The Worst Years of Your Life (27 page)

M
Y MOTHER
keeps junk mail and new magazines in a big wicker basket by her bed. I kneel down and start flipping through the magazines, and I find one after only a minute: Jim Palmer sits on a gray cube. He wears tiny striped underpants.
The Jockey Fashion Statement is Bold,
it says. I know my mother and brother aren't home yet, but I hide the magazine under my shirt just in case they come home as I transport it to the bathroom downstairs. The magazine is cool against my stomach.

I prop the new magazine on the tissue box and unzip my shorts. I imagine I live with Jim Palmer, and he has real arcade games in his mansion that I can play for free. During baseball games I sit in the bull pen with Jim and the other Orioles. The other Orioles like me and ask me questions about what I'm learning at school. They tell me that Jim is pitching better now that he has me in his life. After Jim pitches another winning game, he takes me in his red Porsche for pizza. On the way home, he lets me drive and tells me to take it easy on the curves in the road. He insists we take a bath together every night in his giant Jacuzzi, and I show him how to press himself up against the water jet, like I sometimes do in the pool when I'm positive no one is around.

I'
M SURE
Kim Fenster has arranged a fight between me and Samuel, and I almost don't go to school. The school has called my mother, though, and told her I left early yesterday and ditched three classes. She doesn't even ask me why I did it, just tells me I'm grounded for three weeks—a week for each class I missed. I don't care about being grounded. Jay and Phil are dicks and there's no one else to hang out with. “You come right home after school,” my mother tells me as I leave this morning, and I think,
Big whoop.

On the bus, no one sits next to me and no one talks to me. They all know that Samuel's going to beat me up. Samuel will find me the moment I step off the bus, and he'll begin by punching me in the stomach. I'll fall onto the asphalt, and Jay and Phil will call me a fag and bark at me while Samuel kicks me in the head. I'll barely stand up, and Samuel will shove me, and I'll hit my head on the curb, and I'll die, and no one will say anything and Samuel will never even get in trouble.

I
DON'T
even see Samuel when I get to school, and when I walk into homeroom, Lacy's crying in the corner, huddled with a few other crying girls. I sit at a desk near no one and listen to find out what's going on. I hope that Peter dumped Lacy, told her he no longer liked her and that her friends were too mean to me and that I'm his best friend now. The two of us will ride BMX on the track or skateboard in the parking garages downtown every afternoon when my grounding is over. Until then, Peter will come over to my house and we'll play video games or swim and he'll tell my fortune from my palm or my head whenever I want.

Mademoiselle Rosenblatt walks into the room. She's sniffing and her eyes are red like she's been crying, too. She takes roll, reads the boring announcements, and then says, “I gather you've all heard the bad news about Kimberly Fenster. Our homeroom and Mr. Carlson's homeroom will meet in the auditorium during second period. A grief counselor from the school district will help us and answer any questions we might have.”

Kim Fenster was hit by a car on Tanque Verde Road. She was riding her bike to her older sister's apartment less than a mile from her house. Before second period, I hear a few other things like they still hadn't found her arm, she had been going over there to get marijuana, her mom was drunk so she couldn't drive her, she had been decapitated by a truck's mirror. They're all probably lies. It all seems so fake. Just yesterday, she was being a bitch to me and now she's dead, one of her hairy ape arms possibly missing.

I think I wished her dead yesterday or this morning. I must have. I'm always wishing people dead. I know I wished Phil dead yesterday. I imagined him and his mom both dead, in a car accident. I've wished Jim Palmer's real-life wife dead, I'm sure. Or I wished she never even existed, which I think is worse.

Samuel's in Mr. Carlson's homeroom and he sits right behind me during grief counseling. He's wearing the Thunderbird cap today.

The grief counselor is a lady with short hair, big red glasses, and big red earrings. She wears sandals with pants. I don't really hear what she says because I'm trying to remember if I did wish Kim Fenster dead or not. Samuel leans over and whispers, “I'm going to kick your ass, faggot.”

I sit there, the feeling in my stomach like Samuel already did kick my ass, and I look at the grief counselor's toenails, how they match her dumb glasses and earrings, my heart racing, my throat tightening, until I finally turn around to face Samuel, who has the hat on sideways now. “I didn't say that,” I blurt sort of loudly, my voice cracking. “Peter said it and everyone knows he's a liar and—”

But before I can say anything else, I feel Mademoiselle Rosenblatt's fingernails digging into my arm. She tugs me out of my seat and pulls me into the hall, not even letting me grab my backpack. “What is wrong with you, Craig?” she yells. She's crying and her makeup runs down her face like Alice Cooper on Kim Fenster's T-shirt. “What is wrong with you?”

