Thanks for the Trouble

  John and I stopped hanging out once we got to middle school, but I kept playing make-believe on my own up to an age I’m not, at this moment, willing to put down in writing. So Zelda couldn’t believe it when I told her I’d never been inside the Japanese Tea Garden, which was located smack in the middle of Golden Gate Park, just behind a set of big red lacquered doors. The six-dollar entrance fee had always been enough to put me off, as the rest of the park was open to the public for free. But Zelda said it was one of her favorite spots in the city, and after our impromptu dance party with my mom, we headed there together, past the post-Halloween walk-of-shame parade.

  A teenage girl dressed all in black sat inside the tea garden ticket booth, reading a magazine that appeared to consist entirely of photographs of tattoos.

  “Two, please,” Zelda said.

  Beyond the gates, bridges arched steeply over clear ponds. Tiny, perfectly trimmed trees twisted their trunks as if wringing out a wet towel. The bright-red skeletons of Japanese maples shed their leaves like confetti—pink on one side and white on the other. The teahouse was at the center of the garden. Only a half-dozen people or so were spread out over the wooden patio, talking quietly and sipping at steaming ceramic cups. We took a seat at a table overlooking a rocky creek. When the waitress came by, Zelda ordered for both of us.

  I pulled out my journal and started to write. I had more questions than ever after Zelda’s Oscar-worthy performance at breakfast.

  So was what you told my mom about Omaha and the French school true? I wrote.

  “No. I told you the truth last night. Or I tried to, anyway.”

  I’m serious.

  Zelda sighed. “Parker, let’s play a game, okay? It’s called Benefit of the Doubt. It’s the game that all people play when they meet someone new. If a girl tells you she’s from Australia, or she’s an acrobat, you just believe her, don’t you? You don’t assume she’s lying.”

  Saying you’re from Australia isn’t the same as saying you’re two hundred years old.

  “Two hundred and forty-six, Parker, and sure it is, if it’s the truth.”

  So prove it.

  “That’s easier said than done, believe me. What could I show you that would convince you?”

  I thought about that and realized she was right. It wasn’t like I could chop her down and count the rings.

  “How about this—would you agree that I’d have to be a pretty impressive person to make up a convincing story of immortality?”

  You are a pretty impressive person, I wrote.

  Zelda smiled. “Ask me anything. Try and catch me in a lie. I dare you.”

  The tea arrived. Genmaicha, it was called. I’ve always liked the smell of tea a lot more than the taste, so I spent a second just breathing in the pungent smoke that rose from the cup. When I finally sipped, I was surprised; it tasted like burnt rice. Not bad.

  I can really ask you anything?

  “Do your worst.”

  I always do.

  THE INTERROGATION, PART 2

  WHERE WERE YOU BORN? I wrote.

  “A small city in Germany called Kassel. Very beautiful at the time, though you’d never know it now. The city center was destroyed during the war.”

  The war?

  “World War II. One hundred and fifty thousand people displaced in a single night.”

  I reached for my phone and looked up Kassel on Wikipedia. Zelda waited patiently while I read. Everything checked out, so I searched the page for something more obscure to ask her.

  Tell me about the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, I wrote, glad I didn’t have to worry about my pronunciation.

  “It’s an enormous park built on a hillside. Every year, they would run water out of the Hercules monument and down to the lake around the castle. We children would chase it all the way there.”

  And can you tell me some famous people who’ve lived in Kassel?

  “The Brothers Grimm are probably the best known. They did all their best work in the city, though I wasn’t living there at the time. I did meet them at a party once. One was frightfully dull, and the other was frightfully gay. Of course, such things weren’t discussed in those days. Homosexuality, that is. Not being dull.”

  Which painter is featured in the palace there?

  “There are a few, but you probably mean Rembrandt. Not my favorite. Too dark.”

  Okay, so maybe this line of questioning wasn’t panning out, but it’s not like it would have been hard for her to memorize the Wikipedia page for one little town.

