Breakdown Lane, The (28 page)

“Eight. Thirty? Only eight-thirty. I thought it was the middle of the night.”

“Long day?”

“Yeah. I can’t believe I was asleep. Yeah, Matt, it’s been a long night, and a long day’s night.”

“Sounds like it.” His voice was puzzled, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry. We haven’t talked in a while, Matt. And I told you I was separated from Leo? Well,” I drew a deep breath, “we’re divorced now. And he has a baby. And his girl is expecting another baby. And—”

“Jesus, Julie…”

“And my daughter Caro moved in with my husband and the girl, who’s this alpaca-weaving workout instructor who’s about twenty-five, and she’s in New York State, and my fifteen-year-old son, who’s brilliant and dear, but who has learning disabilities, just told me he’s dropping out of school when he turns sixteen, quite a melodrama….”

“Wow, I…”

“Pretty gruesome? Not what you’d think would become of stuck-up Ambrose Gillis’s baby girl, huh?”

“It’s more than that.” He had no idea, I thought. He went on. “You poor kid. I can’t believe you’re still walking.” He didn’t know how close to the bull’s-eye he’d hit. “What I went through with Susan, I thought that I’d never recover, that I’d never have a day in my life that was completely free from pain. And this is no time for a sermon. But you do. You wait eighteen months, Julie. And I guarantee you, you’ll have a day when you catch yourself smiling at something. I won’t say you won’t feel guilty for that. But you will.”

“It’s not like that for me, Matt. Eighteen months from now, there’s still going to be a big problem.” And I was going to tell him then. What the hell? He had the sweetest voice. I had begun to correspond, through e-mail, with other people who had MS. Maybe he knew someone I could correspond with. I was ready to be out of the closet.

But he said, “I called, Julieanne, because I’m, ah, coming to Milwaukee for a meeting, and I thought I’d stop and see you. It’s not until November—”

“Oh, gosh, I’d love that, but no, see, it’s impossible,” I said, remembering that fleeting, world-beating sense of being cherished. “I’d love to see you again.”

“Too soon, then, and there’s always the chance, of course, that you’ll work it out. After all, you and Leo had a long marriage.”

“It’s over,” I said flatly. “It’s so over. That’s not it.”

“But you’re just not ready to…”

“Are you talking about a date, Matt?”

“Well, is that against the law? To ask? I’ve been a widower for sixteen years. I’ve had a relationship that lasted four years but just never reached the point where I could make a commitment, though she was terrific, really terrific. A really athletic, happy person.”

“If she was so terrific, try it again,” I said, jealous and pissed off because his voice took on this the-way-we-were quality. Why in hell was I talking to this guy? “Anyone that terrific, I’d be with right now, if I were you.” But he went on to explain: The primary problems were his sweetheart’s touchy ego, her near obsession with her body, to the point of becoming anorexic. I looked down in dismay at my steroid-plumped body. I knew I wasn’t fat, but I’d always believed I could pass for the younger Katharine Hepburn. Well, the young Katharine’s Hepburn’s body double, boyishly slender. Oh, well, that’s it then, I thought. He likes them nuts and skinny.

“So,” he said, “how about we don’t think of it as a date, how about we think of it just as a visit? I can bring over hamburgers if you want.” I thought, He’s probably still five feet four, and now bald. He probably wears belts with big silver buckles with whales on them, because he’s said he sailed on Cape Cod. He was probably a frumpy little guy who read frumpy little magazines. But why not have a new friend? I could think of it as the beginning of my new life as a celibate.

“Okay,” I said. “But you should know, Matt, that there’s every chance I could forget what you’re saying while you’re saying it. Or I could have to go out to get my meatball sub using a cane. I have multiple sclerosis, Matt.”

“Oh, I know that,” he said.

“You know that?
Nobody
knows that.”

“Your father-in-law knows that. He told me how wonderful you were, how you fought it like a tiger….”

“When did you talk to my father-in-law?”

“One Saturday I called, and you were at ballet class, and we got to talking. He’s a nice man. He loves you very much. I can’t believe you still take ballet. I’d throw my back out if I played football. I can remember seeing you dance in the variety show. You could have been professional, Julie.” My head was still cranking. I wondered how long he’d known this. I wondered if he had something wrong with him, beyond the baldness and the belt (by now, in my mind, it was a big piece of turquoise surrounded by heavy silver). Something that attracted him to sick women.

