Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (20 page)

“Tia’s working,” I say. “And anyway, she needs to be around in case anything happens with Uncle Bobby. Aunt Edie’s going to need her.”

“People are going to need us too,” Chrissie protests. “He’s my grandfather.”

“Of course they will,” I say. “We’ll come back if anything happens.”

The truth is, I’m not sure who needs me. My father paid an obligatory visit to Uncle Bobby, and then did what he does: he’s spending the summer in India looking at death statues. We are all walking around on eggshells, waiting for a death the way people wait on rain-storms when the sky promises bad weather, but so far nobody has talked to me about it, and nobody has asked me to do anything more difficult than make potato salad.

 

 

It’s afternoon by
the time we get on the road the next day, and we spend hours stuck in beach traffic. Chrissie’s awake enough to resent that I’ve confined her cell phone to the glove compartment. It’s beeping because someone’s left her a message, and between the beeping and her whining, I’m thinking of opening the glove compartment myself. My cigarettes are in there, but nobody, especially Chrissie, is supposed to know I smoke when I’m stressed.

“It could be my parents,” she says. I ignore this.

“We might as well not even be driving,” Chrissie says. “And I’m hungry.”

“Well, then you should have eaten when we stopped for brunch,” I say. Chrissie has been doing this thing where whenever we eat out together, she orders whatever I order, then suddenly remembers she can’t eat it because she’s on a diet, and has two bites and three glasses of water instead. At the diner on the way out of town, she had three french fries and a mouse-sized nibble of her grilled cheese.

“I wasn’t hungry when we stopped,” she says.

“Then you can wait until we get to Richmond for dinner.”

The traffic picks up around the Bay Bridge. In the glove compartment Chrissie’s phone is still beeping something insistent.

“You should let me get it,” she says. “What if my grandfather died?”

“Then someone would have called me,” I say.

Both pleas for her phone having failed, Chrissie sulks, actively. Her sulking takes the form of rummaging through her miniature beaded purse in search of beauty product after beauty product. When she is done with the glitter lotion and the lip gloss and the eye shadow, it’s true her skin has a glow to it, but her hands are covered in sparkles, like a kid who’s just finished an art project.

“I’ll let you answer the phone when you tell me why Aunt Edie doesn’t want you to have it in the first place,” I say.

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” Chrissie says.

“Of course you do,” I say.

“So, I can talk to him?”

“Pick up the phone if you want, but you shouldn’t, he’s an asshole.”

“You’ve never even seen him.”

“Don’t have to,” I say. “He’s a fifteen-year-old boy, which means he’s an asshole by default, or he’s older than that, in which case he’s an asshole for dating you.”

“I don’t look fourteen,” says Chrissie, which answers one question but isn’t any kind of counterargument to my original point. It’s true, though, she doesn’t look fourteen, in the way no girl looks fourteen once she’s got tits and an ass like Chrissie’s and men have stopped looking at her face. She’s the wrong kind of pretty, the kind that’s soft but not fragile, the kind that inspires the impulse to touch.

The boyfriend doesn’t
answer when Chrissie calls him back.

“
Asshole,”
she mutters.

“Look at the water,” I say, because we’re driving over the Chesapeake, and I’ve always thought it was a beautiful view, the wires of the bridge cutting into the image of the water beneath. Passing through the bridge with the sloping wires on either side always feels to me like being inside of a giant stringed instrument. Chrissie looks sideways out the window for a second, then turns back to me.

“We’re going all the way to North Carolina just to see this guy?” she asks.

“What else do you want to do?”

“I think maybe I should go to a doctor.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask. I’m already checking out the traffic headed back to Delaware, because if this kid tells me she’s pregnant I’m turning the car around and giving her back to Aunt Edie. I’ve already done my lifetime share of abortion hand-holding.

“I think my vagina’s broken,” she says.

