Casebook (18 page)

Eli’s parents had fought bitterly, but they’d had an agreement to stay together anyway, until the boys grew up. Then his father met somebody else. They told the boys they were getting a divorce when Eli was nine. That same year, his father took a job teaching at a New Jersey law school. They’d had to leave Ohio. His voice had a sweetness, saying that his mother had loved being a mom. You mean a stay-at-home mom?, the Mims asked. He nodded. You could hear his love and something else, too—embarrassment, maybe?—as if he knew he indulged his mother further than his beliefs should have allowed. But he was glad she’d had the luxury of being a woman who stayed home, happy her children could walk to a good public school. I didn’t get his sheepishness. I mean, of
course
, you wanted your mom to be happy. He seemed to think that because she’d managed to have a little more luck, a little more ease, than so many people in the world, she was robbing some other child’s ability to walk to school. I didn’t buy that that was true. Maybe it was, though. Injustice already loomed, an insoluble problem. You wanted the people you loved to have good lives. You just did. And it was hard to imagine that a woman with a life she liked in Ohio changed things one way or another for a person suffering somewhere in the world. In Rwanda, for example. But I was just beginning to understand that we were all connected on something like a teeter-totter, and our up depended on someone else’s down. Our teachers wanted us to believe that. You had the feeling that that was because they thought our parents’ up was their down.

Eli and his mom and Hugo moved to an apartment in New Jersey.
The fall
. It was a mean life, he said. (Meaning the other meaning of
mean
, Hector interjected.) They bought everything generic. Generic soap. Generic food. After she died, Eli found a letter from her divorce lawyer.
As your adviser, I cannot condone your decision to accept this settlement
. She wouldn’t take money. Eli’s father had done
well in the stock market. If she and her boys lived on her salary, her thinking went, he could invest the money, and in the end there’d be more for Eli and Hugo. She made the father promise that the money would all go to her sons. Not to the mistress.

“But your childhoods were then,” the Mims said. “Once.”

“It was her decision, sweetie.”

The move changed Hugo. Ohio was the last place he ever had a friend. And their mother worked as a legal secretary in the city; she didn’t get home until nine or ten at night. Their dad came over sometimes in the afternoon but left before supper. The boys fended for themselves. They ate from cans. When Eli’s father did take them to restaurants, for their birthdays, their mother came. Not the mistress, who’d moved to New Jersey, too.

The Mims asked Eli if his mother ever
liked
working.

But Eli’s mother hadn’t. A partner at the law firm noticed her reading a history book once and tried to promote her to be a paralegal, but they couldn’t, because she didn’t have a college degree. So it made her proud when her sons went to better universities than the partners’ kids. Eli’s father eventually married the mistress. And Eli had to admit, he was happier then with Joyce, just better. His father kept his word, and the boys inherited his estate. By then, though, their mother was dead, and they split the money with Joyce.

The Mims asked him if his mother had ever met anyone else. Before she died.

She’d joined Mensa; where else could she meet people in the suburbs? Once, in the hallway of the quote unquote mean apartment, Eli passed a chemist wearing only a towel. “Maybe that wasn’t so good,” he said. But the chemist really loved her. He’d wanted to see her when she was ill. Eli was twenty-three years old when his mother died of metastasized lung cancer. His voice dropped when he said those three words. He’d been in England the year she died. Hugo had been taking care of her. When Eli flew home, she asked him to wash her housecoat. Hugo hadn’t thought to, even though
he could see she wore it every day. I made a mental note. I wasn’t sure that laundry was something that just occurred to me either. I wondered why their father hadn’t helped more. My mom and dad would always help with something like that, even divorced. Hector agreed with me. For sure they would. His, too.

Eli’s father came over to see her, and at the end of the visit, he bent down and kissed his mother, and he had a—Eli stammered, saying this—a certain smile. They had laughed a little. His mother and father. Eli remembered thinking, That’s what’s left.

You could tell that memory was his treasure. He was probably making more of it than it was. I’d seen my parents kiss like that pretty many times. “And that turned out to be the last day my father saw my mother,” Eli said.

“Where was Jean during all this?” the Mims asked.

“Well, that was the question,” he said. “Where
was
Jean?”

“She stayed in England?”

