Dear zoe, p.10
Dear Zoe, page 10
“You doing okay?”
“Fine.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Em’s feet appear next to David’s on the sidewalk. One of her hands was at her side so the other must have been in his.
“Is there anything you need? I mean, anything I can get from your room for you to take with you?”
“No.”
“Okay. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Everything’s okay then?”
I nodded.
“We miss you, you know. Your Mom and Em, all of us.”
“Okay.”
No one said anything for a while. I started poking at the edges of the scab with my shoe and brick-colored dust floated to the pavement under the truck.
Then David said, “Okay then,” and cleared his throat. “Hey, Tess?” I started to look up. I swear I wanted to look up at him, I even wanted to tell him I missed him too but I couldn’t. “Maybe you could call your mother a little more often, like you did at first. I think she’s been missing that.”
I didn’t say anything right away, so my Dad said, “I’ll make sure she calls.”
“Thanks, Nick.”
“No problem.”
“Really. Thanks for everything. You’d let us know if you needed anything, right?”
“We’re doin’ fine, but yeah.”
“Okay then.”
Without realizing it I must have been pushing harder and harder against the rusted edges of the hole with the toe of my shoe because right then my whole sneaker pushed through the floor of the truck and I probably would have fallen out of my captain’s chair up to my hip if I wasn’t still belted in.
My Dad said, “Don’t move!” and jumped up to help me pull it out slowly without scraping my bare shin on any of the sharp edges. He had to straddle the weak parts of the floor and I could tell he was embarrassed because he kept talking while he was helping me, partly to himself but mostly to David, about how he was just about to weld an extra piece of sheet metal to the underside of the frame and how he guessed he’d waited one day too long and how he’d been thinking about trading this big old pile of junk in on one of those little foreign cars, a Honda or a Toyota, something that wasn’t breaking down every other week and how if he weren’t putting so much money into the house so he could sell it he’d probably have that new car already. David must have known that it just would have made it worse if he stepped up into the truck to help, so he and Em just stood on the sidewalk and were quiet.
When my foot was free I was looking through a hole the size and shape of a football. The flakes of rust, some big some small, lay on the road not far from where you stepped off the curb that day, and they were arranged in a pattern that was like some form of hieroglyphics I was supposed to understand. I only partly heard my Dad and David saying their good-byes as I studied it, trying to figure out what it was saying to me. My vision blurred then got sharp again and the pieces seemed to rearrange themselves into a message I could recognize with enough time, but then the truck was moving and the words slipped under me like credits going in reverse. I looked up into the big square side mirror just in time to see David leading Em through our yard and Em resisting his pull to watch us disappear.
Dolls
Em was right of course. It was easy to forget how much she must have missed you.
I remember when you were just old enough to start playing with dolls, really pretending, and Em couldn’t get enough of playing with you. She was real patient, showing you how to hold a baby, put it in the high chair, always going along when you wanted to do the same things over and over again. But what she really loved was when you got the hang of pretending to be a baby yourself. That amazed her, that a little person who wasn’t much more than a baby could pretend to be one, almost like you first had to pretend to be older just to have that ability. She’d rock you in the little rocker in her room, read you stories from memory, hold a bottle to your lips while you made kissing noises. Then she’d set you in the bottom half of a plastic under-bed storage bin that was supposed to be your crib, pull her blinds, turn on her nightlight and leave the room. “Call Mommy when you wake up,” she’d say, “or if you have a bad dream.” Sometimes if I was doing homework or listening to music or something she’d come in my room while she waited for you to call. You got to be so good at it sometimes she had to peek in to check and make sure you hadn’t really fallen asleep. That was so unlike you, staying quiet for so long. It was like you were trying to prove yourself to Em. Then finally you’d call and Em would look at me and roll her eyes as if to say a mother’s job was never done. And then she’d open the door on you, and you’d still be lying in the bin, smiling, reaching for her.
Skycoaster
Em had nothing to help her forget you, even for a little while. I had Jimmy Freeze climbing in and out of my life almost every night. And when he didn’t, I slid into his. He kept trying to get me to shimmy down the walls but I couldn’t make myself do it, so finally he made this little half-pipe chute out of some scrap duct work he bought from a heating and cooling guy in the neighborhood. He put a wood frame around it to make it sturdier but it was still light enough for him to lift out of his window and lay on my sill without making too much noise. The drop wasn’t all that steep so it was easy to climb back up by grabbing the outside of the wood frame. Frank was the tricky part. I knew I couldn’t leave him behind or he’d start crying for me. He liked the slide down enough because I held him on my lap. But he couldn’t get any traction going up and his claws made a real racket the first time we tried it. Then Jimmy got the idea of putting him in a laundry bag and tying some extra rope to the drawstring. I’d take the end with me when I climbed back, then pull Frank up behind me. He didn’t like that much either but it worked. When I took him out of the bag he always looked around the room real confused, like he’d been beamed up there or something.
