On the Road to Find Out (7 page)

Freerice is my favorite Web site.

You get a word.

You get four choices from which to pick the correct synonym.

If you're right, the program donates ten grains of rice to a developing country through the United Nations.

When you answer a bunch right, you go up a level.

You get smarter and you feed the hungry!

Free rice!

How much do I love this? I can't even begin to say. I've provided a lot of meals to starving people and have learned a ton of new words, which I like to share with Dad. He gets so happy on the rare occasions I find a word he doesn't know.

 

11

Jenni's nails had grown in. Though I missed the small bit of raggedness on her otherwise perfect person, I was happy her resolution had stuck. One afternoon when we were at a coffee shop we liked to go to called the Coffee Shop, I said, “Dudette—soon we'll be going for mani/pedis with my mom. Your nails look great.”

She held up her cute paws and said, “Yeah, I've stopped biting them. Except for my left thumb.”

And sure enough, the nail on her left thumb was chewed to the quick.

God, I love Jenni.

“It's like the intentional flaw in the Oriental carpet,” I said.

“Huh?”

“You know—when they make carpets like the ones in my house with all the elaborate designs, the carpet makers always add a flaw because only Allah is perfect, and to try to create something perfect would be arrogant.”

Jenni said, “How do you know this stuff?”

“Um, I'm perfect?”

Then she looked like she wanted to say something else, but didn't.

“What?”

“Nothing, really. It's just been hard lately. Kyle and I—”

I sighed really loud and said, “That old Kyle.”

Whenever Jenni tries to talk about Kyle, I usually interrupt her by sighing really loud and saying, “That old Kyle.”

And then Jenni tells me to shut my piehole.

And then I say, “Make me.”

And then she rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

But this time, she didn't tell me to shut my piehole. She just raised a hand and looked into her latte.

Then she asked, “How's the running going?”

I had to stop to think.

“I didn't expect to like it so much. Sometimes it's hard to get out the door. When I don't feel like going, I can find a whole lot of other things to do, like alphabetize my books or clean my room or play Snood or Freerice. I put it off and put it off and then, finally, I remember it's my resolution and I need to at least stick to what I've said I'll do. So I pull on my jeggings and once I'm sausaged into them, I tell myself it will still count if I only go for ten minutes. Once I'm out, and I'm running, I start to feel good. It's like I have to trick myself into doing it, but when I do, I am happy to keep going.”

Jenni gestured toward my half-eaten raspberry oat bar. I nodded, and she slid the plate to her side of the table.

“But here's the thing,” I continued. “My shins are sore.”

I pointed to the front of my legs. “Right here.”

“Hmmm,” Jenni said. “Probably a tendon issue, like shin splints. Might be an overuse injury. Some kind of inflammation.” Because of Kyle, Jenni spoke sports. She also had a milk mustache and I pointed to my own upper lip. She got the message.

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“I don't know. Probably you have to stop for a while. Red shirt. Be on the DL.”

“Wear a red shirt? Be on the down low?”

“The disabled list.”

“I don't want to stop,” I said, surprised to hear this come out of my mouth.

“Why not ask your mom?”

“Right.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't want her to know I'm running.”

“Why not? She said—”

“She said what?”

At this point, Jenni had finished her latte and looked over at mine, still half full. She raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She reached over and grabbed it. In that moment, she reminded me of Walter.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“If I tell her, she'll get all excited and will encourage me and I won't want to do it anymore.”

“Al, she just wants to help. She thinks you spend too much time doing homework and need to develop—”

“I know. I know what she thinks. But it doesn't help me to have her breathing down my neck. It makes me not want to do anything.”

“Alice,” Jenni said, slurping the last gulp in the mug with a noise you would not have expected from a girl so pretty and petite, “sometimes you stand in your own way.”

She was right. I
should
tell my mother. I needed to get better clothes and shoes that fit and she was going to have to buy them for me. The experts and nonexperts talked about technical fabrics that wick moisture from the body.

Wick?
(“To absorb or drain.”)

