Everybody Sees the Ants (7 page)

“Granddad!” I whisper-yell. “Psst!”

No one answers. The ants ignore me, too.

I adjust my eyes to the dark night and see familiar pool things: the diving board, the slide and the big oak tree. I look down at my body. I am the muscular dream-me, which is a relief. If I can’t escape the Freddy pool, at least I can escape the real me at the Freddy pool. I decide to take a night swim. I decide to start with a perfect front flip, which I have never achieved in real life. I go to the board and bounce several times and do a perfect one-and-a-half.

In the pool, under the water, I feel I
belong
here. Like this is
my
pool. I do a lap of freestyle and a few laps of breaststroke. I figure since I’m in a dream and I just did a one-and-a-half, I
might as well try the butterfly, too. I do a butterfly lap that would make Mom proud.

When I get into the shallow end and I stop to catch my breath, there is applause. It’s Granddad. He’s missing his left leg this time. This makes me remember that I am at war. I reach up to my cheek and I feel my own wound, sticky and fresh, and hop out of the pool, dry myself and make my way back to the pit. This booby trap is definitely not part of the primary objective, but this is guerilla shit now. Fuck the rules. Fuck the strategy. Fuck the rescue. Nader must die.

Granddad points to the pit. “You planning to trap someone?”

I nod.

“You know that probably won’t go down well around here, right?” When he says that, he’s wrestling with a rotten tooth, and he rips it right out of his gums and tosses it over the fence and into the road.

I say, “I’m just doing my job.” Then I walk over to the roll of thin sod I’ve prepared to cover the hole and I drag it into place.

At this, Granddad disappears. I face the Tupperware container and the pit. As I slip into it for the last time, I think of Granddad’s reasoning. This is a dream, right? I’m not really at the pool making a booby trap for Nader to fall into and die, am I? Did Granddad disappear because he’s ashamed of me?

I put on the gloves and grab the Tupperware container. I pop the lid off, and the smell is awful. I retch. I smear a little bit onto every spike and then toss the container and the gloves
to the bottom of the pit. I get out and roll the sod over the top, carefully smoothing it over the hole. I tell the ants in the grass to run or else they’ll drown. They go back to smoking on the concrete. I take the hose that they use to fill the baby pool and spray down the sod so it doesn’t dry out and look wrong.

As I walk home in the dark, I can see Granddad hopping on his remaining leg about a hundred yards in front of me, but I can’t reach him no matter how fast I run.

•   •   •

“Lucky?”

It’s Mom. She’s waking me up. We’re home.

“It’s too hot to sleep in the car. Come on. Come inside.”

When she gets out, I stay in the backseat for a minute. My hair is still wet from my dream swim. My hands smell of latex. I sit up and look at my face in the rearview mirror, and I wince when I see it.

When I get inside, Dad doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t look at me, either, when Mom waves a packet of paper at him. Airplane tickets. “We’re going to Tempe for a few weeks. We’re going to get Lucky away from this kid, and while we’re gone you’re going to do something about it.”

I say, “Tempe? Arizona? In July? Can’t we just stay here?”

“I didn’t just pick the idea out of thin air,” Mom says. “I want to see my brother and get out of here for a while. Plus, I think it’ll do you some good.” She means that we don’t know any other people who have a pool in their backyard for her squid to swim in.

“I think it’ll do you both some good,” Dad says.

She shoots him a look that makes him focus on the floor and shut up. This isn’t just about me. Or Nader. Or her wanting to see her brother. This is about them… only I’m getting blamed for it.

“I know it’s a little last minute, but it’s happening, so let’s pack,” she says to me.

Dad sighs.

I sigh.

She sighs.

The ants sigh.

I offer the most positive thing I can say, even though I frown while I say it. “This could be good, I guess. I’ve always wanted to get to know Uncle Dave.”

Mom
and I arrive at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, and she won’t let me on the moving sidewalks. “No point in rushing. Our bag won’t be ready yet, anyway,” she says. We brought one case of clothing because we only have one suitcase and didn’t have time to buy another one before we left. Mom put a big
X
on it in yellow tape so we’d know it was ours when we got here.

Once we find our luggage-collection point, Mom puts me in prime grabbing territory and keeps an eagle eye on the rotating luggage. We watch as suitcase after suitcase arrives, and don’t say anything. Mom looks tired.

“Lori! Lori! Lori!”

The voice sounds like a bird that got hit by a truck. Squawking. Insufferable. Mom winces a little.

“Jodi! Hey!”

They hug. Aunt Jodi nods at me. Her double chin multiplies when she does this. I nod back. I’m frowning, as usual—plus it’s pretty hard to move your face when you’re building a scab the size of a pancake on your cheek. Aunt Jodi scowls at my scab as though I brought it to annoy her. She doesn’t say, “Nice to meet you,” the way most people would when meeting someone—like a nephew they never met before.

“That’s it,” Mom says, squinting and pointing to a suitcase with a yellow
X
. (The yellow
X
which is completely unnecessary, considering our suitcase is from 1985 and luggage has come a long way since then.)

“You only brought one bag?” Jodi asks as I lug it off the conveyor. “God, when Dave and I went to Mexico last year, I took one bag just for my shoes!”

“I’m not a shoe person,” Mom answers, monotone.

“Well, yeah. That’s obvious.”

Mom is wearing the only pair of sandals she owns. A pair of black Birkenstocks with rusty buckles. I’m suddenly especially proud of her for not being a shoe person.

