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by Ron Koertge

  Colleen says, “You’re doing good.”

  Her hand lands on Colleen’s tufty hair like a blessing. “And so are you.” Then she turns away. “Be right back with the entrée.”

  Grandma asks, “So you two struggle together?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Colleen answers. “When I say she’s doing good, I just mean that it’s after seven but she’s not drunk and I’m not loaded.”

  Grandma looks around. “And how does your mother feel about this arrangement?”

  “She knows I’m somewhere with a roof over my head, but I’d never tell her where. Marcie’s got nice stuff, and I don’t want somebody coming in and cleaning her out.”

  “Someone your mother knows would do that?”

  “When I was little, she’d come home from work, take a bottle of wine into the bathroom, and sit in the tub with bubbles up to her chin. She’d put a razor blade on the edge of the bathtub, and she’d call me in and say, ‘If I used this, you wouldn’t know what to do, would you?’ At first it made me cry, and I’d beg her not to kill herself. And then, when I was about twelve, one night I yelled at her and told her to go ahead and do it. I was sick of her, anyway, and I’d be okay on my own. Then I went and stayed with one of my girlfriends from school.”

  “She didn’t ask where you were?”

  “Now or then?”

  “Either.”

  Colleen shakes her head. “My mom’s kind of crazy, but different from Ben’s mom, who’s just out of it. Delia’s like somebody who’s been in a car wreck; my mom is like the person who hit her and then drove off like it didn’t happen.” Then she stands up. “Sit tight. I’m going to go help Marcie.”

  Grandma waits till the door swings shut behind Colleen before she says, “I’ve never heard anyone talk so blithely about such tragic circumstances.” She takes a small bite of salad, then says, “Except doctors, maybe. I’ve been at fund-raisers where physicians come back from Ghana or Peru and tell the most horrible stories in such a matter-of-fact tone.”

  Colleen walks in with a roasted chicken on a platter. She waits while I move the salad bowl and a few other things. She takes a huge knife and an oversize fork and goes to work carving.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” I ask.

  “The butcher at work likes me. He’s tall and handsome, goes to the gym, works with Greenpeace in the summer, and rescued this baby seal that he’s taught to talk. But don’t be jealous, Ben. You’ve got a better camera.”

  Colleen’s a real chatterbox tonight, and I wonder if that means anything about her equilibrium. I hope not. It’s probably just a lot of Pepsi, anyway. A little of anything is never enough for Colleen.

  “We’re not going to wait for my mom?” I ask. “This dinner’s kind of for her.”

  “She said not to,” Colleen informs us.

  “You talked to her?”

  “Sure. I gave her my number when you and I were out there last week.”

  “How come she talks to you and not to me?”

  “She doesn’t know what to say to you,” my grandma says.

  I just look at her.

  Colleen nods. “That’s right.”

  Marcie holds out her plate for a drumstick but looks at me as she says, “Let’s talk about something else for a minute. I’ve been prowling the Net for you, Ben. There’s a ten-day film workshop this summer in Aspen. You should go.” She looks at my grandmother. “He should go, Esther.”

  Esther. I know that’s my grandmother’s name, but I almost never hear anybody use it. Marcie usually calls her Mrs. B. And to everybody else she’s Mrs. Bancroft. Colleen calls her Granny, but not to her face.

  “Didn’t we see an Esther in one of those old movies you make me watch?” Colleen asks. “Always in a swimsuit.”

  “Sure, Esther Williams. Bathing Beauty. Almost outgrossed Gone with the Wind.”

  Grandma straightens her shoulders. “My girlfriends thought I was just as pretty as Esther Williams, and I could swim, too.”

  “Get out of town,” Colleen says.

  “Why is that so unbelievable?” Grandma stands up and puts her napkin on the chair. Where it belongs. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  And out the door she goes.

  “Is she mad?” Colleen asks.

  “She doesn’t sound mad.”

  I look at Marcie, who just shakes her head and says, “I always figured she was born in cashmere separates and only got out of them to bathe.”