Matt MacDougall, a pervert.

But he had been such a sweet, funny boy.

“That’s why I can’t…have a relationship. Now you get it.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“What don’t you understand?”

“The relationship between having a chronic illness and having a relationship, not necessarily with me, but with, well, say you had diabetes. Would you say, Well, I’m never going out with a man again?”

“It’s not the same thing, Matt. You’re a physician. You know there are issues with MS that make it impossible for all but martyrs who were married twenty years before their diagnosis.”

“I know a woman who has MS. She’s one of my patients because she was having some dental…well, it wasn’t related. But she’s only twenty-six, and she uses a little chair/walker thing, and she has a boyfriend she’s crazy about.”

“He’s the one who’s crazy,” I said. “No one, Matt, and I am not putting down your patient, no one would buy into this, Matt.”

“Why do you get to be the judge of that?” he asked me.

That quarter, for the first time in all my hideous years at school, I made honor roll. I got an A and four Bs. The A was in English. When they e-mailed my grades to her, bullshittingly before I could delete them, it made my mom cry. Since being in remission, she’d become harder to control. She was more on top of everything. So she found out, and, naturally, she pleaded with me to reconsider.

But there was a huge price for those grades. It was a mission. It was proof to Kimball that I wasn’t retarded. I simply, totally, fucking did nothing else. I forced myself to write down every fucking word every fucking teacher put on the board. I filled in every fucking sheet copying the answers to every fucking question out of every fucking book. I had dreams about the Teapot Dome scandal. I lay in bed with Rory and read to her from
To Kill a Mockingbird,
every page, so I’d remember every word, and, just like my mother, I got fucking choked up when the guy left the courtroom. At the end, Rory asked me, “What happened to the bird?”

I painted the entire apartment for my Gram and Gramp and with the money I earned paid a cute junior girl basically to do my geometry homework. The proofs reminded me of my life, which I think of as being evidence of negative numbers. The day after the report card came, I brought my mother the paper giving me permission to withdraw.

That about killed me. But I did it anyway.

She was shaking, she was crying so hard. The next day, I went around to all of my teachers, none of whom was intrinsically a bad person, just clueless, and I said good-bye. I saved Mrs. Kimball for last.

She lowered her reading glasses. Wouldn’t she have reading glasses that were cut across the top like little amputees? “Well, Gabe,” she said.

“Well, Missus Kimball,” I said.

“What are your plans?” she asked.

“Do you care?” I asked.

“I don’t think this is a wise choice.”

“I don’t either. But then, I’m a kid. I’m not wise. I’m not learning how to be wise here. I’m learning how to be a victim. And I’m learning how to hate what I love.”

“What do you love?”

“Uh. Reading, I guess. Writing.”

“If you’d written one half of what we’d asked you to do, you could have been an A student, Gabe. Do you intend to take the GED? Are you going to enter the armed forces?”

“Yes, I am, Missus Kimball. I’m going to enter the armed forces. Not really. I’m being sarcastic. Do you really think a lot of guys would like me to have their backs in combat? I’m a little easily distracted.”

“Well, good luck.”

“Do you mean that?”

“What?”

“Good luck.”

“I mean you’re going to need good luck.”

“Good luck to you, too, Missus Kimball. Now that I’m no longer officially your student…” I saw her glance from left to right, to make sure she had a clear path to the exit. “Don’t worry, Missus Kimball. I don’t have a rifle under my jacket. I just want to ask you a favor.”

“What?” She began clipping and releasing her ballpoint with her thumb, a gesture for which she would have interrupted Guided Study to say to me,
Mister Steiner….

“Don’t ever do this to another kid. Don’t pick one out and make him feel lower than a snail’s belly. Don’t mock him for what he can’t help. Cheer him on. Try to look for some good thing about him. Honest to God, I mean this in a nice way….”

“The fact that you didn’t…prosper here doesn’t have anything to do with me, Gabe. But you know that. That was your choice.”

