Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (10 page)

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thought so,” she said. “I’m a freshman at college now, but last year, when I was a senior, I think my high school played yours. I remember you because your team’s not that great, but you’re such a power goalie it didn’t matter much that the rest of your team seemed more interested in touching up their lip gloss than playing, because you were so determined not to let the other side score. You’re a captain, right? So was I.”

I was about to ask Hermione what school she played for when she dropped this one on me: “You’re different than Sofia. But maybe more interesting-looking. Is that your school uniform shirt you’re wearing underneath that reindeer cardigan? Weird. Sofia wears the most gorgeous clothes. From Spain. Do you speak Catalan?”

“No.”

I said no in Catalan, but since the word sounds the same in English, Hermione didn’t notice.

I was starting to wonder what language they spoke in Fiji.

“Time’s up!” Hermione said.

I held up the Muppet. “I christen thee Snarly,” I told it. I handed Snarly over to the guy named Boomer. “Please give this to He of the Unknowable Name.” I also handed over the red Moleskine. “This too. And don’t read the notebook, Boomer. It’s personal.”

“I won’t!” Boomer promised.

“I think he will,” Hermione murmured.

I had so many questions.

Why can’t I know his name?

What does he look like?

Who the heck is Sofia and why does she speak Catalan?

What am I even doing here?

I figured I would get answers in the notebook, if Snarl decided to continue our game.

Since Grandpa wasn’t here this year to take me to my favorite Christmas sight—the way way
waaaayyyyy
over-the-top decorated houses in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, which this time every year were lit up to such an extreme that the neighborhood was probably visible from space—I figured the least Snarl could do would be to show up himself and tell me about the experience. I’d already dared him to in the notebook, leaving him a street name in Dyker Heights and these words:
The Nutcracker House
.

I realized I wanted to add something to the instructions I’d written in the notebook, so I tried to take it back from Boomer.

“Hey!” he said, trying to block me from my own Moleskine. “That’s mine.”

“It’s not yours,” Hermione said. “You’re just the messenger, Boomer.”

Soccer captains look out for one another.

“I just want to add something,” I told Boomer. I gently tried to extract the notebook from Boomer’s grip, but he wasn’t letting go. “I’ll give it back. Promise.”

“Promise?” he said.

“I just said ‘Promise’!” I said.

Hermione said, “She said ‘Promise’!”

“Promise?” Boomer repeated.

I was starting to see how John got his name.

Hermione snatched the notebook from Boomer’s grip
and handed it over to me. “Hurry, before he freaks. This is a lot of responsibility for him.”

Quickly, after the words
The Nutcracker House
, I added a line to the instructions:

Do bring Snarly Muppet. Or don’t
.

seven
–Dash–

December 24th/December 25th

Boomer refused to tell me a thing.

“Was she tall?”

He shook his head.

“So she was short?”

“No—I’m not telling you.”

“Pretty?”

“Not telling.”

“Hellaciously homely?”

“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew what that meant.”

“Was her blond hair blocking her eyes?”

“No—wait, you’re trying to trick me, aren’t you? I’m not saying anything except that she wanted me to give this to you.”

Along with the notebook, there was … a Muppet?

“It looks like Animal and Miss Piggy had sex,” I said. “And this was the spawn.”

“My eyes!” Boomer cried. “My eyes! I can’t stop seeing it now that you’ve said it!”

I looked at the clock.

“You should probably get home before they start serving dinner,” I said.

“Will your mom and Giovanni be home soon?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Christmas hug!” he called out. And immediately I was enmeshed in what could only be called a Christmas hug.

I knew this was supposed to raise the temperature of my cockles. But nothing associated with the culture of Christmas could really do that for me. Not in a humbug sense—I still hugged Boomer like I meant every last squeeze. But mostly I was ready to have the apartment to myself again.

“So I’ll see you the day after Christmas for that party, right?” Boomer asked. “Is that the twenty-seventh?”

“The twenty-sixth.”

“I should write it down.”

He grabbed a pen off the table by our door and wrote
THE 26TH
on his arm.

“Don’t you have to write down what’s on the twenty-sixth?” I asked.

“Oh, no. I’ll remember that. It’s your girlfriend’s party!”

I could have corrected him, but I knew I’d only have to do it again later.

Once Boomer was safely out of the building, I luxuriated in the silence. It was Christmas Eve, and I had nowhere to be. I kicked off my shoes. Then I kicked off my pants. Amused by this, I took off my shirt. And my underwear. I walked from room to room, naked as the day I was born, only without the blood and amniotic fluid. It was strange—I’d been home alone plenty of times before, but I’d never walked around naked. It was a little
chilly, but it was also kind of fun. I waved to the neighbors. I had some yogurt. I put on my mom’s copy of the
Mamma Mia
soundtrack and spun around a little. I did some light dusting.

Then I remembered the notebook. It didn’t feel right to open the Moleskine naked. So I put my underwear back on. And my shirt (unbuttoned). And my pants.

Lily deserved some respect, after all.

It pretty much blew me away, what she had written. Especially the part about Franny. Because I’d always had a soft spot for Franny. Like most of Salinger’s characters, she wouldn’t be such a fuckup, you felt, if these fucked-up things didn’t keep happening to her. I mean, you never wanted her to end up with Lane, who was a douche bag, only without the vinegar. If she ended up going to Yale, you wanted her to burn the place down.

I knew I was starting to confuse Lily with Franny. Only, Lily wouldn’t fall for Lane. She’d fall for … Well, I had no idea who she’d fall for, or if he happened to resemble me.

