The Runaway Restaurant, page 15
Joyce laughs. But the others aren’t listening to me. I’m the crotchety grandma at the family reunion. The spit on the birthday cake. As Molly describes the Mother Earthlings’ garden—a veritable Eden compared to Iris’s paltry patch out back—I stand and cross the parking lot. It’s past noon. The humidity covers me like plastic wrap. Before the end of the day, Molly will return to the Mother Earthling camp with our willing group members in tow. I can’t imagine saying goodbye to her so soon after her resurrection, but I can’t imagine following her, either.
I find Rina sulking on one of the red plastic benches in the McDonald’s, her tangled brown hair tied back with a length of twine that came off a yoyo from the gift shop.
“She’s not Infected,” I say, sitting across from her. “You know that.”
“If she doesn’t have the virus now, then she never had it,” says Rina flatly. “I know a scam when I see one. Where’s the rash?” She shakes her head. “Any of them actually thinking about going with her?”
“Iris. Maybe Duck.”
“They’re idiots.”
“They’re young. They want a chance at something more. Relationships. A family.”
“And you?”
I spread my hands on the table and study my fingers, the stubby nails packed with dirt. In group therapy I could never bear to make eye contact with those women blabbing about their pasts. When it was my turn to speak, I usually just made something up.
“When I was sixteen,” I say, “my parents sent me to this camp to try and rewire me. It was chock-full of people preaching about procreation, a woman’s body as a vessel. Like I was totally empty unless I had a baby inside me. They said we were put on earth for one thing, and that was to be fruitful and multiply. I don’t see how these Mother Earthlings are any different.”
The McDonald’s faces the creek that fronts the north side of the welcome center. Rina and I sit and stare out the windows for a bit, not speaking. Suddenly she laughs. “All these people talking about repopulation, the renewal of the human species, and no one asks the question of whether we deserve to survive. I mean, fuck. Mother Earth’s doing great without us. No bulldozers. No weed whackers. No oil spills.”
“Your anger is a weed whacker,” I say. “Your anger is an oil spill.”
The two of us go about the rest of our day like nothing has changed. We boil buckets of water at the camp stove we took from Home Depot last month. We check on the leftover venison that’s submerged in the creek inside a bag inside a metal lunchbox to keep it cool. We water Iris’s vegetable garden. We take inventory of our non-perishables. There’s only enough canned chili, peanut butter, energy bars, tuna, and raisins to last us the next two weeks. This means more trips into basements and cafeterias. More risks of exposure.
The others stay outside all afternoon. They follow the shade as it moves clockwise around the base of the oak tree. The shadows are long, the sun slanting toward the horizon, when Duck and Iris return to the welcome center to collect their things. There’s not much. A single backpack for each.
“You sure about this?” I ask Duck.
“No.” His foot jiggles anxiously on the linoleum. “But, like, it could be cool, right? Maybe there’ll be some dudes my age to hang out with. Not that I don’t like hanging out with you guys,” he adds quickly. “You guys are dope. And I’ll come back and visit, right?”
“Right,” I say. Even though the welcome center feels too big for three people. Even though I suspect we’ll be packing up and moving farther south within the week.
Joyce prowls around the gift shop, maybe double-checking whether Duck and Iris grabbed all their things, maybe trying to avoid saying goodbye.
“What,” I say, “you don’t want to be a Mother Earthling?”
“This body’s mothered all it’s ever going to,” says Joyce. She leans up against the counter with her sunburned arms folded against her chest. “I’m surprised to see you’re not packing up to go live in peace and harmony with your girl.”
“She’s not my girl. She’s gone off the deep end with this crap.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they have a point. If I were thirty years younger, who’s to say I wouldn’t want to contribute? You’re, what, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? You should be thinking about the long-term.”
I shake my head in disgust. “You know, I thought you of all people would be on my side. Yeah, fine, the world is over. But that doesn’t mean I have to let go of everything. My identity, and my self-worth . . .” I feel myself working up to a real good rage. Then I notice that Joyce is chuckling.
“Relax,” she says. “I’m just pulling your leg. It’s good to see you angry again.”
