The Schwa Was Here

After Crawley rolled away and I had handed Lexie her next mystery object, she whispered so her eagle-eared grandfather couldn’t hear. “Sometimes I think my grandfather died long before I was born.”

  “Huh?” I said. It was such a weird thing to say.

  “You want me to think this is a quarter,” Lexie said of the object in her hand, “but it’s a Sacagawea dollar.” She was, of course, right.

  Once we heard the door to the old man’s bedroom close, Lexie said, “The way he lives in this stuffy cave. It’s not really living, is it? That’s why I come to stay with him. My parents would much rather I stay somewhere else when they go out of the country, but I want to come here. I’m still working on changing him.”

  While the Schwa pondered his object, I pondered what she had said. I didn’t think Crawley could be changed. My dad once told me that people don’t change when they get older, they just get more so. I imagine that when Crawley was younger, he was the kind of kid who always saw the glass half empty instead of half full, and had a better relationship with his dog than with the neighborhood kids. In seventy-five years of living, half empty became bone-dry, solitary became isolated, and one dog became fourteen.

  “Saltshaker!” said the Schwa.

  “Wrong. It’s the queen from a chessboard,” said Lexie.

  “Your grandfather is who he is,” I told her. “You should just live your own life, and let him live his. Or not live his, I guess.”

  “I disagree,” said the Schwa. “I think people can be changed—but usually it takes a traumatic experience.”

  “You mean like brain damage?” I asked, then immediately thought about the Schwa’s father and was sorry I said it.

  “Trauma comes in many forms,” Lexie said. “It changes you, but it doesn’t always change you for the better.” She handed me my next object; something like a pen.

  “Well, if it’s directed trauma,” said the Schwa, “maybe it could change you for the better.”

  “Like radiation,” I said. They both waited for me to explain myself. This was easier said than done, on accounta the intuitive part of my brain was three steps ahead of the thinking part. It was like lightning before thunder. But sometimes you see lightning and the thunder never comes. Just like the way I’ll sometimes blurt out something that sounds smart, but if you ask me to explain it, the universe could end before you get an answer.

  “We’re listening,” Lexie said.

  I fiddled with my object, stalling for time. “You know, radiation . . .” And for once it all came to me—what I meant, and what I was holding. “Just like this . . . laser pointer!” I must have known in some subconscious way all along.

  “I get it,” said the Schwa. “Radiation can be like a nuclear missile, or it can be directed, like a medical treatment that saves your life.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “When my uncle got cancer, they used radiation therapy on him.”

  “And he lived?” asked Lexie.

  “Well, no—but that’s just because he got hit by a garbage truck.”

  “So,” said Lexie, “what my grandfather needs is trauma therapy. Something as dangerous as radiation, but focused, and in the proper dose.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” I told her.

  “Yes,” she said, “I will.”

  I gave her the plastic kneecap, but I could tell her mind was no longer on the game. She was already thinking of a way to traumatize her grandfather.

  “Maybe if we put our heads together,” the Schwa said, “we’ll come up with something quicker.”

  I squirmed. “Three heads are a crowd,” I said. But whatever Lexie’s opinion was, she kept it quiet.

  That Friday night I had Lexie all to myself, since the Schwa’s aunt came over every Friday night. I took her to a concert in the park at an outdoor amphitheater.

  The music was salsa—not my favorite, but that was okay. Concerts have a way of making music you don’t regularly like, likable. I guess it’s because when the people around you really like it, some of that soaks into you. It’s called osmosis, something I learned about in science—probably by osmosis, since it isn’t like I was listening. I was listening to the music, though, and so was Lexie. I watched the way she moved to it, and I didn’t even feel self-conscious watching her because she couldn’t see me doing it.

  We had great seats—right smack in the middle. The handicapped section. I have to admit I felt guilty—not only because I wasn’t handicapped, but because Lexie was the most unhandicapped handicapped person I’d ever laid eyes on.

