My grandparents called each other Joe and Helen. And, despite the cultural milieu of the era, my grandparents slept in the same bed.
My grandparents were real Super Racehorses.
But yeah, it was pretty gross. And really, there wasn’t much for me to do at their house other than the following:
Stare at a wall of photographs depicting my father from birth to age thirty. The pictures progressed chronologically, so I could actually watch Dad grow up before my eyes. They reminded me of those silhouette paintings that show the evolution of human beings from monkey to man.
Wait for the quarterly chimes of the cuckoo clock in the living room while watching my grandfather fall asleep in a full upright position in his favorite armchair.
Get my ass handed to me at the pool table downstairs. (Everyone in my family was an absolute ace at billiards. I sucked balls at billiards.)
Count bowls of potpourri throughout the house. (Twenty-seven. There were twenty-seven. Twenty-seven bowls. Of potpourri.)
Watch everyone around me happily paw at one another. (Like handsy teenagers in the science wing of Hack High.)
My grandparents lived in a small town on the outskirts of Hackensack called New Milford. Just to get out of the house, away from all the heightened geriatric sexual impulses, I took long walks. Suburban excursions, I called them. And I got to know those streets pretty well. My favorite spot was this old stone wall across the street from a disheveled graveyard, which was kind of beautiful in an overgrown, cinematic sort of way. Big mossy trees stretched their limbs, vines and foliage dangled over scattershot tombstones. I used to sit on the stone wall and think, Yeah. Okay. I could be buried here.
And in the plot adjacent to the graveyard, there was an orchard. An acre of well-kept plants, flowers, and trees made all the more immaculate given their proximity to the neighboring mess of graveyard moss. A tapered stream ran the length of the orchard; a vine-covered wooden bridge crossed in the middle. There was a giant barn with a sign that read GIFT SHOP, an old colonial two-story with smoke rising from the chimney, and in the back, a row of greenhouses.
That momentous April, we buried both my grandparents in the graveyard next to that orchard. Grandma went second, and at her funeral, Dad stood next to his parents’ joint tombstone, stared at the neighboring orchard, and swore he would visit at least once a week. And for a couple of years, he did.
And then he got sick.
And then he died.
And that was the end of him visiting his parents who had both died of heart attacks that one momentous April. (It was the end of a lot of things. Pretty much everything, actually.)
It was highly likely that my following these kids was a very poor decision. Certainly, I hadn’t planned on saying yes to Baz’s odd question. Until . . .
We live on an orchard in New Milford.
In that moment—and it’s quite possible I was wrong about this—I saw it as more than an opportunity to reunite my dad with his dead parents. I saw it as a sign. I saw it as Dad compassing me in the right direction.
As I walked down River Street, my backpack suddenly felt quite a bit lighter.
* * *
“You okay?”
I emerged from my Land of Nothingness to find Mad, her head turned, staring at me.
“What?” I asked.
What?
The most medium of words.
“I asked if you were okay.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, thanks.”
The kids had their own rhythm. Nzuzi led the way, using the grocery bag as a barricade between his face and the biting snow; just behind him, Mad held Coco’s hand, carefully keeping her on the side opposite River Street traffic. Together they reminded me of a flying gaggle of geese turning in blind cohesion, and you don’t understand how those geese know the when or where of those turns, but they do. And you figure it must be a miracle.
I brought up the rear, wiping my leaky mug and trying not to feel like the straggler with the broken wing.
Mad’s blond hair lashed around under that yellow knit cap, and in the white winter light, it looked like a fresh slice of lemon, or the tip of a sparkler at night. My poor heart-thinking brain brimmed with frothy thoughts of Mad. But there was no chance she saw me the way I saw her. Far more likely, she saw me the way I saw me.
I am small boy.
I drained the last of my now-lukewarm coffee, and before long we veered off the road toward the Hackensack River, where a little field opened up with a sign reading HISTORIC NEW BRIDGE LANDING. I’d been here before, years ago, on a school trip. The site of a Revolutionary War battleground, it had a few city-protected houses scattered here and there. I looked down at our tracks in the snow and thought of what that must have been like at the time, and how weird that it happened here.
On this step.
And this one.
This one too.
We made our way toward the short pedestrian bridge connecting Hackensack to New Milford; a group of kids launched snowballs at one another from either side. As we approached, one of them raised both hands in the air and yelled, “Game off!” I recognized him from school. Roland, I think, but he went by some odd nickname I couldn’t remember. Roland always wore mismatched shoes like he got dressed in the dark or something. He and his friends belonged to that particular faction of kids at Hack High who did not leave me alone. (Being left alone at Hack High was essentially the goal, though an occasional hallway hello from the student council president, Stephanie Dawn—who was too nice to know how pretty she was, and too pretty to go anywhere but up the social ladder—could literally fortify me against a week’s worth of tongue-lashing.)
I kept my head down as we crossed the bridge, and thought about the war that had been waged in this exact spot hundreds of years earlier. From troops marching toward a bloody demise to Bruno Victor Benucci III marching toward, well, who could say really.
Land was weird. Unlike a person, it did not care who stepped on it.
