Words and Their Meanings (4 page)

“Forget it.”

“You always interrupt people,” she says, flicking her hand up. “‘Forget it' is right. I'm going to see if I can switch with someone doing app rounds. Stay here and be miserable.”

When she stomps across the lawn, I don't try to follow. A year ago, this never would have happened. I can almost remember how it felt, to be the one full of patience, charm, faith in the universe. I can almost taste that girl inside me. But I can't make her come back, and Nat, of all people, knows it.

So I guess it makes sense. Today is a remembering kind of day and Nat's only memories of me from the past year are a mess of chains and anchors dragging her down.

We've always been seen as one entity—“Annat” was our shared nickname in middle school—but Nat is the one with social status. Joe once asked why I wasn't more popular, or why I never got asked to dances or on dates or whatever. I shrugged my shoulders and said I didn't try to fit in, or more accurately, didn't even know how to be normal enough to know what fitting in means.

“You know what? Don't change,” he'd said. “Don't ever change one bit. If you weren't different, you wouldn't be able to write like you do.”

I bear-hugged Joe. My biggest supporter. My other best friend. My bruncle. What a stupid term.

–––––

“Hello?” A guy in a pastel pink polo shirt and aviator sunglasses is waving his arm in front of my face. I jump a little, hitting a serving spoon resting inside a pan full of scallops and other fishy-smelling stuff. Some sauce goes flying, and after an all-too-brief moment of airtime suspension, lands Jackson Pollock-style onto the white silk dress Mrs. Fala is wearing.

Mrs. Fala, who is hosting this party as a fundraiser for the Kristin Fala Fund, a charity set up in memory of her daughter. It pays for a drug counselor at our high school.

I'm stuck to my spot next to the table. Mrs. Fala's face is melting a little, her layers of makeup beading with sweat, her mascara clumping with blinked-away tears. Nat must have seen it happen. She's rushing over with a bottle of club soda and a white cloth. When Mrs. Fala swats her away, Nat hesitates only a second before leading our now-humiliated hostess into the house. Squaring my shoulders, I walk slow and steady toward the kitchen's sliding glass door.

The second I enter the house, though, I start shaking. I rake my fingers through my hair, pulling out what's left of my shoddy ponytail. Thirty minutes into the job and my future is bleaker than ever. Either I have to face that crowd and Mrs. Fala again, take my chances finding another job in the next three hours, or go home and pack my bags to spend the rest of my summer repeating phrases like “I am worthy” in Hell. Every scenario is full of gag-worthy, monumental suck.

“Step out here. No one will see you.”

The boy with a deep dimple and arched eyebrow leans in from a side screen door. The boy who makes sparks. He flicks his shaved head for me to join him.

I slide out to the nook where the Falas hide their garbage cans, partitioned off the side lawn by a wall of white lattice.

“You okay?”

“Fine. I'm fine.”

His voice flushes my whole body pink. His brown eyes are like a doe's. His slow blinks untwist and re-knot my stomach. I start to crack my knuckles, then stop, folding my hands together to keep from fidgeting. Patti Smith cool. Patti Smith strong. Patti Smith, Patti Smith, Patti Smith.

“Fine seems to be the
palabra
of the day around here.” He pulls a green-and-white pack of Kool cigarettes from his back pocket.

I reply something stupid like,“I take French not Spanish,” and he shakes his head a little, unlit cigarette dangling between his lips.

“It means ‘word,'” he laughs, flipping open his lighter and taking a puff. His eyes never leave mine. “I'm Mateo.”

Mateo. I turn the name over in my mind, deciding it's poetry against the tongue.

“Anna,” I say. My eyes burn. “Thanks for the momentary hiding spot. I just splattered your scallop sauce all over Mrs. Fala's dress.”

“Bouillabaisse. Probably won't come out.” He shrugs, taking a long drag. The tip of his cigarette turns orange and shoots close to the filter. “Want a hit for nerves?”

