Parts Unknown (7 page)

I heard a huge crash and a shriek, then Mom’s voice: “Hello, Vivian, sorry about that. How are you? How’s London?”

I heard a lot of crying and yelling in the background—my dad, yelling; Marty crying.

“Mom! I’m having a great time.”

“And are you all settled in at that hostel?”

“Uh huh. It’s okay. Some weird people, but whatever. Listen! London is amazing. Just like I’d hoped.”

 “That’s great. Are you calling from one of those red British phone booths?”

“Uh, I’m at a friend’s house. This girl I met, uh, Jill.”

“How nice of her to let you use her phone! I’d like to say hello to her.”

“It’s a
pay
phone, Mom, just in her house. Some weird British setup. And she’s in the bathroom right now. So I’ll tell her . . . oh, I’m really sorry, I’m running out of pound coins, I can’t talk anymore. Say hi to Dad for me, okay?”

“Wait a minute; I had such a funny thing happen this week with the dishwasher repairman, I just have to tell you. So the dishwasher just stopped working on Tuesday—one day it was working just fine, and then the next, it made this horrible grinding noise . . .”

“Mom, that’s sounds really interesting, but I have to go.”

“Hold on, I’m almost done. So, I’d press the button and nothing would happen except for that noise, it sounded like a cat coughing up a hairball, honestly. So I called Appliance Experts, they’re always so nice--”

“I told you, I’m out of coins here. Tell me next time, okay?” She was still talking as I hung up the phone.

Mom talked a lot, but there was so much she didn’t say. Whitewashing the real issues with pointless stories. At home, I would often find her in the kitchen, reading the ingredients of cleaning supplies, mouthing “oxymethylbutyloxinate” just for something to do. If she was finished with the morning paper and still eating breakfast, she’d read the nutritional information on cereal boxes. She was never not busy.

Talking with my family always made me want to take a nap—I was slammed with mental exhaustion afterward.

There had been a mistake about five years ago, and here was Marty. My mom was almost fifty. She’d thought she was through with raising kids, and was into all these middle-aged-lady activities like going on local garden tours with friends who already did the hair-helmet thing—aging hair bouffanted into an old-lady cloud around their heads.

But it turned out she wasn’t post-menopausal after all, and now there was a maniac kid running around the house, this unwanted child who I barely got to know before escaping to my faraway college. Marty was hyperactive; he was always throwing things, breaking things, and falling down our rickety staircase and smashing his face up. And my mom and dad, never the most affectionate parents a person might hope for, grew ever more distant, acting around the house as if each inhabitant they encountered was an unwelcome surprise visitor.

At home for vacations, I’d sometimes overhear Mom on the phone, updating friends about us. At least five straight minutes of talk about my nineteen-year-old brother Alex. How successful he was, how proud she was, basking in the reflected glory of having a straight-A kid going to an Ivy League school. What she never said was: Alex was gone. He was spending the summer in Boston; he had left for Harvard last fall and hadn’t looked back. He’d finagled a summer job at State Street Bank, handling back-office money market transactions, and was living in an MIT fraternity house that rented its rooms for cheap in the summer. I knew that he wasn’t coming back. Not just for the summer. Never.

I understood why. And I almost didn’t mind that he emailed me less and less often, too. We’d been close all through our childhoods, but I knew why he was avoiding me now, when he’d finally been able to get away.

But I kept showing up, for winter break, for spring break, for summer break. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And I hated myself for my weakness, for the fact that I kept coming back, kept phoning home, kept hoping for the love and apologies that never came.

On the phone with friends, when Mom was finished with her Alex spiel, and moved on to talking about me, it always went: “Oh yes, Vivian, she’s the artist in the family. A future investment banker and an artist—isn’t it funny how two kids can turn out so differently.” And there I was, dispensed with, in one sentence.

Mom never talked about Marty in those phone conversations. As if, by not mentioning him, he might disappear. Then she and Dad could go back to golfing and gardening, without continual Marty-made disasters forcing them to interact. They could return to colliding only every Friday night for their traditional Friday night dates. That one night, they’d dress up, go out, and display to the friends who always dined that same night, at that same restaurant, every week, how committed to each other they both were, after more than twenty years of marriage.

