The Humanity Project (26 page)

Art was saying, I just called you, why didn’t you answer, and Linnea said Because I knew it was you and I was almost here. Art threw up his hands, meaning, Teenagers, while the boy stood there with the polite, sulky face kids wore when they were around parents.

Nobody was paying any attention to Christie yet. She would have liked to get up and leave, or not be there in the first place. She wrapped the blanket closer around herself. Maybe she’d be taken for a homeless person trying to stay out of the rain. Linnea always ignored her anyway, and for once Christie was glad.

Linnea had gone back to brown hair again, with a carrot-colored stripe in the front. She flopped down into one of the chairs. “Is it food yet? I’m hungry.”

“Almost,” Art said. “What do you want to drink?”

“A margarita.”

“Ha-ha. Coke, 7Up, or milk. How about you, Conner?”

Conner, that was his name, said he’d have a Coke. He sat down next to Linnea. He hadn’t looked in Christie’s direction and maybe he’d join with Linnea in ignoring her. She was pointlessly embarrassed by his presence. The grown-up thing to do would be to introduce herself and say, surely I’ve seen you at Mrs. Foster’s. There was a moment when she could have done this, but she let it get past her. Art and Beata went up and down the stairs, fetching drinks, plates, silverware, taco fixings, salad. Christie drank more wine.

“Here, try a taco,” Art said, offering her a plate. “Or I guess this is two.”

“No thanks,” Christie said. The hunger had gone right out of her. The boy gave her a quick sideways glance, then looked away. She felt sure he knew who she was.

The others sat down to eat, balancing the plates on their laps. It was all good, they agreed, yes, very good. The rain had picked up again. It landed hard on the pavement and rebounded so that the ground was alive with water. Christie had the sensation of her foot falling asleep, except it was her whole body, gone numb and tingling. She knew she was halfway to being drunk and stupid, and the best thing was to sit there quietly and not call attention to herself. She watched the boy and Linnea. What an odd pair they made. She thought Beata was right, they weren’t sleeping together. She couldn’t have said how she knew that. The alcohol was making her notice such things, as if she was a sexual Geiger counter. Here were Art and Beata, finding excuses to brush up against each other, two people remembering the last time they made love and looking forward to the next. Here were her own furtive feelings, which were like a rash that should not be scratched in public. She didn’t have any designs on the boy, or any fantasy imaginings. At least, she didn’t think so. He only triggered other disreputable designs and fantasies.

Of course Linnea was lovesick. How could she not be? The boy was too perfectly beautiful. But Linnea was keeping her face blank and indifferent, that useful all-purpose teenage pose. Every so often Art looked over at her, and Linnea made a point of not looking back. Beata had draped a dish towel around her neck to protect her white clothes. She ate her tacos with a knife and fork, in tiny bites. Everything the others did seemed to amuse her.

And the boy himself? Christie couldn’t read him. He drew the others in and gave nothing back, like a dark-burning star. Beata finished with her plate and brushed at her clothes with the dish towel. “Linnea, are you dressing up for Halloween?”

“I don’t know. They’re having a zombie apocalypse at school the Friday before. Maybe I’ll do something for that.”

“Zombie apocalypse,” said Art. “You’ll have to explain this to me.”

“See, some people are zombies, and they’ve attacked the school and eaten people’s brains and stuff. Some people play victims and lie around being dead. Other people are the survivors and they try to keep the zombies from killing anybody else. Meanwhile, society breaks down because everybody who’s supposed to be picking up trash and growing food and taking care of the power plants is either a zombie or else they’re hiding from the zombies. I don’t think that part goes on at school. They just have bulletins over the loudspeaker.”

Nobody said anything. “I want to be one of the zombies,” Linnea said. “The makeup is really cool.”

Art said, pleasantly, “Whose idea was it, spending a school day on this stuff?”

“Dad, it’s only the last couple of periods. We had an assembly and we voted. Lighten up.”

“Honey, I just don’t think it’s very healthy.”

“Fine. I’ll dress up as a big plate of broccoli.”

“Please take the zombie makeup off before you come home. I hope you will please do that much for me.”

After a moment Beata said, “How about you, Conner? What is your costume going to be?”

“Just what I always wear.”

He didn’t seem to mean it as a joke. There was another silence. Beata stood and began clearing up the plates and food. Art helped her. Conner said he had to go, and Linnea got up also. Christie did a good job of not watching him. “Back in a minute,” Linnea said.

Art waited until they were gone. “I’m going to call the goddamn school.”

“No,” Beata said. “Leave it be. It’s just pretend.”

“She can pretend to be something else.”

Christie said, “At least she seems to be looking forward to it.” The other two gave her a weary look.

