Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Spilled Milk
Turtle Power
Copycat
Dawn
I Spy
The Meltdown
Dissonance
Ferrier’s Point Marina
Schooled
Flags
Betrayal
Cassidy
Barbie and the Little Neighbor Boys
Fragrance Testers
Pins and Needles
Self-motivation
Goals
Glamour
Decorum
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
Moving On
Priorities
The Entrepreneur
Electricity
Renaissance Man
The Little Neighbor Boys
Steamrolled
Voodoo Revisited
Waffled
Invitation
Finding Things
Spy vs. Spy
Overcooked
Return to Sender
RSVP
Bubba Crosses the Line
Reality Check
Bubba Strikes Again
Setting the Stage
Blind Date
Salt
Imaginary Enemy
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Julie Gonzalez
Copyright
To Cecile and Herning
Kate and “that rabbit”
And imaginary friends and enemies everywhere
You never liked to get
The letters that I sent.
But now you’ve got the gist
Of what my letters meant.
LEONARD COHEN
AND SHARON ROBINSON
Spilled Milk
It’s not unusual to have an imaginary friend. Many people do (or did, at any rate, somewhere in their histories). But me? I can honestly tell you that I have no imaginary friend. Not one.
What I have is an imaginary enemy. He’s such a satisfying companion—very therapeutic to have around. He’s helped me through a number of personal disasters and misadventures over the years. I call my imaginary enemy Bubba—short for Beelzebub, which is a biblical devil’s name. Pretty good way to address an enemy, wouldn’t you agree?
Bubba’s not necessarily physically unattractive, but this is one of those “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” situations. ’Cause that’s where Bubba reveals his true colors—on the inside. He’s a sneak and a liar and a troublemaker who delights in seeing my life go wrong. My miseries are his homemade ice cream. My heartbreaks are his Godiva chocolates. My failures are his double cheeseburgers and deep-dish pizzas. You get the picture.
When Bubba makes me angry, I write him a letter expressing my displeasure. The first time I wrote to Bubba was in second grade.
Dear Budda,
You spilled milk on the lunchroom floor. I slipped in it and ripped a hole in my new overalls. My knee bled. Everyone laughed. I don’t like you.
Sinfully yours,
Gabriel
Gabriel isn’t my real name. It’s just the name I use in my relationship with Bubba. No point in being overly familiar with an enemy, especially an imaginary one. Gabriel, like Bubba, is biblical—one of the heavenly superstars, along with his pals Michael and Raphael. Gabriel is chief of the archangels—God’s right-hand halo polisher. Kind of like vice president if God is top dog. I imagine him to have beautiful ivory-colored wings tipped with moonlight and a halo of red gold that undulates like the ripples on the surface of a pond.
With my Bubba letter clasped in my hand, I asked my teacher, Mrs. Perkins, for a piece of tape, but when she realized I wanted to hang my message on the classroom wall, she refused. “Jane, why are you writing Buddha a letter about spilled milk?” she asked.
“Buddha?”
“The founder of the religion Buddhism. He was a very wise spiritual leader.”
“Not Buddha, Bubba,” I replied insistently. Cold air from the air conditioner breezed though the hole in the knee of my overalls.
Mrs. Perkins raised her eyebrow. Just one eyebrow. That was the coolest thing about her—she could raise her left eyebrow like a marine raising the flag up the pole. “Then you inverted your lowercase Bs again.” She tapped the letter. “Who’s Bubba?”
“A dirty rotten milk-spilling creep,” I answered.
“Go sit down and behave yourself, Jane.” Mrs. Perkins sounded exasperated. I stalked back to my seat clutching Bubba’s letter and stashed it in my math folder. A fairly modest beginning to what has proven to be a long and fruitless relationship.
Since you know my name’s not really Gabriel, I might as well tell you the three embarrassing appellations my parents attached to my birth certificate sixteen years ago. I can’t believe they did me such dishonor. Start with Jane. That’s J-A-N-E. As in Plain Jane, which the more poetic schoolyard bullies have called me since kindergarten. Along with Birdbrain Jane, Migraine Jane, and Jane the Pain. All because my parents named me after this prehistoric aunt of Mom’s who they particularly admire.
My middle name’s even worse. Venezuela—like the South American country. Great name for a country. Very lyrical and seductive. But a middle name for a girl? Venezuela? That’s where my parents met. It was nothing terribly romantic if you ask me. My mother was visiting her college roommate, a beautiful but unsuccessful South American poet, and my recently divorced father was on a fishing vacation with his brother, my uncle Grayson. Dad’s cooler of semifrozen baitfish leaked on Mom’s suitcase in the hotel elevator, and she insisted he buy her a new one because of the awful smell and the stains. Who knew they’d end up with a bunch of kids and a dog? When I complain about my name, Dad thinks it’s a real laugh to say, “We could have named you Caracas instead of Jane.” (For the geographically impaired, Caracas is the capital of Venezuela.)
Now (drumroll, please) for my absolutely generic last name: White. Like clouds or snow or cotton. Like flour or sugar or milk. Like boredom.
