The World of Normal Boys

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “Robin, make me a promise. If Clark and I ever divorce, you’ll stay with me, won’t you?”

  He shushes her. “It’s not going to happen, so don’t talk about it.”

  She pulls out of his arms and touches her lips to his. “Promise me.”

  “Of course, Mom. Of course.” He gently guides her back behind the wheel, wanting to be free of the intensity of her need.

  She studies herself in the rearview mirror, gazing with pity upon her image. He waits for her to start the car, but she is strangely unable to move.

  Minutes go by. “Mom?”

  She stares at the dashboard as if she can’t make any sense of it. He instructs her calmly: “Put the key in the ignition.” She starts the engine, but remains impassive, her face blank.

  “Mom, put the car in reverse.” She nods, as if revisiting something long forgotten. “Check your blind spots. Watch out for cars. The traffic’s heavy on the Palisades. Just take it slowly.”

  She follows his instructions, a zombie taking orders, and in this way, turn by turn, he guides them home.

  Chapter Twelve

  He begins to visit Jackson by himself after school, after his mother has left and before his father, with Ruby in tow, shows up in the evening. He thinks about these visits all day long, preparing the stories he will tell his brother.

  Every day he relates to Jackson another piece of what life has been like without him: Clark and Dorothy’s increased hostility toward each other, Ruby’s new religion, his own rebelliousness. These stories are unlike any he has ever fabricated with his mother. Now, he keeps his language precise and as rational as he can, trying to preempt the reactions he knows Jackson would display—confusion, protest, mockery. The tales are a stream of words flowing from one visit to the next, returned to over a week’s time. I will make him understand, he thinks. I am his big brother, and it’s my job to make him trust me.

  Slowly, over the course of days, he spells out his new understanding of their family: their parents have never really loved each other; once his mother got pregnant, the thrill wore off. The marriage was probably a mistake—Robin’s birth was probably a mistake—but it’s too late to change that. His mother thinks he’s special, his father thinks he’s an embarrassment, and somewhere in between is the fact of his almost fourteen years of life. He offers his explanation to Jackson’s inert body. “The way Mom and Dad live, it’s like once upon a time they called a truce. Somewhere around the time you were born Mom freaked out. Maybe she threatened to leave; maybe she just turned into a bitch. I’m not sure. But they made some kind of agreement, maybe not a spoken agreement, but, you know ... something like this: Mom got me, and Dad got you, and they kind of share Ruby or just ignore her. But now with you kind of out of it, Dad’s mad. He wants me to be more like you, and Mom wants me to be more like—I don’t know—like her. Everything might fall apart if you don’t get better.”

  As he’s speaking, he visualizes a reel-to-reel tape imbedded in Jackson’s brain, recording his words; he imagines Jackson waking from his coma, opening his mouth and spouting back everything Robin’s been saying. So when he talks about Scott or Todd, about his adventures with them, he censors himself. He stops the story about going to the golf course with Todd at the point where they were splashing around skinny-dipping; he describes the night Scott slept over in his bed, but makes it sound as if they just have a particularly intense friendship. He says, “There’s other stuff, but I’ll tell you when you’re older. You’re not mature enough yet.” Or, “I can’t say anything more because I think the nurses might hear.”

  Some days he just talks about something that he read in a book or saw on TV, because the family stuff, the Scott stuff and the what’s-going-on-in-my-head stuff, even in the unloading of it, is a burden. Some days he just wants someone to talk with about the unimportant things. Jackson’s never been the right person for that, but lately there’s no one else.

  He corners his mother one night in the kitchen, where she sits with her glass of wine, sorting through a pile of bills. More than a week has passed since she took him to the Palisades. “Did you ask Mr. Cortez about Scott?”

  She nods without taking her eyes from her paperwork.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks in astonishment. “What did he say?”

  “He said that Scott was living with relatives in another town.”

  “What relatives? What other town?” His eyes widen in amazement at the information, at her nonchalance in revealing it.

  “He wouldn’t give me details.”

