Still Life with Tornado (7 page)

“You know what you are? You're a loser, Chet. You're just a loser.”

“Then you married a loser. How's that my fault?”

Ten-year-old Sarah closes the downstairs bathroom door behind her. I can hear her peeing. Hallucinations don't pee.

“I've always been a loser.”

“Well then, why don't you try
not
being a loser?”

“You won't give me the chance.”

“Jesus Christ! So now I have to give you a chance to not be a loser? I just worked a twelve-hour overnight. I need to fucking sleep. Figure it out yourself.”

When ten-year-old Sarah comes out of the bathroom, I go in. Our downstairs bathroom at the end of the kitchen is smaller than an airplane bathroom. Now that I'm tall, I can't close the door and sit on the toilet at the same time. So I watch as ten-year-old Sarah wanders around the kitchen.

She says, “They changed this. It looks nice.”

“I don't know why we're doing this anymore!” Dad screams upstairs. He says something else that ends in the word
divorce.

I say, “Yeah. A pipe burst and the old kitchen got ruined.”

I finish and flush and when I come out of the kitchen area, I find her looking at the old painting behind the piano no one ever plays.

“Still my favorite,” I say. It's colorful and abstract. When I painted it, I said it was flowers, but really I didn't know what it was when the paint was going on the canvas. That was when Dad taught me about the muse.
The muse is a made-up person who gives you the images in your head when you paint
was how he put it. I don't know where my muse is now. Every time I look at any old paintings, that's what I wonder. I wonder
Where the hell is my muse?

“I did it in second grade,” she says. “Mom bought me canvas and acrylics. She painted one, too.”

“Just get out of my room and let me sleep, will you?” Mom yells.

Dad comes down the stairs and we're still standing in the study looking at our painting of abstract flowers. He storms past us and into the kitchen. He opens the back door and then stops.

“Sarah?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you were out.”

“I was. I just had to pee.”

I hear him walking back toward the study and I try to hide ten-year-old Sarah behind me, but she won't stay hidden.

He looks at us—both of us—from the doorway between the kitchen and the study and he says, “I didn't know you had a friend over.”

Ten-year-old Sarah smiles at Dad and I say, “We're going back out now. Home by dinner.”

He says, “I've seen you before,” to ten-year-old Sarah.

“Yep,” she answers. “I live a block that way.” She points east.

Dad blinks a few times and says, “Oh.”

We can still see the anger on his face from the fight he just had with Mom. There's a line that curves like a
c
above his nose. When we went to Mexico and he got a dark tan, that line stayed white because even when he lies in the sun, he's angry.

Ten-year-old Sarah walks to the front door first and I follow her. Dad stands in the doorway to the kitchen watching us. I can feel it.

I follow Sarah east even though I know Alleged Earl has gone west. I suddenly don't care about Alleged Earl. I care about my parents getting divorced. Or I care about how they call each other names. Or I care about what Bruce said to me in Mexico. I feel this burr in my chest, right behind the top of my sternum. It's where my tears live. They never come out. Maybe my muse is there, too. Stuck on a burr in my sternum.

We keep walking, me following ten-year-old Sarah, and we end up on Broad Street. It's Sunday and it's pretty empty. The banks are closed. The theaters are closed until later today when the matinees will open and people will drive in from out of town and try to find the cheapest parking.

I see Carmen taking pictures half a block up Broad Street. She's never been afraid to lie flat on the sidewalk to get the right angle for a shot and, when I see her at first, she's sitting, brushing the dirt off her T-shirt and looking through images on her camera. Part of me doesn't want to talk to her but part of me knows she's Carmen—the only one who stayed my friend after the art club fissure. We walk up to meet her and she says, “We miss you in school.”

She looks at ten-year-old Sarah and smiles the same strange smile Dad had. I've known Carmen since I was in first grade. She knew ten-year-old Sarah when she was ten.

“Nobody was even talking to me when I left,” I say.

“Well,
I
miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” I say.

“They say you got expelled.”

“I didn't.”

“They say you got caught with drugs.”

This makes ten-year-old Sarah laugh. She laughs so well. I don't laugh like that.

“I don't do drugs and you know it,” I say to Carmen.

“Yeah. I told people it was a lie.”

Ten-year-old Sarah asks, “So why
aren't
you going to school, anyway?”

I look at Carmen looking at ten-year-old Sarah and see she's blinking and trying to figure us out.

“I drew four more tornadoes,” Carmen says. “Big. On pieces of recycled wood. We're doing acrylics on canvas for the next month.”

Ten-year-old Sarah says, “That sounds so fun.”

“Yeah,” I say, but I don't really mean it. Carmen can paint all the tornadoes she wants. I'm not painting anything.
Muse, burr, sternum.

“I know you,” Carmen says to ten-year-old Sarah.

