Spider Brains: A Love Story (Book One)

by Wingate, Susan

  Luckily, I’m a kid with fairly soft bones, mom went on to tell me the next morning, seeing the Charlie horse on my arm and the knot on the back of my head, “lest, you might’ve broken something.” Lest. She actually said lest. She reads the Bible a lot too since dad died. She even sometimes yells Selah! When I say funny things. I just pray that she doesn’t do it in front of Ricki and Jamie.

  Our lives went a bit "topsy-turvy" (as my psychologist put it) and I was to "just accept inevitable changes that would occur" in mom.

  So, mom made me stay home from school that day and I got to do all sorts of fun things with her like make special potions with Jergen’s lotion and vinegar and sugar. I’m trying to find a new acid-based wrinkle reducing cream for mom, who, by the way, is only thirty-seven. Mom gave birth to me August 12th, 1994 at 4:49 p.m. at St. Charles Hospital, in Port Jefferson, a mere 14.1 miles away from our house.

  Mom doesn’t like her crow’s feet of late but I think they make her look happy. She says they make her look like, “Methuselah but older!” I think it’s one of her Bible references but I’m not really sure. It'll be a year to the day, December 5th, the anniversary of dad's death that we took up reading the Bible.

  Lord! I’m not even all the way through Genesis, it’s like the forever chapter or something.

  Anyway.

  Delilah noticed first. Did I tell you about her? Oh, yeah, I think so. Let me check...

  Did. And, no, I will not stop saying pussy because pussy wasn’t always a bad word and I reject that meaning therein. I’m also thinking about going into law. Pussy, initially, was used in-tandem with cat, pussy cat, to mean a sweet fuzzy four-legged lithe mammal with stellar qualities.

  Remember, I’m also a word FREAK!

  But, it was Delilah first who noticed the change. In me. My super human change. And, after the spider, basically, knocked me down onto the floor and I finally woke up again, I looked at my finger. I realized it might’ve also bitten me. And, upon further inspection of my finger, there appeared a small red dot on its tip and a little white pustule had grown up on a pinpoint of whitish pink bump.

  “Did you bite me?” I shrieked, and, when I looked up at the ceiling, the spider was still hanging from its web. (Good thing, too, because if I had screamed “Did you bite me!” to no one there, I might’ve also become a candidate for the loony bin.)

  The spider did not answer, as one might guess. Instead, she just recoiled slightly within her happy haven website.

  Website. I love that.

  And, she continued to gather silk threads, knit one perl two, and to move to the next obtuse angle for the next knitting session.

  She ignored my question entirely. The snot.

  So, of course, I stuck my finger—pustule and all—into my mouth and scraped it off with my teeth, swallowing it completely and there, I believe, my problem began to take form. Or, should I say, transform.

  Because...

  It was like...

  ...I...

  ...became... ...the spider!

  TWO - Transformation & Invasion

  The air felt crisp and rustled my spiky leg hairs as Delilah galloped along the streets, me hanging onto her like a cowboy holding onto the reigns of his trusty steed. Finally, we reached Morlson's home.

  Delilah jumped up high to the dumpster there behind Morlson’s bedroom window. Then she launched herself, I nearly fell off but a spear of silk shot out, like, automatically, and attached itself to her ear. Delilah caught the edge of the fire escape ladder, me hanging off as if I were the next great Flying Wallenda!

  But. Are you hearing what Delilah did? I mean, she got up to the ladder! That's amazing. Azin' amazin'!

  Cats astonish me. They can get anywhere they want.

  And...

  Without silk rope to do it!

  Still, I had turned into this black hairy-headed, lanky, spiky black body-suit-wearing, wall-climbing dynamo! I could hear and see and feel and taste and smell and sense every miniscule thing around me.

  But, even though it was me, it wasn’t, ‘cause I had shrunk to the size of a nickel! It was as if I had become some ultra-athletic gravity-defiant whiz of a teenager who could leap and scurry and had the strength of fifty teenagers all bundled up into one, me, the magnificent, you guessed it...

  Susi Spidr!

