“As soon as I get the grade back on my chemistry test tomorrow—and my father can see I didn’t need to skip my tennis tournament to study.”
I smiled. “And here I thought you cut school for a wild ski trip.” Which was one of my tamer scenarios. I took her hand and stood there for a long moment that, believe it or not, didn’t feel awkward at all, then I went out to the backyard.
There was all this cardboard in the yard, because today’s project was a cardboard shack for Steinbeck’s starving farmers. At the moment I arrived in our little dust bowl, Gunnar was being scolded by his next-door neighbor over the fence. “Look what you’ve done to my yard! It’s all dead!”
“It’s that time of year,” I offered, pointing out the dead leaves around her yard. “That’s why they call it ‛fall.’”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “What about the evergreens?”
She indicated some bushes way across the yard that had gone a sickly shade of brown. Then she looked bitterly down at some thorny, leafless bushes in front of her that could have just been dormant if we didn’t already know better—because if the herbicide had made it all the way across the yard, these nearby bushes were history.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve cultivated this rose garden?”
My next response would have been a short and sweet “Oops,” but Gunnar has last week’s vocabulary word, which I lack: eloquence.
“‘Only when the Rose withers can the beauty of the bush be seen,’” he told her. It shut her up and she stormed away.
“What does that even mean?” I asked after she was gone.
“I don’t know, but Emily Dickinson said it.”
I told him that quoting Emily Dickinson was just a little too weird, and he agreed to be more testosterone-conscious with his quotations. He looked over at the neighbors’ yard, surveying the ruins of the garden. “A little death never hurt anyone,” he said. “It gives us perspective. Makes us remember what’s important.”
I hadn’t been too worried about the neighbors’ plants dying until now. Collateral damage, right? Only this was more than just collateral damage—and only later did we realize why. See, guys all have this problem. It’s called the we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-directions problem. Gunnar and I had bought half a dozen jugs of herbicide, coated the plants with the stuff like we were flocking Christmas trees, and we were satisfied with the results. We could have done a commercial for the stuff . . . However, if we had read the directions, we would have seen that the stuff was concentrated—you know, like frozen orange juice: we were supposed to use one part herbicide to ten parts water. So basically we sprayed enough of the stuff to kill the rain forests.
Now all the lawns around Gunnar’s house, front and back, were going a strange shade of brown that was almost purple. Our dust bowl was spreading outward like something satanic.
When I got home, my mom wasn’t with my dad at the restaurant, like she usually is on Sunday afternoons. She was home, cleaning. This was nothing unusual—but the sheer intensity of the scouring had me worried—like maybe the toxic mold was back, and this time it was personal.
Turns out, it was worse.
“Aunt Mona is coming to visit,” Mom told me.
I turned to my sister Christina, who sat cross-legged on the couch, either doing homework or trying to levitate her math book. “No—tell me it’s not true!” I begged.
Christina just lowered her eyes and shook her head in the universal this-patient-can’t-be-saved gesture.
“How long?”
“How long till she comes, or how long will she stay?” Christina asked.
“Both.”
To which Christina responded, “Next week, and only God knows.”
It’s always that way with Aunt Mona. Her visits are more like wartime occupations. She’s the most demanding of our relatives—in fact, we sometimes call her “relative humidity,” on account of when Mona’s around, everybody sweats. See, Aunt Mona likes to be catered to—but lately the only catering Mom and Dad have been able to do is of the restaurant variety. Plus, when Aunt Mona arrives, all other things manage to get put on hold, and we’re all expected to “visit” with her while she’s here—especially those first couple of days. With the dust bowl due, tests in every class before Christmas vacation, another date to schedule with Kjersten, and Gunnar’s illness hovering like a storm, Aunt Mona was the last thing I needed.
Just so you know, Aunt Mona’s my father’s older sister. She has a popular business selling perfume imported from places I’ve never heard of, and might actually be made up—and she always wears her own perfume. I think she wears them all at once, because whenever she visits, I break out in hives from the fumes, and the neighborhood clears of wildlife.
She’s very successful and business-minded. Nothing wrong with that—I mean, my friend Ira’s mom is all hard-core business, and she’s a nice, normal, decent human being. But Aunt Mona is not. Aunt Mona uses her success in cruel and unusual ways. You see, Aunt Mona isn’t just successful, she’s More Successful Than You, whoever you happen to be. And even if she’s not, she will find a way to make you feel like the pathetic loser you always feared you were, deep down where the intestines gurgle.
Aunt Mona works like 140-hour weeks, and frowns on anyone who doesn’t. She has a spotless high-rise condo in Chicago, and frowns on anyone who doesn’t. In fact, she spends so much time frowning and looking down her nose at people, she had a plastic surgeon change her nose and Botox her frown wrinkles.
It goes without saying, then, that Aunt Mona is the undisputed judge of all things Bonano—even though she changed her name to Bonneville because it sounded fancier, and because Mona Bonano sounded too much like that “Name Game” song. I’m sure as a kid she was constantly teased with “Mona-Mona-bo-bona, Bonano-fano-fo-fona.” And as if Bonneville wasn’t snooty enough, she added an accent to her first name, so now it’s not Mona, it’s Moná. I refuse on principle to ever pronounce it “Moná,” and I know she resents it.
It turns out that Aunt Mona was considering moving her entire company to New York, so she was going to be here for a while. She could, of course, afford one of those fancy New York hotels, where the maids clean between your toes and stuff, but there’s this rule about family. It’s kind of like the Ten Commandments, and the Miranda rights they read you when you get arrested: Thou shalt stay with thy relatives upon every visit, and anything you say can and will be used against you for the rest of your life.
So Mom’s Lemon Pledging all the dining-room furniture until the wood shines like new, and she says to me, “You gotta be on your best behavior when Aunt Mona comes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I tell her, having heard it all before.
“You gotta treat her with respect, whether you like it or not.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And you gotta wear that shirt she gave you.”
“In your dreams.”
Mom laughed. “If that shirt’s in my dreams, they’d be nightmares.”
I had to laugh, too. The fact that Mom agreed with me that the pink-and-orange “designer” shirt was the worst piece of clothing yet devised by man somehow made it okay to wear it. Like now it was an inside joke, instead of just an ugly shirt.
I picked up one of her rags and polished the high part of the china cabinet that she had trouble reaching. She smiled at me, kinda glad, I guess, that I did it before she asked.
“So, do I gotta wear the shirt in public?”
“No,” she says. “Maybe,” she adds. “Probably,” she concludes.
I don’t argue, because what’s the use? When it comes to Aunt Mona, the odds of walking away a winner are worse than at the Anawana Tribal Casino. Anyway, I suppose wearing the shirt was better than Mom and Christina’s fate. They’d have to wear one of Aunt Mona’s perfumes.