Casebook (16 page)

“…  not only reading,” my mom was saying in the kitchen, “it’s more than books. Emma and Izzy are going to the movies, and she doesn’t want to go along. She says movies are boring. Everything’s boring or scary.”

I knew all this. My mom had talked about it with Sare. I’d overheard Sare say,
Boring or scary! That pretty much covers the world
.

“I don’t know if she follows the plots of these movies.”

That wasn’t the problem, though. It was a social thing, I was pretty sure. Boop Two knew that Izzy really only wanted her sister and that they had to invite her along.

I walked in, took a sandwich, and headed back to my room as Eli asked my mom question after question. He loved her, I supposed. I couldn’t stand to hear more of this, and it was my sister.

Once upon a time, I remembered, my father had been able to calm her. She called him even now about Boop Two. His refrain was
She’ll be fine. I was a late reader, too
. And
I was a National Merit Scholar
.

“You still don’t read,” she’d say back.

“But I
can
read, Irene. I can.”

Eventually, I supposed, she’d figured out that everything would be
fine
not because there wasn’t a problem but because my father wanted to get off the phone. When I was older I understood that he couldn’t take anxiety. He seemed to be trying to talk her into the idea that everything would be fine, but really he was talking himself down. One of my discoveries from the extension was that she still called him four, five, sometimes six times a day about us. He seemed in a race against himself, to see how fast he could get off. One Saturday, I timed him. Thirty seconds. Why answer at all? If you’re just going to say,
Can’t talk now. Got to call you back
.

The douche. He did it to me, too, but not as much anymore. I’d learned how to talk to him. Why hadn’t she?

Eli must have been more selective about when he told her not to worry: she still believed him. The next time I went to the kitchen, she was saying, “She doesn’t seem ADD to me either, but maybe I should have her tested. Sare thinks so.”

Eli was silent, then said, “Well, if
Sare
thinks so.” He said if she had so many people to talk to, he wouldn’t spend all the time he did
thinking a problem through with her to give her his best advice. Then he lit into her about
retailing
the story. (Did he mean
retelling
?) I realized then that he didn’t know about all the phone calls to my dad, even if their average length was under a minute.

“I saw your friend in Philadelphia,” he said. “We had dinner.”

“But you said you wouldn’t see her. You promised.”

“I’m teasing you, honey. We didn’t have dinner. I talked to her on the phone.”

“That time we went out, you said she looked like the young Audrey Hepburn! You touched her stomach!”

“I didn’t touch her stomach. I touched
your
stomach.”

We still avoided the neighborhood where we used to live. We knew all the routes and took long ways around, just not to see our old house.

Then I went to camp. Inside the echoing clomps of guys, I forgot all we’d lost at home. Portaging canoes through the swampy banks of a freezing Maine river, I thought only about keeping up. It was hard. We climbed Mount Katahdin on hands and knees in a hailstorm. Ten times every hour I wished I’d let my mom order the water gear I swore I didn’t need when she tried to make me put it on at REI. My stomach grew fur inside it. We ate Chef Boyardee from the can. I waited for the other guys to go to sleep before I braved the woods to shit. Back at camp, I found a clean facility, off the cafeteria, and hiked there with comic books sent from home. I’d gotten into superheroes that summer. I’d put in orders at Neverland and Malc picked up a batch every week and FedExed them with notes and treats from my dad. Hector sent me postcards. His dad had him reading his extension students’
Merchant of Venice
essays, separating them into batches of acceptable, horrible, and even worse.

When I got home, it felt strange to be clean again, as if I were a smaller self. I roamed loose in my clothes, slept in late, then woke up to the smell of good hot food. Boop One could do side splits
now. Boop Two had grown taller, but despite new glasses, she still didn’t read. She’d developed math talent, though. “I can tell you a trick for squaring numbers that end in five,” she said. I couldn’t do that in my head, I told her. I was more patient, partly because they felt less like my sisters, after six weeks away, partly just from something shed by the old trees. Trees in Maine had a smell.
Petrichor
, Hector wrote in a postcard. Here, August was dry. You didn’t smell the trees, but you heard them at night, like string instruments.

When my dad came to take me out for dinner, I saw the first gray in his hair.

