Wish You Were Here

by Barbara Shoup

  He grins. “Blow off some stress, anyway,” he says. “You could use that.”

  I shrug.

  He takes a long drink of beer from his frosted mug. “You know, buddy, your mom’s worried about you.”

  “Mom always worries,” I say.

  “True,” Dad says. “I can’t argue with that. But every now and then there is a reason for it. She thinks you’re unhappy—and I have to tell you, pal, you don’t seem so great to me, either.”

  “Jesus, what is this?” I say. “I’m happy. Read my lips: I am deliriously happy. Will you guys get off my back?”

  “Okay, okay.” He holds up his hands, palms toward me. “I hear you. Your call, man. You know how you feel. I’m not trying to lay a Father Knows Best trip on you.”

  “Good,” I say.

  Our food comes. Dad flirts with the waitress, orders another beer.

  “So,” he says. “Still no word from the latter-day Kerouac?”

  “Nope.”

  “Serious business this time, hey?” he says. “A clean break.”

  I have to say, I surprise myself. I guess I didn’t realize how pissed off I’ve been at Brady for taking off, for dumping me, until Dad started with the third degree. “That asshole,” I say. “He didn’t have to make a clean break from me.”

  “Whoa!” Dad kind of rears back in his chair. “I thought you were on his side.”

  It’s none of your business whose side I’m on is what I’d like to say, but I’m not stupid. The more upset he thinks I am, the harder he’ll try to dig information out of me—especially since Mom sent him on this spy mission. So I go rational on him. I say, “What side? If he’s not here, there is no side.”

  He shakes his head and gives me this patient look, like I’m a slow learner but he’s doing his best to deal with it. He goes, “Jackson, pal, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”

  And I’m home free. I know exactly the direction in which this conversation is about to turn. I could leave the table, go play the video game in the lobby a couple of times, and come back, and Dad would still be telling the story of his life. How he left college with nothing but his guitar, went out to San Francisco, got high, met the Dead, and lived happily ever after. Until he hooked up with Mom, who tried and failed to civilize him.

  I think about how Brady used to say, “Jax, we ought to trade dads, you know? Your old man would cut me some slack. My old man would chill out. Dude, he loves the way you do things right.”

  “The way I’m uptight,” I’d say.

  He’d laugh. “Yeah, Jax. Uptight. A virtue, according to the Jer. If some of us weren’t uptight, the world would be far too mellow. Nothing would ever get done. Me? I think, who cares?”

  Listening to Dad drone on about how some people just have to get out there and learn things the hard way, I think, Why do I care? About Brady. About Dad, who couldn’t do a Father Knows Best trip on me if his life depended on it. Man, I’m in worse shape than I thought if Mom’s on his case to help me.

  “You’ve got to get a life, Jax,” he says to me now. “You can’t wait around for Brady.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “I’ll get right on that.”

  Get a life. Fine. I’d love to get a life if I just knew how. I go around for the next few days in a total rage. Get a life, get a life, I keep thinking. Screw you, man. I feel like calling him up and saying hey, did you ever think about this? Maybe if you hadn’t ditched me and Mom, I could’ve depended on you instead of on Brady. Maybe I wouldn’t be so fucked up now.

  And I am fucked up. I am clearly fucked up. Even I know I ought to be over the divorce after all this time.

  “Jackson,” Mom says. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Honey, I know you’re—”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I say. “Just leave me alone.”

  I go to the gym when I know Dad won’t be there, and I work out until my muscles hurt so bad I can’t think of anything else. I rake the yard. I slam the rake down into the leaves, which is the closest I can come to hitting someone. But then I start thinking about when I was little and Dad used to rake the leaves into a big pile and leave them in the corner of the backyard for weeks for me and Brady to play in, and I’m not mad anymore. Just depressed.

  It makes me want to go back and be that age again: Dad sitting on my bed every night, the two of us goofing around when I was supposed to be going to sleep, Mom yelling, “Calm down, you guys! I mean it!”