Each time I wore my T-shirt under my hoodie it would get soaking wet. It made sense there would be clothing designed especially for running.

Also, I know Mom is only trying to help. I feel bad about not being more grateful to her.

But the weight of her motherly love makes me cranky and I lash out.

I want to stop myself even as I am doing it.

I can't.

It's like something inside me takes over, a little alien, an evil little alien, who pops out periodically to make me say assholic things to people I care about.

I do this to everyone except Walter, who never does one single thing that annoys me. My mom gets the worst of the alien treatment.

That night, I waited until after dinner, when she had a glass of wine and was reading Martha Stewart's magazine.

“Mom,” I said, “I have something to tell you but I don't want you to get all excited because if you do, it's going to ruin everything for me.”

She set down her glass and the magazine and said, “When you put it like that, I can't wait to hear.”

Dad looked up from doing a crossword puzzle on his iPad. When Mom and I start to get into it, he'll call out questions like, “What's a four-letter word for ‘writes quickly'?” and since neither Mom nor I can resist being right we'll both shout out, “Jots,” and sometimes we forget what we're arguing about.

My dad is sneaky like that.

“I've been running.”

I waited.

Since she can't raise her eyebrows or furrow her brow, my mom generally has a pleasant expression on her face. If she's overdone it with the Tox, she can look surprised for three months.

I could see her eyes getting all shiny, and I knew she felt happy about what I'd said, so I needed to step in and cut her off.

“Don't say anything. Just let me talk.”

She made the rolling motion with her hand that signaled for me to keep going.

“I've been borrowing your running shoes—”

She interrupted me. “Oh honey, you know my feet are smaller than yours. You need to have the right shoes, shoes that fit. You're going to get injured—”

“—and I need to get running shoes. And clothes. My shins already hurt—”

“You're at risk of developing tendinitis and—”

“Will you please listen to me? I'm doing something you said you wanted me to do, I'm getting exercise, okay, and now you're telling me how to do it? I was trying to ask you to buy me the right shoes and you wouldn't even listen to me. You never listen to me.”

Dad said, “Don't you know someone who owns a running store, Sarah?”

Mom and I were locked in silent battle, each replaying previous skirmishes in our heads.

“We can go on Saturday,” she said finally, and went back to reading Martha.

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” Mom said.

 

12

Sometimes my mother and I get along well. When Dad goes out of town on business trips, we have a tradition. Mom makes breakfast for dinner—the only meal she can cook—and we get a pound bag of peanut M&M's and watch chick flicks on Lifetime or old episodes of
Gilmore Girls
. Sometimes Jenni joins us, but often she has a game or is out with the stud muffin.

During these mostly cozy nights Mom will try to get me to talk to her.

She'll ask about school, and when I'm in a good mood, I'll tell her about a project I'm working on (a lab report on optics; a paper on
The Scarlet Letter
; reading the Federalist Papers) but when she tries too hard to get personal, when she asks me questions about boys, I get annoyed and say something bratty like, “Why can't you be more like Lorelai?”

She gets pissed and says, “Why can't you be more like Rory?”

In fact, I wish I was more like Rory. Jenni thought I was excited about Yale because that's where Rory Gilmore went.

But Jenni was wrong.

I don't make my life decisions based on TV shows.

Mom and I started fighting a whole lot more when she got obsessed with the college-admissions thing. She made me go with her on a big college tour at the end of the summer. I told her I didn't need to visit colleges; I only wanted to go to Yale and I didn't have to see it to be sure. I was going to apply early and that would be that.

She said I should keep my options open. She said I'd need to have backups in case Yale didn't work out.

I accused her of not having confidence in me.

In the end, I couldn't get out of the trip.

Some highlights:

  1.  Going to Yale we got ridiculously lost on the one-way streets in New Haven and ended up in some really sketchy parts of town. It was rainy and not quite as magical as I'd hoped. It was still my first and only choice.

  2.  At Trinity College a dad had a heart attack during the group information session and my mom was the closest thing around to a real doctor. So we waited with him for the EMTs and spent the afternoon with his daughter in the hospital.

