Antsy Does Time

10. Collateral Damage, Relative Humidity, and Lemon Pledge in the Dust Bowl of My Life

I want to make it absolutely clear that what happened to Gunnar’s neighbors was an accident—and for once, I get to share the blame with someone else.

With our dust-bowl due date just a few days away, Gunnar and I were under a time constraint, and we were working too hard on this Steinbeck project to get marked down for being late. I have experience in that department, and know for a fact that there are teachers who measure lateness in microseconds on that world clock they got in England. And there’s no bottom to this pit. I actually once got a Z-minus on a late paper. I pointed out to the teacher that she coulda marked me even lower if she used the Russian alphabet, on account of it has something like thirty-three letters instead of twenty-six. She was impressed enough by the suggestion that she raised my grade to a Z-plus.

To avoid letter grades in the lower half of the alphabet, Gunnar and I needed to kill off the plants quickly to get our dust bowl rolling, so we used a lot of herbicide. Now Gunnar’s next-door neighbors were all ticked off because their yards were smelling like toxic waste. It was Sunday morning. The day after my not-quite-a-date with Kjersten. I really didn’t want to be there and have to face Mr. Ümlaut, who I held personally responsible for ruining my evening. And I didn’t want to face Kjersten just yet, because it was too soon after the walkout. But I had to go through the house to get to the backyard. I was hoping Gunnar would answer the door, but he was already working out back.

Kjersten answered the door.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Nice day.”

“Sunny.”

“Sun’s good.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway...”

“Right.”

I tried to put an end to the misery by moving toward the back door, but she wasn’t letting me. Not yet.

“Sorry about last night,” she said. “We’ll do it again, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem.”

“No,” she said. “I mean it.”

And I could tell that she really did mean it. Deep down, I had kind of felt that a ruined evening meant ruined hopes. It was good to know that another, better date was still on the horizon.

“When’s your grounding over?” I asked.

“As soon as I get the grade back on my chemistry test tomorrow—and my father can see I didn’t need to skip my tennis tournament to study.”

I smiled. “And here I thought you cut school for a wild ski trip.” Which was one of my tamer scenarios. I took her hand and stood there for a long moment that, believe it or not, didn’t feel awkward at all, then I went out to the backyard.

There was all this cardboard in the yard, because today’s project was a cardboard shack for Steinbeck’s starving farmers. At the moment I arrived in our little dust bowl, Gunnar was being scolded by his next-door neighbor over the fence. “Look what you’ve done to my yard! It’s all dead!”

“It’s that time of year,” I offered, pointing out the dead leaves around her yard. “That’s why they call it ‛fall.’”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “What about the evergreens?”

She indicated some bushes way across the yard that had gone a sickly shade of brown. Then she looked bitterly down at some thorny, leafless bushes in front of her that could have just been dormant if we didn’t already know better—because if the herbicide had made it all the way across the yard, these nearby bushes were history.

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve cultivated this rose garden?”

My next response would have been a short and sweet “Oops,” but Gunnar has last week’s vocabulary word, which I lack: eloquence.

“‘Only when the Rose withers can the beauty of the bush be seen,’” he told her. It shut her up and she stormed away.

“What does that even mean?” I asked after she was gone.

“I don’t know, but Emily Dickinson said it.”

I told him that quoting Emily Dickinson was just a little too weird, and he agreed to be more testosterone-conscious with his quotations. He looked over at the neighbors’ yard, surveying the ruins of the garden. “A little death never hurt anyone,” he said. “It gives us perspective. Makes us remember what’s important.”

I hadn’t been too worried about the neighbors’ plants dying until now. Collateral damage, right? Only this was more than just collateral damage—and only later did we realize why. See, guys all have this problem. It’s called the we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-directions problem. Gunnar and I had bought half a dozen jugs of herbicide, coated the plants with the stuff like we were flocking Christmas trees, and we were satisfied with the results. We could have done a commercial for the stuff . . . However, if we had read the directions, we would have seen that the stuff was concentrated—you know, like frozen orange juice: we were supposed to use one part herbicide to ten parts water. So basically we sprayed enough of the stuff to kill the rain forests.

Now all the lawns around Gunnar’s house, front and back, were going a strange shade of brown that was almost purple. Our dust bowl was spreading outward like something satanic.

When I got home, my mom wasn’t with my dad at the restaurant, like she usually is on Sunday afternoons. She was home, cleaning. This was nothing unusual—but the sheer intensity of the scouring had me worried—like maybe the toxic mold was back, and this time it was personal.

Turns out, it was worse.

“Aunt Mona is coming to visit,” Mom told me.

I turned to my sister Christina, who sat cross-legged on the couch, either doing homework or trying to levitate her math book. “No—tell me it’s not true!” I begged.

Christina just lowered her eyes and shook her head in the universal this-patient-can’t-be-saved gesture.

“How long?”

“How long till she comes, or how long will she stay?” Christina asked.

“Both.”

To which Christina responded, “Next week, and only God knows.”

It’s always that way with Aunt Mona. Her visits are more like wartime occupations. She’s the most demanding of our relatives—in fact, we sometimes call her “relative humidity,” on account of when Mona’s around, everybody sweats. See, Aunt Mona likes to be catered to—but lately the only catering Mom and Dad have been able to do is of the restaurant variety. Plus, when Aunt Mona arrives, all other things manage to get put on hold, and we’re all expected to “visit” with her while she’s here—especially those first couple of days. With the dust bowl due, tests in every class before Christmas vacation, another date to schedule with Kjersten, and Gunnar’s illness hovering like a storm, Aunt Mona was the last thing I needed.

