On the Road to Find Out (23 page)

Once when we were having it Jenni said, “Why is this called eggs with hats? Isn't it that the whole thing, when you put the circle on top, becomes a hat? It's hat eggs.”

“Stop talking now,” I said.

You don't mess with someone's childhood by trying to come up with reasons for why things are called what they're called. “This is an egg with a hat. Period.”

I later learned that some people call them other things, like toad in the hole, or egg in a hole, or piggies in a basket, or even picture-frame eggs or window eggs. That's all just wrong.

They're called eggs with hats and that's that, people.

Jenni said they were delicious. But sometimes, when she was feeling frisky and wanted to tweak me, she'd whisper, “The egg is the hat.”

Mom and I took our plates of eggs with hats into the living room. We also had glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, going with the whole breakfast-for-dinner motif, and Mom made some bacon, cooked so it was crispy and not at all rubbery. Dad likes it slimy but Mom and I both like it cooked to within an inch of its life.

We put the pound bag of peanut M&M's into a crystal bowl for the sake of elegance and queued up the movie.

Before she hit Play, Mom touched my arm and said, “Why did you pick this one?”

I didn't want to tell her about Miles, so I raised my palms and said I'd heard it was good.

After it started, I was uncertain.

The kid, Harold, tried to kill himself twice in the first seven minutes, and then tried about fifty-seven more times.

Mom kept looking at me during the movie. I knew she was worried that a movie about death, about a young guy obsessed with death, might not be the right thing for me. I didn't look at her—just kept my eyes focused on the screen.

The music was amazing, all these great Cat Stevens songs. When Harold went to a funeral and saw Maude, who was a week away from her eightieth birthday, a woman so delightful and full of life, and Cat Stevens sang, “Miles from Nowhere,” I gasped.

I think Mom thought I was upset because they were at a funeral.

But no.

I loved the idea that Miles, my Miles, who lived with his hippie parents out of town and off the grid, was Miles from Nowhere.

Maude was maybe the most beautiful old woman I'd ever seen. The wrinkles on her face, the light in her eyes, the way she twitched her mouth when she was being all flirty—you could only watch her the way Harold did, with awe and admiration and love.

By the end, I had to cover my face with a napkin because I was crying. I snuck a look at Mom and saw her cheeks were wet with tears. She had her hand on her forehead and her shoulders shook.

As Cat Stevens sang out at the end, Mom reached for me, and this time I let her hold me. I kept thinking of when Harold said, “I love you.”

And Maude, beautiful Maude, wise and amazing Maude, told him that was wonderful, and that he should go and love some more.

Exactly what Walter would have said.

Walter and Maude were a lot alike.

 

18

Now that the weather was good all the time, it was easy to go for runs.

I found myself waiting until late in the afternoon because I liked looking forward to it and if I ran too early, I'd be disappointed it was already over and I wouldn't know what to do with myself after. School had gotten ridiculously easy once AP exams were over.

And running was going well, most of the time.

I still had bad days, days when it felt like I was harnessed to a thousand-pound weight that I had to drag behind me, and days when I didn't feel warmed up until just before I was finished. But a lot of the time I was able to cruise happily along.

I felt like a real runner. I'd been going farther and farther. If I planned to be out for a long time, I carried water with me. I learned from Joan to monitor the color of my pee. Dark pee means you're dehydrated. I had an impressive collection of socks with the Runner's Edge logo, but I tended to wear the same pair—and the same pair of shorts—and wash them out in the shower. When my nose started to drip, I held one nostril and blew out the snot the way Miles had done. Or I wiped it on my sleeve and didn't care. I never hit the wall again, though after a couple of my longest runs, all I could do in the afternoon was lie in the hammock on the back deck and sigh. I stayed outside because I still didn't like being in my room.

I hadn't seen Miles since we ran together the day Walter died, though each time I came into the store, Joan would say, “Oh you just missed Miles.” I had started thinking about him again, and for a nanosecond I wondered if he would have said yes if I had asked him to the prom.

