Notes on a Near-Life Experience (12 page)

“I think I forgot my water bottle,” I say as I retreat.

In the girls' locker room, I imagine what I could have said to Kiki, how I could have won. I think about my mother, how she stayed in her room all day when my father left, even though she had asked him to leave. Maybe I've inherited more than just her nose and eyes.

W
HEN
I
WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, MY DAD SPENT AN ENTIRE
afternoon trying to teach me the Greek alphabet. He was reading an old book in Greek for graduate school; I asked him what it was, and he decided to teach me the Greek alphabet. He taught it to me as a song, to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and we sang it together to my mom and Allen that night. I only remember the first four letters now, but I remember clearly how it felt to hold Dad's hand and sing.

M
Y DAD E-MAILED US FROM
P
ERU TO TELL US HE HAD A SUR
-prise for us and that he wanted us all to meet for dinner the night after he got back.

“Maybe he bought me a llama. I Googled Peru and it said a lot about llamas. I saw some pictures. Llamas look like a cross between camels and ponies… and ostriches,” Keatie says as we drive to the restaurant.

Allen laughs. “I doubt he bought you a llama, Keater. He probably brought us a bunch of hideous sweaters, and I bet his surprise is something like he wants to take us all to Peru this summer. If we're lucky it'll be that he wants to move there.”

Since Dad moved out, he has ignored Al. I mean, we've all seen a decline in Dad-attention, except for Keatie, maybe,
who insists on having daily conversations with my dad about anything she can think of just so she can keep him on the phone, but it's worse with Al and Dad. They always had trouble getting along before, but now it's like they're having some kind of silent face-off.

“Prepare to be llama-fied,” Al tells us when we arrive at the restaurant.

Allen steels his face when we get out of the car. He looks like he's about to be tortured by terrorists looking for government secrets.

We tell the hostess we're supposed to meet my dad.

“Right,” she says. “They're waiting for you. Follow me, please.”

I don't understand why she said “they” until I see the table she is leading us to. My dad, tanner than normal, is talking to a woman sitting next to him at the table.

Dad stands when he sees us. “Kids… hello. Good to see you.” He takes the woman's hand and she stands up. “This is Paloma.” He acts as if this should mean something to us.

We stand there, quiet.

She reaches toward us to shake our hands. “I am Paloma. Of Peru.”

Keatie takes her hand and shakes it limply.

I put my hand out to shake Paloma's; Al shoves his in his pocket.

Dads glowers at Al and gestures toward the table. “Well, come on, have a seat. Let's order.”

We slowly take our seats. Keatie insists on sitting next to my dad, wedging herself in between him and the Peruvian, who I end up sitting next to. She smiles hopefully at me, and I smile wanly back. Allen sits next to me.

“Why is she here?” Keatie asks as soon as she is seated. “Is she going to clean your apartment?”

I lower my head in embarrassment and hope that this woman doesn't speak English very well.

Keatie's limited experience with Hispanic women has been her close association with our Latin American housekeepers, who also sort of acted as babysitters to her. Now that we're all old enough to watch and clean up after ourselves, we don't have a housekeeper. Anyway, none of them were anything like Paloma. They were all kind of round and motherly; not Paloma—she's wearing a tight black minidress and strappy high-heeled shoes. I wonder where Dad found her, and if she hiked around the jungle in outfits like that.

“Paloma is, uh, my, ummm, my new special friend,” Dad stammers.

“What do you need a special friend for? You don't even have time to play with us,” Keatie reminds him.

Allen and I look at each other and smirk. No one is going to give Dad any help on this one.

“Yeah, Dad, what are you going to do with a special friend?” Allen asks.

Dad says something about how Paloma showed him her country and now he is going to show her his.

“So it was kind of this thing where you were like, ‘Hey,
Paloma, you show me yours, I'll show you mine.’ Something like that, Dad?” I try to sound like I am genuinely trying to help him out.

Dad ignores me.

At that moment everyone at the table looks in Paloma's direction to see her reaction to the argument that centers around her. She is applying lipstick and looking into the mirror of her compact but quickly puts the stuff away when she realizes that our conversation has ground to a halt.

“Sorry,” she says, her accent thick. “Everything okay?” she asks, smiling, trying to figure out what to say.

“So she
does
speak English,” I say aloud, before I can catch myself.

Before Dad can say anything, Allen is on his feet. “I gotta go.”

I stand up. “Yeah, me too. Early-morning practice.”

Keatie looks confused. I try to motion toward the door with my head.

