The Breakdown Lane

  “Julieanne!” he said, “I have to scrub in, in about five minutes, but I had to ask you, are you avoiding me? Did I step out of line?”

  “No, you were the perfect gentleman, in a sense,” I said. “I just don’t know if I can have feelings for anyone but Leo. At least, not yet.”

  “So you still have feelings for Leo?”

  “Don’t you still have feelings for the woman you loved just a little while back? And Suzie?”

  “I have feelings about the time we spent together. Not about them, as individuals. That’s what I came up with last night, after we talked. That chapter is closed. You can’t make your whole life a shrine to the past, Julie.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “Well.”

  “I’m glad you called.”

  “But you don’t want to see me again. Really see me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Not now.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “That would depend on what your expectations were.”

  “That would depend on what you wanted me to hope for,” Matt said. “Julie, I have to go. But I wanted to ask you, do you know you were the first girl I ever kissed? When you were elected class president?” I’d forgotten. But now, I thought I could remember. Sweet, Doublemint-smelling breath. Tightly closed lips. My back against the wall of the library extension at school.

  “I remember, now,” I said.

  “Well, I waited twenty-five years to do it again, Julie. All through high school. All through college. Until I met Suzie…”

  “Do you think you’re just wishing yourself back to a time when you didn’t know that all good things, all innocent things, are spoiled in the end?”

  “But that isn’t true, Julie!” he said, and I heard him tell someone he’d be right with her. “Not all things that stay with you all your life, and my memory of you stayed with me all my life, are just because you were a kid and foolish. Sometimes they stay with you because they mattered.”

  “You’re a romantic. You have to pardon me if I can’t be one right now.”

  “Julie, let me come and see you again….”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea.”

  “Let me come and then we’ll decide. No pressure.” Cathy was nodding. Yes. Shrugging. Why not?

  “Even your asking to come is pressure,” I said.

  “Well, okay, then.”

  I heard myself say, “Well, okay then.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, come and see me. When? After Christmas?”

  “I was thinking, ah, Saturday,” he said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Gabe’s Journal

  I got a letter from Leo right before Thanksgiving, asking me to come out there and spend the holiday weekend with him. He would send me a plane ticket. Since I had time before my tutor, who was this really nice older lady who got right down to business and made sure you had food throughout the whole two hours, I decided to answer his letter.

  Dear Leon, [I wrote,] I have to decline your invitation on personal grounds, those being that I hate your guts. I don’t mean that in an unkind way. You’re supposed to be able to admire your father. I tried to make a list for Mom’s therapist of all the things I admired about you. I admired your vocabulary. I admired that you did nice things for your parents. I admired your knowledge of baseball statistics. That would be it, Leon. I figure if you have to make a list of ten things you admire about your own father, and you can come up with only three, and if you can think of thirty things you admire about your little sister’s preschool teacher, this is an indication that either you’re not an admirable person in my eyes or that I’m still too angry to see you, as in, during this lifetime.

  [I signed it Gabe Gillis, adding, as a P.S.,] The new thing in our so-called family seems to be changing your name. I wanted to get in on it. I thought about it for a long time, and decided to use Steiner as my middle name, because otherwise it would hurt Gramp’s feelings. Gramp is such a great guy. Funny thing, genetics, huh?

  I mailed it on the way to my tutor Donna’s house because I thought I’d otherwise never do it. Either I’d lose my nerve or forget it.

  The guy Matthew came to see my mother again after Halloween. They had dinner, and she looked all rosy and pretty in a dress Cathy loaned her. She was doing most all of her own work now, only occasionally asking me to look something up for her or make a phone call—for which she paid me, ten bucks an hour—I hadn’t had much of a chance to look through her files. Once Rory was asleep, I did. And I found another poem, this one with the envelope in which she was to send it—actually, a couple of envelopes. One to Urbane magazine (fat chance, I thought) and one to the Pen, Inc., people.

  I used her copier to make a copy of it.

  A Lamentation of Insects

  Why did the ladybug fly away home

  If her house was on fire

  And her children were gone?

  Did she need proof there was not just one left,

  One beetlet uncharred,

  Last jewel of her breast?

  Did she need (really!) to kiss the charred shells

  To bless her nest’s pyre,

  Enter ladybug hell?

  Why not toss back a cold single malt?

  Or tequila like swamp ice,

  In a tub rimmed with salt?

  Rubbed rumps with a moth in some fleabag bed?

  Drowned her memories of fire?

  After all, they were dead.

  Why didn’t the ladybug fly to Belize?

  Where hulabugs writhe in the amethyst seas?

  Why didn’t she simply do as she pleased?

  Why did she waste so much precious time?

  Had she been a boy-bug, we’d not have the rhyme.

