The Perpetual Motion Machine Read online

  One night, our parents all go to dinner and dancing and Skyler and I get stuck with Gail and Andrew. They’re the kids of another family here that we are supposed to be close with but don’t like. Our parents put us in a cab and we go to a place that has go-karts and arcade games. This is okay with us, but we wish it were just us. I stick with Skyler and watch him play racing games most of the night. I’m not sure what Gail and Andrew are doing and I don’t care. Skyler gets tickets every time he wins a race and I pile them up in my pocketbook, a little black sequined crossbody with a picture of a perfume bottle on the side. It’s posh and makes me feel older.

  Skyler gives me a few tokens so I can play whatever I want, but I only go to a machine where you put in a coin and get plastic ninjas in a bubble. I get two; one for each of us. His is black and mine is blue. I run back to the racing game and show him. He approves with a nod, but his focus is on the laps and curves and jumps of the game.

  I love watching him play. It puts me at peace to stand there and hold all the tickets and feel almost like Mom for a minute; proud for such a great kid. But my love for him is more than that. I’m his sister, his only sister, and I always want to be next to him. He’s getting older, though. He's a teenager, and I’m still a kid. We’re drifting apart because of our ages and the way the world works. I wish I were older so I could understand more things, kiss a boy, feel a greater love than my little body can handle or fathom.

  There’s a scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel sings about wanting to be human. She bursts through the water and thrusts herself onto a rock, waves and sea spray splash around her as she declares she wants to be part of their world. This is the freedom I crave. The force that pushes me to escape my childhood and feel what adults are always claiming they’ll tell me about when I’m older.

  All of a sudden, Andrew rushes out into the rows of games in tears. Gail chases after him. Skyler gets up and yells, “What’s going on? Where’s he going?”

  Gail wouldn’t let Andrew ride the go-karts and he threw a fit. When she argued, he refused to settle down and ran outside.

  “He wants to walk!” She yells. “He’s an idiot!”

  Skyler and I look at each other. This is one of those moments where we have nothing else in the world to use except our own intuition. All experiences prior have told us not to do such things, but in that look we agree to forsake all that training and to see what happens when we walk home, back to the hotel, and follow the two kids we hate all the way.

  Andrew walks in front as the road slowly turns to a dirt path. Gail, Skyler and I follow in a row behind him. Our hotel is in the distance, probably a few miles away, each window lit up, a golden light like little coins from a video game floating and spinning midair.

  “It’s only three or four miles, it should take us an hour,” Skyler reassures me. “Are you okay?”

  I nod and hand him his ninja in a bubble. He smiles and says, “Hold onto it until we get back.” I put it in my purse and take mine out, the blue one, opening and closing the pop-top.

  “Can you stop that? It’s annoying!” Gail yells.

  “You’re annoying!” Skyler says. “You and your brother are both idiots! Andrew, can we please just take a cab back?”

  Andrew continues walking, arms crossed, sniffling and sad.

  “It’s not my fault!” Gail says. “I can’t control him.”

  I know what Skyler’s thinking. He actually thinks it’s kind of cool that we’re walking late at night back to the hotel because we’re definitely not supposed to. And he doesn’t really care about Gail or Andrew being annoying. He never pays much attention to them anyway. I don’t really care either. As long as I’m with Skyler, I’m not scared. My brother is a black belt, like the ninja. I only got to be a blue belt before I stopped, but he got through all the levels.

  We don’t tell our parents we walked, but Gail tells hers when she tells on Andrew being a brat and then we get in trouble, but not really, just a stern talking to.

  We stay through Christmas. There is Santa on the beach giving out presents. There is dinner and dancing on New Year's Eve in my black sequin dress until I tire myself out on the dance floor before midnight. There is a jet ski crash with some of our parents’ friends’ kids where two of the boys actually get hurt. Everyone is skeptical of the water sports for the rest of the trip, but I’m too young for any of that stuff.

