Chapter 19
— Chapter 19 —
When I finally get home, it’s after dark, but the outside light is on. The kitchen light is too, the yellow glow seeping out into the living room. It makes the house look warm. If I were someone else, looking at this Cape Cod cottage nestled under a canopy of trees, I would think it was charming, even in its decline.
“Hey,” I call when I walk through the front door, desperate to get a read on Aubrey before I commit to a location or stance.
“Hola,” she shouts from the sunroom, in a tone that could be shy or bored or annoyed that I’m infringing on the space she felt was hers.
She’s at the table, Spanish text open, writing in her notebook. She still holds her pencil at an angle that makes her twist her wrist into an awkward C shape. I think Aubrey was supposed to be a lefty. Steena was always after her about not using the “wrong hand” when she was coloring.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Fine,” she says, and keeps writing.
“I got a job,” I say and then realize it comes across like I’m looking for approval from her. I probably am, but I hate how it sounds.
“Congrats.”
“Just lunches at the place where I used to work. Sort of.”
“Sort of lunches?” She looks up, like she’s actually interested.
“No, totally lunches, but it’s only sort of the place where I used to work. Same building. New owner.”
She stares at the ceiling like she’s trying to concentrate on a thought in the depths of her mind. “Where we ate snails?” she asks.
One of the times I took her to The Aster, she saw someone at another table eating from an escargot dish with a two-tined fork, and wanted to try whatever they were having.
“Yeah. The snail place,” I say, overjoyed that parts of our time together still live in her memory.
“Do they still serve snails?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out and get back to me,” she says with a wry smile, and I know she got that from Jam, right down to the expression.
“So, you want me to bring some home after my shift if they do?” I grin.
She pulls a face and shakes her head. “Do I want to eat butter-soaked erasers again? No. No. I do not.”
Her hair moves. There’s a ripple at her shoulder, independent of her body, like a wave going in the wrong direction. When I glance at the rat cage on the table, the door is open. I look back and see him peering at me through the curtain of Aubrey’s hair.
“Oh god!” I shout. It’s a reflex that surprises both me and the rat, who disappears again. I thought I was used to him, but the change of context creeped me out.
Aubrey laughs. “Are you afraid of my rat?” She gathers him from her shoulder and kisses his nose. He chatters gently.
I shake my head. “Just surprised.”
“Sure…,” she says, raising her eyebrows, and it’s super disarming because I know she got that look from me.
“Anyway,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “I have a nasty insurance bill to cover, and then I can start taking over the heat and electricity. And paying you back.” It’s humiliating. I never want to take anything from her.
She shrugs. “It was your furniture.”
“Well, I should at least pay you for your labor. Shray too.”
She stands and puts her rat back in the cage, and I get a good view of his bare, skinny tail. I must look horrified because she says, “You’ll fall in love with him. It doesn’t take long. Hey, are those my clothes?”
“Shit. Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t have anything to—”
“I don’t care,” she says. “It’s just weird to be the same size as you.”
I laugh. “It is really weird.”
“I know it’s not what happened, but I keep feeling like you got smaller.”
“Sometimes I feel like I did too,” I say.
Aubrey looks at me as if she understands the sadness in my words. Her rat is watching us, clinging to the bars of his cage, eyes bright with interest. His brown fur is lighter next to his body and darker at the tips and makes him look fuzzy. His nose is pink and twitchy. I remember that I like him.
“Hey, did you eat?” I ask, invoking the ancient call of our shared ancestors.
“I could eat,” she says, which is the correct response.
“I should have picked up something on the way home. Pizza? I could order pizza.”
“I had a slice of shitty deli pizza at work.”
“Does that mean you don’t want pizza?” I also had pizza for lunch, but that was fancy restaurant pizza, not pizza-place pizza, which is an entirely different food.
“Of course not,” Aubrey says. “It’s absurd to even ask.”
I drive to pick up dinner because I don’t want to pay for delivery. Aubrey ordered, and I guess I didn’t realize how much pizza costs when you’re not just buying one or two slices, because I hand over my last twenty and my change comes back in ones. But the smell of that pizza filling my car is absolute heaven.
A little down the road from the pizza place, in the direction I do not go, is the bar where I hung out a lot after I quit college. I’d order Jack on the rocks so the bartender wouldn’t look too hard at the fake license Jam got me as a joke. I hated being a liar, but it was completely absurd that I could work behind a bar and couldn’t sit at one. The photo on my ID was Julia Roberts and the name listed was Gina Lola Brigida, so anyone who served me deserved trouble if they got it. But I only drank enough to keep my claim on a barstool, and I always tipped well.