  When I was scared, he’d make me sing, “Wild thing, you make my heart sing … ” We’d both sing at the top of our lungs to show the monsters in the closet that we weren’t one little bit scared of them. “Heck, we like monsters!” we’d say.

  Halloween night, I drop Snickers bars into the trick-or-treaters’ bags and think of how Dad used to be the one in charge of handing out the candy when he lived with us. He’d dress up like a pirate and open the door with one of my rubber knives in his teeth.

  Kids come in a steady stream. The usual astronauts, gypsies, and queens. Tiny ghosts and goblins trundle up and hold out their bags. Their parents wait on the sidewalk, and in the weird light of the flashlights they carry, they look like ghosts themselves.

  When it’s over, when the street is dark and quiet again, I go up to my room, put in Springsteen’s Nebraska, and turn it up loud. I listen to Bruce sing about losers so I don’t have to think about what a loser I am myself. So I don’t have to think about Dad and how it used to be.

  five

  Saturday. Mom’s gone for the day—she and Ted left ungodly early for the IU–Purdue game. Ted’s a big fan. He has one of those thousand-dollar reserved parking places right near the stadium. Every home game, he motors down to Bloomington in his red-and-white van, with a cooler full of beer and every kind of deli food you can imagine. He has dozens of tapes of sixties music that he blares on a jam box while everyone eats. They invited me to come along, but I said I couldn’t spare the time.

  College applications, I said. I knew that would do the trick with Mom since she’s been driving me crazy to get them done. I did work on them for a little while. I got the easy blanks filled in on all of them. Name, address, high school, parents’ employers. It’s the essays that stopped me.

  In various forms, they all say “We want to know more about you.” I could comment on foreign policy or on an issue that I believe is crucial to my generation. I could name a character in fiction, talk about why I’d like to know that person—what role I’d want him or her to play in my life. I could write about my career goals. I could describe some significant experience that changed me.

  But I don’t care about foreign policy. There is nothing I can say about any issue affecting me and my generation that I think will make any difference at all. I’d like to know Holden Caulfield—God, what a cliché. I have no career goals. The most significant experience of my life is my parents’ divorce, and that’s nobody’s business but my own. So I quit writing.

  When the mail comes—still nothing from Brady—I swipe Mom’s Victoria’s Secret catalog, take it up to my room, and jack off looking at the models. Even that’s depressing. It gets me thinking about what a disaster I am with real girls, worse than ever now that Brady’s gone. I run through all the girls at school that seem the least bit attractive, the least bit possible. Face it, fool, I think. You can’t even talk to them—forget screwing them. Like you’d even get the chance.

  Since noon I’ve been lying on my bed, catatonic, the stereo blaring. When I hear the doorbell, I think, Brady! Then, Ha, forget it. No way. Which pisses me off so bad, I think that when he does finally show up the first thing I’ll do is deck him.

  The doorbell keeps ringing, and now I feel catatonic and agitated both, if that’s possible. Please, I think. Whoever you are, just go away. I ge
t up and look out the window. Grandma’s Cadillac is in the driveway; I’m doomed. She has a key. She comes right in whenever she feels like it, and today is no exception.

  “Jackson,” she hollers. “Come down here. I can hear that awful music of yours. I know you’re there.”

  She’s standing in our kitchen, dressed in her country-club clothes. The minute she sees me, she says, “Sit down. I want to talk to you. Do you realize you’ve got your mother worried sick?”

  I slump into a kitchen chair.

  She yanks at the back of my shirt collar. “For Pete’s sake, sit up straight,” she says.

  I gag, hoping to distract her or make her laugh, but she just stares at me with this sad-dog expression, obviously trying to convince herself that I can’t be as hopeless as I seem.

  “You’re such a nice-looking young man,” she says. “Why do you sit like that, as if you want to disappear? Now—” She lights one of her cigarettes, the long, thin kind with pastel flowers printed on the filters, and I can’t look at her because I’m thinking about how Brady and I used to crack up over them. “Interesting marketing concept,” he’d say. “Kill yourself with pretty cigarettes.”

