The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Julieanne,” said a male voice, soft, intimate, abundantly cheerful. “Are you in bed?”

  “Shut up, freak!” I snapped. “Call your mother!”

  “Is this Julieanne Gillis?” the voice was abruptly reserved, shocked into decorum.

  Matthew.

  “Oh my God!” I sat up. “Oh my God, Matthew. Oh my God, I thought you were some psycho who saw my column picture and decided to kill me. What time is it? What time is it?”

  “It’s…nine-thirty in Boston. Guess it’s eight-thirty there.”

  “Eight. Thirty? Only eight-thirty. I thought it was the middle of the night.”

  “Long day?”

  “Yeah. I can’t believe I was asleep. Yeah, Matt, it’s been a long night, and a long day’s night.”

  “Sounds like it.” His voice was puzzled, embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry. We haven’t talked in a while, Matt. And I told you I was separated from Leo? Well,” I drew a deep breath, “we’re divorced now. And he has a baby. And his girl is expecting another baby. And—”

  “Jesus, Julie…”

  “And my daughter Caro moved in with my husband and the girl, who’s this alpaca-weaving workout instructor who’s about twenty-five, and she’s in New York State, and my fifteen-year-old son, who’s brilliant and dear, but who has learning disabilities, just told me he’s dropping out of school when he turns sixteen, quite a melodrama….”

  “Wow, I…”

  “Pretty gruesome? Not what you’d think would become of stuck-up Ambrose Gillis’s baby girl, huh?”

  “It’s more than that.” He had no idea, I thought. He went on. “You poor kid. I can’t believe you’re still walking.” He didn’t know how close to the bull’s-eye he’d hit. “What I went through with Susan, I thought that I’d never recover, that I’d never have a day in my life that was completely free from pain. And this is no time for a sermon. But you do. You wait eighteen months, Julie. And I guarantee you, you’ll have a day when you catch yourself smiling at something. I won’t say you won’t feel guilty for that. But you will.”

  “It’s not like that for me, Matt. Eighteen months from now, there’s still going to be a big problem.” And I was going to tell him then. What the hell? He had the sweetest voice. I had begun to correspond, through e-mail, with other people who had MS. Maybe he knew someone I could correspond with. I was ready to be out of the closet.

  But he said, “I called, Julieanne, because I’m, ah, coming to Milwaukee for a meeting, and I thought I’d stop and see you. It’s not until November—”

  “Oh, gosh, I’d love that, but no, see, it’s impossible,” I said, remembering that fleeting, world-beating sense of being cherished. “I’d love to see you again.”

  “Too soon, then, and there’s always the chance, of course, that you’ll work it out. After all, you and Leo had a long marriage.”

  “It’s over,” I said flatly. “It’s so over. That’s not it.”

  “But you’re just not ready to…”

  “Are you talking about a date, Matt?”

  “Well, is that against the law? To ask? I’ve been a widower for sixteen years. I’ve had a relationship that lasted four years but just never reached the point where I could make a commitment, though she was terrific, really terrific. A really athletic, happy person.”

  “If she was so terrific, try it again,” I said, jealous and pissed off because his voice took on this the-way-we-were quality. Why in hell was I talking to this guy? “Anyone that terrific, I’d be with right now, if I were you.” But he went on to explain: The primary problems were his sweetheart’s touchy ego, her near obsession with her body, to the point of becoming anorexic. I looked down in dismay at my steroid-plumped body. I knew I wasn’t fat, but I’d always believed I could pass for the younger Katharine Hepburn. Well, the young Katharine’s Hepburn’s body double, boyishly slender. Oh, well, that’s it then, I thought. He likes them nuts and skinny.

  “So,” he said, “how about we don’t think of it as a date, how about we think of it just as a visit? I can bring over hamburgers if you want.” I thought, He’s probably still five feet four, and now bald. He probably wears belts with big silver buckles with whales on them, because he’s said he sailed on Cape Cod. He was probably a frumpy little guy who read frumpy little magazines. But why not have a new friend? I could think of it as the beginning of my new life as a celibate.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you should know, Matt, that there’s every chance I could forget what you’re saying while you’re saying it. Or I could have to go out to get my meatball sub using a cane. I have multiple sclerosis, Matt.”

  “Oh, I know that,” he said.

  “You know that? Nobody knows that.”

  “Your father-in-law knows that. He told me how wonderful you were, how you fought it like a tiger….”

  “When did you talk to my father-in-law?”

  “One Saturday I called, and you were at ballet class, and we got to talking. He’s a nice man. He loves you very much. I can’t believe you still take ballet. I’d throw my back out if I played football. I can remember seeing you dance in the variety show. You could have been professional, Julie.” My head was still cranking. I wondered how long he’d known this. I wondered if he had something wrong with him, beyond the baldness and the belt (by now, in my mind, it was a big piece of turquoise surrounded by heavy silver). Something that attracted him to sick women.

  Matt MacDougall, a pervert.

  But he had been such a sweet, funny boy.