“Not exactly the party to sound like a pusher, you know.”

In an interview, Patti once said she liked to smoke but not inhale, because she didn't want to hurt her lungs. She did it for the show of it. I take the Kool from Mateo. My body hums as his fingertip grooves scrape against mine. I can't do anything but let ash grow between my lips.

When I give it back, Mateo's hand reaches up and catches my wrist, light and strong all at once. He holds us together for a second.

“It's sad, what happened to that girl,” he says. “Too much money might be worse than not enough of it.”

His words call for a somber gesture, a straight-faced nod. But I offer up a shy smile instead. The cigarette drops. I step on it. Twist my black ballet flat to grind its little fire between the pavement and thin sole of my shoe. He steps closer, his expression reminding me of Patti's one-time lover and forever best friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in one of the pictures that always pops up first on Patti Smith Internet searches. In it, she's staring at the camera, one finger in her mouth. Robert stares at her, drinking up every feature of her face. Putting every sensor of their bodies on high alert.

Behind us, the kitchen is coming to life again. The head chef yells for Mateo. Once. Twice. We are still here. When she hollers next, it's with a threat of being a jo
b without second chances, and how he knows there's a line of wannabes waiting to take his place. He starts to move, but stops again, kind of rocking back on his feet.

“You've got a nice smile,” he says. “I gotta go. See you later, Anna.” It's a statement, not a question.

The space we're standing in is small, and we have to shuffle around each other. The screen door opens, snaps shut again. He disappears inside and I slump against the concrete step, unable to shake the warmth spreading in my face, stomach, hands.

He said my name. Match struck. Spark. Explosion. I can't help the thought burning inside that flame: maybe the year mark does matter. Maybe there's a way to shift and change again.

I hold this idea, cup it in my hands like river water, then spread my fingers and let it fall through. Because believing I deserve to feel anything good or true or real ever again is like saying it isn't my fault—like I don't care Joe will never get to feel anything ever again. Like I can heal.

It's a thought far scarier than going to Hell.

8

I
t's way past Bea's bedtime when I walk in the front door, but she's sitting on Mom's lap, wide awake and glued to whatever is playing without sound on TV. I cringe, knowing I need to walk in there. Mom looks beyond exhausted. The crazy Botox binge she went on does little to hide the weariness in her face.

My mother used to be one of those
au naturel
women, a rare gem in a sea of perfectly coifed and manicured suburban wives. She owned a horticulture business, and her gardens were known all over the city. She sold—or “gave away” if you ask my dad—the business to her favorite employee three months ago. About the time she started getting needles filled with the same toxin found in botulism shoved into her forehead.

“What's going on?” I whisper, motioning toward the giant painting leaning against the wall. It normally hangs in our front hall. My Gran painted it, and no matter how many times I've stood in front of the canvas, I can't quite get what she was saying when she swept her brush across again and again in rough red and orange strokes.

“Hi, Anna,” Bea says without looking away from the television.

“Hi, Bea. Mom? What happened?”

“Your sister got it off the wall. Hid behind it like a lean-to, and I looked for her for almost two hours—two hours—before I noticed. Bea was curled up there. She'd fallen asleep. So when bedtime rolled around … ”

I sit down on the couch and lean my head against Mom's shoulder, just for a moment. There's a huge vase of white roses and two cheap-looking bouquets sitting next to the TV. The room smells sickly sweet.

“Where'd those come from?”

Mom sighs.

“The Sarahs,” Bea pipes up. “Sarah H. delivered the roses today. She said she was hoping to see you. And the other two Sarahs came together with those flowers. They're
like the ones they sell at 7-Eleven.”

The “Sarahs” are a trio of pathetic puppies who despised Sameera and loved Joe. They showed up at the house, together, when he died, making a shrine at the end of the driveway: pictures, candles, horrible—I mean horrible—poems.

