by Deb Caletti
“I can’t,” Bex says.
“She’s grounded!” Mom shouts from the kitchen.
“Still?” I say.
“Too long, you think?” Mom shouts again. Trevor and I go to the kitchen, where Mom has started dinner. She’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with hanger bumps on the shoulders. I smell onions, the bitter-sweet tang of them frying in butter. Her long hair is tied back, strands around her face frizzly from steam. “I don’t know about grounding. What do I know about grounding? Bomba and Bompa never grounded Mike or me. Hi, Trevor,” she says.
“Hey, Missus,” he says, which is what he calls her even though she’s not married. My Dad was living in Hawaii with Jennifer. Mom called Jennifer her “step wife.”
“That’s ’cause Uncle Mike was perfect and the only rebellious thing you did was marry Dad,” I say.
“Bomba loved your Dad,” Mom says. “Loves. So even that wasn’t so rebellious.” Bomba, my grandmother (who earned her name when I was a baby and couldn’t pronounce “Grandma”), lives in Arizona, where she and Bompa moved a while back to make their retirement money “stretch.” I like the idea of that, money stretching, the way you take a pinch of gum from your mouth and pull. Bompa died about seven years ago, when my parents were getting divorced. He said he got colon cancer from all the smoke my Dad blew up his ass, but really, he liked the joke so much, he’d use it with various people—insurance salesmen, his brother-in-law. I look at the picture of Bomba that’s on our fridge, stuck there with a magnet from a pizza delivery place. She’s sitting in a blow-up kiddie pool with her sunglasses on, her boobs all water-balloon saggy in her swimsuit, and she’s reading a magazine. She taped on one of those cartoon bubbles, and has herself saying, “Bomba, luxuriating in the pool.” I miss not seeing her. Without Bomba, we have all cookie and no chocolate chip.
“Why’s Bex grounded?” Trevor asks.
“She had to go to the principal’s office,” I say. “This girl at school—”
“Lindsey,” Mom interrupts.
“She hates Lindsey,” Trevor says. “Suck-up. Teacher’s pet.” Another reason Trevor is great. He keeps up with all that stuff. He pays attention.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” I say. “Lindsey told Bex that Bex couldn’t karate chop, so Bex proved her wrong. Knocked her on her butt.”
“Oh, man,” Trevor says.
“Oh, man,” Chico, our parrot, says from his cage in the corner. If you have any brains, you stay away from Chico. He’ll lure you to him with nice words, like Come here, Sweetie, or Give me a kiss and he’ll make smooching sounds. But then when you get close, snap! It gets the vet every time. Trevor snitches a baby carrot from the counter, and Mom gives him a look, shoves the knife over for him to chop some instead.
“She’s lucky she didn’t get expelled,” Mom says.
“Still, she’s been grounded for a week,” I say.
“I like being grounded!” Bex shouts from the other room. As you can tell, our house was pretty small. Privacy, forget it.
“That’s not the idea!” Mom shouts back. “See? What do I know about grounding,” she says.
Mom finishes browning beef and adds garlic, and the whole house gets rich with the blissful, hypnotic meld of butter and garlic and onions. She’s making a Joe’s Special, one of her top-three favorite meals at her favorite restaurant, Thirteen Coins, somewhere we go only for a special treat, since it’s pricey. Okay, actually we went there only once that I can remember, back when she and Dad were still married and she didn’t have to worry in the grocery store aisle over whether she should buy shower cleaner or not. In the old days, fabric-softener sheets you tossed into the dryer and already-made juice in bottles (versus the frozen kind you mix with three cans of water) were not considered luxury items. We could get the ice cream in a round container and not in a square one.
I hear Severin, my brother, come home. Severin, Indigo, Bex—my father had this thing for individuality in names, according to Mom, which basically means, If you don’t like it, blame him. Severin says hi to Bex, and then his bedroom door shuts. Mom adds the eggs and spinach, which may sound gross, but it’s not. It’s amazing. My mother is great in the kitchen, but if you really want to understand Naomi Skye, the person, you need to look at the complicated relationship she had with her old Datsun then. First of all, every smell on the road—a street being tarred, a fire, some tanker spilling exhaust—would elicit this panicky reaction along the lines of, What’s that? Do you smell that? Is that my car? She’d roll down her window, sniff, sniff, sniff, until you said, Mom, relax! See the flames coming out of that building? The fire trucks? The plumes of black smoke over there? And then she’d hold a hand to her chest and breathe a sigh of relief. Thank God, she’d say. I thought I was going to need a new engine or something.
