Anywhere but Here (7 page)

It's not hard to convince Greg to head downtown for dinner after work, but it is hard to get him off the subject of aliens.

“You'd believe me, right? You agreed.”

I'm filming him as we walk. If he's going to go bat-shit crazy, at least I'll have a record of his decline.

“If you see aliens, I'll believe you,” I assure him. “Because it's important that there's at least one person in the world who will believe you. See? I've been listening.”

“But that's not exactly it,” he insists.

Now, a big-ass UFO sweeping through the shot at this precise moment—that would be amazing.
That
would be worth filming.

“See, it's one of those paradox things,” Greg says. “Unless someone believes me, there's nothing to keep it from happening. A green guy could walk right up to me, punch me in the nose, and there's nothing I could do. I'd be on antipsychotic meds the minute I tried to tell someone.”

“So by believing in your aliens, I'm preventing their appearance?”

“Exactly.”

Perfect. Bring on the antipsychotic meds for both of us. I turn off the camera. We've reached Canyon Street, and we cross directly in front of the bar.

“You know that woman walking with my dad the other night?” I say.

“Oh, yeah.” Greg makes the universal sign for enormous tits.

“Do you think she was a stripper?”

He looks at me sideways. Then he makes the universal sign again.

“Is that a yes?” There's a bad taste at the back of my throat, but I need to confirm this out loud.

“Oh, yeah.”

We're at Burger Barn. Cocking an eyebrow at me, Greg
reaches for the
NO PARKING
sign in front of the door. He wraps a leg around the pole. Then he pumps his hips and pretends to lick the metal.

“Okay, okay, enough.” I'm laughing and wincing at the same time. I can't watch.

He starts groaning like a porn soundtrack.

“Boys, do you think that's appropriate behavior for a busy street?” Ms. Gladwell is staring at us. To her credit, she's smiling. Just a bit, though.

Greg stops his gyrations with a cocky smirk, while I wait for the flush of embarrassment to climb my neck and reach my cheeks. Yup. There it is.

As Ms. Gladwell continues down the street, Greg flicks his tongue toward the pole one last time. Then he raises an eyebrow.

“You're completely purple,” he says. He turns to look after the counselor. “Hey . . . did you and she really . . .”

“No!”

And my dad didn't screw a stripper. I hope.

“The Web, take one.”

On Tuesday, I drag Greg to the sidewalk in front of the bakery in time to catch the early evening light.

“Here's my concept,” I tell him once we're in position. “You live in a small town. It looks peaceful and quaint and perfect. But it's actually a big spiderweb and you're tangled up in the middle of it.”

For the right angle—one that includes both Greg and the gingerbread details along the top of the bakery wall—I have to sit on the sidewalk and tilt up the lens. Greg looks as if he has enormous nostrils.

He also looks mildly confused.

“You get the concept, right?”

“I get it,” he says.

I press the record button and signal him to begin.

Silence.

“Anytime . . .”

“I haven't figured out what to say.”

“Just talk. I'll edit later. Start with something like . . . is Webster as nice as it seems from the outside?”

“It's nice, especially this time of year,” he says.

It's hot. That's what Webster is. Hot. The back of my shirt sticks to me, and beads of sweat run down Greg's temples. I stop the camera and make him dab his face. Then we try again.

“I mean from an insider's perspective,” I say. “Is Webster really the pretty, peaceful town it looks like on postcards?”

“It's got its problems, I guess. Some of the economy depends on the tourist trade. When tourism's down—”

“What about personally?” I interrupt. “Do you feel trapped here? Isolated from the rest of the world?”

“Sure. Isolated.” He's sweating again, and he looks stiff, as if he's standing against a scarecrow pole. His eyes look abnormally round.

This isn't going as well as I'd hoped.

“Just tell me your thoughts on Webster. Whatever comes to mind. And remember, I can edit it afterward.”

Ideally, my film would be cinema verité. There would be no formal interviews. Instead, I'd follow my subjects through multiple days and weeks, then edit the vital moments together until the viewer gleaned a sense of their lives.

