13 Is the New 18 (3 page)

“Don't worry,” I tell Elon, “it's just the Axe. You'll get used to it. It's better than having our house smell like a locker room.”

Indeed, as with most fumes that don't kill you, after a few minutes, your brain adjusts and it becomes less noticeable. Besides, it seems to have a half- life of about an hour. I suppose by then whatever was airborne has drifted to the floor, where we will absorb it through the soles of our feet for the rest of our lives. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Taz's sneakers don't smell quite as bad as some of his friends’.

But Elon insists that something more nefarious is going on with Axe. He says it smells like cigarette smoke, maybe even like pot. Undoubtedly, the creators of Axe did this on purpose; it's probably why the deodorant is so popular with teenagers. If their parents tell them they smell like smoke, they can claim that it's Axe and not get in trouble.

But at some point I am convinced that I am no longer smelling Axe, I really am smelling smoke.

I blame myself for this, of course. If my child smells like cigarettes, it can only mean that I Am a Terrible Mother.

I confront Taz about the smoke, and he denies, repeatedly and vociferously, that he has ever smoked a cigarette.

This turns me into a Crazy Woman who skulks around the house sniffing everything, like a dog. I sniff his hair, his coat, his laundry, his backpack. I check out garbage cans for cigarette butts, look in drawers for I don't know what. Then one night I'm certain— certain, for once!— that I really do smell smoke as he walks in.

I confront him again. He insists he was merely around others who were smoking.

“Like secondhand smoke won't kill you?” I scream, following him into the living room as I launch into a litany of all the relatives whose smoking led to cancer and emphysema and other disgusting diseases, none of whom could be here today to recite the dangers of smoking because THEY ARE ALL DEAD!

He turns away from me and sits down at the computer. But I'm on a roll now, and the lack of eye contact won't stop me from really getting into my rant.

“Don't you remember how my aunt up in Maine used to cough and spit out all that stuff, and how she had that oxygen tube stuck in her nose, all because she smoked cigarettes?” I continue.

He and his brother, Sport, really liked that aunt, despite the coughing and oxygen tubes, because she
always bought them a big bag of barbecue potato chips any time she knew they were coming to visit. (It always amazes me how easy it is to win a kid over. You don't have to take them to Disney or buy them a Wii. You just have to be a reliable source of some really awful kind of junk food.)

I have one last image in my arsenal to make my point. “Didn't I tell you that your grandfather had emphysema when he died, and how sad it is that he didn't live long enough to get to know you and your brother …” But here my voice trails off; I can't rant about that. It makes me too sad.

Besides, I suddenly realize that Taz does not appear to have heard a word I've said. Instead of listening to me, he is sitting at the computer, instant- messaging forty- five of his closest friends simultaneously.

No matter. I have a great windup for my speech, and I'm not giving up just because my audience couldn't care less. “And the next time you come home smelling like cigarettes, you can take all your clothes off outside the door, in front of the neighbors, because I don't want that stink in my house!”

A friend of mine told me she knew another mother who'd gotten results with that line, so I figured I'd try it. And lo and behold, the threat of a public stripping grabs his attention.

“OK,” he says, turning around for a moment to finally acknowledge my existence. “Calm down! Don't worry! I get it.”

He turns back to the screen. I creep up and look over his shoulder. Now he's on his MySpace page, where no doubt he is being stalked by dozens of perverts. I remind myself silently that I Am a Terrible Mother.

In the personal profile section of his MySpace entry he has written that he is twenty- two years old. Next to “favorite books,” he has written, “I hate books.” (Terrible Mother, Terrible Mother, TERRIBLE MOTHER!)

For a photo of his alleged twenty- two- year- old self, he has posted a picture taken at Six Flags, in which he is standing next to Bugs Bunny.

Music pulses softly from the computer speaker. He has figured out how to stitch some hip- hop into his MySpace page. Undoubtedly, that is in violation of the music industry's copyright laws, which means that his MySpace page is not only fraudulent because it misrepresents his age, but it is also illegal. The music starts with an ominous synthesized beat—
ba, ba, ba, BA BA BA baaah, ba ba ba, BA BA BA baaah
— and then I hear a thuglike voice chanting:

Suddenly, the IMs are flying.

“WASSUP” reads a message.

“NM,” he types in. “JC.”

A few months back, I would have been trying to figure out why “New Mexico” and “Junior Cadets” were the
appropriate responses to the question “What's up?” But by now I had done enough spying to know that “NM, JC” stands for “Nothin’ much, just chillin’.” (I also know OMG is “oh my God,” and LOL is “laugh out loud,” which makes a lot more sense as a response to jokes than when I thought it stood for “lots of love.” I know WTF, too, but I'm too much of a lady to tell you what that means.)

I glance at the screen name of Taz's correspondent. It's a girl. But just as I start to feel smug about my abilities as a MySpace Mata Hari, he senses me behind him and puts his hand over the screen.

“Go away!” he shouts.

“OK,” I say, and slowly back away. As I make my retreat, he starts flipping through a dozen other MySpace pages, and I recognize some of the photos. A few are kids from his middle school, and a few I actually recognize from his kindergarten class.

But the boys look so large now, and sort of scary. They have … ugh, dark hair growing over their lips. They wear baseball caps with logos that look to me like gang symbols. They smirk. Stare. And scowl.

The girls are even scarier, but for different reasons: They look grown- up and beautiful. They have long wavy hair and wear sexy little camisole tops, and they smile and flirt for the camera.

An image pops into my mind of a photo of some of these kids from a birthday party when Taz was little. They were small and sweet then. They wore dopey little cone paper hats with elastic chin straps. My sister had
painted cat's whiskers on their faces, and we'd made necklaces out of dried rigatoni and played Pin the Tail on the Monster, a creature I'd let them draw on a big piece of brown paper taped to the wall.