Art said, “I’m going to talk to a counselor. I guess they haven’t had themselves a school shooting in these parts lately. Lucky them.”

Linnea came back then and stood with her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket. “Did you get enough to eat, honey?” Art asked. “Come on upstairs and we’ll fix you another plate.”

“No, I’m going to hang out here by the campfire a while longer.”

Christie got up to go and Linnea said, “Wait a minute, I want to ask you something.”

Christie sat back down. Art gave her a different look: what the hell. “Thanks for the wine,” Christie told Art and Beata as they started upstairs. She thought she’d come out on the other side of drunkenness and furtive desire. She was only tired now, curious about what Linnea had to say, but wishing it was already over.

Linnea took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “Are you going to narc me out?” She meant the smoking.

“Not unless I’m asked a direct question about it.”

Linnea considered this, exhaling the smoke to one side. “I don’t want to go back up there until they finish getting their freak on. You know?”

Christie thought she knew. She was pretty sure she heard such things from downstairs. She didn’t know what to make of this sudden chattiness. Linnea said, “I bet that was Beata’s Halloween costume she had on tonight.”

“If you’re going to talk about somebody, you should do it to their face.”

“Like people always do around me, right?”

One reason not to have a baby was so that you would not eventually have a teenager. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”

Linnea hitched her chair closer. The orange stripe of hair was distracting. It looked like a caterpillar clinging to her head. “Con says you do work with homeless people.”

“Yes, that’s part of it.” He knew that much about her.

“Where do people go when they’re homeless? Are there places they end up? Like, camps or something?”

“There are shelters. And a few places you might find people under a tarp, or living in a vehicle. It’s nothing organized. They go wherever they can. They leave town. They turn up in emergency rooms, or jail, or the morgue. Why?”

“So there’s nothing like, police records, anything like that.”

The girl seemed serious, or at least, more serious than she’d been about the zombie apocalypse. “If you get arrested, there’s a record. There are social services that try to do a homeless census once a year, but it’s a difficult population to reach.” Christie waited. “Maybe if you told me what this is about?”

“Con needs help finding his father.”

I
n an effort at building a more honest and authentic relationship, from time to time Art smoked marijuana with his teenage daughter. He hadn’t begun out of any such hopeful motives; Linnea had simply come home and caught him lighting up in the kitchen. “Busted!” she said happily.

“Oh well, ha.” Art was already a little messed over. His brain had that Swiss cheese feel. “I was just, ha.” He opened the refrigerator and closed it again.

“You gonna share?”

What else could he do but hand the pipe to her? He watched Linnea fire up the lighter and play it over the pipe bowl. “Careful. This is pretty strong stuff.”

She spoke with difficulty through the smoke she was holding in. “S’not bad.”

Art sat down at the kitchen table. He shook his head and its insides joggled. “This is just . . . Honey, I don’t know about this.”

“Your eyes are all red. You are wrecked.”

He tried sounding stern. “What do you think your mother would say?”

“She’d say she was right about both of us.”

It was funny enough to make them snicker and snort. Art took the pipe back from her. “Seriously, this isn’t a good idea for you. You can get kind of dependent on it. You can spend too much time just sitting around getting high and neglecting, ah, stuff you need to do.” His daughter’s expression was one of huge merriment. “You’re young, you’re still developing,” Art said. “It can screw up your . . . development.”

“Yeah, can’t have that.”

“And you really, really shouldn’t do other drugs. Or drink. If I catch you doing anything like that, I will pack your young ass off to Montana.”

“No prob.”

Of course she’d say anything. How would he know what kinds of shit she did? What were you supposed to do, lock them up? “Linnea! Don’t push me on this!”

“All right, all right.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ll just be a little pothead.”

“Don’t even be that.”

“Use, not abuse,” she suggested.

“And quit filching my stash.” He’d meant it seriously, meant it to come out seriously, but little laugh bubbles kept rising up in him, like carbonation. He really was hopeless. He should have read one of those books,
How to Talk to Your Kids About Drugs
. There was probably a chapter in there somewhere, “Special Situations.” He didn’t think he was the only parent who had to hold up their lame end of similar conversations.

He wished he had the courage of his stoned convictions. Marijuana was a natural substance, a mild and harmless euphoric. Linnea already smoked it and did God knows what else. But now it was his job to worry about it.

Although she seemed to be doing better lately, settling into school, coming home when she was meant to, well, more or less. Gradually, Art had been able to imagine a longer timeline than getting through the next few days or weeks. He didn’t envision and dwell on every calamity that might befall her every time she left the apartment, or at least he did so less often. Louise still called him every other week or so to fret and complain, but he was more used to her by now, and she only bored him.

