Or to be fourteen again, bursting into the studio after raiding the kitchen with Josh, both of us flopping onto the couch where I sit now, making Mom laugh with some story about what happened at school or at cross-country practice.
“Imagine yourself on a modern pilgrimage,” is the topic of the paper I actually do have to write. “To what sacred place would you travel?” the assignment sheet asks. “Why? With whom? What might you experience along the way? What relic might you bring back? How might the experience change you?”
It would be dorky and way too revealing to write about a pilgrimage to my own childhood, though it’s the pilgrimage I’d most like to make—Mom, Dad, and Jules traveling with me. We’d stop at the places and moments we loved, all the sad, confused layers of myself peeling away like onion skin until my own small, true self was revealed. That’s what I would carry back with me, if I could: the person I was before I even knew Josh Morgan. I’d let her tell me what I should do about—everything.
Instead, I think up something clever about myself as a New-Age Wife of Bath. It’s boring, though. My eyes keep closing. Then suddenly it’s morning. Somehow I’ve ended up in my own bed, and there’s Dad standing in the doorway of my room, glowering.
“Emma,” he says. “That goddamn goose is back. It was in the driveway when I went out to get the paper a few minutes ago. You’d better get up and do something about it.”
Two
Believe me, I try. But no matter where I take Freud along the canal path, he finds his way back to our yard. He’s still there when I leave to go back to school on Sunday afternoon. Monday, Mom calls the Humane Society, the zoo, two petting farms, and a liberal grade school that promotes hands-on experiences with pets. No dice. Then one of the neighborhood dogs goes after him and she has to put him in the garage.
Dad’s garage, I should say. His haven. A place where thousands of dollars of tools are fanned out in the drawers of shiny red mechanics’ toolboxes, where the shelves are lined three-deep in STP, where there’s a CD player and cable TV. Where Dad’s Harley sits at the ready, waxed and gleaming, and a bulletin board displays snapshots of every car he’s owned since he was sixteen. He is not pleased when he gets home and finds Freud there.
“The dog was about to kill him,” Mom says.
“So what?” Dad shrugs. “Natural selection.”
I hear this and more from Mom when I make the mistake of calling home on Thursday. Then on Sunday around noon, while studying, I glance up and there she is standing in my doorway.
Shit. She’s bringing Freud back and I’m going to have to figure out what to do with him—that’s my first thought. Then, I swear, my heart stops. Mom wouldn’t just appear like this, no matter how mad she is about the goose. Something awful must have happened, too awful to tell me on the telephone. But then she says, “Emma, your dad’s waiting in the car. Come on. Hurry! We have something wonderful to tell you.”
So I grab my jacket and follow her, trying to decide whether to be relieved that no one’s dead or annoyed at Mom for being so mysterious. Not to mention the two of them showing up, uninvited, when I’d decided to gut out the weekend alone.
But I have to laugh when I see Dad jamming to the Rolling Stones in the car, the stereo up full blast. He turns it down—slightly—when I get in. “Anything you’ve been wanting lately? Your mom and I were just wondering.”
“Sure,” I say. “New skis, a Jeep, a puppy. A body transplant, a boyfriend. Like you drove all the way down here to find out about that.”
He grins. “Actually, we did. The skis, the Jeep—no problem.”
“Uh-huh, yeah. Why is that?”
“Because we’re millionaires,” he says. “Or we will be first thing tomorrow.”
“I’m so sure,” I say. “Come on, really. What are you doing here?”
Mom turns around, and you’d think from the look on her face that the angel Gabriel had just appeared before her. “Emma,” she says, “Emma. Oh my God. We won LOTTO CASH! The big jackpot: fifty million dollars.”
We’re heading for the airport in Indianapolis to pick up Jules before I can stop screaming and calm down enough for Mom to say, “We don’t actually get fifty million dollars, Emma. There’s taxes. Then you choose a lump sum, or … ” But Dad interrupts her to tell me the story.
