Songs for a Teenage Nomad (4 page)

“You’re welcome,” I mouth back, a warm chill spreading through my body like bathwater as he’s swallowed up by the crowd.

***

My mother has become a vegetarian. It truly sinks in the Saturday after the football game when I wake up and discover our refrigerator full of soy dogs, tofu patties, and Rice Dream.

“Mom!”

“Yeah, sweetie?” Her voice emerges from the office-exercise room. She has Fleetwood Mac on, and Stevie Nicks sings “Gypsy.” I can hear my mother singing along, her voice high and airy—not like Stevie’s at all.

“Where’s the milk?”

She comes out of the room dressed in cobalt-blue yoga pants and a tight black T-shirt; she has a hand towel draped around her neck.

“I bought Rice Dream. It’s the same thing.”

No. It really isn’t.

“Umm. I like regular low-fat milk. And Golden Grahams.”

I check the cupboard. There are no Golden Grahams. I look at her. Wait for an explanation.

She bites her lip and mops her forehead with the towel.

“Golden Grahams are full of refined sugar, honey. They aren’t good for you.”

Refined sugar? It’s happening again.

“Mother.” She knows she is in trouble when I call her that. “We’ve lived here barely two months, and you’re already totally different.”

“Calle Lynn, that is not fair and not true.” I’m always ‘Calle Lynn’ when she is ‘Mother.’

With each new move, my mom gives her life a makeover. Which was fine before. It never changed my stuff really. But this is too much.

“Mother,” I say again. “In Los Angeles, it was facials, Pilates, and California cuisine. In Sedona, we communed with the energy of the vortex, and we hung crystals all over the house. In Sacramento, you developed an intense fascination with floral arrangements and color-coordinated furnishings.

“In San Diego, you surfed…no, you
bought
a surfboard and bleached your hair. You wore flip-flops to work. Now, you’re a vegetarian yogi, Mother. Which is fine—it’s fine. For you. I just want to wake up and have milk and Golden Grahams.”

I hear Rob come through the front door. He enters the kitchen, sweaty from a run. He stops, glancing back and forth between my mother and me. “What?”

I sigh. “Your wife is now a vegetarian. Look in the fridge.”

He does and then looks at my mom.

“Alyson?” Rob has a way of asking a question with almost every word he speaks. He often only speaks in one or two words. Very economical.

“So now I’m on trial for wanting to live a healthy lifestyle?” In every argument, my mother makes herself into the defendant. Maybe she should go to law school. Or stop watching those ridiculous court shows on TV.

“No trial.” Rob picks up a container of tofu from the top shelf and shakes it. It slides around in translucent-looking goo. He wrinkles his nose, replaces the container, and closes the refrigerator door. “No hamburger?”

“Red meat is horrible for you. Kelly at work gave me an article…it was horrible. You should read it.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I’m just trying to do what’s best for us as a family.”

Now I look like a jerk because I’m making a big deal out of this. It’s not like she’s murdered the old couple next door or something. She’s just…she’s just
her
. She
always
does this.

“Maybe we could also get regular milk? You can buy the organic kind. And normal cereal. No granola!”

She nods and puts her arms around me, smelling of jasmine oil. That’s something about my mom that never changes. She has always smelled like jasmine.

***

“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me…

Sitting bolt upright in my bed, I wait for the strains of the song to drain from me as the moonlit room replaces my dream. I pick up my clock so I can read it. I always place the bright green numbers face down on my nightstand or I can’t sleep. I look at it. 4:30 a.m. And it’s almost Monday. My alarm will go off for school in under three hours.

I shake my head and stare out the window. The moon, smug in the night sky, stares back. It’s been awhile since I dreamed about my Tambourine Man. Once I asked my mother about the song. I was twelve, and we were eating pancakes at an IHOP just off the I-5. I remember that she looked at me strangely, her eyes dark.

“I hate the Byrds,” she said. “Eat your pancakes.”

I don’t ask her anymore.

The song is gone now, but my heart still pounds. Something is seriously wrong with me. Sam said I am a strange girl. Those were his words. Strange. Girl. I scan my bookshelf. In the green glow of the clock I hold like a flashlight, I see Jane Austen, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and J. R. R. Tolkien cohabiting.

A teddy bear Red Mustang Ted gave me is stuffed between a book of world poetry I never read and a dictionary with all the Xs next to the words I look up. My CDs form flat plastic rows along the top shelf. I pause, my eyes on my music.

I listen to strange music.

