The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (7 page)

I pick up my guitar case, unclick the buckles,
and take my

47

guitar out like it's a sleeping baby, which it
kind of is. It's a beautiful old Gibson from the seventies--gold-toned,
mahogany, and I got it cheap from Trevor's cousin's pawnshop. I wake it up
slowly; try a little "Stairs to Nowhere" from Slow Change's
Yesterday
CD.
That goes all right, but when I attempt to play "Just Friends," I mangle it so
bad I get mad at myself. The thing is, it reminds me that I don't have the
inborn talent to be a member of Slow Change or any other band, not really, not
if I face facts. Here's a life truth: facing facts sucks.

Mom always says that no one should expect an
eighteen-year-old to know what he or she wants in life, because, hey, most
adults don't know.
Look at me,
she would say.
I work in a
psychiatrist's office because I ended up working in a psychiatrist's office,
blown there like a weed.
Or, when she was in a beat-up-on-Dad mood, she'd
say instead,
Take your father, for example. He'll be eighty and still
wondering if maybe he should get his Master's in between renting out boogie
boards.

Maybe people shouldn't expect
eighteen-year-olds to know what they want, but people do expect
eighteen-year-olds to know what they want. Adults, they can accept the
resignation toward the accidental in other adults, they can understand one
another's giving up on the Big Dream, but there's no room for the unintentional
in a teen. Heck, in a child. It starts about age five, right?
What do you
want to he?
And even a five-year-old realizes they cannot just answer that
they want to ride their bike around the neighborhood or collect ladybugs; they
know they must choose something large with importance or bravery, a cowboy or a
firefighter. There must be focus and determination, an arrow aiming toward the
target.
What are you going to
be? You can't say you're going to
be
a good person, be interested in people, or be a waitress, even if you
love

48

to work as a waitress.
What do you want to
be, Indigo Skye?
I can just see Mrs. Ford, guidance counselor for alphabet
letters S through Z, asking me.
I want to be a waitress,
I would say,
because that would be the truth, and Mr. Mulgoon, guidance counselor for
alphabet letters
A
through F, would have to give Mrs. Ford CPR on the
career center floor, right under the " can't" is a four-letter word poster of
the guy climbing a mountain.

"Be" means something you can write on a
business card. "Be" is a one-word phrase, like "lawyer" or "engineer" or
"accountant," a word big enough to make college debt worthwhile and to put a
sports car in the driveway. A word like "teacher"--nah, even that won't do; even
they're not business-card-worthy for some whacked reason. "Teacher" would get
you the clucks of sympathy disguised as admiration that people give do-gooders,
the way you get a cookie after you've given blood.

And I didn't have one of those big words to
use--I couldn't quite summon the largeness. I didn't know what I wanted to Be.
The not-knowing of that was giving me the restless pissed-offness that questions
without answers give. A sense that I had permanently botched things already,
embarked on the trip without the map. And maybe it scared me too, that I might
end up as a mother of three working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting
surfboards in a grass shack. I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent
of the Big Win, two of the millions of runners-up in the Living the Good Life
sweepstakes. What if fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the
genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed
down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed
too.

Funny's question rolled around in my mind,
nagging. I mean, did I really want to be stuck here forever?
Here,
meaning

49

in this place, living this life, with these
people? Go to school here, get a job here, rot in my old age here?
Here
was not a place where TV cameras rolled, where a lifestyle was unfurled for all
to envy, same as an expensive oriental rug.
Here
was anywhere. And
anywhere was not somewhere. I put the guitar back into its case. I can't even
look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result
there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and
flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling. Besides, I can lick
the bowl and feel satisfied. Thank God or Buddha or my mother for my good
metabolism. And thank Trevor for not minding my slightly wobbly ass.