We believe in the wrong things
, I wrote, using the same pen Boomer had used on his arm.
That’s what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We’re just so damn good at reading them wrong
.

I wanted to stop there. But I went on.

It’s not going to be explained to you in a prayer. And I’m not going to be able to explain it to you. Not just because I’m as ignorant and hopeful and selectively blind as the next guy, but because I don’t think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand it on your own. It’s like when you’re starting to read. First, you learn the letters. Then, once you know what sounds the letters make, you
use them to sound out words. You know that c-a-t leads to cat and d-o-g leads to dog. But then you have to make that extra leap, to understand that the word, the sound, the “cat” is connected to an actual cat, and that “dog” is connected to an actual dog. It’s that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning. And a lot of the time in life, we’re still just sounding things out. We know the sentences and how to say them. We know the ideas and how to present them. We know the prayers and which words to say in what order. But that’s only spelling
.

I don’t mean this to sound hopeless. Because in the same way that a kid can realize what “c-a-t” means, I think we can find the truths that live behind our words. I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don’t have the words for it, since we hadn’t yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily
.

My hands were starting to shake a little. Because I hadn’t known that I knew these things. Just having a notebook to write them in, and having someone to write them to, made them all rise to the surface.

There was the other part of it, too—the
I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody
. That was, I had to admit, less a concern to me. Because the rest of it seemed so much bigger. But I still had enough longing for that concept that I didn’t want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn’t want to tell Lily that I felt we’d all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soulmate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.

Too much. Too soon. Too fast. I put down the notebook, paced around the apartment. The world was too full of wastrels and waifs, sycophants and spies—all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect. Perhaps this was what was so unnerving about Lily at this moment—the trust that was required in what we were doing.

It is much harder to lie to someone’s face.

But.

It is also much harder to tell the truth to someone’s face.

Words failed me, insofar as I wasn’t sure I could find the words that wouldn’t fail her. So I put the journal down and pondered the address she’d given me (I had no idea where Dyker Heights was) and the ghastly Muppet that had accompanied it.
Do bring Snarly Muppet
, she’d written. I liked the ring of the
do bring
. Like this was a comedy of manners.

“Can you tell me what she’s like?” I asked Snarly.

He just snarled back. Not helpful.

My cell phone rang—Mom, asking me how Christmas Eve at Dad’s place was. I told her it was fine and asked her if she and Giovanni were having a traditional Christmas Eve dinner. She giggled and said no, there wasn’t a turkey in sight, and she was just fine with that. I liked the sound of her giggle—kids don’t really hear their parents giggle enough, if you ask me—and I let her get off the phone before she felt the urge to pass it over to Giovanni for some perfunctory salutations. I knew my dad wouldn’t call until actual Christmas Day—he only called when the obligation was so obvious even a gorilla would get it.

I imagined what it would be like if my lie to my mom was actually the truth—that is, if I was with Dad and Leeza right then, at some “yoga retreat” in California. Personally, I felt yoga
was something to retreat
from
, not
toward
, so the mental image involved me sitting cross-legged with an open book in my lap while everyone else did the Spread-Eagle Ostrich. I’d vacationed with Dad and Leeza exactly once in the two or so years they’d been together, and that had involved a redundantly named “spa resort” and me walking in on them while they were kissing with mud masks on. That had been more than enough for this lifetime, and the three or four after.

Mom and I had decorated the tree before she and Giovanni had left. Even though I wasn’t into Christmas, I did get some satisfaction from the tree—every year, Mom and I got to take out our childhoods and scatter them across the branches. I hadn’t said anything, but Mom had known that Giovanni deserved no part in this—it was just her and me, taking out the palm-sized rocking chair that my great-grandmother had made for my mother’s dollhouse and dangling it from a bow, then taking the worn-out washcloth from when I was a baby, its lion face still peering through the cartoon woods, and balancing it on the pine. Every year we added something, and this year I’d made my mother laugh when I’d brought out one of my younger self’s most prized possessions—a mini Canadian Club bottle that she’d drained quickly on a flight to see my paternal grandparents, and that I’d then proceeded to hold (in amazement) for the rest of the vacation.

It was a funny story, and I wanted to tell it to Lily, the girl I barely knew.

But I left the notebook where it was. I knew I could have buttoned my shirt, put my shoes back on, and headed to the mysterious Dyker Heights. But my gift to myself this Christmas Eve was a full retreat from the world. I didn’t turn on the TV. I didn’t call
any friends. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t even look out the windows. Instead, I reveled in solitude. If Lily wanted to believe there was a somebody out there just for her, I wanted to believe that I could be somebody in here just for me. I made myself dinner. I ate slowly, trying to take the time to actually taste the food. I picked up
Franny and Zooey
and enjoyed their company again. Then I tangoed with my bookshelf, dipping in and out again, in and out again—a Marie Howe poem, then a John Cheever story. An old E. B. White essay, then a passage from
Trumpet of the Swans
. I went into my mother’s room and read some of the pages she’d dog-eared—she always did that when she read a sentence that she liked, and each time I opened the book, I had to try to figure out which sentence was the one that had impressed itself upon her. Was it the Logan Pearsall Smith quote “The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star” from page 202 of J. R. Moehringer’s
The Tender Bar
or, a few lines down, the more simple “Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around”? From Richard Yates’s
Revolutionary Road
, was it “He had admired the ancient delicacy of the buildings and the way the street lamps made soft explosions of light green in the trees at night” or “The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he’d walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves”? On page 82 of Anne Enright’s
The Gathering
, was it “But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years
too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.” Or was it “I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met”?