  The soft distinct cadence of a saxophone hung loose in the night, like someone dancing under the stars the way mom and dad used to, on top of their roof, listening, perhaps to John Coltrane... possibly the greatest, most incredible sax player out there! I nearly forgot the task at hand when pussy hiked her way to the top of the ladder, like a lion scaling the side of a mountain.

  Then there we were. On the landing. Outside Morlson's.

  Holy Fish Lips!

  And, there she was, fish lips, lugging around inside her apartment, vacuuming, hair in curlers, SMOKING a longer than normal brown cigarette, like something a Frenchman might smoke.

  Every so often she stopped, took a puff, drawing the cloudy air into her lungs and holding it. When she couldn't hold it any longer, she'd open her lips into a big round circle and poke out a series of wobbly smoke rings, like, thirteen of them! Ghastly. The rank odor wafted its way through the window where me and pussy watched. I coughed a tiny little spider cough and pussy sneezed. Morlson turned to the window although the vacuum cleaner still sputtered away.

  We ducked lower than the sill to avoid being found out.

  When we resumed our position, Morlson's cigarette hung off her lower lip, all slack, like.

  Her level of toadiness just ratcheted up about four trillion notches on the scale of toadiness.

  "Wait here, pussy."

  Delilah sat and began washing her face with her hands. I knew I'd best be moving to avoid being washed off her ear and into her kitty mouth. Horrors of horrors.

  I crawled up the front of her brownstone and in through the window where we'd been staring at the QUEEN OF TOADS.

  Everything felt so incredible as if my entire body could sense every tiny fissure of the hard red clay of the brick wall. Every microscopic sensory nerve ending seemed to be on high alert, like how ex-President George W. Bush was with the Iraqis and the Afghans.

  Like... when in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout! A bit high-strung. That was me that first time out as Susi Arachnid.

  After slipping through the crack in Morlson's window, I ventured down the wall onto her baseboard and waited for her to stop vacuuming. She was heading through her bedroom door and into the larger expanse of the apartment.

  Looking around the room, the colors of her furniture, her shag carpeting, her linens, and the wall paint exhibited tones in varying shades of cigarette ashy-ness. As I was focusing on the boring qualities in her home, she lumbered back into the room withOUT the vacuum cleaner. And, this time, instead, with a glass of whiskey, it looked like to me. The cigarette had been puffed down to a mere inch from its butt and looked as if she were going to get all of its worth out as she pinched it nearly flat between her thumb and index finger, the way I'd seen some of the stonies at school do with their cigarettes.

  I wondered, right then and there, if they made teeny spider-sized cameras that I might snap a pic or two of our lovely teacher so that I might plaster them all over Facebook, MySpace and Twitter! Te he! Wouldn't that be funny?

  Definitely the stuff of losing votes for Teacher of the Year Award! W00T. And, just as I had begun to fantasize about all the possibilities of inventing a camera for spiders, she plopped into bed, adjusting the pillows behind her like the back of a chair, picked up the remote, turned on Biggest Loser, tapped out another ciggie and began to down her cocktail of choice.

  It was a sight to behold. Stunning.

  As she watched TV, every minute or so she'd utter, "Mmm. Mmm. Mmm," in diminishing chords, and wipe a tear from her reddened eyes. After about three times of her doing this I simply got fed up with her, and, if a spider can roll all four eyes together? I did.

>   I'd had enough.

  She deserved a great big smack down.

  THREE - A Good Nap Ruined

  When I got up from my afternoon nap that day, mom was baking a pie. The smell of it all buttery and flaky brown, dragged me from under my cozy-dozy blanket like two fingers up my nose pulling me out and down the hall, drooling all the way, and led me like a sleepwalker into the kitchen.

  There mom stood, in her smart not-so-tight khaki denims, a blue and white picnic table plaid long sleeve shirt, and a stained up white cotton apron tied around her waist. She wore a pair of regular old tennis shoes, the ones she liked to take walks in, their color, if you must know, is a creamy dingy shade and desperately needing a go in the old washing machine--as did her APRON!

  Innocently, I said, “Hey, mom,” hugging her from behind, “what’s up?”

  First off, let me explain something. I LOVE Justin Beiber. It’s actually more than love, deeper than any love ever felt and wider than any cosmos out in any of the billions upon billions of universes out there. My love for him is galactical. I mean, I cried when he broke his foot.