“OK,” I say. “OK, look. I don’t know what that means, and I don’t think I want to, because as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have a vagina and won’t for ten years, and even then I probably won’t want to hear much about it, OK? Talk to your mother about this stuff.”

“If I ever met a woman without a vagina, it’s my mother,” Chrissie says.

“Don’t say that,” I say, because you’re supposed to remind people how they actually do love their parents. Chrissie’s mom is away at a summerlong church retreat. For a while she sent Chrissie post-cards that said things like YOU’RE NEVER ALONE WHEN YOU’RE WITH JESUS and I PUT ALL OF MY EGGS IN ONE BASKET AND GAVE THEM TO THE LORD. Chrissie finally wrote back,
Can Jesus make me an omelet, then? He’s kind of a crappy mom otherwise.
She hasn’t gotten a post-card since
.

“Is something wrong?” I ask. “Are you sick or something?”

“No,” she says, “but we tried to have sex last week and I hadn’t done it before and it didn’t work.”

“What do you mean, ‘it didn’t work’?”

“It wouldn’t go in,” she says. “So he stopped and I left because I thought maybe there was something wrong with me.”

“Well, what did you do beforehand?” I ask.

When she answers, it becomes clear to me that this kid has no idea what’s supposed to be happening, and neither does her boyfriend. I feel kind of sorry for her entire generation, because they’ve learned all the theatrical parts of sex so they walk around pouting and posing like little baby porn stars, and all the clinical parts of sex so they know when to demand penicillin, but not the basic mechanical processes of actual pleasure, which everyone assumes someone else has covered. I didn’t know shit about sex when I was her age, but at least I was allowed to say so; no one expected us to be certified experts. It’s not my subject of choice, but I don’t know who else will explain things to her, except maybe Tia, which seems dangerous. When I’m done, I tack on a speech about how she’s fourteen and emotional right now and he’s probably too old for her and even if there’s a condom it could break or fall off and she could die, and besides, she’s not comfortable enough with her body to enjoy anything that happens to it yet, and there’s lots of things she can do that aren’t actually fucking.

Maybe I’ve kind of freaked her out, because somewhere north of Columbia we pass a Friendly’s, and she gets all excited about it. Even though we’re nowhere near Richmond I agree to stop when she asks. She’s dropped the diet stuff, at least, but if you’ve ever seen anything more disturbing than a kid eating a Reese’s Pieces Happy Face Sundae after you’ve just explained to her how to give a proper blow job, I don’t want to hear about it.

 

 

Chrissie sleeps most
of the rest of the way to Raleigh. I could use her to keep an eye on the map, because I’ve only been down here a handful of times, and I hate this stretch of highway. There’s something about the compressed space of cars that makes people want to say things out loud, maybe just to see what echoes back, and every memory I have of this part of 95 is a memory of argument. The first time I went to Raleigh, I was about Chrissie’s age and my mom was driving. On the way back, we were trying to get out of the state a few hours ahead of the tropical storm that was on its way, but already it was thundering and lightning, and the rain was steadily splattering onto our windshield, distorting everything on the other side faster than the windshield wipers could clear it.

The argument we’d been having was stupid. It was Father’s Day, and she wanted me to call her boyfriend, this jackass dentist she’d been seeing for a while, and wish him a happy Father’s Day. The dentist was always blowing my mother off at the last minute. He yelled when they fought, and sulked when he didn’t get his way. He’d stretched his fairly substantial income to its natural limits, and was always “borrowing” money from my mom that we never got back. You could smell the bullshit coming off of him, unless you were my mother, and then you thought he was the answer to our prayers. I said the dentist had his own kids and I already had a father to call, and my mother said my father was out of the country and the dentist’s kids weren’t going to call him, and I said that’s because even they know he’s an asshole. My mother got all huffy and cried and said she was just trying to have a family, and I said she already had a family, at least until I was eighteen and I could get away from her crazy ass, and she pulled over and slapped me and then said,
I’m getting out now
, and until the car door opened and the sting of the rain hit me, I didn’t know out of what.

