And Then Things Fall Apart (19 page)

I was crying and wasn't even aware of it. There were no words that I wanted to say, so I just closed my eyes to force the tears to flow from behind my lids, my tears and the glass globes all made of the same watery translucence. I could feel my heart beating apart from everyone else's, whispering
IamIamIam
just like Esther's in times of great existential distress. And I am. And I am separate from everything and connected to all, and it was all so overwhelming, no wonder my tears were splashing like rain.

Matt did indeed buy me a latte. And a slice of flourless chocolate cake. We never talked about my miniature breakdown at the Art Institute. What was I crying about? Everything. I was mourning everything—my family, my childhood. I think that maybe I was also mourning the end of
Matt and me, which was sure to come, eventually, whether I slept with him or not. In that little room I felt time pressing on me, squeezing me like a piece of coal, turning me into a diamond, and it hurt like hell. Forever to his credit, Matt stood tall and held my hand.

We sat on the top tier passenger seats of the Metra on the way home, staring down at the city and suburbs swimming past the green windows as if we were fish watching from inside an aquarium. And we were swimming, treading water until everything came to a stop.

IamIamIam.

I've been hearing the ice-cream truck in my grandma's neighborhood cranking out “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” every summer since I was born. When I was a kid, Gram or Dad or Mom would give me a dollar, and I'd run like a girl escaping a fire down the front steps and up to the window of the Good Humor van. Which is so George Orwell's
1984
, a government van that dispenses happy dispositions: Dreamsicles. King Cones. PushUps. Today when I heard it, I grabbed a handful of silver change from Gram's dresser and ran to meet the truck like it was a long-lost friend.

The EPA needs to investigate the ozone-depleting exhalations of the Chicagoland fleet of ice-cream trucks. It was hot enough without the truck idling, its exhaust blasting the ankles of all the kids waiting for their ice-cream novelties. A plump boy in front bought an astro pop while I looked at the pictures of ice cream. I so should have asked him who he was before he was born, but I wasn't thinking. The ice-cream
man was out of everything I wanted, so I somehow ended up with Dora the Explorer. On a stick.

Instead of going inside I sat on the front steps, giving my pox scars a chance to absorb the sun and watching summer unfold in the street. Down the block, girls drew on the sidewalk with fat sticks of chalk. Boys, top heavy in helmets, zoomed around, their bikes pimped out with bells and training wheels. Teenagers I didn't know drove by with their windows down, stupid pop music pulsing from crappy speakers. Dora's hair was strawberry-flavored, though I remembered it as chocolate. She was a fast melter, and I had to concentrate to keep up.

For a minute everything was good. It was August. My chicken pox were gone. My boyfriend and I were working it out. I was young, you know? The world was my freaking oyster. My extraordinary little cousin was healthy-ish at last. Mom the Embezzler was coming home soon. I didn't know what the hell I would say to her, but she would be home at least. And things might seem a little more normal, whatever normal was for us. I was thinking that whatever went on between my parents had absolutely nothing to do with me, and for the first time ever, really, I believed it. For the first time in about a hundred years, everything was okay.

And then I saw
her
.

I let one of Dora's sad, melty eyeballs roll out of her face and down the steps.

She looked the same as she did making change at the D&D. She wore a double tank top and a knit miniskirt and flip-flops. It was summer, and she looked practically naked. She carried a giant Big Gulp cup from the 7-Eleven around the corner, and as she neared my grandma's house, she knocked the ice against the cup sides with a nervous flick of her wrist. I knew she was there to see if Dad was around, and duh, he was w-o-r-k-i-n-g to help fix the whole train wreck of our lives.

I pretended I didn't see her, my heart doing jumping jacks in my chest. I turned my head and tried to finish the rest of Dora so I didn't look like an even more pathetic and underage loser virgin than I already was. I chewed the remaining black gum eyeball. I thought of the talks we'd had over the dishwasher, and the pretend smoking out back, and how much I once loved her. I imagined calling her Mom, as in “stepmom,” and almost keeked.

“Dad's not here.” I was staring straight out across the street, looking at chalk butterflies and rainbows glowing up from the pavement. “So piss off.”

