The Museum of Intangible Things (7 page)

Someone has left an old rusty driver sitting in a canister to the left of the shack where you would buy baskets of balls in the summer. He grabs that and runs out onto the grass, collecting balls and shoving them into his deep pockets. When he returns, I let him show me how to swing, so that he can touch me. He stands behind me, and together we hold the club. The insides of his smooth forearms graze lightly against the backs of mine, and my arm hair stands on end. He lifts the club behind us and presses against me as he shows me how to turn my hips. Then he kisses me on the neck, which unbeknownst to me until this very moment is an intense erogenous zone for Taureans, especially those born in April. We don’t even hit an actual ball before we’re back in the car, kissing in the backseat in broad daylight. Finally I come to my senses.

“We need to go. This is moving too fast. I’m missing school. Rebecca . . . We need to go,” I say with a sigh. Danny lifts his face from where it was nestled in my chest and looks at me. “Now,” I say, stroking my finger down the bridge of his beautifully slightly crooked nose. When I get to his lips, tracing them gently, he takes my finger in his mouth. I pull it out with a pop because it really is going too far. “We have to go,” I tell him.

“You’re killing me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” He hoists himself off me, and I take a deep breath. We straighten out our clothes, get back into the front seat, and start driving. We stop at 7-Eleven and get Big Gulps, mostly full of ice, so Danny can hold the cup in his lap for the rest of the drive to school.

On the way there, he talks about his enthusiasm for the food truck industry. And I realize that we don’t actually have a shared passion for mobile restaurantrepreneurship (Zoe’s word for what I do). I’m doing the hot dogs because my sexist, tight-as-a-clam’s-ass father won’t pay for college for his girl-child.

Danny is doing it because he loves it. He tells me that he’s read all of Colonel Sanders’s biographies. “Colonel Sanders tried to sell his Original Recipe idea more than a thousand times before he had a taker. Business is all about persistence,” he says. “And optimism.” Then he actually quotes something from Henry Ford. “‘Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right,’” he says, and then adds hesitantly, “Right?”

“Right,” I say. “Words to live by.”

He’s brave
, I think.
He cares
,
I think. And I care too.

Not about hot dogs specifically, or food trucks, or the Original Recipe, but I feel that I care deeply about vague things that haven’t yet crystallized in my heart.

According to her texts, Zoe is now up and showered. She assures me she’ll be at my house tomorrow bright and early to share with me the epiphanies from her dreams. Things sound like they’re on the up and up, but you never quite know for sure with Zoe.

On the phone I go through our checklist:

“How is your mood?” I ask her jokingly, because that’s what they would ask her every day in the hospital. “Have you lost interest in your favorite activities? Are you participating in risky behaviors? Irritable? Sleeping too much or too little?” I slip in there: “Talking to aliens?”

“Just needed some rest,” she says.

I try to take her word for it, until I see for myself tomorrow.

In the meantime, Danny’s enthusiasm for mobile restaurantpreneurship motivates me to hitch the cart up and make some sales after school. The rec league has late soccer practice, and if you want to sell some hot dogs on a weeknight, you just have to follow the minivans. I take the dusty dirt road to the field behind the supermarket and set up next to a little pond.

It’s two days until Thanksgiving, and it still hasn’t frozen. The ducks even forgot to fly south. They swim along the ripply frosty edges of the water, puffing out their chests, daring us to ask them to leave now, when the daffodil shoots are already poking their razor-sharp leaves out of the dirt. The kids are still playing in their T-shirts. Nature, it seems, is seriously out of whack. So it is completely in tune with my life.

I put on my baseball hat with the pink and yellow logo in which
HANNAH’S
is spelled out in one continual cursive chain of linked-together sausages—Zoe designed it and had it silkscreened on some hats and aprons for my birthday—and I get busy marrying the ketchups and boiling up the water. For the kids, it’s all about the ketchup.

I’ve made friends with some of the regular moms. By regular moms I mean both the fact that they buy hot dogs from me regularly and the fact that they’re not too pretentious to let their kids eat the occasional hot dog. They’re also not too uppity to be seen talking to a teenager. They’re the kind of mom I hope to be. I like the ones with senses of humor who realize not everything has to be perfect.

My favorites are Karen and Jen. They both sit next to me on lawn chairs as I set up the cart. They’re drinking from ergonomic, BPA-free water bottles, but I’m certain they are not filled with water.

“I’m bored,” Karen says. She’s wearing her mom uniform. Tight black yoga pants that don’t breathe because of the tummy-control panels, and a perfectly highlighted ponytail. “Tell me what’s happening in the wild life of Johnson High,” she says. “Are you just ‘sexting’ the whole day long? . . . CHLOE!” she interrupts herself, yelling toward the field, “Stop doing cartwheels in the midfield!” then without missing a beat resumes her conversation with me. “I sent a naked picture to my husband the other day, and he had his phone sitting face up on the table in the conference room. His boss totally saw my boobs.”