As she guides me to the office, through the empty halls, yelling at me the whole way, I can only think of Jim Palmer. He has never allowed a grand slam. He's won the Cy Young three times. If the Orioles make it to the World Series this year and Jim pitches a winning game, he'll be the only pitcher to win World Series games in three different decades. His perfect hair, long legs, shaggy chest.
The Jockey Fashion Statement is Bold.

And sitting there in the principal's office on the wooden bench, waiting to be punished for disrupting the grief counseling, I can barely stay still. I can't help but smile, knowing that I have Jim Palmer for three more years, as often as I want, until I turn fifteen and have to let him go.

M
Y FATHER DIED BECAUSE OUR HOUSE WAS INFESTED
with ladybugs. Our French neighbors, the Herouxs, had imported a hearty species of the insect to combat aphids in their garden. The ladybugs bred and migrated. Hundreds upon hundreds were living in our curtains, our cabinets, the ventilation system. At first, we thought it was hilarious and fitting for us to be plagued by something so cute and benign. But these weren't nursery rhyme ladybugs. Not the adorable, shiny, red-and-black beetles. These ladybugs were orange. They had uneven brown splotches. When I squished their shells between my thumb and forefinger, they left a rust-colored stain on my skin and an acrid smell that wouldn't wash off. Dad used a vacuum hose to suck up the little arched creatures, but they quickly replaced themselves. The numbers never dwindled. Dad must have smoked a lot of pot before he climbed the ladder to our roof. My guess is that he wanted to cover the opening in the chimney. He'd suspected that the flue wasn't closed all the way. Our house was three stories high. When he fell, he landed on the Herouxs' cement patio, his skull fractured, his neck broken.

For months after his death, I kept finding the ladybugs everywhere. When I stripped my bed, I'd find them in the sheets. When I did laundry, I'd find their dead carapaces in the dryer. When I woke up in the morning, I'd find a pair scuffling along my freshly laundered pillowcases. Then just like that, they were gone.

L
ONG AFTER
the last ladybug's departure, I pulled a pair of sunglasses from Mom's purse on the car seat, fogged the lenses with my breath, rubbed the plastic eyes against my chest, and said to her, “You missed the scenic overlook.”

Mom swiped her sunglasses away from me. “There will be other stops, Elise,” she said.

We were driving through the Texas Hill Country in an upgraded rental car, cruising a roadway called the Devil's Backbone. Our destination: LBJ. His ranch. His reconstructed birth site. The rental car guy had flashed a brilliant smile when he bumped us up from a white Taurus to a monster green SUV. Mom couldn't resist bullying the skinny clerk. “No one screws me on gas mileage. I'm not paying extra to fuel that obscenity. Knock ten dollars off the daily fee.” As the car clerk hammered his keyboard and readjusted the price, Mom winked at me.

My mother the investment banker. Every morning, well before dawn, she would maneuver her own Ford Explorer across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, cell-phoning her underlings while cutting off other commuters. Mom called her first-year analysts “Meat” and bragged that she, in turn, was known as “The Lion.” Mom always wore her long, straightened red hair loose and down her back. She'd sport short skirts and sleeveless dresses, showing off her sculpted calves and biceps. Mom specialized in M&As, corporate restructuring, and bankruptcy. She traveled a lot. Dad had brainstormed our presidential sightseeing tours as a way for him to keep me entertained while Mom flew off to Chicago and Denver, dismantling pharmaceutical corporations along the way.

“I really think we were supposed to stop at that overlook.” We coasted past juniper trees, live oaks, limestone cliffs. As far as I could tell, the whole point of driving the Devil's Backbone was to stop at that particular overlook and view the span of gently sloping hills from the highest vantage point. “Dad would have turned back,” I said.

Mom just kept driving. I passed time by reading snippets from the
Lonely Planet Guide to Texas
and rattling off the names of local towns: Wimberley, Comfort, and Boerne. I flipped down the sun visor, replaited my French braids in the vanity mirror. I'd worn my favorite outfit: red high-top sneakers, baggy khaki shorts, and a T-shirt I'd special-ordered at a mall in Teaneck. For twenty-eight dollars, a man from Weehawken had ironed black velvet letters onto the front of a tiny green jersey. The letters spelled out V
ICTIM
. When my mother asked how I got off being so self-pitying, I told her it was the name of my favorite underground band.

