Stranded (10 page)

“Why aren’t your feet in the paper slippers?” Nana asked when we were in the hallway. She must have heard the difference in the swish on the carpet.

“My socks are clean.”

They weren’t. Loogy had drooled on them.

“This sort of fighting between you and your cousin can’t go on,” Nana scolded when we reached the kitchen.

Instead of asking me my side of what happened at the
Boogmans’, Nana handed me a peeler and cranked the water on over the sink. She also retrieved a washcloth and placed it in my hands. I wiped off the layer of lipstick I had applied at school and had forgotten to remove, but, still feeling puckish, I flung the cloth back at the counter. Nana reacted as if I had thrown it directly at her.

“We have to be careful of what people think of us,” she said. She folded the washcloth over the faucet.

“Why?” I hoped she would tell me.

“Put your body to work.” Nana nudged me.

Fifty-two is a pretty advanced age, and I knew Nana was trying to show me how she had managed her life of disappointment and tragedy. The real heaven, the one in the sky, had to have been a heck of a place in Nana’s imagination for her to want to strive so hard to get there. We peeled side by side, a job I was terrible at—and had scars on my thumb to prove it.

“Would the police arrest someone for getting pregnant even if she didn’t know what was happening to her?” I asked Nana, feeling like I had to know and couldn’t wait until Mom came home or felt like having a private moment with me.

“Honestly.” Nana peeled faster. “Work, Kelly Louise,” she ordered.

“What if it was an accident and the girl, whoever, didn’t mean it?”

“I tell you over and over again not to get your scrapings on the counter.” Nana grabbed my hands and moved the carrot I held above the disposal.

“Nana—”

“Kelly Louise, you have to be careful of what you do.” She dropped her peeler so that it clattered onto the drain board.

Pieces of potato and carrot splashed onto the counter and her hands. She reached into her toxic waste supply under the sink and pulled out a bottle of Spray n’ Wipe. She didn’t need to pollute the groundwater for a couple of vegetable peelings, especially since she had scoured the carrots before she ever went to work on them.

“Nana?” I asked, watching her knuckles go white as she rubbed a sponge back and forth over the mess.

“Kelly Louise, can’t you see? I’m busy.”

Nana seemed to be having the breakdown I had seen coming. I wondered if secrets had this kind of domino effect on every family. She dropped her bottle of Spray n’ Wipe on the way to the kitchen table, probably to sanitize Natalie’s homework. The bottle bounced onto the floor, leaving a small blue toxic puddle on the linoleum.

THE AFTERNOON HAD BEEN ONE IN WHICH
surprises abounded like runs in my stockings on mini-skirt day. Ms. Duncan had paired me with Boog instead of Kenny. Natalie had begged me not to think of her as a monster—when had she ever cared what I really thought of her? Nana wiped the spill on the floor with a sponge rather than a paper towel. Just when I thought we had reached a quota, Mr. Gruber showed up in our kitchen alongside Mom, whose car had pulled into the garage when I was fighting with Nana. As Mr. Gruber entered, he drew the second half of a booty over his right foot. The rule was he needed to have both of them on before making contact with an interior surface.

“I really appreciate you stopping home with me.” Mom shut the door behind him.

“Look out for the spill.” Nana sighed, blotting the Spray n’ Wipe from the floor.

“Kelly Louise?” Mom asked.

I ransacked what was left of my mental faculties to understand what Mr. Gruber was doing at our house. He and I were on fairly good terms as a result of my stopping at his office to talk so frequently—three times this week, the last time to discuss using glassware instead of plastic in the cafeteria. I didn’t think my recent behavior at the Boogmans’ would have led him to organize an intervention and a home visit on my behalf, though it was possible Mrs. Boogman had called him to complain. Maybe Mr. Gruber had come to discuss Natalie. As a high school principal, he had better-than-average insight into the dark side of humanity, and he was the one person who seemed intelligent enough to me to see through her posturing.

Or maybe Mom had a coworker at Bonny’s who she was hoping to introduce him to. Mom liked making matches for other people as well as herself. But as much as I liked Mr. Gruber, I wasn’t thrilled he’d taken this moment to visit. Mom hadn’t had very much time to spend with me lately, between Natalie and her crisis, Bonny’s longer shifts, and whoever it was who had been absorbing her nightly interests. The mystery man must
have been a real hottie to have her on pins and needles to see him so regularly. She had skipped out three of the last four evenings.

“Honey, this is Harvey Gruber,” Mom said, as if I didn’t know my own principal. I thought his first name was Robert, though, and wondered if he was using his middle name with Mom.