More realistic to watch, entirely unrealistic to make. It would take me years to create.

“Webster's okay,” Greg says. “Not everyone likes small towns. But people here are mostly good, and it's easy to buy land or a house. I mean, I'd like to travel, maybe drive the autobahn. As a place to live, though, Webster's pretty nice.”

“What about school? Are you getting out of town for school?”

He looks away. “Still haven't decided.”

This is not working. Greg wasn't a good choice for my first interview. He knows it, too. He's looking at me like a kid who's failed a test.

“Cole, can you just tell me what I'm supposed to say?” he asks.

I'd like to. It doesn't seem quite right, though.

I snap the viewfinder closed. “You know what? You were great.”

“I sucked,” he says.

“I'm sure there's something I can use.” It's only the first interview. I have plenty of time to film something that will actually be useful. Repeating this to myself, I manage a reassuring look for Greg.

“Okay.” He seems relieved. “Listen, I have to get home. Call me later?”

“Sure. I'll call you.”

That's what I'd say if this were an audition.
We'll call you.
Except we wouldn't. Greg would definitely not be on the callback list.

•  •  •

When I walk into my house, the air is saturated with the sharp, slightly alcoholic tang of gardenia perfume. There's an overstuffed pink purse at the door, flung beside high-heeled white sandals.

“Well, speak of the devil,” my dad says from the couch. Judging by the lipstick on his neck, they were
not
just speaking of me. I look from Sheri to him and back again. I'm probably scowling like the devil. My dad is becoming a cliché, right in front of me.

“You're just in time,” Sheri chirps, hopping up. “I made paella. It's my absolute spec-ee-ality.”

I have no idea what paella is, although it does smell good. Underneath the overwhelming layer of gardenia, that is.

“I think I'll leave you two—” I'll call Greg. No, he was busy. I'll call Hannah. She can pick me up. Getting into a car with Hannah and driving into the dark somewhere sounds about a billion times better than being in this house right now.

“What? A big guy like you, Cole, and you can't eat dinner? C'mon. It's delicious. Did I mention it's my specialty?”

I've heard she has other specialties. I bite my tongue before I say it. My Tourette's syndrome must have been temporary, thank God, because the words stay safely locked inside my head.

Dad is in the kitchen now, dipping a spoon into the electric frying pan, looking as if he's about to swoon. “Stay,” he calls, bits of rice spraying from his mouth. “You gotta try this.”

“I don't know if you've had paella before,” Sheri says, setting me a place at the table. “It's Spanish. A few years ago, I thought, ‘Why not try something new?' Turns out I have Spanish in my blood, way back on my mother's side.”

If a filmmaker were following
my
life, cinema-verité style, this would be a scene-worthy moment. You really couldn't invent a stranger secondary character than Sheri.

Now that I think about it, the very first feature-length documentary ever made was about the daily life of a family. Granted, it was an Inuit family. I'm pretty sure there wasn't a scene called “Dinner with Dad and the Stripper.”

“It's nice to have something a little exotic around here, isn't it, Cole?” Dad beams.

Not particularly, when that something exotic has red lipstick and cleavage like the Grand Canyon. But Dad seems
oblivious to the irony. He scoops the paella into a huge casserole dish and sets it in the middle of the table.

I can see sausage slices. And prawns. And chicken. My traitor mouth is watering.

If this were a day-in-the-life documentary, the food would be important. Worthy of a close-up. An image of the dysfunctional family as they tuck into a strange new dish, rife with symbolism.

Take Nanook's family, for example. They ate walrus. Although his family wasn't exactly his family. Apparently, his wife was away and some other woman filled in for the part on-screen. The filmmaker—a guy called Robert J. Flaherty—didn't have a strong grip on the whole documentary thing and the need for absolute truth. How could he, I guess, since his was the first one? Anyway, he fudged some stuff. Like Nanook's name wasn't Nanook. But Flaherty shot a whole bunch of film about the guy's life and called it
Nanook of the North
, and that's what everyone thinks of as the first documentary.

