Everything You Want

by Barbara Shoup

  Then one afternoon we’re reminiscing about racing up in Michigan, and get to watching this cute little girl on the course. She’s six or seven, all bundled up in a bright red ski outfit. So proud of the two bronze NASTAR medals pinned to her jacket.

  Dad gets a kick out of that. “Two medals!” he says to her. “You must be pretty fast.”

  She grins a toothless grin. “I got one for trying really hard,” she says. “Yesterday I almost won, so my dad gave me his medal. Then today, I really won. So I got another one.”

  “That is so sweet,” I say afterward, going up on the chairlift.

  “Are you kidding?” Dad says. “It’s bullshit! Why the hell would her dad give her a medal she didn’t earn?”

  “To make her feel good?” I say. “To encourage her to keep trying? What’s so wrong about that?”

  “It’s dishonest,” he says. “It makes both medals meaningless. Don’t you remember how you felt the first time you won a bronze medal, what a big deal it was?”

  “Sure,” I say. “But maybe earning every goddamn little thing isn’t the most important thing in the world. Maybe once in a while it’s okay just to make your kid feel good.”

  We get to the top right then, and I catapult myself off the chair and huff away. I’m so mad I fly through the gates and beat his time by three seconds.

  “You know I’m right,” he says, back on the chairlift. “You know there’s no point in having a medal you didn’t earn. Tell me that gold medal you just won wasn’t all the better because you kicked my butt doing it?”

  “Who cares about a gold medal,” I say. “Who cares about winning a million medals? I’d ten times rather feel like I wasn’t such a loser all the time.”

  Dad looks pained. “For Christ’s sake, Emma, you’re not a loser. You’re just going through a tough time. You need to lighten up a little. Enjoy yourself.”

  “Lighten up,” I say. “Okay. I’ll get right on that.”

  Furious, I ski away from him, away from the race hill, and slam down through the first mogul field I can find. Once in the middle of it, I feel pure, like a machine. I don’t think about anything. My body knows what to do and it does it again and again the whole way down. My legs are burning by the time I get to the bottom. I stop, bend over, breathing hard.

  Dad slides to a stop beside me. “Great run, Emma,” he says. “I mean it. That was a great run. You were unconscious!”

  But I ski away from him again, all the way down to the base. Then I take my skis off, heft them onto my shoulder, and head for the condo.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad says, catching up to me. “Really. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I shrug.

  “You’re not speaking to me?”

  “Why bother, when you have no idea what I’m trying to say?”

  “Fine,” he says. “Fuck it. Be miserable.”

  “What’s wrong with you two?” Mom says when we stomp in. “What happened?”

  I just sink into one of the ridiculous leather couches, fold my arms across my chest, and watch Dad get pissed all over again telling Mom about the little girl’s medals.

  “It’s not about the stupid medals,” I say. “Okay?”

  “Then what is it about?” Dad asks. “For Christ’s sake, we win fifty million dollars and suddenly everyone’s depressed? You’re right. I don’t have a fucking clue.”

  Mom and I sit there, mute, until he leaves, slamming the door behind him.

  “I know what you mean about the medals,” she says after a while.

  “Yeah, well, do you know how Dad can be so incredibly obtuse?”

  “Actually,” she says, “I think I do. The thing is, Emma, he’s so—himself. He’s so comfortable in his own skin. It’s a wonderful way to be—”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But he thinks everyone should be that way. He thinks you can just decide to feel good about yourself. That I can decide that.”

  “I know,” Mom says. “He thinks I can, too—though, God knows, I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime trying to disabuse him of the idea. But Emma, you know how you can understand something in your head, how you can absolutely believe it, and no matter how hard you try you keep on acting, thinking in the same old ways?”

  “Yeah. Unfortunately, I have no problem whatsoever with that concept.”