A nanosecond later I realized he was the kind of kid who might hate prom as much or even more than I did.

A nanosecond after that I thought, I hardly know him. I don't know what he'd like or not like.

Just as I was finishing my Saturday-morning shift and had gone to the stockroom to change into my running clothes so I could jog home, I heard the door jingle.

A bunch of runners, mostly men and a few women, came in like a pack of stray dogs, skinny and hungry-looking in tiny shorts and flashing lean arms and messy hair. I saw the mass of red curls that belonged to Nikki and heard her unmistakable laugh.

“Need water,” Nikki said. “Who knew it was going to be so hot this morning?”

“Weather.com?” said Joan, as she went over to the water cooler and started filling paper cups for the sweaty runners.

Nikki said, “Thanks, Joanie. You're always here when we need you,” and she gulped the water so fast that it ended up dribbling down her chin. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and then said, “Okay, crew, let's go. Saturday morning run's not over until”—she glanced at a short woman with her hair in two pigtails—“we get the baked goods!” and with waves and grunts goodbye, they filed out the door.

Everyone except Miles.

“Alice,” he said. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

I wore a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of running shorts Joan had tossed at me saying, “Sale!” They had built-in underpants and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to wear anything beneath them. I had asked Joan and she said it was totally up to me. Some people did, some didn't. I did. My legs were still Clorox-commercial white, but when I looked down at them I noticed how after only four months, they'd become more muscular.

I'd seen my body develop and get stronger. Nothing much jiggled on me anymore. My thighs were still big, but they were solid. My gluteus maximus had gotten only a little less maximus, but like my thighs, my butt was hard and no longer Jell-O-like.

Right after Walter's death I hadn't been eating much, and I'd felt myself getting weak. But since I'd started running longer distances, I'd built back up. I felt strong.

Miles said, “You look really good.”

Gulp.

“I'm headed toward the boulevard for my warm down. Wanna?”

“Sure,” I said.

 

19

“Miles from nowhere,”
I said when we'd started to run.

“You saw it!” Miles said.

I nodded, even though we were running side by side and he couldn't see me.

“What parts did you like best?”

“You mean besides everything?”

He laughed. “Including everything.”

I told him there wasn't anything I didn't like about it, but my favorite part was when Harold and Maude were sitting together and Harold says to Maude that she has a way with people and Maude just kind of shrugs and says, “Well, they're my species,” and he gives her a present and it says …

Miles chimed in and we said the line together. I thought how right Maude was that if you toss the material stuff away, you'll always know where it is and you can hold on to the feeling instead.

We were running pretty fast, but it felt good. At times we were even running in step, like a pair of horses harnessed together.

He said, “God, I love that movie. Can you believe it's more than forty years old? The woman who played Maude, Ruth Gordon, was also a screenwriter. She and her husband, Garson Kanin, wrote one of Harry's favorite movies—
Adam's Rib
, with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It's about a married couple, both lawyers, who end up on opposing sides of a case. Wouldn't be a big deal, except that it was made in 1949 when there weren't many women lawyers and Katharine Hepburn's character makes an argument about treating women equally.”

He was geeking out. It was really cute.

“That's your kind of movie?”

“You bet. Harry is a feminist from way back. It rubs off.”

“But you're also kind of a romantic?”

“Not mutually exclusive,” he said.

“Too bad you have such bad taste in books.”

He turned to look at me, but I kept my eyes straight ahead. “No one's ever said that to me before.”

“
The Catcher in the Rye
? Really?”

“What's your problem with
Catcher
?”

He asked it as a real question, not a challenge.

So I told him.

I told him all the stuff I'd written in my crappy college-admission essay about how Holden was a big phony, how he was all polite to people to their faces but he went around judging everyone, and it wasn't fun to be in the head of someone who was pissed off at the world all the time. Teenage rage wasn't that interesting. He was a hypocrite and I can't stand hypocrisy.