“What is she up to at school?” Louise demanded.

“Geometry, Spanish One, Intro to American Civilization—”

“You know what I mean.”

“She’s fine, things at school are fine. She sees a counselor, it’s all good.” He decided not to tell her about the plans for the zombie apocalypse. “She does her homework, she goes to class. I don’t know if she’s made a lot of friends yet, but she’s new, give it time.”

In fact Linnea’s only friend, as far as Art could tell, continued to be Conner, whom Art disapproved of on the general grounds of his being male, and older, and fully capable of sexual misdeeds. He wasn’t going to tell Louise about him, either. “Everything’s going well, why do you keep worrying?”

“Because worrying is what you do with children. You missed out on a dozen years of training. You’re still playing catch-up.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“Art? If you think she’s doing just great, you aren’t paying attention.”

“Maybe you could give her some credit. People do change.”

“I’ll believe that when you get a real job.” No matter what he said to Louise, she was always able to serve it back up to him as new and tasty fare. “You think I don’t know about change? Didn’t I watch her change from a normal child into a nightmare? You think it didn’t break my heart? It did. You think I didn’t try to help her, to get her help? She didn’t want to be helped. She took pleasure in pushing me away.”

“All right.” It was time to get off the phone, before Louise got too carried away with the vision of her own suffering. “I’ll tell Linnea you called.”

“I had to give up on my own child. Not entirely give up, I mean, you always hold out hope. You say she’s doing better, that’s great. It’s probably easier for both of you since you’re so much more objective about her.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked unwisely. “‘Objective,’ like, I don’t care about her?”

“I’m sure you at least think you do,” Louise said, and hung up.

The next time Art smoked marijuana with his daughter, they were sitting in front of the television watching a reality show that Linnea enjoyed because it was “so sick.” The show was about girls Linnea’s age who got pregnant and had babies and then found out it was a big drag. Linnea and Art passed a joint back and forth and Linnea hooted at the television. She made fun of the teen moms for being dumb and for having dumb boyfriends.

Art was encouraged by this. It seemed like a good opportunity for some sort of teachable moment. At the next commercial, he said, “You have to wonder, did they have any idea what they were getting into?”

Linnea pinched the end of the joint open so it would draw better. “You mean, do I realize that being a teen mom would put a crimp in my exciting, fast-paced social life? Yeah, I do.”

“Well that’s good. I mean, good that you know . . .” He had to stop attempting heavy-duty parental conversations when he was drug-addled. Maybe he wasn’t the best person to be giving lectures about the serious, long-term responsibilities of family life.

“Besides, don’t worry, if I ever got pregnant, I would definitely have an abortion.”

“That’s not the point. Let’s back up a minute.”

“The social life thing?” She gave him a cracked smile. “It’s OK. It’s not like I have these great expectations.”

“How about, ‘Don’t get pregnant,’ and the best way to do that is not to have teen sex.”

“No kidding. This is like, kaput.” She dropped the stubby remnant of the joint into the ashtray. On television, one of the teen moms’ moms was hollering about the teen mom letting her baby drink soda pop from a baby bottle. Why did these people agree to be filmed? Did they think they’d end up looking good?

They both watched a while longer. Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating. Linnea yawned. “These guys, they’re so stupid, they all should have been sterilized. So if Beata got pregnant, what would you do?”

“Huh.” It was an unwelcome thought—that is, he hadn’t bothered thinking it.

“I’m sorry, that’s not the right answer.”

It had been embarrassing enough to talk about his daughter’s sex life; he surely didn’t want to discuss his own. “That would be up to Beata,” Art said, meaning to put an end to the discussion.

“So if she said, ‘I want to be your baby mamma, let’s do this,’ you’d go along?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it. It’s not going to happen, anyway.” Beata took birth control pills. Or so she said. Was it something he ought to worry about? A pregnancy trap?

“You could have a little boy. Name him Jerzy or something else Polish. Then I’d have two half brothers. Just from different halves.”

She didn’t say anything more, and Art was afraid of saying anything more, so they sat in silence, watching the teen moms and their hapless, adorable babies.

Things were going just fine with Beata. Weren’t they? He thought so. This fall they were both teaching the usual patchwork of courses that made up a part-timer’s life, the usual composition and remedial composition, at night classes and refugee centers and adult education programs and online courses. They were both busy with their comings and goings and with the mounds of grading. Sometimes they were able to manage a quick meal and a tryst at Beata’s apartment in the Sunset. On weekends Beata usually came up to Marin and stayed overnight, and she cooked big dinners and they watched television, and there wasn’t pressure for something more.

