Casebook (10 page)

“Three,” my mom said. “If it just seems too much, I could save it for Miles.”

“Oh, just give it to Eli. You bought it for him. It’s a beautiful watch.”

But I liked the idea of her saving a watch for me!

“Hey, what ever happened to that suit?” Sare asked.

“We never went to London.”

“Where’s the butter?”

“Bottom drawer, next to the mustard you like.”

“He should have just bought you a suit here.” Sare’s voice changed. “Do you think there’s some reason you’re taking it so slow?”

Taking
what
so slow! I wanted things to stay the way they were. Separation had made me conservative.

The Mims sighed. “He called me up last night and said, ‘Don’t you want to just go to the movies with me?’ And I do. But I have to think of the kids.”

Oh, just go to the movies
, I felt like saying. “I can babysit” is what I did say, and took my bagel to my room. I’d burned it.

The year before, we’d had blowout Friday-night sleepovers with six or seven guys every week. This year we’d dwindled to Hector, me, and sometimes Charlie. Several of the Rabbits were hanging out with girls. Charlie was obsessed with Estelle.

I still wanted to find out who’d snitched, but no matter what I said to my mom about not trusting her anymore, she wouldn’t crack. I planned to bring it up with Eli. He’d already told me his ex-in-laws were Nazis.

Hector and I walked a lot that December, speculating about the other people in FLAGBTU. By then, we’d lobbied to get the U added, for Undecided.

I jumped into Charlie’s arms just to see my dad’s face tumble. I was beginning to enjoy this. I said, “You’re against DOMA, aren’t you?” I had to explain that DOMA was the Defense of Marriage Act. He knew that DADT was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. My mom shocked me by recognizing the term NAMBLA. One of the things my parents still shared was an irrational fear of pedophiles.

Eli had read in an English novel that a man paid his grandchildren to memorize poems, and the Mims offered to give us ten dollars a sonnet, fifteen for longer poems. Since I’d lost soup selling, I needed income. We kept buying lunches—it was hard to go back to the stuff my mom packed. So I memorized “Annabel Lee.” But the Mims turned out to be a stickler. One line off and she sent me back to my room to try again.

30 • The Game in the Front Seat

I hunted for ladders to put up lights. We had two in our garage, but neither was tall enough. I left a note for our gardeners taped to the hose—we had mow-and-blow guys like everyone else we knew in LA—asking to borrow a high one. I got no answer, so I had Esmeralda translate my note. That worked. A tall rusty ladder appeared.

I kept asking my mom when Eli was coming. I hauled the lights from the basement, ran them along the living room floor, and plugged them in to make sure the bulbs all still lit.

Eli finally walked in carrying his suitcase, late the Sunday before Christmas. The tree had been up for days already. My mom
warmed his plate, and he ate on a chair by the fire. The Boops, in pajamas, turned marshmallows on long retractable forks our father had once bought. With everyone there, I said, “So, Eli, our dog got adopted.”

“Angeldog!” Boop One cried out. “When? Is it a nice family? With girls?”

My mother looked at me strangely. “Tell Eli when, Miles.”

“November twentieth,” Boop Two said. No one but us had remembered him.

“That’s just great,” Eli said. Then the Boops had to go to bed, and they wanted him, so I followed the Mims to the kitchen, where she whisked milk on the stove with sugar, vanilla, grated nutmeg, and some cardamom. She brought the Boops each a mug with one star anise floating on top.

I lurked around all night, listening in on my mom and Eli, half bored.

The first thing I heard that seemed to matter was my mom saying, “I could have worked harder.” At what? She was a pretty hard worker. Way more than me.

“I don’t know, sweetie. If he’d been there with you, you would have rubbed your hands together and blown it into something. You, you and your family romance.” I’d actually
seen
my mom rub her hands together. “You haven’t had the experience of being married to someone you got along with.”

But my parents did get along! I knew. I was there. I lived with them.

“You had that. Why weren’t you happy?”

“Jean’s like a sister to me. I haven’t had a life with a woman. It’s not just sex. It affects everything. Still, I’m the one who should be guilty. I knew before we married.”

“Why did you, then? Twenty-three is so young. I think of Miles.”