  “Why not? Did you tell him I’ve been trying to find Scott?”

  She shuffles through a pile of mail, pulling a few envelopes from it. “I wrote away for literature on prep schools, and I’d like you to look this over.”

  “Mom, I’m asking you about Scott.”

  “I’ve said it before, Robin. I’ll say it again: I don’t think it’s any of our—”

  He cuts her off, infuriated. “It is my business—it is—and I can’t believe you won’t help. You promised me.”

  She finally raises her head. Her voice is unyielding. “Robin, I’ve never, ever said this to you in your entire life, but I’m going to say it now because I am at my wit’s end: I’m your mother, and you must listen to me. It’s that simple. No more questions. Just do as you’re told and stop asking about Scott.”

  She thrusts the school brochures at him, but he backs away empty handed, hissing out a threat. “Fine, if that’s the way you want it. You know, I made a promise to you that night, but I guess I’ll just take that one back, too.”

  A few days later, Dorothy asks him what he wants for his birthday.

  “I don’t want anything anyone can give me wrapped in a box.”

  “That’s very noble, Robin, but if I were to get you something, what would you like it to be?”

  He tells her he wants a camera, which is something he hasn’t thought about since he learned that photography was not part of freshman art. He had a camera when he was younger, an Instamatic that didn’t keep anything in focus. The colors of the pictures disappointed him: skies always nearly white, trees and lawns lurid and shiny as Astroturf. Faces were flat and bright from the flash or hidden by shadows. He finally put the camera away, thinking one day he’d have a Canon like his father’s, only he’d use it more often, not just on the one vacation they took every year. He wanted to take photos like the reproductions his mother had framed around the house—Cartier-Bresson, Stieglitz, Doisneau; people in the city, in their homes; the emotion of fleeting moments perfectly preserved—not the boring shots of monuments and nature glimpsed through a car window that his father favored. When he hears himself asking his mother for a camera for his birthday it seems like a long-standing wish suddenly voicing itself. Later, his father tells him out of the blue, “Don’t expect a lot for your birthday, Robin. It’s just not a good year.”

  He gives up on the camera after that, even as part of him holds fast to the idea. He makes a list of the things he wants to photograph and recites it to Jackson at the hospital: “Strangers on the street in New York City who catch my eye, like the crazy guy with the dogs in the wheelchair on Eighth Street, and the woman with the leopard-print pants, who I definitely think was a model. Kids at school when they’re not looking, especially the kids I don’t like doing gross things in the cafeteria, like Seth Carter stuffing a disgusting sloppy joe in his mouth, or Danielle Louis mixing her mashed potatoes and wax beans. If you look close you’ll see the grossest things people do while they’re eating. Victoria sometimes eats butter on a fork! And last but not least, I would like to take pictures of Scott, in his room or in the courtyard at school or at The Bird.”

  He thinks to himself that he would also want to take pictures of Jackson in the hospital, to show to him when he was out and feeling better.

  December 15. Robin’s birthday. Nana has made a chocolate cake from scratch, and Ruby has spread white frosting from a can and pressed M&Ms into the surface
in the shape of the letter “R.” Fifteen candles—one for each year and one for good luck—lie in a pile on the counter. Dorothy has insisted on a celebration, although Robin had no one to call now that Scott was gone and Victoria is no longer speaking to him. It will just be his parents and Ruby, Nana, Uncle Stan, Aunt Corinne, and Larry. Dorothy has recruited Clark to help her blow up a bag of white balloons. Clark criticizes the color, but Dorothy brushes him off. “White in winter is perfect. And for a birthday, it’s absolutely the right choice.” She piles the shiny white balloons in corners around the house, like enormous spilled pearls.

  For Robin, a roomful of balloons is a room brimming with tension—a room waiting to explode. The sound of popping balloons is one of his least favorite sounds. No matter how prepared he is for a balloon’s eruption, the noise still shocks him. He doesn’t protest his mother’s white balloons, though, because maybe, without Jackson, their presence will be bearable. Jackson with balloons was a monster. He carried balloons behind people and popped them without warning, and if anyone protested, he’d stomp on one or two right in the middle of the floor. He’d spear them on his silverware and hold them close to candles (which is why they’ve never used helium). Robin believes that some of Jackson’s happiest moments were when he popped four or five balloons in a row, working the room into an uproar.

