6.
Almost More Like Poems
Rachel raised her hand as soon as we were assembled at the kitchen table for the family meeting. “Divorce,” she said. My parents stared at her and I knew she was right.
“An experiment,” my mother said.
“That’s just about right, trying something new,” my father corrected. “An experiment in living separately.” He cleared his throat, switching to lighter news. “I’m moving to New York. On some weekends I’ll come here and stay at an apartment I’m going to rent, and on some you’ll come down on the train.”
I thought, Good. Since Gaia Foods, it had been difficult to watch my parents speak to each other, so I was glad they’d live far apart. The euphoria that had accompanied the revelation that my father slept with Nancy was gone. What remained was the knowledge that for a long time—I didn’t know how long—my parents’ marriage had been a carcass walking upright. Now they were talking and listening with no expression on their faces, upright carcasses themselves.
He still doesn’t know we saw him kissing Nancy in Gaia, I thought. He thinks he got away with it for a long time. I looked at Rachel and my mother. Did they know what I had seen in the police station last night? Did anyone know that Khadijah and I had been on the verge of a kiss?
“Josh, your father and I have talked about what happened at the station,” my mother said, her voice drained of character. “We’d appreciate it if you’d not discuss it right now.” With her eyes, she indicated Rachel.
Rachel came to understand that she was being left out of something secret and horrible. She began to cry. “What is she talking about?” she asked my father. “Why do you want to move to New York?”
“I’m still going to see you every weekend, sweetie. But I’ve never been fully at home in the ecosystem of a political science professor. I wish I could give you a better explanation, because I love you so much, but please understand, I’m a different person than the one I’ve been acting like I am.” His voice went high. “I’m going to try to make some connections down there, my love. I want to find some people I can talk to about the kinds of essays I want to write, essays that are almost more like poems than essays. I’ll try to publish in some respected quarterlies, for starters. Since I’ll be consulting for nonprofits on a freelance basis, it’ll be easier to keep that work coming if I’m able to be in the belly of the beast, so to speak. So it’s practical, sweetie, try to see that. Your daddy wants to make you proud.”
He sounded near tears himself. I didn’t understand what he was saying. I looked at the brown rug. My mother stared straight ahead, doll-faced. I felt sad for her, but I could also feel an unmistakable surge of revulsion, now that she’d been discarded by my father, and this surge in my stomach made me hate myself. The intensity of this new sensation—self-loathing—surprised me. I had seen my mother kick a potty at him across the room, heard her scream at him to leave the house. When these things happened, I knew they were technically bad. But I’d respected her. I’d been moved by her. Now that she was being Adult in the face of outrage, I wanted to run. It was like ten cups of English Breakfast, panic and inspiration all at once, a need to leap out of the skin.
“Can we go now?” I asked.
After my parents retreated to the study to compose an agreement on the sharing of resources, my little sister and I stayed on the sun-drenched first floor of the white Cape Cod. It was three-thirty on a Wednesday. We had too many empty hours in which to consider what had just happened, so we invented a game a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old should not have been playing, called Googy. I was a retarded baby—Googy was my name—and Rachel was my mother. I ran to open the front door and escape into the woods by ramming my head against the door repeatedly, and she came up behind me and dragged me from the vestibule, shouting, “Googy, you’ll only make your brain even worse by doing that.” I gurgled and moaned, and rolled around on the floor, gripping my head in my hands—retardation and epilepsy were not yet rigorously differentiated for Rachel and me. I tried to learn to crawl and collapsed repeatedly, finally curling into a fetal position and pretending to puke on the floor.
I lay for a while in a sunbeam, like a dog. I ignored my sister’s demands that I rise, until she went upstairs to her room and I looked out the window and saw ashes falling from the sky. My parents were in the study, writing their agreement, and would not have been able to see. I thought of telling them about the evidence of fire, but in the end I walked up to Rachel’s room to see for myself what she was doing.
I knocked on the door. “It’s me,” I said. “Mom and Dad are in the study.” There was no answer, so I went in.
She knelt by her open window with a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip, with the economy-size box of kitchen matches beside her on the sill. She used a match to light a piece of paper and threw the match in a plastic cup of water, in which four other matches lay floating. She dropped the flaming page out the window.
“They’re letters to my future husband,” she explained. “I wrote them when I was eight.”
I watched her do this for another thirty seconds. Unable to say anything about it, I went to my room, and the object that didn’t feel tainted by my ownership of it was the acoustic guitar an aunt had lent me six months ago. I’d only learned six chords. But now I put it down only when my fingertips were in too much pain to touch anything, at which point I plugged in my headphones and worked methodically backward and forward through my booklet of CDs, listening in my desk chair, until I could handle strings again.
By the following evening, each of the fingertips on my left hand had grown a cloud: calluses. From that point forward, I put down the guitar only to eat dinner and to walk to a licentious Cumberland Farms, where I bought and experimented with cigarettes. Nobody asked me where I was going.
Around ten o’clock that night, my father knocked on the door.
“I’ve come to have a little talk with you,” he said. “Nancy, Khadijah, your behavior, my behavior.”
He sat in my rolling desk chair. I put down my aunt’s guitar and sat on the floor with my legs tucked close to my chest, tapping an imaginary drumbeat against my knees in order to be musicianly. I waited. He opened his mouth several times and closed it again, like a goldfish.
“Do you know any songs?” he asked. “I can hear you a little from downstairs. It sounds like you’re playing a lot.”
I looked at the guitar. The truth was I was having a hard time with chords. I was also having a hard time with playing anything and singing at the same time. The one song I could pull off, sort of—it was actually easier than “Psycho Killer”—was “Heartbreak Hotel.” You could play “Heartbreak Hotel” as a bass line on the low E. And you barely had to sing and play at the same time. The singing was the call, the bass line the response.
“Sure,” I said. I picked up the guitar. I couldn’t sing very well. But the vocal was basically talking: “Since my baby left me (guitar: BUM BUM) / I found a new place to dwell (BUM BUM).”
My father spread his legs and clasped his hands in the space between them as I played and sang. He reached out and put his left hand on my right hand, which was still holding a tortoiseshell pick, hovering by the strings. Did he hear Nancy’s voice when he heard music, like I heard Khadijah’s?
“Not bad, Son,” he said. He held my hand, for three seconds, or four, and then he stood and left.