The Museum of Intangible Things (8 page)

Inside, my mom has left a note on the kitchen counter, as if it suddenly mattered to me where she was. “At the gym,” it says, and then, “On a date!”
That’s wonderful
, I think somewhat sarcastically and head to my room to change and try to stop shivering.

I walk right into my closet without turning on the lights. I strip down, peeling off my wet clothes. I throw a towel around myself and sit at my desk. I erase the entire Wiener Meter and draw a new black outline of an empty hot dog.

“Why is the Wiener Meter set to zero?” says a voice behind me.

I spring out of my seat and back myself into my bedroom door. Zoe is sitting on my bed, her long legs tied into a jegging-colored pretzel. Her hair, a matted black curtain, hangs in front of her face as she tries to untangle it a strand at a time.

“What the hell are you doing here?! How did you get in?” I ask her.

“The fake rock. With the key in it. You should maybe scatter some other rocks around it. It looks a little conspicuous sitting out there by itself. What happened to the wieners?”

“Nothing,” I say. “What happened to the long nap?”

“I woke up.”

“Did your mom let you out?”

“Define
let
,” she says.

“It’s a three-letter word for
allowed
,” I say, wrapping my freezing hair into a towel turban.

“I allowed myself out, I guess,” she says, paging through a magazine I left near my bed. “Why are you soaked?”

“No reason. Rebooting, I guess.”

And then she explains how before she snuck out for a cigarette break—

“Cigarette break? You don’t smoke,” I tell her.

“Everyone smokes on the inside,” she says, as if her bedroom were some kind of prison, and then she tells me how before she snuck into the woods during a cigarette break from her suicide watch, she turned her room into an intangible-thing installation: an exhibit on freedom. She wrote the Bill of Rights on a roll of toilet paper, carved the Statue of Liberty out of a bar of soap. Drew the
DON’T TREAD ON ME
snake on one of the walls, and folded her sheet, origami style, into a bald eagle. She hoped her mom’d ponder that and start to treat her with more respect.

“She was trying to help you, Zoe. How did you get here?” I ask her.

“Hitched,” she says, sticking out her bony thumb and pulling it to the right. “Karen and Jen picked me up. Those two are nuts.”

“Okay, well, we should tell your mom where you are,” I say. I stand up, walk over to the bed, and hold my hand out to help her up.

“No, I can’t deal with her right now. She doesn’t get me. You get me, Hannah. She just wants to keep me in a box. She thinks if she can box me in, I’ll someday become like her, and Karen and Jen. I can’t be like them. It’s not that I’m crazy; I just have slightly bigger ideas than most people.”

“It’s okay to have big ideas,” I tell her. “‘It’s okay to have two dads. It’s okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub. It’s okay to be small, medium, large, or extra-large . . .’” I continue, quoting from our favorite picture book that we read to Noah when he was little.

But I’ve been doing some more reading about bipolar disorder. The grandiosity. The inflated self-esteem. And the paranoia that can sometimes accompany a manic phase. The suicidal depressive stuff. I’m learning that it might not be “okay to be bipolar” unless you’re on medication.

“Maybe you should go talk to someone, Zo. A doctor.”

“Doctor? Don’t you remember last time? If I had one idea of my own, they’d call it noncompliance and then take things away like showers and phone calls. My IQ is exponentially higher than every one of the doctors’ and nurses’, and yet they would control my entire fate. If I cried one tear out of frustration, they’d label me ‘depressed’ and increase my medication. It’s barbaric, Hannah. What I need . . .” she says, hanging on to the last syllable so I can tell that she wants something from me.

“What?” I ask her. “What do you need?”

“Don’t let them make me a lab rat, Hannah. I need to get out of here.”

She is getting agitated again, and she stands up and begins straightening all the stuff on my shelves. My books, my trophies from third grade, my matchbook collection.

“What do you mean, ‘out of here’?”

“Road trip. You need one too, obviously. Your life is in the shitter. Everything gets better when you get out of town.”

“I need to deal with some stuff here,” I tell her.

“I saw the video. That’s exactly
why
you need to get out of here. You need to stop rescuing his ass. Let him figure it out for himself this time, Banana. Plus . . . everyone will be talking about it at school.”

