Breakdown Lane, The (10 page)

“I’m not seeing how these things fit together,” I said, by way of breaking up the moment.

“They don’t have to. My parents can go from why we shouldn’t eat pepperoni to the Holocaust in less than three minutes,” Luke said. “But your parents never fight. They’re always like, ‘Will you pass me the butter, Julie? How’d it go today, Lee?’ I don’t mean phony. Just really nice.”

“My dad is a little off his rocker currently.”

“Drugs?”

“Drugs?” I was knocked off my chair. “Drugs? Fuck, that would be Ripley’s. Leo? On drugs? No, I mean all this health-food shit and his photography vacation, and my mom is getting fed up with it and shit. I told you about that.”

“Personally,” Luke said, “I’m never getting married. I think they spend about a month of every twelve just fighting. All of them. Whether they do it loud or soft. Mark Hunt’s parents don’t talk at all. I guess fighting is superior to that. Now, it’s that my mother thinks we’re going to be barred from the afterlife or some shit….”

“I don’t see how you can have kids, though, and have it be fair, otherwise,” I said, “if you don’t get married.”

“You want to have kids?”

I shrugged. “I like Aury.”

“Me,” Luke said, “I’m never having kids. Just a nice parade of ladies. Your kids is another thing you fight about. Maybe the main thing. Your ma is spoiling you. Your dad is giving in too much. Or he’s too mean. Or she has a big mouth and the kids are going to be like her. You know.”

“But like, I almost wish they could fight about shit like that,” I said. “My dad just sort of slips around her and goes back to e-mailing the loony toons he’s friends with. It’s not totally fair. It’s like she can’t do anything right.”

“Is Justine here tonight?” Luke asked. Luke, like every other straight male at Sheboygan LaFollette, had the hots for Justine, one of my sister’s best friends along with Mallory. Every male, that is, except for me, because I knew her—like working at a restaurant where everyone loves the food except you because you saw it made. I didn’t know whether she was at our house. Although she and Caro were unable to spend a weekend night apart, it was always a toss-up (usually dependent on whose parents were less likely to be home) where they would sleep over. We knocked on my sister’s door. No answer. “Let’s walk up there and TP the house,” Luke suggested.

“That’s a goddamned mile, Luke,” I said.

“Come on,” he urged me, punching me in the ribs. We went down to the laundry room to get rolls of toilet paper. You might have thought, and I did, that throwing rolls of toilet paper into people’s trees was a waste of parental rage—in other words, you might as well have gotten grounded for something worth it, like taking the car without having a license, which I had done, because despite not having a talent for concentration, I do have a talent for driving. But if you’re a guy in ninth grade, refusing to TP a hot girl’s house is like not wanting to go rearrange the letters on the ABS sign: in other words, it’s the same as admitting you’re a fag. We took out four rolls, and then my mom came flying out of the bedroom with her hair all sticking up and these big gauze pads on her knees and said, “Caroline? I have to talk to you. Now. Hi, Luke. Maybe this isn’t such a hot night for you to be here.”

I said, “I’m sorry, I mean, uh, Gabe.”

She looked at me as though I had suddenly developed Elephant Man’s Disease.

“What?”

“You called me ‘Caroline.’”

“What the hell, Gabe! What are you doing with all that toilet paper?”

“What are you doing with those big pads on your legs?”

“I fell.”

“You fell?”

“I fell off the steps at the restaurant.”

My mom was a dancer, and she could put on panty hose standing up with her other clothes already on, which I had seen her do when I was a younger kid. It was hard for me to picture her falling. On the other hand, there had been the shaky hand and twitchy eye lately, which I attributed to my father making her nuts, but also was partly her fault because she paid attention to him when he went into one of his the-earth-is-dead rants, which none of the rest of us did.

“Did Dad push you?” I asked suddenly.

Luke said, “I better go.”

“Wait,” I said. “Can we talk later, Mom?” But it was like she’d totally forgotten she ever spoke to me because she went stumbling away into the living room, like someone who’s trying to dodge bullets. “Are you all right?” I asked her. “Did you get a concussion?”

“I only hit my knees,” she said. I couldn’t see her in the dark. “Go ahead. Forget it. I’ll talk to you later.”

I looked into my parents’ room, and Leo was rolled like a corn dog in his blanket (my mom had her own, a big poofy white duvet, because Leo was a cover hog) and sound asleep.

“Let’s take the car,” I said to Luke.

“Tell me what words you want on your tombstone, man,” he observed.

“Leo’s asleep.”

“What if he wakes up when he hears the car start?”

“He wouldn’t wake up if he heard the space shuttle start in our garage.”

“What about Julie?”

“Out of it.”

