And Then Things Fall Apart (21 page)

Instead I was sitting at a stoplight, looking through my window at the motel sign, desperately searching for a pork chop, waiting for an answer. And this is what she said:

“I was trapped, Keek. There was nothing else I could do. If there was, I would have, but there wasn't.” Then she leaned forward and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. The air-conditioning blew a tiny pink braid back from her temple, revealing its gray roots. “I'm so fucking sorry.” Then she started to cry, and the light went green, and angry horns beeped, and we were off.

“Yeah, well,” I said.

“Besides, Keek,” she said, sniffling and getting her Zen on. “This really is between your dad and me, our development, and our growth. Amanda was collateral damage. Your dad's forgiven me. So lighten up. You and Matt have stuff that's just between you. And Dad and I have stuff that's just between us.”

“Don't compare Matt and me to you and Dad, or I'm going to puke right here on the floor mat. That is sofa king ridiculous, Mom.”

“And don't ‘sofa king' me, Keek. In the mood for this, I am not.”

Whatever, Yoda. I just wanted to be back in my own bed.

“Dad could have pressed charges, you know. Still can. Should.” Have I
ever
talked this way to my mother? There was something dangerous about it, the power I was feeling,
like I was inhaling frozen white light and it was darting from my mouth in sharp, icy stabs straight at her heart. I felt out of control. Possessed—aka really good.

“He wouldn't.” But she looked scared for a minute, swerving a little as we neared our intersection.

“That's his apology about Amanda, I guess, not getting the police involved,” I said, as if saying it out loud made it the truth. “And your pink braid is sofa king stupid.”

My mom smirked, and then we were pulling into our driveway and I let her help me inside with the typewriter and my bag full of clean clothes and the box of vintage wonders from Gram.

Everyone is wrong and everyone is right and we are alive, so there you go. Mom had picked up Coffee earlier, so now I'm in my old room listening to her toenails clicking across the kitchen linoleum. I'm a little sick of words tonight, but still. I'm sitting here, typing and typing and typing because I'm like, now what? I haven't even told Matt I'm back. An alien with a similar personality to my mother's has inhabited her suit of skin and is walking around the house crumbling dog food into Coffee's dish and making instant iced tea. And I'm still fuming, smoldering mad at her, and I still love her more than I perhaps ever have because I have seen a side of her that is new to me. And this will feel better one fine day, but that is not today.

Thank God for Sylvia Plath and her Bell Jar world. It
cheers me up. It emboldens me. It helps me interpret my own life experiences so that I start to believe that I am—if not wise, then at least more capable of handling my screwed-up life. That I'm not alone.

As I type and reread and type and reread these last weeks, I see this whole time as a kind of fever dream. I remember it all in ultra-vivid detail: cannibal cups, Hershey, Amanda and Dora gumballs, Judge Judy, Muguet Des Bois, Matt's mouth, Dad's tiki flames, Gram and her shock treatment and vintage secrets, Nic and the Squirrel, the pox and the blood, all of it, everything. And one day, maybe I'll forget the excruciatingly painful specifics but the truth is, all of these experiences—good, bad, and otherwise—are part of me now. Like my bones, my pox scars, the holes that pierce my ears. What is done cannot be undone. There's nothing I can do but what Gram said, put my head down and just get on with it.

Esther Greenwood comes to the same conclusion. And not long after, she is free to go, to walk right out of the asylum and start her real and true life all over again, as if she never went crazy and never tried to off herself.

She gets a second chance. So do Mom and Dad. And me, I suppose, to recover from everything.

And now that I'm here—back home, or whatever you want to call this place where I grew up with two parents—I'm wondering how much recent events have damaged my
psyche. Gram said I would survive and she was right. What else is there to do? I mean, yeah, I got the mumps and chicken pox within six months of each other, dyed my hair black and pink, toyed with the idea of getting my tongue pierced and giving it up to Matt, but when all is said and done, I'm really, like, fine. Okay for now. It's a little anti-climactic. No heads in ovens. No asylum roommates. No shock therapy or medication. Just okay.