After dinner I ask to borrow Mom's car to go
over to Melanie's. I still have this feeling, a sense of swirling water going
down the bathtub drain. Mom was having a premenopausal episode at dinner--she
was silent and snappish and stressed, and the vegetables turned out like someone
left them on the porch during a heavy rain, and you could have strapped the beef
onto the bottom of your feet and made your way across the desert. She'd devoured
the pie before dinner too, another bad sign. The fork with crumbs still attached
was in the sink along with a glass whitewashed from milk.

I hunt around for something slightly outrageous
to wear to Melanie's, because she expects it and because it gives her parents a
nervous should-we-be-worried thrill too. When landscape lighting is a priority
in your life, you need a good parenting crisis to stir up some excitement. I go
for a black lace tank top and my bike chain necklace. On my way out, I see Bex
sitting on her floor and at first I can't believe my eyes and have to look
again. She has this

50

thick layer of coins spread out around her,
some U.S. Treasury flying carpet.

"Holy shit, Bex, did you rob a bank?" I
say.

"Watch your mouth, Indigo," she says. "You're
supposed to be a role model." She doesn't look up. I can see only the straight
line of her hair part on her head, the top of her rounded cheeks.

"Seriously, where did you get this?" I see her
life flash before my eyes. Mom's premenopausal episode turning to full-fledged
menopausal meltdown. I see Bex grounded until she's thirty, getting a better
education than me, probably, from CNN and public television.

Bex holds up an empty coffee can, shakes it.
Oops, not quite empty, a coin rattles inside, and she dumps it to the floor. The
coffee can has a piece of construction paper taped around it, from the same
stack of orange we got for my world studies project on Malaysia--I recognize the
shade. She'd used a big fat marker to write on the side, please help is printed
carefully in huge letters. I'm sure she's just scammed the neighbors into giving
her money for an Xbox that she's wanted for years, and I consider going to
Severin's room to ask for some assistance in saving Bex's life before we share
this with our mother. I hear his voice coming through the wall, his
talking-to-a-girl voice, which is lighter and more laughy and animated than it
ever is talking to us. He won't be any help. But then I see the smaller writing
on the coffee can. tsunami victims . She's even spelled it right, and Bex is a
lousy speller. That's what twenty-four-hour coverage'll get you.

"What, exactly, have you been doing
today?"

"I rode my bike to Albertsons. They let me
borrow a card table, and I sat there and collected donations."

"Wow, Bex. Wow." I can't think of what to say.
I have a few

51

fleeting worries about her just getting money
from people. Like, is it that easy? Did you need some kind of permission for
that sort of thing? But I refrain from interrogating her. She looks so serious.
"Now, would you shut up?" she says. "I'm trying to count."

Mom had the kind of car that should have been
embarrassed going into Melanie's neighborhood. The Datsun was that shade of
yellow they don't make anymore, some color that went out of fashion and that's
bound to be back twenty years from now when the car's a thin layer of metal in a
garbage heap. Her windshield had acne, pockmarks from when she drove behind a
dump truck and got flecked with pebbles. It had a tape deck, back from when tape
decks were a big deal, and it didn't have cup holders, from the days when people
went places without a perpetual liquid pacifier. It had been through a whole
forest of those Christmas tree air fresheners, since Freud peed in the backseat
about a thousand years ago when he was ticked off about something, who remembers
what. It still smelled slightly tangy in there, but you had to know what you
were smelling for.

Anyway, it's a Car o' Shame as it curves up the
hillside to Skyview, where Melanie lives. I picture all the other cars of the
neighborhood peeking out from their garages and getting nervous and thinking
because it's yellow and is an old Datsun, it's there to commit a
crime.

I pass the faux mansions with their trimmed
hedges and pots of snowman-like topiary that seem to be a requirement for
residence here. The yards are the gardens of Mom's crunchy-geraniumed
dreams--flowers, watered. Lawns, mowed. These are the kinds of houses where the
furnace filters are changed on schedule, the gutters are clean. Garages are not
made into bedrooms, but are

52

nearly empty, sometimes carpeted; tidy caverns
that hold cars with rain-sensor windshields and don't-you-dare-eat-in-here
leather. These are houses where whole rooms exist just for display. It's the
land of living rooms no one lives in.

