a message for you. –Annie Earl
My mother! I’d meant to call her yesterday. I guess thinking about her so much during the Old Jewish Cemetery tour had somehow given me the impression that I’d actually talked to her. I slid the sticky note into my pocket. I’d call her after workshop. I didn’t have the mental energy to sound overly upbeat. And to keep her from worrying, that was the only mood I wanted to project over the phone.
I walked down the long hallway. It felt good to put some distance between me and Veronica. I mean, I was my own person. I felt fierce. And ready to tackle something. Like my day.
But after I left the dorm, even though I was walking at a brisk pace, I realized that I didn’t have a clear idea of what would be interesting to look at. I’d spent so much time following Veronica around that, left to create my own agenda, I felt a little stumped. I pulled out my tour guide and flipped through it.
There were a lot of “must sees” in this town. I picked two things right away. The Old Town Hall Astronomical Clock and the Dancing House. The clock was one of the things I’d researched before I came. Every guidebook mentioned it and the fact that its oldest parts dated back to 1410. At the top of the hour, a skeleton called Death tips his hourglass and pulls a cord. This rings a bell and a window opens. Then, out roll the Twelve Apostles and they circle around. The show ends when the rooster crows and the hour is rung. It seemed like something everybody should see at least once. The other thing, the Dancing House, my mother had mentioned while I’d packed my suitcase.
“It’s not the most interesting building you’ll ever see in your life,” she had said. “But based on this photo, it’s at least worth a walk-by if you’re in the neighborhood.”
My mother was sitting on my bed, straightening a stack of underwear already loaded into my suitcase.
“Why is it called the Dancing House?” I had asked. “Who danced there?”
“No,” my mother said. “The dancing doesn’t take place on the inside. It’s the actual building that’s dancing. Look.” She handed me a picture she’d printed off the Internet.
The glass building twisted at its center, making the building look cinched, like it had a waist. It was supposed to look like a man and a woman dancing. But it was also called the Drunk House.
My mother took my underwear out of the suitcase and refolded it, flattening down the fabric to reduce the stack’s bulk. Then she reached into her pocket and handed me a bunch of twenty dollar bills and an ATM card.
“It’s a hundred dollars,” she said. “And this ATM card is connected to our checking account. You can pull money directly out of it.”
My parents didn’t have a lot of money for my trip. This was a huge gesture. It meant I’d be traveling to Prague with four hundred dollars and the option to pull out additional cash. Though I knew I would never do that.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re going to learn so much,” my mother said. “You’re so lucky to be going to Prague at your age.”
And even though I knew my mother didn’t want me to feel guilty, as I folded my last pair of jeans and handed them to her, I couldn’t help but feel something negative. My mother had never been to Prague. She’d never been anywhere interesting at all. And the worst part about this was that she tried to pretend it didn’t matter to her. But I knew different.
Once, after she’d picked me up from a fifth-grade play practice, she’d turned to me, breathless, and asked, “Do you want to drive to Canada?” It took me a second to realize that she meant right then. She reached over and squeezed my hand, but I pulled it away. Canada? My mother had never said anything so bizarre. I felt like saying, “No way!” Because we couldn’t leave the country. And it was a weekday. Dad would be home for dinner soon. We didn’t have time. Plus, I was dressed like a mouse. “Maybe next week,” I told her, scratching my whiskered face. And she dropped it.
And even though she’d never brought up that idea again, I knew it hadn’t been a joke. Since then, in bookstores, I was always painfully aware that my mother preferred to drift right into the travel section, even though she rarely bought travel books. It didn’t seem fair that somebody so curious about the world would be born and raised in Ohio. And it also didn’t seem fair that unless her financial situation changed dramatically, like if she won the lottery or found a suitcase full of money in our driveway, she might never go anywhere worth going.
Visiting the Drunk House meant taking a metro I’d never ridden before. I traced my finger along the route to make sure that I had my bearings.
“Are you lost?”
I looked up. It was Waller. I said the first thing that came to mind.
“You look terrible.”
“I know,” he said. “Last night was a rough one.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He ran his hands through his hair. “Dessy, I’ve been changed in ways that I didn’t know I wanted to be changed.”
He reached out and took hold of my shoulder. Our chemistry made me swoon.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“I don’t feel the same way about anything anymore,” he said. “Has that ever happened to you? You wake up one day and realize that everything you were aiming for in life, every rule you’d been honoring, every impulse you’d been denying yourself, is total shit?”
“Um, not really,” I said.
“I am a man with new eyes,” he said, opening his arms wide, like he was preparing to embrace an elephant. “I mean, do you smell that?”
“What?”
“The morning, Dessy. It’s got this new clarity for me. Like somebody has thrown water over the entire world and splashed it clean for me.”
A picture of a soap commercial and a man in an outdoor shower flashed through my mind.
“What exactly did you do last night?” I asked. I was beginning to suspect drugs.
“I broke down some walls,” he said.
