Casebook: A novel

  This was how I learned we needed money. Could Eli really give us some? He worked for the NSF, but I thought we got mailings from them asking for donations. My mother sent in checks, once for twenty dollars, another time fifty dollars to their Youth Foundation. And to the Smithsonian, too. In the morning, there was a new Albert quote on the blackboard: A TABLE, A CHAIR, A BOWL OF FRUIT, AND A VIOLIN; WHAT ELSE DOES A MAN NEED TO BE HAPPY?

  Not to contradict a genius, but I could think of plenty else.

  15 • The Room Not Chosen

  The un-Dutch Holland wanted my dad’s floors to be darker, so he moved into my room for a week. He made me take the top bunk, and I couldn’t sleep right; the ceiling loomed too close.

  I was never a kid who had nightmares, like my sister who woke up tangled in my mother’s bed, their female legs all over each other. But the last night my dad slept in my room something woke me. A scrape at the back of the house.

  I climbed down the bunk ladder. The noise seemed to come from the room off the kitchen. In its life in our house, that room had never been chosen. My mom wanted to fix it up so each twin could have her own space, but so far they liked sharing. All the unused furniture ended up there with a rack of old clothes and boxes with diplomas. From behind the dark clutter came a heave. It was hard to make out words but a melody rose. You told me we’d be together, it said, again and again.

  This could have been from the yard next door.

  You said I could be with you—

  A window banged. I made myself walk through the towers of clutter, to latch the open window. But when I stepped in, a force repelled me. I knew not to go farther. So I turned back and edged toward what had once been my parents’ room. Behind me, a noise choked outside. How much time!

  I put an arm out to steady me in the hall. I was trying to decide if I should wake my mom. But only Boop One slanted across the sheets, the covers flung aside. So was it true: Was my mother in that room off the kitchen, listening to a person outside? I wondered all of a sudden if my dad knew about Eli. I felt like waking him, but then I bumped into the Mims in the hall, wearing a white nightgown. “Did you hear that?”

  She put her hand on my forehead. “You’re warm. Do you want a glass of water?”

  I said no. She went one way; I went the other and climbed the ladder to my bed.

  Just before I woke, something spat in my ear: If you got pregnant, we’d have the baby! Baby! I hit my head awake on the ceiling and then sat there on the top bunk. Simon’s parents had had a baby, number four. He thought his whole family was an embarrassment now, and it kind of was. Plus they’d named it Theodore.

  I heard the familiar scrabble of Gal. The extent of my parents’ capacity to provide a living creature during the years of their marriage, despite our pleas for a dog, was a tortoise named Gal, who lived in a terrarium on my floor. They’d meant to get a smaller turtle, a sort my father recalled buying in a slim cardboard box at the circus in Madison Square Garden that afterward resided in a plastic pool with its own plastic palm tree. Gal scrabbled on wood chips to the top of a rock in her terrarium.

  My father slept through it all.

  16 • Were You Ever Going to Tell Me?

  Hector’s mom, Kat, took a job working for Sare, and he hated it. He referred to her as Sarah Bennett’s gopher and Charlie’s mom’s slave.

  Now that she worked, Kat wanted us there Friday night because she hadn’t seen her kids all week. Hector and I walked his aunt Terry to her AA meeting at the YWCA. She gave us sixty dollars to rent a movie, and so we bought megacandy and rented Godfather I and II. My dad had said we had to wait till we were fifteen, but we thought maybe with Kat we could get away with it. This would probably be our only chance for years. Kat stuck in her head and said, “You guys hungry?” without even asking about the rating. She looked at the candy wrappers all over the couch. Then she brought us each a bowl of pasta and told me she’d seen my mom and Eli in a restaurant. “They seemed happy. He was feeding her with his fork.”

  “He was what?”

  “He held a hand under. It was sweet.”

  I had a spasm. “Yuk.”

  But we watched both Godfathers. I kept expecting someone to stop us. Terry came in and sat with us a moment. “I love Brando as an old man in that garden,” she said.