I'm sitting in my room, cross-legged on the floor, and it's silent but for the
clackity-clack
of the typewriter keys and that old brag of my heart.
IamIamIam.
It beats. And that is totally what my heart is doing all the time:
bragging
. Showing off, boasting about how good it is at keeping me alive. My heart's a prizefighter, expecting the best from me at all times. And there is always, at the end of the day, just—me.

Existing is not quite enough. Passionate living is the best revenge.

Which is why, despite the demoralizing events of late, I am still thrilled about Aurora. She's living and not dying anymore. Mom left her digital camera on the kitchen table and I beeped through the pictures. They went from Aurora lying in an incubator like a chicken breast in a microwave to a video of her at home in a purple Onesie, sucking like crazy on a bedazzled pacifier.

Aurora is beautiful. I'm not
into
babies or anything, but I've been the only kid in my entire family for forever, and I'm
not really a kid anymore. And when she's older and can talk, I can say, “Oh, when you were born, I had the chicken pox. It was the hottest summer in Chicago, and the whole time I languished in my grandma's spare bedroom, I just knew that you would be absolutely fine. And here, I wrote a poem all about it.”

 

AURORA

Shhhhh
Breath over teeth to whisper you
Into the world.

You're too early.

We're not ready.

Hold on.

Translucent sea creature sleeping,
Delicate and rosy-fingered
Body curled into a fist
An oyster clutching a pearl.

You, exquisite and vulnerable –
Technology was made for you.

Closure. I'm kind of into it, seeing as there's not much of it in real life. I think it is what we seek in great literature. I was in my room, pulling together supplies for school, when—lo and behold—there was my whole stack of tea-stained and dog-eared sheets of heartbreak from my
Bell Jar
summer. All lovingly held together with three bulldog clips.

And I realized that I had to at least finish it.

I'm not going to work on this for the rest of my life. There's got to be a beginning, middle, and end, and this is it. The end, I mean. Taking a break from typing was good. Stepping back and really living was awesome. Going garage sailing with Nic and the Squirrel, going to the Music Box Theatre's animation festival, barbecuing marinated tofu slabs in Matt's backyard. The last three weeks of summer in Keekville were superb. Not so much with the parents' marriage, but things are not as blindingly depressing as they were a month ago.

For one thing, school has started. And believe me, school
is
the
great distracter. I think people can tell that I have been through some major shit, but they don't say anything. They just seem to look at me and see me, which is different from how it was in June. And it is good to be recognized for me and not as the resident psycho or the hot wrestler's girlfriend.

Nic and I are still cool. Thank God. She cut my hair. She said, “The only statement this hair is making is, ‘I am insane,'” and she took scissors she bought at Sally's Beauty Supply and cut it into a flapper-y bob. And then she doused my head in “Chestnut” (what, had I been in the marketing department of L'Oréal, would have been christened “Love You a Latte”). And, voila! With a lot of pomade and curls at cheek height, I look like Dorothy Parker's badass little sister. Nic and I are dedicating four weekend hours to creating masterpieces for our Etsy shop. The rest are earmarked for whatshisname—oh, yes, the love of my life, Mutant Frogboy himself, Matt.

Oh, virginity! You temptress! I think I am firmly—at least until Matt's junior prom, anyway—staying away from that bridge. As you know, I think about it all the time. And I mean a lot. And I have come to the conclusion, having read the evidence laid out so clearly on these very pages, that I am not ready to go there, yet. I am ready to dip a toe into the water. I am willing to taste the water, scooping my hand in and sipping from my palm like a clever gorilla at a mountain stream. I run around all day with my bathing suit under my
clothes just in case I decide to go swimming—and yet, I am not prepared (as of this writing) to take the proverbial
plunge
. And so we will continue to look, lick, kiss, caress, and basically do everything but. And that is really okay with me, and it is really okay with Matt. And I believe him when he says it is really okay. And if it's not, all I have to do is think of my cool Gram and my own trajectory, and tell him to go piss up a rope.