“Literally?” I asked. “You vandalized something?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Hey, let’s get going. We can talk on the way.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the metro station.
“Do you want to see the Drunk House?” I asked.
Waller looked back at me and laughed. “That sounds perfect.”
Waller’s grip slid down my arm to my wrist, until finally, somehow, he held me by my hand. I let my fingers open, and his moved into mine. Then he squeezed my hand. And I looked at him like I didn’t know what to expect.
I surrendered the map to Waller during the metro ride.
“So we’re visiting an office building downtown?” Waller asked.
“Yeah. But it looks like two people dancing,” I said.
“Drunk people?”
“It’s called the Drunk House or the Dancing House. Though if it ever topples over, it probably will be called the Drunk House that Danced.”
“Oh, you mean the Fred and Ginger House?” Waller asked. “It’s named after Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the dancers.” He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. Things felt dreamlike. Yes, by stomping out of the dorm room I’d strained my relationship with Veronica, but everything else seemed to be on the upswing. For instance, my connection with Waller was blooming like mad! I leaned back and melted into the metro seat and listened to him talk about the importance of creativity when it came to modern architecture.
“A building is more than its bricks,” he said. “I should be able to look at an edifice and hear a saxophone. I should be able to ride in its elevator and smell chocolate.”
I had no idea what Waller was talking about. But I nodded and patted his knee.
“I want to eat the world, Dessy,” he said.
He leaned over and bit my shoulder. His teeth left wet bite marks on my green shirt. It was the first time a guy had ever bitten me. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
The metro stopped and Waller jumped up.
“Come on!” he said.
We walked along the Vltava River at a quick pace. I wanted to talk to Waller about a bunch of things, to strengthen our connection. But we were hurrying so fast that I got winded.
“We’re going to look back on this time and be amazed by how much freedom we had,” Waller said. Then he stopped and turned around to face me. He placed both of his hands on my shoulders. “Let’s promise each other right now that no matter what ties us down in life—marriage, kids, jobs—that we’ll never forget this feeling.” He touched his own stomach and then mine. “You feel the feeling, don’t you?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said.
He placed his hand back on my stomach. “No. Concentrate. You need to feel totally and completely free. Right in your gut.”
His observations were beginning to feel New Age to me. And not in a way I could relate to.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Why?” How come everybody was so hung up on my age in this city?
“Because you’ll never be this age again. Here. Right now. That moment is gone. Your life is ending. My life is ending. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.”
“I’m seventeen. And my life isn’t ending, Waller,” I said, breathing hard. “That’s fatalistic.”
He leaned in close to me, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me. I lightly closed my lips to prepare a place for his to land. But he pressed close to my ear instead.
“You need to grab life, Dessy,” he whispered. “You get one turn. One ride. One trip through this universe.”
His lips sent a feeling into my ear that I’d never felt before. I lost my balance. I put my arms around his waist to steady myself. And he held me.
“You are so sweet,” he said. “You even smell sweet.”
“Thanks,” I said. I considered mentioning that I used an almond-scented shampoo. But I wasn’t sure that a college guy would care. I leaned farther into him, pressing my face against his chest. He smelled good too. Unlike Hamilton, who usually smelled like soap, Waller had a scent that was similar to my father’s favorite snack— olives stuffed with pimentos. He kept his arms around me, and I nuzzled my head deeper into his chest.
“Do you know who you remind me of?” he asked.
“Who?”
“You remind me of my little sister, Allie,” he said.
I ceased nuzzling. Did he say what I thought he’d said? I kept my arms around his waist, and face pressed against him, but after his revelation, holding him in this manner felt slightly weird.
“I remind you of your sister?” I asked. “How old is she?”
Maybe she was a hot twenty-two-year-old. Maybe she was adopted. Crushing on your adopted, hot sibling seemed acceptable. Kind of.
“Allie is twelve,” he said. “But she’s very mature. She’s already devoured Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction and Marianne Moore’s poetry, and right now she’s reading the Bible.”
The Bible? Twelve? Marianne Moore? I pushed away from him. Had I misread something? I thought he was flirting with me. Veronica sensed he liked me at a level eight or nine. But if I’d sent him prepubescent sisterly vibes, clearly there was no chance he was romantically interested in me. Ugh. If Veronica were here, she could tell me what I needed to do to avoid making a complete fool of myself. And protect my heart from further bruising.
“To the Fred and Ginger House!” Waller yelled, tugging me by the hand.
Okay. Maybe I was supposed to overlook the sister comment. Everybody says something dumb in their life. It happens. Screw it. Just screw it. So what if I have flaws? So what if I don’t understand guys? So what if I put my heart out onto the sidewalk for anybody to stomp on? My heart is smooshed. I want a rebound. And I want it to be with Waller Dudek. I want it. I want it. I want it.
It was settled. Not even logic would hold me back.
“Are you paying attention to the scenery?” Waller asked.