Miles slowed and said, “Hmmm. I read it a little differently from you. I don't think it's just about teenage rage. I think it's about something else.”

“Yeah? What's that?”

“Death,” he said. “Dealing with death.”

That stopped me. Literally. I stopped running. So Miles did too.

“Think about it,” Miles said. “Where is Holden at the beginning of the book?”

I tried to remember. I started running again and Miles fell in beside me. “At that fancy prep school he'd just been kicked out of.”

“No,” said Miles.

“Yes he was. And he went to see his English teacher, who had the grippe.” I have to confess that after reading that book, whenever I got a cold, I said I had the grippe.

“No,” said Miles again, patiently, like a teacher. “He was writing down all the crazy stuff that happened. It was because he was in the same place he was at the end of the book. In the loony bin. Right? He'd been having all this trouble at school, and made that wild trip to New York because—”

“Because he was still so upset about his brother's death,” I said, “which was, like, years before.”

“Three years before, when he first started having trouble in school.”

I hadn't thought about that.

I'd read the book before I lost Walter—before anyone I'd ever loved had died—and I hadn't understood how grief makes you more angry than sad, how you can't control your behavior, can't control your thoughts.

I had missed the main message of
The Catcher in the Rye.

It was a book about grief.

 

20

My last day at the store wasn't as sad as I thought it would be because Joan told me I had to come in on Saturday mornings for the group run. I knew Nikki and Miles and other speedy people always showed up, but Joan promised there would be people who ran my pace. She said, “Caroline runs about an eleven-minute mile, and you're a lot quicker than that.”

“Miles is pretty great,” I said. And then felt embarrassed and busied myself dusting the counter.

“He is,” she said. “You are too. Guess it runs in the family. Your mom—you know this. Your mom is an incredible doctor. And a wonderful person. I don't know what we would have done without her.”

I finally felt like I knew Joan well enough to ask her. “So did my mom find a mole? On Ricardo?”

Joan exhaled. “No, not a mole.”

“Sorry. I was just wondering.”

“No, it's okay. Your mother is really the hero, so you should hear it.”

“My mother? A hero? I mean, I know the women whose wrinkles my mom erases worship her, but it's all cosmetic. Not important stuff.”

Joan sat down on the bench that faced the
START
wall and patted the spot next to her. I settled in beside her. We both looked at the wall blanketed with bib numbers for a while, and then, finally, she began to speak in a soft voice.

“I've known your mother for a long time. Someone with skin like mine”—she extended her pale arm in front of her, dotted with freckles and moles—“who spends as much time outdoors as I do, I knew it was important to keep an eye on things.

“Ricardo, on the other hand, was dark, and didn't like going to doctors. He began to suffer from back pain. He'd had a bike crash, not terrible, not for a cyclist at least, and assumed that's what it was from. After about a year, I got him to go to a doctor, and the doc said it was nothing. Said he should do exercises to strengthen the muscles that support his back, that many people have weak backs. Ricardo tried to explain he didn't think that was the problem, but the doctor wouldn't listen.”

Joan choked out a laugh. “Ricardo's back was stronger than anyone's. He wasn't a whiner, never complained about pain.” She rubbed her hands over her slim hips.

“Then he got these purple dots on his lower eyelid. One day, when I was seeing your mom for my mole check, I told her what was going on with him. At the end of the day, she stopped by the store and said she wanted to take a look at Ricardo's face. She talked to him for a while, asked a bunch of questions, and said to us, ‘I'm afraid I know what this is.' She explained she had trained in oncology and people tend to diagnose from within their specialty but—”

“She didn't train in oncology. She's a dermatologist.”

Joan kept going. “She said she had been through an oncology residency and she'd seen this before. She said the spots were purpuras and that, with the joint pain, she was worried Ricardo might have multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. She sent him to a friend of hers who is an oncologist—”