aubrey; chapter two
Well I guess I should stick up for myself
But I really think it's better this way
The more you suffer
The more it shows you really care, right?
Jesse and I walk silently up the basement steps from the garage, but there’s no way to avoid my aunt and uncle, set up all cozy, side-by-side at the kitchen counter. Aunt Debbie is chopping pungent onion while Uncle Mitch is massaging raw ground meat in a bowl. Jesse manages to duck away around the corner to the second stairwell, while I get caught with two beaming faces.
“Hi, kiddo!” my uncle squeaks in some cartoon, kid-show voice. “We’re having some of Uncle Mitch’s cheeseburgers. How many you want?”
He speaks of himself as to a toddler who’s just learning what the names of everything are. Look! What’s this? Bowl. Oven. Table. Sink. Smile. Uncle Mitch.
I really don’t like ground meat, but I don’t really have the heart to tell him.
“Just one,” I mutter.
“Well, there'll be plenty," he says, shaping the bloody pink mush, slapping it down on a tray. I force a swallow instead of gagging.
Apparently as a kid, I didn’t like any cheeseburgers but my uncle’s. Tonight makes the second time he’s made cheeseburgers in the week I’ve been here. Despite his considerable girth and height—the very definition of barrel-chested—he manages a Big-Friendly-Giant presence that is both intimidating and disarming. It’s the dichotomy that I find most unnerving.
I’m rapidly retreating to the stairs while my Aunt's voices follows me, louder and louder: “I put some of Jesse's old jeans on your bed, just to see if they fit. I can always take them in. Oh! Also, there's an old jacket of your Uncle Mitch's. It's gonna start getting colder! Let me know if you need anything, okay sweetie?”
My aunt—overly affectionate and always cooking—is constantly pestering me. Questions about how do I take my eggs, do I need anything from the store, what’s my favorite shampoo? Shoving hoards of hand-me-downs at me to help fill in my obviously lacking wardrobe. And always "Anything you need!" and "Whatever you want!" like I'm some kind of deprived orphan who didn't grow up with a mall and McDonald's.
Well, if she’s as much of a pushover as she seems, she won’t notice the fives I’ve been collecting from her wallet each night.
I take the stairs by threes, pass Jesse’s postered door, and shut myself in my room—and find that I still can’t breathe, even here.
My room is not my room. I’ve lived in a lot of different places in my (almost) seventeen years, but of all the rooms I’ve stayed in, this one is the worst. I’ve stayed in roadside motels more comfortable.
It’s my elder cousin’s—Candace, who’s away at some tech school. My aunt, on welcoming me to her home for the first time in eight years, declared that I could have my own room, just as soon as we cleaned it up a bit.
A bit. Yeah right. Right now, it’s a basement storage room that stinks of cat piss—a cat, I’m told, that died three years ago.
So while we clean up that toxic waste zone, I’m staying in the bright purple, boy band poster walls and freezing waterbed hospitality of my unseen older cousin. You know, if you keep all the lights off and the gauzy curtains closed, it’s almost bearable. And if you lay perfectly still in the direct middle of the bed, you can manage to get to sleep before getting seasick. (Bedsick?) Not that I sleep much anyway. I’ve never been a good sleeper. It’s just not all that appealing to me.
This is a rather big house. Definitely the biggest place I’ve ever lived in. I wonder how they could even afford a place like this? My aunt and uncle aren’t anywhere near well-off. But this—three floors, three bedrooms, two-bay basement garage, master suite and jacuzzi tub! And on probably fifteen acres of secluded woodland, almost in the middle of nowhere. (I say “almost” because there’s a little corner store two miles down the road, on the corner of Corn Field and Soy Beans.)
To put it lightly, this is not the kind of place I’m used to. Even when we lived in the area eight years ago, at least we were in town, could get to the grocery store well within a fifteen minute drive.
How do these people live out here?
There’s really not much to do in the hours before dinner, so I do my homework, maybe watch whatever someone is watching on TV (usually Roseanne or Jeopardy or the news or some sports game (Barf!) but also some MTV, which I like), and snoop around my cousin Candace’s room. She’s got terrible taste in music. Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Alanis Morisette. All that Pop40 stuff that bores me to tears. And she has almost no books, just barely used copies of stuff like ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ that she was probably gifted for Christmas and never cracked open. I’ve already read everything on her vacant shelves, but with seven days down and an unknown quantity left to go, I’ll be forced to reread ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ And I hated it the first time.
