land grant families, like Wuffie, who was a Camarillo. I thought maybe this year I should come out with a vase full of marigolds and some spray cleaner and see if there are any Camarillos there. Wuffie probably wouldn’t approve—she thinks celebrating the Day of the Dead is morbid and/or sort of countrified—but my father might have been from Mexico, or maybe his parents were. I feel entitled to that much of him, at least.
Once we were past the cemetery, Michael and Sarah let go of Jesse and followed Lily, who said she knew where the best houses were. Jesse and I ended up sitting on a rock at the end of someone’s driveway, waiting for them. I could tell the leg was hurting him but he wasn’t going to say anything else about it, so I developed a blister on my foot. I don’t think he believed me, though.
But I could see the tension in his jaw loosen up when we sat down and he stuck his bad leg out in front of him. “You look nice in that veil,” he said. “It suits you.”
“It makes me feel like Zorro’s girlfriend.”
He reached over and tucked it around my chin, arranging the folds. “Nah. Duchess of Alba.”
“Who?”
“By Goya. Famous painting. She reminds me of you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He smiled at me. “She’s always been my favorite.”
I can absolutely get into the idea of looking like a famous painting.
After a while, Lily and the kids came back with their bags overflowing. Jesse looked sort of horrified—there was enough candy to keep two little kids sick for a month—but Lily, it turns out, had already negotiated the deal with them and they were all pleased with themselves for collecting candy for the shelter. We sat in Lily’s car while they dumped it all out onto the back seat and graded it, putting their favorite stuff back into the pumpkins. They were half asleep and sticky by the time we dropped them off.
“Thanks, you two,” Jesse said as he hauled them out and put the princess over his shoulder. “’Night, Rudolph. ’Night, Duchess.”
Lily raised an eyebrow, and I said, “Famous painting.” A little smugly, I expect.
“Goya,” Jesse said. “You should look her up.”
So I did, the next day after school. She actually does look kind of like me, and she definitely has my hair. I also looked up the C-Leg online. The manufacturer’s website has a picture of the leg, which looks like something you’d see on the cover of a science fiction paperback. It said the C-Leg is “ideal for people who currently are or have the potential to be unlimited community ambulators.” Only a company that made something like computerized legs would think up a phrase like “community ambulator” to describe someone who wants to get up and walk around.
Our whole house is wireless—Ben’s a computer nerd—so I took
my laptop into his study to show him. His scripts have people getting blown up all the time, and I thought he might know about things like the C-Leg. He was clicking away at his keyboard, but he turned around and smiled when I came in. He’s been acting strange ever since he and Mom had the fight about picking me up, and I wonder if maybe he isn’t as unconcerned about it all as he’s been acting.
“So why do you want to know about this?” he asked, when I showed him the screen.
“Jesse says he might get one. I was just trying to picture what it would be like to have to walk around on something like that.”
“Oh.” Ben gave me a funny look. “How old is Jesse?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s nineteen maybe. Too young to have to wear something like that.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. I hadn’t thought much about the war really until lately, but now the whole idea of it was making me furious.
“Are you upset about war or about Jesse?”
I wasn’t really sure. About people getting blown up, I suppose. That’s real, and pieces of them really come off, not like in Ben’s movies where it’s rubber and fake blood. And there are little kids, like Michael and Sarah, getting blown up too. “It’s just not right,” I said. “Why do we have to do that to each other?”
Ben nodded. “Oh, Angelfish. It’s pretty painful when you get a social conscience, isn’t it?”
He couldn’t tell me much about the C-Leg though. “Pretty much everything in movies is made up,” he said. “If the technology we need doesn’t actually exist, we just lie.”
After dinner, Mom called me up. “Angie, honey …” I could tell she was using her working-up-to-something-in-a-casual-fashion voice. “Did you have fun last night? Trick-or-treating?”
“Yeah. And I’m not eating a bunch of candy.”
“Darling, I was not calling you to quiz you on your candy consumption.”
“Jesse’s little brother and sister got all the candy. Well, maybe I stole a Heath bar, but that’s all.”
“Jesse. Mmmm. How old is Jesse Francis?”
“Mom, Ben asked me that. And you already know, anyway.”
“Well, I … do you think maybe he’s a little old?”
What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Page 4