Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 15
“I can’t sleep,” I said to Mom.
Mom patted the bed and I curled up next to her. Dad was always sleeping downstairs on the Man Chair, and Mom was always eating clementines in bed.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t trust sound sleepers.”
I got in bed.
“Your father,” she said. “I don’t know how he does it. He just passes out on that chair. I don’t know how anybody can sleep on a chair. But he does. He’s just like, Goodbye, world! It’s sick! Really.”
I slept a lot in Mom’s bedroom after that. I liked it in there. Mom hung fancy golden curtains and had someone paint flowers on her wall. She peeled oranges and watched TV and stroked my hair while we listened to the news, which was usually about the president. The president was getting impeached not because of his blow job, but because he lied about his blow job. That seemed to be the consensus: if he had just been honest about the blow job from the very beginning—if he had raised his hand in court and swore that yes, I was the recipient of said blow job, people wouldn’t be so angry. Some people would have even been proud of him. And it should have been embarrassing to be sitting there with Mom learning details about the president’s official White House blow job, but it wasn’t.
“The world is a very strange place, Sally,” Mom said.
“I know,” I said.
* * *
Things Dad said at dinner in August:
Did you know that Lewis and Clark had to build their own canoes when they were already on their expedition? Can you imagine?
Did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same exact day? July 4, 1826!
“Richard, please,” Mom said, as if it was rude to talk about America during dinner.
But America was something to talk about. Mom rarely talked about anything but you, and then she started to cry, which was awkward. It was awkward to eat potatoes and listen to someone cry. To swallow and think, Hmm, this is a good potato, while your mother is weeping.
“What’d they die of?” I asked.
Mom got up, started putting the dishes in the sink. She washed them by hand. She insisted the dishwasher was broken, and Dad insisted he fixed it, and I didn’t know how they could disagree on something like that, but they did.
“Who knows?” Dad said. “Could have been a million things.”
“Richard, stop,” Mom said, and that was that.
I started to take long baths after dinner. I began a quest to become hairless. I plucked the hairs all over my body and used a waxing strip on my armpit, but all it did was strip bits of skin off.
“Ow!” I said, and thought of how hard it must have been for Lewis and Clark to make a canoe in the middle of nowhere. I pulled another strip off, and Mom walked in.
“Mom!” I said. “I’m half-naked!”
“Oh, who cares, I’m your mother,” Mom said. “I know what you look like fully naked.” Which is the worst thing any mother can say to a child. I didn’t want to know that Mom could picture me naked any time she wanted.
“What are you doing to yourself?” Mom asked.
I didn’t know.
So I stopped taking baths and starting writing stories at my desk. The first one was about a girl who stayed in her bathtub for too long. She wrinkled so much that everyone in her house thought she aged eighty years. She started to go on elderly adventures. She discovered she was good at Bingo and made a lot of nut rolls. But then the bath wore off and she de-wrinkled and returned to being young again, with a newfound appreciation for the elderly.
“This is good,” Mom said, after I read it at dinner.
“This is very good,” Dad said. “A nice lesson at the end.”
“I think I’ll dedicate it to Grandma,” I said.
* * *
When it stormed, I wrote a story about a hurricane sweeping away a farm girl into a river, where she was happy, because there she could cry as hard as she wanted. There, in the river, nobody noticed. In the river, she was surrounded by tears. But then the tears kept filling up the river and the river flooded the town until the whole world was underwater.
“You could try scaling down the drama a bit,” Dad suggested, after I read it aloud at dinner. “Why don’t you try seeing what happens to the girl when she returns to the farm after the giant flood. Now that’s interesting.”
“And why don’t you call Valerie?” Mom said.
“She’s still at Disney,” I said.
“What about Priscilla?” Mom said.
“Priscilla was Kathy’s friend,” I remind her. “And Kathy is dead.”
* * *
By the end of summer, I had written so many stories about girls returning to the ruins of their homes, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
“I want to be a Victorian novelist,” I announced at dinner. I wanted to be like Thomas Hardy.
“Not to be discouraging,” Dad said, “but the Victorians are dead.”
Of course. Everybody was dead.
“You can be a regular novelist though,” Mom said. “A living one.”
“Unfortunately,” Dad said, “that kind doesn’t make as much money.”
* * *
Mom must have called Priscilla, because why else would Priscilla have called me? She wanted to know if I wanted to come hang out with everybody at the Aldan Day Carnival at the end of August. I didn’t ask who “everybody” was. I knew better than that.
“Can I invite someone?” I asked.
“Of course,” Priscilla said. “Invite anybody you want. Everybody’s going.”
* * *
When I invited Valerie, she was impressed. “To the carnival, with Priscilla?” she asked. “But isn’t Priscilla a senior?”
“Yes,” I said.
Valerie was excited. She had heard things about the carnival. “Like what?” I asked.
“Like people go to the carnival to make out,” she said.
“Make out with whom?” I asked.
Valerie laughed. “Make out with whom,” she repeated. “Only you would say that, Sally.”
“It’s how you say it,” I said. “Everybody should say it like that.”