When I was just over a year old, my parents got frisky. My brother Lysander was born nine and a half months later. He’s named after one of the confused, love-struck youths in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Dad’s a Shakespeare freak). My brother hates his name. Go figure. He tells everyone to call him Zander.
Sixteen months after Zander came my sister, Carmella, whose name evokes visions of bonfires, gypsy music, starlit nights, and silver bangles. Me Jane, Plain Jane—You Carmella. Talk about a prize-winning recipe for some vicious sibling rivalry.
Dear Bubba,
Shakespeare might have his “What’s in a name?” thing, but he wasn’t dubbed Jane Venezuela White. Why would you ever allow anyone to go through life being addressed so blandly? And you claim to love me.
A rose by any other name,
Gabriel
My half brother, Luke, who’s five years older than me, sat by my side on the sofa playing a video game. He’s the offspring of Dad’s youthful marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Sandy. “Gotcha,” Luke said as his character zapped mine. The screen lit up in neon blue flashes as my player sizzled and lost a dose of power.
“Bully,” I snarled.
He laughed. “No crybabies allowed.”
“I’m no crybaby,” I protested. Crybaby was the ultimate insult someone could hurl at an ornery seven-year-old.
“Pay attention, loser!” He detonated his weapon and my character strobed once again.
I pushed a pulsating radioactive boulder over him. “Take that!”
His character fizzled out in a puff of purple smoke. “Yikes!” he exclaimed, laughing.
“I like it when you come over,” I said
. Luke spent Wednesdays and alternate weekends with us. And sometimes he came for unscheduled visits. This was one of those. He’d ridden his bike to our house after school.
“I like it here. And you have a dog. Mom won’t let me have a pet,” Luke said, tossing the game controller aside and dragging his fingers through Banjo’s fur.
“Maybe she’s allergic. Like Peggy next door. Dogs make her sneeze and itch.”
“Naw. Mom says we’re not home enough for a dog. That they need lots of attention. And Marty thinks they’re a mess. All that fur and stuff bugs him.” Marty is Luke’s stepfather.
“Well, Banjo’s your dog, too,” I said, feeling a generosity of spirit at the time.
“Marty sucks.”
“Dad says he’s okay.”
“What does he know?”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Luke shrugged. Something about his demeanor made me feel like I was the older sibling. “I just don’t.”
“Is he mean?”
Luke shrugged again. Banjo, so named because as a pup he was described by our neighbor Elliot as being “wound tighter than a banjo string,” climbed into Luke’s lap and nuzzled his neck. “He’s just…I don’t know…he’s always telling me what to do. And how to do it. And what not to do. And how not to do it. It’s not like he’s my real dad.”
“My mom tells you what to do when you’re here.”
“Yeah, sometimes. But not in the same way. She treats me like she treats you and Zander and Carmella. Marty—he never makes his little princess do anything.”
“You mean Lainey?”
“Who else? And why should I get stuck babysitting his kid? I hate it when she’s there.” Lainey, Luke’s stepsister, is around my age. I’d played with her a few times. Just a week earlier, she’d been with Sandy when she brought Luke over for the weekend. All the adults were talking, so Lainey and I ran around the yard collecting leaves.
“I think Lainey’s nice,” I told Luke.
“She’s boring. And spoiled. All she has to do is whine and she gets whatever she wants. I can’t believe my mother lets her get away with that stuff…. It sure never worked for me.”
“Maybe you’re a brat, too, and just don’t know it.”
“Funny, Jane. Too funny.”
It’s always weird to imagine my father married to someone other than my mother—to picture pleasant little family scenes like we have but with a different supporting cast. Not Luke so much, because he’s been around my whole life. But Sandy…Did my father really have a life before us? Did they go on picnics and gather around Christmas trees? Did he come up behind Sandy and wrap his arms around her waist when she stood at the sink washing dishes? Take her to those family functions at Grandma’s that Mom attends now? In some irrational way, it seems traitorous to me.
The yard next door to ours has always been the most tangled musical paradise on earth. The lawn, which is exceptionally large, slopes gently away from the house. The grass is thick and lush and nearly always overgrown, which used to make it a spongy cushion for our wild childhood games. I loved the way it felt when it brushed my bare legs with feathery tickles. I liked the wild rabbits, snakes, beetles, and katydids that hid in its green carpet. Studding the yard are several ancient live oaks wrapped in vines that weave their tendrils into the bark and dangle from the heights like serpents in a snake-a-phobe’s worst nightmare. But all that’s only part of what sets the deMicheal property apart from everyone else’s.
Our neighbor Elliot deMichael is a musician. He and his family moved in next door before I could walk. Back then, Elliot was working on his PhD. His thesis had something to do with major and minor scales in nature. That was what inspired him to turn his yard into a musical theme park. The trees are festooned with a smorgasbord of wind chimes he made from things like sticks and stones and alligator bones. He recorded the songs the wind wrote there and somehow worked them into his dissertation.
Palm trees line the back fence. “I don’t care so much for the way they look,” he once admitted, “but there is nothing to compare with the concerto of the rain and wind in their fronds.”
