After our fourth swimming lesson, I invited Ari over to my house for lunch. My parents were curious to meet him (and they claimed I hadn’t stopped talking about him since Monday). My mom was still at work but I knew my dad would be home. He’s an English professor and was spending the summer researching and writing his latest book, which to me looked a lot like hanging around his office all day reading and drinking tea. Not a bad gig, right?
“My dad’s in his office. Let’s say hi then we can make some lunch. I could make peanut butter and jelly, tomato soup or heat up some frozen pizza bites. We could eat those with leftover black beans and rice?”
“Pizza bites with rice and beans? Well there’s a first time for everything, I guess.”
We went into my dad’s office. I could tell Ari was nervous. He didn’t move too far past the doorway and he kept his eyes locked on his shoes.
I sat down on the arm of Dad’s big brown leather chair and gave him a kiss on the cheek. His chin was scratchy (again). “You didn’t shave this morning, Dad.”
“That means you don’t have to work.”
“That means I have to finish writing my book.”
“Writing a book isn’t work.”
Dad laughed his big belly laugh (my favorite of all his laughs). “You have a lot to learn about work.”
“It’s summer, Dad. I don’t want to hear about work.”
“You never want to hear about work.”
I didn’t like where this conversation was headed so I tried a diversionary tactic. I pinched at his chin scruff and asked, “Are you going to grow a beard?”
“No, it’s too hot. And besides, your mother won’t kiss me if I go more than a day without shaving.”
“Wow, she’s strict.” I never minded the ticklish way my dad’s chin felt when it was stubbly, but I guess Mom could lay down the law where her own lips were concerned.
“And what would you do without her kisses?”
I knew I was getting close to the amount of teasing he’d tolerate. He smiled and turned his attention to Ari, who was still hovering in the doorway. “How do you put up with this guy? You must be Ari.”
“Yes, sir,” Ari said. Sir! Who knew Ari had such good manners?
My dad got up and shook Ari’s hand. Ari’s eyes got all wide. “I’m Sam,” my dad said. “Sam Quintana.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Quintana.” Wow Ari was really gunning for polite friend of the year award!
“You can call me Sam,” Dad said.
“I can’t,” Ari said, so quiet I almost couldn’t hear him.
Dad nodded and said, “That’s sweet. And respectful.” Dad turned his eyes to me and said in his trying-to-be-authoritarian voice, “The young man has some respect. Maybe you can learn something from him, Dante.”
“You mean you want me to call you Mr. Quintana?” I sassed. Dad was trying hard to keep a straight face in front of Ari but I was onto him. Dad gave me a look before turning back to Ari. “How’s the swimming?”
“Dante’s a good teacher,” Ari said. I was proud he said that and I liked how my name sounded coming from his lips. He snuck a quick look at me through the curtain of dark hair that half-covered his eyes, almost like we were sharing a secret. He had this way of shaking his head forward every now and then so his hair stayed in a swoop over his eyes. I hadn’t noticed this cute tic of his in the pool when his hair was wet before. I had the sudden urge to tussle up his hair but knew that would not go over well.
“Dante’s good at a lot of things. But he’s not very good at cleaning his room. Cleaning a room is too closely related to the word work.”
I knew where Dad was headed with this and I didn’t like it. “Is that a hint?”
“You’re quick, Dante. You must get that from your mother.”
“Don’t be a wiseass, Dad.” If Mom were here she would have scolded me for using a curse word, but I was taking a chance that Dad wouldn’t mind it. Turns out I was wrong.
“What was that word you just used?”
“Does that word offend you?”
“It’s not the word. Maybe it’s the attitude.”
I rolled my eyes. Ok, maybe I was showing off in front of Ari a little bit. Bravado and all that. I sat down to take off my sneakers.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Dad said. “There’s a pig sty up there that has your name on it.”
Drat. I’d rolled the dice on the sass-o-meter and lost big time. I was hoping I’d be able to spend all day doing nothing with Ari but it looked like Dad was choosing today of all days to play dictator.
I kicked off my sneakers and wiggled my toes. Ari looked at me a little funny and reached down to take off his shoes, too.
“Oh, you can leave your shoes on if you like,” I said. “I just like having mine off. ‘Free the feet’ is basically my life’s motto.”
“Ok, good. Because my socks both have holes in the toes,” Ari dead-panned and my dad and I both laughed.
“Ari and I need to eat lunch, Dad. You can’t expect me to starve our guest just because you are hell bent on enforcing dictatorial rule about the state of my room.”