“The point is, you can make out with anybody you want,” Valerie said. “I don’t think it matters. I think the point is just to make out.”
“But how do you make out at the carnival? Aren’t there a lot of people there?”
“Exactly,” Valerie said. “I don’t know about you, but I plan on making out with a person.”
“Right,” I agreed. I laughed. “People. No squirrels.”
“You can even sleep over after,” Valerie said. “My mom said it was okay.”
* * *
I told Mom about the carnival and the sleepover and she was thrilled. She deemed it My First Big Outing of the Summer, which made me suddenly not want to go.
But I was going. “Get in the car,” she said. She drove me to Valerie’s herself. When she pulled into the driveway, I could tell she wanted to come with me. I could see how Mom wanted everything to be different. Mom wanted to be a young girl again. Start her life over. Choose Paris.
But she couldn’t.
She chose us and now she was stuck. Stuck in the house like those Greek women in the attics. (That’s what Mr. Klein had said—that the Greeks may have invented democracy, but they were no heroes! They still kept their wives in the attics.) Mom was going to drive home and sit by herself and watch Jillian Williams.
“Be careful,” Mom said. “Call me if you need anything.”
By the time we pulled into Valerie’s driveway, I felt as if I was going off to war, as if this was goodbye forever, as if we all knew I would not return home as the same person, or maybe I’d never return. This was what I was always worried about. When Mom left for the store, I looked at her longingly, as if she was already dead. I loved her so much, it made me want to cry sometimes.
But then Mom said, “Sally, you’ve got to do something with your hair,” as if my hair was my own fault. She licked her thumb, pressed my hair down, tucked a piece behind my ears, and I felt like I hated her.
“Hey,” Mom said. “Your ears are pierced.”
I waited for her to get angry. To say something about how I defied her orders. To ask me who in God’s name pierced my ears? But all she said was, “They look nice. You look really pretty, Sally,” and a deep well of sadness opened up within me as I walked to Valerie’s door.
“Do you have any earrings I can wear?” I asked Valerie in her bedroom. I was tired of the two metal dots I had been wearing for months. Subtle enough so Mom wouldn’t notice. But now that she knew, I wanted something bigger. “Anything funky?”
“You can wear these,” Valerie said. Two triangle earrings that she bought in Florida. They hung downward into a point. “They’re made of bone. Real bone, Sally.”
I was confused. “Whose bone?”
“What do you mean, whose bone?”
“Like, human bone?”
Valerie laughed. “No! I don’t know what kind of bone,” she said. “But it’s not human bone.”
“How do you know though?”
“I don’t know. Because why would someone want earrings made out of human bone?”
All she knew was that the guy who sold them to her kept saying, “Three dollars, real bone, real bone!” and she thought it sounded like a good deal. Like that might be pretty cheap for bone. But now, she admitted, it sounded weird.
“I don’t know what kind of bone they are.” She shrugged, and so I shrugged and put them in anyway. I leaned close to the mirror the way you always did when you got ready to leave the house, and thought of how you once told me there were only two kinds of faces in this world: hearts and ovals.
“Did you know that my sister’s face used to be shaped like a heart?” I asked Valerie.
She didn’t. “Is mine a heart?”
“No. You’re an oval.”
Valerie looked disappointed, the way I had been when you announced that God had made me an oval. “Why can’t I be a heart?”
“Because God didn’t make you that way, I guess.”
“But that’s stupid. Why wouldn’t God just make everybody a heart?”
A good question, one I hadn’t thought to ask you at the time. “I guess that’s not how God does things.”
When the earrings were in, I looked at myself in the mirror and smiled.
“They look cool,” Valerie said. “Bone really works for you.”
We laughed.
We were ready.
We walked downstairs, through the kitchen, and out the door. We passed Valerie’s ShitPu. The dog barked at us as we walked down the street. As if he were trying to warn the world about us. Or maybe he just thought we were strangers, unrecognizable with all that makeup, and our jean shorts, now split up the seams. It felt better that way.
It wasn’t a long walk to the high school. But longer than Valerie had made it sound on the phone. I secretly understood why her mother kept insisting on dropping us off at the carnival. It’s no big deal, Mrs. Mitt said, we’re happy to drop you off, but it seemed weirdly important to Valerie that no one’s parents dropped us off, important that we were not caught sliding out the dark minivan of our mother’s love.
We were teenagers now, and we preferred, when given the opportunity, to suffer.
We walked in silence down Main Street. We passed the mini-mart. Bill’s Tree and Garden. The abandoned parking lot. The tree that killed you. We didn’t say a word until I saw the empty brick buildings called “Professional Buildings,” which always made us laugh, because whenever we saw them, you said, “They must be really good at being buildings,” and I said, “They’re the best.”
But when I said it to Valerie, it sounded wrong, not funny for some reason, and we both pretended that I hadn’t said it. We walked in silence again until we approached the high school.
“Wait,” Valerie said. “We can’t go in looking like this.”
What did we look like?