On the offensive purple wall hangs a tacky Mickey Mouse clock, his bulbous gloved hands pointing to the wrong time. At night, it’s so quiet, the ticking scrapes the inside of my pounding head. I’m this close to ripping it off the wall and giving it a quick, shallow grave in the woods.
Now, blessedly, Jesse’s blaring grunge next door, and that drowns the clock out. It’s a good album, though I don’t recognize the band. I stretch out on the empty floor, open my bookbag, and pull out the battered copy of The Scarlet Letter Ms. Weissman gave me and start from the beginning. Again.
At dinner, the four of us sit lopsidedly around the table. I can tell they have their assigned seats, because the first night my aunt patted the seat next to her and said, “You can sit right here, sweetie,” even though it made an obvious gap between me and my uncle at the head of the table. That one’s for Candace.
I wonder what’ll happen when she comes home for break? Maybe I won’t be here. I can only dream.
In between bites, my aunt asks, “So how’s school?” Bite, chew, chew, chew. “Settling in?”
I force down a dry bite of burger with tepid water. “It’s fine.”
She’s still looking at me, chewing. Uncle Mitch and Jesse are focused on their food. As you should be at the table. But she insists on asking questions every night.
“It’s school,” I shrug.” Pretty much the same everywhere.”
“Do you have a favorite subject? Any extracurriculars you want to get into?”
“Not really.”
She persists.
“Candace was on the lacrosse team. They went to regionals her junior year. Always looked real fun.”
“Hmm.”
“And Jesse’s in the Art Club. He helps with the stage sets sometimes. The school plays are real good. We went to see Annie Get Your Gun two years ago, and the girl playing Annie was just so good . . . What about band, or choir, or . . . ?”
She trails off and shares a look with Uncle Mitch. I get the vague paranoid feeling of being “talked” about while still in the room.
My aunt takes a drink of water. “Well, if there’s ever anything you want to do, you just let me know, and we’ll get you there, alright sweetie? It’s no burden. Not at all. You just say the word.”
I hum vaguely and try to push out the feeling of walls closing in. If she smothers me anymore, I’ll asphyxiate.
Well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad.
It appears that after the obligatory supper attendance, we all go our separate ways in the evening—Aunt Debbie to her shows, Jesse to his room, Uncle Mitch to his shift at the plant—which allows me to do whatever I please, almost. As long as I stay out of their way (i.e. stay safely shut in Candace’s room) they all seem to stay out of my way. And I do.
But when they all go to sleep, and the music goes quiet in Jesse’s bedroom, I get to have my fun.
Confession: I like to snoop.
This is how I know both my cousins’ transcripts since first grade. How little my uncle makes at the dairy plant. Exactly how much in debt my grandfather was when he died. I poke into every random drawer and cupboard, mapping it all in my head.
The kitchen junk drawer—a dozen company matchboxes, a ring of twenty-odd keys, paper clips and old rubber bands and spare rolls of film.
My uncle’s rusted tool chest—mismatched L-wrenches, scraps of worn-out sandpaper, hundreds of random screws and nails cluttering the sawdusty bottom.
My aunt’s desk—bills and stubby pencils, a little box of cut-up credit cards, an old stamp collection, so many pictures, old rubber toys. And her wallet and purse and the envelopes of little bills labeled “Groceries” and “Clothing” and “Gift.” I slip a five out of both the Gift and Grocery envelopes and stuff them in my hoodie pocket.
Yeah, I take things. Not just cash. Little things, too. Things nobody will notice, or if they do, it’s of no big consequence. They just think they’ve misplaced it. Why do I take these things? I don’t rightly know. Maybe I take things just to have a secret to keep. Or because I think this thing needs more attention than its owner is providing. Or because I have a weird obsession with abandoned trinkets and broken things.
