Going Nowhere Faster (3 page)
THE BLAIR hippie Zen WITCH who sells spinach to strangers PROJECT
I hid my bike in a furrow of gooseberries and snuck around the house, past the spinach patch and the tractor and the wood hut (Smith’s Natural Foods and Gifts) where my mother’s Zen-buddy Prarash sold organic (mealy) produce, and scrambled onto the back porch, breathing heavily. The gift hut cast one long angular shadow that folded into the trees. The whole farm was dark and crickety and scary, and it didn’t help that our house looked like a haunted scrap pile, hunkered in the center of a half dozen vegetable patches, three wings of the house jutting like spokes, one still unfinished and the third completely unused. My father designed and built it himself. “Designed” might actually be the wrong word. More like “haphazarded.” There were hallways that lead nowhere and doors that frequently opened to nothing, or even worse, concrete or brick. When I was younger, I was always stepping into unfinished rooms and smashing my face, and my nose was usually red.
“Hey, Rudolph, what’s up with your nose?”
“That’s funny. Really.”
My father swore he had a plan, and was frequently sawing and hammering on weekends, but there were still staircases with no stairs. And rooms full of half-finished inventions. The Solar Fridge kept things warm. The Talking Showerhead didn’t talk. When you said “Hot!” a cold drizzle came out. When you said “Off!” scalding water coated your back. The Talking Shaving Cream was mute, and the Talking Toilet Roll was always empty. So, really, “house” might be the wrong word as well. More like “maze.” Or “trap.” It wasn’t until I was thirteen I stopped getting lost.
FIVE THINGS THE HOUSE I LIVE IN SORT OF LOOKS LIKE:
1. A big pile of crap
2. Driftwood after a forty-foot wave
3. Where an extended family of orange-wig clowns practice their routines
4. The nest of Bob the Enormous Irradiated Gopher
5. The most embarrassing house in Pennsylvania
I disabled the “alarm,” which meant taking a string off a nail; the string stretched at ankle-height across the doorstep and tied to a bunch of pots and pans. Strictly low-tech. No pin number needed. I felt my way along the wall and then crept up a staircase I was almost positive led to my sister’s room, and hoped she was still awake.
Olivia lay in bed, the covers thrown off. She rolled over when I came in the door.
“Stanny?”
“Hi, Peanut,” I said, sitting on the edge of the mattress and holding her hand. It was tiny and moist. She’d turned six two weeks ago. There were still birthday cards and banners and wrapping paper strewn about the room. I tended to call her dumb nicknames, like Peanut or Pumpkin or Big O. With anyone else it would be stupid, but with Olivia, it didn’t matter if I was stupid.
“Where’s Chopper?” she asked.
“Right here.”
I put my foot on our ancient bulldog, rubbing his belly with my toes. He grunted with pleasure. And then farted. Social graces were not his strong suit. At this point, neither was running or chewing. He was half-blind and had two ridiculous snaggleteeth sticking out of his lower jaw, but Olivia was crazy about him. When I was little, he used to sleep next to my bed, but somewhere along the line he changed allegiances.
“Chop-chop,” Olivia said, and then reached down and yanked his ear, which he accepted stoically. Olivia could do just about anything and it was okay with Chopper.
FIVE THINGS CHOPPER SMELLED LIKE:
1. Old hamburger breath
2. Old mozzarella
3. Old grandmother feet
4. Old turkey loaf
5. Brand-new sweaty dog-butt
“I’m glad
you’re
here, too,” Olivia whispered, sitting up and throwing her arms around my neck.
Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking: Stan’s been reading
Catcher in the Rye.
Hey, it’s not my fault there are two people in the world who are hopeless and also love their little sisters. Besides, that’s a
book.
This is life. In fact, sitting there, I was again reminded that Olivia was the only thing, the only evidence, the only compelling argument I could make, just by her sheer existence, that the world wasn’t, in reality, a massive and useless pile of crap. So Holden can go screw.
“Are we still going to feed the birds tomorrow?”
I’d promised to take her to the lake. Olivia liked to sit on the benches, where we’d tear hunks off an unsold loaf of my mother’s organic seventeen-grain spelt bread, and watch with amazement as the birds actually ate it.
“We sure are.”