  “Are you having fun?” she asked when the band took a break.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, sure,” I said, trying not to sound like I was having as much fun as I really was, because what if she took my real enthusiasm for fake enthusiasm?

  “I like this band,” Lexie said. “Their sound’s not all muddy. I can hear all seven musicians.”

  I thought about that. I had been watching them for more than half an hour, and now that they were off the stage, I couldn’t tell you how many musicians there had been.

  “Amazing,” I said. “You’re like one of those mentalists. You can see things with your mind.”

  She reached over to pet Moxie, who sat next to her in the aisle, content as long as he was petted every few minutes. “Some people are good at being blind, others aren’t,” and then she smiled. “I’m very good.”

  “Great. We’ll call you the Amazing Lexis.”

  “I like that.”

  “And now,” I announced, “the Amazing Lexis, through her supersonic skills of perceptive-ability”—she giggled—“will tell me how many fingers I am holding up.” I held up three fingers.

  “Um . . . two!”

  “Wow!” I said. “You’re right! That’s amazing!”

  “You’re lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s only a one-in-four chance that I’d get it right—one-in-five if you counted your thumb as a finger—so the odds were against it. And besides, ‘lie’ was written all over your voice.”

  I laughed, truly impressed. “The Amazing Lexis strikes again.”

  Lexie grinned for a moment, and I noticed how her smile fit with her half-closed eyes. It was like the face you make when you’re tasting something unbelievable, like my dad’s eggplant Parmesan, which is poison in anyone else’s hands.

  Lexie reached over to pet Moxie again. “Too bad Calvin couldn’t come with us.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, right.” I probably would have gone the whole night without thinking about him once, and now I felt a little guilty about that—and annoyed that I felt guilty—and irritated that I was annoyed. “Why would you want the Schwa on a date with us, anyway?”

  “This isn’t a date,” Lexie said. “People don’t get paid to go on a date.”

  She thought she had me there. “Well, you’re not supposed to know I’m getting paid—and since you know and are still letting me take you out, it is a date.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. Maybe she just couldn’t argue with my logic.

  “There’s something . . . unusual about Calvin,” she said.

  “He’s visibly impaired,” I told her. “Observationally challenged.”

  “He thinks he’s invisible?”

  “He is invisible . . . kind of.”

  Lexie screwed up her lips so they looked kind of like the red scrunchy she wore in her hair, then said, “No, it’s more than that. There’s something else about him that either you don’t know or you’re just not telling me.”

  “Well, his mother either disappeared in Waldbaum’s supermarket or got chopped up by his father, who sent pieces to all fifty states. No one’s really sure which it is.”

  “Hmm,” Lexie said. “That’s bound to have an effect on a person, either way.”

  “He seems okay to me.”

  “He’s very sweet,” Lexie added.

  “Ripe is the word,” I said. “He’s gotta start wearing deodorant.”

  The lig
hts in the amphitheater started to dim, and the crowd began cheering for the band to start.

  “Maybe you should walk the dogs,” Lexie said.

  “Huh?”

  “I said maybe you should walk the dogs, and Calvin should be my escort.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. It hit me in a place I didn’t know was there. All I could think of was one of those medical shows. They’re operating on some poor slob, they accidentally nick an artery, and he starts gushing. “We got a bleeder!” the surgeon yells, and everybody comes rushing to the operating table. Nobody was rushing to me, though.

  “Sure,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”

  The band began to play, and I quickly wiped away the tears I was bleeding, even though I knew she couldn’t see them.

  Lexie confronted her grandfather the next morning, telling him she knew that he paid boys to hang around with her. I showed up at Crawley’s that afternoon, determined to quit before I got fired, but Crawley didn’t give me the satisfaction.

  “You are a miserable failure,” the old man told me. “You couldn’t even keep our financial arrangement a secret.”

  “She already knew,” I told him.

