Everybody Sees the Ants (19 page)

The ants are lying in prone position on the coffee table, shooting tiny M16s at Aunt Jodi.

“Can we stop talking now?” I ask.

“Sure. Just know that I’m always here for you, okay?”

I skip dinner and go to bed early just to forget she ever said this to me. But I can’t. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m looking at it all wrong. Maybe it
is
my fault, even though I didn’t ask for any of this shit to happen. I didn’t ask for Nader to target me. I didn’t ask for the school district to save me. I surely didn’t ask for my parents to argue about the solutions. And yet it’s my problem. All mine. And maybe that’s why we’re here.

As I fall asleep, I think about Ginny and the look she gave me at church, and it makes me feel that familiar sinking in my gut—the way I’ve felt every time I’ve seen Nader McMillan in the hall since I was seven. He didn’t even need to say anything
to me. Just his existence would make me feel powerless and stupid.

The difference, I guess, is that he gained his power by humiliating me. Turns out, when someone you actually give a shit about turns on you, it’s even more powerful.

I
wake up to the noise of a vacuum cleaner again. Right outside our door. I hear the whir of it retreating, the whir of its attack, and then,
bam
, it hits the door. I am guessing Aunt Jodi took an aggressive vacuuming pill this morning. Mom sits on her bed, head in her hands, and mutters, “What was I thinking, bringing us here?”

“One day we’ll laugh about this,” I say.

“I don’t know.” She sighs. “I think it was a big mistake.”

I sit up. “I don’t know. I think it’s been okay, mostly,” I say. This makes her smile.

For breakfast Jodi has made a homemade crumb cake, which she claims was inspired by “Chef Lucky,” and she insists we all sit down together to eat it. She says, “Families who eat
together are stronger.” Mom raises her eyebrows at me when Jodi isn’t looking.

Then the phone rings. It’s Dad. I am reminded that we do not have a strong family, no matter how much we eat together. Maybe Jodi is right. Maybe Mom and Dad are really having bad marital problems. I realize how little I know about their world, even though I live inside of it.

Jodi and Dave have cordless phones, but when Mom goes to talk to Dad privately in the guest room, Jodi says, “Lori, don’t go too far. I don’t want to be gossiped about in my own house.” She points to the living room, with a suggestive
sit there
hand. Mom pretends she hasn’t heard this and walks into the guest room and closes and locks the door firmly behind her.

Until Jodi started to throw a fit, I thought she was just being paranoid. Now, since she’s thrown a spatula on the floor and stormed over to the guest room door and jostled the locked doorknob, I realize that things are getting out of hand. When I see her take a run at the door shoulder first, I reach out my hand to snap her out of it.

“Aunt Jodi! Stop!”

She runs for the door and tries to break it down like they do in detective shows. It bounces her back but doesn’t budge. She tries it a few more times and then gives up and sits at the dining room table next to me and rests her face in her hands.

My mother quietly opens the door and looks over at me and then at Jodi.

Jodi says, “I’m sorry. It’s my nerves. I’m all over the place today.” She gets up and goes to her bedroom and closes the door.

I try to pass the time until Dave gets home by reading and doing a few laps in the pool between card games with Mom. Jodi has locked herself in her room, and Mom and I take turns listening at the door for sobs or footsteps, making sure she hasn’t overdosed.

When Dave gets home, we go out to the garage to lift. After fifteen minutes of manly silence, he points out that my arms look more defined in just a week. “Another few weeks of working out and you’ll have guns like these.” He flexes and admires his biceps.

“I think it’ll take more than a few weeks,” I say.

“Well, you know, it’s not all about the muscles. It’s about the confidence, man.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you feel more confident already?”

“Kinda.”

“Kinda? Work with me here! You’re a cute kid with defined arms. The girls will faint over you. I’m serious.” I know he’s exaggerating, but the image of Freddy girls fainting over me makes me laugh. I think of Lara and how she’s probably forgotten all about me already and I’ve only been gone two weeks.

He stops doing curls and looks at me. “Really—you don’t feel like you could kick that kid’s ass now? Or at least stand up to him while he kicks yours?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

I sigh. “Because it’s not about kicking his ass. It’s about getting away from him. Getting away from
all
assholes. I don’t want to become one—I just want to escape them.”

“Good luck with that. Escaping assholes is about as easy as escaping oxygen.”

The door opens. It’s Aunt Jodi.

“Dinner in five.”

“ ’Kay.”

“Don’t come in all sweaty.”

“ ’Kay.”

When she closes the door, we look at each other uncomfortably, towel off, and cool down with a few stretches. I think back to the last thing Dave said to me and try to imagine what escaping oxygen would look like. It looks a lot like drowning.

An hour after dinner I claim time to myself to walk the development. Before the door shuts behind me, Jodi says, “Don’t get lost this time!” in a perky voice that makes me want to scream. Her moods are rubbing off on me. One minute I feel sorry for her, the next minute I want to tell her to go die. The ants toss tiny grenades at her before I close the door and duck and cover on the front stoop.

Of course I walk to the playground. Of course it’s empty.

