He almost wished Jesse hadn’t come back. Steven hated crawling under the house.
Last summer he’d had to crawl under with some cans of antiflea spray, after mangy dogs set up shop in the under-house underworld. He’d worn a bandanna around his face but felt sick afterward. Once he had to crawl under when his dad was out of town to look for a leaking pipe. It was disgusting down there. Worms and roots and rotting wood. Some old paint cans. He put on his worst jeans and a ripped T-shirt and gritted his teeth.
“Here, Jesse!” he clicked and trilled. What was that old sound he used to do? “Kitty kitty kitty!” High, in a girl voice. After Jesse left, he’d gotten a turtle from his science teacher. Actually paid a dollar for it. The turtle, Joey, had a real personality. People did not realize this about turtles. They thought of them generically, not individually—the way people thought about guys whose jeans hung down off their butts. Bad. Joey was shy. He only liked Steven, not other people. He pulled his head in when other people came around.
Joey lived in a red dish tub of water in the yard, sunned on a brick, ran around the grass during the afternoons. Steven had fashioned a little staircase of bricks so Joey could go in and out of the tub on his own. He slept in the water. Steven fed him stinky ReptoMin pellets and sliced bananas and apples. Actually Joey had bitten him, too, while Steven scrubbed his shell a bit too vigorously, but he never told anyone—how embarrassing was that? The first night after the bite he worried—could there be some bizarre virus transmitted through turtle bites? He looked it up on the internet. Of course he had secretly cleaned the wound and applied antibiotic cream, but the internet said he should take antibiotics by mouth, too. No way. Then he’d have to tell someone. Pets were not always so easy.
“Kitty kitty kitty!” he trilled. A slight movement off to the right. There he was—pitiful growling Jesse, hiding behind one of the wooden posts that held the house up.
Steven started backing out from under the house. “Mom, I found him! Call Animal Control immediately! He still seems mad!”
Joey the turtle was hibernating right now. Steven suddenly missed him. At least he couldn’t lunge or leap.
Jesse’s tail thickened. He howled and showed his teeth again. “Enough of that, Buster,” Steven hissed. “You ran away, we didn’t!”
According to some sources, Salinger had suffered posttraumatic stress from his wartime experiences. Or maybe his reclusiveness was a decisive marketing strategy—if you disappear, people are more interested in your work. You become a legend while you’re still alive. Crouching behind a stone wall, or the post under a house . . . people are kneeling down to find you.
There Is No Long Distance Now
“I hate my name,” said Brad.
“Why?” asked Sophie. She was twelve and hadn’t thought much about her name, except when kids called her Sofa which she didn’t mind because she loved cuddling up on any couch.
“You are so young!”
He was standing at the kitchen counter mixing his bizarre daily breakfast potion of strange amino acid substances, protein powders, a tiny glass of juice, a half banana, and a handful of wheat germ. He was working on his body.
“How was the party?”
“Horrible. No, fun—in a bloodshot kind of way.”
“Did you drink alcohol?”
He snorted. Soon she would be asking him which parts of his girlfriend’s beautiful body he had actually touched. And he would say, her hand, sweetheart, only her hand. The truth was, he had no girlfriend. Everyone was his girlfriend. This was his theory—float and drift. Be in love with everyone you see. The heart is a bucket without a lid. Maybe he read it in a play. But it seemed to work.
“I had one sip of wine.”
“You did not.”
“Maybe not.”
“You better not. You are only seventeen.”
“And what are you, a cop? Thank you for informing me. I still hate my name.”
Sophie loved Brad so much. She loved to go anywhere with him and be identified as his little sister. He could open hard things. He had biceps. He told her important facts about the world, such as, There is really no long distance now, as there used to be in the old days, when it took a long time to find out what was happening in Ireland or Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Sophie had an e-pal in Saudi Arabia, a girl named Suheir who dreamed of being a pilot, in a country where her mom couldn’t even drive a car.
