Mam nodded. "You like stasis."
I stopped kicking and looked at her, startled that she knew about chaos and stasis. I started walking and Mam walked beside me.
"What's wrong with stasis?" I asked, watching my feet make tracks in the snow.
"JP, you know better than I do that it's impossible. You read the book. It can't last, it can't be maintained. Things do change."
"That's not true," I said. "Not with everything. Not with water kept below thirty degrees, not with—"
Mam threw her arms up. "JP, we're not ice! Stasis is stagnation, and stagnation is death."
"So is chaos. Chaos is just as impossible, totally unpredictable. I never know if I'm going to be able to sit down at dinner and have my own space to myself or be sharing it with Jerusha, the she-man."
Mam laughed. "I think she likes you." She started walking again, and I followed.
"I hate the way she takes food off my plate. She just takes it! I hate them crowding in on our dinner. And I hate finding that Harold guy using my bathroom. He has to climb two flights to use it Why can't he go downstairs?"
"Maybe he wants privacy. Maybe he's like you and needs to get away every now and then."
Mam waited for me to catch up, then she linked her arm in mine and said, "I spent so much of my life alone, JP. I was surrounded by my family and yet, except for your uncle John, no one paid any attention to me. Of course, I never made the effort to get to know anyone. I was shy and awkward. Like you, I spent so much of my life and my schooling in my bedroom. It was easier just to keep my head buried in my books. It's easier, JP, but not better. I agree chaos is no better than stasis, but there's got to be a middle ground, doesn't there?"
"Yeah," I said. "My book calls it complexity."
"Complexity." Mam nodded and considered the idea awhile, slowing her walk and staring at her feet.
"Complexity. That's perfect, isn't it? That's such a rich-sounding word. That's exactly what we are, isn't it? Complex." She squeezed my arm and shook it. "Tell me about it, scientifically, I mean."
This felt good, Mam asking me something, wanting me to teach her. "Well, to put it simply, complexity is that place where things aren't predictable but they aren't out of control, either."
"Exactly!" Mam said. "I like it, go on."
"Take for instance water. If you freeze it you've got stasis, if you boil it you've got chaos, but there's that point just before boiling where the molecules could go either way and—"
"That's perfect!" Mam interrupted. "That's what we'll work toward. How about it? Complexity." Mam nodded to herself as if she'd solved it all. As if just by saying this she could pull us back from the chaos.
"Mam, you didn't let me finish. You know where complexity exists?"
Mam nodded. "In just about everything, I'd guess. All of life is complex."
"No, Mam, I mean mathematically, scientifically."
"Tell me. Where does complexity exist?"
"At the edge. At the edge of chaos. That's what they call it, and the edge is too close to chaos for me."
"Well then, JP, you're stuck," Mam said, and then realizing the truth of her statement shook her head and added, "and you're lonely, and I can't seem to do anything about it, can I?"
I shrugged and pulled my arm away from her and walked a little faster. She kept up.
"What about Timmy? Why hasn't he come by for a visit? Why don't you go see him?"
"He's so different now," I said "I talk to him on the phone and we've got nothing to say. I'm talking about the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinear equations, and he's talking about football and Laura Pentero and some party he went to. I don't know. He's gone wild"
Mam nodded. "He's changed, too. That's all it is, JP. Life just changes and you can either move along with it or stand there, but either way it's going to keep on moving."
I stopped. "It's the way it's changed. Look at you, Mam. Why do you have on Larry's boots?"
Mam looked down at the boots and laughed. "Is that what's bothering you?"
"And you have on Bobbi's earrings, and Bobbi keeps taking my Einstein shirt and most of Pap's shirts, and Larry wore and ripped my jeans."
Mam leaned back on her heels and clicked the toes of her boots together. "I've got on Larry's boots because they were right there by the back door and my boots are somewhere in Bobbi's room, two flights up."
"I could have gotten your boots for you. You just had to ask."
"These will do," Mam said, still staring at them.
"Why can't everybody just keep to their own stuff? I can't find anything anymore. It's a mess. I don't like it."
