Better Nate Than Ever (8 page)

And when I stand to fill up my water bottle and pop a lozenge and check that my audition music hasn’t wrinkled, I break into tears too. The weight of it all—the realization that Anthony covered for me and Libby covered for me; that Aunt Heidi has to see her stupid nephew who looks like her stupid janitor brother-in-law; that she probably avoided me for years for this very reason, probably because I remind her too much of all the people in my family who are too closed-minded to accept that she had a New York dream too; that she wouldn’t work at Flora’s Floras and wanted, instead, something more for herself, something different and less grey? Well, it all makes me cry.

I pass a strange wicker hallway mirror and see my face. My oily face that is indeed starting to trade freckles for zits.

And you know what? Aunt Heidi was wrong. I don’t look like my dad. I look like her.

“Nate.” She appears, getting my name right, getting me, and I turn around to her. She is looking at
me like I’m poisoned, like I’m the famous cream dress she stole out of Mom’s closet, for Homecoming, and which ended up stained with red wine by the end of the night. Legendary family story. And Heidi had to bring it back to my mom, sobbing, apologizing.

And that’s how she’s looking at me. Like I’m that dress, stained and irretrievable.

“Aunt Heidi, I’m so sorry,” I say. She reaches to touch my arm. And you know how when you’ve just pulled it together but then somebody gives you the slightest touch, not even a hug, but shows you the littlest kindness? And you just lose it again? “Don’t,” I say, “please, don’t. Please.”

“Come on,” she says, looking at her watch, “we need to get you on the next bus. Like,
now
.” I pick up my bookbag and slot Libby’s emergency manila envelope back in.

“Are those . . . lozenges?” Aunt Heidi says.

“What?” I say, wiping my horrible zitty nose against my horrible plaid shirt, the shirt of a pirate out to prove that he doesn’t care what people think of him. Except I do. I do terribly.

“Did you pack lozenges for your trip?”

“Yes.” (And I even thought of it before Libby did.)

“Because that’s what Broadway people—what—
carry
on them?” Heidi says, smiling or something.

“I dunno, yes. Yes?”

“And you’ve got your water bottle, and”—she pulls back the zipper of my bookbag—“twenty-four Entenmann’s Donuts?”

“Twenty.” I’d had four on the bus ride. “Actually, sixteen.” I had several today, and one at the rest stop after I thought the guy was going to kill me in the bathroom; when he was only handing me Libby’s brilliant escape note.

“That sounds about right,” Heidi says. “Most of my actor friends eat donuts all day and drink water.” She clears her throat and brushes the hair off her shoulders. “When they’re not doing yoga,” I think she says, quietly.

“I guess we ought to really scram, huh,” I say, composing my voice, “if I want to swing by Applebee’s before the bus?”

Even though I’ll hate myself if I don’t audition. Even though Libby fell on her sword for me, and I didn’t even earn it.

Heidi doesn’t say anything, pausing like my head might be on fire. “Come on,” she finally says, “let’s get out of here,” and she leads me to the bank of elevators.

And when the elevator dings, another round of children get out; one relevant boy in particular holds a stack of music and a beautiful, professional color headshot, topped only by his audition song: “Bigger Isn’t Better.” Same as mine but probably sung like a
real boy, with friends. Just as all of this happens, the blonde casting assistant woman yells out, “Anthony Foster? Number ninety-one, are you here or not?”

Her voice is ragged, the ripped chords of an Eat’n Park hostess back home. Of somebody who has been calling my number for the last ten minutes, I can hear, and is as ready to give up on me as I am.

I look at Aunt Heidi.

“Anthony?”
she says.

“I”—I fight back tears, my face a leaking boat in a storm—“I lied. And I used Anthony’s fake ID.”

The boy with my song and the nice headshot passes us and snickers, and finally there’s something here that I can relate to: being laughed at. I would give anything to be like him. He’s probably a whole three years younger than me. Back when nobody at school had gotten the growth spurt that could give them the strength and confidence to steal your lunch, to bury it in the playground sand, to not even eat your turkey sandwich with too much mayonnaise that you had to wake up and make for yourself that morning.

“Just a second,” Heidi calls down the hall, leaving my side, pushing past the snickering boy. “Just a second, please.” The hallway stops squirming and looks at her. “Anthony Foster is here. Anthony Foster is going to audition.”

