A Dangerous Dress (34 page)

Nope.

After we sat around for a while, my mom finally got up and put a movie into the DVD player. It was
The Wizard of Oz.
Do not think for a second that I didn’t get the significance. Small-town Dorothy, over the rainbow, blah blah blah, no place like home. So the fact that my mom put that movie on was frankly more than a little annoying.

On the other hand, it’s a pretty engaging movie. I love the munchkins. Especially the tough guys from the Lollipop Guild. And I still think the flying monkeys are scary. In spite of myself, I guess I enjoyed watching it. At least it took my mind off things for a while.

Only then came the part near the end, after the Wizard flies away in the balloon. Glinda comes back in her big pink bubble. She says Dorothy has always had the power to go home, only Glinda didn’t tell her right at the start because Dorothy wouldn’t have believed her. More like if she had told Dorothy at the start, there’d be no movie. But anyway, ruby slippers,
click click click,
No place like home.
And Dorothy wakes up in bed in Kansas. In black-and-white.

“Why does she go back to black-and-white?” I asked. It was the first thing I had said since my mom put the movie in.

“Because . . . that’s the movie,” my mom said.

“But why would anybody voluntarily go back to black-and-white?” It actually made me quite angry. “After all the beautiful color. After the munchkins, and the yellow brick road, and Oz. Even if that is an awful lot of green. Why would she go back to black-and-white?”

“I don’t know,” my mom said.

“Plus now the dog dies,” I said.

My dad shifted his recliner upright. “No it doesn’t.”

“Not in the movie,” I said. “
After
the movie. Did you ever think about what happens after the movie is over? Before the twister, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry say ‘We can’t go against the law.’ Only the law still has a warrant out to arrest Toto and have him destroyed. Why would you want to come back to a world where everything is black-and-white and they kill your dog?”

I didn’t expect an answer. I didn’t wait for one, either. I ran upstairs, closed the door to my room, and turned on my rickety old computer. Then I started to type.

I came downstairs for dinner. I didn’t stick around, though. As soon as I finished eating, I went back upstairs and typed some more. In fact, I was up quite late typing.

The next day I got up early. I showered and fixed my hair, nothing fancy but neat, and I got dressed for work, even though it was Saturday, and I don’t usually work on Saturdays, even though the bank is open. I walked over to Independence Savings. It’s only a couple of blocks. Uncle John gets there at seven thirty in the morning, every day, and nobody else comes in until eight. So I knew he would be by himself. I went into his office. “I’m back,” I said.

“So I hear,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“So you say,” he said.

“Can I have my job back?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you lose it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you want it?” he asked.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Do you
really
want it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“At least that’s honest,” he said.

“It is honest,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m twenty-five. I don’t know.”

He gave me a long hard look. “You can’t just run off on me again,” he finally said.

“Okay,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean I expect you to work here for the rest of your life. Maybe you will, maybe not. But you can’t keep running off for some crazy scheme and leave me in the lurch.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not okay,” he said. “I mean it. I want you to promise.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Then get to work,” he said. So I went back to work. And he didn’t mention it again.

I have probably done an extremely imperfect job of replicating that conversation. Even though I have the words down pretty much exactly right. Because first, just the words do not convey how hard it was to walk in there and say those things. Even though he said I might not work there forever, I felt like I had just promised to do exactly that. Which was not my dream. Ever. And second, after that conversation, Uncle John did not talk to me. At all. For weeks.

Which was just as well. I had no time to talk anyway. At work I was busy catching up.

The rest of the time I was at home typing. By now you have figured out what I was typing. This. This story, or book, or whatever it is.

I never did have that conversation my mom expected—the one where I open my mouth and out spills everything that happened. I spilled everything out here instead. Now I’m done.

Only there doesn’t seem to be an ending yet.

S
o now I have this story without an ending. If that’s what this is. Now what do I do?

Read it, for starters.

 
Well. Reading it did not make me feel better. But it did make it quite clear to me that I miss two people. I miss Celestine very much. Even before I went to Paris, I missed having my best friend from college around to share everything with. Now I miss her even more. We
do
e-mail every day. Sometimes I call her, or she calls me, but it’s hard with the time difference, not to mention that calling France is expensive and as you know, Uncle John doesn’t pay me much.

And I miss Josh. You probably already knew that. But I didn’t for the longest time.

I didn’t even have it figured out while I was writing this. Now that I’ve read the whole thing, though, I realize I miss him terribly. Profoundly. And I feel so bad. Even with what he did to me. Even with Grandma’s dress. Do not think I have forgiven him. I haven’t. How could I? But if he could do something that bad to me and I still miss him the way I do, that must really mean something. Something important.

So I got this crazy idea. I dug out his script. His address was on the cover page. Mind you, it does not say that
the
address is
his
address. But, I mean, who else’s address would it be?

I called directory assistance and got the number for the only Josh Thomas listed in New York, NY. It took me two days, but finally I got up the nerve and called. Only it wasn’t Josh. I mean, it was
a
Josh, but not
the
Josh. Not
my
Josh. So all I had was this address.

I printed out a copy of what I wrote. Then I mailed it. To Josh Thomas. At the address on his screenplay.

Let me tell you why I did it. After I finished reading my story, I read Josh’s screenplay one more time. How Harold and Catherine managed to find each other again, even if took them till they were ninety years old to do it. I did not know if Josh Thomas was my Harold and I was his Catherine. But I thought just maybe. I knew for sure that I had all these complicated, very intense, very unresolved feelings for him. I did not want to wait till I was ninety to resolve them.

