The Perpetual Motion Machine Read online

  “Don’t wake her up,” Dad says, looking at me as I rub Mom’s arm.

  “I have to pee.”

  “So go. He won’t wake up for a while. I’ve already gone twice, it’s fine.”

  I stand there in the hotel room. I don’t want to pee in front of a boy, let alone my brother. What if he wakes up and sees me and wonders what I’m doing in there while he’s in there? Does he even know where he is? Dad sees this isn’t going to happen and he puts on his pants and tells me to wait by the door.

  The lobby is quiet. I’ve never seen it like this before but it makes me feel at peace. To know that this is what happens here late at night, to see something I’m not supposed to see, the early morning shift of the hotel and how calm it is. It’s comforting that at some point the craziness stops and the hotel takes a deep breath. Dad holds my hand all the way from the elevator to the restrooms and nudges me into the women’s room. I’m hesitant though, because when I’m done and we go back upstairs, I’m not sure what will happen next. I don’t know if there will ever be calm again. My brother is growing up and I’m not, or maybe I am. Maybe growing up is finding calm in the storm, and if so, I’ve found it here in the lobby at dawn. My dad in his pajamas, me in mine as well, both of us momentarily enjoying the truce in a battle that is about to take place for the rest of our lives.

  The next morning, Mom is back at the lounge chairs playing Scrabble. Dad is out scuba diving with Janice’s husband, getting in his last dive before we get on a plane. The rest of the adults are sunning and not wondering where their kids are at the moment. This is when the vacation turns everyone selfish and they want to get what they truly need before they leave. For me this means going to bet on the turtles. This also means I will have to ask my mom for permission.

  I approach the tiki hut and wait my turn to speak. Mom is always so presentable. She keeps a bottle of Lancôme liquid blush in her purse to reapply whenever she wants to look more radiant. She slathers it on mine and Skyler’s faces after a vacation like this and says it will make our tans stand out.

  The moms are talking about what happened last night. Beth sits alongside Janice and helps her pick out letters. “Apparently Gail threw up in the cab!” Beth participates in the conversation. Gail’s mom is nowhere to be found to validate or negate this. “That’s terrible,” Janice agrees in disgust. I wonder about David and if he had any part of this. I think about Jake again and realize maybe he’s more my speed. He’s back to shoveling sand underneath the jungle gym. He wipes a black tuft of hair out of his face, getting sand all through it in the process and I fall in love again.

  “What happened to Skyler?” Jake’s mom asks, curious but trying not to be intrusive, but she is anyway.

  “He’s getting his punishment,” my mom says flatly and lays down a word that is impressive, but not winning her the game anytime soon.

  “Jodi is punished too,” Janice says. “She’s up in the room and not coming out until we go back to New York.”

  I decide it’s now or never on the turtles.

  “Mom, can I have two dollars to bet on the turtle race?”

  “Let’s all go,” she says, and I rejoice.

  My little feet are hot on the pavement but I refused to wear sandals for some reason. Mom pulls them out of her purse and they land on the ground with a slap. I slide my feet into them and feel safe, protected, like a kid, and it’s not so bad. I pick the turtle in the purple lane and it loses to the one in the yellow lane, the one Beth picks. She chooses a bottle of bubbles from the prize chest and lets me take turns blowing bubbles with her the whole walk back.

  “You’re my jo,” I say. But Beth doesn’t know what I mean and pretends not to hear.

  Skyler eats Corn Pops out of a box underneath the tiki hut. His sunglasses are on and the older kids gather around, asking him questions in awe of his drunken feat. This is the first time my brother has ever really gotten in trouble. He doesn’t look sorry. He looks out of it. I’m happy to see him not on the bathroom floor. I’m happy to see him up again.

  “I’m so upset with him . . . I just don’t know what I’ll do,” Mom says as we walk by. I can tell she wants to ignore him. She doesn’t want to deal with the real problem.

  Now I understand why my mom suggested that we all go together to see the turtles. She was losing her Scrabble game and all control that comes with that victory. But for me, the turtle race wasn’t about winning, it was about getting away. Even though we are all powerless to the outcome of the race and I’m just a kid betting on turtles, we’ve gotten away from the tight grasp of the rest of our lives, the claw that digs for our heads and bodies, the promise of a prize, the thrill of a win. In this moment on this vacation, Mom can gain back some power; at least one of her children is still a child.

