The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  “A cab! Why not a limo?”

  It was nearly third period by the time we finished at the office and were back outside.

  “I didn’t like that guy,” I said. “He was mean to you.”

  “They all are. I tried to explain, but they don’t listen.…”

  She admitted that Fairchild had offered her another job before she was let go last Friday, and that because she had refused it, she probably wouldn’t get unemployment benefits soon, if at all.

  “Jeff, the job they offered me was so insulting. They wanted to humiliate me.”

  “You’re too good for that,” I said. “We’re too good for that.”

  “You bet we are.”

  She started the car and we drove away and I asked her again to let me skip school.

  “Sure, I’ll call them,” she said. “I’ll hear from these guys in five to seven days.”

  “Can we last that long?”

  “Sure, sure,” she said again. “I’m already rationing, thinking of ways.”

  She went quiet and stayed quiet the rest of the way home, busy thinking of more ways while I wondered what we were too good for.

  On Tuesday, Mr. Maroni, the language arts teacher, was finishing one unit and starting another. Mr. M, which he lets people call him, has a beard and a ponytail and wears button-down shirts and skinny ties under the same old rumply jacket. He never stands still because I don’t think he can. He walks up and down and across the room and between the desks, talking the whole time in a stream of words.

  Once I stuck my foot way out in the aisle when he came near me, then pulled it back noisily at the last second as a joke. I think he laughed.

  Colin Anderson thought it was brilliant. Of course he was right.

  Today, Mr. Maroni was strolling across the back of the room when he spun on his heels like a ballerina and waited for us to get settled.

  “Okay. Final thoughts on the final book in our poetry unit. Although some people might say our next book is quite poetic, too. Never mind that for now—speak. Speak, and I shall listen! And grade you! Possibly. Anyone?”

  Anyone but me.

  I don’t talk much. About books anyway.

  This one was Out of the Dust, which is a poetry book that I liked except for all the poems. That’s only partly a joke. The book was also supposed to be a story, but you had to connect the poems into a complete story yourself. Fine for some people, but the author made me work for it.

  So, of course, joke of jokes, Mr. Maroni calls on me.

  “Jeff, any thoughts?”

  “Uh… normally, no,” I said.

  Colin laughed from across the room; so did Josh, who was sitting next to me.

  “Uh-huh. Anything you liked about the book?”

  “The short lines,” I said.

  “And yet,” he said, standing weirdly still and not taking his eyes off me.

  I wondered if this was a chance to give the class the full Jeff treatment, my first in this room. I decided to take it. “Well,” I said, “there’s the fact that Billie Jo’s had a terrible accident. And it kind of sears her, you know? Plus, her mother is gone, which her father can’t talk about. And the one thing that might make her feel better—playing the piano—is impossible with her wounded hands.…”

  “Jeff, don’t—”

  “To make matters worse,” I said, “dust storms are devastating the family farm—”

  “Jeff. Really. Thank you for reading the back cover to us.”

  Someone did applaud me and I got some good laughs, but a pretty girl in the front threw me a really sour look, so I switched gears. Putting the book down, I said, “Seriously, I did learn about droughts and dust storms and farming—”

  “Uh-huh. Maybe you should see me after class?”

  “Also history,” I said, “and famine and hunger and poverty and the government eighty years or so ago. Plus, families living far away from each other and how they suffered and no one helped them and parents dying and children who didn’t have much and how a poem makes you think and feel things with almost no words. That’s pretty much all, though.”

  “You might have led with that,” Mr. M said, not pleased. “Good to know you actually read it.” He twirled on his heels and moved on.

  Actually, the book was great.

  But it was somebody else’s life, not mine.

  At the end of class, while I was barely listening and still riding high on my joke, Mr. M slapped his desk and held up a skinny paperback.

  “Our next book: The House on Mango Street. Anyone know it?”

  A couple of hands went up. “Okay, yeah. It’s worth reading again, of course. Certainly, I keep finding new things I missed, subtleties, nuances, hues, et cetera. And, bonus, it’s only a hundred and ten pages!”

  Applause.

  He held up his hand. “Thank you, thank you. You do have the best teacher. Now, things being the way they are, we’ll need parents to okay this one before I can hand it out. I know, I know, but please, by tomorrow, if you would, and you can pick up your copies then. Take a sheet when you leave. Thank you!”

  On the way out I took a permission slip, but since I sign a really convincing Michelle Hicks, I really didn’t need to bother Mom. Talk about bonus.

  But the day was long, and as it dragged on, so did I, forcing myself forward like Billie Jo through one of her dust storms. Somewhere along the way my lungs collapsed. They must have—that’s how much my chest hurt by eighth period.

  Wednesday was a blur. I had a headache all day. Something was creeping around my insides and I couldn’t imagine eating any food that I wouldn’t instantly spew, which probably made it worse. I handed in my forged permission slip for the book and got a copy from Mr. Maroni. He gave me a squinty look, then said he hoped I would have something real to say about it.

  “This is often considered more of a high school book, because of some… racy… stuff in it. I don’t agree, but that’s why we need a parent’s permission.”

