The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  And I knew he had done it.

  I breathed in deeply, but not, I hoped, audibly. I’d held out hope that something about proving to himself that he actually could succeed would spur him on for the meager twenty months it would take to finish. But to a person of Gabe’s age and temperament, twenty months was an eternity. For anyone, it was an eternity, if you were spending it in purgatory.

  On the other hand, there had to be a limit to my tolerance. He may have usurped a part of my role, but I still had the influence. I knew he cared about what I thought. “If you want something in the way of my saying okay, I’m fine about this, Gabe, what you’re going to need is a different mother,” I said. “I do have something for you.” I handed him a stack of job applications I’d picked up on my little errands around town, to the bank, the doctor, the physical therapist. “Time to start living the life of an adult, pallie. Get a job.”

  On the bed, Gabe seemed to sink deeper into the contours of my mattress. He sighed noisily.

  “Well, you’re being a real sport about this,” he said. “You’re showing a lot of sympathy.”

  “This is the kind of thing they call Social Services on parents for being a good sport about,” I said sharply. “Want a pack of smokes? Want to be able to drink beer, but just at home? It’s not me, Gabe. Healthy or sick, single or double, I’m still the same mother I was. And, damn it, I spent ten good years of life trying to get you past the, okay, past the thick-headedness, the intolerance of public school….”

  “Yeah, and it helped me. But it didn’t change anything.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t change the world, Gabe. I’ll try to get to that next week.”

  “I thought I’d take a little time to orient myself,” Gabe said, as if by way of changing the subject. “And it’s not like I haven’t worked. I’ve done, uh, some writing, as I recall. Unpaid.”

  “I could count that toward room and board,” I suggested, sounding tart as a lime even to myself. “The deal is you support your minor children as long as they’re in school—did you realize this is going to mean that your dad no longer has to pay for your support at the same level?”

  “Do we have to tell him?”

  “Do you think we’ll need to? Caro has her sources, Gabe.” I didn’t even know whether this was strictly true. But he deserved it. “Now, if you agree to some kind of homeschooling, plus work, that might be a different story.”

  “I never thought it would cost you money,” he said, kicking off his shoe. “I’ll go back, if it means that.”

  Unwilling to let him off the hook, I said, “Okay, fine. Un–drop out. Or go to a different school, Gabe. You can drive. It doesn’t have to be Sojourner Truth.” I looked him over. He was almost the same thickness as the comforter. Had he lost weight? He could ill afford it. “Forget it,” I finally said. “But I don’t want you to think this is going to be the beginning of a nice, long nap, Gabe. What kind of person would that make me?”

  “You’re one to talk,” he muttered.

  “Uh, I can’t help that, and you can take that back.”

  “I take it back, but you’re pretty up on your high horse since you don’t have to have people pull you out of bed.”

  “Would you rather see me…the way I was?” I held out my hand, which jigged obligingly. “I’m not exactly ready for the biathlon, Gabe.”

  “No, but I’m worn out, too, Mom. This hasn’t been a banner season for me, either. I’m sick of having a surrogate child, for one thing.”

  Despite myself, I was proud of his using the word surrogate correctly. “Okay, what should we do? Let Aunt Jane raise her? Send her out to Happy Hollow with the other little Sterns or Steiners?”

  Gabe sighed even more gustily, and said, “I love her; don’t get me wrong. But I’m…I don’t want to be Rory’s daddy. And that’s how she looks at me.”

  “What do you want to do about it? I mean really. This wasn’t the plan….”

  “Have her spend more time with Gram and Gramp, for one thing. They don’t have jobs, and they’re always calling and asking if she can come over, and if Abby can come over. Let her, sometimes. So I don’t have to drive her everyplace and go through her book bag and fill out her order for ivy plants and Christmas wrapping and crap.”

  What I felt for him was disgust. And sympathy. I thought of telling him what it felt like to have a catheter inserted. “I can raise my kid, Gabe,” I said. But he didn’t shut up! We both should have stopped, right then.