“I live down the street,” ten-year-old Sarah says. “That way.” She points south.

“So . . . are you ever coming back?” Carmen asks me.

“I don't think so,” I say. “Things are kinda messed up right now.”

“Miss Smith thinks it was something she said,” Carmen says. “I've been helping her after school. She says she thinks she's the reason you're not coming to school.”

Carmen was born to be the art teacher's pet. There is nothing original about being the art teacher's pet. I only hope Carmen steers clear of Miss Smith's lipstick. I don't think Carmen is her type anyway.

Either way, Miss Smith is kinda right about it being her fault. But telling Carmen this wouldn't be original because Carmen already knows, only she can't talk about it. So I say, “Nah. It wasn't Miss Smith.” I look at the sidewalk and a piece of gum that's been ground into it. “We'll see you around,” I say. Ten-year-old Sarah has been walking around a signpost for the last minute and she's making me dizzy.

“I hope things get better,” Carmen says.

“Have fun painting your tornadoes,” I say.

I walk up Broad Street, and ten-year-old Sarah follows me until I realize that she brought us here and I have no idea where she wanted to go.

“We lost Alleged Earl,” I say.

“He'll be near City Hall,” she says. “It's Sunday.”

“You're ten. You never followed him when you were ten,” I say.

“You don't remember things all that well, do you?”

“I remember lots of things.”

“You don't remember asking his name. You don't remember that he goes to City Hall on Sundays. You don't even think we did this before.”

“So this isn't original?” I ask.

“Nothing is original. We know this already.”

Ten-year-old Sarah walks under City Hall into the underpass. I'm about to ask her if she knows that Philadelphia City Hall is the tallest municipal building in America, but then I remember she's me and she knows because I know and I've known for years.

She says, “Did you know that City Hall is the tallest municipal building in America?”

“Yep,” I say.

“Did you know that this is where Dad proposed to Mom?” she says. “And then they went upstairs and got the license?”

I search my brain archives. I seem to have forgotten this, too. I say, “Not very romantic if you ask me.”

Alleged Earl isn't at City Hall. Ten-year-old Sarah says, “He must have changed his routine.” She walks west toward the art museum, and I walk back down Broad. “See you tomorrow,” she says. “Maybe you can tell me why we dropped out of high school.”

“Stop saying
we
.”

I was mortified that Mom wore a bikini. She never wore a bikini on the New Jersey seashore, but in Mexico, nearly everyone wears a bikini. As I watched the drunk adults—most of them younger than Mom and Dad—swagger around in their bikinis, I felt like Mexico was all about sex.

Sex and drinking.

I was ten, and this was obvious. So looking at Mom in her bikini, ordering drinks from Martín the beach bar waiter, just grossed me out.

The other people at our resort were animals. They left their empty beer cans on the sand. They talked in that loud, drunken way all day and night long. One time I saw a couple making out so hard that it was nearly sex right there on the water's edge. There was a kids' club place—glorified babysitters—but there were only a handful of younger kids in there. The thatched hut sat next to the spa-massage tent between the pool and the beach, and the little kids could look out at the animal-people doing their animal-things while they made crafts or played bingo.

Every thatched beach umbrella had a hand-lettered wooden sign nailed to its trunk. The sign said:

RESERVING BEACH SEATS AND UMB
RELLAS IS
STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
DO NOT LEAVE PERSONAL BELONGI
NGS OR TOWELS ON BEA
CH CHAIRS. CHECK LOST
& FOUND IF YOUR ITEMS
HAVE BEEN REMOVED.

This sign was also posted on the wall behind the beach chairs. It was posted at the towel exchange hut, and it was even posted in our hotel rooms. And yet every single morning on vacation, 85 percent of the beach chairs had random towels and personal items on them and there were no people in sight. If you were late to the beach, you didn't get an umbrella until you waited long enough to figure out which chairs were really being used and which were inappropriately being reserved while the people who reserved them went to breakfast. Sometimes people would just walk around the beach chair area, scoping. Sometimes they would make the towel attendant come to the beach and remove things from the chairs so they didn't have to do it themselves. It drove people crazy. This was resort behavior. No rules—even when there were rules.

Our family followed rules. It was in our nature. Dad was in insurance. Mom was a nurse. We never reserved beach chairs. Day Two was the first time we realized that everyone else did.

Day Two started with a two-hour-long “vacation club” time-share presentation. I'd explain it to you but it was so boring there's no point. The only things that came out of it were resort credits for all of us—Bruce and I got a kayaking adventure and Mom and Dad got a romantic dinner on the beach—and my fascination with people who can do math upside down on paper. I still try it sometimes. My best numbers are zeroes and ones.