Then, second, there was that pesky little red “engine” light that flickered on the dashboard. This was a sign of certain doom, which she completely ignored. If you pointed it out, she’d say, It’s fine. It always does that. It’ll go off. And then, finally, there were the windshield wipers. We’d be driving along, and her windshield wipers would be going even though it’d stopped raining twenty minutes ago, or maybe even the day before. Still, they’d be ke-shunk, ke-shunking and she wouldn’t notice until you said Mom! Your wipers are on! and she’d give this little surprised Oh, right! and shut them off. See, a triple threat existed in Mom; it’s still there, really (and will probably be there always, no matter what), some anxiety-denial-distraction combo that expressed itself most clearly as soon as she was behind the wheel of that old yellow car. That’s what happens when you’re a single mother and work full-time in a psychiatrist’s office and are raising three kids and trying to find the time to get the laundry done, she’d say as she sprayed Febreze on some shirt in lieu of actually using the washing machine. I don’t know about that, but I do know that even if she’s a bit scattered, she’s great with food. She knows how to feed us.
There in the kitchen, Trevor agrees. “Mmm.” He groans with smell-pleasure. His own mom runs a day care in their house, so he was lucky if he got hot dogs cut up into little pieces and Cheerios in a baggie.
“Tell your brother and sister that dinner’s ready,” Mom says.
“Bex! Sever-in!” I shout. “Dinner’s ready!”
“Indigo, God.” She sighs. “I could have done that.” Which is what she always says. “Go and tell them.”
“God!” Chico says.
In a few moments, we’re all around the table, pouring milk, passing rolls. Mom liked us to sit and have that meal together. We will not be one of those families that eat in the car on the way to somewhere else. Where sports practice and meetings and trips to the mall are more important than being together, she would say. I want us to share our day. Trevor was the one who really got off on this, since his mother didn’t hear a word he said unless he was dripping blood and had to go to the emergency room.
“Top of the line built-in model,” he says, “and they aren’t even gonna use it. It’s for the catering kitchen. The place the caterers go to make a mess in so guests don’t see.” Trevor had delivered a refrigerator earlier that day to some people on Meer Island.
“The Moores have a catering kitchen,” Severin says. “And this whole room where Mrs. Moore can practice her tennis swing in virtual reality. I saw it at the Christmas party.” Then, Severin worked after school for MuchMoore Industries, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, but if you haven’t, it’s this company that sells digital cameras and image transferring. They’ll print your name and photo on any object from greeting cards to wallpaper. Severin’s my twin, but you’d never know it. I got blessed with the part of Mom that’ll reach into her purse for a pen and will pull out a tampon, and I got blessed with the part of Dad that’s dissatisfied with social constraints, and that’s maybe just a little dissatisfied in general. The way most people feel on Sunday nights is how I think he feels a lot of the time. This led him to get fired from his job at an advertisin
g firm, after he submitted a proposal for a major account, Peugeot, with the slogan, “Got Peu?” After that, Dad left advertising for good, moved to Hawaii, and opened a shop that rents surfboards.
Bomba, who loves me, claims I dance to my own drummer, and I’m sure she’s got this wrong, because it makes me sound like I’m flailing around in the focused psycho-ecstasy you see in groupies in the front row of any concert. But Severin, he doesn’t dance to his own drummer. He walks in a straight line. He got the parts of our parents that remember to buy stamps and that love books and that plan for the future. Severin’s one of those guys who have looks and height and brains and a sense of purpose. He worked for MuchMoore, hung out with the Skyview kids from our school, and he could fake his way through the truth that he didn’t fit in with them. The fact that girls like Kristin Densley and Heather Green called our house all the time and that he got good grades didn’t piss me off, though, because Severin’s this really nice person. He treated Trevor like an equal even if Trevor graduated from the alternative school. Severin, my brother, talked to me at school, even if no one seemed to grasp the idea that we were related. He’s the kind of guy that also does nice things for no reason, like once he replaced a broken string on my guitar as a surprise.
