The Oriental Trading catalog comes in the mail with Dad’s stack of Wall Street Journals and by the next morning it’s on the back of the toilet, pages curling from the shower. Temu before Temu. Everything in it comes in bulk. Twenty-four plastic leis for five ninety-nine, a gross of rubber frogs, grass table skirts by the dozen, sticker sheets in quantities nobody on this earth could use, printed for people who have that many people.
The good issues I take back to my room and go through at night with a ballpoint. Tiki torches. Coconut cups with the bendy straws. Paper lanterns strung on wire. A piñata shaped like a parrot. The order form in the back has twelve blank lines for item number, color, quantity, and I fill in all twelve and never tear it out.
The party is at dusk on our deck with the torches going down both sides and the parrot hanging off the gutter and the coconuts getting refilled and nobody going home. It never rains on it. Nothing tips over. I have this party in the bathroom, in my bed, out in the dry crusty field behind the house where I’m sure a rattlesnake is waiting for my ankle, and it is a daydream, a wish, a want, a prayer.
The real deck is where Dad comes out after a twelve hour shift, boots off, and throws Frisbees for the dogs before he’s had dinner. The wind comes across the yard with nothing to slow it down and a tiki torch out there would last about as long as a match. Mom and Dad don’t have people over.
In my room the sock drawer is the washer and the drawer under it is the dryer, and I draw burners on gray paper with a red marker so I can brown ground beef the way I watch her do it, and I cook for the dolls, and I set the table, and everybody eats.
The one night anybody comes is Dad’s reunion, and while they’re all inside I back the Comanche into his friend’s car and put the taillight across the gravel in red plastic pieces. I pull forward, kick what I can find under the tire, and go sit at the kitchen table and wait for it. When the two of them come out with their beers they stand there looking at the bumper a long time, and then they start laughing, both of them, and Dad puts his hand flat on his friend’s shoulder and leaves it there. Nobody comes in to get me. I sit on the back step in the dark way past when I should be in bed listening to a sound I can’t place at first because I haven’t heard it much.
The rest of the summer the phone hangs on the kitchen wall and Mom waits for it. Oil on her legs at the counter while she waits, smelling like Jovan musk. When the call comes we load up and drive out to the park at Foothills and she walks the loop with the other mothers, three times, four times around, while we’re all turned loose. Bible school in June with the paper crowns. Wednesday nights with the verses. The Christian bookstore with the cassettes and the devotionals and a wall of figurines with their big wet eyes. Mountain Dew runs to the Kum and Go, fountain and bottle both, and if we’d done something wrong that day we went for free. The calendar on the refrigerator is filled in through August in her small handwriting, and for two people who don’t have any friends, my parents are forever keeping track of what’s popular.
The knocker on our door says AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. Over the stove there’s GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD in cross-stitch with the glass gone soft from the grease. There’s a fish on the back of the van. I learn the verses cold, I could say them in my sleep, and I do sometimes.
At youth group I say out loud that we don’t seem very on fire for God, and the pastor waits until after and walks me down to the hallway by the coat hooks and talks to me quiet enough that not one person turns around. That night the catalog is right where I left it, swollen from the steam, and I open it to the luau pages and start circling.
I have a dining table now. Before this I had a room at the Lariat with a mini fridge and a dog, so I want to be clear about what a table is. There are platters in the top cabinet I’ve never taken down, a folding table still in its plastic in the garage, a box of string lights, a case of mason jars I bought for a reason I could explain to you if you asked me to.
The catalog still comes. Not to that house, that house sold, but here, with my name on it and a customer number I never gave anybody. Same parrot piñata. Same grass skirts by the dozen. They’ve added a cotton candy machine that does forty and a whole separate edition called Fun & Faith.
Berkshire Hathaway bought the company in 2012. Dad read the Wall Street Journal every day of his life, stacks of them in the spare room, cups and handles and W’s, hours in the green chair working out where the money was going, and he never made a dime. The one thing Buffett wanted was sitting on the back of our toilet the entire time.
I want to open a Pilates studio. I have never said that out loud to anybody who could do anything about it, but I can see it better than the room I’m sitting in. Morning light, mirrors on the long wall, rubber floor. Reformers down both sides with the springs color coded, red and blue and yellow, and the sound of a room full of them is the best sound I know: the click of a spring going on, the carriage running out and coming back, forty pounds of somebody’s body moving on a track and not making much noise about it. Water bottles sweating on the sill. Everybody’s shoes in a pile by the door because nobody wears shoes in there. Reformers run four thousand apiece and the company that sells them mails a catalog too.
Ten reformers. That’s what fits.
The roster is on a clipboard by the door with the date at the top and ten lines under it, first name and last, and there’s a pen on a string so nobody walks off with it.
I start at the top.
