My mom referred to Speck as my girlfriend once, and I corrected her: Speck was my roommate. We were not involved. We would never get involved. I had warned Speck not to fall in love with me, and she had laughed it off. It would be impossible, she had said; she was even harder than I was. True, we slept in the same bed. True, we hung out all the time, shared all the details of our lives with each other. True, we fucked constantly, in all manner of acrobatic positions. Speck was infertile, so we fucked joyfully, gleefully, like we were getting away with something. I had her hold her arm tight to her side one night, and I fucked her armpit because we had exhausted every other perversion we could think of. It worked, and when I came on her back, we collapsed into giggles. Best roommate ever!
While I had been spasming back and forth across the country, Mom had patiently worked her way up at her customer service job, from phone rep in the trenches to a marginally less degrading supervisory role. Since her collapse in the driveway in New Hampshire, she had never faltered again. She took everything in stride, applying her lipstick in the hallway mirror, then putt-putting off to work in her tired little Nissan Sentra. She had taught me how to drive in that little car, snugly buckled into the passenger seat, her hands folded neatly in her lap: “I know how to do it, but I don’t really know how to explain it to you . . . You’re smart so I’m just going to sit here and love you, and I know you’ll figure it out.”
You could plan a day at the beach, wake up to a monsoon, and she’d throw open the curtains and say, “Well, look at that! A perfect day to clean the house! Why don’t I put some cookies in the oven, and we can listen to that Beach Boys record, and then there will be fresh cookies when we’re done cleaning?” It was maddening—nothing got to her. But I was so happy to see her and so relieved to be home—in a rented house I’d never been to that belonged to people I’d never met—that even her high spirits couldn’t bring me down.
She’d found a boyfriend, Paul, an ex-plumber from New York who looked like a Neanderthal but was as intelligent as he was insecure, generous and coarse and easily pissed off. But he treated me like an equal, turned me on to Dave Van Ronk and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and was good to my mom. I knew it was good for her to have someone.
Still, her attitude baffled me. My father treated us kids like an unpleasant, expensive chore, like buying new tires for an old car or getting a tooth drilled. But my mom had gotten royally fucked; she had built her life around a lie, devoted more than twenty years to a man who’d bailed on her for the most banal trope—a younger secretary and a red sports car. I was poisoned with resentment, not for myself or my sisters but for her, and somehow she could joke about it. It was grossly unfair for this woman, who had always put everyone else first and herself last, to be treated poorly. It made me so angry to hear how rude people were to her at work that I couldn’t even be there for her to kvetch about it. I would have taken it all on for her if I could. What I really wanted was to punish those fuckers, but I was powerless.
I loathed my job. My blue-blooded New England buddies at Simon’s Rock had ruthlessly romanticized the working class, pontificated at length about the merits of honest, hand-and-back work. My coworkers—weed dealers and racists and convicted sex offenders on work release—these were the salt of the earth? Working full-time, I still couldn’t afford to insure the Bronco I’d blown all my hard-earned wages on. It sat silently in the garage like the fossil of some great beast made obsolete by evolution.
I loathed the other college kids. Alone in my basement at night, I imagined their fantastic lives: their Range Rovers and Land Cruisers, their ski weekends at Vail, the coeds in the hot tub, brand-name vodka, cocaine, orgies—tanned, svelte bodies writhing and grinding on each other, pure Sodom-and-Gomorrah luxurious carnality. Their privilege, their excess, their entitlement disgusted me. And I would have done anything for a taste of it.
I was exhausted all the time, dozing off on the bus, at dinner, on the toilet. But, aching and sleep-deprived, I did every reading for every class, every lick of homework. Great Barrington had taught me that fun was pointless, the low road to a life of servitude. A degree was the only way out. I stopped drinking after a humiliating meltdown on the night of Speck’s birthday party and ground tirelessly toward my bachelor’s.
The English department head raised an eyebrow when I turned in my application for the honors program.
“Your reputation precedes you. People are talking.”
“People talk. What are they saying?”
“That you’re a good writer with a grating personality.”
“I agree with the second part.”
