Absolutely Normal Chaos (12 page)

That made me feel
a lot
better, but still—eight hours in a car with Carl Ray????

I do like to visit Aunt Radene, because they live on this great little farm with a cemetery in the front (they tell a lot of ghost stories) and a big hill in the back (with cows on it) and an enormous barn (with a loft full of hay) and the niftiest swimming hole in the world.

The bad part about visiting Aunt Radene is that not
only is there no phone, but there also is no electricity and there is NO PLUMBING. That means outhouses and wells and stuff. Really.

But I don’t know how I can be away from Alex for a whole week.

Beth Ann called to say that she had talked to Christy, who said that the GGP is still considering her for membership, but that she would have to come to the next pajama party, which is next Saturday. And Beth Ann said that since Carl Ray and I would both be gone (she sounded real jealous when she heard I was going, but I told her that he was just my stupid cousin and I didn’t even want to go and it wasn’t going to be any fun and I would remind him of her every five minutes), she might as well go to the GGP pajama party. Just for the heck of it, she said.

I’m glad I’ll be gone.

Tuesday, July 24

My mother has forbidden me to use the following three words: “God,” “stupid,” and “stuff.” She said I needed to expand my vocabulary. It’s not easy eliminating those words all of a sudden. When she said that, I said, “Well,
God
!”

“Mary Lou!”

And then I said I had to go do the
stupid
dishes and she said, “Mary Lou!” and about two seconds
later I said I was going to have trouble not saying God and
stuff
, and she said, “Mary Lou!” So I asked her what in the heck I was supposed to do with these big holes in my vocabulary all of a sudden, and she said, “Use the thesaurus.”

Right. So I spent about an hour combing the thesaurus, and here’s what I came up with:

God:
deity, Lord, Jehovah, Providence, Heaven, the Divinity, the Supreme Being, the Almighty, the Omnipotent, the Infinite Being, Alpha and Omega, the Absolute, King of Kings, etc. (There’s lots more.)

(I’m having trouble picturing me saying, “Oh, deity!” or “Oh, Omnipotent!” or “Oh, Alpha and Omega!” but I’ll give it a try.)

Stupid:
foolheaded, asinine, buffoonish, apish, fatuous, witless, moronic, imbecile, batty, besotted, myopic, poppycockish, cockamamie, lumpish, oafish, boobish, beefbrained, chowderheaded, beetleheaded, cabbageheaded, etc.

(There are
lots
of words for stupid. I can’t believe my mother wants me to use some of these, but I’ll try. I practiced already: That witless ole Carl Ray! That beefbrained Christy! That cabbageheaded Beth Ann! Pretty good, eh?)

Stuff:
material, constituents, sum and substance, nub, pith, quintessence, elixir, irreducible content.

(Well,
sure
. I can hear myself now. We all messed
around and quintessence. He had all this elixir in his pocket. We went to the park and irreducible content. It doesn’t make a bit of sense, if you ask me.)

Not much elixir happened today. Alex had to work all day, so I stayed home, watched Tommy, read some more
Odyssey
, and quintessence.

Mrs. Furtz came over again, all crying and nub, about some cabbageheaded letter she got. I don’t know what she was going on about. I do feel sorry for her and all, I really do, but Omnipotent! She realllllly gets to sobbing and pulling at her hair.

Alex and I are going out tomorrow night and Thursday night before our Separation. Oh, sob.

The only good thing about Carl Ray going out with Beth Ann is that after dinner he splashes on about a gallon of besotted aftershave and runs (well, drives) over to Beth Ann’s (she lives a whole block away), and he doesn’t get back until about ten or eleven o’clock. Dad is happy because he finally gets his TV-watching chair back, and everybody else is happy because they can watch their own programs again.

I have a confession to make. I snooped around in Carl Ray’s room today. I don’t know what got into me, but I was vacuuming upstairs and I was looking at all these new bottles of aftershave (he has
two
bottles of Canoe; he must have heard how much Beth Ann
loves
it) on his dresser, and his top drawer was open a bit and I sort of peered in and then I guess I
was wondering if he had all his money in there and I wanted to see if he had any left, so I opened the drawer.

He sure had a lot of sum and substance in there. Alpha and Omega! About twenty packs of gum, a bunch of pennies and nickels, three can openers, two pocketknives, some horse chestnuts (???), three pairs of ratty old socks, pens, pencils, packs of matches, glue, a can of tuna fish (unopened), and a can of sardines (also unopened), a DIARY (!!!!), and something wrapped up in tissue paper.

