My Life in Dioramas (10 page)

“I don't know, Liv. I honestly don't.”

I flushed and walked out into the hall.

When we got home,
the stereo was blasting another one of Dad's band's songs. A ballad called “Super Powers” that always cracked me up because it's about a guy who has powers like having fun when he's alone and knowing how to get off the phone. Now it seemed a little sad to me, my dad having written a song about a lame superhero.

The whole house seemed to shake as my dad sang,
“Look at me. I've got super powers.”

He had the windows open and we could see him, down by the patio near the tennis court, dancing slowly while he swept up debris that had fallen from the trees. Angus was lying near an Adirondack chair.

Years ago, my parents had a party where they'd strung all these lanterns from the weeping willow. I was running around all weekend with my cousins, and friends were coming and going, and we were launching these glowing rocket things into the air at dark.

I was about to ask my mother if she remembered that weekend, that party, but then she turned down the music. “I'm going to go lie down. Can you go tell Dad we're home and to get dinner started?”

“Sure,” I said.

She left the room and I watched out the window as my dad just kept on dancing for a few minutes, finishing the song exactly in time with the music playing softly in the house. Then he turned and saw me standing there. I waved and he waved for me to come down. So I did.

When I got down to the yard, he was sitting in a patio chair, smoking a cigarette. “Don't tell your mother,” he said.

“That you're the world's worst dancer?” I snorted. The cigarette made my dad look like an entirely different person. “Pretty sure she already knows.”

“It's just one. I'm not going to start smoking or anything.”

“Okay, Dad.” I knew he had smoked a bit when they were in the band, and I sometimes smelled cigarettes on nights when my parents were hanging out past my bedtime outside with friends, but I'd never actually seen him do it myself. It made him look younger somehow. But also shaky? Stressed?

“How was school?” he asked, exhaling, laying his head back on the chair and looking up at the weeping willow.

“It was school.” We just sat there quietly for a while. A thick white cloud drifted out from behind the willow like a slow-moving cruise ship, and I realized I'd just missed a great opportunity to grab some food for the rotting project.

“Do you remember that party?” I said, after a while. “With the movie projected on the sheet? And all those lanterns in the tree?”

“Barely,” he said, and he laughed. “I mean, of course I do. Why?”

I shrugged. “Are things going to be like that again, do you think?”

Pants and two kittens appeared across the yard by the pear tree. Angus lifted his head and put it down again.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘like that'?”

“I don't know.” My throat tightened. “Happy?”

“Of course they are, Kate.” He shook his head and looked up toward Big Red. “It's just a house.”

But he didn't sound convinced.

I sat back in my chair and watched the wind blow the weeping willow's long soft branches. I loved that tree. Loved how when it was in full bloom some of its branches brushed the grass, how you could hide behind strands of leaves during a game of hide-and-seek. A tree expert who my parents had hired to take down some dead trees a few years back had studied this one, with a huge hollow dead branch broken off the main trunk, just hanging there. He told us that, sure, he could cut it off but it would just happen again. The tree was fine. That's just what weeping willows did. They let part of themselves die so the rest could live.

I thought about asking my dad if my mom was depressed. But he looked pretty down himself, and I wasn't sure there was much point. So I got up and grabbed my scooter from the shed and started making lazy circles on
the tennis court. After a few jumps and tricks, I said, “Oh, Mom said to tell you to get dinner started.”

He took a final drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on the bottom of his shoe then got out his phone. Holding it to his ear as I balanced on one foot with a long leg out behind me like an ice skater, he asked, “Pepperoni or plain?”

After pizza and homework,
I went downstairs and started to play around with some green yarn and tiny bits of green paper. When I had the hang of making tree branches, I searched around but there were no more shoeboxes down there, so I went up to ask my mom if I could raid her closet. My parents were sitting in the living room, each of them reading in an armchair. When they were like this, so normal, so boring looking, it was hard to imagine when they met and were younger and, well, cooler.

“Mom, can I grab a shoebox from your closet?”

“Sure,” she said.

So I did that, but on my way back downstairs, I said, “I'm going to have ice cream. Anybody want any?”