  “Well, there you go,” Mom says. “Your dad’s not perfect, either. And ever since we got the money, he’s been like a kid in a candy store. But he’ll come down from it. He can’t ski forever. Eventually, he’ll have to figure out what to do with himself, just like the rest of us.”

  She means to make me feel better, saying that. But as much as Dad drives me crazy sometimes, I count on his relentless enthusiasm. It scares me to think of him being any other way. “The thing is, he was right about the medals,” I say. “That’s what made me so mad.”

  “Maybe,” Mom says. “But you were also mad because he wasn’t listening to you. Fine. He’s right about earning your own way. But feeling good about yourself helps you be able to do that—and feeling good about yourself doesn’t automatically happen just because you’re competent. Which is basically what you were trying to say to him, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you were right, too, weren’t you? He should have done a better job of letting you know how proud he was of you, growing up. We both should have. Emma—” Her voice wobbles. “Dad and I both think you’re wonderful. You know that, don’t you? You know how much we love you?”

  Then we’re both crying.

  “I know you and Dad love me,” I say, when I can get my breath. “I don’t love me. It’s my problem.” I let her put her arms around me and hold me, like she did when I was a little girl.

  I should tell her about Harp now. Try to explain what happened between us and how it made me feel worse about myself than I ever have. But it seems like such a long story, so stupid and confusing, that I can’t think how to begin.

  Trouble is, I can’t think how to stop thinking about it. For days, I swing back and forth between believing that maybe I really am a perfectly okay person like Harp said, just confused (maybe even a person Gabe Parker could like), and replaying my failures with Harp—and Josh, too—certain that they’re just the first two of however many heartbreaks I’m bound to suffer until I finally wise up and accept that I’m destined to spend the rest of my life living all alone with my competent, out-of-it, dilettante self.

  I also think about something I read about karma in a book Harp lent me: that you choose your troubles based on lessons you need to learn. Could that be right, too? Could I actually be choosing to be screwed up, choosing to be a human pinball machine of emotion? Choosing not to be loved? I run that one by Mom, who looks at me with that expression she gets when she’s standing at her easel, paintbrush in her hand, trying to decide where to make the next stroke.

  “Well, take a look at yourself,” she says carefully. “Your clothes, your hair. You look great, but so—extreme.”

  “Yeah?” I say.

  Mom shrugs. “You’re always talking about not being pretty, yet you refuse to make any effort to look pretty. You cut off all your beautiful hair. You dress in black—”

  “I did it to simplify my life,” I say. “I told you that. And anyway, why should I spend all my time trying to look pretty just to attract some stupid boy? I hate that. If boys don’t notice me, if they don’t like me the way I am, screw them. Who needs them?”

  “Emma,” Mom says. “I hate to tell you this, but the way you look now absolutely screams for attention. Personally, I think you look wonderful. You know, very chic. But to most boys, you probably look, well, a little alarming. Why would you want to alarm them?”

  “I don’t want to alarm them,” I say. “I just don’t want to bother with them if they can’t handl
e the real me.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I can see that. But don’t you think you might be putting off a lot of perfectly nice guys in the process, guys who’d like you just fine if they felt comfortable taking the chance to get to know you? It’s hard for them, too, you know. Dating isn’t only hard for girls. And think about this: trying to look avant-garde is ultimately no different from trying to look conventionally pretty. You do realize that, don’t you? That it’s the same impulse at work? The same extreme attention to appearance?”

  My heart sinks: I hadn’t, till this moment.

  “Bullshit,” I say nonetheless. “I look the way I do because I like looking this way. I can’t believe you think I should dress to make boys happy.”

  Mom looks pained. “I didn’t say you should dress to make boys happy, Emma. You know me better than that. I’m saying, be honest with yourself. That’s all. It’s not easy, I know. And I know we went overboard making such a big deal about you and Julie being smart and independent. We should have made sure you knew we thought you were pretty, too.”

  “But Jules is pretty. And smart. It’s not like it turned out to be a problem for her.”