I overheard Sare trying to talk my mom into the swim team for me.
The swim team? Really, people!
The annoying thing about wiretaps was that you couldn’t talk back. Then I learned that my mom had signed me up for cross-country! I’d never run in my life! Philip had joined Hector, too. It was all his doing.

I’d have to get out of it, of course, but I couldn’t start arguing until I officially knew. This was a huge downside to reconnaissance. And Hector wasn’t even home yet.

He finally returned from surf camp taller and tan. They’d made bonfires on the beach and heard waves boom and crash over and over, all night long.

“You like Surferdude better, then?”

“No. I still hate him.”

Hector had gotten to be an even bigger reader over the summer. Or at least he read bigger books. He was in the middle of
Moby-Dick
. I’d gone the other direction. Floppies, superhero comics. I followed ifanboy.com. Hector had a bracelet tied on his ankle, woven from string that looked like it had already been wet and dried a lot of times. I kicked it. “Where’d you get that?”

“A counselor,” he said. “College woman.”

If that bracelet had been on the ankle of any other Rabid Rabbit, I would have teased him, but Hector was the last of us to show
any interest in sex. Other Rabbits wondered if he was gay. I didn’t know. It seemed the one thing from his parents’ divorce; he just didn’t have that yet.

He kept the string on his ankle all that year. It was the most romantic I’d ever seen him and ever would, for almost a decade up till now.

42 • A Full House and a Borrowed Dog

It was the Mitzvah year, Bar and Bat, for the Boops, and so far Boop One had received thirty-six invitations and Boop Two five. Hector and I hadn’t been invited to many either when we were in seventh grade, just to Simon’s and the ones that included the whole class, but what mother would allow her brat to invite one twin and not the other?

Apparently, quite a few of them.

Our whole family got invited to Simon’s sister’s, and the Mims decided I had to wear a suit. She trudged me through department stores and appraised me in mirrors, where, even after climbing the mountain Emerson called a “vast aggregation of loose rocks,” and someone else famous said was the most treacherous in America, I still appeared stout. As opposed to pleasantly plump, which is how I liked to think of myself, or even as
about to shoot up
.
^*
All through that miserable afternoon, the Mims called Eli. This is what she’d always wanted with my dad: a running commentary on her life with us.
An endless conversation
. “It’s all good,” I said to the first two suits, but she trucked me halfway across town to Brooks Brothers. Eli’s idea, probably. We wore the salesguy out until he produced a suit that made her shoulders drop when she surveyed me. She took a picture on her phone, and Eli called back in about ten seconds. “That’s the one,” he said from Washington.

“Let’s pin it,” my mom told the salesguy.

She hadn’t even asked me! And I was there! In the store! In Los Angeles!

I had to admit, though, when I glimpsed myself in the mirror pinned, I looked taller. Slim. Nineteenish. She put Eli on with the tailor. They talked for a long time about sleeves.

My dad loved the suit, too, when I modeled it. He clapped a baseball cap on me backward and told me to put it on with sneakers. My dad wore a baseball cap backward after he washed his hair; he’d figured out if he put one on while his hair was drying, it went a way he liked. “That’s great,” he declared, looking at me. My mom agreed. She seemed happier now with him. He gave her the same attention he’d always offered, but now she had Eli talking her through the rest of the day.

Boop One insisted on wearing Uggs with a borrowed black dress, and the Mims said, “You are not attending a Bat Mitzvah in Uggs, young lady,” and she said back, “Then I’m not going!” and I said, “Don’t be such a brat,” when she stomped into the kitchen and the Mims said, “Oh, that’s adorable. I was wrong.” Boop Two had on tights and the Doc Martens Eli had bought for her that looked leather but weren’t, a plain dress, and her hair in one thick braid. Then Eli showed up, carrying a suit on a hanger and a dog on a leash in the other hand. “Your dog!” Boop One said, but he said no, it was a friend’s.

“Are those leather?” Boop Two whispered, looking at his shoes.

It may have been the first time I’d ever seen him in hard shoes.

“Yes. I already owned these, so the damage is done. I keep getting them resoled. They’re going to have to last me the rest of my life.” They looked wrong. Square-toed. Even now, I don’t understand how fashion gets to us. Why did I think those shoes looked wrong? I’d certainly never picked up a fashion magazine.