  “You know, Mama, this isn’t all about you and your being the proud-though-challenged Julieanne Gillis. At some point you’re going to have to admit that we’ve, well, gone down in life. We’re not having people over for little wieners and wine before the ball game anymore. We’re not having a Christmas open house. We’re renters. You, me, and this poor little kid Dad didn’t even want. We’re, like, renting our own lives on a month-to-month. People weren’t ever calling to have me over, but you haven’t gone out for dinner with anyone but Cathy or Stella since Dad left for his little trip. You know what they say about the smell of a winner? That works in reverse, too.”

  “You’re saying we’re…losers?” I reached down into the permanent files and pulled out one of my copies of Pen, Inc. “I’ll have you know I’m a published poet now, Gabe. This isn’t easy to do. Okay, they didn’t pay me much, but I’m trying to do different things from the things I used to do.”

  “Yeah, but one little poem in a little magazine published by a guy in his garage isn’t going to mean that anything, anything ever, is going to be like it was again.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Gabe.”

  “That’s what Jennet said. We have to be optimistic but not unrealistic.”

  “If I’m not a little bit more than optimistic, I’ll hang myself,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well I see your point. And plus, it’s really, really boring. I think of Caroline out there frolicking through the woods, doing whatever the hell she pleases, and here’s old Gabe, holding down the fort….”

  I tried with all my might to see this through Gabe’s eyes. It wasn’t so difficult. He had endured an uncommon amount of responsibility. Maybe he did need a break, time to sleep late and stay up watching stupid TV, like most teenagers. Maybe he needed a dumb part-time job as a bagger at the co-op. Maybe he needed to veg out. It was my own humiliation that was forcing my hand against the back of his neck. This, my last hope at a proud ending, at least until Rory, who seemed unnaturally bewildered and timid in the face of the world, grew up, had, as my mother would have said, seen its final inning. It was I who’d wanted Gabe to nail a thirty on his ACT tests—to smite Leo. It was I who wanted to watch him toss his mortarboard into the air—as a reward to me, for all my hard work.

  “What do you want, Gabe?” I asked finally, letting my hands drop into my lap.

  “A rest,” he said. “A couple of weeks off to figure out what I’m going to do.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I will figure out what I’m going to do.” I thought that was about as likely as him separating the jeans from the towels. But I nodded, and he slouched into his room. The book bag was still on the floor.

  Rory couldn’t quit preschool. I supposed I could withdraw her, saving Gabe even the possibility of needing to give her rides, but that would be a four bagger. Everyone in my life, loused up by Leo, administered the coup de grâce by MS and me.

  I wouldn’t let that happen.

  But the next day, I took an ad out in the newspaper. Within four days, I’d sold my single-carat diamond, my mother’s wedding ring, to a nice young couple from Milwaukee. With the proceeds, I bought Gabe an old Toyota Corolla, with no rust, no dents, complete with air bags (Gabe Senior made sure, and chipped in by buying new tires), and I called one of those places in Minnesota that take young men out and march them around the rim of Lake Superior or through the Everglades with a pack of matches and a spoon. Gabe would find himself, or at least bulk up.

  The program I coul
d afford had quotes on the Web site that I could more or less agree with, and was for kids who weren’t overt felons. I paid the deposit for a three-week stint beginning in April. He’d go out with a group over spring break and then continue for another two weeks on a “solo” with a counselor I hoped wasn’t a rapist.

  I presented him with both, as accomplished facts.

  When he saw the car, he got tears in his eyes. “I don’t deserve this,” he said. “I just said a bunch of shitty stuff and dropped out of school.”

  “You do deserve it. You have to get places. And you have to take Rory to Gram’s. And the shitty stuff you said, well, I kind of asked for it.”

  He smiled. “And I have to drive to work.”

  “Yeah. Part time.”

  “Mom, you can’t afford this.”

  “Let me worry about that, huh?”

  We agreed that he’d find a job, and then we’d look for a minimalist homeschool teacher, someone who would coach him for college exams, acquaint him with the basics of what he would have learned from biology, geometry, and so on—a series of tutors from the U. at ten dollars an hour were probably all I could afford—so that he could either earn a high school diploma by virtue of my certifying he’d completed the equivalent of four years of science and four years of English (the law allowed that), or the GED.

  “Hour about four hours a day?”

  “How about two?”

  “Gabe, what can you learn in two hours a day?”

