Нил Шустерман - Antsy Does Time

Those of us who don’t fit into those three categories have a harder time in life, because we gotta figure things out for ourselves—which leaves more opportunity for personal advancement, and mental illness—but hey, no pain, no gain.

So Kjersten liked “genuine” guys. The problem with genuine is that it’s not something you can try to be, because the second you try, you’re not genuine anymore. Mostly it’s about being clueless, I think. Being decent, but clueless about your own decency.

I don’t know if I’m genuine, but since I’m fairly clueless most of the time, I figured I was halfway there.

“So ... what do you think I should do?” I asked, parading my cluelessness like suddenly it’s a virtue.

“You should ask her for a date,” Gunnar said.

This time I sprayed the herbicide in my eyes.

My advice to you: avoid spraying herbicide in your eyes if at all you can help it. Use a face mask, like the bottle says in bright red, but did I listen? No. The pain temporarily knocked Gunnar’s suggestion to the back of my brain, and the world became a faraway place for a while.

I spent half an hour in the bathroom washing out my eyes while Gunnar threw me a few famous quotes about the therapeutic nature of pain. By the time my optical agony faded to a dull throbbing behind my eyelids, I felt like I had just woken up from surgery. Then I step out of the bathroom, and who’s coming in the front door? Kjersten.

“Antsy! Hi!” She sounded maybe a little more enthusiastic than she had intended to. I think that was a good thing. Then she looked at me funny. “Have you been crying?”

“What? Oh! No, it’s just the herbicide.”

She looked at me even more funny, so I told her, “Gunnar and I were killing plants.”

Kjersten apparently had a whole range of looking-at-you-funny expressions. “Is this ... a hobby of yours?”

I took a deep breath, slowed my brain down—if that’s even possible—and tried to explain our whole dust-bowl project in such a way that I didn’t sound either moronic or certifiably insane. It must have worked, because the funny expressions stopped.

Then Mrs. Ümlaut called from the kitchen. “Are you staying for dinner, Antsy?”

“Sure he is,” Kjersten said with a grin. “He can’t drive home with his eyes like that.”

“I... uh ... don’t drive yet.”

She nudged me playfully. “I know that. I was just kidding.”

“Oh. Right.” The fact that she was old enough to drive and I wasn’t was a humiliating fact I had not considered. Until now. As I thought about this, I could tell I was going red in the face, because my ears felt hot. Kjersten looked at me and laughed, then she leaned in close and whispered:

“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed.”

That embarrassed me even more.

“Well,” I said, “since I’m mostly embarrassed around you, I must be adorable.”

She laughed, and I realized that I had actually been clever. I never knew there could be such a thing as charming humiliation. Gold star for me!

Tonight Mrs. Ümlaut made fried chicken—which was as un-Scandinavian as hamburgers, but at least tonight there was pickled red cabbage, which I suspected had Norse origins but was less offensive than herring fermented in goat’s milk, or something like that.

It was just the four of us at first—once more with a plate left for Mr. Ümlaut, like he was the Holy Spirit.

Sitting at the Ümlaut dinner table that night was much more torturous than the first time. See, the first time I was desperately trying not to make an ass of myself, just in case Kjersten might notice. But now that she was certain to notice, it was worse than my third-grade play, where I had to dress in black, climb out of a papier-mache tooth, and be a singing, dancing cavity. I forgot the words to the song, and since Howie had spent half that morning whistling “It’s a Small World” in my ear, that was the only song left in my brain. So when I jumped out of the papier-mache tooth, rather than standing there in silent stage fright, I started singing all about how it’s a world of laughter and a world of tears. Eventually, the piano player just gave up and played the song along with me. When I was done, I got applause from the audience, which just made me feel physically ill, so I leaned over, puked into the piano, and ran offstage. After that, the piano never sounded quite right, and I was never asked to sing in a school play again.

That’s kind of how I felt at dinner with the Ümlauts that night—and no matter how attractive Kjersten might have found my embarrassment, it would all be over if the combination of fried chicken, pickled cabbage, and stress made me hurl into the serving bowl.

“I had a consultation with Dr. G today,” Gunnar announced just a few minutes into the meal. His mother sighed, and Kjersten looked at me, shaking her head.

“I don’t want to hear about Dr. G,” Mrs. Ümlaut said.

Gunnar took a bite of his chicken. “How do you know it’s not good news?”

“Dr. G never gives good news,” she said. It surprised me that she didn’t want to hear about her son’s condition—and that she hadn’t even accompanied him to the doctor—but then everybody deals with hardship in different ways.

“I may have more time than originally predicted,” Gunnar said. “But only with treatment from experts in the field.”

That wasn’t quite what he had told me, but I could see there were more layers of communication going on here than infomercials on a satellite dish—which, by the way, I am forbidden to watch since the time I ordered the Ninja-matic food processor. But I suspected that whatever treatments Gunnar was talking about were going to cost more than twelve easy payments of $19.99. Maybe that was it—maybe the cost of medical treatment was the elephant in the room here—although I’m sure that wasn’t the only one; the Ümlauts seemed to breed elephants like my sister breeds hamsters.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, an entire new herd arrived. Mr. Ümlaut came home.

I always hear people talk about “dysfunctional families.” It annoys me, because it makes you think that somewhere there’s this magical family where everyone gets along, and no one ever screams things they don’t mean, and there’s never a time when sharp objects should be hidden. Well, I’m sorry, but that family doesn’t exist. And if you find some neighbors that seem to be the grinning model of “function,” trust me—that’s the family that will get arrested for smuggling arms in their SUV between soccer games.

The best you can really hope for is a family where everyone’s problems, big and small, work together. Kind of like an orchestra where every instrument is out of tune, in exactly the same way, so you don’t really notice. But when it came to the Ümlaut orchestra, nothing meshed—and the moment Mr. Ümlaut walked through the front door everything in that house clashed like cymbals.

It started with the dinner conversation. From the moment I heard the key turning in the lock, all conversation stopped. I glanced at Gunnar, who stared into his food. I turned my eyes to Kjersten, who turned her eyes to the clock. And when I looked to Mrs. Ümlaut, she didn’t seem to be looking at anything at all.

Mr. Ümlaut came into the kitchen without a word, noticed there was a guest at the table, but didn’t comment on it. He took out a glass and dispensed himself some water from the refrigerator door.

“You’re home,” Mrs. Ümlaut finally said, bizarrely stating the obvious.

He took a gulp of his water, and looked at the table. “Chicken?”

Without standing up, Mrs. Ümlaut reached over and pulled out his chair. He sat down.

I took a moment to size the man up. He was tall, with thinning blond hair, small glasses, and a wide jaw that Gunnar was starting to develop. There was a weariness about him that had nothing to do with sleep, and he had a poker face that was completely unreadable, just like Gunnar. To me that was the most uncomfortable thing of all. See, I come from a family where we wear our hearts on our sleeves. If you’re feeling something, chances are someone else knows about it even before you do. But this man’s heart was somewhere in a safe behind the family portrait.