The Slide: A Novel (16 page)

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. Normally when I can’t sleep I sit in the living room, but I wanted to see you come in.”

“I thought this was the living room.”

“This? No, this is the family room. The living room has the fireplace.”

“Are you sure?”

She held the mug centered at chest level and stared in a way that I kind of wanted to drop to the floor.

“Why, yes, I’m sure. This is the family room.”

I was almost positive she was wrong, and I felt a certain warmth for this dash of parental fallibility. The light on the answering machine blinked tiny red dashes.

“What keeps you up so late?”

“Thirty-five years of snoring from your father. You’d think by now, wouldn’t you? You’d think one would adjust. But still, here I am.”

She shrugged and brought the mug up to her mouth with both hands. I slipped off my shoes and walked past her into the kitchen. She looked even stranger from behind, just shoulders and head. I tried to recall if her head had always been so
round
. I unwrapped a slice of American cheese and sat down in my father’s recliner.

“Dairy,” I said.

My mom sipped from her mug. “Are you enjoying being home?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to leave?”

“Mom.”

“When the snoring got this bad I used to think about sleeping upstairs in the guest bedroom. Just go up there for the night. I held out because I didn’t want to hurt your father’s feelings. Then one night, this was recent, within the past few months, I went up there. And do you know what? Something about the vents, maybe because the guest bedroom is on top of our room, and the vents? Anyway, the point is that he’s even louder upstairs. I know it sounds impossible.”

“It’s bizarre,” I said, “because I don’t hear any of it. And trust me I’ve been awake.”

“No. It doesn’t make it over to your room. I’m glad it doesn’t bother you.”

By now my eyes had adjusted to the lighting and I felt bad about my initial shock at finding her here. And upon further review I decided she was right about the living room. Of course she was. This was more her home than anyone’s.

“You’ve slept in my room?”

“No I have not.”

“Let me ask you something, Mom. Do you ever hear anything up in the attic?”

Her hands and mug went from chest to lap. “The attic?”

“I’m just wondering. Any sounds at all.”

“Is this about the squirrels?”

“Different than squirrels.”

“How different?”

“Just different.”

“No,” she said, raising the mug. “There’s nothing in the attic.”

For several minutes neither of us was willing to speak or leave or do anything besides sit there.

“At least stay through the fall, honey. I know how much you love our falls in the Midwest.”

“Mom.”

“You were always saying on the phone how much you missed the seasons. There was that funny thing you said about smog doesn’t count as a season.”

“You mailed me that box of leaves,” I said. “I loved that.”

“You and your father will rake the yard,” she said. “Do you know what that would mean to your father? To rake leaves next to you, side by side?”

“These allergies,” I said.

“Christmastime around here is so special. All the energy, all the trees hung with lights, the decorations at the Botanical Garden. It’s going to be beautiful.”

A pause lingered.

“And who can resist the spring? I don’t have to tell you how nice our springtime is. All the green, the yards. The bulbs sprouting through the softening ground. The whole city blooms. Color everywhere.”

“I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen.”

“The other day, Potter, just the other day I had the oddest memory of your childhood. Right in the middle of lunch. Someone was saying something about some group of people down in the wine country, and then all of a sudden for some reason I remembered when you were first learning to speak. I was trying to teach you colors, but all you wanted to talk about was yellow. You loved yellow. I think you liked the softness of it. Gentle yellow. Only two colors mattered: yellow and not yellow. Except you pronounced it
yayo
. I’d point to something and you’d say
yayo
or
not yayo
. I held up a banana.
Yayo.
Outside in the grass.
Not yayo
.”

As we sat in icy dark, the vents exhaling freezing streams that collided somewhere overhead, then settled downward, I pictured a world in which all things were so wonderfully reducible. By this point I was positive my mother had seen Freddy. The jurisdiction she held over this household, her deep knowledge of its most recessed nooks and crannies, she must have.

“That message on the machine is from Audrey,” she said.

“What? She called here?”

“About fifteen minutes ago. I thought maybe the ringing would wake up your father so I sort of let it go until the machine picked up.”

In addition to trying very very hard not to leap over the couch to get at the machine, I was also working to come up with an explanation for why Audrey would call my home over my cell phone. I pictured her clutching an international phone card, bent over the alien shape of some pale gray or blue phone terminal, handset resting horizontally in that European manner, poking the elaborate sequence of card number, country code, area code, and the final seven digits. She was sad, perhaps. Longing for some connection with a household, the anchor of home. Was she crying as she dialed? She might have been crying. Or laughing, Carmel’s fingers tickling her bald head.

“She’s in Germany,” my mother said.

It was amazing what this tiny bit of knowledge did for me. Germany, a smallish country, roughly, I approximated, the size of a middle-American state? I could now pinpoint her in a region. This was a problem for us, my habit of not exactly needing, per se, but very much appreciating knowledge of her location. She couldn’t stand when I left her messages with
not sure where you
are, but I’m
. . . or some such passive query. And part of me was pleased that my little habit angered her. It showed that the finer points of our communication mattered, that our words counted in some larger sense. I stood and crossed the room to the little stand where we kept the answering machine.

“Here. I’ll give you some privacy.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I mean you’ve already heard it.”

She settled back into the couch, relieved and heavy, and I wondered if maybe there was something besides milk in her mug.

