Octavia Boone's Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything Read online

  Here are Andrew’s big questions:

  Is there life in outer space?

  What was around before the Big Bang?

  Why does time go forward but not backward?

  Why can’t we travel faster than the speed of light?

  How do we talk to an alien if it’s nothing like people but more like a jellyfish or a metal cube?

  Is there really a Wealth Corner, and if I open my window to get a breath of fresh air because I am suffocating and dying of heat prostration, will the IRS really audit my parents’ tax returns and bankrupt us so that we have to go live in Connecticut with my uncle Carl?

  I thought those weren’t bad actually, except the Wealth Corner one, which was sarcastic. Besides Andrew likes his uncle Carl.

  “Why would anyone want to talk to a jellyfish?” I said.

  “You would want to talk to it if it was an intelligent jellyfish,” Andrew said. “Like a Star Trek jellyfish.”

  “There weren’t any Star Trek jellyfish,” I said. “On Star Trek, every intelligent alien life-form in the universe was like people.”

  “No, they weren’t,” said Andrew.

  Looking shifty, so you could tell he couldn’t think of any examples.

  Then Aaron Pennebaker came over and told us about how his cousin Michael got stung on the leg by a jellyfish while he was swimming in the ocean in Hawaii.

  “His leg swelled up and turned black, and they had to take him to the hospital,” Aaron said. “He nearly died.”

  “Was it an intelligent jellyfish?” I said.

  “No,” said Aaron. “It was a stupid jellyfish. Michael is a jerk. A smart jellyfish would have stung him on the head.”

  Then the bell rang and we all had to go in.

  Usually when I got home from school, Boone was in his shed in the backyard, painting his masterpiece. But that afternoon he was in the kitchen making dinner, though he was still wearing his painting clothes, which were a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of splattered overalls. Boone always said that his whole career was painted on those overalls. His Blue Period, his Yellow Period, his Red and Green Period. There was even a Pink Period on his rear end, but that might just have been where he sat down in something.

  Boone did most of the cooking at our house, because Ray worked long hours at her law office and didn’t have time. I liked Boone cooking, because it always gave us a chance to talk. When he was out in his shed, painting his masterpiece, he never liked to be disturbed because that broke his creative flow. But cooking didn’t seem to require as much creative flow, or at least not the same kind.

  I also liked it when I got to help. Boone would let me chop vegetables and grate cheese, and he taught me how to separate eggs. Though at first he told me that that’s when you put one egg in the kitchen and one in the living room. I let him think I thought that was funny.

  Then he showed me how you crack the egg and tip the yolk back and forth between the two halves of the shell until the white part drips into one bowl, and then you drop the yolk into another.

  “Do you think there’s a purpose to life?” I asked Boone.

  “Is this a trick question?” Boone said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Boone began to heat olive oil in a frying pan while he considered.

  From the back I could see where he’d gotten paint in his ponytail.

  “I think the purpose of life is to make the most of it while you’ve got it,” Boone said. “Because, in my opinion, we only get to go around once.”

  He threw some onion slices into the olive oil.

  Then he said, “‘You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.’ That’s Henry. Henry pretty much knows it all.”

  Henry is Henry David Thoreau. Boone always calls him Henry, as if Henry were still alive and living down the street and they were best buddies. He acts as if he and Henry sat on the porch together and kicked around the simple life and talked about the weather at Walden Pond and the best way to grow beans.

  “So what do you think are the world’s big questions?” I said.

  Boone thought for a minute, stirring.

  “The big one for me is ‘Why won’t your mother wear belly shirts?’” he said. “I think she’d look really good in one of those skimpy little shirts. And I ask her and she says, ‘Don’t be silly.’ You could help me out there, Octavia. You could drop a hint. Get some advice from that fashion-nut friend of yours, the one who wants to be Coco Chanel.”

  “No, really,” I said.

  Boone threw some chopped peppers in with the onions and stirred some more.

  “Seriously?” he said.

  “Yeah, seriously,” I said.

  Boone thought again.