“My man,” Luke said. “Our chariot awaits.”

This turned out to be one of the best nights of my life.

We drove over casually and TP’d Justine’s house, for which her mother came out and cussed us. But, since she sort of secretly identified with Justine’s popularity, being a divorced person and the age forty equivalent of a hottie, resembling that country singer whose mother was her partner. She also asked us to come in. And Caroline was there, along with several of Luke’s JV friends with the shaved heads of savages and strategically torn-up shirts; but since I’d driven my parents’ car AWOL, everyone was eager to make my acquaintance over Diet Dr Pepper, which I think tastes like cough medicine but it was all they had. We all got into the car, Justine’s mother being rather tanked, and drove to the place they were building the golf-course community, which had roads and even greens but no houses and should have had a sign on it that said, MAKE OUT HERE. There were so many cars already parked there with their lights out, it looked like Wal-Mart. But we drove farther back, to where it almost ended with what used to be a field, and for the first time in my life, I actually did make out, with this really cute little Thai exchange student who went to our school for about two months on a Rotary program, whom Caroline really liked. Her name was Tian, but Caro and everyone called her “Tee.” We lay on the green grass, which felt better than our carpet, and it was this perfect no-bug night, a shitload of stars, like someone broke open a snow globe and threw it across the horizon. We talked about what she wanted to be, which was a pediatrician. She asked me what I wanted to be, and I said I wanted to write songs. She sat up and, in this little voice like Snow White’s, sang “Younger Than Springtime,” and then she asked me if I knew that song, which I did because my mother has the CD of every musical ever written, and what it was about.

“It’s from that show about being a racist,” she said. “About World War One or Two. On an island, there was this girl who’s supposed to be a bad girl in Tonkin but she isn’t, and she’s in love with this American soldier. She is a Pacific Ocean girl. This actually happens all the time in Thailand. I mean with American soldiers and girls if their parents don’t have any money. I have friends who are prostitutes.”

“Not your age.”

“My age. Younger. No bullshit.”

“Kids?”

“Twelve. It’s big thing. You go to Bangkok and get a girl for a week be your girlfriend. And then she get pregnant. Sometimes they get married, if she’s old enough. You can’t marry a thirteen-year-old kid. Even in Thailand.”

“Do other girls…?”

“Other girls, like me, my parents keep me locked in closet. Practically. Like, I would never be here. With a boy. My father would kill you if you kissed me.”

Which I of course did, and she kissed me, and she said it was okay, because we were in America; and I thought, I could die right now, happy. Here I am, Gabe Steiner, with this beautiful girl in my arms wearing a halter top and no bra, who’s also really smart, and she’s all over me—not, you know, mixing body parts; but pretty good. And me just fifteen. And Caroline was in the backseat with one of Luke’s idiot friends in his torn T-shirt, and Luke finally got, well, he got a lot farther with Justine than I’m sure any of the rest of us got with anybody else that night, Justine being casual about this sort of thing.

We all laid around out there until it got to be close to midnight, when I had to break it up, because they ticket for curfew where I lived, much less driving without a license, or even a permit, with eight kids in a Volvo, and if my mother had come back to anything like her senses since my exit, I was in deep shit, not that it wasn’t totally worth it. We drove out and rearranged the ABS sign:
FALL BRINGS OUT THE BE
(
A
)
ST IN OUR BULLS

so that it read
HI GRAB SLUT BOOBS LET ALL NUTS IN FUR
. Not too creative, but it was too late to mess around, and the girls were semi-offended anyhow, even when we told them the purpose was to jerk the farmers around, not to insult their gender. I then dropped everyone off but Caro and Luke, and we went home.

It was the best night of my life for a long time.

This is it, the above.

I cut out the first column that Cathy and I wrote for Mom.

The first week my dad left, my mom lay in bed.

She stayed in bed like it was a second job.

I only remember her getting up once, long enough to make homemade macaroni and cheese that she was then too weak to take out of the oven. There was cheese and spilled milk all over the counter. My mother wore the same tracksuit, day and night, from Monday to Thursday. She didn’t run or stretch or even wash her hair.

I figured she was letting herself go because of depression, but, not wanting to scare the shit out of my grandparents—who would have wanted her to get blood tests or something—I called Cathy. Cathy was always good in a fix. She had taught me some good stuff to say to teachers and junk. She came over with Abby, asked me why my mother didn’t call me herself, and shook her head when I said I didn’t know. She fixed dinner for the little girls and made me help Caro with algebra, which both of us were hopeless at.

When my mom woke up, I heard them talking.

“When do you have to turn it in?” Cathy asked. “How do you send it? How long does it have to be? Two short ones or one long one or does it matter?”

