The Art of Crash Landing (13 page)

W
hen Tawny and I pull up outside the house, I'm pleased to note the absence of JJ's truck next door. Maybe he's out harassing someone else. Maybe he's in his shop fixing my car for free. Maybe he's finally run one stop sign too many and is in the hospital in traction. Hey, a girl can dream.

“You got those funny dogs inside?” Tawny says.

Surprised, I look over at her, but she doesn't meet my eyes.

“Yeah. Want to come in and play with them?”

Still looking away, she shrugs, saying, “Whatever.” She hesitates, probably weighing the ramifications of letting me see her be friendly, and then finally she turns off the truck, grabs her backpack, and hops out.

“The keys . . .” I say.

“Who'd steal it?”

The dogs are thrilled to see her, ecstatic. Thing One hops up and puts his front paws on Tawny's knees as she leans down to ruffle his ears. Thing Two spins in circles stopping every third turn to nudge the girl's hands. They like me okay, but they love
her. Of course they also love to lick their asses, so I'm not sure how much to read into this display of affection.

“They love me,” she says.

I reply, “Whatever.”

I excuse myself and go upstairs to change out of my librarian costume. Barefoot, in a T-shirt and jeans, I return to the living room dressed as myself. Tawny is sprawled on the sofa with both dogs in her lap. She is holding a beer.

“Where did you get that?”

“In the fridge,” she tells me.

I don't remember seeing beer in the refrigerator, but I didn't exactly look for it. I'm trying to visualize my grandmother—her closet filled with tweed—tossing back a longneck.

I sit in the chair next to the sofa. “How old are you?”

“Old enough,” she says, effectively telling me that she is not of legal drinking age. I decide not to respond—I'd like to keep the conversation away from the wadded or unwadded state of my underpants.

The girl reaches in her bag, brings out the yearbooks and sets them on the coffee table. Then she pulls out a pack of Marlboros. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Yes.”

With some eye rolling she returns the cigarettes to her backpack. It's almost physically painful to watch her heavy-handed efforts to be cool.

“So you've been here before.”

“Why would you say that?” She's petting a dog with each hand.

“You knew the dogs—”

“I knew
of
the dogs.”

“You knew how to get to the house without any directions, you knew there was beer in the refrigerator . . .”

We stare at each other for several seconds. I win.

“I came once with Fritter when your grandmother was sick.”

This brings up a question I've been wanting to ask someone. “I was wondering . . .” I try to keep my voice casual. “Did my grandmother die here? In this house?”

Tawny grins. “Scared of ghosts?”

“Just curious.”

I lean over and pick up her beer. It's cold all right, and it looks untouched. I wonder if Tawny only opened it to bolster the I-belong-in-juvie image she's going for. I take a tentative sip. Fuck. It's awful. I scoot a coaster over and set the sweating bottle on the cork.

Tawny puts her feet up on the coffee table. The smaller, stinkier dog takes the cue and walks out onto her legs and lies down, facing the table.

“You've got the wrong end of that dog pointed at you,” I tell her.

She reaches out to scratch him just above the tail. He squirms with delight and stretches his back legs further out.

“About that room upstairs with the orange light . . .” Tawny says.

“The darkroom.”

“It's for making pictures, right?”

I nod. “My mom must have set it up when she lived here. She was a photographer.”

Tawny gives the dog's rump another scratch. “What does she do now?”

“Nothing. She's dead.”

Tawny picks up the beer. I watch her face as she tips it back and takes a swallow. She grimaces.

“So we have something in common,” the girl says, setting the beer on the wood, not on the coaster. Her look dares me to move it back to the coaster, but I just smile and lean back in my chair. What the hell do I care?

“Your mom died, too?” I ask.

“No. But she does nothing. I wish she was dead.”

A small space opens up in the conversation. Tawny pets the dogs, the beer sweats on the table, and I think about how much I loved my mother and how much I hated her. How much I wish I could go back and do things differently. I could try to explain it to Tawny, tell her how it feels from this side, but I won't. People like Tawny and me never understand anything until it's too late.

“The photography thing is cool,” Tawny says. “In the old movies where they swish the paper in the water and pictures magically appear.”

“There's no such thing as magic,” I tell her, and it's the truth.

