The Museum of Intangible Things (2 page)

“No one really uses the
nipple,
Hannah,” Zoe says. “You should twist the top off.” I had just squeezed a wet slurping gulp of water into my mouth from my Poland Spring bottle and wiped the excess from my chin with the back of my wrist.

I sometimes need to have things pointed out to me.

It’s not that I’m slow, or “on the spectrum” or anything like that. It’s just that I’m an only child. I don’t have older siblings to observe. I’m out here like a lone wolf, just trying to slake my thirst. It bothers me that there are rules about the slaking. One should just slake it. The thirst. I bet in Europe, teenagers don’t judge each other by how they drink from their water bottles. I have exalted ideas about Europe, especially Scandinavia, which I imagine as a perfect egalitarian utopia.

“Even in Sweden, that is kind of disgusting,” Zoe continues, reading my mind. She is sitting in the chaise lounge next to me wearing a green bikini and enormous bug-like sunglasses that reflect the work she’s doing with gray felt and a crochet needle. The sun glints off her belly ring. You can almost hear it say, “
Ting!
”

She has agreed to sell the hot dogs with me today, a freakishly hot ninety-degree Columbus Day, in which mothers have scrapped their plans to go apple picking and have come instead to the beach to bask in the global warming with their offspring. We parked the cart in the lot closest to the sand and have enjoyed a steady stream of business since nine thirty, which is apparently lunchtime for three-year-olds who wake up at five.

“Hannah’s Hot Dogs” combines all of my father’s favorite ideas: alliteration, meat in casing, the American Dream, and his refusal to pay college tuition for a girl who will “inevitably be knocked up.”

He hatched the hot dog scheme five years ago on a trip to Miami Beach, where he met a young bikini-clad entrepreneur studying for her O-Chem exams in between her hot dog transactions. And for reasons I prefer not to think about, he imagined his daughter in the same position—wearing a bikini on the side of the road, selling meat in the shape of a phallus to predatory commuters on the way to the city.

Often, I sit in a chaise lounge in the turnout of Route 15 and wait for the crunching tires in the gravel that alert me to my next customer. It’s profitable, the hot dog business. Especially in the Northeast, where you can procure some quality meats with a real snap to them. I’ve made enough money after two months to pay for a year’s tuition at “Harvard on the Hill,” the county’s community college on Route 46.

It’s nice keeping the cart close to home today. People here in the country keep their expectations in check. No one ever asks me for a tofu “Not Dog.” Or a grass-fed beef dog. Or worse, a buffalo dog. The closer you get to the city, the more dog divas you encounter. For a while I tried to keep up with the requests. It’s not that I don’t believe in healthy living. I ordered the “not” dogs and the organic ketchup, until those things festered and grew moldy in the storage area beneath the pan. I realized that my business plan should be pure. It’s a hot dog cart. You know what you’re getting. Hot dogs. Condiments. Chili on Wednesdays. And maybe a wink from Zoe, if she has the time to attract customers for me. I do spend a little more to get the dogs with no nitrates. I do not want to be a purveyor of poison.

The lake amplifies the sounds of sharp yelping from the children splashing their big, bluish-white bellies in the dark green October waves. A motorboat buzzes directly across the lake, slicing through the bright autumn foliage reflected in the water’s black mirror. The driver stands and seems giddy. Just last week he was probably kicking himself for being the last guy on the block to get his boat out of the water before it freezes. And today his sloth paid off. He gets one last ride in the sun.

Behind us, only one grimy, algae-sided boat still rocks back and forth in the community boat slips. It’s my father’s,
The Hannah New Jersey
, a dedication to me and a play on
Hannah Montana
, which no one ever, ever gets. I know the rest of the boat owners are taking bets on whether he’ll get it out before the lake freezes over. Odds are fifty-fifty. He is one lazy SOB, which is what he would say if he were talking about someone else.