  “How could she already know? What do you take me for, an idiot?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  He grunted, then threw a chew toy at Fortitude, who was gnawing on his shoe. The toy bounced off the dog’s nose, and she went for it, trotting off happily with the toy in her jaws.

  “Apparently, whatever you did, it disgusted my granddaughter enough that she’d rather be with that Schwa kid than with you. You are hereby demoted to dog walker again.”

  “Who said I’m doing anything for you anymore?”

  “You did,” Crawley said calmly. “You accepted twelve weeks of community service.”

  “Well, now I unaccept it.”

  “Hmmph. Too bad,” Crawley said. “I was actually beginning to think you had some personal integrity.”

  I grit my teeth. I don’t know why it mattered what he thought of me, but it did. He was right; I was a miserable failure—even at quitting.

  “Do you want me to walk the dogs now or later?”

  “Walk them at your leisure,” he said, and rolled off. For once he didn’t gloat over his little victory.

  I went to get the leashes and spent my afternoon trying to think of nothing but walking dogs.

  10. Earthquakes, Nuclear Winter, and the End of Life as We Know It, over Linguini

  My parents had a fight on the day I got demoted to dog walker. Maybe it was no worse than other fights they had over the years, but I noticed it a whole lot more. Maybe because seeing the Schwa’s sorry home life made me more tuned in to my own.

  I heard them even before I walked in the door. They were screaming at each other like the Antonoviches two doors down, who would end our dependence on foreign oil if you could harness the sheer vocal energy of their fights.

  “It’s the Big One,” Frankie said when I came in the door. “I estimate eight-point-six on the Richter scale. Better hold on to something.” He pretended to watch TV while listening to the fight.

  Christina crouched by the kitchen door, sticking her nose in, and writing in her diary. “It began at five-eleven P.M,” she said. “Thirty-seven minutes straight, so far.”

  “Red sauce?” I heard Mom yell. “I’ll give you red sauce!”

  We all knew the Big One was a clear and present danger. For years we hoped the pressure could be released through smaller tremors, and for years it had worked. I was beginning to think maybe the Big One wouldn’t come at all.

  “If it wasn’t for me, you’d all starve!” Mom yelled.

  “At least we’d be out of our misery!” Dad shouted back.

  The Big One was all about food. Mom was no slouch when it came to cooking—but, like I said, Dad stood in a league by himself. No parent I know—mother or father—could whip up dishes the way my dad did, but he didn’t often get the chance, because the kitchen was Mom’s. Dad might have been the Vice-Vice-President of Product Development for Pisher Plastics, but Mom was the Empress of Bonano Food Productions, and I pity the fool who challenges her reign.

  Dad was that fool. It was his destiny.

  Well, if the Big One was tonight, they picked the wrong day to have it. I had just walked fourteen dogs, been dumped by a blind girl, been dumped on by her grandfather, and right now I wanted a cold soda.

  “Antsy, don’t go in there,” Frankie warned. “We ain’t got any body bags.”

  I figured I could slip in and out unnoticed. The Antsy Effect was nowhere near as potent as the Schwa Effect, but in my own family, it worked just as well.

  I pushed my way past Christina, who was scribbling her life away in the diary, logging her impressions of the battle for future generations.

  The scene was weirdly dramatic. Like something out of Shakespeare. Dad waved a spatula in the air as he spoke, making him look like a swordsman, and Mom spoke with her hands so much, it looked like karate.

  “I’m tired of eating your family’s lousy, tasteless recipes,” Dad said.

  “Tasteless recipes? My grandmother’s rolling in her grave!”

  “It’s from indigestion.”

  She threw an artichoke at him, and he batted it away with the spatula.

  I went to the refrigerator, took out a Coke, and then something very strange happened. I flashed to Howie and Ira playing “Three Fisted Fury,” ignoring the Schwa. Anger began to boil up inside me. Yeah, I could get in and out of that kitchen unnoticed, but suddenly I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to ever again. I had a right to be noticed.