She keeps a casual tone in her voice, but it's obviously forced. “Do you know how to do it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you teach me?”

I can think of nothing I would rather not do. “First you have to take pictures with a regular camera that uses film, not a digital one.”

“Do you have a regular camera?”

Upstairs, in the corner of my mother's room, sits the camera bag I brought with me. One of the things inside that bag is my mother's old 35mm Nikon.

“No,” I say.

“Bummer.” Tawny sighs and takes another shot at becoming a beer drinker. This attempt looks no more successful than the last.

The fat Winston noses the girl's arm until she sets down the bottle and turns her attention back to him, scratching him under his chin and behind his ears. The little dog grunts with pleasure.

Tawny smiles. “I had a dog,” she says.

“What kind?” I'm not particularly interested, but it's something to say.

“Just a mutt.”

I ask the next appropriate question. “What happened to it?”

She shrugs. “My mother's new husband isn't a dog person. They told me my dog ran away, but I'm not stupid.”

“Oh man . . . I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, well fuck 'em.” She gives each dog a pat on the rump and then sets them carefully on the floor. “I'd better get going.”

I don't want to do it, but the thing about her dog got me feeling sorry for the girl. “Look, there are a bunch of old negatives upstairs,” I tell her. “I could show you how to make a print from one of those. That's what you're thinking of. When you put the paper in developer, and the picture appears.”

Her face lights up, and for a second she almost looks like the kid she is. “Cool!”

“We need paper and chemicals. Is there a photography store in town?”

“There are still lots of bottles up there.”

I pause, surprised that she looked around the darkroom long enough to have noticed the containers stored under the desk. “Fresh would be better.”

“I'll buy some. I've got money.”

She stands, so I stand. I'm already regretting my offer to print the negatives, but when she promises to pick me up for work in the morning, I can see that it's in my best interest to not piss off this teenager.

“She didn't, you know,” Tawny tells me.

“Who didn't what?

“The old lady didn't die here. She went to the hospital and died there.”

“Good,” I say. “Thanks.”

Tawny smiles. “No ghosts.”

I look around at the room, at the yearbooks, the sewing machine, the piano. “I don't know about that,” I reply.

S
ometimes it's not possible to tease out the beginning of the end, to find the origin of a break, to know whose finger knocked over the very first domino.

But sometimes it is.

The summer I turned seventeen three things happened, and they happened in this order: my mother came home from a ninety-day stay in rehab, Queeg bought her a 1978 Chevy Malibu, and I broke her heart.

H
er stay in an inpatient facility had been at Queeg's insistence, but I think it was a relief for us all, even my mother. For the first year of their marriage, she'd managed to hide the extent of her drinking problem, but eventually Queeg couldn't help but notice how quickly the booze disappeared and how often my mother was either enraged or incapacitated. Finally, Queeg threatened to leave if she didn't quit drinking, so she packed her bags, he took out a loan, and they found a place called Meadowbrook with an open bed.

After all that drama, it stands to reason that their third wedding anniversary, falling as it did only a week after my mother's release from rehab, would have a giddy over-the-top quality for all of us, especially Queeg. He woke us up early that June morning, urging us to come outside. There in the driveway sat the Malibu with its flaking blue paint and patches of rust. Queeg had stuck a silver bow on the middle of the hood. When I pulled it off, it brought a chunk of paint with it.

I remember being surprised by how much my mother loved both the car itself and the fixer-upper aspect of it. Newly sober, she had too much time on her hands and she seemed thrilled at the prospect of a project. We were quickly assigned roles—Queeg was in charge of getting the engine running, and my mother would remake the shabby upholstery. Me? I ended up in charge of everything else. Laundry, cooking, cleaning—it all fell on my resentful seventeen-year-old shoulders.

While my mother was at Meadowbrook, Queeg had purged the house of alcohol, searching for and finding all of her stashes, except one. He never checked behind the dryer, and I never pointed out the unopened bottle of gin tucked in that dusty corner. Was it because I planned to swipe the booze someday to take to a party, or was I leaving it there to test my mother? At the time I told myself it was the former, but in retrospect I think it was the latter. All summer I checked on that bottle at least once a week. The lint surrounding it disappeared, making it clear that my mother knew it was there, however the seal remained unbroken. Perhaps she left it there as a test as well. Or an insurance policy.