In class, when asked to write about heroes, Sophie was the only one who wrote about her brother. Mike with the stupid buzz cut asked, “Are you in love with him?” and she said, “You are so weird.” But she was, in a way. She wanted to be his protector, his bodyguard. She wanted to go to parties with him and hold up her hand against beer bottles which came within twenty feet of her brother. She had read about alcohol poisoning and it really worried her. Already she had joined the campaign against texting while driving. She wanted him safe.
One good thing she realized—he cared so much about his body he would surely not take drugs or do other abusive things to it. Quick-witted. That’s what he was. She had to write a poem which used the letter Q six times, at the beginnings of lines, so she kept thinking of q words without even trying to. The assignment seemed in keeping with her teacher’s love for Quirky assignments. Quiet, Quintessential, Queries, Quit. She was sure other people would use Queen, Queer, Quest.
“Why do you think he likes violent movies when he could be in any movie?” Brad often talked to himself when the blender was on.
“What? Who?”
“Brad Pitt. He could do anything he wants to do. But still he does stupid violent movies, too.”
“He does?”
“I mean, Benjamin Button was worth his time, but some of these others?”
Sophie knew nothing about Brad Pitt. She knew about Miley Cyrus and Flight of the Conchords. She had watched most of the Flight segments three times already on HBO and owned both seasons on DVD. Their parents thought the content a little “old” for her, but somehow Jemaine’s and Bret’s New Zealand accents and goofy music softened things. Miley was so versatile—singing, dancing, acting so funny, bouncing in and out of scenes—Sophie just adored her. She would not have minded to be named Miley but . . . suddenly she understood.
“Do you feel like people compare you to Brad Pitt?”
“Of course. Our likenesses are irresistible. He has a dozen children and I’m seventeen.”
“No, he doesn’t!”
“What are you looking for? Q words. Sister, you are Quaint.”
Sophie sometimes couldn’t tell what was a compliment and what wasn’t.
Brad continued, “Did you know Mom had some lecithin pills in the bathroom cabinet that expired in 1991?”
“Before I was born!”
“Before either of us were born!”
“That’s quirky! And did you take one?”
“Guess what, I threw them out. And what about that ancient shampoo bottle she keeps refilling from the bulk barrel at the grocery, then hides in the back of the cabinet so no one else will use it?”
“Yes. She said the bottle has sentimental value and it will be the last bottle she ever uses. Her own style of recycling.”
“Did Dad give it to her or what?”
“I don’t know. It seems strange to be attached to a shampoo bottle.”
Brad held out his tall blue glass and said, “Taste this!”
Sophie pinched her nose. “No way! It’s so thick I would gag!”
“You’ll love it! You’ll have twice as much energy all day!”
Why did anyone want that much energy? Sophie felt fine. She liked everything, even her toothbrush, which was turquoise, a word which came from the Arabic language originally, as did lime, jar, gazelle, cotton, mask, yoghurt, monsoon, oasis, mocha, algebra, average, giraffe, soda, adobe, crimson, sugar, and mummy.
She had apologized to Suheir for the mean things some people at her school said about Muslims, and Suheir wrote back, “I am thinking about your lett
er. I don’t know what to say. I know you do not feel that way.”
Sophie asked Brad, “Do you think I shouldn’t have brought it up? Did I hurt her feelings?”
He said, “It was a little rude. If she had asked you about it, that’s one thing. But bringing it up out of nowhere would be like me telling you my friends call you Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Your retro hairdo and shiny red shoes.”
My Boyfriend, John Mayer
Today my mom told me she wants to get married again. But she hasn’t met the person yet. I’m not even sure if it will be a man or a woman. Wait, I said to her. Please wait. Wait till I move out and then you can do anything you like.
