But then I think about his life. Maybe he can’t help thinking the way he does. I mean, when he was my age, he thought he was going to be big in the movies. He didn’t know he was going to be working for some crappy cable show. He didn’t know his wife was going to leave him. He didn’t know he’d be sharing a kid with another guy when he isn’t even gay and therefore couldn’t even enjoy it. Maybe that kind of stuff makes you want to smile like the Buddha just to piss other people off.
He rubs his eyes and I see how tired he looks. He shuffles to the door. “Are you okay?” I ask him. Even though he gets on my nerves in the worst way, I still don’t like to see him moving like an arthritic octogenarian. My mom’s seven years older than him, but it’s like she’s decades younger.
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” he says. People say that we look alike, and it’s true. At least on the outside. I have the same red hair, the same height, the same long arms that make it easy to reach the highest shelves in the kitchen. But the man never expects anything good to happen. I can’t imagine living my life wrapped in a wry little cocoon, expecting boredom and disappointment and even disaster around every corner and then being funny about it when it comes.
“You want something to eat?” I say.
He shakes his head. “Not hungry.”
He’s never hungry. “I’m going to make you something to eat,” I say. I go to the kitchen and fill up a pot. All I can do is mac and cheese, but he could use all the calories he can get.
“Can’t have Dad wasting away,” I say to Tippi Hedren. “What will the neighbors think?” I put her on the perch we keep in the kitchen.
“Why don’t you love me, Mama?” says Tippi. She spreads her wings to make the line more dramatic.
Dad stands in the doorway of the kitchen as I tear open the box. He gestures to the cuckoo clock we have hanging over the counter. “Marty and Matthew should be here soon. Why don’t you make enough for them?”
I stop ripping. “It’s Wednesday?”
“Yep,” he says, and ducks out of the room. I have to search for more macaroni and cheese, but Marty set us up right the last time he went shopping: there are at least a dozen boxes in the pantry. I make four. Three for me, one for everybody else.
Only takes me fifteen minutes to cook the pasta and stir in the nuclear-orange cheese product and an artery-splitting amount of butter and milk. I hear the front door opening, voices echoing in the front hall. Tippi Hedren makes the sound of a doorbell, then a buzzer, then a clock ticking.
The Meatball appears in the kitchen, followed by Marty. The Meatball says, in his grave way, “Hello, Eddy.”
“Hello, Meatball.”
“Did you know that a human head is the same size as a roast chicken?”
I glance at Marty. “He’s reading that book again, isn’t he?”
Marty throws up his hands. “He likes it.”
“He’s obsessed.”
“He’s passionate,” says Marty. “Everyone needs their passions.”
“He’s passionate about a book called Stiff. My mom would say he should get back on the meds.”
Marty peeks into the pot and pokes at the macaroni like a kid poking a particularly gross bug. “Your mother isn’t here.” He grins wryly, looking a lot like my dad. “Besides, the whole thing’s funny, don’t you think? Rather appropriate, considering.”
“More like weird.”
“Weird is funny.”
“Did you know that dead people are occasionally used as crash test dummies?” Meatball asks. “The dead excel at tolerating pain.”
Marty grins wider. “Funny. See?”
I hand them bowls and they spoon themselves some mac and cheese. I fill a bowl for my dad and one for myself. I leave them on the counter while I scoop up Tippi and put her back on my shoulder. Then I pick up both bowls and head for the family room.
Dad’s already got the TV on and the opening song blares from the speakers. Something by the Who. “Who Are You”? “Teenage Wasteland”? Who knows? The title appears in blood red: Crime Scene: Miami. The credits roll. Takes a while to get to her. She’s billed as Shelby Graham. That’s not her real name, of course. She told me that no one in Hollywood uses real names. That she never got to go to Hollywood didn’t seem to be relevant. Anyway, her real name is Shelby Rochester Fishbone because she isn’t quite divorced from Marty yet, but I suppose Shelby Rochester Fishbone isn’t the best name for an actress.