Mr. Gruber gave me a nod. Maybe seeing Nana on the floor cleaning a mess I had supposedly made caused him to be less talkative.

“How was school today, honey?” Mom asked.

“Ms. Duncan wore one of those completely strange brown pantsuits.” I started with one of the day’s smaller travesties.

“Just because Ms. Duncan is old doesn’t mean you should make fun of her.” Natalie bounced into the kitchen, any tears she might have leaked now dried.

I would have preferred that Natalie not monopolize Mom while I was trying to have a conversation with her about the day and who had really dropped the Spray n’ Wipe. Natalie held her vigil signs tucked under her arm, maybe hoping for Mom to ooh and aah over them—which she most likely would.

“I agree with Li, baby. Making fun of Ms. Duncan is uncalled for.” Mom didn’t give me a chance to tell
my side of the story.

Mom tucked her hands into her pink work smock. She had spent the day rolling old ladies’ hair into curlers. In Des Moines, she wore black and listened to techno music. I wondered if she missed her old cool self—I did.

“Honey, Harvey was telling me in the car how much fun he had on student council when he was in high school.”

“Student council?” I asked.

“I love student council,” Natalie chimed in.

I wished she would chime out.

“Where are you going with that?” Mom referred to a fork I had taken from the drawer.

“You never had to do student council.” I brandished the utensil.

“I missed out on a lot.” Mom reached for me, but I stepped around her, planning to head for my bedroom. I had some idea I might rip open a few pillows with the word
love
stitched right on them.

“Kelly?”

“You missed out on a lot because you had me?” I turned and asked as if it were a casual question.

Mom had always claimed I made everything better with my little pointed Schmoo head and folded ears. I was beginning to suspect the flattery wasn’t as true as
I had once believed. Otherwise, why drag me with her to Heaven and ruin my life to save Natalie’s? Why leave me every Friday and Saturday night to spend time with men she barely knew?

“No, baby.” Mom finally became aware of my frustration.

“You love her better than me.” I pointed at Natalie.

Mr. Gruber took in our family scene much the way Boog had my description of the flooding Mississippi, as if it baffled him but he thought it prudent not to comment.

Mom’s expression revealed that she
was
experiencing a hitch in her affection, even if she tried to blink the signs away. In the past, when my mother and I had spats, Mom said, “You’re right” to my accusations that she didn’t care, lifting her hands in surrender, letting me know through some sort of telepathy that the opposite was true, that she loved me all the way to the planet Schmoo.

Now—I wasn’t feeling the love. I was feeling her impatience.

A minute passed, the only sound the rhythmic
thunk
as my grandmother returned to her vegetables.

I rushed with my fork to the hall, turned, and seized the kitchen door, poised to slam as hard as I could. I forgot that it was one of those on a flexible
hinge that swings both ways.

“Ouch!” It caught me in the nose.

Mr. Gruber reached a hand out and prevented the door from rebounding and hitting me a second time.

“Are you all right?” He led me to a kitchen chair, peering closely at my face to make sure my nose wasn’t bleeding.

My mother kissed Principal Gruber for his heroism, a great mushy thing with sound effects. It was a romantic gesture that completely contradicted the gayness I had learned about on the bus and had been processing for two weeks already. The day had been so lousy, I almost believed I had seen it coming.

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

Mr. Gruber laughed. Nana sucked in her breath and demanded to know what I was thinking.

I explained that Mr. Gruber was supposed to be gay. The bus seat called him a fag—the local term—with exclamation points.

Nana sucked in her breath again; any further and she would draw the rest of her body in and disappear.

Mr. Gruber remarked that I must be mistaking him for his twin brother, who was the principal of Carrie Nation High School.

Nothing was what it seemed—everyone was a liar and good was bad and bad was good. I wasn’t even
sure I was me anymore. I was so stupid that I needed a simple identity explained. And clearly, since all my terrible behavior seemed to come easily, I was the bad seed in the family. In the generation before ours, there had been Aunt Denise, and there had been Mom. I was Aunt Denise all over again.

Harvey picked up one of Natalie’s vigil signs from the table and examined the fetus that had been changed into a heart.

“This is nice,” he said politely.

Like his twin, Harvey was soft-spoken. On the Maximum Man scale, he earned a rating of two for looks, though his twin earned an eight because he filed his fingernails instead of cutting them straight across. Harvey asked me the significance of the blob at the bottom of the sign. He asked me, rather than Natalie, thinking I was the artist.

