Jesse smiles and shakes his head. “Good enough,” he says.
It’s the second time I’ve witnessed the curious decision-making process they call consensus. Sometimes it seems as random as throwing a dart against a wall of swaying balloons. But the results are as good as any so-called adult decisions I’ve ever witnessed, and as long as they make decisions and we keep moving, I don’t care.
I flip open the divorce journal to where there’s a page called Spending Time Together. I know it’s not my title. In fact, I don’t even think it’s my handwriting. But underneath two columns, labeled mom and dad, are lists of ways I spent time with my parents. There are only two things under Dad’s column: shirt shopping and ice cream.
They’re not bad memories. Dad used to take me with him when he’d go to Bloomingdale’s to pick out a new dress shirt. He always did this before a job interview. I liked the way a man in a suit would come and ask us if we needed help, but Dad and I liked to go through the shirts ourselves, looking carefully at slight differences in stripes or buttons and checking the neck size, which I still remember was 15 1/2. Then we would go out for ice cream sundaes. It was always a school night.
There are a lot more things on Mom’s side of the paper. Things like shoe shopping and groceries, soccer practice and skiing, picking out old movies at the library. But none of them have the clarity of this one memory with Dad.
***
“Okay,” Tim says after we’ve been riding in silence for a while. “This is the game: desert island. You can only bring two movies for the rest of your life. What would they be?” He looks at me.
“I’m not going first,” I protest. I know one of them right away, but I need to think about the other one.
“Citizen Kane,” Lyle says. “And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Tim looks at him with disbelief. “Dude, that’s a messed-up island you live on.”
Lyle shrugs. “Whatever.”
Now I know I won’t try and impress anyone with my answer. I’m tempted to say The Muppet Movie, just to point out how pretentious he’s being, but I decide to be honest instead. “North by Northwest and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I guess.”
“Classy and dorky,” Tim assesses. “I’m not sure the Lord of the Rings can count as one movie, but I’ll let it go this time.”
“Thanks,” I say. G picks Lord of the Rings too, and something called The Breakfast Club, which I’ve never heard of. And then, before anyone else can respond, Tim goes into this long description of some Spanish movie he really likes where all these people are competing to see who can have the most luck. It sounds pretty weird.
“What about you?” I lean over and ask Emily quietly.
She shakes her head like she’s embarrassed, but I can tell she’s glad I asked. “I have really cheesy taste in movies,” she whispers.
“So?” I say.
“And it’s been ages since I saw one at the movie theater anyway.”
“Come on. Just tell me,” I nudge her.
“I really like Grease,” she says and then looks up to see if I’m laughing. “And Dirty Dancing. Any Jane Austen movie, or anything with Meg Ryan. And musicals in general. I loved Mamma Mia,” she gushes. She looks up, and I’m smiling. “You think I’m a total dork, don’t you?”
“Hey, Emily,” Tim interrupts. “What about you? Come on, two movies.”
She shoots me a look. “I like books,” she says.
“Luh-ame answer,” Tim says. But he moves on to Jesse. Meanwhile Emily smiles at me like we have a secret.
Finding a place to perform in Buffalo turns out to be trickier than expected. After one sparsely attended performance the group decides to pack it in and head for the squat. In the meantime, I find out from Tim that a squat is abandoned real estate where people live without paying rent or owning the place. This is a new concept, and I write it down on my list of useful information, even though it doesn’t sound like anywhere I would want to live. It’s a funny list so far, considering a definition for the word squat comes right after directions on how to get the bus to pull over when you have to take a crap.
I’m picturing some sort of squalid apartment building or abandoned factory, so I’m pretty surprised when we pull up in front of an enormous home with a brick walkway and overgrown lawn. I guess I was expecting some kind of industrial zone, but the neighborhood is as suburban as the one I live in. Only after we pass through the gap in the eight-foot-high hedges on either side of the walkway do I start to notice anything out of the ordinary. Hanging from a branch in one of the hedges is a wind chime made entirely of twisted forks. In one window, Tibetan prayer flags hang in place of curtains, and in another there are strings of red glass beads. Jesse knocks, and when no one answers, he turns the handle and lets himself in. We all follow close behind. The first room we pass might have been a living room. The only furniture left is a long, low coffee table pushed up against one wall and ten or so mismatched cushions spread out on the floor. There’s an upright piano, an amplifier, and a couple mike stands set up on one side of the room. An enormous banner painted on canvas hangs over this setup and reads, “Dance Like No One Is Watching”.
The place isn’t filthy, but it’s not exactly clean either. A few abandoned plates and bowls are stacked in the living room with the remnants of what looks like soup molding inside. The carpet is curling up along one wall and sprinkled with patches of bread crumbs. There’s still no sign of inhabitants as we walk down the hallway towards the back of the house. The walls of the hallway are covered with intricate finger-painted art resembling tribal designs. I’m admiring these when I slam into the back of Lyle. He turns around and gives me a glare as I blush and apologize. He’s still not really warming up to me.