“Friday morning,” Dad says. “I’m walking over to my office from the parking garage with a guy I know, bitching about the goose, and we stop at the newsstand in the lobby so he can buy a New York Times. With the change, he gets a couple of LOTTO CASH tickets. ‘Big jackpot this week,’ he says to me. ‘You ought to get a few. Or are you figuring on the goose to stop shitting and lay the golden egg?’ And I think, what the hell. G-O-L-D-E-N. Six letters. So I number the letters of the alphabet, match them up, and buy a ticket.”
“So he goes out to get the paper this morning,” Mom interrupts. “And suddenly he starts yelling and I think, if he says one more word to me about that damn goose…”
“I told you,” Dad says, “ I take back everything I said about the goose. I love that fucking goose. He’s my man!”
Mom laughs hysterically.
“Hel-lo,” I say. “And then?”
“Oh. Well, he was yelling because we won,” Mom says. “He wanted me to bring him the LOTTO CASH ticket to be absolutely sure. I’m like, what LOTTO CASH ticket? So he gives me the paper and says, ‘Stay right there,’ and gets the ticket—so I can read the numbers out loud. So he can compare them. You should’ve seen him, Emma. Honest to God, Mr. Hard-Nosed Lawyer. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
“Hey,” Dad says.
“You were totally freaked out.”
“I was not freaked out. I was happy.”
“Ha,” Mom says. “Look at you right now.”
“What?”
She glances pointedly at the buttoned pocket on his denim shirt, which he touches about every two seconds, then throws up her hands as if in surrender. “Oh. It’s not the LOTTO CASH ticket you keep checking on, it’s a compulsive patriotic gesture—” She places her hand over her own heart and starts saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
“It’s a hell of a lot of money,” Dad says.
Rather testily, it seems to me.
To avoid further discussion of this matter, I ask, “What about Freud? Are you building him a little dream house? Giving him his own credit card?”
“He’s gone!” Mom says. “Emma, it’s the weirdest thing. I let him out of the garage yesterday morning and he walked straight down the driveway, turned left, and headed for the canal. Like he’d stayed for the sole purpose of driving your dad crazy enough to buy that LOTTO CASH ticket, and now—” She waves her hand to finish the thought.
“I have to admit that I was ready to kill you for bringing that goose home,” she goes on. “But now it’s clear to me that you did it because you are a kind and good person. An exemplary person! Our winning LOTTO CASH is clearly a reward from the cosmos for having raised you so well.”
I just smile—a serene, cosmic smile. Wait till Jules finds out, I think. Not only are we fabulously rich, but I’m one-up on her big time. Maybe for life.
Not that I don’t love my sister. I do. It’s just that she does everything right. She was valedictorian of her high school class, graduated magna cum laude from college, and now she’s living in New York trying to make it in musical theater. She’ll probably succeed at that, too. She’s a great dancer—and she’s beautiful: tiny, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. Okay, she’s also nice. And really quite amusing.
When she gets off the plane later that afternoon, I ask, “How was your flight?”
“Horrible,” she says. “Turbulence. Jesus! It was like being on the Beast at King’s Island. For two hours. No lie! And all I could think was, oh perfect, the plane crashes when I’m on my way ho
me because Dad won fifty million dollars, and I’ll never get to spend a single cent.”
When we get to the car, where Mom and Dad are waiting, her first words are “Well, when do we shop?”
But it’s nearly five o’clock—and Sunday, so the mall will be closing at six. There’s nothing to do but spend the next sixteen hours in a state of agitation, waiting to be rich. Dad disappears into his garage to commune with his automotive equipment. Mom calls in sick on the substitute hotline, then goes to her studio to make lesson plans to drop off at school early the next morning.
Jules and I watch Singin’ in the Rain, the old videotape of it she’s had since she was a freshman in high school. She takes it everywhere with her. Instant Valium, she calls it. She swears it’s impossible to watch that movie and stay anxious about anything.