"You want us to leave your things alone?"
"Yes! I want everyone to leave my stuff alone. If they want something, they can ask first. Nobody asks, they just take. I hate it."
Mam started walking again, her hands in the pockets of her jacket. I followed her, keeping a couple of steps behind.
"Okay, JP. Tonight at dinner I'll tell everyone that your room is off-limits. Will that help?"
"Yes."
"Anything else?"
"Yes."
Mam turned around and waited for me to catch up to her. I didn't want to. I preferred talking to her back.
"What is it, then?" Mam looked wary, as if she knew what I was going to say.
"It's Dr. Mike."
Mam nodded and turned and started walking again. She didn't want to face me, either. I talked to her back.
"You said he'd stop coming around when we moved. Remember? You said it would all be over, but you still see him. Mam, you're going out on dates with him and you're married. What would Grandma Mary say?"
"I refuse to make predictions about what someone who died might have said. She's gone and I'm here, and I've got to live my life."
Mam sounded angry, but I wasn't sure if she was angry at me or Grandma Mary—maybe us both.
Mam ducked under some low-hanging branches and I followed her, holding my hand in front of my face in case she let a branch go too soon. She was moving fast, breathing hard, not looking to see how far behind her I was walking.
"I told you," she said, "I'm not going to be like Grandma Mary. I'm not even going to try." She stopped a second and thumped her chest with her fist. "This, JP, who you see now, this is me. This is who I am. I like people. I want to be around people. I don't want to hide away anymore. I want a family and good friends, and one of those good friends happens to be a man." She turned back around and continued along the trail. "I can talk about things with Mike I can't talk about with Pap or you or Larry or Bobbi. I can bring out this other side of me. I'm not all one thing. I don't love just one thing, or one person."
I stopped walking and pounded my fist against a tree. "So now you love him? First you say you're friends and now you love him?" I didn't know what to do. I wanted to run away. I wanted to stay and yell at her, demand that she stop dating Dr. Mike and kick everyone out of the house who wasn't family—real family. Instead I paced. I kept my head down, watching my feet, tramping down my old tracks again and again.
"JP, of course I love him, the way I love Larry or Bobbi or any of the others who come to our house, the way I try to love everybody. I'm not in love. I don't love him the way I love you or the way I love Pap. You two are special."
"You could have fooled me." I stopped pacing and looked at Mam in her big old coat and huge dangling earrings. "I never see you anymore." I pointed at her. "I never see you! Even when I do see you, it's not you. You're part Bobbi or Larry or Jerusha. Look, even your freckles have faded. You're someone else. You're not my mother. You're nobody's mother. You're acting like a teenager. It's embarrassing. Yeah, that's it You embarrass me. I hate who you are! I hate this life!"
Mam let me have my say, and I could see tears in her eyes, but she held on. She kept her head up, her jaw forward, her hands buried in her coat pockets.
When I finished yelling I ran back toward the house, the pack filled with our day's supplies bouncing on my back.
Mam stayed in the woods. She stayed there all afternoon and on past dark. Everyone wanted to know where she had gone. I kept telling myself that she was fine, she knew how to get around in the woods. I told myself that I didn't care where she'd gone, but the longer she stayed away, the faster I found my heart beating, and I couldn't concentrate on my studies. I heard the others downstairs organizing a search party. I looked out my window when the porch light went on and saw them all gathered in the driveway, Pap and Bobbi and Larry, with his odd assortment of friends. I wondered why they just stood there. Why weren't they running out to the woods? They were so slow. I pounded my wall and yelled through the glass pane, "Get a move on!"
Then I saw Dr. Mike's BMW rolling into the drive and swerving onto the grass to avoid the junk heaps lined up near the porch. He drove right over to the group and stopped his car, and both doors opened. Dr. Mike got out of one side and Mam out of the other.
Pap ran to Mam and hugged her. The others crowded around and I could see Mam explaining herself, her hand pointing to the woods and then at Dr. Mike. I watched them all head back onto the porch and heard them come inside, their voices filling the halls, and then the whole house filled back up with voices and music and laughter. I turned on my radio and sat at my desk. I had a lot of work to do.