  “That’s why I can’t…have a relationship. Now you get it.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “The relationship between having a chronic illness and having a relationship, not necessarily with me, but with, well, say you had diabetes. Would you say, Well, I’m never going out with a man again?”

  “It’s not the same thing, Matt. You’re a physician. You know there are issues with MS that make it impossible for all but martyrs who were married twenty years before their diagnosis.”

  “I know a woman who has MS. She’s one of my patients because she was having some dental…well, it wasn’t related. But she’s only twenty-six, and she uses a little chair/walker thing, and she has a boyfriend she’s crazy about.”

  “He’s the one who’s crazy,” I said. “No one, Matt, and I am not putting down your patient, no one would buy into this, Matt.”

  “Why do you get to be the judge of that?” he asked me.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Gabe’s Journal

  That quarter, for the first time in all my hideous years at school, I made honor roll. I got an A and four Bs. The A was in English. When they e-mailed my grades to her, bullshittingly before I could delete them, it made my mom cry. Since being in remission, she’d become harder to control. She was more on top of everything. So she found out, and, naturally, she pleaded with me to reconsider.

  But there was a huge price for those grades. It was a mission. It was proof to Kimball that I wasn’t retarded. I simply, totally, fucking did nothing else. I forced myself to write down every fucking word every fucking teacher put on the board. I filled in every fucking sheet copying the answers to every fucking question out of every fucking book. I had dreams about the Teapot Dome scandal. I lay in bed with Rory and read to her from To Kill a Mockingbird, every page, so I’d remember every word, and, just like my mother, I got fucking choked up when the guy left the courtroom. At the end, Rory asked me, “What happened to the bird?”

  I painted the entire apartment for my Gram and Gramp and with the money I earned paid a cute junior girl basically to do my geometry homework. The proofs reminded me of my life, which I think of as being evidence of negative numbers. The day after the report card came, I brought my mother the paper giving me permission to withdraw.

  That about killed me. But I did it anyway.

  She was shaking, she was crying so hard. The next day, I wen
t around to all of my teachers, none of whom was intrinsically a bad person, just clueless, and I said good-bye. I saved Mrs. Kimball for last.

  She lowered her reading glasses. Wouldn’t she have reading glasses that were cut across the top like little amputees? “Well, Gabe,” she said.

  “Well, Missus Kimball,” I said.

  “What are your plans?” she asked.

  “Do you care?” I asked.

  “I don’t think this is a wise choice.”

  “I don’t either. But then, I’m a kid. I’m not wise. I’m not learning how to be wise here. I’m learning how to be a victim. And I’m learning how to hate what I love.”

  “What do you love?”

  “Uh. Reading, I guess. Writing.”

  “If you’d written one half of what we’d asked you to do, you could have been an A student, Gabe. Do you intend to take the GED? Are you going to enter the armed forces?”

  “Yes, I am, Missus Kimball. I’m going to enter the armed forces. Not really. I’m being sarcastic. Do you really think a lot of guys would like me to have their backs in combat? I’m a little easily distracted.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “What?”

  “Good luck.”

  “I mean you’re going to need good luck.”

  “Good luck to you, too, Missus Kimball. Now that I’m no longer officially your student…” I saw her glance from left to right, to make sure she had a clear path to the exit. “Don’t worry, Missus Kimball. I don’t have a rifle under my jacket. I just want to ask you a favor.”

  “What?” She began clipping and releasing her ballpoint with her thumb, a gesture for which she would have interrupted Guided Study to say to me, Mister Steiner….

  “Don’t ever do this to another kid. Don’t pick one out and make him feel lower than a snail’s belly. Don’t mock him for what he can’t help. Cheer him on. Try to look for some good thing about him. Honest to God, I mean this in a nice way….”

  “The fact that you didn’t…prosper here doesn’t have anything to do with me, Gabe. But you know that. That was your choice.”

  “But you could have helped me make a better choice,” I said. I had thought long and hard about this. I had made notes. “It has everything to do with you. Because you can take a kid’s hand, not really, but you can tell him he’s okay, and find him the help he needs, if you’re interested.”

  “Only if you have a student who’s interested.”

  “But how would you know?”

  “I have a group now. I need you to go, Gabe. Leave.”

  What did I really want Kimball to say?

  What did I expect her to do? Tell me I wasn’t garbage? Tell me she was sorry it hadn’t worked? Tell me that she cared? Tell me she was going to get Lou Gehrig’s and die a slow death? Say she was sorry about my family? Say she even knew about my family? She handed me a file of official papers about the GED. I made a point of dropping it into the trash on the way out the door. The whole thing hadn’t gone as I’d rehearsed it. Had I really expected it to? Mrs. Kimball being who she was and I being who I am?

  Had I expected, finally, some guidance from the guidance counselor, for the principal to be a prince and a pal?

  What had I thought my leaving would accomplish that my being here never had?

  I left Sheboygan LaFollette for the last time through the gym door. I saw Mallory, my sister’s friend, changing classes. “Gabe!” she said, “I totally can’t wait until Cat comes for the four-day weekend at Halloween. Aren’t you excited?”