  The lights are turned out. The song begins. Dorothy waltzes the cake into the room, candles blazing. Make a wish, they say. Robin presses his eyes together and holds his breath and thinks, Please bring Scott back, but in the split second before he blows out the candles, Larry speaks up, saying, “I wish Jackson was here,” and the words hit him like a blow to the gut. As he exhales, his eyes meet Larry’s, and he cannot help but feel that Larry knows he made the wrong wish. Robin remembers Larry on the slide that day, taunting Ruby, taunting him, too; he remembers the horrible sound of Jackson’s bones cracking as Larry turned him over, and he thinks, It’s your fault.

  From his father, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; from Ruby, a Miss Piggy coffee cup that reads, “This mug belongs to moi;” from his mother, a blank journal with a violet cloth cover, which he likes more than he lets on. Aunt Corinne gives him a boring argyle sweater that he doesn’t think he’ll wear, though Dorothy grandly announces that it will be perfect for his new school. Then she presents another box. “It’s from all of us,” she says, but from the look on his father’s face, Robin is sure that she bought it without telling him.

  The camera is heavy in his hands. Its black-and-silver metal gleams like a gun. The weight and texture of it proclaim the seriousness of its purpose. There is a zoom lens encircled with tiny numbers. There are settings for things he doesn’t know how to use and a separate flash unit that slides onto the top. Holding it up to his face, he feels like an adult. People react when he points it at them: Nana backs away; Aunt Corinne adjusts her hair; Larry pushes up the tip of his nose and grunts like a pig. He likes this power to rouse people from their passivity; he likes this injection of control. It feels natural.

  “Everyone stand together,” he says. “On the count of three.” Through the viewfinder they look posed and stiff, false in their snug harmony. He gets an idea: “Oh, wait, something’s wrong.” Everyone relaxes for a moment, allowing him to adjust. He waits until the composition unravels—his mother’s smile faded, his father’s posture loosened, Ruby’s and Larry’s eyes gazing elsewhere—and then snaps the image without announcement. A chorus of protests follows, but he ignores it. This image of his family in disarray has been preserved.

  Later, while the adults are playing cards around the table, Ruby pulls him aside. “What about what you promised?”

  He takes the stolen Pisces medallion from under his bed and carries it to his parents’ room, where the coats and purses have been dropped onto the bed. He finds Aunt Corinne’s purse and shoves the medallion inside, burying it at the bottom so that she might think she had overlooked it there.

  He is startled by the ringing of the phone. The purse slips from his hands. As he is gathering up the spilled contents, Larry pushes open the bedroom door.

  “Hey—that’s my mother’s!”

  “It is? I just noticed it fell off the bed and I’m cleaning it up.” He stuffs everything back in and snaps it shut, the medallion now tangled up with the rest of it. He curses Ruby under his breath, curses himself for agreeing to help her.

  “You’re stealing from my mother.” Larry moves closer, thrilled to be catching Robin red-handed.

  “I wasn’t stealing, I was just looking at it. It’s a nice purse.”

  “What? Do you want one of your own?”

  “Shut up, Larry.”

  “I bet you were going to put on her makeup.” Larry jumps behind him, reaching beneath the waistline of his jeans and tugging upward on his underwear. “Wedgie!”

  Robin is twisting out of Larry’s grip when the bedroom door slams open again. His mother braces herself against the doorframe, her face pale and horrified. Robin has never seen her look so ghostly. “Get off me,” he says to Larry, pushing him away and adjusting his pants.

  Larry turns to Dorothy. “Robin was stealing from my mother.”

  Dorothy opens her mouth but does not speak. A tremor races outward from her chest, along her limbs, up to her face. Her teeth are nearly chattering.

