What the Family Needed

by Steven Amsterdam

  After dinner, she called her sister. Because Ruth was younger, because she had seen more, because she had lived through more, her solution would be more evolved than anything Natalie and Peter could devise. And Ruth enjoyed telling Natalie what she didn’t want to hear.

  Natalie broke through call waiting to find her on hold with the phone company. Ruth was trying to have the phone service turned on at the house she was moving into, the home that would finally, surely, help her feel centered. The word irritated. She conceded, though, that her sister’s closer proximity would be a comfort.

  Ruth instantly rattled off all the activities that might be stealing Alek’s attention: girlfriends (other than the much-approved Vicenta), boyfriends, drugs, and petty crime. Or all of the above.

  “Your prurience is appreciated,” Natalie said.

  “Or maybe he’s selling—drugs and/or his body. It would show an entrepreneurial streak this family has lacked.”

  “That’s hopeful. But what should I do?”

  “At the end of the day, how far is he going to stray from the family purse? I say you’re giving him exactly what he needs: space. He’s got to answer his own questions.”

  “The school is asking their own questions and I don’t have any answers. All I want to do is eviscerate him, if only to get some words out of him. Give me an angle here.”

  “Cover for him. Tell them he’s very self-directed at the moment. He’ll start next term in full flower.”

  “You don’t even believe that.”

  “It’s possible. What can I tell you? Give him the cold shoulder. Remember the silent treatment Giordana gave me? I matched her, glare for glare, for seven months. Neglected her thoroughly. I didn’t have the time to do more than that. Look at her now: a firecracker. Plus, you’ve never been in love with that school. Give Alek at least as much credit as you’re giving the staff there.”

  “I do, but he’s become not normal.”

  “You would never have been satisfied with anything else. He’s Alek. Do you think that you and Peter can handle the disgrace of not normal?”

  “Yes.”

  “It happens. It will pass.”

  There. What she’d needed was perspective. “Thank you.”

  “Fabulous. Anything else to report?”

  “Remember how I always wanted to be a terrific sleek swimmer? I’ve been in the pool a lot lately, and I have to say I’m going at it like a speedboat.”

  “Really? That’s wonderful. I’ve been working two jobs to keep myself in shoes.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you need anything—?”

  “Not a thing. Only your guilt.”

  “It’s always here for you. Are Ben and Giordy all right?”

  “They’re finally off the payroll, so yes, they’re fine.”

  “Anybody special worth mentioning?”

  “No. But he’ll fall into place after the move.”

  “I’m sure he will.” This wasn’t true.

  “You’re my favorite.”

  “You’re mine.” This was.

  “Okay, then hang up, so I can get back on hold.”

  That night, Natalie caught Alek in the hall and said to him, “I want to make a deal with you.”

  “What?”

  “First, I have to make sure you’re safe: do you need us to protect you from anybody or anything?”

  “No. I can protect myself. I’m a grown-up.”

  Natalie said, “Exactly. That’s why I want to treat you with the respect you deserve. From tomorrow, I’m not picking you up at school anymore. I’m not taking you to the pool. You don’t want me to, so I won’t. How’s that?”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Be worthy of it.” She stared him down, as if to demand cooperation, before he retreated to his room. His eyes were only partly hazel, she realized. Not quite a single color, but a palette—an expensive marble. She could have sworn she also saw a white flag floating in each of them.

  Natalie lay across the bed, too warm to get under the covers. Peter was getting undressed. “Brutalizing him won’t help. We have to respect him,” she said.

  “So no more supervision?”

  “I don’t think there’s much likelihood that it will benefit any of us.”

  Peter rubbed his whole face with his hand and yawned. “I’m sure you’re as right as I am.” And that was the end of it.

  Natalie had been loving Peter in her terrified-of-losing-him way lately—more so, she had to admit, because of this acquiescence. After he showered, she waited for him, naked under the sheets. This was all she had to do to initiate.

  He didn’t last long. It had been a while and tomorrow was a workday. The closeness was appreciated. Afterward, the sight of his depleted, sleeping soul, his skin already loosening its grip, underlined their difference. His few extra years seemed to matter more that night. Their marriage had surely slipped in certain areas. The thought didn’t worry her. Natalie looked down at her own legs. They were tight along the contours of her muscles, like she had just been unwrapped.

  Another fruitful day at school, with the children trailing her lesson plan with such precision that she could hear the switches clicking in their brains. In the afternoon, instead of harassing Alek, Natalie drove to the pond. When she got there it looked small, like a house you used to live in. Hardly worth it, so she circled back to the university. This was not, she insisted, an excuse to check up on him. She went for the outdoor pool, even parking by the science buildings so that the sight of the family station wagon wouldn’t give him cause to complain.

  In a lane by herself, she found that her speed had, impossibly, increased. The curve of her arms, the whirlpool created by her legs, and the length of each breath felt more and more like she had been designed for the sea. This power didn’t come from practice at the pond or from menopause. It was her body’s antidote to Alek. She would be a lifeguard at the most dangerous beaches. Baywatch tough and mother soft. Shooting out to save one swimmer, then another, then another. She saw herself hauling a dozen near-lifeless bodies back to shore, turning them on their sides with factory efficiency, and pumping them back to life, one after another.