We take our seats, always the same ones: me and Marty on the couch, my dad in the recliner, and the Meatball sitting on the floor by the coffee table. I hand my dad the mac and cheese and he starts eating it absently, as if he’s forgotten that he’s not hungry. I eat the way I always do—like I’m in a food-eating contest. Marty frowns at the food—he makes his own Alfredo sauce with freshly grated cheese—but doesn’t complain. The Meatball’s fork hovers between his bowl and his mouth, two shiny limp noodles hanging from it. The Meatball has a hard time doing two things at once. We’ll remind him to eat during the commercials.
We have to wait a while, at least ten or fifteen minutes, for her one and only scene. Takes that long to kill whoever’s going to die in this episode, find the body, call the cops in, have the main cop guy march around in his oversize sunglasses threatening everyone, and then get back to the office, where the pathologist can scoop out the dead person’s guts and compare them to manicotti or maybe hack the top of his or her head off while making bad quips about hats.
My mom is the pathologist.
I guess the Meatball’s obsession is rather appropriate.
“I hope she’s wearing an actual shirt this time,” I say. “I’m pretty sure most pathologists don’t walk around in tube tops.”
“Shhh,” says Marty.
My mother stands over the “dead” body in the eerie green room. She’s wearing a lab coat opened to reveal a low-cut shirt. Once I made the mistake of watching the show with Rory. When my mom first appeared on-screen, he yelled, “Whoa! Your mom’s onions are about to fall out!” I never made that mistake again.
She’s moving around the table, holding up shiny instruments and pretending to do mysterious, medical things with them. Her hair is longer and lighter now, streaked with fat stripes of gold, piled high on her head the way a queen might wear it. I wonder if she thinks of us, any of us—Dad, Marty, me, the Meatball. I wonder if she worries at all, or if she just imagines that we’ll all muddle along fine without her. That’s what she said when she left, “Oh, I know you guys. You’ll all muddle along fine,” as if she’d just be gone for a day or two, as if she wasn’t leaving Marty and Meat and me to work for the kind of TV show she said she’d never work for and move in with some too-tan media mogul down in Miami.
She says, “The victim was only a kid. Nineteen, twenty maybe. This kid should be hanging out with his friends, not lying cold on my table.”
Cop guy says, “What else can you tell me, Kallendria?”
“I can tell you that he didn’t die of that shark bite.”
Cop guy: “He didn’t? But his legs are gone!”
Mom: “Look at this.” She turns the dead guy’s head and points to a tiny hole behind the ear.
Cop guy: “A needle mark.”
Mom: “I almost missed it.”
Cop guy: “You never miss a thing.”
The Meatball slowly lowers his fork to the table and stands up. He wraps his hands around his throat and starts to cough. Then he falls to the floor, writhing and wriggling, clawing at the collar of his shirt. He stops moving, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, still as the “corpse” on TV.
When I was eight years old, Mom took me for an audition for Law & Order. Just for fun, she said, but she was so excited I could tell how bad she wanted me to get the part. So, I got the part. I was the dead body. I described it to Meatball not too long ago, how still you had to lie, how quiet, until they said, “Cut.” How hard it was to control your breathing, to let only a little air out and a little air in. How
your arm itches or your back itches and you desperately want to move and you can’t because you’ll ruin everything. The Meatball never forgot it. And when she left a year ago, he started doing this. I think he thinks that one day he’ll open his eyes and it will be her shaking him awake, her reviving him. And he’ll die every day until it happens.
Marty and Dad know the drill. I get up, move around the coffee table, and kneel by Meat’s side. I grab him by the shoulders and shake him a few times. “Meat!” I say. “Are you all right? Was it the food? Is it stuck? Can you breathe?” I lift him into a sitting position and pretend to give him the Heimlich.
After a few minutes of this, he opens his eyes and turns to me. “I was choking.”
“Yeah.”
“You saved me.”
“I always do.”
“I appreciate your speed,” he says. “You didn’t let me choke for long. That was a fast response.”
“I try.”