  “Well, while we’re alone,” I say, “how much is that summer thing you were talking about?”

  “Who cares? Your grandmother can afford it, and it’s got everything — three films in three weeks, sixteen millimeter or three-chip DV, continuity work, composition, blocking, you name it.”

  “You should go,” Colleen says. “Don’t worry about me while you’re off with beautiful, talented girls who share your passion for filmmaking. I’ll just work my minimum-wage job and help the butcher beat his meat.”

  “Hey, I’ll go to film school if you’ll go to comedy school. Work on your timing. Get some new material.”

  Colleen comes around the table, leans into me, kisses me on the neck, licks my ear. She’s just kidding around, but it still makes my heart beat fast. Partly because it turns me on, but partly because I used to see girls at school do that to their boyfriends, and I thought it’d never happen to me in a million years.

  Marcie leans back in her chair. “I was born in this stupid little town with one stoplight and one cop. Whenever he caught high-school kids parked somewhere and making out, all he’d ever say was, ‘Take that somewhere else.’”

  “Did you go to high school there?” Colleen asks.

  Marcie nods. “They’d bus kids in from the boonies. There were maybe forty in my graduating class. Mostly girls. The boys dropped out and went to work or enlisted. We had a girls’ track team, though. Not that anybody cared. We just ran because we liked it. There weren’t any parents or boyfriends. Two of the girls were gay but didn’t know it, so we more or less protected them.”

  “But you knew.”

  “Nobody ever said anything.”

  Colleen asks, “Who did you protect them from?”

  Marcie shrugs. “They were just really happy when we were all in our stupid, baggy gym suits. Then they got married after graduation and were miserable.”

  “Not to each other.”

  “In Oklahoma? Are you kidding?”

  Colleen looks at the door like this conversation will end when Grandma comes back, and she doesn’t want it to.

  “But you got out,” she says.

  “Oh, yeah. As soon as I could. I wanted to experience life.”

  “Like?” Colleen’s eyes are bright and hot.

  “Oh, like I had this boyfriend my first year in college. I knew he was coming over, just not when, exactly. So I’d read until he showed up, but I’d be nervous. ‘All het up,’ as my mother used to say. Then I’d hear his car, and I’d put a piece of paper in the book and put it back on the shelf. By that time I’d be on my feet.”

  “Were you naked?” Colleen asks.

  “Gee, no. He thought I was a nice girl. And, anyway, he liked to tear my clothes off. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I’d buy shirts and blouses from the Goodwill and sometimes just sew the buttons back on.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, he was married. My heart was broken.”

  I ask, “Did you finish the books?”

  Marcie shakes her head. “I still don’t know what happens at the end of The Great Gatsby.”

  Colleen takes a bite of chicken before she says, “Well, I’m not telling my stories. They’re too sordid.”

  “And you’re my story,” I say, “so we all know that one.”

  We just sit for a while. Water from one of the little fountains gurgles and drips. The candles flicker, lean hard to the left for a couple of seconds, then straighten up. We grin at each other like something slightly magical just happened.
<
br />   I think how much I like this: sitting at a table with my friends. Or one friend and my girlfriend and my grandma. Or maybe it’s really my girlfriend and two friends, because ever since the secrets about my mom came out, it’s like Grandma can relax. What would it be like with my mother here? Just thinking about it makes me nervous.

  When the front door opens again, I stand up, because that’s what I was taught to do when “a lady” enters the room. Grandma’s carrying a blue plastic bin. I point to the nearest chair, but she says, “No. This will be fine.”

  She means one of the tall stools that I’ve sat on and talked to Marcie while she cooked. But it’s a few yards away from the table, and Grandma has her back to us as she takes off the white lid. What’s in there that she might not want us to see? It’s not like her to just be dramatic.

  She turns around, holding pictures. Photographs, maybe, is what she would say. All in frames — silver, gold, ebony. I just know she was careful to have the frames complement the snaps. Or she paid someone to do it.

  “Here we are,” she says, propping one of them on the table.

  “Oh, my God,” says Colleen. “Look at you.”

