Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach
“Grubby little seventeen-year-old-boy hands. Disgusting.”
Are you older than me?
“Time flows differently for girls,” she said dismissively, then flagged down a passing waiter. “Garçon? Two more coffees, if you would, and make it snappy.”
I gave her a funny look, because really, who said shit like that? It reminded me of this one time that Mr. Bear, my American history teacher, called a paper I’d written “anachronistic,” which meant that it didn’t correctly describe the time period it was supposed to (in his defense, I had written a fictional version of the Civil War that involved a lot of Confederate androids with laser muskets and almost no reading of the assigned textbooks). That word was a perfect fit for the silver-haired girl. She didn’t seem like a normal teenager—more like something between a space alien and a homeschooled kid. Or maybe she was just a lot older than she looked. There was this girl in my chemistry class named Laura who was half Dutch and half Native American, and she had these hands that I swear could have belonged to an old woman: weather-beaten, tanned like old leather, crosshatched with wrinkles. Basically, a palm reader’s wet dream. The silver-haired girl was a little like that, except instead of her hands seeming too old, it was her whole personality.
“So tell me, Parker Santé, what has inspired you to fill up a hundred and four and a half journals in your short and sordid seventeen years on this planet?”
I didn’t usually answer that question honestly, but I wanted to throw something in the girl’s way, something that might shake her seemingly unshakable composure.
I stopped talking after my dad died, I wrote, then prepared myself for the usual things people said after I told them that.
“What a remarkably asinine thing to do.”
That was not the usual things.
“I’m sorry if that sounds rude, Parker, but I hardly see what your father dying has to do with what sounds like—and you’ll have to excuse me again if this comes across harshly—an almost deranged sort of graphomania. My father died, and I never wrote a single word about it.”
My therapist said it might help, at least until my voice came back. But my voice never came back, because I wouldn’t go to speech therapy.
“Why ever not?”
Before I could answer, the waiter returned with two fresh cups of coffee. The girl poured cream and dropped a big boulder of brown sugar into her cup. She went to do the same to mine, but I put my hand over it just in time.
“Really?” she said. “I’ve never understood people who take their coffee black. Isn’t life already bitter enough?”
That’s what I like about it. Life isn’t sugarcoated. Why should coffee be?
“The first reasonable point you’ve made, Parker Santé. Cheers.” We toasted coffee mugs. “But we were talking about your strange condition. You refuse to go to speech therapy, and instead you rob innocent strangers in hotels. Do I have that about right?”
Innocent people don’t usually have fat stacks of hundreds in their purse.
“Then I am the exception that proves the rule. This money is everything I have left in the world.”
For real?
The girl nodded.
Then you should probably put it in a bank or something.
“But I just took it out.”
Why?
The girl stared at me for a few seconds, as if weighing her options. Then she opened up her purse and took out a cell phone. She placed it between us on the white tablecloth. “I am waiting for a phone call. And when it comes, I’m going to give this money to the first needy person I see. Then I’ll take the trolley to the Golden Gate Bridge and jump off it.”
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if someone said something like that to you, you’d just assume it was bullshit. And so would I. But you have to trust me when I tell you that the way the girl said it was really convincing. I mean, it didn’t seem like a performance, or a cry for help, or a joke. She’d stated it as a simple, undeniable fact. So even if I didn’t really believe that she would do it, I did believe that she believed she was going to do it.
The Palace Hotel’s pretty far from the Golden Gate Bridge, I wrote. Why wait here?
“Because I met someone in this very room who became very important to me. His name was Nathaniel. I was working here as a waitress, and he asked me why I wasn’t in school—” Suddenly the girl had a thought. “Wait a minute. Isn’t it a school day?”
Finish your story. You were a waitress? How old are you?
“Answer my question, Parker.”
Answer mine.
“I asked first.”
Fine! I wrote, underlining the word to emphasize my annoyance. Yes, it’s a school day.
“So why aren’t you at school?”
I skipped out. I do it all the time. Then, in response to her horrified expression: It’s Halloween!
“Halloween is not that kind of holiday, Parker Santé. And if you skip out all the time, how are you going to get into college?” There was a scolding tone to her voice I didn’t appreciate, or even understand. What did she care if I skipped out on school? I was nothing and nobody to her.
I’m not. I’ve got a criminal record and shit grades. No college would want me. Besides, I’m kinda schooled out at this point.
“But that’s ridiculous. That little fairy tale you wrote me was lovely. You should keep writing.”
I rolled my eyes with such intensity that I ended up rolling my whole head.
“Hey!” She reached out and put her hand on my arm. I could feel my hairs stand up on end, and I hoped she couldn’t tell. “I will not allow you to squander your life.”
You don’t even know me.
“So what?”
Well, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go to college if you don’t jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
“That’s not . . .” She took her hand away, leaving a cold patch on my arm. “It’s not the same thing.”