  Robin jumps to his own defense, “I wasn’t stealing. I was going to put something back—”

  “I caught him!”

  “Damn it, Larry,” Dorothy shouts, her eyes wild. “Go downstairs!”

  Larry slides through the doorway past Dorothy, avoiding contact with her as if her unhinged behavior were contagious.

  Robin tries again to explain. “I swear I wasn’t stealing. Aunt Corinne’s purse just spilled.”

  “No, no, no, no . . .” She is walking toward him, arms outstretched as if to brace herself for a fall.

  “Mom?”

  From downstairs he hears muffled commotion, someone sobbing, heavy footsteps out the door. The screech of his father’s car speeding into the street. What he sees in his mother’s face has nothing to do with finding him and Larry fighting. It is a reflection of something much larger, much more terrible. Some news that has just come in over the phone.

  When she says it he has already figured it out: “Jackson is dead.”

  She falls toward him as she says the words. He steadies her, guiding her to the bed, where she curls up in spasms. Her cries are the sound of physical injury, breath screaming out against pain. He stretches his arms wide, as if sheltering a shivering child with a cloak, and presses down against her, afraid that in her shock she might die, too. He is aware of his own trembling moving from inside out, but he forces himself to ignore it, to hold tighter to her. There is nothing else to do. He has no other thoughts in his head. Her grief is the only real thing.

  What happens now? He is caught in a daze of incomprehension. He cannot remember from one moment to the next where his thoughts have been. He is dissolving.

  Four in the morning, wide awake, he crawls downstairs with his new camera. He skims the instruction booklet and then sits on the floor in the dining room, pointing the lens toward the unfinished room. He removes the shade from an end table lamp and shines the bulb on the plastic windows. He focuses on the pale grain of the two-by-fours overhead. He zooms in on nailheads and Sheetrock seams and dust piled in the corners. He doesn’t stop to question what he is doing. When he runs out of film, he realizes he has been keeping a running commentary throughout, an explanation, to accompany the photos, for his next visit to Jackson.

  He feels stupid, unprepared, witless. He rips the film from the camera, stomps his heel on the canister, runs it under water in the sink, buries it in the trash can.

  Nothing is harder to grasp than this: there will be no more hospital visits. No more watching and waiting, no more tallying of days, no further deterioration. It is over. They lost.

  In the morning, his mother wakes him up from a deep, disturbing sl
eep and announces that he and Ruby are to come shopping with her. She buys clothes for each of them. Robin gets a black three-piece suit and a pair of pleated black trousers and a black sweater. She buys Ruby two black dresses and a black skirt and sweater. Ruby complains that the sweater is itchy, but Dorothy says she must wear it anyway. Ruby begins to cry. Dorothy walks her to the car and tells her to wait there while she and Robin continue on, but Robin steps to her defense.

  “I’m not leaving Ruby here,” he says, seething at his mother’s cruelty.

  Dorothy looks exasperated, beleaguered. “Fine. Fine. But no more arguing from either of you. Not today. Just do what I say—no more questions.”

  She buys herself two black dresses, a pantsuit, a trench coat, new black pumps, and a black leather purse. Robin is awed by the beauty of it all. When Dorothy is satisfied, they throw everything in the trunk and proceed to a hair salon. He gets his hair shampooed by a teenage girl whose breasts dangle loosely in her shirt just in front of his face; he is surprised to feel himself getting hard under the white smock they’ve made him wear. His mother stands next to the stylist, delivering clipped instructions. Despite Robin’s objections she orders that his hair be cut short. Wet locks flutter to the floor, lightening as they lose their moisture. He finds himself saying good-bye to his long-haired self, which is sadder than he allows himself to admit. When finished, he has a side part and short bangs smoothed to the side. In the mirror his ears look enormous. He tells the hairdresser that it’s fine, though he is obviously lying, and she looks as unhappy as he is. Ruby surprises him with a whispered encouragement: “It’ll grow back. Don’t worry. You let it grow long like you had it. It was so pretty that way.” Ruby also gets a few inches cut off, though the change is much less dramatic.