He didn’t answer. He was quiet for a moment, then said that his dad had died completely unexpectedly—of a heart attack—six months later.

When Hector heard that, he shook his head, grim, as if he was seriously concerned.

“What?” I asked, but he wouldn’t say.

When Eli left to go back to DC, he gave me a sideways hug, pulling me hard against him. I stood with my mom on the porch, watching him get into the taxi. Things had finally settled. I’d gotten used to the new house, the creak of the tire swing outside my window. I wanted everything to stay. And for a while longer, it did.

44 • Friends of Dorothy

Hector and I stayed after school for FLAGBTU and learned the phrase
friend of Dorothy
. I loved code. Kids talked about how their
parents spied on them. One girl’s dad had a program he put in her computer to see every IM. A guy said his mom listened in on his phone conversations.

“How?” I asked. “I mean, technically how does she? Can’t you hear her breathe?”

He told me she’d bought a device for thirty bucks at RadioShack.

Just then, Maude Stern broke into the meeting room and, typical her, raised her hand. “Is this FLAG?” she asked, looking around when no one called on her.

My mom was clueless. I could so never marry Maude Stern.

“BTU,” Hector corrected. “FLAGBTU.”

We were running a winter clothing drive for teenage gay kids. I had grocery bags of coats in my locker. I reported the statistics on homeless gay kids compared with every other kind of kid. Maude volunteered to help. What was this about? Could Maude Stern be gay? Oh, I hoped so. I hoped so so much. I’d love to inform my mom that Maude was a lesbo. She had an older brother and he was perfect, too. They both had that bright red moppy hair like Annie and were all-star athletes in two different sports. He was at Princeton now, where he sang in a choir called the Tigertones.

“So tell me what to do, ’kay?” She smiled at me, her mouth full of iridescent butterfly-wing-colored braces. She liked me. Maybe that was all; she was joining to get to me.

I suggested that we start selling soup for FLAGBTU. People went for the idea. I said we’d need to take a cut. I’d have to give some percentage to Esmeralda, too.

“That seems fair,” Maude said. We voted. Everyone was down with that.

45 • The Hollywood Spy Shop

Eli showed up one Thursday and took me with him to pick up Boop Two from the pound. As we waited for her in the small office,
a tall man in a suede jacket and loafers dragged in a recalcitrant dog. “We can’t keep him,” he said, out of breath. “He attacked our five-year-old! He missed her eye by an eighth of an inch!”

“Did you ever train your dog?” Eli said.

The ponytailed guy behind the counter lifted a hand, like,
Yo. Chill
.

“What did your
five-year-old
do to him?” Eli said.

The tall man turned and seemed to notice us for the first time. He had a friendly, majestic air. Eli bent to pet his dog. The ponytailed guy behind the counter hopped over the swinging door to usher us out. “It’s cool. I’ll handle it. Guy’s upset. His kid almost lost an eye.”

“We’re here to pick up my sister,” I had to say. I felt bad for Boop Two. We’d embarrassed her. We waited outside by Eli’s borrowed car. It was a cold December night.

“Fucking North of Montana people,” Eli said, kicking a tire not even his.

But North of Montana was where we lived. We didn’t even own a house there anymore. We rented, just to stay. What if he wanted us to move away from everyone we knew? Eli seemed less whole to me after that. I couldn’t shake that phrase,
Fucking North of Montana people
. He must have meant us, too.

When we walked in the door that night, my mom looked happy and looser, the way she did around Eli, but our life didn’t feel as pure as it had been last year at this time, the way Christmas wasn’t after you learned it was just your parents, and almost nothing felt as right as at Little League when you were nine and the ball landed hard in your mitt.

I just blurted it all out to Hector, what I’d seen or not seen in Pasadena, up to Eli yelling at the pound. Hector’s jaw literally dropped. I’d never seen that before in real life. “He doesn’t have a scar,” he
finally said, and I realized that I’d been ambivalent about Eli for a while. I told Hector about the phone ringing all night and Eli calling Marge and Sare.

“He met that Audrey Hepburn woman after he said he didn’t,” Hector said. “First he told your mom the truth, and when she was upset, he lied.”

“He got caught. And promised never to do it again.” I’d gotten caught and said the same thing. Now I wondered if he really had touched the mathematician of light’s stomach.