  Cool, I thought. Bonuses everywhere.

  Thursday, I woke up sick and puked before breakfast. I knew it was stress about seeing my father the next day. Mom called school and let me stay home. She didn’t do anything either. After breakfast and the grocery store she came back tired. “I’ll be better tomorrow, honey. I feel yucky and you know…”

  She was trailing off her sentences more and more.

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

  “Give me a hug.”

  She seemed small in my arms. In a little while, she went upstairs and fell asleep, so I read comics for a bit before remembering that I needed to start reading the book about mangoes. But it turned out to be another hard story to follow because none of these chapters connected either. It must be nice to write a book and not have to make a story. The chapters here were like old-time snapshots lying out on a table. You look at one, then another one. Maybe after a while you recognize people in different photographs. It made my brain tired and I had to keep going back to start over. So I went to sleep, too.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON THE PLATFORM

  Friday morning, the big day. We ate. Mom drove us to the train station. It was six dollars for the day if you parked after nine. They’d leave an envelope under your windshield wiper, she said, and you paid later by check. We crossed the lot and climbed a short set of steps to the platform. It was windy and just the two of us there. She used her credit card at a machine to buy two one-way tickets to New York.

  “Off-peak,” she said.

  “Kind of like us, since last week,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Not funny, Jeff. No. It depends on what time you go if it’s full price or off-peak price. We’ll get return tickets at Grand Central”—she meant the station in New York—“when we’re ready to leave. No sense buying one or the other until we know which train we’ll be on.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve been down to visit Dad. But good idea.”

  “Every once in a while I have one. I’ll
keep the tickets with me.”

  “I’ll get a schedule.”

  “Another good idea.”

  “We’re on a roll.”

  “I could eat a buttered hard roll right now!”

  I laughed. Yeah, we were on a roll, all right. I’d spent so much time with my mom over the last week, we were becoming best buds. If I was a victim because of Mom, I got my quick humor from her, too.

  The inside of the old Fairfield station was empty except for a guy running a vacuum over and over the same patch of floor. Was there no suction left or did he just not care? Sliding a schedule from the holder on the counter, I looked at the clock. Train stations and clocks. Like the olden days. Twelve minutes yet.

  There was a bathroom. I went in. Closing my eyes, I imagined my father’s face as Mom talked to him. He wasn’t funny like me. He nodded, frowned, shook his head, stood up, stepped away.

  I was washing my hands when the vacuum-cleaner guy pushed in with a sudsy bucket. He had purple rubber gloves on.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Leaving him in there, I snitched a pair of gloves from a box on his cart. I could have asked for them and he probably would have said okay. I didn’t, though. I trotted back up to the platform. It was windy there. My mother was perched on the edge of a bench. I walked back and forth, trying to clear my mind of my father’s dumb face, which was all I seemed able to think about.

  “I’ll probably go on Halloween as somebody with rubber gloves. Look—” I flapped them out of my pocket. “A killer surgeon or something.”

  “Go? Go where? You’re too old to go… Look, Jeffie, I don’t think I can see him. Your father.” She hunched over into her own lap and rocked up again. “Let’s just get back in the car. I’ll use the tickets some other time—”

  “Mom, no. We need to talk to him. He can’t go around just living like nothing’s happening. He’s a father. If we need money he’s got to help.”

  “Tell that to a judge.”

  A gust of wind blew up the tracks across the platform and she closed her eyes.

  “My head hurts from all this, honey. I have a stomachache.”

  Yeah, I knew what from.

  The four bottles she brought home on Saturday were gone already. Only half a bottle per night, she said. More than that and you have a problem the next day. Well, she was having a problem now.

  A train roared by without slowing, on its way north toward New Haven. I thought of my grandfather, but he’d stopped working for the railroad long before the new cars replaced the old ratty ones.

  “Did you know,” I said, trying to get her off this kick, “that they take old train cars and dump them in the water to become reefs? Somebody told me that. Can you imagine? Fish swimming around the seats?”

  She wasn’t buying it. “And if she’s there, I’ll probably attack her.” She meant Dad’s girlfriend, whose name was Deb. She was one of the reasons Dad left us in the first place. The other reasons, I guess, were Mom and me.

  “You won’t attack her,” I said, watching the end of the northbound train disappear up the tracks. “I’ll do it first.”

  That was a joke, but Mom wasn’t having that either. She stood up from the bench, brushed down her jacket front. “Let’s get in the car; we’re going home. I’ll find another way to get some help until I start working again. I know other people. This is a bad idea.”

  “No it’s not,” I said, standing in her way. “Or I’ll go alone. I need to talk to him. About school and stuff.”

  “I don’t want you going there alone and confronting him—”

  “I have to!” There were people on the platform now, and they were craning their necks to see what we were arguing about, or looking at their shoes because they were embarrassed for us.

  I lowered my voice. “I need to find out about St. Damien’s. And other stuff.”

  “Why do you even think about that place?” she said, not sharply, but like she really wanted to know. “Jeff, what for?” Her face was red, tired, I don’t know what.

