On the Road to Find Out (15 page)

We all applauded.

“Now, presents,” Jenni said, clapping her hands so that only the palms touched, like a seal catching a ball.

Dad slipped a box from Mom's favorite jewelry store in front of her. For years they'd had a joke, “Where's the box?” On her birthday, or during Hanukah, Dad would give Mom these nice, practical gifts—like a GPS for her car, or an iPod preloaded with her favorite tunes, or once, and this was a low point, an automatic hot-water dispenser for the kitchen. Mom, who always complains about being cold when the temperature dips below eighty-four degrees, drinks gallons of hot water with lemon at practically every meal, and she hates waiting for the teakettle to boil. Even the microwave is too slow for her. So Dad had installed the InSinkErator.

But when he brought my mom into the kitchen and showed it to her, she said, “That's great, Matt. Love it. But you don't get someone hot water for her birthday. Now. Where's the box?”

This time, though, there was a box. A tiny, exquisite suede box. Mom opened it, snapped it closed, and threw her arms around Dad. “Oh, Matt,” she said.

Sylvia said, “Pass it over,” and my mom handed her the box. Sylvia took out a small gold ring with a stone the color of royalty.

“Tanzanite,” Mom said.

“And this,” Dad said, handing her a shoe box wrapped in shiny silver paper with a big blue bow. “Sorry—I can't stop being me.”

She opened it to find a dozen pairs of reading glasses. Mom was always losing her reading glasses. “Now you can leave them all over the house and office,” Dad said.

Sylvia grabbed one of the pairs of glasses, put them on, and inspected the ring. “This is gorgeous, Matt. Nice job.”

“I had some help,” he said, and looked over at Jenni.

Christ on a bike! How much planning and shopping and colluding had these people done?

Sylvia gave Mom a gift certificate to a spa and said they were going to have a pampering day together.

Walter-the-Man handed over a card, and when my mom opened it, three tickets to a Gillian Welch show fluttered out. Mom, Jenni, and I all love Gillian Welch.

“Girls' night,” Walter-the-Man said. “I'll babysit Matt.” And he mouthed to my dad,
NC State game
.

Jenni's present was something she must have spent the past few weeks in shop class working on: a makeup mirror. It was carved out of some dark hardwood, and she had done the electrical work so it had a light built in. Part of it was regular mirror, and part was magnifying. The detail was intricate, delicate, and elegant.

Then it was my turn. I handed over a paperback book published in 2000, the cover of which had been nibbled by a rat, wrapped in pages torn from a magazine and held together with Band-Aids, along with a card that could have been made by an eight-year-old. Jenni looked horrified.

My mother read the title out loud:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

I said, “It's a true story. Both of his parents died of cancer when he was a senior in college and he had to take care of his little brother. It's really funny.”

Sylvia put a hand on my mother's back.

“That's very nice, Alice. Thank you,” Mom said, and the room got quiet.

Jenni's face was white.

Dad was staring into his cake plate and shaking his head. He looked up at me and said, “What is wrong with you?”

“It's really funny,” I said in a weak voice.

 

15

The grownups escaped into the living room to talk and drink more wine, leaving me and Jenni to clean up. Jenni stacked the plates aggressively and practically threw the silverware into the dishwasher.

I said, “I think I'll get Walter to help us with this.”

She stopped, bent over the sink, and said without turning around, “Can you think about somebody other than yourself for one minute?”

“What do you mean? I was thinking about Walter.”

“You know, Alice, I've listened to you whine about Yale. Everyone has listened to you whine about Yale. You work so hard on your vocabulary. Do you know the meaning of the word
self-absorbed
? How about
self-centered
? How about just plain
inconsiderate
?”

I looked at her. Jenni was never mean and rarely angry, but now she hissed at me.

“Your dad worked really hard on this dinner and you couldn't even remember it was your mom's birthday. All you think about is yourself. And then you give her that crummy old book. Did you also manage to forget that your mother's mom died of cancer when she was in college?”

I hadn't even thought of that. It was just a really good book. I said, “But it's funny.”