“Well played,” I tell her. She knows how hard it will be for me to face the people whispering about me behind my back. If she wants me to get out of town, that’s the reason I would go.

She gets up and hugs me, and I cry a little onto the shoulder of her T-shirt.

“Your shoulder bone just poked me in the eye bone. You’re doing the not-eating thing.”

“I don’t need food right now. I need to get out of town. Till after Thanksgiving. That should be enough time.”

“Enough time for what?” I had forgotten about Thanksgiving.

“Stuff,” she says.

“Well. This is bad timing. There were some developments. In the Danny Spinelli department. You slept through them. I had to talk about it with the soccer moms.”

“I’m listening,” Zoe says.

“Things were going well, and then I kind of sabotaged it.” I pace back and forth with my forehead in my hands. “And I can’t miss school tomorrow. I have a math test, and the school newspaper is going out. So we’ll have to deal with your shit here. In town. Because I have shit to deal with too.”

Zoe finds a nail file in my drawer and begins scraping it against her thumbnail. “‘Why think about that, when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?’” she asks distractedly.

“
Walden
?”

“Nope.
On the Road
. Jack Kerouac. I memorized it.”

“The whole book?”

“I have newfound abilities.”

“You need to talk to someone. You said yourself, the socks won’t work. It’s sort of stupid to think that they would keep working.”

“Fine. I know what I need to do. It came to me while I was sleeping. I need to hit the road, and I’ll go with or without you.”

“Fine, go,” I say, waving her away.

“You’re calling my bluff.”

“It’s okay to call someone’s bluff.”

“No it’s not.” Zoe says, sticking out her bottom lip. “Hannah. Come with me. Please,” she begs. “Just for a little while. We’ll go talk to Danny right now. I’ll explain to him you’ll be back in a day or two. What harm could forty-eight hours do? You’ve been waiting to kiss him for six years. And . . .”

“And what?” I ask.

“And she signed the papers.”

“What papers? Who?”

“My mom . . . The commitment papers. She’s putting me in.”

“No. I told her not to, Zo . . .”

“Well, she’s like a mom and a nurse, and you are a seventeen-year-old hot dog vendor. She probably felt like she didn’t need to consult you.”

“She really did it? Are you bullshitting me?” I’m astonished and hurt that she didn’t talk to me about it.

Zoe unravels some documents she’d folded back and forth into a paper fan.

“Fuck,” I say.

“Now you’re talking. Pack a bag,” she says. “We’re going on an insouciant adventure. Insouciance. That’s your first intangible thing.”

“I don’t need intangible lessons,” I say. “I feel things.”

“Yes. But you feel the wrong things. Trust me. We’re leaving now,” Zoe says. “Packy packy!” She sweeps around the room looking for a bag to put some of my stuff in.

I think of him while I smooth out and fold the ice cream sandwich wrapper he gave me and tuck it into my back pocket. “I think I can smell that he likes me. Danny,” I say. “He smells different. There’s a depth. You know how the lake smells different where it’s deepest?”

“The lake has a smell?”

“Oh my god, do you notice
anything
?”

“I notice that you think you can smell water, or that you can smell
love
, for that matter, and I am the one they think is crazy. Anyway, it was bound to happen, you and Danny. But this is unfortunate timing. Because I have to go.”

I throw some things in the bag. My favorite jeans, a T-shirt, some underwear and a toothbrush, my phone charger, the shampoo that’s supposed to “volumize” my hair. Also,
The Brothers Lionheart
. I pretend it was written for me.

“What will we do for money?” I suddenly realize. “As you can see, the hot dog money has been depleted.”

“Of course it has. By him, right? And I’m sure you’ve already forgiven him.”

“Having a resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.” It’s a quote from AA.

“Whatever. Your father makes me feel good about not having a father. That’s what a jerk he is.”

“Yeah, well, he’s still my father, so it hurts my feelings when you say that.”

“The coins,” she says.

“It’s come to that?” I ask.

“It has.”

