The Museum of Intangible Things (10 page)

The tolls are killing us. We have to use a whole roll of quarters and two rolls of pennies just to get through the Lincoln Tunnel. Luckily we ate for free at IKEA. The cinnamon bun sits like a lump of clay in my stomach and will keep me full for at least six hours.

I love how as you approach the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel on its elevated C-curve Jetsons-like ramp, they give you a quick glimpse of the skyline before spinning you around and plunging you beneath the Hudson. You get to look across to the crystalline, pristine, pointy city twinkling like Oz and think, “In just ten minutes (or an hour, depending on traffic), I will move from
here
, where nothing ever happens that’s good, to
there
, the center of the universe.”

It’s crowded today, the day before the big Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and people are filling up the tunnel like lemmings or cockroaches running from the light, ready to infest the streets just to look at . . . what? Balloons? Marching bands? What is the appeal? I guess it’s just another place to go to take pictures of your kids. It’s a Facebook opportunity. There are worse things to live for.

“Why do you want to go to the city today of all days?” I ask Zoe. It has taken me the forty-minute drive down the turnpike to accept the fact that I will miss school today and that the school newspaper will probably not go out. It’s a half-day, though, so I force myself to get over it.

“I have some unfinished business,” she says, trying to be tough and mafia-esque. She folds a piece of Juicy Fruit into her mouth and stares straight ahead, looking through a pair of aviator sunglasses that she may or may not have stolen from Officer Franz.

As we start to turn away from the view of the city and toward the entrance to the tunnel, our senses are assaulted by a giant black-and-white billboard for the revival of
A Chorus Line
, which is my favorite musical in the world because it is a meta-musical about a musical and because for some reason, I identify with the plight of these young people who want to believe they’re special. Like Zoe. She really needs to believe she’s special. I admire that about her. Because you have to believe you’re special before you can do anything special.

“I think what you need is a plan for the future,” I tell her now. “Let’s come up with a plan and next steps, and then we can go home for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“I had a plan,” she says.

“You need a Plan B.”

“Plan Bs are for losers.”

“Is it Plan Bs or
Plans B
? Like
mothers-in-law
?”

Zoe just nods a little, smirks, and otherwise ignores me.

We have to wait longer and pay more because Zoe ripped off the E-ZPass. The toll collector’s hand drops as I place the heavy rods of coins into it. She shakes her head at us, and Zoe says, “What? It’s money. You have a problem with our money?” The toll taker just gives us a pathetic laugh, and we pull away.

The old decrepit brick entrance quickly gives way to the space-age white tile and fluorescent lights of the
Star Wars
y tunnel. It’s as if we’re being transported to another dimension. And we are, because when we emerge, we get to a place where anything can happen and sometimes does. Which may have been a phrase from an old NYC brochure we had lying around the house, but I’m not sure.

You would think driving in New York is a scary thing, but it’s not. Especially in Midtown. The entire thing is a grid, so it’s impossible to get lost. Especially if you know which avenues travel uptown and which down and which streets go east and which ones go west. Once you have that down, and you remember to ignore the lane lines and go with the flow of traffic, the taxis will avoid you. So you just pull in and go. Like a red blood cell traveling in a vein.

“Where to?” I ask Zoe.

“Twenty-seventh and Seventh,” she says.

I turn right on Forty-second and another right on Seventh where it splits off from Broadway. It’s only ten blocks, but it takes a while. Miraculously I find a twelve-hour meter on Twenty-eighth Street. But that too sucks up a lot of our precious coinage.

We de-LeMans once again, and Zoe unfurls her spidery legs, steps to the sidewalk, and grabs a kids’ backpack in the shape of a green turtle shell from the backseat. She must have stolen it from IKEA, but this is the first time I notice it.

“Come on,” she says, snapping her gum.

She struts up to Seventh like a tall, svelte Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and without even thinking about it, takes out a spray can of blackboard paint that she must have also stolen from IKEA. She shakes it as we walk, the marble clonking around inside, until we come to the monolithic beastly home of the Fashion Institute of Technology, a solid brown brick on Seventh that straddles Twenty-seventh Street.