For the most part, my memories of those two months are happy ones of a peaceful but messy home—the mess a result of my negligence and of my mother's insistence on making tuck-and-roll upholstery for the car. Scraps of leatherette littered every surface, and the ancient heavy-duty sewing machine she bought for the job
took up the entire coffee table. Only someone who wanted a piece of sewing-machine needle in her foot went barefoot in the house that summer.

Toward the middle of August, the Malibu was looking good. Thanks to a $99 check to Earl Scheib, the car was candy-apple red, and thanks to my mother and Queeg, the black tuck-and-roll upholstery was installed and the engine rumbled in an even pitch. I can still smell the fresh rubber of the seats, the lemony shampooed carpet. And the day it was finally finished, even though it was much too hot to be outside, we headed for the beach.

When I think about that afternoon—and I do think about it—I always slow the memory down at the same spot, a moment polished smooth from years of fond handling. The three of us unpacking the car and then shuffling through the sand. I can still feel the tingle of the impossibly hot sun on my skin, still smell the soft, salty air. I looked over at my mother walking next to me, holding the other handle of the red cooler we carried between us. Her eyes met mine and she smiled. She was squinting in the sunlight, her face full of happiness.

But tides rise and fall, and one domino tips into the next and again, and again: click, click, click . . .

There's no stopping time, not even when it's in the past. Even that afternoon at the beach, my favorite memory, has no choice but to tip over into all that came next.

I
follow Tawny to the foyer and hold on to the Winstons' collars as she opens the door and steps out. Blocking the dogs' exit with a foot, I squeeze out behind her.

JJ is in the front yard, looking inside the cab of the old truck. Tawny walks toward him and I follow.

He looks up as we approach. “You ever clean this out?”

“Screw you,” the girl replies.

“Don't you know there's a city ordinance prohibiting public eyesores?”

“Then you'd better get inside your house before someone sees your ugly face.”

They both laugh.

“I take it you've already been introduced,” I say.

They turn and look at me as if they just noticed my presence. JJ's smile disappears.

Tawny nods, still grinning, and says, “Unfortunately.” She climbs up into the truck. “So long, fartknocker,” she says, presumably to JJ who is, surely, a fartknocker, whatever that is.

“Later, runt,” he replies.

She cranks the truck, leaning a little hard on the starter, making both JJ and me flinch at the squeal. The truck trundles down the street, shuddering a little as she shifts into second, and then she turns left at the corner and is gone.

Suddenly it's weird to be standing here in the yard with JJ. I try for friendly. “So, how do you two know each other?”

Friendly doesn't work.

“You come up with any money?”

“Not yet.”

“The parts will be in by this afternoon. I'll have the car ready tomorrow.”

“You went ahead and ordered them? I thought I had to pay first.”

He laughs. “I figure it'll be my car before long, anyway.”

“Why would you say that?”

“There's an abandoned vehicle ordinance . . .”

“You wouldn't dare.”

“Thirty days, lady.”

“Come on . . .”

“My offer to buy it still stands. Of course, it's getting lower every day.”

“I already told you that the car was my mom's,” I say.

“And I still don't give a shit.” JJ turns and walks away.

“Why do you have to be such a jerk?” I ask his retreating back. He doesn't answer. “And stop throwing your cigarette butts in my yard,” I add.

JJ stops on his porch and looks back at me. I'm waiting for his response, which will be, I presume, either a gesture of the one-finger variety or a few words of the four-letter variety, but instead he just smiles and walks into his house. An entirely unsatisfying reply.

Back inside, I dump some kibble in the dog bowls, and then get on my phone to find a local photography store. With a quick call, I establish that they sell what we'll need, so I write down the address for Gandy Graphix, and then get back on my phone for another quick search. It has occurred to me that although my car can sit at JJ's for twenty-eight more days doing nothing more tragic than gathering additional rust and a slightly funkier smell inside, my other issue is more pressing. I may be too stupid to avoid getting knocked up, but I'm not stupid enough to wait until it's too late to do anything about it.

I find a local women's clinic and make the call, hoping that someone is still answering phones at five twenty-five. Although the receptionist, in her aggressively ivy-league accent, offers me an appointment in two weeks, I start making up dire symptoms until I manage to get an appointment tomorrow afternoon. I scribble down the address and ask for directions.