I listen to my mother’s music. She loves Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen and Alicia Keys, and I breathe it in through her. Some of it’s mine, but my mom always seems to make it hers. She likes Taylor Swift a lot more than I do, even though I’m the one who bought the CD. And just last week, she took my Ingrid Michaelson disc and hasn’t given it back.

A girl in San Diego once told me that I like all the music her thirty-six-year-old brother likes. She wasn’t mean about it or anything; she just thought it was interesting that I didn’t listen to the same music as other kids did. And I don’t have an iPod or a cell phone. I have a
Walkman
. No one buys CDs anymore. And I don’t know any of the latest bands. Don’t know about podcasting or how to text message someone. No Facebook (Mom would freak!).

I’m strange.

I push the covers aside and walk silently to the front door, the dream already lost, my heart slow and rhythmic. I can hear Rob snoring, little putters that sound like a distant moped. I open the door and pad out in my socks to the edge of the street where I can just make out a thin band of the sea, still dark, even in the light of the moon. A strip of aluminum in the night. My socks are soon soaked.

My mother had me when she had just turned nineteen, which never seemed that unusual. But Alexa’s mom is forty-eight and Drew’s parents are over fifty. My mom was five years older than I am now when she had me. Maybe she and my dad met at a club where she was working. He was older, playing in a band. Maybe he wrote a song just for her.

My mom keeps two pictures in a side-by-side silver frame. In the first, she is pregnant with me. Her hair is dark, and she wears a man’s white T-shirt over her round belly. Maybe my father’s shirt. In the picture, she’s looking away and laughing, her hand settled over her belly, her dark hair spilling over her shoulders. The other picture is me three months old, round-faced and blinking after a bath, a towel draped over my head.

I never thought until now that my father must have taken those pictures. Said something to make her laugh. Dried me off after the bath with a blue-edged towel. And then he left, and my mom and I began our Ford tour of California. We had each other. And we had our music. Her music.

Sam said “strange girl.” Standing there in the chill, the sea air pawing its way into my hair, I know it’s my mother who makes me strange.

Island in the Sun

Mom storms out, door slamming…I should’ve known better than to ask about what happened with Dan, should’ve known she’d freak out. Needing to dream, hide, I play Weezer full blast; she’s no longer home to tell me to turn it down. The sky through my window is white sand. A bird sits on the sill; if I invite him in, I won’t be so alone…

Tabitha Daly’s two low pigtails stick out like handlebars. When she talks, they ticktock back and forth, a hypnotic clock. It distracts me, so I am not totally listening to her.

“Calle?”

“Hmm?”

“What symbol should we do for our society?”

Somehow I have ended up with a cool group for our English project. Sam’s in my group, much to Amber’s annoyance. I laughed when she got stuck with Caleb Wilkins. He doesn’t do anything but pick his nose and draw Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, in compromising positions on his plastic binder cover. Trey Carter is also in my group. He’s really funny but takes school seriously, so he won’t just expect the rest of us to do all the work. And Tabitha knows
everything
. She’s like the person version of Trivial Pursuit.

I’m lucky. A cool group and a cool project, as far as school stuff goes. Mr. Ericson wants us to “draw and analyze a symbol for our society.” We are going to be reading the novel
Animal Farm.
But first we’re going to analyze our own society on a symbolic level. We don’t know how to do it, but it seems like a cool project.

“Are we just going to look at the United States?” I ask. “Or more globally?”

Sam speaks up, something he never does in class. “We should focus on the United States as an island. Wait. Is an island a symbol?” He looks embarrassed.

Tabitha looks surprised. Sam’s a jock. Tabitha and her friends think that group has the IQ of a shoulder pad. I glance at his flushed cheeks. Maybe the jock image is just a cover. After all, it doesn’t always pay to be the smart kid in high school. Only so many of the smart kids get to hang on the fringes of popularity in the semi-popular student-council, honors classes crowd. And Tabitha and her friends have that market cornered.

“It could be,” she nods. “Do you mean in the way the United States isolates itself in its own gluttony?”

He shrugs. “It was just an idea.” The confidence I’m used to seeing in him seems to be hiding out in the letterman jacket slung over the back of his chair.

Trey leans forward. “No. It’s a good idea.”

I nod at him. “Really good. A lot of potential.”

There’s that Colgate smile. Like the sun. I remember what Emily said at the game. What’s sad about his family?