The irony is that he should know exactly when the lake will freeze over. He’s a weatherman, trying to climb the ranks of the network on nothing more than his good looks. Which is not unheard of. And he’s gotten pretty far. But the future of his career is cloudy with a chance of becoming a limo driver, which is what he does on the side to make a little extra.

“I’m actually working on ‘Sloth-slash-Laziness’ right now,” Zoe announces.

I seriously do not get how accurately she can read my mind. I give her a look to that effect, and she says, “What? I saw you looking at your father’s boat . . . I’m trying to make the distinction between Sloth-Laziness-Depression and Sadness-slash-Despair.”

Zoe’s eight-year-old little brother, Noah, has some kind of Aspergery thing. He could read when he was two. He understands Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. He’s read all of Stephen Hawking’s books. He is obsessed with the cosmos and talks about it constantly without ever noticing if you’re listening to him. And yet he cannot process anything at all irrational or intangible. Emotions are elusive to him. Dreaming and imagination, foreign.

To help him, and since he loves museums (he’s been to the Museum of Natural History/Hayden Planetarium twenty-seven times), Zoe created the Museum of Intangible Things, for which she creates a new installation in her basement every month.

September’s project was “Pride.” In the corner, Zoe created a puffed-out human chest with papier-mâché and peach tempera paint. A marionette peacock walked back and forth over a gay pride rainbow, while a video montage streamed footage of a mother watching her son graduate from college, a swimmer winning a gold medal, and an actress receiving an Academy Award. She covered the walls with white paper and asked me to write about when I feel proud.

I feel proud when I get As on my report card. I feel proud when I win a race. I feel proud when I help someone who needs help. I feel proud of you when you listen to other people. Etc., etc.

Noah will talk about the installation for a few days, his way of digesting it, before moving on to his constant chatter about the Big Bang, Carl Sagan, string theory, Stephen Hawking, and the universe.

“So Hannah, do you think a peacock really
is
proud or just seems proud because of the feathers?”

“I think he is proud, Noah. He has nothing to be ashamed of, I guess.” But then you have to discuss shame and how it is the opposite of pride.

“He seems to like it when you do opposites,” I say to Zoe now. She is still working the gray felt into what looks like a tiny dress.

She considers this for a moment and then says, “No, I think he’s ready for subtlety.”

Zoe explains that “Sloth-Laziness-Depression” will consist of Barbie and Ken in gray felt outfits installed in a shoebox also covered in gray felt. She found an old flowered couch with the foam bulging from the rips of the cushions, and on top of it, she flopped her mannequin dressed in a Snuggie. An old TV/VCR will stream infomercials, and Zoe will scatter potato chips and empty soda cans around the couch, which will also be sprinkled with cat hair.

For the interactive part of the exhibit, she filled the pockets of an old fishing vest with rocks and will ask Noah to try it on. Behind a screen in the corner of the basement, to distinguish between sloth and sadness-slash-despair, Zoe created a beating heart impaled by a kitchen knife.

“Won’t that scare him?” I ask.

“Um. Duh. He doesn’t understand fear.”

“Maybe you should do that next. Fear can be useful.”

“Speaking of scary . . .” Zoe tilts her head in the direction of the entrance to the parking lot without even looking up from her felt.

My father, still in his suit even in this heat, is in deep discussion with an ice cream man who is just setting up shop. I see him lean his reddening face into the order window. I hear the word “permit” and some more chatter and then “Beat it!”

“Isn’t that Danny’s truck?” Zoe asks. In New Jersey all the public school boys’ names end in
y
. Danny, Tommy, Timmy, Louey, etc.

Danny Spinelli has bristly black hair that’s cut short and already beginning to recede a little in the corners. It’s the kind of hair that never gets wet. When he emerges from the lake, water collects on top of his hair in silvery amoeba shapes before shaking off completely. He has deep dark brown eyes, and a tall, bendy Gumby-like body with long fingers that apparently help him control the ball on the basketball court. He is shy. And I am shy. And so we’ve been desperately avoiding each other since sixth grade when he kissed me suddenly and recklessly on the mouth while we were playing co-ed tackle football on the beach one day.

