Big Ugly Dish

This wasn’t my idea. My mom pulled hard on my hand to keep me from looking at the tufts of grass that poked through the sidewalk cracks like hair on a straggly dog. She was always rushing me. This time we were visiting our “new neighbors” who lived in this old tired house on the top of the hill. We moved from a suburb in Columbus out here because they thought it would be a better place to raise me. I didn’t have a say in all this, as you’ve probably guessed. Eleven-year-old girls don’t get to decide where the family moves. My dad works as a computer programmer and my mom is a tax accountant so they said they can work from anywhere. Why they needed to bring me to this stupid wilderness I will never know. This place is full of old trees, giant rocks and no friends.

We made our way up onto the porch of the house, which seemed like it should have blown away in the wind already. It was a small house, tall but not wide and made me think of horror movies.

My mom knocked on the door frame to avoid touching the tattered screen door.

“Just a minute,” came the voice from inside.

My mom and I looked around at the yard while we waited for the woman to come to the door. The lawn was patchy and shaggy, but someone had mowed most of it recently. There were evergreen hedges next to the porch on both sides. A big satellite dish sat in the middle of the yard. Bees had made homes in the wood siding just under the roofline.

“Hey, I’m sorry, I was in the middle of making some cookies. How can I help you?” She looked at my mom expectantly. The woman had a nice smile and a single gold tooth in the front of her mouth which gleamed. She looked thin in her gray tank top and burgundy short-shorts. Her bright red hair was pulled into a messy bun.

“Hello, my name is Alberta and this is Phoebe!” My mom grinned stupidly at the woman. “We just moved into the place at the bottom of the hill and we wanted to say hi.”

The woman smiled too. “Oh wow, the Franklin place! That’s good. That’s real good. I appreciate you coming up here. And you have a family!” she said, looking down at me. I frowned and hugged my mom’s leg.

“Yes, my husband and me and Phoebe. We’re sure happy to be in Pickaday County! What is your name, ma’am?”

“Oh, where are my manners! I’m Gwen and my daughter is Philippa. My husband Phil passed away a couple of years ago.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” My mom reached out her hand to Gwen but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Quite alright, we’ve mostly recovered,” Gwen said. “Come in, neighbor, come in. How are you, Phoebe?”

I just looked up at her.

“She is a bit shy around strangers,” my mom said. She called it “playing shy” but I felt like it made sense to be a bit careful around people until you get to know them.

Gwen sat us in the living room on an old yellow couch with a cool driftwood table in front of it as she got some drinks and cookies. My mom surprised me by asking for coffee, which she usually didn’t drink in the afternoons.

“Phoebe, would you like to meet Philippa?”

“I guess,” I replied.

“Philippa!” Gwen screamed. My legs shot out in front of me as the noise of Gwen’s voice reverberated.

“Just a moment!” came the reply scream, sounding like it was coming from downstairs.

“What caused you to come to Pickaday County? It’s Alberta, right? Alberta?”

“Yes, Alberta. Like the province in Canada.”

“Okay. I don’t know that much about Canada, truthfully,” Gwen said casually as she poured the coffee in my mom’s cup and 7-up into mine and we crunched on the oatmeal butterscotch cookies. “Alberta. That is a really nice name,” Gwen smiled apologetically.

A young girl with long golden hair, blue sweat pants and a pale pajama top ran to the top of the stairs and stood and stared at us.

“Philly, these are our new neighbors. This is Alberta and Phoebe. I think Phoebe is just about your age.”

“Alberta, like the province?” Philippa looked at my mom.

“Yes,” my mom said, then looked quickly over to Gwen.

“Oh don’t worry," Gwen flipped her hand. "She’s smarter than me and I know it. She’s smarter than everybody. Just ask her. How a dingaling and a drunk produced her, I'll never know.”

“I am not conceited and you are not a dingaling,” Philippa said quietly. Then she strode across the living room floor and offered her hand to me. After a long few seconds, I put my hand into Philippa’s, who gently pulled me out of my seat and towards the stairs.

“May Phoebe and I play downstairs, Mom?”

“It’s okay with me but you’ll have to address Alberta too, okay?”

“It’s fine with me,” my mom grinned at the girl.

“Let’s go.” Philippa led me as she bounded down the stairs.

“They are just going to gossip,” Philippa told me once we reached the basement level. The basement had a smelly carpet and dark blue walls.

“Yeah,” was all I could offer. I hoped Philippa didn’t want to gossip because I didn’t know any.

“You gotta come see what I’m working on, Phoebe,” Philippa led me to the corner of the basement which had sheets of transparent plastic enclosing it where the carpet stopped. The inside of the temporary room looked like a workshop, which surprised me.

Philippa moved around the equipment confidently and grabbed a piece of wood with something metal attached to one end.

“It’s a noiseless hammer,” Philippa said matter-of-factly. I just looked at her blankly.

“You see, most hammers cause a lot of commotion. This hammer can hit nails on wood and it makes only a small sound, less than 20 decibels. Regular hammers are like 50 decibels. You can barely hear it. See?” She wound up and knocked the hammer against the bench and it made only a small poof.

I didn’t know what a decibel was but this hammer seemed like a good idea. When we lived in Columbus we had a neighbor who was building an addition to their kitchen and the noise was terrible every day, all day.

“That’s cool,” I said.