Sometimes Jimmy and I got stoned but mostly we just talked. And kissed a lot. Nothing more than that, at least not at first. He didn’t push me to do other stuff and I guess I wasn’t giving off any signals that I wanted to. I figured he had lots of experience and that kind of scared me. I mean I’ve told you I’m no tease or anything but those other guys I let do stuff to me were so clueless I always knew I was in control. With Jimmy, I was afraid if I waved him on to second he might try to stretch it into a triple or more and I wouldn’t want to stop him. Plus he was the first really good kisser I ever made out with and there was something powerful about that. With everything on my mind, you, being away from Mom and Em and even David, Jimmy’s kisses created this little force field around us that kept everything else away. Everything slowed down, just like being stoned, and an hour of making out with him could erase a whole day’s worth of bad stuff. I think he must have felt a little bit the same. Jimmy had his share of things to try and block out.
When I asked him about the music that had nearly bounced me out of bed that first night he said he played that stuff because it was the only thing that sounded as angry as he felt. At first he was mostly mad at his mom for dying. Then when he started to love her again he got mad at everyone else for getting on with their lives without her.
His mom was much younger than his dad and they had five kids by the time she was twenty-seven and that was supposed to be it. Then the year she turned forty she started having these feelings and she thought she was having her life change early but it turned out to be Jimmy. She had all kinds of complications during the pregnancy and the birth, and Jimmy’s dad told him she was never really the same after he was born. Jimmy said well, then, she really must have been something else before. When she was fifty she started having weird feelings down there again but knew it was different this time. It was cancer and she was dead a little more than a year later. Jimmy was ten.
We were in his room when he told me that. We hadn’t kissed at all that night. He just started talking the minute I slid in, like I was late and he needed to catch me up. He didn’t cry or anything. Maybe it had been too long. But he seemed anxious for me to know about her and I envied him being able to talk about her like that when I couldn’t even tell him you’d ever existed.
“She sang to me every night,” he told me. “I don’t remember a single night of my entire life that didn’t end with her voice. Even at the end when she couldn’t come to my room anymore, she made me come to her and lie down with her and she’d sing in this whisper, always the same song.”
He said his Dad wasn’t built to be alone and he got remarried less than two years later. He said he felt like they both became his stepparents that day, like he was mostly a job that came with their new relationship. His stepmom seemed so weak compared to his mom. She liked to be taken care of and even though she wasn’t young anymore, she was enough younger than his dad that he took on that role for her. All his brothers and sisters were long gone, some married with kids, and Jimmy was stuck watching his dad be in love with someone that wasn’t his mom. That’s when he started carrying her picture, stopped being mad at her and started in on everyone else. His brothers and sisters mostly had their own families and his mom’s dying hardly seemed like a blip in their lives. At least to him. And even though the doctors said there was no connection between his mom’s late pregnancy and the cancer, Jimmy always felt like his father blamed him. Then Jimmy started getting in trouble.
“It just gave him a good excuse to send me away, pay to let it be someone else’s problem,” Jimmy told me.
I said it seemed like an awful lot of money to pay if you didn’t care about someone.
He said if I wanted to be on his dad’s side I could go downstairs and wake him up.
I said I wasn’t talking about sides, just if you were going to be mad at your own dad you should make sure of your reasons. I said maybe you’d like it better if you could buy your drugs from your dad instead of mine.
He said, “Okay, Tess DeNunzio. Settle down.”
That was the only time we came close to fighting about anything and he seemed to look at me differently after that. More like we were equals and I was someone he could not only tell stuff to but ask about things too. Out of all the other things I liked about him, I think that’s what made me start to fall in love with him.
At first we were only together at night but then Jimmy got me a summer job at Kennywood at the Thelma’s Lemonade stand. It was right by the big final drop on the Logjammer ride and Jimmy worked right across from me at the Skycoaster. He worked at the park every summer and knew some people and they hired me and paid me cash even though I wasn’t sixteen yet. Anyway, Thelma’s is that really cold slushy lemonade and the funnest part about working there was watching people almost faint from brain freeze. They’d come to my stand all hot and sweaty, usually before getting in the long line for the Logjammer so they’d have something to keep them cool, and they’d take that first big gulp and get a look on their face like someone just put their head in a vise and turned it hard. “Man!” they’d say and shake their heads, and then tip the cup up for more. You’d think word would get around to go easy on that stuff at first but it was the same thing all day every day.
The Skycoaster where Jimmy worked was only the coolest ride there. You had to sign up and pay for it like three hours in advance and come back at your assigned time. Then they strapped you in three across in these harnesses that were attached to a bungee cord, hauled you up and back maybe a hundred and fifty feet and then made you pull the release cord yourself. At first it was just a free fall straight down, but then when the bungee caught it sent you screaming out over the lake and up over the Logjammer and my Thelma’s stand. The Skycoaster and Thelma’s and the Logjammer made up just about the busiest part of the park, especially when it was hot, and my days flew by. It seemed like time was kept by the screams from the Skycoaster and the bursts of water that came with every plunge down that last Logjammer hill, and Vicky taught me to time my conversations with our customers around those sounds.
