“Yo, Jackson,” Dad says, and deals me a hand. “So how was the wedding?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, and that’s that.
The three of us play till after midnight, stopping only when Dad gets up to change the music on the stereo. We listen to the new Eric Clapton, the Traveling Wilburys, the R.E.M. tape that Brady made for him and was so pleased that he liked. Nothing old, I notice. Nothing that might make him think of Mom, downtown in the bridal suite at the Hyatt, starting her new life.
seventeen
Holiday parties are strictly against the rules at our high school, but Mrs. Blue is great at setting up what she calls “educational experiences.” Parties in disguise. We’ve been reading The Canterbury Tales in Western Civ, so the last day before break, we’re telling our own stories. We’re having a “traveler’s repast.”
It’s the first time I’ve enjoyed myself at school in a long while. Everybody’s mellow for a change, telling funny stories about family vacations or road trips that turned out to be a disaster. I tell about the time Dad insisted on taking a hundred-fifty-mile detour through Cawker City, Kansas, so we could see the second-largest twine ball in the world. Everybody laughs.
We drink the cranberry juice that Mrs. Blue brought as a substitute for the wine Chaucer’s pilgrims drank. We eat bread and cheese. Then Tom Best goes to his seat and gets the grocery sack he’s been carrying around all morning.
“Medieval nachos,” he says, and whips out five bags of corn chips and a huge Tupperware container of jalapeno dip.
Even Mrs. Blue thinks it’s funny.
Just before the end of the period, we do our gift exchange: something appropriate for a pilgrimage, Mrs. Blue had said. There’s a lot of screaming and laughing as people open their presents. A mix tape of road songs, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an all-day sucker, a squirt gun. I get a Hot Wheels race car from Kate Levin, who says, “Remember how you and Brady used to race these in the back of the room in second grade, when Mrs. Carver wasn’t looking?”
“Yeah,” I say, and think of him out in the world now, searching, a real pilgrim.
I drew Stephanie. I was relieved, in a way, because I knew I couldn’t keep avoiding her. She called me a couple of times after the party. Sorry, I can’t talk right now; sorry, I can’t go out, I said. The wedding, moving. I felt bad about it. So when I drew her name, I figured, what the hell, and spent more than the limit to buy her this thing called a dragonfly’s eye. You look through its prismlike lens and see multiple images of whatever’s in front of you, kind of like a collage, only every piece is the same thing.
“Whoa, far out,” she says when she puts it to her eye. “What a trip! You guys, this is blowing my mind.”
She hands it to me. Through it, I see rows and rows of her smiling face, her wild hair. I turn it slightly and she shifts, as if dancing.
“Oh, Jax, what a cool present,” she says, and throws her arms around me.
Mrs. Blue smiles and takes a turn. “This is wonderful!” she says. “And useful, yes. A pilgrim must learn to see in new and different ways.”
After class, Steph is waiting for me. “Listen,” she says, “I’ve been thinking, like, maybe we could do something together sometime. You want to do something, Jackson?”
She stands there, twirling a strand of her long hair on her finger.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, definitely.” But I chicken out again. “After Christmas—”
“Sure. After Christmas,” Steph says quickly. “Hey, have a good one, Jax, okay? We’re rich now; we’ll probably get all kinds of shit, right?” She kisses me on the check and leaves me standing there, my hand on my face, as if I’ve been slapped.
“Carr hitting on you, Watt?” Tom Best laughs as he passes, giving me a friendly punch in the arm. “Hey, go for it, man.”
Exactly what Brady would have said. He isn’t even here; he didn’t say it. But he’s the one I’m mad at. Again.
I’m mad at Dad, too. At least sick and tired of his annual holiday snit, which has now moved into high gear. We go to breakfast Sunday morning and all he wants to talk about is the variety of ways Kim’s driving him crazy.
She put red and green Hershey’s Kisses in his boxer shorts, he tells me. He found the same candy in his mailbox, in his jeans pockets, in the glove compartment of his Jeep. She bought toilet paper that plays “Jingle Bells” when you unroll it. “If she doesn’t quit trying to cheer me up, I’m going to kill her,” he says.