Not having the chicken pox? Glorious!

Parents not skulking around acting all depressed and confusing and infuriating? Grand!

Having Nic back as my real-life pal?
Wunderbar!

Amanda moving to Minneapolis? Best idea ever!

Matt getting a parking space in the junior lot? Hot!

One day, when I am choosing a dress to wear to the Pulitzer Prize awards ceremony, thinking of what to say in my acceptance speech, I must remember to mention my humble beginnings as the—are you sitting down?—managing poetry editor of
Ctl. Alt. Delete
, my school's brand-new literary magazine.

I know!

The newspaper was so not up my alley. The five
W
s of irrelevance:

Who? Homecoming king and queen.

What? Homecoming.

Where? The gym.

When? Mid-October.

Why? Who the hell knows.

No, thanks.

You can't have any significant leadership role in any school organization as a sophomore. However, a recommendation from one or two honors English teachers and a submission of a poem or two (
from these very pages
) and Scholastic Art and Writing Award, here I come! How Sylvia Plathian! That, Algebra II, and letting my hair grow out is giving me good 'n' plenty to think about besides
le divorce
. Most of the time.

Let me be clear. My life is still, er, challenging. Every once in a while a feeling of great sadness and despair overcomes me. They say that when epileptics have seizures, sometimes they have a weird vision in their head, like a bear riding a bicycle in the corner of their eye. Or they smell a nonexistent smell like gasoline or burnt toast, and that's how they know that, in any minute, they are going to go into spasms and flop around on the floor and freak out everyone in the room/auditorium/roller-coaster line/restaurant.

I don't have seizures, but sometimes I feel
The Bell Jar
hovering over me a little, like a spaceship tracking my every move. When I sense it coming, any little thing can set me off. If I come across some old shirts my dad forgot to take out of the back of his closet, or if I find a dried-up bottle of nail polish in the bottom of a reusable shopping bag in the
trunk of Matt's car, or if I see my mom looking at me as if I am a person she has never met before in her life—I'll lose it and have to sit on my bed, on a chair, behind a closed bathroom stall door. I hold my head in my hands, listen to that old freaking brag of my heart, and let the tears fall where they may, before standing up and getting back out there.

But this is a thousand pounds better than I was before.

At least I'm not dry-heaving anxiety into garbage cans in homeroom.

In other more pressing real-world news, Dad got himself a business partner, some guy he went to college with who has an MBA, so the D&D is in good shape, which is important to me, because it's the only thing that hasn't totally changed in the last year. And its profit will pay for college and Dad's rent for his—drum roll, please—new apartment. Which is not far from the Dine & Dash. Furniture by IKEA. Styling by Keek. I have a room there with a little blue writing desk that Nic and I scored from a garage sail. Dad calls it the Virginia Woolf room. It is really a breakfast nook with an IKEA room divider as a door, but it's mine, and I can stay there when I want and bring my laptop there when I want, and it's another place to be besides home, or rather, another home. In addition to the one I inhabit with
her
.

She
is, actually, not so bad. Annoying and really into the white wine, but also really taking herself and her parenting responsibilities way more seriously than I can ever remember.
For instance, she signed us up for mother-daughter pottery lessons at this new shop that opened in our neighborhood. It's called Works of Earth, and at first I was all eye rolling and aggravated because it was ridiculous. Most of the daughters were ten. The teacher is a total hippy, like, crunch, crunch, crunch. He walks among the wheels in his clogs humming and saying things like “Communicate with the clay,” “Center,” and—my favorite—“Breathe through your belly,” as if that is where the lungs are.

The first day, Mom made a bowl you could totally eat cereal out of, while I couldn't even slap the clay on the wheel right. But we're at week four now, and I'm sort of into it. My mom is into our teacher. By the time this session is over, I'm sure she and Mr. Crunch will be dating, whatever that means. It probably means yoga classes, foreign films, wine tastings, art openings in crappy suburban galleries. Despite my wariness of my mother's new crush and his graying beard, pottery is, as Mr. Crunch would say, blowing my mind.