Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts (2 page)

I can’t imagine my father is easy to work for. He’s persnickety and grumpy and demanding. He’s my dad so I’m stuck with him, but Jacob doesn’t have that excuse.

I guess he’s used to harsh treatment. He told me once he had a rough time as a teenager. He was a sensitive intellectual at a big Texas high school, which basically meant he was ostracized and bullied on a regular basis. He figured his only hope for a better future was to escape to a good college as far away as possible, so he spent his days and nights studying. He’s a bright guy, Jacob: he got into Harvard, and once he went there it was like the whole world opened up. He fit in. It no longer counted against him that he was small and scrawny and would rather read than play football.

He needed to support himself, though, so he applied for a job as an assistant to a government professor. Not just
any
government professor: the most highly regarded government professor at Harvard and possibly the world, aka Lawrence Sedlak, aka my dad.

Jacob had already taken my dad’s best-known course, a survey class, the popularity of which was so great it was taught not in a classroom but in a theater, and even so required a lottery to keep the number down each year to 250 students. The required reading included not one, not two, but
three
books by the professor himself, including the one used in universities throughout the world and widely considered by poli-sci geeks to be The Book on political systems, titled, with more accuracy than inspiration,
A History and Overview of Modern Political Systems.

Jacob’s interview for the assistant position was rigorous: Dad fired about a million questions at him, then made him do some research right there and then, first online—in front of him—and then in the deep recesses of one of the university libraries, “to prove you know how to read a book and won’t just Google everything,” the professor said. Jacob was given a time limit for finding the necessary info and had to race back to Dad’s office, which is over half a mile from the library in Harvard Yard.

By the time the two-hour interview was over, Jacob was covered in sweat and his hands were shaking. Dad called him up a week later to say he had the job. Jacob says it made him prouder than getting accepted to Harvard. Since then, he’s worked for Dad as a research and office assistant and, over time, more and more as a personal assistant.

He spends a lot of time with my family, showing up for most major holidays, helping out with house-related tasks, shuttling Dad back and forth from campus, and then staying for dinner more often than not. Of course, this was all before the move, which I assume will change Jacob’s amount of contact with our family as much as it will Dad’s.

Now Jacob greets us enthusiastically, giving me a brief hug before shaking hands with Tom, who says, “I hear the old man finally moved out.”

“
He
did. His stuff didn’t. You wouldn’t believe how much there is to sort through. Fortunately, it’s all fascinating. To me, at least. I’m trying to convince him to let me donate some of his old drafts and letters to Houghton Library.”

“Are you crazy?” I say.

He takes a surprised step back. “Why not? People write dissertations on his books all the time. These materials are valuable.”

“It’s too weird,” I say. “Strangers reading our personal stuff.”

“It’s your father we’re talking about,” Jacob says. “None of it’s all that personal.”

He has a point—the few times in my life I’ve gotten a letter from my father, it’s been of the “Hope you’re enjoying your stay there. I just gave a talk at Brandeis that was roughly forty minutes long and was followed by a question-and-answer period. I think it went quite well” variety. Hardly the sort of thing to make anyone blush.

Even so…I just don’t like the idea. Expose our family to the light and who knows what hideous things might crawl out?

Tom says, “Seems like it should be your father’s call, Keats.”

I shrug, unreasonably annoyed at both of them. “Where’s my mom?”

“Up there. She sent me down to fetch you.”

We follow Jacob up the stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to the narrower stairs that continue on up to the attic. “Hey, Milton!” I yell in the direction of his bedroom door, which is closed. No response. “I’ll go say hi later,” I say to no one in particular, and we mount the worn and uneven wooden steps up to the third floor where my father’s office, bed, and life have been for the last decade or so.

The attic apartment runs the length of the house. It’s long, so you’d think it would feel big, but the angled roof and narrow, small windows make it cramped and dark. Tom—who at six foot two is at least six inches taller than anyone else in the room—ducks his head instinctively, even though he doesn’t actually have to. He can stand upright in the middle of the attic and walk a few feet in each direction without stooping, but the roof is always close enough that he keeps his head warily inclined.

