Casebook (2 page)

“Like who?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I knew my dad: he was about to blab and I couldn’t stop him. And sure enough, idiotically, he named a name. By second grade everyone I knew had understood never to name a name.

“Holland Emerson,” he said. What kind of name was that? Was she Dutch?

“Oh,” the Mims said. “You’ve always kind of liked her.”

“I
guess
so,” he said, as if he hadn’t thought of it until she told him.

Then the mattress dipped, like a whale, to squash me, and I scooched over to the other side as the undulation rolled.

“I didn’t do anything, Reen!”

She got up. Then I heard the chair fall and him following her out of the room.

“I’m not going to do anything! You know me!”

But he’d started it. He’d said
opportunities
. He’d named a name. I bellied out, skidded to the bathroom, missing the toilet by a blurt. A framed picture of them taken after he’d proposed hung on the wall; her holding the four-inch diamond ring from the party-supply shop. On the silvery photograph, he’d written
I promise to always make you unhappy
.

I’d grown up with his jokes.

By the time I sluffed to the kitchen he sat eating a bowl of Special K. He lifted the box. “Want some?”

“Don’t fill up.” She stood next to the wall phone. “We’re having the Audreys for dinner.”

“Tonight?” he said. “Can we cancel? I think I’m coming down with something.”

“We canceled them twice already.”

The doorbell rang. It was the dork guy who came to run whenever she called him. He worked for the National Science Foundation and liked to run and talk about fractals.

Later, the Audreys arrived, all four of them standing clean, like they’d just taken showers. It was strange to see Hector’s hair ridged by a comb. His sister had a snub nose and freckles, but at least there was only one of her.

She looked at my two sisters for about a second, and then they all ran to the Boops’ room and slammed the door. When they had a friend over, the first thing the Boops did was go to their closet, strip, and exchange clothes. Jules Audrey was a grade older, so the
Boops would be vying for her attention. They were all in there now, trying on every single thing the Boops owned in front of the mirror. I’d told my mom a jillion times she should take that mirror down.

“You’re wearing out the glass,” I called as Hector and I skidded past their door. “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the stupidest of you all?”

“Hard call,” Hector mumbled, hands in his shorts pockets.

We ate quickly and got excused. Later, we asked for a ride to Blockbuster.

“We’re just eating dessert,” my mom said.

They had ice cream with espresso poured over. She said we could have some without the coffee. She gave Hector the larger portion. Hector was skinny, as sidekicks to fat kids usually are. He wore flip-flops and shorts, even in winter, and his legs looked like bug feelers.
^*
She gave him two scoops and me one made to look like two. My mom had liked Hector ever since the time she’d driven us to the Wildlife Waystation when we were seven and he’d pronounced Slobodan Miloševi?; correctly. That same ride, he’d said from the backseat, “My aunt could never drive these turns. My aunt is an alcoholic.”

The adults sat at the table with coffee cups and the strange-smelling bottles of liquor, the three girls screeched in my sisters’ room, and from the shipwreck of dishes on every counter in the kitchen, Hector and I stood forking pasta straight from the big bowl.

My mom had strategized, inviting the Audreys. She wanted Hector and me to be friends. She thought I didn’t talk enough to boys at school. Since we’d played chess tournaments at the LA Chess Club above the Men’s Wearhouse in first grade, the Mims had set her sights on Hector. By fourth grade, I liked him, too. That night, I told him about the walkie-talkie under the bed, with
rubber bands and electrical tape holding the button down. I wanted to show him, but my dad stayed in their room all through dinner. The Mims had told the Audreys he wasn’t feeling well.

“How was it?” my dad asked, holding the remote, when everybody finally left.

“This is the hundred and twenty-sixth day this year we haven’t eaten dinner together,” my mother said. “And it’s only June.”

^*
Don’t think just because you’ve jumbled up our looks I don’t know when you’re really talking about me
.—Hector

2 • A Walkie-Talkie

The walkie-talkie didn’t work. I could hear my mom but not the other person. I hadn’t thought of that. And in a lot of conversations, most of what she said was
mm-hmm
. I hadn’t thought of that either. With us, she said a lot. I had to be completely still so she wouldn’t hear noise through the device. Most of the time, I just heard her moving in her room, singing Joni Mitchell songs, off-key.