We looked like girls in blue jeans and striped shirts. Valerie passed me a tube of lipstick. A green tube. Clinique. We put it on. We drew circles around our mouths.
“We’re here!” Valerie said.
We walked up to the entrance. It cost ten bucks to get into the carnival. Funny how we could walk onto this field at all points of the year for free, but for three days in August, someone tied orange CAUTION tape to two trees, and suddenly we had to pay to cross the line.
* * *
Inside, the carnival was not as full of people making out as Valerie led me to believe. Some rock band was on a stage, apologizing, asking the audience to please understand how everything sounds so much better at night and under really dramatic lighting. I understood. I was no good in this light. I couldn’t believe Valerie would consider making out with someone at four in the afternoon.
“Where are we meeting Priscilla?” Valerie asked.
“She didn’t say,” I said.
I looked around the carnival for Priscilla, but I didn’t see anybody I knew, even though everybody looked familiar in some way. Who were all these people? And how were we going to make out with them?
I didn’t know.
“Want to go on the Ferris wheel?” I asked.
“No,” Valerie said, and we immediately agreed that we both hated the Ferris wheel. It was too slow. Made us feel like we should be having a really meaningful conversation or getting engaged at the top. So we went on the Slingshot, which I loved. I loved the feeling of being flung into the air and dropping so fast that we left ourselves behind.
We passed by the simple games. Keep-A-Critter, Touch-a-Duck. Guess-How-Much-You-Weigh! We considered guessing our weight, but Valerie said, “How is that a game? Why would anybody pay a dollar to find out how much they weigh? I already know how much I weigh.”
Valerie’s mother weighed her every day. And Valerie weighed too much, apparently. She was getting put on Weight Watchers when school started. She bought Big League Chew and dangled it dramatically over her mouth, right before she bit. Then, she looked down and said, “Hey! Rick Stevenson.”
Rick was working at one of the game booths.
“What are you doing here?” Valerie asked him.
“I have to be here,” Rick said.
Rick said all the high school sports teams were volunteering to work the rides—for charity.
“Since when are you on the high school basketball team?” I asked.
“Since last week,” he said.
“So, what is this booth?” Valerie asked.
Rick shrugged. He barely knew. Behind him was a giant cardboard school bus with the windows cut out. Valerie leaned on the counter of the booth toward Rick. “Just throw that ball in one of the holes,” he said.
“How’s that any fun?” Valerie asked.
“You’ll find out once you throw the ball through a hole,” Rick said.
Valerie picked up a white ball on the counter and threw it through one of the giant holes cut out of the bus.
“Welp,” Rick said. “That’s a dollar.”
“A dollar?” I asked. We looked at each other. No way were we giving Rick a dollar for that.
“Run!” Valerie said.
We sprinted away before paying, and exploded into one giant laugh, because that was the only way we knew how to laugh. We held our stomachs and crumbled against the popcorn machine and waited for Rick to chase after us and demand the dollar, but he didn’t. Rick didn’t care, either. The money from the carnival was only going to us, anyway. To be used to build a new computer room at the high school, Valerie explained.
“And what do we really need computers for at school?” Valerie asked.
I had no idea. All we ever did in computer class was type out our name and then play Oregon Trail. We had spent a lot of time trying to get our wagons across some river, but I never could. The river was always too big. The water too strong. Someone always died, each time a different girl with a name that Valerie and I had spent way too much time choosing.
We began to wander through the booths again, where it was loud. That’s what I liked most about the carnival, I decided. There was no pressure to speak and fill the silence like there was at dinner with Mom and Dad. Here, there were so many noises: sirens and whistles and children screaming for things. Valerie and I watched in total silence as an elderly man got dunked in a tub of water. As a goat stood on top of a horse. As a woman in a cowboy hat sang a song about broken hearts. Then, we ate fried dough and watched the people swinging around and around on the swings.
“Where’s Priscilla?” Valerie asked.
I didn’t know.
“But oh my God, look,” I said. “There’s Mr. Klein.”
I couldn’t bear to watch, but we did. There he was. Mr. Klein, alone on the swings. A fate I wouldn’t wish upon my greatest enemy, if I had such things. We watched and marveled as his jowls set into orbit.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s keep walking,” as if it were indecent, like staring at a wreck on the side of the road.
The sun began to set and the heat at the carnival grew. I started seeing more people I knew. Peter and his sister. Our math teacher. But no Priscilla. And no Billy—not like I expected to see him there. I had no idea where Billy was by that point in August.
I could tell Valerie was getting bored with the carnival by the way she looked at her pink watch that hadn’t told the time in three years. She didn’t care; she liked the way the leather straps had browned on the edges, like it was slowly becoming a part of her. And suddenly, there was Priscilla.
“Hey, there’s Priscilla,” I said.
She was walking toward us with a bunch of girls I didn’t recognize. I wondered if they knew you well, if they had come to your funeral, if they wept over your casket. But, I admit, it was hard to picture them being sad as they shared a giant stick of cotton candy. Not even Priscilla looked sad at the carnival. She smiled as soon as she saw me.