“The way I did it was to change the structure of the strike pad and to add a noise-cancellation module inside the handle. Do you know how noise-canceling works, Phoebe?”

I shook my head.

“Okay so, all sound moves in waves through the air. The sound creates waves and your ear picks up those waves. To cancel a noise, all I need to do is create another wave that is the opposite and your ear will hear nothing. The waves cancel each other out! How cool is that?” Philippa was jubilant. She flipped her hair out of her eyes and continued “Most people haven’t figured out how to do noise cancellation outside a closed space, but I figured it out. My noise-canceling works even using this hammer outdoors, like on a construction site.”

My dad had noise-canceling headphones that he used when he was working but I had honestly never thought about how that worked. Boy, this Philippa girl was sure interesting. I couldn’t follow everything she said but I could feel myself getting excited.

“Couldn’t you just make a softer hammer?” I volunteered.

“I thought that too, at first. There are rubber hammers but they still make noise and they don’t work that well with nails. They're better for moving pipes into place or stuff like that.” Philippa was my age but she talked more like a grown-up. Like a smart grown-up.

“Yeah, makes sense. Are you gonna sell your idea or something?”

“I’m going to patent it, first. You have to protect everything you invent, you know? I have a patent-pending on this baby,” she proudly lifted the hammer above her head.

“What else do you do besides inventation?” I asked.

“You mean invention?” she corrected me, but there was no mocking in her tone. Most of the kids at school made fun of me when I said a word wrong, which I often did. Sometimes my mom even did. But I liked that Philippa didn’t do that.

“Yeah, invention, I meant, obviously.”

“No, invention isn’t my whole life. I go to school. I play soccer. I like to go outside and listen to the birds at night.”

“At night? My mom doesn’t let me go outside at night by myself.”

“I like it. That’s when the owls are hunting.”

“Are you scared?”

“Scared of what? Owls? No, I love owls. They help me with my designs!”

“You have owl helpers?” I was confused.

“Yes, you’ve got it! I lay down on the grass and watch how they fly and listen to their wings and it tells me how to make stuff quieter. Like this hammer,” Philippa said.

“You use the owls as an example.”

“Yes, exactly! You see these lines on the sides of the strike pad, Phoebe? They help disburse the sound so it isn’t so loud. I got the idea from looking at owl tail feathers!” Philippa smiled at me. She was really beautiful, much prettier than me. I wondered who her teachers were at school. They must be really smart.

“Why do you guys have that monster satellite dish on the front lawn?”

“It is how we get Internet and TV stations. My mom calls it the Big Ugly Dish. But I love it because that is how I can access YouTube and all the science websites where I learn this stuff.”

“I use YouTube,” I said, although the only things I watched there were cat videos and clips of Taylor Swift interviews. I didn’t know that there were videos about owls and hammers there.

“Yeah, it’s a great thing,” Philippa continued. “My dad bought that dish and set it up for us, because there is practically no other Internet here. It’s my window to the world.”

“You don’t have cable TV or Internet?”

“Cable doesn’t come out here. Do you have it at your house?”

“I don’t know. We just moved in. We don’t have much stuff connected yet.”

“Which house is yours?”

“The one at the bottom of the hill.”

“Oh, the Franklin house. They had a little girl like us but then they moved to Myrtle Beach. But she didn't like all this stuff that I do. She thought I was weird.”

“That’s too bad. I don't think you're weird. I think you're really cool,” I smiled at her.

“You want to be my partner? You want to help me invent things?”

“Sure!” Up until this very minute, our new country house had seemed like a prison term to me. I liked Columbus. I loved the skate park. I loved my friends there. But Philippa was someone like I’d never met.

“Why do you want to make a noiseless hammer, Philippa?”

“Everyone calls me Philly, okay? I want to make a noiseless hammer because…” she held her chin. “...because I can see a future where construction sites don’t make any noise. I just need to invent each construction tool and make it noiseless and then we will all have a nicer life.”

“It seems like your house is out here in the boonies, Philly. Why are you so worried about noise?”

“You know the other house, close to yours? The one with the big greenhouse?”

I had seen it but didn’t know who lived there.

“There was a guy, he’s dead now, but he was an artist who created stuff from junk. He was always working outside on his huge sculptures and making a ton of noise. My dad hated it.”

“Did he go talk to the guy?”

“He did. He even took his gun sometimes. My dad had a drinking problem.”

“Did he kill the guy for making too much noise? Is that why the guy’s dead?” I was horrified.

“No, he never did but he said he took the gun to ‘scare the guy.’ My mom said it was big mess. I feel like that constant noise was one of the reasons my dad did what he did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shot himself in the neck,” Philippa gave me a serious look with her beautiful green eyes.

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“Yeah, it’s okay. My dad was an asshole and I think my mom is happy he’s gone. He wasn’t very nice to her.” Philly wiped the sawdust off her hands using her pajama sleeves.

“Did he hurt you?”

“No, he never did. But he hurt my mom lots. Now he can’t do that anymore.”

“That’s rough.” I had heard my dad say that to people who had someone who died.

“Philly?” I said tentatively.

“Phoebe,” she said and smiled.

“I want to be your partner in inventation, I mean invention.”

“Well good!” Philippa beamed. “Do you want to help me with the noiseless power saw?”

“Sounds cool,” I said and moved closer to my new friend’s work table.