My Life in Dioramas (5 page)

He seemed to be thinking hard for a second, his eyes looking up and away at a point high on the wall. “On such short notice, I'm thinking fecal.”

“Gross.”

“You have Angus and Pants. And your neighbor's cows? The ones you're always complaining about, with the mooing and all.” He seemed mildly irritated but also amused. “I wasn't suggesting you . . . you know.” He nodded toward the door of the girls' bathroom.

I was probably blushing. “Of course not.”

“By the way,” he said. “I liked your scooter diorama a lot. You have a way with aluminum foil.”

“Thanks.”

He winced a little and scratched his neck. “They're really selling Big Red?”

“Trying to,” I said.

Naveen shook his head. “Where are you moving to?”

“I don't know.
They
don't know.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah.” I was
not
going to get emotional. “Anyway, like I said, I'm just going to try to . . .
delay
things a bit. Dance Nation is in June. If I make it to then, I'll be happy. I mean, not
happy
, but you know, I'll deal.”

He scrunched up his face. “What's Dance Nation?”

“Oh, at dancing school. We're competing as a troupe for the first time. It's going to be
amazing
. We've been asking to do it for years. I seriously can't believe it's happening.”

“Ah,” Naveen said. “So that's why you want to stay so badly? Here I was thinking it was because of, you know, me.”

“That, too,” I said, and nudged him with my elbow. Then we were off to our next class, where I sat right near Stella.

“Naveen's a genius,” I said.

She was drawing swirly doodles on the back of a folder. On closer inspection I saw they were the folds of the curtains of a stage, where a girl in a purple leotard stood holding a trophy.

“Can I see?” I asked, but she flipped the paper over, which was just as well.

I didn't want to talk about troupe or any of that, not if
Stella was going to get all worked up about it again. On the other side of the same page, she'd drawn the words
STELLA + TRIS
inside a heart. I didn't know where she got this stuff. I'd never even see her talk to Tris Culpberg.

“Just doodling,” she said. “So what's this about Naveen? You're finally going to admit that you have a crush on him?”

“No. For the
gazillionth time
. Why are you so set on me having a crush on somebody anyway?”

“Because it's what we're supposed to be doing.”

“According to . . .?” I looked around the room.

“Never mind, Kate.” She started to doodle another heart. “Why is Naveen a genius?”

So I explained about the fecal matter, and how I officially had a plan.

Or at least I thought I did.

Until Stella said, “I can't believe I'm going to stoop to your level, because it's totally disgusting, but how are you going to collect it? And where will you even put it?”

“I'll figure it out,” I said.

I had to.

6.

Like most of the people on
the planet, I liked Friday afternoons best of all.

Fridays were when my dad would whistle at five o'clock and open a beer and sit out back and ask me about my day and talk about weekend plans.

Fridays were when my mom cooked red sauce and meatballs.

Fridays were free and fun.

But when I came home, I didn't see any sauce on the stove. My dad was in the living room, looking through old records and playing “Semi” at low volume.

“Hey,” I said, plopping down on the couch.

Angus came over to greet me so I petted him on his head.

“Hey.” Dad turned an LP over to look at the other side.

“Where's Mom?” I listened as her sad, sad violin part kicked in while my dad sang the line,
“I'm passing that old farm again / I carry the same load as the last time.”

“Napping room,” he said, and he sang along softly,
“Don't ever think of you anymore. My mind's clear as the road.”

I listened.

I petted Angus some more.

“Why did you write a song about a long-distance truck driver?” I asked.

He shook his head and smiled. “I have no idea.” He was sorting records into crates and stopped for a second, then started shifting them again. “I guess I was writing about loneliness. Longing. Roads not taken. All that sort of stuff.”

“But you were like twenty-five when you wrote it, weren't you?”

“Twenty-seven,” he said. “Yes. And that's not too young to be lonely and longing for stuff.”

Miss Emma was twenty-seven. I knew what she longed for—a boyfriend, an actual dancing gig—but my dad? It was hard to imagine. “What were you longing for?”

“I don't know.” He looked up and out the window. “Love? Life?”

I saw Pants out the window, down by the tennis court, licking her front paws. Seeing her usually made me happy. But not today. “Do you still feel like that?”

“Do I feel
longing
?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Yeah, I mean. I guess. Doesn't everybody?”

I was longing for a lot of things right then. Or maybe just one thing. Power. Control over my own destiny.

My dad said, “But also, no, not really. I have you. I have your mother.”

“So then what do you long for?”

“I don't know, Kate.” He stopped shifting records again. “Time? The past?”

My mother's violin solo kicked in. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that those notes, those words, had come out of the minds and bodies of the people who were now my parents. “How did you even know you could write songs?” I asked.

“I didn't,” Dad said. “Until I did it.”

“Hey.” Mom came up the stairs, her hair all flat from sleep. Angus went over to nudge her hello and she bent to pet him.

She looked at me. “Kate, I need you to get started straightening up your room. The realtor wants minimal clutter.”

Studying her—her droopy eyes, her puffy lips—I was worried she was getting sick, or already was. “Are we having spaghetti and meatballs?” I asked.

“Yeah, they're in the fridge,” she said, heading into the kitchen. “I made the sauce this morning.”

She left the room and the song ended and I wasn't sure why, but I felt relieved.