Because of his shyness, Rebecca Forman, a loud and busty cheerleader with a big nose and bad teeth, saw an opportunity and pounced on him in ninth grade. They’ve been together ever since. Our innocent kiss in the Garden of Eden, lost. And we are left forever wanting.
I
am left forever wanting. Danny Spinelli is getting his needs met. And yet he does seem to show up every once in a while just to keep me in his clutches. I hear that warbling ice cream truck loop of “Turkey in the Straw” from miles away and my palms start to sweat.

As my father walks toward us across the hot macadam parking lot, I put on my sunglasses and try to sneak a peripheral peek at Danny without his noticing.

“He can see you,” Zoe says, without looking up from her knitting.

“No he can’t,” I start to say, but then shy Danny, blushing in two perfect pink circles on his cheekbones, waves to me, I think.

“Was that a wave?” I ask Zoe, trying to stay calm. “Did he just
wave
at me?”

“I think he did. You should take a pregnancy test.”

“Shut UP!” I tell her but when I turn back, the ice cream truck, tattooed with stickers of this summer’s latest chemical delights, backs out of the lot with its tail between its legs, its warbling, tinkling music stuttering as it retreats up the hill on Yacht Club Drive.

“Say ‘thank you,’” my father announces as he saunters up to us chewing on a toothpick. “That kid was stealing all your business again. I don’t like him hanging around.”

“Oh god, what did you say to him?” I ask.

“He just drives that truck around to stalk you.”

“Really?” I can’t help but hope.

“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Zoe asks him in her dismissive monotone.

“What? Stalking? She’s my daughter,” he says.

“Which entitles you to: A, rides to school, B, dinner time, and C, a few hours on the weekend.” Zoe counts each thing out, pointing to sequential fingers with her crochet needle.

My father ignores her. “Hannah, you coming tonight?”

My dad is getting a two-year sobriety coin at AA. “Which meeting?”

“Dover.”

“Sure.” I actually like the meetings in Dover. It’s a more urban environment, and the stories are grittier. People hit some very low lows in Dover and share stories of waking up in whorehouses or having their toes shot off by the mafia. It’s much better than sitting in the basement of the local bumpkin Methodist church and running into your ex-drunken gym teacher.

“Don’t you think she should be doing something more age-appropriate, like, say, homework?” Zoe asks.

“I need you,” he says to me.

Finally Zoe takes her glasses off and looks at him. “You know, Doug, that’s the thing. You’re not supposed to need her. She can need you, but it doesn’t go both ways until you start peeing in your pants. Are you peeing in your pants, Doug?”

“Not yet, Zoe dear.” He knows she
hates
it when he calls her “dear.”

“Stop, you two. Yes, Dad. I’ll be there.”

“Great, I’ll take you to Crapplebee’s. Cheers, Zoe dear.”

“Nice boat!” Zoe calls to him as he walks back across the parking lot. “I don’t trust him,” she says to me, which is fine for her, but I have no choice. And at least he’s trying.

“At least he’s trying,” I tell Zoe now. The October sun burns close and concentrated as it scrapes its way down the sky on the opposite side of the lake. I sell one last hot dog to a little boy in a wet suit, flatten out his damp and crumpled three dollars, and then start packing up.

“That’s something, I guess,” Zoe agrees.

My mom, Elizabeth Morgan, is not trying. She awakes every morning to the
Today Show
and a live shot of the Gowanus Expressway. In her forty-eight years, she’s never driven on the Gowanus Expressway. It’s as foreign to her as the Goethals Bridge, the Cross Bronx, and the Major Deegan, all of which wind steaming, broken, dirty, and crowded into the hot bowels of New York City. She fears these roads and never has to encounter their fire-breathing hatred of humans. Nevertheless, she awakes every morning to a live shot of the Gowanus. Someone thinks it is important information. It’s not, when you live on Beechwood Terrace.

When you live on Beechwood Terrace, what’s important are the dates for recycling and making sure not to put out too many wine bottles at once. She thinks two a week is a healthy number for one person, and so she keeps a collection of remainders behind my old water skis in the basement.