I perked to my name. She’d probably want me to marry Maude
Stern, a hand-raising, butt-lifting-off-the-chair, call-on-me type. I would never marry Maude Stern.

“When I found out Jean wanted to get married, I thought she was pretty
enough
, smart
enough
. My mother knew I wasn’t in love with her. But I did it. I even proposed.”

“Did you get a ring?”

“No. Not then. Once, later, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, she saw a ring she liked at a street vendor and said, ‘Buy this for me.’ It cost ten dollars.”

“I wouldn’t want Miles to marry someone he wasn’t in love with.”

“No. You want them to do it right the first time.”

I peeked around the corner. They were sitting on the floor, her hand on his ankle.

My mom shook me awake and gave me a mug of hot chocolate with coffee. I sipped; it was wild in my mouth. “Eli’s taking Jamie to the shelter. She wants you to go along.” I hadn’t even peed yet. My mom gave me two twenties. “Donate this. And throw some clothes in a backpack. Your parka. We’re going somewhere right after. I’ll bring toothbrushes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. It’s a surprise. Eli said to bring warm clothes.”

I didn’t want to go anyplace. Why weren’t we staying home today to put up lights? I seemed to be the only one who cared about our lights, but I really did care!

It was still dark. At the shelter, I hosed the cages and blasted the animals’ bowls before filling them with new food. We squirted a green liquid in the water for their teeth as the sky lightened. “Your sister has an amazing rapport with animals,” a woman who worked there told me. Weird. Boop Two had a life away from us, apparently. Eli patted a whimpering dog, and it quieted. I guess he had good rapport, too.

I liked cleaning the cages, one by one, down the aisle. I got into it. Finally, I wound up at the shed in the far corner, where Eli stood over a cardboard box filled with straw. Inside, cats tangled together. He lifted one. “You poor thing. You been brave.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“FeLV,” the woman who worked there answered.

“Cat leukemia,” Eli translated.

He handed me the warm throbbing thing and lifted out another. I held it. After a while, I gave it back and asked the woman for a different job. She fitted a sack of vitamin pellets into my arms for me to mix in with the dogs’ kibble. The shelter differentiated between three sizes of dogs. I started with big dogs and worked my way down. I had one more aisle to go when Eli tapped my shoulder.

I didn’t ask, but I knew that the cats were dead. “Where did you put them?”

He exhaled. “In that box. At the end of the day, they’ll probably incinerate the bodies.”

“They can’t get better?”

“It’s incurable. When I see this, at shelters, I just try to give them a good death.” What was it about this guy? I felt an attachment from the part of my chest that was where he’d been holding the cat. It was still so early the air felt thin. We washed our hands with disinfectant.

Outside, my mom and Boop One waited in the running car with the heat on.

“Where are we going?” I asked after I stopped recognizing turnoffs.

“Pine Mountain,” he said.

My sisters and I fell asleep, and when I half woke and heard my mom and Eli in the front, their voices sounded different from altitude. While we’d slept on one another’s bones, they’d driven into snow. A glance out the window showed mountains.

Eli finally parked in front of a shack where a bearded guy, dwarfed by the landscape, fitted us with boots and skis. Hats covered
a Peg-Board wall, some fleece, some knit. We each got to pick out one, and Eli bought us gloves, too, working them onto our fingers. Then he gave us paper packets you unwrapped like candy bars and put into your socks to radiate heat. On our skis we followed the bearded guy in two grooves made from packed-down snow. It felt stiff, like walking on stilts. After a while, he said, “Arms opposing. You get the idea. Use your poles.” Awkward and graceful, like a bird with open wings, he turned around in an elastic rectangle and skied back toward his shack.

The Boops got the knack of it right away. Boop One tried to pass me. A very irritating person.

The world felt quiet. Snow slipped off pines onto other snow, but you registered that in the chest more than heard it. Eli’s skis crossed over each other, and he tripped. Boop One shot ahead, Boop Two scooting in behind her. I hadn’t fallen yet, but it was hard work heaving uphill or else terrifying going down too steeply. Eli landed again, and my mom’s ski caught on his. I got split like a V, rolled to the side, and then shoved up. The fresh snow stung at first, then melted cold and wet in my clothes.