Of course I sit there for nearly a whole hour, squinting into the darkness for Ginny. Of course she only shows up while I’m walking home.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey. You ready to go?”

I didn’t expect this after the whole church blow-off. I still feel that hole in the pit of my gut and a need to protect myself. “Can’t. Need to go home.”

“Home? Like, Pennsylvania?”

“No. Like, to my aunt’s house.”

“Crazy Jodi?”

I nod. I am simultaneously embarrassed for Jodi and relieved. I’m so glad other people know she’s crazy. Ginny pulls on my sleeve and gets me to walk with her toward the playground.

“You know about that?” I ask.

“About her being completely nuts?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t you see her in church with my parents? She’s a passive-aggressive bulldog.”

“Yeah. I noticed that.”

She twists her hair to the side to stop the wisps from blowing into her face in the evening breeze. “She freaked out two years ago during Sunday service. Stood up and said all sorts of crazy shit.”

“Like what?”

“Stuff about the people there. How everyone was just faking it. How none of us practiced what we preached. We were all hypocrites. That kind of thing.”

“During church?”

“Yep. Right in the middle of the sermon. Just stood up and started yelling.”

I take a minute to imagine this. Not hard to picture, since only this morning I watched Jodi run at a locked door in order to break it down. I have to say, when I picture her standing up and freaking out in church, I wish I’d been there. I might have applauded.

“She’s on a lot of pills,” I say. “Too many.”

“Is she? Huh.”

“Like, way too many,” I say. “Kinda makes me want to get Dave to take her to a place to help her. She’s that bad.”

“Dave?”

“My uncle? I mean, you guys have treatment centers for stuff like that, right?”

She looks at me and narrows her eyes.

“What?”

She looks at me again, this time shaking her head a little and raising her eyebrows.

“What?” I ask again.

“You know she’s probably like this because Dave fools around, right?”

It’s as if she just kicked me in the nads. Sure, Jodi and Dave are not the warmest couple I’ve ever met, but they seem to have an okay marriage.

“A lot, too,” she adds. “He has a bunch of girlfriends.”

“No way,” I say. Because no way, right? No way the only guy who ever seemed normal to me is really a jerk who cheats on his wife, right?

“Yeah way. Like—everyone knows this. News flash, dude.”

“But—”

“But what? He works hard? He’s extra sweet to her at home?”

“I—”

“You want to know how I know?”

“You said everyone knows.”

“Yeah, but do you want to know how
I
knew before
they
did?” she asks, climbing the fence into the pitch-dark playground and heading past the swings, toward the little bus shelter on the other side of the road.

We cross under the amber streetlights and she sits on the warm sidewalk rather than the bench in the bus shelter. I follow her lead because I figure she knows something I don’t know. She suddenly doesn’t seem at all like a girl I’m falling inexplicably in love with after knowing her for one night. She seems like an older sister or a Seeing Eye dog.

She lights a cigarette. “I know because he used to screw my mom.”

“Oh,” I say. “Wow.” I feel my chest tighten with this news. “That’s heavy.”

“Not really, when it comes to my mom. She’s the exact opposite of everything she stands for.”

“Oh.”

“Huh. So you really didn’t know?”

I shake my head.

“Where’d you think he went all the time? Work?”

I nod. I realize I got that idea from Mom when she told me that her brother was a workaholic, like Dad.
Not quite, Mom
.

She says, “What I can’t figure out is which came first. I
mean, did Jodi go crazy
because
Dave is like that, or is that
why
he started looking elsewhere? You know?”

I have thought this a million times about my mother. Was she a squid when Dad married her, or has being married to a menu-obsessed turtle done this to her? Or was it the other way around? Did being married to a squid make my father into a workaholic turtle so he could avoid watching her go crazy, lap by lap?

“And I don’t mean to be a bitch, but how Dave could ever go to bed with Jodi is beyond me,” she says.

Fact is, I do not want to be picturing my aunt Jodi and uncle Dave having sex. I do not want to be drawing parallels to Mom and Dad. I do not want to think about any of it. Most kids my age are dying to be adults and do adult things, but not me. Not right now.

“Mom says he’s great in bed,” she says. “I mean, she says that to her friends. Not me. She doesn’t know I know.”

Seriously. I’d rather watch
Barney & Friends
with a sippy cup of juice and a plastic bowl of animal crackers.

She drags the last pull on her cigarette. “I can see him as a great lover. He’s pretty hot.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, my hand out. “I get it.”

She laughs and squeezes my thigh. “Does it run in the family?”

The bus comes to a stop in front of the bus shelter. I get up to walk toward the dark playground, and Ginny grabs my sleeve again, this time stretching it as she pulls me hard toward the bus. “I don’t have any money,” I say.

She puts a few quarters into the machine in front of the driver and yanks me into the bus.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer.

Ten minutes later she drags me off the bus the same way she dragged me on. The right sleeve of my shirt now looks three inches longer than the left.

We get off at a stop that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. I hear highway traffic nearby, but there are no houses or businesses or anything. Just a bus stop and a skinny road with very few streetlights.

“This way,” she says, walking toward the sound of traffic.