The party is magnificent. There are scantily clad high school girls parading around in cliques and the boys are in their silk underwear and robes smoking cigars. A stripper comes in at some point and pours alcohol all down her body for J.P. to proudly lap up. My friend likes J.P.’s best friend. He’s wearing a tie with no shirt on. He’s the one that pays me. My friend goes silent at the sight of him. I do most of the talking. Girls are already strewn about the couches looking vodka-logged with nipples showing. I find the guy I’m supposed to talk to and he’s too stoned for his own good. He seems to like me and wants to go somewhere quiet to talk.
The guy my friend likes and my guy are friends somehow. They have a mutual respect for each other because one is a lineman for our football team and the other is rich, both showing signs of prosperity in their futures. The rich one says he knows a place. We walk toward my car, the four of us, my lineman in sweatpants holding my hand already. On the way, the most popular girl in the senior class appears. She’s hanging out of a Ford F-150 with her boyfriend, another football player, and they’re making out vigorously. She’s in a beautiful silk kimono and a bra with high heels. She sees us cross her path and stops us like the Queen of Hearts. Her boyfriend grabs her by the ass and pulls her back in. She pushes him away in disgust and then gives him a look of endearment.
“Hey!” she calls out. “Didn’t what’s-his-face just break up with you?” She is asking me but everyone else is listening.
“Yes,” I answer, shocked. I’ve only made eye contact with her once when I was running late to class because juniors and seniors traverse the same halls. She was wearing red high top Converse that I now own as well.
“He’s an idiot. You’re great! You’re like smart and shit and he,” she said, pointing to my new guy, “is way better. He’s so cute! Good for you!”
Her boyfriend mumbles something incoherent.
“Shut the fuck up, no one cares what you think!” She snaps. Then she leans in and looks at me with her drunken eyes. “You’re gonna be great.” The prettiest girl in school, the richest girl, the cream of the crop.
We tear away from the party as the rich guy leads us to his parents' house that’s still under construction. I let him drive my car because I’m too high at this point, especially as we pass around a joint, my girlfriend refusing to smoke it, but I don’t mind her anymore. I’m back here with a guy’s hand on my leg and it’s all right. The mood is changing, and the farther we get away from the party the better I feel. I’m happy we’re going to see where the house is being built. I’m happy we’ll be somewhere where no one is.
The place is a disaster, like Roman ruins. The rich kid disappears for a few minutes and returns in a golf cart. He takes us to the top of the plot of land. We can see all of Boca from here. All the shimmering lights, the glistening man-made lakes, the sparkling chandeliers from inside glass windows reflecting toward us on the top of the hill. I know I don’t belong here, that it happened by chance because I’m a girl of a certain age with certain curiosities. But it feels good to be so out of place. If I keep this up, I can really go places.
Toad stands on the podium, the scores tally and come together and he gets first place. You watch him hold up the trophy, the oversized gold prize, and he smiles back at you and says “I’m the best!” and you know it’s true, you know that you’re an unbeatable team, you and him, you can take on anyone. You win, you always win, but you need to keep playing because you always win.
Part of my sorority’s hazing process is known as Sober Sister where we have to pick up drunk girls from the bars between the hours of 12:00 and 3:00 a.m. We have a big pledge class, so each of us only has to do it once, but we do it in pairs. I get stuck with my roommate who is afraid of cars and driving, being from New York, so that means I have to do all of it. Maybe answering the phone is worse though, the sloppy yells and belligerent insults. My biggest fear is that one of the girls will get sick in my car. Each trip involves me racing back toward North Jordan as fast as I can. I know the shortcuts. I know I can cut across Fee Lane and turn right, then left, pull in by the side door and let them out. So far no one’s gotten sick, but one girl did eat popcorn in my back seat and spilled it everywhere, I presume on purpose.
When we’re not getting calls, we sit downstairs in the informal room and watch TV on the big screen. My roommate does her homework and I try to write, since I’ve recently discovered I have a passion for it and now it’s all I can do. I write about her while she sits beside me on the couch in one of my small notebooks and it gives me great joy to take notes on the way her face scrunches up involuntarily. I also write about the girls who stayed in or came back early and are eating loudly in the kitchenette whispering drunken banter between them. I like how ridiculous they are. Their outfits. Their hair. The boys they are inviting over to sleep with. I like how they think tonight matters so much.