  “Totally,” I said. I had no idea she was coming at all. I had no idea where she was staying, or with whom.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Take it easy, Mallory. I dropped out today.”

  “That’s so cool,” she said. “My parents would kill me.”

  “Mine, too,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So, well, say hi to my sister, and tell her we’re fine. Just fine.”

  “Isn’t she staying with you?”

  “You know she isn’t. Maybe you didn’t think of it. Bet she’s staying with my grandparents. She won’t talk to my mom. She thinks my mom hates her for moving out there. But she doesn’t. And, y’know, Mallory, why don’t you tell her that?”

  “She has the coolest boyfriend. He’s, like, eighteen, and Leo and Joy let him stay with her—”

  “I don’t want to know this.” I knew I shouldn’t have stopped to talk to Mallory. It was unprecedented.

  “But it’s the most natural thing in the world, Gabe. They don’t want her to have her first sexual experiences in a car or with some creep. They made sure she was protected, and they had this long meeting before, with his parents….”

  “I so don’t want to know this. And please, neither does my mother. ’Bye, Mallory.”

  “Well, ’bye, Gabe. Is your mom sick or something?”

  “More like, or something.”

  “Are you going in the army?”

  “Marines,” I said. “Special Forces.”

  “Cool,” she said.

  As I opened the door, Luke and a cadre of his jock brothers stumbled out of the gym. They were talking about who had been “trashed” the past weekend, who made “time,” what an asshole Burke was in Algebra II. I looked at Luke. He looked straight back into my eyes. Then, he pretended to see something on the floor, nodded the briefest nod, and turned away.

  I began to turn away, too, when he said, “Dude.”

  I said, “Dude.”

  Luke said, real low, “Want to hang out Sunday?”

  I said, “Maybe.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Daniel

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  Distributed by Panorama Media

  Dear J.,

  I met a man last spring who was absolutely everything I wanted. We clicked immediately. Bright, funny, so caring and interested. He couldn’t do enough for me. Notes, flowers, surprise dates planned—even a dance class! After a long, long dry spell, I felt I’d died and gone to heaven! As the fall progressed, however, he got more preoccupied and distant. I knew that he was working on his PhD dissertation, so I gave him space. Occasionally, he dropped by for dinner and an overnight, but he was distracted. At last, he told me that he’d be finishing his dissertation the following week, and defending his thesis, and then he’d be all finished, getting ready to look around the country for a place to be happy. Naturally, I assumed he meant that for both of us, and I began to tidy up loose ends at work. Two days after his defense, when I knew he’d be home, I dressed in a beautiful new sundress and loaded the car with wine, cake, and flowers. I drove to his house. It was empty. There was a FOR RENT sign in the yard. There was no note. His phone had been disconnected. J., I immediately came home to write this note. We were in love! What am I to think?

  Hysterical in Hoboken

  Dear Hysterical,

  Do you still have the cake and the wine? Sit down. Eat the whole cake. Drink as much of the wine as you can without doing permanent damage. Take a long, long nap. Then, get down on your knees and thank whatever deity you embrace that you didn’t quit your job or in any other way change your life for someone who clearly is a flake at best and something much, much more treacherous at worst. Studies show that more than half of the people with whom you “click” the first time are sociopaths. They know what you want and they give it—but only for as long as they want to. And they never look back. You are obviously a decent person, so don’t you look back, either.

  J.

  Dear J.,

  My boyfriend of two years just told me last week he felt he needed to end the relationship. Naturally, I asked why. He said that the most honest answer he could give was that he just didn’t feel the way he needed to feel when he wanted to get serious. He certainly felt serious a year ago—like twice a night! But then, when I’d make plans for us with friends for the weekend, he’d star
t getting sulky. He raved about the sweater I made him, then never wore it! His job has become more complex and is taking more of his time, so I know that’s a factor. But I’ve just heard that he’s been coming on to a mutual friend who is known as the biggest here-today-gone-tomorrow girl in town!

  Nice Girl in Nantucket

  Dear Nice,

  I don’t want to be the first to tell you. Your mother should have. Nice girls do finish last. It’s an unfortunate fact of male nature that the hunter is not going to want to eat the game he didn’t stalk—in a manner of speaking. Next time you fall in love—and you will—make a rule. Every time you ache to return his phone call, wait twenty-four hours. The new flirt is the girl with the most classes, most consultancies, most meetings, most girlfriends—the one who’s always just on her way out the door. Yeah, it’s incredibly stupid. But it’s been the guaranteed recipe for bliss—or at least getting what you think you want—since mothers were writing “Do not call him” on the walls of caves.

  J.

  I heard the door open and knew that it was Gabe. I sat up straight at my father’s desk and concentrated on my computer. In fact, I performed a parody of a woman lost in utter concentration. I didn’t know if he’d come into my room, but if he did, I wanted to make sure I was so absorbed I didn’t notice. He did. I could feel his facial expression. He dropped his book bag onto the floor and said, “I think I’ll wash this. I returned all the books, Mom.”