Chapter Fourteen
MAM TOLD EVERYONE that I wanted my belongings and my room left alone. Late that night the household paraded in and dropped off my clothes, books, chess set, microscope, Swiss Army knife, a pair of shoes, a five-dollar bill, and some change. Half the stuff I hadn't even known was missing, and some of the shirts and books didn't belong tome.
Jerusha came in last and handed me my book on biodiversity. She sat down on my bed, making herself at home by drawing her knees up under her chin, the heels of her boots digging into the edge of the mattress. She looked at me with her protruding eyes and said, "I'm interested in science, too. I'm not just into poetry. It's neat how species change, isn't it? I mean, just by living in a different climate a finch can take on a whole different set of characteristics and needs from his fellow finches in another climate."
I sat at my desk and nodded, waiting for her to leave. Jerusha made me uncomfortable. She seemed too intense, with her large staring eyes and the veins in her neck that bulged anytime she spoke. Her voice sounded hoarse and raspy. She was stick thin and never seemed to eat except to pick a bit of food off of my plate. She wore her dark brown hair straight, cut just above the shoulders, with bangs that came exactly to the top of her brows, and she had on a man's pinstriped suit with a superwide Minnie Mouse tie.
"I'm sorry I took your book." She sighed. "I'm sorry, you know, everybody's been getting into your stuff and you don't like it. You should have said something sooner. No one was doing it to steal from you or anything."
All evening, as each person had come in with my things and apologized, I had felt like a cranky old man. They all made me feel as if I were being selfish to want to keep track of my things, to want to hold on to it all, but it did belong to me, and it was all I had.
"If you'd just ask first, maybe I'd let you borrow my books," I said to Jerusha. "I hate people just taking stuff. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that I might want to read that book or wear my own shirts or use my microscope. My grandmother gave me that microscope."
Jerusha shrugged, hugging her knees. "Sorry," she said.
"Yeah, well."
She sat on the bed, nodding at me as if she wanted me to say something more, but I couldn't think of anything else to say so I told her I needed to get back to work.
"You work a lot."
"Yeah," I said, turning back to my desk and my books and pretending to get interested in my studies.
"I graduated from high school when I was sixteen," she said.
"Mmm," I said, a surge of jealousy rising up in me. I, too, would be graduating at sixteen, and I had been proud of that—well, stuck up about it, really. I had skipped the fourth grade. Back then, the whole school, the whole neighborhood knew it. I'd made sure of that, and I loved hearing people say things like, "That smart O'Brien kid with the retarded father. Looks like he got all the brains."
I didn't mean to be cruel to Pap; I just knew how people saw things, and I wanted to make sure they understood that just because Pap had brain damage didn't mean I did.
"I'm taking this year off, though—from college, I mean," Jerusha said, and I looked up.
"I didn't know you went to college. How come you just—well, why don't you have a decent—How—"
Jerusha laughed, nodding. "What am I doing waitressing for a living? That's what my parents want to know. They want me to finish college and go to med school."
I turned around in my chair to face her. "Well, if you've got the brains, why not?"
"I'm not sure I'd love medicine enough. I don't know what I want to do. I love music and poetry, I'm interested in science, but then I'd like to do something—I don't know, maybe join the Peace Corps or something." She raised her brows, closing her eyes, and grabbed the toes of her boots. "I've had several pieces of poetry published and I've got a manuscript out, so maybe I'll be a poet."
"If you're serious, why do you hang out with those pretentious lunatics?"
Jerusha unfolded herself and stood up. "Because they're fun. So I'll see you, then," she said, giving me a half wave before leaving.
Maybe Jerusha and I could have been friends, but like Mam, she always hung out with the group. Once I tried to bring up biodiversity with her at the dinner table and the whole conversation around us stopped. Jerusha looked at me, then at the rest of the table, and broke into laughter, resting her head on my shoulder a second as if she thought I was just the silliest, most pitiful person she'd ever met. I tried to laugh it off, too, but after another five minutes, when the conversation got rolling again, I got up, leaving my plate for Jerusha, and slipped back up to my room, where I belonged.
