Zen and Xander Undone (3 page)

It wasn't the prank that was so terrible; it was the timing. We did it right before Grandma Vogel came over for her sixtieth birthday dinner.

Xander's the one who nicknamed Grandma the Droning Crone, and we all call her that, even Dad sometimes.

“Grandma doesn't converse, she comments” was the tactful way Mom would put it.

When you've done something she doesn't like, Grandma makes her withering pronouncement, then scrunches her thin lips together and looks off to the side. She wears silk flowers in her hair, and she is so hung up about proper behavior that it's like she's got a copy of
Miss Manners
clenched between her butt cheeks.

But there's one thing about Grandma Vogel that isn't prim and proper: she can't control the volume of her farts. It's very awkward, because she pretends it doesn't happen. She doesn't even say excuse me. And since she has no sense of humor about it, we all have to pretend we didn't just hear her butt hit a high C.

Outside of that, she's no fun, and we don't really like her.

Xander and I thought our salt and sugar joke would ruin Grandma's special birthday dinner, and her cake. We didn't realize the trick was also being played on Mom, who slaved in the kitchen to make beef bourguignon, and candied carrots, and a huge salad with homemade vinaigrette. She also baked from scratch a double-layer Belgian chocolate torte with raspberry sauce.

We watched Mom salt the roast with sugar, and candy the carrots with salt, and add a whole cup of salt to the cake. Xander and I started to get a little nervous. We sneaked into Xander's room, and I said, “We should tell her what we did.”

“No way!” Xander grabbed the back of my hair and held my head so I'd have to listen to her. (This was before I knew karate, and it's also why I learned it.) “She's already mixed everything. We can't tell her, or we'll get in huge trouble.”

I punched her in the ear, but I did see her logic. So we kept quiet and waited for the birthday dinner to begin.

I watched as Grandma cut her first bite of the roast, raised it to her lipsticked lips, took it into her mouth, and chewed it. I stole a glance at Xander, who was holding her breath.

Grandma swallowed, took a sip of her wine, and said, “I must say, Marie, this beef is quite . . . scrumptious! What did you do? Is this an Asian recipe?”

Mom took a bite, chewed the beef slowly, and nodded. “You're right. This turned out pretty good!”

The meal was yummier than yummy. The sugar made the beef a little crusty and sweet, the salt made the carrots a little savory, and the crispy salad was salty-sweet and tangy.

Dad's chest practically burst out of his dress shirt, he was so proud of Mom. He kept saying, “My little gourmet,” and toasting her with his wine. He could see Grandma approved of Mom for once, and that made him happy.

Mom seemed ecstatic the meal turned out so delicious. She even laughed at the story Grandma was telling about how the Church Ladies were fighting with the Church Vicars about how to divvy up the surplus from the collection. Mom tossed her head back, her bouncy hair flashing in the candlelight, and laughed loud and wide. Mom had great big teeth, and a wide mouth, and when she laughed, the whole room seemed to whirl around her.

I looked over at Xander as everyone ate, and I could tell she was just as relieved as I was. We'd even begun to relax when Mom brought out the cake.

It was beautiful. Stripes of raspberry sauce flowed like burgundy rivers through the rich chocolate frosting. Mom put six candles on top, one for every decade, and we all sang “For She's a Jolly Good Fellow,” because Grandma hates the birthday song. She thinks it's hackneyed.

Grandma's face puckered into a smile. She blew out the candles (farting a little in the process) and clapped. She
actually clapped
for Mom. Then she stood up, holding her wineglass, and made a speech: “Well, Marie, this meal has meant the world to me, and I just want you to know that I think you're a very special daughter-in-law to go to all this trouble for a bitter old broad like me.” (Grandma would never have said this if she wasn't drunk.)

Then Mom, her smile practically blinding everyone at the table, cut up the cake, giving the biggest piece to Grandma. Xander and I took huge bites, because by now we were sure that somehow we'd discovered a magical cooking potion, so of course the cake would be perfect too.

Oh, but it wasn't. It tasted like bitter chocolaty mud. It was revolting.