“But you could have helped me make a better choice,” I said. I had thought long and hard about this. I had made notes. “It has everything to do with you. Because you can take a kid’s hand, not really, but you can tell him he’s okay, and find him the help he needs, if you’re interested.”

“Only if you have a student who’s interested.”

“But how would you know?”

“I have a group now. I need you to go, Gabe. Leave.”

What did I really want Kimball to say?

What did I expect her to do? Tell me I wasn’t garbage? Tell me she was sorry it hadn’t worked? Tell me that she cared? Tell me she was going to get Lou Gehrig’s and die a slow death? Say she was sorry about my family? Say she even
knew
about my family? She handed me a file of official papers about the GED. I made a point of dropping it into the trash on the way out the door. The whole thing hadn’t gone as I’d rehearsed it. Had I really expected it to? Mrs. Kimball being who she was and I being who I am?

Had I expected, finally, some guidance from the guidance counselor, for the principal to be a prince and a pal?

What had I thought my leaving would accomplish that my being here never had?

I left Sheboygan LaFollette for the last time through the gym door. I saw Mallory, my sister’s friend, changing classes. “Gabe!” she said, “I totally can’t wait until Cat comes for the four-day weekend at Halloween. Aren’t you excited?”

“Totally,” I said. I had no idea she was coming at all. I had no idea where she was staying, or with whom.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Take it easy, Mallory. I dropped out today.”

“That’s so cool,” she said. “My parents would kill me.”

“Mine, too,” I said.

“So?”

“So, well, say hi to my sister, and tell her we’re fine. Just fine.”

“Isn’t she staying with you?”

“You know she isn’t. Maybe you didn’t think of it. Bet she’s staying with my grandparents. She won’t talk to my mom. She thinks my mom hates her for moving out there. But she doesn’t. And, y’know, Mallory, why don’t you tell her that?”

“She has the coolest boyfriend. He’s, like, eighteen, and Leo and Joy let him stay with her—”

“I don’t want to know this.” I knew I shouldn’t have stopped to talk to Mallory. It was unprecedented.

“But it’s the most natural thing in the world, Gabe. They don’t want her to have her first sexual experiences in a car or with some creep. They made sure she was protected, and they had this long meeting before, with his parents….”

“I
so
don’t want to know this. And please, neither does my mother. ’Bye, Mallory.”

“Well, ’bye, Gabe. Is your mom sick or something?”

“More like, or something.”

“Are you going in the army?”

“Marines,” I said. “Special Forces.”

“Cool,” she said.

As I opened the door, Luke and a cadre of his jock brothers stumbled out of the gym. They were talking about who had been “trashed” the past weekend, who made “time,” what an asshole Burke was in Algebra II. I looked at Luke. He looked straight back into my eyes. Then, he pretended to see something on the floor, nodded the briefest nod, and turned away.

I began to turn away, too, when he said, “Dude.”

I said, “Dude.”

Luke said, real low, “Want to hang out Sunday?”

I said, “Maybe.”

I heard the door open and knew that it was Gabe. I sat up straight at my father’s desk and concentrated on my computer. In fact, I performed a parody of a woman lost in utter concentration. I didn’t know if he’d come into my room, but if he did, I wanted to make sure I was so absorbed I didn’t notice. He did. I could
feel
his facial expression. He dropped his book bag onto the floor and said, “I think I’ll wash this. I returned all the books, Mom.”

And I knew he had done it.

I breathed in deeply, but not, I hoped, audibly. I’d held out hope that something about proving to himself that he actually could succeed would spur him on for the meager twenty months it would take to finish. But to a person of Gabe’s age and temperament, twenty months was an eternity. For
anyone,
it was an eternity, if you were spending it in purgatory.

On the other hand, there had to be a limit to my tolerance. He may have usurped a part of my role, but I still had the influence. I knew he cared about what I thought. “If you want something in the way of my saying okay, I’m fine about this, Gabe, what you’re going to need is a different mother,” I said. “I do have something for you.” I handed him a stack of job applications I’d picked up on my little errands around town, to the bank, the doctor, the physical therapist. “Time to start living the life of an adult, pallie. Get a job.”

On the bed, Gabe seemed to sink deeper into the contours of my mattress. He sighed noisily.