  Grandma takes a long drag. “We’re all worried about you, Jackson. You just haven’t been yourself lately.”

  “Senioritis,” I say. “Early diagnosis.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” she says. “According to your mother, you haven’t even touched your college applications, and here it is November. If you really can’t stand high school anymore, I’d think you’d be a bit more enthused about planning what you’re going to do when it’s over. If you don’t get those applications done before Thanksgiving, who knows where you’ll end up?”

  “IU is fine with me,” I say. “Those other schools are Mom’s idea, not mine. I don’t want to go to law school or med school. I don’t want to be a yuppie with an MBA. So what do I have to go to Yale or Harvard for?”

  “Jackson, don’t be ridiculous. You are seventeen years old. How do you know what you don’t want?”

  “I know,” I say.

  “Well, you don’t know a thing about how tough it is out there in the real world. You don’t have any idea about what you may be called upon to do in your lifetime.”

  That gets her going on who’d have ever thought Mom would end up divorced, struggling to make ends meet on a music teacher’s salary—which leads her handily into the subject of Ted.

  “Jackson, I hope you’re not going to spoil things for your mother,” she says. “We both know Ellen can only be happy if you’re happy. If she’s worrying about you, how can she enjoy her relationship with Ted; how can the two of them attend to their own lives? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see them get married if things go right. Your grandfather, God rest his soul, would’ve been crazy about Ted. He’s just the kind of man he always wanted for Ellen. Responsible. And he obviously adores her. Your grandfather was heartsick over all Oz put her through. Just heartsick.” She lights another cigarette.

  I hate it when she gets on this track. I know Dad’s no prince, but it makes me mad when she bad-mouths him to me, and today, for some reason, it makes me even madder than usual.

  “Yeah, it’s really a bummer that Mom ever married Dad in the first place, isn’t it?” I say. “If she hadn’t, she could’ve spent her whole life blissed out at tailgate parties in the IU stadium parking lot. And, hey, you wouldn’t have had me to worry about at all. Because I wouldn’t even exist.”

  “Jackson!” Grandma looks as if I’ve just slapped her.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. But give me a break, will you, Grandma? Why would I screw up the thing between Mom and Ted? Have I ever acted like I didn’t want Mom to be happy? Just tell her to quit hounding me, and I’ll be fine.”

  She takes a Kleenex from her purse and dabs at the corners of her eyes, careful not to mess up her makeup. She collects herself, tilts her head, and looks at me with a sneaky smile. “So, getting back to IU,” she says.

  “What about it?” I say.

  “Ted loves IU.”

  I go, “No shit, Sherlock. What gave you the clue? The picture of Bobby Knight he keeps on his bedside table?”

  She gives me her prune look. “You know I don’t care to hear that kind of language from you, young man.”

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “Like I was saying, Ted loves IU.” She leans toward me. “Now, Jackson, use your brain. Ted would be very pleased if you loved IU, wouldn’t he?”

  I have to laugh. She can’t help herself, always trying to fix things. I say, “Jeez, Grandma. All the world’s a stage, and we’re your puppets, right?”

  “Think about it, Jackson.” Grandma reaches into her purse and takes out a twenty-dollar bill. “Buy something for yourself, honey,” she says.

  “Is this a bribe?” I ask.

  She winks at me the way she used to when I was little. Then she’s gone.

  Back in my room, I tear up all the college applications except the one for IU. I filled it out a long time ago. There’s no essay if you live in-state, so it was easy. I put it in its envelope and slap on a stamp.

