The Breakdown Lane

  Leo and Cathy got along famously, at first, and we sort of made extended family of her and her mom, Connie, alternating Thanksgiving dinners at each other’s houses and such. He balked when I wanted to make Cathy the kids’ legal guardian, in the event that Leo and I should die; but finally saw that she would certainly be a better substitute for us than my sister, Janey, and her husband, or than his own parents. Heck, she was more a sister to me than my sister, in reality.

  Just as Leo graduated, a job opened up as legal counsel to the chancellor at Wisconsin State. The money was ever so right, and Leo grabbed it. Soon enough, he was handling legal issues, problems not so different from the ones in my letters. We got raises. I hired someone to landscape the front of the house. I found a school for Gabe where ignorant plate-heads didn’t suggest he was autistic because he couldn’t name his colors but could make the pencil sharpener run on solar energy. I knew then that there was something different about Gabe, just as I knew there was something different about me when I was little, though they didn’t have a name for it then. I wasn’t “hot-headed” or “too chatty,” I had what would now be called an attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. Gabe had something else. He could express the hell out of himself verbally, but his writing still looked like a kindergarten child’s. He read like a house on fire, but couldn’t spell the words he’d just read. But he was so bright and wonderful! I thought I could smite down whatever it was that was off about him—just as, through force of will and a couple of minicourses, Leo and I had become the kind of swing and ballroom dancers who could clear the floor at weddings.

  We lived well.

  People marveled that we’d been married for so many years. We marveled that we’d been married for so many years, slipping out to skinny-dip in Door County when the parents and the children were asleep. A neighbor once told me she walked past our house and saw all of us on the lawn, trying to teach Caro to stand on her hands; and that turned out to be the night she told her boyfriend that her answer was yes. She wanted a family like ours.

  Anyone would have. Anyone except Leo. Leo holds himself blameless for “the turn of events,” as he calls it, as if the space that opened between him and me was caused by weather or new tax laws. He tends to hold himself blameless in most things—I guess he always did. Now, if I let myself be the one doing the looking back, I see that Leo may have had one foot out the door before I ever suspected it—that his odd behavior was a detail of a larger picture, of which I could see only one corner.

  What he did was, I thought, sort of have a breakdown. He began to fall apart from stress, and he let me believe it was largely my fault, or my fault and the kids’ fault, or the simple fact of his own clarity muddied by the chaos of our culture. He didn’t say in so many words that he was Leo Steiner, victim, but if he’d shouted the implication through a bullhorn, it could not have been clearer.

  He began with odd, uncharacteristic complaints. He observed that the organic chicken at the co-op wasn’t…organic enough. We all needed better nutrition, Leo told us, whole-er food and potions. Our immune systems would collapse otherwise. The extra responsibility of Aury, yet another child to outlive, as he once bizarrely explained it, combined with the strain of work, and the very unkindness of the air we breathed, pushed him to ill health.

  We ended up going to this free-range farm where the chickens were actually beheaded, a forty-five-minute drive, and driving home with sinister-looking bloody bags in the back of the Volvo. Leo soon began to talk about our raising a few of our own, though I put my foot down, sure that kids who had to eat their acquaintances might need analysis.

  But which came first really, the chicken or…well, the egg that became my youngest daughter?

  I don’t think I’m ever going to know that.

  I don’t think Leo entirely knows that.

  If you do, you know where to write to me. Letters still come.

  THREE

  Judges

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  The Sheboygan News-Clarion

  Dear J.,

  That I keep a boa constrictor as an affectionate pet alarms my roommates. Hercules is seven feet of pure muscle, clean and beautiful, and he has never escaped his cage, nor has he molested any guest in any way. He is allowed out only in my room, with the door closed, for exercise and play. My roommates say that even knowing that Hercules must eat live mice (which I also keep in my room, in a cage) is reason enough for them to detest the living situation. They demand that I either move or get rid of Hercules, but since I am the leaseholder, and my ad specifically said I had an unusual but mild-mannered and hypoallergenic pet, I think they have no case. They are threatening to leave, and by doing so, desert me with a rent payment far larger than I can manage. What can I do?

  Annoyed in Appleton

  Dear Annoyed,

  Though you clearly are the right owner for Hercules, you cannot blame your roommates for feeling a bit alarmed at sharing their home with seven feet of pure muscle that also eats live mice. Think of it from their point of view—when they responded to your ad, they probably thought you had a ferret. I would give your roommates a specific length of time to find other accommodations so they don’t feel ripped off, and then advertise for other roommates, making it clear that your pet is a BIG reptile. Studies have shown that snakes are one of the animals that people associate with danger and horror. Good luck. P.S. Have you ever wondered why you consider a boa constrictor an “affectionate pet” and considered something that was, perhaps, warm-blooded? Like, the mice?

  J.

  It has occurred to me ten or a thousand times that I was punished for looking down on them. My readers. For feeling disdain.