There’s a warm, yeasty smell floating in from somewhere in front of us. “Hi,” I hear Jesse greeting someone. We all push forward into the kitchen. The bread baker is a short guy in his twenties with curly brown hair and wire-rim glasses. He’s wearing camouflage pants and is shirtless except for a dingy white apron.
“Welcome to the Shire,” he says and smiles warmly. “I’m Mark.”
Everyone introduces themselves, and we sit down on benches around a long wooden table. Mark talks at us for a while, explaining the workings of the house and the various roles that the five current full-time residents play. He makes bread and hummus every day, or as needed, and is also responsible for cleaning the bathrooms. I raise an eyebrow, thinking back to the state of the living room. The bread smells incredible, and I try to ignore the fact that he keeps wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“I call it Alien Garlic Bread,” he says. “Because it’s out of this world.” He laughs hardest at this until he snorts. Then without any segue, he adds, “If you guys want to crash here tonight, we’re having a tempeh stir-fry and vegan chocolate cake.” My stomach lets out an audible groan.
Mark snorts again and says, “I guess that’s a yes, huh, man?”
***
After we set up our sleeping bags on the floor of an unused bedroom, I wander around back, where there’s a swimming pool that’s been filled in with dirt and turned into a garden. Aside from a few withered and blackened tomato vines, most of the rows are covered with hay. I turn my head at the faint sound of strumming and see a guy, at least a few years older than I am, hanging his legs off the second-floor balcony, a battered guitar in his lap. “Hey, man,” he calls. I give a little wave in return. “Did you just roll in with those guys in the bus?”
I nod.
“Cool,” he says. “I’m Dylan.”
“Andrew,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says like he already knows or isn’t listening. “Is, um, Emily, is she like with anyone?”
“What?”
“Like that short anarchist guy? Are they like together?”
“Um, I’m not really sure. I haven’t really been with these guys for all that long.”
“Yeah,” he says and blows his stringy bangs out of his eyes
. “Sorry about that.” He picks up his guitar and goes inside. I keep walking around the side of the house, but I stop when I hear voices. It’s Emily and Lyle, and neither of them sounds happy.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Emily is saying, “But I didn’t know he would be here.”
“And now you want to leave?” Lyle says, sounding exasperated. “And I’m supposed to explain what exactly to everyone else? What’s the big deal? It’s only one night.”
There’s a long pause during which I slowly creep backwards to avoid getting caught eavesdropping.
We eat our tempeh stir-fry and vegan chocolate cake with spoons and knives. The squat had a visitor last month who turned all their forks into wind chimes like the one I saw walking in. Mark’s been living there the longest, almost four years. He said no one bothers them because the place was such an eyesore before they moved in. They’ve actually improved the property values just by keeping the lawn and the bushes tidy. Mark says the owner is a real estate company in Cleveland, but Bess, one of the other housemates, insists it’s an actual person whose aunt lived there with a bunch of cats until she died about ten years ago. Apparently the power company will give you service without proof of legitimate residency as long as you’re willing to pay the bill. Another useful fact for my life-after-high-school list.
Besides Dylan and Mark, the three other housemates are women, so it’s not hard to figure out that it’s Dylan whom Emily has some problem with. Every time he speaks, she winces. She barely touches her food during dinner, but with the crowd around the table, her silence goes unnoticed, except by me and probably Lyle. Dylan offers to play music after dinner, so everyone grabs a seat in the living room except for Emily, who disappears, muttering something about a walk.
Dylan plays some covers that are okay and then some of his own stuff, which is pretty drippy—a lot of love songs with obvious rhymes. G and I play spades until my eyelids feel like they’re wearing lead aprons. When I roll out my Spidey sack and climb in, Emily still hasn’t come back.
In the middle of the night I get up to pee, carefully stepping around the sleeping bodies. It’s too dark to tell who’s there and who isn’t. Stumbling a little bit down the hallway, I catch my wounded big toe on a loop of carpet and curse softly as pain knifes my foot. I slap the tile wall to the right of the bathroom door until my hand finds the switch. The compact fluorescent bulb is naked and gives off a greenish glow as it hums to life. Something rustles the shower curtain, and I freeze as my heart jumps into my throat. The pressure in my bladder is gone, and I contemplate just turning around and going back to bed. It’s probably just a cat. I reach forward and shake the curtain to see if I can scare out the offending feline. Instead I see a hand.
“Drew!” It’s Emily. My brain manages to register this before my throat releases the girly horror-movie scream that was about to pass my lips.
“Jesus! You scared the shit out of me.” Her nose is red and her cheeks are tear-streaked. She’s sitting cross-legged at one end of the giant claw-foot tub. “What are you doing in the tub?”
She sighs and wipes at her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Oh, I came back really late from my walk. You guys were all asleep, and I didn’t want wake anyone fumbling around for my stuff.” She looks at me, a faint smile on her lips. It occurs to me that I’m standing in front of her in my boxers and a T-shirt. Why is she smiling? Am I hanging out the front of my shorts? I try to casually adjust things to avoid that possibility and sit down on the toilet seat in front of her.
“So you couldn’t find a couch or anything?”
“I felt safer in here.”
“Right. In case there’s an earthquake?” I joke.
