On the Road to Find Out Read online

  My desk is in a nook by the bay window and I have a chair that’s supposed to be good for your back named after the designer who came up with it and convinced people to spend a bucketload of money on something not very attractive.

  Attached to my room is a bathroom with a heated marble floor, a Jacuzzi tub I never use, and a shower I do. The shower is actually great; it attacks you with streams of water from all sides. And, because Mom did a tour of Europe after college and became smitten with French bathrooms, there is a bidet.

  If you don’t know what this is, you probably don’t want to know. Here’s a hint: sometimes I threaten to give Walter a bath in the bidet because it’s meant for those with dirty tails.

  Walter has a cage, of course, a three-story deluxe playhouse. Like me, he thinks his accommodations are a waste of space and spends most of his time in the tiny sleeping hut Jenni made for him. When I’m home, we have an open-door policy, and he’s welcome to go wherever he wants. The great thing about a room this big is that during free-range-rodent time, Walter gets plenty of exercise and can stimulate his brain with explorations. However, he usually wants to be where I am.

  Most often, I am in the chair in my closet or in bed, reading, or with my laptop looking up stuff or playing Snood. I play a lot of Snood even though it’s not that much fun. I’ll play a few games, and forty-five minutes later, I tell myself I’ll just play one more.

  And then I play another.

  And another.

  It’s hard to quit once I’ve started. These days, I haven’t done much reading or looking stuff up. Snood is about all I’m good for.

  Last year Mom kept saying that computer games don’t count as extracurricular activities on college applications. I hate it when she’s right.

  Walter is happy to sleep on my shoulder or my chest, but what he likes most is when I’m lying down and my legs are straight out in front of me and he can burrow in between them right above my knees. He has a tendency to nibble on my jeans, and I have tons of tiny holes in my favorite pair. When Mom complains, I remind her people pay a lot of money for jeans with holes in them. I tell her I might rent Walter out to the high-end designers she likes to support. It would be good for him to have a job, I say.

  Mom just lets out a big sigh when I say stuff like that and shakes her head to remind me that I am not the perfect daughter she was hoping for.

  Walter trails me to the bathroom. He usually follows me around when he’s not in a deep, curled-up sleep. He’s more doglike than many dogs. He does tricks. He can push a marble around the floor with his nose and can climb anything. He comes when you call him. He has a special dance he does for broccoli, a joyous twirling, circling ballet of love. He’s a rat of many talents. If there were a gifted-and-talented school for rodents, Walter would be the valedictorian.

  3

  That first run was so depressing, and being reminded about Yale was so icky, that I stayed in the shower for a long time, probably in the misguided if unconscious belief that I could wash some of the shame off.

  Didn’t work.

  But I stayed in so long Walter decided to check up on me. When I dropped the soap I saw him standing on his back feet with his paws against the glass of the shower stall. He left tiny handprints in the steam. Looking at him made me feel better. I begged him to answer the question, “How can anyone be so cute and wonderful?”

  I named Walter after our family friend Walter.

  Not after him in the sense of paying tribute, but more because I thought he would find it annoying. I like to annoy him and he likes it when I annoy him. I call Walter the man Walter-the-Man and Walter the rat Walter.

  Walter-the-Man is a lawyer who works at the same law firm as my dad. He lives down the street. He eats at our house most weekends and many weekday nights and has done ever since I can remember. He’s usually parked in front of our TV watching college basketball, especially Duke, which he follows with a fervor that knows no bounds or reason—or football or baseball or golf or Wiffle ball—and drinking a beer.

  Walter-the-Man is like a human piece of furniture, comfortably overstuffed like my closet chair, and like my chair, a bit worn down. He spends what little vacation time he takes going to see the Barenaked Ladies or the Dave Matthews Band.

  I tell him it’s kind of sad, a middle-aged man traveling around the country to hear middle-aged men sing.

  He tells me nothing’s less appealing than a jaded teen.