  Suddenly I’m starving. I grab my car keys, cruise past the post office, and mail the application; then I head for Hardee’s, where I order more food than I’ve eaten for the last three days combined. It’s kind of crazy how much better I feel just knowing where I’ll be a year from today. Not that I think some miracle is going to happen just because I’m in a different place. For all I know, I’ll end up by myself; I’ll spend my Saturdays eating crap food in a Hardee’s there. Where will Brady be then, I wonder? For just one split second, I get this light feeling inside me, and I don’t care.

  six

  For Mom’s birthday, Dad has forty black roses delivered by Merry Messengers. Normally, she’d have thought this was hilarious, especially the fact that the delivery guy is dressed up like Methuselah and sings that Simon and Garfunkel song that ends “How terribly strange to be seventy.” He sings “forty” though, drawing it out, “for-hor-ty,” to fit the rhythm. But lately Mom’s been edgy, not her usual self. I could have told him they would upset her.

  Not in the way they upset Grandma, who calls about two minutes after they’re delivered. She’s appalled when Mom tells her about the black flowers—that Dad would make such a big deal about her turning forty at all. She still believes it’s perfectly sensible for a woman to keep her age a secret. My mom’s upset because the flowers are so extravagant and because they’re from him.

  I don’t know. Maybe Dad did do this on purpose, like Grandma says. To spoil her birthday. But he’s not a mean person, and it’s not as if he and Mom haven’t played jokes on each other before. More likely, if Dad did upset Mom on purpose with the flowers, it was to remind her exactly how different he and Ted are.

  Well, if that’s the case, he certainly proved his point. Ted arrives to take us to dinner at Grandma’s about a half hour later. He’s got forty roses, too. But beautiful pink ones, with a string of real pearls hanging from one of the stems.

  Predictably, this gift makes Grandma ecstatic. She fusses over Mom, arranging the necklace just so on her fuzzy sweater. She fusses over Ted, too, oohing and aahing over his perfect gift. She actually drags out Mom’s senior picture from high school to show him. Mom’s wearing borrowed pearls in that picture—Grandma’s, the ones my grandfather gave her. She gets the two of them settled in the living room, drinks in hand, then bullies me into the kitchen, acting as if she’s desperate for help with the hors d’oeuvres. “I told you,” she stage-whispers.

  “Come on, Grandma,” I say. “You never said one word about Ted giving Mom pearls for her birthday.”

  “You know what I mean,” she hisses. “I told you things were going to work out between them. Pearls are just one step from an engagement ring.”

&nb
sp; “Oh,” I say. “Let me get my notebook and record yet another rule from the Doris A. Boyles Guide to the Civilized World.”

  “Very funny, young man,” she says. She thrusts a tray of stuffed mushrooms into my hands and swats me back toward the living room.

  Later, in the van, Mom reclines the seat and throws her arm across her face. She fakes a strangling scream: “Aaaarrgh.” Then she makes her voice sound like a movie announcer’s: “The mother from hell. She incites you with niceness. She makes you murderous with gratitude.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Ted says. “She meant well.”

  “Please,” Mom says. “The fact that she approves of you is already making me extremely nervous. If you won’t admit what a pain she is, I swear I’ll never see you again. I’ll keep the pearls and send you packing.”

  “She does have a certain frantic—uh, birdlike quality,” he says.

  “Birdlike,” Mom says. “Don’t you love that, Jackson? Birdlike. Vulture, maybe. Listen, she’s crazy about you, Ted. I just hope you’re fully aware of what this could mean. She adores you. You’re the man of her dreams.” She starts laughing hysterically, then suddenly she’s crying.

  “Ellen!” Ted pulls to the side of the road, stopping so abruptly that Mom bounces in her seat like a rag doll. “Ellen, are you okay?”

  “Oh, God,” she says. “Don’t pay any attention to me. Mother always makes me insane. Really. Doesn’t she, Jackson?”

  Ted looks back at me hopefully, and I nod. “It’s true,” I say.

  “It’s the roses,” Mom says, when we’ve gotten going again. She resets her seat to a normal position before she continues. “Oh, Ted, I wasn’t going to say anything—it’s so stupid, really. But since the goddamn roses have gotten me all out of whack it only seems fair.”

  Ted looks stricken. “I shouldn’t have brought you roses?” he asks. “I—”

  “No, no,” Mom says. “Not your roses; they were wonderful. Oz sent me roses. Forty black ones.”