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” I stated. I meant Natalie’s pathetic attempt at drawing.

He said yes, the situation with Baby Grace was sad. He completely misunderstood me. His brother was much more attuned to my complex psyche.

Words like Harvey’s were hardly a pick-me-up; they made the tears that had been building shoot out of my eyes. Harvey patted his coat and pulled an old
green bandanna from the recesses of a pocket. It was the sort of object that sometimes caused Nana to tremble. I blew my nose into it.

“You should have Nana clean this.”

Nana was having trouble even looking at the handkerchief and hadn’t yet regained her color since it made its appearance.

I blew my nose again and gave it back to Harvey.

We all stood silently in the kitchen, breathing in the smell of garlic and rosemary. Natalie began to tell Mom about the vigil. I left the kitchen without throwing another hissy fit. When I reached the bedroom, I flopped face-first into my pillow in the bed. The box spring compressed and
sploink
ed. I reached under the mattress. She had shoved her little red diary into my bed instead of hers, a wily trick on her part, the work of a mastermind.

On the cover she had written, “You will go to hell if you look inside.”

I took a look at my surroundings—the puppy-and-kitten poster, the frilly pillows, the ceramic unicorns. The girl was a psychic, because even though I had yet to crack open the book, here I was already burning away in the lowest of places. I bet the devil slept on a lacy bedspread, too.

IN AN ENTRY IN NATALIE’S DIARY, I READ THAT ON
April 9 last year, she and Steve had sex in the back of his car. Natalie was both flowery and apologetic in how she described it. The sad part was that Steve had a girlfriend, and even more horrible, on May 20, Steve told Natalie he needed to cool off their relationship until he had time to break his senior girlfriend’s heart. He never got around to it, though he did seem to want to persuade Natalie he would. Steve made a few more silver-penned appearances in the diary. (Natalie used different inks for different moods.)

Despite the lying, Natalie tried to do the right thing. She went back to being a virgin and writing about ironing shirts in order not to become the other woman in Steve’s relationship. Then she worried about her
weight, then about feeling sick. It was a depressing downhill slide from July until the pages in October, when
oops
, out popped Baby Grace.

Natalie had gone to the cornfields to think and to pray because Pastor Jim had told her God loved wide-open spaces, and the field was where she sometimes met Steve. She walked the three miles. Natalie’s water broke right in front of Kenny Stockhausen, who happened to be hanging around one of the Quonset huts. She screamed and Kenny helped her give birth.

Gross.

I stayed in my room reading every page, skipping the stew Nana prepared by making the excuse that I wasn’t hungry and I needed to work on my Earth Science report. I flipped more pages for details, but they only became exciting again when Mom and I moved to Heaven. Enduring my messiness caused Natalie to delve into the exclamation marks, primary-colored pens, and exceedingly inventive adjectives. I needed to introduce the girl to emoticons. I wasn’t sure why Natalie didn’t think people would pity her when they heard her story. They seemed pretty accepting of her when she wasn’t so open and vulnerable, when she was folding her hands on her desk and pretending to listen to discussions of echinoderms. I admired her for
telling the truth, even if it was to a diary. One detail surprised me. Kenny Stockhausen had proposed to her while he was cutting the umbilical cord. She had turned him down, and he had stormed out.

The next morning Natalie picked a fight about making my bed, but I was dead to her assaults. I escaped to the kitchen only to get into a conversation with Nana that led to the subject of Mom and Harvey Gruber. They had gone out the night before and Mom had not returned. Nana insisted that he was a gentleman and well-to-do (apparently he farmed several thousand acres). It was true that Harvey represented a different type than Mom’s usual, but I attributed the improvement to her wanting to protect Natalie.

She was using him.

Nana was so over the moon about Harvey, she even clasped her hands and said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if their relationship were serious?” To me, Harvey seemed too good to be true, not the sort of partner Mom had ever been interested in before, nearly as gay as his brother. I didn’t want him around taking up her time, even for the short while he was bound to last.

I was so downhearted, I kept my distance from Nana and Natalie for the rest of the day. Mom called from Bonny’s to say that she was at work and would be home
late. I didn’t have to make an excuse for not attending the youth group vigil Natalie had been preparing for. When seven o’clock rolled around that evening, Nana scooted to her card night and Sherry Wimple rang the bell for Natalie. Mr. Wimple waited for Natalie and Sherry to collect Natalie’s signs. She had drawn six in all—quite the hefty number for an angel of deception.

I considered what Natalie had told me about the ridicule we would face if she was exposed.