Aunt Jodi is staring at my scab. I know this because I can feel her staring at it, even though I’m not looking at her. She whispers to Mom, “Is he okay? He looks awful!”

Mom blows her off—a sign that she’s already mentally in Jodi’s backyard pool doing laps.

When we walk out of the airport, it’s as if we have walked into a pizza oven. I feel like a pie, baking. It’s insane. I can’t even sweat. My eyeballs are hot and dry. My lips become
chapped before we even get to the parking lot. My scab puckers.

Once we’re in the car with the air-conditioning blasting, Aunt Jodi talks annoyingly about tourist attractions, as if this is the reason we’re here, when we all know it isn’t. Halfway to the house she turns on news radio and shuts up. When we get there, Uncle Dave hugs me and then holds me at arm’s length and gives my scab an evil look.

I only met Dave once before, three years ago. He and Mom are only siblings, and they look alike—same hair and cheekbones. He came to see us while he was in Harrisburg on business for a week, but I was twelve and stayed in my room a lot. Now he’s saying, “Can’t wait to show you my weight room,” and “You watch baseball?” These comments make me confident that the next three weeks might not suck nearly as much as I thought they would back at the airport. At least we’re not talking about bullshit like how beautiful desert sunsets are or the plethora of tourist attractions that the scabbed pronoun in the backseat would love.

After brief welcomes, Aunt Jodi shows us around. It’s a one-story house with a long hallway back to Jodi and Dave’s bedroom. The room across the hall is filled with various hobby items—a sewing machine, a treadmill, a scrapbooking table and Jodi’s home computer, which is so old it must have two megs of RAM, tops. The floor is crammed with stacks of magazines. Mostly tabloids, like
People
and
Us
. Our room—the guest room, with two twin beds, a dresser and its own bathroom—is right off the living room/kitchen area.

“Please don’t move any of the furniture,” Jodi says. “It’s all in the right place to move positive energy around the house. If there’s anything you two need right now, it’s positive energy, right?” She says this like a kindergarten teacher. As if her feeble attempt at feng shui will rebuild our family, cure my dad’s turtle-itis and maybe even heal my scab. Mom excuses herself and goes into the guest bathroom.

I heave the suitcase onto Mom’s bed and stare at Aunt Jodi until she gets the message. “I’ll give you some space,” she mutters, and waddles into the hallway. I close the door gently behind her and flop onto my bed.

Mom emerges from the bathroom with her swimsuit on and her towel draped over her right arm. While she swims and talks to Aunt Jodi, who sits on the side of the pool dangling her feet in the water, I turn on the TV in the living room and check to see whether Jodi and Dave get the Food Channel, but they don’t. I go back to my bed and take a short nap, careful not to turn onto my right side so I don’t stick to the pillowcase.

Can I call it a nap if I don’t really sleep? Can I call it a nap if all I do is lie here and listen to the ants in my head saying things like:
Dude, this place sucks. You’re perfectly matched. Maybe you should move here. We could rename it the Pussy State just for you
.

It’s hard to believe that technically, only a few hours ago, I was getting my ass kicked by Nader McMillan outside the men’s room at the Freddy pool. After a while, I get up and inspect my scab in the guest room mirror for the first time. It’s
dried into a sore, ugly, rucked-up plateau. Parts are cut more deeply than others. I swear he nearly revealed the peak of my cheekbone. No doubt I’ll scar and remember Nader every day of my life when I look in the mirror.

On a lighter note, it’s the exact shape of Ohio. Like—identical. My eyeball is floating lazily on Lake Erie. It’s thinking of going water-skiing later.

For dinner we eat food that tastes like we are visiting an old folks’ home. The green beans are mushy. The chicken is covered in powdered soup mix and tastes like one big chemical. The milk is skim and blue. I suddenly miss my father. He may not say much or stick around when we need him, but the man can cook.

“We can’t wait to take you two to the Grand Canyon!” Jodi says at dinner.

“You’re gonna love it, Lucky,” Dave adds. “It’s a life-changing place.”

Great. No pressure, guys.

The conversation—or should I say monologue—moves from tourist sites to Dave’s crazy work schedule to Jodi and her seven new diets, which aren’t working. She talks about how she can’t exercise because of the ailments—a bad back, sore knees, breathing difficulties—all caused by her weight gain. She says she read in one of her magazines that people like her die young. She read in another that people like her go on disability and get to use the handicapped parking spots. She read in
Us
about the master cleanse diet, where you don’t
eat anything but just drink lemonade for two weeks. “Like that’s even possible,” she says.

Mom offers, “One of the girls I swim with in the winter does that master cleanse thing every year.”

Jodi looks at her. “So?”

“Uh. I don’t know. I mean, it works for her, but you know, not everyone can do it. I mean, uh.” I’ve never seen Mom this awkward. “I couldn’t, that’s for sure.”

Things go silent for about a zillion minutes. No one talks about my Ohio scab or my mother’s amazing butterfly stroke. No one talks about food.

Jodi eventually says, “Lucky, I see you put clothing on the floor under the window. I put the little table next to the dresser for that.”

“Thanks. But I’m cool with it being under the window.”

“But that will mess up the energy,” she says, a golf ball–sized lump of mushy green beans in her cheek.

I decide, even though I know all about feng shui from a book Mom has, to play stupid. “What energy?”

“The chi,” she says while chewing.