“Terrie told us anger’s not productive. It won’t get us anyplace we want to go.”
“Terrie, God rest her soul,” says Joyce, “didn’t know shit about anger. Anger’s the only reason we’re alive.”
It’s nearly sunset by the time everyone’s done milling around saying their goodbyes. Iris and Duck light torches. In the parking lot, Molly gives me another hug.
“You know no one would force you to do anything you don’t want to. I hope you’ll reconsider, Sandy. I really do.”
“Don’t count on it,” I say.
A hand clasping either one of my shoulders, she holds me at arm’s length. “Why won’t you trust me?” she asks softly.
“Why won’t I trust you? Because you’ve been brainwashed! Those nutcases convinced you that they saved you from a sickness you never had, and now you think you owe them something. And what happens when you have the kid? You gonna have another one, and another one after that? What happens when you can’t have any more?”
Molly’s arms drop to her sides. I think for a moment that I’ve really hurt her, and I’m sorry. She glances back at the welcome center where torchlight scatters shadows across the sidewalk. Then, in a single swift movement, she pulls up the front of her smock, and in the glow of the setting sun I see the familiar rosy stains blossoming across her breasts and the swell of her stomach. They’re almost beautiful. Like a child’s rendition of springtime. I’m struck by the urge to reach out and touch it, this rash I’ve only ever seen from a safe distance. As the others step out the doors into the parking lot, Molly drops the smock to cover herself again.
“Goodbye, goodbye!” chants Duck, tap-dancing his way across the pavement. “Adios! Aloha! Fare thee well!” He’s being goofy, I know, to conceal the strain of departure. Iris gives me a hug. We haven’t always gotten along, but I realize that I’ll miss her, too. She joins Duck and Molly: three people holding three sputtering torches, only this time they’re headed away from me. They’re crossing the parking lot, wading through the grasses toward the exit ramp and the empty highway and the trees waiting beyond.
So that’s it, I think to myself dully. Our precious family of two years: fractured clean in half. I’m feeling exhausted again. How badly I’d like to curl up in my nest behind the cash register and sleep for decades. When I wake, nature will have won its slow war of reclamation. Tree roots will buckle and crack concrete. Woodland animals will occupy every ruined home, forging burrows from the detritus of all that gone life. Stubborn holdouts like the Mother Earthlings might have their square of land on which to plant fruit trees and weave their homemade sandals. But repopulate the earth? Give me a break.
Rina nudges me. “C’mon. Joyce wants a meeting.”
Of course she does. No matter how many people we lose, there’s still the looming unknown of tomorrow to prepare for.
I follow Rina around the back of the welcome center where Joyce has built another fire. Its meager light laps at her face and bounces off the round object she offers me in the palm of her hand: a snow globe. A shoebox filled with them rests at her feet. She must’ve gone through the gift shop, ransacking every shelf.
“What are we doing here, Joyce?”
“You know,” she says shrewdly, and I realize that I do, for what enraged woman hasn’t longed for a secret box of breakable things that will shatter with such majesty into a hundred shining fragments? I accept the snow globe, glancing briefly at the smiling cartoon cardinal suspended inside. Then I hurl it against the building. The sound is everything I hoped it would be, a resounding and triumphant answer to the helpless roar that’s been building inside me for years. Rina and Joyce take their turns, and I go again, and for just those few minutes until the box runs empty, the night is alive with tiny glass explosions.
snow girl
Marcy Greer was born in summer, but winter followed her like a shadow, like a long, snowy cloak. The first time it happened: the metal flavor of frost in her mouth, the white burst of a snowball against her brother’s head. He’d committed some crime or other—maybe touching her toys without permission—and the blizzard of Marcy’s fury was biting and swift. By the time her parents caught on, David was so buried only the hairs at the top of his head protruded.