“Are you sure you want to go to this?” I asked her.

“I have to,” she said. “It’s expected.”

When the house was empty, I tried to call Katy. I wanted to hear what advice she had for me—even though I couldn’t tell her the whole story exactly. I planned on saying I was asking for my friend Sherry Wimple, a troubled soul with a compulsive lying problem. I stepped outside to get a better signal. The weather had changed; it was wetter than it had been in the afternoon. The cold air cut through a layer of my mental fog. Katy’s phone rang three times and then her voice mail message yapped, “What up, dog?” and I said, “Listen, I have to talk.” Then I rambled about the stores I missed at the mall. Her voice mail beeped and I said, “Call me back,” too late for her to know that I had more than prom dress modeling on my mind.

The clouds spit fat drops, which shot sideways like pellets. I headed toward the backyard, to a corner of the lawn under a tree. A chain-link fence surrounded Nana’s yard. Her grass was trimmed with flower beds, while on the other side, weeds sprouted all the way back to the Stockhausens’ house. Wet leaves dislodged and dropped onto Nana’s covered patio furniture.

The backyard stirred memories: my idiot cousin making daisy chains for her fairy friends; Nana bent over the tulip bed. I tried not to let my recollections make me sentimental, because the last thing I wanted to become was the puddle of snot I had been most of the night before, clawing my way around inside my conscience. Maybe I could drive to Des Moines and rent a cool bachelorette apartment with Katy.

Just over the fence, Kenny’s silhouette passed in front of a window.

I heaved a twig to get his attention and missed. I dug around for something heavier, but Nana had removed all the rocks from her yard in favor of tulips, foreseeing the day when one of the lunatics would want to escape the asylum. Finally, I seized a small piece of brick and heaved that, putting a dent in the side of the Stockhausens’ gas grill. My mother had once claimed that the grill was the only thing the Stockhausens valued. If I actually broke it, someone might come outside and shoot me.

Bang! Oops, I’m dead. No need to think about stealing a car. Problem solved. I made myself laugh, but not in a very sane way.

Kenny probably had experience with grand larceny. I needed a criminal I could trust to help me stage my escape.

I caught my jeans on the wire of the fence as I hopped it, and I hung before tearing myself free and dropping onto the other side. I crossed the cement patio and rang the Stockhausens’ back doorbell. I risked coming face-to-face with Brent, but Katy would not have waited this long to pay Brent a visit. She would have heard the local rumors and dropped in on him on her second day in Heaven.

The girl knew how to function in a permanent dare.

Music—not the kind that comes from an iPod but the kind you make yourself—emanated from the back of Kenny’s house. There was a hole in the screen and evidence that I could ring until Christmas without anyone responding. I pounded on the aluminum as hard as I could.

Kenny appeared in a pair of boxer shorts and his anarchy T-shirt. He carried an electric guitar dragging a cord and he looked more asleep than awake.

“Jesus,” he said, seeing it was me. “What do
you
want?”

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Please,” I begged. “I have a question for your uncle,” I lied.

Kenny didn’t like my excuse, but he let me inside, maybe because I smiled. He didn’t have hot legs and had absolutely no business strutting around with them naked.

Nobody else was in Kenny’s house, or, at least, the kitchen or living room. There were signs that a party had taken place a day or so earlier: beer cans, overflowing ashtrays, an empty pizza box, a puddle on the floor by the door. The house smelled of cigarettes, but behind the grime, the soot, the stains, the couches losing their stuffing, and the holes in the wall, the layout was the same as Nana’s—a living room when you came in the front door, two bedrooms on the left down a short hall, a third on the right, and a kitchen on the side with the garage.

Afraid Kenny
was
leading me to his uncle, I braced myself against a wall, prepared to run. Kenny opened the door to a room that was mine and Natalie’s in our identical version of the same house. No unicorns or pink crucifixes, though. Kenny—I realized it was his lair instead of Brent’s—had amassed some fantastic
clutter. Clothes, shoes, magazines, and textbooks littered the floor. Posters of ghost riders, leather-clad female vampires, and devil symbolism papered the walls. I wondered if in the middle of the mess he had tossed the knife he had used to cut Grace’s umbilical cord, in which case the police would never find it. He rummaged and found a pair of jeans to pull over his boxers while I made the mistake of sitting on his bed.

Something underneath me moved and slurped. What I had thought was a spring mattress turned out to be a water bed without an optimal amount of fluid inside to make it firm. A television set on the floor, airing
CSI
, cast a weird blue light on the ceiling. Kenny didn’t appear to be watching; instead, he plugged his guitar back into an amp and deposited himself in one of those chairs that look like the infinity symbol on its side.