“Will you be arriving via public transportation? I can give you directions from the bus stop,” she says.

I consider my options and then smile, remembering Tawny's truck with its ugly paint and its beautiful keys left dangling from the ignition.

“No thanks,” I reply. “I'll be arriving via public eyesore.”

I
rummage through the dusty, stale contents of the pantry and then look in the freezer: Five Cheese Cannelloni, Four Cheese Rigatoni, Three Cheese Chicken, Double Cheese Enchiladas. The options don't excite me, but they do explain the jumbo jar of Metamucil by the sink. Sigh.

After spending a few minutes microwaving and then choking down some freezer-burned cannelloni, it occurs to me that I have another long evening ahead with only basic cable and two squatty
dogs for entertainment. I walk to the front window and look outside. A faint haze of cloud cover edges everything toward sepia and softens the lengthening shadows. There's plenty of light to go for a walk.

The instant I pick up their leashes, Fred and Ginger begin a crazed scrambling dance at my feet and by the time I manage to grab each squirming dog and clip leash to collar, I'm sweating and cursing. Outside, they immediately begin to pull me, sled-dog style, down the hill toward the park, which is fine with me because that's where I'm going anyway. They're gasping, strangling themselves as they strain against their collars. For dumpy little freaks they've got some spunk.

Somebody is grilling, and the smell of meaty smoke makes my mouth water and fills me with envy. There's a sprinkler in the yard across the street, tick, tick, ticking its way in a lazy arc. JJ's truck is in his driveway but he's nowhere in sight. Thank God. He's got his windows open and his stereo playing classical piano music. Hmmm. The banjo suited him better.

At the bottom of the hill, where we cross the street to get to the park, the dogs notice a lump in the center of the road, and they drag me closer to investigate. It's a turtle, head and legs drawn in at our approach. There's a car coming, so I pick the turtle up, careful to grab him well away from his head. Once we're all under the trees I set him down in a grassy spot that looks appealing, at least what I think a turtle might find appealing.

He pushes his leathery head and legs out of his shell, then looks up, opens his mouth and hisses a warning. His pursed beaky little face and bad attitude remind me of my tenth-grade history teacher, Mr. Newcomb. He was a cranky old man who'd lost whatever love he once had for teaching. Day after day he endured our inattention, our halfhearted efforts, our murmured laughter when he turned to write on the board. If you'd asked me about him back
then I would have told you how much I disliked the man, but now all I feel is pity. He was miserable in his job, probably miserable with his whole damn life. The dogs tug at their leashes, trying to approach the turtle, but I pull them away from him and back to the asphalt path. Poor old Mr. Newcomb has had enough.

T
here's an interesting cross-section of humanity on the trail. Joggers with their short-shorts and earbuds, other dogs dragging their owners, families on bikes, elderly people, androgynous in primary-colored windbreakers that whisper with each swing of their arms.

The Winstons and I weave and dodge along, making good time, and before long the trail dips down to follow a creek. The brush is thick along the bank, and in it I hear the crickets start their evening song. Up ahead is a playground with tall metal swings and a wooden climbing fort with gravel beneath. Just past the playground the path splits. One half goes up a steep hill to a bridge next to the main road; the other half continues to follow the creek under the bridge. There are no kids in the playground, but there is a balding man sitting alone on a bench, reading a newspaper.

I give the creeper a wide berth and lead my pigs up the path to the street level to look around and get my bearings. The hill is steeper than it first appeared and I'm panting along with the dogs by the time we reach the street. I stop and take a few deep breaths.

I'm happy to see that I know where I am; the distinctive spire of Father Barnes's church looks to be not more than three or four blocks away. I'm less happy to see a small child sitting on the bridge railing on the far side of the road. Of course, the good news is that this probably means the bald guy at the playground is her father and not some random child molester, but the bad news is that this little kid is going to kill herself if she's not careful.

I drag the Winstons across the street. She hears us coming and twists her body to watch our approach.

“You'd better get down,” I say.

The girl is stocky and wearing jean shorts and a red shirt with a picture of some cartoon character I don't recognize. Judging by the brown smudges covering her cheeks, chin, and the front of her shirt, she has had a recent close encounter with something chocolate.