  Then he said, “I think the world’s biggest question is ‘What is a good life?’ It’s the most important thing anybody has to solve.”

  “Well, what is a good life?” I said.

  “Nobody can answer that for you,” Boone said. “You have to work it out for yourself.”

  That means that Boone hasn’t worked it out yet.

  These are what I think are the world’s big questions:

  Is there a God?

  If there is a God, then why do bad things happen to good people, like earthquakes and Hurricane Katrina and 9/11?

  If there is a God, which religion is the right religion?

  Do people have souls or just brains?

  What happens to us after we die?

  Is there a purpose to life?

  Why would God bother to find math homework for dorks like Marjean?

  AFTER A FEW interminable Sundays with the Redeemers, I had learned a lot more about the kids in my class than I had ever wanted to know, and I had worked out a plan for running away from home and living in the Wolverton County Natural History Museum, in the diorama that had the bear cave. I figured I could have a pillow in there, and a flashlight so that I could read, and I could sneak out at night and get food out of the snack machines.

  I knew the most about Marjean, because I was still sitting next to her and because Marjean planned to be a missionary someday to Zimbabwe or maybe the Amazon jungle in Brazil and she was treating me as a sort of practice heathen. Marjean’s last name was Duveen. Marjean Duveen. She had two little brothers named Bud and Grover, and her dad drove a milk truck, one of those big tankers that goes around collecting milk from farms. Her mother stayed at home and scrubbed stuff. That’s God’s design, Marjean said. The man is the head of the house, just like God is the head of the church, and a woman’s place is to serve the family in the home. I wondered if any of the Redeemers had spilled that to Ray, about serving the family in the home.

  Marjean wanted to learn how to play the guitar because, along with being a missionary, she also wanted to be a Christian country-music star. Though my take was that she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell unless she traded in those frumpy dresses for a pair of rhinestone jeans.

  I’d been wondering how Marjean survived the teasing at school, what with those braids and always wearing outfits that looked like they came out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog from 1895. But it turned out that she didn’t go to public school. The Redeemers had their own school. Everybody in Mrs. Prescott’s class went to it except me and Ronnie, who had learning disabilities and went to a special academy on the other side of town.

  Ronnie lived in the trailer park over past the railroad tracks and his mother worked part-time at Tinker’s Tavern on Main Street, but in the part of the tavern that serves the hamburgers, not the part that has the bar.

  Cathy Ann used to be very fat, but she lost weight with the help of God, and now she was a size five.

  Matthew wanted to go to college, but his parents didn’t think much of college.

  Todd wanted to make computer games with Christian superheroes, like David and Goliath, but with rocket guns.

  Marie’s grandmother once saw the face of Jesus Christ in a potato c
hip.

  I’d done everything I could think of to get out of going back to the Fellowship of the Redeemer, including faking diphtheria and threatening suicide. But Ray wasn’t having any. Ray, once she got an idea in her head, was as stubborn as sixteen mules and the Rock of Gibraltar. I suppose that’s what made her such a good lawyer, but it’s not so great in a parent. Sometimes talking to Ray was like shouting down a well.

  Boone wasn’t any help either because he figured, what with Ray always switching around all the time, that all I had to do was wait a little bit and the whole thing would go away. Also he was obsessed with his latest masterpiece. He’d just head out to his painting shed saying “Try to be patient, Octavia, and don’t nag and upset your mother.”

  “What about not upsetting me?” I said.

  Yelled, actually.

  But by then Boone was shut up in his shed and in the middle of creative flow, and might as well have been in a submarine at the bottom of the sea.

  So I went next door to see Mr. and Mrs. Peacock.

  Mr. and Mrs. Peacock are the closest thing I have to a grandfather and grandmother, since Boone is alienated from his parents due to irreconcilable philosophical differences and Ray’s mother died before I was born. Her father is remarried and lives in Palm Beach with his second wife, Edna, who has blue hair and a wicked golf swing. They send a ten-dollar bill for my birthday and a check for Christmas, and that’s about all I hear from them.