A little, discolored rubber elephant I picked from my aunt’s desk on my first night here. One of those really old, big, fat keys that looks like it unlocks a dungeon. A nearly illegible love letter tucked into an old international envelope. A little plastic-gem ring that barely fits my pinky.
I keep them all in an old shoebox stuffed in the bottom of my trunk, under a bunch of old elementary school papers—nostalgic childhood stuff that someone thought I’d appreciate some day. And I do. They make excellent adult repellent, should anyone look for anything suspicious in there.
After about half an hour of snooping, I may grab a book and flashlight and lay on the couch, Robin giving me grumpy glances from across the room, while I wait for the perfect time.
Two-thirty is the quietest part of the night. Even the night owls have crashed by then, and it’s just early enough no one’s headed to the bathroom yet. Sometimes I’ll look out the window. Sometimes I just sit somewhere and listen. No lights. No sounds. Just observing the night in its natural state. It’s actually kind of lovely out here in NoWhereLand.
And then, at 3:16 A.M. I call collect to Rochester, New York, and pray with all my might that he picks up.
I still know the number by heart (but of course, I still keep treasured away in that old shoebox the 3 x 5 he wrote it on). When I know my aunt and cousin are fast asleep, and my uncle still hours from arriving home, I unhook the kitchen phone, duck as far down the basement steps as the cord allows, and dial those beloved seven numbers, longing to hear his groggy greeting and the indulgent smile tingeing every inflection of “You know you shouldn’t be calling me, baby.” It would almost be worth it if she picked up instead, because at least I’d know they’re still there, that all this drama hadn’t driven them out of the city. That he is still, in some way, reachable to me.
The phone rings. And rings. And rings. Until I get a beep for the answering machine, and I hang up. I lay my head against the stairwell wall.
He could have been just another guy in our apartment building if I hadn’t worn my Offspring t-shirt on moving day. Maybe we would have introduced ourselves and forgotten the other’s name right away. Maybe we would have awkwardly nodded as we passed in the parking lot.
But for some reason, he wanted to help. He saw Mom and me struggling up that skinny staircase, and he jumped right in, took over for Mom, and asked where we were coming from.
“New Jersey,” I said, content with being aloof. He would be a blur of memory in a few months.
He was content with chatting about the severe weather up in Rochester, and warned us that I should get a shovel if I wanted to get out in the winter mornings. He offered to lend us his in the meantime—it was November and had just stormed last week, the seven-foot mounds taking up a good three to four parking spaces in our little lot. Mom had had to park on the street.
We carried my rickety dresser up to our third floor apartment and right into my bedroom, set it down, and it was like his soul came to life before me.
“I haven’t met anyone else who even knows them!” he exclaimed. I could feel myself grow lighter and realized that he was actually really handsome.
Later, he said he had no idea I was a student. High school student, anyway. He honestly thought Mom and I were roommates, which makes sense. I look nothing like her.
Where Mama is petite and feminine, I am tall and gender-confusing at best. Mama has curves. Mama has charisma and character and charm. I’m gangly, flat, boxy, and all around have a hostile aura that naturally repels the introverted and intimidates the extroverted.
It makes no sense that it would have been me.
But he wasn’t intimidated. He smiled every time he saw me, and we laughed quietly when we saw each other in my history class that coming Monday, and said he hadn’t noticed it before, but did I know my eyes were beautiful?
“They keep changing color.” He lifted my chin with a finger. “Sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes green.”
So much of my life has been made up of waiting. As long as I’ve got an end date, I can wait through burning coal and dry ashes. And when someone tells you you’re beautiful—any part of you—for the first time ever, you don’t wait anymore.
You act.
A rumble under the stairs wakes me up from a sleep I didn’t know I’d slipped into. The garage door. The phone is beeping from being off the hook for so long. Frantic, I get up, replace the phone on the receiver, and race upstairs—taking three steps at a time. I’m in Candace’s bedroom by the time I hear my uncle stomping through the kitchen, and Robin shaking his collar in greeting.
I’m panting against the inside of the door, begging my body to quiet. My lungs burn from holding breaths. I hear the heavy steps trundle up the stairs, past my door, and down the hall. The master bedroom door clicks closed.
Shit. There goes my morning smoke.
Read the next chapter here.