  “Excuse me,” I said, loudly. “If you two are just going to argue all night, I’ll cook dinner; otherwise we’ll all be rolling in our graves from parental starvation.”

  “Don’t you open up a mout like that!” Mom said.

  “Go back to the living room,” Dad said. “This isn’t your problem.”

  “Bullpucky!” I said, which isn’t actually the word I used, but I’m in a much better mood now than I was then.

  When she heard that, Mom drew in a breath kind of like the way the ocean sucks back before a tidal wave. “What did you say?!”

  “I said it’s time to eat. If you wanna fight, why don’t you lose a few teeth and go on a daytime talk show?”

  Mom glared at me, and crossed her arms. “Do you hear this?” she says to Dad. “Where do you learn this disrespect, huh?”

  “You don’t learn disrespect,” I told her. “You’re born with it.”

  “Just keep digging that hole deeper, Antsy,” Dad said. So now all their anger had turned away from each other and was aimed at me. There was awesome power in being the center of fury.

  “You want to earn your dinner, smart mout?” Mom says. “You tell us—who makes a better fra diavolo sauce. Me or your father?”

  It was a stupid question, because who really cared, and yet I knew the answer was critical. The old Antsy would have found some way to distract them from the argument and, failing that, would have said something to keep the peace, like “Mom’s is better with pasta, Dad’s is better with meat” or “Dad’s is spicier, but Mom’s is heartier.” An answer would have held everything together and would have eventually gotten things back to normal.

  Then it occurred to me exactly what my place in this family was, and had always been. In spite of my wisecracking, pain-in-the-neck ways, I was the clip that held things together. Unnoticed. Taken for granted. Okay, maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here, but I’d be damned if I was gonna keep on being the family paper clip.

  “You gonna answer us or not?”

  “You want the truth?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay, then. Dad makes the best fra diavolo sauce.”

  Stunned silence from the both of them. They hadn’t wanted the truth. We all knew it. Suddenly I wasn’t playing by the rules. “And come to think of it, his alfredo sauce rocks, too. What else do y
ou want to know?”

  Dad put his hand to his head like he had a headache. “That’s enough, Anthony.”

  Mom nodded and pursed her lips into a thin red line. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, that settles it, then.” I didn’t like the calmness of her voice. She walked over to the range, took the big pot of sauce she had made, and in one smooth motion dumped it down the drain. A cloud of steam rose and curled like a hydrogen bomb had gone off in the sink.

  “You make dinner, Joe.” She stormed out of the house, leaving us all in nuclear winter. Once she was gone, Frankie pulled me aside and glared at me. “You see what you did?”

  Dad did cook us dinner that night. He had to go to the grocery store to get his ingredients, so dinner wasn’t ready until nine. He made us veal rollatini, better than you’d get in the best Italian restaurants. We all ate and said nothing to one another. Not a thing, not even “pass the salt,” because it didn’t need salt. It was, at the same time, the best and the worst meal I had ever sat down to.

  When it was done, we all did our own dishes and left the kitchen spotless. Dad made a plate of leftovers and put it in the fridge. I knew it was for Mom, but he wouldn’t say it.

  Frankie and Christina went to their rooms, but I hung around in the kitchen a bit more while Dad cleaned the pots.

  The clip is gone, I thought. The pages are flying like confetti. What a moron I am.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Antsy.”

  The fact that he didn’t know scared me more than anything else that night. Was our family so fragile that this could tear the foundations loose?

  “It seems like such a little thing,” I said.

  “The biggest things always seem like small things,” he told me.

  I stayed up as long as I could that night, waiting to hear the front door open and Mom walk in, but I fell asleep before I heard it. In the morning, I woke up feeling no better than I had the night before. Mom wasn’t in the bedroom, and Dad had already left for work. I went downstairs slowly, afraid she might not be there. What would I do if she wasn’t? What would that mean?

  I don’t know, Antsy.