My dad had recently decided to go into politics. Starting from the ground up, he was a city councilman, and he was often at nighttime council meetings, planning meetings, or out with work friends. This was intentional. And it worked out great for Mom, because she could tell her friends, winding the phone cord obsessively around and around her finger, “Have you heard—this weekend the
mayor himself
invited Howard to golf with him. Well, Howard and the other council members too. But I mean, what an honor!”

And I could just see Dad driving there smugly in his Cadillac, golf clubs in the trunk. It was an impulse purchase from ten years ago that he’d driven home one day, straight from the dealership. He’d known Mom had her eye on a used Mercedes: as posh as a new Cadillac, but half the price. Whenever she saw his car, her fingers would nervously pluck at the sides of her always-matching outfit, and she’d talk about her shopping list, the store vacancies on Lincoln Avenue, the price of milk, faster and faster, hardly stopping to take a breath. I figured, if she spoke fast enough, she might forget how much she hated that car, the wrong car that my parents couldn’t afford, that they had only recently finished paying off. Dad avoided car confrontation most days by pulling straight into the garage.

They covered it up pretty well, but my parents were barely middle class. They owned a few single-family home rentals, along with Dad’s pay as a city council member and Mom’s seasonal work as a substitute librarian. They made sure to look and act as wealthy as they could, without actually spending much money to do so. Mom and Dad might write our private-college tuition checks, but they used the special checkbooks from our trust accounts to do so. They paid for college with Uncle Paulie’s money.

They’d had a plan once, to make a lot of money without a lot of work, but it hadn’t worked out. It had been a total disaster, in fact, and nothing at home had ever been the same again.

~ ~ ~

I was jolted out of my reverie by the sight of a smiling face peeking out from around one of the doors. “I’ve been waiting to meet you. Josh has said so many wonderful things about you,” said a very dark man with a lovely meld of an African and British accent.

“Hi, you must be Trevor,” I smiled back. “I’m Vivian.” He was impeccably dressed in an ironed white polo shirt and navy-blue shorts with a sharp crease down the front.

“Welcome,” he said. “I must cook you dinner tonight. If Josh has been feeding you . . .” He shook his head darkly.

“What, a person can’t live on pizza and noodles alone?” I laughed. “Thanks for the invite. Josh is working tonight, so I’d love to. What can I bring?”

“Just yourself, of course,” Trevor assured me.

I was unreasonably excited. Josh directed me to the local Sainsbury’s, and I walked up and down its bright aisles for a long time, looking for the perfect accompaniment to an African meal. The food in England was all so lusciously foreign—trifle in single-serve containers, chestnut-flavored yogurt, and muesli in big bags. The frozen foods aisle featured single-serve steak-and-kidney pies. I was so in love with this country now, the leftover pound coins in my pocket my passport to all this.

At last, I decided on a properly British dessert—ginger cake, brown and shiny, in a paper wrapper. Counting out my change confidently to the store clerk, I felt like I finally had the hang of things—until I realized I was meant to have brought my own bag. Was nothing free in this country? Grumpily, I paid for a plastic bag in which to tote my cake, and headed back to the safety of that row house.

Trevor was preparing the meal. I poked my head in. “I’ve got dessert,” I told him, presenting the cake. “My favorite!” he said politely; he would have been equally polite had it been his least favorite kind of cake, I was sure. “Now please, refresh yourself—I will call when dinner is ready,” he instructed. I waved goodbye and headed happily toward the stairs. A strange clanking sound was trailing from Boris’s room. What did he do in there all day? I stopped and listened. Now it sounded like cutting—scissors struggling to slice through a heavy piece of cardboard. I shrugged, and proceeded upstairs. I’d yet to meet the final flatmate, whose room was across the hall from Josh’s. I sort of hoped I wouldn’t—I wasn’t certain how thin the walls were, and I’d been rather noisy, the past few nights.