Why not?
“Because I’ve earned the right to be bitter.”
So have I.
We stared at each other across the table. Somehow, a conversation that I’d felt had at least been flirting with flirtation had turned into something more serious.
“Young people feel things so deeply, don’t they?” she said quietly, almost to herself. “Everything’s happening for the first time.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but the girl started speaking again before I got the chance.
“All right, Parker Santé,” she said. “I’ve come to a decision. You’ll be my needy person.”
What?
“You’ll be my needy person. The recipient of my largesse.”
It took me a second to figure out what she meant. Hold up, you mean you’re gonna give me all that money?
“Not give. God knows what stupidity you’d spend it on. We’ll spend it together.”
All of it?
“Every last cent. And in exchange, you have to promise me you will apply to and attend college. Deal?”
She put out a hand to shake.
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT LOVE
LOVE IS A LITTLE BIT like genetics—sure, there’s an element of chance in there, but when all is said and done, you’re probably going to end up taking after your parents.
My mom and dad loved each other. I know that much. But that’s probably the best you could say for them. They loved each other like the ocean loves the shoreline—eating away at it, little by little, day after day. They loved each other like the sunlight that makes the plants grow, then scorches the leaves and bakes the moisture from the earth. They loved each other like the seagulls love the bronze statue they’re always shitting all over.
My dad moved to the States from Colombia back in the early nineties. He’d gotten this prestigious scholarship to study medicine at UC San Francisco, but he never finished his degree. Unbeknownst to his family back home, he’d started taking creative writing classes at California College of the Arts, and he
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I basically learned fuck all about love from my parents.
I’ve learned even less from direct experience, for obvious reasons. It’s tough to romance a girl when you can’t speak. My dad won my mom over with Neruda. (I’ve got his copy of the love poems now, in both languages: “Para que tú me oigas/mis palabras/se adelgazan a veces/como las huellas de las gaviotas en las playas.” So that you will hear me, my words sometimes grow thin as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.) But reciting love poems is to writing them down as a box of chocolates is to a box of croutons; there’s just no comparison.
So what could I possibly know about love? I definitely didn’t think I was “in” it or anything; I’d only met this girl a few minutes ago. All I knew was that I’d told way bigger lies than the one I was about to tell for way less important reasons, and if the alternative to lying was never seeing her again, I would’ve promised to go to a hundred colleges.
I reached across the table and shook her hand.
“Good,” she said. “That’s settled. I’m Zelda, by the way.” She put the wad of bills back in her purse and stood up. “Now shut that silly notebook, Parker. We’re going to the mall.”
FOREVER 21
LIKE MOST PEOPLE WITH A brain, I’ve always hated malls. And it’s not just the insane specificity of a shop called the Art of Shaving, or the inexplicable cost of the ass-ugly plaids for sale at Burberry (what kind of raving serial killer psychotic would drop nine hundred dollars on a scarf?), or the fact that the whole building stinks of whatever toxic waste goes into Cinnabons and Wetzel’s Pretzels, or the soul-crushing volume of the music that gushes out of Abercrombie & Fitch like so much sonic sewage. No, it’s the people that really get to me. It’s the minimum-wage-powered sales staff, made up half of hormonal, sulky teenagers (like me) and half of embittered adults railroaded back into the workforce by the recession (like my mom). It’s the crush of foul-smelling skater punks, bleached-blond cheerleaders, testosterone-addled jocks, happy couples (rarer than sushi), unhappy couples (common as a cold), bawling babies, and the shitty parents who never bother to pick them up out of their strollers.
Also, it’s pretty much impossible to steal from people in a mall, because of all the cameras.
Zelda seemed to share my general contempt for mall culture, but instead of being depressed by the crass consumerism and mindless conformity, she found the whole thing hilarious.
“Look at that one!” she said, pointing out a Lids store and laughing a condescending little twinkle of a laugh. “Is there nothing in there but baseball caps? My God, your generation really will buy anything with a logo on it.” She turned around and found a group of punkers chomping down on McDonald’s burgers. “And what about these kids here? All dolled up like rebels, but spending their money at the biggest multinational corporation in the world.” She grabbed hold of my hand with a little-kid-at-Disneyland sort of excitement. “You have to treat me exactly like a teenager, okay?”
I nodded, though I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant. Wouldn’t I be treating her like a teenager just by, you know, being a teenager? Or maybe I’d been right about the homeschool thing, and she’d never had the chance to experience normal kid stuff. Or what if it was even worse? What if she’d been raised in some kind of crazy religious cult? That would explain the silver hair and the fact that she registered about a 9.2 on the weirdo-Richter scale.
“So what should we do first?” she asked.
C-l-o, I spelled out in sign.
“A little more slowly, please.”