Zoe stops at a brass sculpture in the shape of a small skateboard ramp, topped on one side by a big elliptical donut and on the other side by the spherical donut hole. She doesn’t stop to think before spraying
FUCK YOU
across the base. She tucks the spray can under her arm and runs. I follow after her, down Twenty-seventh until she comes to a hideous white and blue archway built in front of the student center.

The campus has emptied out for Thanksgiving, so no one sees her as she shimmies like Spider-Man up the inside of the archway and in full daylight sprays the same thing on the underside of its white hood. She lets go, lands gracefully in a squat on the sidewalk, and we run again back to Seventh, turn left, and run upstream around the tourists toward Thirty-fourth and Madison Square Garden, where we can finally duck into Penn Station and hide out underground.

We’re squatting against a shiny black marble wall, trying to catch our breath. The station is shaped like an underground octopus. At the center are the ticketing booths and the big old-fashioned flip board announcing arrivals and departures. Branching out from the center are the hallways that lead to NJ Transit, Amtrak, or the Long Island Rail Road. Carved into the black marble walls around the periphery are bagel shops, pizza joints, newsstands, and random underground ethnic boutiques selling head scarves and sunglasses and incense.

“Oh my god,” Zoe says. “That felt good.”

“Are you kidding me? You are better than that!”

“No,
you
are better than that. I feel fantastic for doing it. Fuck them. They can’t control my future. I’m too good for them.”

“Zoe. I need to tell you the story of Colonel Sanders.”

“Who the fuck is Colonel Sanders?” You can tell she’s really amped up when she uses the
F
word a lot.

“The Kentucky Fried Chicken guy. He failed more than a thousand times with his Original Recipe until it finally worked out for him. You’ve only failed once. You just have to keep trying.”

“That’s sage advice coming from someone who didn’t try at all. I need to tell you the story of Audacity. It’s your next intangible thing. When someone screws you over, you need to have the audacity to fight back. Men get that. Women don’t. Today, we cultivate Audacity.”

I check in with Zoe’s eyes. The right one once again seems a little smaller than the left. Her pupils are glassy and unfocused. I thought this trip might ground her and help her come to terms with reality, but she hasn’t come back to Earth yet.

We spend some time chilling out underground at Penn Station. It’s a little less crowded down here. No tourist would even think of plunging into these bowels. And most of the commuters are home defrosting their turkeys, so what’s left are Zoe and me and a bunch of homeless alcoholics who smell like pee. Some of them congregate in the seated waiting area until a cop walks by and kicks them out. “Hey, go pick those off somewhere else,” he says. A matted-hair woman wrapped in her shelter-issued wool blanket stands up, still scratching as she shuffles away in her flip-flops.

I think about my dad, happy that at least he’s never gotten this low. Something keeps saving him before he completely destroys his life. He has some hope left.

Zoe ducks into a boutique and steals a fire-colored scarf, which she wraps around her head.

“That is not inconspicuous,” I tell her.

“It’s audacious, though, word of the day,” she says and continues walking through the station like she owns the place. On her travels through the hallways, she is not only audacious but resourceful enough to gather the tools she apparently needs for our next adventure: a Swiss Army knife, some black wool caps, a Polaroid camera, and two long, puffy down coats to use as sleeping bags. These she gets by begging some matronly women headed toward the LIRR. They probably have teenagers like us at home and they literally gave her the coats off their backs. At twilight she says we can go.

We wear the sleeping-bag coats, whose sleeves are too short for both of us, and fill the pockets with the hats and camera and Swiss Army knife, and we take the train to Eighty-first Street. A familiar stop for us: It’s the Museum of Natural History.

“The museum tonight?” I ask her. “Noah will be so jealous. It will be like
From the Mixed-Up Files
 . . .” It was one of our favorite kids’ books, in which a sister and brother run away and sleep in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Nope. Not sleeping there. It’s where they blow up the balloons.”

As we climb up the dingy stairway from the subway to the street, we can hear generators humming, intermittent hissing, and the muted hustle of a crowd.