  I wake up one morning violently ill. Coughing, snotting, crying. The only clinic is a fifteen-minute cab ride away, which my mom accompanies me to and I lay my head in her lap the whole way. The waiting room resembles what I imagine a third world country would look like. It reminds me of when Skyler plays Rampage and lands on a world tour in a distant city with dusty streets and run-down buildings. Sick kids cover the chairs and floors with red eyes and missing limbs, runny noses and bleeding scabs. I huddle into my mom for protection and she tells me to not to breathe or touch anything.

  A small girl is coughing into the air, mouth wide open, and her mother is rocking her baby brother in her arms. The small girl dances around the waiting room until she spins herself dizzy. She then proceeds to vomit on my mom’s foot. My mom screams and we run into the parking lot, get in our cab that’s waiting, and leave without seeing the doctor.

  A few hours later, a doctor comes up the hotel room and listens to my chest as I cough. I’m in my pajamas, which is weird because it’s the middle of the day and everyone else is at the beach. “She threw up right on my foot!” my mom tells the doctor who speaks little English and tends to me. “Thank you for coming” my dad says in his polo shirt and bathing suit bottoms. My brother must be with the other kids, out having fun, or being bored, either way they’re all together and I’m up here sick in bed. I wonder why I got sick and no one else did. The doctor diagnoses me with a chest infection and I get a bottle of pink liquid to drink from three times a day.

  My mom gives me an early Hanukkah present: a drawing set that comes in wooden briefcase. I draw our entire family and cut out the characters so they can move around the room. I also make various outfits for the figures that fold on and off as needed for different occasions. In their swimwear I line them up along the terrace window and face them toward the beach. When I’m done playing I stack them like a little deck and put them into the briefcase so the family can stay together. My mom tells me to go downstairs and lie on a chair with my mouth open to the sun so it will kill the bacteria from the infection. She tells me to put lemons in my hair to make it more blond. In two days, my infection has cleared and I’m a much blonder pre-teen girl on the beach with nothing to do again.

  Our parents allow us to go out again with the rest of the kids. Tonight it’s me, Skyler, Beth, Jodi, Andrew, Gail, Jake, and David going out for a pizza dinner. I’m beyond nervous. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. A few days ago I was playing bingo in a towel with my hair all frizzed with all the other little kids, but now it’s just embarrassing.

  Tonight I’m sitting here at the pizza place and Jodi is flirting with Skyler. He’s playing video games in the corner and she’s twirling her hair and smiling. She has beautiful long, black hair that lies straight and flat on her back, almost to her butt. Her eyes are green and she’s thin with a Jewish nose, but she makes it look good. She’s grown into it. I note her posture, the languid pose of interest yet distant configuration of desire in her eyes. This is the shape of wanting someone, of being attracted, attached, of growing up and feeling something called love or being in love, or wanting to be in love.

  David asks me what I want to drink and I try to think of the mature choice and say, water. Water is sophisticated. “You’re going to have pizza and water?” Jake taunts. “Don’t you like soda or something?” “They have Pepsi,” David says. His deep brown eyes and tanned face brood in the pizza parlor. I am still a kid and all I can say is, no. So now I’ve lied. I’m a little girl who hates soda. This is how it has to be from now on I guess—a life without soda, a life of lies.

  The pi
zza comes and it’s good, but it gets soggy with water and I wish I had a Pepsi. Skyler sits down and the whole gang eats their pizzas. Skyler sees that I don’t have soda and he looks confused. “Don’t you want a Pepsi?” He asks. I shake my head and stare down at the little glowing triangles on my plate. I can tell he knows that something is wrong here, all mixed up, but he doesn’t know what and doesn’t bother asking.

  Jake starts talking about the beginning of the world and Adam and Eve and all that. My brother and I were raised Jewish, but only went to temple for our cousins’ bar and bat mitzvahs, so we’re not sure what we believe. We know what latkes are and how to chant the Hanukkah prayer, but we’re not sure how the whole world began. Skyler had his bar mitzvah on top of Masada last summer in Israel, but most of the time I was just really hot and tired and didn’t understand the meaning behind anything. My mom kept saying “Skyler is becoming a man!” but I thought that was something that would happen when he was forty or so. I didn’t get how a thirteen-year-old could possibly be considered an adult. Skyler still plays video games and while he always wins, he didn’t seem any more grown up than before. Or maybe he was changing, but as a kid I couldn’t see it.