My mother is kneeling over a box next to the daybed, but she rises to her feet in one impressively graceful motion as we emerge from the stairway. “Good,” she says. “You came.”

“Did we have a choice?” I ask jovially as I come forward to kiss her on the cheek.

She ignores that and waves her hand at my boyfriend. “Tom,” she says, and it’s clear from the wave and the way she turns back to me immediately that she is not in any way inviting him to hug her.

My mother doesn’t like Tom. It frustrates me because any other mother would love him. He’s reliable and devoted and good-hearted. Handsome, too: tall and broad shouldered and muscular with a head of thick dark hair. Right now he’s wearing jeans and an old blue T-shirt that matches his eyes. He came ready to help out. She should be flinging her arms around him in gratitude, but instead she just gives him that cold wave.

I understand why it bothered her when we first started going out because I was so much younger than he was—so young in general. But it’s been ten years, and we’ve been living together happily for the past four, and I’m twenty-five now, no longer a kid. The age difference—a little over five years—has stopped being meaningful. If I had just met him, no one would think twice about it. So she can’t possibly think he wants to take advantage of me, not anymore.

Maybe disliking him has just become a habit for her.

She says to me, “There’s so much work to do here, you can’t believe it. I feel like we’ll never get through it.” She’s always overwhelmed by any amount of cleaning or organizing work. Her MO is to check out what needs to be done, feel hopeless about it, and abandon the project, which is why every closet and drawer in our house is bulging with stuff that should have been cleaned up and thrown out years ago.

“Is Dad coming back to help?” I survey the stacks of books and papers and boxes covering the room’s furniture and floor.

Mom snorts. “It took me a decade to get him out of this house. I’m in no rush to invite him back in. I asked him to clean up before he left—apparently this is his idea of clean.” She jerks her chin toward the small, slight man standing near her. “But at least he sent me Jacob, who’s given me more help in the last half hour than your father has during our entire marriage, which, by the way, we’re officially dissolving. I’ve seen a lawyer and started the divorce process.”

I stare at her. “This is how you tell me?”

“The engraved announcement is in the mail,” she says drily. She fidgets for a moment, her fingers tapping on the edge of Dad’s enormous oak desk. Even though it’s cleanup day, she’s wearing some kind of multicolored, floaty bohemian skirt topped by an old pink shirt that has big round buttons down the front.

Mom always wears skirts because they flatter her figure. She’s thin from the side, a board really—no breasts, no butt, nothing sticking out. But if you look at her straight on, her hips are surprisingly wide. The skirts hide that unexpected ultrafeminine width. She looks ungainly in pants, but in a skirt she’s close to gorgeous with her long dark hair—threaded with gray now but not as much as you’d expect for a fifty-five-year-old woman—and her large hazel eyes, long, straight nose, and wide mouth. I got her nose, but that’s it. Otherwise, I don’t look much like her or much like Dad, either. “You don’t even look like the mailman,” my big sister Hopkins used to tease. “Poor little red-haired freak.”

“Let’s go downstairs,” Mom says to me abruptly. “I need a cup of tea.”

So much for getting down to work. But I’m not all that eager to start cleaning, either, so I’m happy to flee with her.

As we head down the steps, Tom starts to follow us. Mom halts. “Help Jacob pack up in here, will you, Tom?”

“Sure thing,” says Tom and retreats back up the stairs.

* * *

I watch my mother as she whirls around the kitchen, plucking tea bags out of a canister on the counter, grabbing a couple of mugs out of the cabinet, filling them with water, and sticking them both in the microwave, which she closes with such a violent push that a stack of papers on top falls over and scatters on the floor.

“This kitchen!” she says, bending over and angrily snatching them all up. “It’s a mess. I can’t stand it.”

I look around. She’s right: it is a mess. Not only is every surface covered with old mail and dust, but the room itself hasn’t been updated or repainted for decades. I’m sitting on the breakfast booth bench, which is covered with a teal and pink vinyl that was probably considered stylishly modern in 1980 but which is just plain ugly now. The faded off-white cabinets that line the wall are fussy and ornate and not like anything my mother would have picked out herself, so they must have predated my parents’ purchase of the house. The floor is brown linoleum, the counters beige laminate.