I spit mine out right into the palm of my hand. Xander gagged. Dad dribbled the cake in a brown mess onto his plate. Mom actually swallowed her mouthful, but her eyes watered like crazy and she drank an entire tumbler of milk. Grandma primly spit hers into her napkin, narrowing her eyes at Xander and me.

What started out as a rare tension-free evening between Mom and Grandma turned into a screaming match. They weren't screaming at each other, though. Oh, no. They were screaming at us.

Grandma: “Do you realize what it means to turn sixty years old? [fart] My two granddaughters who are supposed to love and respect me sabotage my party! Is there not a shred of [fart] humanity in either of you?”

Mom: “I worked so hard all day on this meal and you
watched
me! [sniff] You stood there with smiles on your faces! [dabbing at tears in eyes] All my hard work! All that time spent on that beautiful cake! I should have known something was up when you wouldn't lick the spoon!”

Dad just sat at the table, laughing as he finished the bottle of wine.

We were grounded and stuck in the backyard during the height of summer for one full month. We never sabotaged Mom's cooking again, but ever since then, she always put a little sugar on her beef bourguignon, and extra salt on her candied carrots.

And years later, whenever Mom would tell this story, she'd laugh her head off.

I
T'S NOT EVEN EIGHT O'CLOCK
when Xander barges into my room with Mom's first letter to us in her hand. “I say we find this person.” She plops next to me on my bed and bounces up and down. Already she's showered and dressed in her holey jeans and a baby-doll T-shirt with a picture of a baby doll on it. It's way too small, and I can clearly see even in the dim light filtering through my curtains that she isn't wearing a bra.

Mom would never let her dress like that, not even at home.

“Find
who?
” I ask as I rub my eyes.

“Whoever has Mom's letters!” She waits for this to sink in, and when my eyes meet hers she smiles slowly at me. “I can see in your placid little countenance that you want to.”

“For a hussy you sure talk pretty,” I say before burying my head under my pillow.

“You bet your magnificently muscular ass I do.”

It's true that I kind of do want to find the person who has the letters. Waiting is practically torture. On Christmas we got a video of Mom wishing us a Merry Christmas. Since then it's been five long months of waiting. A couple months ago Xander and I searched the house top to bottom, and then we stole Dad's keys and ransacked his office at the university. There was no sign of any letters, so we're sure Dad doesn't have them. If he knows who does, he'll never tell. We asked once, and he was outraged that we'd pry into Mom's final wishes. We should leave it at that, I know, but I've started to wonder if the person forgot about the letters, or died or something. We might never get another letter again.

Xander gets up from my bed, and I hear her rooting through my desk.

“Stop that!”

“What? Afraid I'll find your porn?”

“No, I just like my privacy.”

“Ooo, bubblegum!” she warbles. “Grape. My favorite.”

“Leave it!”

“Where are your pens?” She practically shoves her nose in the top drawer of my desk, fishes out a stubby pencil, and licks the lead. She turns Mom's letter over and starts to write on the back of it, but I leap out of bed and snatch it away from her. “Don't write on Mom's letter, idiot!”

She grins. “Knew that'd get you out of bed.”

“No one likes a manipulative bitch.”

“People like me
because
I'm manipulative,” she retorts.

This isn't exactly true.

“Paper,” she demands of me.

To stop her from ransacking my life, I reach under my bed, pull a page from my biology notebook, and hand it to her.

“Take a shower. I can still smell Hank on your foot,” she says.

“Frank,” I say as I stumble across the hall into the bathroom.

“Frank stank,” she yells after me.

“And he does crank,” I call back.

“Then he gives his weenie a yank!” she screams at the top of her lungs.

“Hey!” Dad yells from downstairs. “Both of you! Stifle!”

“Or you'll get your rifle?” she yells back.

“And I'll throw you off the tower of Eiffel!” he snarls.

Rhyming is kind of a Vogel thing, not that we're particularly good at it.

I step into the shower and let it pummel the sleep out of me. I wait until I can feel my bones warmed up before I start rubbing the soap into my washcloth. I love how regular soap smells. I don't need any of this fancy herbal crap Xander's always bringing home. Plain white for me.