There, around the entire block that encircles the museum (a gothic Hogwartsy thing in the center), streets are closed off and clogged with them. They are round and jubilant and bouncy, and they are held down with giant nets. Men in neon-colored jumpsuits run around with hoses plugging them into different sections of balloon in the proper sequence, an arm here, a butt there, then a big red nose. Almost all the balloons are inflated: Buzz Lightyear, the Sock Monkey, a new little elf, with two or three still lying in flat, brightly colored splats on the sidewalk.

Tourist dads with their cameras around their necks and their kids up on their shoulders walk along a designated path to get a preview of the balloons. SpongeBob’s banana nose sticks out from beneath a net. Snoopy’s Red Baron aviator cap pushes against the ropes as if he’s trying to be born.

“This is
so
cool,” I tell Zoe.

“I knew you would like it,” she says.

We shuffle around the block with the crowds till we get to the back side of the museum on Eighth Avenue. It’s quieter over here because most of the inflation has finished. I see out of the corner of my eye that Zoe stops at Kermit the Frog.

“It’s not easy being green,” she mumbles, and I get a bad feeling about it. I suddenly know what the Swiss Army knife is for.

“No, Zoe, not this,” I say.

“Doesn’t it make you so sad to see him strapped down? His eyes are so expressive.”

“They’re Ping-Pong balls cut in half, Zoe. Leave him alone.”

“Nope, it must be done,” she says, and she tells me to be on the lookout while she begins the sawing. Security is tight, but she is wiry, wily, and dressed in black. The hissing of the helium hoses drowns out the gnawing, scratchy sound of her Swiss Army knife. When NYPD comes around the corner, I quickly unfold a balloon map that I found discarded on the path, and I ask the officer how to get to Mickey Mouse.

He has his back to Zoe, and behind him I can see she is making some headway. Kermit’s webbed foot is drifting skyward toward the moon, the raw edges of the black net flopping around where he kicked himself free. She needs to act fast before anyone notices.

And work fast she does. In less than five minutes, she is back at my side, huffing and puffing. She grabs my elbow and tells me to run. We sprint up Seventy-eighth toward Central Park. If we can get to the park, we can hide. Once inside, behind a bush, we turn and look at him, Kermit-green and gangly, floating ass over elbows, swimming almost, toward the Hudson River Parkway, or some happy Sesame Street swamp in the sky.

“He’s free!” Zoe exclaims. “Doesn’t that make you happy? I feel like
I’m
filled with helium.” She pulls out her Polaroid and takes a photo of him wafting away. She tries to take another one, but it takes too long to crank the plastic dial and prep the next shot.

Before he’s completely gone and because the moment calls for it, we sing for him, “Someday we’ll find it / The rainbow connection / The lovers, the dreamers, and me . . .”

I can’t say that part of me isn’t enjoying this audacity business. The corners of my face hurt from smiling for so long, and my stomach muscles are tired from silently laughing.
How can you have memories if you don’t have the audacity to create them?
I think. But I’m not sure audacity requires breaking the law.

“I think we just screwed a lot of people over,” I say, trying to pull us back to reality.

“Who?”

“The people who made Kermit. The people who paid for him. The people who want to see him tomorrow.”

“What, you think Kermit was sponsored by some mom-and-pop bodega? Macy’s can afford another Kermit. And as for the people tomorrow, do you really think they’ll miss one balloon? People are so overstimulated these days that they’re desensitized. They can’t give a shit about one issue, news story, baseball game, TV show, book, parade balloon, scandal for too long because there’s another one coming down the pike to overshadow it all. We’re buried in information and sensory impulses. People don’t have time to care about any one thing before it’s overshadowed by the next. Kermit will fill some time on the eleven o’clock news, and then he’ll be forgotten. No one will care but you. Stop giving a shit!”

“I’m starving,” I tell her. “Don’t you need to eat?”

“The answer to that question is no, actually. But we can find you a hot dog or something.”

“Great,” I say.

We sleep in the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo because Zoe is good at picking locks and they don’t lock it up very well. We tiptoe in. It’s cold and cavernous like a damp vault. The penguins’ environment is cut in half by the surface of the water, so we can watch both their land and sea behavior. They have nowhere to hide. There’s about sixty of them, and they snore, standing up on the faux rocks in their tuxedos like old men at a cocktail party. Some curious chinstrap ones dive into the water. They zoom over to look at us, checking us out, making sure we can jive with their flock. Then they welcome us by slapping their wings on top of the water. They have souls, I think. It’s obvious that if we have them, animals have them too.