  My grandmother in a bathing suit that’s almost psychedelic: swirls of purple, white, orange, black.

  “Elastic waffle nylon with tummy-control panels and a floral Hawaiian print.” She recites the specs wistfully. It has that long-ago-and-far-away tone. One I’m not used to from her. When I was little and she read to me, Red Riding Hood would speed through the forest like a little fire engine.

  “What’s that ruffly thing on your head?” asks Colleen.

  “It’s a bathing cap with a rather ornate —”

  Colleen asks me, “Didn’t something like that fall on Sigourney Weaver in deep space and try to suck out her brain?”

  Marcie looks at my grandmother and says, “You look wonderful.”

  “I went to the country club every day,” Grandma says.

  “You could swim in that getup?”

  “I swam the sidestroke to keep my makeup dry. I wore a lipstick by Elizabeth Arden called Perfect Red.” She looks at me. “Your grandfather loved that shade. He once had me kiss him on the neck so a little showed up on his white dress shirt. Then he went to work. He wanted people to kid him.”

  “Holy shit,” Colleen says. But reverently. I know what she means. I’ve never heard Grandma talk like this.

  She says, “I was pregnant when this photograph was taken. I just didn’t know it.”

  She walks to the bin, moves a few things, comes back. “Here’s your father when he was three.”

  He’s a solemn-looking little kid in short pants and a striped sweater. A black-and-white dog lies at his feet.

  “What’s the dog’s name?” I ask.

  “Owen.” Then she pairs it up with another one. “And then here you are, Ben.”

  “You guys look alike,” says Colleen. “Except both his legs are the same size.”

  I ask, “Where’s Mom?”

  Grandma looks at Marcie, then me. She retreats to the bin, returns with half a dozen pictures, which she lays out slowly, like tarot cards: Mom and Dad, him with his arm around her; he’s grinning. Mom and Dad and me at Disneyland; he’s holding me. Dad and me beside his car, a cool-looking convertible. Me in the backyard with a fat plastic bat and him pretending to pitch a beach ball. Me on a tricycle and Dad making sure I don’t tip over. Mom by herself, shading her eyes with one hand and looking out of the frame. At Seattle, maybe.

  “There’s a lot of just my dad and me,” I say.

  “Your mother preferred lying down with a cold washcloth on her forehead,” Grandma says.

  Just then Colleen’s phone rings. The timing is too perfect. I sigh and sit back in my chair. Grandma’s hand floats through the space between us and lands on my shoulder. We listen to one side of the conversation.

  “It’s all right, Delia,” Colleen says. “If you have to go in, you have to go in. Yes. Yes, absolutely another time. Ben and I’ll come out next week. Sure.”

  “I knew it.” I look at Grandma. “Didn’t you know it?’

  She admits, “I certainly wondered if she’d be able.”

  I hit the table with my fist. Not hard, just decisively. “Every time it’s like starting over with her. I drive twenty miles or take a stupid bus, and it’s just a rerun of the last time. Why do I even bother?”

  “She said she wants us to come to her house,” Colleen says. “That’s progress.”

  “Well, great. Maybe we can all sit in that one chair.”

  “You don’t have to do any more than you already have if you don’t want to,” Marcie says. “We all really are on our own paths, Ben, and it’s just possible that yours and your mother’s don’t actually intersect.”

  Colleen puts down her fork. “That’s such bullshit. Ben has to try. Delia’s his mom.” She looks at Marcie. “How can you say fucking heartless shit like that?”

  Marcie takes a sip of Perrier and says evenly, “I’m just presenting alternatives.”

  “Well, that one stinks.”

  I say, “I know what Marcie means. Maybe my mom just wants to be left alone. She sure acts like it sometimes.”

  Grandma shakes her head. “No, I agree with Colleen. You have to try.”

  Then we don’t talk about that anymore. We eat and don’t look at each other. Little by little, we start again — Colleen’s job at the co-op, movies that the Academy drones overlooked at Oscar time, what’s going on at my school and Colleen’s, and Colleen herself, who is embarrassed to be getting good grades. She adds, “Class participation is a lot easier when you’re not unconscious.”