  Sometimes, when I say something sassy, Walter-the-Man will secretly flip me the bird. I’ll respond by shaking both my middle fingers at him and we keep this up until we’re afraid that one of my parents will see us. Then we’ll giggle and Mom will say, “What? What’s so funny?” and Walter-the-Man will say, “Nothing. Alice and I were just discussing the trade imbalance with China and the federal-budget deficit.”

  Walter-the-Man was in a long-distance relationship with a woman named Deborah for a couple years. I never met her and they broke up in the spring of my freshman year, though they have remained friends. She is dean of admissions at some university in North Carolina. They saw each other infrequently but apparently talked on the phone for hours. Walter spent a lot of time telling us her stories “from the front lines of the bloody college-admissions battle.” He’d tell them in a news-announcer voice.

  Last year, when I had to pretend to be interested in schools other than Yale, Walter-the-Man offered to have Deborah talk to me and give me some advice.

  I didn’t think I needed any. All the crazy things he told us about what the students and parents did to get in had nothing to do with me. Because:

  1. I am the top student at my high school.

  2. My SAT scores are 780, 800, and 800.

  3. I have high 700s and a few 800s on my SAT IIs.

  4. I am a National Merit Semifinalist.

  5. I’ve taken the handful of AP classes offered by my school and got 5’s on the AP tests.

  Most kids from our school who go to college—and not all that many do—end up at one of the state universities and many of them start out at a community college. The National Honor Society kids go to the U.

  Hardly anyone applies to fancy-pants colleges, but both my parents grew up in New York City and went to Bowdoin, a dinky private college in Maine, which is where they met. They both have graduate degrees from Duke. They aren’t snobby or anything, but they have told me since I can remember that while they have chosen to live here, I should probably go some place more urbane (“refined”) for college.

  I figured you couldn’t get more urbane than Yale, one of the oldest schools in one of the oldest states in the country. But that wasn’t the reason I first got interested in it.

  My favorite book is the tattered copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry Dad used in college. Sometimes he and I sit around and read poems aloud and then analyze them. I know how nerdy that makes me sound, but really, it’s what I like to do. Dad likes it too, and I like to make him happy. We especially love Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke. I adore Sylvia Plath.

  I was obsessed with The Bell Jar for a while and asked my family to call me Esther, but it didn’t stick. Dad doesn’t love old Sylvia. She’s a tad too nutty for him, he says.

  Once I noticed how many poets had gone to Yale, I decided that’s where I would go to college. This was in the days when I thought I might want to write poetry. I had a great English teacher in eighth grade, Mr. Brooks, and he made me think I could be a poet. I’ve since given up on that and am happy just to read poetry and talk about it with Dad and Ms. Chan, my English teacher this year, but the Yale part stayed with me.

  It was all set: I did really well in school; I’d apply to Yale and go there.

  In my mind, it was a done deal. What did I have to worry about?

  After Walter-the-Man broke up with Deborah, he dated Sage, a cosmetician twenty-five years his junior. Mom kept telling him what an idiot he was, that he needed to grow the hell up, that Deborah had been hi
s perfect match, that he wasn’t going to do better.

  He responded by telling my mother she needed a deeper hair conditioner and she might want to consider a French manicure because her fingers looked kind of stubby. Then he gave her a gift certificate to a day spa. My mother loves pampering and it stopped her from nagging Walter-the-Man about ditching Deborah. For about fifteen minutes.

  When he started seeing Chef Susan, Walter-the-Man began to comment on Dad’s cooking. He’d say, “Chef Susan uses pancetta and porcini in her omelets.” I had to look up both of those things and found out Chef Susan made eggs with bacon and mushrooms—big whoop.

  He said things like, “Chef Susan thinks copper pots give better temperature control than those Le Creusets you use.”

  Dad finally told Walter-the-Man he could go eat Chef Susan’s food if it was so great, but when he had dinner with us, he might consider developing an interest in the weather.

  Not long afterward, a copper pot appeared on my dad’s stove. When Dad tried to thank him, Walter-the-Man said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Matt.”