  “Which do you like better,” I asked Hector in the dark, “your mom’s or your dad’s house?” Now it was our dad’s or our mom’s. It wouldn’t ever be our house again. But we were maybe getting a dog, I reminded myself; we couldn’t if my dad still lived there. He and Boop One were allergic. Boop One wanted a puppy anyway. My mom said Eli would help us find one.

  “My dad’s house,” Hector said.

  The next time Eli visited, dogless, he wore a big-shouldered jacket. An Eisenhower jacket, he told us, from the Korean War. Boop One reached up again to touch his hair.

  “Marine cut,” he said. “High and tight.” But hadn’t some stylist made up his hair? I could have remembered wrong. Was there such a thing as a Marine stylist?

  That night the Boops wanted Eli to read them a book before bed. “You should feel good,” I said to the Mims while he was in their room. “He’s a handsome guy. He looks like Lyle Lovett, and he was married to Julia Roberts.”

  Later, they had her computer open on the table; Eli was explaining how to take money out of her paycheck for medical savings. “We’re making a budget!” she called.

  “Woo-hoo!” I yelled back.

  The next time I came in, he was calculating on a legal pad that if she stopped going to her coffee shop, over a year she would save fifteen hundred dollars. Next to them was the wooden bowl she served popcorn in, filled with the frilly baked kale she always tried to make us eat. He picked up a papery clump. If he ate that, maybe they were meant for each other. When you subtracted the cost of beans, he said, you’d still save nine hundred. I wasn’t going to like this. Sunday mornings with my dad, we ambled in and out of stores and stopped, after not very long, for what he called a restorative cup of hot chocolate.

  On the other side of the wall, my mom said, “I don’t have thousands of dollars to buy a new sofa.” Movers had carried our couch to my dad’s house. We’d kept the table.

  “Well, I do,” Eli said.

  We hadn’t known him for that long. Maybe it was nice that he’d offered money. And there was something normal about them making budgets. I didn’t think you could be the way I’d heard in the unused room that night and then, like other people’s parents, sitting at the table, talking about money.

  It seemed as if he was turning down a job because of the Mims.

  “No, sweetie. Whoever takes that job has to stay at least five years. It’s a huge responsibility. I wouldn’t be able to spend the time with your kids.”

  “We could make it work.”

  “I’m not going to risk that. A lot of the problems you had with Cary were from him not being home enough. I think we should go away together once a month. And every Friday night, we’ll take the kids out for dinner. It’s good to build rituals.”

  “All that time when we were friends, were you ever going to tell me?” Tell her what? I wondered.

  “I thought I’d tell you on your fiftieth birthday,” he said. “Because by then you really would be too old.” Too old for what? My mother was forty-three.

  She sighed. “How’s your divorce coming?”

  “Done.”

  The next day, I found three watches and old snapshots on the coffee table. Eli’s mother, presumably, in a belted coat, his shovel-faced dad, and him with his brother. Eli was bowlegged, not a pretty kid. I couldn’t decide if I admired him or pitied him for showing her that. He was gone again. Back to DC. Maybe this was the solution to divorce. My dad had Holland, and now my mom had Eli. They were both people I’d heard about when they were married. Sometimes I thought one had tilted the boat over, sometimes the other; most of the time they canceled each other out.

  A PERSON WHO NEVER MADE A MISTAKE NEVER TR
IED ANYTHING NEW, on the blackboard.

  My mom put the watches in a Baggie to bring to the repair shop. I didn’t remember my parents doing errands like that for each other. Maybe they did before they were married. Or at least before they had us. A few nights later, I heard Eli through the extension phone. “Honey, remember, I’m in a room waiting while you’re with your kids in your million-dollar house.” I felt dropped down a well. I didn’t know what we’d be allowed on his budget. If he had so much money to lend her, why was he alone in a room? But did our house really cost a million dollars? If it did, then we were richer than I’d thought. I fell asleep listening to her tell him her worries about Boop Two, until his shrill voice woke me. “I need a timetable! People are waiting!”

  “I know,” my mom said. “Why don’t you move here first and then bring out Jean and Timmy?”

  “I really don’t want to live in California if we don’t end up together,” he said. “If they’re there, I’d be stuck.”