. . .
Halfway across the bridge, it started. They were not words; they were wasps, stinging in all the soft, fleshy places. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
A snowball hit my back.
Then my leg.
Then my face.
“Bull’s-eye!” yelled one of the kids.
I heard Dad from my backpack. Think with your heart, V.
I scraped the snow off my cheeks, tried not to let them see my eyes. This was key. If they saw my eyes, they’d know they’d gotten to me. From the side pocket of my backpack I fumbled for my earbuds, my empty heart begging to be filled by the soaring sopranos. Scroll, scroll, scroll, play—now, to disappear completely into an entirely other world.
In that world: every faction left me alone.
In that world: I was not one seven-billionth of the planet’s population.
In that world: I was one-fourth of the planet’s population: it was Dad, the two sopranos, and me.
In that world: we soared through the sky and clouds, above it all, not a care in the world, the most miraculous of gaggles, catching the souls of those rare, lovely heart-thinkers.
In that world: my wing was mended.
MAD
I didn’t know what Vic was listening to, but I sure hoped he had the volume turned up.
VIC
“Straight to the back,” said Coco, lifting the bottom of the chain-link fence. Mad had already scrambled underneath and was currently reaching for the bag of groceries as Nzuzi handed it over the top. Across the street, I saw my old perch: the stone wall, the fig tree. I felt the presence of that little graveyard on the other side of the orchard, wondered how many times Dad had visited, and if he’d ever stopped by the orchard.
“Dude,” said Coco. “You okay?”
“What?”
She motioned under the fence. “Shit or get off
the pot, kid.”
This little girl’s vocabulary, it seemed, knew no bounds. “How old are you, exactly?”
“I’m eleven,” she said. “But that’s, like, twenty-six in Queens years.”
“Right. Okay then.”
I handed my backpack over the fence, wincing as Mad dropped it carelessly onto the ground. After crawling under the chain link, I dusted the snow off my chest and legs, took a quick look inside the bag (luckily the tape on the urn’s lid held strong), and followed the kids down a path of thorny-dead rosebushes.
“What do you got in there?” asked Mad. “A cannonball?”
I let her words ring in the air, left them there.
“Well, whatever else,” she said, pointing to my bloody jeans, “I hope you have a change of clothes.”
I was about to ask what kind of kid carries around a change of clothes in their backpack when I realized I did, in fact, have my favorite sweatpants tucked away. During winter, the gym at Hack High grew incalculably drafty, ergo, our PE teacher allowed us to wear our own gym clothes instead of shorts.
“I do, actually.”
“Cool. After we get settled in, I’ll show you where you can change and get washed up.”
Snow was piled high on either side of the path. Ridged grooves ran up and down the embankments where someone had recently shoveled. It was bizarre walking through a place I’d only ever admired from a distance. I started across the wooden bridge, where a posted sign read: CHANNEL A LA GOLDFISH. Between the slats of two-by-fours under my feet, a giant goldfish swam idly in the narrow stream below.
Channel à la Goldfish was a very literal channel.
Once across, Nzuzi darted off toward the only house on the premises—the old colonial two-story. We waited by the bridge while he sat the bag of groceries on the porch, knocked on the door, and jogged back toward us.
“Let’s go,” said Mad in a shiver, leading the way down a row of greenhouses.
There was something Oz-like about the whole thing, as if I’d stepped into a portal and been transported to some bizarre world with an unexplained set of rules and a pack of reckless, parentless, wild kids. (So Oz with a dash of Neverland, I guess.) Even though these kids were effectively homeless, they had an air of pride about them, and I could see why. Like Oz, the orchard was beautiful and cozy in its strangeness. Most of the plant life was barren, but even so, it felt like a lush botanical garden, as if the outside of the orchard were incapable of reflecting its inside.
The orchard reminded me of this: an old man’s youthful heart.
Mad stopped in front of the smallest greenhouse, tucked in the back like an afterthought, half the width of the one next to it. Less a greenhouse, more the footnote of a greenhouse. Less the entrée, more the leftovers.
I loved it from the word go.
“Welcome home,” said Mad. A rush of warmth hit me in the face as she opened the door. The kids filed inside, took off their jackets, hung them on a coat rack, and walked down the center aisle.
I was wrong.
This place was stranger than Oz.
While the front half was full of typical greenhouse fare—rows of blossoming vegetation on waist-high tables, and potted plants hanging from the clear curved walls—the back half reminded me of a postapocalyptic movie I once saw about a family who lived in a bomb shelter for something like seven years.
There were bookshelves, for starters. I counted five of them—stocked with canned fruits and vegetables, bags of nuts, chips, beef jerky, gallons of water, stacks of books and vinyl records, and an old turntable. A space heater hummed from the back wall; just underneath, four sleeping bags were spread on the ground, neatly made, a pillow at each head. A green couch sat in the opposite corner, a coffee table in front of it (as if this were a perfectly normal living room, thank-you-very-much). On the coffee table was a stack of cards and a lamp. I spotted an outlet under the space heater, and a power strip for the lamp and record player.