A letter arrived a week later: “Welcome to the University of Colorado at Boulder English Honors Program.” I mailed my dad a couple of the stories I had written but didn’t hear back. I printed them up and mailed them again. Still nothing.
One night after sex, Speck rolled off me, then took my head in both her hands, pulled me close, and spoke into my ear.
“Mishka?”
“You’re pregnant?” This was my running joke, more hilarious each time I said it.
I could hear Speck smile.
“No. I love you.”
I drew a deep breath. That I had feared this was coming didn’t mean I was prepared to deal with it.
“When I said I wasn’t going to fall in love with you, I wasn’t lying,” she said. “I was already in love with you, and had been for a long time. I took that job washing dishes just to be close to you.”
“Speck,” I said, “I love dogs. I love my mother. And I love rock ’n’ roll.”
In the silence that followed, I could hear us breathing in time there in the darkness. She would leave. She had to now. It would be the best for both of us.
A month later, I bought some ’shrooms from a waiter who dealt out of IHOP. Walking home with the plastic sandwich baggie in my pocket, I realized I didn’t want Speck to eat them with me. Falling in love with me, then scheming, lying to me, and trying to fuck me into loving her . . . it made me angry. It was like she had gotten herself addicted to crack: I worried for her welfare, and I knew I could no longer trust her. And I was mad at her because—crack cocaine!—what the hell had she been thinking?
Tashina would trip with me. Only days after news of the divorce broke, I’d understood how it would work. Tatyana would be the good daughter. I’d be the bad son. Tashina would slip through the cracks. I’d done a couple of cool things with her since I’d been back, like bring her to see the radical feminist riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, but mushrooms would let us reconnect on a deeper level. She was fourteen. That was old enough.
We choked them down, chasing each disgusting mouthful with tons of water, then bundled up and snuck out into the winter night. We were walking up Table Mesa Drive toward the National Center for Atmospheric Research, when the mushrooms hit us so hard we could barely walk. We shuffled off the road to avoid the terrifying headlights of the occasional passing car. The snow was deep, and we made slow progress up the hill, giggling and falling.
I struggled upright at one point. The bright moon shining down made the boulders on the hillside cast dark shadows against the white snow.
“Tashina, look at the black spots on the snow! It looks like a cow.”
“You mean, like . . . moo?”
We toppled back into the snow, cackling. I loved Tashina. She loved me. We would never stop loving each other. She was the best sister for not being Tatyana. I was the best brother for feeding her mushrooms and edifying her on the grand, sweeping issues in life, like midnight mountain climbing and David Bowie and the uselessness of America’s police force.
We were half-frozen by the time we got back, post-euphoric but still cognitively disabled. I tried singing the alphabet song to myself, but I couldn’t remember what order the numbers went in. Down in the basement, Speck was sitting in a chair, reading. She closed the book when I stumbled in.
“Can we talk?” she said.
“You’re pregnant?” I said, grinning.<
br />
“Yes,” she said.
Turned out Speck had never actually been diagnosed as infertile by a doctor; she had just never gotten pregnant before. I picked up a twelve-hour shift at the International House of Pancakes, from five p.m. Friday night to five a.m. Saturday morning, to pay for the abortion. The graveyard shift was quiet, so I was charged with deep-cleaning all the grills and cooking fifty pounds of bacon for the morning rush. Standing over that hot grill, sweat cutting rivers down my greasy face, the tendons in my back popping and straining, I felt like I was coming apart.
My whole life, I had yearned for an older brother. Maybe that’s why I had worshipped Chuong so. Where the hell was he now? In Albuquerque? In jail? Back in Vietnam? Dead? When my mother told me in high school that she’d had an abortion before she and Dad had gotten married, it made perfect sense. That had been the older brother I was missing. What would he have looked like? He would have had some good advice, which would come in very handy right now. Or at least some money.
Speck went back to Philadelphia. I started drinking again. I decided I loved her and pleaded with her to come back. Finally, she relented and came back in the spring. I met her at the airport with a dozen roses. It was okay, for a while.
