Breakdown Lane, The (30 page)

I got a letter from Leo right before Thanksgiving, asking me to come out there and spend the holiday weekend with him. He would send me a plane ticket. Since I had time before my tutor, who was this really nice older lady who got right down to business and made sure you had food throughout the whole two hours, I decided to answer his letter.

Dear Leon,
[I wrote,]
I have to decline your invitation on personal grounds, those being that I hate your guts. I don’t mean that in an unkind way. You’re supposed to be able to admire your father. I tried to make a list for Mom’s therapist of all the things I admired about you. I admired your vocabulary. I admired that you did nice things for your parents. I admired your knowledge of baseball statistics. That would be it, Leon. I figure if you have to make a list of ten things you admire about your own father, and you can come up with only three, and if you can think of thirty things you admire about your little sister’s preschool teacher, this is an indication that either you’re not an admirable person in my eyes or that I’m still too angry to see you, as in, during this lifetime.

[I signed it
Gabe Gillis,
adding, as a P.S.,]
The new thing in our so-called family seems to be changing your name. I wanted to get in on it. I thought about it for a long time, and decided to use Steiner as my middle name, because otherwise it would hurt Gramp’s feelings. Gramp is such a great guy. Funny thing, genetics, huh?

I mailed it on the way to my tutor Donna’s house because I thought I’d otherwise never do it
.
Either I’d lose my nerve or forget it.

The guy Matthew came to see my mother again after Halloween. They had dinner, and she looked all rosy and pretty in a dress Cathy loaned her. She was doing most all of her own work now, only occasionally asking me to look something up for her or make a phone call—for which she paid me, ten bucks an hour—I hadn’t had much of a chance to look through her files. Once Rory was asleep, I did. And I found another poem, this one with the envelope in which she was to send it—actually, a couple of envelopes. One to
Urbane
magazine (fat chance, I thought) and one to the
Pen, Inc.,
people.

I used her copier to make a copy of it.

A Lamentation of Insects

I thought it was funny and probably halfway decent, but it was creepy how she seemed to think about men. I wondered if she included all men, myself, in that poem, or just my father? It didn’t seem to include the Matthew guy, who came the morning after he took her out to dinner and took all of us to brunch at this big hotel in Milwaukee. I thought, Aha, the old try-to-win-over-the-kid thing. But he hardly paid attention to me, beyond telling me why he reconstructed faces for his job. Really sad story. I don’t mean that sarcastically. All he could do was look at my mother, as if she were some kind of really rare painting. I thought it must be nice for her, to have someone she knew once still think she was pretty. And he was a fairly nice person. He showed Rory pictures of his daughter on her horse, Diva. The horse, not the girl. The girl’s name was Kelly. She was in college in New York, at the New School. She wanted to be a journalist or a professional equestrian or a vet. Or train horses for a living. The girl was amazing-looking. She had the longest blonde hair I ever saw on someone who wasn’t nuts. He had a big farm between Boston and Cape Cod—well, big to apartment people—maybe twelve acres. He commuted, and traveled a lot, teaching other doctors how to do this one thing he’d sort of invented for cleft palates.

I walked with him to get his rental car, because my mom tried not to walk too far, especially in front of other people. She was still worried she’d fall and humiliate herself, though her balance was halfway decent now.

“What do you do, Gabe?” he asked.

“I go to home school,” I said. “I have learning disabilities.”

“Bad?”

“Yeah, I think, like they say, one more chromosome, and I’d be a cricket.”

“But you’re smart. To talk to.”

“I didn’t say I was stupid.”

“Do you want to go to school?”

“Maybe. If it seems worth it.”

“People all get to it at different times. Maybe your time won’t be until you’re in your twenties.”

“Maybe,” I said. It was a long walk, like, two city blocks. “So, was my mother much like she is now when she was a kid?”

“Yes,” he said, “almost exactly. Smart. Pretty…”

“Stuck up,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’d think she would have gotten over that by now.”

“For her, it’s not a matter of being really stuck up, Gabe. I mean, I don’t know her now. But when she was a kid, it was more like she had to keep her dignity.”

“Maybe that was it,” I said. “Because my grandparents were great, but they drank a little, and she didn’t like that. She always wanted to be in control of herself, she used to tell me.”

“Which is why this disease is probably so hard on her,” he said.