The Devil's Backbone reminded me of the shingles sore tormenting my lower torso. The giant scab resembled a hard red shell. The family doctor had explained how sometimes the chicken pox virus would remain dormant in a nerve ending, waiting for the immune system to weaken before reemerging. He was concerned because he'd never seen shingles in anyone my age. Usually he treated it in older patients, or in cases occurring with cancer or AIDS. People closing in on death. I told Mom the shingles were proof I was special. The agony wasn't limited to the blisters on my back. My whole body felt inflamed, as if a rabid wolf were hunting rabid squirrels inside my chest. The doctor recommended ibuprofen for the pain. He gave me pamphlets describing stress-reducing breathing exercises. The first few nights Mom slipped me half a Vicodin and a nip of Benedictine brandy. As I tried to sleep, I heard her roaming from living room to bedroom to family room. I listened. My mother the widow did not weep, did not cry out for her dead husband.

A
YEAR AFTER
my father died, my mother's breasts began to grow. She developed a deep, embarrassing plunge of cleavage, a pendulous swinging bosom that attacked my own flat body each time she hugged me good night. Mom's belly had pouted. Ballooned. I could detect the domed button of her navel pressing out against the soft silk of her blouses. Her ankles swelled and I became suspicious. Mom was maybe six months into her pregnancy. I did the math. Dad had been pushing dead too long to be the father. I was about to enter my sophomore year at the Academy of Holy Angels. Before school started, I wanted the shingles on my back to disappear, I wanted to tour the reconstructed birthplace of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I wanted my mother to admit to me that she was pregnant.

W
ITH
D
AD GONE,
I'd insisted on upholding our family's tradition of visiting presidential landmarks. Dad and I had been doing them in chronological order. We'd seen the big ones: Mount Vernon, Monticello, The Hermitage, Sagamore Hill. Weeks before Dad broke his neck, we'd spent a lively afternoon in the gift shop of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, rubbing our faces in the soft velour of JFK commemorative golf towels. The less popular the sites, the more obscure the leader of our country, the more Dad got excited: “Elise, can you imagine? John Tyler actually sat in this breakfast nook and ate soft-boiled eggs from those egg cups.” In Columbia, Tennessee, I tore white azalea petals from James K. Polk's ancestral garden while Dad rambled on about the Mexican War, the “dark horse,” and the “Fifty-four Forty or Fight.” At the Albany Rural Cemetery, Dad and I knelt solemnly before the grave of Chester Alan Arthur. A giant marble angel with voluminous wings towered over us. We prayed to our favorite forgotten leader, the father of civil service reform. One year, we spent Christmas in Cape Cod at a beachside inn that had been a secret getaway for Grover Cleveland and his mistress. Mom couldn't make that trip, so Dad and I tramped by ourselves on the snow-covered sand dunes, plotting my own future run for the presidency. “You need a catchphrase. And a trademark hairdo so the cartoonists can immortalize you.”

A
LL DAY
we'd been driving in various stages of silence and radio static. Mom asked whether I'd like to stop for sundaes. I considered patting her belly and making a joke about cravings for ice cream and pickles. I had expected Mom to nix my travel plans for us, but really, I just wanted her to be honest and say to me, “Elise, I can't fly. Not in my condition.” Instead, when I said, “Johnson,” Mom folded her arms against her burgeoning chest. She swung her hair over her shoulders, and said, “Texas in August? Why can't it be Hawaii? I'm certain Lyndon Johnson loved the hula.”

The day before, we'd visited the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. Mom and I took the elevator up to the top of the Texas School Book Depository. We slowly worked our way through the permanent exhibit dedicated to the Kennedy assassination. Though a glass wall surrounded the actual Oswald window, Mom and I got close enough to size up the short distance between the building and the
X
on the street below. The
X
marked the spot where Kennedy was first hit. I'd always imagined Dealey Plaza as an enormous expanse of traffic and park, but here it was in front of me, tiny and green, more like a miniature replica made by a film crew. One SUV after another covered the
X
as the cars drove over the site in perpetual reenactment of Kennedy's last ride. This was the bona fide scene of the infamous crime. Mom whispered, “Even I could make that shot.” She hugged me from behind and I felt the baby's heartbeat vibrate through her belly. In anticipation of our trip, I'd begun calling my secret sibling “Lyndon.” I asked, “Is Lyndon kicking?” Mom ignored me. Weeks ago, when I'd asked her point blank if she was pregnant and quizzed her on what she intended to do with the baby, instead of answering the question she told me that her new goal in life was to get me away from “the fucking Holy Angels.”

