“You okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s just my damn knee acting up.” He slapped it as if it were a bad dog that had dumped on a brand-new Oriental rug.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Jessie, here’s some advice: Don’t get old.”
“Ah, but the alternative is worse, right?”
My dad slapped his knee again. “Ask me another day.” Then he promptly changed the subject. And the new subject, appropriately enough, was you. “So Marcus is off to Princeton next week. That’s a great area around there.”
I knew what he was getting at. I picked a raisin out of my bagel as if it were an annoying hanging scab on my elbow. “I don’t know if we’ll get a chance to check out the towpath….”
“I hope you haven’t changed your mind about the bike trip.”
As you already know, Dad had this big idea about leading us on a bike expedition along the densely wooded dirt trails that wind through Princeton and other towns in Mercer County.
“I’m not sure we’ll be organizing that trip with Marcus after all.”
“Why not?”
“Things are…” I paused here. Not for effect, but to find the right word. “Unsettled between us.”
My dad rubbed his head. “Do I even want to hear more?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Do you?”
He nodded reluctantly, a gesture that resembled more of a wince than an affirmation.
“It’s been something that’s been coming for a while, I guess. We’re at different places in our lives….”
“You two always seemed like you were in different places in your lives.”
“Well, maybe it always seemed that way to you, but our differences are just more…uh…pronounced now than ever before.”
My father surprised me by looking right at me when he said, “That’s such a shame.”
“What?”
“That you and Marcus are having problems. That you’re unsettled.”
“Wow…I didn’t expect you to react like that….”
“How did you expect me to react?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I wasn’t even sure if you ever got around to, you know, liking Marcus or not.”
“Look, Jessie,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you. When I caught wind of his checkered past, the drugs and all that trouble he got himself into in high school, I wasn’t happy that this royal screwup of the first order was dating my daughter.”
“But he was clean when we got together.”
He waved his bagel in the air to stifle me. “I know,” he said. “But I still didn’t like it.” He then chucked his bagel into the nearest garbage can with a resounding clunk. “If I had tried to step in and put a stop to you two, it would have backfired. Just like it did with Bethany and Jerry.”
Jerry.
Wow.
Jerry.
I had not heard that name in almost two decades. How could I have forgotten Jerry? He was my sister’s first serious boyfriend, from her sophomore year of high school. I was only five years old during the Jerry Years, so when I think of him, I can only conjure his junior yearbook photo, which I studied intensely and with great interest. He had a rectangular flattop haircut, a conniving underbite that was apparently impossible to unhinge into any semblance of a smile, and thick black eyebrows like two censorship bars trying to block out his dirty thoughts. He was two years older than Bethany, and drove, I kid you not, a silver I-ROC tricked out with a neon-pink underbelly that made our driveway glow like a seedy no-tell motel whenever he honked for my sister. The horn was barely audible above the strains of Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the only cassette he ever listened to, which, naturally, as these things happen, became the only cassette Bethany listened to for like six months straight. To this day, I know every goddamn lyric to every goddamn song on that goddamn album, and not just the givens like the title track, “Armageddon It,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and “Love Bites.” I even know all the words to the less obvious cuts, such as “Excitable”:
(Oh) (Whoa) Oh, you know I get so
(Excitable) I really get so (Excitable)
(Okay. Maybe those lyrics don’t seem so hard to commit to memory, but you try to put every “Oh” and “Whoa” in its proper place and see how easy it is.)
Anyway, to say that my parents hated Jerry is an understatement, one that requires me to consult my thesaurus to pile on the synonyms reviled, loathed, detested, abhorred, and despised, none of which do justice to the hatred they felt. They hated him with a passion that was only outdone by its inverse.
Oh, how Bethany loved him.
“Then you and Marcus broke up,” my dad continued. “He went to that crazy Buddhist camp in the middle of the desert, and you had that other boyfriend at Columbia. The prep school brat from Greenwich, Connecticut…The philosopher…What was his name?”
“Kieran.”
My dad all but rolled his eyes, because he knows it’s undignified and lamely Laguna Beach for a senior citizen to roll his eyes. “Well, I never met him, so you’ll forgive me for not remembering his name.”
There is a very good reason I never introduced my parents to this junior-year error in judgment: Kieran was an emo assclown.
“Then last Christmas, Marcus shows up on our doorstep and is back in your life again. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And he had really cleaned himself up. Got his head on straight. Got himself into Princeton…” He trailed off.
“What?”
“It’s just unfortunate,” he said, forehead wrinkling, “that things are unsettled just as he was getting respectable.”
“That’s right, Dad, I broke up with him just to piss you off.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “He really seemed like he was getting his act together. It says a lot about a man’s character to overcome substance abuse problems and the like. And it showed real initiative for him to apply to Princeton.”
(I’m not disagreeing with any of these points.)
“Unsettled,” my dad groused. “Does your mother know about any of this?”
“No, I haven’t talked to Mom lately….”
“So I found out before she did.”
“Yes.”
