Virgin Territory (10 page)

Neither of us have much to say after that. Crispy stands there chewing his lower lip, and I shift my weight from one flip-flop to the other. I can tell he’s thinking about things that have nothing to do with my mother or me. I wonder if he and I will be friends this time next year, or if he’s just one of those people who will pass through my life and not leave fingerprints.

“By the way,” I say, in an effort to wrap up my story, “my name’s Dylan.”

He looks at me as though he’s trying to see a Dylan where an Alex had been standing only a moment ago.

“Cool,” he says, and then withdraws his attention from me and puts it back into his pocket, where he picks more lint.

“My real name’s Crispy,” he says. “Actually, it’s Chris Pollard. But my folks’re both in AA. Their friends call them Molly P. and Tim P. So when I came along, I was known in the rooms as Chris P. The rest is history.”

The girls haven’t come out of the Shack yet, so I confess to Crispy that the only reason I’m involved in this Virgin Club business is because I’m hoping to get on Angela’s good side.

“Right,” Crispy says with a wry laugh. “And into her pants. Don’t sweat it. We’re all in love with her. And those who aren’t want to
be
her. Two days ago she kissed Desirée. On the lips.”

“Whoa,” I say, trying to slow my mind, which immediately has gone into a major girl-on-girl spin. “Did Desirée kiss her back?”

“What do you think?”

“You won’t say anything,” I plead. “I mean, about Angela and me.”

“Dude, it’s obvi.”

“Really?”

“Way.”

“We’re all set,” Angela announces as she and Desirée step out onto the sidewalk and into the blazing sunlight. And then she looks to me for instruction. “Where to?”

Naturally, Angela thinks of Jupiter as my home turf; she assumes that I know the best house to break into, a place that doesn’t advertise a major alarm system, or feature mad dogs waiting to take a bite out of our asses. But she’s wrong. Even though I’ve been living in the neighborhood for years, I’ve never considered this place my own, never bothered to learn who lives where and what they’re up to. Until further notice, I’m just passing through, a stranger trapped in an even stranger landscape. Jupiter is my continuing-care community without the care.

“Follow me,” I tell them. And they fall in line. How can I let Angela down?

We turn off the main drag and head toward a residential section that features the kind of houses I’m sure they have in mind—fancy houses that promise easy comforts like wide-screen TVs, sunken bathtubs, fully stocked refrigerators, and unlocked back doors. We walk without saying a word, but out of the corner of my eye, I check them out; they’re appraising the houses and the well-clipped gardens.

“When I’m famous,” Desirée blurts out, “I’m gonna have, like, four houses. One in Beverly Hills. A big apartment in Manhattan. A house in Atlanta for my mom. And one by the ocean, someplace maybe in the tropics.”

“Really?” I ask. “How’re you going to get famous?”

“Singing, acting. And I’m going to have my own fashion line that I’ll design myself. And I’m going to be a spokesmodel for some kind of telecommunications company. And I’m gonna do a perfume. Just gonna call it ‘Desirée.’ But I’m still gonna go back on weekends to Atlanta in my private plane to sing in my church.”

“You got it all figured out, huh?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says with the utmost confidence. “I got plans. Know what I mean?”

“Sort of,” I tell her.

“What about you? You got a plan?”

I try to think of something I can offer that might sound like Desirée’s idea of a plan—at least for the moment—but nothing comes to mind. The idea of grave robbing with Frankie Rey
seems like too far of a stretch—even compared to Desirée’s fantastic scheme. But I envy the fact that she has a plan at hand; she can believe in herself: she sees herself in ads and smells her future. I lost the scent of whatever it was I wanted to be or do a long time ago, and I’m just here in this world, stranded in the moment, hanging out with friends I don’t really know, and ready to break into a house that isn’t mine.

Years ago, Kat had a plan for me. When she was in the hospital, I used to climb into her bed, and she would imagine my future. The way she saw it, I was going to graduate from high school and then go on to a good college. I would marry a beautiful girl who was smart and funny. I would have children, and when the kids were old enough, I’d tell them that once upon a time they had a grandmother who wrote poetry. She made me promise to read her poems aloud to them. Whenever she talked this way, I’d change the subject. I wasn’t interested in a plan that didn’t include her. But she insisted and just plowed on. As the prospects of her own future diminished, it seemed as though her need to concentrate on mine increased proportionately. She put her whole self into creating a plan for me, and I suppose, by comparison, my future must have seemed like some kind of happy ever after, endless. But not to me. After she died, I tried not to think of my future at all, and a plan was out of the question.