  Walter-the-Man likes to try to use me as his servant. From his (GO DUKE!) basketball/football/volleyball/golf/shuffleboard-watching post in front of our TV he’ll wave an empty bottle at me and say, “Hey, Alice, go fetch me another beer.”

  I’ll say, “No, sir, Walter-the-Man, I’m not your retriever. You can fetch your own dang beer. And don’t be asking me to do your laundry or cook your meals or clean your toilet, either. If you want a maid, bucko, pay for one.”

  But I’ll always go into the kitchen and get him another beer.

  Walter-the-Man may be a pain in the butt, but he’s our pain in the butt.

  4

  A big mistake you can make with a New Year’s resolution is to tell people about it, especially people who will remember and ask you how it’s going. They’re trying to be helpful, though sometimes you feel like you’re being bullied by your own good intentions.

  Of course I told Jenni about my resolution, since it was her idea to make resolutions in the first place, and also because if you don’t tell your best friend about something, it’s like it doesn’t exist. That’s part of what it means to have a best friend: you have a warehouse for all your stray thoughts, which, if you keep them in your head, don’t seem as real as they do when you hear them come out of your mouth.

  Jenni never forgets one single thing. We’ve been friends for more than a decade and although we’re different in lots of ways, she knows me better than anyone. She’ll remember what I wore the time we went bowling with these skeevy guys from Morgantown who tried to get us to eat mushrooms—not the kind you put in omelets—and she’ll remember what flavor birthday cake I’ve had every year since we were six. She’ll remember the time I drank a bunch of Southern Comfort and she had to hold my hair back while I puked and said I was never going to drink alcohol again, something I think about each time I drink alcohol, but she never mentions. She’ll remember I said I didn’t want to go to college still a virgin, but she doesn’t point out I’ve never even kissed a boy.

  She doesn’t bring these things up to use against me, as some bad friends would, but instead waits for me to mention something or ask her a question: What was the name of that restaurant we went to that time in New York City? Where did I first have tiramisu? And then she’ll tell me. So she’s not only a storeroom for random thoughts but also the historian of my life.

  A few nights before New Year’s Eve, Jenni and I were at my house.

  I had been complaining about my Yale rejection. Which was pretty much the only thing I’d talked or thought about for the previous two weeks. Jenni had been trying to comfort me, but like everyone else, she was so surprised I had been rejected she didn’t know what to say except that they were making a big mistake. I’d given up trying to argue.

  Jenni didn’t understand why Yale was such a big deal to me, since no one from her family had even gone to college.

  Jenni didn’t talk about her plans for next year and I avoided asking. I didn’t want to pressure her and make her feel bad if she chose not to go, which was kind of what I expected.

  Instead, I kept trying to make her see what a failure I was and that I probably wouldn’t get in anywhere else. But she loves me too much to see my flaws, and she indulges me when I spend hours pointing out these very same flaws. Jenni just kept saying, “They’re making a big mistake. They’ll be sorry when you’re interviewed by Oprah.”

  That night my parents went out to a holiday party. I had to beg them to go. Mom threatened to cancel because she was worried about me.

  For two weeks I’d been saying I wanted to stick my head in the oven.

  For two weeks I had barked and snarled at everyone who wasn’t Walter.

  I was miserable for darned sure, but I wasn’t suicidal.

  When I said I wanted to stick my head in the oven it was a joke. Black humor, people. But no one thought I was in a joke-making frame of mind.

  I had to remind my mother we had an electric oven and if I tried to pull a Sylvia Plath, all I’d manage was to singe my hair and eyebrows off.

  Still, before my parents went out I overheard Mom tell Jenni to keep an eye on me. Which is kind of funny, since Jenni does that all the time anyway. It’s kind of her job. Just like my job is to make a lot of obnoxious comments. And to make her believe in herself more. For such an amazing person, Jenni can be a little insecure.

  Jenni and I lay on my bed with a buffet of snack bags between us. Walter was on bed patrol, sniffing around and peering over the edge to make sure the perimeter was secure. Then he walked into a bag of Ritz Bits.