“You promised,” she said, ready for me to back out and disappoint her. No matter how hard I tried, it seemed like I did that a lot. Life kept getting in the way of being the person I was supposed to be.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “Now go to sleep.”
“But I’m not tired.”
“Yes, you are.”
I laid her down and scratched her back while she squirmed, then waited until her breathing became steady. As I tiptoed to the door, Chopper gave me a parting blast, a solid B-flat.
“Classy,” I told him.
He raised an eyebrow and then rolled over and went back to sleep. I considered opening a window, but the percentages were against it. It might open sideways. It might open to a pile of bricks. It might open to an alternate universe where Chopper lay in bed in his jammies and Olivia was curled up on the floor with a ham bone in her paws.
I felt along the hallway, which narrowed and sloped downward, coming to a dead end, then retraced my steps, took a hard left, bent under a four-foot doorway, and found my room. I sat on the bed, trying to keep my balance. For some reason, it leaned to the left. The floor was level and the legs were all the same length. I’d measured them. Still, it leaned. It defied logic. My father defied logic. He’d also invented Bedsheets-on-a-Roll. There were a dozen sheets above the headboard, perforated like paper towels. Instead of washing your old sheets, you threw them away and just pulled out a new one. Was it environmentally friendly? Probably not. Maybe that’s why I was stuck with the prototype.
I looked around the room and wondered what to do. There were the same books (either Nietzsche or
The Basketball Diaries
) on the shelf, the same records (either the Stones or Pavement) on the floor, the same posters (either Jean Harlow —
old school,
or Uma Thurman —
leather tracksuit
) on the wall, and the same smell of sweat-sock there always was.
Boring.
I could work on my script
. What script?
I could work on my idea.
What idea?
Anyway, I didn’t feel like it.
I could go downstairs and talk to my father, except he was probably tinkering in his basement lab. Actually, there was no probably about it. He was definitely down there, inventing see-through earwax.
I could go downstairs and talk to my mother, except she and Prarash were burning incense and having “book study,” which was supposed to mean discussing Buddhist texts, but really meant eating carob truffles and gossiping about people in town.
I wondered what Keith was up to, which was dumb, since it was a near mathematical certainty he was lying on a couch gobbling candy and watching some sport, which allowed him to lie in one place for ridiculously long periods of time. It also gave him a reason to yell, loudly and repeatedly, “GO! STOP! TACKLE! HIT!” without his neighbors calling the cops.
Then the phone rang, which hardly ever happened.
My mother yelled “Stan? Phone?” which also hardly ever happened.
I walked down(some)stairs, walked upstairs, took a hard right, ducked under a five-foot doorway, ended up near my father’s “laboratory” (there it was), and then walked to the old plastic receiver in the kitchen. I could hear soldering or the cranking of nuts and bolts. With any luck, the old man was inventing an ATM.
“Hello?”
“Yo, Stan-dog.”
It was Miles, my best friend. (Yes, I have friends. Sort of.)
“How many times have I told you not to call me ‘Stan-dog,’ Miles? Or, for that matter, attach the word ‘dog’ to anything, ever?”
“Ha-ha,” he laughed, in his smooth and charming way. “Ha-ha.”
Miles had a great name. Miles. Like Miles Davis or Miles Away from Home or I Can See for Miles. As a result, he was popular in a sort of goofy way that required no effort or forethought, and no one ever punched him. He wore the clothes he wanted to (odd colors and thrift-store — always clashing) and the hair he wanted to (long and curly and everywhere) and didn’t feel obliged to copy any style. He was always invited to parties, and when he walked in, everyone said “Miles!” and even the blond soccer girls liked him, although he’d had the same girlfriend since second grade, Cari Calloway, and everyone knew, even then, that the two of them would grow up and be married and be smart and funny and wise adults and have a nice house with a library full of rare leather books and a pool shaped like a martini glass. They were also destined to produce any number of painless-labor, bright-eyed, smart and funny and wonderful children who would invariably go to eastern colleges and be on prestigious committees and serve selflessly as volunteers in African republics and wear comfy sweaters and come home regularly to help Dad rake the leaves.
You could see it all just by looking at him. Why in God’s name he put up with me was still a mystery.
“Sorry, Dick Nixon,” he apologized. “I keep forgetting you’re DJ-phobic. Anyway, you wanna go to a party?”