  Anyway, as long as we’ve lived here, whenever Boone and Ray weren’t around, I was sent next door to stay with the Peacocks. That worked out pretty well, since Mr. and Mrs. Peacock don’t have any grandchildren of their own, due to Sandy having what Mr. Peacock says are shortsighted and unnatural career ambitions and no regard for biology. Mrs. Peacock likes children, and Mr. Peacock says I’m not as tomfool as most kids these days.

  Mr. Peacock hadn’t heard of the Redeemers, but he knew a lot about the Cadillac Motel because of the trouble Arnold Sykes got into there with that floozy half his age in a skirt the size of a penny postage stamp and hair of a color that nature never put on any woman, and him, Mr. Sykes, a respectable married man and a Grand Regent of the Loyal Order of the Moose, though what he had to put up with from Lucille Sykes afterward is something he, Mr. Peacock, wouldn’t wish on a mongrel dog.

  He would have said more, but Mrs. Peacock told him to hush.

  Mrs. Peacock had heard of the Redeemers, due to believing in keeping informed about current events, unlike some people she could name, and reading something in the paper every day other than the sports page and the obituaries.

  “They’re not bad folks,” she said. “They made a donation to the Fire Department Rescue Fund, even though some of them had objections to the way the station has those Saturday night bingo games. And they brought a whole lot of food for the potluck supper. One lady made a real nice macaroni and cheese.”

  Mr. Peacock made a snort like a rhinoceros, which I recognized from watching nature shows on TV, and said it was a sad world when people were ready to sell their principles down the river for a plate of macaroni and cheese.

  “Well, what do you think I should do?” I said.

  Mrs. Peacock looked up from where she was slicing applesauce cake.

  “Well, Octavia, I don’t see as you should do a thing,” she said. “Your mama is a fine person, but she’s flighty. So you can wear yourself and everybody else out making a lot of fuss and hullabaloo, or you can sit quiet and tight and wait till she flits off onto something else, which my guess is shouldn’t take too long. And in the meantime a little Bible reading never hurt anybody.”

  “Don’t be a tomfool, Clara Jane,” Mr. Peacock said. “What they’ve got going on at that motel is a cult, and you know as well as me what to do when you meet up with a cult.”

  “What do you do when you meet up with a cult?” I said. I wondered if there were rules for cults like there were rules for other disasters. Like you’re supposed to stand in a doorway during earthquakes and go to the cellar during tornadoes and get off the telephone during thunderstorms.

  Mrs. Peacock set the applesauce cake on the table. Mr. Peacock forked up a big piece and put it on my plate. Then he pointed a bony finger at my nose.

  “What you do when you meet up with a cult,” he said, “is you get your young ass out of there.”

  We were having tea in the kitchen, which is my favorite room in the Peacock house, even though Boone says that from an artist’s point of view it’s a nightmare, like what might happen if Grandma Moses somehow got crossed up with Jasper Johns. The woodwork is turquoise, and the wallpaper has a pattern of big pink salt and pepper shakers. There’s a shelf above the stove where Mrs. Peacock keeps her collection of teapots, including my favorite, that’s shaped like a gingerbread cottage, and a framed certificate on the wall from when Mr. Peacock was honored by the Rotary Club, and a rocking chair, and a table with a red-and-white-checked oilcloth cover. I think it feels good. It has what Andrew’s mom would call positive chi.

  I put a lot of sugar and skim milk in my tea, which turned it into what Mrs. Peacock said was called cambric tea when she was a little girl.

  Mr. Peacock said there is only one name for a drink with skim milk in it: swill.

  “Well, I like it,” I said.

  Because Mr. Peacock is not completely trustworthy when it comes to food.

  Then we talked about the world’s big questions.

  These are Mrs. Peacock’s big questions:

  Why did the Lord God see fit to make things like black flies and the common cold and other aggravations to the spirit?

  Why do the people with the emptiest heads always have the loudest mouths?

