“So son,” your Dad says, “I was sent this new album at the station last week. The press release calls this ‘alternative rock.’ They say it’s the next big thing with kids. I wanted to play it for you and see what you think. I can’t make heads or tails of it myself. Seems like starting in the late-70s nobody wanted to make a song with any meaning in it at all. I was ready for songs being angry when I got old, but not nothing. Seems like the songs get less meaningful every time I hear a new one. When I was a kid, rock and roll was shocking. It was in your face and it challenged you. This is just …”
You strain to listen to the odd music over your Dad’s rambling. If this is the future, if this is alternative rock, then you finally feel like you understand the other kids your age. This music makes sense to you. It’s fun and it’s funny. The melodies are little jokes of their own. The narrator is unreliable and suspect. You look forward to turning on the radio and hearing a lot of bands that sound like They Might Be Giants.
Doesn’t it seem like time drags in hospitals? The shortest little bits of time seem to drag out twice as long as everywhere else. You’d think everyone would be in a hurry and instead it’s as if everyone just woke up from a nap.
The nurse that wraps your arm waits forever as each strip of plaster soaks. The cast is warm against your arm at the beginning but uncomfortably cold before she finishes. You’ve been given a shot for pain, but you feel a sad embarrassment inside. Six weeks seems like an impossibility long wait to be able to use your arm again. You hope that the cast is off when swimming lessons start up in the spring.
Glum.
At least you don’t have to practice piano anymore.
Saturday afternoon. You’ve spent all morning watching large snowflakes fall through the window. The drifts pile higher than your head. An idea hatches.
Your mom is occupied, as always, at the kitchen table with a crossword puzzle. She’s solved it hours ago, but she trying to run down her own weird white whale: a crossword puzzle full of alternative answers, synonyms that mysteriously still fit the clues and interlock as cleanly as the intended words. She got almost halfway through one once. Someday it will happen for her. She doesn’t do things without reason.
You sneak into the hall closet and get out your snowsuit and moon boots, mittens and round plastic sled. You’re allowed to go sledding, but you have other ideas today. You carry the items upstairs as slow as possible, hoping to not attract too much attention.
You climb to the top of your dresser and look out of a half window that oversees the top of the garage. From inside, you can hear your Dad and his friend wanking on electric guitars. This is the beginning of your generation hating guitar solos. If your fathers hadn’t played guitar, you might have more respect.
The guitar playing isn’t enough to cover your plan. The ice around the window cracks loudly. Downstairs you hear a chair scrape on the kitchen floor. Your mom calls your name. “Where are you?” she asks. But you can already hear her approaching the steps. You have to rush. Your little arms barely have enough strength to pull yourself up and out into the snow. You flail around to pull the sled through after you. The small window isn’t big enough. You bend it until it nearly breaks to force the fit.
The snow storm rages outside. The snow and ice come with a sandy bitterness on your skin. While it looked soft as cotton from downstairs, it swirls and attacks now. You can barely see past the edge of the house. Scampering on your hands and knees, you position yourself on the ridge of the garage rooftop. Your mom is now at the window, threatening to climb out to get you. She yells to you to not sled down the roof. You turn away from her. The inside of your snowsuit is padded and warm. You listen to your heart beat inside your ears. When you push off, the eave comes quicker than you could have guessed. You vault into the air with a violent bump, and for a long, silent moment, you can only hear the cold breath of the wind rushing against your cheeks.
Perhaps repetition and romance can’t co-exist. Every Valentine’s Day, your father picks up his old acoustic guitar and, over a bottle wine, he sings the same old love songs that he always sings to your mother. You enjoy the tradition, however, the songs have always seemed like other people’s words taken from dead love affairs. Your mother is often more interested in the wine than the wooing.
You don’t know where the songs came from or why he always feels the need to sing the same ones. There’s something familiar about each, though, you’ve never heard him play them in his car or on the radio.
Today each song seems warmer that they have in the past. You see, you aren’t thinking about your dad and mom at all when you hear them. Instead you are thinking about this morning. You’d watched out your classroom window for the French girl and her mother. The world opened up like a flower bud in the sun when they turned the corner.
Then disaster. After her mom finished tying the blue ribbon and had turned away, the French girl untied it and removed it from her hair. You slumped into your seat. The entire morning bent at the top of the stem. The removal of the blue ribbon was a hailstone in your heart. You’d ruined something delicate and beautiful. And while you knew from the beginning that it couldn’t always be, you didn’t want to ever find out you were right.
That afternoon, when you were saddest and most anxious, waiting in art class, she reappeared beside her desk with the ribbon retied around her neck.
Tonight dad’s songs seem more about today’s afternoon than someone else’s afternoon years ago.
You usually ask Matt Murphy to be your partner in art class, but you asked him during recess to be partners with Randy Duger instead. Your gamble pays off. Only you and the French girl don’t have partners for the last project.
When you scoot your desks together, you notice that she has all of her crayons in color order like you keep yours. She smells like birthday cake. She seems happy to have a new partner because usually she gets stuck with Alyssa LeRoy.
(Randy usually takes Jake as a partner and then because Jake is taken Robbie takes Maggie as a partner. If Maggie doesn’t take Christine as a partner then Babby gets taken. But since Maggie takes Christine this time, then Babby needs a partner and she takes Laura. Laura usually pairs with Annick. In this case, Annick pairs with Alyssa. Usually Alyssa is left over for the French girl. It’s very complicated. Anyway.)
The project requires dipping yarn and pictures in glue and pasting it on a posterboard about our families. You have to find things in common and place those on the board with your families names attached to them.
You try to talk with the French girl, but you aren’t sure that she understands everything you say. Her voice is strong when she speaks, as if she’s handled each word too much beforehand.
“My Dad is a radio DJ,” you say. “It means that he talks on the radio.”
“My Dad is a robot scientist,” she says.
The best robot you’ve ever seen was on the show Silver Spoons. The kid had a little remote control robot that would bring him lunch on a tray. You tell her about this, but make sure to let her now that you don’t like the show.
“What about Small Wonder?” she asks.
Yes, you admit, that is a better show.
You both cut out pictures of dogs. You tell her that your dog needs a walk every day exactly when you want to watch tv. Also you tell her that you mom is following Mrs. McCallister for some reason.
She doesn’t say a lot.
You think you shouldn’t, but since you can’t think of anything else to say you tell her that you once read a story in a TIme/Life book about ghosts that had a girl that wore a ribbon around her neck. In the story, the hero falls in love with the girl and she agrees to marry him on one condition: that he never removes the ribbon from her neck. Then, one night as she sleeps, he pulls the ribbon loose and her head rolls off and falls to the floor.
You immediately regret saying this. It was all you could think of, you know?
