Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Six


Lunch Bunch





Let me just clarify one thing: I don’t actually eat lunch in the library. Food and beverages are not allowed, as the signage posted every two feet will tell you. So I scarf down my lunch standing in front of my locker, then head for sanctuary.

The first thing I do when I get there is find an open computer and check out my mom’s blog. Each new post is an adventure in potential humiliation, but somehow I can’t help myself. I have to see how my mom has reconstructed her homemade life for public viewing.

My mom is a freelance journalist, which is to say a writer who doesn’t make any money. She used to be a reporter at the Manneville Gazette, but when Avery was born she downgraded to correspondent, which meant she contributed the occasional article, but most nights fell asleep in front of the computer, too tired to type. After we moved out to Farm World, she quit the paper entirely and began working on a memoir about—wait for it—moving out to Farm World. Step one for writing a memoir: blogging a memoir.

“I want to respect your privacy,” she told me a few days before she launched Gone Country (subtitle: Notes on a Homemade Life). “I won’t post any pictures of you, but there might be times I want to write about you or use something you’ve said. Is that okay?”

Was it okay? I was ten and a half. My mother was going to make me famous! It was more than okay. It was excellent!

And for a little while, it really was. In my mother’s portraits of mini-farm life—the day the goats arrived, her misadventures in beekeeping, how she finally learned to bake bread—I came off as a bright, philosophical kid who had interesting insights into the inner lives of chickens. Avery was the mischievous little girl always getting into scrapes. My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was portrayed as a “let’s look on the bright side of things” kind of guy, the pillar my ever-bumbling mother (this is how she presents herself in her blog—the woman who messes stuff up in charming, amusing ways, misreads instructions, puts in an order for fifty pounds of marigold seed when she meant to ask for five packets) leans on in times of distress.

When did it begin to go sour for me? Was it the time she veered ever so slightly off the topic of mini-farm life to report on my first boy-girl party, when I was eleven and a half? She pretended the party at Quaid Porter’s house had something to do with life on the farm because it happened to be on the day Patsy Cline had her first litter (and yes, she made connections between goat babies and spin the bottle, much to my alarm), but the fact is, she was just looking for an excuse to talk about the fact that I was growing up.

Admittedly, for the most part my mom sticks to Farm World in her posts. The problem is, since she started Gone Country three years ago, it’s become sort of a local institution. The Manneville Gazette ran a feature on my mom and her blog a year or so after she’d started blogging, and suddenly everyone seemed to be reading it. My mom went from getting three or four comments per post to chalking up twenty-five to thirty. People around town with their own mini-farm dreams started living vicariously through her. The library asked her to give a lecture series on living sustainably on five acres or less. A group inspired by my mother’s chicken musings began a movement to overturn a long-standing ordinance against keeping chickens within city limits. My mom was asked to give a speech to the city council, and many of her fans credit her passionate oration with making chickens legal in Manneville proper.

So people far and wide have a thrice-weekly window into my family’s life, and while my guess is that aside from my close friends none of my peers (a) are aware that my mother and her blog exist, and (b) wouldn’t read my mother’s blog if they were aware of it, nevertheless it’s nervous-making to know that at any given time people who might possibly be persuaded to know and love me could read three years’ worth of archives about my family and our life down on the farm.

I look around the library as I’m waiting for my mom’s page to load. It’s the usual B lunch suspects, the tall kid with his question mark slouch and purple acne reading steadily through back issues of Nintendo Power at the round table by the radiator, the two guys who appear to be on the lam from sixth grade working a Rubik’s cube as they sit next to each other on matching orange beanbag chairs, passing the puzzle back and forth and muttering frustrated obscenities. A round girl with angelic yellow curls writes with a Sharpie pen in a thick, hardback journal, occasionally stopping to doodle another black ink tattoo on her left arm.

Once in a while someone appears who gives you hope, a cute boy reading the latest Sports Illustrated or a girl of the normal-looking variety thumbing through the books on the “This Just In!” cart. Are they cafeteria refugees too? But they never show up two days in a row, and my hopes for finding friendship in the library are dashed yet again.

That’s my dream, of course. That some regular, everyday people will show up and recognize me as someone who is basically normal, in spite of my Farm Girl mishaps, but whose soul is too sensitive to deal with the cafeteria alone. We will become friends and find other B lunch refugees, hiding out in the back of the school auditorium or hovering around the edges of the newspaper office, pretending to have a lead on a big story. When we’ve banded together enough troops, we’ll take over a table in the cafeteria and never be lonely again.

Looking around, I see that once again I’m out of luck. I turn back to the computer screen, and there’s the picture of the chickenmobile directly over the banner that asks in bright yellow letters whether or not I’m ready for the country. Sure, why not, I think, and click on the downward cursor.

Today my mom has blogged about the trip she and Avery took Saturday to the flea market over at the state fair grounds. In the last two years, my mother has become a huge fan of getting as much of your stuff secondhand as possible. Not just clothes and books, but tools, linens, and small kitchen appliances. Saturday she and Avery found a treadle sewing machine. They spent most of Sunday cleaning and oiling it, then giving it about a hundred test runs before they got a straight seam. It’s actually a pretty cool machine. Too bad my mom can’t sew.

She admits as much at the beginning of paragraph two in today’s post. I can’t tell you how much I now regret rejecting my mother’s offers to teach me to sew when I was young, she writes. She’ll smile when she hears I got this machine.

