The Usual Rules

by Joyce Maynard

  You know you’re my only brother in the whole world, right? she said. And who’s your only sister?

  You. They’d been through this before.

  And even if I’m not around, you know how much I love you, right?

  Yup.

  I guess I’ll go pack now, she told him.

  He didn’t say anything. From where she stood in the doorway now, she could see him still sitting there, just the back of his head, hair slightly matted, with one of Pablo’s ears draped over his shoulder like one of her mother’s boas and his feet, in their Ernie slippers, curled under him. She could see from the back of his neck that he needed a haircut. Scraggy curls hung over the collar of the sweatshirt he made them put on him every day, even though he’d outgrown it, that their mother gave him.

  Louie sat perfectly still on the couch, facing the television screen. The soft, lulling voice of Mister Rogers talking about something—she didn’t even know what. Nothing moving except the two fingers of the hand he used to twirl the tip of frayed blue ribbon in his small pink ear.

  Kate called.

  Josh told me what your father did, she said. I won’t even call him your father. Garrett. Because as far as I’m concerned, your real father’s Josh.

  It’s okay, Kate, Wendy said. I have things worked out. I’m just trying it out for a little while.

  The same tired feeling she’d had the night before was back. She didn’t feel like talking about it. Better just to go.

  And what about Louie? asked Kate. How’s he supposed to deal with losing his mother first, then his sister?

  When I told him he didn’t seem all that upset.

  He doesn’t understand, Kate said. He thinks it’s like when his dad goes on some gig upstate.

  I’ll come back and visit soon. Or just come back, probably.

  I just can’t believe you’re actually letting Garrett do this, she said. I don’t want to bad-mouth him, but he was never the most responsible person.

  Maybe he’s changed, Wendy said. He said he loved my mom a lot. He said he knew he made mistakes.

  Oh, great. What a breakthrough, said Kate.

  I don’t mean to be rude, Wendy told her. But I should go pack.

  You know what your mother would do if she knew? Kate said. Then, before she knew what she was saying: She’d die.

  Wendy was in her room packing when Josh came in.

  Listen, he said. I’ve been trying all day to figure out what a person’s supposed to do in a situation like this. Not a person. Me. I want to do the right thing here.

  You do everything fine, she said. You practically always do the right thing.

  I used to think that, he said. Everything in my life made total sense for the longest time. I didn’t ever have to sit and ask myself what to do about the people I loved. I just knew, like breathing.

  She had been taking T-shirts out of her drawers when he came in. When Josh went on road trips, he brought her back shirts with corny sayings on them. Now he picked up one of them, from some diner in Syracuse.

  I remember that night perfectly, he said. We finished playing just after midnight and stopped in for burgers. I called your mother from the pay phone and sang her this old Fats Waller number. “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

  She had really small feet, Wendy said.

  I know.

  She was taking papers out of her desk. A stack of photographs from last summer. A list she and Amelia made one time of every type of ice-cream flavor they’d ever tasted. A report she’d written back in fourth grade on polar bears, her favorite stop at the Central Park Zoo. Her first clarinet songbook. A tally she and Amelia had kept from second grade through sometime in sixth, where they made an X every time they cracked an egg, making cookies.

  Now, though, he said, I never know anymore. It’s not something you’re prepared for, having a person you thought you’d be spending the next fifty years with walk out the door and never come back.

  You thought you had this great life, and in one minute the whole thing disappears. It’s not even like you did anything wrong that you can blame yourself about. It’s this totally random thing that happens, but once it does, you wonder what any of it actually meant. If something like this could happen, you wonder about everything else. It isn’t just now that looks so screwed up; it’s everything.

  You start wondering if anything that you thought was real actually was, or if the whole thing was all some kind of a joke. Why it makes sense caring about anything else ever again. You don’t know what to do.

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now, either, she said. I guess I figured going to California would be different anyway. I already know what it’s like here, and it’s not very good.

  I keep thinking maybe I’m supposed to stop you, he said. I try to imagine what your mother would have me do. If it was me the way I’m used to being, I’d pile you guys into the car and we’d just start driving someplace. Go up to New Hampshire and spend a few days hiking in the White Mountains or going on amusement park rides. Play about a million holes of miniature golf, till I was sure he was gone.

  Only me the way I used to be, in the life we used to have, this never would have come up in the first place. And me now, I just don’t feel that sure I can do any better than some guy in California who hasn’t dropped in for a visit in three years. He may be a screwup, but who’s to say I’m any better, staring out the window, trying to decide if I should go to the grocery store or back to bed?

  I would tell you you can’t go with him. I would tell you it breaks my heart to see you walk out the door, not to mention what it could do to your brother. But everyone here is heartbroken anyway. Maybe your best shot is getting out of here. Maybe the shame of it is that there isn’t some guy from California or Maine or South Dakota or God knows where to come along and take your brother away, too.