  She smiled with a hint of triumph. “So are you convinced yet?”

  You’re just answering trivia questions.

  “Only because you’re asking trivia questions.”

  She was right. Hard facts were easy. I needed something bigger, something harder to fabricate.

  Tell me your life, I wrote.

  “My life?”

  Yeah. Like, the whole thing all at once.

  “Two hundred and fifty years makes for a pretty long story.”

  You said two hundred and forty-six.

  “I was rounding!” Zelda sighed. “Voltaire said that the secret of being a bore is to tell everything. You don’t know this yet, Parker, but it’s possible to get sick of your own stories. Is this the only thing that will satisfy you?”

  Stop stalling and talk.

  “My, my! What a little dictator!” Zelda picked up her tea and blew on it, then took a slow sip. I figured that would be time enough for a good storyteller to come up with the basic outline of a fiction, but there would still be holes, if I listened closely enough. There were always holes in a first draft.

  “My father was a judge,” she finally said. “My mother was a mother, as all mothers were back then. My childhood was relatively normal for the time. I was educated in the things that girls such as myself were allowed to be educated in. Music and drawing. Languages. The niceties. I was a catch, even with this.” She pointed at her silver hair. “Yes, it’s always looked like that.”

  You dyed it.

  “Oh you’re such a man. Look at the roots, silly. The color goes all the way down.”

  She leaned over the table and stuck her head in my face. I reached forward and separated a couple of strands. It was true—silver from top to bottom.

  You could’ve had it done yesterday, I wrote.

  “Yes,” Zelda scoffed. “I dyed my hair yesterday so I could convince you, a boy I’d yet to meet, that my hair was naturally silver. Don’t be ridiculous.” She flipped her hair back over her head. “Anyway, my first husband, Karl, quite liked the color. He said it was a mark of distinction. We were married when I was eighteen. Karl was a lawyer, a very good friend of my father’s. I liked him well enough, and I did my best to be a good wife. But it turns out that one of the symptoms of my condition is an inability to conceive. We tried everything. I spent months at a time in sanatoriums at very high altitudes. ‘Taking the waters,’ as it was called. When it became clear that there would be no cure, my husband had our marriage annulled. I figured I would never marry again. In those days a woman who couldn’t bear children was hardly a woman at all. I stayed at home with my mother and father while my siblings all started families of their own. It was another few years before the questions began. Why did I look the same at twenty-five as I had at eighteen? Why did I look the same at twenty-eight? At thirty-three? People still believed in witches and demons back then, you see. When the gossip grew too loud to ignore, my father moved me to a house we kept in Scotland. There was no one there but a housekeeper and a groundskeeper. Fiona and Clive, they were called. Eventually they came to understand my condition, but discretion was still considered a virtue in those days, and neither of them ever said a word. Such beautiful souls, they were. I saw both of them put in the ground.”

  Zelda stared off into space, teacup poised against her bottom lip, steam floating in front of her eyes like mist on a lake. She appeared to be on the brink of tears. I still didn’t believe her, of course, but I wa
s increasingly impressed by both her stubborn dedication to the story and her dramatic ability.

  “Life in Scotland was dreary, but at least I was safe. If I had to go into town, I’d cover my face with a scarf, but mostly I stayed in. I read books and tended my garden. I played music and painted. Decades passed. My siblings came to visit me a few times over the years, and one of my sisters even lived with me for a while, but eventually they all passed away. Not long after I turned one hundred, I began to travel. I visited dozens of countries all across the world, on every continent but Antarctica. Around the turn of the twentieth century, I decided to move to America. It was much easier to falsify documents back then, so I was able to reinvent myself as my own descendant. I couldn’t do that now, of course. Technology has sucked the magic out of so many things.”

  How do you survive? I wrote.

