Life Is Funny (13 page)

The essays are full of Family and Freedom. Great-grandparents kissing their own tears into the ground, imagining streets paved with gold and opportunity. Persecuted and oppressed great-uncles and aunts rejoicing on crowded boat decks as the sun rises over Liberty's torch. Dreams coming true.

“Taking the time to think about where we came from and how we fit into our community can be both educational and emotional,” the professor's saying. “Beginning this journey at a public monument that holds so much meaning for so many can make this one of the most profound educational and emotional experiences you'll have had.”

The assumption that her assignment will rock our world amazes me. As if our childhoods were some sort of preparation for this other, more valid existence. As if we haven't already learned the most educational and profound lessons just by having lived our lives.

*  *  *

As soon as Caitlin sees Monique and Hector waiting for us near the ferry ticket window, she drops me like I'm a hot potato. “I'm holding their hands!” she yells, running toward them. “I'm holding their hands!”

I watch Monique watching Hector scoop Caitlin up and swing her around, and while I'm thinking about how good it is to finally see Monique halfway happy, my stomach turns. I try to ignore it as I catch up to the three of them.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” I tell Monique, meaning to be cute but somehow sounding grumpy instead.

“Fuck you,” she answers. “I wasn't smiling. It was gas.”

“Funny.” I try again, only this time I sound sarcastic, and then my stomach repeats the first turn, making me wonder if my sunny-side-up eggs weren't cooked enough this morning.

“What's funny?” Caitlin asks.

Hector puts her down and kisses my cheek.

“Monique farted,” I tell her.

Caitlin giggles hysterically.

“I did not,” Monique protests. “Molly did. Molly's disgusting.” Which makes Caitlin nearly fall on her face.

“I
feel
disgusting,” I mutter to Monique.

“That's a switch,” Hector says. “What's wrong?”

I shake my head.

“I'll get the tickets,” he offers, and I hand him money.

“Can I pay?” I hear Caitlin asking as they walk away.

Monique frowns. “What's the matter with you?” she asks.

I'm never like this. I shrug.

“You want a cigarette?” she goes.

“Right.”

“They help, sometimes.” She pulls a crumpled pack from her back pocket and offers it up.

“I thought you were trying to quit,” I say.

“I am.”

“I'm just cranky,” I tell her, pushing the cigarettes away. “I hate this assignment. I hate that class.”

“You sound like me,” she says, and my intestines twist, hard. “God.”

We watch Hector help Caitlin count her change. He holds the tickets in his mouth so that his hands are free.

“But off the subject,” Monique says, “I might get main-streamed or skipped back up to my regular grade.”

“No way,” I tell her.

“Way.” She nods.

“That's great,” I say, while this morning's grapefruit juice and toast fight over space. I mean it.
“You're
great.”

I swoop on her with a huge hug, which she always pretends to hate, but I know she really loves.

“Fuck you,” she says, smiling.

*  *  *

On the ferry a school group of kids around Caitlin's age wears plaid uniforms. They're screaming and racing and shoving each other and huddling in little groups, and Caitlin can't stop staring at them.

“Don't you want to look at the water?” I ask her, thinking that if I just hadn't topped it all off with two strawberry Pop-Tarts, I'd be fine now. Ugh. “Or the statue? Look over there. See how huge it is?”

But she can't take her eyes off those kids.

“What's so great about them?” Monique asks.

“They have uniforms,” Caitlin says. “They go together.”

“So what?” Monique says.

“I don't go with anyone.”

“Bull,” Monique tells her. “You're smarter and cuter and more fun than all of those little uniformed monsters put together.”

“Monique,” I mutter.

“What?” she says. “It's true.”

“Let's not give her a big head.”

“My head's not big,” Caitlin argues. “My head's regular.”

“Maybe if you ask nicely, Hector will put you and your regular head on his shoulders,” I suggest. Which she does, and he does.

“I'm going to throw up,” I tell Monique.

“Are you pregnant?”