I sounded totally tough, right? But I wanted to flee the scene. I wanted to run and keep going until I was somewhere safe and quiet where I could think. Her sunglasses were totally cool and covered half her face with black lenses. I couldn't help but notice that her toenails were painted Lincoln Park After Dark purple-black.

“I'm not here to see Kevin.” Amanda slurped up melted ice from her stupid Big Gulp, which is perhaps the most inelegant sound in the universe. For a minute I was like,
Who the hell is Kevin?
And duh, I know who the hell he is. Was she freaking showing off that she calls my
father
Kevin? That they are
peers
,
sexual partners,
“
lovers
”?

On reality shows and soap operas and, once in a blue moon, even on
Judge Judy
, women become so inflamed with hatred, jealousy, and anger that, before you can say “Order in the court,” they are at each other's throats, pulling out hair like wolverines, and doing the girl fight dance while the cameras try to catch it all. It always seemed childish to me. I would never debase myself in such a way. But as Amanda stood there, a veil of red descended across my vision, and I wanted to bash her head against the sidewalk and hopscotch over her limp body.

Sometimes when I get really agitated or nervous or excited, the muscles beneath my clavicles shudder under my skin like the flanks of a racehorse. They were shuddering, and my hands were shaking, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Gram had just told me to class it up, and I wasn't about to go all Roller Derby on her in the middle of the street, so I held my breath and let sweat drip down my temples, hoping that I could somehow fast-forward to the part where I'm an adult looking back on this.

“I'm here to see you. Matt gave me the address. He's
worried about you, kid.” Now she was talking to
Matt
? “He told me about the chicken pox too.”

HUH?

“I bumped into him and Earl when I was picking up my last check from the D&D. Matt was kind of an asshole to me, actually. I deserve it, I guess.”

God, I love him.

“He told me that I should say something to you about everything. That I owed you that. Here.” She handed me a white paper bag from the D&D that I hadn't noticed she was carrying. “I thought you should have these, give you something to do while you get better.”

The bag was heavy, and inside were bottles of nail polish. All the subversive ones we'd bought together and some she'd shoplifted from Sephora, back when we were the best of friends. They were all there, the whole gang: Off with Her Red, Jade Is the New Black, Damsel in a Dress. We're talking, like, seventy-five dollars' worth. I was excited at the bonanza. And furious that I was excited. And had to stifle an urge to take each bottle out one by one and fling it onto the pavement so they exploded in Technicolor bombs.

Amanda still hadn't said anything worthwhile. And I wasn't about to say “Thank you, you skank, for giving me used nail polish in a bag from my parents' restaurant.”

“How are you, anyway?”

IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhate: YOU
. And then I said,
“Why don't you find some other person's life to demolish? There are plenty of nice innocent children all around here. I'm sure their dads would be happy to fuck your brains out.”

Good, right? Do not mess with the Keekinator. The blow landed hard, because she actually gasped and took a slight step backward. I couldn't see her eyes, but her Big Gulp cup was suddenly sofa king still.

“It's not like that, Keek. Your dad's cool and everything, but what we did, it wasn't important, really. I mean, we were a little drunk and a lot lonely.” She had obviously scripted this at home. “I wasn't thinking about anything. It was totally and completely stupid. I mean, we're not in love or anything.”

Oh, Esther Greenwood. WTF am I supposed to say now?

“I will never forgive you,” is what I said. As solemn and pale as Wednesday Addams.

“I never meant to hurt you, you know. It wasn't a big elaborate plan to ruin your life.” Which was actually extremely good to hear. “We were just adults behaving badly. If I could undo it, I would. Your dad is even more upset than I am.”

“Really?”

“Your mom and him—whoa. I'm no therapist, but they should not be married.”

I'm totally paraphrasing all of this, but that was the gist of her intended communiqué. But then I said, and this is pretty much verbatim:

“Yeah. I know. But I thought you were my friend. Or at least on my team, Amanda. It wouldn't hurt so much if it were anyone but you.
Anyone
. Like any other person in the whole freaking world, even my English teacher, and I am serious.” And I was breathing hard and suddenly dripping wet with sweat, and I said, “Thanks for the chitchat and the nail polish, but we are so over.”