  “May I keep your pictures?” she asked. “Or should I send them back?”

  “They’re the only ones I have. Get me, get my photos.” He laughed. He seemed to think they were some draw. Those sad little pictures.

  17 • The Receiver on My Bed

  With Hector’s old phone, I listened in on the Mims and Sare. I was hoping that they’d talk about me getting a GameCube. Charlie had one. But the conversation turned out to be about Eli. He’d mentioned running when they first met at UCLA, with a lot of people around. Then, on their very first run, he’d said he was seeing an old friend with whom he’d been close once but wasn’t anymore. My mom had asked why. He’d said, Oh, well, it’s a long story. I did something I shouldn’t have done, and he lost respect for me. Why didn’t my dad ever talk to her like that? She’d probably asked herself every day of her marriage. But I knew why: he didn’t have to! They were already married.

  My mom niggled Eli. People gave her their secrets. Everyone except my father. He wasn’t holding out on her. The man had nothing to tell. But Eli had some jangling around in there, and my mother shook one out. He’d had an affair with someone he worked with. The man who’d lost respect for him knew the mistress, and he’d also met the wife.

  She was really beautiful, Eli said about the other woman, named Lorelei. It turned out to be irresistible, he said, and I knew I’d heard that before.

  I shook my head, to make liquids go clear; I had to think of Eli a different way. I wouldn’t have guessed he’d even had the chance for an affair. I didn’t understand yet the part that pity could play in love.

  “He shouldn’t have told you that,” Sare said to the Mims.

  “He didn’t want to. I kind of dragged it out of him.”

  “He still shouldn’t have,” Sare said.

  “You’re the only person I’ve told, besides Cary,” my mom said.

  “What did Cary say?”

  “I don’t know. I always thought our generation didn’t have affairs. We’re too busy fussing over our children. Fighting over whose job it is to do that fussing.” She sighed. “Cary said, An affair! Sounds like fun.”

  “Only at first,” Sare said.

  So neither of those women had had an affair. They talked big. But in real life, they devoted themselves to, well, us. Eli had cheated on his wife. This is not bad luck was written on a corner of paper. On the other side, A chance to put a lot of things right. That scrap was still there in her drawer but like a coin less shiny.

  18 • Speakerphone

  The place I grew up didn’t feel like a beach town, except for a few bright afternoons of flash and mirrory reflection. Most of the time we lived cushioned in fog. Sare talked my mom into being on the committee for our end-of-year beach party. My mom didn’t do that kind of thing often. I treasured the day, for her; she loved being one of the moms.

  Sare ordered Charlie and me to open the folding legs of rented tables and stake them into the Malibu dunes. My mom hung close to Sare. She turned shy and tentative here, a mystery.

  The ocean had a film on its surface over the deep mess. Hector and I stalked in, letting the water adjust our legs to its temperature, the liquids inside and out the same. Twenty feet south, people from our class drifted, girls wearing bikini tops, their arms stretched out over the surface, and guys just in shorts doing lazy tricks, kicking water.

  We didn’t have a chance with girls, and we knew it. Hector’s limbs still looked like antennae, and I could feel my fat. Tan fat was better than white fat, at least. I had dark skin. Charlie didn’t have a chance either, but he walked toward the girls, hands in his pockets, looking as if he were studying the glassy waves. Everyone got married eventually, even fat people, I thought. Marge Cottle was married until her husband died on her.

  Philip Audrey stood laughing with my mom. A fan of hair blew over her cheek; I wondered if he thought she was pretty.

  Hector could stand up on a surfboard. The waves always pulled me under. I had a catch of salt in my throat. This was one of those rare days I knew I’d remember later: our western childhoods. The fucking eternal boom of the surf. The Boops pranced at the fringe of foam with other little kids, their shrieks mostly lost in wind. I noticed my mom on her phone, pacing in the sand. She had a red phone then, big enough to see from a distance. Who was she talking to? I wondered. We were all here.