They lived in a valley in upstate New York. November through April, the place was a snow-filled trench and Marcy’s “accidents” were camouflaged easily enough. The problem was summer. Rose Greer, who’d quit work to teach her daughter at home, tacked a calendar to the bulletin board next to the faded world map. For every ten days Marcy went without spitting snow, a treat awaited her at the breakfast table: gel pens, barrettes, erasers shaped like tropical fish. Jacob Greer made threats. “You screw up,” he growled, “you answer to me,” though he was the sort of huge, hulking man who’d never hit a person in his life, all bluster and lumber, and Marcy knew it even then.
The incident that exposed her would forever be remembered as the September freak storm of 2000. Marcy was ten, and the family dog, who liked to wander, had just come up dead under the wheels of Mr. Kistler’s tractor. Marcy marched onto the neighbor’s farm and planted herself in the aisle between trees, branches bowed with the shiny red plumpness of Jonagolds and Honeycrisps. She opened her mouth and screamed. Snow surged from her lips and eyes and nose, from the tips of her fingers and the ends of her hair, fat drifts crashing apple trees into splinters. CNN broadcast the story accompanied by clips of gleeful children building igloos in flip-flops. “A meteorological anomaly,” the storm was formally dubbed. But Mrs. Kistler had seen, and soon the whole town knew bits of the story—not enough to fully believe it, just enough to give the Greer place a wide berth.
The details of that day remained fuzzy to Marcy. Sometimes, watching nature documentaries with David, witnessing an elephant stampede or a white shark breach, she felt like she could call up a similar power, mighty and mindless, an ancient force blowing beneath her skin. Most of the time, she was helpless. She stood in front of the mirror each morning plucking ice chips from her bleeding lips. The storms came upon her without warning: dinnertime blizzards blasting cutlery off the table, ice driving cracks into the floor. Water damage covered the ceiling in rusty rings. The house succumbed to a slow ruin, and Marcy’s parents along with it. Rose chipped ice from the countertops with a butter knife, glassy-eyed and grinning. “Never mind—you’ll outgrow it!” (To the contrary: It seemed to Marcy that she was growing into her snowing, the blizzards getting more severe with the onset of puberty). Jacob took on double shifts at the auto yard to try and cover the cost of repairs. He was rarely home, and when he was, he slept on the living room couch in a nest of old blankets, looking more and more like a stranger who’d wandered in and collapsed at the first available place.
Only David remained cheerful, her sole companion and comfort. He pointed to the family dramas they liked to watch on TV after dinner, absurd shows with cyborg stepfathers and long-lost, vindictive twins. “See?” he said. “We have it much better than them.” When freezing mucus clogged Marcy’s sinuses, he brought a hot wash rag to lay against her face.
The day after Marcy’s thirteenth birthday, her parents sat her down and explained about the hospital. For years, Rose had driven her to visit baffled allergists and neurologists, but these people, she assured Marcy, they were the real deal. International experts. The best of the best. Already they’d assembled a small group of patients with similar conditions—bringers of strange weather who, like Marcy, had spent their lives searching for the elusive cure.
“You’ll go, get fixed, come back,” said Jacob with his usual gruffness, and Marcy wanted to ask if he really thought it would be that simple. But what choice did she have? Didn’t she and her parents want the same thing? She looked around the living room with its water-warped floors. On the table sat plastic forks and paper plates from yesterday’s birthday party, a housefly buzzing over the dollops of dried frosting. Marcy had no friends to invite, so it had just been the four of them, she feigning enthusiasm at each unwrapped doll and glittery notebook and other things she’d long ago outgrown.
The hospital was in the desert. Red rock stretched for miles around the cluster of unassuming buildings, reminding Marcy of a movie she and David had seen about a colony on Mars.
After she said goodbye to her parents, the hospital director, a thin man named Dr. Rhee, led Marcy to the dayroom where she could meet the others: Alma from Oakland, who caused small earthquakes when she sneezed. Eloise from Plano, whose fingers itched with secret lightning. Glynn from New Orleans, summoner of smoke and fog. Marcy tried to hide her disappointment. Her whole life, she’d dreamed of girls out there like her. She’d imagined them swooping through her bedroom window like eagles, bearing her off to a mountainside where they were all worshipped as queens. But these girls were just girls. Pimples speckled Alma’s chin. Eloise wore neon sportswear and a sour expression. Glynn smiled, revealing braces gummed up with hospital cafeteria food.
