2.
Thank You for Saying That
When my father and I came home from Gaia Foods, he kissed my mother on the mouth and sliced the pears. I watched him to see if he looked guilty, but I couldn’t see his face as he stood at the kitchen counter chopping. My mother slid a pizza from the oven, spun the greens, and asked about his day in her low, steady therapist’s voice, the way she always did. If she knew anything, it didn’t show on her face.
“Did the anthro guy try to get his new courses in the major?” She dialed down the volume on All Things Considered to give her full attention to his answer.
“He tried, and then he asked us to articulate our needs. He’s a whore.” My father plucked the grapes from their stems and dropped them on the pears. A grape fell to the linoleum, and he stepped on it without noticing.
“Does he make you angry?”
“Do I seem angry? Not particularly. He’s a nice whore.”
“So nothing’s wrong?”
“I’d like to banish him to a comfortable island before he kidnaps more of my students and conscripts them, that’s all.”
My mother nodded as she fanned the steaming pizza with a mitt. She’d sensed something was off about him—did she know? Was there more to know than what I’d seen? She called my little sister, Rachel, who shuffled in with her library book about an Arab girl forced into marriage, her hair wild with static from reading in the corduroy beanbag. I didn’t want it to be dinnertime. I was usually ravenous all hours of the day, but now I was too jumpy to eat. I drummed my fingers against the fridge, the radiator, the bowl of greens.
As we sat at the table, my mother, my father, Rachel, and I, I stood my mother next to Nancy.
Nancy, like my father, taught at Wattsbury College, a small liberal arts school whose campus sprawled a square half-mile between the Wattsbury town common and the lumberyard. From the common you could see its glassy library, from the yard its columned gymnasium. It had redbrick dormitories jacketed in ivy, but it was smaller than any school in the Ivy League, and sported a color scheme I’d never seen elsewhere: The stucco business school and the observatory were lemon, the administrative buildings sherbet orange. It was as if a more whimsical civilization had ruled Massachusetts in days beyond remembering, and fallen, stranding a colony in our midst. Whereas my mother taught psych at a college twenty minutes west, in the shadow of the Berkshire Hills. It was my high school duplicated five times over, beige blocks, concrete.
“You look glum, Joshua,” my mother said. “What’s wrong?” She flashed me clown faces: a cartoon frown, a madman smile, the gape-mouthed stare of a person struck with a pie.
Was it that my father thought Nancy was hotter? “Your outfit’s strange, Mom,” I said.
My mother’s clown face disappeared. She looked at me probingly, twisted a lock of her long brown hair. She wore a denim button-down over a pleated denim dress. “It’s not really an outfit,” she noted.
“In this family,” my father said, “we permit women freedom of dress.” He reached into my mother’s hair and rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. “Your mom looks nice.”
“Notice he didn’t actually defend what I was wearing,” said my mother. But she was smiling. There was something about this, her smiling at my father, after he’d kissed Nancy, that was intolerable to me.
“We ran into Nancy Dunn and Khadijah at Gaia today,” I said. My father glanced at me and resumed chewing.
“Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn,” said Rachel. She had memorized the names of all the girls and most of the boys in my class, knew our social hierarchies better than those of her own grade. “She’s pretty, unconventionally.”
My father waggled his eyebrows. “I bet Josh liked her outfit.”
Rachel made the sound like the crescendo of a police siren that to seventh graders signifies the detection of lust. I blushed and dropped the subject.
When we were done eating, my father cleared the table while my mother headed for the stairs. Every evening, immediately after dinner, she performed her rituals: a hundred prostrations, a seated meditation, the pouring of water into twin orange cups.
“Why do you do that stuff?” I called to her. It was the first time I’d raised the subject in years; she never spoke of it. I looked to see if my question had provoked a telling reaction from my father, but he had his head in the cabinet over the sink, where we kept the wine. “Does it ever bother you that the rest of us don’t believe in it?”
“No,” she said, turning on a step, crossing her arms. “It would be worse for you to become a Buddhist because I’m a Buddhist than for you to not be a Buddhist.” It was the same answer she’d given when I was in junior high. “I do it because if I didn’t do it I’d be”—she lifted her hands and wailed like a ghost—“crazy.”
I knew what she meant. Nine years ago, there had been a period of experimentation with violence. When Rachel was in toilet training, my mother had made her potty fly. The kick was more fluid, more natural, than the ones I’d seen her execute when she picked me up at soccer practice. It was a surge of strength from her heart to her leg. The potty leapt across the living room with its lid open and landed upright at my father’s feet, splashed pee on his sandals. She apologized to me, because I’d seen it, and I pretended to be upset because I felt it was expected. But I liked my parents’ fighting, even when it frightened me. When I saw it I could feel that they needed each other, sharpened each other. I felt some of what they felt, the fear of getting hit mixed with joy that somebody might give enough of a shit about what you were saying to hit you.