  Ouch. Poor Justin.

  See, and don’t get grossed out here but this is the total truth. I want to kiss those pouty Justin Beiber lips of his and have about fifteen thousand little Justin Beibers all who we’d name “Baby Beibers.”

  So, last week, when this freaky kid moved into the house, number 11, across the street, bringing with him his single dad, I barely noticed. God. And, when my mother decided she wanted to take the dad a pie, “or something nice to let him know we welcomed him to the neighborhood.” Lord. I nearly choked on a tuning fork when she asked me to go too, “since he has a son about the same age as you.”

  “No!”

  “Why not. They look like nice people.”

  “What about Justin?”

  “Who?”

  “Mo-therrrr.” I extended the second half of ‘mother’ really long and crossed my arms trying to block the pain that was growing inside my chest. “He looks like a freakazoid.”

  She turned fast and glared at me. “He looks fine.” She turned away, back to the counter when she said it, like, she knew it was a lie and she didn’t want me to peer into her eyes, into her soul where the lie grew from and, instead, to put the final touches into the care package she’d begun building for them.

  I began to explain, “His hair’s all spik-” She stepped all over my words, “Look, he doesn’t have a mother.”

  “’Cause he’s a freak.”

  “Stop it.”

  I humphawed and leaned against our grainy-looking fake “Spanish Moss” granite Corian countertop sink where she was working, folded my arms and had to listen to a long load of prurient excrement flow from her mouth.

  But, let me stop here because if you didn’t catch it, the word prurient is a perfect word to shorten into a way cool word, like pru. “Pru, man, that’s so pru!” Hmm. Has potential. I just might try it out on Tanya, see what she thinks.

  So, she’s going on, mom that is, and I’m having to stand there and listen while she makes her case about why I must go with her on a ride with the welcome wagon to see the freak and his dad and to say, “So, nice to know you “ and “ Welcome to our neighborhood.” ‘Cause, for me, it would be a lie and, like, the Bible says, it’s bad to lie. In fact, it’s Hell time if you lie so that’s kind of what I said to mom and so she says,

  “The Riders,” How does she know their name? “Probably feel a little lonely since the mother passed away.” What the? Where was she getting her intell?

  She stopped. Then turning to me, again, she puts one hand to her heart and says, “Remember how we felt when daddy died?”

  Of course. God. I had to nod my head because my eyes began to burn all of the sudden.

  “Well, I’m sure that’s how they feel now.” She turned back as she loaded her favorite red and white Macy’s bag with the pie, two plastic forks, two plastic knives and two paper towels that she’d detached into singles and folded into quarters. “There.” Like it was Michelangelo’s David or something.

  I rolled my eyes and humphawed again. I’ m really super-good at humphawing.

  “Come on.”

  “Now!?” I screamed.

  “Well, of course, now. The pie is hot and if you,” this is where all of the emotion she could muster came rolling off her tongue, “do, not, lose that attitude, young lady, I will think about a punishment worth the crime.” She lifted the ropy straps of the Macy’s bag and grabbed my arm moving me away from our fake Corian counter, twisting my body toward the door and pushing me. “Go. Come on.”

  “Quit pushing me.”

  “You know.” She made a noise that sounded a lot like losing air. “When was the last time you read something from your Bible?” We were out the door by then and she walked nearly on my heels with that stupid bag poking me in the middle of my back like I was going to be the first lamb to the slaughter and all the while it’s her demented idea to act as the neighborhood welcoming committee. God.

  “Gah. Mother.” Rolling my eyes again!

  “Quit whining, or else.”

  What does that mean, exactly. Or else. Or else, what? Or else the world will finally implode from all of the pent up toxic gasses brewing at its core and I will never, not ever have to meet freak-boy next door? Or else. Or else, Jesus Christ himself will appear which would stop us, forever—I mean forever ‘cause that’s the effect Jesus has on folks—having to visit any new neighbors at all or especially to go over to freak-boy’s house across the street. Or else... I mean. Really. We could play this game for an eternity, this ‘or else’ thing. God.

  QUATRO - Don't Give Neighbors Sugar!