I stared at the diary and the thing wrapped up in tissue paper for a few minutes. I didn’t want anyone to catch me, but I sure wanted to open that diary and that little package. But I was starting to feel guilty. I decided to open only one thing. I figured that it would be worse to open the diary, so I opened up the tissue paper.

How peculiar.

Inside was a gold ring with a large black stone. There was also a card that said: “Carl Ray, I want you to have this. I’ll explain later. C.F.” I figured it must be from his father (Carl Joe Finney), but I never knew that Uncle Carl Joe could afford anything as fancy as that ring. If he could, why wouldn’t he put a bathroom in his house?

I was going to look inside the ring to see if it had an inscription, but Dennis came upstairs then and he
caught me sticking it back and asked what I was snooping at and I told him I was just cleaning, for Deity’s sake.

The Dead

Book Eleven of the
Odyssey
is deadly boring. Ha. That’s a pun, because this part is all about Odysseus’s visit to the dead. It wasn’t as exciting as I expected it to be. He meets some old friends who weren’t as lucky as he (they’re dead, after all) and also he meets a prophet who tells him what’s going to happen to him in the future. He warns him about all the dangers ahead and tells him that he will kill all of his wife’s suitors. I didn’t think Homer should give away the ending like that. Also, this prophet tells Odysseus how he will die!!! He’s going to die at sea, but a sort of peaceful death
.

Imagine. Would you want someone to tell you what was going to happen to you and how you were going to die? What if you were told you were going to die at sea? Wouldn’t you stay about as far away from the sea as possible? But the way this prophet tells Odysseus, it’s as if there isn’t a darn thing he can do about it. It’s all planned out. Would you want to know what was on your path of life and all? I wouldn’t. No way. But I wouldn’t mind visiting dead people. I’d check on how Mr. Furtz was doing.

Wednesday, July 25

I’ve just been with Alexxxxxx. Sigh. But I’ll wait and tell about him at the end.

First, Beth Ann. She called today and jabbered on for hours about that wonnnnderful Carl Ray. That cabbageheaded ole Carl Ray sent her a dozen red roses!!! I asked her if she was absolutely sure they were from him, and she seemed a little offended. She said that there was a card with the flowers and it said, “To Cleo from Tony.”

“Huh?” I said. “Cleo? Tony?”

She giggled. “Our nicknames. I’m Cleopatra, he’s Antony.”

Oh, Alpha and Omega! It took me about ten minutes to quit gagging. I could not imagine Carl Ray standing in some florist shop writing out this card that says, “To Cleo from Tony.” I mean, what would the storekeeper
think
? King of Kings! Supreme Being! What
happens
to people?

But then I started wondering why Alex and I hadn’t given each other nicknames, and then I started wondering if maybe he didn’t like me as much as Carl Ray likes Beth Ann, and then I started wondering why Alex hadn’t sent
me
roses.

Anyway. Beth Ann still has not heard from “the jerk.” If you ask me, she’s too busy drooling over Carl Ray to care very much anymore. She sure
forgot Derek-the-Divine quickly.

Oh, and Beth Ann, my devoted best friend, has definitely decided to go to the GGP pajama party on Saturday night when I am off in West Virginia suffering through a week of Carl Ray. Some friend.

So now Alex. Ah, Alex. Tonight I met him halfway between his house and my house, and then we walked back to his house. The Big Moment: I was going to meet his parents. All the way there, he told me about them. He said his dad would be very quiet and serious and that his mother would be a little weird. When I asked him what he meant by weird, he said she changes moods quickly and dresses strangely sometimes and never sits still, but that she was real nice anyway.

Mrs. Cheevey was standing in the driveway aiming a bow and arrow at the garage when we walked up. She was wearing a black cocktail dress, pearls, and a pair of tennis shoes. On her head was a baseball cap. She shot a bow and arrow at the garage door. It landed right between two of the windows. “Bull’s-eye!” she shouted.

Then she heard us coming and turned around. “Oh hi, hi, hi,” she said, walking up to us. She was real pretty, with curly blond hair and a sweet round face.

She put her hand out to me. “Mary Lou, Mary Lou, Mary Lou!” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?” She was smiling all over the place. She held out
the bow and arrow. “Just practicing,” she said. “Want to try?”

I said, “Maybe later,” but I smiled a lot too.

