“And you blame me?”
“Wait,” Jennet held up a hand. “I didn’t say that. In fact, I don’t blame you for closing your eyes to what seems obvious to me, because you’re not me, and I wasn’t the one married to him. Behavior that starts gradually, the way you describe Leo’s, becomes customary, and anything customary seems preferable to something awful and alien. Like living alone. Like losing your daughter, too. But making a pastiche of Leo and your health is going magical, Julieanne. Some coincidences are coincidences. In fact, though I don’t want to offend whatever religious beliefs you have, I think most coincidences are…coincidental. In other words, if they hadn’t happened…if you asked God for proof of His existence and an eagle did not fly overhead, well, that would have simply been a day you didn’t remember.”
“So this leaves me?”
“With a lot of anger work to do.”
“Oh that sounds so psychie-wyckie. Anger work.”
“Well, it might. But you’ve got to acknowledge to your kids that you’re absolutely furious with their father, stop telling them to ‘respect’ him, that they want to ‘love’ him one day. That’s their choice. And right now, while you can help them honor their memories, their dad has snapped his cap. And you have to stop thinking of yourself as a victim. And stop looking like a victim, in baggy pants and sweatshirts. Get a life, Julieanne.”
Well, it was easy for her to say.
Talking to Matthew, there’d been that. Little Matthew MacDougall, my secret seventh-grade crush, now a big-shot surgeon in Boston. I was flattered at first that he’d read, much less liked, my poems.
But it wasn’t as much fun after Leo’s and my divorce. Talking about my woes with someone who was smart and funny and (tragically, but I hadn’t known her) widowed felt as if I were on a par with Leo. He’d lost his wife in a car accident that his child thankfully survived. Better yet, he obviously was smitten with his quarter-century-old memories of me. It had been a kind of vengeance. Harmless vengeance. You got a Pilates instructor who makes jam? I got a facial surgeon, a real doctor, not a dentist! He rebuilds jaws instead of picking berries. He makes baby’s faces whole instead of doing the Hundred.
But I didn’t really “have” Matthew, or want him.
I remembered Matt MacDougall as an absurdly short, almost elfin boy—I’d been tall for my age, and dancing with him was like talking to the part in his hair—who worshipped me through mournful aquamarine eyes and let me copy his math papers. Over the years, when a notice came round for one of our high school reunions, I would read of him vaguely—he hadn’t been a crush. His wife, Susan, who’d died when their child was just a toddler, had been the first person from our class to be lost, except in Vietnam. On my stationery, JSG, which I now used for grocery lists, I’d sent him a note. Though the publication and the huge check (fifty dollars) of my poem in Pen, Inc., had been a thrill, I wondered why a doctor read a “little” (really little) poetry magazine.
In fact, I wondered why he wrote and asked me to call, and why I did.
I was lonely.
I wanted someone who couldn’t see me to want me. I wanted someone who didn’t know that I tripped or staggered, slurred, or stammered, to want me.
“What did you do tonight?”
“Oh, it was big,” he’d say. “I got the car washed, and I went and bought the new Elmore Leonard novel. I got a cup of coffee on the way home, though I know I’m too old for that, and it’s going to keep me up….”
“That’s more than I did this week.”
“Oh come on,” said Matt. “My friends tell me I’m the most boring man they know. Go to the gym, buy carryout, fall asleep after ranting at the news. Last month, I tried to cut a couple of my big shrubs into a topiary shape. I thought it would be fun to make them into dolphins. I got a book from the library. Well, I’m a surgeon, right? How hard could this be? Let me tell you. It looked like kids had vandalized the house afterward. No, it really looked like the KKK had vandalized the house.”
What he’d said, about his shrubs, his fireplace, his pal Shawn, and his pal Louis, from New York by way of Nigeria, made me feel connected to a normal world of people doing ordinary things for fun. The three of them had decided to go pheasant hunting. Shawn’s father lent them the guns. They’d driven to the game preserve the previous fall, but it happened to be the day that the gamekeepers were unloading that year’s stock. The pheasants hopped out of the truck and stood looking at Matt and his friends, making no attempt to fly or allow themselves to be stalked. One by one, the men exchanged glances and, without a word, put the guns back into their cases. “That was my hunting period,” Matt said. “I’m entering my fly-fishing period in a couple of weeks, when I go on vacation. I’m sure no trout will be in peril. I think my guitar period will follow that.”
