Roomies

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

I shake my head and he shrugs, dumbfounded.

  I should break up with him, I know. Because we are not going to have sex. Because I don’t feel that way about him anymore, if I ever did. But it hardly seems worth the effort when college can do the breaking up for me. The path of least resistance is a path I know well, having trod it in circles around my mother for years.

  When I turn up at the address Tim gave me, there’s a guy I’ve never seen before poking around in the yard out front. Tim never said anything about a new employee, but I’m not exactly his confidante. It is true, however, that he has started to take me more seriously now that I’m enrolled in a landscape architecture program. Mostly, he tells me stories about life before he and his wife (who handles the administrative end of the business) had kids, and I like to listen. Apparently, they used to work hard all spring and summer, then spend their winters in places like Belize and Costa Rica when their work dried up for the season. I’ve never been anywhere so the idea that my chosen profession might allow me to “winter” in South America excites me no end. In my fantasy, my mother even comes down every year and we have Christmases that are fun, like with Rum Runners and Caribbean-sounding music, and not like the ones we have now—with endless televised yule log fires and that feeling of disappointment we share when we realize we’ve only been awake for ten minutes and have already opened each other’s presents and have nothing else to do.

  “Can I help you?” the guy says when he sees me. He looks about my age and I’m sort of annoyed that Tim thinks he needs a male intern or employee. The rocks are heavy, yes, but I’ve never complained.

  “I work for Tim,” I say, and the guy says, “Who’s Tim?” He looks like he just rolled out of bed. His hair is jutting in all the wrong directions, his clothes are crinkled, and there’s even something cakey near the side of his mouth. Like some kind of frosting or old milk. In spite of all this, he is adorable.

  “Landscaper?” I say.

  He wipes his dirty hands on his shorts. “Oh.”

  A woman’s voice calls out from somewhere. “Didn’t I tell you to leave it alone?”

  The guy looks up. “Yes, Mom.” He smiles over at me and rolls his eyes. “Multiple times.”

  I look up and catch a flash of blond hair disappearing into a second-story window and only then really start to notice the house we’re working on. How nice it is. How massive. How entirely unlike the condo my mother and I have lived in since my dad left when I was in kindergarten. There are trees around the house that I would kill for. Old trees. The sort that have benches under them and thick knots in their trunks. Trees that weep flowers in spring. There are trellises in the yard that have been strangled by roses in a sort of gothic way, and there is a part of me that thinks that this guy’s parents are wasting their money, hiring Tim to update their grounds. Still, I am happy to be able to spend time here. The “garden” at home is an eight-foot-square lawn beyond a tiny patio, on which sits a grill my mother has never figured out how to use.

  The guy says, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it.” He walks up a path to the front door, picks a mug up off the steps, takes a sip of what I can only assume is coffee, then turns and says, “I’m Mark, by the way.”

  “Elizabeth,” I say.

  I do not say “but everyone calls me EB.” I do not register the green of his eyes, the smooth skin of his arms, the way his shorts hang a tiny bit too low on his hips. I am leaving. Soon. Leaving Alex, leaving my friends, leaving my mom and this Mark guy, too. There will be no regrets, no looking back, and certainly no weird flirty stuff with a client’s son.

  Still, I can’t resist asking. “What were you doing?” I nod at the garden.

  “Oh.” He shakes his head. “It’s stupid. But there’s this frog that sort of hangs out here. I was going to, I don’t know, relocate him?”

  Not noticing the way his top lip sort of puckers when he talks and for sure when he kisses, too; not thinking at all about the fact that a guy who’ll save a frog while his coffee gets cold is probably a guy worth getting to know, I say, “I’ll keep an eye out,” and he says, “Cool.”