We were in the car at the corner by The Cove, that strange Laundromat/car wash/music joint/fish taco stand combined into one place, and I was thinking if that place were a person, it might have a diagnosis. My mom sighed. She said, Do you want a fish taco? I said, No, I want to wash all my clothes. Lately I’ve been thinking how some people start off on a path and just stay on it and other people jump from path to path trying to decide which one to keep going on. And basically when you are a teenager, that is your main business, to discover if you are on a path you want to be on, or can stand being on, or if you are still jumping to find another one. And the people who get into big trouble sometimes are the ones who fall into a crack or space or ditch between the paths and just get stuck there.
For the first years of my life I thought everything was my fault. Everyone in my family was some kind of wreckage—my mom, my dad, even my grandpa with his gin bottles all lined up on the kitchen table like bowling pins, and Uncle Lou. Pretty self-centered, isn’t it? How could a five-year-old kid be responsible for so many people? What was the common denominator? Who did they all know? Me. It had to be my fault. Never dawned on me that they all knew each other, too.
When Mom was in a good mood, we had a blast, basically. We read about someone in the newspaper who was growing tall native grasses out by Lake Medina, and she said, Do you want to go see that? Yes, I said, and we hopped in the car. That’s why Dad left, basically. He could never find us. He’d come home from work and we’d be down at Port Aransas. Once we volunteered to work at the giant sea turtles refuge and forgot to call home for a whole weekend.
But Mom’s gloomier episodes, which sometimes lasted a year or more, they were tough. That’s when I started hiding out in my room, snipping up magazines, making collages using a lot of eyes from Vanity Fair ads, those big painted makeup eyes, gigantic Penélope Cruz–style. I’d sit there at my desk with scissors and a glue stick and small cardboard rectangles to paste everything on and play John Mayer really loud and it was okay. It was comforting. I’d come out and show my creations to my mom, who was usually dozing in the big chair after work, the disgusting fat chair with a remote control device, which I have always refused to sit in, and she’d look at them without smiling and close her own eyes again. Maybe that’s why I was so obsessed with eyes. I wanted them to stay open.
The day before Uncle Lou fell asleep on the train track, he came by our place and told my mom he was real, real afraid of growing old. So what’s the alternative, Lou? she asked him. As far as I could tell he was already old, so I listened in with some interest. He said, Checking out, Sissy. That’s the only alternative. And my mom, who was kinda down then, really popped up onto a higher rung when she heard that. She said, Lou, you stay for dinner. I’m going to make macaroni and cheese, the old-fashioned scratch way you like it, with real crumbs on top, and he didn’t get excited at all. I’m starting to grate the cheese right now, Mom said. I noticed with some interest how a person who is down seems much improved when faced with someone who is more down than they are. It’s all a matter of degrees. She said to me then, Why don’t you show some of your collages to Uncle Lou, while I make dinner? This seemed highly far-fetched and not like something that was going to, you know, bring him up a notch, but I said, Sure thing, Mom, trying to act bright and normal as I always did when faced with people who were on the far side of regular, which was just about like every minute.
So we went into my room and Lou saw a poster of John Mayer and he said, Is that your boyfriend? I started laughing so hard and said, In my dreams. He said, Who is it really? And I played him maybe the wrong choice of song, about every little past frustration, which Lou certainly had a lot of, and also about the shadows in your head and all, but basically the song says, Step up, say it, open your heart, say it clearly, you know? So, was that bad? It even says it’s better to talk too much than too little. Which I could certainly underscore. But, trust me, I thought about it later, the train tracks, that song running through Lou’s head, what was he saying to us?
Um, I don’t really know what I need right now.
I think I need a friend I never met before. Someone without any tangle of history that intersects with mine or my family’s. So we could start over at some other spot, like a log at the beginning of a trail. I need a new log. And a new path. Like that thing I was saying. It’s time to jump.
I think I need a long walk over some ground that isn’t too rough, like Nebraska.
I wouldn’t mind some big geese flying over and shouting and stuff.
Where We Come From
“A bully and a religious fanatic.”