“Well, come in, come in, come in,” she said. So we followed her inside. Alex lives in this enormous house on Lindale Street. The living room is about as big as our whole downstairs, and it looks, at first, as if it should be a picture in a magazine. But then, if you look more closely, you notice some strange things. Each set of windows has a different color of curtains, for example: red, gold, purple, black, peach, blue. On one side of the room, the furniture is all antique-looking: a huge ornate couch in green velvety material, a gigantic wooden cupboard, four of those dainty little chairs that you would expect little princesses to be sitting on, and lots of those little round tables with curved legs. Then on the other side of the room, everything is modern: a long white couch, two leather-and-metal chairs that each look like an enormous S, and a long black coffee table with metal legs and a wavy top that looks like a great big noodle.

Then the walls. On the antique side is this orange-and-green-patterned wallpaper, and on the modern side the walls are shiny yellow. One side of the room (guess which side!) has six huge portraits of very stern-looking grandmothers and grandfathers (I guess).

The other side had all kinds of interesting things on it: one of those paintings that looks like someone just stood back and flicked paint off a spoon; a stuffed pig’s head; a white plaster sculpture of an arm and hand coming right straight out of a piece of tin; a pair of red cloth lips, about two feet in diameter, with a stick of gum emerging from the center; and a long shelf (maybe six feet long) with hundreds and hundreds of little pebbles on it.

Mrs. Cheevey said, “Sit down, sit down, sit down,” and she motioned us to the antique side of the room. We sat down. “Oh,” she said, “I just love it, love it, love it, when Alex brings someone home!” Then she started calling for her husband, “Oh, Ralph, Ralph, Ralph.”

Pretty soon Ralph came in. Wow! He is about seven feet tall, about as tall and skinny as anyone I have ever met. First I saw his feet coming down the stairs, and they were e-nor-mous. He wore gigantic leather sandals. Then I saw his legs coming down the stairs. He wore blue jeans, and his legs just kept coming and coming. I didn’t think there was a body attached. Then I saw hands and arms hanging down; these long, swinging things in a red plaid shirt. Pretty soon a long neck and then, surprisingly, a rather small head. I was glad that it was a small head, because I was beginning to think a giant was
coming down the steps. His face is pale and freckled and he has brown hair.

He stepped into the room. “Oh, Ralph, Ralph, Ralph,” Mrs. Cheevey said, “this is Mary Lou!!” He nodded, but before he moved any farther, he motioned to the other side of the room with his hand. Alex and Mrs. Cheevey automatically got up, so I did too, and then we all went and sat on the other side of the room.

But as soon as we sat down, Mrs. Cheevey jumped back up and left the room. Mr. Cheevey said, “Son,” (I liked that, the way he said “son,” so formal and all), “do you and Mary Lou have plans for this evening?”

Alex said, “Yuh.”

Then Mrs. Cheevey came rushing back in the room with a plate of oysters! Ugh. I’d never eaten oysters, and I didn’t really feel like starting today, but it didn’t look like I had any choice. She balanced the plate of oysters on two of the waves of the noodlelike table and went rushing out again. Then she came back in with some purple napkins (cloth) and handed us each one and sat down. Then she got back up and passed the plate of oysters around.

We had each swallowed one oyster when Mrs. Cheevey jumped up again and said, “Oh! Ralph, Ralph, Ralph! The time. It’s so late, late, late.” She was already up and halfway out of the room.

Alex said, “Well, I’m glad you got to meet—”

Mr. Cheevey stood up. “Mary Lou Finney,” he said, and put out his hand, and I quickly wiped off the oyster juice on my purple napkin and put my hand out and he gently crushed all my fingers in his enormous hand.

Already Mrs. Cheevey was back, carrying a green parka, which she put over her shoulders. She was still wearing the black cocktail dress, pearls, baseball hat, and tennis shoes. Mr. Cheevey was still wearing his jeans and plaid shirt and sandals. They left. Dressed like that, they left.

Alex said, “They’re really nice, honest, once you get to know them.”

“Wow,” I said.

Alex and I were
alone
in his house. I started examining all the things on the walls—the pig’s head and the shelf with all the pebbles on it and the big pair of red lips with the gum sticking out the center. Can you imagine practicing kissing on those huge lips?!! I think Alex was more nervous than I was, because he was shuffling all around. We did try sitting on the long, white couch, but we felt pretty silly sitting there on that huge couch in the middle of that enormous room, so finally Alex suggested we go to the Tast-ee Freeze. It was a relief, to tell you the truth. And then, just to show you that it must be true about the quiet, romantic places not being all that they are cracked up to be, wouldn’t you know it,
when we got out on the street and were passing Artie’s Automotive, that’s when he put his arm on my shoulder again!