  When I would read my letters aloud to Cathy (the myth of confidentiality among doctors, lawyers, and journalists being just that, although it never went outside the house), we would fall against each other’s shoulders in helpless laughter. There was the snake man. And the plumber who wanted to start a sheep-shearing business and wondered if he could make a go of it in an urban setting. (“In Brisbane!” Cathy hooted.) The woman who wondered why her two beaux objected when she asked to review their past two years’ tax records to decide which she would marry. Even as the landscape of my own life was being shredded, people were asking my counsel, and I was giving it blithely, from a position of strength I either thought I had or actually had, depending on your view in retrospect.

  I think Caroline was maybe still in grade school and Gabe just starting middle school when Leo started the worrying about his health. Leo. The same man who had not so long before chided me for “making a religion of sit-ups.” He started with his sleep issues, his obsessions with all he hadn’t done to ensure his longevity. I could sense his resentment of me, and what I had done. I would come in from walking a couple of miles and see him give me the kind of baleful look you reserve for people who come over for dinner and bring Newfoundland dogs.

  I’d catch him stopping to take his pulse a couple of times every day. He began giving me studies to read about people who lived to the age of one hundred and five on coffee and vitamin C. Leo began driving across town to take yoga in a totally dark and windowless room in somebody’s house. He used to sound like his own father when he’d say, “Look. I only run when someone’s chasing me. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. My parents are in their eighties. Everybody dies.” I thought his new passion was…like a minor case of food poisoning that would burn its way through my husband’s system. A little humor was the best antidote, I thought. Saltines for the soul.

  I felt sorry for the poor bastard. And a part of me actually thought it was great, something we could share.

  “Vikram Leo!” I said, and began to applaud, the first time he limped into the house, so sweat-soaked he looked as though he’d been caught in a downpour, after an hour of contortions. Every few years, Leo would purchase a new pair of expensive running shoes, run twice through the neighborhood, then give the shoes to our tenant, Klaus. B
ut no more. Days went by. Months. It began to seem like the real thing.

  As I virtuously rubbed arnica into his legs, he asked if I might not like to try it, too. “I don’t know if you could do it, though,” he said, “given the ballet. Ballet makes you stiff.”

  I did get…stiff, then, with indignation, and rubbed a little harder than was strictly necessary. But I forced a constipated little chuckle. “I, um, I’m actually pretty flexible, Leo. I think the two disciplines have a lot in common. So sure,” I told him, “I’ll come along….”

  “One works against nature and one with it, Julie. You should see people in this class, Jules. Women your age who lift a leg, standing, into an entirely straight plane, like a split standing up.”

  “I could probably do that. Uh, not.” “Not is right. And I never will. They’ve been doing a daily practice for years.”

  “You may be onto something. Everybody swears by it now. Even movie stars. I just can’t imagine the sitting-still part.”

  “That’s the big challenge. Just being in one place with yourself. I don’t know if you could concentrate enough. You’re Julie, my human jumping bean. Remember when you tried the self-hypnosis for labor?”

  “I remember that you were the one who got hypnotized.”

  “Well, I can concentrate.”

  “Leo, I can concentrate,” I hurrumphed. This was a lie. I can never think of fewer than four things at once. “I just can’t go into a coma. Remember before you went to law school? And I had the idea right after college I might go to law school, when you were still going to be a merchant prince? I did better on the LSATs than you did.” This was a sore point, still, and Leo bristled.

  “The LSATs are different from actual law school. Anyhow, ballet never led anyone to any kind of spiritual enlightenment.”

  “Neither did law school. And I was twenty-one when I took the law boards, Leo. You were thirty-five. And lots of religions use dance in their rituals and the stories dance tells.”

  “It’s the breathing, Jules. I feel as though I’ve taken my first real breaths since I was a kid.”

  “Well, all those monks just got head trips by hyperventilating. But, hey. I’ve always wanted you to work out with me. We can get long muscles and spir-it-u-al enlightenment together.”

  “Don’t mock it, Jules,” Leo said. “We’ve failed our kids in that area. They have no concept of Judaism or Christianity….”

  “They’re good Democrats, though,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, Julie,” Leo said with a sigh.

  But we had been relying on Mark Twain, Robert Frost, and Meredith Willson as the foundation of our kids’ moral development. Church just seemed to require such a big…effort. Still, we began to attend the Unitarian Meeting House in Sheboygan when Gabe was in about seventh grade and Caro in sixth. I liked it. I loved the Mozart, the old hymns such as “Simple Gifts,” the fiery political sermons. For Gabe, who couldn’t sit still, they had a Sunday school class for kids through ninth grade, in which they learned why early man worshipped fire and how to build one from nothing but a little dandelion fluff, and why planting trees for reforestation, which they did about every other week, was holy; and one for Caro about how the myths we consider fairy tales really were the basis of religions (Gabe called Caroline’s class the gospel according to Walt Disney). But during the silent prayers, Leo looked as though he were trying to take a shit. I think he was concentrating on all the sins he’d failed to repent, all the people at work he’d failed to forgive on the day Jews forgive people every year, for the thirty years since his bar mitzvah. (I’d come to find out he did have a bar mitzvah, and once had owned a yarmulke, for about six months. He confessed his was the shortest Torah portion ever, the equivalent in Psalms of “Jesus wept.”)

