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One Hundred Spaghetti Strings

Page 4

by Jen Nails


  Nina would leap and dance around the house sometimes, but not while an actual trumpet was playing. A couple times she held out her hand for me to join her. It was definitely a kind of movable-to song, lots of notes going around and around in this nice little melody, but I shook my head and she grinned at me. I wanted to do something, though, so I went into the kitchen.

  While I was getting out the big flowered bowl, I was feeling like the trumpet was this stranger filling up the whole house. And when we were at Auntie Gina’s, I had felt like a stranger, even though Auntie Gina was there. As I put lettuce into the bowl, I wondered if anything’d ever start to feel normal again.

  Then there was the secret in the fridge. I was getting out tomatoes and carrots when I saw it. Behind the tortillas and the salsa on the bottom shelf was a six-pack of beer. I closed the door and stood back from the fridge for a second. Now it felt like this was a different person’s kitchen. Well, okay. Just because Auntie Gina didn’t buy beer didn’t mean Dad wasn’t allowed to. Right?

  While I added the already-cooked grilled chicken, Nina kept dancing. I didn’t mean to, but I started chopping carrots on beat with the music. Maybe the only thing to do was to welcome the strangeness in, like Nina was doing.

  Then the trumpet stopped. I looked up, and she was finishing turning and then she kicked up really high, came down, bowed her head, and just stood there breathing. In a minute, Dad’s door clicked open, and he came down the stairs.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” we said.

  “Dad,” said Nina. “You play the trumpet now. That’s new.” She was panting and wiping her forehead.

  “Not quite,” said Dad. “I’m learning the trumpet.” As I shook salt and then pepper onto the salad, I pretended I wasn’t watching him stroll into the kitchen. I made myself really busy pouring dressing as he swung open the fridge and bent down. After a second, he came out with a beer. He twisted the top off, held the bottle out in front of him, and pressed his lips together. Then he took a long, long drink.

  I looked at Nina, and she shrugged. “How long have you been playing?” she asked.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “I played in jazz band in high school. That’s where I met your mom.”

  Everything inside of me lit up, like turning on the Christmas tree lights for the first time after they get strung on the tree.

  “She played piano, and I played trumpet. Badly.” Dad laughed at himself and so we did, too. He was talking about our mom. He hadn’t said the word mom since he got home. Maybe he’d keep talking about her. Telling us more things. Why he left. Why he came back. When he’d come with us to the Place.

  “I stunk at dance when I first started,” said Nina. “Especially ballet. But then I started taking jazz and modern.”

  Then they talked about jazz music, how it’s a theme that gets repeated. How the instruments come in and out and take turns doing their version of the theme. I cut up a loaf of Italian bread and for fun made big, small, and medium pieces: all variations on the theme of bread.

  The more Dad and Nina talked, the more I didn’t have to worry about thinking of anything to say or that they would fight. I sprinkled a few spoonfuls of Parmesan cheese on top of the salad, and then we all sat down to dinner and Dad drank another beer. Then another beer. He told us he’d always wanted to play an instrument and did we ever feel like that? I said no, and Nina said yes.

  “I guess Steffy’s instruments are all in here,” said Dad, gesturing toward the kitchen cabinets. I just nodded, my whole soul filling up. I thought right then that maybe I could ask Dad to write the parent-or-guardian letter for the autobiography assignment. Even though I didn’t know what I’d write about myself yet, maybe he was seeing me better than I could see myself somehow?

  He opened another beer. Me and Nina watched him gulp it down. There was some kind of bell that went off inside of me—like the oven buzzer—that said, “This is wrong.” But he talked to us. And looked us in the eye. And while he opened the next bottle, he described a California night on the beach by himself.

  “So it’s so beautiful there by the Pacific Ocean, you feel like you’re at the end of the Earth and that there’s nothing else to see.” His eyes were really glassy by now. He went on and on about the strength of the waves and how loud they are when they crash. “But standing there, next to all that power, you feel like the smallest person on the Earth, too, somehow. Like you don’t matter.”