“Or what?” she replies.

“You might fall.”

“So what? It wouldn't hurt.”

I look over the railing, down at the rocky slope on one side of the shallow creek and the sidewalk on the other. The ground is much farther away than I expected. I've heard it said that there are two types of falls: the ones that solve all your problems, and the ones that cause you more. I suspect the distance to the culvert below is right at the sweet spot. It could go either way.

“You're wrong,” I tell her. “It would hurt a lot.”

She swings one leg back on this side of the railing. “What are their names?” She's looking at the dogs who are wriggling from head to toe in happiness at the sight of her. Obviously they have a higher opinion of small bratty children than I do.

“Ben and Jerry. Want to pet them?”

She clambers down from her perch to kneel on the sidewalk next to them. “Their names are like the ice cream,” she tells me. “I like chocolate ice cream.”

“So I see.”

“My name is Shandy, like the drink, or that's what my dad says, but my mom says it's short for Shannon but when you say it it's not any shorter so I don't know why, but my dad likes to call me Shandy anyway.” She stops and takes a breath, finally.

“Is that your dad down there at the playground?”

“Yeah, we had to come here because when he got home my mom told him that she needed a break and so he should bring me here and play with me, which is good because the park is nice but mostly when we're here he just reads.”

“I can see that.” The dogs have finished cleaning the girl's face and have started in on her shirtfront. “Well, Shandy,” I say, “it's been nice to meet you, but—”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Are you a mom?”

I now see why this girl's mother needed a break. I'm tired of her, and we've been talking for less than a minute. “No.”

“You know what? You don't have to be married to have a baby. How it works is that the man has a banana, and milk comes out of it and gets all over a lady's eggs and inside her stomach the eggs turn into a bun in the oven except that it gets way bigger more like a watermelon.”

Wow. I'm not sure what to say at this point, so I ask the obvious question, “Is your dad a grocer?”

“No, he's a funeral director which means that he takes care of dead people, but he says that he likes the job because it's quiet which makes sense because he's always telling me and my mom that he needs some peace and quiet in the house. Have you ever seen a dead person?”

“No,” I tell her and it's true, though I wish it weren't. What we don't see with our eyes, we see in our minds. I know my mother looks worse in my imagination than she really did on that steel table, but knowing something isn't the same thing as believing it.

“My dad lets me come to work with him sometimes,” the girl is saying, “and you know what?”

I don't bother to respond. She's going to tell me anyway.

“Dead people are colder than you think and they're hard, which means that people are more like bread than fruit because old bread gets hard but old fruit gets soft.”

We're on the food again. Maybe she's hungry. “So your dad lets you touch dead people?”

“He tells me not to but it's no big deal because it's not like they care and mostly I just sit in his office and play on the computer but once I got to see him put clothes on a dead person and do you know what? They cut the back open and just put it on and don't close the back so the dead person is really naked on the bottom.”

I'm all for Take Your Daughter to Work Day, but this kid can't be older than seven and she knows more about corpses than I do. “How old are you?” I ask.

“Old enough,” she replies.

“I've heard that once today already.”

She is hugging the dogs against her as they slobber on her shirt. “So why are your dogs so ugly?”

“Nobody knows,” I tell her.

“So if they're ugly why do you have them?”

“I don't know that either.”

She looks up at me and cocks her head to one side. “You know what? My dad says that people and their dogs look alike which means that you're ugly, too.”

Okay, I've had about enough of this. “Yeah, well, your dad named you after a really terrible drink, so what does he know?”

“He knows everything, dumbass.” She pushes the dogs aside and stands. “And you know what? He's way better than your dad.”

Well, if she's talking about my biological father, she's got me there. “You shouldn't call people dumbass,” I say. “It's not nice.”

“I don't give a shit,” she says, skipping across the street to the sloped path that leads down to the playground.

“You know what?” I shout after her. “I've already heard that
today, too.” She turns back and flips me the bird before disappearing down the slope.

I cross the street to watch from the bridge as she runs past her father and climbs on a swing. She pumps her legs hard, back and forth, sending the swing higher and higher. She calls out to her father, “Look at me!” He never looks up from his paper. I wonder if he isn't listening, or if he isn't interested. I wonder if there's any difference.