by Laura Ruby
“Catch animals that don’t want to be caught?”
“Enough,” she says.
“Isn’t it kind of dangerous?”
She eyes me as if we’re talking about something other than what we’re talking about. “Somebody has to do it.”
Outside the cat room, Lucinda hands me one of those lint rollers so I can get the cat hair off my shorts and T-shirt. It doesn’t work. We visit some of the odder denizens of the shelter—some floppy-eared rabbits, guinea pigs, one potbellied pig named Sherlock Holmes. There’s a cockatiel named Charlotte, after the spider.
“Don’t worry, she’s pretty friendly,” says Lucinda.
This I can handle. I feed Charlotte some seeds and she warms up to me. Delicately she dances up my arm and perches on my shoulder. Soon she’s nibbling on my ear.
“I think she likes you,” says Lucinda.
“Surprised?” I say.
I think she’s going to say no, she’s not surprised, she’s never surprised, but she says, “You know birds?”
“I have a bird,” I say. “An African gray. Her name is Tippi Hedren. She was my mom’s bird.”
“Tippi Hedren. That sounds familiar.”
I nod. “Mom loves movies, especially Hitchcock. But she never really got The Birds. Ever see The Birds?”
“No, not the whole thing. I know what it’s about, though.”
“Well, Mom never liked it. She thought it was anti-climactic. Hated Marnie, too. She thought it would be funny to name her bird after the actress who starred in both movies. And then she taught Tippi all these phrases from that movie and some others.”
“How is your mom?”
“Fine. Happy down in Florida. She’s on—”
“TV, I know.”
“Yeah. Anyway, she lives down there with some freeze-dried creep. I guess she’ll marry him. Or maybe she won’t. Whatever.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I say. “We’re not.”
Lucinda waits as if I’m going to say something more about this, which I absolutely won’t. She takes Charlotte from my shoulder and puts her back in her cage. Then she leads me over to another cage that looks empty.
“Look,” she says, pointing to an odd pouch dangling from the top of the cage. I peer into it. Two huge eyes peer out.
“What the hell is that?”
“The sugar gliders Bonnie was talking about up at the front desk. They’re marsupials.” She opens the cage and reaches into the pouch, pulling out this freaky chipmunk-mouse-monkey thing with a long tail and a stripe down its back. There’s a smaller chipmunk-mouse-monkey thing clinging to the bigger one. Lucinda checks the swinging pouch. “One more baby in there.” She puts the sugar glider on her shoulder and the chipmunk-mouse-monkey thing promptly pees on her.
“Nice,” I say.
“I didn’t like this shirt anyway,” says Lucinda. She pets the animals. “Hello, there. Aren’t you sweet?” She glances up at me with her frost-colored eyes. “So what do you want to call them? All you have to do is pick some character names from books. It should be a book that you love, though.”
“I don’t love any books,” I tell her.
“Come on. Not one? Not even the one you were named after?”
“I was named after a book?”
“Edward Rochester? From Jane Eyre?”
“That’s a movie. Mom made me watch it. The only reason the experience didn’t kill me was because Orson Welles was in it.”
“Who’s that?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
She’s not listening. “You should read Jane Eyre sometime. But there has to be a book you love. How about from when you were a little kid?”
“Well,” I say, thinking, “there was one book. My mom read it to me when I was, like, eight or something. It was called The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm.”
“Don’t know it.”
“I liked it because it was set maybe two hundred years from now in Zimbabwe. It was about three kids, the kids of some very important general, who escape their dad’s house only to fall into the hands of some crazy people. Detectives are hired to find them—the Eye, the Ear, and the Arm. All of them have special powers because they were exposed to radiation or nuclear waste or something. Anyway, the Eye has super-enhanced vision. The Ear has one ear as big as an elephant’s and has supersensitive hearing. The Arm has long, spidery arms and legs and his special power is that he can feel all the emotions other people feel. He feels them so much it hurts him.”
“Huh,” says Lucinda. “Sounds interesting.”
“It was good. The last book I remember really loving. Maybe because you can’t love a story as much as you can when you’re little. It’s different when you get older.”
Lucinda strokes the biggest sugar glider, whose nose twitches. “Maybe Mom is the Arm. Moms are always Arms.”
I grunt. “Some, anyway.”
We didn’t do more than walk some dogs, pet some cats, and get scratched, hissed at, and peed on, but I’m exhausted, like the Arm when he felt too much. I can smell the sugar glider on Lucinda, this pungent musky scent that makes my nose sting. When we get back to Lucinda’s car, she opens the trunk and pulls out a bag.
“I have another confession to make,” she says as she rummages in the bag.
“What?”
“You remember when we were at Camp Arrowhead? Those two weeks we were meeting in the woods next to the locker room?”
“How could I forget?” I try to touch her arm and she swats at my hand.
“Remember that I got really mad at you for being such a slut?”
“I was not being a slut,” I say.
“Sure you were. But my point is that I got mad at you for kissing other girls, but I was kissing another boy.”
“What do you mean? What other boy?”
“His name was Pete somebody. I was meeting him behind the baseball field in the morning, you in the afternoon.”