Hector had seen an old phone in his garage. He wanted to try hooking it up as an extension. He liked the idea of spying. He couldn’t watch
Survivor
either, because they just had an old TV that was broken. His only hope was my house. I held the bottom of the ladder while he reached for the black rotary from behind rusted paint cans. The Audrey garage held treasure. We hauled the heavy phone in his backpack to our place and found a painted-over jack under my bed. I had to pick out crud from the opening, but then we plugged it in and heard a dial tone! We covered the mouthpiece with cotton balls and duct tape. Then Hector thought of Silly Putty. We tore the stuff off, filled the holes, and brushed over it all with my sisters’ nail polish. No matter what, my mother wouldn’t be able to hear us through that. Then, for hours, the phone didn’t ring.

Finally, we heard talking from her room. The phone still hadn’t rung; she must’ve dialed. I slid in my socks down the hall, lifted the jangly box from under my bed.

Maybe I don’t inspire love
, we heard her say, through static.
I’ve never been beautiful
.

I didn’t want Hector hearing that. I wanted my mother to be beautiful.

We’re as good-looking for women as they are for men
. That was Sare, Charlie’s mom. I loved Sare. I’d have recognized her certainty through any static. “Maybe you and I just aren’t great marriage material.”

That stumped me. I didn’t know what she meant. My parents were better than other people’s parents; I believed that in a way so deep I didn’t think of it as a belief. It seemed a fact. My dad made everyone laugh. My mom stood apart, quieter, with her arms crossed. That was how they fit. The Mims didn’t tell Sare that she’d asked if he felt attracted to anyone else and that he’d named a name. Did my parents not have good sex? The thought streaked through me. I supposed they’d had it twice, at least. (My sisters were twins.)

I felt miserable, sitting cross-legged, the heavy black receiver leashed by its coil on top of the bed between Hector and me. Sare said that Dale relaxed her. His heart rate was very, very slow. Even though my dad worked long hours, he was beginning to be successful, Sare said.
Doesn’t that thrill you a little?
My mother thought a moment and then said no, not really. I knew that was true, and it scared me. Why didn’t it thrill her?

“I think your mom’s pretty beautiful,” Hector said.

On that August evening, in the year two thousand nothing, those two Los Angeles mothers talked for another hour. About what? Nothing we cared about.

Where to get the best thermos? Target! Music: Josquin des Prez, Mahalia Jackson, and Lucinda Williams. My mom listened to gospel, but she didn’t believe in God. More hikes, they both agreed they were going to get us to take. Putting on pumps and walking to church every Sunday? Not until those nuns got unshackled from their
fucking vows of poverty
. Sare said
fucking
! She was way cooler than my parents.

Sare was a very smart person who’d never tried anything too hard for her. She had that confidence and that boredom. Charlie had been my first friend. We knew each other through our mothers. The Mims was in awe of what Sare could make: for years, Charlie had a sandbox that took up their whole backyard, with boys crouching all over, running trucks and hoses. My mom wanted to learn from her the how-to of family life. My dad couldn’t understand.
Sofia Kovalevsky wasn’t Martha Stewart
, he kept saying. I heard that a dozen times before I learned that Kovalevsky was a dead mathematician, not someone they knew. But Sare had some wisdom about ease, an understanding of moving life, the warming and the holding. That never seemed to me unimportant. We were different from other families. My dad had chosen to be. The Mims just was. She couldn’t help it. She probably would rather have been more like everybody else.

“Well, the answer is …,” Sare said. This seemed to be her refrain. The answer to sex was once a week, in the morning. “Get it over with,” she said. “I always feel better after. It’s just before. The
dread
.”

I pushed the tonsil-like buttons to disconnect, as if by accident. I didn’t want to hear my mom talk about sex. It was bad enough to have heard Sare. I started to think about Sare without clothes on and had to stop. I hadn’t understood that people their age—like our parents even—kept on doing it. Or maybe I’d known, but I hadn’t thought about it.