  “My family left me money, which ran out around the time of the Great Depression. I took jobs after that, until I got married again, to Nathaniel. I mentioned him to you yesterday, I think. We met at the Palace Hotel. He was a handsome young man, but I’d known a lot of handsome young men in my time, so I was cautious. It took months of persuasion on his part before I agreed to have dinner with him. We were married within the year, and soon after, we left America and began to travel the world together.”

  The name Nathaniel reminded me of the voice mail I’d deleted last night. He was definitely a real person, but God only knew why Zelda was pretending he was her husband.

  Did you tell him all the same stuff you’re telling me?

  “Of course. He was bound to catch on sooner or later.”

  And he believed you?

  “He did.” Zelda drank off the rest of her tea. “Now, do you have any more questions, Parker Santé, or are you ready to admit defeat?”

  I considered. She’d done as good a job as anyone could have; I hadn’t spotted a single hole in her story. But that hardly mattered when the story she was trying to sell me involved immortality, multiple marriages, and hanging out with the Brothers Grimm. Basically, the whole thing was a hole.

  Sorry, I wrote. But no.

  BELIEVE IT

  “WELL, I DON’T KNOW WHAT else to tell you,” Zelda said. “I’ve done everything I can.”

  I write stories too, Zelda. It’s not that hard.

  “It is for me. I don’t have that talent. I can only tell things as they are.”

  But you don’t actually expect me to believe you’re immortal just because you say so, do you? I’m not stupid.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid, Parker, and I didn’t say I was immortal. I just don’t seem to age. I have every confidence that when I jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, that will be the end of things.”

  See, there you go again. More crazy shit you want me to believe just because I like you. You say you’re going to kill yourself so I’ll feel sorry for you or something, and you make up this husband—

  Zelda reached across the table and ripped out the page of the journal I’d been writing on. She crumpled it up into a ball and tossed it over the railing, into the stream. She was angry now, or pretending to be anyway; I could almost see the waves crashing in her eyes.

  “Parker, do you want me to leave?”

  Her tone was dead serious, and I suddenly remembered this vacation my mom and dad had taken me on, back when I was really little. We’d spent a whole week fishing off some huge boat in Alaska, along with a bunch of other people and this really intense fisherman-captain dude whose beard was so thick you probably could’ve hidden a full-grown salmon in it. The trip was crazy boring up until the third day, when I got my first bite. All at once, everybody on deck started cheering, and this fish was thrashing around for its smelly life, and I was pulling and pulling, and the line was jumping like an EKG during a heart attack, and the intense fisherman-captain dude was watching with this look on his face like he would be evaluating my viability as a human being based on whether or not I landed this stupid fish. I fought and I fought and I fought . . . and then everything went slack. The cheering died. The fisherman turned away. I’d lost the fish.

  And you’d think I wouldn’t have given a shit. I mean, so I didn’t have a fish, right? Who cared? One minute earlier, I hadn’t had a fish either. But somehow that one minute of struggle had transformed the very concept of not having a fish, from something that didn’t matter at all to something that mattered a whole lot.

  If I’d never met Zelda, well, that would have been one thing. But now that I had her, or almost had her, I couldn’t stand the idea of losing her. Which I realize makes it sound like I’m comparing her to a fish. But whatever—it’s a metaphor. Deal with it.

  “Parker, do you want me to leave?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then you have to believe me. Because I’m not going to spend what is probably my last day on earth trying to convince someone I’m not a liar. I promise you that, in exchange, I’ll believe everything you tell me as well, even though you’re an admitted thief, misanthrope, school skipper, and all-around malcontent.”

  I’ll try, I wrote on a fresh page.

  “No. Not good enough.” She pushed our cups of tea to the edge of the table. “Close your eyes.”

  Why?

  “Just do it.”

  I did. And then I felt Zelda’s hands come to rest gently on top of mine. “Believe, Parker.”

  So I thought back over everything I now “knew” about Zelda. She didn’t age. She’d been born in 1770 in Germany. She’d been married twice—and unless there were two Nathaniels in her life, one of those husbands was in the hospital just down the street.