By the time we got to the beach, it was eleven o'clock and all the chairs were taken—some legitimately, some not—but it was hard to tell which were which. Dad walked around three times until he found one chair under a thatched umbrella with a dry towel slung over it in the way that chair-reservers do it. Dad removed the towel from the chair, and Mom said, “We'll have to share until we can find more chairs.” Dad went off to find a beach attendant to get us another chair. Mom took the extra towel and spread it on the sand, sat down, and looked out to sea. I said I wanted to get in the water so she covered me in sunscreen and looked at her watch and said, “You can only stay out there an hour.”

I ran into the surf and then stopped at ankle deep and walked slowly instead.

The water wasn't what I thought it would be. Mom and Dad told me it would be crystal clear and turquoise. But seaweed had come in from the Atlantic. That's what the Amstar vacation-guide guy said later. He said, “Nothing we can do about it. Storms do this.” The water past the huge globs of seaweed still looked dirty because the seaweed had been tumbled there on its way to the shore, and if I looked at it long enough, it looked like watery diarrhea. No chance of seeing fish. No chance of seeing my feet or even my own hands underwater. Once I saw what it looked like, I didn't want to get into the water at all, really, but I did. In my head I imagined what it was supposed to look like. Clean, blue-green, with white angelfish. Just like the website picture Mom showed me. I didn't last the hour. I managed to avoid waves and clusters of seaweed for about fifteen minutes and that was it.

By the time I got back to the towel, Dad was agitated because the beach attendant wouldn't give him another chair. Dad kept pointing to two chairs a few feet from us and saying, “They just throw a magazine or a rock on the chair and then leave for the day. Selfish bastards.”
Selfish bastards.
He said that every time he saw a reserved chair. Rule followers don't know what to do with selfish bastards.

Mom went into nurse mode. She solved the problem. She said it was time for Bruce and me to use our adventure credits and the three of us went over to the kayak shack while Dad stewed over all the selfish bastards.

The kayak adventure wasn't all that exciting. Not exciting enough to call it an adventure. They made Bruce and me wear life jackets, and it was maybe a hundred degrees out there. It was midday and I wore a thin, long-sleeved dive shirt and a wide sun hat because no amount of sunscreen would keep me safe at noon in the Caribbean sun. I put it on anyway of course, but I put the shirt on over it.

I had never kayaked before so that part of it was adventurous. Bruce taught me how to paddle and we got out past the string of buoys and the sea was rougher than it should have been. We battled just to get from one end of the resort's water boundary and back to the other. Salt water got up my nose and I almost started to cry because it stung so much. Bruce said if we paddled out between sandbars, we would find a calm place to just sit in the kayak and talk so I paddled with him to get there.

Once we could rest and bob in the kayak for a while, Bruce asked me if I thought Mom and Dad would be mad if he dropped out of college. Just like that. First thing he said. “Do you think Mom and Dad would be mad if I dropped out of college?”

I said, “Does it matter if they get mad?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? You're, like, almost twenty.”

“You know what it's like when they're mad at you,” he said. “Doesn't change just because I'm older.”

“I think you should do what you want to do,” I said.

He didn't answer. He just sat there and looked into the water. “God, this water is disgusting.”

“I know.”

“And the pool is filled with drunks.”

“Yeah.”

“That's a shitty vacation right there,” Bruce said. “Bet Dad picked the cheapest place to go and never even looked at any reviews.”

“I don't think he plans on swimming.”

“Wanna head back?”

“Is our hour up already?” I asked. I looked up at the sun as if it were a clock.

“I just want to wash all this crap off me.” He had bits of brown seaweed stuck to his arms. I looked down. So did I.

We started paddling back over the breaking waves, and the ride back was a bit smoother than the ride out.

“Why do you want to leave college?” I asked.

He stopped paddling, which made the boat go in a circle until I stopped, too. “It just seems pointless,” he said.

“I thought you wanted to be a psychologist,” I said.

He laughed a little. “I think I need to
see
a psychologist, not be one.”

We paddled to shore and gave our life jackets back and walked to the outdoor showers and rinsed off. Bruce said he had seaweed in his swim trunks and told me to tell Mom and Dad that he went to the room to shower. I went back under the thatched umbrella and told them. Mom said, “Aren't you going to swim, honey?”

I wanted to tell her that the water was a toilet bowl but I thought it would be rude with Dad sitting right there. So I said, “Sure,” and went back into the water. I closed my eyes. I imagined the fish and I said hello. They said hello back.

That night at the buffet, I imagined I liked seafood tacos and runny refried beans. Bruce ate his lasagna and Caesar salad. I told them about the fish as if they were real. I ate three desserts and we stopped to take pictures of a two-foot-long iguana on our walk back to the room. We all fell asleep the minute we hit our beds.

Day Two: over. Day Two: kayak adventure, swimming in a toilet, selfish bastards.