“A righteous banker and a flirt.”
“An agoraphobic and a daydreamer.”
“A shopping addict and a masochist.”
“A worrywart and a beer drinker.”
They were sitting around the lunch table describing their parents, the odd combinations of people who had made them, wellsprings of their DNA. Many of these jolly duets were now divorced, but still their parents nonetheless. They tried to outdo one another.
“A drug dealer and a spoiled brat.”
“Your dad isn’t a drug dealer!”
“Historically, yes.”
No wonder they were a little strange themselves.
“I have not seen my father in four months.” (Sharif, whose father taught in Cairo)
“I have never seen my father.” (Juan Carlos)
“My mother says if she sees my father she’ll kill him. That’s really nice for us.” (Tyrone)
Annie could never say, “My father is so sweet, I hope I die before he does.” Because sometimes it seemed she was the only person with a sweet anyone.
Rick said his father had been under a car since the day he was born. His dad’s brand of happiness: greasy wrenches, oily jeans. Rick said he was never going to get a driver’s license. “I will work for public transit. To defy the family gene.”
A daughter was supposed to have an extra dose of her father’s mother’s DNA in her. Annie had never known her father’s mother—she’d died in a car accident before Annie was born. But Annie adored her father’s aunt, a vibrant German Texan ranch woman who said, “I’ve turned into one of the little old ladies I used to make fun of.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did. I still make fun of them when I see them wearing checkered pink shirts with striped red skirts, or too much rouge. Don’t you have eyes? I ask myself. You nutty old lady. Then I realize I’m older than they are and I’m wearing gingham.”
Age was such a mystery. Some people felt old when they were three. And some never seemed old. Annie’s great-aunt could drink a cup of coffee at eleven p.m., then go straight to sleep. She was disturbed that no one “knew goats” anymore. Except 4-H kids. She said when she was little, living out by San Angelo in the rocky country of great horizons, people understood goats’ needs and intentions; they knew how to talk to them and listen, too.
“Spitzy, I think I’m okay,” Annie said. “Not talking to goats. I don’t think I’m too lonely for them.”
“You would be if you knew what you are missing.”
Also, people had lost an essential skill before discovering it. Spitzy was saddened that so many young people grew up these days not knowing how to ride horses. A serious omission. Rick said he would ride a hors
e if he had one.
“You all want to meet up at Spitzy’s someday? She’d cook us a big pot of stew or some chili and corn bread. She’d love you!”
“No one loves me.” (Tyrone)
“We all love you!” (Chorus at cafeteria lunch table)
Spitzy displayed a joie de vivre contagious beyond belief. How could anyone be happy living in such a jumble? Annie always wanted to help her great-aunt clean up. But no, she was keeping those six old cracked dish drainers just in case. Dusty horse blankets, empty plant containers, half-burned Christmas candles, baskets, laces, mumbo jumbo of clutter tied together with a leaky garden hose. On the porch. That was just the porch.
Sometimes Annie asked her dad to drive her west to Kerrville so she could stay with Spitzy for the weekend. “I’m needing some rice pudding, Dad.” Spitzy refused to come into the city anymore since there was so much traffic and all the downtown carriage horses were enslaved, made to wear fake floral wreaths on their heads to haul around honey-mooners. Annie’s dad always had to get back to the city for a meeting or a lunch. What was the adult fascination with lunches?
“When I grow up, I am never going to make lunch dates,” Annie said to Spitzy. They were drinking lemonade with mint. “Not for weekdays, certainly not for weekends. It’s been bad enough having to eat with all those same people at school every single day.”
Spitzy said, “You’ll miss them later, baby. Oh, how I miss my old friends! Even though they’re all around here still. Somewhere. Or in nursing homes. Or dead. Sometimes I hear their voices come across a field clear as day.”
“Clear as day?”
“Better than.”
Most days weren’t clear when you were in them. What kind of day did Spitzy remember?
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