Miles had the habit of constantly referring to me as someone else, usually some celebrity or historical figure, depending on the situation. He did it without thinking. All the girls thought it was cute. I thought it was annoying as hell. Also, I definitely, absolutely, completely did not want to go to a party.
“NO PARTIES!” my mother yelled from the living room. We had only one phone and she was hundreds of feet away. There was no possibility she could have overheard.
“How does she do that?” Miles laughed.
“Psychic hotline,” I said. “She’s really a Jamaican priestess.”
“Anyway, Bob Marley,” he said, “party?”
“I can’t.”
“Ellen’s gonna be there.”
My throat constricted. My brow furrowed. My cliché clichéd.
Her name was actually Eleanor, but everyone called her Ellen and there were many, many nights that I lay on the carpet in my room and said her name over and over and over again until it was one long yogic chant. I’d been crazy about her for a year, and she absolutely didn’t notice or care. Plus, she was so beautiful it made my teeth hurt. Pale, with a small nose and small hands and small feet. She had a way of smiling, almost a smirk, that drove me crazy, one lip up and showing her teeth like
I know something you don’t.
She wore sweaters with necklaces dangling outside of them and jeans with a tiny butt inside of them and she had slender, tapered fingers, like they were made for something more important than just fitting into gloves.
There was
one
other thing. No big deal, really. Just sort of a minor obstacle. A hiccup. Like your grandmother might smile after you broke her favorite candy dish and say, “It’s okay, sweetie, life’s full of little problems.”
Ellen was Chad Chilton’s girlfriend.
Or ex-girlfriend. Depended who you asked.
“Um . . . ,” I said. “Ummm . . .”
Miles laughed. “You have absolutely
no
poker face, you know that, Johnny Chan? Absolutely none.”
“You can tell over the phone?”
“Yes.”
“Ummm . . . ,” I said again. Ellen. Every single inch of me ached.
“Meet me at the bridge in fifteen minutes,” Miles commanded. (He refused to come to my house on the off chance that he might run into my mother, or even worse, Prarash.)
“What are you afraid of?” I goaded.
“Man, is that Prarash dude there?”
(Was he ever
not
here?)
“Nope,” I lied.
“You’re lying, Benedict Starnald, I can practically smell him over the phone.”
I laughed. “Okay, okay.”
“Dude smells
funky,
you know it? And he’s always smiling, too. His leg could be on fire and he’d be smiling away, telling you how blessed he was to be warm.”
“Yeah,” I sighed.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” Miles said ruefully.
“I guess since I have no choice, it’s pretty easy.”
“True,” he admitted. “Now hurry up and pedal over, Lance Armstrong, and I’ll pick your Casanova butt up.”
“Wait!” I said. “Holy crap, Miles, I forgot to tell you how someone almost ran me over, and . . .”
I stopped explaining when I realized the line was dead. Besides, I needed time to pick out the right clothes. And the right deodorant. And the right face.
FIVE THINGS I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T WEAR:
1. An orange Speedo
2. A gold medallion that says “Love” on one side and “Hate” on the other
3. High heels
4. A chocolate mustache
5. One large Yogi Bear tie
Actually, the Yogi tie wasn’t half-bad. But I settled for a sweatshirt instead.
MR. AND MRS. (no, seriously) SMITH
Her name was Eleanor, but everyone called her Ellen, and her last name was Rigby, so she spent a lot of time explaining herself:
Typical Football Moron: “Eleanor Rigby? Your name is
Eleanor Rigby,
like the
Beatles song
?”
Ellen: (sigh) “Yup.”
Typical Football Moron: “Cool. Just like the Beatles song.”
Ellen: “Yup. Just like it.”
Typical Football Moron: (loud and within earshot of all his pals) “So what’s your mom’s name,
Madonna
?” (Ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha.)
Ellen: “Gosh, I never heard that one before.”
So, we had a lot in common, given that my name was not only Stan, but also Smith, for the combined wonder of
Stan Smith.
Typical Soccer Moron: “Your name is Stan Smith?
Stan Smith,
like the sneaker?”
Me: “Yup (sigh), like the sneaker.”
Typical Soccer Moron: (loud and within earshot of all his pals) “So what’s your mom’s name, Air Jordan?” (Ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha.)