Later, at The Peak, I try to explain to Kim how what she’s doing only makes things worse.
“It’s like you and steak,” I say. “There’s nothing in the world anyone could do to make a steak look good to you. Nothing that could make you look at it and not think, blood.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Just don’t try to make Dad like Christmas, okay?”
“But then my Christmas is spoiled,” she says.
Jesus, I think. This is hopeless. To tell the truth, I’m about up to my ears with Christmas myself. Mom’s doing this Better Homes and Gardens thing, baking cookies like a maniac, buying all the presents she’s never been able to afford to buy. I haven’t done anything. “Take the charge card,” she tells me. But what can I buy her now that she has everything? And what do I buy for Ted? For Kristin and Amy, my sisters? I don’t even know them!
I wander around at the mall for hours but can’t make up my mind what to buy. There are too many things to choose from. I sit on a bench and eat a frozen yogurt, watching all the kids lined up to see Santa. When it’s their turn, a girl dressed up like one of Santa’s elves escorts them to the throne where he sits. I’m too far away; I can’t hear what they’re saying. But I suppose they’re asking for all the things they see advertised on television, like Brady and I used to do. We’d sit up in his room every day after school, making and remaking our Christmas lists. It’s one of the advantages of divorce, he’d say: the way parents feel guilty when the holiday season rolls around. So we might as well play it for all it’s worth. He cashed in big-time. He got every single thing he ever wanted, even the G.I. Joe doll that Layla was opposed to because it glorified war and Mr. Burton was opposed to because he felt that giving Brady a doll, any kind of doll, might plant the seeds for homosexuality later in life.
I got a lot myself, though not as much as Brady. I never told him, but I never gave Mom the list we made together. I made a different, shorter list. It had some toys on it but also books and clothes. Those first years after Mom and Dad were divorced, neither one of them had much extra money. Even so, they tried a lot harder than Brady’s parents did to make Christmas as nice as it could be. Yeah, they felt guilty. But it was obvious that they also felt depressed and sad. Somehow, there was no fun in taking advantage of that.
eighteen
Christmas keeps getting closer and closer, and Mom still hasn’t said a word to me about what plans she’s made with Dad this year. Ted’s the one who finally says, “Jackson, Ellen tells me that you and your mom and dad have always had Christmas breakfast together. If it’s okay with you, I thought I’d give Oz a call and invite him here.”
Even Dad had to admit it was a decent gesture. He appears a little past ten, carrying my Christmas present—a CD player, a good one, and the complete Beatles on CD.
“Dad,” I say. “Jeez—”
“For your new room.” He gives me a rough hug. “I’ll set it up after we eat.”
I give him his present, a T-shirt that has a picture of Elvis on it with “I’M DEAD” in big letters beneath. Dad puts it on immediately. “Graceland,” he says, and shields his eyes as if he’s having a vision. “We’ve got to go there!” Then he looks at me kind of funny. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done one of our trips, Jax,” he says.
Mom brings out the waffles and melted butter, the bacon, the fruit salad, the fresh-
squeezed orange juice. Dad doesn’t make a single remark about the hokey Christmas centerpiece on the dining-room table or the George Winston Christmas album on the stereo. He doesn’t say how strange it is to be spending Christmas morning here instead of in our old, crowded kitchen.
We talk about the weather, make good-natured fun of Grandma. Ted asks Dad a lot of questions about music, and we end up sitting at the table a long time, all of us talking at once.
“Peter, Paul, and Mary,” Ted says. “Man, I loved Peter, Paul, and Mary. I saw them in concert in Bloomington, must have been when I was in college.”
“You like folk music?” Dad says. “You should have heard Ellen sing that stuff. She was terrific.” He pauses and glances at Mom almost apologetically. Quickly, Ted starts talking about something else.
After breakfast, he shows Dad around the house. We’ve been here less than two weeks, but from the way it looks—everything is in place—we might have been living here for years. He shows him up the stairs to my room, then leaves the two of us alone.