“Trust me,” I told him. “It would be hard on anybody. But she’s way better now than she was.”

“Do you mind that we’re dating?”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“No,” he said, as I swung up into the passenger seat. “But I want to. I don’t know if she does.”

“Do you know anything about multiple sclerosis?”

“Only what I’ve read. And I had a patient with a facial deformity who had it.”

“Jeez, two strikes.”

“Yes, but she was great. She didn’t let anything stop her. Even using a walker. She danced with her walker.”

“Christ, I hope that doesn’t happen to my mom.”

“It puts a lot on you.”

“That’s not why. It’s, like, what you said about her being so into her dignity and so forth. She’d feel like she could never go out of the house.”

“I’m very taken with her,” he said. “I always was. But you had to get to the back of the line to have a prayer with Julieanne Gillis.”

I tried to think of my mother, then, as a hottie, someone guys would kill to go out with. True, she had a semi-famous father, and she lived in a ritzy place. But I couldn’t manage to see my mother that way. “I always thought she liked me. But I wasn’t on her level. Like, her father.”

“And you are now.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“MS. The big leveler.”

He stopped the car. “No,” he said. “You’re a kid, but that’s kind of a slam on your mother. I meant, I’m a doctor. People seem to think you have some brains to do that. Back then, I was basically a poor kid who went to public school because there was no other choice, not like your mom, who went to public school because her parents were liberals and didn’t want it to seem as if they thought their daughter might get diseases from mingling with the common horde.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” I muttered.

“And she
was
kind of stuck up,” he said, laughing. “I went to her house once, for a party—”

“You were at my grandparents’ house?” I asked, suddenly missing them, unable to make the picture of my grandmother’s face form in my mind, able only to summon her voice, saying, “Ambrose, it’s time we got on.”

“Yes, it was when she was going on to Miss Whatever’s School, and there were maids passing out—”

“Cucumber sandwiches,” I finished for him.

“Yeah! To kids.”

“That would be them,” I said.

“But she was so embarrassed, for all of us. She wanted us to go fly kites in Central Park. And finally, we all did. I can still see her, climbing up the rocks with her kite, letting it unspool. She was a really athletic girl. Strong.”

“The ballet.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, starting the car again. “I thought she’d go pro,” as if the American Ballet Theater were the Dallas Cowboys.

“She was too fat and too tall,” I told him. “She didn’t want to do the anorexia thing. She says dancers live on vodka and chocolate and cigarettes.”

“She’s perfect,” he said.

“You should live with her when she gets in one of her everybody-out-of-the-boat moods,” I said.

“Well, Gabe, I intend to,” he said.

The beginning of the second beginning of my life happened unexpectedly, as so many things do. I hadn’t exactly given up on planning, even knowing it to be an exercise in futility. But I had decided to try to be happy within the confines of what I could do, and stop lamenting what I couldn’t, as much as was possible for a person of my kind, who had finished buying and wrapping her Christmas presents by September.

I began dating a guy I met through a show Cathy was in. He was a nice enough person, though I could feel myself pale when he told me he was a lawyer; but it turned out that he was a corporate lawyer for the big sporting-goods company, First Gear, which I didn’t find nearly as threatening, for some reason. “So,” I asked him, the first time we had dinner, “what you do is try to get people off the hook when a kid falls on one of your skate-boards and gets brain damaged?”

“You do come right to the point,” he said, “but what I do is try to get people benefits for the child when that happens, without bankrupting the company. You know people in our world now; I don’t think that anything bad should happen, and if it does, someone should pay.”

But after a few months, during which I saw Matthew twice and Dennis almost every week, I resigned amicably from Dennis.

Nice enough wasn’t good enough, even for me.

I’d believed I would be abjectly grateful to anyone who showed the slightest interest in me. It turned out that when
Urbane
did accept my poem, and paid me a thousand dollars for it, it was Matt I wanted to tell, even before I told Cathy or Gabe.

He was ecstatic on my behalf. He told me he was going to buy copies for everyone on his staff and for all his friends, and he had many friends. There was one weekend when I offered to come to Boston to see him, but he was headed off on a football weekend. For the next two weeks, when he called, I didn’t pick up. I felt rebuffed, slighted. Finally, he sent me two dozen white roses in a silver-and-blue trophy cup. The card read
, Is it me you don’t like or the Patriots?
And I called him. A week later, I received an engraved invitation to a gathering at the home of Matthew MacDougall for two weekends hence.