  “Hey,” said Jenni. “He’s in the bag.” She looked a little disgusted, though it’s not like she hasn’t seen him do this kind of thing seven thousand times.

  Walter wasn’t, technically, in the bag. Only his front end was. On a search-and-destroy mission, he grabbed a Ritz Bits, backed out of the bag, and retreated to my lap, where he perched to disarm it with his teeth.

  “Okay,” said Jenni. “It’s time to resolve.”

  “Resolve what?”

  “Resolve what we’re going to do better next year. New Year’s is coming, or did you forget because you don’t approve of a holiday that’s all about getting drunk and making noise.”

  It’s true. I don’t like New Year’s Eve. It’s noisy and unruly and usually cold.

  Plus, there’s no good candy. The best holidays involve candy. I’m a big fan of Christmas, even though my family doesn’t celebrate it, because there’s so much good stuff to eat. Hanukah’s pretty lame in comparison. Those gold chocolate coins we get for playing dreidel taste like poop medicine.

  This year, I was too dejected (“sad and depressed”) to help Jenni bake Christmas cookies, which is something we always do. She likes to give them out to everyone she knows and even some people she doesn’t know that well, like our UPS driver and the secretaries at school.

  As far as holidays go, Halloween is tops in my book, except for the whole costume part. I try to be strategic about gathering a year’s supply of Indian corn because it’s seasonal, and even then, it comes only in small bags. If you get the larger bags of Autumn Mix, you end up with a few Indian corns, a lot of regular old candy corn, and a bunch of nasty pumpkins.

  I can’t stand the pumpkins so I make Jenni eat them. She likes to point out they’re made of exactly the same stuff as candy corn so why don’t I like them?

  “BECAUSE THEY TASTE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!” I have to gently remind her.

  Jenni doesn’t understand how shapes affect taste. She also doesn’t understand the Peeps hierarchy.

  It’s a happy day when Easter Peeps make their annual appearance at the grocery store. I only like the yellow chicks, which must be eaten stale—or frozen, if you don’t have the time to leave them out—and you have to nibble the butt first and then bite off the head. The pink bunnies are okay, but everything else in Peeps-dom is a wannabe.

  Do
n’t get me started on the purples and the blues.

  Or on Peeps for other holidays. That’s just wrong.

  I’d gotten so worked up thinking about candy I managed to forget, for a few minutes, that my future career might be ringing up Peeps at a grocery store and asking, “Paper or plastic?”

  “Resolution,” said Jenni. “New Year’s. Now.”

  I pounded my right fist on my heart and said, “I hereby resolve to be more like Walter,” which was, when you think about it, not a half-bad resolution.

  “Alice,” Jenni said.

  I said, “Walter is always in a good mood. He’s curious and playful and interested in others. He’s loyal and faithful and has a great sense of humor. He’s open to new things and never bites anyone. He eats when he’s hungry, and when he’s full, instead of stuffing his face until he needs to go lie down, he stashes the leftovers. Now, it might be better if he didn’t store them in the far corners of the closet or under the bed, since sometimes he forgets about the piles and they start to rot and stink, and Mom gets all, ‘You can’t let that rat spread food all over the house,’ and I have to clean up after him, but it’s a good policy in case we ever run out of food. You can’t fault someone for preparing for a rainy day.”

  I stopped for a minute to poke Walter in the belly. He grabbed my digit with both of his tiny four-fingered hands and brought it to his mouth and licked it.

  “And,” I continued, “Walter would not have been rejected from the one school he wanted to go to. He’s never failed at anything in his life. And he loves me even though I’m a loser.”

  “Alice, knock it off already. You are so far from being a loser that if all the losers in the world had a gigantic party, you wouldn’t even make it to the C-list. Until two weeks ago, you had never failed at anything in your life. Come on, I think we should do this. Let’s each think of something.”

  “You don’t think Walter is worthy of emulation?” I can get defensive on Walter’s behalf, since there has been such a long history of bigoted persecution against his species.