  “That’s basically all you do in school,” he argued. “The rest is fighting the crowd, listening to stupid announcements, going to assemblies and junk.”

  “Okay, but two hours and you have stuff to do afterward.”

  We shook on it. Then he hugged me, tight, as he had when he was small. “I love the car, Mom. It’s a cool car. What did you have to do to get it?”

  “Oh, I sold a novel for an advance of…about a hundred thousand bucks.”

  “That’s so great,” he said. “Let’s buy a lake house, too.”

  “I sold Grandmother Gillis’s ring.”

  Gabe looked as if the car had turned into something foul. He put the keys down on the kitchen table.

  “Look,” I said. “I have your father’s ring to give Caroline. And I’m counting on Rory marrying to great wealth. And you, well, you’re going to have to give your wife—”

  “One from the machine at the grocery store, in a little plastic egg.” Gabe laughed.

  “You’re never going to get a girl anyhow,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Come on, mope,” I said. “I meant, you have to learn to dance.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “No, I have my shot tomorrow, and then I’ll be soup for a day at least, so tonight I’m going to teach you to dance.”

  “Nothing…no way, Mom. I can dance enough for practical purposes.”

  “Can you swing dance? I know people do it again now. I see it on TV.”

  “Please, God, don’t make me do this.”

  “Dance!” Rory cried, cranking up the CD player to about five hundred decibels. Gabe strode across the room and grabbed her. I followed them, and rifled through my CDs until I found something I’d grabbed in a coffee store, I had to crack the thing open on the edge of the kitchen counter.

  “Watch it!” Gabe cried. “You know, we don’t own this place!”

  We started the music and Gabe stood, helpless and embarrassed, while we octopus-armed each other until we had the approximation of a couple’s stance. “Now, listen, everything else you do is based on this: one side, one side, back, front. That’s it. Do it.” Of course, he couldn’t do it. “Come on, Gabe. A chimp could do this. One side, one side, back, front.” Rory was already in the rhythm, bouncing up and down in her footie pajamas. I don’t know what the song was, some updated forties jive, though I guess I should have remembered it, given everything. He finally got it, and we did a tentative few minutes on the basics. “Okay, next, you’re going to spin me, not too fast, and then we just go arms out straight, then side, side, back, and front, again. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Gabe said, half laughing. I hit the button again, and was just coming out of the turn when I noticed that Rory had opened the door and was standing in the front hall with a tall, dark-haired man in an olive trenchcoat.

  “What? Rory! Hasn’t Mommy told you never, ever to open the door!”

  “But he knocked! You didn’t hear him,” Rory said mournfully. She ran to me, tucked her thumb into her mouth, and hid behind the wide panels of my trousers. I pushed my hair up from my sweaty brow.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “This has to be one of the most charming things I’ve ever seen,” said the tall man, who had masses of wrinkles around his wide, greenish eyes, but beautiful thick, dark hair. I crossed the room, glad Gabe was there beside me. The guy was taller than Gabe. Gabe was six-two.

  “Listen,” I said, “whatever you’re selling—”

  “Julieanne,” he said, “I’m Matthew. I’m Matt MacDougall.”

  “But…you grew!” I said like a damned fool.

  “Well, I’ve had thirty years!” He leaned down and hugged me lightly.

  “Well,” I said, “you didn’t…you didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “I left three messages on your machine.”

  “Mom?” Gabe asked.

  “Oh, Gabe, this is my old friend from New York. My boyfriend from eighth grade. Seventh grade?”

  “Maybe a little of both. Maybe neither.”

  “This is Matt. Matt, this is my son, Gabriel Steiner, and my daughter, Aurora Steiner.”

  “Gabe Gillis,” Gabe said, taking Matt’s hand to shake. My mouth opened to protest, but I shut it.

  “Well, I didn’t make anything for you to eat or plan anything. I didn’t even wash my hair. Can’t you come back tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” he said, “why not?”

  “But you drove all the way from your conference?”

  “I can drive all the way back.”

  “Well, you want a cup of coffee?”

  “I brought a bottle of champagne.” He’d brought Cristal! I wanted it desperately.