I didn’t want to go. I did want to go, but I knew that something would happen, in front of his physicians’ wives’ friends, something that would prevent me from ever again crossing the Massachusetts border. But I thought, then, it was a party. How hard could it be to sit on a sofa and talk to regular people? I had once been a regular person.

And I thought I might go to see Cat. It had been months, with no word. She’d sent Rory a set of cloth dolls for Christmas, but they frightened Rory, since they had only eyes but no mouths or noses.

I might rent a car and drive to the place that I could no longer really recall the name of, since Gabe and I had, so often, called it the Happy Valley. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I could get Cathy to keep Rory, and Gabe was fine on his own, with Cath in casual earshot. It turned out, when I mentioned it, that he and his grandparents were going to Door County that weekend, to do some preseason work on the cottage. He wanted, he said, to fish while it was still cold. “It makes me feel like a mariner,” he said. “In summer, anybody can sail.”

And so I readied myself carefully. I packed garment by garment over a period of weeks. A clinging black dress with a skirt that descended sharply in back and which ruffled around my legs when I moved, a movement I thought might disguise movements of my own—the unintentional kind. Wide-legged flowing trousers and a satin blouse. Funny big fake pearls on a fishing line. Jeans and two sturdy sweaters. A pair of boots and a pair of tennis shoes. Gabe asked me if I was moving.

A few days before I was to leave, the editor of
Urbane
called me. She asked whether she might give my e-mail address to a publisher who’d expressed interest in my “poems of anger.” I hadn’t known they were that, but I agreed in any case. What if there turned out to be a few bucks in it? I wrote the poems for a twisted kind of fun, and having had them published wasn’t even the icing on the cake, it was the frosting roses. I never expected anything to coalesce around my poems. Even Gabe called them my “so-called poems.”

The woman, an Amanda Senter, a name that seemed oddly familiar, wrote and asked permission to call.

“Julieanne Gillis,” she said when I picked up.

“Yes?”

“The last time I saw you, you were hiding under a piano.” It was that, then. The Dad thing. “I was your father’s agent, Julieanne, for a very short time a very long time ago, when I was very young. Before I moved to the other side of the desk. You probably saw me twice in your life. But when I read your poem, I thought Ambrose would like knowing that I recognized his girl’s work.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s kind of fun.”

“And what do you have in the trunk?” she asked.

“The trunk?”

“I mean, do you have enough poems amassed for a collection? I see it as a sort of woman’s triumphal rejection of the old male rule…and they’re kind of fun. You know, a poem to read when you’re furious at him.” I had no idea what she was talking about. The poems I had written were the poems I had written. Four. There were no odd slips of paper and jottings of consummate power tucked away in my drawer, to be found with breathtaking consequences by the children after my death.

“I’m an advice columnist,” I said. “I’m not a poet.”

“Why not let me be the judge of that. I have my own imprint now. I do very few things….”

I ended up, conscious of the firm, approving stare of my father from on high, sending her two. One of them I wrote after we got off the telephone, in perhaps twenty-five minutes.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

Promptly, the following morning, she wrote me and told me she’d cried upon reading it. I thought she must be going through some rough times mentally. She talked about positioning and presentation, about line drawings or the lack of them.

“Wait, Miss Senter,” I finally said.

“Amanda,” she replied.

“Amanda, just what are we talking about here?”

“Well, poetry, as a rule, isn’t a major seller. But what I’m thinking is that, there are enough women out there who’ve been dumped, or who have gone through similar trials, for all sorts of reasons, that we could almost present it as a book of friendship, of solidarity….”

“A book?”

“We can’t offer you much.”

“I don’t have a book of poems! How many poems go in a book?”

“Twenty-four, I think. I see it small, very rich-looking, almost like a thickish greeting card….”

“It would take me six months to write twenty-four poems!”

“Well, we wouldn’t expect them for a year, at least. But we can give you five now and five upon acceptance.” She meant thousands. I was grateful to be sitting down. A year’s worth of therapy and home schooling. More if I petitioned the school district and won, so they had to pay for Gabe’s schooling. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. “I’m sorry it’s not more, Julie.”

“Well, I think it would be nice to be public.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Published. I think it would be nice.”

“So it’s okay? Who is your agent?”

