Dream Girl

by Lauren Mechling

  That afternoon, Louis was finally going to make good on his promise to come by Hudson and pick me up. The plan was to ride our bikes over the Brooklyn Bridge and go to Prospect Park to see some simulated refugee camp installation that he’d heard about. As I passed through the doors, I had a sinking feeling that he’d forgotten all about me, but he was across the street, between the Queen Bees and a Mister Softee ice cream truck. I was used to thinking he was slightly dweeby, but in a sea of Hudson kids, he looked almost hunky by comparison. Or maybe that was what happened when you suddenly got a girlfriend.

  He was watching the BDLs, who were waving their flowers around like beauty queens and making even more noise than usual.

  When I greeted him, he nodded in Sheila’s direction. “Has your old friend taken up gardening or something?”

  “More like she’s taken up being a social terrorist.” I started walking toward my bike and he followed, guiding his by the handlebars. “She and her friends bullied every boy who doesn’t know better into sending them flowers. Welcome to the world of New York’s…”

  “Bravest and brightest.” Louis was finishing off my last thought, completely oblivious to the fact that I was trembling.

  My bike—or at least, what I could only assume was my bike—had been completely covered with toilet paper and chewed-up wads of gum. The cherry on top: an extra-large maxi pad had been stuck on the seat, and somebody had used a tube of lipstick to write BIG BUTT ON BOARD on it. As if my carnation that morning hadn’t been enough. God, she was thoroughly awful.

  “I’m going to kill Sheila.”

  “No way. This is the work of Sheila Turd?” Louis looked back and forth between the bike and the villain, shaking his head at the horror.

  I ripped off the pad, crumpling it in my hand, and hopped on my bike, with Louis following close behind. I waited until we were only a couple of feet away from the BDLs to say anything more. Just as I was about to ride by the evil pack of clones, I threw my seat cushion Louis’s way and yelled, “Heads up! Try sitting on it! It makes it so much more comfortable.”

  He reached out for the maxi pad, and instead of catching it, he knocked it with the side of his arm. Louis was too good at sports to make a mistake like this.

  The maxi pad spun in the air like a disc of pizza dough, then landed at Sheila’s feet.

  “Ack!” Sheila jumped back like a revolted kangaroo. “What is that thing?”

  “You know what it is!” Louis called back. “Keep it for the next time you want to bully somebody. More environmentally conscious that way.”

  { 24 }

  When Only Bubbly Will Do

  It was a beautiful day for bike riding, with a clear sky and hardly any wind, but I was in too foul a mood for our original plan. Louis rode with me to my apartment building and helped me bring my bike down to the janitor’s basement closet. “We’ll make it good as new,” he said confidently.

  But half an hour later we were still scrubbing. “It’s not coming off.” I was heartbroken. We’d been using industrial-strength scrub pads to loosen the gum, and my arm was too tired to keep going.

  Louis ran his hand over the frame. “Feels pretty good to me, just a couple of bumps.”

  “A couple of bumps? That’s like saying Bozo the Clown only has a few hairs on his head.” I collapsed to the ground.

  He looked at me and ran his hand through his hair which, come to think of it, wasn’t entirely un-Bozoish. “Will you stop worrying, Lemonhead? You’ll come out on top.”

  Sitting there on the cold linoleum floor, surrounded by shelves of roach spray and garbage deodorizer, I was too demoralized to reply.

  “You’ve got to snap out of it,” he said. “Your bike’s fine. You’re just depressed. It’s coloring your sense of reality. You won’t even notice anything the next time you see it.” He lifted my bike off the floor and asked me to grab his—a hunter green ten-speed that was a shiny reminder of how terrible mine looked.

  I shuffled behind Louis as he rolled my bike into the storage room, and we didn’t say much on the elevator up to the eighth floor.

  “You sure you don’t want to go on a walk or something?” he asked up by the door to my apartment. “Or I can come in and we can watch TV.”

  “Nah.” I stuck my key in the door. “Not in the mood. Why don’t you go hang out with your girlfriend?”

  Louis stepped away, putting his hands in the air. “As you wish.”