“Nice digs,” Dad says. “Like an apartment.” My bed and dresser are on one side of the room. On the other, near the built-in desk and bookcases, are the couch and coffee table from our old house. My music posters are tacked up on the cork wall. “Nice house,” he says. “Your mom belongs in a house like this—”
Here it comes, I think. We’ve avoided talking about how Dad feels about this marriage for months, and now, Christmas morning, he’s going to nail her, and I’m going to have to defend her, and we’re both going to end up feeling bad about it. But he surprises me.
“What I mean is, I know a house like this is what she always wanted,” he says. “And I’m glad for her, Jackson. I really am. This marriage is a good thing for her, for both of you. Ted’s okay. He won’t mess you up. That’s what used to scare me. That Ellen would fall in love with someone that wasn’t right for you. But Ted—he sees who you are.”
I get that same feeling I had in the diner the morning of Mom’s wedding, like a camera focusing, allowing something new about my dad and me to come into view. I mean, I’ve always known that Dad loved me. In his way. That’s the phrase Grandma’s always used when she talks, grudgingly, about Dad loving me: in his way. Even Mom uses it sometimes: he loves you in his way. Translation: he loves you as well as he can. Somehow less. And I guess, over time, I’d come to believe it was true. Now I see it’s not like that at all. Dad’s way of loving me has nothing to do with some idea of what a kid is or what a father should be because he doesn’t really have one. That’s why it’s different. His way of loving me has only to do with me. Jackson. Whoever I was or am or will be. I earned his love somehow, like a friend would: that’s what I suddenly understand, and I feel proud and a little bit emotional about it, like if he keeps on with this conversation I might start to cry. I would for sure if I tried to explain it to him, so I don’t.
“Jax,” Dad says, his voice a little anxious. “You do think it’s a good thing, don’t you? Your mom and Ted?”
“Yeah. I think it’s a good thing.”
“Whew.” He grins. “Ellen has a history of falling in love with the wrong kind of guy, you know.”
“You’re not that bad,” I say. “Don’t give yourself so much credit.”
“Shit,” he says. “Don’t tell Kim that. She thinks I’m the biggest badass since James Dean.”
“I’m sure,” I say, and we both laugh.
“Okay,” he says, opening the box with the CD player in it. “Let’s set this thing up.” He checks out my receiver to see where all the wires should go, then asks me where on the wall of shelves I want to put it. I choose a place, and he goes to work.
Stretched out on my unmade bed, I remember how I used to love to watch him work when I was little. You’d think a kid would be bored or jealous or even scared when his dad was concentrating so hard that he’d completely forgotten him. But I liked being with Dad when he was that way. I liked his tuneless whistle, the same whistle I’m hearing now. I liked the way his hands hovered, his fingers pressing here and there, almost as if they were making music instead of connecting wires or smoothing wood.
“There are so many things that Oz could do,” Grandma used to say. She’d list them: engineering, building, computers … “I don’t know why he insists on keeping that ridiculous job. Honestly, a stagehand.”
Mom understood what he loved. She never wanted Dad to be anything other than what he was. The problem was that after a while, what he was didn’t fit with what she was becoming.
“Your dad thinks I want life to be easy,” she said to me once. “I don’t. I want to do the right thing. It’s just that the right thing turned out to be smaller than I thought it would be.
“Oz thinks I’ve sold out. If I’m in the system, I am the system. Responsible for every terrible thing that happens. He’s so angry about the world. ‘Don’t get any on you,’ he says. I swear, he acts as if doing the right thing is no more than not doing the expected thing, never doing whatever they think you should do. Whoever they are … ”
It’s true. Mom and I laugh sometimes. For being so allegedly laid-back, Dad can be as judgmental as Grandma. And he’s so full of contradiction. He rants about workaholic yuppies, but nobody works harder than Dad does. He loves work. He’ll work twelve, fifteen hours at a stretch, and never complain.
But why wouldn’t he work those hours if it makes him feel the way he obviously feels now? He steps back, thinking, steps forward, fiddles with some knobs, adjusts a wire. The whole world could disappear around him, and he’d never even know it.