Deep in the bottom of her closet sit two heavy boxes of coins that her grandmother, because she doesn’t know about Coinstar, rolled all by herself, every night for two years while watching
Jeopardy
. Two thousand dollars worth of coins. Zoe and I were saving it for an emergency, and I guess this qualifies.

We go to her house first, and sneak into her room. The first box rips a little as I drag it out from her closet by a lid-flap. It is graffittied with Magic Marker sayings like
BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
,
RESULTS MAY VARY
,
DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME
,
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
,
MAYBE YOU SHOULD WEAR A HELMET.

Zoe stares at it as if I’d just pulled a giant squid out of the ocean. “It’s really come to this?” she whispers.

“Well, yeah,” I say. “We’re kind of running away.”

We each hold one heavy box of coins as we waddle our way to the car and toss them into the backseat well with a satisfying
thud
. At least the coins will weigh us down if we get into a fender bender with an SUV. We settle in the front seat; I adjust the rearview and back the car out of the driveway.

“I didn’t get in to Parsons,” she admits with a sigh.

“Oh no.” I look her in the eye.

“Or FIT.”

“But if only they could see your new stuff . . .” I say.

“Too late.”

“I just registered at County. They have some design courses. You could come with me.” But I try to imagine her there. At a commuter college, where she is smarter than everyone in charge but too oblivious to know her place. Nothing good could come of it.

“County jail . . . County College. Same thing,” she says as she looks beseechingly toward the sky. She’s still clutching a corner of the cardboard box flap that ripped off the coins, and she begins to stroke it lightly across her wrist. “We. Are. Better. Than. That.” One stroke for each word.
Better
gets two strokes in an X. She believes this with a conviction rooted deep in her gut. I know because I can feel it. I can feel her feelings sometimes, like she can read my thoughts. It’s as if we’re some kind of Siamese twins connected at the soul.

I reach for the box flap and gently take it from her before it can break the skin.

A strange gusty wind blows through the open window, and her hair stands straight up and then whips across her face in satiny ribbons. She looks out the window, and a fat raindrop splashes onto her cheek, then she looks at me. “That’s a sign. We have to go,” she says, urgently. “Let’s say good-bye to your boyfriend. I’ll give you ten minutes.”

I drive to Danny’s while Zoe pores over an old road atlas and creates playlists on my iPod at the same time. She’s talking to herself, but only a little, and waving what might be hallucinatory flies away from her face.

His house is an old converted mobile home in a neighborhood called Sun Valley or “Scum Valley” if you’re lucky enough not to have to live here. It’s your typical white ghetto with rusting car parts on the front lawns, underwear on the line, last year’s dead Christmas wreaths still hanging on the doors.

I hear the music coming from the half-light of the small basement window near the ground. A deep thudding, like the rhythm of my heart.

His mom works hard, when she can get work, and she’s working now at Casa Bianca, a gourmet restaurant, possibly mafia owned because no one can figure out why they’d put it here except to launder money or feed gangsters after they bury their debtors in the woods.

There’s a heaviness inside me as I peer at that window and imagine him inside. I want to be with him there, underground forever, and melt with him into the earth. I’ve never felt so heavy and deeply rooted. I want to grow roots and vines from my body and ensnare him forever in my branches. No wonder we scare men away.

As much as I’m feeling a density and gravity and rootedness, a deep pulling need to stay and absorb him into my body, Zoe is feeling the opposite. She is feeling the flighty lightness from the adrenaline of her escape. “Come on,” she says from behind me, pushing me through the door. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Enough for a quickie.”

“Right,” I mutter. I tiptoe across the foyer toward the entrance to the kitchen and take a left down a dark hallway. It is home to a gallery of sepia-toned, sun-damaged school portraits of Danny and his sister at ages five, six, seven, and eight. I study him. It’s strange how he looks exactly like himself. How everything, the crookedy nose, the crinkly-eyed smile, was there from the beginning, just waiting to reach its full glorious Danny potential. I find an open door after “
DANNY, AGE 8
,” and it leads to the stairs of the basement.

“Hello,” I say into the doorway, but he can’t hear me over the music. “Danny,” I say a little louder.