“What about the owner?” I asked. “Or . . . orchard keeper, or whoever? The guy who lives in the house.”
Mad stuck her hands in front of the space heater. “Gunther doesn’t mind, so long as we bring him groceries and supplies so he never has to leave the grounds. Apparently he hit the lottery decades ago, figured he could wave good-bye to customer service. People stopped venturing onto his orchard, and Gunther stopped venturing off of it.”
“What about school?”
“Gunther’s too old for school,” said Coco, who burst out laughing. “Ha! Nailed it.” She kept laughing as she pulled a cup of applesauce off the shelf, opened it, and used two fingers to scoop it into her mouth. “Anyway, Mad’s done with school, Baz works at the Cinema Five until he and Zuz get their cab service up and running”—Nzuzi, who was debating which record to pull off the shelf, snapped his fingers once—“and that leaves me. And I’m an orphan.”
“So?”
“So, orphans don’t go to school. You gotta have moms and dads to sign shit. Plus, an address. What, I should write Eleventh Greenhouse on the Right, Maywood Orchard, New Milford? Might as well add Cupboard under the Stairs while I’m at it. It’s a public school, not Hogwarts. I’d get laughed out of the building.”
“Hogwarts is definitely the shit, though,” said Mad.
Coco nodded. “Oh, Hogwarts is the shit.”
“With the Cornish pasties and treacle tarts and all.”
“I don’t even know what the frak a Cornish pasty is, and I still want one.”
Nzuzi snapped once, pulled a record off the Shelf of Improbable Things, placed it on the turntable, and lowered the stylus. After the initial hiss of white noise, the music started and Nzuzi broke into dance. Strikingly nimble, he pulled his elbows in, cocked his head to one side, snapped his fingers on every upbeat. It wasn’t synchronized; it was authorized. As if each body part had given permission to the other body parts to go nuts as one.
Nzuzi was an absolute ace at jigging.
“‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’” said Coco, polishing off the applesauce. “His favorite. Hey, Zuz, you hungry?”
Still jigging, Nzuzi snapped a finger. Coco grabbed a plastic cup of peaches off the shelf, tossed it to him. He caught it mid-jig, tore back the lid, and dug in.
I was a real mythology-sucker-legacy-loving type guy. I needed history. I needed know-how. I needed origin. I had roughly one zillion questions, and planned on asking one after another until someone shut me down.
“What’s with the finger snapping?” I asked, as good a place to start as any.
Coco said, “One snap means yes, two means no. Zuz has plenty to say, you just gotta know how to listen.” She tossed the plastic cup into a nearby trash can, leaned back, and spread her arms wide. “So, what do you think, kid? Pretty sweet setup, right?”
I was done being referred to as “kid” by an eleven-year-old.
“My name is Vic,” I said. “Or Victor is fine.”
“You mean like—to the victor belong the spoils?” Coco let out a raucous, juicy laugh, little bits of leftover applesauce flying from her mouth. “Maybe we’ll just call you Spoils. How about that?”
Coco kept talking, but I really couldn’t say what about. Mad had just removed her knit cap; ergo, my head had just removed its eyeballs.
She’d shown me the scar on the side of her head last night, but even so, I found myself almost completely incapacitated right now, as if I’d had a blown fuse my whole life and someone had only now replaced it. On one side, her hair was long, wavy, unruly, exactly as I imagined; the other side was shaved right up to the top of the temple. Not bald, but buzzed, a total West Coast punk cut. The hair led to the eyes, which led to the lips, which led to the skin, which led to, which led to, which led to . . .
Mad was a map.
And I was Magellan.
I plotted my course, dreamed of uncharted terr
itories and the glories found in each valley and crevice. I dreamed of the sloping, sensual summit, and of mounting its zenith.
“You can sleep on that,” said Coco quietly.
I am a Super Racehorse.
“What?” I said in a breath.
“The couch.” She pointed toward Mad. I stood there like a sideways hug, wondering if the couch came with the girl. “Chapters get the couch,” said Coco, tossing a bag of beef jerky to Mad.
I took a deep breath. “And what exactly is a chapter?”
“Not chapter,” said Coco. “Chapter. With a capital C.”
“How do you know I didn’t say it with a capital C?”
“I could hear it in your voice.”
Nzuzi grabbed a metal watering can and danced up and down each aisle of plants, watering as he went.
“Okay, fine.” I cleared my throat. “What exactly is . . . a Chapter?”
“Patience, cockroach,” said Coco.
“Grasshopper,” said Mad.
Coco raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Coco shrugged. “Patience, grasshopper.”
. . .
The kids were more than just a gaggle. They were puzzle pieces, a well-packed trunk, as improbably organized as the improbable shelves in their improbable habitat. I stood there, wiping my leaky mug, a circle-peg-square-hole type guy saying sideways-hug type things like oh and what. Less a puzzle piece, more the box it came in.
I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my Mets sweatpants. Dad called them my Metpants, which I used to hate.
Now? Shit. Missed it.
“You said there might be somewhere for me to change . . . ?”
“Right.” Mad hopped off the couch. “Let’s go. I could use a smoke anyway.”