  “Mom, why don’t you give me the tickets and go home? That way I won’t need money to come back. Dad will give me lunch. I know where he lives. I’ll walk.”

  “You will not!”

  Our train whistled from down the track toward us, and people started jockeying into position. They seemed to know exactly where the train doors lined up with the platform. I squirmed into the nearest bunch, but Mom grabbed my arm and started back toward the stairs to the parking lot. “Come… on!”

  The train rolled slowly along the platform, then stopped. Something bad came over me. I pretended not to struggle and went halfway down the stairs with her and then I swatted the handbag out of her hand. It spilled down the steps. A woman saw this and gasped. It was mean and stupid, but while Mom was clawing her stuff together, I pushed onto the train and hurried back to the next car, then the next, and the train started to move.

  CHAPTER 7

  MOM

  I’d done it.

  Except I hadn’t.

  Two minutes after I’d slid into a seat, there was Mom, storming down the aisle toward me, all a mess and steaming like a lobster. Her face was practically purple; her lips were squashed together. She wanted to smack me—I know she did—but not in the filled car. She nudged me hard into the window seat and plunked down next to me.

  “That was mean, Jeff. Very mean.” She was teary and wiping her eyes.

  “I need to see him.” The way we talked, we didn’t do a lot of dancing around. What to say, what not. We always saw through it, so why bother. Right now, Mom knew exactly why I’d done what I did.

  She was silent as a stone for minutes, then looked to see if there was a bathroom in this car. Maybe her stomach actually was rolling over and she had to throw up.

  “But yeah. I’m sorry,” I said, just to end it.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was mean. I’m a jerk.”

  She sniffed once, then again. “No. You’re just…”

  “A jerk, I know.”

  “You’re not. Now shut up.”

  At Green’s Farms station, a pack of high school students got on together, in the middle of a round of laughing. There must have been five or six altogether. They were all scrubbed, with expensive jackets and shoes and backpacks, the girls, too, wearing navy skirts and black tights, all standing in the area near the doors.

  “They just use the train like this?” I asked, hoping to break Mom’s silent treatment.

  “I don’t know.” She barely glanced at them or me. She was still pouting.

  “This is how they get to school?”

  “I really don’t know, Jeff.” She arched up in her seat as soon as the train started rolling from the station, then pushed her way into the restroom at the same time as the conductor drifted down the aisle. I pictured my grandfather in his uniform, with the flat-topped hat cocked to the side. That was before, of course.

  “Tickets,” he said flatly, over and over. He said it again when he got to me.

  “My mom’s in the bathroom,” I said. “She has our tickets with her.”

  I saw him glance under his hat rim over my head, then nod. So the guy in the seat behind me verified I was telling the truth. Really? The conductor thought I was lying? Did I look like my mom was unemployed? Did I look different already? Or was “liar” always the way I looked? Before he left, he punched holes in a cardboard strip and stuck it in a slot to show there were two of us.

  I guess I wanted to prove something, feeling all “out there,” like Tom Bender used to say his parents wanted him to be—jumping onto the train alone, going to see my ex-dad. So before my mother finished in the restroom, I slid out of my seat and went up to the rich students. They’d finished their joking by then and were just checking their phones or listening to them.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” one of the boys said, pulling out an earbud, not smiling, but not with a mean face either. “What’s up?”
<
br />   “What school are you guys going to?” I asked.

  “Baines,” one of the girls said. “Upper School.”

  “And you take the train every day like this?” I said. “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah, you?” said the other girl.

  I shrugged. “My mom and I are visiting my dad. He’s in a hospital in the city. Cancer.”

  “Oh, sorry,” the first boy said. “My aunt has stomach cancer. She did. She just died.”

  “I didn’t know that,” the second girl said, touching his arm. “I’m so sorry.” She hugged him close, but she wasn’t his girlfriend. I don’t know why I knew that.

  “She was old and had it for a long time. I practically never saw her.”

  “What hospital is your dad in?” another kid asked.

  My brain stuttered. I thought it was another interrogation, to see if I was telling the truth, until I looked into his eyes and saw he was just interested.

  “New York… something,” I said.

  “Presbyterian?”

  “That’s it.”

  The kid with the dead aunt nodded. “That’s a good place.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “They gave me these last time.” I waved the purple gloves out of my pocket. See how quick I am? Not that they were impressed. Rich kids probably have all the rubber gloves they want. But a couple of them smiled.

  “Anyway, good luck,” I said.

  “You too, man,” said the boy with the dead aunt, going back to checking his phone. The girl had long ago detached from him and was looking at hers.

  You think I’m going to make a point here: They were rich and I was poor so I felt bad. No. I could totally have fit in with them. They were fine. Not snotty or playing superior. They were just on the top of the curve that I was on the downslope of. Next time it could be the other way around, right?

  Sure.

  Mom was buried in her seat when I got back. She didn’t say anything. I tried to sniff if she smelled pukey, but she didn’t. It reminded me that maybe not everything shows. Not that my parents were broken up and my mom had no job, not that maybe she just threw up, not that I was a jerk with only one part-time friend.