“No, thanks,” they both said. I went to the kitchen and got out a Tupperware and took two eggs and a piece of chicken out of the refrigerator. I cut open the plastic on the chicken and slid it into the Tupperware, then quietly cracked the eggs on
top of it and closed it up. I figured it wouldn't stink for a while so I just stashed it way in the back of the pantry for safekeeping. I fixed a bowl of ice cream, grabbed the bag of Barbies I'd left by the front door, and went back downstairs.

As soon as I started making the weeping willow for real, I got the idea to turn the box on its side so that it was more tall than wide. I lined the walls of the box with black construction paper, then cut a strip of a sort of gray/brown felt into the shape of a tree trunk and glued it to the back wall. Then, one by one, I took my strips of green yarn, each of which I'd tied still more yarn to, and so on and so on, to create the look of the weeping branches, gluing them to the top of the box so they draped down. It took a while, but it was shaping up to really look like a tree so I kept at it. When it was done, I took some of these little furry glitter balls I had hanging around in a jar and threaded string into them with a needle. I made five of them in different colors before I started hanging them from the tree.

Party lights.

From the bag of Barbies, I pulled out a dress made of red gingham fabric and cut out the largest square I could get out of it.

A blanket for stargazing.

When I decided to take a break for ice cream before putting myself and maybe some cousins in the scene, I saw that it had melted.

I went ahead and finished the scene.

In the living room my dad
was asleep on the couch.

Upstairs, my mother was reading in bed.

When I poked my head in to say good night to her, Angus got up and followed me into my room.

14.

I had zero opportunity to retrieve
my Tupperware of Stink from the pantry Tuesday morning but it seemed unlikely anyone would find it before I got home. My mom had a day of networking for a bunch of Hudson Valley lawyers to oversee; my dad was designing a book cover on a rush schedule and also announced that he was working on a new song. He'd be headphoned and out of it all day. For the first time in forever, it seemed like maybe they were actually making some money, but it was too late.

“Oh,” Stella said, when we got off the bus. “Here.”

She took a tall stack of envelopes out of her backpack and handed me the top one.

“Oh,” I said. “Cool.”

I hadn't been sure whether we'd had a fight or not, so I was a little bit relieved.

Then Stella was off flitting around, handing out invitations here and there and by lunchtime, all any of our friends were talking about was Stella's party. I sort of felt bad for people who weren't invited, maybe because I knew what that felt like. But I slapped on a smile and joined the conversation Stella was having with our friends Sara and Maggie.

“I want to sing this one,” Sara pointed at a list of songs they'd been studying.

“Oh, sorry,” Stella said. “Birthday girl calls dibs on that one.”

Maggie said, “I want number seven-eight-six-four. Write that down for me!”

“Oh,” Stella said. “Really? I have that on my list, too.”

The boy thing was bad enough, but with Stella going all diva, it really didn't seem like this party was going to be any fun at all.

“You'll have to take a break for cake at some point, eh, Stella?” I said.

Maggie smiled. Sara laughed.

“Ha ha,” Stella said. “Very funny.”

Then the bell rang and we had to hurry to Gym, where we were playing kickball, a game that I found to be fun for the three seconds it took to kick. Otherwise it seemed there was a lot of waiting around. Unless you got picked to “pitch”
like Sam Fitch did, mostly because he was better than anybody else at actually getting the ball to roll over the plate.

At one point, at least, I ended up waiting in line to kick with Naveen next to me.

“So.” He seemed amused. “You going to the big party?” He waved his hands like he was a crazy person.

“Right? It's not just me?”

He nodded a few times, slowly. “She's excited, that's for sure.”

“I'm her best friend, so I'll be there. You?”

“Totally.” He nodded then flashed his sly smile; one of his front teeth was just slightly crooked. “I bet you don't know this about me, but I'm a pretty good singer.”

“You're pretty good at everything, Naveen.”

“I take offense to that!” He nudged me. “I
excel
at most things. I'm
pretty good
at a few additional things.”

“What are you going to sing?”

“I haven't decided yet. I'm going to spend some time considering the options. They have them on the website.”

“Cool.” I hadn't managed to even peek at the list the girls had at lunch so I had no idea what I would sing.

“How about you?”

“I don't know.” I really didn't understand the whole planning ahead thing. “Maybe some eighties hair metal. My dad's way into that stuff so I know a ton of lyrics.”