  He disappears inside and I sit on the stoop and don’t think about whether he’s going to watch me work, from his window, or whether I’ll see him again later today or tomorrow or the next day. I don’t think about sippy-cup Alex and that burger juice or sex at all. Because things are already complicated enough. So I just sit waiting for Tim and take my phone out and pull up Lauren’s latest e-mail. When I reread the bit about popcorn, I think how dull she sounds. Because looking forward to popping popcorn sounds pretty… sad. But then I think about all the frozen-dinner or takeout nights I spend at home alone while my mom is on dates and think about the fact that if my father hadn’t left—or been gay—maybe I’d have a brother or a sister to watch movies with, and how that would be more fun than watching alone, or with Alex or Justine, and then I realize that I am actually looking forward to it, too. To popcorn and pajamas and maybe even silly pillow fights. And maybe I am reading into things. I decide to give her the benefit of the doubt one last time.

  Lauren,

  Great news about the microwave. Orville

  (I Google orville popcorn for the right spelling.)

  Redenbacher, here we come! Thank your friend Keyon for hooking us up.

  Something about typing the name Keyon makes it pop out more and it occurs to me that it sounds… black? African-American? I realize that for no good reason I have been assuming that Lauren is white. But I can’t exactly come out and ask her what ethnicity/race/color she is, can I? And also I shouldn’t assume she’s black if she has a black friend. God, I’m naïve. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to go away to college in the first place. People here seem a little samey and closed-minded sometimes, especially when they hear that I have a gay dad, and I don’t want to end up like that if I can help it. I go back and reread her e-mail for other possible clues, then feel dumb—of course there aren’t any!—so I get back to my own note.

  BTW, I live in New Jersey, but by the beach. The weather here is horribly hot and humid these days. Which sounds an awful lot like Florida now that I think about it.

  FIVE younger brothers and sisters? Twins! Wow. It’s just me and my mom.

  Gotta go!

  EB

  Tim still isn’t there, but it’s good to keep things short and sweet. And so I wait. And I go to Facebook on my phone and search for Keyons but between the small screen, the mobile app, and the sun’s glare, it’s too frustrating and, really, sort of pathetic of me. I decide to take a closer look at the garden to see if I can’t find that frog.

  SUNDAY, JUNE 30

  SAN FRANCISCO

  “What is it, P.J.? What? I can’t understand you when you’re crying!” Actually, I can’t understand P.J. at all, anytime, crying or not. She’s in that incoherent toddler stage of language, and though my parents seem to understand her, everything that comes out of her mouth sounds to me like a series of wheezes, glottal stops, and pig Latin. Of course, she’s convinced she makes perfect sense and is therefore red with frustration that I can’t comprehend why the food I’ve served her is totally unacceptable.

  “Ga meh ippy geh!”

  Wish I could help you with that, Peej.

  It’s me, P.J., Gertie, and Marcus tonight; Mom and Dad took Francis and Jack over to my grandma Gertrude’s in Daly City. Her rule is no more than two children at a time in her house. Smart woman.

  “Gert,” I plead, “do you know what P.J. wants?”

  Gertie shakes her head soberly as she threads one piece of macaroni onto each tine of her fork.

  “Marcus?” I try.

  “Ippy geh!”

  “Maybe she wants ketchup.” He slides off his chair and goes to the fridge to retrieve the bottle; then before I can say “Marcus, don’t,” he’s squeezed ketchup all over P.J.’s mac and cheese.

  She completely loses it. Total core meltdown.

  Instead of going right to her, picking her up, talking h
er through it—which should come naturally since I spend so much of my time doing just that—I stare at her face like I would if this were a research project. P.J., in my kitchen table lab.

  My observations:

  It’s amazing how red she can get. Nearly purple.

  I wonder if I ever howled like that, making myself so sweaty with anger that my hair stuck to the sides of my face.

  How long can I do nothing before the neighbors start to think I’m torturing my siblings, or before Marcus and Gertie attempt to intervene, no doubt making it worse?

  And lastly, the thought I’ve been avoiding:

  What are my parents going to do without me?

  I mean, I know it’s not like I’m moving across the country, but across the Bay feels almost the same when you’re like us and even going over a bridge counts as an exotic vacation. I guess I can jump on BART anytime, then grab the L car and be right here.