“I can’t believe you!” I say. And I really can’t.
She laughs. “Surprise.”
“You said I was a dog!”
Her eyes flick to my face. “Are you saying you’re not?”
I open my mouth to argue but can’t quite bring myself to do it. Lucinda was kissing someone else that whole time? How did I not know? And why wouldn’t she have told me that last day in the trees, if only to make me feel worse? That’s what most girls would have done.
Like a guy, Lucinda reaches behind her neck with both hands and tugs the stained shirt over her head. For a few seconds, I see the thrust of her ribs against her milky skin and that huge, ugly contraption of a sports bra before she pulls a fresh shirt down over her body.
I nearly cry.
“Lucinda?”
She’s putting the bag back in the trunk. “What?”
“Can you do that again?”
“Oh, shut up.”
I take a step closer. “Make me.”
She turns and puts a hand on my chest, right where she hit me with the tennis ball. Then her other hand is curling in my hair and she is kissing me and killing me with her warm pear tongue and I am definitely shutting up.
Some Like It Hot
After I leave Lucinda, I’m too wired to go home. It’s like the sheer voltage of her has short-circuited my brain and I’ve been left drooling and useless.
So, I roll down the windows and drive. The sun is warm, but the wind still has a little kick. I don’t have any particular destination in mind. I loop through the developments, wind around blocks, rev impatiently at stoplights. I’m heading down Alps Road when, in the distance, I see the top of a Ferris wheel. One of the elementary schools must be having an end-of-year fund-raiser and has brought in a carnival. Though it’s only five in the afternoon and the sun will hang around for another four hours, the rides sparkle and beckon. I pull into the parking lot.
I grab my video camera and get out of the car. The air is thick with the smell of hot dogs and cotton candy cut
with beer. I push my way through packs of kids. I stop at the ticket booth.
“How much for the Ferris wheel?” I ask the pimply kid manning the booth.
“Seven tickets for the wheel.”
“Okay, I’ll take seven tickets.”
He stares at me blankly. “You can only buy packs of ten,” he says, as if this is obvious. I aim the camera at him and turn it on.
“What?” I say.
He blinks at the camera, nervously picking at a pimple on his forehead. “You can only buy packs of ten,” he says again. I like this guy. I will have Rory put one of those black lines over his eyes when we edit so we don’t need permission.
“Ten, huh?” I say.
“What’s the camera for?”
“Movies.” I pay for the tickets and head for the wheel. There’s no line. Everyone’s waiting to ride the teacups or the ship or the rotor—the vomit machines. The attendant, a tattooed and leather-vested reject from a biker gang, locks me into my own metal car. It swings gently as the wheel begins to turn, just enough to make the ride feel a little dangerous, like I could be an article in the next day’s newspaper if I don’t stay centered in my seat.
I focus the camera on my own feet, then on the people below, all of them screened behind the blue, rusty grid. Packs of kids pinball from one ride to another. Groups of older kids mill, checking out the clusters of girls dotting the landscape. You can’t blame them. The girls are so beautiful in their tank tops and shorts and artfully messy hair. They’re fourteen and fifteen and whateverteen. They sense the summer is coming. Life is coming. Anything can happen. I feel like that, too. I zoom in on the clusters of girls, mouthing the name Lucinda.
I ride the Ferris wheel for a half hour, watching the moms herd their young, watching the boys and girls watch each other, till the attendant finally makes me get off. He eyes my camera suspiciously. “You weren’t taking any weird videos, were you?”
“Depends on what you mean by weird,” I say. I hold up the camera and tell him to smile. He does, showing me his gold tooth.
Weird.
Someone’s selling ears of hot buttered corn at the carnival. I buy two, have them wrapped in waxed paper and foil, and take them home. I find Tippi Hedren hanging upside down in her cage singing “Some Like It Hot.” She nearly loses all her feathers when she sees the corn I’ve brought her.
“Long yellow! Long yellow!” she shrieks. I suspend one of the ears of corn from the bars of her cage by the husk, tying it in a knot. She alights on the cob, cooing as she nibbles.
I unwrap my corn and sit at my computer. It chirps like it recognizes me. Automatically I flip to the MTV site and scroll. The Tin Man is still at it, but I’m on a Ferris wheel high above it all. I don’t care what he says, I don’t care who he is, I don’t care if he’s a he. I’m hanging from a cloud, so high that the flying monkeys can’t ever find me.
A new instant message pops up on my screen.
$ugar
Sugar loves honey, sugar loves honey. I rack my brains. Nothing.
Lucinda?
Rear*Window13: Hey.
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Cameron Diaz?
Sugar sends a MySpace link. I click on it. It’s the groupie, the one who pissed Gina off. Her name, it turns out, is Sonya. In her picture she’s biting her lip. Next to the picture it says, Hotter than you. And she is.
I type:
Rear*Window13: Much better than Cameron. What’s up?
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Surprised. I don’t think I was very friendly at the end of the shoot.
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Good. I don’t like pissing off the ladies.
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Where’d you hear that?
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Now?
$ugar
I hesitate, my fingers hovering over the keys. I must have taken too long because she types:
$ugar
I shouldn’t.