  When the university swimming team showed up for training, she dove under the separator and into the slow lane. There she swam around other women her age who were waiting for the water aerobics teacher to turn up. Natalie claimed the back edge of the pool and continued to do laps until their class was over. As if she were resting up after great exertion, she sat on the concrete lip, watching the water bead off her arms and wishing she could swim with the team.

  As she left the car in the driveway, she could hear music coming from Sasha’s room. No voices, only bass. Alek’s sneakers were outside the front door, another recent weirdness. Still, the clues provided a pleasure: the boys were at home.

  Letting herself in, she caught an unguarded glimpse of Alek. He was standing still at the back of the hallway. In the past, he would have been singing something, trailing his hands along the walls mindlessly as he went. When was the last time he’d made a voluntary sound?

  His jacket and backpack were hanging off one shoulder. His pants were too long, and rumpled at his bare feet. If he stood up straight, he would be taller than she was, but that hadn’t happened in a while. One would never know there was a beautiful boy under there.

  Alek lurched when she finally shut the door behind her. There was a slight terror in his “hello,” like he’d been caught. If she had confided to him her mysterious new energies, perhaps he would feel free enough to reveal something. No, it would still be coercion. We will both have our secrets, she accepted, as if that would be enough to keep the family together.

  With all of her self-control, Natalie didn’t search for signs of where he’d been. She kissed his cheek. A few days since it had seen a razor and still so soft. She consciously exhaled so as not to sniff for the scent of chlorine or alcohol or dope or Vicenta. Her conversation was restrained. She didn’t provide any details of h
er day, which might be read as a lead-in to inquiries about his. She didn’t offer to make his favorite pasta for dinner, as this might be construed as extortion. Instead, whenever she glanced in his direction, she simply gave him her warmest and most patient gaze, the one she reserved for her students who were closest to tears.

  In return, he opened his backpack on the kitchen table and did her the favor of lingering. Three textbooks came out, along with his copy of Dune, a dog-eared transitional object he’d been carrying around for months. This was followed by his empty lunch box and swimming gear. It was impossible to tell by looking if the dark green towel was damp. She made no offer to hang it up.

  He had true promise when he was younger. Not merely bright, he had an ocean underneath him, an imagination that wasn’t bound up with rules, a Byronic sensitivity that would one day develop into a melancholy but intelligent sweetness. Now the thought of his head filling up with the simplest facts—trucks and sports—would have satisfied her. At this point, she would have been content with average.

  As she shuffled the day’s mail, Alek opened one of his schoolbooks. Opening a letter, she paused to see what would happen next. For a hopeful moment it seemed as though he would do his homework at the table while she made dinner.

  “May as well give the new wok a workout. What if I cut up some veggies for a stir-fry?” It was her most innocuous attempt, but talking wasn’t in the deal. Alek packed up everything into a bundle and took it upstairs, leaving his empty lunch box on a chair.

  At dinner, when Peter asked the boys about their day, Sasha regaled them with an account of the complications involved in selecting a mascot for the debating team. They had achieved a high standing in their division and were eager to find a way to shine at their own school in an otherwise athletic suburb. The team’s most artistic member was barely able to draw a passable bear or fox—their preferred symbol. He could, however, draw a stunning mouse. For a team largely composed of boys who were not that physically impressive, this was a problem. Sasha bored them for the better part of the meal, discussing what changes were proposed to make the mouse more masculine.

  It was never clear whether Sasha was truly eager for any of these activities or if he was, like Alek, getting away from the house. In any case, if they didn’t all eat meals together on occasion, these reports wouldn’t even reach Peter and Natalie. They were happy for any vestigial bursts of enthusiasm. Alek had never been as plugged in at school, but there was a time when he would have poked Sasha with a sharp question, laying bare the desperation of the whole mascot scheme. Natalie realized that Alek had stopped participating a while ago. Maybe Sasha’s engagement was being provided as compensation.

  Peter finally intruded. “And Alek, any news from your corner of the universe?”

  “I attended school and swimming,” he reported, as if he were having his activities notarized.

  Sasha and Peter looked to Natalie to take charge. Again, angry energy coursed through her until she could gain control and allow it to erupt, soberly, as acceptance.

  “I think we all have low days now and then.”

  Her face relaxed, serene after a glance at the three of them. A smile promised all would be well. Sasha and Peter, at least, were put at ease. She guided the conversation back to the debating team.

  Watching and waiting was the path to take. Alek would eventually communicate. It wasn’t confidence that allowed her to telegraph such inner peace. She had been thinking about the pool.

  The week skimmed onward in that unsustainable rhythm: Natalie powering her class all day, then racing laps faster than the swimming team; Peter accepting her wisdom without question; Alek holding himself hostage in his room except when leaving was mandatory. The topic of the unexplained absences vanished like lemon juice.