In the cab on the way over from the Palace Hotel, I’d taught Zelda the alphabet signs, but only because she’d practically begged me to. Truth is, I’ve always kinda hated signing. My mom hired this private tutor named Tara back when I was in middle school. She was a partially deaf girl who dressed in long hemp skirts and had a mandala tattooed on her shoulder. She wasn’t a bad teacher, but she’d taken it personally when I told her I didn’t want to be part of the deaf community. I don’t think she understood that I just didn’t want to be part of any community.
C-l-o-t-h-e-s, I finished spelling out.
“Obviously,” Zelda said. “But where?”
Clearly, she didn’t realize she was asking this of a broke-ass straight boy who’d gotten dressed this morning by using the smell test (Armpit #1? Check. Armpit #2? Check minus. Eh, good enough); I had no idea what stores sold the nice clothes. But I didn’t want to let her down, so I started walking as if I knew where I was going. Pretty much everybody else in the mall was an adult (not surprising, given that it was just past ten a.m. on a school day), so it was impossible to use the clientele to tell which stores were actually cool. Luckily, just when I was about to give up and pick one totally at random, Zelda spotted a sign and burst out laughing.
“That is too perfect! We absolutely must go there.”
I nodded in a way that I hoped made it look like I’d been planning for us to end up here all along.
“Maybe I’ll even pick out a few things for myself, while we’re at it.”
We wandered slowly from rack to rack. Zelda would push the hangers from right to left, as if she were flipping pages in a book. Every once in a while she’d pull something out and hold it up, then say something like, “Would this look good on me?” or “Isn’t this ghastly?” I’d nod, or shake my head, or shrug—whatever it seemed she wanted to “hear.” We wound our way through the entire women’s department and on into menswear. Zelda took a blue button-down shirt off the rack and pressed it up against my chest, as if I were a paper doll.
“Hold on to this one,” she said, handing me the hanger.
After I’d been laden down with more clothes than I actually owned, we went to the dressing rooms. I sat on the carpet outside while Zelda changed. Just below the edge of the door, I watched her dress fall around her ankles, and I wondered what she would do if I limboed myself in there with her. At the other end of the hallway, back in the actual store, a salesperson quickly glanced in at us, then just as quickly slipped away. Was he worried that we might be trying to steal something, or that we might be hooking up?
“What do you think?”
Zelda’s shapely legs, made smooth and black by leggings, were just a few inches away from my face. They disappeared beneath a very short leather skirt.
S-h-o-r-t, I signed.
“Clothes are all about highlighting your assets, Parker. I’ve got no chest to speak of, so I have to draw attention to my legs. I usually don’t go in for things that are quite so revealing, but I figure it’s now or never.”
Before long, it was my turn in the hot seat. I’d never played this game with anyone other than my mom before. When she and I went shopping together, I’d grudgingly pick out a couple of T-shirts or a pair of pants, she’d insist I get a smaller size, and then we’d call it a day. But Zelda wanted a show. I came out wearing a pair of tight black jeans that I’d had to hop around in like an idiot just to fit over my hips. She gestured for me to spin. I shook my head.
“Don’t be silly, Parker. I have to see the fit. Jeans are all about the rear view.” I gave a silent sigh, then turned around.
“That’s your asset right there,” she said.
I looked at myself in the three-way mirror. These jeans were a lot nicer than the ones I’d come in with. The old pair was balled up on the d
“Stop staring at yourself, you narcissist, and try on the shirt with the red collar.”
We spent a good hour in that dressing room, though it only felt like a few minutes. It’s weird, but some people are a lot better at talking to me than others. I can feel like I’ve had a conversation even when I haven’t said a word. Dr. Milton says it’s about the quality of someone’s attention. Most of my teachers suck at it. My mom has good days and bad. But Zelda was a champion. She filled up the silences that might’ve been awkward, making fun of the other people who came into the store (“She needs a shop called Forever 51, am I right?”), chatting up the salespeople (“Why is everything here made in China? Whatever happened to American manufacturing?”), and asking me a lot of yes-or-no questions (the easiest to answer when you can’t speak). I did notice that she hadn’t told me anything about herself yet, but I could understand that. I was usually pretty slow to open up too. In fact, Zelda was the first person I’d talked about my dad with in . . . well . . . ever.
When we were finished trying things on, she carried our stack of clothes up to the register. The total was $614.23—a mind-demolishing amount of money, in my world—but Zelda just handed over seven of the hundred-dollar bills like they were a bit of loose change.
“You’ll be a gentleman and carry the bags,” she told me.
The hour we’d spent in Forever 21 was already more than enough shopping for me, but Zelda insisted we hit up a couple more stores. She bought me a pair of sunglasses with small perfect circles for lenses (“Just like Lennon,” she said), this crazy watch that was made of wood and cost as much as all the Forever 21 clothes put together, and a few more shirts from a department store where even the mannequins looked rich.