When, finally, he’s satisfied, he inserts a CD, and “Sgt. Pepper” fills the room. “There you go, pal,” he says. “Okay, I’m outta here.”
“You don’t want to stay and listen?” I ask. “This is great. It sounds great.”
“Can’t do it. Got some stuff to do at home; it’s a pit. And Kim gets back from her parents’ this afternoon. Besides—” He winks, nodding toward the piles of clothes on the floor, my open empty suitcase. “You need to pack for the honeymoon.”
Downstairs, he gives Mom a kiss on the cheek, shakes Ted’s hand. “Don’t get burned,” he says, and we all laugh.
It’s another beautiful winter day. Clear and not so cold that I can’t walk him out to the Jeep with no more than a sweater. Dad opens the car door but doesn’t get in right away. He looks up and down the block. Little kids are out playing with their Christmas loot. Bicycles and skateboards whiz by. Little girls pushing their dolls in strollers.
Suddenly I think, don’t go. I feel awful about looking forward to the trip to Jamaica, about liking Ted as much as I do. If I hadn’t liked him, right now Dad and I might be taking off on one of those weird trips we used to take together.
“Well … ” he says.
“Listen, thanks, Dad,” I say. “The CD player. I never expected anything like that. It’s so cool.”
He jangles his car keys. He takes his sunglasses from the pocket of his leather jacket, blows the dust from them, puts them on. The sun glints off the gold rims. “I love you, pal,” he says, punching me on the arm. “Don’t you forget it.”
nineteen
Grandma takes us to the airport in her Cadillac. “Now leave your heavy jackets,” she says. “They can stay right here in the trunk until I come back to get you.”
Ted unloads our luggage and carries it to the curbside luggage handler. He has all our tickets. We wait, watching our fellow travelers hurry up and down the concourse, while he checks in at the desk. “All set,” he says. We send our carry-on bags through security. Our timing is perfect. The plane will be boarding in fifteen minutes.
It’s an uneventful flight. I doze in the window seat, half listening to my Walkman. Beside me, Amy colors. Kristin reads Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Across the aisle, Mom and Ted have the Jamaica book out and are mak
ing a list of things we might like to do.
I look out the window, beyond the silver wing that looks too big to be real, down through the wispy clouds to the turquoise blue water—the same color as the ink Steph always uses. No, don’t think about her, I tell myself. I focus on a boat below, just a black dot trailing a white wake, like a jet stream. In time, Jamaica appears, like a papier-mâché relief map: carefully modeled mountains painted gray and forest green, green-checkered farmlands, silver threads of river. There’s a wavery white line where the land meets the water. The engines shift as we circle around to begin our descent.
The heat hits us like a wall. Ted goes to get the rental car and picks us up out front with the air-conditioning turned on full blast. “No way will I ever get in one of those jitney cabs again,” he says as we cruise past the line of vans along the curb. “When I came here for a conference a few years back, we had to stop twice for people to throw up. Honest to God, the driver nearly killed at least three schoolkids who were walking in the road. Not to mention nearly killing us—”
“Ted!” Mom shrieks. “Left lane, remember?”
He swerves, then when we’re safe in the lane we’re supposed to be in, he reaches over and pats her hand. “Like I was saying, if we’re going to get killed, I’d rather kill us myself.”
“Oh, what a comfort,” Mom says. But she’s smiling.
The road to Ocho Rios follows the coastline. To our left, the ocean stretches out forever, striped in a half-dozen shades of blue. Everywhere else it’s ferns and palm trees. Occasionally we pass resort areas, where the vegetation has been cut back and manicured. The hotels and guest houses are brightly painted, surrounded by extravagant flower beds. People dressed in the same bright colors cruise around on golf carts with striped awnings.
The native villages we pass through are gray and dusty, though. Wiry black kids play in the streets, shouting and laughing. Men lounge, smoking, outside houses that are like shacks, really. You can look right through the open front doors and see beat-up furniture and more kids inside.
Wish You Were Here Page 10
