When I return to the living room, it’s clear my parents have been whispering heatedly.
“There he is,” Dad says, smiling dumbly. His hair is trimmed, his clothes clean, his beard shaved.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
“That’s exactly what Jill said.”
I hazard a glance at Mom, who looks back in irritated confusion, as if she’d ordered the steak and wound up with sea urchin. “I don’t understand,” she says. “Jill should have five more days. At least.”
“Well, don’t look at me,” I say. “All I did was wake up.”
She narrows her eyes. “Well, this is …” Her head makes those tiny shaky motions.
Dad watches her nervously for a second, then comes over and punches me on the shoulder. “Heck, I think it’s terrific. Do I get a hug? Or is that too much?”
“It’s too much,” I say.
“Fair enough,” he says. “Hey, I know.” He claps excitedly. “Why don’t we make a day of it!”
Mom looks at him in horror, but he just keeps smiling.
“How about it, Jack?” he says. “Are you hungry? Have you eaten? Why don’t we go out for breakfast.”
“You want to go out for breakfast?” I say. “With me?”
“Why not?” he says. “You’ve got to eat. What do you say, Helen?”
But Helen seems to have crashed like a piece of buggy software, her body rigid and her face stuck in a permanent expression of disgust and dismay. After a few seconds she reboots and says, “Yes. That would be nice.”
“Hah!” I say. Because seriously, nothing would be less “nice” than me and the Evil Snow Queen of Winterhead eating breakfast together. And that’s not just my opinion. Believe me, this hatred is a two-way affair. What must be happening is that Mom’s software is struggling to collate the unexpected data of my presence and has fallen back on an older version that prioritized decorum.
“Actually, you know what?” I say, just to mess with her. “You’re right, Mom. That would be nice.”
“Perfect,” Dad says. “Where should we go?”
Unlike Dad, Mom understands sarcasm. “Richard,” she says. “Maybe we should just go home.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. “You must be psychic, because I was thinking the exact same thing.”
“Now just wait a minute,” Dad says. “Let’s not be hasty here.” He positions himself between Mom and me like a referee in a boxing match. “All I’m suggesting is that we go have a meal together.”
“Oh, I get it,” I say. “You buy me breakfast and we just pretend the last four years didn’t happen?”
Dad shakes his head in big, dramatic arcs. “That’s not what I’m suggesting here.”
“Look,” I say. “Just because I was big enough to be civilized toward you this summer doesn’t mean all’s forgiven. You guys locked me in a room. Do you remember that?”
“Of course we remember,” he says.
“Not like I do,” I say. “I remember the smell of paint. And the cameras. I remember the drip from the shower, which, incidentally, was the only sound I heard because of the metal plates over the windows and the locked steel door.”
“We made mistakes,” Dad says.
“Don’t kid yourself, Dad. Mom made mistakes. All you did was nothing.”
“Now wait a minute, Jack. I was the one who showed Jill the code to that security system.”
“Yeah, and what was that about anyway?” I say. “What kind of messed-up, indirect—”
“Richard,” Mom says. “Let’s just go.”
“No,” Dad says. “We have a lot to talk about. This is good. I think we need this. All feelings are valid here. Let’s see if we can’t work through it.”
“No,” I tell him. “You didn’t come here to see me. You scheduled this visit for Jill’s phase, so let’s stop pretending you even care about me. Let’s just go back to ignoring each other.”
Just then footsteps come rushing up the stairs, followed by keys jingling in the lock. For a crazy second I have visions of Jill coming home and whisking my parents away.
But of course, it’s Ramie.
When she comes in the door, she looks as shocked to see me as my parents were.
“Jack!” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“I guess that’s the question of the day,” I say.
Ramie looks at my parents, then back at me.
“Hi, Ramie,” Dad says. “How are you?”
“Great,” she says. “Hi, Mrs. McTeague.”
“Hello, Ramie,” Mom says. Subtext: you are the devil’s spawn.