  Everybody listens, even the ones propped up in their expensive frames — my dad puts down the beach ball, Delia turns around and smiles, Grandma takes off that amazing swim cap and runs one hand through her short hair.

  “Ben and I will clean up,” Colleen says when we’ve finished.

  “It’s your job,” Marcie reminds her, with just a little chill in her voice.

  Colleen calmly picks up the four bowls. “You want to wash or dry, Ben?”

  When we’re alone in the kitchen, I ask her, “What was that about?”

  “That’s just Marcie being Marcie.” Colleen turns off the hot water and picks up a pair of blue rubber gloves. “I loved seeing those pictures. And I’ll bet Granny brought them over for Delia to see, too.”

  “I’m not going to give up on her.”

  “I know, baby. You might be a wormy little spaz who’s spent way too much time indoors, but you’re not a quitter.”

  Then she kisses me.

  Colleen washes and I dry. Once, we hear Marcie and Grandma laughing in the other room, and we look at each other and make that you-never-know face.

  When I reach for a saucer that Colleen is holding out, I tell her, “I’ve seen this kitchen scene in about nine thousand movies.”

  “Usually the guy’s traded his cojones for a cardigan sweater, right? Who was that Father Knows Best dude, anyway?”

  “Robert Young. But that was television. Played the most well-adjusted guy in the world, but in his real life he tried to commit suicide.”

  “No shit?” Colleen freezes. White suds on the blue glove. A dripping dish halfway to the rinse water. The sleeve of her tangerine sweater pushed way up, and there’s that tattooed race car, complete with wavy speed lines zooming toward her shoulder.

  “It’s cool that you know that stuff,” she says. “It puts things in perspective. You know what I wonder? How many people watch movies and shit and then want to be like what they see. They don’t think about some actor taking off his, like, costume and turning into somebody who needs to stop at the market on the way home.”

  I say, “There’re probably a hundred seminars a year with people trying to figure out if watching movies is bad for kids or not. The same experts over and over. They probably all travel on the same bus. And nobody knows for sure. I watched who-knows-how-many movies. I was
a spaz when I started and a spaz ten years later. Movies didn’t change me; you did.”

  She leans into a greasy platter. “Just for the record — after a night like this, I want to smoke a blunt about as big as King Kong’s thumb.”

  “Was it that bad? You seemed totally —”

  “I was fucking nervous. What if Delia canceled? How were you going to feel about that? What would you do if she did? So I wanted to get high.”

  I pull her toward me. She resists, and then she doesn’t.

  “But I’d kind of hate myself afterward,” she says. “And you’d hate me.”

  “I’d never hate you.”

  She turns around, drapes both arms across my shoulders, and asks, “Why are you so fuckin’ nice to me? I’m really not a nice person.”

  “Remember when we were in Target that first time? And you went over to my mom and told her that her son was standing by the polyester separates? And then you ate that stupid lunch in that stupid snack bar and you were so patient and sweet to her?”

  Colleen nods. “Well, okay. Maybe I am pretty lovable sometimes.”

  “And modest, too.”

  There’s that smirk of hers, the one I like so much. She tightens her grip on me. She makes sure I can feel her from my forehead to my knees. She gets right up next to my ear and hisses, “Leave your window open tonight.”

  “Why?” I gasp. “When Grandma goes to bed, I’ll just unlock the front door.”

  She shakes her head. “I want to come in the window. That’s how Dracula does it.”

  A couple of nights later, here’s what I’m staring at:

  Find the constant k such that the system of the two equations 2x + ky and 5x – 3y has no solutions.

  I literally say “Huh?’ out loud, and just then the phone rings.

  “Remember Crystal and Amber,” Colleen asks, “those dancers we ran into at Buster’s? Well, they’ve got a new place, and they’re having a party tonight. Right now. They want us to drop by.”

  I close my math book. “Are you crazy? They’re druggies.”