She then called me into the kitchen. She had my mother’s iBook and a stack of folders.

“Look, Gabe, you’re no dummy,” she told me.

“You’re no dummy, either, Cath,” I said, wondering what this had to do with the price of cheese.

“Thanks, you big asshole,” Cathy said. From the television, I could hear Jasmine-the-princess singing to Abby and Aury about a whole new world. I had the feeling that I was about to enter one and that, given the option, I’d rather not have the key.

“You know your mom is not okay.”

“I know she acts funny. Is she bipolar?” I asked.

“Bipolar?” Cathy was aghast. “No, she’s not bipolar. I mean, I don’t think from my experience of working with people who have bipolar illness that this is what we’re talking about. I think she’s physically sick, and when I took her to her regular doctor, all her blood tests and her everything tests came back ordinary. She doesn’t have a virus, and she doesn’t have an infection or an allergy. Obviously, she’s very depressed, but that doesn’t account for how symptomatic…for how weird she’s acting. And so we made an appointment with a neurologist, but it’s going to take three weeks for her to get in to see him….”

“A neurologist?”

“I think there’s something off with your mom’s balance. At first, I thought that could be from a virus that was affecting her ear, or even her brain. But she’ll have to have an MRI—”

“Do you think she has like a brain tumor?” I asked.

“No,” Cathy said. I could tell this was not a definite no, but a hopeful no. “What did you do?” I asked, then, “wait until we walked out the door to school and then start running to emergency rooms and doctors’ offices all over the city? And not bothering to tell Caroline or me?”

“We went to Milwaukee. Obviously, Gabe, we didn’t want to worry you. You might be as big as a man, but you’re a kid.”

“How do you do this, Cathy? If you don’t mind me asking? Don’t you have to work? I know my mother can do her job from our house, and I know she has Dad’s…whatever, pension, to fall back on…but how do you just go tromping around—”

“I do a lot of phone counseling—”

“Like phone sex.”

“Exactly like that.” This was the reason Cathy was such a cool friend for an adult. You could say anything to her. Gay people are less uptight as a rule, is my observation. It’s like they’ve already heard it all. “People don’t give themselves time to go and sit in a therapist’s office anymore, though I do have a regular base of traditional clients. And most of us aren’t comfortable on the phone. But my partners have sort of turned the phone side over to me because I am. I guess because of theater stuff, I can hear a lot in voices, like when someone’s trying to fake she’s okay, whatever. Some people just aren’t as comfortable face-to-face, even though I can learn a lot from them that way….”

“By body language,” I said.

“Even from just how they sit and where. But these days I have a couple of meetings with a couple or a kid or a woman and make a general assessment of how people feel about themselves based on their appearance….”

“Are ugly people nuttier?”

“No, but fat people are eating because they’re mad at someone, sometimes themselves, but not always. After that, I have a lot of appointments at eight o’clock at night and stuff. When the kids are in bed or the husband is out playing softball or the delinquent is over at his girlfriend’s.”

“Sounds like a nice gig.”

“It has its moments. But, Gabe, it takes a lot out of you, too, y’know? To talk for two years to a woman who’s getting the crap beat out of her every two weeks but who still thinks her husband has a lot of good in him because he never hits the kids? And because her father was so lousy and her first husband did hit the kids, like with farm implements, so she thinks she’s better off?”

“You’re always so sort of upbeat, though.”

“I have to do a lot of running and dancing and horsing around to stay that way. If I kept it all in…I’d be like the sin eater. That’s what my mother calls it. The person at the…well, this is gross.”

“Go on.”

“When my mother was little in Ireland, poor people would find an even poorer person to come to the wake when someone died—”

“Is that generally when they hold a wake?”

“Shut up,” Cathy said, grinning and opening the computer’s lid. “They’d set out this big meal right on the poor dead person’s coffin. What’s her password?”

“‘Atticus.’ So, about the sin eater…”

“The sin eater would devour this big meal, which was supposed to cause him to take all the sins of the dead into himself, so the loved soul could go right to heaven.”

“What happened to the sin eater?”

“Well, he lived longer, as a result of not starving.”

“Did he go nuts?”

“Well, if he was, like, a superstitious Catholic, yeah, sometimes. Some were just shrewd businesspeople, who asked for a few shillings along with the meal. But all of them arranged for a sin eater to be on hand when they kicked the bucket, for certain.”

“Liability insurance.”

“Yeah.”

“So all these doctors—”

“First things first. All these doctors haven’t come to any consensus about Julie yet. But her column is due tomorrow, and she hasn’t been in any shape to do them ahead of time, and she’s in no shape to write one now. I can think of the answer, if you give me a problem, but I can’t write it. I’m not a writer.”