She gives me a sad half-smile. “Yeah, something like that.”
I’m not sure what to say to that. I’m not sure if she wants me to ask what she means. I sit there on the toilet, lightly tapping my fingernails against the porcelain cover. There’s something blank and defeated about her sadness. It’s something I recognize, maybe even relate to. I put my hand on her arm, but it’s not enough. I want to be closer to her. “Well, I’m awake now. Mind if I join you?” I say it like I’m joking, but when Emily smiles for real and scoots to one side, I shrug my shoulders and step into the tub. “Kinda cold,” I note as I lean up against the wall of the tub. “Not so great for sleeping. You should come back in.” Emily looks like she’s considering it, but then shakes her head with that same sad smile. “Well, we can’t have you getting cold now can we?” I want to cheer her up. I want to be the one who makes her smile again. Which I guess is why I do what I do next. I reach over and turn on the water.
“Jesus, Drew. What are you doing?”
For a minute I’m afraid I’m the big jerk here. The water is cold and soaks my boxers and the bottom of my T-shirt. “Warming up?” I suggest and look hopefully at Emily.
It works. She laughs and flicks some of the water at my face with her fingertips. “You’re crazy!” The water is getting warm now. I pull the stopper on the drain and the tub begins to fill. Emily pulls off her sweater and her thick wool socks. I stand up and hop out of the tub, glad that my boxers are a dark color.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Surprise.” I open the wooden cabinet above the toilet, hoping what I want is in there. Bingo. I dump the contents of a plastic container of lavender bubble bath into the tub and step back in. Soon we are up to our chins in big fluffy white bubbles. We make bubble beards and bubble mustaches and smack the bubbles between our palms like little kids. Every time the water cools off we drain a little and add more from the tap.
“So you and Dylan know each other, huh?” I say all casual. As if I haven’t been thinking of a way to bring it up for the last twenty minutes.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
I nod because it’s better than admitting to being an eavesdropper.
“Yeah,” she goes on, “it’s total bullshit that he’s even here. I’m the one who told him about it. And he said it sounded like a bunch of dumb hippie freeloaders.”
“Mmm.” I know better than to share my thoughts about the cleanliness of the place. “So you guys were together once?”
“Yeah.” She holds up some bubbles in the palm of her hand and blows them toward my face. “Back when I believed in monogamy.” She says it like she’s forty years old, and I would laugh if she didn’t look so sad and so serious. She’s staring at her knees, which rise up out of the bubbles like two cloud-piercing mountain peaks. “I actually thought I loved him.” For just a moment I can see it in her face—how much she did love him and how hurt she is. “He totally knew it too. And he used it to manipulate the crap out of me. Don’t ever fall in love, Drew, if you can help it.”
“Seriously?” I say.
She shakes her head. “No. You’re right. Love is a good thing. A really good thing. Just don’t ever fall in love with a self-centered musician.”
“Okay,” I agree, hiding my smile with the back of a soap-bubbled hand. What about a dreadlocked Hula-Hooper with a slight flair for the dramatic?
“He would say he was going to be somewhere and then purposely not go. I’d show up looking for him, and when he wasn’t there, I’d confront him later and he’d act like I misheard him, like I was the one being all crazy. And then other times he’d be so loving and amazing and he’d tell me how amazing I was. It was back and forth like that, and it made me feel completely psycho sometimes. I don’t know if I’ll ever love anyone ever again.”
“What about Lyle?”
“Yeah,” she says, and sighs as if this is an answer we both understand. “Sorry, Drew. I’m sure you don’t want to hear all this crap.”
“No, I do. I really do.” Maybe I’m a bit too insistent, because she looks at me funny and then holds up her fingers to show me.
“Pruned,” she says. She reaches over to show me and gently ruffles my hair. I feel a flicker of annoyance at being pet, like a dog or a younger brother.
“Yeah, we should probably get out before we get hypothermia or something,” I say. But neither of us moves.
“Thanks, Drew,” Emily says, and it sounds pretty sincere.
“Anytime.”
“Anytime I want a bath?” she jokes.
“Uh-huh.” I want to add more, but I don’t. She can take it however she wants. We both stand up in the tub, soaking and covered with bubbles. There’s one threadbare towel hanging on the rack.
“Here,” Emily says and throws it to me. “You go first. Dry off, and I’ll meet you in there. Can’t sleep in here now that you soaked my bed.” She turns around, and I strip down and towel off as best I can. I wrap the bath mat around my waist and leave my soaking clothes hanging over the edge of the tub. Thankfully I’m using my backpack as a pillow, so I find my extra boxers easily and slip back into my sleeping bag. A few minutes later I see Emily’s silhouette as she slips quietly into the room. I lie there for a while thinking about how much has changed in the last thirty-six hours. A girl touched my knee. I took a bath with a girl. Not just any girl; a hot girl I actually like. Or at least I think I do. Is it wrong to want her to feel about me the way she felt about Dylan, even if it made her crazy? Maybe it’s the bathwater; the wrinkling and pruning of my fingers stretching my skin. I feel closer to the world in a good way, on the inside looking out instead of the other way around.
The Other Way Around Page 10