What I wanted right now was for them to scream at each other. “Dad,” I said, as my mother disappeared upstairs, “don’t you get sick of Mom doing insane groveling in the bedroom? Doesn’t it annoy you?” My mother paused on the landing and listened.
My father spun a bottle of wine against his palm. “No, Joshy,” he said. My mother continued her ascent. “It’s restorative. The equivalent is when I watch baseball, or read popular history.”
The thump of my mother’s prostrations sounded rhythmically from the master bedroom. My father uncorked his bottle of red and took it to his study. Rachel went to the phone to call one of her friends—it was Friday night. I stood and sat down, stood and sat down again.
“Why are you being weird?” Rachel asked.
“This is what I do when I’m thinking about a Russian paper.”
I went out to the yard and lay on my back in cold grass and stale snow. The gray branch of a sapling shivered. What I’d seen in Gaia might have been a dream, to judge from the way the world marched on. Had my senses tricked me? Was I one of those adolescent males my mother talked about who had manic breaks, who lost their minds forever in episodes of grand hallucination?
I yanked grass out of the ground, my arms stretched to either side, and filled my hands with snow. I pounded the earth. “I saw it,” I said.
I rose and walked inside, through the kitchen to the closet in the hall. My father’s barn jacket hung from a chipped white hook. I stepped into the closet and closed the door. It was dark. I pulled on the quilted jacket, warm and capacious, like a bed. I ran my hand over the corduroy on the right side until I found what I was looking for, stuck in the grooved cloth, and tasted them for sweetness, to make sure they derived from cookies: crumbs.
The next day, when the phone rang, I was taking close-ups of the kitchen radiator for photography class. I was pouring small amounts of water on the radiator, trying to make it look like one of the ominous steaming props I’d seen in a Nine Inch Nails video.
My mother answered. I knew from her face that a person of significance was on the line; in moments of drama she assumed a meditative reticence. As a general rule, the events that caused my father to go bombastic caused my mother to go still.
“It’s for you,” she said.
I took the receiver and said hello.
“This is Khadijah,” came a small, effortful voice. “How are you doing?”
So that was what my mother’s portentous blankness had meant: It’s a girl. This was unprecedented. My mother made a face I had never seen her make, a mix of triumph and amusement, and jogged upstairs.
“It’s really good to hear from you,” I said. I punched myself in the back of the neck, three times, as the words came out.
Khadijah asked how the Russian Club had fared on Language Day. I gave a nuanced account. She provided an overview of the French Club’s fiscal woes. When she fell silent, I looked outside, trying to think of a way to say, Why did you call me?
“The snow appears to be melting.” I slurred the words, to sound casual.
“What?” she said.
“Snow is melting,” I enunciated, enraged at myself.
“True.” She drew a breath. “Maybe you’d like to meet. Maybe you’d like to meet up, downtown, and discuss that thing that we saw happen.”
“Yes.” I took the cordless into the bathroom and shut the door. “Yes. I feel insane. I am becoming an insane person.”
“That,” she said, “is exactly what I hoped you would say.”
I sloshed uphill, past the common, the Bank of Boston, the head shop, Al Bum’s Records, the fire station, the townie bar. In half an hour I was kicking the muck off my Doc Martens, on my way to the back table at Classé Café, where she was already seated, homework spread before her.
“I have proof it’s not just kissing,” she said, after we’d ordered carrot cake and herbal tea, and she’d put away her binder. “They’re in love.” She said this in a perfunctory manner, looking out the window at an incense salesman on the sidewalk who moved as if he’d had three strokes. I asked her how she knew.
She reached into her backpack and unrolled a charcoal still life: a pineapple. “Grotesque, right? I draw like an ape.”
“All the pineapples are like that,” I said. It was true. Ms. Chumly had made everyone do a charcoal drawing of a pineapple, and no pineapple had been an unqualified success. The halls were blackened with grenade-like fruit. The effect was austere. It made you think about how every student who drew a pineapple was someday going to die.
“Even so, my pineapple particularly sucks,” Khadijah said. “So last night, after we put away the groceries, I show it to my mom so she can see I got an A—she has a rule that she has to see all my grades on everything—and my dad walks in and laughs at my pineapple and then he leaves.”
I sipped from my cup of Lemon Zinger. I looked directly at her with my eyebrows raised, something I’d seen male love interests do in romantic comedies.