It’s a nice fantasy: people singing and dancing their way to romance. Mainly, though, I like the way it always makes Jules so happy. Now, like always, she jumps up and does the rain dance with Gene Kelly, tipping an imaginary umbrella, belting out the words to the song.
When it’s over, she collapses on the couch, grinning. “Suppose I could get Dad to give me the money to remake this movie?” she asks. “Starring me?”
We get giddy, trying to one-up each other casting the male lead. Matthew Broderick, Brad Pitt. George Clooney, why not? She hits the rewind button and we watch Gene Kelly dance backwards to the beginning of the movie.
“It’s just so weird to think we could remake a movie if we felt like it,” she says.
“Or buy a Lear Jet. Or a Rembrandt.”
“Who’s buying a Rembrandt?” Mom asks, carrying in two greasy pizza boxes and setting them on the coffee table.
“We’re just fantasizing,” I say.
She smiles. “Remember how you guys used to play ‘Rich’ when you were little? I’d save up all the magazines and catalogues and you’d cut out pictures of everything you wanted, making up stories.”
“Mine would always be clothes and makeup,” Jules says. “Hotels and swimming pools. Pink convertibles and diamond bracelets.” She wrinkles her nose. “Ugh. Do you think I was overly influenced by Barbie? Like, permanently damaged?”
“Clearly terminal,” I say.
Jules raises an eyebrow. “Well, you had a death wish,” she says. “As far as I could tell, everything you wanted was likely to kill you. Motorcycles, skis, speed boats.”
“Dogs,” I say. “I always put a trusty dog in my adventures. And, Mom, remember the time we cut up the art catalogues and made our own museum?”
“I do,” she says. “I believe we had a Monet—that Japanese bridge with wisteria; Matisse’s red room. And the Chagall with the man and woman lifting off in a kiss.” She shook her head, bemused. “We were so greedy with that imaginary money, weren’t we? But right now just the prospect of new sable brushes and all the cobalt blue my heart desires seems like absolute heaven to me—which pretty much shows I’m nowhere near getting my head around the concept of really being rich.”
“Just do your best, Mom,” I say. “That’s all anyone ever expects of you.”
She bonks me on the head with a stack of paper plates. Then she goes to the back door and yells for Dad, who comes in looking more, rather than less, agitated than he did earlier.
“I keep thinking about that little trailer we lived in when we first got married,” he says to her. “How we’d keep the furnace on low to save money and every fucking night the back door would fly open and it would snow right on our bed.”
Said trailer was where they’d ended up because Mom got pregnant with Jules while they were still in college. There is this rather hilarious—but exceedingly long—story about the considerable trauma surrounding their wedding.
I look at Jules, who rolls her eyes. She sees it, too: Mom and Dad looking moony, the way they always do when they talk about that time. They’re on the brink of launching into telling the whole story right from the start: how Mom was sitting at a table in the Commons the first day she arrived on campus (the very campus where I’m now a miserable freshman) and Dad walked through the revolving door, took one look at her and, bam, fell in love.
One of us has to break the spell or we’ll be here all night, the two of them reminiscing, when what we need to do is think about the future. So I say in my firmest voice, “Dad. You should be thinking about Corvettes.”
He grins. “As a matter of fact, I am—1962, 327, 4-speed. Red and white, with a red leather interior. Might take a while to find one in mint condition. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll pick up a new one. Can’t have too many Corvettes.”
“So true,” I say. “Too much of a good thing is—not.”
That night, waiting to be rich, we are giddy, dreaming.
Dad will have his Corvettes; Mom, her sable brushes and cobalt blue; Jules, tickets—really good ones—to every single Broadway show she wants to see. I’ll ski every ski resort in the world. Chase snow, like surfers chase surf. Maybe I’ll start in that cool place in Switzerland where they filmed the James Bond movie—the one with Roger Moore, where he seduces the teenaged ice skater and gets hounded by Nordic biathletes. I’ll practice my French in St. Moritz, where all the movie stars go. Get some of those really expensive sunglasses and people will probably think I’m—someone.
