by Ann Packer
I closed my eyes and listened to a conversation about fish oil turn into an argument between Robert and James. There had been a news report linking higher levels of a certain omega-3 fatty acid to a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s, and James said maybe now people would start taking supplements, as he’d recently begun doing. Robert said there was a difference between cause and correlation and asked James if he knew that the study had been funded in part by a company that manufactured fish oil supplements. James countered that fish oil had also been shown to aid heart health, that people who regularly ate fish had healthier hearts than people who didn’t, and Robert asked James if he was sure it was the fish. “Think about it,” Robert said. “Say I eat a lot of fish and my heart is healthy. Is that because of the fish, per se? Or is it because by eating fish I’m avoiding red meat?”
“I can’t believe I’m related to someone who says ‘per se.’ ”
“I can’t believe I’m related to someone who’s planning to break up a family.”
No one spoke, and I became aware of the dishwasher sloshing at the other end of the room. I said, “Please, you guys.” Then my eyes were burning. “Why do you have to do this?”
“I think ‘have to’ is a good way to put it,” Rebecca said.
“Hear that, James?” Robert said. “We’re acting under a compulsion.”
Marielle reached for my hand, and I let my head fall to her shoulder. I wished we were back home at the shed, the three of us. It was our cocoon—our tiny, happy bubble. How would we bear losing it?
Robert and James went back and forth, and I spaced out. I stared across the coffee table at Walt and Rebecca. They never touched in public, but the back of his hand was very near the back of hers, and I wished one or the other of them would extend a finger and close the gap. Marielle always said she thought they had a strong erotic bond. She even used that phrase, “strong erotic bond,” though that was probably because it turned me on.
I wished my father had lived to see Rebecca married. He hadn’t lived to see James married, either, though this had never seemed like a real possibility until now. Then it occurred to me: James and Celia could have a child together. There could be another Blair in the world. This made me incredibly happy. I looked over at James, and he gave me a strange look back, almost as if he knew what I was thinking. But then he spoke.
“Listen, you guys,” he said. “About the house. I have a different idea.”
8
THE PIECE
The Blairs got a second phone line when Robert entered high school but a third car only when Ryan began to drive. By then Robert was away at college and Rebecca was a senior. The car was a Honda Accord meant for Bill, who planned to pass down to the kids his ’68 Plymouth Valiant with the proviso that they use it only around town, where a breakdown would be manageable. It was a bright February Saturday when he drove home in the new car, forest green with sumptuous leather seats. Everyone admired it. Then Penny said she wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of the kids driving the ancient, ailing Valiant; it would make more sense for them to take over her reliable station wagon, the car they most often borrowed. She said to Bill, “I’ll drive the Valiant . . . unless of course you don’t want me taking it on the freeway, either. In which case I guess I could drive the Accord.”
So Penny got the new car and Bill kept driving the Valiant, through 1981 and a new transmission; through 1982 and a breakdown on Market Street in San Francisco, the car dead in the middle lane as the traffic light went green and red and green and red and people honked incessantly; through 1983, when, on the very day Ryan graduated from high school, the odometer finally passed 200,000; and all the way up to the January night in 1984 when James drunk-drove Penny’s station wagon up the driveway, misjudged the distance to where his father’s car was parked, and hit its rear end with so much force that the car leaped forward and slammed into a wall.
Both cars were totaled, but James walked away with some bruised ribs and a forehead laceration that required five stitches—that and a parentally mandated three-month suspension of his brand-new driver’s license.
The incident brought him a certain amount of celebrity at Woodside High, and he began to get invited to the parties from which underclassmen like him were usually excluded. At one of these, a few weeks after the accident, a senior girl named Cindy pulled him into a bathroom, kissed him wetly for a few minutes, then stuck her hand down the front of his pants. “Tell me,” she said as she stroked him, “is it true you wrecked both your parents’ cars in one night?”
“Not exactly,” he said, trying not to gasp.
She stopped moving her hand and said, “I heard you wrecked two cars.”
“I did. They just weren’t exactly my parents’ cars anymore.”
The bathroom was off the main hallway of the house, and he could hear people yelling and laughing. She started working again. “Are you in a ton of trouble?” she asked hopefully.
For James, losing his license had been nothing compared to the look on his father’s face—not right after the collision but later, when the two of them were in the emergency room and James was holding a towel to his forehead. It wasn’t even disappointment he saw; it was exhaustion. Of course, it was two o’clock in the morning, but his father’s exhaustion looked deep and expansive, an ocean rather than a temporarily flooding river. “I’m sorry,” James kept saying, “I’m sorry.” His father just shook his head and wouldn’t really look at him. In the car going home they were both silent until Bill turned in to the driveway. Penny, asleep in the shed, didn’t know yet. Bill braked at the turnoff, and James was afraid he’d be sent to wake his mother. Instead Bill reached over and brushed his fingertips along James’s hairline, just above the bandage covering the stitches he’d received. He said, “Do you remember the night of your poison oak? We got home right around this time.” He waited, but James didn’t respond, and finally he drove the rest of the way up the driveway. There was broken glass everywhere; when the tow trucks were finished in the morning there would be a lot of cleaning up to do. “You don’t remember?” Bill said, and James shook his head, although he did.