“Two kitchens to clean, is all I can think,” Mom says.
“They don’t clean them,” I remind.
“No, they just hire immigrants at less than minimum wage,” Mom says. She sounds like Jane, my boss.
Bex takes a swig of milk. “There are people without homes and food now, let alone refrigerators,” she says.
“Detention’s over, Bex,” Mom says.
“No, wait. Seriously,” Trevor says. His face does get serious. But serious in a way that makes you want to laugh. “What would you do if you had that kind of money?”
I know that Trevor is someone who asks a question because he’s dying to give you his own answer, and I am a good girlfriend, so I say, “What would you do?”
“I know what I’d do,” he says.
“Start your business,” I say.
“What’s that saying? ‘Give a man a lemon, he eats lemons for a day; teach him to make lemonade and he’ll always have something to drink’? I’d invest in myself,” Trevor says. You can see why I might be lacking a little faith in Trevor as a businessman.
“Nunderwear!” Bex shouts, raising a fist to the air. This is Trevor’s latest brilliant plan. He’d had other ideas before, but this time he’s serious. The last time, he was serious too, but he’s forgotten that. Nunderwear is based on those days-of-the-week underwear, only with Nunderwear, they’d all read SUNDAY. Trevor’s got this whole product line of gag gifts he wants to sell under the business name Lapsed Catholic Enterprises. He’s sure other lapsed Catholics would find them just as hilarious as he does, and he doesn’t even smoke anything (anymore). He wants to make those little packets of cheese and crackers using communion wafers, called My Body Snack Pak. Then he has the Pope’s Hat Coffee Filters, which he actually sketched out on a piece of notebook paper. Shaped like the pope’s hat, they’d come in a pack of fifty and fit any standard electric coffeepot, for using or wearing.
“You guys laugh, but you won’t be laughing when I’m rolling in the dough.”
“If I had that kind of money?” Bex says. “I’d give it away to the needy. To people whose houses have washed away, just like that.” She snaps her fingers.
“CNN isn’t good for kids,” I say.
“I mean it,” she says. Her blue eyes look directly at me. She’s eleven years old, so I suspect her submersion into disaster coverage will fade as soon as she’s in her sixth-grade class painting papier-mâché tribal masks they’ve made out of strips of the Seattle Times and Gold Medal flour and water. “I would.”
“Severin?” Trevor asks.
“Easy. College.”
“Like you’re not going to get scholarships,” I say.
“You have no idea. I get Bs! God. I’m up against these kids who’ve taken every SAT prep class, who’ve hired college counselors that have been working with them since they were zygotes, searching out scholarships and filling out applications…. It’s nuts. And they don’t even need the scholarships.”
“What’s a zygote?” Bex asks.
“I told you, we’ll work out something,” Mom says. But she doesn’t look too sure, honestly. She stares down into her plate when she says it, picks at her salad with her fork as if the solutions are hidden somewhere under the lettuce.
“What’s a zygote?” Bex asks again.
“When the egg and the sperm—”
“Oh gross, never mind,” Bex says.
“Can we ditch the sperm talk at dinner, please?” I say.
“What about you, Missus?” Trevor asks. His mind is still on rich people. “What would you do if you had lots of money? Lots and lots of money.”
“College. For Severin and Indigo and Bex.”
“I don’t want to go to college,” I say.
“So you claim,” Mom says. It’s an ongoing argument between us, and now when the subject comes up, Mom stops it cold with some statement that indicates her irrefutable superior knowledge about my real desires. She doesn’t get that I don’t know what I want to study, and that it therefore seems a waste of money. I’m not going to be one of those people who spend thousands of dollars getting an art history degree and then end up working in a dentist’s office.
“Okay, besides college,” Trevor says. “Don’t you people dream big? Swimming pools?”
“I’ll take a pool,” I say.
“Famous people, parties…” He’s trying to bait me.