  “Adam and Eve were the tallest humans in the world and God had to fold them up into boxes every night so they could sleep,” Jake preaches.

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” Gail says. “They were normal people like us. Normal sized and everything.”

  “No!” Jake insists. “They were so big! And when Eve ate the apple that’s when He shrunk everyone else after to normal size.”

  “That’s so ridiculous. Your brother is an idiot, David,” Gail says, trying to get David on her side. Jodi and Beth laugh and then have a minor moment of disgust for finding Gail funny. I realize what’s going on here. It seems that Jodi has temporarily given up on Skyler, Beth has developed a taste for older men as well, and Gail has a crush too. Everyone likes David.

  Andrew, Jake, Beth and I are sent home by our elders. Beth is upset because there is supposed to be something more for her, something she’s missing out on by taking a cab home and having our parents pay the fare when we arrive.

  Sleepy-eyed Andrew is escorted to his room by his mom. We’ve all forgotten about the mishaps of yesterday. Every night in Aruba brings about a new adventure for the kids who are getting older, a new disappointment for the preteens, a new toy from the grab machine for me. My dad is too tired to come with me to the game room and my mom wants to watch a movie upstairs, so somehow Jake and I are allowed to go together to the arcade room. The arcade closes at midnight and it’s only ten o’clock.

  Jake and I race there and I momentarily lapse on my desires for a boy. Jake is the boy and I am the girl. I’m not supposed to win here. I’m supposed to lag behind and pretend I’m tired, wait for him to slow down so I can catch up. Then he can let me win, or beat me and I can congratulate him with loving eyes. But for me it is all about winning, getting there before he can, touching the white door to the arcade and screaming I win and making him feel insignificant and slight. “I can’t run in my dress shoes!” Jake proclaims.

  We walk inside the game room and both become lost in the crowd. There is a pool tournament happening and Jake is an ace at pool. My dad taught me how to play on one of the first nights we were here this year. He showed me how to correctly hold the cue stick and how to best angle the shots. I picked it up pretty quickly, mostly because it is a game that requires a quiet skill, an inside voice, the perfect amount of silent anxiety I am accustomed to. I assume Jake has succumbed to the depths of the pool table and I make my way over to the change machine for tokens.

  I change a five-dollar bill, which is a lot of dough in kid money, and I attempt to play a racing game, Cruisin' USA. Skyler always plays this one. I know which vehicle to pick, and to drive automatic because it’s easier, even though he always drives manual, but I can’t quite grasp the mechanics of the game and I end up in eighth place. I crash into walls and my car explodes, rebuilds itself in technological wonder, and then I land it in a body of water. The big-breasted, bikini-clad animated girls jump around at the finish line where a neon green car is receiving its trophy.

  The game room has lost its awe. The walls seem darker. The crowd is different. My brother is not here. Jake isn’t actually playing pool, he’s just watching an older kid play, a teenager. It seems that’s all we’ll ever be good at, watching the older kids play while we wait our turn, waiting to grow up and get on with our lives. I walk over to the grab machine and a father and daughter are playing. The girl is about five in a fluffy cupcake dress and hair barrettes strewn about her blond head. She has her eye on a dog with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. The father drops the crane. It lowers into the mass of stuffed bears and turtles and dogs. Colored heads and fuzzy bodies. He clasps a neck and grips it tight. The crane ascends. The claw is filled with a new friend. It’s made its escape from the bottom.

  She’s excited when her father lands the right coordinates and a puppy plops into the prize box. She lifts the lid and hugs it to her chest, and then turns again to good old Dad wanting another friend from the machine. The dad slides in another set of coins and the game lights up again. The red bulbs lining the machine flash to carnival music.

  The game depresses me now. There’s no excitement anymore; it all feels wrong. Animal heads and legs and butts poke out. I don’t see any I would want to put on the cot next to the others. I shouldn’t even have stuffed animals anymore anyway. I’m too old. The grab machine is for ages five and under, and I’m eight, a pre-teen, purposeless in a sea of crazy arcade kids wondering where my older sibling is. What is happening out there without us? Is this why Beth is so sad when Janice tells her she can’t stay out past eleven? What do they do so late and why can’t I go?