“My mom looks at him like she’s going to throw a knife at his back. She picks up my pineapple and goes, ‘There’s a friend of mine who’s seen your work, who told me you’d be a great artist if you had the proper training.’” Khadijah paused for effect. “She was talking about your dad. Isn’t it obvious, when you think about it?”
I stared at her, trying to figure out if she was right.
“Do you think I’m overdramatic? My parents say I’m overdramatic.”
“No way.”
“Oh my god, thank you for saying that.” She threw her arms across the table and laid her head beside her plate, to signal a lifting of a great burden from her shoulders.
The bad news: It was possible that Nancy and my father were committing a crime against our families. The silver lining: There was a conspiratorial feeling growing between Khadijah and me. We were being drawn together in a game.
That night, I walked through the last snowstorm of the year to CVS and bought a Gillette Sensor Excel razor. I studied the pictures of hair on bottles until I began to comprehend conditioner and pomade, how each might amplify the benefits of the other. I bought a Neutrogena antiacne scrub, a witch hazel toner. The next afternoon, I asked my mother to take me to the JCPenney in the all but gutted Mountain Farms Mall, known locally as the Dead Mall, where I picked three rugby shirts, and to Payless, at the nameless, less thoroughly eviscerated mall farther down Route 9, known as the Live Mall, where she bought me a pair of running shoes. As the fresh snow melted on the springy new track at the college, I went for the first run of my life.
When I came back, my lungs full of silver air, my skin red and warm, I looked at my father with wonder, reading in his chair. How could he look the way he always had, even though he had kissed a person not his wife? I wanted to scoop up a snowball and throw it at his head, if only to catch him off guard, dent his shell. I needed to know: Were he and Nancy Dunn screwing?
No matter what he had done, he had a talent for secrecy. He sat with a bowl of ice cream, his first glass of wine for the evening, his eighth or ninth military history of the year—he never tired of wars, though he hadn’t been in one and professed hatred of them. He saw me staring. “If I keep eating like this, and you keep working out, I won’t be able to murder you, once I start to feel threatened by you,” he said. He smiled, warmly. “You’ll just outrun me.” He returned to Scourge of Dunkirk.
I climbed the two stories to my renovated room in the attic, showered with conditioner, cranked out four push-ups, and took my clothes off in front of the mirror. I felt I could see myself become less revolting as I became more and more interested in being devoted to someone. And now that there was something unrevolting to give, I wanted to give it. I stretched my arms out in either direction and lolled my head to one side, imagining myself on a cross.
I wanted to give what I had to Khadijah, of course. Part of it was the way she looked and the way she carried herself. But it was also that a small piece of me was close to a small piece of her in a way I had never been close to someone, because of what we had seen.
Satisfied my father was stationary for the evening, I slunk to his study, in my pajamas, and rifled through his desk. It was the nicest piece of furniture we had. We didn’t have a lot of money; we’d been to Europe once, to Paris, and my father had cursed every time the bill came for lunch. The desk was a gift from an entertainment lawyer he knew from the Harvard Lampoon. Made of black wood, it worked like a drawbridge; you turned a little brass key and eased the work surface down on brass hinges, revealing six black drawers, each brass-knobbed and coated on the inside with mauve felt.
There was nothing of significance in any of them. A magnifying glass, an unopened letter from the Democratic Socialists of America, a roll of tape with no tape left on it, little mauve strands clinging to the translucent circle. In one drawer that was otherwise empty, there was an unused postcard. I flipped it over; the picture side was a photograph of Emily Dickinson’s house, in nearby Amherst, taken from the street. I thought about this a little while, and slipped the postcard in my pocket.
On Monday, during study hall, I wrote Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn a note on the postcard. “My dad HATES the Emily Dickinson house. He says it’s an ahistorical tourist fetish. Does your MOM like it?” The capitalization of hates might have been hyperbole, but he had called it a tourist fetish once, and though he hadn’t really called it ahistorical, ahistorical was a word he applied with derision to many things other people liked, like Schindler’s List and Mel Gibson’s version of Hamlet. I slipped the postcard through the gills of Khadijah’s locker.
It materialized in my own locker the next day. A message was written on it in a large, loopy script that must have been Khadijah’s: “Found in my mom’s office @ work.” A twice-folded sheet of graph paper was attached with an apple green paper clip.
I’d deduced that Nancy Dunn was an art historian of some talent from the fact that my father deigned to kiss her, but I was still awed by what I saw. On the graph paper was a time line, untitled, drawn with a fine, black pen, ferociously graceful, the cursive you’d think would flow from one of Nancy’s dark hands, with their skeletal fingers. It might as well have traced the development of pottery in Mesopotamia, or perspective in European painting. But its subject was a series of local outings.