In the photo I'm thinking of, Taz had his cheeks puckered, ready to blow out the candles on a cake I'd made. I remember that day felt like an important milestone. We were moving from tricycles to training wheels, from being a little boy to being just a kid. It seemed like a very big deal.

Fast forward eight years to Taz's bar mitzvah, when he turned thirteen. He was wearing a suit and tie, and everyone at the party kept walking up to him saying, “Today you are a man!” in a fake deep voice and cracking up. But Elon and I didn't think it was so funny when we saw the way those eighth- grade girls in their high-heeled shoes were hanging all over him.

Still, I could see that the thirteenth birthday was a turning point, too, just like when he'd turned five. Childhood had abruptly given way to adolescence. All the little triumphs that had seemed so important along the way suddenly felt unremarkable— learning to swim and skate, memorizing times tables, crossing the street, and walking to school without a grown- up.

Now all those accomplishments seemed like one big given, the inevitable result of a little boy growing up. But if I pushed myself, I could find, at the edges of my maternal memory, the details that proved each of those achievements was incredibly hard- won. Like his father
steadying him on a two- wheeler day after day until he could pedal a few yards on his own without falling over. How many times did Elon jog around the block, following that wobbly little bike to make sure there were no accidents, kidnappings, or hit- and- runs?

And how we worried for days after Taz started walking to school alone in third grade that something terrible might happen to him. The worry intensified three grades later into sheer parental terror when he started middle school in another neighborhood and had to take the train to school. Parents in other parts of the country worry when their kindergartners first take the school bus, and when their teenagers first get learner's permits, but we live in New York, where the parental nervous breakdown comes when your kid starts riding the subway without you.

I comforted myself by noting that at least Taz wasn't
driving
the train, he was merely a passenger. But what if he got lost? What if he got mugged? What if he lost his fare card? What if a crazy person pushed him on the tracks or tried to kidnap him?

The first few days of his new commute, Elon and I went with him, morning and afternoon. I wasn't sure how we were going to keep doing this, given that we both work full- time, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead. By the third day, though, Taz had had enough of our mollycoddling.

“Just what do you think is going to happen to me?” he demanded.

Not wanting to frighten him with my paranoid visions of disaster, I said, “You might get lost.”

“I'll prove to you that I won't,” he said. “Follow me, and don't say a word.”

It was around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night. I didn't particularly feel like leaving the house at that hour just to test his sense of direction. But he nagged me until I relented. He was determined to go to school the next day by himself, and getting me to test him that night was the only way he could think of to get me off his back.

Wordlessly, I followed as he made the trip that night to school and back without any interference from me. When we got off the train near home, he turned to me triumphantly.

“See? I did it!”

Instantly, my brain was flooded with a hundred what- ifs. I decided to quiz him.

What if a scary person got on the train and started staring at him?

“I would stand next to a nice- looking lady and pretend that she was my mom.”

I was impressed. “What if the train skipped your stop?”

“I would get off at the next stop and take the train back.”

Then came the trivia. I quizzed him on transfers, train lines, directions, neighborhoods, and everything
else I could think of. Quick as a winning
Jeopardy
contestant, he fired off every answer flawlessly until I was exhausted.

“OK, then, now can I go to school by myself?”

What could I say? I had to give in. I made him promise to call me on his cell phone before he got on the train and when he got off the train. Though exactly how this would help him if someone was trying to kill him wasn't clear to either of us. Still, it made me feel better.

Little did I know that the cell phone I was counting on to rescue him would soon become the monster that ate my bank account. He goes over his minutes every month, by a lot, and it's not from calling me. They have to mail the bill in a ten- by- fourteen envelope, it's so big.

I make him pay back every cent over the basic charge, but that doesn't seem to stop him from exceeding the limit every time. I could just not pay the bill, but it's not like it used to be, where they cut off service if you owe. Now they wreck your credit rating, too. I could take the phone away, but then when it's 8 p.m. and I don't know where he is, how am I going to find him?

Sure, he's getting too big to kidnap, but what about the crazies who might push him onto a subway track? What about drivers who don't yield to pedestrians? What about muggers looking to steal a wallet or an iPod or the very cell phone I'd hoped would keep him safe?

One night, as he heads out the door to get pizza with
some friends, I remind him about kids we know who were mugged— one outside school, one on a bus, one at knifepoint near our house.

“Mom,” he says, “I'm not stupid!”

“I know you're not stupid,” I say. “Just be careful.”

“Mom,” he says, “I'm un- JUMP- able.”

That's a new word for me. But as he pulls up the hood of his oversized sweatshirt (reminding me of another word,
hoodlum),
I suddenly see him and his friends the way someone else would. They are hulking. Rowdy. Horsing around. Cursing, high- fiving, laughing about some private joke. If I was walking toward them, I would probably cross the street.

They really do look … unjumpable.

“See you later, Mom. I love you!”

What?

He said, “I love you,” to his mother in front of his friends? I'm stunned.

As they file out, one kid knocks the dog's water dish over, another steps on the cat's tail. They're pushing and shouting and singing snatches of a rap song, one of them chanting, “I love it when you call me …” and all the others chiming in, “Big POP- pa!”

Finally, the door slams.

Then it opens again.

“Mom,” he says, “can you give me ten dollars?”

Sighing, I reach for my wallet. “Get juice, not soda! No candy! No pepperoni! It's not good for you, all that sugar, all that fat. I don't want you to get diabetes!
There's an obesity epidemic in this country, do you know that?”

I interrupt myself to hand him a $20 bill. “I want change from that, OK?” I say.

“Thanks.” He smiles.

We both know that twenty dollars is as good as spent.