Being in a sorority is nice because there are always people around to do things with. It’s like having a hundred sisters who are all really pretty and dress well. I’m in a Jewish sorority, but aside from Passover dinner and the cultural history, it mostly just means we are a bunch of slutty girls who like to smoke weed. All the fraternities love us because we’re little and cute, and we like to get high, but they also hate us because we leave parties early and complain a lot. This is why most of our older members go to the bars once they turn twenty-one.
I stopped talking to my brother when he got kicked out of where he was staying, something about getting caught for possession. He says it was prescribed, but I wasn’t there and I don’t know the whole story, and when it happened, I was about to start my sophomore year of college in Indiana. I wanted to focus on myself and stop worrying about him and everyone back at home. I knew that if he didn’t want to help himself, that if he kept going because our parents wanted it and didn't do it for his own good, it wouldn’t work. I’m going home in a few weeks for winter break and I’m not sure if I’ll even see him.
The girls eventually head upstairs to meet their suitors or to send themselves to sleep. In the dark of the informal room, I can only hear my roommate’s pencil marking up her paper. She’s taking notes for something, but what she’s doing looks pointless, like she’s doing it to keep herself busy. It’s almost 3:00 a.m. We’ll be done soon. I can go to bed and then wake up and keep moving forward. The phone rings and we have to drive to a house party in the Villas, just outside Bloomington. Two girls scream into the phone and I grab my keys. “Come get us!” they say. “Hurry!”
In the Forest
Spin in circles in my denim jacket, watch the maple seeds fall from the trees, twirl down from the sky. Little helicopters. Pick them off the ground. Pinch them in the middle and stick them on my nose. Search for honeysuckle. Pop them open and kiss the insides. Drink the honey and collapse in the leaves. October in New York.
The kids in my kindergarten class hog the tire swing. I lace my fingers through the chain-link fence and watch the older kids play tennis. In the back of our playground, behind the big maple trees, there is a path that our teacher takes us on sometimes, a nature walk. We have to walk in pairs and hold hands with our neighbor. Harry Goldberg tells me that when we go in the forest, once we pass over the big tree stump, we are in heaven. It always seems to get quiet on that part of the walk, and I wonder if we are really dead. I think death is giant trees and rustling leaves. I imagine God sitting somewhere in the forest, waiting for us.
My brother was nine when he got pneumonia. He was a little kid, tiny frame, lean arms, fluffy puff of hair. I was four—just a small thing—people used to call me Itty Bitty Britty. I disliked it, but it was attention, so I took it. All press is good press. Everyone knew me as Skyler’s little sister. Teachers welcomed me into their classrooms, remembering their days with my brother, the “A” student, the big deal, the next whiz kid, the future genius, their star student. I had my beautiful braid and array of colorful sweaters to set me apart from the crowd. There was one with fake fruit hangi
ng off of it, pom-poms that I would suck on when no one was looking. The only time Skyler and I crossed paths at school was for picture day when siblings were encouraged to take their school photos together to be hung up on refrigerators or placed in the yearly look-how-they’ve-grown frames. He sat behind me, our hands folded on the makeshift table. The photographer shouted, “SAY CHEESE!” and the big white light flashed into our eyes. Then we separated, Skyler going one way and me back to the other side of campus.
He woke up coughing. A cough isn’t so bad, I thought, what’s the big deal? I can make myself cough if I try real hard. I can run the hot water and stick the thermometer under it. I can pretend I have a fever too. He had never lied, though; all nine years, a crystal-clear slate of innocence and perfect report cards.
My family went to see Dr. Judy in the city. We drove an hour to her office. I sat in the backseat with Mom while Dad drove and Skyler slept in the front, coughing in spurts the whole way. I looked out the window and watched the raindrops. I imagined them as a family, split apart by the rain and trying to swim back together. They bounced and rolled down the window, tumbling and connecting, then became dismembered and torn apart again. I put my finger up to the ones I wanted to be joined. I waited to see if my finger alone could draw them together. Mom told me to take my hands off the glass.