And as I stood to go inside, she said in a normal and as-serious-as-I've-ever-heard-it voice, “I'm really sorry, Karina.” Finally. The she-wolf apologizes.

“Yeah, well. You
are
sorry. Now get off my stairs.”

Cue lights and music. Keek has left the building. I went inside and sat on the couch, nervously shaking the bag so the bottles
click-clocked
together, watching her out the picture window like the final frames of a movie as she turned and slowly walked down the block to wherever she'd parked her crappy hatchback.

Coming here had taken guts, I guess. I suppose I should have appreciated it, but I didn't. Or at least I didn't just then. I felt like I'd handled the whole confrontation like a sophisticated person. And I was feeling a tiny bit better, calmer even. I went to the bathroom in a daze, thinking about how young I'd been three months before, three weeks, three minutes—how old I felt just then. How before I knew it, I would be at college, on my own. Washing my hands, I thought about how I'll be taking Driver's Ed. in the fall. I have a cousin
so much younger than me that she will probably call me Auntie just to be polite. I was feeling what my mom's guru would have called “the serenity that only emotional growth and wisdom can bring.” And then I looked into the mirror, and my entire mouth was black and purple from the stupid Dora gum, and I looked like a crazy witch girl, with black teeth and black and pink hair. I'd been talking to Amanda the whole time with this mouth of ridiculousness.

Sofa.

King.

Pathetic.

Ugh.

Dad took me to the beach yesterday.

I was surprised he took the day off work and even took the magnetic Dine & Dash signs off the van. When I was a kid we used to go to the beach often, and I'd forgotten how great it was. But I hadn't packed my suit when I'd gotten sick, duh, and he didn't have any of our beach stuff—umbrella, blanket, sunscreen. So on the way downtown, we swung by the house, and when I say “house,” I mean his old, my and Mom's current, abode.

Awk.

Ward.

Mom had changed the locks, and only I had a key. “Wait here,” I said, and went in, like we were pulling off a bank robbery. I couldn't think about what he was thinking, fiddling with the XM Radio controls while I entered the forbidden zone.

The house was still and airless. Coffee's water bowl was empty. The digital clock on the microwave had the
correct time. This house had just been sitting here the whole time I'd been gone, and it totally creeped me out. I felt like any minute I was going to discover a body splayed out on the living room floor with a steak knife sticking out of his chest, or drug dealers hiding in the mudroom with wires taut between their hands, waiting to strangle me. It was my house but fundamentally different. It was a house and not a home. I'd always heard there was a difference, but only then did I understand what people who said that were getting at.

I grabbed a bathing suit from my top drawer, took off all my clothes, pulled on the suit (a black one-piece with two silver rings at the hips), and then put my clothes back on over it. It was like having on a superhero costume. At the first cry for help I could tear off my clothes and fly to the rescue—
Bell Jar
Girl. Saving lives through difficult and genre-bending poetry.

A sheet, a bottle of Coppertone, and towels from the closet, an umbrella from the garage, and I was back in the van so fast even my dad, in his slightly preoccupied frame of mind, was surprised.

I didn't tell Dad about Amanda's visit, because really it had nothing to do with him. I don't feel sorry for my dad. He is an adult. He has the benefit of experience, which gives him access to wisdom, right? He still is one infuriating man, but if he's trying, I suppose I should too.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's go.” To get to the expressway Dad had to take the same route as he would to drive to the D&D for the first few miles. He had been navigating this way toward the restaurant for almost ten years. He could have driven the route with his eyes closed, at least till we got to the Eisenhower. But yesterday his eyes were wide open, like he was taking it all in for the very last time. For Christ's sake. Weren't we supposed to be having fun? And so I started to sing “The Beautiful Sea” in total Ethel Merman, jazz hands, child star of vaudeville mode, even though it's, um, a lake. And it dawned on me at that moment that I was sofa king determined to make him happy that it was ridiculous.