Glitter and Glue (17 page)

Big party tonight at the American’s. I wish we’d run into him earlier. We only have a few more weeks before we leave for the Great Barrier Reef.

While I dry my hair, Tracy reads aloud from the morning paper about Bill Clinton’s mythical childhood. A penniless have-not who never met his dad and grew up in a rural ghetto that’s actually called Hope.

“People are gonna eat that up. He’s everything we like to think is possible in America,” I say.

“So here’s a line for you.” Tracy reads a sidebar about Ross Perot. “ ‘If you see a snake, you kill it. You don’t appoint a committee on snakes.’ ”

“Sounds like something my mom would say.”

“Totally. What happened to your bangs?” Tracy asks.

“I torched them. The hair dryer here is total crap. John bought it before I moved in, which was so nice, but this”—I point at my scorched fringe—“is the best I can do, even with my new styling brush that cost like twenty bucks.”
Oh for God’s sake, Kelly, who’s looking at you?
I hear my mother ask.

“Put a little water on your bangs. I can smell the burn.”

On the train to the party, Tracy hands me her Zinc Pink, and I coat my lips.

Evan meets us at the station downtown. We glance at each
other, sheepish about our party looks, me in mascara and lipstick, Evan in shoes and a belt. We make small talk as we follow Walker’s directions. When we get to the door, Tracy and Evan look to me to do the knocking. Standing in the hallway between them, I don’t know who we are or who I want us to be: three pals … a couple and their single buddy … best friends and some guy?

Walker throws open the door. “You made it!” he says to us, kissing both Tracy and me on the cheek and throwing out his hand for Evan to shake. “Good to see you, mate.” He says he thought we might not come, but we’ll be glad we did because this party is
going off
. He points Evan toward a keg and takes Tracy and me to the kitchen, where we drain a bottle of wine into giant orange stadium cups that Walker wants us to notice are from UVA.

“Hey,” Walker says to the guys in the kitchen, “these are the American girls I told you about.” We all shake hands, and everyone is happy to meet us. I glance across at Evan, who is filling his cup, and wonder if he’ll surprise me by getting hammered.

“Right, then, American Girl,” says an Aussie named Ian. “How do you like ’Stralia?”

I tell Ian I love his country, I can’t think of one thing wrong with his country, his country is like a giant resort—gorgeous and open late and geared toward adventure.

“I reckon nothing’s better than the States. Fan-bloody-tastic.” Ian takes the uncomplicated view of us. Half the people we meet think like Cultural Chernobyl Goatee Boy, and the other half see the United States as Xanadu. It’s nice being around that half, nice like when my old friend tells me that my mom’s the rudder.

Ian and I talk about nannying, and I keep it simple. I don’t
tell him the Tanners’ sad story. It’s a party. We laugh about how hopeless I am, driving on the wrong side of the road, freaking Milly out in Darling Harbour, and then he says he’s been on the dole since he got out of uni.
Talk about hopeless
, I hear my mother say.

After an hour, someone puts on Depeche Mode and people start bobbing their heads and tapping their feet. Evan is across the room, talking seriously to a plain girl with very good posture. She suits him. Like Evan (and Milly and my mom), she hails from the part of the world where people are not looking to be noticed. It’s a place I haven’t chosen to spend much time.

Tracy taps me on the shoulder. “Cig?”

We duck outside and meet a new crowd, the smokers. Someone holds out an open pack, and we each take one and say, “Cheers,” like we’re locals. I’m glad Evan’s not out here; it’s insensitive to smoke in front of a person whose family was destroyed by cancer, even if it wasn’t lung cancer.

We end up staying outside a long time because Walker’s turned up to regale us all with adventure stories. He’s done everything—white-water canoeing, wind-surfing, zip-lining, hiking something called the Tarkine Rainforest Track in Tasmania. Walker is totally fearless, a Go For It guy. As he talks, Tracy and I make mental notes of the awesome things we need to do and the off-the-beaten-track places we need to hit.

Eventually, Evan leans out the door, reminding me that in some ways I’m already way off the beaten track.

“Oh, hey,” he says to me.

“Hey.” I move the ashtray and slide over so he has a place to be. His beer is almost full, and I wonder if he’s still on his first.

Folding Evan into his audience, Walker starts a new story, about parasailing. Someone interrupts and asks when he managed
to do “all this incredible shit,” and he says, “Pretty much over the last year.”

“Dude, that’s a killer year,” someone says.

“Just trying to keep moving and see it all,” Walker says. “The best was black-water rafting in New Zealand. Incredible.”

Someone asks what
black-water
means.

“Rafting through caves—subterranean.” Someone whistles
woo-ee
. “Yeah. Never seen anything like it. The really rad thing is that once you get deep down in the tunnels, there are, like, thousands of glowworms clinging to the walls.”

I’d have gone for Walker if I’d met him last year at happy hour on Water Street in Baltimore. Me in my rayon skirt and pleather pumps, him in his JoS. A. Bank suit and genuine leather briefcase, telling me how he’s going to be an expat in Australia. Shit, I almost fell for him here, settling in at his feet as he rolled out his director’s cut of ripping yarns.

But then Evan came outside and stood next to me, and as I looked back and forth between him and Walker, thinking about what they’ve each seen and conquered these past twelve months, Walker started to look designed, like a fitness fanatic whose muscles have been carefully shaped in the gym, an expensive trainer guiding his every rep, where Evan is a foot soldier, made fit by a tour of service, no spotters, no mirrors. He’s done the night watch, carried a body, guided his unit back to civilian life.