Since the divorce, and the midlife, and the realization that this is going to be as good as it gets—a crumbling house on the lake, an average-in-every-way daughter, and a dead-end job at the DMV—she has wrapped herself in a cocoon. She’s been cocooning, and I’ve been trying to coax her out and spread her wings. Because although that’s as good as it gets, there is magic in each one of those things. The lake. The daughter. The job. The moments. There can still be magic in the moments.

I try to tell her that. And she keeps getting up. If for no other reason than to watch Dr. Oz. She has a powerful crush on Dr. Oz.

When I get home, she is making chili. It’s from her side of the family that I get the William Penn behind, and hers rounds out her pale pink bathrobe as she shuffles back and forth from the spice rack to the stove in her slippers.

“You’re up,” I say. She usually spends Sundays in bed reading.

“I’m up,” she says. The bluish skin beneath her eyes hangs there like two used tea bags. She can’t look me in the eye, maybe because she feels so much guilt about how she’s been raising me lately.

“You’re cooking,” I notice, somewhat surprised. We usually fend for ourselves. She nukes a Lean Cuisine, and I make some pasta with dill and smoked salmon like they probably eat in Scandinavia. It has omega-3s.

“I cook for you,” she argues.

“You . . .” I start and then decide not to disturb her alternate reality. Let her believe that she cooks for me. How can she possibly believe that, though? She may have cooked for me a few times in 2009. I vaguely recall a roasted chicken. “Um, how was your day?” I ask.

“I finished my book.”

“That’s good.”

“And I decided to make some chili. For your hot dog cart.”

“Really?” She’s generally against the cart. Because it’s my father’s idea and because it embarrasses her. She’s often embarrassed. That’s her ruling emotion. The only reason she hasn’t banned me entirely from selling wieners is because she can’t afford to send me to college herself. “Thanks. I really appreciate it,” I say.

“No problem,” she says and then blows on a spoonful of chili before giving it a taste. “Hey, someone at work was talking about his kid taking the SATs. You took those, right?”

So, what is the opposite of a “helicopter parent”?
I wonder. A subway parent? A sinking ship parent? A hibernating bear? “I was supposed to take those months ago, Mom.”

“But you didn’t?”

“What’s the point?”

“Well, I have a little socked away . . .”

Right
, I think. If she returns half of the stuff she bought at Marshalls that now sits festering in a landfill-sized pile of unopened plastic bags on the side of her bed. The bottom layer has probably already decayed and liquefied. She has some hoarder tendencies.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I can go to County. They don’t ask for SAT scores. What did Dr. Oz have to say today?” I ask her, changing the topic.

“Magnesium,” she says, stirring the chili and looking out at the lake. At sunset, patches of glassy obsidian stillness begin to stipple through the unsettled parts, putting the entire body of water to sleep.

“Magnesium?”

“Yes. It’s even more important than calcium.”

“For what?”

“Bones, muscles, digestion, sleep . . . things.”

“Things?”

“Woman things.”

“Gross.”

“Speaking of gross . . . ”

“What?”

“I did that thing you said I should maybe do.”

“Sign up for a class? Go to Weight Watchers? Take a long walk? Call your friends? Water aerobics?”

“No, the other thing.”

“Senior Singles dot com?”

She nods, blushing.

“Oh my god, that is SO . . . gross!” I spit out, surprising myself, and bowing my head in a fit of giggles.

“You’re the one . . .”

“I know. No, I’m happy for you really,” I say, catching my breath. “I’m totally happy in an entirely disgusted kind of way. Way to go, Mom!” I say, hugging her soft, squishy beanbag body into mine.

“Thanks.”

“What photo did you use?”

“The blue blouse one.”

“Fabulous,” I tell her, picturing, in spite of myself, some old dude opening the car door for her and pinching her ass. I shudder. But I’m proud of her.