My grandmother will fall out of her chair laughing when she hears my mom got a sewing machine. Everything my mother does these days cracks Grammy up. As a teenager, my mother swore she would never stay at home to raise children, she would never learn to cook, and she would never submit herself to the tyranny of yard work—she’d pave her yard over if she ever had one.

And now here she is, with her very own mini-farm and a sewing machine.

I’ve decided to make as many of our clothes as possible from now on, my mom suddenly declares at the beginning of paragraph four, and I actually choke on my own saliva. I sputter and turn red-faced. Mrs. Welsch, the librarian, looks at me in alarm, but I wave her off. A little spittle in the old windpipe won’t kill anybody.

On the other hand, having to wear clothes sewn by my mom just might.

You have to understand about my mom. She’s very competent as a rule, and highly intelligent. When she puts her mind to something—like learning to cook or starting a blog, for instance—she’s determined and ultimately successful.

Except when it comes to arts and crafts.

My mother has tried knitting, crocheting, and cross-stitch. She has taken up pottery, basket making, and weaving. She has failed miserably in each attempt. It’s a sad cycle to witness, actually. You know something’s about to start when she comes home with a gleam in her eye and a shopping bag from Michael’s or A.C. Moore. “From now on we’re making our own Christmas cards,” is the sort of thing she’ll declare, dumping a bundle of rubber stamps and ink pads onto the kitchen table.

Now, who could mess up rubber stamping? you’re probably wondering, and the answer is: my mom. Her stamped images turn out blurry, the ink gets all over her hands and her clothes, and by the end of her efforts to make our Christmas cards, she’s in such a fluster my dad has to buy her dinner and a bottle of wine just to get her calmed down again.

When it comes to creative endeavors, my mom should stick to perfecting her basil-cremini pizza sauce.

I log off the computer and, feeling a little shaky, take a seat at my usual table, two tables over from Angel Hair Tattoo Girl. Visions of me dressed in homemade clothes dance like sugarplums-gone-bad in my head. I see the sagging hemlines, the left sleeves shorter than the right sleeves, the fabric bunching up in all sorts of unfortunate places. What if my mom decides to make jeans? Can you make jeans at home?

Oh. Please. No.

“Are you okay?” Angel Hair Tattoo Girl whispers across the tables, and I realize I’ve been whimpering. I nod, and she takes my nod as an invitation to move closer.

“You seem a little freaked out,” she tells me in a slightly louder voice as she takes the seat beside me. “Which, believe me, I know all about. Every day of my life is a freak-out day.”

I look at her Sharpie tattoos and believe her.

“Like today?” she continues, apparently needing no encouragement from me to go on. “I wake up and there’s, like, totally nothing to wear. My mom’s in Europe on this business trip. And my dad is useless. You know, like, welcome to the twenty-first century, Dad, where men do laundry, right?”

I nod. Right. Kids, too, I think, but keep it to myself.

“So what choice do I have except raid my mom’s closet, which she would kill me for if she knew. But here’s the weird part.” She pauses for dramatic effect, and I check out her outfit, which is nice, but unremarkable, a soft black sweater and a dark brown velour skirt over black tights and very cool-looking biker boots. “What’s really weird is my mom’s clothes smell like her. I mean, her perfume, and so all day it’s like my mom has been walking right beside me. Which, you have to admit, is a pretty freaky feeling.”

“That would be pretty freaky,” I agree.

“Hey, did you ever read that book, Freaky Friday? Where the mom and the daughter change places?”

And she’s off again. All I have to do to encourage her to keep talking is to nod and smile at the right places. I don’t even have to listen to what she’s saying. I can tell by the rise and fall of her voice, the dramatic pauses, and the “You know what I mean’s” when it’s time to rejoin the conversation.

Occasionally I take a moment to look around the library in hopes that someone is witnessing Janie Gorman personally and positively interacting with another human being.

Sadly, no one is.

The bell rings. Angel Hair Tattoo Girl stands. She smiles at me and extends her hand. “I’m Verbena. It’s nice to meet you. I see you here all the time.”

I take her hand, shake it. Her grip is surprisingly firm. I can’t help but ask, “Verbena?”

She shrugs. “Yeah, I know.” She bobs her head side to side in the international sign for I’m a goofball, what can I say? “My mom thought it sounded French. But you know what? After I started taking French, I realized it doesn’t sound French at all. It sounds like the name of some rundown eastern European country.”

I laugh. Mrs. Welsch, who completely ignored Verbena’s twenty-minute monologue, gives me the evil eye and the “shush” signal, index finger to pouty lips, but I don’t care. There’s something about Verbena that I like. Maybe it’s that for the last twenty minutes she’s taken my mind off the outfits my mom plans to make for me just as soon as she learns to thread a needle without drawing blood.

“I’ll see you here tomorrow, okay?” Verbena asks over her shoulder, retrieving her journal and Sharpie from her table. “It was really cool talking to you.”

I wave and gather my books. I try not to think about Verbena’s Sharpie tattoos. When the hand of friendship is offered, it’s bad manners to refuse it, even if it’s covered with tiny black peace signs and roses and—what were those other things, anyway? Angels of Death?

Doesn’t matter. Somebody talked to me. Verbena the Tattooed Girl talked to me.

I have arrived.