“Lunch first. Then clean.”
For lunch Ari decided pizza bites and black beans was an abomination so he decided to make his “special secret recipe” of fish-stick tacos instead. I was his sous chef and responsible for the chopping. He was a real stickler for chopping, let me tell you. He showed me the best way to hold a knife and the difference between mincing and julienning. I may have known all the technique when it came to swimming but he sure had me beat in knife skills. When it came time for me to chop an onion he got a big grin on his face.
“What?” I asked. “Are you going to laugh when the tears start streaming down my face?”
“Ok, I read this thing about onions in a magazine once but have never got to try it.”
“Apparently if you wear goggles it will stop you from crying.”
So we put our goggles on and it actually worked! We liked wearing them so much we spent the rest of the time preparing the meal pretending like we were underwater. I don’t normally like cooking but I didn’t mind it with Ari.
After we’d eaten and cleaned up we went up to my room.
My dad was right (darn him), it truly was a mess.
I had of burst of nervous jitters in my tummy now that Ari was on the threshold of my room. I did a quick scan to make sure there wasn’t anything super embarrassing like dirty underwear in plain sight. Nothing too bad, just the normal hodgepodge. I hadn’t felt nervous at all when we were downstairs, but being alone in my room felt different somehow.
I started picking up the dirty clothes and putting them in my hamper. I didn’t want Ari to smell anything foul and think I was a heathen. He was doing the same hover-in-the-doorway thing he’d done in my dad’s office so I decided to put on some music, hoping to set a more relaxing mood.
I chose Abbey Road, basically the most perfect record ever made.
“I can’t believe you have an actual record player,” he said.
“It was my mom’s. She was going to throw it away. Can you believe that? Vinyl. Real vinyl. None of this cassette crap.”
“What’s wrong with cassettes?”
He laughed at that. But I sort of knew he would before I said it. “Records scratch easily,” he said.
“Not if you take care of them.”
He gave my room a thorough once over. “I can see that you really like to take care of things.”
He had me there. I laughed and handed him a book of poems that was sitting on my nightstand. William Carlos Williams. I had been reading it last night before I went to bed and had a dream I was stringing up a mountainous stack of white sheets, shirts and dresses on a clothesline in the middle of a prairie field while a big storm was brewing overhead. The white sheets flapped in the wind like a whip. I liked the dream though it was unsettling, too. Good poetry will do that to you.
There was a particular poem called “Icarus” that when I read it last night it reminded me of Ari. I wanted to tell him that, but I thought he might think that was a little strange, telling him I was thinking about him while I was reading poetry. So I handed him the book, instead. Maybe he’d read the same poem and think of me and we’d both be none the wiser. “Here, you can read this while I clean my room.”
“Maybe I should just, you know, leave you—” he said and flicked his hair forward. I could still see his eyes looking all around my room. “It’s a little scary in here.”
Scary, ouch. I mean, my room was a little chaotic maybe, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it scary. Ari and my dad seemed to be on the same page about the optimal cleanliness of rooms, I guess.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t leave.” (I really didn’t want him to leave). “I hate cleaning my room.”
“Maybe if you didn’t have so many things.”
I looked around. To someone else’s eyes I could see how it could leave the impression that a tornado had just breezed through: clothes, shoes, books, records, notepads, polaroids, sheet music, old homework assignments and tests, and all the pictures I’d torn out of magazines for my inspiration board were scattered everywhere and covered nearly every available surface. Yeah, I guess there was a lot of stuff, but who doesn’t have a lot of stuff?
“It’s just stuff. If you stay, it won’t be so bad.”
“No. It’s my job.” I knew my mom would really tear into me if she found out I’d roped my new friend into cleaning my room for me. I’d never hear the end of it. And knowing me, I wouldn’t be able to not tell her. That’s the funny part.
We chatted a bit about our moms and dads. Ari hadn’t told me much about his parents and I was curious what they were like, how Ari got along with them. It seemed like Ari had magically entered my life like Athena emerging fully grown out of Zeus’ skull and I was having trouble picturing him as a baby or with his family. I told him that I understood my dad—heck, I’d had his number since I was a little kid. My mom, not so much. She’s a psychiatrist and helps teenagers for her job and so she knows how to keep her cards close. My dad and I are more alike. Both big open books. Ari, he was more like my mom, I realized: inscrutable in certain ways, clear as day in others.
“Read that book while I clean.”
He opened it up and thumbed through a few pages. He looked up at me and I could read it on his face that poetry was not his thing.
