by Meg Howrey
And it kind of went on like that.
So here I am, sitting at the desk in the room that my dad grew up in. It’s kind of a small room. It’s a little bit sad, in some way. Maybe it’s not sad. I don’t know. Above the desk is a shelf, with three trophies and two framed pieces of paper. One is a certificate commemorating Anthony Boyle’s completion in something called “Polar Bear Swim Camp,” and the other is my dad’s high school diploma. Two of the trophies are for Grover High City Champs, and the figurines above the plaques are carrying footballs. The third trophy isn’t as big as the football ones, and is for Mark Franco: Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Drama. It’s a Golden Globe award. There is a photo on the desk, in a frame with gold stars, of Mark standing on a stage holding the award. It looks like the picture was taken off of a television screen. I’m going to go to bed now.
Luke turns off the desk lamp and gets into his father’s old twin-sized bed. The sheets have a slightly musty, flowery smell. Mark is sleeping on the couch in the living room, and Luke can hear his father turning over, sighing, thumping a pillow. It is the kind of house in which you can hear what other people are doing in other rooms, quite distinctly. Luke stares at the ceiling. He waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
After lunch, Bubbles went to work. Mark had Luke drive them to a place called Kickapoo Park, where Mark said there were some good running trails. They did not talk much in the car, because Luke was concentrating on driving well, and Mark was pointing out more things along the way: “That’s where my friend Brian lived,” or “God, they have a Chinese restaurant there now? That used to be a Wendy’s.”
When Mark and Luke got to the park, they found a trail that looked promising, and ran it fast. Luke noticed the humidity, and the presence of bugs, conditions more similar to Delaware than California. Mark suggested running over to the lake and taking a dip to cool off. They removed their running shoes and socks and their sweat-soaked T-shirts at the lake’s edge, and waded in. The water was fairly muddy at first, but refreshingly cool. In the distance, they could see powerboats on the lake, and someone water-skiing.
“On the other side of the lake is where the country club is,” Mark said. “We weren’t members, though. My friends and I used to sneak in at night and do shit, you know. Drink beer. Get high. Try to scare each other.”
“Well, we could do that tonight if you want,” Luke said.
“Ha. Can you touch the bottom here?”
“I can kind of bounce off it.”
“So you okay?” Mark asked.
“Oh yeah,” Luke said. “I can tread water for a long time. Or I can bounce.” Luke demonstrated this.
“No, I mean with being here. Meeting Bubbles. It’s a little awkward. She’s a piece of work, I know. And believe me, she’s actually mellowed a lot.”
“Why do they call her Bubbles?” Luke asked.
“I don’t really know. She used to drink.”
“Oh,” Luke said. “She doesn’t anymore?”
“No.”
“She seems nice,” Luke said, lying.
“Luke,” Mark said. “Really? Nice?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Luke amended, partially. “I didn’t actually form a concrete opinion or anything like that.”
“She’s been a little pissed at me,” Mark said. “Because I told her that I knew about you, and I didn’t ever tell her, and I didn’t … you know … do anything until now.”
“Oh. Is that why she called you …?”
“A stupid motherfucker?” Mark laughed. “No, that’s normal. You see where I get my foul mouth now. She’ll call you that too, if we stick around long enough.”
“How long are we going to stay?” Luke asked.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about that. The … uh … person I saw last night? I haven’t seen that person in a long time and … I kinda want to see that person again. Like maybe on Saturday? Only if that’s okay with you, though.”
“Oh,” Luke said. “Tomorrow? Okay. Yeah, that’s cool. Won’t Bubbles be upset, though? We just got here.”
“Well, I thought I’d just go in the afternoon,” Mark said. “And you can hang out with Mom, which is probably better anyway, because that’ll give you some time just the two of you. And I’ll come back on Sunday and we’ll stay until Tuesday if we can both stand it?”
This was not exactly what Luke thought he was agreeing to, as he had imagined that Mark would take him with him to Chicago. Luke had not anticipated being left behind, and tried to think of a plausible objection other than, “Don’t leave me here alone.”
“What are you going to tell your mom?” Luke asked.
“I’ll say that it’s a work thing. She won’t ask, though. And I mean, it’s really you she wants to see, I think.”
Bubbles had not said anything along the lines of, “Sit down and tell me all about yourself, my long-lost grandson.” Luke had thought she might be more curious about him, but so far the only question Bubbles had asked Luke was if he had any dietary restrictions. Even that had not been phrased in question format. Bubbles had said, “I don’t know what you eat,” when she gave Luke a grilled-cheese sandwich.
“There’s that barbecue on Sunday,” Luke reminded his father. Bubbles was planning a sort of Franco family reunion, and several of Mark’s uncles and cousins would be there.
“I’ll be back Sunday morning.”
Later, Mark and Luke had stayed at home and watched TV since Bubbles was still at work. They were unable to sprawl in their usual way in any of Bubbles’s chairs, because of the knick-knack element. Mark ordered a pizza.
“Everyone knows about me, right?” Luke asked Mark at one point. “In your family, I mean?”