He made me smile.
But after Caroline was gone, and the long, languid summer began, I was too sapped to talk to Matthew or even much to Cathy or Gabe. My daughter “Cat” sent a few desultory duty notes, about her adventures in Quaker-dise, about learning to fish, Amos beginning to crawl; but even I, after a while, began to feel that she was rubbing my face in her father’s new life. I still called her every week on her cell phone, leaving messages when she didn’t answer. She rarely called me back. When she did, she was eerily breezy. “Mom. Hi. Great. Yeah. Love.” Nothing I could do touched her. Her birthday card to Gabe, which he threw away and I rescued, was signed “Cat Steiner.”
Leo’s insurance, which had covered all of us for the first years after he left the university, lapsed. And though the divorce required he cover Gabe, Caroline, and Rory (so Gabe finally got therapy for his language-processing problem), I began to have to pay for my medicines, my little sentinels against the dark, which no one was sure were effective, but which everyone was pretty sure were too risky to stop. No insurance company covers medicine for MS, because all treatments for an “incurable” disease are experimental. I did get my physical therapy paid for by a state program, with a little finagling from Cathy. I sold the last of my mother’s antique bisques and her little Renoir sketch. I had another critical look at my closet and decided I really needed only three good winter and three good warm-weather dress-up outfits. One lovely lady gave me eleven hundred for two armloads of suits and dresses—some my mother’s and some mine. Hannah gave me a box of her voluminous matching scarves and gloves, and I ended up looking—on purpose—vintage.
With seventeen thousand dollars in the bank, after the garage sale and all that other selling, I felt rich—but with physical therapy, food…it was an illusion. Eventually I knew I had to find an insurance policy. Which meant I had to find a full-time job. But what nice company would want to hire a reporter who sometimes had to lie down two hours a day? And had a weird preexisting condition. Maybe one that wanted federal brownie points for hiring the handicapped.
Until then, I had to find a way to do more, to make a dollar stretch more, with less. I made small economies. Although Cathy paid for most of the groceries, I began experimenting with various ways to make rice and beans more interesting. We bought into a vegetable co-op, and I made soup, soup over pasta, pasta with soup and extra beans.
Leo would have been in heaven.
This, was, then, to be my life. Speeches, when I could catch one, were increasingly farther and farther away, as the column was picked up by far-flung newspapers. But the airfare often was flung in with my honorarium, which I boldly raised to two thousand dollars. I would look after Abby when Cath had to go out of town—unless it coincided with a shot week, when Hannah or Connie looked after all of us—so she was glad to take over with my little girl when I went away. I sometimes believed that Aurora thought Cathy was her mother, but when my mind went grazing there, I tried to think that she was lucky to have such a good other mother. If I had to go to Atlanta, or even on hot summer days up in northern Wisconsin, the heat was enervating, but not, so far, problematic. If I got a nap, and I learned to fall asleep instantly on any moving conv
eyance from backseat to airplane, I was okay. Increasingly, I used one of my father’s canes. People thought it was a fashion accessory, especially the one with the silver peacock he’d been given by some lord or laird.
When I had a moment, and they were few, I messed with poems, trying different forms, trying to work out whether I was angry or heartbroken. I got contact lenses for my birthday from Cath, and cut and sewed a bat costume for Aurora. It took two months of evenings.
Then, two things happened simultaneously and disastrously.
One Friday night, when the shiver under the murk of August heat portended fall, Gabe came into my bedroom, where I lay watching the ceiling fan, counting beats to a minute. Rory, who’d adjusted rapidly to her new name, climbed up next to me and nestled into my neck, tucking a finger into the corner of her mouth.
“Most banned book in the history of public schools,” said Gabe.
“Okay, wait,” I temporized. “Um, that Judy Blume book.”