“Karen!” Jen says. These two are kind of like me and Zoe in the future. Karen is the Zoe one. “I’m sorry, Hannah. She is
so
embarrassing. Filter!” she says to Karen. “Where is your filter?”

“Don’t you get tired of the filter? We have to use it all day with the kids. A woman can never speak the truth. So. Tell me, Hannah. Who do you have your eye on?”

“Don’t answer her, Hannah, just so she can get her rocks off. She is disgusting.”

I only pause for a second. I need to tell
someone
, and Zoe has been MIA. “Actually,” I say as I drop eight franks into the boiling water and shut the lid. They both lean closer to me. “Do you know Danny Spinelli? With the ice cream truck?”

“Get. Out. Of. Town!” says Karen. And then, “SHOOT! JACKSON!!! He always putters up close to the goal and then forgets to get a shot off . . . Danny Spinelli?!?”

“He’s adorable,” says Jen.

“And how big are that kid’s feet, like size fifteen?”

“My god, you are disgusting. Hannah . . .” she begins.

“Size matters,” Karen interrupts. “Don’t let her convince you it doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t,” Jen says to me, and then, “Hey, I’m sorry about your dad. That must be hard.”

“Um, my dad?” I ask. As far as I know he’s been going to meetings and drinking the grapefruit juice for weeks now. But everyone in the neighborhood knows about his issues. He’s the closest they all have to a town drunk. “Oh, I guess you didn’t see,” Jen says, blushing.

“And now who needs a filter, big mouth?” Karen says to her and then motions her fingers across her lips as if she’s zipping them up. “Don’t worry about it, pussycat,” she says to me. “It’s just a little publicity. And you know what they say about publicity. All publicity is good publicity.”

But this I know cannot be true. I’m too embarrassed to ask them to spell it out for me, so I try to focus on selling at least the eight hot dogs I’ve cooked before packing up furiously and driving home.

In my room, I rip open my laptop, google his name, and there he is. On YouTube.

It’s from last night’s weather report. In the video, he is obviously drunk, his nose lit up like the clown that he is. And he is having a public breakdown for everyone to see. “I’m drunk,” he’s telling his audience. “And you know why I’m drunk? First of all, because I can perform this stupid job inebriated,” he slurs. “But mostly because these people won’t let me tell you the truth. The truth is that we’re screwed, and it’s too late to change anything because we’ve done irreversible damage to the climate. Because stupid-ass politicians won’t listen to science but pander to their idiotic constituencies. Because of some idiots who believe that everything in the Bible really HAPPENED, we are now headed the way of the dinosaurs. Ashes to ashes. Oil to oil.

“That wind outside, people. That is not a normal wind. I’ve never seen anything like it . . .” He burps, and then the producer finally cuts to a commercial for trucking school. Which seems tempting to me for a second. I like to drive. I’ve probably made enough money with the hot dogs to go to trucking school.

In the next link, they broadcast his forced, public apology: “And I hereby rescind my statement that the oil companies, one of whom owns this television station, have completely run this country into ruin . . .”

It’s hard to say what I feel about this. I am numb with disappointment. And shame. I pull out my phone and call him, but he’s not picking up.

I start clicking away again on the laptop, because it suddenly occurs to me I should check some things. I can feel a hot liquid terror rising through my body like mercury in a thermometer. I start furiously clicking away, paying what I can online from my mom’s account, before he can figure out a way to drain it. Mortgage, electric, car insurance. This begins to calm me down. Putting things in balance.

It was two years ago when I started paying the bills for my mother. Things just started getting shut off. Gas, and electricity, and landlines. So I told her to give me all her passwords and account information, and I took over. I’m good at it. I enjoy a nice spreadsheet. It’s clean and pure. Nothing can hide in a spreadsheet. Which is why, realistically, I’m thinking a career in accounting.

I write checks for the rest, signing her name in the perfect cursive they used to teach people in grammar school. I enter it all in a spreadsheet that makes satisfying cash-register noises when I enter a deduction. Reluctantly I open my own account for the hot dogs.

It’s in the red. Twenty-seven fifty in the red. I hope I’m wrong, so I shut it down and reboot it. There was $2,466 in there yesterday. I take a breath and let the truth of the matter wash over me, but I can’t believe it. I slam the laptop closed, yank the cord from the wall, and hoist the computer out the window, letting out some kind of primal animal sound in the process. A roar? A squeal? A cry? A bellow. I think I bellowed.

He took it all.

• • •

I find him at Mickey’s, and he’s still half in the bag. An old slang term for
drunk
that I learned from my AA friends.

“You should call your sponsor,” I tell him in a flat monotone.