“What?” she asks.

“Do you want to stay or go?” I try not to sound mean.

“Go, I guess.” She looks like she is about to cry as she gets up from the table. “But we didn't even eat. And Dad has surprises.”

“If he has any more surprises, I'm sure he'll bring them over later,” Allen says, putting his hands on Keatie's shoulders and turning her in the direction of the restaurant's entrance. “We can eat at Wendy's.”

Although Keatie could eat nothing but chicken nuggets
for the rest of her life and die happy, she doesn't quite accept this bribe the way she normally would. Once she's gotten her nuggets, she eats only one and a half before handing the box to me and telling me she's full.

I nibble on my bacon cheeseburger even though I'm not hungry, either.

When we get home, Keatie tells my mom about Paloma. “Daddy made a friend named Paloma in Peru and now she's visiting Daddy and she speaks Spanish. Allen wouldn't shake her hand.”

When she hears this, Mom looks the way she did when we were at this Indian restaurant and she found out that her curry was made with goat meat. “Hmmm,” she says.

Allen tries to make her feel better. “She's nothing, Mom. She's just visiting. And she's an idiot, she barely put a sentence together.” I've noticed that Al does this a lot with Mom, tries to take care of her.

That night, I fall asleep imagining Dad's reasons for bringing Paloma home with him. Maybe he's just trying to make Mom jealous. I bet he'll ship Paloma back to Machu Picchu as soon as Mom takes him back. I run through this scenario twelve times in my head, unable to make myself believe it, no matter how hard I try.

K
EATIE'S SCHOOL IS HAVING A RECYCLING DRIVE, AND WHICH
-ever class brings in the most paper, cans, and whatever else to be recycled wins an ice cream party. She is plundering the house for all things recyclable and keeps interrupting me while I'm trying to choreograph.

“Is this recyclable?” she asks, holding up a milk carton, with milk still in it.

“No,” I tell her. “Stick to cans and paper.”

She's back again five minutes later, hefting a plastic Stater Brothers bag. “What about these?” she asks, taking out some empty bottles.

“Yes,” I tell her, annoyed. But when I look again, I notice that they are vodka bottles. “Where did you get those?”

“I'm not telling.”

“Keatie,” I say in my most authoritative voice, “tell me.”

“Okay, fine. From our big trash can outside. I couldn't find anything else in the house, so I looked in the trash. They were in there.”

Weird. My mom isn't a big drinker…. At least, I don't think she is.

“Well, stop going through the trash. It's gross.”

Keatie goes back upstairs and I can hear her shuffling around, still searching.

W
HEN
T
HURSDAY ROLLS AROUND
, I
AM STILL FREAKED OUT
about my dad and the Peruvian woman. So much so that I forget that I don't actually answer any of the questions Lisz asks me. When she asks me, “How have you been? What's been going on?” I blurt out, “My dad got back from Peru on Tuesday,” without even thinking.

“I didn't know he was in Peru,” Lisz says.

Having trapped myself, I decide to give it to her straight for once. What the hell. Things can't get much worse on the Dad front anyway. “Yeah, he joined a hiking club after he moved out and they hiked to Machu Picchu. We saw him last night.”

“Oh. So how was it seeing him again?”

“Weird. He brought a woman. Home with him. From
Peru. A Peruvian. He wanted us to meet him for dinner, and when we got there, there was this woman waiting for us at the table. My dad introduces her and says she's Paloma from Peru. And she goes, ‘I am Paloma; I am of Peru.’ She doesn't speak much English, I guess.”

Lisz looks like she's trying to hide a smile. “Does your dad speak Spanish?”

“Yeah. He speaks it all the time for his job.”

“That's right,” says Lisz, “I forgot.” She looks a little embarrassed. I wonder if she ever gets her patients' lives and problems confused. She looks at me expectantly. Probably not.

I finish the story, leaving out the parts about Mom's sad, scared face and Allen's refusal to shake Paloma's hand. Those things seem too personal. Lisz asks a few questions about my feelings toward Paloma (“I don't have any feelings about her: I don't even know her”) and then our time is up. I am kind of embarrassed that I didn't have to use the jar, that I've actually discussed part of my life, however tiny it was, with a shrink.

As I wait in the waiting room for Allen to finish his session with Lisz, I do my history homework. Surprisingly, I am able to concentrate for the first time in weeks; for once, what I read actually makes sense. If I didn't know better, I'd think that talking had actually helped somehow. But that's ridiculous. How could the recap of a disaster possibly do anything to clean up the wreckage?