I flip to her page and click on Pics.
I stare. And stare some more. I can’t believe she put these up. And I’m thinking that HELL YES she’s coming over RIGHT NOW when I see her face.
Great face.
Wrong face.
Rear*Window13: Love the pics, but it’s not a great time. Parents.
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Sorry, Sugar.
$ugar
Rear*Window13: Talk to you later.
$ugar
Now I feel like I’m sitting on an anthill. I search MySpace and Facebook and the whole web to see if I can find a site for Lucinda. No luck. I think about her taking off her shirt, about her kissing me, about her doing all sorts of things that I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind agreeing to and the ants do a hard march through my blood vessels. I lunge for my bed and chomp into my pillow, my own heartbeat taking me down.
Later I let Tippi Hedren demolish most of her corn before I pull her from the cage to wander around the house. I feel old, but not in the bad way, in the adult way. In the I-can-go-to-the-beach-anytime-I-damn-well-please way. Like every other red-blooded American old person, I grab a beer and crash out in front of the TV. Raising Arizona, an old Coen Brothers movie, is playing on a cable station and I say the dialogue along with the characters: “You take that diaper off your head and put it back on your sister!” and, “Gimme that baby, you warthog from hell!” After Raising Arizona, I find a station playing Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart as a cop with a fear of heights who’s in love with a woman pretending to be someone else. Kim Novak plays the woman. Hitchcock really loved his blondes. Can’t blame him.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I know, Tippi’s squawking something about San Francisco and my dad’s looming over me.
“Hi,” I say.
“What’s with the beer?” he says.
“I fell asleep before I drank any.”
“You know I don’t like you drinking.”
“I know,” I say.
“So why did you?”
You gotta love parents. They always ask questions that they (a) know the answers to or (b) have no reasonable answers.
“I took the beer because the little voices in my head said so,” I say.
“You’re not funny.”
“Oh, but I am.”
Dad sits next to me, and Tippi climbs up his arm to his shoulder. He pets her gently and she nudges his fingers with her beak. “Your mom loved this bird.”
I suddenly realize that Mom hasn’t called me back yet about MTV. “Yeah, she loved it so much she left it here.”
“I remember when we got it. We were in a pet store. Terrible place. Sad, sickly puppies everywhere. Your mother asked to speak to the manager. She wanted to sue. She wanted to have it shut down.”
I’ve heard this story a million times. “I know, Dad.”
“But before the manager could come to the desk, a funny little bird started to talk to her. It said, ‘Hello, lady!’ I remember that clear as day. ‘Hello, lady.’ Your mother was so surprised.”
“Surprised to be called a lady?”
“How much beer did you drink?”
“Five cases, give or take.”
“So, the funny little bird says, ‘Hello, lady!’ and your mother tells me that it’s a line from one of her favorite movies, The Princess Bride. Fezzik the giant says it to Princess Buttercup at the very end.”
“I’ve seen the movie.” I don’t mention that it’s also one of my favorites. But then I don’t have to, because my father knows this already. It’s one of
his favorites, too. He always said that mom looked like Robin Wright Penn, who starred as Buttercup in the movie. Nobody else saw the resemblance, but then I guess it doesn’t matter much if they did or they didn’t. Dad swore by it.
“Anyway, the bird was so cute that your mother forgot all about suing the place and bought the bird instead.”
“I have to get to San Francisco!” Tippi chirps.
“Too bad Mom had to get to Miami.”
Dad goes silent and for a second I feel bad for ruining his story. He loves to tell this story; he loves to talk about the early years with Mom. But I’m annoyed. She should have called me back. She should have been the first one to congratulate me.
All this talking about Mom is ruining my good Lucinda buzz. I change the subject. “How was work?”
“Super,” he says in that dry way he has so that people don’t know if he’s serious or if he’s kidding. “Went out to Staten Island. Another tiny house. Not sure why all those people with those tiny houses end up collecting so much stuff.”
“So what did you find?”
“Giant balls of tinfoil. They were everywhere.”
“What were they doing with them?”
“Saving them in case of excessive leftovers? I don’t know. Thing was, they had no problem getting rid of any of the usual stuff—extra furniture, weird lamps shaped like mermaids, four pairs of bronzed baby shoes, old records, whatever—but they refused to get rid of the giant balls of tinfoil.”
“Why?”
“Sentimental value? General mental illness? Wally talked to them, the designer talked to them, the producers talked to them, but no matter what we said, they wouldn’t get rid of them. The designers ended up having to design them into the décor. Hung them from the ceilings like disco balls.”
“Some people are too stubborn for their own good.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Speaking of stubborn, have you thought any more about college?”
“Good night, Dad.”
The Lucinda buzz lasts until the next rehearsal. We’re all hanging in my garage listening as Gina goes over her lines. “My mom and dad told me I couldn’t go to the party, but what do I care what they think? After they went to bed, I climbed out the window. Josh had heard me and Weasel had broken up and he thought he’d move in, the little creep. I told him to bite me. He said, Anytime, sugar. Sugar? Who seriously calls a girl ‘sugar’ and expects to get any?”