We try to name them in order to tire ourselves out and get ready to sleep on the bed we made out of the down coats from the Long Island ladies. The underwater lamp provides the perfect night-light. “Puffy, and Stinky, and that one,” I say, pointing to a seemingly selfish one who is pecking at his spouse, “that one is Ethan . . .”

Zoe ignores me.

“We should maybe talk about whether Ethan is a good penguin or a bad penguin and whether perhaps he’s done some bad penguin shit that makes us want to run away from home?”

“You’re trying to make things black and white, Hannah, when really it’s not something you will ever understand.”

“Sometimes things are black and white, Zoe. Exhibit A,” I say, pointing to the flock.

“Let’s just get some sleep. Big day tomorrow,” she says, and she rolls over.

We stink like fish as we spend the next day at Maaco, which, in the Bronx, beneath the Cross Bronx and in the shadow of the GW Bridge, happens to be open in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning.

We pull up next to some suspendered mafioso gentlemen in a white Oldsmobile. They probably just finished a hit and buried him, rolled in a carpet, in the woods of my hometown. It’s only been two days, but I miss not waking up to the lake. I miss not seeing it sparkle outside my window. I miss my favorite birdcall in the morning. And the melted-snow fragrance of the water. I miss it with all my cells.

But Zoe is still not well. You can see it in her eyes, and I need to get her back to normal. She really is all I have in the world to depend on. I need her healthy, and I think perhaps she is right. Maybe we need to put some more distance between us and the place where she seemingly lost her mind.

So far, because of the fortuitous timing of our escape, not many people are looking for us yet. The staff of the local police department is bare bones around Thanksgiving. So probably there hasn’t been much publicity around us.

But sadly, because we are white and almost middle class, it won’t be long before this will hit the news. At least the local news. Maybe not
Live at Five
or anything.

So we must paint my car from its hideous opalescent turquoise, which my mom picked back in the nineties when she was a happier person, to a new, solid, inkblot black.

What they don’t advertise about Maaco, but what Zoe apparently overhears from our mafia friends now smoking cigars in the already fume-filled waiting room (at least it masks the smell of fish), is that if you say the
word
, which is
tagliatelle
, then you can also buy a new set of hot license plates.

The men sit balancing the folded-up newspaper on their bellies as they look down through their reading glasses and discuss what they normally have for Thanksgiving dinner.

“My wife makes a brujol and a lasagn and some spaghett and some mozzarell.” To prove you are really Italian around here, you leave the final vowels off your food.

“Don’t you have any turk?” Zoe asks boldly. “Or stuff or mashed potat?”

“Ah, what do we have here? A comedienne?” the biggest one says, pointing his cigar at Zoe. The skinny gray-haired one just nods and smirks and gets back to his newspaper. He’s mostly bald, the speaker, the dark black hair over his ears slicked back with some kind of old-world goo. “You’re funny, kid,” he says. “What’d, you get yourself in some kind of trouble in the suburbs?”

“Just a misunderstanding,” Zoe says.

This makes the mafia guy laugh. “Ain’t it always, kid. I ain’t been nothing but misunderstood.”

“I’m sure you’re really a nice guy,” Zoe says.

“Got three kids at home your age.”

“Triplets?” she asks.

“No.” He stops, frustrated with her joke. “
Around
your age. If I ever saw them hanging around the Bronx at five
A.M.
I’d beat them with a stick.”

“Wow, that’s some tough love,” Zoe says, inching closer to him until her bony butt is in the seat next to his. “You’re tough,” she says, tracing the outline of the anchor tattoo on his hairy forearm.

This makes my skin crawl. “Zoe!” I gasp. “You’ll have to excuse her, sir. She’s not herself lately.”

“Yeah, I may be experiencing some boundary issues,” she says, looking up at him with sad eyes.

“That’s what happens to you kids who are given everything,” the burly man says. “You don’t know when to stop.”

“Yeah . . .” Zoe says. “That’s not us. We get nothing handed to us. But you can believe that if you want.”