  She hurries me toward the towel stand where a couple sells jewelry. They are a husband and wife who live on a boat and travel the world with their two sons. Blond-haired, shirtless boys with shark tooth necklaces and baked little bodies. Mom says I can get something if I want. I’ve waited the whole trip for her to say those words. All I want is new jewelry to add to my collection. I’ll wear it for a month straight and then forget about it forever.

  The wife points me toward a pile of necklaces with clay wizard men charms that hold colored crystals in their lap. She says they each have different meanings, depending on the color. Blue is for earth energy. Yellow is for the mind. Green is for nature. Red is for love. Mom says to pick one. I choose yellow. “Yellow will help you in school!” Mom beams. “Yes,” the traveling jewelry lady agrees, “rub the crystal during your tests and it will help you focus.” They both smile.

  I put the souvenir around my neck. I know it looks childish, the wizard in a hat and the crystal, but when the kids in my class ask where I got the necklace, I tell them “in Aruba” and they marvel in awe, like I’ve done something great, been somewhere cool, farther than they’ve been and perhaps further than they’ll ever go.

  Mario Saves the Princess

  Pancakes. A stack. There were always too many. Syrup spilling over. Breakfast soup. River of syrup. Too many pancakes. Too much for our little stomachs. The river was dangerous. The river was excess. Mario floats on a pancake. Mario must save the princess. Don’t stand in the booth. Don’t sit on your knees. Sit on your tush. Eat with your fork. Mario mush. Princess is a knob of butter. Princess is a straw wrapper. Princess is an ice cube floating in the syrup river melting on the pancake mush. Do you want a piece of bacon? Do you want chocolate milk? Do you want to save the princess? My eyes are bigger than my stomach. My little stomach. My little belly. The big stack. The tall stack. Are you going to save the princess? The side plate is an island. Bowser is a saltshaker. Bowser is a pepper grinder. Bowser is a spoon that scoops her up. No one is mad. No one yells. Mario wins. The pancake tower falls. We never finish the stack. The princess is safe. Mario always wins her back.

  My brother invents a prototype for a perpetual motion machine. He meets with his ninth grade science teacher once a week to test out his design and go over new findings. I don’t understand how it works, but it involves miniature magnets that are supposed to represent bigger, massive ones and something about them turning endlessly once set in motion. He keeps the machine in his room on his desk. When he’s not there, I hold the magnets in my hands, flip them over and feel the whoosh of energy, like trying to pull up weeds from the ground at recess, the dirt clinging to the weed, the weed clinging to the dirt.

  When I am left home alone I go through everyone’s things. I start with my dad because his stuff is all laid out. The Grateful Dead albums lined up on the windowsill in my parents' room in New York City. I am eight and this is very interesting to me. I am a detective and I am trying to figure my family out without them knowing. I open each one, take out the CD and examine it, then place it back into the correct holder, place the cover back over it. I turn on the computer and type something in Wingdings font, something only I will be able to understand, then erase
it, X out, and shut it off. Next I move to Mom’s jewelry box, the blue and white one where the second drawer is stuck. I open it and take every piece out, lay it on the floor: the pendants of my brother and I as jeweled children on a thin chain necklace, rings that don’t fit me, her heart-shaped diamond engagement ring that does fit me that I wear for the duration of the plundering (and I know to put it on my left ring finger because that finger’s vein leads to my heart), the pearl necklaces that aren’t quite white, white but are more opalescent or beige, some beaded bracelets from Aruba that I have discarded or neglected (the one with the star I reconsider to make a comeback but then realize this would hint to Mom I’d been through her things), and last the Hebrew charms that I can’t read but I am told they mean “life” (the symbol resembling a kitchen table). In my mind I understand this; life happens at the kitchen table because families are supposed to talk about their day at dinner. My family doesn’t do this. Skyler and I often climb and jump off the kitchen table when no one is around and this once resulted in the scar that still resides on my forehead.