  But it won’t be the same. School is going to be hard, and I’ll be working, too, as soon as I can get a job on that side of the Bay, and even if I come by on the weekends…

  “Can I have ice cream?” Marcus asks, calmly but loudly, over P.J.’s screams.

  That snaps me out of it. I take Peej out of her booster seat and carry her through the kitchen, patting her back, while she calms down.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Mom said no dessert tonight. For any of us. You heard her.”

  “Why not?” Marcus asks again. Despite the fact that he and Gertie are twins, the only way they’re alike as far as I can tell is their love of variations on the question why.

  P.J. takes in a big, shuddery breath. “Ippy,” she whispers.

  “Why should you have dessert every night? I practically never got dessert when I was your age.” I open the fridge in search of something P.J. might eat.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Mom and Dad were health nuts back then. They didn’t believe in sugar.”

  “Why not?”

  I close the fridge door. “Seriously, Marcus, you’re not going to break me. You can ask me ‘why not’ a hundred more times and you still won’t get dessert.”

  He pushes out his lower lip and flounces out of the kitchen saying something about how it’s not fair. Oh, the drama.

  Thank God Gertie is being an angel tonight, slowly eating her dinner in peace, even the green beans. I want to kiss her sweet little cheek.

  I need to get food into P.J. somehow, then get them all to bed. Then do my push-ups and sit-ups, update my checkbook to see where I’m at, then shoot off e-mails to Keyon, Zoe, and Ebb. What I would also love is a hot bath. However, I showered this morning and when there are eight people in the house it’s a little selfish to use that much water twice in one day.

  P.J. passes up everything I offer: peanut butter on crackers, baby carrots dipped in pickle relish (gross), ham- and-cheese roll-ups, all her favorites. She mashes her lips together in total refusal.

  I guess she won’t starve to death in the night. When I carry her into the living room I find Marcus asleep in the beanbag chair. That was fast. After getting P.J. and Gertie washed up and into their beds, I carry Marcus to his and let him sleep in his clothes.

  Now, for as long as I can stay awake, it’s Lauren Time.

  For a scary second, I feel like I’m on the verge of a P.J.-like meltdown myself. That’s the thing about having a minute to think around here. Everything you haven’t had time to worry about in the chaos of the day comes at you, whoosh. If you don’t move on to the next task, ASAP, it can undo you. When people remark to my mom how tiring it must be to have all these little kids, she always laughs and says, “I don’t have time to think about how tired I am.”

  Well, me neither. I’ll have to schedule my meltdown for another day.

  I open up my bank accounts online. Things are looking okay, considering. I’ve got about $600 in my checking and nearly $3,200 in savings, which I think of as half of that, because of the laptop situation. Dad’s birthday is coming up in September and I want to get him a new gas grill for the back porch. He’ll say it’s too extravagant, that his little mini-grill is fine, but secretly he’ll rejoice. The man does love to put meat on a fire. And the more Dad grills, the less Mom has to cook, and the fewer pans I have to scrub.

  I write a short e-mail to Keyon thanking him for the microwave hookup and asking him to send my schedule for next week so I can plan with Mom when I’ll be available for kid-watching.

  When I start an e-mail to Zoe, I see she’s online so we chat instead. Because of my crazy schedule, practically our whole friendship is conducted via computers and cell phones when we’re not at school, even though she lives pretty close. She’ll be going off to Seattle University soon, anyway. In some ways it feels like no big deal. We’ve had our good years and our bad years and always wind up as solid as ever with no major drama. In other ways, it seems we’ve already started to say good-bye.

  A lot of our conversations are about memories.

  Remember the summer we were volunteer zoo docents. Remember how Aaron Goldfarb broke both our hearts in sixth grade. Remember when we thought we lost Jack at the Exploratorium. Remember when I burned off Zoe’s bangs demonstrating the chemistry set my parents gave me for my twelfth birthday. (That was one of our bad years.)

  Zoe ends the chat with Keep it real, LoCo!, which cracks me up.