In the beach club I severed myself as quickly as I could from them all and found Simon, sucking a Coke. Hector hadn’t been
invited. “Hey, dude, you hear what happened?” Simon said. “Zeke got kicked out.”

We’d been in school with Zeke since kindergarten. Simon told me he’d been caught with a joint in the parking lot. One joint. Zeke played tennis, too. On the team.

“Suspended or expelled?” I said.

“Like forever after.”

I jammed my hands down into the pockets of the new suit pants. “Hey, man, you didn’t tell your mom about me selling soup, did you?”

“No, Miles, for the ten millionth time.”

We took egg pies on napkins from a tray. Girls huddled outside, their dresses blowing up in the wind, so they batted them down not to show too much. I made myself stop staring at their legs. Simon said his sister had learned
two hours
of Hebrew. My parents had decided before we were born no Christenings, no Bar or Bat Mitzvahs. Because we were half. But people hauled in thousands of dollars at these things! I thought about that money during the long, long service. Almost all my friends were half, too. Simon and his sister were just half. But their parents were still married.

After the candy throwing, they showed a montage and Boop One was in a bunch of the pictures, Boop Two not in any. The grown-ups ate outside, where wind snuffed out their candles. Only the girls who took dance every day after school danced.

At ten, I went to ask my mom if we could go home, and just then Eli came and put his hands on her shoulders. “Would you care to dance, Ms. Adler?”

They went off to the windy dance floor where my popular sister hopped around. My mother couldn’t dance. Eli moved strangely, too. He kind of jumped up and down. They matched. Before my parents had gotten married, my father had arranged for ballroom-dancing lessons, probably worried about how they’d look at the wedding, dancing their first dance. He’d given my mom the
lessons for Valentine’s Day. (A joke in our family was that she had one big talent and none of the small ones. He had all the little ones. And they came in handy!) My dad was like Boop One; he’d been popular all his life. Boop Two and I were like her, bad dancers.

I wished I were more like my dad.

Walking to our car, my mom held on to a pinch of Eli’s sleeve. Which suit was this? I wondered out loud. “The second suit, or the one they gave him for free?”

He looked at my mom keenly. “This is the one they made right,” he said, in a weird way, faltering. Eli drove our car home, and she leaned her head back and started singing “Blackbird.” The Mims couldn’t drink. She couldn’t sing either. At home, she kicked her shoes off and flung herself down on her bed. Eli dabbed a washcloth to her forehead. When Hector arrived, Eli was pulling a T-shirt down over my mom’s head, like she did for us when we were young. She sat, lifting her arms. Seeing her arms stick up like that, I remembered the feeling of a shirt pulling down darkness over me.

“Do we own
Rear Window
?” I said, flipping through the pile of DVDs on her dresser. Eli flopped onto the bed next to her.

“Okay, I can die now,” she said, banging her head against the headboard, happy but drunk. She might have been the happiest she’d ever been, but she wasn’t the smartest. With our dad, she’d been sharper, her wit chased by his lower knowing laughter. A terrier circling under a cat in a tree.

A few minutes later, Eli appeared at my door holding
Rear Window
. He showed me where he’d alphabetized the Hitchcocks, and then he went outside to feed the dog. That was the first night Eli slept in the Mims’s room. When I went to get chips from the pantry, I heard him stammering. “But maybe you don’t want to, maybe this is enough for you, one or two nights a week; the rest of the time you can run your little empire.”

Her voice unrumpled itself. “I want to be married! Don’t you?”

“You know I’ve always wanted to marry you.”

Eli’s kid wasn’t there, but his friend’s dog was sleeping under the tree with the swing; it was a small full house, and everyone had somebody. I had Hector. He’d sunk into my beanbag, where he always slept at the new house.

“Was it fun?” he asked.

“What?”

“The Bat Mitzvah.”

“Oh, I gue-ess, kind of.”

“Good,” he said. He sounded wistful, like he wished he’d been invited. But the only reason I was, was that Simon’s mom thought the Mims had the best everything. It wasn’t ’cause of me. I told him that. He was quiet then and it occurred to me that, even divorced, probably my family seemed better-off than his. I tried to share whatever I had with him, but there were things you couldn’t share. “It wasn’t that fun,” I said. “You know.”