Dad was the Catholic. Mom's family had come over on the Mayflower. “Elise, a lot of Yankees brag about tracing their roots back. Always be conscious of your place in history. Most of the people on that ship were poor. Your relatives were the lucky ones with money.” Before her parents divorced and squandered everything, my mother grew up rich in Manhattan. Her childhood bedroom had a view of the Sheep Meadow and the Central Park Reservoir. Both of Mom's doormen were named Fritz. When she turned six, her folks hired Richard Avedon to take the snapshots at her birthday party. At sixteen, she'd curtsied before Princess Grace at a charity fund-raiser for retired racehorses. I often felt as though Dad and I were descended from one class of people, while Mom hailed from another class entirely.

My father sold pies for a living. Nominally, he was the vice president of “The Pie Piper,” his parents' international bakery corporation, but mostly what Dad chose to do was drive his pie truck around the Tri-State Area. Checking and restocking Safe-ways and Star Markets. Shelving lemon cream, Coconut Dream, and chocolate meringue pies. Dad had a jacket with T
EAMSTER
embroidered on the back. He liked to brag that he knew the fastest routes in and out of Manhattan, at any point during the day. He knew when best to take the Lincoln Tunnel.

Dad felt that my aristocratic heritage and working-class line-age would make me an ideal political candidate. He cast me as a liberal Democrat and cast himself as my campaign manager. Dad first ran me in third grade for homeroom line leader. I lost to Andorra Rose, whose mother, on election day, made two dozen chocolate cupcakes with pink rosebuds in the center. Dad viewed this loss as a tactical oversight. Our future campaigns always involved the Pie Piper donating dozens of pies and pastries to Holy Angels. In fifth grade, I was class treasurer. In seventh grade, I was student representative to the advisory council on redesigning our school uniforms. Dad imagined I would win the governer-ship of New Jersey, and from there, if I could find the right Southern running mate, become the first woman president of the United States.

I was twelve the afternoon I caught Dad sprawled out on the Philadelphia Chippendale, one hand holding a silver lighter, the other hand cradling a short ceramic pipe. There'd been a bomb scare at Holy Angels and the nuns had begrudgingly sent us home early. Dad was wearing his boxer shorts and watching a rerun of
The Joker's Wild.
He flung a cashmere blanket over his lap, swung his legs off my mother's two-hundred-year-old sofa and said, “Honey, come meet James Buchanan.” I sat beside my bare-chested father, his blond hair flattened on one side, and watched him twirl his pipe around. “Made this in college. Art class. The clay morphed in the kiln.” He showed me the blunt end of the pipe. “Looks just like our bachelor president. His first lady was his niece. Handsome fellow.” On the TV, Wink Martin-dale exclaimed, “Joker! Joker! Joker!” Dad smiled, “Don't worry. Your mom has seen me smoke.”

My father confided to me that he'd had panic attacks as a kid. “I'd be paralyzed with fear. Knocked out with it. The only thing that helped was reading almanacs.” Dad memorized historical facts, like the years each president served in office, and he'd repeat these dates in an effort to calm himself down. “Zachary Taylor 1849–50, Rutherford Birchard Hayes 1877–81, Franklin Pierce 1853–57.” At fifteen, Dad discovered pot.

I loved sitting in the living room while Dad toked up. Marijuana haze drifted around me, settling on the folds of my wool pleated skirt. I'd lean my neck down against my Peter Pan collar and catch the wonderful stink of weed lingering against my blouse. I was a nervous kid. I often threw up before big tests. No one at Holy Angels invited me to their sleepovers anymore, on account of my loud, thrashing night terrors. Even my closest friend, Alana Clinton, often insisted I take a chill pill. I'd attempted hypnosis therapy to treat the warts on my hands, the muscle spasm in my left eye, the mysterious rashes that appeared across my stomach, my inner-ear imbalance, and my tooth-grinding problem. Only breathing in my father's pot smoke truly relaxed me. He never let me inhale directly from Buchanan, but he'd grant me a contact high. Afterward, the two of us would split one of my father's ancestral peach pies. This happened once or twice a week. Mom didn't know.

M
OM AND
I pulled off the Devil's Backbone and stopped for soft-serve at a place called The Frozen Armadillo. She got a chocolate and vanilla twist with a cherry-flavored dip, and I ordered a vanilla cone covered in something advertised as Twinkle-Kote. Outside in the August heat, the ice cream dripped down our arms. We decided to eat the cones in the air-conditioned rental car. I told Mom my theory about LBJ and the Kennedy assassination. I was convinced that Lyndon was the real culprit. Nothing that big could happen in Texas without Lyndon's approval.