“The answer,” Sare was saying, when I let the tonsils spring up, “is gratitude every day.” To our lunches, paring vegetables all at once and decanting them to glass jars in the refrigerator. Decanting seemed to be the final answer.

But I hadn’t breathed dust balls to hear about vegetables. I didn’t like picturing Sare nude with Dale, Charlie’s bookish dad who wore wire-rimmed glasses. Did he take the glasses off when he undressed?

More than an hour and the moms never got to
Survivor
.

I’d heard the Mims complain once to my dad that they should be having an endless conversation. “And what would that conversation be about?” he’d asked.

This
was an endless conversation.

I did the cut-my-head-off sign and set the extension down on its cradle.

3 • Faking Sleep

While I rummaged in my mom’s drawer, I heard my parents laughing as they came up the steps outside. I dived under their covers when I heard the crunch of them unlocking and I made myself completely still. They walked in and hangers in the closet cymbaled. My mom kicked off her shoes.

“He has a crush on you, all right,” my dad said. A crush! Crushing was what girls did, I thought; every day it was on someone different. At the end of the bed, my father flicked on news. Through eyelashes, I could see him rubbing his socked foot. “Did you hear him stammering, ‘I’m besotted with your wife’? He practically couldn’t get the words out.” My dad laughed. “I guess he really liked your paper.”

“I’m surprised anybody noticed.” My mom had published one paper, about animal locomotion. When two copies of the journal came in the mail, my dad had brought home flowers and they’d gone out to dinner. The dork guy had been at UCLA, making a site visit for an NSF grant to the department, and he’d picked out my mom to be friends with. He said he’d read her paper, but she thought it was because he wanted a running partner while he was in LA.

“I’m not worried,” my dad said. “He’s a less-good-looking version of me.” In general, my dad only minded taller men. “It’s not an ugly baby they’ve got. Not like some potatoes we’ve known.”
What baby did they think looked like a potato? Would my dad call his own daughter a spud?

“His wife asked me to talk to him. She said,
I tell him he’s smilier than other babies
. She thought he’d come around because he’s good with the cat and the dog. So I told him, ‘You’ll fall in love with him. Everyone falls in love with their own children.’ And he said, ‘Well, with
your
babies, sure.’ ”

“Miles
was
the most beautiful baby,” my dad said. “And Emma! Those curls!”

Boop One! Beautiful?
A startling idea. I was alive when the Boops were born and I had eyes. Two lumps that wailed was more like it.

“The wife’s kind of a dishrag,” my dad said. “What’s with the Heidi braids?”

“You know what she said? After that whole thing about how he didn’t love the kid, she told me she was planning to get pregnant again right away. I asked if she thought that was such a good idea, given how he’d taken to this one. She said, in that little-girl voice, ‘Well, if he’s unhappy with everything anyway …’ ”

“Still, it can’t hurt for you to have a friend at NSF.”

My dad cared about the Mims’s position in the math world, where she felt she was still a beginner and too old to be. She’d made a miscalculation. She’d tried to solve an open problem and not published anything for five years. Now she had to teach more and didn’t get paid her summer ninths. I pretended sleep. They had a little scuffle then over whether to let me stay. “But
she’s
always in here,” my dad said, meaning my sister.

“So let him this once.”

My dad sighed. But he didn’t move me. And I slept beautifully, between them.

4 • Eavesdropping

My mother went running late at night, after we were supposed to be in bed. She loved for us to sleep. She could do things then without missing time with us. One night, I happened to be sitting in the crook of a tree when I heard voices rise from the street.

“That proved to be irresistible.”

“But this is?” she said. “Resistible?”

You could tell from the sound of the wind in the leaves that it was no longer summer.

“I’d probably leave everything,” the male voice, not hers, said.

“It would never work,” she answered. “We’re allergic to animals.”

It took a moment longer than usual for the words to line up into sentences. Possible meanings assembled, like a puzzle that could be put together different ways but that still left extra pieces until the real form used every one of them. Was it the dork guy offering to leave his wife for the Mims and her letting him down easy? I didn’t think it could be that. But the words pressed on me, like sharp cookie cutters.