  Then it is off to Skyler’s room. His is the hardest to infiltrate because I know he can tell exactly where I’ve been. Even if I try my hardest, I cannot outsmart his genius. In his room I practice the art of going unnoticed. I hover over his miniature car set and scan each row of painted bodies. I touch his blue bedspread and feel the fluffy quilted material under my hands. I spy the chrome edition Buzz Lightyear figurine from Toy Story that he never lets me play with. I don’t dare touch this one, as my fingerprints would remain on the silver wings, the clear helmet, the gold buttons on his chest. The shelves of National Geographic magazines, Where’s Waldo books, encyclopedias. Bean bag chair. White desk with the Apple logo sticker peeled halfway off that I think I stuck there but I didn’t. Series of ballpoint and fine tip pens. Small set of paint and brushes. The perpetual motion machine. The prototype sits on his desk and I’m not supposed to touch it without his permission or supervision. In its stationary state I wonder where all the energy is. What would happen if it actually worked? Could he really save the world? I can’t help myself and I thumb the magnets hoping to feel a surge, a rush of something I don’t understand.

  He told me once about doomsday, how the world will stop spinning, suddenly, without warning. He said he knew when it would happen and I believed him. I trusted him to fix it, to prevent it, to know what was wrong with the world and how to stop it from ending. He becomes my hero before I become the damsel in distress. He is the only one who can save me. He is the only one who knows how.

  WINNER WINNER. In big letters it glows on the screen. A floating trophy. Two children in the blue bedroom. New to the area. We don’t know the rest of the kids. We play alone on Saturdays with a bin of Legos. I organize faces and bodies. He builds cities. We go out to dinner with our parents. I have a kid’s meal. He has an adult meal. We feel smaller than the other kids. We are smaller but we have more things. Our toys took up so many boxes when we moved. The other kids should be so lucky to get to come over and play. A house with a loft. The loft is for all our toys. The Super Nintendo fits nice and snug above the TV set. The cords are tucked behind the entertainment center so we don’t see its inner workings. We sit on the carpet and enter the digital world where we belong. I ask you to use your magic feather to jump into the splishy splashy pools. You hop in and I am amazed by the possibilities of this game. I am amazed by you and all the things we have here in this house. Every drawer is filled, all the space is for us, it is ours, you are winning the game and I am watching you all this time.

  You are getting older and I feel like I won’t. I feel like I will never be your age. You are in high school and I am in elementary school. The Nintendo 64 stays in your room because you are older. I watch you play Starfox. I watch you play Golden Eye. But I like Mario Kart the best. You let me play and teach me all the tricks, the jumps, the way to shoot shells, the way to hop on turns, the boost. I am learning how to be as good as you. Someday I will beat my opponents, someday I will get the glowing, gold trophy and it will matter every single time I do. It will matter because we are the best. Mom still needs to adjust our uniforms for prep school. The khaki pants are too long, the polo shirts are too baggy. She tells people she has to force us to eat ice cream. So many times I threw away cups filled with ice cream because I wasn’t hungry, my little stomach, but she wanted us to have the treat. Vanilla ice cream in a cup. She wanted us to have the little vanilla cups.

  Dad picked me up from the airport only a few hours before. I was coming home from Chicago. From some bad trip in Chicago. I still had trains and lost love on my mind when the call woke me up. I dropped to the floor and prayed like a hopeless person. The way Dad didn’t even quiet Mom when she screamed.

  You looked cool, like you always do. You had your shades on, your cargo pants, your black backpack, fully loaded on painkillers, and your gun in the front compartment. If the zipper was loose, if the bag fell, if you wanted me to know, I could have seen the silver barrel shining through the knitted mesh.

  Treasure chest. Lego set. Oxys hidden inside. Lego click. Pirates and wenches. Lego palm trees. Oxy set. A Lego hand reaches out, pronged and cupped, toward land, toward the treasure chest, toward what you’ve hidden.

  I felt like I didn’t have a brother. I knew I did, but it didn’t feel that way. You were a memory, a sunny day on the swings across the street from our old building, a great vacation, a nice time. I looked at pictures and thought that must have been nice. Years are dated on the back, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1997, like high scores, going up.

  You slept on the couch until morning, until a cop came to the door and asked for you. He searched your bags and found the gun. It’s like we didn’t have parents, it’s like we didn’t have anyone telling us what to do, no one to say what’s right or wrong. When you lean over the balcony to smoke, they didn’t question why or how, but they repeated, “Look what you’re doing to your sister” like a glitch in the game.