I opened Josh’s door with the spare key he’d given me and looked in; he was gone for the evening shift. I wandered out to the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall. Squinted at myself in the mirror—hard to make out my face in the hazy glass with the dim light bulb. I made some experimental funny faces, pulling my lips back ridiculously far, then, bored, went back to Josh’s room. Poked around his toiletries for a bit, trying to gauge his personality from the anti-perspirant he used. Speed Stick—hmm. I hadn’t a clue. Thumbed through his books. Inspected his BUNAC Student Exchange Employment Programme work permit, with a deer-caught-in-headlights blurry passport photo that barely looked like Josh at all. A gray rectangular stamp proclaimed HOTEL AND CATERING TRADES EMPLOYMENT SERVICE.

Then, I scouted around for a secret journal; couldn’t find one. I did find some folded-up pieces of lined paper scribbled with poetry I couldn’t understand:

The palimpsest

Writes the writer

A roundelay in close quarters

As the children outside

Play in the sand, erasing

Stick drawings as they make them.

I had a feeling this poem wasn’t very good. I found a few blank notebooks, some with fancy covers that must have been never-used gifts. Apparently, Josh was a blank slate, just as I was. All possibility. No follow through. Yet.

Finally, inevitably, rummaging through my duffel, I pulled out the sketchbook. The girls twirling around the fountain, the light glancing off their hair. Forever incomplete, because Josh had pulled me away from that moment, and into his. I started sketching—still life with anti-perspirant container—then stopped. Lay back on the bed and fell asleep.

A knock on the door woke me for dinner. I hastily smoothed my hair and slipped on some flip-flops, then scuttled down the hallway, bumping into a tall, olive-skinned man with masses of dark curly hair along the way. “Sorry!” I exclaimed.

“So you’re the new live-in, huh,” smirked the man over his shoulder.

“What?” I gasped, confused.

“Just joking!” he returned, grinning at my shocked look. “I’m Dov. I’ve heard about you. Well, we’ll get to know each other over dinner.”

Trevor was smiling, waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, his hands encased in oven mitts. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said happily. “I have been cooking all afternoon. I wanted you to try some proper Nigerian food.”

“I’m so excited, Trevor,” I said warmly. “I’ve never eaten Nigerian food before.”

“Well, you are in for a treat.” He gestured us toward the kitchen table, transformed into a low-rent dining destination with a wilting dandelion in a jam jar, three mismatched placemats, and bright pink paper napkins. I hugged him impulsively. “No one’s ever cooked me dinner before, either.”

He patted my head. “Sit, please.”

Dov tossed himself into a chair. He appeared not to have shaved in a week, and reeked of cigarettes and another, deeper odor—pot, probably. He was wearing a reddish stretched-out T-shirt that appeared to read “Coca-Cola” in Hebrew. “So how do you like London?” he asked.

“It’s gorgeous!” I enthused. “I haven’t had a chance to see much yet, but it’s so beautiful—the buildings, and everything. And the parks. And . . .”

“Admit it,” Dov chortled, “You’ve been spending most of your time in Josh’s room, haven’t you? I’ve been waiting to catch a glimpse of this mysterious love interest Josh is all gooey-eyed over.”

I blushed. “That’s me, I guess. I’m not so mysterious, though.”
Ask questions
, I instructed myself, pleating my napkin nervously in my lap. “So how long have you been in London?”

“Since January, actually. I don’t want to go into military service in Israel, and I’m lucky enough to have a British passport, because I happened to be born here. So I’m going to stay away from Israel as long as possible. I don’t want to go back.”

His English was perfect, his Israeli accent giving it a slightly French sound, the r’s swallowed. His eyes were dark but guileless. “I work at Council Travel. Not my life’s dream, but it’s a job, you know? I’m saving up money to maybe travel the world. Who knows.”

Meanwhile, Trevor was serving, ladling soup into bowls, and then handing them around. “This is
efo
,” he explained. “It’s a smoked fish soup.”

I tasted, dubiously. It was an acquired taste, but good too—hot and spicy and salty. “Yummy . . . What’s in it?” I asked.

Dov put a hand up in warning. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, please—tell me, Trevor. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.”

Trevor, tilting his bowl to slide an unidentifiable piece of meat onto his spoon, said, “It is a dish full of surprises. For example, do you see that red feathery plant in the backyard?”

“Celosia,” I said. “My mom grows it in her garden too.”

“Yes, it is one of the ingredients. Also a few other items from the backyard.”