“When I’m dead, I would like to be a crash test dummy.”
I say, “Okay.”
“Death,” he says, “doesn’t need to be dull.”
We all watch as cop guy smirks and looks down my mom’s shirt.
Dial M for Murder
Saturday finally comes and begins how it always begins: breakfast at Marty’s and a ringing phone.
Marty turns away from the phone and begins to wash the dishes. I take my time finishing off a piece of bacon before I answer it. “Hello?”
“Eddy!”
She always sounds different, like she’s trying out characters. There’s the casual, “Hey, Eddy.” There’s the emotional, “Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice.” There’s the please-don’t-ask-me-anything-serious-because-I-can’t-handle-it, “What’s up, hot stuff!” I’m not sure what today is.
I take the phone and walk into the next room. I can only go so far, though, because this phone is ancient and has one of those long twisting cords. A built-in leash. “Hi, Mom.”
“How are you?”
“Good.”
“Not just good. I’ve been following the show, you know. You’re doing great! I knew you could. I’m so proud of you!”
I twist the cord around my arm like I’m preparing mountain-climbing equipment. “We haven’t won yet.”
“Oh, now you sound like your father. Everything doom and gloom and doubt. Of course you’ll win. Your show is the best.”
“There are other good ones.”
“Not as good as yours.”
Because I want to believe her, I don’t ask if she’s watched the other shows. I walk over to the living room couch. Hanging over the couch are family photos, the biggest a picture of me, Mom, and Meat with all of us, even Meat, laughing. “How are things going with you?”
“Fine. I’ve been in some talks down here. Trying to get them to expand the part a bit. But I don’t have any complaints. I’m meeting so many people, Eddy, you wouldn’t believe. You have to get down here. I’ll introduce you around. Never too young to network.”
“That would be great.”
“Though you probably won’t need me, once you win that contest.”
“I’ll come down soon. Maybe at the end of the summer.”
“We’d love to have you anytime,” she says. We. I always try to forget there’s a we and she always manages to slip it in the conversation.
“Any chance you’ll be coming up this way?”
“I’m sure I will. There’s talk of doing a dual episode with the Crime Scene: New York crew.”
“I meant to visit us.”
“Of course I’d visit you. How’s your brother?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Well, he’s the same.”
“Is he taking his meds?”
I let the cord drop and walk farther away from the kitchen, out of earshot. “They don’t think he needs them,” I tell her. “They think he’s funny.”
“That’s my point.”
“Ha ha funny, not crazy funny,” I say.
“He isn’t crazy. He’s troubled.”
“They say he’s unusual. They say there should be room in the world for unusual people. That’s what makes the world interesting.”
“Is Matthew still reading that book about dead bodies?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell Marty to take him back to the doctor.”
In his brief life, the Meatball has been diagnosed with ADD, OCD, depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, autism, and vitamin deficiencies. The last doctor, a young guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his white coat, said that Meat was a nerd, but so was Bill Gates and look at what he did with his life. That was good enough for Marty. And since Mom wasn’t around to make a big deal about it…
“You should probably tell him yourself,” I say.
“He doesn’t listen to me,” my mom says. “He thinks he knows everything. That was always our problem.”
I don’t want to hear about their problems. I don’t want to hear about “we.” I pluck at the cord. “So, about graduation.”
“I thought you said that you didn’t care about it,” she says.
“I don’t. Not the ceremony, anyway. But I thought maybe you could come up and make a big fuss over me.” I’m trying to make it sound like a joke.
“You better believe I’ll make a fuss over you. Speaking of fusses,” she says. “Any new girlfriends I should know about?”
I peek into the kitchen. The Meatball has finished his breakfast—one egg, sunny-side up, two slices of bacon placed in an X over the top—and is waiting for the phone. “Meat wants to talk to you.”
“I wish you would call him Matthew,” she says.
“He’ll always be Meatball to me,” I say, and hand the Meatball the phone.
“Hello, Mother,” says the Meatball. “I would like to ask you to come home now, please.”