The last time I was there, I’d just been dumped by my college boyfriend. I wanted to be in bed, drowning my sorrows in ice cream, watching my VHS copy of Doc Hollywood for the millionth time. But I couldn’t bear to run the gauntlet of my mother and Step, so I went to the bar and tried to drown my sorrows in a bowl of peanuts. I was exhausted and detached. I kept forgetting not to drink my Jack, and the bartender gave me a refill on the house. There was a Grateful Dead cover band playing on a makeshift stage in the corner of the bar, and I felt like I’d fallen into purgatory, stuck in an endless space jam, no lyrics in sight. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, but I didn’t even bother to turn around until they called out to me too.
Aubrey is on the roof when I get home. I can see the outline of her and the glowing ember of her cigarette.
“Aunt Frey! I’m up here,” she shouts as I’m getting out of the car. Her silhouette waves.
It’s the first time she’s called me anything since I’ve been back. Ten years since I’ve heard her say “Aunt Frey,” and it makes my heart feel warm and achy.
“Want to come down and eat?” I call back.
“Can we eat up here?”
“It’s cold!” Navigating the steps up to the house with the pizza and two fountain sodas feels like more than enough of a trek, and I’m worried that trying to hold my balance on the sloped roof will make my incision hurt.
But she shouts “I’ll get blankets!” and sounds so happy that I can’t say no.
I’m out of breath by the time I get to Steena’s bedroom.
Aubrey aimed Steena’s gooseneck lamp so it shines out the window. She has our old striped beach blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and she’s sitting on my Smurfette sleeping bag. I hand her the pizza and one of the sodas and yank the satin-edged blanket off the bed.
“Let me hold your drink!” she says while I’m trying to balance on Steena’s saggy mattress. The Aubrey I left had the same desire to help but was not yet skilled in cause and effect. She’d remember to grab my gloves from the car but drop one of them in a puddle. Or try to assist me when I made mac and cheese, only to spill the open packet of powdered sauce all over the kitchen floor, then end up underfoot while I was trying to drain the pasta. As I’m watching her balance both sodas, angling her foot to keep the pizza box from sliding off the roof, I remember that there are so many tiny ways to be proud of a person. I’d never known that feeling before Aubrey was born, and I’d forgotten it while I was gone. I don’t think anyone ever felt that way about me. Maybe Babbo sometimes, when I helped him snap string beans on the deck. I remember his face looking the way I feel.
“Here,” Aubrey says, handing my soda back, making sure I have a good grip on the cup before she lets go.
It’s too cold to be comfortable, but I don’t care. The pizza is still hot. It’s clear tonight and we can see the stars.
“What’s the deal with the rat?” I ask when we’re settled into our blankets, eating slices, sodas secured between our feet.
“I stole him from school,” Aubrey says with her mouth full. She pulls the slice away from her face, trying to get the stringy cheese to break. When it does, it hits her chin, and she laughs.
“You what?” I hand her a wad of napkins, resisting the urge to wipe her face myself.
“He was in the science room. A kid in my row spent the whole class trying to chuck things into his cage without Mr. Gioletti noticing. I started thinking how that was one boy in one class and there are like six classes a day in that room. It was too mean.”
“How’d you get him out?”
“My coat pocket,” she says, like it’s nothing. “I left my coat in the room on purpose and went back to get it at the end of the day. Mr. Gioletti was standing in the hallway talking to the principal.” Aubrey laughs. “I had a rat wriggling in my pocket and his tail was sticking out and they didn’t even notice. It took four days for anyone to realize the rat was gone. So, like, Mr. Gioletti wasn’t feeding him enough or cleaning his cage. Also, you’re not supposed to only have one rat. They’re really social, which a science teacher should know. You’re supposed to have at least two. But I think he’s really old. I don’t want to get another and end up stuck in an endless rat cycle.” She sighs, and it sounds like an adult sigh. “I didn’t even want a rat. I just couldn’t stand that no one was taking care of him. I don’t know if I’m the best for him, but I’m better than what he had. So, I try to spend as much time with him as I can, and I hope it’s enough to keep him happy even though I’m a person.”
I turn my face to the shadows and take a sip of my soda so Aubrey can’t tell that I’m getting choked up. Who she is now feels like the logical continuation of the little girl I knew—fiercely kind and always rooting for the underdog.
“What’s his name?” I ask once I’ve gotten a handle on myself.