I nodded, then realized that he was in front of me and couldn’t see my head, so I yelled, “I’m loving the scenery. It’s exactly how I want to spend my life. Looking at scenery. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.”
I’m not sure he heard me.
“Look at those pigeons!” he yelled.
A group of dirty gray birds strutted in front of us on the sidewalk. They pecked at the ground, appearing both cocky and content. When we reached them, several burst into flight and landed across the street. Waller let go of my hand and lifted his arms up from his sides. Then he began to turn in circles. His feet moved quickly, like he was dancing. Birds continued to rise around him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Having a moment,” he said. “Join me.”
But by the time I entered the pool of pigeons, they’d nearly all fled to a less trafficked area. Waller reached out and grabbed my hand again. Then he pulled me back in the direction of the Dancing House.
Hamilton never would have allowed us to run through a group of pigeons like that. He would have made us stop and observe them from a distance, possibly even insisting that we hide behind a garbage can in order to encounter the birds’ most natural behaviors.
“We only have two more hours before workshop,” Waller said. “We should be going faster.”
The force with which Waller pulled me this time nearly dislocated my shoulder. But I went along with it. The sooner we got to the Dancing House, the sooner we could continue our conversation. And talking to Waller made me feel like I was learning something. Not just about him and his wacky ideas concerning “special moments” and pigeons. I felt like I was gaining information about key life issues. Like happiness. And guys. And myself.
Chapter Twelve
Waller ran exactly how you’d expect a guy to run. Fast. Which was unfortunate, as I ran exactly how you’d expect a girl to run, especially in a foreign land. Daintily.
“There it is!” Waller shouted. He stopped and doubled over, gasping. “That building doesn’t look like it’s dancing or drunk.”
The glass twisted the way it did in the picture. The building was supported by several cement pillars that looked like bending legs.
“I wish I had a camera,” I said. I thought about the disposable one I’d left back in my room. I think I was forgetting it on purpose. I needed to get over the fact that I was too poor to have a nice camera. I was in Prague. And I had what I had.
Waller shook his head. “You should take the picture with your mind. You don’t need a camera,” he said.
“I wanted to take a picture of it for my mother,” I said. “I can’t show her what’s in my mind.”
My potential rebound was beginning to annoy me. His philosophical view on how to live life had become bossy. Waller threw his arm around me. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s too bad we can’t peel open our heads and show people what’s going on inside there.”
I thought about agreeing with him, but I found the mental image so disgusting that I just stood there instead.
“Do you want to see the Astronomical Clock?” I asked. “I think we still have time.”
Waller grabbed my hand again. “Good idea!”
We started running back down the street the way we came. I didn’t mind running, really. I thought it was good exercise. But even though it was morning and still cool outside, the humidity was oppressive and I didn’t want to develop sweat circles around my armpits.
“Maybe we can walk,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” Waller said. “That way we could talk more. I really like talking to you.”
This was fantastic! I felt like we’d regained substantial ground since that whole, “you remind me of my twelve-year-old sister” comment.
“How’s your story coming along?” I asked.
This seemed like the perfect topic. Because it gave him the chance to talk about himself.
“I’ve hit a snag,” he said.
“A big one?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I want this thing to happen, but I don’t know how to make it happen.”
“Could you Google it?” I asked.
Waller stopped walking and shook his head. “I’ve hit an impasse at an emotional level.”
Before coming to the July Prague Writers’ Conference I had never heard of anybody encountering an impasse. Now it seemed like everybody I’d met had hit one.
“Do you see that?” Waller asked. He pointed to the side of a melon-colored pub.
I knew it was a pub because it had two words written on it: “Pub” and “Hostinec.” “The pub?” I asked.
“The waterline.” He left my side and walked toward the building. “It’s from the flood of 2002. It was the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. Look at how high the water rose.”
The pub’s melon color was much darker on the first story. Below the windows on the second level, you could see clearly where the water had peaked.
“Fifty thousand people were evacuated from the city.”
“Wow,” I said. I wanted to keep talking about personal stuff, not a natural disaster.
“There was so much damage.” He turned and walked back toward me. “And the zoo sits right on the Vltava. It went through an apocalypse.”
This was such a depressing tangent.
“An elephant, hippo, lion, and bear had to be euthanized. They got caught in the floodwaters and were going to drown.”
“They should have evacuated them.” I knew nothing about the Prague flood, but my suggestion seemed sound.
“And there were four sea lions. Three escaped, but one stayed behind.”
“Did it die?”
“No. That one lived. And two of the escaped ones were caught, but the fourth one, Gaston, he wanted freedom.” Waller bit his lip and stared off in the direction of the river.
“He crossed into Germany and swam down the River Elbe toward the North Sea.”
“That makes sense. Sea lions are designed to swim.”
“Authorities caught him in Dresden. He’d made it almost eighty miles. But he was weak and infected from the floodwaters. He died in transport on his way back to Prague.”
“That’s terrible.”
Waller walked back and put his arm around me. “Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.”
A Field Guide for Heartbreakers Page 14