  “I’m allowed, like, a half of one glass. Like a little girl at Christmas,” I told him. “How about coffee?”

  “Mom,” Gabe said urgently, “can we turn down the music?”

  “Gosh, yes, sure,” I thought of how I must look, my already spiky hair peaked by sweat, my mascara running from sweat and laughter, one of Leo’s old dress shirts hanging over a pair of baggy khakis, bare feet. Well, it wasn’t as though he has come a-courtin’. He has come…from curiosity. And now I recognized him. He had a dimple in his right cheek. He’d been able to draw horses. He drew horses all the time.

  “Do you have any horses?” I asked him.

  “Two. Why?”

  “You used to draw them in art class.”

  “Huh. You remember that.”

  “So, I was thinking, I’d take Rory to the Culver’s Custard and drop by Gram’s,” Gabe broke in. I thought for a moment he was trying to leave me alone with Matthew. But then I remembered. He hadn’t had a chance to drive his car.

  “Well,” I said, with a shrug, “she doesn’t have school tomorrow. And you don’t. So, okay. But don’t be long. And put her long coat on over her—”

  “I know how to do this, Mom,” Gabe said, already swooshing Rory’s parka over her head.

  “And don’t forget her booster seat!”

  “Mom!”

  “New car,” I explained to Matthew. “Sixteenth birthday.”

  “Nothing like it.” He smiled, and the wrinkles deepened. He looked older than I did, but not, somehow, in a ruined way. As if he’d spent far more time in the sun. As if it didn’t much matter to him.

  Gabe gave me a kiss. “I’ll stop at all the lights. Full stop. I’ll put Rory in the back.”

  “Go on,” I told him, and turned to the stranger on my hall rug. “Can I take yo
ur coat? Is it snowing or anything? Do you care if I go and wash my face?”

  “I don’t care,” he said easily, with a Boston accent, removing his coat carefully and folding it over his arm. “I can hang up my own coat, and I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  There was nothing to do about the state of my face that wouldn’t require a half hour of repeal and repair. So I rubbed colored moisturizer onto my face and wet my hair even more, scooping out a dab of Gabe’s hair pomade. I took the mascara off with cream and put on some new stuff, a few strokes. I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. All this seemed to take hours, as I didn’t want to smear the stuff all over my face. After a few minutes, he called, “I know how to make coffee. I even have the same machine. Just tell me where you keep it.”

  “The freezer,” I called. “And the grinder is in the cabinet above the machine.”

  The last thing I did was put a cold washcloth between my breasts and force myself to breathe deeply. I looked in the mirror. I looked like a very flushed Cyndi Lauper with my apple steroid cheeks. What the hell, I thought. I heard Matthew humming as he flipped through the CDs. When I came back out into the living room, he had just pressed the button to close the machine, and punched up, of course, “God Only Knows.”

  “Look. Wanna dance?” he asked, his blush, if possible, more savage than my own.

  “Well, you’re taller than I am now,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, and I can lead, too,” he said.

  Afterward, we sat at my kitchen table and talked, about old acquaintances and what had become of them. His sister had been in my sister Jane’s class, as had Suzie, his wife. Nothing more than a sidelong glance betrayed him as he described what he considered the single worst moment of his life, waiting in the hospital mortuary for a curtain to be drawn up so he could identify the side of his young wife’s face that had not encountered the steering column, while upstairs, surgeons worked on his little daughter’s collapsed lung and broken jaw. “You go mad for a moment thinking that maybe it isn’t her; maybe a friend of hers was driving Kelly somewhere; maybe it’s all been a mix-up. And then they raise the curtain. I’ll never forget that sound, so authoritative. And she was lying there, covered to the chest by a sheet. They had brushed back her hair and washed off her face, and the young patrolman with me held my elbow so I would not fall. I said, “Suze?” As if she would answer me. She was a fourth-year nursing student, and I was an intern. Everyone we knew was the same couple we were, a nurse and an intern. I’d been in dermatology. I wanted more kids; I wanted a predictable life. But I switched to surgery the next week and took a specialty in rebuilding faces, after I watched how long it took to rebuild Kelly’s jaw and palate, feeding her through a straw, her crying and asking why Mommy would let people hurt her.”