Hector just shook his head. “Remember that time he had his friend’s dog? Who loans dogs? I mean, really, think about that. We’re friends. But you never borrowed Rebel.”

Something woke in Hector; he came alive with suspicion, energized in a straight line like a dog tracking. He read about the Hollywood Spy Shop, and once he’d decided we had to go there, the best I could do was stall, saying we had to save allowances, meaning mine. He didn’t get an allowance. I was the one with money. I could memorize poems. We had to get permission from the community service woman for selling soup through the club. Finally, when he wouldn’t let me put him off any longer, we took a bus after school on a Friday—the only day of the week we didn’t have to clomp on a trail.

People who didn’t look like us filled the bus. Mostly women. Many seemed to be holding grocery bags on their laps, housekeepers going east, home. I thought of Esmeralda, then of Eli’s mother having to work. We stood holding the pole. The address was on West Sunset. Los Angeles was big! You forgot. We passed ugly cheap hotels, the kind of nonarchitecture that gave LA a bad name. Except for the night I’d come home from Esmeralda’s Lucky supermarket, I didn’t have experience with buses. Forty minutes later, we still swayed, now holding straps from the bus ceiling on Santa Monica Boulevard, long past Santa Monica. An old-fashioned brown sign said
HIGHWAY 66
. “Santa Monica Boulevard is a
highway
?”

“My mom grew up here,” Hector said. “Before LA got glamorous.”

My mother grew up in Dearborn, outside Detroit, and she took classes at Wayne State during high school. She played violin. She was good at math. I’d once visited there and saw the weedy, chain-link-fenced fields she walked past every day with her violin in its violin case. She was no beach girl, ever. “Is it glamorous now? I didn’t know.”

He shrugged. “It’s a place that puts up signs for its own old highways. What does Eli do again for work?”

“The National Science Foundation. They give grants. Marge says he deals in prestige. And survival.”

We rode past the address for the store and had to get off and walk back. We couldn’t find the place. Maybe it went out of business, I said. The number belonged to a brick building, with a billboard on the western side that said
PAINTBALL
. We went to the door, which was closed with a metal diamond-patterned grate. Inside, a sign said
PAINTBALL
and then, in smaller letters,
HOLLYWOOD SPY SHOP
, and gave the hours as eleven to five. Through the spaces in the lattice we glimpsed two rooms: the bigger one had guns, ammo, and camouflage gear; the smaller had items in glass cases I couldn’t make out. I rattled the cage. “Hey, you open?”

A thin Asian guy came out of a back room in sneakers with the heels stepped down. “I just waxed the floor,” he said.

“You’re s’posed to be open.” I pointed to the sign. It was only four forty.

“I can let you in, but you can’t walk on the wet part.” He slowly unlocked. We meandered to the paintball cases, waiting for the other floor to dry. The army masks looked real. A lady minced in, holding her purse under her arm.

“I can’t let you go in there,” the guy said.

“He did some shit to the floor,” I said.

“What are you looking for?” he asked her.

She glanced at us and then looked down. “I want something that records, maybe video. I think my husband is cheating on me, and if I had it on tape, he couldn’t deny it.”

I squatted down and touched the floor with my fingers. “Pretty dry.”

The guy made us take off our shoes. Hector was barefoot without his flip-flops.

They had video cams and recorders built into sunglasses. The guy opened cans that looked like real Cokes and Pringles but were actually safes.

“What if someone threw it out?” the woman said.

The guy shrugged.

Everything was a fake something else. Pens that digitally recorded, also thumbsticks and an ugly tie. “I like the pen,” the woman said, stepping in carefully on the balls of her feet. “How much is it?”

“We’re out of the pens. They’re on order.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’d buy it.”

“Everyone wants the pen.”

“Not much of a salesman,” Hector whispered.

They installed security systems to keep people from breaking into your house and carried devices to help you invade other people’s lives, take their pictures, and record their conversations. And they had stuff to detect bugs. A picture of two black guys behind bars hung on the wall, with a caption that read:
ONLY STUPID PEOPLE TRY STEALING FROM A SECURITY SHOP
. “Racist assholes,” Hector whispered. Three additional grates were folded behind the diamond-patterned one. This was the most secure store I’d ever seen, and to paraphrase Eli, what exactly were they trying to preserve?