At the beginning, on the left edge of the black horizontal line, there was a perfect miniature architectural drawing of a greenhouse. Beneath it, a caption: “Botanic Garden of Smith College.” The next item, two inches to the right, was a little millstone, filled in with black and perfectly round. Beneath the millstone, in the same indestructible, filament-thin block letters of the caption previous: “Book Mill Used Books, Montague, MA.” Next was the Sunderland Pet Shelter, illustrated with a litter of lithe kittens, who bared claws at each other in Darwinian conflict as they tumbled across the bottom of the page; then, a movie screen that emitted thick, black rays of light and displayed a title I didn’t understand: La règle du jeu. It was at the terminus of the line that Nancy had drawn a picture of the Emily Dickinson Homestead, its balcony framed by identical trees.
Outside the social studies classroom, I caught Khadijah’s shoulder. For a moment, our eyes met and we passed something back and forth, a mix of elation and panic. Then we remembered we were surrounded by our peers and assumed postures of ironic detachment and bemusement.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I’m still not persuaded. But thank you.”
“Neither am I,” said Khadijah. “So.” We turned in opposite directions and walked away, backpacks bouncing, stupidly fast.
The time line became the keystone of our investigation. It turned otherwise innocuous objects into proof; it was what allowed us to settle the matter in our minds.
“Dad,” Rachel called from the kitchen that evening, “are we getting a sweet-natured, mixed-breed sheepdog whose behavior shows very mild signs of puppyhood trauma, but who will blossom under the care of a firm but gentle master?”
“Who wouldn’t blossom under one of those, honey?” My father swiped the Sunderland Pet Shelter flyer from her hands. “Daddy was using that as a bookmark. Why did you take it from Daddy’s book? You should try to keep a respectful distance from your daddy’s things. My own daddy, good Irishman, would have gone somewhat apoplectic if you had appropriated a bookmark like that.”
“I just wanted to see if the book had Holocaust pictures.” She was at the peak of a one-sided carnage phase.
“Your old dad went to Sunderland for a bike ride and stopped to look at the dogs. You know how much I’d love to get you one, but we have to consider your mother’s allergies.”
At school the next morning, I ran to Khadijah as she hopped off the bus. “My dad took home a picture of a dog from the shelter,” I said. “You were right. It’s a definite thing.”
What we’d been doing had come to resemble a game so closely that I was surprised when Khadijah’s face collapsed and she covered her eyes with her hands. When she withdrew them, she was twitching. Her brow wrinkled. Her mouth puckered. Her cheeks assumed an alien roundness. She was trying to hold it together, like she had a broken wrist.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say it like it was good news.” But it was too late. She signaled forgiveness with a wave and spun into the crowd marching through the green double doors.
We were in almost the same location that afternoon, just after the final bell, when she appeared at my side. Her eyes were red, her face was calm.
“Come with me,” she said. “We’re going to the Thing in the Woods.”
The Thing in the Woods was a rusted wheel that must have once belonged to a landscaping vehicle. It sat in a fairy ring of mashed cigarettes and glittering bottle glass. Residual snow lay in patches on the brown grass, like mold on bread.
Khadijah drew two sheets of paper, the same graph paper her mother had used for the illustrated time line, from a pocket of her three-ring binder. I considered for a second whether the chart could have been a forgery of Khadijah’s, but I knew that her draftsmanship was not as delicate as Nancy’s; the person who could make those inky kittens dart and swipe would not have drawn as geologic a pineapple as Khadijah’s. Khadijah’s handwriting, too, was different from the handwriting on her mother’s time line, larger, loopier, more arabesque.
She’d written: “I, Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn, will never cheat on anyone. If I’m in a relationship and I want to be with someone else, I will either wait and see if it changes or I will break up with the person I’m with before I do anything. I will not be an a*shole and just cheat on them. If I think about doing it, I will remember this moment, now.” The other sheet of graph paper had the same vow written on it, only with my name at the beginning instead of hers.
She took the sheet with her name, knelt in the grass, and held it to the side of the rusted wheel. She took a blue ballpoint pen from her pocket and signed. Watching me closely, she offered the pen.
I knelt beside her in the grass. I pressed the paper against the rough surface of the wheel and put down my name in stilted, overly slanted cursive, the first time I signed my name rather than wrote it. Facing each other on our knees, we shook hands.
“Here’s my question,” I said, dusting off my shins as we walked away. “If they’re into each other, if they make each other so happy, why don’t they get divorced and be with each other? People don’t hold it against you if you get divorced in Wattsbury.”
She folded the sheets of graph paper, creased the fold, and handed me mine. “Because we exist.”