Hello, Mayses, it’s Audrey calling from Heidelberg, this
wonderful little German town on this wonderful German
river. We’re near the Black Forest. Or wait, maybe we’re in
the Black Forest? Carmel has a family friend at the university,
so last night we had this meal, oh my God this meal,
and I drank ale from the horn of some creature, some horned
beast. What else? There’s a castle up on this hill we’re about
to hike to. Oh man, card’s running out. But Potter! People
here say there are faeries in the woods around the castle, actual
real live faeries that will grant you wishes if you catch.
Oh the lady is saying there’s no more time. Anyway, Carmel
bought this net? Shut up lady! Okay so I hope everything is

End of message. I replayed it once more, then pressed delete and went back to my father’s chair. I stared at my toes inside my socks. Carla sipped her mug and held it just below her chin. Never had I so thoroughly appreciated my family’s penchant for conversational minimalism. What could my mother think of this girl?
Faeries
said it all. What was there for her to ask? To answer? No, we opted for silence because it was what we knew best. And now something must have been altered or made somehow special, some new layer of noiselessness left behind by Audrey’s voice, because only now did I hear the faint nasally rips of my father echoing from back in the bedroom.

“Sounds like a walrus dying,” I said.

Carla leaned back so she could unfold her legs. She stood and stretched arms over her head with the mug hanging from one finger. Then she approached me in my father’s chair, leaned forward, and kissed my forehead.

“I love you so much sometimes I wonder if it’s even fair.”

When I awoke, still in my father’s chair, the first razors of dawn were slicing through darkness outside and everything looked a color right smack between yellow and not yellow. I heard the first cries of early-rising birds and the metallic, ratchet-like snores sounding from the master bedroom, where I imagined my exhausted mother lying, eyes open, staring at the ceiling above.

It was almost time to go deliver the city’s bottled water.

I worked. I went and loaded and drove and unloaded and reloaded and drove and punched my time card and came home. I showered. Each day I considered writing something to Audrey, and each day I did not.

I sat on the front porch sipping a beer, listening to the come-and- go drone of cicadas. One house over, the Hoyne daughter emerged from the front door and began the walk to a silver Jetta parked in the street. I followed her blond hair against the background of prevailing green, like some halo accompanying her frame, and her name came to me: Zoe. She drove the twenty yards to the front of my house, then sat there with her left arm hanging out the window. She didn’t look at me. And there was something about her arm, a nonchalance, call it a poetic carelessness, hanging there, hand patting the beat to whatever music she had on. I finished my beer at what I pretended was my own pace, then set the bottle down and approached her car in deliberate steps, stretching my forearms as I went. She wasn’t wearing any makeup.

“You should get in.”

“Into the car, you mean. Where you headed?”

“Anywhere. I had to get out of my house. Mom is on the phone with my brother because something’s wrong, or his version of wrong, so she had to console. My mother consoles loudly.” She smiled, and something I kept inside ceased to exist. “Come on.”

“Tonight’s a big night. The mother’s got some kind of roast going in the oven.”

“How about you just get in the car.”

A woman in a minivan passed by and waved, while a squirrel sat motionless on the power line directly overhead, nibbling at something in its paws, watching us all. I walked around the car and got into the front seat. The music was old, staticky reggae. The interior was littered with the normal bits of teen-girl livelihood. Magazines full of bad advice. Those cheerleading shoes with the removable plastic-triangle colors. Things I wanted to call trinkets. I was pleased to see a standard transmission. I pulled a cigarette from the pack in the emergency-brake divot and examined the song list from one of the blank CD cases scattered around the front seats. I put the cigarette back. We still hadn’t moved.

“I’ll admit a small amount of relief that even your brother needs consolation.”

“He’s probably eight times more pathetic than you’d ever imagine.” She picked up the pack of cigarettes. “He calls with weekly law school updates on his class rank. And Christ help us if it ever falls below three.”

“How long have you been a smoker?”

“Been a smoker?” she said. “Oh God. I’ve never thought of myself that way. I started in sixth grade to make sure none of my friends would disown me.”

I formulated a plan to avoid any and all references to age, grade, or temporality in general. Which I knew was impossible since this immaculate girl was a full six years younger than me, meaning right now the ratios of age disparity over personal age (6/22 and 6/16) were too significant to shrug away. I had already run through the usual extension of relativity: at my thirty, she’d be twenty-four, and so on. But these thoughts worked regressively as well: the deeply disturbing image of a six-year-old me like some wolf, fangs dripping drool onto the newborn girl below.

“Are you aware that the songs on these CDs are horrible? This is a concern my generation has about your generation. This comes from a complete certainty that our own music was crap, and therefore yours must be even crapper.”

“You can’t judge someone based on something given them as a gift,” she said. “A gift only speaks of the person giving it.”

“I remember one Christmas being given two different Jane Goodall biographies,” I said. “The ape woman.”

“And what’s this generation nonsense?”

“Are we still sitting here?” I said. “I was sure we’d begun moving by now.”

Zoe laughed and pulled us away from the curb. I could see this little girl at her fortieth birthday party, taking the number in stride, stepping over it like some sidewalk crack.

“The boys I know seem to think a mix CD is this like ultraperfect present. And I’m supposed to gush thanks and think of them every time I play it. Since they require upward of five entire minutes to make.”

“There was a time when a mix tape meant a lot of clicking noises. Holding your finger above the pause and record buttons of the tape deck. My God. You don’t remember any of this.”