There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  My wife makes a move toward my ex-wife, to embrace her. I stand there waiting to see whether there will be an implausible hug. But Astrid stops herself in midstep.

  Right about then, Lucy sails into the kitchen, heading toward the refrigerator for a diet soft drink. She turns and sees Corinne. “Who’re you?” she asks rudely.

  No one remembers to say anything in response. Down the street, in the distance, a car alarm goes off, a faint eee eee eee sound.

  Lucy looks at me, then at her mother, then at Corinne. “What’s going on?”

  “This,” I say at last, pointing at Corinne, “is Jeremy’s mother, Corinne. She’s here for a visit.”

  “How do you do?” Corinne says. “You must be Lucy. You look so clean. And bright. So do you, Astrid,” she says, smiling at my wife. “But then you always did. It must be from the hospital. It must be from the disinfectants.”

  “My God, Corinne,” Astrid blurts out. “What happened to you?”

  “I died,” Corinne says. “And then I got on a bus and came here.”

  —

  Astrid tells me that she and I need to talk, and we descend into the mudroom to confer. I explain about the postcard, and Astrid nods randomly. She’s angry, of course, that I said that Corinne was, or is, Jeremy’s mother. She’s even angrier that she’s here and that I had said nothing about her arrival, but given the strangeness of events, I am temporarily forgiven. We determine that for now Corinne will sleep in the basement rec room’s foldout bed. She may find the basement somewhat damp, given her allergic inclinations, but that’s life. The dehumidifier does its level best. Then Astrid says to me, “Don’t ever do this again,” as if Corinne’s appearance here is my idea.

  “I didn’t do it this time,” I reply.

  When we return to the kitchen, my mother has descended from her upstairs room and is talking to Corinne as if Corinne had only been away for a few days. My mother is immune to surprise. Those two are conversing quite lucidly on various topics: the weather, and then recipes they once shared, and treatments for the common cold (zinc lozenges). Astrid returns to the salmon. Will there be enough for everyone? Yes, if the portions are small. I instruct Lucy to set the table, which she does, happy to have a task to keep her occupied. I remind her to set an extra place for Corinne. I pick up Corinne’s two brown paper bags and take them downstairs, and I fold out the bed and make it up with sheets and blankets that we keep down there in an old dresser near the dehumidifier.

  But what I am thinking about is Jeremy, and so I go back upstairs, past the kitchen, into the living room, and then out into the front yard, and I open my cell phone, and I call him, and when he answers, I say, “Get right home.”

  He says, “I’m almost there. What’s up?”

  “Something has happened,” is all I can say, “and it’s about you. I’ll explain when you get home.”

  —

  Most people don’t realize that in an automobile repair shop, you see a wide variety of human behavior in reaction to bad news. Some people practice stoicism. But most of the time, if you tell someone that his car’s transmission is shot and will require thousands of dollars of work, you see anger directed against the automobile. Or against fate. Or against God for having had a hand in bum transmissions. Or against me, for serving as messenger. The anger is pointless. Life does us no favors. We have to manage with what we have. I’m not complaining. I’ve had a good life so far. I played tackle in high school football and chased girls and always loved cars. I raised some hell, mostly petty vandalism and a bit of promiscuity and public drunkenness, before I settled down with Corinne. I did my share of drugs. So what? I was crazy the way young men often are. I’m proud to say I was never hauled in before the authorities when I got really wild. My friends watched out for me, and I therefore survived my youth. Because of that, I give thanks for my health and my family. I got my associate’s degree. Like I say, I’ve got no complaints.

  But Corinne broke my heart when she left me, and I was ready to be angry with her for years after that. That’s a long time ago. Day by day the anger seeped out of me in a slow trickle until it was gone. I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She’s wreckage. It’s as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins. What happened to her could’ve happened to me or to anybody.