  I get it, I know what you mean. I have felt like that ever since Auntie Gina left. I don’t know where to go or who to be.

  After dinner, Nina insisted on loading the dishwasher. Dad sat at the table, twisting the top off the sixth beer. I got up and started bringing dishes to the sink.

  “It’s like, I just always knew I wanted to dance,” Nina was saying. “Like, from when I was little. And not just take lessons or be in recitals, but dance dance. Like be a real dancer.”

  “I remember,” Dad said, “picking you up from ballet.”

  “You do?” Nina asked, her nose wrinkling. She turned off the water and came and sat down at the table with him, even though the dishes weren’t done. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” said Dad. “You were . . . oh God, couldn’t be more than two years old. Steffy wasn’t born yet. You wouldn’t take off the tutu.”

  “Really?” she said. Her eyes got big.

  He nodded. “They had a recital,” he said. “You played a lamb. With ears. We were in the first row. Your mom . . .” He stopped talking and leaned his head to the side. “Your mom.”

  Nina and Dad sat together at the table, both looking down at their hands. They had the same shoulders, and the way that their necks craned forward looked similar. I was tossing silverware into the dishwasher and it was making a clanging noise, but I stopped clanging because they stopped talking.

  They were having this minute together, about Mom, this minute that I couldn’t be in because it was all about before-I-was-born stuff. Pretty quick Nina got up from the table and went upstairs. Then Dad pushed his chair from the table and grabbed the beer that he hadn’t finished. He and the bottle went upstairs. I didn’t think a beer had ever gone up to the bedroom, ever, in the history of our house.

  I filled up the sink with lime dish soap, and the kitchen felt like the kitchen again. I washed the big flowered salad bowl by hand, because I always did that, and I put the rest of the stuff in the dishwasher. I slid the dish-drying thing toward the sink so the water from the bowl that I had left to dry could go down the drain instead of on the floor. Because I always did that.

  Spicy Nina-ritos

  Mexican food was not my best subject—math was. But burritos were Nina’s favorite, and I always liked making someone’s favorite something. We cooked them for dinner before her dance concert. They really were easy: you just got a packet from the store called Taco Seasoning and dumped it into a pan with meat. I usually added a pinch of pepper to the meat, too, because everyone liked them spicy. Then you got your toppings and fillings all cut up and set them all up like a buffet so people could have fun serving themselves. I dumped tortilla chips in a bowl, too, for salsa dunking.

  There was all this excitement bouncing around the kitchen because 1) tonight Nina would dance her first solo, and 2) it was almost Thanksgiving break, and 3) it was starting to feel like a “we” in our house instead of an “us” and a “him.”

  “All right if I take a couple of these for my lunch tomorrow?” asked Dad.

  “Sure. You can put them in your briefcase,” I said.

  “Briefcase?”

  “That briefcase-y thing you have.”

  “That briefcase-y thing is a trumpet case,” Dad said.

  “Oh,” said Nina, “yeah.”

  At the recital, she turned and leaped so seriously and gracefully, and there was such a sad look on her face that went with the music, I almost didn’t realize it was her. Up there on the stage, she was standout good. All the girls could do the moves, but she was act
ing while she was dancing, and I was wishing I’d brought tissues. I thought I caught Nina looking right at Dad a couple times from the stage when she danced.

  Auntie Gina and Harry had met us there, and they sat on one side of me in the theater and Dad sat on the other. This was the first time all of us went somewhere together, and there was too much in me then, with those two sides of me coming together, and I couldn’t stop fidgeting with the armrest.

  After the concert, we got ice cream at Uncle Louie’s with Nina’s dance friend Denise and her mom. The sun had just set, and there was a breeze and a pink sky. We all sat at these little round tables outside, and I got butter pecan with caramel sauce. Everybody complimented Nina on her solo.

  “Oh my gosh,” she said. “I totally messed up.” That was Nina. Downplaying that she had been so perfect and good in the recital. She and Denise looked like famous actresses with their stage makeup still on, and even though I was only in an orange sweater and jeans, I felt fancy just being with them.