What good is the stuff flashy Walker knows?
Keep moving. See it all
. Why? For the stories? How do they help anybody?

If I have only so much time to learn, I’m pulling my chair up to Evan and begging him to talk. His parents’ separation and divorce, his mum’s second marriage, her tumor, the treatment and side effects, the first time a doctor used the word
terminal
, deciding how to spend the time left, the first skipped dose, the
mess of a body breaking down, the last words, the closing of her eyes, the relief, the fury, the hole. I need to know the things he knows. Everyone does.

Evan is a Person of Great Interest, of True Interest. My mother would have preferred him over Walker from
word one
.

On the ride home, I open the window because I smell like an ashtray, and I stare out at the yellow line marking the road’s shoulder until it blurs, mad at myself for ogling over Walker’s well-stamped passport and daredevil badges.

You think rafting through the dark is so gutsy, Walker, in your helmet and life preserver?

Try watching your mother die. Try looking after her father and her kids. Try family life
.

The next day is gorgeous. Bright but not hot. Outside on a chair, a thin blanket across my thighs, I crack open my book, thinking about my mother and the many moments of my childhood when she tucked herself away somewhere, enjoying what she called
a party for one
.

In the early spring and later fall, when the air was chilly but the sun was warm, she’d settle into a chaise longue she’d set up in a patch of sunlight just inside the garage to read one of her giant library books with the crinkly plastic covers. She loved having a little color in her cheeks and she could not hear the phone out there—or, better yet, us kids.

In the humidity of summer, she could be found sitting in the driveway in her station wagon, enjoying the air-conditioning, opening the mail or making a store list while listening to
MacNeil/Lehrer
.

In the winter, when the sun went down early, she’d slip up to her room, unhook her bra, and lie down on top of her well-made bed. Curled up on her side, hands tucked between her knees, she’d keep her eyes open toward the door, like a doll with a dead battery, until one of us barged in with a grievance of some sort. “Mom! Didn’t you hear me calling you? Booker broke my hairband!”

This is the first time, here in Australia, that my life has looked and sounded and moved like hers, from bed to kitchen
to car and back, and consequently she is everywhere, like a movie playing across the walls and furniture from hidden projectors.

In my book, Ántonia and Jim have lost touch. He’s gone East to “be educated,” and she’s started a family with a man named Cuzak, also an immigrant. They have a large orchard and many children to work it. The last time Jim saw her, twenty years back, he told Ántonia that there was a time when he would have liked to have had her for “a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister, anything that a woman can be to a man.”

I put down the book and close my eyes, thinking about Jim’s affection for Ántonia, how he wanted to be someone important to her and how much bigger and more lovely that is than simple infatuation.

“Kelly?” I hold my hand up to block the sun. Evan is standing in front of me.

“Oh hi,” I say, blinking, not knowing how long I’ve been asleep.

“Sorry to wake you, but you’re getting pretty red.” My blanket’s on the ground, and I can feel the heat of the sun in my legs. “Maybe you should move your chair back into the shade?” He doesn’t want me to get too much sun. He wants me to be careful.

“Oh, right, thanks.”

“I’m going to head downtown … You need anything?”

“Um, no, I don’t think so. Thanks. Tracy and I are going in on Friday.”

“Right, then. G’day.”

I watch him walk down the driveway, rubbing my eyes, realizing the true nature of my interest in Evan. Like Jim’s broad hopes for Ántonia, I want to be someone to Evan, someone useful and good, someone important.

I remember a lecture from one of my lit classes about a theory called “Reader Response,” which basically says: More often than not, it’s the readers—not the writers—who determine what a book means. The idea is that readers don’t come blank to books. Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age. Then you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book—who gave it to us, where we read it, what books we’ve already read—and, as my professor put it, “That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended.”

One thing’s for sure. There’s no telling how
My Ántonia
would taste to me if I had tried it years ago, in class or one summer by the pool, instead of here, a foreigner in a motherless home, spending most of my time with a local boy about my age. And then there’s the matter of my mother, who loved it so, and how I seem to be looking for her in every passage.

After Evan is out of sight, I lean back in my chair and survey the yard. Pop has hung a small load of laundry. Through the rows of clothes, I can see the door to Evan’s empty room.

I want to go in.

I think I’m going in.

I’m in.

A long, wide shelf bracketed to the wall is covered with gear catalogs, carabiners, rope, an ID card with the lamination peeling off, and about a dozen university textbooks. (Maybe he
is
going back.) The shorts he wears every day are on the floor, along with boxers, socks, hiking boots, and a bandanna. Tossed diagonally across his bare mattress is a down sleeping bag, as if there’s no use making up the bed with sheets and pillowcases,
since he’s just passing through. Pushed against the wall are two twin mattresses, I guess for his brother and sister when they come to visit. On the wall is a sign with the Rovers’ line about each individual being the principal agent in his own development. I wonder if part of his enthusiasm for Rovers is a reaction to his mother’s death—maybe he’s learned it’s wise to be prepared, to isolate, and to count only on yourself. Then I wonder if there’s anything about the Evan I know—his interests, his pace, his disappearances and appearances, his silences and underreactions, his long hair, his fitness, the attention he gives the kids, how he tinkers with but never fixes his car—that is entirely unrelated to his mother.

Of course, maybe there’s nothing about any of us that doesn’t in some small way touch back to our mothers. God knows, every day I spend with the Tanners, I feel like I’m opening a tiny flap on one of those advent calendars we used to hang in the kitchen every December 1, except instead of revealing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, it’s my mother. I can’t see all of her yet, but window by window, she is emerging.