“Yeah, Bubbles spread the word,” Mark said. “And I bet everyone said, ‘Oh shit, really?’ and that was pretty much it. We’re not exactly the Royal Family. I guess compared to your family, we’re kinda … I don’t know. There weren’t any Francos on the Mayflower. Hey, are you really okay with me going tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Luke knew that Mark felt guilty and that “sure” was not a word that normally satisfied people. Luke didn’t know if Mark felt guilty about abandoning him with a stranger in a house full of china teddy bears and pillows shaped like strawberries with someone who said things like, “Well, if you ask me you could use a little meat on your bones,” when you told them you were a vegetarian, or guilty about going to Chicago to have sex with someone who was either a celebrity or married. Possibly, Luke thought, Mark felt guilty about leaving Bubbles with a seventeen-year-old stranger that she never knew about who didn’t have the sense to know a good steak when he saw one. Luke himself felt guilty for not providing the necessary words that would release his father from any of these possible guilt sources. The phrases formed themselves in Luke’s head: “Hey, that’s great,” and “I’m happy to stay here with your mom,” or “Don’t worry about me,” but Luke did not say any of these things.
Luke, listening now to his father turn over once again on the pullout couch, wonders how Mark would feel sleeping in Luke’s room in Delaware. Luke wonders how his father would feel if Luke brought him to Delaware and left him there by himself for a whole day with Sara and Nana.
Mark coughs.
Luke stretches himself out, and smacks his ankle against the wall. Mark coughs again. Luke inhales for a count of four, holds the breath for a count of four, exhales on a count of four. He does this ten times, then increases his breath to a count of five, then six. Luke tries to quiet the chemical processes within him. He visualizes the neurons in his brain moving to a resting potential, a quiescent state where the neurons keep their ionic charges separate. There are something like a hundred billion neurons in Luke’s brain, working in large network systems: talking to each other, processing information, giving commands, and making associations. Luke does not want them to do this. He does not want chatter. He does not want ideas. He does not want to connect the dots.
Luke cannot keep potassium away from sodium in his brain, or sodium separate from chloride, simply by conceptualizing this, and trying to relax. “Resting potential” is a bit of a misnomer. An extraordinary amount of energy is needed to make things still, to keep things separate, to be silent, to think nothing of nothing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When I was ten, my sisters and I spent two weeks with Aunt Caroline and Uncle Louis at their house in White Plains, New York. Sara had not come with us because she was in Colorado leading a Rolfing seminar. Nana didn’t come with us either. She went to Nebraska to visit her sister. We took the train by ourselves to White Plains, with Aurora acting as our leader, which meant that she got to hold the tickets and was in charge of keeping track of the stops so we would get out at the right one. I remember that she took this duty very seriously.
Aunt Linny met us at the train station in a brand-new car. I remember that because she almost hit somebody pulling out of the train station parking lot, and she got totally flustered by this and made us promise not to tell Uncle Louis.
My aunt and uncle live in a really big house. A deliberately big house, I would say. We live in a big house too, but it’s not all fixed up and new, and this makes it seem more accidentally large.
I’ve never been exactly clear on our family’s finances. Sara’s sort of a well-known person in the world of yoga and alternative healing, but that’s not, like, a high-finance world. The Rising Moon Wellness Center is successful, but it’s Sara’s friend Lydia that actually owns it. I think Sara still gets some money from Barry, Paul’s brother, for my sisters, or maybe as part of the divorce. Nana made money from her books, and also I think my grandfather’s family had money, and she got some when he died. My sisters and I earned money by working at the Wellness Center, and Aurora babysat. Pearl and I had our little driveway-shoveling business in the winter. So there seemed to be money around, in a general way, although we don’t have a fancy car, or designer clothes, or go on ski trips, like a lot of the kids at school. Well, actually my sisters have some designer clothes, because Aunt Linny always gives them clothes for their birthdays and at Christmas. Our nicest presents always come from Aunt Caroline and Uncle Louis. Not necessarily the best presents, because both Sara and Nana are really good at giving presents, and Aunt Nancy always sends us big gift certificates for books, but I mean my aunt and uncle give us stuff that we wouldn’t even think about asking for. This computer I am writing on was a gift from them.
Anyway, Aunt Linny went out of her way to make everything nice for us on that trip. She took us to the swimming pool at her country club and to the Bronx Zoo. We went into New York City for the day and saw the musical Titanic on Broadway. Doing things with Aunt Linny is fun because of the element of conspiracy that Aunt Linny creates around her. Standing in front of the concession stand at the Bronx Zoo, Aunt Linny would gaze and sort of murmur, “Things to eat … should we?” and we would all say, “Yes, let’s get pretzels,” or whatever and Aunt Linny would say, “Pretzels! Really? Well, I won’t tell if you won’t,” and somehow eating pretzels became this very subversive action.
What I remember best, though, was the Fourth of July party that happened while we were there. That memory has a couple of different parts to it.