The funny thing is that the house itself—a 1920s Tudor—is incredibly valuable, especially because Newton is such a desirable suburb, much more coveted than Waltham, where Tom and I live. The school system is good and the Mass Turnpike is close enough to be convenient but far enough away that you can’t hear or see it.

And just as I’m thinking,
Wonder what this house is worth now?
my mother says, “I’m putting the whole thing on the market.”

“Ha,” I say, pleased to be ahead of her for once. “I saw that coming.”

“Really?” She seems surprised. Then she shrugs. “Good. I’m glad. I was worried you’d get upset.”

“It’s too big for you and Milton, anyway. Now that Dad’s moved out.”

The microwave dings. Mom instantly wheels around, pulls the door open, and grabs at the mugs. Tea slops over the edge as she strides over to the booth and plops them down. She cooked the water with the tea bags already inside so both cups are a dark brown color now.

“Milk? Sugar?” she asks.

“Whatever you’re having.” I’m not a tea drinker normally. Coffee’s my drug. I keep hoping it will make me feel alert, aware, brilliant, on top of my game…but it just makes me irritable and always needing to pee.

Mom is at the fridge in seconds. A whirl of skirts, and the milk is glugging into the mugs. Another whirl and sugar is pouring from a teaspoon. A whirl, a knock, a shove, a beat, and she’s sitting across from me, her spoon clicking rhythmically against the sides of her mug, open milk carton and spilled sugar still out on the counter behind her.

No one moves faster than my mother. My main memory from childhood is of trying to keep up, pumping my little legs like crazy while I raced after her in a supermarket or department store, desperate to grab hold of a corner of the elusive skirt that was always billowing just out of my reach.

You’d think with all that energy, she would be efficient, but there’s a frenzy to her restlessness. She moves a lot, just not in any particular direction. Even at the supermarket, we’d be cutting back through the store multiple times to get things she’d forgotten or missed on the first pass.

I take a sip. The tea is tepid and harsh, barely drinkable. She may have figured out how to make it quickly, but she hasn’t figured out how to make it taste good. I put my mug down. “Do you know where you’ll move to?”

“Definitely an apartment. Probably downtown, but maybe Cambridge or Somerville.”

“What about Milton?” My brother hasn’t left the house in two years, not since he graduated from high school. “Does he know you’re moving?”

Mom carefully places her own mug down on the table. There’s a dark red shield on the side facing me that says
Ve-ri-tas
. Truth. “I haven’t figured out what to do about him yet.”

When I picture my brother, he’s hunched over his computer—because he usually is—his face pale, his eyes large and expressive when they’re staring at the screen, elusive and blank when they meet another person’s gaze, which they rarely and reluctantly do. Even when he was little, he was a homebody, the kind of kid who never went on playdates and who would insist he was sick and had to stay home from school as often as he could get away with it—which was often, since he managed to get straight A’s no matter how much school he missed. When he was sixteen, he told my mother seriously that he had thought about dropping out since he could do it legally now, but that he’d decided it made more sense to finish up.

Given that conversation, Mom should have been worried he might not make it to college, but I guess any fears she had were allayed when Milton applied to and got accepted by six Ivy League schools. We all waited to see which one he’d pick.

None, it turned out.

“I’ve decided I just want to live at home,” he said in April of his senior year of high school. “I can go to college online.”

“Why did you bother applying to real schools then?” I asked him crossly, annoyed that he had gotten into two schools—Harvard and Princeton—that had rejected
me
, and then wasn’t even interested in going to either one.

“The guidance counselors would have bugged me if I hadn’t,” he said. “It was easier just to do it. Oh, and tell Mom I’m not going to give the valedictorian speech, will you? They wanted me to but I said no, and if
I
tell her, she’ll get that tone in her voice.”

My brother, folks.

He’s basically been hanging out in his bedroom since then with occasional forays down to the kitchen—he doesn’t even take the trash out as far as I know. When I ask my mother why she isn’t doing more to get him out of the house, she throws her hands up in the air and says she’s done everything she can think of, by which I guess she means that every once in a while she tells him he really should get out of the house and he ignores her.