Jenni was trembling and her lower lip started to quiver. Her voice got soft and she said, “And another thing.”

It's never a good thing in an argument when someone says, “and another thing.” I braced myself.

“Do you realize that in all our conversations about college, you haven't once asked me what I'm planning to do next year.”

Crap.

She was right.

I hadn't brought it up because school never seemed important to her. Jenni cared about cheerleading and dances and the right color of lip gloss.

“I—I didn't think—”

“Right. You didn't think. So you know what? In July I'm moving to New York City.”

“What?”

“Your mom got me an internship with a designer she knows from college.”

How could this be? I hadn't heard anything about it.

Jenni continued. “I'm going to work for a year, live in Brooklyn as a nanny with another friend of your mom's from medical school, and then apply to FIT or maybe Parsons the following year. Your mom has made all of this possible for me.”

Jenni was going to apply to Parsons?

“We all tiptoe around you because we love you. And we forgive you for being so self-involved because we know that's how you are. But it would be nice if you could at least sometimes, for a few minutes, notice that there are other people in the world.”

She dried her hands on a towel and walked out, leaving me to finish the dishes.

 

16

Jenni avoided me at school the rest of the week. Mom and Dad were annoyed with me, so when I got home I just went up to my room and stayed there. I read e. e. cummings's poems out loud to Walter and I repeated the line, “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” five times. I played a lot of Freerice.

It wasn't that different from what I usually did, but I felt awful. I didn't mean to be self-involved and inconsiderate. I didn't mean to forget Mom's birthday or keep putting off asking Jenni about her plans for next year. It wasn't like I didn't care. I just got stuck in my own head, mired in my own muck.

On Saturday, I started working at Joan's store, Runner's Edge, which Mom referred to as “Joan's store” and I guess I picked that up from her.

The stockroom, littered with piles of boxes and plastic bags containing shirts and shorts, needed help. I sat on the floor and put everything into neat stacks so I could use the fun machine that made price tags. After a couple of hours, the piles were a lot smaller. Occasionally I'd bring merchandise to Joan and she'd put it on hangers on the round racks.

A compact woman with thick red corkscrew hair burst through the door and shouted, “Hi honey, I'm home!”

“Nikki!” Joan said.

“Yo.” These two tiny chicks gave each other a chest bump—as if they were basketball players.

The woman told Joan she needed a new pair of shoes and wanted to try something with a lower profile. “I'm not ready to join the barefoot craze,” she said, “but, well, I don't know, I wondered if there was maybe some middle ground.”

“I have something I think you'll like, Nik,” Joan said, and went into the stockroom.

“Great,” said the woman. She had been wearing hiking boots and now she peeled off thick wool socks.

Her feet were even uglier than mine, if you can believe that. A couple of her toes curled down and her two big toenails were purple. Not painted purple, like with nail polish, but the nails themselves.

“What?” she said, when she saw me looking at them. “Never seen a runner's feet before?”

I said, “First day on the job.” Then I felt really awkward so I said, “Um, can I offer you a Tootsie Roll?” Joan kept a big jar of candy on the front counter. She said runners really liked candy. From what I'd seen that morning, it was Joan who really liked candy.

Joan came out with two boxes of shoes and said, “They run small, so I brought you a 9 as well as an 8½. And here's a pair of socks.” She tossed them at Nikki.

Joan lifted her chin in my direction and said, “Alice just started running. She's learning.”

Then she turned to me and explained, “Many runners end up with black toenails from blood blisters that form under the nail bed. Sometimes they're the result of wearing shoes that are too small, but usually, especially for experienced runners like Nikki, they're the price of doing business. Nikki is a fast downhill runner, and the foot naturally slides forward in the shoe. There's nothing dangerous about them—”

“They hurt like mofos,” Nikki said.

“—but they don't make for pretty feet. Eventually, they fall off.”

“The toenail falls off?”
I blurted out. “That's disgusting.”

I realized too late that may not have been the most polite thing to say. But both Joan and Nikki were laughing.