“Well, you’re being a real sport about this,” he said. “You’re showing a lot of sympathy.”

“This is the kind of thing they call Social Services on parents for being a good sport about,” I said sharply. “Want a pack of smokes? Want to be able to drink beer, but just at home? It’s not me, Gabe. Healthy or sick, single or double, I’m still the same mother I was. And, damn it, I spent ten good years of life trying to get you past the, okay, past the thick-headedness, the intolerance of public school….”

“Yeah, and it helped me. But it didn’t change anything.”

“Sorry I couldn’t change the world, Gabe. I’ll try to get to that next week.”

“I thought I’d take a little time to orient myself,” Gabe said, as if by way of changing the subject. “And it’s not like I haven’t worked. I’ve done, uh, some writing, as I recall. Unpaid.”

“I could count that toward room and board,” I suggested, sounding tart as a lime even to myself. “The deal is you support your minor children as long as they’re in school—did you realize this is going to mean that your dad no longer has to pay for your support at the same level?”

“Do we have to tell him?”

“Do you think we’ll need to? Caro has her sources, Gabe.” I didn’t even know whether this was strictly true. But he deserved it. “Now, if you agree to some kind of homeschooling, plus work, that might be a different story.”

“I never thought it would cost you money,” he said, kicking off his shoe. “I’ll go back, if it means that.”

Unwilling to let him off the hook, I said, “Okay, fine. Un–drop out. Or go to a different school, Gabe. You can drive. It doesn’t have to be Sojourner Truth.” I looked him over. He was almost the same thickness as the comforter. Had he lost weight? He could ill afford it. “Forget it,” I finally said. “But I
don’t
want you to think this is going to be the beginning of a nice, long nap, Gabe. What kind of person would that make me?”

“You’re one to talk,” he muttered.

“Uh, I can’t help that, and you can take that back.”

“I take it back, but you’re pretty up on your high horse since you don’t have to have people pull you out of bed.”

“Would you rather see me…the way I was?” I held out my hand, which jigged obligingly. “I’m not exactly ready for the biathlon, Gabe.”

“No, but I’m worn out, too, Mom. This hasn’t been a banner season for me, either. I’m sick of having a surrogate child, for one thing.”

Despite myself, I was proud of his using the word
surrogate
correctly. “Okay, what should we do? Let Aunt Jane raise her? Send her out to Happy Hollow with the other little Sterns or Steiners?”

Gabe sighed even more gustily, and said, “I love her; don’t get me wrong. But I’m…I don’t want to be Rory’s daddy. And that’s how she looks at me.”

“What do you want to do about it? I mean really. This wasn’t the plan….”

“Have her spend more time with Gram and Gramp, for one thing. They don’t have jobs, and they’re always calling and asking if she can come over, and if Abby can come over. Let her, sometimes. So I don’t have to drive her everyplace and go through her book bag and fill out her order for ivy plants and Christmas wrapping and crap.”

What I felt for him was disgust. And sympathy. I thought of telling him what it felt like to have a catheter inserted. “I can raise my kid, Gabe,” I said. But he didn’t shut up! We both should have stopped, right then.

“You know, Mama, this isn’t all about you and your being the proud-though-challenged Julieanne Gillis. At some point you’re going to have to admit that we’ve, well, gone down in life. We’re not having people over for little wieners and wine before the ball game anymore. We’re not having a Christmas open house. We’re renters. You, me, and this poor little kid Dad didn’t even want. We’re, like, renting our own lives on a month-to-month. People weren’t ever calling to have me over, but you haven’t gone out for dinner with anyone but Cathy or Stella since Dad left for his little trip. You know what they say about the smell of a winner? That works in reverse, too.”

“You’re saying we’re…losers?” I reached down into the permanent files and pulled out one of my copies of
Pen, Inc.
“I’ll have you know I’m a published poet now, Gabe. This isn’t easy to do. Okay, they didn’t pay me much, but I’m trying to do different things from the things I used to do.”

“Yeah, but one little poem in a little magazine published by a guy in his garage isn’t going to mean that anything, anything ever, is going to be like it was again.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Gabe.”

“That’s what Jennet said. We have to be optimistic but not unrealistic.”