  “Julie has her own problems,” Mom says. “We all do. And for God’s sake, Emma, you’re pretty too. Don’t you realize that there are probably a million girls out there not nearly as pretty as you are who think they’re gorgeous because their parents made a big deal of telling them so? They’re probably upset about how nobody ever told them they were smart.”

  Well, I’m too tired to think about that, too tired to think about anything. In fact, I’m suddenly so completely exhausted that I fall asleep right there where I sit. When I wake up, it’s night, and I can hear the low murmur of my parents talking in the kitchen.

  “ … pack up, get a few hour’s sleep,” Mom says. “If we leave early and drive straight through, we’ll get there about as quick as we could by flying...”

  I can’t make out the next words, so I get up and go toward them. Dad’s sitting on the edge of his chair, bent over, his forearms crossed on his knees. Mom’s pulled another chair beside him. Still half-asleep, I look at them and feel relieved to see them close, her hand on his knee, their heads bent in earnest conversation.

  “At least he made it back from Florida,” Mom says.

  “Christ, who knows when someone would have found him in that damn Winnebago if it had happened on the road.”

  I thud fully awake then. “Gramps?” I ask.

  They both look toward the doorway, where I stand.

  “Margaret called a while ago,” Mom says. “She thinks he may have had a heart attack.”

  “Gramps?” I say again.

  “He’s okay now,” Mom says quickly. “Of course, he wouldn’t let Margaret call an ambulance, wouldn’t go to the doctor—so we’re a little concerned. But you know Margaret: such a worrywart. He’s probably perfectly fine.”

  Margaret’s a worrywart, all right. But I’m not fooled. Margaret or no Margaret, I know Mom always believes the worst thing will happen: her pretending that Gramps is fine is absolute testimony to how certain she is that something’s terribly wrong with him. I look at Dad and know he doesn’t think Gramps is fine either.

  I turn and walk back into the dark living room. I look at the rumpled afghan on the chair, at my boots that Mom placed neatly side-by-side. I go to the window and press my forehead against the cold glass. Beyond it there’s only the dark mountain, snowflakes swirling. I close my eyes. My life has been on a skid-path ever since we got rich, and now this. Gramps had a heart attack.

  As if those two things were equal, I think.

  As if winning fifty million dollars was a tragic event.

  Twenty–one

  Gramps is in his garage when Dad and I get there, Waylon Jennings blaring on his little radio, his beat-up tools and a half dozen greasy engine parts in a clutter all around him. He’s working on the snowmobile. He and Dad never did get it running right up in Michigan.

  He doesn’t hear us come in. The music is loud and he’s hard of hearing, anyway. He’s sitting there, holding the carburetor in his hand, staring at it. Dad smiles, really smiles, for the first time since Margaret’s call. I smile, too—and feel the knot of anxiety give a little inside me. Gramps’ bemused expression is so familiar. This whole scene is familiar, reassuring: Gramps in his wreck of a garage figuring out too late that he has no idea what the hell he’s doing.

  But when he looks up and spots us, fear flickers in his eyes. He holds up the carburetor with a sheepish grin. “Hey, when all else fails, follow directions,” he says. Which is what he always says when he gets to this point in a project.

  Clever, I think. How he avoided asking us why we’re here.

  Dad avoids it, too. He finds the owner’s manual under a pile of junk on the workbench. “Okay,” he says. “What are you trying to do with this mess?”

  “Goddamn carburetor,” Gramps says. “I can’t get any rpm’s out of the son of a bitch. I know it’s not electrical, and it’s breathing air. Got to be the carburetor. Clogged high-speed jet.”