“Please,” I moan. She knows I'm an actual, live, in-the-flesh nineteen-year-old virgin. She knows I've always been too busy for men.

“Ugh,” I groan. My face feels cold and sweaty at the same time.

“Seasick?” We look at each other, and I can tell she's trying not to laugh.

“It's not funny,” I snap.

“I know. I'm sorry,” she tells me. “It's not that much longer. Look. We're almost there.”

“I hate this assignment,” I moan. “I hate that class.”

She swings her arm over my shoulders, the way I usually do with her. It feels unsure, angular.

“We've never been on a boat before,” she says, as if to explain something. She uses her new, post-Hector, soft voice. It's nice, how she says “we,” how her arm warms the back of my neck.

*  *  *

I'm so sick by the time we dock it's all I can do to limp onto land.

“Are you going to throw up?” Caitlin keeps asking.

“Nope,” I tell her.

“Who will take care of me if you get really sick?” she says.

“I'm not going to get really sick,” I answer. “I'll be fine.”

But I'm not fine. There's too long a line for the gift shop's bathroom, so Monique yanks me to the waterside path that moats Liberty, and I puke over the metal railing into the wavelets below.

“I can't remember the last time you spewed,” Monique tells me, holding my hair back and then handing me bottled water so I can rinse my mouth.

“The last time was never,” I say, gargling and then spitting. “Throwing up was your thing.”

“You always brought me a clean towel and a ginger ale ice cube,” she remembers.

“Every week,” I say.

I poured the ginger ale into the plastic trays each Friday because I knew she'd need them after she got home from her father's. I don't remember where I'd gotten the idea, but it seemed to help. It took me a lot of years to realize there was a pattern. It took me a lot of years to realize that she stopped being sick as soon as her father disappeared and she didn't have to visit him anymore.

“I'm sorry I didn't know what was going on,” I tell her now. My knees are weak, and my saliva is sour.

“You're sorry?” she says, as though we've talked about this a lot and in depth. We haven't. “You've got nothing to be sorry about.”

“I should have taken better care of you,” I tell her.

I have dreams where I'm standing over my mother, who's stuffing her mouth with marbles. I'm screaming, terrified,
Where's Monique, Mom? Where's Monique!
And my mother just keeps cramming in handfuls of marbles, crunching them between her teeth, glass bits frothing from her lips.

“Jesus,” Monique says. “You took incredible care of me. You saved me.”

I didn't, though.

“Molly, I'm serious,” she tells me. “If it weren't for you, I'd have died.”

“I should have done something.”

“I'm not kidding,” she says. “I would have killed myself.”

*  *  *

We decide that Hector will climb with Caitlin up to Liberty's crown, and Monique will stay with me on the ground. Hector takes my pulse and checks my eyes and my tongue one last time.

“Keep drinking water,” he orders. “And if you can find some crackers in the gift shop, eat those.”

Monique walks with me around the little island. Seagulls hassle each other over our heads. Liberty looks smaller and greener than I thought she would on her stone pedestal. The New York skyline looks bigger and more colorful. I vomit over the railing twice more.

“Pink,” Monique calls out the second time. “Cotton candy pink. What did you eat this morning?”

“Shut up,” I tell her. She does, and we keep walking. Slowly.

When we were smaller, we used to spend a lot of time like this. Just being together. Waiting out my mother's weekday silence or Sunday craziness. In our room reading books, or outside, circling Prospect Park on foot. Quiet.

We watch a boy juggle a soccer ball while his littler sister keeps count. He's not bad. She's on 103 when I first notice them. He loses the ball at 110.

“Shit,” he mutters when the ball bounces away from him.

“You shouldn't swear, Jackson,” the girl tells him, and then I recognize her.

“You shouldn't be so ugly,” he tells her back. Monique snorts.

“I know that kid,” I say.

“Which one?” Monique asks.

“The girl. She used to do Gymboree with Caitlin. A couple of years ago. Her name is Linnette.”

“Well, say hi then.”