“Uh. I have to get in touch with her.” I had to think of something. I had to think of an old (and that would mean really old) friend of my father’s I could call, to ask for the name of an agent. But I didn’t know any of those people! Not as an adult! They knew me as a little girl in my high school uniform. I called Cathy at her office, and was too tense and excited to remember to ask for her by name. “I’d like to talk to the psychologist.”

“She’s in session.”

“I’d like to have her call me back.”

“Are you suicidal?”

“No!” I burst out laughing. “It’s…Julieanne Gillis. She’s my house-mate. Cathy Gleason.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, Missus Gillis.”

Cathy and I spent the evening looking at the spines of my father’s signed books. We picked out the name of a woman who had at least a hope of being alive and sentient, found her agent’s name in the acknowledgments, and when I called, she not only remembered me, she greeted me with the vocal equivalent of open arms. She was glad to go over my contracts. She’d love to have me to her home for dinner, next time I was in New York (next time I was in New York?). She knew my father would be proud. She thought the advance was a little on the stingy side, and she would try to keep foreign rights out of it. “We can pick up money on foreign sales,” she said. She might as well have been speaking in Aramaic. She used words I had heard my father use, but I had been trying to ignore the words at the time.

The publication of my poems was a terrifying crack in an opening door. I was afraid that the light from that opening door would hurt my eyes. I was afraid I would disgrace my father. I was afraid for the world to see what seemed, to me, like the little pages of scribbles Aurora held up at the dinner table. (“I have an excusement to make,” she would say, “I wrote a column.”) Abruptly, the trip to Boston was no longer a source of anxiety. It was a relief.

Matthew met me at the baggage claim, carrying a Patriots fan card with the words
GILLIS PARTY
written on it. “Enough with the Patriots jokes,” I said, meaning it. “How far is it to your house?”

“About twenty minutes if the traffic is good.”

“I don’t think anyone has ever said anything else to me,” I told him. It struck me funny.

“What?”

“I mean that no one has ever said anything to me except ‘It’s about twenty minutes from here.’”

“And all clocks in store windows are set for twenty minutes after eight.”

“Isn’t that because it’s when Abraham Lincoln died?”

“No,” he said. “I think it’s because it shows the hands better. The hands of the clock.”

“I think it’s because of Abraham Lincoln. And don’t mess with me. I’m a trivia expert. And the strangest thing happened.” I had rehearsed this revelation. Girlish and flirtatious? Proud but somewhat bewildered? Surprised yet confident? “There’s going to be a book. Of my poems.”

“Julieanne,” his reaction was different from what I’d expected. Very un–football fan. A quiet approval. A proud, proprietary nod. We passed through the center of a small town called Briley, and headed down a country road. When he turned in at the columned house, I thought he was stopping to buy eggs. “My humble abode.”

“It’s a fucking mansion!” I said. “I’m sorry, Matt. For cussing. I hang around a sixteen-year-old. But I never imagined…” A cream-colored horse watched us with amused, kindly eyes as we passed. “That’s my girl’s girl, Diva. My horse is Carver. Kelly gave him to me. The name? It’s her idea of a surgery joke. He’s a good old boy, though.”

“I used to ride,” I said, thinking of Central Park, my mother in her jodhpur boots.

“We can take a turn tomorrow,” Matt said eagerly.

“I couldn’t sit a horse now.”

“Don’t be so sure. With Carver, you just have to let him do the driving.”

“Matt, you’re one of those guys who’s always thrashing off to do something, aren’t you?”

“I guess,” he said, taking my suitcase out of the trunk. “That a bad thing? I stand still all day, using my hands to make tiny motions. So I like to make big motions in my time off. It makes sense.”

“So what do you want to do hanging around with a lady who used to be able to jump three feet into the air and now has to take her time going up three steps?”

“There’s more to life than thrashing around,” he said, and opened the door.

It looked like my memories of Tuscany, from a summer when I was nine or ten. Golden walls and thick green rugs. Brick-red furniture with striped pillows and a chandelier that looked like Cleopatra’s barge. I flopped down on the couch, from which I could see the long table, cherry, plain and shining and the kitchen with its painted tiles and strings of garlic. “Hey, congrats to your decorator.”

Matt nodded, then shrugged. “I picked up junk because I liked the colors. I bought the chandelier when Peter Mangan sold the prototype from a restaurant I like to go to in Seattle.”