  I thought it was funny and probably halfway decent, but it was creepy how she seemed to think about men. I wondered if she included all men, myself, in that poem, or just my father? It didn’t seem to include the Matthew guy, who came the morning after he took her out to dinner and took all of us to brunch at this big hotel in Milwaukee. I thought, Aha, the old try-to-win-over-the-kid thing. But he hardly paid attention to me, beyond telling me why he reconstructed faces for his job. Really sad story. I don’t mean that sarcastically. All he could do was look at my mother, as if she were some kind of really rare painting. I thought it must be nice for her, to have someone she knew once still think she was pretty. And he was a fairly nice person. He showed Rory pictures of his daughter on her horse, Diva. The horse, not the girl. The girl’s name was Kelly. She was in college in New York, at the New School. She wanted to be a journalist or a professional equestrian or a vet. Or train horses for a living. The girl was amazing-looking. She had the longest blonde hair I ever saw on someone who wasn’t nuts. He had a big farm between Boston and Cape Cod—well, big to apartment people—maybe twelve acres. He commuted, and traveled a lot, teaching other doctors how to do this one thing he’d sort of invented for cleft palates.

  I walked with him to get his rental car, because my mom tried not to walk too far, especially in front of other people. She was still worried she’d fall and humiliate herself, though her balance was halfway decent now.

  “What do you do, Gabe?” he asked.

  “I go to home school,” I said. “I have learning disabilities.”

  “Bad?”

  “Yeah, I think, like they say, one more chromosome, and I’d be a cricket.”

  “But you’re smart. To talk to.”

  “I didn’t say I was stupid.”

  “Do you want to go to school?”

  “Maybe. If it seems worth it.”

  “People all get to it at different times. Maybe your time won’t be until you’re in your twenties.”

  “Maybe,” I said. It was a long walk, like, two city blocks. “So, was my mother much like she is now when she was a kid?”

  “Yes,” he said, “almost exactly. Smart. Pretty…”

  “Stuck
up,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’d think she would have gotten over that by now.”

  “For her, it’s not a matter of being really stuck up, Gabe. I mean, I don’t know her now. But when she was a kid, it was more like she had to keep her dignity.”

  “Maybe that was it,” I said. “Because my grandparents were great, but they drank a little, and she didn’t like that. She always wanted to be in control of herself, she used to tell me.”

  “Which is why this disease is probably so hard on her,” he said.

  “Trust me,” I told him. “It would be hard on anybody. But she’s way better now than she was.”

  “Do you mind that we’re dating?”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “No,” he said, as I swung up into the passenger seat. “But I want to. I don’t know if she does.”

  “Do you know anything about multiple sclerosis?”

  “Only what I’ve read. And I had a patient with a facial deformity who had it.”

  “Jeez, two strikes.”

  “Yes, but she was great. She didn’t let anything stop her. Even using a walker. She danced with her walker.”

  “Christ, I hope that doesn’t happen to my mom.”

  “It puts a lot on you.”

  “That’s not why. It’s, like, what you said about her being so into her dignity and so forth. She’d feel like she could never go out of the house.”

  “I’m very taken with her,” he said. “I always was. But you had to get to the back of the line to have a prayer with Julieanne Gillis.”

  I tried to think of my mother, then, as a hottie, someone guys would kill to go out with. True, she had a semi-famous father, and she lived in a ritzy place. But I couldn’t manage to see my mother that way. “I always thought she liked me. But I wasn’t on her level. Like, her father.”

  “And you are now.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “MS. The big leveler.”

  He stopped the car. “No,” he said. “You’re a kid, but that’s kind of a slam on your mother. I meant, I’m a doctor. People seem to think you have some brains to do that. Back then, I was basically a poor kid who went to public school because there was no other choice, not like your mom, who went to public school because her parents were liberals and didn’t want it to seem as if they thought their daughter might get diseases from mingling with the common horde.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” I muttered.

  “And she was kind of stuck up,” he said, laughing. “I went to her house once, for a party—”

  “You were at my grandparents’ house?” I asked, suddenly missing them, unable to make the picture of my grandmother’s face form in my mind, able only to summon her voice, saying, “Ambrose, it’s time we got on.”

  “Yes, it was when she was going on to Miss Whatever’s School, and there were maids passing out—”

  “Cucumber sandwiches,” I finished for him.

  “Yeah! To kids.”

  “That would be them,” I said.

  “But she was so embarrassed, for all of us. She wanted us to go fly kites in Central Park. And finally, we all did. I can still see her, climbing up the rocks with her kite, letting it unspool. She was a really athletic girl. Strong.”

  “The ballet.”

  “Yeah,” Matt said, starting the car again. “I thought she’d go pro,” as if the American Ballet Theater were the Dallas Cowboys.

  “She was too fat and too tall,” I told him. “She didn’t want to do the anorexia thing. She says dancers live on vodka and chocolate and cigarettes.”

  “She’s perfect,” he said.

  “You should live with her when she gets in one of her everybody-out-of-the-boat moods,” I said.