I start down the stairs, sliding one hand down each wall as I go. I am about to bend over and peek beneath the ceiling of the finished basement when I hear it. It’s quick, but it is a distinct slurping, spitty inhale—air whistling around too many teeth, followed by a short nasally goose honk. Rebecca’s laugh.

I think maybe I’m hearing things. Maybe it’s just some improvisation in Jimi Hendrix’s
Blues
blaring from the stereo. I stay where I am on the stairs, but I get the courage to dip my head down so I can see into the dimly lit basement.

I see an old indoor basketball hoop arcade game surrounded by a net. I see an entertainment center along the wall with an old stereo and an even older television. The speakers on either side vibrate with the bass. I see a few basketball trophies on the windowsill, and then I dare to look at the plaid, skirted pullout couch along the wall . . . and there she is.

She has her feet on the couch with her knees bent up on either side of her, exposing her crotch to the room. Her crotch is clothed, though, in tight dark-wash jeans that come just to her pudgy hips.

She is very comfortable here. It is her couch, says her posture. The couch she and Danny have christened. And she sits like she has a right to it. There is no awkwardness. No wondering what Danny thinks of her. No newness to this relationship. It runs deep, and I suddenly don’t know what I’m doing here.

The intense anticipatory throbbing that I was feeling beneath my diaphragm and in my nether regions begins to climb. It moves up and pounds against my rib cage. Then it climbs higher and strangles my throat. It finally lands behind my eyes, where it stays and threatens to make me cry.

I let out a gasp and run up the stairs.

I keep running out across the sharp crackling thirsty dead grass and across the street to a wooded lot, where I bend down and try to catch my breath.

“Hannah, what’s wrong?” Zoe asks. She was sitting on the stoop looking at a road atlas with a tiny magnifying glass.

“Nothing.” I can’t breathe. It feels like I’ve run twenty miles.

“What, Hannah?” Zoe places a hand between my shoulder blades.

“Nothing,” I say. A tear squeezes itself out of a tear duct, and some of the pressure is released. “Nothing,” I say again.

I know I told him to stay with her, but I guess I didn’t think he actually would. My shock and sadness take on cosmic proportions. I can feel my heart spin, getting denser and denser until it turns inside out on itself, leaving a black hole in the center of my chest. I wish Noah were here so I could describe it to him. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I say.

• • •

Zoe, because she experiences them (sometimes all in the same hour), understands the full range of human emotions. She is very sympathetic on the first leg of our trip. She lets me cry for a while, then buys me an Oreo Blizzard at Dairy Queen before we officially hit the road.

“Open up,” she says, trying to feed it to me with the big red plastic spoon as we sit in the DQ parking lot.

I shake my head like a toddler refusing strained peas.

“Come on, Hannah, it’s a Blizzard. It’ll make you feel better. Want some whipped cream on it? Wait. I’ll go get you some whipped cream.” She gets out of the car, pops the plastic lid off the Blizzard and then tilts it toward the cashier and points to the top of it. “Whipped cream,” I hear her say, and then she hands her two extra quarters that she peels from our first roll of emergency coins.

She hands me the cup, and I take one bite. It does make me feel a tiny bit better. The cold is soothing the lump in my throat.

“So you’re crying for two reasons,” Zoe says. “The first one is because your dream is squashed, and that’s a valid reason for crying. The second is because you feel like a fool. And that one is not valid. You deserved him more than anyone. You deserve better than him, obviously, if he gave up on you so quickly. He is the fool. Not you. Say it out loud,” she says as she wipes my tears with a scratchy DQ napkin.

“What?”

“He’s the fool.”

“He’s the fool,” I mumble through my whipped cream.

“No, say it like you mean it.”

“He’s the fool.”

“Now yell it out the window.”

“He’s the fool!” I yell. But a new tear comes to my eye, because Danny is really not a fool at all. He’s smart. And grounded and ambitious and hardworking. Like a perfect working-class Jerseyan hero in a Bruce or Bon Jovi ballad. And I’m the one who pushed him away.
I’m the fool
, I think.

Zoe thinks I’ve recovered enough to start driving, though. And I’m really ready to get out of here too at this point. Who cares if we ever come back. Really, all those great songs about New Jersey were about getting the hell out of it.