Tabitha sits straight up. “Hey. We could draw a big picture of the country as an island, separated from the rest of the world by its own corporate control systems—McDonald’s and Starbucks and Gap. We could play music clips to support our ideas.”

Trey starts to sketch a cartoon-like picture of the United States adrift in a choppy sea.

“Wow, Trey.” Sam peers over his shoulder at the Gap model emerging like a weed from the soil of the island.

The bell rings. Sam stands, collecting his binder. Amber is by his side before the bell finishes ringing. He gives a wave as she curls her arm through his and pulls him toward the door. At the door, he turns back to us.

“Maybe we should meet after school one day this week to pull it all together, like Thursday or something?”

Tabitha agrees for all of us.

Feeling my face flush, I gather up my binder and Walkman and meet Drew at the door, hoping he doesn’t notice my red face.

Another First Kiss

…the dock of the boardwalk is screaming with summer people in shorts and burned noses; my mother eats a caramel apple and smiles big and sloppy at me. A faraway radio plays They Might Be Giants as two people embrace on the curved moon of green grass near the boardwalk edge. Seeing them, my mother stops smiling and tosses the half eaten apple in a garbage can…

“I’m going to be late today,” I tell my mom. “I’m meeting a friend.”

“No set painting?” she asks, stretching out on the floor of the kitchen in her yoga tights.

“Alexa’s out of town for the weekend with her parents.” I slurp cereal from my duck bowl and watch my mom bend her head to her knee.

“That’s nice,” she says, muffled. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”

My eyes stray to the cabinet where I found my father’s picture.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you ever wonder where Dad is?”

She stops stretching and looks up at me. “He’s at work.”

“Not Rob. Dad. My father.”

I look at the soggy remains of my cereal in the bottom of the bowl, waiting. Outside, the fog is starting to thin, and I can just make out the tall eucalyptus tree in the neighbor’s yard.

She stands and grabs the towel she’d been sitting on.

“No, I don’t,” she says as she leaves the room. I rinse my duck bowl and go to school.

***

This afternoon the theater is dark inside, the set a strange ghost in shadows, sitting ready for opening weekend on Friday. Rehearsal’s not until five tonight. I wait for Sam outside, clutching our class poster. He missed class today, so I told him I’d show him our project.

“So let’s see the goods.” Sam walks up beside me, his backpack slung over his left shoulder. I unroll the picture and show him, pointing to the green A in the circle.

“Sweet,” he says, his eyes scanning Mr. Ericson’s response. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a perfect score on anything before. Good thing I got into a smart group.”

“You’re smart,” I say, taking the paper back and rolling it into a tube.

He shrugs. We stand for a moment in silence, waiting. It seems stupid now that we met here. I could have read him the comments over the phone.

“Do you have to go?”

“No,” I say quickly.

“Do you want to go for a walk or something?” Sam has a way of looking past my shoulder when he talks to me. Like he’s looking for someone. Maybe he doesn’t want people to see us talking. I feel nervous and strange in my sweatshirt, my baggy jeans.

I say, “What about Amber?”

I don’t really care about Amber, but it seems like something to say. She’s always hanging on him after class or passing him tiny notes folded into triangles branded with pink penned hearts and smiling faces.

“Amber and I don’t go out,” he says, this time looking at me, eyebrows raised. “We’re not together anymore. Besides, it’s just a walk. I’m not getting us a room.”

“I know.” I falter and look at my feet. They seem big in my shoes, clunky like battleships attached to the ends of my legs. Amber wears shoes that make her three inches taller and seem a part of her long, tan legs. Her lipstick matches her pink plastic sandals.

We don’t talk on the way out to the beach. Our feet move in time with each other, and I’m aware of the way he waits a little for me, slowing his natural pace. He’s wearing his grandfather’s letterman jacket; the wool is old and soft. Light hangs around the edge of his profile, a force field. I’m a girl with old sweatshirts and battleship feet and no lipstick at all. He is too cute to be walking with me.

“I really admire you, Calle,” he says, finally.

We stop at a rim of hardened sand that crumbles slowly onto the powdery beach. Tiny tufts of grass hang around, and there are shells, cracked and bleached white with sun. The sky is a thin colorless blue. I find it hard to believe that he would admire me. I feel plain and bulky and wrong in the salt air that breathes around us.

“Oh?” I don’t want to say something stupid, so I try not to say much.

He looks out at the sea. “You’re so smart, and you don’t care what other people think of you.”

“I care.”
I care very much what you think of me
, I want to say to him but don’t.