I can’t sleep that night, running it all through my mind. I feel half-sick with anticipation, like I used to feel on Christmas Eve when I was a kid. At three o’clock, I creep out to the kitchen to scavenge some leftover pizza, and there are Mom, Dad, and Jules sitting at the table, drinking coffee, looking as bug-eyed as I feel.
“Yo!” says Dad.
Mom smiles, weakly.
Jules sighs. She’s wearing these idiotic flannel pajamas that have little pink poodles with wings and haloes all over them. Her hair is sticking up every which way; there are dark circles beneath her eyes—which only make them look bigger. God. Even when she looks bad, she looks adorable.
I strike a pose, play a little air guitar, and sing a few bars of “Gimme Some Money.” My favorite song from This Is Spinal Tap.
Nobody laughs.
“Elvis used to hire out a whole bowling alley or a movie theater when he couldn’t sleep,” I say. “He’d call up the Memphis Mafia and get them all out of bed and make them come over and bowl with him. Or whatever.”
Nothing.
“Once, in the middle of the night, he jetted from Memphis to Denver in his private plane because he got hungry for a certain kind of peanut butter.”
“Thank you so much for sharing,” Jules says. Then she gives me that look. The one that says, “Please shut up now.”
So I do. I get my piece of pizza and pop the tab on a Diet Coke, which sounds like a little explosion. I slump into the empty chair: mine. Crazy, how we go to our regular places at the table no matter what. We’d all probably go right to them if a crazed killer broke in and waved us into the kitchen with a loaded gun.
I do not share this observation with my family. Clearly, they are in no mood for conversation, no matter how witty and observant. You’d think this would annoy me. Instead, this weird, almost scary happiness floods all through me. Not because we’re about to be rich. Because here we are, all of us together around the kitchen table, the way we used to be.
Three
We’re waiting at the door of the lottery office when a man comes to unlock it, at exactly eight o’clock. He doesn’t say a word, just waves us in. I suppose we’re not the first dazed people he’s ever seen at opening time on a Monday morning.
Dad unbuttons his shirt pocket, takes the ticket out. “I believe this is a winner,” he says.
The man, Bob-Something, smiles then, and leads us to a room with ugly plastic chairs and a television blaring Good Morning America. He takes the ticket from Dad, saying we can wait here till it’s verified.
“Oh, God,” Mom whispers the second he’s gone. “Counterfeit lottery tickets. I never even thought about that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the ticket,” Dad says.
“Yeah, well, what if that Bob guy doesn’t even work here?” I say, just to mix things up a little. “What if he’s heading out the back door right now, even as we speak?”
“Ha, ha,” Jules says.
Mom, Dad, and Jules sit across from us, their hands in their laps, mute as crash test dummies. Above them are photos of LOTTO CASH winners. There’s a young, earnest couple, a little boy with a terrible bowl haircut standing between them. A church lady, dressed in a flowered dress with a Peter Pan collar, her hair swept up and sprayed into a silver pompadour. One big fat guy, in bib overalls, looks like he just fed the pigs and drove in straight from the farm.
What are they all doing right now, I wonder?
“Mr. Hammond?”
Bob gestures us into his office, where he confirms that the ticket is valid and explains the options. Dad can take the whole amount paid out annually over twenty years, or a lump sum of twenty-five million dollars now—minus thirty percent in taxes in either case.
“Lump sum,” Dad says. “Bring it on!”
“You got it,” Bob replies.
He leaves the office and returns in about five minutes with a huge cardboard replica of a check. “Mac Hammond” is written after “Pay to,” and on the next line, “Fifty Million Dollars.” There’s a PR guy, Clark, who takes a picture of Bob handing Dad the actual check for $17,500,000 with me, Mom, and Jules holding the big fake check in the background. Then he interviews Dad with a video camera rolling, probably for the TV news.
“Any plans, sir?” he asks. “Will you be quitting your job?”
“Are you kidding?” Dad says. “Anybody who wins fifty million dollars and keeps working has got to be crazy!”
Everything You Want Page 2