“Dr. Rhee,” she said plaintively, “the TV’s doing that thingy again.” And while the director bustled into the corner to mutter and thump a fist against the box set, Marcy found herself shrinking under the gazes of her fellow patients.
“What’re you in for?” demanded Alma.
Marcy explained about the snowing.
“Ha!” cried Eloise. “That’s five dollars for me.”
“Your money was on flooding,” said Glynn. “And you said it would be a boy.”
“I hoped it would be a boy because I’m tired of you idiots. And a snowstorm can easily turn into a flood. Duh. Once it melts. Right, Marcy?”
“I guess,” said Marcy, fiddling with the straps of her backpack.
“You guess?” Eloise unfolded her long legs and rose from the couch. She was no taller than Marcy, but her puffed-up halo of staticky blonde hair gave her an impression of great size. “You wanna know what I’m in for? I shot lightning bolts through the roof of my school. Classes were canceled for a week. There’re still scorch marks on the wall.” Leaning in toward Marcy, she whispered, “They say I’m crazy. I’m a force to be reckoned with.” She lifted a finger and set it against the hollow of Marcy’s throat. It was only the slightest shock, the kind Marcy had received a hundred times touching door handles in winter, but she leapt as if slapped.
There wasn’t much to unpack. Some hair ties and clothes. The ratty stuffed pig her parents had bought her as a toddler. Her clock radio. A grape-flavored lip balm that, after careful consideration, Marcy placed on the chest at the foot of the bed. She had opted to leave her Harry Potter books at home for David—a decision she now regretted as she felt the smothering expanse of her boredom creeping in on her.
A window glared from her bedroom into the hall. Drawing back the paper blinds, Marcy could see straight into Alma’s room across the way. Rock music thudded from an unseen boom box. Alma floated back and forth past the window, arms flickering, head bopping—a bizarre, graceful dance from which Marcy couldn’t look away. She knew so little about girls her own age. Were they all so uninhibited when they thought no one was watching? Even when she was alone, Marcy treaded softly. She didn’t sing in the shower. She didn’t pout and preen before the mirror like the girls on sitcoms. She didn’t lust after boys, real or imagined. Lately she’d begun to wonder if the snowing hadn’t cursed her with a different, more far-reaching kind of coldness: a numbness toward things that should have made her happy.
Alma halted, her back to the window. She wore a too-large pajama tank top that slid off one shoulder. Her body tensed. Buckled. Marcy couldn’t hear the sneeze, but the force of the tremor toppled her onto the floor. She looked up, dazed, as the bedroom lights flickered. From down the hall, Eloise’s voice screamed, “Goddammit, Alma!” Marcy raised herself to the window. The rock music had cut out, and Alma’s blinds were closed.
She wouldn’t have thought it possible to adapt as quickly as she did to the hospital’s routine. Morning lessons with her stammering tutor in the dayroom. A battery of medical tests in the afternoons: scopes probing, needles pricking, an endless rotation of geneticists, neurologists, and endocrinologists asking the same questions over and over. Could she describe the pre-snow sensation? Could she pinpoint circumstances where it seemed likely to happen? Could she remember when she first experienced the urge to snow at people? That last question annoyed Marcy more than the rest combined. She felt like asking the doctors if they remembered when they first felt the urge to not snow at people.
Evenings, Marcy called home to talk to David. The telephone outside the dayroom had a strange, cheesy smell. The hallway, with its high ceilings and walls sponged to look like clouds, gave an unsettling impression of infinity.
“And she’s read Order of the Phoenix three times already,” finished David triumphantly. He was talking about the new girl in his fourth-grade glass, Becky something. Together, they had joined the school chorus and the Newbery Club. Marcy wanted to be happy for him. Her brother had been so intent on keeping her company during her indoor seclusions that he hadn’t made friends his own age. But the thought of David laughing and learning with a stranger raised an icy burn in Marcy’s throat. She turned her head from the receiver and coughed slush into her palm.