“The Sarahs,” Mom repeats with a sad laugh. “And of course one had to pick Madame Legras de St. Germain roses. The whole house smells like bad floral perfume. But let's not talk about that. How was work?”

“I didn't get fired,” I shrug. She tips her head back a little but doesn't push the issue. Instead, she holds out her hand. I take it.

We sit together, the three of us, watching some show about stupid pet tricks. The volume stays off, but for some reason, the silence isn't so loud tonight.

Daily Verse:

You can't let emotions consume you.

9

M
ore than anyone else, Joe tried to keep my love of words light, fun, unburdened. He bought me a word-a-day calendar every year for Christmas. The last one is still sitting in my desk drawer. It's stuck on June 15. And the word is “callipygian” (definition: having shapely buttocks).

Striker for the soccer team, class vice president, beautiful and smart girlfriend since puberty—I mean, Joe was basically a textbook case of popularity. But he wasn't like what you read about in bad teen novels or poorly scripted shows. He was nice to everybody. He liked to read. He spent two days during his junior year home on the couch, leaning against my mom because some friend made a comment about Joe's “orphan card.”

Mom held him tight and said orphans don't have family, and that his friend needed to invest in a dictionary.

“Or an Anna,” he'd said.

I'm convinced it was lines he read aloud, lines like “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” that made me a believer. Made me think words could mean one thing, but also, something much bigger than any dictionary could hold.

I sent him every piece I wrote when he was at school, before anyone else saw it. He was my best editor. Words tied us together. When he died, the thread was cut. No matter how much I wanted to, how hard I tried, I couldn't reconnect us. Earth to sky. Here to gone. I failed him.

Even if I tried writing again, my ideas for good first lines have vanished. And a first line makes or breaks a work. More than last lines. More than the stuff in between. Because I once thought I was a superstar in this arena, I can say with absolute certainty you've got about two punctuation marks to bind someone's eyes, mind, soul to a story.

For my life, I claimed one first line: “The universe is made of possibility.”

I wrote no less than 361 poems and stories using it. I won a lot of awards. You can do amazing things with such a simple, wide-open sentence. Until you stop believing in what those words mean.

In my mind, no more first lines means no more good writing. Gramps, on the other hand, says he doesn't buy it. He tells me at least once a week I need to be doing something productive with my time.

“Forty-five solid minutes of word purging would be much better for you than lying around playing dead,” he says, peering up from whatever stereo or laptop he's fixing for a friend. Gramps owned an electronics repair shop for like, four decades. It was down in old town, where I'm only allowed to hang out during daylight hours. He closed his business a few years after Gran died, but he still gets lots of calls at home. He's a fixer.

He tells me Gran stories, about how she was this brilliant artist and if she couldn't paint she would have gone crazy.

“Even when the painting felt dark. Even when it was scary. But mostly, she had to paint because she liked to do it. If you don't like writing anymore, then find something else you do like. You aren't just one thing, Anna. You can redefine yourself without needing to copy another person's life or spending part of every day acting like you no longer exist. It's wasteful, what you are doing.”

Gramps might be a retired electronics repair guy, but I'm pretty sure in a past life he was a monk. A monk who talked way too much.

But before I went to bed last night, I pulled an empty notebook from under my bed. Scribbled on a corner of the page until the dying pen I found started leaving its mark.

Rain clouds hang low and sluggish, ready to burst the minute their bellies hit a building corner or church steeple. I will them toward downtown, where angles are sharp, rusted. I want it to pour. I want to hear water pound down against the roof and windows and pavement. It has been one year since Joe died. I was sixteen, and now I'm seventeen. He was nineteen, and he'll never be twenty. No one but Sameera said his name today. Not Mom. Not Dad, who didn't even call to see if I went to work as promised. Not Gramps or Bea or Nat. I spent today proving to everyone I can start over and that they can stop worrying I'm a Sylvia Plath in the making. This seems oddly hilarious, considering Bea's the only one who has ever stuck her head (shoulders, arms, legs) in the oven.