  I leave the arcade room even though Jake and I are supposed to go back to our rooms together. I question the idea that Jake and I would want to leave a place at the same time. He’s fine with how things are. He doesn’t care about what happens after dark. He just wants to run and play and be loud and get dirty and be a little shit. All his appeal is gone for me. I think about David on the way back to the lobby and have a moment by a tall palm tree. I stand against it and close my eyes, think about him, his brown eyes and the way he laughs, shy at first but then bursting out. It’s dark outside and I wonder where he is now, what he’s doing. I hope he’s not talking to Gail or Jodi. Maybe he secretly loves me and is afraid because I’m so young. Maybe if I wait until next year, maybe the year after, he’ll feel better about it and we can be together, whatever that means.

  The lobby is still crowded. There are always people coming and going, entering and exiting. I see a couple getting out of a cab and returning to the hotel. The woman is dressed in a long red dress and the man is in a suit and tie. Her hair is up in a swirl and he grabs her hand and whisks her away into the depths of the hotel. This is what romance looks like. This is something I want.

  After New Year’s, most people leave, but we’re still here. We’ll leave in a few days, not sure how many. I don’t keep track of time, but I can feel it coming soon, just like I feel I’m not supposed to be in that arcade room anymore. I wonder if my parents are sleeping. I hope they’re not mad that I came back alone, but maybe it’s a good thing to get in trouble once in a while. David might like that about me.

  I go up in the elevator and get off at my floor. I try to sneak by the concierge lady but she sees me and offers me a cookie. It’s a sugar cookie, my favorite, with rainbow sprinkles. She’s writing in her datebook and smiling at the nothingness of the hour. I look out a window and all I see is the ocean, the waves rolling into one another, a blackness that obscures the room. Out there is where my brother is and the rest of the older kids too. They are doing things and saying things and having fun and getting in trouble and being together and learning what it means to be an adult.

  I can’t tell what’s out there in the night, but I can see it’s dark.

&nbs
p; “Where is he?” Mom whisper-yells into the dark of our hotel room. My cot is in the corner next to my brother’s bed, which is next to my parent’s bed. Dad is sitting at the table in the corner at the foot of my bed. They think I’m asleep, but I’ve positioned one of my stuffed animals under my chin so I can squint my eyes and see underneath its floppy ear. “It’s two in the morning, and he’s not back yet. What could he possibly be doing out so late?” Dad gets an idea to check the hotel television channel where guests can see what’s been charged to the room. There are multiple charges at the hotel pool bar for various alcoholic drinks. They don’t seem to believe it to be true though. Mom suggests that someone took the room key and charged all this stuff. Dad doesn’t really respond. He opens the terrace door and lights a cigarette.

  There is a banging on the door. My dad stumbles up in his pajamas. My brother is unconscious on the hallway floor in different clothing than he was in before. Two boys run toward the elevator.

  I don’t know what it means or why he is face down on the carpet in someone else’s clothes. There’s nothing I can do but watch.

  I sit up in my cot. Mom and Dad carry Skyler to his bed in the middle of the room. His face is toward the wall on the other side so I can’t see if he’s alive.

  “Go to sleep,” Mom insists. “He just needs to sleep it off. He’ll be fine.”

  There’s a rumbling sound and Skyler throws up all over the bed. Dad carries him into the bathroom. “Fuck,” he says, but he’s not mad. Mom tears the sheets from the bed and throws them out the door into the hallway. Dad covers the bathroom floor in towels and lays my brother down next to the toilet. They’re not angry. They’re mechanical. I cry because I’ve never seen someone like this.

  In the middle of the night I wake up and have to use the bathroom. I forget about the whole ordeal in my slumberous state and walk all the way to the bathroom door only to find Skyler sleeping using a towel as a pillow. I walk back over to my parent’s bed and try to wake up Mom. She’s fast asleep though.