  “Well, Gabe, I intend to,” he said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Psalm 37

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  Distributed by Panorama Media

  Dear J.,

  I can’t tell anyone. My husband hits me. Last week, I was too bruised and swollen to go to work. I’m a nurse. You’d think I’d know better. I see people like me every day in the emergency room. But I’m afraid to leave. First, I know he’ll find me and kill me. And second, he’s a wonderful father. He’s well known in our community. No one would believe me. And the children would hate me for it. How can I get him to stop? He’s sorry every time, so terribly sorry; but he says it’s the combination of the demands the kids and I make and the stress of his job that makes him lash out.

  Miserable in Manhattan

  Dear Miserable,

  I believe you. And others would believe you. I promise you that. If you tell one person and that person doubts you, tell another one. I want you to write down a plan. And start packing, slowly, the few things you and your children will need to relocate. A good nurse can find work anywhere. Change your name, and, if you have to, change your birth date. Most people who leave are found because they don’t change their birth dates. Use one from someone who doesn’t need it anymore (see my confidential answer for details). Your kids may be angry at you. All kids get angry at their parents when they have to do things that mean big changes for the kids. But the worst thing you can do for them is to allow them to believe that what they’re seeing is something that’s acceptable. Get out while you still can. Get a cell phone to call 911 for any reason, if you suspect he’s found out. Get a gun if you need to. Just get out. Don’t try to help him. He’s beyond help. You’re not. Yet.

  J.

  The beginning of the second beginning of my life happened unexpectedly, as so many things do. I hadn’t exactly given up on planning, even knowing it to be an exercise in futility. But I had decided to try to be happy within the confines of what I could do, and stop lamenting what I couldn’t, as much as was possible for a person of my kind, who had finished buying and wrapping her Christmas presents by September.

  I began dating a guy I met through a show Cathy was in. He was a nice enough person, though I could feel myself pale when he told me he was a lawyer; but it turned out that he was a corporate lawyer for the big sporting-goods company, First Gear, which I didn’t find nearly as threatening, for some reason. “So,” I asked him, the first time we had dinner, “what you do is try to get people off the hook when a kid falls on one of your skate-boards and gets brain damaged?”

  “You do come right to the point,” he said, “but what I do is try to get people benefits for the child when that happens, without bankrupting the company. You know people in our world now; I don’t think that anything bad should happen, and if it does, someone should pay.”

  But after a few months, during which I saw Matthew twice and Dennis almost every week, I resigned amicably from Dennis.

  Nice enough wasn’t good enough, even for me.

  I’d believed I would be abjectly grateful to anyone who showed the slightest interest in me. It turned out that when Urbane did accept my poem, and paid me a thousand dollars for it, it was Matt I wanted to tell, even before I told Cathy or Gabe.

  He was ecstatic on my behalf. He told me he was going to buy copies for everyone on his staff and for all his friends, and he had many friends. There was one weekend when I offered to come to Boston to see him, but he was headed off on a football weekend. For the next two weeks, when he called, I didn’t pick up. I felt rebuffed, slighted. Finally, he sent me two dozen white roses in a silver-and-blue trophy cup. The card read, Is it me you don’t like or the Patriots? And I called him. A week later, I received an engraved invitation to a gathering at the home of Matthew MacDougall for two weekends hence.

  I didn’t want to go. I did want to go, but I knew that something would happen, in front of his physicians’ wives’ friends, something that would prevent me from ever again crossing the Massachusetts border. But I thought, then, it was a party. How hard could it be to sit on a sofa and talk to regular people? I had once been a regular person.

  And I thought I
might go to see Cat. It had been months, with no word. She’d sent Rory a set of cloth dolls for Christmas, but they frightened Rory, since they had only eyes but no mouths or noses.

  I might rent a car and drive to the place that I could no longer really recall the name of, since Gabe and I had, so often, called it the Happy Valley. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I could get Cathy to keep Rory, and Gabe was fine on his own, with Cath in casual earshot. It turned out, when I mentioned it, that he and his grandparents were going to Door County that weekend, to do some preseason work on the cottage. He wanted, he said, to fish while it was still cold. “It makes me feel like a mariner,” he said. “In summer, anybody can sail.”

  And so I readied myself carefully. I packed garment by garment over a period of weeks. A clinging black dress with a skirt that descended sharply in back and which ruffled around my legs when I moved, a movement I thought might disguise movements of my own—the unintentional kind. Wide-legged flowing trousers and a satin blouse. Funny big fake pearls on a fishing line. Jeans and two sturdy sweaters. A pair of boots and a pair of tennis shoes. Gabe asked me if I was moving.

  A few days before I was to leave, the editor of Urbane called me. She asked whether she might give my e-mail address to a publisher who’d expressed interest in my “poems of anger.” I hadn’t known they were that, but I agreed in any case. What if there turned out to be a few bucks in it? I wrote the poems for a twisted kind of fun, and having had them published wasn’t even the icing on the cake, it was the frosting roses. I never expected anything to coalesce around my poems. Even Gabe called them my “so-called poems.”