“Ha,” he said with no joy whatsoever.
forty-eight
My mom was fifteen minutes late in picking me up from the bus station. As I waited for her to show up, I watched a shimmering silver SUV pull into the parking lot. I mocked the anonymous driver of this immense and intimidating luxury export for being a status-obsessed, bigger-is-better, gas-guzzling idiot who was responsible for U.S. dependency on foreign oil from countries that harbor and abet terrorists…
Then the driver rolled down her tinted window and told me to get inside.
“Jessie!”
My mortifying ride had arrived.
“Sweet tank, Mom,” I said as I climbed up and into the passenger side. “I hear it gets three miles to the gallon. Where’s the ‘Support Our Troops’ magnet?”
But my mom didn’t hear me. She was finishing up a conversation on her hands-free headset.
“Remember, you have to speak the language of the interior,” she was saying. “Is it Rustic French? English Country? Tuscan Renaissance?”
I do not speak any of these languages.
“I’m dropping my daughter off at the hospital. Then I’ve got a three o’clock. Then I’ll swing by around four-thirty to approve the throws for the Thompson sale and…”
I still can’t get over how efficient and businesslike my mother sounds when she’s working.
“So your father will be in for another two hours or so.”
I was looking the dashboard, marveling at all the various controls.
“Jessie!”
“Oh! I didn’t realize you were talking to me,” I said.
“Of course I’m talking to you,” she said, though there was no change in tone or gesture that would indicate that her phone
call had ended and our conversation had begun.
“I’m going to drop you off, leave for a couple hours, then come back and take you both home.”
“You’re not staying?”
“I have an appointment,” she said.
“With who?”
“The nursery,” my mom replied, “should have set aside the hardy mums for you to arrange on the front porch. Make sure you put them in the clay pots because the plastic planters are tacky and cheap.”
It took me a second to realize that she was back to addressing the headset. I turned my attention to semi-abandoned strip malls along the highway, suddenly remembering that the last time I rode along this highway was in January, in the Caddie with you. wasn’t supposed to be back in Pineville, on the road, in the Caddie with you. I was supposed to be in the rental car with Hope, headed for Happyland, Oklahoma.
“Why do developers keep building new strip malls for dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants when the old strip malls aren’t fully occupied by dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants?” I had asked you. “It’s depressing.”
forty-nine
I wasn’t supposed to be back in Pineville, on the road, in the Caddiewith you. I was supposed to be in the rental car with Hope, headed for Happyland, Oklahoma.
“Why do developers keep building new strip malls for dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants when the old strip malls aren’t fully occupied by dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants?” I had asked you. “It’s depressing.”
“What’s depressing?” you asked. “Some people would call that progress.”
I was surprised that you had responded at all. It seemed as if everything I said lately was met with a silent chin-first nod, or a simple “Yes” or “No.”
“I don’t know,” I said, having trouble articulating the source of melancholy that usually set in whenever I left the city for Pineville. “All those abandoned storefronts are depressing. All that emptiness.”
When you contemplatively dipped the Beard, I thought the conversation was over. We passed through two green lights, then stopped at a red.
“Buddhists strive for emptiness,” you said.
“Really?”
“Shunyata. It means not so much ‘empty’ as ‘open.’ Without boundaries.”
“Really?” I said again, if only because it had worked the first time in coaxing more conversation out of you. You surprised me by obliging.
“Without getting all metaphysical, sunyata means that everything in this life is interconnected. There is no me that is separate from you.”
“Or anyone else, for that matter.”
“I suppose that’s true, too.”
That was a blustery afternoon in early January. Twenty minutes later, we huddled together on the boardwalk, our own bodies providing shelter from the wind. As the gray waves churned with sturm und drang, you revealed two things I had previously known nothing about: Your dad had been diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer. And he had insisted that you make good on the binding, early-action offer from Princeton University.
fifty
“My aesthetician,” my mother said in a sharp tone meant to get my attention.
“What?”
“I have an appointment with my aesthetician.”
“The Botox doc?” I asked. “Mom!”
“What? I have to schedule my maintenance visits months in advance,” she said. “If I miss it, I won’t be able to get in until next year.”
Now that she mentioned it, the smoothing effects of the Botox must have worn off because her face was able to wrinkle itself into detectable expressions of genuine human emotion, and at that moment, it registered annoyance.
“You’re leaving Dad alone in the hospital so you can keep your appointment with the aesthetician?”
“But I’m not leaving him alone,” she said. “I’m leaving him with you. You can handle it.”
When did I become the paragon of all things adult and responsible? I sleep in a bunk bed, for Christ’s sake.
“There’s so much wrongness going on here,” I said, “I don’t even know where to start.”
“I’m sure you’ll find your way,” she said drolly.
“Okay, first of all, I just don’t understand why you do this to your face. You’re beautiful for your age without all that artificial help.”
“See? ‘For my age.’ You mean I’m beautiful for an old lady.”
“You’re not an old lady,” I said. “You’re—” I stop myself.
“Forty-eight,” she said without batting a curled eyelash.
