I went upstairs and lay down on my bed. If I had a dollar for every minute spent staring out my dirty window scribbling wandering poems about misplaced feelings and aborted love I’d be as rich as Madonna, but I never thought I’d be draining ink from my pen worrying about my mother.
It’s weird when your mom’s trial and error starts to overshadow your own. The astronaut has shuttled her off to sin city with the intention of a final seduction. The man is in high gear, whipping out his finest polyester, working all the night moves. Mom is defenseless. She’s a suitcase looking for a vacation, and so she swims into the dark corners of DuPage County and surfaces with Captain Kirk, right-wing lover boy, used-car dealer, man of God. He’s a step back in her evolution. She’s sacrificing big-time. Mom needs to get out more, but I can’t be the cruise director fishing for a dreamboat. Her decision to get married has really put a snag in my tights. I know I should be happy for her and feel all that “if she’s happy, then I’m happy” stuff, but it’s not working. I can’t find the light switch.
My brother is about as helpful as Mr. Potato Head. He’ll spend the rest of his life baking in front of the boob tube, shrugging me off with enlightened arrogance, as if there were any accomplishment to swallowing pills that spin your eyeballs in circles. David’s locked into a superslack depression cycle. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, he sucks all the air out of the room. His obsession with death has been flourishing. His wardrobe has been reduced to black pajamas. He’s taken up clove cigarettes and likes to disappear on long walks through the cemetery where he traces etchings from tombstones. One wall of his room is covered with them. He also bought a bug light a few months ago, hung it on the porch, and started a collection of moths zapped by his purple ring of fire. Their beautiful wings harden into stiff weightless specimens. He spends hours building meticulous wood cases in my father’s workshop to exhibit their frozen eternal beauty. The moths are pinned side by side with their Latin names typed onto small strips of white paper and glued to a purple velvet lining. It’s one of the few occupations he seems to enjoy, as if maybe he were studying to be a taxidermist or an undertaker or a serial killer or something. He’s getting weirder by the minute. But maybe I’m just projecting my own cloud upon him. He could be perfectly normal for all I know.
My death princess hours are usually spent in the willow tree playing with the puppetry of danger, but last night I rode my bike through Denburn Woods and sat beside the Burlington Northern tracks. The greasy scent of railroad ties smelled like ancient history. The tracks looked like an old scar sewing up some forgotten wound. I watched a freight train rumble through town. Its tall rattling cars were rusting; beside the faded serial numbers were exotic names like Pacific and Chesapeake. Some steel doors were open and I could see shadowy figures hunched in the moonlight, hobos or homeless people headed for the next stop or the one after that. It was one of those nights when I wanted to either jump the train or put my head on the tracks, but didn’t have the courage to do either one.
Outside the window, beyond the trees, the thick black plume of the Lemont Fire billowed into the heavens like a mushroom cloud, then tilted and dissipated into the upper atmosphere. I wondered if the atmosphere was like an old dishwasher, and whether after a while the glasses would start coming out spotted.
On Earth Day a scientist from Argonne National Laboratory came to our school and told us toxicology was one of the fastest growing fields in the scientific community. Sometimes I dream of being a forest ranger, someone who tracks bears and repairs trails and points in the right direction when befuddled tourists find themselves lost at a trailhead, but something tells me I’m going to end up a cashier at Taco Bell or working the Slurpee machine at 7-Eleven for snotty teenagers raised on Beavis & Butt-head. My greatest fear is to be known as the girl with the purple hair that works at Barnes & Noble.
Tracy says we should move into the city after graduation and get an apartment in Wicker Park because a lot of cool bands live there. She thinks we should start our own band and become famous rock stars with lunch boxes full of money to buy frilly dresses and fingernail polish.
But that dream reeks of some hole-in-the-wall apartment and a menial job that provides a check just barely big enough to blow on potato chips and beer. Tracy wants me to work at a copyshop so I can make free posters. I told her working in a bookstore would make me a better lyricist, then we got into a huge fight over who would write the songs, even though neither one of us can play a single chord on the guitar yet.