“If I’m not a little bit more than optimistic, I’ll hang myself,” I told him.

“Yeah, well I see your point. And plus, it’s really, really boring. I think of Caroline out there frolicking through the woods, doing whatever the hell she pleases, and here’s old Gabe, holding down the fort….”

I tried with all my might to see this through Gabe’s eyes. It wasn’t so difficult. He had endured an uncommon amount of responsibility. Maybe he did need a break, time to sleep late and stay up watching stupid TV, like most teenagers. Maybe he needed a dumb part-time job as a bagger at the co-op. Maybe he needed to veg out. It was my own humiliation that was forcing my hand against the back of his neck. This, my last hope at a proud ending, at least until Rory, who seemed unnaturally bewildered and timid in the face of the world, grew up, had, as my mother would have said, seen its final inning. It was I who’d wanted Gabe to nail a thirty on his ACT tests—to smite Leo. It was I who wanted to watch him toss his mortarboard into the air—as a reward to me, for all my hard work.

“What do you want, Gabe?” I asked finally, letting my hands drop into my lap.

“A rest,” he said. “A couple of weeks off to figure out what I’m going to do.”

“Okay.”

“And I will figure out what I’m going to do.” I thought that was about as likely as him separating the jeans from the towels. But I nodded, and he slouched into his room. The book bag was still on the floor.

Rory couldn’t quit preschool. I supposed I could withdraw her, saving Gabe even the possibility of needing to give her rides, but that would be a four bagger. Everyone in my life, loused up by Leo, administered the coup de grâce by MS and me.

I wouldn’t let that happen.

But the next day, I took an ad out in the newspaper. Within four days, I’d sold my single-carat diamond, my mother’s wedding ring, to a nice young couple from Milwaukee. With the proceeds, I bought Gabe an old Toyota Corolla, with no rust, no dents, complete with air bags (Gabe Senior made sure, and chipped in by buying new tires), and I called one of those places in Minnesota that take young men out and march them around the rim of Lake Superior or through the Everglades with a pack of matches and a spoon. Gabe would find himself, or at least bulk up.

The program I could afford had quotes on the Web site that I could more or less agree with, and was for kids who weren’t overt felons. I paid the deposit for a three-week stint beginning in April. He’d go out with a group over spring break and then continue for another two weeks on a “solo” with a counselor I hoped wasn’t a rapist.

I presented him with both, as accomplished facts.

When he saw the car, he got tears in his eyes. “I don’t deserve this,” he said. “I just said a bunch of shitty stuff and dropped out of school.”

“You do deserve it. You have to get places. And you have to take Rory to Gram’s. And the shitty stuff you said, well, I kind of asked for it.”

He smiled. “And I have to drive to work.”

“Yeah. Part time.”

“Mom, you can’t afford this.”

“Let me worry about that, huh?”

We agreed that he’d find a job, and then we’d look for a minimalist homeschool teacher, someone who would coach him for college exams, acquaint him with the basics of what he would have learned from biology, geometry, and so on—a series of tutors from the U. at ten dollars an hour were probably all I could afford—so that he could either earn a high school diploma by virtue of my certifying he’d completed the equivalent of four years of science and four years of English (the law allowed that), or the GED.

“Hour about four hours a day?”

“How about two?”

“Gabe, what can you learn in two hours a day?”

“That’s basically all you do in school,” he argued. “The rest is fighting the crowd, listening to stupid announcements, going to assemblies and junk.”

“Okay, but two hours and you have stuff to do afterward.”

We shook on it. Then he hugged me, tight, as he had when he was small. “I love the car, Mom. It’s a cool car. What did you have to do to get it?”

“Oh, I sold a novel for an advance of…about a hundred thousand bucks.”

“That’s so great,” he said. “Let’s buy a lake house, too.”

“I sold Grandmother Gillis’s ring.”

Gabe looked as if the car had turned into something foul. He put the keys down on the kitchen table.

“Look,” I said. “I have your father’s ring to give Caroline. And I’m counting on Rory marrying to great wealth. And you, well, you’re going to have to give your wife—”

“One from the machine at the grocery store, in a little plastic egg.” Gabe laughed.