The first one is that Aunt Caroline had forgotten something she needed at the grocery store that day and Uncle Louis took me with him in his car to go get it. I didn’t really like being in the car with Uncle Louis by myself, because I don’t really like him so much. Pearl always says I like everyone, and that I am completely uncritical, but that’s not totally true. I have likes and dislikes like everyone else. People often make that mistake about me.
Uncle Louis is not a bad person. It’s just that I’m not comfortable around him. He used to pat me on the head. That might not sound like a big deal, but I didn’t like it. For one thing, he is really tall, and has big hands, and his hand would hover over my head before he patted it, and so there was a moment when I knew that at any second this hand was going to descend, and there would be three or four pats, of varying degrees of strength, and that I would just have to stand there while it happened, and I never knew what to do, like should I say, “Thank you,” or what. What I always really wanted to say was, “Don’t touch my head.” He also has this way of speaking like he’s giving a demonstration of what a powerful speaking voice sounds like, as if we should all be totally mesmerized by how brilliant he is, even if he’s saying something like, “Pass the juice.”
Growing up, there was always some extra gift for me that was specifically just from him, and it was always some gift that was very “boy” like binoculars, or a compass, or a telescope, and I liked all those things, I was grateful for them, but I didn’t like how it made it seem as if Uncle Louis was “looking out for me,” or something like that.
I know that Uncle Louis is supposed to be this incredibly impressive person, and people talk about how “charismatic” and “charming” he is, but I just don’t get it. Pearl doesn’t either, but with her it’s more about Uncle Louis’s hair. “Uncle Louis walks around like somebody just told him what a great head of hair he has,” is how she describes him.
I don’t mean to imply that there is anything creepy about my Uncle Louis. Sara always has nice things to say about him because he helped her get divorced and Sara thought he was so great she introduced him to Caroline, and they got married. And it’s not like we see all that much of him, or that he’s a major player in my life.
Anyway, I remember being in the car with him, that Fourth of July, and I remember at the grocery store the clerk handed me the bag of whatever it was and said, “Why don’t you carry this for your granddad?” And Uncle Louis got into it with this clerk, like he reprimanded her about making personal remarks to strangers, and I was just standing there with this bag of groceries. It was very uncomfortable. I guess Uncle Louis is used to people just gazing at him in awe, or admiring his hair or something, but it was an honest mistake and, I mean, he is sort of old enough to be my grandfather.
So then we got back in the car and Uncle Louis was totally silent, and then I said something, or did something, and he said, “I understand I have no control over the way you are being brought up, but when you are with me, Luke, you will obey my rules.”
I don’t remember what I did to provoke that. I felt like I didn’t do anything at all and I felt like he was making sort of a slur on Sara, who always, like I said, spoke really nicely about him: “He held out a hand to me in a dark hour of my life. He’s so good for Caroline,” etc. Anyway, just because Sara isn’t a big rich lawyer doesn’t mean she’s not a competent parent or that we didn’t have rules.
The party turned out to be fun, though. Right before the guests arrived, Aunt Caroline said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all played croquet?” and my sisters and I set up a course in the backyard and we had a tournament, and everybody played. We had a good view of the country club’s fireworks right from the backyard.
The last part of this memory is of Uncle Louis and Aunt Caroline getting into a fight after the party. They fought in their bedroom, and the three of us could hear it, and so Aurora said we should all go out in the yard and pick up the croquet hoops.
“It’s ’cause all the women were flirting with Uncle Louis,” Aurora said. “That’s why they’re fighting. Because Uncle Louis is so handsome.”
“Gross,” said Pearl.
“Also they had too much to drink,” Aurora said. “When you drink, it affects your judgment.” (I totally have to remind her of this conversation.)
“How can you tell if Aunt Linny is drunk?” Pearl asked.
Then Pearl did an imitation of Aunt Linny playing croquet, where she would start to line up her mallet in completely the wrong direct
ion and then go, “Oh, oh, where am I supposed to go now? Which one is me? Am I orange still? What should I be doing?” and then an imitation of how Aunt Linny took these tremendous whacks at her ball, I mean just creaming it, and how we all had to dive out of the way. I remember standing in that yard and laughing so hard I was crying at Pearl doing this imitation. And part of my laughing, and general happiness at that moment, I have to say, was that I was glad that someone was yelling at Uncle Louis and his stupid hair.
I am remembering this because we are having a Fourth of July party here, today, with this other family of mine. It seems weird to call them my family since I’m coming in halfway through the movie, as it were, but Bubbles, at least, seems to feel like I’m as much a Franco as a Prescott. Apparently I am not a Boyle at all.
“You’re a Franco,” is what she said to me several times yesterday. It’s sometimes a little difficult to follow the logic of Bubbles’s conversation, though.
“I’m the best cook,” Bubbles told me, at the Kroger where we picked up two tons of meat and a box of frozen veggie burgers for me. “I don’t make fancy things because I don’t have time. I had to work full-time and raise a son. But what I cook, I cook good. Everybody loves my cooking. You live with your grandma, right? Your grandma and your mom?”