  And what possesses Claudine Boucher, who doesn’t have the sense God gave a sick chicken, to think that she has anything to say about the operation of the Public Library Volunteer Circle, of which Mrs. Peacock has been president for the last fifteen years?

  These are Mr. Peacock’s big questions:

  Why does the great American public always send such empty-headed tomfools to Washington, D.C., where they do nothing but sit around on their rumps and crank up the price of pipe tobacco and gasoline?

  If those psychics you see on TV are so psychic, why don’t they ever seem to know a damn thing?

  Why would anybody in their right mind buy water in a tomfool plastic bottle when you can get all the water you want right out of the kitchen faucet?

  And what’s with those tight bicycle shorts that anybody that wears them is squeezing off the blood to the body in unnatural ways and doing God knows what permanent harm to a person’s manly parts?

  He had more, but Mrs. Peacock hushed him up.

  Mr. and Mrs. Peacock don’t have any questions about the existence of God. They’re convinced that he’s there. They’re also certain that after they die, which Mrs. Peacock refers to as Passing On, they’ll go to heaven, where they’ll be reunited with all their lost loved ones.

  Mrs. Peacock says that while no one can presume to know the face of God, she’s always imagined him as a wise old man with a white beard, a long white robe, and a shepherd’s crook, like you sometimes see on the cover of the Baptist Women’s Quarterly Magazine. Mr. Peacock said that in his mind, God looks pretty much like Abraham Lincoln, but without the stovepipe hat.

  The one thing Mrs. Peacock isn’t sure about is whether or not people are descended from apes, but Mr. Peacock says it’s pretty obvious to him. He told Mrs. Peacock just to look at her brother Billy.

  When I got home, there was a note on the refrigerator saying that Ray had gone to a Redeemers’ meeting, and Boone was still in his shed.

  These are my O words for that day: Oppressed, IgnOred, and Overruled.

  And here’s where I wanted to be: Oolloo Crossing. It’s got five Os in it and it’s in Australia, which is ten thousand miles away from Winton Falls.

  ANOTHER MONTH WENT BY and Ray didn’t show any signs of flitting off onto something else. She liked the Redeemers.<
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  I kept thinking about the life cycle of corals, how they begin as this little swimming thing called a planula that paddles all over looking for a good place to settle down. Then once it finally decides to settle, that’s it. It sticks. It stays stuck to that place for the rest of its life and develops into a coral reef. It was like that for Ray. She’d paddled around all over the place, but once she paddled up to the Redeemers, she settled down and stuck.

  She joined the Redeemers’ Wednesday night Bible discussion group and prayer circle. She stopped wearing her gold-chain necklace and her earrings and even her wedding ring because the Redeemers don’t believe in jewelry, because of the sin of vanity. She started keeping a Bible on her bedside table. She began getting a lot of phone calls from people I didn’t know.

  I couldn’t understand why Boone didn’t care.

  “Doesn’t it bother you how Ray is off with the Redeemers all the time?” I said.

  Boone shook his head.

  “Don’t worry so much,” he said. “Give her some space. She’ll drop them any day now. You know your mom. These things don’t last very long with her.”

  I began to feel sorry for Boone, because there’s a lot you miss when you’re out in the yard shut up in a shed. Boone was like an ostrich with his head buried, but in oil paint, not in sand. I realized suddenly how much of the time Boone basically wasn’t there.

  Then one night he finally yanked out his head and looked up.

  We were eating dinner, the three of us together, which we didn’t do very often due to Ray’s crowded schedule with her clients at the law office and Boone’s creative flow. Since those times were special, we always used the Mexican tablecloth that Boone and Ray got in Mexico City on their honeymoon and put flowers on the table. That night I’d picked chrysanthemums from Boone’s garden and arranged them in a big glass jar. I love chrysanthemums, first because chrysanthemum is such a great fluffy orange-Popsicle-colored word, and second because of the spelling-lesson scene in Anne of Green Gables, where Anne beats Gilbert Blythe by spelling it: “Chrysanthemum. C-H-R-Y-S-A-N-T-H-E-M-U-M. Chrysanthemum.”