She wasn’t always like this. She was, at one time, many years ago, a great mom. Zoe and I played with her a lot when we were little. She pitched for endless rounds of kick ball in the front yard, wove stems and stems into daisy wreaths for our hair, baited our fish hooks, fired our pottery, laced our beads, shrunk our Shrinky Dinks.

She taught Zoe how to sew. She
got
Zoe before anyone else did and knew the sewing would help her focus and stay in the world. She was alive once, my mom. And we wrote books together.
Mother Ship and Barnacle
Girl
, she called the series. It was about us and how we conquered the world together, because I was going through a phase where I would never leave her side.

“I’ll be in my room,” I tell her now, “trying not to think of my new cyber-stepdad.”

“Very funny,” she says, and she actually grins a little, then she tries unsuccessfully to wipe it off her face.

• • •

My room is neat. I like to keep things in order. I have a special way of folding my T-shirts and a special way of putting them in the drawer and a special way of making my bed so that the seam of the bedspread lies perfectly on the edge of the mattress.

The bedspread is gray. The throw pillows are lemon yellow. My dresser is white, and I have a lemony yellow and white area rug outlined in gray. Everything is spare and minimalist. There is no fuzziness or fluffiness. There are no tassels.

My desk is neat too, and I spend a lot of time sitting at it. On the wall to the right of my desk hangs a large whiteboard calendar with color-coded magnets and dry-erase marker notes indicating my to-dos for the month. I like to have it all laid out in front of me and not tucked away in a computer somewhere.

On another whiteboard is the Wiener Meter. It’ a three-foot-tall, dry-erase hot dog indicating with brown marker how many I’ve sold, and how much more I have to sell to pay for two years at County and two more years at a state school somewhere. I have $2,466. I need $5,454 more, assuming I get some good financial aid. I make a profit of $2.17 per frank, so I need to sell 2,513 more hot dogs. At an average of twelve hot dogs a day, that’s 209.42 more days of selling hot dogs one day at a time.

It’s good to be goal oriented. I will study accounting. Get a job at the phone company and get an apartment nearby so that I can continue to take care of my parents.

Zoe says it’s good to be goal oriented but that I have the wrong goals.

Tucked in a desk drawer that no one knows about is a red folder filled with information about studying abroad in Sweden. On the wall behind me is a black-and-white signed photograph of Astrid Lindgren sticking out her tongue. And my bookshelf is filled with soft, washed-out, well-loved copies of her books. Not just the Pippi ones, although those were my favorites. (I was Pippi Longstocking three years in a row for Halloween, and one year my father dressed as my horse and I pretended to pick him up with one hand.) But the more obscure ones too, like
The Brothers Lionheart,
in which the heroic young brothers die not once, but twice, to experience two different levels of heaven. In their final death, they jump off a cliff together so they’re never left apart.

I guess that red folder represents the goal of my true self. If there were no society, no
circumstances
, no
friction
, I would become an author-slash-illustrator of books about egalitarian utopias like Sweden, where girls are more like boys and vice versa. And I’m really not sure my ideas about Sweden are accurate, so I would start with a study abroad to find out.

Abroad
is a word that people at Johnson High don’t think about, though. At least since they fired all the guidance counselors and put the school secretary in charge of “guidance.” She just goes about her normal business, and if someone has a guidance question, she refers them—with a not so kind gesture—to her pile of applications to County College of Morris.

Just for kicks I open up my file cabinet and pull out a yellowing crackly construction-paper volume of
Mother Ship and Barnacle Girl,
which of course I’ve kept because I’m like that. My mother’s face was drawn in profile. Her torso, the figurehead of the ship, and the hull the rest of her body. As Barnacle Girl, I wasn’t really a barnacle but a super girl with a mask and tights made shiny by pressing down too hard on a purple crayon.

“Over there, Mother Ship,” says Barnacle Girl in a black crayon speech bubble.

“Our destiny awaits,” replies Mother Ship as she beaches herself on the shore.

Well, you can’t argue with that
, I think, and I tuck the book back where it belongs, still wondering how it will all turn out.