He wasn’t going to tell Cindy any of that, though. He said, “Grounded for life.”
She smiled. “Can you sneak out?”
“Our laundry room has a door to the outside, and my dad’s room is pretty far away, so you know. It’s not really sneaking.”
“What about your mom? You have a mom, right? I heard your mom wanted to throw you out.”
“I threw her out. She lives in the shed.”
“Funny,” Cindy said. “You know Tony Misner?”
James shrugged. People were always asking if he knew this person or that person. If he said no, they acted as if something was wrong with him, so he stayed noncommittal. This contributed hugely to his popularity, though he didn’t know it. He was about to cream his pants, so he batted her hand away and pushed his jeans to his knees.
“Ew,” she said, looking away from his dick. “I don’t want to see it.”
“Yes, you do.”
When they got back to the living room, the crowd had grown even larger and spilled through every opening, including the front door, which had been closed earlier by Michael Greer, the kid whose house it was. Greer had the idea that if everyone stayed inside, the neighbors wouldn’t find out about the party. James saw Greer on the kitchen floor and figured the night was winding down. He was supposed to be home at midnight, but that wasn’t going to happen. It already hadn’t happened.
In the backyard he found the three guys he’d come with, two juniors and a senior named Rufus who’d driven them in his Jeep. “Want to get out of here?” James said.
“I don’t know, I think there’s more beer,” said one of the juniors.
“Did Cindy blow you?” said the other.
This embarrassed James, and he stuffed his hands into his back pockets.
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“HJ?” Rufus said. “That’s her specialty.”
“You guys are wasted,” James said.
“I heard she fucked Tony Misner,” Rufus continued. “The night before he got sent to boarding school. Kind of a goodbye fuck.”
The other guys snickered. “Nothing like a good-luck fuck,” one of them said.
They headed for the kitchen, James following. There was a crowd circling something, everyone staring at the floor. James squeezed forward and saw Greer flat on his back with a pee stain on his pants. Someone was kneeling next to him, saying, “Greer, come in, please. Greer, do you read me? Do you read me?”
“Maybe we should go,” said Rufus.
“Watch, now he’ll puke,” said someone else.
James followed the guys to the car. He grabbed shotgun and then told Rufus to stop before they’d gotten ten feet from the curb. Rufus glared at him. “What the fuck? You were the one that wanted to leave.”
“I think we should roll him on his side.”
“Greer?”
James opened the door and stepped down from the Jeep.
“I’m not waiting,” Rufus cautioned.
“People shouldn’t inhale barf,” James said.
“People shouldn’t inhale weed,” said one of the juniors, “but we all do it.”
The crowd in the kitchen had thinned, five or six people leaning against the counters or sitting at the table. Greer was motionless on the floor, his face flushed and sweaty. You were supposed to remember A-B-C: airway, breath, circulation. James didn’t want to stick his hand in Greer’s mouth, so he just knelt and tried to roll Greer on his side; he went too far and Greer’s face hit the floor. “Nice one, Blair,” someone said. “You want to give him a bloody nose?”
James went back outside and tried to figure out who might be heading to Portola Valley. No one. Greer’s house was in Redwood City, in a confusing area where most of the streets were named after states. James headed in the direction he thought would take him out to Woodside Road, but after a while he thought maybe he’d gotten turned around. It was February and cold. Every house he passed was completely dark. He wondered if he might find a back door unlocked. He wasn’t going to call home, but he could call Rebecca, whose Stanford dorm was only a few miles away. She didn’t have a car, but her roommate did.
He made his way up a short driveway to a gate. It creaked really loud and he hurried back to the sidewalk. Some German shepherd would probably kill him. He wished he knew how late it was, but he didn’t have a watch, which was unfair: both his brothers had watches from their grandfathers, and he had nothing. Grandpa Greenway’s watch wasn’t even nice, it was a Timex with a stretchy metal band, but Ryan had inherited it and wore it every day. Robert didn’t wear his all the time, and it was actually worth something.
The better treatment his brothers got was a subject rich with the power to enrage him, and as he walked he felt the injustices of his life gather above him as if he were a cartoon character followed around by his own personal rain cloud. There was Robert’s silky passage through school and the way his father showered praise on him, which Rebecca should mind more than James did, seeing as she was a better student than Robert and a lot less of a bragger besides. There was Ryan’s position as the family pet, like people actually petted him, even now, when he was a college freshman.
But James was pretty sure neither of his brothers had gotten jerked off at a high school party. Cindy was a slut, but that went with the territory. Who else was going to jerk you off? He’d never heard of Tony Misner, but if James got shipped off, as his mother threatened at least once a week, he was going to make sure he got Cindy alone somewhere for a few minutes before he left.