  No one had ever been fed a more unbelievable story.

  Believe it, I told myself. Believe it.

  I opened my eyes.

  “So?” she said. “Do you?”

  I nodded, and even if I only about 25 percent meant it, Zelda was so happy she leaned across the table and kissed me. It was probably only a 3 on the passion scale (with our full-on skinny-dip make-out the previous night a 9.5), but it was the first time we’d kissed that day, and thus a powerful motivator toward blind faith in the impossible—say 33 percent now.

  “Glad we got that sorted out,” she said, then opened up her purse and dropped another hundred-dollar bill on the table. The wad was a little bit thinner than it had been yesterday, and I had this image of Zelda as a tree, losing her leaves one by one, until nothing but naked branches were left. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we? I think it’s high time you told some stories.”

  PARKER SANTÉ’S LIFE STORY

  WE AMBLED ALONG THE GRAVEL paths that crisscrossed the tea garden. Every crunch of our feet sounded like a big dog taking a bite out of something.

  “I have so many things I want to ask you,” Zelda said. “But your condition being what it is, we can’t really walk and talk at once, can we?”

  I shook my head. It was one of the many downsides of communicating through the written word, along with writer’s cramp and the fact that you needed a paper shredder to keep your past conversations secret.

  “That’s all right. We’ll just have to alternate. I’ll ask you something, and then you can stop somewhere and write down your answer while I do a lap of the park. When I get back, I’ll sit down and read your answer while you walk a lap. Sound good?”

  I nodded.

  “First question: What was your first kiss like? Be as detailed as possible.”

  She skipped off over one of those steep bridges, and I sat down on a stone bench. I’ve already told you about Rosie Cuevas and the game of spin the bottle, so I won’t bother copying down exactly what I wrote (I’ve still got the journal, complete but for the page Zelda threw in the stream, so it’s possible to recreate my half of our conversations word for word). It’s not much of a story, so I was finished with it long before Zelda got back to the bench. I left her there to read, walking a random path through the park, passing cuddly young couples and their slow-moving elderly counterparts. I go
t a little lost on the way back, and Zelda greeted me by chucking the journal at my head. I barely caught it by the front cover.

  “Well, that was boring,” she said.

  I put on an offended expression.

  She sighed. “I suppose I should have asked a more exciting question. For example, why don’t you tell me about the first person you ever slept with.”

  She started to walk away, so I had to jump up and grab her shoulder.

  “What?”

  I haven’t, I wrote.

  “Haven’t what?”

  I spread out my hands in the universal gesture for Figure it out, genius.

  “Oh!” She laughed, which made me feel about four years old. “I’m sorry, Parker. I just thought all the kids were doing it these days. Another question, then. Have you ever been in love?”

  I shook my head.

  “My God. Who gets to seventeen without falling in or making love?”

  I shrugged. What was there to say?

  “Well, this romantic angle is proving entirely fruitless. Family, then. Can you tell me what happened to your father?”

  That’s kinda hard for me.

  “Well, I’ve told you all my secrets. It’s only fair you give me something of yours. Besides, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to be able to talk about the deep stuff.”

  Fine. I’ll try.

  “Take your time. I’ll walk slowly.”

  I decided not to overthink it. I’d just set down the facts as I remembered them. To let too much emotional stuff in would result in a Golden-Gate-Park-size bummer of a story, and I was trying to keep things with Zelda light.

  We were driving back from the East Bay IKEA, I wrote. We’d just merged from the 80 to the 101. I remember I was licking that IKEA-brand ice cream (Yogurt? Fro-yo? Vanilla-flavored chemical mush? What is that shit, anyway?) off the little web between my thumb and index finger. My dad had just wrapped up some argument with my mom on the phone. Maybe he forgot to buy something, or else he bought something he wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know. I was twelve and I had ice cream, so nothing else really mattered.