I clashed with my mom’s boyfriend, Paul. He had squandered his life on a career beneath his intelligence, and it had left him angry. While I was constantly busting my ass, his sole ambition was to catch a buzz and do as little as possible. He liked me, as he saw his past self in me. I hated him, as I saw my future self in him. We got into screaming matches, nearly coming to blows one night.
I clashed with my boss. Meal breaks were a scam to have you clock out when it was slow so you’d be stuck there a half hour longer. I never took meal breaks, just snatched bites of a sandwich between orders. My manager told me I had to take a meal break, then took my time card and punched me out. I left my hat, scarf, and cook’s shirt in a pile on the floor and walked out. I got a job at a moving company run by an ex-member of an Aryan gang. He’d been shot in the head by a cop and become a Christian in prison. He worked us brutally hard. Stumbling in after my third fourteen-hour day in a row, I noticed my hair was frosted gray with dried sweat.
Speck adored me, and I could never forgive her for that. We were fucking in the basement one day, and she was saying all kinds of crazy stuff—how she would die for me, how she could touch my skin in the dark and instantly know it was me. She whispered my name in my ear, my full, loathsome name: “I love you, Mikhail Valerian Shubaly.”
I threw her off me. She drew a ragged breath, and before she could begin crying, I heard the sounds of Paul fucking my mother upstairs. I told Speck I never wanted her to touch me again. She left, and this time she didn’t come back.
At the end of the summer, my mother got downsized. Such a despicable practice, both the bloodless elimination of jobs for corporate profits and the act of concealing it in a meaningless word like “downsizing,” blunting the blade so it looks less dangerous. And hurts more. Was America bent on destroying us?
My mom and Paul made plans to abandon the United States for a caretaking gig in the Virgin Islands with Tashina in tow. My mom finally seemed to be coming around to a hard truth Tashina and I had accepted long ago: Fuck the world. In the eye. Straight to hell. Forever.
Tatyana had cruised efficiently through college, gotten her degree in electrical engineering, and moved to California, where she was pulling down big bucks doing some Internet thing I didn’t understand. My father was barely a voice on the other end of the phone. Would I be okay left to my own devices with no adult supervision? Sure, Mom, what could go wrong?
I moved into a college slum blocks away from our old house with Sam Sacks, a movie geek from Boston who had befriended me—the helpless leading the hopeless. I quit my job moving furniture and quickly blew through the money I’d saved as my drinking ratcheted up, a reliable solace in the dark. I had to plead for my old job at IHOP. I made less money at the grill, but it was impossible to move furniture with a hangover.
I studied hard every day and slung pancakes all weekend: the good son. But I was isolated in a relentless circuit: rising, throwing up, going to class, drinking and studying till I passed out. More than once, I awoke in the night, crying hard enough to wake Sam in the other room. Part of me knew I was making progress toward my degree and my plan for revenge. The rest of me just wanted to set the entire thing on fire.
Riley called me drunk in the middle of the night. She had tracked me as I had tracked her in Great Barrington. She was unhappy, she missed me, she loved me. I sold my Bronco at a heartrending loss, then convinced Sam we had to drive halfway to Washington to meet Riley and her roommate in Idaho.
Riley was more erratic than ever. Drunk, she was abusive and even dangerous. It didn’t matter: we were in love. I finally had something of my own, our nation of two. Nothing else mattered.
At my mother’s urging, I went to the Virgin Islands for the summer. Paul assured me there was work. There was no work. But the drinking age was eighteen, so I drank the local $2.19-a-bottle rum and obsessed over Riley, who was attending a dance program in Maryland. I wrote her letters daily, called her nightly with the calling card my father gave me to call him until he caught on and canceled it. One day, I drank a liter of rum, woke up in my own urine, and suffered some kind of weird nervous collapse, unable to make even the most trivial of decisions for several days. Finally, a menial construction gig came through, removing the internal plywood forms and cleaning newly poured concrete cisterns for a housing development. Brutal work, but I was no stranger to that.