He’d spent half his life listening to Ryan and Sierra moaning. After Robert left for college, Ryan took over Robert’s room, and with the closet door open, James heard everything. Oh oh ohhhhh. Almost worse was when she started to sleep over—she wandered around the house in her pajamas with her hair unbrushed, as if she were one of them. James didn’t understand why his father allowed it. Neither did his mother. “What are you thinking?” she screamed when she found out, which didn’t happen for a few months because she never slept in the house herself. His father said, “What am I thinking? Do you actually care what I’m thinking?” And she said, “Is that girl on the pill?” And he said, “I think that’s private.” And she said, “For God’s sake, you’re a pediatrician.” And he said, “Are you suggesting I don’t know about unwanted pregnancies?”
It was the summer before Rebecca started college. She told James that he wasn’t old enough to understand that their father was actually watching out for Ryan and Sierra by allowing them to sleep together—otherwise they would do it somewhere else. “If people want to have sex,” she said in her most schoolteacherish voice, “they’re going to have sex.” James was furious that she thought he didn’t understand that. He was thirteen and knew plenty. The conversation took place on a cool July night, after Rebecca had picked him up from a movie. They sat in the car, pulled over just before the turnoff for the driveway, for five or ten minutes.
“What do you care?” James said at one point. “You’re not even going to be here much longer.”
“I’ll be two minutes away. Why do you think I chose Stanford?”
“Because Dad paid you.”
Rebecca rolled down her window—the car was old enough that you actually rolled it. “Dad didn’t pay me.”
“Why are you doing that?” James said. “You about to light up?”
“James, it’s stuffy. You see people breaking the law everywhere you look.”
“Ryan is breaking the law.”
“But that’s just it. He isn’t. I’m not—I’m just going to college. Robert just went to college. We don’t mean to be leaving you behind.”
At that, James got out of the car and ran. She looked for him, driving slowly with the brights on, but he hid in some bushes and at last she yelled out her window that she was giving up, going home. He walked through the front door twenty minutes later, and she had covered for him—told their father there was a mix-up and someone else had picked him up from the movie. Now here he was three years later, wandering around a maze of little streets in Redwood City, and whom would he call if he found a phone? Rebecca.
He walked for another ten minutes, wishing he’d paid attention in school when they talked about using the stars for navigation. At last he turned a corner and saw a commercial road up ahead, and in a few minutes he was at a pay phone.
Rebecca was in her junior year at Stanford, a double major in biology and psychology, the kind of college student who blocked out her study schedule in a Filofax. She designated twenty-minute breaks every three hours because she’d found that to be the best plan for optimal efficiency. On this Friday evening, she had done some reading and then typed up a paper for her Developmental Psychology class. She went to bed at one, and when the phone woke her sometime later, she figured it was her roommate, skipped the greeting, and said, “Just try to be quiet when you get here.”
“Rebecca?”
James’s voice was unmistakable, the lowest-pitched of her brothers’ voices and hoarse from the late hour or drinking or marijuana—from who knew what.
“I’m lost,” he said. “Well, not lost, but I don’t have a ride home. I’m fucked.”
He told her about the party, about his ride leaving ahead of him because he’d gone back inside to make sure a guy didn’t asphyxiate his own vomit.
“Aspirate,” Rebecca said. “Wait, what are you talking about? Where are you? Dad must be worried, why didn’t you call Dad?”
“I didn’t want to wake him up!”
“James, he’s not asleep. You know he’s not.”
“Well, what should I do?”
Rebecca was already pulling on jeans, the phone tucked between her chin and her shoulder
. She told him to stay where he was and then called her father, who answered on the first ring. “The corner of Woodside Road and Kentucky Street,” she said, “but I’ll get him—I just wanted you to know he’s okay.”
“Rebecca,” he said, his voice choked with gratitude.
“I know, Dad, it’s okay.” She paused. “It turns out he was being a Good Samaritan.”
As soon as she said this, she knew she shouldn’t have. Her father wanted to know what had happened, and what she knew was so much less than what he wanted to know that by the end of the conversation he was saying he’d go for James himself.
“Dad, no, it’s much easier for me.”
“James said this boy vomited?”
“No, he said he rolled him over just in case.”
“So he was unconscious?”
She knew she’d lost by then, but she didn’t have the ability to hand over problems to other people. She pretended she was giving in, but once she’d hung up she left her room and went to the lounge, where she found someone willing to lend her a car.
Hurrying through the parking lot, she let herself understand the absurdity of two people going to pick up James, but she also knew she could be useful to her father, just being there.
The roads were all but deserted. Her psych paper was on attachment theory, and as she drove she thought back over what she’d written. From the moment she’d begun her research, she understood that she’d found words for partially formed ideas she’d had most of her life. She believed James’s chaotic character reflected an insecure-ambivalent attachment to their neglectful and distracted mother, and that monotropy, the child’s need to attach to one main caregiver, meant that despite their father’s attempts to be a good substitute, James had suffered maternal deprivation. Rebecca and her brothers had tried to mitigate it by watching out for him, but they hadn’t succeeded.