“Hun-ter E-den,” Mom sings. Okay, so I had a little crush on Hunter Eden then. Who in their right mind didn’t? My friend Melanie actually went to one of his concerts and met him, because her dad’s PR firm handled Slow Change. Yeah, I’d have liked to handle Slow Change. I may not have wanted to dance to my own drummer, but I wouldn’t have minded dancing to my own guitar player. Not only did I find his playing to be amazing and inspirational, but he was sexy enough to melt ice, like he did on the body of that girl in the video for “Hot.”
“Okay, okay. Front row tickets, backstage pass, after-concert party. Then I’d die happy,” I say.
“I could sing you ‘Hot’,” Trevor offers. Everyone laughs. Even Chico does his eh, eh, eh laugh imitation. “It wasn’t that funny.”
“You still need something for yourself, Mom,” I say.
“College is for myself,” she says. “You can take care of me in my old age.”
“Diamonds!” I joke. Mom is a nonjewelry person. If she ever gets remarried (which was looking unlikely since she didn’t even date) she’d probably rather strap a hefty Barnes & Noble gift card to the third finger of her left hand than a ring.
“Dahling,” she says. “No, I like the blue ones. What are they? I always think topaz, but that’s not right.”
“Sapphires,” Severin says. “How about a trip somewhere?”
“Zygote City,” Bex says.
“A Jenn-Air built-in Euro-style stainless with precision temperature management system,” Trevor says.
“No, I know,” I say. Bex looks at me and smiles.
“I know too,” she says.
“Toilet seat!” we say together.
“Eh, eh, eh,” Chico says.
“Come on, guys, it is not that bad,” Mom says. She was wrong, though—it was. It had a thin, shifty crack in it, and you had to be careful how you sat down, or it’d snip you in the ass. If you stumbled to the bathroom in the middle of the night and didn’t stay alert, you’d get a zesty wake-up pinch.
“We’ve got the only toilet seat in all of Zygote City that bites,” Bex says.
“I promise, I’ll get it fixed,” Mom says. “Add it to the list.” Microwave oven: out of commission since Bex put a foil-wrapped Ho Ho in there. Why she wanted to warm it up is still a mystery. Vacuum: worked if you only used the hose attachment and didn’t mind spe
nding about twelve hours hunched over the carpet like you’d lost a contact lens. Iron: black on the bottom and leaking water.
“Gold toilet seat,” Trevor says, as if it’s decided.
“Or one of those padded ones,” Severin says, and grins.
“Those give me the creeps,” I say.
“Me too, but I don’t exactly know why,” Mom says.
Freud, our cat, saunters in from the living room, stretches his hind legs behind him. Bex dangles her fingers toward the floor and Freud nudges them with his triangle nose.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” Chico says evilly. He makes smooching sounds.
That was what my life was like, before I got rich.
2
I might have been the only one in the world who didn’t have a cell phone, but I didn’t care. Or maybe I cared a little. One time Trevor and I were driving around downtown Seattle, and we saw this guy sitting on the curb with his bottle of Thunderbird in a brown bag, and a cardboard sign that read WILL WORK FOR FOOD, and he was talking on a cell phone. I’m not kidding. Unless he was on some Friends and Family plan, that’s just whacked. But it did make me wonder if maybe I should spend my hard-earned money on one. I decided no, though, because I really needed a car right then, and that’s what I was saving for.
Mom always said that in the real world, not everyone has cell phones and TVs in their rooms and drives their dad’s BMW. She was referring to the Skyview kids that went to my school. Nine Mile Falls (the suburb just east of Seattle) has its sections, like those parfaits at Carrera’s with the layers of pudding and whipped cream. There’s the downtown, where we live, which sits in the valley between three mountains, Mount Solitude being the largest. The town is all small Christmas-card charm and lies along a winding river that runs with salmon in October. There’s another hill, though, at the edge of town, called the Midlands, where new housing developments are continually springing up; not-there, and then there, like those toy sponges that are paper flat until you put them in water. And finally there’s another part of the Midlands, the highest part of the hill, a neighborhood called Skyview. Skyview is where all the kids live whose parents make a ton of money at Microsoft. The land of SUVs, of big headlights bearing into your back windshield with crazy-eyed caffeinated aggression. The super rich, the only-on-television rich, MuchMoore rich, don’t live in Nine Mile Falls at all, but a few miles north, on Meer Island.