I stay in the shower a long time, hoping Xander will lose interest in her mission. But when I come back to my room, wrapped in my fluffy green robe, she lifts up the paper she's been writing on and waves it in front of my face. “I've got four strong possibilities!” she announces.

“Solving string theory, are we?” I ask her.

“I'm off cosmology,” she sighs. “I'm thinking particle physics now.”

“You should try at least to
seem
humble.”

“Why?”

Xander is the salutatorian of the senior class, second only to Dion Jefferson. She'd probably be valedictorian if she ever cracked a book, not that her grades even matter at this point. She got a perfect math score on her SATs, and won the National Science Fair for devising a new way to diagram quantum equations. Some reporter from the
New Scientist
wrote a tiny blurb about her, and now all the big science universities, like MIT and Caltech, are taking her out to lunch, which has swelled her head to the size of a nuclear reactor. She's just toying with them because she likes the attention. I know she'll pick MIT. Caltech is too far away.

“Don't you want to see my list?” she wheedles as I slather lotion on myself.

“Read it to me.”

“Okay. Number one: Martha.”

“No way.”

“She's Mom's best friend since high school!”

“No, she lives like ten thousand miles away.” Martha moved to Hawaii four years ago. She almost didn't make it to Mom's funeral. “Remember, the video was left on the porch.”

“It could have been sent by courier,” she says. “It's the perfect cover.”

“That's what
you
would do, not what Mom would do. Next.”

Xander must agree with me, because she moves on without a quibble. “Mr. Blackstone.”

“Possible, but he'd never tell us if he was the one. Attorney-client privilege or something.”

“He'd tell
me,
” Xander says, twisting her hair with an evil grin. Mr. Blackstone gets all blustery around Xander, so naturally she tortures him. “Anyway, we can find out without him ever knowing.”

I don't want to know what she means by this. “Next.”

“Aunt Doris,” she says.

“She's the most likely one,” I say. Even though Mom was ten years younger than Doris, they were always very close. And Doris is within easy driving distance.

I hear a screen door slamming across the street, and pull aside the curtains to see Adam and his mom, Nancy, walking to their beat-up car. Adam is wearing a suit and tie, and Nancy is in a flowing silk dress. Xander sticks her head out the window and yells at Adam, “Nice suit! Is there a fuddy-duddy convention in town?”

“He's the keynote speaker,” Nancy says as she opens her car door. “I'm very proud.”

“Where are you guys going?” Xander asks.

“None of your business,” Adam says as he gets into the car.

“He's surprising me,” Nancy says eagerly. She bites her lower lip, which makes her buckteeth look even bigger. Nancy has kind of a stretchy, comical face, and it goes with her personality. “Why don't you girls come along?”

“Thanks for the pity invitation,” Xander says. “It being Mother's Day and all, I think I'll be getting drunk instead.”

“Splendid!” Nancy says, clearly choosing not to take Xander seriously. “Have a gimlet for me.”

“I bet Adam's taking you to Marnie's on the Lake. Aren't you, Widdle Adam?”

He glares at her, so she must have guessed right.

“Oopsie. Did I spoil the surprise?” Xander giggles demurely. “Get their niçoise salad, Nancy! It's delicious!”

Adam starts the engine and drives off before Xander can come up with anything more to say.

Xander turns around as if none of that happened, shakes her list of suspects in my face, and says, “And of course Nancy was fourth on my list. Who do you want to check out first?”

“Mom, at the cemetery.”

“Ghoulish! I hate going there.”

“It's Mother's Day, for god's sake!” I yell at her.

“Fine,” she says, but she mopes.

Now that I've said it out loud, suddenly the whole day seems dark and bitter. Mother's Day hurts. We're silent as I search through my drawers for something to wear.

I wriggle into my black pants. Even if Xander is dressing like a stockyard hag to go to the cemetery, I'll represent the Vogel daughters with some dignity.

“Did I miss anyone on my list?” Xander asks without really meaning it. I can never think of things she doesn't already consider.

“The list is fine. Too bad we're not asking any of them.” I fight my way into the only black shirt I own, which is a turtleneck. I talk to her through the dark fabric. “They'll all deny it anyway. That's how decent people behave, after all, Xander. They respect people's dying wishes.”