Ramie turns to me. “Big hurry. Can’t stay. Come with me?”
I nod, and she drags me into the safe, parent-free sanctum of her room. I close the door and put my back to it.
“I deeply did not expect to see you today,” she says.
“Hold me.”
She laughs, then gives me a big hug. “There, there.” She pulls back. “What happened to your dad? He looks amazing.”
“Make them leave.”
She goes to her closet and drags her suitcase out.
“Where are you going?”
“Marguerite’s waiting in a car downstairs,” she says. “I’m going to Paris!” She throws the suitcase on the bed and opens it.
“What?” I say. “For how long?”
She looks up and squints painfully. “Five days?”
“But you’ll miss my whole phase.”
“I know.” She opens her dresser drawer and hurriedly pulls underwear and socks out of it. “I’ll be back Thursday night. I didn’t think you’d be here yet.”
“But I am here,” I say.
She throws the underwear and socks into the open suitcase. “Jack,” she says. “We’re shooting Paris Vogue. I’m assisting Marguerite, who’s assisting Marley Storm-Anders.” She opens another drawer and takes out some T-shirts.
“Who’s Marley Storm-Anders?”
Ramie pauses for a moment to express her shock at my ignorance of this apparent celebrity, then rushes to her closet and starts rifling through it at warp speed. “Only the third-biggest stylist in the industry. I know I’ve mentioned her before.” She pulls out a pair of black jeans.
“Oh,” I say. I do not bother pretending to be impressed by this, because all of my energy is consumed by my furious opposition to her being anywhere but at my side right now.
She rolls up the jeans, then presses them into the suitcase. “It’s big,” she says. “Trust me. These are the kinds of connections you can only get through people like Marguerite. She knows everybody. I mean, people really doing it, you know?”
“Doing what?”
“It,” she says. She zips up her bag and kisses me on the lips.
“Marguerite,” I say. “Is she that teacher’s assistant? That English girl you told Jill about?”
Ramie nods. “She’s brilliant. You’ll love her.” She drags her suitcase off the bed. “Come on, I have to hurry.”
She wheels her suitcase through the door and out to the living room, with me following close on her heels.
At the front door, she faces my parents. “Sorry I missed you yesterday. You look great, Mr. McTeague. I like your haircut.”
So help me God, my father blushes. “Thanks,” he says. “It’s good to see you, Ramie.”
Mom smiles her preprogrammed tolerance-only smile.
The sight of both of them side by side on my couch makes me shudder. When Ramie opens the door to leave, I follow her down the stairs.
Outside, a black airport limo awaits. In the backseat is a beautiful redhead talking on a cell phone while madly scribbling in a notebook. Marguerite, presumably. Her bright blue scarf blows through the half-opened window. She doesn’t look at us.
The driver puts Ramie’s suitcase in the trunk, and Ramie comes over for a final kiss.
“Don’t go,” I say.
“You don’t mean that,” she says. “Because you know how important this i
s to me.”
“No I don’t.”
Marguerite knocks on the window, then motions for Ramie to join her quickly. She never looks at me.
“I have to go,” Ramie says. “Wish me luck.” She kisses me on the forehead, then gets into the car. Marguerite, still absorbed by her phone call, moves an expensive-looking bag off the seat and makes room for Ramie. Ramie rolls down the window all the way. “Hey, maybe you should just make up with your parents,” she says.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “Something different.”
“Never,” I say.
She shakes her head.
“I love you,” I say.
Ramie opens her mouth, but the car drives off before she can say anything. There’s a blinding glare on the rear window, so I can’t tell if she’s waving or mouthing “I love you too.” I watch her car disappear around a corner; then I stare at the corner that swallowed it.