“Moooooooooom.”
“Whaaaaaaaat?” she asked, mocking my tone as she flicked the turn signal.
For the record: I’m proud of my mom. I mean, how many women launch their own successful business in their fifties? But if she doesn’t stop shaving off the years, soon she will have to start telling everyone that Bethany is either (a) her younger sister, (b) the product of my dad’s first marriage, or (c) the first-ever baby conceived by a mother who was still in utero herself.
“Dad retired last year at fifty-five. You’re a year younger….”
She violently shushed me, lest occupants of other SUVs on Route 37 should hear.
“Are you saying you’re forty-eight because you don’t want to be fifty but you don’t want to say forty-nine either because that sounds like more of a lie than forty-eight? Which is crazy because you’re fifty-four!”
She took a sharp turn into the hospital parking lot and I was thrown into the passenger-side door.
“First of all, what I do to my face is my business, not yours. It’s not your place to criticize,” my mom huffed. “It’s an outpatient procedure that takes a minute. It’s not like I’m getting a face-lift….”
“Yet!” I blurted. “Botox is the gateway procedure….”
My mom wrinkled her forehead in disdain again, a gesture that she would not be able to execute post-“maintenance.” “Stop being so dramatic, Jessie.” She sighed. “I wouldn’t expect you, at all of twenty-two years old, to understand what it’s like to look in the mirror and not even recognize the old person looking back at you. Looking better makes me feel better. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with that…” What’s wrong with that, I thought, is that more and more women deal with emotional insecurities by fixing their physical flaws, all in the false name of self-love. What’s wrong with this, I thought, is that we’re reducing ourselves to a gender of firm flesh and unlined faces, empty heads and hollow hearts. It’s no wonder that my mom is getting maintenance, or that Bethany promotes the DONUT HO’ and refers to herself as a MILF.
“I don’t understand how you can be so cavalier,” I finally replied.
She pulled up to the orange cone that designated the drop-off zone. “I can be so cavalier,” she said, putting italics on my word because she wouldn’t use it herself, “because your father did this on purpose.”
“Did what on purpose?” The silver monster idled in the circular drive at the entrance to the hospital, creating a traffic jam behind us.
“Crashed his bike.”
“Why would Dad do something stupid like that?” I asked. I was eager to find out, then get out because a line of cars was honking at us to move on already.
“He’d do something stupid like that to get my attention.”
fifty-one
I called my sister from the bright and antiseptic hospital lobby. As the phone rang, I watched keys pop up and down on a player piano programmed to play “feel good” music. I listened for Barry Manilow. Maybe a little “Can’t Smile Without You” or “Bandstand Boogie.” But he never came on.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“At the hospital.”
“How’s Dad?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been up to see him yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
My phone beep beep beeped: low battery. In my haste
I’d forgotten the charger.
“I’m waiting to recover from my ride with Mom,” I said.
“What did she say?”
And then I quickly recounted the conversation, including my mom’s accusation that he had crashed his bike on purpose.
“See?” Bethany asked.
“Please don’t mention the Signs,” I said.
My phone beep beep beeped again.
“Asserting her financial independence. Improving her physical appearance. Distancing herself from her spouse,” Bethany said with a certain smugness. “All three Signs in a single conversation….”
Just then a chubby girl around Marin’s age came and stood next to me in front of the piano. She wore a thin acrylic sweater, the pink pilled fabric barely stretching over her round belly. Her jeans were both too large and too small, with the elastic waistband straining against her stomach and cuffs dragging on the floor. Two pink butterfly barrettes were haphazardly clipped to either side of her dirty blond hair. Dirty in both senses of the word, as I detected a certain oily, unwashed scent. This girl existed in the real world of cheap fast food, unpaid credit-card bills, and trips to the ER instead of insurance-covered doctor visits.
She broke my heart.
“By the way, how was Dr. Kate? Was she as incredible in person as she is on TV? When do—”
And then my phone beep beep beeped a final time before crapping out—thank God—for good.
The girl tugged on the hem of my T-shirt with grubby fingers half-licked of chocolate from vending machine snack cakes. “Who playin’ dat pee-an-nah?”
I glanced at the piano, then back at the girl. A Pinky the Poodle Band-Aid was stuck to her forehead, through which I could see a brownish dash of blood. As you might recall, Pinky had once been Marin’s favorite cartoon character. But that was a birthday or two in the past. Marin had already moved on.
One look at this girl and I felt like I could—and should—make a monumental difference in her life. I was overcome by an irrational urge to take her home with me. If I had the choice, I would have chosen to be her legal guardian, and not my own niece’s. I’m not under the illusion that money buys happiness, but not having to worry about life’s basic necessities certainly helps improve one’s general outlook. Marin was born into unfathomable wealth. Her parents can guarantee the basics, and so much more, no matter who assumes legal guardianship. But this girl, I thought, this girl needs me more…. I never thought it was possible, but I suddenly understood, with luminous lucidity, why celebrities indulged the egotastic impulse to adopt foreign orphans.