  Jeremy, however, possesses neither wisdom nor adult perspective, and my heart is thumping away like a maddened rabbit in a cage as I wait for him to get home. At last I see him coming down the block on his skateboard while he talks on his cell phone.

  When I get to the kitchen, he’s standing there near the stove, and all the women are looking at him but no one is saying anything. Again, the silence. What’s the matter with them? They talk all the time when nothing is on the line, but if something serious happens, they clam up.

  “What’s going on?” he asks. He looks over at Corinne and nods his head in her direction. “Who’s this?” Corinne is standing over there, propped up against the refrigerator.

  Again a silence persists. No one will step up to the plate. So I say, “This is Corinne. Corinne, this is Jeremy.”

  The thing is, they look so similar that you’d never mistake them for anything except a mother and her son. Gazing at Corinne, Jeremy suddenly notices that resemblance, and he flinches.

  “Hi,” Corinne says shyly. She sweeps the bangs away from her forehead and gives him a halfhearted smile. She can’t hug him. She can’t kiss him. Not yet. All she can do is stand there.

  Jeremy looks at her, then at Astrid, then at Dolores, and finally at Lucy. That’s when Lucy pipes up. “That’s your mom,” she says as if this were the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum.

  Jeremy points at Astrid. “That’s my mom.”

  “Well, we both are, sort of,” Corinne says. “Don’t you think?” She looks like a high school girl at a dance hoping that some eligible fellow will come into view to retrieve her.

  “You’re kidding,” Jeremy says.

  “Corinne is going to stay with us for a while until she gets back on her feet,” I say.

  That’s when he turns to me, blushing from anger. “On her feet?” He starts to leave the room, but then Corinne points at his ear.

  “You have an earring,” she says. Jeremy nods, stumped by the obvious. And then she says, “I’ve never gotten used to them on men. Not even on grown men. I know I should, the way everyone else does, but I can’t. I just can’t.” She seems to be trying to break up the silences with plain speech. “No one told me how boy-pretty you’d become. I’m so old-fashioned. With that earring you look a little queer.”

  “Corinne!” my mother says, leaning against the kitchen counter for stability. “You can’t say that. No one says that.”

  “Yes,” she says shamefacedly. “No one does say anything like what I say. It’s been my downfall.”

  “It’s all right,” Jeremy says. “Because I am queer. I’m, like, a total fag. And now this queer is going upstairs. Goodbye.”

  Off he goes, clumping noisily away from us. I’ll let him sit up there for a minute before I go up to talk to him.

  “Anyhow,” Lucy says, “the word is ‘gay.’ You can’t say ‘queer’ unless you are queer.”

  “They’re the same, aren’t they? Those words?” Corinne asks, trying to smile. I truly wish she would stop talking.

  “Well, what’s really interesting,” Astrid says, suddenly turning around and facing us, “is why Jeremy would say that he’s gay when all the evidence is to the contrary. And there’s been quite a bit of evidence already, Corinne, though you wouldn’t know that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t know,” Corinne responds.

  “Tell her about Alissa,” Lucy says to her mother. “Little Miss Princess? The pink stockings? The locket? The bunny factory?”

  “No, we’re not going into that,” Astrid says.

  “At least he didn’t get her pregnant,” I say helpfully, because he didn’t. They used condoms.

  “But he could
of,” Lucy says proudly. “If he had tried.”

  “This is so the wrong topic,” Astrid says. “Corinne, you must be very tired. We’re all surprised to see you, as no doubt you know, and I suppose you’d like a glass of water. Are you hungry? Thirsty? The salmon will be ready soon, and we’ll all sit down to eat. I wish you had given us a bit of notice. And we’ll have to catch up on all your news!” Astrid tries a smile.

  “I don’t have any news,” Corinne says. “Well, I mean, it’s all news, it’s all news to me. What isn’t news? This bright shiny kitchen is news! And Lucy: you certainly are the newest thing.” She looks at all of us, one by one. “Oh, have pity on me,” she says, and then she begins to cry, and all the women move toward her.