  She didn’t want to look at him. Wendy hadn’t realized it until then, but up until that moment, she had believed that Josh would stop her from leaving. She might tell her teachers she was going away, and take her clothes out of the closet and pack them into suitcases, pack up her drawing pencils, take her Madonna poster down off the wall. She might even get as far as the airport. But at some point, he was going to come crashing in like the Dustin Hoffman character in her mother’s all-time-favorite movie in the nonmusical category, The Graduate, and bang on the glass. Get her out of there, just as Simon and Garfunkel started playing “Mrs. Robinson.” Garrett hadn’t stopped Josh from marrying her mother, as she had once believed he would, but it had seemed reasonable to suppose, given everything she’d known about him, that Josh would stop Garrett from taking her away now.

  Not until this moment did she realize it was actually going to happen. Tomorrow morning, she would board a plane for Sacramento, and by nightfall she’d be walking into the house of a man she hardly knew, who called himself her father, and everything she’d known or loved best in her life up to this moment would be gone, and whatever was coming next, she didn’t have a clue.

  PART TWO

  California

  Thirteen

  Garrett lived in a town called Davis, a little outside of Sacramento. Wendy asked him if the Golden Gate Bridge was nearby. That’s San Francisco, he said. But I’ll take you there one of these days.

  When she pictured him in California, she’d imagined a little cabin off in the middle of a field, facing out at the ocean, with a sleeping loft and plants in macramé holders and crystals hanging in the window—like a picture she’d seen of a place where her parents had lived in upstate New York one summer when she was a baby. She imagined artworks all around, and the smell of incense and bread baking. But he lived in a regular house, with neighbors on both sides, and a couple of shrubs in front and a cement walkway leading up to the door.

  Inside was an old leather couch and a La-Z-Boy chair and a TV set, also a stereo, and a coffee table with magazines, and those were the regular kind, too. Time and TV Guide.

  There were some tools and fis
hing equipment leaned against a wall, and a painting over the couch, sort of abstract, but she could make out the figure of a man and something that looked like a boat.

  I like that, she said. I draw a lot, too.

  I don’t make as much art as I used to, he told her. The job and all.

  He did carpentry work. Framing mostly, but he could build cabinets, too, when people wanted them.

  The things you do to pay the bills, he said. He had opened the curtain of a window that looked out into a little backyard. There was a barbecue and the orange tree she’d heard about in his letter.

  The puppy from the photograph, part black Lab, part retriever, was older now. His neighbors had been looking after Shiva while Garrett was in New York, so the first thing he did when they got back to the house was go next door to pick her up. I always wanted a dog like this, she told him. Some people wouldn’t like it when a dog licked their face, but Wendy did.

  He opened the fridge. Here, he said. See what hits the spot.

  It was nothing like their refrigerator back in Brooklyn, with half a dozen different kinds of cheeses and the crisper drawer crammed full of vegetables that her mother used to complain were always more than they needed. You never know what you’re going to feel like, Josh used to say. Could be cold roast chicken. Could be a bagel with cream cheese. A person has to be prepared.

  Here there was a stick of beef jerky and a package of sliced turkey breast. Store-bought tomato sauce. A couple of eggs. Margarine. Never trust a person with margarine in their fridge, Josh told her once.

  Stop giving our daughter these ideas, her mother said. The first thirty-five years of my life, that’s all I ever had.

  Our daughter.

  Wendy was still standing in front of the open refrigerator. Nothing strikes your fancy, huh? he said. Can’t say I blame you. But I was saving the best for last.

  He opened the top door, the freezer. A half dozen different Healthy Choice dinners were stacked inside. Take your pick, he said. The sky’s the limit.

  In the end, she settled on a couple of Oreos. That’s genetics for you, he said. I love these things, too.

  He had fixed up a room for her. It must have been his workroom before, because there were still boxes stacked in the corner with papers and a few more tools and art supplies. But he’d put an India-print spread on the bed and a vase of flowers next to it. He’d set a stuffed lion on the pillow.

  It was mine when I was a kid, he said. Of course, you’re old for that kind of stuff. I just thought you might like a little homey touch.

  He set her bigger suitcase on the floor at the foot of the bed. In a day or two, we can set you up with whatever other stuff you need. You probably like music, right?

  Yes.

  We’ll head over to Circuit City and get you one of those portable CD players. Just don’t tell me you like rap okay?

  She hadn’t pictured herself this way. Actually playing music in some room other than the one back home. Hanging her clothes up in this closet next to the box of tools.

  No, she said. I listen to jazz mostly. But I like Madonna and Ani DiFranco and Sade.

  He left the room. When he came back, he was holding something—a very old photograph of her mother, from when she had long hair. Pregnant, from the looks of it.

  Janet kept most of our pictures, he said. I only have a few.

  She looked at the face in the picture. Her mother wasn’t exactly smiling. She had a puzzled sort of expression. Wendy wondered if even then they had been arguing.

  We had different ideas about a lot of things, he said. She was more the type to want to settle down and make a home. I never believed in traditional family structures. It always seemed to me like most people’s problems start with their parents. I wanted things to be a little looser, hands-off. Like the whole world was your home, instead of just one place.

  Didn’t you like your mom and dad? she asked him.

  Garrett made a sound a little like a laugh, but not really. Let’s just say I might have been better off raised by wolves, he said.