I went upstairs and found a mostly empty box in my closet and started packing my glass animals. Starting with the elephant first felt right since it was the first one I'd bought. I'd always hated going to garage and barn sales with my parents, looking at all the old smelly stuff, until I'd found a small gray glass elephant a few years before. After that I hadn't minded trolling through other people's junk so much because I had a mission. It had been another few weeks before I found another glass animal, a flamingo. It was mostly clear but had enough pink glass blown inside that there was no mistaking it was a flamingo. Even though I'd never actually been on a plane before, it made me want to go to the nearest airport and buy a ticket to Florida or San Diego or wherever flamingos lived. Then came the frog and the poodle and the panda, and before long I had a whole mini mantel full of them.

Packing them made me sort of sad, but I didn't want somebody to knock one over and break it during the open house. Actually, I didn't even want anyone to know they existed or to know anything about me. So after I was done, I started to stash anything that had anything to do with
me
under my bed.

(Which first required me to go down to get the vacuum so I could get rid of some dead, dried-out stinkbugs under there. Gross!)

I took photos of me and Stella off my bulletin board.

I took the ballerina print over my bed off the wall.

I even flipped over my bedspread, an elaborate paisley
pattern that I adored, to the plain orange side on the reverse.

When the room finally looked like I'd never lived there, I went downstairs.

“That was fast.” My mom turned away from the stove, where she was stirring her sauce.

I took an apple slice from a bowl she had put on the table and couldn't think of the last time she'd actually gone to work. No wonder they couldn't pay their bills. “Any conferences or networking things this weekend?”

“Nope.” Still stirring her sauce.

“Seems like things have been slow.” I bit the apple and it was sour. She put lemon juice on them to keep them from browning, which was great when you were mentally prepared. Otherwise, not so much. “Shouldn't you be, like, asking for extra hours or something? Drumming up new business?”

She set her spoon down then crossed over to the sink to wash her hands.

“I need you to go out to the barn,” she said. “Make sure those kittens haven't made a mess. And you have some old ballet shoes out there, I think. Just try to tidy.”

I thought it was smart not to push on the topic of her not working very hard to save our house. I was going to take matters into my own hands, anyway.

“No problem,” I said.

When she left the room, I grabbed a Ziploc bag and a spatula, shoving the bags in my hoodie pocket and sticking
the spatula in the back of my jeans, just in case I got lucky and could collect some fecal matter this afternoon.

The barn was quiet and there were no signs of the kittens or any of their poop. They weren't idiots; they didn't poop where they slept. So I picked up my old ballet shoes and shoved them behind a few cans of paint on a shelf, and went out to walk around the yard. There had to be some fecal matter out there somewhere. But my first walk through the garden and along the stream turned up nothing. So I doubled back and crossed over one of the footbridges to the woods. Maybe there'd be some raccoon poop or deer droppings or anything.

No luck.

What had I become? Scouting out the yard for poop?

I ended up on the old metal bench by the pear tree, watching the stream. It was really running fast, and I closed my eyes and listened and then opened them again and watched the way the light played on the water, making the stream seem like a living breathing thing, a part of me.

A part of me worth fighting for.

I had to figure out my plan for real.

I needed exact logistics.

I needed help.

So I went inside and texted Stella and Naveen.
I need help! Operation Save Big Red summit—10am Truxton Pond.

My mother was vacuuming the wooden ceiling beams in the living room. She shouted over the loud hum, “I thought
we'd go roller-skating! On Sunday! What do you think?” She used her foot to turn off the vacuum. “Your father said he'll take Angus over to Joe's and help out with some odd job. So it'll be just us girls.”

“Sounds fun.” Under normal circumstances it would be, particularly for my dad, who loved to help our elderly neighbor Joe with projects, just to hear crazy old stories. “Can I ask Stella?” I asked, because I always did.

My mom looked at me for a second, turned the vacuum on, and said loudly, “Sure!”

I got roped into some vacuuming and boxing up of clutter in the living room. Then I was sent out to the back porch to stash random stuff like old candles and bug spray and gardening gloves. A slight breeze blew while I collected everything and my mother's wind chimes rang out a random, joyous melody that made me think of churches and Christmas. They were part metal and part wood with a green stone of some kind hanging from the main string. My dad had given them to my mom for her birthday a bunch of years ago, and I'd seen her blow gently on them before sitting down with her iced coffee or tea a million times. On cloudy days the green of the pendant looked like a deep emerald but on sunny days like this one, it lit up like a green sun in some faraway galaxy. Looking at it now made my heart hurt.

Before my mother could come up with any more jobs
for me, I went downstairs and started a diorama of my bedroom. I wanted to capture it as it looked before I'd stripped it of all personality—just in case I never had the chance to put my stuff back for real.

I couldn't make glass animals small enough so I just made a little mantel and bed. I colored a braided rug and tried to make Angus, this time out of cotton balls and some beige yarn. I put him at the foot of the bed and the whole thing looked so cozy that I wanted to just climb in.

When I was done, I headed for the stairs, but I heard my parents talking. My dad was saying, “We've been through difficult things before.” And my mom said, “This feels different.
I
feel different, like I can't handle it.”

I backed away and just stood there, outside the napping room.

Dad said, “Think you need to talk to someone?”