Vicky was the girl who worked with me most days. She was a little horsey looking in the face but she had this killer body she wasn’t afraid to show off that even made her buck teeth seem sexy. Guys were always crowded around our stand, ordering their Thelma’s and drinking them right there, pushing stuff off the counter so Vicky’d have to bend over to pick it up. She knew what they were doing but she’d put on a real show for them anyway, letting her tank top fall away from her boobs or giving them a glimpse of her silk thong underwear sticking up out of the back of her tiny jean shorts. Sometimes Vicky would leave and “take a walk” with one of them for a while. It was her second summer there so she was a little loose about how she came and went but I didn’t care. She took the stand while
I had lunch with Jimmy almost every day, so she could hook up with whoever she wanted the rest of the day as far as I was concerned.
Working made the summer go fast and I felt a little bit like I’d started a new life or something. Now that school was over I never saw any of my friends. It was just me and my Dad and his family and Frank and Jimmy and now Vicky. Most days I had to be at the park by ten thirty to open my stand and just when the day seemed to get started it was already time for lunch with Jimmy. Usually we walked across the park to the Potato Patch, where they had the best fries I’d ever eaten. It was right under the Thunderbolt, this really fast old wooden roller coaster, and our lunchtime conversation weaved in and out of the coaster clattering over our heads. After lunch we’d wander back to the Logjammer and usually cut in line for a ride to cool off. Then I’d tap us both a free Thelma’s and we’d sit and watch people’s faces as they flew by on the Skycoaster. Jimmy said he never got tired of that. He said no matter how cool someone thinks they are, the first time they’re pulling four Gs at the bottom of the arc, their faces show pure terror.
After lunch the long part of the day started. The park got crowded and the heat from the pavement was sometimes so heavy it seemed to hum. That’s when Vicky would do most of her entertaining and leave most of the real work to me. I didn’t care though. It gave me an excuse to ignore all those guys who even though some of them might have seemed cute to me before seemed pretty silly next to Jimmy. I’d be pulling Thelma’s out of the tap almost non-stop until I was done at six and then meet my Dad at the park entrance at six-thirty. He was usually coming back from the gym, so he was starving and we’d grab a bite to eat or get takeout for home. After dinner my Dad usually made a few deliveries, had a few beers and fell asleep on the couch. Once he was out I’d tap on Jimmy’s window, spend a few hours with him, sleep ’til nine and then the whole routine started over again. Everything was so new and my days were so full I didn’t have time to think about everything else until I pulled Frank into bed with me, and by then I was so tired it didn’t matter.
It was at least two weeks before Jimmy got me to go on the Skycoaster with him. He rode it all by himself every night he worked late, after closing time. The park was dark and quiet and he said it made him feel like a bat, soaring and free and dangerous. It was that last part that concerned me.
“The ride’s not dangerous, Tess. It just makes you ffeel dangerous.”
“Either way, no thanks.”
“Come on, I’ve ridden that thing at least two hundred times. Do I look any worse for it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know you before.”
“Look, I’m not going to make you do it, but you’d love it. I promise.”
“Maybe another day.”
“At least stay and watch me then. You can’t get up your courage watching all these amateurs all day.”
So sometimes I’d stay. My Dad had given me a cell phone when I started working and I’d call and tell him I was helping out at the Potato Patch until closing to make some extra money. He didn’t really like me staying so late but the park was a safe place. I think mostly he didn’t like having to wait until eleven to have his first beer.
Jimmy loved flying stoned so I’d smoke a little with him beforehand, being careful not to go past where I couldn’t fake being straight with my Dad. But one night I got a little carried away and the extra buzz made me brave.
We were smoking and snuggling on the raised platform in the middle of the lake when I told him, “I’m going up with you tonight, Jimmy.”
He pulled me in close then took the joint away from me. “That’s my girl!” he said. “No more weed for you, though. I want you to feel it! Hey, Mickey!” He called to the other guy who worked the coaster with him. “Two going up!”
Mickey walked out to the platform and started buckling us into the harnesses. It was a warm night but I started shivering like crazy and probably would have chickened out if Mickey hadn’t worked so fast. Once he’d clipped us in he helped us lock arms and that’s when Jimmy could feel me shaking.
“Easy, Tess.”
“I can’t do it! I can’t, I can’t!”
But we were already on our way up.
I screamed, “No! No!” and closed my eyes and we went up and up and I thought we’d never stop. I could tell when we cleared the trees because the wind picked up and we started to sway. I dug my nails into Jimmy’s arms. “Make it stop! I want to get off!”
“Too late. Open your eyes, Tess. Look at this!”
“I can’t!” We were still going up. It felt impossible, like we were attached to a cloud instead of the steel pole I’d looked at every day, up and up.