  She should have been tired, considering the time difference. But after he left her, she lay in the dark room and couldn’t sleep. He had said he’d take her around tomorrow, show her downtown Davis, all three streets, and then take her over to her new school so she could see it. One friend of mine in particular is looking forward to meeting you, but that can wait, he said. You might want to adjust a little first.

  She thought about her room at home in New York, with the posters still up. “Sailor Moon” and the framed Playbill from when her mother took her to see Guys and Dolls on Broadway. In her mind, she moved down the hallway past the bathroom to Louie’s room. She knelt beside the bed.

  Louie, she said. Are you sleeping?

  I dreamed I was driving a cement mixer, Sissy. But I’m awake now.

  Want me to get in with you?

  Yes.

  She lay there in the dark with him. He snuggled against her the way he liked, like they were making an electrical connection and all the surfaces had to be in contact to work. She could feel him adjusting his body to curve in alongside her better. She draped her top arm over him and rested her hand on his round belly through the fleece of his sleeper suit.

  What do you want to talk about? he said.

  I don’t know, Louie. How about you?

  Trucks, he said. Which one would you want, a dump truck or a street sweeper?

  How about we talk about farm animals instead? I’m not in the mood for trucks.

  If you could have any animal, what would you pick?

  A dog, she said. He knew this already. A Boston terrier.

  I’d want a pig.

  They’re cute at first, she told him. But have you ever seen how pigs get when they’re older? Really fat and ugly and covered with mud.

  Not the pig in Charlotte’s Web. I like him.

  He was a great pig all right. But I don’t think they’re all that good. Plus, they’d track mud in all over the place, and Mama would hate it.

  Mama isn’t here anymore.

  Poppy, then. He has enough work to do without cleaning up after a pig.

  Sissy? he said.

  Yes, Louie.

  Did you know I can make a pig noise?

  No, Louie. Let’s hear.

  He used to just say, Oink, but now he snorted. That sounded just like a real pig, she told him.

  Sissy? he said.

  Yes, Louie.

  After Charotte had her babies, she died, didn’t she? At the end?

  Yes, Louie.

  But the baby spiders were okay. They had Wilbur anyway.

  Also each other.

  In the morning, because they didn’t have much food in the house, Garrett took her out for breakfast. She had a grapefruit, something she never ate at home. She hadn’t told him, but she was going to eat all different things in California, so when she went home, they’d barely recognize her. You can create a whole new identity, Amelia had said.

  Don’t you want something else? he asked. English muffin? Pop-Tart?

  She said she never ate much for breakfast.

  They drove down E Street so he could point out the landmarks: the other diner he sometimes went for breakfast, the bar he and his buddies went to after work sometimes to play a round of pool. Not that I’ll be stopping in there now that you’re here, he said. We’ll be doing the bonding thing.

  They were sitting in the cab of his truck. Shiva rode in back, with her head facing the wind and her tongue out. Wendy was worried that she might jump out, but Garrett said she never would. This is one loyal dog, he said.

  I always wanted a dog, she told him. My mom and Josh didn’t think we had room.

  Speaking of her mother now, even in that small way, left a sad little hollow feeling in Wendy. She had been thinking about her mother just about constantly in New York, but she realized as she said the words that an hour or two had gone by today in which she hadn’t thought about her. She should probably feel guilty
about that, but she also liked it that she could forget for a little while, or put it out of her head anyway.

  When they got back to the house there was a message on Garrett’s machine from Josh, wanting to be sure she’d gotten there safely. She knew she should call him back, but she wasn’t in the mood. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear his voice yet, least of all Louie’s. They’re probably out now anyway, she told Garrett. I’ll get back to him later.

  I’ll drive you to school, Garrett told her on Monday. He made the announcement as if it was no big deal, starting in at a new school two months after the start of the year.

  The junior high was a long, low, flat building. Nothing like the way schools looked in New York City. There were playing fields out back, too, and a parking lot full of cars, and a sign that said, HOME OF THE HOLO COUNTY REDBIRDS.

  She had worn her jeans, same as she did to school back home, and a heavy sweater. She wasn’t expecting it to be so warm, but she had nothing underneath but her underwear, so she had no choice but to keep the sweater on.

  Remember, he told her, it’s always a little weird at first, anytime you start off in a new place. You have to give things a little time.

  They went to the office. If it had been her mother and Josh, they would have made a bunch of calls ahead of time, talked to the guidance counselor, tracked down parents in the know to find out who the best teachers were and which ones to avoid. But she could tell this was the first time Garrett had talked to the principal.

  One thing she was grateful for: He didn’t mention what had happened. Only that she was moving here from New York.

  So you were there on September eleventh? the principal asked.

  We figured it was a good time for my daughter to get out of New York, he said, like it was some kind of joint plan. They’ll be sending her records along.

  That was it.

  They set her up with a schedule pretty much like the one at home. This is a big school, the principal told her. You might feel a little lost in the crowd at first. Just remember, we Redbirds are a friendly bunch. Before you know it, you’ll be a real California girl.