I swallow and blink, and pop a lozenge, uncapping
my water bottle and spilling half the contents down my shirt in a hasty chug. Heidi walks up to the casting assistant and exchanges some words, her head shaking a lot and hands planted firmly on her hips. She races back to me.

“Come on,” she says, pushing the down elevator button. “We’ve got twenty minutes until your group goes in.”

“Where—what are we doing?” and Heidi doesn’t even allow the next elevator car of people to debark. She just burrows through, like the hedgehog Dad hates in our backyard.

“We’re getting you a new outfit,” Heidi says, hitting the lobby button and pulling me into the elevator car, the locals staring. “No nephew of mine is auditioning for
E.T.: The Musical
looking like a thug.”

And we’re off.

“W
hat do kids wear these days? Would you be insulted if I took you to Old Navy?”

We’re dashing, cutting through pedestrians and into the street, not only
not
obeying basic traffic laws but also basic human decency protocol; twice, I watch Aunt Heidi flip off cab drivers who almost take her out.

“No, Old Navy is fine, I guess. I dunno. Mom buys all my clothes.” I probably shouldn’t mention Mom too often, since it’s clear Aunt Heidi thinks Mom can’t stand her.

“Your mom can’t stand me,” Aunt Heidi says, hitting another sidewalk edge and doing a New Yorker’s version of looking both ways (not looking both ways). She takes a quick moment to check on me, behind her, the brim of my Yankees cap whipping wind into my eyes. I’ve never run fast enough to get wind in my eyes.

“You’re quite a sprinter, Aunt Heidi, and I’m sure Mom
can
stand you. Just because she doesn’t mention you ever doesn’t mean anything.”

Then, cutting through an alley and coming out alongside a shop that
only
sells caramel popcorn (seriously, you’ve got to see it to believe it; I bet they have entire stores here that only sell bubble gum or Twizzlers, too; a great town), Madison Square Garden towers before us.

“Holy moley,” I say, and Aunt Heidi laughs and says, “Aw, Nate, is a stadium making you homesick for Pittsburgh?”

In Pittsburgh, you can barely cross the street without passing a stadium or a football fan or a tailgate party. Everyone is always celebrating victory or drinking away defeat.

“I was actually more impressed,” I say to Heidi, my eyes trained on the massive Madison Square Garden lights and the ads for cell phones and trips to Bermuda, “because Libby has a Playbill from a production of
A Christmas Carol
that played here.”

“Okay,” Heidi says, finally stopping to catch her breath. I follow the lead and practically fall over, like a machine set to crazy spin mode that’s all of a sudden been switched off with no cooldown. “Old Navy is across the street,” she says, not even panting. “We’ve got to be back to the audition in, like, seventeen minutes.”

We’ve done all of
this
in three minutes? Three minutes for stadium sightings and almost getting killed by cabs, and flipping them off, and seeing a grown man in a leotard with a trained rat on his head (that happened two blocks ago, but it whirred by so fast I barely had time to include it in the text)?

“Nate!” Heidi says. “Goodness, you’re a daydreamer. Snap out of it.” And she takes me by the hand and walks me across the street, in an orderly, weirdly law-abiding way. “I used to date the cop on the corner,” she says, “and I don’t want to attract attention by jaywalking.”

We get to the boys’ section and it overwhelms me. I hate clothes shopping and, even more, having to make any decision.

“What size are you?” she says.

“Eek. Whatever Mom buys. Probably boys’.”

“Boys’
what
?”

“Just that? Just . . . boys’ size?”

“Oy, Nate,” she says, pulling back the collar on my plaid Montego’s shirt to inspect the tag. “Who dressed you in this, for God’s sake?”

“Oh, this was an emergency purchase.” I open my bookbag and untwist the plastic bag, with my hometown clothes now bunched into a wet fist, then pull out my navy polo. “But this is what I usually wear.”

“I don’t even want to know,” Aunt Heidi says,
inspecting the dripping sleeves. “Okay, we need to find you a boys’ medium. This says ‘husky’ but no nephew of mine is wearing a husky.” I like that she’s taking ownership of me.

“Keep in mind,” I say, “that the role I’m auditioning for is Elliott, the wise-beyond-his-years sensitive son of a single mother. He is enchanted by aliens. And bums around the house in sweats a lot, according to the film. So maybe nothing too fancy?”

Heidi holds up a black-and-pink striped shirt from a sale rack. “I have no idea how to dress a child. What do children wear?”