I wonder what made Ramie think I’d “love” Marguerite. Sure she’s beautiful. I guess that counts for something. But she didn’t even have the decency to introduce herself to me. Was her phone call so important? Was there a global fashion crisis she had to fix? I wonder if Marguerite even knows who I am. I wonder if Ramie’s told her anything about me, like, for example, that I’m “brilliant” and that Marguerite will “love” me.
I don’t like this idea of love being tossed around so casually. Love is what Ramie and I have. Love is what Ramie and Jill have. It’s not something you dole out indiscriminately to teachers’ assistants, no matter how brilliant they are.
As I stand alone on the sidewalk in front of my building, I realize that Ramie is now spending the next five days with someone she might “love” as much as she loves me. By stark and wildly unfair contrast, I’m facing five days alone. I’m no fan of alone. I’ve done alone, thank you. Four years of it. I thought my alone days were behind me. Ever since my escape from Jill’s bedroom, I’ve seen Ramie every single day. I go to sleep with her at night and wake up with her in the morning. I can’t think of anything worse than being alone.
I hug my arms against the cold; then, looking up, I spot my mother staring down at me through my living-room window. I stand corrected. There is something worse than being alone. It’s called breakfast with Helen and Richard McTeague.
The urge to run is overpowering. Then Dad comes to the window and mouths the words “Are you all right?”
I hate him. I hate her. I hate them both.
But I’m not wearing a coat, and it’s freezing out here.
I look up again, and Dad mouths the word “breakfast?”
If I ran, where would I go? I have no money in my pockets. I have no friends. As a final insult, my stomach growls with hunger.
Fine, I think. They can buy me breakfast if they want, but this in no way means I’ve forgiven them, and it does not make us a family.
Since they’re paying, I pick the most expensive brunch place I can think of, which, ironically, is housed in an ancient rusty diner car in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. I order the lobster omelet ($22.00), a large freshly squeezed orange juice ($6.00), and a double-shot cappuccino ($5.50). I intend to order dessert as well ($7.00–$11.00). And another cappuccino ($5.50).
After ordering, we all sit in silence for a long time, which is fine by me because I have nothing to say to them.
“So Ramie’s going to Paris,” Dad says finally. “That’s a beautiful city.”
“She’s going to dump me,” I say. I look at my mom. “You’re welcome for that.”
Mom takes a deep, calming-down breath. “Jack, I don’t think Ramie’s a bad person,” she says. “I just think …”
“You think she’s a, quote, worshipper of chaos.”
Mom nods. “Yes, I think I’ve used those words. But …” She takes a calming-down sip of water. “I know this may be hard for you to believe, Jack, but your pain is not my joy.”
“It’s not?” I say. “Are you sure?”
“What makes you think she’s going to dump you?” Dad says in a bold attempt to hijack the conversation.
I shrug. In all honesty, I was being dramatic. But now that he asks, the idea of Ramie dumping me is suddenly tinged with a halo of plausibility.
“Have you been fighting?” Dad asks.
“No,” I say. “But …” I stop myself. Why would I share any of this with them? What are they going to do about it?
“Go ahead,” Dad says. “We used to be young once. Remember, Helen?”
Mom laughs wistfully.
I almost puke at the thought of them being anything other than old and used up. But then I figure if I don’t start talking about a subject I care about, Dad’s bound to make us share our feelings or something.
“She spends a lot of time in the city,” I say. “With that Marguerite girl, the one who’s taking her to Paris for some stylist job. Apparently Marguerite’s been introducing her to people who are ‘really doing it,’ whatever ‘it’ is.”
Suddenly a vague Jillmemory comes to me. Not something she did, but something she thought. Ramie’s outgrowing us.
Us. Not just her. Jill was thinking of both of us.
The waitress comes with our plates, each one brimming with a gigantic omelet.
“Mmm, that smells good,” Dad says. “Good choice, Jack.”
“Yes,” Mom says. “Food we actually want to eat.”
I’m starving, so I dig in. I’ve never eaten lobster before. Jill has. She didn’t like it. When I get a bite in my mouth, it’s like an explosion of flavor. “Oh my God,” I say with my mouth full.