  3.  When we stayed at the Four Seasons in Boston we got bitten by bedbugs, which was as uncomfortable as it was disgusting. All that money for an expensive hotel and it turns out the beds were already occupied—with creepy critters.

  4.  Also in Boston, someone broke into our rental car and stole my laptop. I know, I shouldn't have left it in there, but I was tired because we'd been to Tufts, Boston University, and Harvard all in one day. Then I had to listen to Mom tell me eight thousand times that I shouldn't have left my computer in the car. Also in Boston, we had a blow-out fight (see above, under
computer loss
) and I told my mother I wanted to go to college, to any college, just so I could get away from her. She said, “Don't let the door hit you on the way out.” I said, “Fine.” She said, “Fine.”

  5.  In Providence, Mom got food poisoning. She stayed in the hotel room and barfed while I did the tour of Brown. I felt guilty for being so happy to get away from her for a bit.

  6.  I managed to convince Mom to let us stop at the Ben&Jerry's factory on the way to see Middlebury. They had a “flavor graveyard,” where headstones mark the deaths of flavors that didn't make it. It made me kind of sad to see where good ideas go to die.

  7.  Our rental car got a flat in western Massachusetts and while we waited two hours for AAA to show up, we had another giant fight.

  8.  A bunch of drunken frat boys at Amherst hung out the window of their house and screamed that Mom had a nice ass. I thought it was funny and laughed, and laughed even harder when she got mad at them, which made her mad at me too. I asked why she wore tight jeans and high heels if she didn't want people to notice her ass. Then she got madder at me and we didn't speak for the rest of the day.

  9.  The information sessions all sounded the same and were so boring I thought I was going to die. Except for the one at Trinity College, where the dad almost did die. Not funny.

10.  I had on-campus interviews and Mom made me get dressed up, even though Walter-the-Man said Deborah said the interviews didn't matter. Most of them were awkward and painful. The guy at Wesleyan had a half-eaten PayDay on his desk and I told him I thought if Pluto could be fired from being a planet, PayDay should be banned from the candy aisle. We had a lively debate about what makes for a good candy bar, though he was completely wrong.

11.  This was different from the interview with the woman at Dartmouth, who asked me with a straight face, “If you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?” I thought she was kidding and laughed. She wasn't kidding. So I thought about it for a minute and gave her an answer I thought she was looking for. “I'd be an artichoke,” I said. “Why?” She leaned in, as if she wanted to know. “Because I have a prickly, tough exterior, but inside there's a big warm and fuzzy heart.”
     Then she told me I was going to host a dinner party and I had to invite twelve people from any time in history. “Who would you invite and where would they sit? Who would be to your immediate right? Who would be at the end of the table?”
     When I get asked a question like this, my mind goes blank. I couldn't think of one person to invite to this made-up dinner party. Finally, I said, “Ben Franklin.” “Why?” she asked. So I said, “He invented electricity. Well, he didn't invent it, but he figured it out with his kite-and-key experiment. He also invented bifocal glasses and the Franklin stove—which he didn't want to patent because he thought people should be able to use his ideas for free. He started the first fire station, figured out how to predict storms, and mapped the current of the Gulf Stream. He invented the flexible urinary catheter when his brother John suffered from kidney stones. He was a postmaster, printer, and politician. He was a journalist, a businessman, a philanthropist, and a good swimmer. He invented swim fins! Swim fins! And the lightning rod! He calculated population growth! He invented a musical instrument called an armonica, which you played by rubbing the rims of glasses filled with water! And he wrote this funny letter to a horny young man on why older women make better mistresses. He was the Dr. Phil of the Founding Fathers.”
     Okay, so I got worked up, but how can you not love Ben Franklin? The Dartmouth lady looked weirded out and said, “That's one. Who else?” I told her Walter, and explained who he was. Let's just say it went downhill from there. She couldn't get comfortable with the idea of a pet rat. She cringed when I talked about him and that made me hate her.