“Aunt Heidi, when was the last time you hung out with a thirteen-year-old?” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “We have to get you back uptown, but let’s just say my last adolescent experience didn’t go well. I was down to the end to play the mother in a canker-sore commercial—it was the only time I’ve ever been too
young
for anything, believe me—and lost out to a woman who ended up getting a recurring on one of those sappy hospital dramas.”

So she
is
an actress! Mom never told me but I knew; I just
knew
that nobody would leave Jankburg, and the easy security of a job at the family flower shop, to move to New York and work in the floral industry. Nothing seems to grow here, nothing outdoors anyway. The only time I’ve seen anything green, it was the palm tree in the pot at the audition.

“Have you been in other TV commercials?”

“A few, a million years ago,” Heidi says, holding a red T-shirt up to me. “But I gave that all up for the glories of a waitress gig. Let’s not talk about it.” And then I’m being led to a dressing room. I can’t believe she’s been in commercials! “Okay, Nate, put this T-shirt on, and take off that hat—like, forever, honestly—and I’m going to find you a pair of jeans.” She crouches down in front of me. “Are you allowed to be left alone in a dressing room without me? You don’t like, need me to button your pants or anything, do you?”

“Aunt Heidi, I’m
thirteen
, not three.”

Mom has, of course, never left me alone in a dressing room, and certainly not one in the middle of Manhattan (where musicals are so big, they have to play at sports arenas), but Aunt Heidi needn’t know all this. She’s distraught already, it’s clear, over the canker-sore commercial flashback.

And here I am, staring into a dressing-room mirror, my hat off and the brim—much tighter than I’d realized—having branded a red rim across my forehead, giving me the overall look of a post-lobotomy grade-schooler who, as a final wish before the infection sets in, gets to visit the World’s Biggest Old Navy, just once.

“Nate,” Heidi says, knocking on the door. “Are you all finished in there?”

All finished? I just got here. My God, everything is warp speed in New York.

“Just a sec, Aunt Heidi,” I say, and whip the plaid tent off over my head and avoid looking too close at my soft body in the hard light. Heidi flips a pair of jeans—miraculously, just my size—over the top of the door, and I emerge for her to inspect me.

She claps and giggles, playing absent-mindedly with her hair. “Oh my God, you look adorable. Take back what I said about you looking like your dad—you look like a doll. Oh, God, I see the appeal of dressing a child.”

I spin on myself and wonder if it’s a good thing to look like a doll. “Are you sure these clothes aren’t too tight, Aunt Heidi?”

“No, they actually
fit.
I’m sure you all dress in sizes that are way too big, back home. This actually looks human on you.” She’s pulling me to a cash register. “What’s up with your forehead?”

The lobotomy.

“Oh, my hat, the Yankees hat. It was too tight.”

Aunt Heidi pays for the whole outfit! “Consider these new clothes a gift,” she says, “to make up for all the birthdays I’ve missed.”

“You sent cards,” I say, but she’s already three paces ahead of me, running again, like we’re in a relay and a billion-dollar iTunes gift card is at the finish line.

“Come on!” she shouts, and pulls me into a cab, announcing “Eighth Avenue at Thirty-sixth.” Which I love, which sounds like a real spy-thing to say. I would’ve
gotten in and said, “Take me to the place where children’s dreams come true if they aren’t eliminated for being too pear shaped or not being able to juggle.”

And then, in opposite fashion to our racing-by-foot venture, the cab is suddenly the slowest vehicle I’ve ever been in, like we’re just sitting on an inner tube in traffic and hoping the tide picks up.

“Come on, man,”
Aunt Heidi says to the driver. She looks over at me. “Are you having, like, any fun?”

Any!?

“Oh, gosh, Aunt Heidi, this is probably the most exciting day of my life.” I see a woman purchase a street pretzel and my belly groans, on cue, issuing its vote.

“Are you starving?” Aunt Heidi says, looking at me like I might shatter if she doesn’t water me often enough.

“I wouldn’t say starving, but I caught sight of a very beautiful Applebee’s, back near the Port Authority, and I might want to pop in there for a few fajitas, after.”

“Okay,” Heidi says, now looking back out the window, again clicking that free bank pen open-shut,
click click click
. “If you’re in New York, you are never,
ever
allowed to go to an Applebee’s. Like, it’s totally off limits.”