  —

  Once I’m upstairs, I knock on Jeremy’s door. He doesn’t say “Come in,” but I go in anyway. I’ll spare you the details of his room. He’s lying on his bed with his eyes closed. His shoes are off and his big feet are sticking up at the end of the bed in their white socks, and he has an arm flung across his face, covering his eyes. I am amazingly proud of my son. I love him so much, but I have to hide it.

  “Jeremy,” I say. “You’ll have to come back down eventually.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s unfair. She’s unfair. I mean, she’s, like, crazy. And I…and I’m supposed to love her, or something? Because she was once my mother? Fuck that.”

  “I need to say something to you,” I say. “I just can’t think of what.”

  “Please, Dad. None of that wisdom shit, okay? I hate wisdom. I just fucking hate it.”

  “Okay,” I say. “You’re in luck. I don’t have any.”

  “That’s good. Can we talk about something else? No, I know: let’s not talk.”

  So we don’t talk for a minute or two. Then Jeremy says, “You know, this isn’t so bad.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, having your mother show up and act crazy. That’s not so bad. I mean, you know how I’m studying world geography now?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And, like, the point of world geography is not where the countries are, but what people actually do, you know? I mean, take a country like, for example, Paraguay. You know where Paraguay is, right?”

  I nod. But I actually don’t know where it is. Near Bolivia?

  “So”—and here he sits up—“so, okay. Anyhow, Paraguay is like this nothing country in the middle of South America, and they don’t even all speak Spanish there, but this weird Indian language like Sioux except it’s South American, but the point is, when you look at conditions, it’s not all happy days down there. Well, maybe it’s happier now. But what our textbook said? Was that they had, you know, torture parties there. Once. Where torturers get drunk and turn the dial up to eleven. Like they did in Chile. And Argentina. People get their fingernails pulled out and electrodes and stuff. I read about it. I’ve been reading about it. Torture. Like in Cuba, and in Europe when it was medieval? And in Russia. They’d hook you up to an electric board and zap you. And your body would dance around on the electric table. Total pain. I mean, compared to torture, this is nothing.” He lies back on his pillow. He closes his eyes. “My mother showing up and being crazy? That is nothing. That’s not even waterboarding.”

  He gives me this lecture while staring at me with great bravery.

  I go back downstairs, and the five of us have dinner. Jeremy doesn’t join us. That night, lying in bed and looking up at the ceiling fan in the dark of our bedroom, Astrid and I agree that I will have to investigate halfway houses for Corinne, and I will have to get her to a shrink so her moods can be stabilized.

  —

  The next morning, Jeremy does not join us for breakfast, and when I look outside, his bicycle is gone. And then, somewhat to my surprise, Corinne reappears in the morning light uncomplaining, saying that she experienced a good sleep. What will my ex-wife do all day? My mother says that she will look after Corinne for now. Perhaps they will go for walks, and my mother will expound about Jesus and how He is coming again to gather us up. As for Jeremy, he can’t be upset forever. Lucy gives me a goodbye-daddy kiss before she boards the school bus. She seems unaffected by recent events, but then Corinne is not her mother, and she probably wants life to get back to normal.

  That afternoon around four o’clock, as I am writing up a repair order on a faulty water pump, Jeremy comes bicycling into the garage. He looks around and sniffs appreciatively. He surveys the containers of brake fluid shelved in the Parts Department. I don’t want him to give me any shit in here in front of my coworkers, so I don’t smile although I am glad to see him.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he replies. He takes off his helmet and shakes out his hair. He’s impressive: you can see why girls love him.

  I put down my ballpoint pen. We walk into the customers’ lounge and sit down on two vinyl chairs in the corner, next to a table on which are scattered old issues of Field & Stream and Cosmopolitan. All the customers are gone, so we’re there alone. Jeremy stares at me for a moment, as if it’s my fault that I met Corinne in the first place and made love to her eighteen years ago, so that he was born.