  Most of the kids in our class bobbed in the water. Ella knelt on a board. She was known for having a beautiful older sister, but I thought Ella was cuter. I was the only one who thought that, and it occurred to me that if she knew, she might be grateful. But I couldn’t figure out how to ever tell her. Simon swiveled Ella’s board, tipping her into the water, her T-shirt getting drenched. Maybe it was okay that we weren’t them. We would be later. We would be in college. The Rabid Rabbits had started liking people, and now everything was messed up. Charlie liked Estelle, but she stood motionless like a deer by her mother. Zeke liked Leah, but today she’d declared herself in love with Simon. I liked Ella, but I wouldn’t tell anyone because I knew I didn’t have a chance. Nobody liked who liked them.

  I ate a lot but still had that scooped-out feeling from being in the water a long time. I felt skinny, but I wasn’t. I loved soft cupcakes. I ate three. Hector liked the tougher kind.

  Boop One stood at attention at the table for henna tattoos, arms straight at her sides, while the woman pressed the patch on her arm. Ella lifted her blouse, and I saw she’d gotten a belly. That seemed terrible and sad. My mother stood with Sare, their hair wild. The Mims had gotten a tattoo on her ankle, a navy-blue chain of flowers. Sare had an anchor on her left shoulder.

  Hector rode shotgun on the way home. The Boops fell asleep; a head bored into me. Then my mom’s phone went on speaker by mistake. It did that sometimes, in those early days of the technology.

  “Just so if anything happened,” I heard Eli say, “she could tell Timmy.”

  “I love you,” my mom said, in front of us. I blushed for Hector to hear. The Boops were out cold. I wasn’t shocked, it wasn’t that; if someone had asked me I would have said she probably loved Eli, but I’d never heard her say that out loud to anyone besides me and my dreadful sisters. Not even to my dad. They hadn’t been that kind of couple. I always liked that about them.

  After the phone snapped off, she said that Eli had had an emergency operation. To take out a tumor in his pituitary gland.

  “In DC?” I asked.

  “Isn’t the pituitary gland in the brain?” Hector said.

  “Yes, but it went well, and he’s recovering. His ex-wife is there.”

  “Where does she live again?”

  “Wisconsin. With Timmy and her parents.”

  I wondered if my mom would go to Washington. We generally went to the hospital. Esmeralda’s son had had an operation from a pitching injury, and we drove in traffic to bring him a Game Boy my mom would never have bought for me. Eli was in the hospital for brain surgery. She probably had to go, but I didn’t want her to.

  It was the
kind of summer night I loved. At four in the morning, I heard my mom bounding up the stairs. She stomped out onto the roof where we were and woke us, her face not jolly. “Do you know how dangerous this is, Miles?”

  We’d set up sleeping bags on the flat part of the roof and brought up pillows and a box of graham crackers. It didn’t feel dangerous at all. From up here the curve of beach looked small, like a fishing village. Feathery tree boughs touched us.

  Kat picked up Hector the next morning. She was wearing shorts and her legs looked the way legs were supposed to, tan with dips where you wanted dips to be. I didn’t know how I knew what legs were supposed to look like, but it surprised me how few did. Boop One’s did. Boop Two’s no way ever would.

  The Mims didn’t go to Washington.

  I felt bad for the guy. Eli loved her more than she loved him.

  19 • Silence

  I woke up the first day of vacation and found this on the blackboard:

  BENIGHTED:

  IN A STATE OF PITIFUL OR

  CONTEMPTIBLE INTELLECTUAL OR MORAL

  IGNORANCE

  “That’s one I can think of some uses for,” I mumbled. “Two uses.”

  The Mims had a will to improve us. Summer Sundays were going to be cleanup days, she announced. She chalked a quote on the blackboard: SOME FRENCH SOCIALIST SAID THAT PRIVATE PROPERTY WAS THEFT. I SAY THAT PRIVATE PROPERTY IS A NUISANCE—ERDOS.

  She did battle with our closets. She bribed the Boops for try-ons that the other three hundred and sixty-four days they did for fun. Hives of clothes grew on the floor. She swacked open black garbage bags and made me twisty them and haul them to her car. At the end of the day, she asked, “Now, doesn’t that feel better?”