Just then the Maaco guy comes into the waiting room in his jumpsuit, takes off his gas mask, and tells us our car is ready. I reach into my messenger bag for twenty rolls of quarters and start piling them into a pyramid on the counter.

“Ah, Jeezus Christ,” Tony—we’ll call him Tony—says. “How much is it?” He pays for our paint job and then pulls Zoe over to him by her belt loop. “Kid. Here. Take this,” he says, and he sticks another two hundred-dollar bills into the waistband of her jeggings. He seems practiced at this.

“Thank you,” Zoe whispers, kissing him lightly next to his ear.

Tony is confused for a second, trying to navigate the wacko energy of Zoe; then he pushes her away and says, “You’re welcome,” and then to me, “Watch out for her.”

“I will,” I say, and we are off.

“Zoeeee,” I say in the parking lot. “What the hell?”

She cannot stop laughing long enough to answer me.

She starts to climb into the driver’s side of our newly painted vehicle. We had to choose the cheapest paint available, and it is completely opaque and dusty like a chalkboard. It absorbs every ounce of light, completely void of color. We look criminal and suspicious in it, but we do not look like ourselves. I walk around the front of the car and look at our new New York vintage plates, the old orangey gold color from the seventies.

“We look badass,” I tell Zoe.

“Bad ass. Morass. First class. Bluegrass,” Zoe mumbles and then begins chewing on her fingernails to stop herself from rambling. She’d been doing this a lot. This nonsensical rhyming associating thing.

“Let me drive,” I tell her. “Maybe you can nap in the passenger seat. It reclines if you twist the crank enough. It’s one of the luxury features of this automobile,” I joke.

The LeMans is bare bones. Half the dials on the dashboard are there for decoration. There is no AC. We cannot measure RPMs. I think it was the last American model ever made where you have to manually roll down the windows. It’s a stick shift. And it’s basically a box cart. It shakes when you go over seventy, and we have to lean forward when traveling uphill. But now, in its new inkblot black with its hot orange plates, it is badass. I swing it around and up a ramp to the Cross Bronx, and we
putt-putt
our way to the GW.

“Where are we headed?” I ask Zoe.

“West,” she says.

“You know what’s weird?”

“What?”

“I get jealous of you even when creepy old men are attracted to you. I stand there and think,
What am I? Chopped liver?
”

“You don’t want to be me. You are the girl they put on a pedestal. That’s where you belong. Men will always see women as either virgins or whores. It’s always better to be the virgin. You don’t get as much immediate action, but you get more play in the long run.” Her eyes are closed beneath her aviators, so she’s trying to rest, but her feet won’t stop moving.

“Are you afraid of sleeping?” I ask her. “Afraid of your dreams?”

“I do have some bad ones. But no. I just don’t need it anymore. Sleep. Or food. Much.”

We head west on 80 as the sun rises behind us, and we slowly leave any trace of metropolis. It gets woodsier and woodsier on the sides of the highway, and the rock walls on either side of us get steeper and steeper as we approach the Delaware River. Hawks spiral above us, riding some invisible whirlpooling currents.

Once we drive over the Delaware on an ancient crisscrossed iron girder bridge, we leave all traces of city behind. We step back in time to a place where people, according to the billboards, still eat big pancake breakfasts but no longer work it off in the fields. They eat a thing here called “scrapple,” which I don’t think you find outside of Pennsylvania because if you haven’t grown up eating a gray meaty thing called “scrapple” there is no way you would ever let it pass your lips.

We are in scrapple country, looking off in the distance at the patchwork farms and the occasional old red barn. To Zoe, in her state of mind, the landscape probably looks like a Technicolor painting by Hockney. She refuses to remove her sunglasses even though it is still overcast and windy. We pass outlet malls and tourist-trap caverns and diners that claim to be Pennsylvania Dutch. And after about two hours we see a sign for a truck stop. It is about as tall as a skyscraper, and it simply says
TRUCK STOP
in red and white. No one even bothered to name it.

“Land ho,” Zoe suddenly calls out.

“What?” I ask.

“I’ve always wanted to go to a truck stop. And we could use a shower.”

It’s true. Every pore in my body feels like it’s overflowing with gunk. My armpits feel volcanically warm and moist, and I am starting to itch. Just the suggestion of a shower makes me realize how badly I am craving one. Suddenly I would do anything for some hot water. But a truck stop?