“Well, call the editor. I’m not a writer.”

“You’re a good writer.”

“But you can’t read what I write, Cathy.”

“Ever hear of a spell-checker?”

“Yeah, and I can use it until the end of time, but stuff is still going to come out backward and sideways in the sense of organization.”

“I can fix all that.”

“Isn’t this, like, illegal?”

“Probably.”

“Because they could probably get someone else to do it for a while.”

“Gabe,” Cathy told me, pressing her lips together before she continued, “if your mom loses her job now, she loses more than money.”

“I would think the last thing you would want to do if you felt lousy is listen to other people’s lousy problems which they caused themselves.”

“On the other hand, they don’t always cause them themselves. Sometimes, they’re just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And helping someone when you feel useless and down can make you feel…powerful. Can restore your—”

“Don’t say it. Self-esteem. If I hear that word once more, and then never again for the rest of my life, I’ll be happy.”

“But really. If you get dumped on, you need to know you’re still a really important, worthwhile human being.”

“Is that how you felt?” I asked.

“About Saren?”

“Yeah.”

“I felt like I wanted to eat butter-brickle ice cream and watch
X-Files
reruns until I died from diabetes. But your mother, your mother bullied me into being in that show with her, ummmm…”

“
Carousel
.”

“Yeah…”

“I remember because they let me run the follow spot in rehearsal. What a crap show. I mean, I’m not exactly a musical-theater fan, but that was stone crap. Not as bad as
Oklahoma!
, though. That’s the top.”

“And what a message! I mean,
Carousel,
” Cathy agreed. “A slap can feel just like a kiss! But working on it with her, being with her, and growing to love your mom, as a friend—she’d always been my friend, but she became my best friend—it made me want to go on. It made me have the courage to adopt Abby. I can never repay her.”

“So you want to do this for her. The column. Until she’s better.”

“Well, that should be only this week. She’ll be up and around pretty quick, if I know Julie. If we can get away with it. I think we can. I think people ghostwrite stuff all the time.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t you call your dad and ask?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because I’ve called him fifty times since he left, and I’ve left fifty messages, and he’s never returned my calls.”

“Has he sent letters…?”

“And Caroline has kept them, and she’s given me the addresses and I’ve written to him, and I’ve never heard back from him.”

I took a long breath. “He probably thinks she’s faking it.”

“I’ve called him, too, Gabe. And you know what I think? He’s probably just a total bastard.”

“Whoa! You’re talking about my father, Cathy.”

“Yeah, Gabe, I’m talking about your father. And if you have an honest bone in your body, and I know that you do, you realize that sending a few letters from Illinois and New Hampshire and Massachusetts over the course of five months isn’t being a father….”

“He’s still my father.” I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I felt the same way she did but also this blistering need to defend Leo, almost like if I didn’t, what she said would be true because of me. Like, I wouldn’t be the sin eater.

“Yeah, he’s still your father. But he should be calling back. He should be calling you. He should be calling little Aury, every night, not sending her a box with a fucking acorn in it! How many times has he called?” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t remember whether it had been three times or two times; but one of the times, I’d been out with Tian, who had only a few weeks left before she left for good. Frankly, if I wanted to talk to anyone, it was her, not Leo. Leo would be back soon enough, smelling of miso and burning anisette incense in the bathroom. Maybe trying to talk us all into moving to a happy land, far, far away. But I didn’t want to move away. I didn’t want to be away from Grandma and Grandpa Steiner for one thing, who now felt like the only fixed point in the galaxy. But more importantly, for the first time in my life, I felt like a normal teenager, like if my mother had noticed, she’d have said the things about me parents say about normal teenagers:
I never see him. He’s hardly ever home.
You don’t know what it’s like to feel average if you’ve never felt up to average. Tian understood that I had special study halls and all, but it didn’t affect her at all; she just thought they were like her English-as-a-Second-Language program after school. When I couldn’t get the words to go along with my thoughts the first time, she laughed like a little bell because the same thing was happening to her. Like me, English wasn’t her first language, either. To her, my head-wiring problem didn’t make me an edge-feeder if not a downright geek. She didn’t notice it.

I knew I was going to lose her; I knew that my life after she left would go back to being its customary empty plate with a hole in it. But right then, I had Tian. I, Gabe Steiner, Special Ed goon, had the girl everybody in the school wanted, the girl who looked like a goddamned movie star, and was also smart and really sweet and so small I could pick her up and hold her. I was in love. You can be, even at that age. And I knew that having loved Tian would change my life, that I would have lasting respect of some variety, that I would think about her forever—how perfect her skin was, how she let me slide my hands almost up to her breasts, how humble it made me feel that some creature so exquisite let my hands make contact with her.