  On Thursday Natalie came home from the pool to a quiet house. Upstairs there were no sounds from either of the boys’ rooms. Hanging her bathing suit, goggles, and towel in the laundry, she caught a view of her upper arms in the mirror. They looked streamlined, purpose-built for swimming. No wobble. It had been a while since she had studied her reflection. Even her curls looked tighter. She unbuttoned her blouse and unhooked her bra. She couldn’t look at her body for long without thinking about Ruth’s. Five years younger, practically identical, but diluted. She had more beauty and more warmth than Natalie, but had lost it on a series of poor choices. Wasted it. The latest was this move. She would be a twenty-minute drive away, the closest they’d lived in years. How long would that last?

  Ruth would have begged Natalie to pay more attention to her fantastic flush of power. She would tell her to swim constantly till she won medals, till she had only enough strength to make it out of the water and collapse onto the grass. She would tell Natalie that anything less was wasting it.

  The lines of age around Natalie’s neck and breasts had faded. The skin tone was even and clear. Her posture was forthright, her shoulders were muscled, and her body was full. After forty-seven years of skinny, with far fewer curves than Ruth, she had expanded, desirably, to slim. She took up the right amount of space. What an unlikely development. Her face, when she finally caught her own eyes, was ready.

  Natalie stole time from her routine to sit on the veranda. After Sasha was born, Peter had screened in the whole wooden frame to keep out mosquitoes and prevent him from crawling off the edge into the hydrangeas. Later, during the long afternoons of early motherhood, she would spread out the baby blanket on the floor. Sasha would toss blocks that Alek would fetch. And now: Sasha was conquering the world, one extracurricular activity at a time; and perhaps Alek was on his way home with a brilliantly coherent explanation for everything.

  A man shuffled around the corner and at first Natalie believed that the human droop was her son. It was a widower she vaguely knew, on his daily circuit of the neighborhood. He smiled and waved. Natalie did the same.

  One morning, a decade earlier, while she had been sitting in the same spot watching over the boys, Alek suddenly went to war with a table and used both hands to push it over. Barely missing Sasha’s head, it tore a gash in the wall. Like a prisoner working on his tunnel, Alek started picking at the hole and, after Peter repaired it, the patch. Escape had become more engaging than his big brother.

  Even when they shared a room, they had never been close. This, despite all the thoughtful timing for them to be close in years and, thus, in spirit. There had also been Peter’s hopeful dream, pulling both of their names from one of his long-dead grandfathers, Aleksander. Their namesake had been a farmer in a Russian village so tiny and then so obliterated that it was lost to maps. How could he have dreamed up these irrelevant descendants with their reflective sneakers and thumping music? Peter had hoped that curiosity would lead the boys to learn Russian and travel, or work for the United Nations. For what reason? “For the sake of the past,” he had said. The boys didn’t know about the homeland, didn’t like Peter’s mother’s stuffed cabbage when Natalie tried to make it, and everyone in Russia was busy learning English. Perestroika, the world couldn’t help itself, it was always being rebuilt.

  The phone rang. It was the assistant principal. “Alek didn’t come to school today. I think we ought to plan for a meeting here, so that we can attempt to figure out what’s actually going on.”

  Natalie could have lifted a car. While she was absorbing this news, Alek walked up the street. It was a relief at least to see that he was spryer than the old man who had passed by earlier. She let her side of the phone conversation lapse into one-word responses as he came into the house. A peacemaking open hand was all he gave her, half of a high five. If she had put her hand up to meet it, he would have shied away. He headed up to his room as she let a meeting be scheduled for next week.

  “Thank you,” she told the assistant principal and put down the phone.

  She soared after him, barely feeling her feet on the stairs. It became a scene immediately, with her pushing on one side of his door and him pushing back from the other.

>   “That was the school. I trusted you.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You have to tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  “I don’t have to do anything!”

  “Please, I’m on your side.” She used more of her force against the door.

  “You’re not. You’re on my back.”

  This was how she could be a good mother: there was a basic parental obligation to make sure he was safe. Starting now, Natalie would stop trying to protect him from herself. She slammed right in, bashing the door against the wall, leaving a mark in the plaster. He backed against the window, small and shrinking, till he had slumped below the frame.

  Natalie followed him down, holding him by the front of his shirt. There had never been a tussle like this in the house before. Alek had a slight smile on his face, as if this was what he’d wanted her to do all along. She shook him to let him know she was very serious.

  “Talking will, at the very minimum, get me off your back. Speak.”

  Less than a breath away, she watched his face. He seemed to be reaching for and finding what he needed to say. Thoughts sprouted and his readiness for the confrontation seemed even stronger. He looked almost game, beginning to inhabit himself, becoming larger as he sorted out his words. The confession, whatever it was, was winding together into sentences that would clarify. All would be forgiven and understood. Natalie relaxed her grip and sat back on her knees so he could compose himself from a less vulnerable stance. There was a fresh intake of air, as if he was about to commence with a clear statement of self. She was ready to receive. Then, as if it had all grown too thick too quickly, his face faltered. He could no longer verbalize it. Even if he could, she wouldn’t understand. The sentences were too long, the explanation was too complicated. It was beyond either of them. She saw all of this in his shaking expression. He shuddered and gave up. It had been close, but at the last minute he had failed. He dissolved into the helplessness of crying.