“What do you want, Sorenson?” he asked.

He had purple bruises on his legs, I’m assuming from skateboard accidents, but maybe from kicking puppies and other small animals.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“LiLi giving poor little Greeny Locks a bad time?” he asked.

He must have gotten the drift of how things were between Natalie and me from seeing us at school,
or maybe news of the incident at the Boogmans’ had reached even his outcast ears. I explained that my name wasn’t Greeny Locks and then began relating the whole Kelly Louise/Tina Louise business in case he couldn’t tell from looking at me that I had a glamorous past.

Sometimes, accidentally, I mock myself. I left out the folded ears I’d had as an infant but did include the detail about when I went potty on a demonstration toilet at the Home Depot. Midway through my happy little reunion with my former self, Kenny picked at the strings of his guitar and interrupted me with the sound that barked out. He checked a wire that ran from his guitar to the amp.

“Piece of shit electronics,” he muttered.

“Do you like Amy Winehouse?” I asked, vomiting up anything I could think of to get our conversational ball rolling. It didn’t seem like either one of us wanted to mention our real problem, the thing we both knew.

“No,” Kenny said.

“I like the song about rehab—.”

“She’s shit,” he interrupted again.

I had only heard him play three chords and, to judge from those, he didn’t have much musical talent either. It also wasn’t like he was hot. The guitar added points, but his skinny legs took them away. There was no value
in sending a picture to Katy—I could hear her high-pitched “Eeeeew” as I telepathically ran him by her. Kenny tightened a wire from the amplifier to the wall. When he was finished, he picked up the guitar, tested it, rubbed his hands down his jeans, and moved the guitar closer to play a few notes.

“OK,” I said. “What about Norwegian Recycling?”

“You are the world’s biggest appreciator of crap,” he said.

He strummed one of his three chords.

“You have a lot of books.” I shot back a comment that had the potential to be a kind of insult.

“Yeah, well, television blows,” he remarked.

We both glanced over at
CSI: Omaha
.

He was right.

“Is that supposed to be
Stairway to Heaven
?” I asked about whatever it was Kenny was almost playing.

“What’s it to you, Sorenson?” He didn’t bother to look at me but ran his pick across the strings and changed to another, less familiar, cover or a self-written song I wouldn’t recognize as badly played.

I leaned back, my hands squishing down to the floor through the depleted water mattress. I tossed the book that he had left near his pillow—
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
—onto the floor. Leave it to Kenny to read
a title about hating people. Fewer of his books were vampire-related than I might have supposed, given his pasty skin.

“Have you read
Twilight
?” I asked.

His ears reddened. He turned his back and refused to answer.

In the pile next to the bed were books on our school reading list. Others, I was happy to note, were on Pastor Jim’s “Books That Should Be Burned” pamphlet. I wondered if Kenny had assembled his tastes according to what would most likely get him damned for all eternity. I wished I could pluck out my inner eye like I had seen cartoon monsters pluck out their eyes on television. I wished I could rid myself of the nervous itching on the back of my neck. I was crossing a line, fleeing the coziness of planet Schmoo.

“So, are you here to get high or what?” Kenny wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said, although the answer was no. I had climbed the fence looking for a ride to Des Moines.

He ruffled a pile of clothes until he found the pair of black jeans I had seen him wearing at school. He didn’t have a huge wardrobe, but what he did own he didn’t waste time folding and placing into drawers. He reached into the pocket and pulled out a bag with
seedy brown stuff at the bottom.

“Do you have any papers?” he asked as he hunted through the mess on top of his bureau.

When I told him I didn’t, he asked me if anyone else was with me, which seemed paranoid, unless he could see inside of me to my divided self. One part of me wanted to go home. The other part wondered what would happen if I stayed.

“Close the bedroom door,” he ordered. A scary what-your-mother-always-warned-you-about quality infected his voice.

I didn’t know for certain that someone wasn’t going to catch me—my cousin, abandoning her vigil plans because of the rain, the look of shock and disgust on her face increasing as she reached the deeper recesses of Kenny’s room. For some reason, I enjoyed the thought of seeing Natalie in Kenny’s house and wondered if, later, there might be a way I could lure her over and make her take a whiff of his soiled socks.

“Spark her up,” I said.

He put his guitar on his lap. The amplifier popped and hissed.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Spark her up.”

In Des Moines, when I’d seen people getting high,
the coolest person in the room always said “Spark her up.”