Just so you know, Aunt Mona’s my father’s older sister. She has a popular business selling perfume imported from places I’ve never heard of, and might actually be made up—and she always wears her own perfume. I think she wears them all at once, because whenever she visits, I break out in hives from the fumes, and the neighborhood clears of wildlife.

She’s very successful and business-minded. Nothing wrong with that—I mean, my friend Ira’s mom is all hard-core business, and she’s a nice, normal, decent human being. But Aunt Mona is not. Aunt Mona uses her success in cruel and unusual ways. You see, Aunt Mona isn’t just successful, she’s More Successful Than You, whoever you happen to be. And even if she’s not, she will find a way to make you feel like the pathetic loser you always feared you were, deep down where the intestines gurgle.

Aunt Mona works like 140-hour weeks, and frowns on anyone who doesn’t. She has a spotless high-rise condo in Chicago, and frowns on anyone who doesn’t. In fact, she spends so much time frowning and looking down her nose at people, she had a plastic surgeon change her nose and Botox her frown wrinkles.

It goes without saying, then, that Aunt Mona is the undisputed judge of all things Bonano—even though she changed her name to Bonneville because it sounded fancier, and because Mona Bonano sounded too much like that “Name Game” song. I’m sure as a kid she was constantly teased with “Mona-Mona-bo-bona, Bonano-fano-fo-fona.” And as if Bonneville wasn’t snooty enough, she added an accent to her first name, so now it’s not Mona, it’s Moná. I refuse on principle to ever pronounce it “Moná,” and I know she resents it.

It turns out that Aunt Mona was considering moving her entire company to New York, so she was going to be here for a while. She could, of course, afford one of those fancy New York hotels, where the maids clean between your toes and stuff, but there’s this rule about family. It’s kind of like the Ten Commandments, and the Miranda rights they read you when you get arrested: Thou shalt stay with thy relatives upon every visit, and anything you say can and will be used against you for the rest of your life.

So Mom’s Lemon Pledging all the dining-room furniture until the wood shines like new, and she says to me, “You gotta be on your best behavior when Aunt Mona comes.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I tell her, having heard it all before.

“You gotta treat her with respect, whether you like it or not.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And you gotta wear that shirt she gave you.”

“In your dreams.”

Mom laughed. “If that shirt’s in my dreams, they’d be nightmares.”

I had to laugh, too. The fact that Mom agreed with me that the pink-and-orange “designer” shirt was the worst piece of clothing yet devised by man somehow made it okay to wear it. Like now it was an inside joke, instead of just an ugly shirt.

I picked up one of her rags and polished the high part of the china cabinet that she had trouble reaching. She smiled at me, kinda glad, I guess, that I did it before she asked.

“So, do I gotta wear the shirt in public?”

“No,” she says. “Maybe,” she adds. “Probably,” she concludes.

I don’t argue, because what’s the use? When it comes to Aunt Mona, the odds of walking away a winner are worse than at the Anawana Tribal Casino. Anyway, I suppose wearing the shirt was better than Mom and Christina’s fate. They’d have to wear one of Aunt Mona’s perfumes.

Right around then the doorbell rang, and Mom looked up at me with wide eyes and froze. I know what she was thinking. Aunt Mona never showed up when scheduled. She would come early, she would come late, she would come on a different day altogether. But a whole week early?

“Naa,” I said to Mom. “It couldn’t be.”

I went to answer it, fully prepared for a blast of flesh-searing fragrance. But it wasn’t Aunt Mona—instead it was two kids—fourth or fifth graders by the look of them, holding out pieces of paper to me.

“Hi, we’re collecting spare time for a kid who’s dying or something—would you like to donate?”

“Let me see that!” I snatched one of the papers from them. It was my own blank contract—second- or third-generation Xerox, by the look of it. Someone had taken one of my official contracts and was turning out counterfeits!

“Where’d you get this? Who said you could do this?”

“Our teacher,” said one kid.

“Our whole class is doing it,” said the other.

“So are you going to donate, or what?”

“Get lost.” I slammed the door in their faces.

So now collecting for Gunnar had become a school fund-raiser. I felt violated. Cheated. Betrayed by the educational system.

I didn’t bother my parents with this—they had enough on their minds, and they’d probably just say “So what?” and they’d be right. It was petty and dumb to think that I owned the whole idea ... but the thing is, I liked being the Master of Time. Now there were people running around, doing it on their own, without official leadership. They call that anarchy, and it always leads to things like peasants with pitchforks and torches burning things down.

“Think of those little kids as disciples,” Howie said, when I mentioned it to him the next day. “Jesus’ disciples did all the work for him after he wasn’t around no more.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still here—and besides, Jesus knew his disciples.”

“That’s only because the lack of technology in those days forced people to have to know each other. Now, because of computers, we really don’t gotta know anybody, really.”

Then he went on about how today the Sermon on the Mount would be a blog, and the ten plagues on Egypt would be reality TV. None of this addressed the issue, so I told Howie I was leaving, but by all means he should continue the conversation without me.

I think this whole prickly, offended feeling was the first warning. I was sensing things getting out of control—not just out of MY control, but out of control in general. My little idea of giving Gunnar a month to make him feel better was now turning into a monster. And everyone knows what they do to monsters. It’s pitchforks and torches again. That happens, see, because people think the monster’s got no soul.

As it turns out, they’d be right this time. My monster didn’t have a soul... and I was about to find that out.