  My mood comes down again when I start replying to Ebb’s e-mail. I still feel like a major jerk about my last one to her. I’d tried to be more enthusiastic; then I messed up again.

  Dear EB,

  I can’t believe I said Florida. Not Florida. NOT. It’s no excuse, but would you believe the farthest (furthest?) I’ve ever been from home is Bakersfield? That’s a big, depressing city in central southern CA. But you probably know that, obviously being more acquainted with maps than I am.

  Yeah, the microwave thing is kind of a funny story. I don’t know Keyon super well. His dad owns the company I work for.

  That sounds a lot better than “I work at his dad’s sandwich shop.” Ebb is probably rich or at least upper middle class if she’s coming to Berkeley from the other side of the country. And I know that shouldn’t bother me or keep me from being myself, but I like the way “owns the company” sounds. Like Ebb will maybe get a different impression of me than I have of myself. I mean, she’s not here, she can’t see into my life, I can kind of be whoever I want with her for now.

  He works there, too. We work together.

  Reading Dr. Seuss to P.J. has affected my writing style. I backspace over that part.

  He went to my school but I didn’t KNOW him know him, except in the way everyone knew him because he was this big jock and also really smart and not an ass. Wide receiver on the football team. Speaking of football, I should warn you: You have to get into it at least a little if you’re coming to Berkeley. You probably know about the rivalry with Stanford. It’s kind of a big deal. Personally I love it. We’re 49ers fans in our house even though they can be so unreliable and have broken our hearts too many times to count.

  I’m tempted to talk about the 49ers of my childhood and my fondness for Jeff Garcia, but going on a sports tangent this early in our correspondence seems like a risky move.

  So do you have a summer job or anything?

  Or are you independently wealthy, hangin’ at the beach and sending me e-mails from your phone, while I continue to have the dumbest phone in the world and still have to text with the number pad?

  Whoa. Bitter. Where’d that come from?

  Okay! Have a good day tomorrow. Or whenever you get this!

  Lauren

  When my parents get home, I hang out in the living room with them a little, talking quietly so the kids don’t wake up. Dad has these almost comically huge bags under his eyes, and somehow when he’s tired his cheap clothes and DIY haircut make me sad. Other days, when his energy is up, I love those things about him, his self-sacrifice, and his willingness a
nd ability to work as hard as he does and still be an awesome dad.

  Our family’s bigness and its particular challenges from that bigness can be endearing sometimes. Or, I can get the kind of thoughts I had while writing Ebb’s e-mail—thoughts about wishing I really did know people who owned big companies, or that I had the mental space to get the state of my future roommate’s residence right, or had a better phone and more time to write to her.

  The meltdown hovers.

  I distract it by reenacting P.J.’s mystery food request for my parents.

  They look at each other, brows furrowed, until finally Dad lights up. “Oh! A dippy egg.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Mom laughs. “You know. An over-easy egg. Then you cut the toast into strips and she dips it in the yolk.”

  I roll my eyes. “Wow. Don’t know how I missed that.”

  “You’ll catch on one of these days,” Dad says, and Mom makes some kind of a joke, too, but I’m not sure what because I guess I fall asleep, and the next thing I know one of them is squeezing my shoulder and helping me to my room, where I proceed to conk immediately out.

  SUNDAY, JUNE 30

  NEW JERSEY

  There is a leftover dinner plate in the fridge when I get home from a long day of working for Tim—we sometimes work on Sundays—with a note that says, Don’t wait up. I’m too hungry to even bother to heat it, plus I don’t like what happens to chicken in the microwave, the way it seems to absorb some kind of metallic, deathly taste. So I take the plate into the den, plop down on the couch, and turn on the TV. There’s a Housewives of some kind or another on—like there always is—and I listen to a bottle-blonde braying as I chew. I’m almost afraid to check e-mail because it’s been days since I e-mailed Lauren and I know she’s not going to have written back yet and that I’ll continue to feel freaked out the way I have all weekend, like maybe I somehow pissed her off. Like I should have let the Florida thing go for now. She’d have figured it out on her own soon enough.