“God and Margaret and having your period, but no,” he said.
“Okay. Gimme another chance.”
“We don’t do two chances. It’s Lord of the Flies.”
“How can I prove that, lying here? And anyhow, that reminds me of your father’s first commune.” According to Jennet, I was not supposed to ignore Leo’s existence: I was supposed to bring up his name.
“It’s true.”
“More than that wrestling book?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he went on, lying down at the foot of the bed. “Top jingle of the twentieth century.”
“Had to be by Barry Manilow,” I said. “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener. No wait. It could be ‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.’”
“Ma, they don’t have cigarette-commercial jingles.”
“They used to.”
“I think your, uh, mind is playing tricks on you, Mom.”
“No, Gabe. There used to be cigarette commercials on TV, with big TV stars singing about cigarettes. There was the Marlboro Man, and he was this big macho symbol. He died of smoking. Before he died, he made a commercial saying, ‘This is what happened to me. By the time you see this, I’ll be dug.’”
“You mean dead.”
“Right.”
“I so believe there were commercials for smoking.”
“Look on the Internet, big shot. Anyhow, I think that was the top one.”
“Wrong again, Ma,” said Gabe. “It’s ‘You deserve a break today.’”
“Well, there you have it,” I said softly, noticing Rory had fallen asleep. “I don’t eat garbage. So how would I know? Anyhow, I was partly right. Barry Manilow wrote it.”
“You’re such a good loser.”
“I get a turn now. What TV actor said ‘Nano, nano’?” I asked.
“Mom, no seventies crap. It had to be, like Gramp says, since the flood receded.”
“Okay. God. Name the thirteen colonies.” I surrendered.
“So she goes back two centuries.”
“Well? That much you know by the time you become a sophomore.”
“Okay. New York. New Jersey. New Hampshire. North Carolina, South Carolina,” Gabe said.
“Well, that’s all the News and Norths and Souths, but I only count six.”
“No big wup. I’m not going to be a sophomore long.”
“Yeah? Skipping a grade?”
“No. Quitting.”
“Carry Rory to bed,” I told him, because some form of human electrical charge from my body had already disturbed her, and she was whimpering. “Please make sure she goes to the potty first.”
“Come on, squirt,” Gabe said, rolling his limp little sister into his arms. “Okay if she just sleeps in this? I’ll change her in the morning.”
“Uh-huh,” I murmured, thinking, Cathy, Cathy will talk him out of this. It’s just an anger reaction. It’s a form of disgust. He can’t bear the thought of facing Mrs. Kimball again, and who could blame him? I’ll get his caseworker changed. I’ll find a way to pay for homeschooling once the checks start coming—what’s good enough for Caro is good for Gabe, too. I had all my arguments mustered when he came back into the room. I burst into tears instead and took his big hand. “Don’t hand me one more thing, please. I don’t want to guilt trip you, but, Gabe, I beg you. Don’t give me one more failure. Please.”
“I don’t want you to think of it that way,” he said gently. “I want to learn. I’m going to keep reading. But I hate that place….”
“We can find another school….”
“Yeah. Sojourner Truth? Mama, I don’t want to go to school with kids who have designs they cut into their own arms with bobby pins. I don’t want to go to school with kids who may be perfectly nice people, but who wear black leather vests with nothing underneath them in the winter and have purple hair. I’m not that kind of weirdo. I’m just an ordinary weirdo.” He sighed. “I know this really sucks, on top of all you’ve been through. But I’m sixteen and I’m not your ordinary sixteen, for bad or good. I know you aren’t getting the checks from Leo yet. I can get a job—”
“No, Gabe,” I pleaded. “No, I know you hate it. I’ll think of another way. But once you drop out, you never go back.”
“Some big shots have. Doctors. Steve Jobs.”
“He dropped out of college, Gabe. He was driven by a violation.”
“A violation of what?”
“An…idea. A…plant. A vision! That’s what I meant. And he was, like, a genius.”
“Well, I know I’m no genius, but I don’t want to end up digging a ditch. I’ll go to college. But I’m going to LaFollette exactly one more semester. If that. I’ll finish in January because I like things neat. But that’s it.”