  “Steffy,” Auntie Gina said, taking two sheets that she’d printed from a website out of her purse, “you can do this.” It was a Crock-Pot turkey dinner recipe. I nodded. I really felt like I could. She put her hand on my hand.

  “I’m gonna miss you two next week. So much.” She swallowed, and her eyes watered. She licked her chocolate-and-peanut-butter scoop. A gush of cold air came out of Uncle Louie’s as customers left the shop with their cones.

  “This is all so hard, isn’t it?” she said to me. Nina and Denise and her mom were taking a walk down the block with their cones. Harry and Dad were talking at another small table nearby.

  Auntie Gina said, “Everything’s so different. I don’t even know how it all happened.” She wiped her nose. “Just feels like yesterday me, you, and Nina were sitting on my bed setting up little towns from those little punch-out books, remember?”

  “Yeah, and acting out the Point Philips family saga,” I said. We laughed at the soap opera we once made up with the paper doll people. But mixed with the laughing, there was this pulling-down feeling in me. Thanksgiving was one more week away. It would be the first big holiday that I could remember that I wouldn’t spend with Auntie Gina. The thing was that she had been a mom, a friend, and the funnest babysitter all wrapped into one, like a burrito with all my very favorite fillings inside. It did feel to me like our dad was getting to know us better, and even liking us, and that was so, so good. But it looked like I would never, ever get to have all those parts of Auntie Gina in my life again.

  Iced Caramellatos and Bubble Tape

  Greensboro Four always did a fun day of school the day before Thanksgiving. There were no classes, just activities and parties. This year fifth grade did this big thing called “Have You Ever . . . ?” where our whole fifth-grade class got into a giant circle in the gym. They turned most of the lights off, and our teachers stood in the middle of us. Me and Lisa held hands next to each other and so did other sets of friends, and everyone had a hard time calming down and getting quiet. Joe Glorioso had his hands cupped around his mouth, and while turning around in a slow circle he kept saying, “Tone it down. Tone it down. Tone it down,” in a loud monotone.

  Once we started the game it went like this: a teacher would read a sentence, and then if what they said was true about you, you stepped forward, into the middle of the circle.

  They started out by saying things like “I have seen a movie in the last six months” and “I have listened to a song I like in the last few days.” Everybody pretty much stepped forward for those. But the more the game went on, the harder it got. They said, “I have cheated on a test this year.” And at first no one stepped forward, and then lots of people stepped forward. And then they said, “I have felt stressed this year.” And lots of people stepped forward. Me included. They said, “I have talked to my friends about feeling stressed.” I stepped forward on that one, and Lisa stepped forward, too, and we squeezed hands. I liked that we were kind of in the dark.

  Then they got to saying things like “I feel like I can talk to my parents about anything.” And hardly anyone stepped forward. I was glad that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t. And when they said the next thing, “I feel like my parents know exactly who I am,” I was glad that I wasn’t the only one who stayed still. By far.

  At the end of the day, everyone went to their last-period class, which for me was of course English. And of course Mrs. Ashton reminded us about the autobiography.

  She said, “I noticed that during this morning’s activity in the gym, you were prompted to consider whether or not you think that your parents know who you really are. I want you to write about that now.”

  Even though I was mad at Auntie Gina for going to New York this year, I had to admit that she knew who I was, for sure. But Dad was knowing me better now, too. Thinking about the letter, I was all torn about it. At least after playing the game this morning, though, it seemed like I wasn’t the only one in my class who was having trouble with it.

  Instead of writing any of that down in my notebook, I just made the list of groceries that me and Nina were getting at the Harris Teeter later. I knew them all by heart already, from the printout Auntie Gina gave me, but for some reason it felt good to write them down, too, in my own handwriting. I never liked writing very much, but maybe Mrs. Ashton was right about something: once this year she said something like “Seeing the jumbles in your head come out on a piece of paper could help you make sense of what was going on up there.” Even if the jumbles were in the form of a Thanksgiving dinner list.