I also took out Josh’s rose. By now it was dry and faded, and it had gotten a little crunched along the way. But I was awfully glad I had saved it.

Finally I took out the note Josh wrote when he left me that rose. I read it. It said:

 
He promised to treat me to dinner again. He
promised.
And he believes that making a promise has to count for something. And so do I. So I mailed it.

The next day I was sorry I did. Besides my being responsible for Reed’s hitting him, Josh’s movie didn’t get made, would never get made, all on account of me. Which made me think he must hate me. Worse than hate me. I don’t know what worse than hate is, but I was convinced he felt it. And why would you read something written by someone you worse than hated, much less want to discuss it with them? Sorry or not, though, all I could do was hope that I was wrong and I would hear from him. So I waited. And waiting is hard. Very hard.

I guess when you’re waiting for something that probably won’t ever happen, it helps pass the time if you distract yourself with interesting things. However, because I still live in Kirland, there are not a ton of interesting things to distract me.

In fairness, one interesting thing did happen while I was waiting. Dave Stankowski, the baseball coach at Roger Wells Kent High School for as long as anybody could remember, died. With all due respect to Dave and, more important, to Dave’s widow, the fact that Dave died is not the interesting part.

I never really knew Dave. But his wife Rose and my aunt Rose were really good friends, before my aunt Rose died. So I went to the viewing over at Saban Funeral Parlor, which is right across from Independence Savings. I didn’t stay long. Just long enough to tell Dave’s wife I was sorry. Then I crossed the street to the bank and went back to work.

A bunch of Dave’s former baseball players came back for the funeral, and they formed a procession down One Hundred and Nineteenth Street, behind the hearse. When it pulled out of the funeral home, the police held up traffic on Indianapolis Boulevard.

Now here’s the interesting part. All the old baseball players had brought black umbrellas with them. Even though it was a bright sunny day. When the hearse pulled out, they all put up their black umbrellas. Like at a funeral in New Orleans. Only instead of singing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” they sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I am not kidding.

I stood in the doorway of the bank and watched, since I didn’t have to worry about not being at my desk. Dave Stankowski had been a veteran, and Uncle John was part of the American Legion honor guard, so I knew that after the funeral he’d be going to the cemetery.

I will admit the parade was interesting. But it was the
only
interesting thing that happened. So all I had was Kirland, my crummy bank job, and waiting to hear from a man who worse than hated me.

N
orthwest Indiana can get quite hot in June. Humid, too.

When I was growing up, my parents did not have AC. Now they do, which makes life much better. But when the weather turns steamy, the comfort of the house discourages you from going out and doing anything whatsoever unless you absolutely have to.

On Saturdays, I don’t absolutely have to do anything.

It was a Saturday in June. It was hot and humid and disgusting outside. I was inside, lying around, watching my dad surf channels on the remote. He may be wonderfully nonjudgmental, but my dad is still a man, and he cannot sit still on a channel for a tenth of a second.

Watching my dad channel surf was not my idea of exciting, but it was better than what I had to do that night. I had to go to Reinhardt’s restaurant and chaperone the Roger Wells Kent High School senior prom. Generally speaking, the only people who get stuck chaperoning the senior prom are parents, which I am not, and faculty, which I also am not. Here is how I landed in this particularly unfair position.

My cousin Mary’s best friend is Helen Klosek. They grew up together, went to Indiana University together, studied to be teachers together, and moved back to Kirland together. Helen teaches history at Kent High School, so she had to sign up to chaperone the prom. At the last minute, though, Dave Hruska, who is the head of the meat department at Sterk’s market, asked Helen to marry him. Helen has only been waiting for Dave to propose for about nine years, so she said yes. He insisted they get married immediately and go on their honeymoon. Nobody knows why all of a sudden Dave was in such a rush, but after nine years Helen was not taking any chances. So she said yes, they got married, and off they went to Aruba.

Before they left, Helen asked if Mary would chaperone the prom for her. Since Helen is her best friend, Mary said okay. Only Friday afternoon, she came home from work with a hundred-and-two fever. So she begged me to take over for her.

I had to say yes. But I hated the idea.

I did not enjoy my own prom, which was also at Reinhardt’s. Because that is where the Kent High School senior prom is always held. The boy I wanted to go with did not ask me. The boy who asked me, I did not want to go with. But I went, because it was my high school prom. And how do you not go to your high school prom? Especially in Kirland, where everybody acts like the prom is the biggest event of your life. I now know better.

Enough about my high school prom. My point is, if there is anything less exciting than going to your own Bumfuck prom, it is going to somebody else’s.

At about twelve thirty, there was a knock on the door. My dad just kept flicking the remote. My mom didn’t move either. Finally I said, “I’ll get it.”

Kirland is the sort of place where people’s front doors do not have little peepholes. Not very long ago, everybody still left their doors unlocked. Nowadays they don’t, but there are still no peepholes. So it should come as no surprise that when somebody knocks, you open the door without saying “Who is it?” Because you pretty much always know who it is. It’s cousin Mary and Paris, or Uncle John, or cousin Mikey, and so on. So I just opened the door.

It was Josh.

Josh Thomas.

I think he was about to say something. Only I slammed the door in his face.

I did not slam the door because I was still mad about Grandma’s dress. I slammed the door because I had not expected to see him. And I had no clue what to say.

“Who is it?” Mom asked.

I still wasn’t sure what I’d say to Josh, but I
was
sure I didn’t want to explain the whole thing to my parents. So I opened the door, stepped onto the porch, and shut the door behind me.

“Hi,” said Josh.

“You didn’t call,” I said.