“Are you sure? We’re going to stand out,“ I tell Zoe.

“Standing out is my specialty when I’m in the mood for it.”

“I’m more about the blending in,” I say, mixing my hand in a circle.

“Just follow my lead.”

A lot of truckers are working today because they get time and a half for Thanksgiving. The showers are through a door along the back wall, where scruffy-faced potbellied men in sleeveless white T-shirts wait in line holding their towels and brown leather Dopp kits.

“Two showers, please,” Zoe says to the woman behind the counter. In the glass display case underneath her flabby elbow are piles of jingoistic tchotchkes, like bald eagle this and stars and stripes that. Piled in the center of the store are boxes of Pennsylvania Dutch apple pies. There are aisles and aisles filled with pork rinds and beef jerkies of all varieties. On a table in the back next to the door that leads to the diner, a taxidermist has displayed a small fox, a skunk, and a squirrel. The squirrel is on sale for seventy-five dollars.

“We don’t have a ladies’,” the old woman at the counter says. We know her name is Marge because we have overheard some of her conversations. She could use a shower too, by the looks of her silvery-tan hair that’s pulled back in a greasy bun. Her teeth are yellow, and she plays with a red and white Bic lighter, just jonesing for her next cigarette break.

“That’s okay, we’ll wait,” says Zoe, and I am appalled. I can only imagine one thing that is dirtier than me right now, and it is one of those shower stalls where truckers have been hocking up their mucus all morning.

“I’m all set,” I tell Zoe. “There is no way I’m showering in there.”

“Even if we wait until they’re done?” she asks. She looks over to the line of undershirted truckers. “And maybe buy some flip-flops. You sell flip-flops?” she asks Marge.

“Even if hell freezes over, pigs fly, and over your dead body.”

“Never mind,” Zoe tells the cashier. “My friend is reluctant to take advantage of your facilities. Do you at least have a ladies’ bathroom?”

She points to the restrooms behind the coffee bar—some clear-glass pitchers on hot plates, bubbling with thick black liquid, and a shaker-container of nondairy creamer. “You would think with all these cows around they could get some milk,” I mumble as we pass it and then duck into the bathroom.

I swab down the entire sink with wads and wads of toilet paper before I even dare to use it. We wash our faces with our loofah sponges, splash some water in our armpits, brush our teeth, change our underwear, and we are completely refreshed.

“I’m hungry,” I tell Zoe. “My stomach is doing visible cartwheels. Look,” I say and pull up my shirt. “And you should eat too. A nice hot open turkey sandwich for Thanksgiving. We’ll use the money from your friend.”

We are headed toward the door to the diner, but Zoe stops to look at the taxidermy table. “Fine,” she says with a sigh, “but I’m buying that stuffed squirrel. It’s on sale.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. I want it, and I’m going to buy it. Today’s lesson is Gluttony. Take what you want.”

“You know that’s another symptom of bipolar disorder. Ill-advised shopping sprees, unwise purchases.”

“It’s just a stuffed squirrel.”

“A real stuffed squirrel for seventy-five dollars, which we need for gas. It probably has rabies.”

“He’s mounted on a log. And he’s holding a chestnut.”

“We can’t afford him, Zoe.”

“You can even see his real front teeth.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I won’t take no for an answer,” she says, and she brings the hideous thing with its fake plastic eyes to the cash register. Its fur is the same color as Marge’s hair. Zoe tries to bargain her down, but in the end hands her one of our precious hundred-dollar bills and gets twenty-five dollars back.

In the diner she sets “Squirrely” on the table in front of the mini jukebox, and she takes a picture of it with her disposable camera. It watches us eat. I hate Squirrely, and I want to stab him with my fork.

She orders one slice of every kind of pie they have, including apple pie with melted cheddar cheese on top, takes one tiny bite of each, and then proclaims herself full, while I methodically plod through my open-faced turkey with cranberry sauce from a can, fake gravy from a jar over Wonder Bread. It actually hits the spot, and I eat the entire thing. I have no idea when we will eat again, because Zoe keeps spending our money on dead rodents.