“Yep,” said Nikki. “Usually by that time, a new one has begun to grow underneath. I have a collection of them at home in a bowl in the guest bathroom.”

Nikki put on the new shoes, got up, and walked around. She jumped up and down a few times. She said, “I rarely have ten toenails at one time. Wow. This feels strange. Kind of like wearing Earth Shoes. Remember Earth Shoes, Joan, where the heel was lower than the front? I'm tipping backward.” And she rocked back as if she was going to fall.

“They're cushioned, superlight, and I think for the kind of running you do, both roads and trails, they might work well. Take them out for a spin.”

Nikki ran out the door. Joan said to me, “Wait until you see the hammer toes. And the bunions. And the blisters—you've never seen blisters until you see someone who's had a rough race. The whole bottom of the foot can be one giant blister.”

I must have made a face because she said, “We think of them as badges of honor, along with our cuts and bruises and scrapes. It's because we're out mixing it up. If you run hard, you might fall. If you fall, you might get dirty, a little bloody. Nothing too bad. Most serious injuries come from overuse.”

Nikki burst back into the store. “Yes!” she said. “Love them.”

“Thought you might,” said Joan, and she moved to the register. I followed and watched her ring up the sale. She said, “Charleston Running Club members get a 10 percent discount.” I knew about the club from the Red Dress Run.

“Also need something for chub rub,” Nikki said.

Joan said to me, “Body Glide,” and motioned to an item on the wall rack that looked like a stick of deodorant. “Chafing,” she explained, and pointed in the direction of her inner thighs. Then she yelped, “Nikki! I forgot! How was your marathon?”

Nikki put her hands into her head of curls and groaned. “You don't want to know.”

“What happened? You were shooting for sub–2:50, right?”

“That was the plan. You know what happens when people plan. God laughs. At my race, she laughed so hard she probably peed her pants.”

“Your training went so well.”

“Yeah, but my racing didn't go well that day. I got behind on calories. I was feeling good, running fast, but I didn't take in enough fuel. I bonked. Hit the wall at 25.”

Bonked? I thought. Hit the wall? There's a wall? Near the end of a marathon?

Joan looked at me and said, “That's a saying. Not a literal wall.”

“Sure feels like it. I was on pace through 24 and a half. Then the wheels came off. I could not get my legs to move. There was nothing I could do to change my fate.”

“Glycogen debt,” Joan said. “Been there.”

“I never had been before. It sucked. There were so many spectators, and I was the first woman, and they were all cheering me on but when I got to the mile marker at 25, I had nothing left. And after that, you're beyond all help. Gatorade or gel or salt tabs—nothing does any good. It's all muscling and mentalling it out and I couldn't do it. I finished in 2:57. Humiliated.”

I had some thoughts:

  1.  Seven minutes were that big a deal?

  2.  It seemed silly to be able to run at mile 24 but not at mile 25. I mean, you've already run that many miles. What's one more?

  3.  I felt like I'd been stuck in my own version of mile 25 since I'd been rejected from Yale.

“So sorry, Nik,” Joan said. “We've all been there. Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.”

“I was beyond insectitude at that point. I was slime. I was primordial ooze. But I'm back at it.”

“Box?” Joan called. Nikki had picked out packets of gel in different flavors and flipped them onto the counter.

“No thanks,” she said, “but I need to stock up on portable calories.”

Joan handed me the empty shoe box and I brought it back into the stockroom. Then the front door jingled and I heard Joan say, “Miles!”

Without moving a muscle, without breathing, I listened.

“Hey, kid,” I heard Nikki say. “You here to pick up your weekly recipe for speed?”

“Know it,” Miles said in the easiest, most comfortable voice. “You chicked me once. Not going to happen again.”

“We'll see about that,” Nikki said.

“I hate that word,” Joan said. “The idea of getting ‘chicked' is ridiculous. We are competing in different races. If a woman beats a man and wins overall, she still gets the trophy with the boobs. She's still only First Woman, not Overall Winner. So why is getting beaten by a woman any big thing? Why do so many men care about beating the first woman? You're competing against other men, Miles; Nikki is competing against other women. When she beats you—”