Elliot built fountains and waterfalls whose music he records and charts. I used to sit at the patio picnic table with his kids and watch as he rearranged the stone tiers of some water garden to get a new progression of sound. He’s wired bird feeders to steal the secret conversations of hungry but unsuspecting blue jays and finches. He has even bugged a wasps’ nest with a miniature microphone. He’s like the CIA of the natural world.
Elliot checks the weather report daily. If a storm or strong winds are predicted, he’ll drag fancy equipment from the garage and set it up outside, covering it with tarps or plastic bags, and snake waterproof microphones to locations all over the yard to catch Mother Nature singing in the shower. He records thunder and rain and wind. Twilight with its dance of insects. Crickets fiddling the night away. Frogs croaking in deep bass tones.
To earn a living, Elliot teaches at the university and has a studio at home where he gives private lessons to aspiring musicians. When his students are there, his children are banished to the backyard, where my siblings and I often join them.
Considering Elliot deMichael’s obsession, it’s no surprise that all four of his children have musical names—Chord, Sharp, Jazz, and Harmony. His wife, Peggy, a lawyer, didn’t mind indulging her husband’s whims, and always teases their children, saying, “Besides, who’d want kids named Habeas Corpus, Sidebar, or Deposition?”
Chord is a year and a half older than Sharp and me and has always been a grade ahead of us in school, a fact he used to flaunt as proof of his superiority. As for Sharp, he and I were best friends until about middle school, when we went our separate ways, mine being predictably mainstream, his being increasingly unconventional.
Sharp and Chord both have blue-green eyes and unruly light brown hair as overgrown as the grass in their backyard, and as randomly curly as the tendrils springing from the vines in the live oaks. That’s why they’re often mistaken for twins. It happened all the time when they were younger. The resemblance is purely physical, though. In personality they’re opposites, Chord being outspoken and abrupt, and Sharp quiet and easygoing.
One Saturday morning, Elliot invited Zander, Carmella, and me into his studio (his children were already there), promising us heavenly delights. My mouth watered in anticipation as I imagined ice cream sundaes and platters heaped with pastries. Elliot closed the blinds and clicked an icon on his PC. Recorded rain dripped from the speakers lining the room.
“Rain sounds different beneath the peach tree than it does when it splashes into the fountain,” he said softly. “And what a racket it makes on banana leaves,” he added, clicking the mouse. “And the kiss of the dew on the grass—sublime!”
At that point I could barely hear anything, but Zander’s eyes were shining. “Do it again!” he said.
“And now,” Elliot announced, beaming with pride, “when I blend them all together…listen.”
“Hey, that’s Beethoven’s Fifth!” exclaimed Sharp.
“In raindrops,” said Chord. “Too cool.”
“Beethoven’s fifth what?” I asked innocently (or ignorantly, maybe).
“You’re really stupid, you know?” said Chord, rolling his eyes. “Dumber than a box of rocks.”
“What are you doing?” Zander asked. I jumped because I’d been unaware of his presence. He was standing in the doorway with Jazz, his best pal. I glared at both of their reflections in the bathroom mirror. Zander and Jazz, the same age, are practically inseparable. They act more like brothers than neighbors—fighting one minute and scheming together the next, taking one another’s belongings without asking, and exploiting each other’s flaws.
“Nothing.” I stepped away from the mirror.
“Why are you making those nasty faces?” asked Jazz.
“I’m practicing, creep.”
“Practicing what?”
“You know my teacher, M
rs. Perkins?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she does this eyebrow thing, and I’m trying to—”
“What eyebrow thing?” interrupted Zander.
“Like this,” I said, and I used my hand to lift one eyebrow halfway up my forehead.
“Yuck. That’s creepy.” Even as Zander spoke, I noticed him and Jazz peering into the glass and contorting their faces.
“It’s great when she does it. Wait till you get to second grade. If she’s your teacher, you’ll see.” I tried again to do the trick, hands free.
“You look like you swallowed something gross,” observed Zander.
“Go away.”
They just stood there. Jazz pushed his left eyebrow, trying to make it do a Mrs. Perkins.
“I said go away, clones.” I shoved them out the door and slammed it.
Turtle Power
My second letter to Bubba was inspired by a more serious set of circumstances than simple spilled milk. The incident occurred about three weeks after that soggy mishap. My father was reading an insurance company publication. He had an orange highlighter in his hand and every now and then he marked a passage. “These new depreciation charts could certainly be useful. I need to make a copy of this for Jim,” he said, but no one was listening. I could think of few topics more boring, and I didn’t even know what depreciation charts were.
Zander and I were playing checkers on the floor while Carmella watched cartoons. My mother walked into the room. “Kids, Peggy told me her boys got their report cards today. Where are yours?”
I ignored her, moving a checker to block Zander’s potential double jump.
“In my backpack,” my brother said. He scrambled down the hall to his room.
“Jane, I’d like to see your report card,” said my father. I studied the game board like it was the Rosetta Stone: the key to some universal secret.
Zander returned, digging through his backpack, and finally extracted a crumpled but stellar assessment of his academic and social progress. “What a good kindergartener you are!” Mom said proudly after looking it over. “Did you see what Ms. Golden wrote about you?”
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