At least there didn’t seem to be. Beata didn’t complain or hint around that she wanted him to take her on expensive wine country tours, or they should move in together, or any other change in their routine of modest entertainment and good old reliable sex. When she wasn’t around, he didn’t have to worry about her. Was that so wrong?

But he wasn’t always the best judge of women, what they wanted and what he was supposed to do about it. Usually they blindsided him with accusations, the things he had failed to notice, the offenses he so willfully committed against their needs, their natures, their exquisite sensibilities. Louise had turned this sort of denunciation into a minor art form, but Art had to admit, he had heard similar speeches elsewhere.

The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you’d signed up for a credit card without knowing it. Once, the two of them sitting at opposite ends of his couch, each of them hunched over their laptops making frantic grade entries, Beata had asked him what he wanted to be doing in ten years. “Fishing up at my cabin in the Sierras,” Art had said.

“No, I mean doing with your life.”

“I don’t know. Retire.” He hadn’t thought about it. He seemed unlikely to be doing anything that much different. “Win the lottery.”

“I want to be entirely new,” Beata announced. “New work, new house. Everything new and amazing.”

“Go for it,” Art had said, humping to get his grades turned in before the online session closed. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time, and Beata had not said anything more. At least he didn’t think she had. Among the other things Beata had not said were that she wanted to have a baby, or get married, or any combination of these. Surely he would have remembered something like that. But of course such things were seldom spoken outright. They were implied, assumed, conveyed through an indirect language that everyone expected him to speak fluently.

Linnea wasn’t in the habit of offering observations about Beata, and Art didn’t know why she’d done so now, aside from teenage brattiness, and wanting to unnerve him, and if so, good job. He’d almost forgotten the half brother back in Ohio. And the stepfather, and the dead girl, the stepsister, well, he hadn’t forgotten them, but it was too distressing to think about them. What a lopsided stumpy mess people made of a family tree these days. The last thing any of them needed was some new little sprig grafted on.

Then it was only a few days before Halloween, and Beata surprised him in a different way, which he guessed was the nature of surprises. She called and said she wanted them to go to a costume party together. A friend of hers in the city was hosting it. “You’re kidding,” Art said, though he was pretty sure she wasn’t. “You mean, dress up?”

“Yes, that’s usually what people mean by costume.”

“Who is this friend?” Art asked, stalling for time. He wasn’t a big Halloween fan. In San Francisco, you were talking serious drag queens.

“She is a friend from college, she lives in the Mission. I think you should meet some of my friends. I would say, I should meet yours, but you don’t have any.”

There was a certain crispness in her tone. So here it was: the voicing of discontent, the required changing of his ways. He guessed it had to happen. “Can I go but not dress up?”

“Not allowed.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? How am I supposed to get a costume together?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference if I gave you a month. You would still do it at the last minute.”

The whole idea was dismaying him. “Honestly, I usually don’t do Halloween.”

“Make an exception.”

“Do you already have a costume?”

“Yes, and it is a surprise.”

“Don’t you think you should tell me? I mean, shouldn’t we match or something?”

“I will look amazing, and you should too. Saturday night, come pick me up at eight. Oh stop groaning. Be fun.”

Art hung up the phone. He was not feeling fun. This was a test of some kind. He would have to be a good sport, enter into the festive spirit of the occasion. He wondered what Beata might have told her friends about him already. He didn’t like the idea of them looking him over, comparing notes, deciding if he measured up. He wasn’t a great party person at the best of times. Usually he hung on to a drink and communed with the host’s bookshelves.

“What do you think I should be?” he asked his daughter. “A vampire, maybe?”

“Everybody goes as a vampire.”

“Right. Skip it.” Anyway, the vampires in television and movies these days were all young and handsome, more like your average brooding fashion models than the undead. “I’m supposed to look amazing.”

Linnea hooted at that. “Just be something completely different than normal. That’s the whole idea.” She was fixing herself breakfast, a bagel with peanut butter and banana slices. She was good about feeding herself, which was a lucky thing, since he had never really gotten it together when it came to cooking. Beata made a point out of cooking for him. He should have been more wary about that.

As if he had just thought of it, he said, “Hey, isn’t it the zombie apocalypse today?”

“Yeah. I decided not to be a zombie. They already have too many of those.”

“Oh.” Cautious now. “Were you going to be anything else?”

“Maybe I’ll be a zombie slaughter victim. That’s easy, you just lie there. Con and I are going to hang out on Halloween,” she added, overcasually.

Art was still trying not to visualize her as a victim of slaughter. “Hang out, what? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just hang.” She rolled her eyes. Dumb Daddy.