“A plan?” I ask Desirée.

“Yeah,” she says, prompting me. “That’s how it works. You
got to always be listening for a plan. Like, for your future.”

I listen hard, but all I can hear is the burbling of a fountain from behind someone’s courtyard wall and an SUV whizzing by, its windows tinted against the sunshine.

A plan?

We pass a housekeeper, a middle-aged woman with the face of an Aztec lady warrior. She stands in front of a big stucco house watering a lawn. She’s obviously suspicious of us as we walk by, and her look is so accusatory that for a moment I think she might turn the hose on us.

“¡Hola! Hace tanto calor aquí hoy y tan temprano, ¿verdad?”
Angela calls out to her.

I’m able to tell that they’re talking weather, but the minute they veer away from Spanish 101, I’m lost. To keep myself busy, I study Angela. When she speaks Spanish, everything about her changes—there’s a quickening of her whole self. Her eyes flash, her hands dance, her tongue clicks and clacks like a little cart happily traveling over a rough patch of a familiar cobblestone street.

Could Angela be my plan?

“Oh, my God,” she cries out, and clutches her head with both hands. “The sun’s too hot. Evil hot. I think it may be boiling my brain.”

“Yeah. I know,” I say, clutching my head in the same way. “Me, too.”

Crispy catches my eye and mutters, “Way obvi, dude.”

As it happens, we’ve stopped on the pavement across from Marie’s house. I think,
Why not? It is, after all, a fancy place with a wide-screen TV, a sunken bathtub, a fully stocked refrigerator, and an unlocked back door. Doug will never know. Neither will my new friends
.

And just like that I have a plan.

“This place looks good,” I say.

Breakfast dishes are piled in the sink. Doug’s coffee cup, the skillet in which Marie scrambled an egg, my cereal bowl—they’re all sitting there like incriminating evidence. I’m scared that any minute the sponge or the toaster or the cutting board will betray me, that I’ll give myself away if I look at the kitchen as though it means something to me, as though I care about the place. I try to make my face go slack so that I appear as blank as possible. I’m a ghost just passing through a place where I once lived, not quite sure if haunting the house is worth the bother.

“So what do you think?” I ask them. “Is this what you had in mind?”

“Not bad,” says Angela. “Not bad at all. You think they have a Jacuzzi?”

There’s nothing with my name on it, nothing to give my game away in here. Still, what’s wrong with my heart? It’s pumping like a native drum designed to send out warning signals to neighboring tribes.

“Hey, guys,” I say a little louder than I intended. They’re headed into the living room, and that just won’t work. Who knows what’s out there just waiting to blow my cover? “Let’s stick together. Isn’t that the idea? For us to experience this as a group?”

Angela smiles at me as though I’ve just won an around-the-world cruise contest for the whole bunch of us. She’s definitely on board. I’m her captain.

“Esssaaactly!” she says as she sidles up beside me. “Okay, what next?”

They’re all looking to me for instructions. Funny. For years, no one’s come here to visit me. Not one friend. And now I’m playing host and giving a tour in my own house. Corey, my aforementioned and alleged BFF, was always promising to spend the night, have dinner with Doug and me, download stuff off the Internet, make crank calls; but he never made it through our front door. Then one afternoon, he confessed that Marie’s house depressed the hell out of him. Admittedly, it isn’t as nice as his, but still I don’t think that’s a good reason to avoid a sleepover with someone who is supposedly your best bud. Anyway, this just proves why I’m out of practice as a host and have no ideas about what’s next.

“I know,” Crispy calls out. “Why don’t we try and figure out who these people are. That could be fun. Y’know, like detectives.”

Desirée picks up a Popsicle-stick napkin holder and offers an opinion: “I’d say these people have fallen on some hard times.”

I want to tell her that I made the thing for Marie when I was eight years old. And even though the glue has gone dry and flakey and some of the glitter has lost its original shine, we keep it around because it has sentimental value. But I don’t say a word. There’s sweat running down my spine like someone forgot to shut the faucet tight.