“Poetry,” I said. “It won’t kill you.”
“What if it does? Boy Dies of Boredom While Reading Poetry.”
I tried to keep a straight face—after all poetry is an important art form and has a bad rap!—but that worked just as well as it always works when Ari is looking at me with the corner of his lips upturned in a half-smirk and a sparkling gleam in his dark brown eyes. I shook my head in mock offense and started attacking the monster task of getting my room in order.
My comfy reading chair had become a catch-all receptacle for all the random things I hadn’t bothered putting away over the last few weeks so I told him to clear it off so he could sit there and read.
“What’s this?” he asked, picking up one of my sketch pads.
I shook my head no. “I don’t like to show it to anyone.”
It wasn’t that I was embarrassed about my drawing skills or that I thought Ari wouldn’t appreciate some of the drawings I’d done—in fact I bet he’d especially dig the comic book characters I liked to do sometimes for fun. But there were a few drawings in there of a boy sitting on the edge of a pool that I didn’t want him to see.
I picked up the pad and put it away on my desk and changed the subject back to the book of poetry. “Really, it won’t kill you.”
Ari sighed dramatically but then settled in to reading with little complaint after that. While I cleaned up I snuck quick peaks at him to see how he was enjoying it. His eyebrows were knitted together the whole time he read and he had a habit of biting his lower lip when he was really concentrating (I had noticed this at the pool as well when I was giving him detailed instructions) but he kept at it until he’d read the whole book.
Late afternoon in my room is my favorite time of day. I have westward facing windows and when the golden light spills in you can see little dust particles floating in the air in an almost sparkly and magical way sometimes. The light hit the white pages of Ari’s book and it reflected back up onto his face, making him glow almost.
After Abbey Road was done I switched on Pink Moon. I’d found the record at a junk shop and liked the surreal picture on the cover so I bought it even though I’d never heard of Nick Drake before. It quickly became one of my favorite records.
Believe it or not, I do have a system once I get going organizing my room. Books especially. My shelf is alphabetical by author’s last name (the library way) and my ‘to-read’ pile on my desk goes in ascending order of excitement about reading. Once all the dirty clothes are in my hamper it’s pretty easy to sort the rest of my clothes out, too. I like folding everything in neat stacks by type of clothes (undershirts, tshirts, button down shirts, shorts, pants) and by color. I find it soothing to see them all stacked up in rainbow order in my drawer. My painting and drawing area also needed some attention. I organized my drawing pencils, charcoals, pens and paints in my plastic storage bins. I soaped up all my paintbrushes that had gotten stiff. I organized my records, alphabetical by artist.
Every now and then Ari would make a “hmm” noise or a soft grunt. I was dying to ask him what he thought about the poems he was reading but I kept focused on my room. The sooner I finished, the more time we’d have to talk and hang out.
I finished up my room and looked around, satisfied with my work. I took the book of poems from Ari. I found one I particularly liked called “Death” (uplifting title, right?), which is about a dead dog. Whenever I read this poem I thought of Ringo, my old dog. There’s a picture of us on my bulletin board. He was old when he died. He had cancer. Reading the poem aloud felt almost like giving him a eulogy again (I had insisted my parents and I all give speeches when we buried him). It still hurt thinking about him, but I liked how reading the poem aloud made my memories of him feel alive inside me. Like I was marking an important moment by remembering him aloud, even if the remembering was only for myself. I didn’t tell Ari about Ringo just then because I was afraid I might tear up. I knew I’d tell him one day, though.
He’s dead
the dog won’t have to
sleep on the potatoes
anymore to keep them from freezing
he’s dead
the old bastard—
I smiled at that last word, thinking of Ringo and also because here, alone in my room with Ari, I had free reign to say curse words like ‘bastard’ without the cluck of my mom’s tongue or my dad’s raised eyebrow. We had our own rules up here, ones that we could make up on our own, together.
While I was reading aloud, Ari had shut his eyes. Not because he was sleeping or bored, but because I think he was really trying to listen to the words. His face was peaceful then. The crease between his eyebrows smoothed over. I felt bold enough to continue reading more poems to him. I wanted to keep that peaceful look on his face for as long as I could.
When I got to “Icarus”, my heart started beating fast, I don’t know why. It’s not like he would know that when I read the beautiful words I imagined Ari falling from the sky like a shooting star and landing in a sparkling, clear blue sea with barely a splash.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
My voice quivered a little when I read the last line. If Ari asked about it I could just claim it was allergies.