  But Unitarian thought, with its B.Y.O.T. (Bring Your Own Theology, as Cathy called it), wasn’t enough. Leo kept morphing. He took his first solo vacation, ten days, to photograph petroglyphs. He nearly taught all of us hypnosis with a full hour’s carousel of slides of scrapings on rocks that might have been deer, or moons shining, but especially of a human figure Gabe called Homo muchas erectus, a fertility god apparently for some ancient Hopis or Zunis. He got them on a disc and rented a TV and a DVD player to show them to us. The kids looked at it as if he’d bought a Harley.

  Then, for Christmas, Leo gave Caro a sewing machine and some patterns for wrap skirts for her to sew her own clothes.

  She came to me in tears. “Mom,” she said, “Daddy wants me to look like I’m Amish.”

  He gave Gabe a table saw instead of the camera hookup to the computer he’d wanted so badly. Gabe was, however, game. They made a worktable, which Gabe still has, and which is, I admit, beautifully joined, not a nail in it. He gave me a pair of Adirondack chairs (from the Adirondacks, no less) to squeeze in next to the tomato tubs in place of our big chaise longues. This was apparently so we could watch the tomatoes grow and view the neighbors grilling bratwurst while we grilled Little Bear veggie burgers. I kept wondering, sitting uneasily in my easy chair, what would come next?

  What came next was that Leo bought a pair of barbering scissors and a book on haircutting, and spent a whole Sunday trying to get near Caroline’s head, with her dodging and warning him, “I’ll hit you, Dad. I’ve never done anything that bad and I don’t want to, but if you touch my hair, I’ll hit you.” We could afford Caroline’s haircuts, and he knew how much it meant to a young girl to have her hair look downtown instead of downriver. But Leo said he didn’t like seeing a twelve-year-old girl spend twenty-two dollars on a haircut. People could do things…themselves. To keep peace, Gabe gave in, and went to school looking like someone who had been mowed. Leo praised him for helping us become more “self-sufficient.” (Gabe comforted me later, telling me that his hair would grow back, and his peers thought he sort of resembled someone from the Goo Goo Dolls.)

  But I was peeved.

  Why, I thought, didn’t Leo just remodel himself? Or install some solar panels or something?

  He went after my makeup next, uncomfortable seeing me use one moisturizer in the morning and another at night. He asked me to give up wearing makeup and start using Sloan’s soap on my hair and Kiss My Face lotion (you can imagine what we call this lotion now) instead of Clarins on my neck and forehead. And to give up eyeliner.

  “Leo,” I told him, “you haven’t seen a woman who was awake and not wearing makeup since you were in eighth grade.”

  “That’s not at all true. Many women prefer the natural look. They don’t mind looking the way women were meant to look as they age. Plus. Do you know Caroline wears mascara?” He said this in the same tone he might have used had he accused her of freebasing.

  “So what? She only wears it for rec night at the teen center.”

  “She’s not even a teen! She’s completely caught up in a whole consumer thing—”

  “She is not. She’s about half as thing-conscious as Marissa or Justine or any other of her friends, especially that one…that girl who’s a model now.” I was flustered. We didn’t need the money I spent on goddamn moisturizer. It wasn’t going to change the fate of Third World nations.

  “It’s just all those jars, sculpted glass, blue bottles, all that packaging. That’s what you’re paying for. You could have the same effect with vitamin C and petroleum jelly, Julie.”

  “When did you become a cosmetician?”

  “It’s globally gratuitous, to spend thirty-five bucks on something your skin can’t even really absorb.”

  “Well, it’s locally ludicrous to complain about such a dumb thing. Why don’t you get a bicycle instead of driving the Volvo, Leo?”

  “I would, but I can’t get to work fast enough in rush-hour traffic.”

  “Rush hour lasts about five minutes here, Leo….”

  We let the matter drop. And I began buying Yonka—even more expensive than Clarins, and yes, packaged with the salty joy of passive aggressiveness.

  Then one day, Leo told me, “I’ve be
en thinking that I may take early retirement at fifty-two, because I know there are going to be cutbacks. What I hear is that everybody who’ll do it voluntarily is going to get the full benefits package and pension, plus some salary. I thought, we’ll sell this place. Maybe get a cabin. Just a one-room cabin. Maybe up near Wild Rose or someplace nice, when the kids are off to college.”

  “Have a ball,” I told him, “and visit often. I’m not living in a one-room cabin, Leo.” I didn’t bother to look up from sewing patches on Caro’s jeans—for decoration, I might add, not to cover holes. “I have enough trouble with the spiderwebs in the bedroom rafters in Door County.”

  “Or upstate New York,” he went on, ignoring what I’d said. “I’m thinking of going there, just for a photography weekend. I’ve met some people online up there who are doing some amazing things with small-space gardening.”

  “More fertile tubs? Tomato prayers?” I asked.

  “No, smart ass. I mean, they’ve turned their yards, if you want to call them that, into a combination of prairie and garden. It’s gorgeous.”

  “Show me a picture.”

  “I…I don’t have one,” Leo said.

  “Then how do you know they’re gorgeous?”

  “I…read about them.”

  “Leo, Caroline isn’t even in high school yet.”