“You like it?” Dad says.
I quickly suppress my pleasure and shrug sullenly. “It’s all right.”
After that, we eat in silence for a while, both of them making periodic mmm’s of approval. I keep rolling over in my head whether there is any plausibility to the Ramie dumping me scenario. She seems happy whenever we’re together. But now that I think of it, she does get this faraway look sometimes. Jill’s seen it too. She doesn’t understand it any more than I do.
“Well, this is just delicious,” Mom says. She wipes her mouth daintily. “Jack, are you thinking about Ramie?”
“Don’t mind-read me,” I say.
“I can’t help it,” she says. “It’s part of a mother’s tool kit.”
The idea of this loveless software program thinking of herself as my mother almost, almost steals my appetite. It’s down to the stellar nature of the food that I’m able to keep eating.
“Can I tell you something, Jack?” she says.
I shrug.
She puts her fork and knife down. “One of the most important things in any relationship is that both people bring the same number of cards to the table.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Do you know what I mean by that?”
“No.”
She looks at my dad.
“Your mother’s right,” he says.
I keep eating. If these two think I’m taking their word for what constitutes a good relationship, they’re even crazier than I thought.
“When I met your mother at UMass,” Dad says. “All she did was talk about poetry.”
My mom laughs. “Keats,” she says. “I had a crush on Keats.”
“A dead guy?” I say. “That sounds about right.”
Dad, opting to ignore my comment, jumps right in with, “I remember thinking that this beautiful girl was way too smart for me.” He taps his head in case I don’t know where smartness is located. “I was pre-law,” he says. “But I didn’t have any passion for it. It was just what I studied between keg parties. You know what I mean?”
“I’ve never been to a keg party,” I say.
“They’re greatly overrated,” Mom says.
“I’ve never been to a party.”
Dad pauses for the briefest of moments to acknowledge my brilliantly timed intrusion of pathos. Then he brushes it neatly aside with a subject-changing, “Anyway.” He takes a sip
of his coffee. “I didn’t want to lose this little gem to some clove cigarette-smoking philosophy major.”
“Like Randall Jordan,” she says.
They both laugh.
I’m fully prepared to let them both slip away down memory lane while I consume this pornographically delicious lobster omelet, but Mom drags me back into the nostalgia fest by leaning over and whispering, “He was a poet. Very brooding. Big vocabulary.”
“He was a tool,” Dad says.
The idea of my mother (a) being into poetry and (b) having guys fighting over her strains credulity. Not that I ever thought about my mom as a young person, but if I did, I’d picture a sadist’s apprentice.
“The thing is,” Dad says, “I knew if I was going to hold on to her”—he gestures toward my mom with this thumb—“I’d have to pony up in the intellect department.” Again, a tap to the head. “So you know what I did?”
I shake my head because the catalog of possible atrocities is virtually limitless here.
“I hit the books,” he says. “Not just assigned reading either, but extra stuff. The philosophy of law. I realized there was something to it too. Something more than a grade point average.”
“He was insufferable,” Mom says. “He’d go on and on for hours about case studies and Thurgood Marshall.”
“I did go a little overboard,” he says. “But hey.” He looks at me with a face full of pride. “She’s Mrs. Richard McTeague now. Not Mrs. Ran-tool Jordan.” He winks at me because that little play on words just might be the pinnacle of his comedy career.
Mom and Dad spend the next few moments looking at each other with those misty expressions old people get when they think about themselves as young people.
“Thanks,” I say. “You’ve really given me something to think about. Just so I’m clear: I should worship Thurgood Marshall and fall in love with a dead poet?”
Mom inclines her head at me in exactly the same way she does with Jill. Then she picks up her fork and knife and resumes eating. “Cheekbones,” she says.
My dad scrunches up his face at this, but I know what she’s referring to. And she knows I know.
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