  They work a while: soak the carburetor in cleaner, then run a wire through the clogged place. I watch, which is what I’ve done ever since I was big enough for Dad to set me on the barstool Gramps keeps at his worktable and not have to worry about me falling off of it. I’d listen to them talk, wait patiently for the moment they’d turn and, laughing, tell me some story. How Dad used to stay out late and climb into his bedroom window when he was a teenager, and one night Gramps waited in the bushes and scared the shit out of him when he crept around the corner into the backyard. How Gramps once ran a drill bit right through the palm of his hand, stared at it for about two seconds, then turned the drill back on, pulled the bit off, wrapped his hand in an oily rag and kept on doing whatever he was doing.

  It cheers me up a little to remember that he refused to go to the emergency room to have his hand looked at, just like he refused going the other night. Still, I watch him now, looking for any sign of what Margaret described when she called us in Colorado. He looks a little tired, maybe; other than that, he looks all right. He’s wearing a jacket, though, which worries me a little. Even in the dead of winter, Gramps works in the garage wearing just a flannel shirt.

  He looks up. Maybe he can feel my eyes on him. “Emma,” he says. “I’ll tell you what, that Winnebago runs like a dream. I pulled it right up on the beach down near Tampa. Sat in my leather seat with my feet up on the dash, drank a beer and watched the sun set over the ocean. It’s the life, all right.” He winks. “Couple of gals were out there one day, sunbathing, and I gave them the tour. If I hadn’t been heading back home the next day, well, who knows?”

  “Did you feel okay while you were gone?” Dad asks. “You didn’t have any—episodes down there, did you?”

  Gramps picks up the carburetor, examines it, wipes it off with a rag. “So that’s what you’re doing here,” he says. “Goddamn it. I told Margaret not to call you.”

  “Don’t be pissed off at Margaret,” Dad says. “You scared her half to death the other night. What happened, anyway?”

  Gramps makes a disgusted sound and starts polishing again. “Yeah, okay, it was probably a little heart attack,” he says. “I got your mother’s medical book down and took a look at it after Margaret left. There’s a pretty good chance that’s what it was.”

  “Oh.” Dad takes a step back. He looks as shocked as I feel. In a million years, I’d never have thought Gramps would admit he might have had a heart attack, and I realize that, till this moment, I haven’t really believed it could be true. I feel nauseous, dark and fuzzy at the edges— kind of like I felt once in grade school, coming to after I got conked in the head with a swing.

  Dad looks at Gramps, takes a deep breath, and blows it out through his lips slowly like air hissing from a punctur
ed tire. “Shit,” he says finally, almost to himself. Then, “Why wouldn’t you let Margaret call an ambulance if you thought you had a heart attack? For Christ’s sake, Dad—”

  Gramps sets the carburetor on the garage floor with a clunk. “Listen,” he says. “If you came all the way from Colorado to call a goddamn ambulance for me, forget it. I’m not going to the hospital. No way. When your mother died, I swore there was no way in hell I’d die in a goddamn hospital.”

  “You’re not dying,” Dad says.

  But his voice cracks, and that scares me more than anything.

  “I mean it,” Gramps says. “I’m not going to the goddamn hospital to die.” He takes his glasses off to peer at the small print on a can of motor oil on his workbench, then mutters, “Fifty to one. Not enough oil. Burn a piston.”

  “Dutch,” Dad says in a low voice. “Dad. Will you please listen to me?”

  Gramps shrugs, looks up. “Yeah, okay. Shoot,” he says.

  “All right. No hospital.” Dad holds his hands up, in surrender. “I’m not asking you to go to the hospital right now. But you need to see a doctor and find out if you really did have a heart attack. How to avoid having another one, if you did.”

  Gramps snorts. “I had a goddamn heart attack, okay? And I know how to avoid having another one: crap health food, no beer, sit around and watch the goddamn TV like an old fart. To hell with that. I’m leaving for Arizona in the Winnebago next week, just like I planned. So don’t talk to me about doctors and hospitals. I’m not going.”

  Dad says, “It could be something else, you know. There’s all kinds of weird shit it could be. Would you just see the fucking doctor? Indulge me?”

  Gramps shrugs again.

  “I’m going to call Dr. Crandall, okay? See if—”