Through the stream of rain on the windshield, I watched my mother get smaller and smaller because of distance and water. It was like watching a person deflate. I understood that if she wasn’t coming back, I wasn’t going anywhere, not because I was still a few months away from my learner’s permit, but because I lacked the instinct to run. I understood, for the first time, how much I loved my mother. I understood that if I could help it, I would never love anybody that much again. When she got back in the car ten minutes later, soaking wet and both of us still crying, we didn’t say a word about it—not then, not all the way back to DC.

I want to wake Chrissie and tell her about this as if it’s a warning: Don’t push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment. One minute you have a parent, or a friend, or a lover, something solid, and physics tells you their resistance will always be there to meet you as you press yourself into relief against them. Then all of a sudden your mother is a fading outline in a thunderstorm, wet and weak and so far out of reach; or your lover who may also be your best and only friend is pulled so quickly into someone else’s life that you don’t even realize he’s left yours until you’re getting a save-the-date card; or your father is somewhere at the other end of the world and even if you had a number for him, you’d feel wrong calling to tell him to quit collecting stuff when it’s painfully clear that you have nothing to offer to replace it. But I don’t wake Chrissie because she’s sleeping like a baby, and anyway, she isn’t a baby and she doesn’t need me to tell her what it is to watch somebody let you down by being human in the saddest and neediest ways, what it is to push at something that has long since given way. It hits me like my mother’s slap that just watching me these days is teaching her this lesson.

 

 

I wake Chrissie up
just before the highway exit so she can read me the rest of the directions. The bar is not hard to find and has its own parking lot. On the outside it’s kind of like a giant cottage, mute stucco with a brown shingled roof. Inside, it’s big and dimly lit. The ceilings are high and the splintered wooden rafters are showing. We’re still early for the show and there are only a handful of people in the bar. I can see Brian onstage with his back to me. I try to sneak up on him, but before I get all the way there he turns around.

“Hey, stranger,” he says, hopping down from the stage. He hugs me like I’ve just gotten back from a war. The smell of him is like if someone made a perfume out of cigarette smoke. “I missed you, kid.”

“I missed you too,” I say, kissing him on the cheek. Chrissie smirks beside me, and starts humming the underpants song under her breath again.

“Who’s this?” asks Brian, taking note of Chrissie for the first time.

“I gotta pee,” says Chrissie. She walks off in the other direction. The sound of her heels against the floor of the mostly empty bar is less of a controlled staccato and more of a
stomp, stomp, stomp
.

“Who was
that
?” asks a shaggy-looking guy messing with the keyboard.

“
That’s
fourteen and it’s my cousin,” I say. “I’ve got a knife in my pocketbook and I will cut you if you touch her.”

“Shame,” says the keyboardist. “You legal, then?”

“Stop flirting with my sister,” says Brian, hugging me to him again.

Brian and I call each other brother and sister because it lets us pretend we have an excuse for still knowing each other. In anyone else’s life, Brian would be the college ex I never spoke to again, and I would be the crazy ex who’d once deliberately destroyed his brand-new guitar. But instead of being embarrassed by everything that’s happened between us, we’re both comforted by the fact that someone else has seen us at all of our possible worsts and hung around anyway.

There was a point, maybe even a year, where we were fucking each other for the conversation afterward. Not that the sex was bad, it just wasn’t the point anymore. We talked about our futures, the ones we never dared to imagine being full of anything but chaos. We toasted to the shortcomings of the various potential stepparents we’d grown up with: between the two of us, nineteen in total. When he was at his drunkest, he always told me the story about the time his mother passed him off as a neighbor she babysat, in order to date a banker who didn’t want kids, and when we were done laughing as though it were hysterical, him imitating the banker and his eight-year-old self, one of us would cry for real, and I would hold him and tell him I was sorry he was so fucked up, and he would tell me he was sorry I was fucked up enough to want him anyway.