  When we hopped off the Number 7 bus late that afternoon and headed across the street to the Harris Teeter, I was really starting to get excited about tomorrow. If I thought I might have been a little sad to come Thanksgiving shopping without Auntie Gina or if I might have wished it were Dad taking me, I turned out to be wrong. It ended up being fun with just me and Nina. Ever since the night with the trumpet, she’d been in a good mood.

  Plus, it was the Harris Teeter, and besides being fun to say (Auntie Gina used to call it the Harris Tooty-toot-tooter), it’s just one of the best places ever. The gush of air-conditioning when you press where it said PUSH on the front door. The perfumy smell from the bouquets up front, the scent of ground coffee from the java station. Mmmm.

  Nina insisted that we stop for iced caramellatos. I’d had that exact thought right before she said it. We were by ourselves, after all, so no one could say no, you don’t need a froofy coffee drink. Yes, we did.

  We passed the guy spritzing the apples in Fruits and Vegetables and we got our potatoes. In Canned Goods we picked up the turkey stock, and in Meat we got the turkey. I guessed it was hard to pick out a good turkey because there were all these grown-ups there, lifting up turkeys and looking at them and then putting them back and getting another turkey to lift up and put back. I felt like there was a secret that I didn’t know to picking out the very best one. I looked at Nina and shrugged.

  “This looks good,” she said, pointing. “It says ‘turkey’ on it, right? And it will fit in the Crock-Pot.” Together we lifted one turkey into our basket.

  If Auntie Gina had been with us, she would’ve said not to push the basket while kind of running down the dairy aisle for whipped cream, but no grown-ups were with us, so we ran. We also grabbed a carton of milk because we needed a splash for the mashed potatoes. When we got to the checkout, of course there was all that candy and gum that Auntie Gina always said no to.

  “Gum?” Me and Nina looked up at each other, and both said it at the same time, and then we couldn’t stop giggling for anything. We chose grape Bubble Tape. And I threw in a Snickers for Dad. We paid with the money he left us, and we got the giggles when we tried to carry all our stuff outside. Nina was managing the bag with the turkey in it plus one other bag, and I had three bags with the rest of the stuff. We were making each other laugh because we were walking all funny because it was all so heavy. There were a couple ladies from church chatting up by where you leave
the baskets. You could tell they wanted to say something like “calm down, girls,” but they didn’t.

  The bus seemed overloaded with all the grocery bag people on board, and it pulled away slowly, with everybody jabbering to each other. A big turkey bus with all the travelers as stuffing. Maybe for the first time since Dad moved in I was officially happy. School was out for four whole days, Dad and Nina liked each other now, and as my sister unwound just the right length of Bubble Tape for me, I was realizing that there was more than one person who really knew me in my life. That maybe I could turn in a couple letters instead of just one.

  Crock-Pot Thanksgiving with the Blue-Stained Hand Guys and Cigarette Carol

  Okay, this was what I did. I washed the turkey with cold water. But I dropped it, and it blanged into the side of the sink and I felt bad. Then, as per Auntie Gina’s instructions, I felt around in the neck for these little gross-out bags of innards that she said not to cook in the turkey. Then I put the bird in the fridge overnight.

  I got us up early on Thanksgiving Day. We figured out we could actually angle the TV that sits in the living room so we could watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade while we worked in the kitchen. Nina put frozen waffles in the toaster, and then she helped me heft the turkey up into the Crock-Pot.

  Then came Auntie Gina’s stuffing recipe. You cooked the chopped onion and celery in butter, then poured that into a big bowl and mixed it with bread cubes and seasonings. We added water and tossed it like a salad. Once that was ready, I packed it inside the turkey and pressed leftover bits onto the skin, too. Then Nina poured on the turkey stock.

  Santa was floating down the street in the parade when Dad came downstairs. The turkey dinner was simmering away in the Crock-Pot.

  “Whoa,” he said when he saw all the stuff everywhere.

  “It’s all Steffy,” said Nina.

 

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