I push Melanie's doorbell, which rings in
chimes. I listen to the mini-concert that sounds large and hollow, like church
bells. It makes me want to do it again, so I do. Melanie comes running to the
door. I can't see her through the leaded glass windows, but I hear the
thwap,
thwap
of her feet.

"For God's sake, Indigo, quit ringing the
doorbell. My dad's trying to watch the game." Allen was always trying to watch
the game,
no matter what time of the day and no matter what season. I
always wondered about "the game." Was there one game? Did everyone know what
"the game" was? Who knows what he was really doing. He was probably buying skin
cream off the Home Shopping Network.

"If I park on the street, will one of your
neighbors call the police?" I ask.

"Go to hell," she says. Typical Melanie
greeting.

You wouldn't match Melanie and me up, and if we
hadn't gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if
we'd have matched us up either. I'm not sure why we even stuck, except that we
each probably find the other to be entertaining and low maintenance the way
someone very different from you can be. When one person is fast food and the
other is a gourmet meal, there's no use trying to be something you're not. Might
as well relax and be who you are, and this is possible as long as each really
doesn't want what the other has. We didn't compete with each other, is what I'm
saying, I guess, and that makes friendship easy, clear of all those weird
psychodynamics that can

53

sometimes happen. Besides, I felt like it was a
personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie's world, though I think she felt the
same of me.

I have to take off my sandals at the door.
There's a whole row of shoes by Melanie's door, all different styles, though
she's an only child. Her mom and I must wear about the same size (Melanie has
huge feet), because there are my-size leather slip-ons and a pair of white boots
that remind me of Trina, and a set of heels and jogging shoes. Mini-shoe store
minus the boxes and the creepy foot fetish sales guy. I put my sandals with the
others, so they can play too.

We pass the kitchen (Jenn-Air appliances,
espresso machine, glassed-in closet wine "cellar"), head upstairs. The library
door is open, and Melanie's mom sits at the desk. All the spines of the books
look the same, so I guess the books aren't for reading. Melanie's mom is at the
computer, and she turns when she hears us.

"Hi, Lisa," I say. I can see her cringe, as if
someone has just cranked her backbone tighter. Melanie's supposed to call
everyone Mrs. This and Mr. That. I'm usually a very polite person, and I work
with the public, but there's something about Melanie's parents that makes me
want to act out, which is also part of why Melanie keeps me around, I know.
Vicarious rebellion. Lisa Gregory is the modern equivalent of the fifties mom,
which means she drives a minivan and cares about window coverings and has enough
candles in her house to burn down the West Coast. The semi-hysterical order in
all this just makes me want to stir my little spoon of chaos.

"Hello, Indigo," Lisa says. She turns back to
her computer, where she's buying stuff off of the Web. The Internet just
extends

54

store hours for some people. Twenty-four-hour
mall, minus the Orange Julius, which is the best part of a mall, if you ask me.
"We'll be in my room," Melanie says.

"Have fun," Lisa says, but she says it like a
warning.
Have fu-un,
which actually translates to
I'll be able to
smell any alcohol on your breath.
Lisa was sure I drank and drugged because
I played around with my hair color and didn't dress in a conventional fashion,
and because my parents were
divorced.
Divorced is okay, of course, if
your parents have rejoined the respectable adult community and have remarried.
Single parents, though--they're sure to mean C averages and sex, booze, and
drugs in an empty Mom's-at-work house. Or, more accurately, "single parent"
means "poor," and "poor" means C averages and sex and drugs. "Poor" supposedly
means kids who are out of control because they're not babysat every minute by
Mom, who's working ten-hour days. Which is all pretty ridiculous, given that at
my school, it's the kids who drive their own Land Rovers and are babysat by
every entertainment device possible so Mom doesn't have to that are the biggest
partiers and sex addicts. Go figure.