***
CHRISTMASTIME HAD ALWAYS been a big deal at our house when Grandma Mary was alive. She had been born on December eleventh and Pap on Christmas Day. The whole month had been a time of mounting excitement for all of us, but that year as the days drew closer to her birthday, my heart, my whole body seemed to get heavier and heavier. When I awoke each day I felt as if I were getting up to go to her funeral all over again.
Pap, however, was his usual excited self. He had always been possessive about the month of December. This was his special month, the month he shared with Jesus, and when in church the priests talked about Christmas Day and Jesus's birth, I think Pap believed they were talking about his birth, also, as if he, too, were born in a manger.
He loved Christmas carols and sang them as if they belonged to him, his own birthday songs. When others sang them with him, he'd blush and hang his head and sing quieter, finishing with a shy smile.
That December, Mam and I had purchased several gallons of paint and we were all working to get the downstairs rooms painted before Christmas Day.
One late afternoon when Mam and Pap had not yet returned from work, the rest of us got busy painting the woodwork in our dining room a color called Soldier Blue. Larry, Harold, Leon, and new guy Ben, all in their jewelry, scarves, and boots, worked on the molding around the ceiling and floor, while Melanie, bending and dipping as if she were at a ladies' tea, Jerusha, with her Winnie-the-Pooh tie tied around her head, and another new addition named Susan, a guitar player, did the windows and doors. Bobbi and I painted the mantel and shelves around the fireplace.
While we were working, Bobbi turned the radio down and brought up the subject of Pap's birthday, and said that Pap didn't want tofu and seaweed for his birthday dinner.
I told them that we always had a special dinner for Pap on Christmas Eve and suggested having roast beef and chocolate cake, which was what Grandma Mary had always prepared for him.
Bobbi dipped her brush into the bucket of paint she and I shared and said, "No, he told me he wanted hamburgers and hot dogs and p
otato chips."
Larry and Jerusha gagged.
"Why don't we just inject ourselves with lard, it's a lot faster," Larry said.
Harold said, "Not half so tasty, though."
"Maybe you're the one who wants the burgers," I said to Bobbi, and she sneered at me.
"Ask him yourself, then, if you don't believe me. He also said he wanted to toast marshmallows."
We all laughed, but then Susan, who was a lot like Mam and game for anything, said, "Well, why not? We could light a fire in one of these fireplaces and toast them inside."
Bobbi shook her head. "No, he wants it outside, at night, so he can see the Nativity."
"Well, that's impossible," I said, painting across the top of the mantel and getting Bobbi's hand by accident.
"Hey! You did that on purpose."
I held up my hands. "I swear I didn't"
"Yeah, well, watch it"
Susan said, "Why is it impossible? We could make a pit in the ground, or build one if the ground's too frozen, and do the hot dogs and hamburgers and toast the marshmallows all outside. It would be great. We'd just need a lot of blankets and stuff."
Leon said, "I've got some old wool army blankets we could use, and a grill we could set over the pit Yeah, it would work."
Then everyone started talking, making suggestions, each one more ridiculous than the next, and I said so.
"You guys are crazy. We're not about to have a weenie roast in the middle of December—give me a break. The least we could do is give Pap a decent roast beef and chocolate cake dinner like he's always had."
Susan turned around to face me, her whole body covered in more paint than she was putting on the door, and said, "You're a real killjoy, JP, you know that?"
"Lighten up, JP," Harold said, and Ben and Leon agreed.
Larry said, "Leave him alone," and Bobbi said, "Why? He's always acting so superior. Mr. Know-It-All. 'You! Paint the doors, and you, paint the windows,"' she added, imitating me. "Mr. Boss Man, telling us all how to paint. 'Even strokes, even strokes'—give it up, JP."
"Mam put me in charge," I said, my voice cracking.