  There are some times when even chocolate won’t do. When I’m really upset, all I want is to go to Kiki’s for a long almond-scented soak. We have a tub in our apartment, of course, though we use it as often as the make-your-own-marmalade machine Dad gave Mom for Christmas three years ago—that is to say, never. There would be no point. In our household it is nearly impossible to pass five minutes in the bathroom without somebody coming along to pound on the door and kick you out.

  I pulled myself together and an hour later I was in Kiki’s master bathroom, dressed in nothing but a robe. My folded-up clothes were resting on the marble countertop, next to a porcelain figurine of my grandparents’ old dog Winston. The bath was nearly completely drawn, and the room had already filled with the lemon verbena scent of Kiki’s foaming bath gel.

  “You all set?” she called to me from the other side of the door.

  “Yes!” I replied, leaning into the steamy mirror to remove the last of my bobby pins and my cameo. “I’m about to go under.”

  “Sink away, then. I’ll be out in the living room if you need anything.”

  I could hear her television turn off and the door shut. Kiki respects my need for total peace and quiet when I take my baths.

  Averting my eyes so I didn’t catch sight of my naked reflection in the full-length mirror, I reached over to dim the lights and slowly stepped into the water. A warm sensation moved from my feet through my calves, and finally reached the crown of my head as I dunked all the way under.

  I leaned against the clean tile wall and looked out the bathroom’s picture window. The view was of another building’s thirty-eighth floor and a narrow patch of sky. I sat still, watching clouds and birds and planes as they passed by, giving my head a chance to empty out. I needed to let go of my beef with Sheila and remember what really mattered.

  At some point the bubbles were gone. I used the pad of my shriveled big toe to finesse the lever down and I waited for every drop of water to empty out before standing up.

  The only thing that had changed between the time I’d shown up at Kiki’s door and now was that I was clean and naked, but I had developed a completely new lease on life.

  I clasped the cameo back around my neck. I was going to get to the bottom of my dreams, no ifs, ands, or buts.

  When I came out, Kiki and Clem were gussied up and feasting on the weirdest picnic dinner: lamb with mint jelly, carrot sticks, and gummy worms.

  “I’m not even going to ask,” I said.

  “We’re loading up on gelatin,” Kiki told me.

  “My beard’s been looking a little lusterless,” said Clem.

  “Come now, Claire.” Kiki patted the seat cushion next to her. “Your hair and nails will thank you.”

  I joined them for a little while, but I was in no mood to linger—I needed to get home and see where my reinvigorated disposition would take me. My slice of lamb finished, I wrapped a clump of gummy worms in a napkin and bid my farewells.

  I was home by eight-thirty and in bed less than an hour later. I lay there forever, staring into an old pink hand mirror and trying to put myself to sleep with thoughts of boring things: kitchen sponges, instant oatmeal, pet rocks.

  Ever wonder what it’s like to be a worm burrowing your way underground? Well, neither had I. Turns out it wasn’t at all claustrophobic—but the darkness was mildly annoying. Underground, I wriggled ahead, toward a gauzy halo of light. I followed it up to the surface. Past a cluster of black-and-white dandelions, I could make out the silhouette of Cheri-Lee standing at a podium, gesticulating wildl
y. A Doc Marten boot was coming toward me, so I ducked back underground.

  Everything went to pitch black. I had an itch in my belly—or was it my back?—but being an earthworm, I couldn’t exactly reach out and scratch it. I noticed another seductive flicker of light in the distance and poked my body through the ground again. The top layer was pebbly, and I wriggled around against the little bumps, hoping the friction would make the itchiness go away. As I surfaced and adjusted to the sunlight, I saw a stick figure pulling apart a slice of pizza. I would have stayed for more had a hungry-looking bird not been swooping my way.

  I woke up in a sweat, utterly confused. What was this pink thing pressing into my eardrum? Oh, right—the mirror.

  The images clanged around in my head as I picked up a wayward pillow from the floor. I had no idea what was up with the stick figure, but I knew the first person I’d seen in my dream was Cheri-Lee giving a talk.

  And before I could really think about what I was doing, I booted up my computer and Googled Cheri-Lee Vird and poetry conference.

