You Take It From Here (4 page)

O
nce Henry and Tucker took off in search of something vintage, you and I walked back up to the house. You hooked your arm around my waist and dropped your head onto my shoulder. The heat of the sun soaked your thick, blond hair, which had that impossible shine of youth. Your hips kept knocking into mine as you walked, once again proving you were no longer a little kid—your center of gravity was lowering, and you were still getting used to your new body. You smelled like cheap perfume, which meant you were rubbing magazine ads against your forearms again.

“Oh, hey, I got you something,” I said as I remembered, pulling back to reach into my purse.

“Yay.”

I handed you a small bottle of Chloé perfume. “Hide it immediately before she finds this and throws it at my head.”

Smidge had been known to suddenly declare the most random, innocuous things offensive, tacky, or dangerous. There was the time she outlawed cheese, the month she banned hiphop,
and the unforgettable winter she tore all the carpeting out of her house.
With her own two hands.

Smidge would then change her mind in what would appear to be just as abrupt a decision. She’d never just admit she might have been wrong or made an irrational decision. There was no regret, no remorse. Rather, it was always a choice to go in the other direction, as if she’d done some consulting from a more learned advisor.

“I guess listening to a little hip-hop won’t kill anybody,” she might have said. “If it’s the good kind with Kanye West in it. Y’all, that man knows what he’s doing.”

As if he’d called her himself and talked her out of the ban. “Shorty, why you trippin’? How can Kanye fix this?”

Smidge never did change her mind about Capri pants. I learned that the hard way when she cut mine into shorts while I was wearing them.
While I was wearing them.
In her backyard, surrounded by guests, a barbecue in progress, your mother attacked me with a pair of scissors she’d grabbed from the kitchen, shrieking, “This is for your own good!”

Perfume became contraband when Smidge was on a tear about the way things smelled, often stopping a conversation midword to flick her head to the side and sniff.

“What in the
hell
?” she’d mutter to herself, glaring at any unfortunate nearby stranger. Everyone was a suspect as her senses were continually assaulted.

She’d gag on the smell of gasoline, strawberry milk shakes, and chewing gum. One day she stared into her backyard for almost half an hour, positive she’d found a skunk. It got to where even the idea of certain smells were upsetting to her; the thought of someone striking a match made her queasy.

But Jenny, you were not having this perfume ban. I have to admit I got a bit of a thrill watching you stand up for yourself, recognizing injustice when it encroached on your own body.

“It’s not like I’m always around her nose,” you said to me. “If she’s so sensitive, she should just wear one of those surgical masks, like an Asian lady at the airport.”

Still, I made you promise to keep the bottle safely hidden in whatever place you were keeping your secrets those days. You swore you would, tucking that small, golden bottle into your shorts pocket, patting it gently as you shot me your mother’s smug expression. “I love you, A.D.,” you said.

Remember when you called me that? For Auntie Danielle?

You wandered away from me, headed toward the backyard, your head down as you rapidly thumbed keys on your phone, somehow already in the middle of another conversation.

Standing at the front door, I prepared myself for the familiar sound of your family’s chaos. I always had to take just a second before I stepped inside.

It still seems impossible only three people lived in that house. Three people and that old dog and I know somewhere there was allegedly a hamster named Quiche Lorraine, but I hadn’t seen it. The amount of electricity, energy, and sound surrounding that place made it seem like a hub for a family of ten, or maybe a squad of fifteen cheerleaders. Perhaps some kind of adult day-care center. A television was on in almost every room, with each set tuned to a different channel, even if nobody was watching. In the kitchen next to the microwave, an iPod rested in a speaker system, blasting twangy songs I never recognized.

The house was always impeccably clean. What it lacked in serenity, it more than made up for in order. Your mother arranged her cereal boxes by hue. The refrigerator bore no magnets. All cords were sheathed in a tube the same color as the wall behind it. So loud and yet so empty—like everybody had been kidnapped. Or perhaps all just got up and left.

The Rapture.

That was it. What it will look like after the chosen ones have been summoned, when people disappear. Since I’m certainly going to be one of the heathens left behind, I always said I’d beeline it straight to Smidge’s during End of Days, as her cabinet had the expensive snacks.

I didn’t live that way. I couldn’t. I need quiet, even at the expense of a mess. I don’t mind being buried under piles of laundry and stacks of papers as long as the background noise is either the television or the radio—not both. Never both. Being in Smidge’s house was like living inside a slot machine. The bedlam made me uneasy, like I needed to grab the counter with both hands to steady myself.

“Smidge! I’m here!”

From the back of the house, I heard my best friend shout back, “Good! Come get this!”

I headed toward her room, sidestepping the old basset hound camped out in the hallway. “Hello, Dr. Phil,” I said as I gently tiptoed over his enormous floppy ears that stretched almost halfway across the floor.

Smidge was wearing a pair of white shorts and a blue tank. Her thick hunks of dark curls were pulled back into a low ponytail, covered by a floppy sunhat. One slender arm rested along a bookcase as she slid a cobalt flip-flop onto her foot.
She tottered there, head nodding toward the small, leopard-print suitcase on the floor beside her bed.

The rest of the room was pristine. We could have just as easily been standing in an IKEA display, or the bedroom of a child hampered with severe allergies.

“Just that one bag?” I asked. Smidge normally carried enough pieces of luggage to outweigh her by a factor of two.

“Yes, smarty-face,” she said. “I’m traveling light!”

When she raised her arms in celebration I noticed she’d lost weight since I’d seen her last, around six months ago, when she flew out to my apartment for an overdrunken event we called Danielle’s Definitely Divorced Weekend. I don’t remember much of it, but I know somewhere she had pictures of me wearing a black veil, hugging a palm tree, simultaneously crying and laughing. I look deranged. She claimed it was her favorite picture of me.