Something will change by then, I thought. Something will have to change. There is no justification for this, this, this endless persecution. Then, I thought, why am I taking this personally, thinking of it in terms of everything happening to poor me? The kid’s lost his father, who’d previously been out to lunch for probably the past two years; he’s lost his closest sibling, and he has virtually lost his best friend, the only thing that once made school fun at all for him. Luke was even more too cool, this year, for Gabe…he’d have to be a summer friend, and Gabe just couldn’t accept that anymore. And he’d lost his love, too. Tian. I was still thinking of this mess as the most legendary tank in history, the sinking of the good ship Julieanne. The ship was burning, but all hands were on deck; other people had worse problems. Think of the letters I didn’t answer publicly. The ones for whom I called professionals and made sure the professionals found ways to contact the writers. The ones from teenagers whose father crept into their rooms at night, whose mothers washed their mouths with soap when they tried to ask for help. The wives who “walked into kitchen cabinets” or “tripped” and went to work with their arms in slings. The priests whose superiors could not hear the sins they needed to confess. The mothers whose children had been taken away, who’d never see those children again because of what they’d done to them, or what their boyfriends had done to them. The women with breast cancer that had come back after eight years. The people with…multiple sclerosis, who could no longer walk; who had timers they set when they held meetings at the offices they still somehow managed to run, to remind them when to stop talking; whose husbands had to give them colonic flushes, feed them oatmeal on a spoon.
“Gabe,” I said, taking his hand. “I don’t blame you. I don’t want this, but I don’t blame you.”
“Listen, please, Mom. It wasn’t easy, but it was possible, to face it when I had you to help me out. I can’t face it now. I know we can’t afford tutors. I just can’t. There’s too much to do here. And we can’t live our whole lives on vegetarian chili, easy on the soy burger.”
“The checks will come soon. The whole thing should be sorted out, property, everything, before Christmas.” He sat there patiently. I knew there was no changing his mind. I knew that well over half of dropouts neve
r go back, and dropouts earn half of what graduates do, for the rest of their lives. But he was my son. To push him would be to seal the decree to this.
He said, “Rory needs me, too. You’re not here sometimes, and when you’re here, there’re those few days when you’re out of it.”
“I’m getting better. Every month, it takes less out of me.”
“Mom! I have to do three hours of homework to do the same stuff people get done in the class. It’d be different if I could use a laptop. But we can’t afford a laptop for me, and if I try to get on one at school, there’re three psychos in front of me playing Viking Samurai who’d kill me if I tried even to ask them if I could use it for a while; and then I’d get suspended. There has to be a place where I can go, where I can show what I know without having to write it down in this stupid, stupid writing that looks like Rory’s stickman drawings. There has to be a place where you can carry a computer without some psycho throwing it up on the roof.”
What do you do with the truth when it’s more than you can endure? What do you do when the assessment of what has to be the wrong choice is so sound in so many ways that you can barely argue against it? And when there is nothing left to change it that you haven’t tried? There had to be a place, and I would find it. I would find Gabe a college, and make sure he got tutored for his entrance exams. Maybe he could start at seventeen. His IQ wasn’t through the roof, but he’d never been able to take a reliable test. It was at least as high as my own.
Dreams that you believe you own can come to seem as though they are your destiny.
Finally, I said, “I hope you change your mind, but if you don’t, I believe you will go to college. And if you don’t do that, you can take over my column and live cheap and support me.” I was only half kidding. I thought maybe he could write, something for teenagers. He had a gift, in speech at least, for the word. We both laughed, and I hugged him a little longer than was comfortable for him. Our laughter a little weak, a little damp, and I fell asleep as he made his way down the hall.
When the telephone rang, I grabbed it in a clumsy cacophony of clattering medicine bottles and used water glasses. I was sure that it was midnight and Hannah was calling from the hospital, that Gabe Senior had finally had his stroke, and that this, too, was my fault. When I found out it wasn’t, I was furious.
Breakdown Lane, The Page 30