  The Rogers College poetry conference site was as corny as could be, with a lilac background and a banner line of poetry across the top that changed every five seconds. I navigated away from the list of attendees and skipped around the pages for Rogers College and Poetry, Distinguished Speakers, and Registration Information.

  And then, just when I was about to go back to bed, I clicked on the Rogers College: Out and About page:

  Our campus is located in bucolic Rogerstown, New Jersey, the birthplace of the touch-tone phone. Come walk under Main Street’s canopy of elm trees or visit the legendary telecommunications museum.

  Voted the state’s second-best college town by the New Jersey Register, Rogerstown offers the best of both worlds: a mere hour from the world-class museums and concert halls of New York City, the area boasts a quaint center with independent bookstores, two movie theaters, and several excellent restaurants with cuisines ranging from Ethiopian to authentic Neapolitan pizza.

  Come see for yourself.

  Pizza, you say? Well, well. I just might take you folks up on the offer.

  { 25 }

  Meeting of the Minds

  “Who knew? I’d never taken you for a poetry lover!” Cheri-Lee exclaimed. “Sheila’s been allergic to it all her life. I blame her father for reading the Economist to her when she was still a kid.” She squinted against a shaft of blinding sunlight. “God, he was always so passive-aggressive.”

  It was Saturday morning, and Cheri-Lee’s teal Honda was heading down the New Jersey Turnpike. Getting invited to tag along to the Rogers College Poetry Conference had been a lot easier than expected. When Cheri-Lee came by to check up on us on Friday morning, all I had to do was tell her I thought the conference sounded interesting. “Then you should come!” she gasped. “Gustave, lend me your daughter for the day. Best to expose them to the joys of language when they’re still whippersnappers.”

  Cheri-Lee’s energy level was no less frenetic at this early hour. While she waxed hyperactive about everything from the knitted-fiber jewelry course she was considering signing up for to the new drying machines in the complex’s basement laundry rooms, I gazed out the window, taking in the factories and Life Saver–colored container stacks along the turnpike’s southern belt. It wasn’t exactly heartstoppingly beautiful, but it had a certain Zen appeal.

  Careful not to appear too interested, I made sure to keep my line of questioning about Cheri-Lee’s daughter to a minimum. Where’s Sheila today? Have you ever taken her to New Jersey? Not surprisingly, Cheri-Lee didn’t have any revealing answers—no news of Sheila bringing home lumps of cash or snapshots of her taking psychological hit man classes at the Learning Annex. If I wanted to advance my investigation, I was going to have to work a little harder for it.

  Though the Rogers College campus was barely ten minutes off the turnpike, it might as well have been continents away, with its brick colonial-style buildings and tree-lined paths that looked like they had never come into contact with litter. The people clustered around the center were dressed professorially, and I was glad I’d worn an olive green corduroy dress, a white button-down shirt, and a chunky pair of black Mary Janes. I looked right at home.

  “I knew they’d have quite the all-star lineup,” Cheri-Lee said as she studied the schedule taped to the door of the Basel-berg Student Center. She was one of fifty poets and academics who would be participating in the day’s lectures and workshops. “Get ready for the exposure of your life.” Cheri-Lee tugged me by the arm down a hallway. She stopped short at a doorway with a SOUVENIRS sign tacked to it. “Oh! They had the cutest Paul Muldoon tote bags last year.”

  I’d come hoping Cheri-Lee would let something revealing about Sheila slip, but that didn’t seem about to happen anytime soon. She was way too wrapped up in the conference to think about anything else. Was it possible that the second part of my dream, the part with the pizza, was where the secret treasure was hidden?

  “Actually,” I told her, “I’m suddenly starving.” Ever the bad actress, I made an awkward gesture in my tummy’s direction. “Why don’t I run to town and pick something up for the two of us? Weirdly, I’m craving pizza.”

  “As if!” she trumpeted. “I’m not ready to give you up just yet. Let’s pick up a muffin at the café and check out the morning programs. They tend to be the best, when everyone is still fresh.”

  And so, after pretending to be ravenous and stuffing a bone-dry orange-cranberry scone down my throat, I sat with Cheri-Lee through two presentations—a reading by Mya Nanh, a Burmese refugee, and then a roundtable on poetry, parody, and possibility.