  His father answered the door. And, if I had, at that moment, a paintbrush, and if I could’ve painted anything across his face? It would be a big yellow question mark.

  He looked like he’d been asleep or something ‘cause his blue button-up short sleeve shirt looked like a map of some land far, far away in the kingdom of Wrinkle, and he was wearing, somehow, someway, a pair of overly relaxed jeans. The pocket hung just on the top of his thigh and one hand was so deep in it I thought he might be looking for a lost gummy bear or something.

  Plus, one of his white tube socks had a hole at the end of it and his third, or maybe, fourth toe was sticking through inspecting the situation at the door. The toenail on the thing looked like a mouse had bitten a chunk out of it. It was yellowish, like gouda cheese.

  He wore a pair of black Ray Ban-looking clear glasses that sat cockeyed and about one-third down on his nose. He stood there for a second before pushing the glasses tighter to his face with his thumb then he dove both hands now deeper into his pockets and stood evenly, balancing his oh-so-tired body somehow on both legs, as he looked at us.

  He looked dumbfounded.

  I rolled my eyes and looked away from him, away from mom for anything, for something to save me. A great big pumpkin perhaps with four white mice that turned into four white horses. For my prince. Where’s Justin when I need him.

  But mom spoke. “Mr. Rider.” Mom shoved her free hand out from behind me for him to shake. “Hello. I’m Willa. Willa Speider from across the street. In 9. There.” She let out a single nervous laugh, turned and pointed with her nose behind her. It was like she was all giggly and I wanted to sit on the ground right then and fall onto my back, lie down on my side and then run my legs around in a circles, throw this humongo fit and suck my thumb.

  But, I couldn’t. Mom was too fast. “This is Susie.”

  “Hello Susie.” He didn’t even offer his hand. Plus, his breath smelled yeasty like he’d fallen into the vat of beer and was still swimming around looking for a ladder to climb out of.

  I know beer. Dad used to drink it when he and his guy friends went deer hunting. Don’t ask. It’s a real horror story. We still have a mounted deer head, a beautiful buck, now some morbid art form, hanging above the dining room table that mom refuses to exorcise from our house. I r
efuse to eat in that room. (Mom doesn’t even know but when I talk to it, you know, sort of, like, apologizing for dad and all, I call it “Moose.” Moose listens real well. And, sometimes, to me, he even seems to nod his poor guiottined deer head or move it real slow, side to side. One thing about Moose is mom could learn from his listening abilities.)

  My hand flew up to my nose to protect me from his breath. Mom stepped in.

  She nearly bumped me off the porch with her achy swaying hips as she held out the Macy’s bag for him to take. “I, we," Uh, yeah, I'm still here mom, "made you a welcome package.” Her recovery was swift and complete.

  “How sweet of you.” He grabbed the bag, looked in, looked up, smiled and then there was like this forever moment but then a thought formed in his mushy trap of a brain, it sounded like a slow wheel grinding up to start, and he turned and screamed, “Matt!”

  He looked back to us and smiled again. “Matt. My son. He’s upstairs.” He turned again.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Matt! Now! We have guests.” He screamed again.

  “It’s not a problem, Mr. Rider.” Mom pulled me back by my tee-shirt right at the shoulder, “We came unannounced and certainly wouldn’t want to inconvenience you. Come on, Susie.”

  “No. Hold on.” He turned and walked a couple steps inside his house out of sight from us. “Matt! Down here. On the double!” I noticed how the floor in the entryway had black smudges on it, probably from moving in last week.

  All of the sudden, you could hear lame-o speaking. “What, dad, I’m streaming...” but Mr. Rider cut him off.

  “Now. I won’t say it again, Matt.”

  “Jeez.” You could hear dorkowitz at the top of the stairs slogging down each thick carpeted step.

  Then before I could turn and run, he showed up and all his long-limbed, bizarre-o glory.

  “Matt?” Mr. Rider said, “This is Mrs. Speider and Susie” I prayed he wouldn’t say it, “Speider.” God.

  Matt kind of giggled but his dad nudged him with an elbow to the ribs. He pushed, with his thumb, at his dad-look-alike-glasses. No lie. “Nice to meet you.”