He sits down and motions for me to sit next to him, our legs dangling from the lip of sand. My stomach churns with nerves.

“What I mean is you’re not that stupid, manufactured pretty that the other girls are…you’re just your own pretty. You’re just you.” He looks at me sideways. “I admire that.”

“I’m not pretty.” I look straight ahead at the waves. The conversation seems unreal, something that should be happening to another girl. A girl on TV. Not to me.

“You’re pretty. And smart. And just…not like everyone else.”

I’m strange. I get it. We’ve established that.

“What’s your mom like?” he asks.

What a weird question to ask me. “She’s okay,” I say. “Very pretty and funny.” And not at all like me. “She makes some dumb choices in men, moves us around a lot. But she’s doing her best, I guess.”

“So you’re close.” He looks a little sad for a moment. He kicks at the sand with his heel and stares at the ocean.

“We sort of have to be,” I tell him. “It’s just us. I don’t have anyone else.”

“Dad?”

I tell him about my father.

“Do you ever wonder about him?” He moves his hand to cover mine; it’s warm like the sun on my face.

“One time,” I find myself telling him, “I found a newspaper clipping about his band.”

“He’s in a band?”

I nod, watching the light hit the water, sending small sprays of diamonds across the waves. “He’s a musician. Plays in a band called ‘Wonderland’—at least he used to. I found the clipping in one of my mom’s books.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“She wouldn’t say much. Just that she didn’t know if he was still playing. She took the article. We don’t talk about it. You know the funny thing is, until recently, I didn’t really think much of him. He was just…” I search for the right word. “He wasn’t real. Like a character from a movie you don’t notice. Like someone at another table in the restaurant where the main character is eating.”

Acutely aware of his hand on mine, I tell him the story. Our moves. My different schools. The Fords.

“How do you even deal with it?”

I watch a gull dive at the water and come up empty. “It’s just what we do. There’s this Indigo Girls song called ‘Leaving.’ Have you heard it?” He shakes his head. “In the song, the singer basically says that leaving is the only thing she knows how to do. That’s like us. It’s what we know.”

He nods. “I’ve lived here my whole life. Sometimes I wish I could just start over in a new place, a new life.”

“It has its benefits,” I tell him, looking out at the water, the sand, the calling gulls—the landscape of his whole life. The subject of my father seems closed. I’m relieved. How can I explain something that feels so uncertain, like sand slipping through my fingers?

“What about all your friends?” he asks. His hand is growing hot; it’s distracting me, dismantling me. I try to concentrate on his words as they come to me, but the air in my chest is tight.

“I have my journal and my headphones.” I laugh a little, a forced, nervous laugh, thinking of our hands, of the information I’ve so easily given him.

“A boyfriend?” He stops kicking the sand and looks closely at me.

A real laugh now. “Hardly.”

He looks surprised. “What about Eli? I always see you with him at school.”

I’m amazed that he notices me at school. “Nope,” I say. “Eli’s just a friend.”

“You listen to that CD player a lot.”

“It’s a way to pass the time, you know.” I don’t tell him that it’s so much more than that, the record of my days.

“If you’re so into music, you should get an iPod.”

Without thinking, I say, “We can’t really afford one.” Not wanting him to think we’re poor or something, I rush on. “Besides, my mom’s ex-boyfriend Ted gave me this. It’s the only thing I have of his.”

He nods. “So it’s special.”

“Yeah.” I give myself a mental kick for the ‘can’t afford it’ comment. So not cool.

“Who’s your favorite band?”

I shrug. “Don’t have one. My music taste is kind of all over the place. I like a lot of ’90s stuff, older than that even. I like a song if I can hear it again years later and still like it.”

“Me too,” he says. “But we’ve got to get some newer stuff on your playlist. Some Katy Perry or the Black Eyed Peas at least.”

My heart stirs. “Okay.”

We sit for a minute and soak in the sounds of the beach. I don’t tell him about “Tambourine Man” even though it’s tapping against the back of my mind, anxious to be shared. Then Sam takes his hand away, digs into his backpack, and produces a bottle of water.

“Thirsty?”

I shake my head. He takes a long drink. My hand feels light, like it could float away.

“Actually, yes.” I reach for the bottle and take a drink, wanting something to put my hand around. When my lips touch the rim, I realize that he just drank from it, that his mouth was here.

Before I can hand the bottle back, he leans into me. His kiss is water and salt and sun, and I only wish that there were music, so that someday I’ll remember this when I hear it play.