  “Overwhelming, all of this, isn’t it?” Cheri-Lee asked at the start of the lunch break. She’d just bought a vegetable sandwich from the Keats Kiosk, and we were moseying across the atrium toward an undernourished man she said she recognized from another conference.

  “Gavin? Gavin!” she called his way. “It’s me, Cheri-Lee!”

  Fighting my way through a wave of disheveled poets, I caught up to my host, who was now at her old friend’s side. The guy was definitely Cheri-Lee’s type—he was wearing several tote bags on each shoulder and he had sunglasses, reading glasses, and a pair of binoculars hanging from chains around his neck. “It is overwhelming,” I told her. “So much to absorb. I think I need to get some fresh air.”

  “I hope I haven’t scared you off,” she said, more for Gavin’s benefit than my own. It was clear that my companionship was no longer needed. “You’ll be back soon, won’t you?” she asked giddily. “The panel I’m on starts at one.”

  “I’ll be quick as a wing,” I told her, citing one of Dad’s favorite mangled expressions.

  She laughed, and a sprout flew out of her sandwich and landed on her quilted poncho.

  Once I’d escaped the building and started down the walkway, I had to ask myself what exactly I was looking for. I’d come this far and crashed Cheri-Lee’s poetry conference, but by this point I’d seen all the participants, and the only new thing Cheri-Lee had told me about Sheila was that she was considering getting a belly-button ring. There was little reason to believe any of the afternoon’s programs on assonance or iambic pentameter was going to further my Shuttleworth investigation. The pizza part of the dream had better work. Maybe there’d be a secret message written in pepperoni waiting for me.

  The sky had begun to cloud over and the air was starting to fill with a cool mist. I zipped up my newly Kiki-bestowed green Courrèges jacket and rushed down the pathway. A sign for the Rogerstown Museum of Telecommunications led me to Main Street. It was less picturesque than I’d expected—instead of mom-and-pop stores, there were dingy franchises for places like Taco Bell and Abercrombie. There was a huge Starbucks full of college-age kids drinking enormous whipped cream–topped drinks and talking on their cell phones.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a crazy-looking lady on the bench outside. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a silk-screened picture of herself on it.
“Do you know where the pizzeria is?”

  “There’s a Domino’s down the block,” she told me.

  “Isn’t there another one? I think it’s supposed to be Sicilian style or something?”

  “Not around here, there isn’t,” she said reprovingly. “Only Neapolitan.”

  My heart contracted. “That’s the one,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s kind of far.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her, feeling mildly defiant. I’ve often found that residents of small towns tend to have inflated notions of how large their corner of the world is.

  The silk-screen lady sighed and pointed down the street. “On the left. Just keep going. And going.”

  As I’d predicted, Emilio’s Brick Oven was only a few blocks away, and I was there in a flash.

  Or maybe I shouldn’t say I was there, because that would imply I made it inside. When I hit the corner, I could barely breathe, let alone move.

  And what I saw had nothing to do with Sheila.

  Though I almost wished it did. What I saw was a whole lot worse than anything I’d ever imagined. And that’s saying a lot—my imagination is hardly anemic.

  Seated on the bench under the Emilio’s awning was an overweight guy with a tiny head and dark hair. He was dressed in standard-issue badass attire: baggy jeans, a white Starter jacket, and multicolored basketball sneakers that were open around the ankles. On his lap sat a tiny caramel-colored dog wearing a collar that perfectly matched the guy’s sneakers. But the real showstopper was the girl next to him. Even though she was facing away from me, there was no mistaking whose bony back I was looking at. The guy tried to feed Rye a bite of pizza and she started making her inimitable nervous squeals.

  They moved about with the familiar rhythms of two people who’ve known each other for ages, play-wrestling until she finally gave in and took a bite of pizza. Her head was making tiny back-and-forth motions as, I imagined, she succumbed to the feeding hour. I was so exhilarated by the thought of him force-feeding her a greasy wad of cheese, it took me a little while to note that the slice of pizza was still in the guy’s hands. I moved slightly to the side. Something was making contact with her mouth, all right—but it wasn’t a high-fat dairy product. She and her friend were sucking face.