I don’t wait to hear the answer.
At twelve thirty, I park in the lot of the school and grab my old tennis racket from the backseat. Lucinda’s waiting at the tennis courts. No white dress today—black shorts, blue T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up—all business. She has two cans of tennis balls, two bottles of water, and her racket. In her hands, it looks like a weapon.
She looks like a weapon.
I’m hoping she can whack my mom right out of my head.
“Hi,” she says, handing me one of the bottles of water. “I wasn’t sure if you’d show.”
“Why wouldn’t I show?”
“’Cause I’m going to work you till you fall over.” She pokes me in the gut with the racket. “You’re soft, Rochester.”
I’m tempted to take off my shirt to show her how not soft I am, but she’d see through that in a second. “Are we going to play or not?”
She doesn’t answer. She tucks her racket under her arm, reaches into her pocket, and pulls out a coin. “Heads or tails?”
Because of where my own head is, this sounds like a proposition. I say, “Heads.”
She flips the coin and slaps it down on the back of her wrist. “Tails. I serve first.” She pockets the coin and two balls and strides away from me, her pale legs gleaming in the sun. She waits until I’m in position on my side of the court. Bounces the ball a few times. Tosses it—not too high, not too low—coils her body, snaps her arm down. The ball hits the corner of the service box and slams into the chain-link fence before I have a chance to react. I’ve seen this before. Topspin slice. Lucinda and I spent two months at the same summer camp when we were twelve. She didn’t learn the serve there, but she used it on me over and over again.
Needless to say, it’s a lot faster now.
I stare at her across the net.
She waves back.
She’s enjoying this already.
I crouch and flip my racket from hand to hand. Time to take this a little more seriously. What Lucinda doesn’t know: my mom used to use me as a tennis partner when she had no one else to play with. And my mom’s pretty damned good
. Or at least she was, before she turned into a wisecracking pathologist who makes bad hat jokes.
I watch as Lucinda tosses, coils, and springs, whacking another to the corner. I catch a bit of fuzz on this one but hit the ball out. Her third serve is a smash straight up the middle. Another miss. 40–love. I wish I could film her serving in slow motion so I could watch it at home. I bend and wait for the next serve, one that bounces high up around my shoulder. This one I hit solidly. Lucinda’s so surprised that she gets it late, hits a short, soft ball. I run up to the net and put it away.
My turn to wave.
She grins. And proceeds to take me apart.
This is not the first time. The first time I was dismantled by Lucinda Dulko was on the courts of Camp Arrowhead when I was twelve years old. It was some stupid field day, where everyone had to play different sports in rotation and the counselors just signed you up for stuff even if you weren’t good at it. I was okay at a lot of things—at least, I managed not to humiliate myself most of the time—so when they signed me up for tennis, I wasn’t worried. I figured that whoever I played wouldn’t be that great either, and I would manage not to humiliate myself again, and the next day we could all get back to regular camp stuff. That is, getting poison ivy, trying to drown each other in the pool, and watching Renee, the counselor with the most enormous boobs we’d ever seen, jump off the diving board.
When I saw Lucinda on the other side of the net, I demanded to know what was up. I didn’t want to play old Lucinda Dulko from school. I didn’t want to play any girl.
“Boys should play boys,” I told the counselor running the tennis matches.
He didn’t look up from his clipboard. “You’ll play who you’re scheduled to play, Rochester, so quit whining.”
“I’m not whining.”
“You’re whining. Get out there.”
Lucinda waited on the other side of the court, tapping the soles of her shoes with her racket impatiently. I could hear the other guys whispering, could see them bumping and nudging one another. I walked onto the court and sized Lucinda up. She’d grown early, so was taller than me, but not by much. And she was pale and skinny, like one of those bugs you find living under rocks (even if she was sprouting a pretty nice set of boobs herself). I figured I was stronger and faster. I mean, I was a boy and she was a girl. So it would be fine, I thought. I would win this. And I would try not to embarrass her too much. I’d let her get a few points here and there.