“I don’t know,” Crispy offers as he stares into one of the empty cupboards. “Maybe the mother is depressed or something. I mean, this kitchen doesn’t look like a mom’s in charge of it. Or if she is, where are the spices?”

Kat wasn’t much of a cook, but she did have a small repertoire of dishes and recipes to which she was devoted. Six, to be exact. But she didn’t know from spices. She served up her meals like clockwork, one for each day of the week, and she rarely veered from her set menu. The meals themselves weren’t inventive or especially delicious; they weren’t even that memorable, but they were distinguished by their reliability, and we learned that sometimes the greatest spice is anticipation. We knew, for instance, that Monday was the day for meat loaf; Tuesday meant spaghetti; Wednesday was chicken and rice; Thursday gave us macaroni and cheese; Friday found us eating fish; on Saturday we ordered pizza; and on Sunday she cooked pork chops. This routine was so unvaried, so predictable, and in its way so comforting, that when we moved to Florida I was not only surprised to learn that the whole world didn’t conform to this round of food, I was also angry.

Kat claimed that because she had the menu all worked out ahead of time, she didn’t have to waste her mental energy deciding on the menu, or flipping through cookbooks in search of a fricassee or a green curry sauce. She knew what we would be eating when she woke up, and that was that. She could devote herself instead to the crafting of her poems all day long, and when dinner rolled around, she could throw together that same old meal.

“What kind of spices are you talking about?” I ask Crispy.

“And not so clean, this place,” says Angela as she runs a finger along the grout in the counter tiles. Then she looks up at me and acknowledges the shame of it all by
tsk-tsking
and giving her head a mournful little shake.

I feel an unexpected desire to defend my family’s honor.

Crispy is dragging a kitchen chair across the room. He places it directly under the air vent. Now he’s standing on the chair and holding up a finger so that he can to feel the breeze that’s blowing through the vent with arctic fervor.

“Wow,” he says without any of the enthusiasm that usually accompanies a wow. “These people ought to be publicly shamed. I mean, who leaves the AC on when they’re not home? What’s up with that?”

Doug can go on and on about the environment; he knows all about the danger of the disappearing polar caps and the growing hole in the ozone. But once we moved to Florida, all that info just flew out the window. He says that he likes the house to be
refrigerated when he gets home from work, so he keeps the AC going throughout the day. He refuses to accept the fact that he’s an energy hog and a hypocrite of the highest order.
Listen, buddy, when you grow up and have a house of your own, you can do what you want, but till then, chill out
. I point out that by the time I’m old enough to buy a house, there will be no more ozone to worry about and we’ll both be dead from skin cancer. The winner of the argument is the last person to leave the house—hence the AC.

Desirée’s phone rings.

“Hey, Momma,” she says into her phone, putting on her thick Southern patois and sounding like the girl she once was. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … No, I’m at a friend’s house right now.… Who? Um … his name’s Alex.… Of course there’s other people here. You can talk to them.”

She holds the phone out toward us, but Angela and Crispy don’t want any part of it; they bumble through the kitchen door and disappear into the living room. I grab the phone from Desirée and start talking.

“Hey, Desirée’s mom! This is … Alex.”

I’m doing such a convincing imitation of someone who’s in control, I actually convince myself.

“Desirée’s here at my house.… Well, I’m kind of a new friend to Desirée and Angela and the gang. I’m showing them around town a bit, giving them a tour.… Okay … Yes, ma’am. I will. I’ll be sure to say hey next time I’m at the golf club. Bye now.”

I flip the phone shut and hand it back to Desirée. “Your
mom’s just checking up on you, making sure you’re not hanging out with ax murderers.”

“She didn’t always worry so much. We lost our house a few years back. Just me and her now, traveling ‘round. Naturally, she’s always gotta be shinin’ a light on me. You know how it goes.”

“I do,” I say, though I have only a dim memory of a light like that shining on me. “What do you mean you lost your house?” I ask.

She hikes up one shoulder and looks around the room as though trying to find something to explain her situation.

“I dunno. They took our house from us. My momma lost her job, and we weren’t able to pay. Next thing I know, I’m packing stuff and we moved to South Carolina with my aunt Tee. Then we stayed some time in Alabama with my momma’s cousins. But we’re gonna get back on track real soon. We are.”