Catching my stare, she pulled her arms across her chest into a defensive hug. “What?” she asked as though issuing a schoolyard challenge, her chest puffed up and chin tilted.

“Nothing.”

Her eyes remained slits as she warned, “Better be nothing.”

Then, just as quickly, all the toughness melted from her face. “Come here, yay!” she said, dancing into my arms for a long hug. We remained that way until I heard a toilet flushing in the master bathroom.

“Who’s here?” I asked.

Smidge scrunched her face and shrugged as a way of an apology. I needed no further answer.

Vikki Lillian was a woman instantly recognizable by her big teeth and even bigger parrot necklace. A woman for
whom I had absolutely no patience. As she came lurking around the corner, I watched her decide to act like she was surprised to see me.

“Oh, hello, Danielle,” she said, all singsong and gooey. “Well, didn’t you just about frighten me?” Her face held that fake shock as she tangled her fingers into her hideous necklace. The parrot was green, sitting on a branch, half the size of her hand, and I couldn’t help but wonder if summers ended with her finding a bird-shaped white patch across her splotchy chest.

She rocked on her heels, fixing her gaze Smidge’s way. “I was just here to see if Smidge needed any help while y’all go off gallivanting on y’all’s trip. With Jenny or Henry or the house. Y’all are sometimes gone for so long and this house is so big, I know you’ll need help keeping it up when y’all are gone for who knows how long.”

Sometimes hearing that accent, no matter how many years I’d been surrounded by it, with some people it still sounded like someone was plucking a banjo.
Ping, pawng, y’all y’all.

“Isn’t she sweet?” Smidge asked, not meaning it in the slightest.

“That’s nice of you,” I told Vikki. “But Smidge has a housekeeper.”

Smidge smacked her thighs. “No, I don’t!”

She did. Her name was Tamara; she was forty-six and always entered through the back door, even though your mom would insist she came through the front. Smidge wasn’t embarrassed to have someone working for her; she just didn’t want Tamara getting the daily credit when she only came once a week.

“It’s not like company’s coming over to see if my sheets are clean and my towels are in the closet,” she’d say. “When people say my house is clean, it’s because I wash the damn dishes every day and know how to use a broom. That praise is mine.”

“She doesn’t have a housekeeper,” Vikki corrected me, so happy to think she was up on something.

Smidge gave me her wide-eyed warning to let it go.

“I told Vikki I’m good here,” she said, “but she just keeps on insisting there must be something she can do!”

Vikki shook her head, presumably to dislodge all the self-righteousness she was about to need. “Y’all are just so lucky,” she said, “getting to drop everything to go wherever you want, whenever you want, without feeling bad. I just don’t know how y’all do that. Well, I mean, I guess you’ve got Henry to help, and with Danielle here not having any kids or a husband. All alone, you might as well travel. That’s what I’d do if I were like that with nobody in my life. Nothing else going on, why not see some Chinese people?”

Vikki had started hanging around Smidge about a year earlier, when Smidge’s knitting club dissolved after everyone finally admitted they were unable to knit and purl at such high levels of intoxication. People were starting to get testy with one another, leading Smidge to make a declaration that she wouldn’t hold more than three women on her porch at once. I have to admit it’s not that bad of a rule. Despite the lack of an invitation, Vikki kept coming every Tuesday night, and eventually Smidge felt sorry for her. “I think her husband hates her,” Smidge confessed to me one night, whispering
into the phone as if Vikki was within earshot. “He’s probably afraid she’ll chomp on him with those horse teeth of hers.”

After that, Vikki always seemed to be there, acting like she’d always been there, like it was normal for us to be a threesome. Even if I’d just traveled hundreds of miles to get to that porch.

Vikki loved being a shadow to Smidge, like her sole purpose was to stand around waiting for the moment Smidge needed someone to agree with her. But the joke was on Vikki; Smidge already knew she was right about everything. Smidge let Vikki have just the smallest perception of the wonderland that could be her friendship, without anything tangible to take home. I don’t think Smidge would have even lent her Fiestaware.

Smidge interrupted here with one of her singing segues, a habit of hers that never failed to suck all the attention in the room straight over toward her. She usually did it to change the subject, but sometimes it was to make a conclusion. She could draw out that word until it sounded like she was frozen, trapped in the middle of singing “Do Re Mi.”

“Sooooooo!”
she sang. “Let’s hit the road, Danny. I wanna stop at Sonic for a cherry limeade.”

And that was it. No
Bye, Vikki.
No
Thanks for stopping by.
Smidge acted like Vikki was already gone, a doll dropped as she wandered into another room.

Some decent part of me knew I should have at least a pang of sympathy for Vikki as I watched her slink out of the house, but it was hard to feel for her when she insisted on bringing these situations upon herself. And the parrot necklace made
me irrationally angry. Did she sleep wearing it? She must have. She probably showered with it.

That’s when you appeared in the doorway, arms crossed in front of your budding chest, head swiveling at us like you were an audience member on
Jerry Springer
. “Y’all are mean,” you said to us, your tiny little mouth a bracket of disapproval.

Your mother snorted. “I learned it from you.”

FOUR

Y
ou followed us all the way to the driveway asking your mother for some extra cash. “What if something happens while you’re gone?” you whined. “What if Daddy forgets to feed me and I need emergency pizza?”

Even though we all knew you’d be fed and safe, Smidge made a big production out of slipping you a twenty. “Give me Odd Hugs,” she said, once you’d stuffed the bill near the perfume-shaped lump in your pocket.