We waited two hours to be told that Dr. Judy was unsure of the diagnosis. I remember her floppy white lab coat, her frizzy blond hair gathered up in a big scrunchie on top of her head, the waiting room with the wooden play center, moving the red balls and orange cubes and the yellow triangles along their paths. I remember Andes chocolates from the glass jar in the waiting room. I never liked them, but my brother did.
He kept getting worse. He wasn’t one to miss school, so even his teachers were concerned. I wasn’t allowed in his room. I wanted in. He had all the good books in there, all the ones I couldn’t even read yet. I narrated my own stories from the pictures. And he had all the Legos, the board games, the video games. I had the Barbies. Those dumb rubbery girls who never talked back. I once burned one of their heads on the stove. Mom helped because I was too young to use the kitchen appliances. I said it was a way to express myself, so she let it happen. I had one doll that I called the “ugly doll.” She was used for experiments, tor tured, cut, burned, painted, dyed. The rest would stay well-dressed and beautiful.
My friends all had the accompanying Ken dolls so that Barbie could go on dates. On play dates, I would dress up the dolls. They would have a lovely evening together and kiss at the end. At home, I could put my dolls in danger and see what happened to them when they were pushed to the edge of death.
A memory. We are at a school play. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Mom wanted us to go. The three of us are sitting there. My brother and I lean back in our chairs. We feel our heads get hot. We are kids. We are sick kids. We feel ourselves burning up like heat waves in the New York summer. Our little heads, our little bodies, growing sick, each scene melts into another, each scene brings us closer to our end. Mom notices there is something wrong, so we leave early. At the intermission, we make a break for it. Skyler takes the front seat, reclines all the way. I spread my mini self in the back, looking up at the roof of the car. Everything is boiling. My mouth feels hot. We complain of the same condition. It’s Thursday. There won’t be school for us tomorrow, us sick kids. We need medicine to make us better. We need good night sleeps and lots of apple juice. We separate at home; Skyler in his blue room, me in my pink room. I watch a marathon of some cartoon show about rotten tomatoes. They’re evil and they steal things from science labs, and I drink juice boxes, one after an other, throwing them on my carpeted floor when I’m done. I’m resting in my room. I’m sleeping through the day and up all night watching these glowing, red tomatoes fight the city. My brother is on the other side of the house. He battles the sickness in another way. This way I do not know and will never see because we are separated. We are sliding down the window, small raindrops torn apart. In the middle of the night, I wake up choking for air, my head still hot, beads of sweat rolling down, raindrops on fire. From the other side of the house, I hear noises. Sometimes I hear him coughing. Sometimes I hear nothing.
My parents took him to the hospital. I still had to go to school, and I only got to have one of my parents home at night. Sometimes I stayed with Grandma and she made me eat orange muffins. I only liked blueberry.
Mom waited by his bedside while Dad had to work. Visitors came and went. I was oblivious, only worried about which sticker I’d get for putting my backpack and crayons away correctly or how many minutes I’d get to play on the tire swing. I had to wear my hair down every day because Mom was so occupied with Skyler. Everyone wondered where my beautiful braids went. I liked the way my hair flew free, running down the big concrete hill at school.
In the hospital room in the middle of the night, Mom got up to go to the bathroom. When she came back, some nurses were wheeling my brother away. The nurses made a mistake in taking the wrong boy, and luckily Mom had been there to intervene.
This chaos caused Dad to come in the next day and make a scene. The mishap was cleared up, but my parents wanted him out of the New York University Hospital.
Sensei Paul visited. He was my brother’s karate instructor. He rubbed Skyler’s back, moved around the mucus and phlegm, loosened his muscles. He wanted Skyler back in the dojo as soon as he felt well again. He was training to earn a black belt.
Then I visited. This hospital was big. Not that I had been to any other, but the lobby was huge and everything felt oversized. Murals painted by children lined the walls. Big glass windows let in the daylight. Lab coats rustled, and ink pens jotted down notes. I held Dad’s hand.