But I'm not in the mood, and we keep walking instead.

“I used to wish we were twins,” Monique announces after a while. “So that you could come with me to my father's, and he would think you were me.” When I don't answer, she pulls my arm, so I'll stop and look at her.

“Do you understand what I'm telling you?” she asks.

“Perfectly,” I say. She shoves out her chin, trying to make herself look ugly, the way she used to do, before Hector. “You wished we could be each other so that he'd get me sometimes instead of you,” I explain for her, so she understands that I understand.

“It was a disgusting wish,” she says. “I know it was.” She pulls out her cigarettes. “So feel free to hate my guts.”

“Don't be insane,” I tell her, pulling the pack from her hand and tossing it as far as I can. “I hate
his.
”

In the gift shop we see a gang banger snatch candy bars and a T-shirt and shove them down his pants, which are so baggy, he can get away with it. He grabs his loot with one hand and holds on to a younger kid's shoulder with his other hand.

“Can I help you, young man?” a clerk asks the younger kid.

Monique squeezes my arm, afraid that the clerk saw the older one stealing. She's always on the side against the law.

“You mean him,” the little one goes, pointing to his big brother, very serious. “Eric's the man.”

*  *  *

We settle into a grassy area underneath Liberty's side. I'm not feeling so queasy anymore, but I'm dreading the boat ride back.

“So what are you going to do about your paper?” Monique asks.

“I don't know. Make something up maybe.”

“I made up a family tree,” she tells me.

Immediately I think of her baby that never was. Her non-baby. How it would look as a tiny leaf hanging down from a dotted line linking Monique and her ex-boyfriend's larger leaves. How it would have a slash through it, indicating death, and no name.

“What family tree?”

“We had to do one for history,” she explains. “You know. A genogram.”

I remember how Hector whispered to her in the hospital.
It's better this way, you weren't ready, it's better this way, its spirit will come back the next time, when it's ours, the same baby will come back, when everybody's ready, it's okay, it's better this way. . . .

“So I made something up.”

“Uh huh.”

She would have had to make it up. My mother is the only relative either of us knows, and my mother is, to put it nicely, off-balance. So as far back as I can remember, I was in charge, all the time.

I would make us do our homework after school, and I'd fix dinner. Macaroni and cheese or french toast or eggs or oatmeal or peanut butter sandwiches with bananas. Our daytime meal was school lunch or day camp lunch, depending on the season. My mother left us just enough money to line our stomachs but not to fill them. Saturdays we bought pizza on Seventh Avenue. One slice each and a shared soda. In the years when Monique was gone at her father's on the weekends, I'd be alone Saturday. I would clean our apartment all day, except for a nap I'd take in Monique's bed.

I washed our clothes at the Laundromat down the block. I made Monique help me. The people there knew us. They would give us their extra quarters. Except for Monique's vomiting after father visits, we never got sick. Ever. I remember one of the few times my mother actually spoke to us. She told us that we weren't allowed to get sick. Ever. I guess it worked.

On Sundays my mother counted marbles. She still does, as far as I know. She keeps them in a small homemade sack, and she pours them out and counts them over and over again all day long. She's done this for my entire life. On Sundays she doesn't answer the phone, and she doesn't eat. We weren't allowed to bother her for any reason on Sundays. If we did, she would yell maniacally or hit us. Once I cut my arm on a broken bottle when I fell outside. We were too scared to bother my mother since it was a Sunday, so Monique bandaged the gash with an old ribbon and tape. I still have a white, bumpy scar.

For years I believed all the mothers counted marbles on Sundays. I thought that when I got to be big and grown-up, I would understand why and I'd count marbles, too. When I realized the truth in fourth grade, that it was just
my
mother, I worried for days over whether or not to tell Monique. In the end I thought she ought to know. When I told her, instead of crying or throwing something or screaming at me, she just rolled her eyes and went,
Duh.

*  *  *

“Hel
lo
! Anybody in there?” Monique's saying now, throwing a handful of grass at me.