  “Dad, I’m fucked up,” he says. “And it’s really fucked up that she’s here. I’m just saying.”

  “I know,” I reply. “It’s hard on all of us.”

  “Not as hard on you as it is on me. I didn’t think I could go back home today.”

  “Where else could you go?”

  “Somewhere,” he says. “Friends.” It’s true: he has many friends he could stay with. “I could actually, like, move out.” He waits. “But I’m not going to.”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask. I have neither wisdom nor advice for him. All I have is curiosity.

  “So I went to school this morning? And I found Alissa. I mean, we’re over, but we’re still friends, sort of. And I’m like, ‘My birth mom showed up, and she’s fucking nuts, and also she said I looked gay,’ and Alissa is like, ‘Yeah, wow, but she’s your mom and thinks you’re cute and you’re way not gay,’ and I go, ‘Who gives a shit?’ and she’s, ‘You should,’ and I say, ‘But she’s crazy,’ and this is when Alissa sort of gets that lightbulb look and says, ‘Well, the cool thing would be to put it all on your Tumblr. That’d be so great. ’Cause if your birth mom’s so weird and interesting, everybody will want to read it. Like: “Guess what, everybody, my mom showed up.” ’ ”

  Somehow I have the feeling this has become a huge business with his friends within the past few hours and that they all have opinions about what he should do.

  “And?” I ask.

  “That’s what’s weird,” he says. “Like half of my friends already want to know if she’s got a blog herself. Because they want to check it out, like right now.”

  “Maybe you could help her with a blog,” I say, trying to mediate. “Maybe you could help her set one up.”

  “Yeah, I guess I can do that. But I have to hate her for a few more days.” He sits there quietly. “I have to really hate her a few days. I know she’s crazy. I get that. But I have to hate her for not being loyal to us.” He used that word: us. As much as I love Astrid, she didn’t use that word last night. It was all you: you have to do this or that.

  So I tell Jeremy that he can hate Corinne for a while, and then he has to give it up.

  —

  The hatred lasts longer than we think it will. In the meantime we get Corinne to a psychiatrist, who puts her on lithium. There are no discernible effects at first.

  Corinne tries to be inconspicuous down there in the basement and at dinnertime. I’ll give her credit for that. It’s hard for her, however, because right out of the blue at dinner she’ll start talking about wildlife creatures, some of them imaginary, that no one has mentioned in conversation. Wolves and lemurs figure prominently in her thinking, and all the while Jeremy is seething over there at his place at the table. He stares at Corinne with distaste
as he bolts his food before he rushes upstairs and slams his bedroom door.

  Three weeks later the atmosphere in the house begins to shift subtly, as if a low-pressure system had arrived after a long period of drought. One evening I am coming up the stairs and I see Jeremy and Corinne talking on the landing. Then, two days later, I see her in his room, sitting at his desk in front of his computer, and Jeremy is standing behind her, quietly giving her advice. I know better than to ask them what’s going on, so I knock on Lucy’s door and go in there. Lucy hears everything that’s going on in the house before anyone else does. It’s true that she likes to preach, but she has the soul of a Soviet spy.

  “Hi, Princess,” I say. She’s lying on the bed reading a Harry Potter book.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Um, yeah.” She has her head propped up by an arm under her chin. On her wall she has a poster of some ballet star up on her toes surrounded by other pink-tutu-clad ladies. Adhesive stars decorate Lucy’s ceiling, and her lifelong doll, Eleanor, gazes at her with glassy plastic eyes from the bookshelf. Lucy continues to read while she talks to me.

  “What’s going on between Corinne and Jeremy? Do you know?”

  “You should ask them.”

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “So,” she says, putting the huge novel aside and looking up at me, “he’s helping her with Runaway Mom.” She waits for my reaction, and when I don’t say anything, she says, “He got tired of hating her. He decided she wasn’t going to go away.”