“Skyler doesn’t look so good,” he warned me.
“What do you mean?”
“He looks sick.”
I had only seen television episodes of sick kids in bed. I imagined my brother with two black eyes and a bloody face. A kid in a wheelchair started coughing a few feet away from us. I looked up and saw a giant papier-mâché ball that had the whole world painted on it. I felt like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was going to break off and fall any moment. I closed my eyes and saw my brother dying. I felt the hospital grow around me, I felt the forest, the trees, the tall maples mocking, everything larger than I was, bigger than I could ever be, greater than I could possibly understand.
I let go of my Dad’s hand and started crying, silently at first. When he tried to pull me along, I threw a fit. It was too much for me to handle. I could only take my burning Barbies, exploding tomatoes, and the bubbling orange river of Bowser’s castle. That’s what pain was to me. That’s what I knew about death.
Skyler eventually got better and came home. He went back to fight in karate, I got Mom to braid my hair again for school, and civilization was restored. But that day at the hospital I realized something awful could happen to someone I loved. Before, I only knew of creepy crawlers and beautiful dolls, the anxiety of my family watching Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune together in the living room, Mario falling off Rainbow Road, and little Lakitu in his cloud, bringing Mario back to life.
Another memory. Mom used to sew us plush Mario stars made out of felt. She drew faces on them with Sharpies. When we moved, she made me one of an apple to represent New York, and one of an orange to represent my new life in Florida. I stitched the orange myself. My brother didn’t want an orange. He just kept his yellow star. It was Skyler’s idea for us to make the characters from the game; he wanted them to be real. He loved the cute little stars, and because he had one, I had to have one, too.
The plastic bin of our plush toys sits in the center console of the car on the way to see Grandpa for the last time before we move. Mom had been working on them while we were at school. The edges of my orange are uneven, and it makes me sad. I want a good orange. I want my orange to look as good as the apple. Mom doesn’t seem right. She keeps missing the turn and can’t figure out
where to park. She doesn’t let us say goodbye to our grandpa. Instead, she just leaves the car running in front of his apartment building, the building she grew up in, the building where she had babysat for a serial killer, the building where bad things happen to good people. My brother and I sit in the car, Skyler on his Game Boy and me staring at the fruits and stars and holding them, poking their bellies, pulling at the stitches, hoping I could get my little orange fixed. Mom comes back crying. She has to leave her dad. Skyler and I stay quiet. We aren’t sure how to deal with leaving people, what the protocol is for this kind of thing. She puts the soundtrack to Footloose on, slips the cassette tape in, turns it up loud, as loud as it goes, and the music is blasting, and she is crying, and my brother starts screaming. “You’re crazy! You’re crazy! Turn it off!” I want to look back at him, to see what he thinks, to see what he feels, if he is as scared as I am. But I can’t move. I want to turn around and grab the sleeve of his coat, make him understand that I don’t want any part of this, that maybe he and I could run away, get out of town, be the pair we are meant to be, genius and willing accomplice, brother and sister.
My brother is twenty-eight, and I am twenty-three. I am living at home because Los Angeles didn’t work out. He writes a suicide letter, an incoherent mix of song lyrics and memories from the past. He posts it online with a picture of himself, a gun and a cigarette. After that, he goes missing. Friends that he hasn’t spoken to in years call our house looking for him. I trip over my Nintendo 64 console to answer the call at 3:00 a.m. from a college friend. He tells me to go on Facebook. I tell him I don’t have one. He lets me use his information to log on and see for myself.
We can’t get ahold of Skyler for a while. I think he is dead; I’m sure of it. I know that when he sets his mind to something, he always goes through with it. I try to recall the last time we saw each other. I think about going to Dave & Buster's for dinner and arcade games a few months ago. I remember thinking he was high again but not really caring because I just was so happy to spend time with him. He calls Mom back around 4:00 a.m. Mom and I drive down to pick him up with no plan. Maybe something will come to us on the way, but it doesn’t. We just silently hope he doesn’t do anything before we get there.
The Perpetual Motion Machine Page 7