  Years later back in Chicago, I drink beer at a party. I’m in a makeshift cat costume and I lean up against the wall. Everyone is eating chips out of colored bins decorated for Halloween. My best friend is dressed as a witch and her hair lights up blue and green. Someone I don’t know walks over and asks me where I’m from. “Somewhere else.” The president of Zeta Beta Tau is here, my college hookup, and he invites me back to his place to play Kart. I accept and he is sure he will beat me, but surely he can’t. In my cat ears and tight, black dress, I sit on the floor and choose Toad as my character. I hop over the wall at Wario Stadium and he has no chance. He can’t catch up and I win. He is frustrated, but still wants me to spend the night. When he asks, I say sure because I don’t want to be alone. I leave my controller on the hardwood floor and shut off the game. The screen goes black. Mario Land goes to sleep. Somewhere out there, Mario saves the princess in another player’s game. In a simultaneous universe of electricity there are trophies and stars and Bowser is big and Mario is small and the Princess kisses him when he wins. Her face, the crown, her pink dress, all of it lighting up dark rooms, glowing on other screens.

  Apples to Oranges

  I had to miss the last week of summer camp because we were moving to Florida. My camp counselor carried me to the infirmary (as I frequently complained of mosquito bites) and as the nurse applied the cream that I would immediately wipe off upon exiting, I thought I might actually miss New York. We walked back to the cabin, and my counselor’s boyfriend who also worked at the camp held my hands and picked me up on the count of three. “One . . . Two . . . Three!” and up I went. I had made my mark there. I was going to be missed.

  I asked Mom to take me to the park with the zip line on the way home, one last time. New York, with its rolling landscape, green parks in the summer and snowy streets in the winter. Tall buildings and trees, our apartment just outside the city, our school, our friends, Dad’s side of the family, our whole lives up until then. We were giving all of that up. We were moving and moving
on.

  Skyler was on a teen tour and came back home to a boxed-up apartment with no time to acclimate. The next day we were in Florida searching for another place to live. He blamed our parents for moving us so quickly like that, not letting us grieve our losses. There were things we had that disappeared, like when I left a Happy Meal toy in the jungle gym in Aruba and it was gone forever, or when he brought his action figure to a gymnastics birthday party and it got lost in the foam pit. In Mom and Dad’s defense, they thought it would shield us from having to say goodbye, from feeling too sad. Maybe now that’s why we ruin all our goodbyes. I don’t think it’s that change scares us, but we learned early on that moving forward meant not looking back.

  We lived at the Westin hotel in Ft. Lauderdale from July-August in ’98. I was ten and Skyler was almost fifteen. We stayed at the hotel all summer. Waking up every morning and getting a free bagel from the concierge, watching Bug Juice on the big TV, getting dressed and interviewing at different elementary schools for me and high schools for Skyler. Then came looking at houses all afternoon.

  We played a game on those many house tours; who could escape the house having stolen something? While Mom and Dad talked prices with the realtor, we scouted the home for decorative fruit that fit in the palm of our hands, only to be revealed later in the hotel room. One of us always pretended to listen in on the housing conversation. We’d stand behind our parents, tiny versions of the serious, soon-to-be homeowners. We wanted things too, we had demands. We required a pool for swimming, a big loft for playing Legos, and separate bedrooms with not too much distance between them.

  Potted plants made good targets for stealing. Usually fake, they allowed us to pluck tiny leaves, flowers. Once a purple orchid that I kept in a playing card box until I was twenty-one. Once, a bamboo napkin holder made its way to my back pocket during a routine showing. When we arrived back at the hotel, we spilled the contents of a day’s work out on the floor in front of the TV. Zorro glowed on the screen above us; the masked hero, Don Diego de la Vega, whipped through foreign cities in black and white. My brother pretended he was Zorro, wielding a balloon sword we got from Dave & Buster’s, protecting me from danger in our hotel room. Pillows were boulders, the bed was a giant cliff, the blanket was a storm, and we always escaped just in time. I remember one night Skyler gave me a purple orchid. “For your troubles,” my brother said, and handed it to me the way Zorro handed flowers and gifts to his lovers.