Once I take my first bite of paella, all thoughts of Nanook and documentary film and symbolism disappear like polar bears in a snowstorm. Paella's delicious.

I wish it sucked. I wish Sheri were the worst cook in Webster. No, in North America. But I can't stop eating. Soon, Dad and I are both leaning back in our chairs like overfed walruses.

Sheri gets up and takes our plates. In my endorphin-ridden
state, I decide that if she's going to cook like that and then do the dishes, I might change my whole opinion of her.

She runs a hand along Dad's cheek as she walks by him.

“We'll save dessert for later,” she whispers. As if I'm not sitting right here.

I scrape my chair back. “I forgot I had to . . .”

My mind goes blank. I can't think of anything to say. My dad and Sheri both stare at me expectantly.

“I'm supposed to . . . go.”

And then I barrel down the stairs because really, if I stay in that room, I'm going to throw up and that would be a waste of good paella.

I find myself leaning against the back of my closed bedroom door as if there's an armed invader in the house. And now that I think of it, there is. Sheri's an invader, and I think she's using those bazoombas as weapons on my dad. She must have quite the arsenal because otherwise, none of this makes sense. Sheri is
not
my dad's type.
Mom
was Dad's type—smart, insightful, and a hell of a lot more classy than that woman upstairs whose laugh I can still hear through this door.

That paella was a trick. I should never have tasted it.

•  •  •

As if I'm in a black-and-white film flashback with “15 months earlier” in sans serif across the bottom of the screen, I remember
my dad's face during one of Mom's cancer treatments. There was a nurse there. Tracy. She didn't look much like a nurse. Even in her scrubs, Tracy seemed to have stepped out of a punk rock video. Black lipstick, heavy eyeliner, nose ring—Tracy was goth in a way that I'd only seen on TV. She was also quite . . . muscular.

“Built like a brick shit house” is how my dad described her. The same way he used to describe me. Except in Tracy's case, he didn't add, “and just as smart.”

Strange or not, Tracy was my favorite nurse, and I think Mom liked her too. If you had questions, even hard questions, Tracy was the one to ask. She didn't flower around, making things sound sweeter than they were.

Tracy was the one who finally explained “stage 3” in a way that we understood. In Mom's case, it meant that the tumor in her pancreas had wrapped itself around a blood vessel. “Unresectable” meant they couldn't cut it out.

Mom was sitting in a reclining chair at the time, chemicals dripping into her arm. Dad and I were sitting on either side, in folding chairs. Mom seemed calm, as if Tracy were explaining something she already knew.

Dad looked like someone had cut open his jugular and drained the blood. After a minute, I had to look away. Graphic content. Some scenes are not suitable for all viewers.

•   •   •

I force my shoulders to relax. Sheri is a distraction. A rebound. A fling. And I should get out of the house, go for a drive, and clear my head.

What I need is distance. If I keep my distance and pretend Sheri doesn't exist, she will eventually disappear. Strippers must have strings of temporary relationships, right?

God, I hope I'm right.

I start work at the cherry plant at the end of July. When Hannah picks me up after a twelve-hour shift, my hands are stained purple with cherry juice, I smell like a mixture of sweat and fruit punch, and my hair is molded into the shape of my hairnet. (Hairnets: absolutely humiliating. Not even James Dean could appear iconic in a hairnet.) It's only seven o'clock at night, but I'm dead tired. So tired that I fall asleep before we're halfway back to town.

“Hey.” Hannah runs her fingernails lightly up my forearm until I pry my eyes open. “I've got something special planned for us, but I can take you home if you're too tired.”

Home. Though that sounds tempting, so does the something
special. I sit up a little straighter. I've been hanging out with Hannah for more than a month now, with no real action. It's sort of like having a Porsche in your driveway and never turning the key.

I consider her lips for a moment. “Home. Um . . . no. Well, yes. How about home first for a shower? That will wake me up, and then we'll go out.”