“Lenny.”
“Like Of Mice and Men ?”
She looks at me. “No. Like Lenny with the juice?”
“Huh?”
“He likes apple juice, so I named him for that song by that sleepy band you used to listen to—about the juice that wasn’t scared of the world ending?”
I have no idea what she’s talking about.
She stares at me. “You listened to that song all the time. Lenny’s juice is not afraid?”
I don’t want to laugh at her, but it wells up and bubbles over. “Lenny Bruce , not Lenny’s juice. It’s an R.E.M. song.”
“Who’s Lenny Bruce?”
“He’s a comedian who got arrested for saying bad words.”
“Comedians say bad words all the time.”
“This was in the sixties.”
“And he wasn’t afraid of getting arrested? Is that it?”
“Yeah. But he died of an overdose… So maybe he was afraid of something.”
Aubrey looks crushed. The fearless juice box she’d imagined all these years was a lie. And I feel sorry I told her about the end of Lenny Bruce. I should have left the story in the middle.
“How old was he?”
“I don’t know. Not old enough.”
“That’s really sad… that he died like that.”
“He did change the world,” I say, because I want to give her a moral to the story, a button that makes everything less awful, although I suspect the world is even more awful than I know. The world ate Lenny Bruce for being himself. I don’t want it to eat Aubrey too. At the very least, I don’t want her to think it’s futile to try. “He was brave, and he spoke up and said what he wanted to say, and now you live in a world where you didn’t know a comedian could get arrested for being obscene.”
Aubrey flashes a sad smile. “Well, fuck,” she says, watching me warily, not sure if she’ll get away with it.
“Fucking shit,” I say, grinning.
She laughs.
“Were you afraid to steal Lenny?” I ask.
“I wasn’t,” Aubrey says, wrinkling her brow. “I mean, what do I have to lose? I’m already forced to go to that stupid school where they waste my time all day. I’m stuck dealing with my stupid parents and my asshole brother. No one can make those things happen harder. So, I may as well save Lenny.”
Her logic astounds me. I wish I’d been more like her when I was her age. I want to be more like her now. “May as well,” I say.
“Fuck yeah,” she says, then cups her hands to her mouth and shouts “Thank you, Lenny Bruce!” out to the night sky.
After we get the pizza box and soda cups and blankets back through the window, Aubrey asks, “Do you want me to move my stuff out of your room?”
“Oh, god, no,” I say in an exhale. “I don’t think I could take the flashbacks.”
“Do you want help moving your stuff in here?”
I look around, and even though Steena’s room is also mostly gutted, it still has the same bright yellow walls and sloped dormer ceilings and could never feel like anything other than her room to me.
“This one might be worse.” I tilt my head toward Aubrey and point to the scar at the end of my eyebrow. “One weekend, while Steena was at her dad’s, I went to borrow one of her Sweet Valley High books, but she rigged the door with a Halloween pumpkin bucket full of thumbtacks. That’s where the edge of the pumpkin hit me.”
“Jesus,” Aubrey says.
“When I fell over, two thumbtacks stuck in my knee.”
“Was she ever not mean?” Aubrey asks, sitting on Steena’s bed with her sneakers on, which I know would drive my sister into white-hot rage.
“She could be nice in little moments,” I say.
Aubrey nods. “Like just enough so you feel bad when you hate her.”
“Yeah. I think that might be the point of her nice moments.” I feel bad as soon as I say it. When I was a kid and people insulted my mother, it made me angry, even when they were right. But Aubrey looks at me with relief. Maybe she doesn’t have Stockholm syndrome, because she hangs out here. She isn’t trapped in her life the way I was.
“My mom is almost always nice to Austin,” she says. “They’re like peas in a pod.”
Once, when I went over to help Steena after Aubrey was born, she handed off her sweet, sleeping baby, saying, “Ugh, Freya, don’t ever do this. What a terrible scam babies are!” She complained about diapers, spit up, and having to warm bottles as if no one had told her babies required care. But when Aubrey was four, Steena had Austin, and every inch of him was a miracle to her. One time, holding his tiny foot in her hand, she looked at me, tears in her eyes, and said, “Have you ever seen anything more perfect?” with a kind of reverence that suggested there’d never been a baby with feet in her life before. Steena seemed to identify with Austin on a cellular level.
“Like us,” I say, without thinking, and I’m instantly embarrassed.
Aubrey turns away from me. Fiddles with her shoelaces, hair falling in her face. “Yeah,” she says. “Like us.”