“I sure will.”
He headed off the way I’d pointed, and I almost drew my elbow into my gut, a tiny huzzah, like the nerdy girl I still was. “Happy New Year,” I shouted. Instead of getting back in the van, I beelined for my house, chewing on a smile, feeling three sets of eyes follow me there. That was enough Cat for one night. I didn’t want to push my luck.
Back inside, Jimmy was even drunker than Mom, his eyelids so heavy that to call him awake was no more than a technicality. Though Jimmy was just eighteen, Mom had given up pretending to turn a blind eye to his drinking and whatever-else-ing since we’d moved to Silver Lake. She claimed that rent-paying adults should be able to have a beer, and that it was constitutionally wrong that Americans could die for their country before having a drink with dinner. But really, she let him because she didn’t want to drink alone.
Mom had nodded off in the computer chair, her chin against her chest, an exclamation of salsa drizzled onto the chest of her T-shirt—one of Dad’s. I logged out of her online dating profile and closed the browser. I combed my fingers through her hair until she stirred, and helped her to her room. “Your father can do the dishes,” she mumbled, I think, her arm around my waist. She curled up on top of the comforter, and I had to pull her legs flat to tug off her jeans, so loose they didn’t even need to be unbuttoned. I filled a glass with water and left it on the bedside table next to a couple of Tylenol. Jimmy was snoring on the couch; he could stay there all night. There was so much I wanted to ask him: about Marlena and tweaking, or better yet, where he thought Dad was right now, if he pictured him like I did, celebrating with Becky, not thinking about us at all.
Until Marlena descended like a UFO, Mom and Jimmy were all I had. If I didn’t call Haesung or Dad, and I only responded to direct questions, I was pretty sure I could go a whole day without saying more than ten words. For New Year’s, I resolved to try it.
Before going to bed I rearranged the magnetic letters on the refrigerator door. Happy new fam!, I spelled. We didn’t have enough Es and Ys.
*
Not long after, Jimmy reported that he’d gotten a job at a plastics factory. He speared two pieces of meatloaf, stacking them into a tower on his plate.
“Is the money good?” Mom asked.
“Twelve an hour,” said Jimmy.
“That’s better than I would’ve thought.” I could tell from the look on her face that she had silently started to count.
“Okay,” I said, pressing a carrot into a gravelly landslide of meat. “Let me get this straight. Aside from the obvious insanity of deferring a scholarship to Michigan State University to move to Silver Lake with us, now you’ve gone and taken a job at a plastics factory. A factory where people make plastic?”
“Plastic is made at the plastics factory, yes,” Jimmy said.
“Thanks for the clarification. Congrats, Jimbo! You’ve finally begun your downward spiral into a futureless hick who eats pot three meals a day. Maybe you can use some of the plastic you make to carry your weed around in.”
“You know something,” Jimmy said, before Mom could intervene. “You’re growing up to be one snobby little bitch. Thank God we got you away from Concord before it made you even worse.”
“Mom!” If Jimmy’d said “bitch” at the dinner table in front of Dad, he’d have gotten a smack. Mom just sat there, staring into her carrots.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “But, Cat, I will not be judged about my life choices by someone who is too young to drive.”
I mashed my meatloaf into a meat wad. A couple years before, Jimmy and I had watched a documentary about American factories. People lost hands, eyes; people stopped to scratch their foreheads and thirty seconds later they plummeted into vats of boiling water. The movie was full of real-life accounts of accident after accident after accident. The subjects were all missing things: a strip of eyebrow, the top segment of their first and second fingers, entire arms.
Jimmy told us how he’d seen the Help Wanted posting on the window, how the manager had looked him over top to bottom and asked if he considered himself a night owl. Jimmy was a night owl, and that was that. Jimmy modeled his khaki uniform and his protective eyewear, and then he showed us these gauzy tube sock sleeves that he was supposed to pull over his arms to protect him from burns. He’d work four days a week, sometimes from midnight to six in the morning. He described his duties in detail, but from then on when I pictured him at work I saw him standing in a bright room, picking up fingernail-sized chips of plastic and putting them back down on a conveyor belt.
“It’s like a Huxley novel,” he said. This killed me. It was not like a Huxley novel. It was like working in a plastics factory.
“Well,” Mom said. “It’s good to experience new things.” Her eyes were all big and sort of wondrous. She poured herself another glass of wine and left the dishes for me and Jimmy to clean up.
*
Eight words, the next day.
Yes, no, no, no thanks, night Mom, night.
*
Marlena’s phone was often either dead or out of minutes, and so it was hard to get in touch with her—a quality that added to her magic. I assumed she’d been distant because school was about to start. She was cool. She must be, because of how she looked, because of how she sang, because of Ryder, how easily she called him her boyfriend. Kewaunee High squatted on the horizon like a beast, winged and all teeth.
“Mom, the thing is, this has been a really difficult time. Children suffering from the effects of divorce should be introduced to changes outside the family situation very, very slowly. That’s what everybody says. All the experts.” I was quoting, nearly word for word, from an anonymous message-board comment posted by bunneehart 2109 (help me my parents just got divorced and my cat got hit by my boyfriend’s car:(), an extremely unlucky person.
“Fascinating. You know what that makes me think of?” She sprayed the counter around the sink with Clorox. Her bathrobe flopped open at the neck. It wasn’t tied tightly enough. I could see the grayish cups of the bra she’d been wearing for days. For a moment, I was overtaken by an urge to hit her. “Hint. It’s a Rolling Stones song.”
“‘Satisfaction’? ‘Brown Sugar’?”