Three weeks before we were to move to Denver so we could start our lives together, Riley erased herself from my life: letters returned, phone ringing and ringing. I attacked the labor at my job passionately, crawling out of cisterns drenched in sweat, coated head to toe in gray concrete dust, my hands torn and bloody, coughing up chunks of clay on my lunch break. After work, I helped Paul break rocks and dig fence-post holes on the property, anything to keep myself from thinking about what had happened, what lay ahead.
I landed in Denver in September, $1,000 in my pocket, unemployed, heartbroken, no place to stay.
Sam took me in. He met me at the airport and drove me back to his apartment, a beery second-story crash pad with a rotating cast of ne’er-do-wells, including Conor, a bartender who was more than happy to serve me despite my being six months shy of twenty-one, and Judah, the only guy I’d met outside Simon’s Rock who drank more than I did. The landlord on the first floor despised us. For a heartbroken twenty-year-old, it was a heaven, of sorts. I set about diligently drinking my way through the money I had saved.
I awoke one night, fully clothed, one shoe off, lying on my back in Judah’s bed. The moon was shining through the window, and it was pleasantly cool. I was incredibly thirsty. It took me a minute to get my other shoe off and stand up. I was surprised when I stumbled on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water, because I felt totally sober. I drank two glasses of water and washed my face. I walked around the apartment, calling Sam’s name a couple of times. No answer.
Sam’s room was dark when I opened the door, so I turned the light on. His bed was empty, a yellow mattress with roses printed on it, a fuzzy blue blanket, a pillow waxy from his pomade, no sheets. I needed desperately to talk to Sam, or someone, anyone. I mixed myself a mug of rum on ice and went back into Judah’s room to look at my pictures of Riley.
Riley had sent me two pictures of herself at Yellowstone before I left for St. John. In my favorite she was standing in front of Old Faithful as it was shooting off. One cloud in the brochure-blue sky, assorted tourists in the background. They struck me as unnaturally candid and corny, as if they weren’t actual tourists but extras hired for a photo shoot. Some fluorescent letters were silk-screened onto the back of someone’s T-shirt, and I could almost make out what they said. Maybe “I Blew My Top at Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Monument.” Or maybe “The Seven Stages of Tequila.” Or ma
ybe “Mishka, You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake.”
Riley was standing in front, missing all the action by facing the camera. Hands on her waist, elbows out. One hip was thrust to the side, as if those hard hip bones had just sprung up under her skin overnight and she hadn’t quite figured out how to wear them yet. There was a slit up one side of her cutoffs where the seam had come unraveled and the white threads trickled down onto her pale, froggy legs. She was wearing a red-and-white-striped T-shirt. The material had been carefully stitched at the arms so that the stripes lined up with the rest of the shirt, encircling her forever, a perfect circuit, like Old Faithful erupting every seventy-some minutes, tourists returning year after year like sunburnt pilgrims. Riley’s hair glowed red in the sun like heated metal. Was it hot on her head? Did red hair somehow react to the sun, as certain species of fish only breed under a full moon?
Her eyes were circumspect, one eyebrow slightly crooked from a childhood tumble off her bike. I squinted at the picture and turned it in the light, looking for a clue. Riley was smiling tentatively—great popsicle-red lips, but they were closed, no teeth. She looked tired. Had she been posing like that all day, all summer, all the time I had been gone, the real natural wonder at the national park? Maybe at the end of the season, the Yellowstone rangers took her cutoffs and T-shirt and put them in a pressurized chamber to prevent dry rot, then made her crawl into a tiny, Riley-shaped pit of murky sulfur water under the boardwalk. She would hibernate the entire winter, the volcanic chemicals keeping her fresh, keeping her hair incandescent for the next season’s amateur photographers.
The second picture was darker. Riley wore a light-gray jacket, leaning on a weathered wood railing overlooking the silty, bubbling pool. Her stubbornly red hair seemed gray, limp, and defeated. The light in the picture was evening light—no, more mournful than just the end of a day; something bigger was coming to an end. Her lips were waning red, pressed into another tight, painful smile. What’s the matter, Riley? If I were there, I’d kiss that close-lipped smile right off your face. Please, Riley, throw your head back, laugh, open mouth, teeth.
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 9