“Sorry about the money, but I lost the job, and you’ll have to kick in to support the family,” he says. “That’s how it works—” He takes a last sip and slams his glass down on the bar. “In families.”

“Is it?” I say. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, so now this is about you. Poor
you
,” he mock-whines, contorting his face into a grotesque red monster.

“Call your sponsor,” I tell him. I’m numb with fury.

“I said I was sorry. AA teaches you that.”

“No, you didn’t, actually. And I wish AA would teach you not to fuck up in the first place. Then we’d have something.”

“Watch your mouth, young lady,” he says, raising his hand to me.

This, for some reason, makes me laugh. I laugh until I’m doubled over, and my friend Obey, the ancient German shepherd guard dog, comes over to sniff at me and figure out what’s happening. I laugh until tears start running down my cheeks, and I keep laughing until I can’t tell if I’m laughing or crying. Obey licks my face. I try to catch my breath, and stick my fingers into the dog’s thick winter coat. I squat down and hug him around his enormous brisket while he keeps licking away my tears.

• • •

My body seems to move on its own after that. I am not inside of it but watching it move more fluidly than it usually does as it hitches the hot dog cart to my car and drives it to the boat launch by the beach. I do a three-point turn with the rig, which is no easy feat, and then I back it up to the cement ramp and I lower it slowly into the lake. First the mini tires, then the propane tank, then the chrome box with the diamond quilting effect on the side. The mini grill for toasting buns, and then the pans for the hot dogs, sauerkraut, and relish. I get out and wade around back in the frigid water to unhitch the cart.

It releases with a heavy metallic thud, and I watch Hannah’s Hot Dogs roll deeper and deeper into the water until the only thing left to see is the yellow umbrella, which I left open. A little deserted island of what was left of my hope. “Fuck you!!!” I scream at it until that too, gets slowly consumed by the waves.

I sit numbly on a bench and look out to the lake, and I’m reminded of that story about the frog and the scorpion. The one where the scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river. The frog is suspicious at first. “Why would I do that?” he asks. And the scorpion, sharp as a tack, responds, “Because if I sting you, I will die too.” That makes sense to the frog. He’s eager to please, because that is his nature, so he decides to give the scorpion a lift.

The scorpion stings him, in the deepest part of the river, because that is in
his
nature, and together they sink to the bottom.

“Bad day in the food service industry?”

I can recognize his voice by the way it lusciously vibrates through my body. I don’t even have to use my ears.

“Never mix business with family,” I tell him without turning around. “What are you doing here?”

“Saw your car,” he says and comes to sit next to me. “Do you at least have insurance on that thing?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve given it to my higher power. The lake. Is my higher power.”

“That’s supposed to be a metaphor, right? You’re not actually supp—”

“Have you broken up with Rebecca?” I blurt.

“Well, I was . . .”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t break up with her. You don’t want any part of this,” I say, swirling my hand in the air. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous or anything, but you seem to be testing the waters. And these waters are seriously polluted. With scorpion venom and Crown Royal and all sorts of toxic whatnot. Stay with Rebecca.”

“But—” I hear him say as I get up, get into my car, slam the door, and drive away.

Back home, I sit on the end of the dock letting the scratchy rough edges of the two-by-fours press into my calf meat. I just want to feel something, and this does the trick. For a moment I can understand the inclination of cutters.

The pain soothes me, and the lake soothes me, too. I can see how other people would find it creepy and dark—would be afraid of what lurks beneath the surface—but I’ve grown up with it. I can’t imagine living without it. To me it is soothing, and blue and clear. A baptismal font. A big life lozenge living in my backyard. Looking at it literally slows my heartbeat.

A muskrat, slick and black like oil, floats back home to its nest beneath the neighbor’s dock. It ignores me and my problems, which I try to remind myself are First World Problems. Number one, nobody died. Number two, I’m not orphaned or starving. Number three, no one sold me into sex slavery. Number four, I do not live in a landfill.

I try to put things in perspective, despite the whiny Zoe voice inside my head that keeps interrupting. “But who steals hard-earned college money from a teenager? Who
does
that?” it asks.

My father, I guess, does that.

I try to think of the story Danny told me about Colonel Sanders. How at the age of ten his father died, so he was shipped off to another farm to work and raise money to support his family. And when he was fired for, like, being
ten,
his mom shamed him mercilessly and shipped him off to another farm to try again.

No one sent me off to work on a farm.

And if they had, it would make me stronger. Colonel Sanders got strong and famous and finger-lickin’ good at everything after that. So, this is a test.

But I didn’t have to push Danny away. I don’t know why I did that. The pain of that finally sinks in. I’m without him. I’m worried about what to do about Zoe. I slide slowly, toes first, scraping my whole body against the dock, as it slithers soundlessly into the frigid water. I let it envelop me like an amniotic sac. And when I burst free, breathless, I hope I can figure out how to start over.