Still, it was beautiful for hours. We saw a stiff owl, two families of deer, and comic rabbits tracking the drifts. We fell into a rhythm of numbness, pain, and occasional glory, absolutely alone. We each found a way to do it—the slide exhilarating, as in a dream—only Eli kept falling. He made jokes, brushed snow off, and snapped the toe clasps into place once more and started over again.

By the time the shack came into sight, he and my mom were far behind us. She’d slowed down for him. The bearded man took our skis back and, a few minutes later, passed us scrambled eggs on flimsy paper plates and then sweet chai lattes. He was making it all on a two-burner hot plate. It had just started to snow when my mom and Eli stomped in. Flakes stuck on Eli’s stubble. “Snow-flakes are hexagonally symmetric,” Boop Two said. “Like viruses. The symmetry, I mean.”

“How?” the Mims asked softly.

“I forget.”

“Dodecahedron. And how many symmetrical crystals are there?” my mother quizzed. We didn’t know. She and Eli took their chai lattes to go because we had a long drive. In front, they studied a folded-out map. Later, they shook us awake and told us we’d carry our stuff in a wheelbarrow. We followed them under enormous sycamores. We’d entered different weather. Now it was night cold but without the freeze in it. A cabin stood at the bottom of a hill, and Eli shoved the door open. We slept with just our pants off in tightly made cots that smelled cold while Eli pushed the wheelbarrow up to the car.

In the morning, they already had a fire going. Leaves of the forest waved outside windows in patches of sun. Eli stumbled in with an armful of branches and stuck marshmallows on the ends of the longest ones. He pulled a box of graham crackers and chocolate bars out of a grocery bag to make s’mores.

“For breakfast?” I said.

“It’s vacation,” he answered.

The Mims stood making coffee in the wood-paneled kitchen.

“You’re down with this?”

She smiled. Everything tilted.

We hiked (the Boops whining “Are we almost there?” every fifteen minutes), and Eli showed us things through his binoculars. Beaded ferns. Geometric moss on the trunk of a pine. He and the Mims began to talk about mathematical patterns; were they really present in nature or did we invent them?

I said, “I mean, they
seem
to be everywhere.”

“But our visual system creates illusions,” Eli said.

“Of a seamless world, for example,” the Mims continued. She said that because electrons are the exact same and interchangeable, the universe holds potential for incredible symmetry. Fractals are shapes that have detailed structures on all scales of magnification, like ferns, she said, and mountains.

“Symmetry’s a better illusion than God,” Eli said. “It’s elegant, deep, and general.”

They were talking mostly to each other. I heard my mother vow to become a bird-watcher. They said if everything worked out, they should really start going to church. Church! (What about those nuns and their
fucking vows of poverty
!)

“I’m so grateful,” she whispered. I wondered if religion was a result of love. That and brain mush.

Eventually, they took out pb and j sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, and we ate by a waterfall. I felt blurry from not sleeping in my real bed. The cabin had just one bathroom. For number two, I needed comic books and a Boop-free zone.

I had no idea what time it was. Then my distracted gaze landed on a watch on Eli’s flat wrist. Was that
the watch
? “I like your watch,” I said.

“From your mother.” He looked at her. “I’ve never had a watch like this before.”

Sare had told her to give it to him, not me. All of a sudden, I thought Sare must have been the one who’d ratted about soup selling, too. Charlie was a traitor.

“You did Christmas presents already?” I said.

“What did he get you?” Boop One asked.

The Mims looked down. He hadn’t given her anything. I just knew.

“I sent, I sent a box that hasn’t arrived yet,” he said. “I’m glad my gift is kind of elaborate, too.” He said
gift
, no
s
. Did that mean there were no presents for us in the box he’d sent? When we returned to the cabin, we fell back onto our cots around the dwindling fire. Eli turned on the old-looking television, fiddled with the antenna, and switched channels until he found a movie starting.
All About Eve
. My mom made popcorn in a big pot; we heard it thumping against the lid. Miniature fireworks noise. When the movie finished, Eli suggested we take a drive to look at Christmas lights. He drove our
car again, to a street lined with pine trees that must have been a hundred years old, their thick boughs draped with lights. My mom looked at me.
Here, you have your lights
, she meant, but even under this wattage and the dark canopy of fir, I still wanted
our
lights.