Breakdown Lane, The (5 page)

My parents had died the summer before last.

Though they’d rarely come to see us, we’d gone to New York every year to see them. They weren’t a presence in our daily lives, as the Steiners were. But when they died in a plane crash in Scotland, guest of some laird, the effect on me was devastating. In a foolish homage, I reduced the space in our bedroom by a third to install my father’s mahogany desk, with photos cemented by time under its glass top. Photos of him as a young man, laughing with E. B. White and Truman Capote, neither my father nor any of the others absent a cocktail glass. Leo bored a hole in the back for my computer cords, and I worked there, surrounded by the tweedy presence of my father’s loving, offhand protection. I had my sister, Janey, but she was in the mold of Mother and Father—she and her architect husband giving “little parties” for fifty, hanging around the Hamptons with sons and daughters of famous writers with names like Bo and Razzie.

My only real world was Leo and the kids. I wasn’t going to have it pulled out from under me like a worn-out rug on a whim.

“I’m not ready to be retired, Leo,” I told him severely. “I’m not ready to become
your
parents. And I won’t be in five years. I’m a medium-density housing person. I need human friends, not just cybers.”

“You could telecommute. They let you do it now whenever you want to.” This was true. Steve Cathcart didn’t care where I was when I wrote my column. I rarely went into the office except to collect mail.

“This is going to be a log cabin with high-speed cable? What would we
do
? Just living alone?” You’re supposed to be charmed at the idea of a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thy spouse beside thee in the wilderness of Wild Rose; and I wondered why I wasn’t. It made it hard for me to swallow.

“We’d do all the things we never got the chance to do. We’d live. We’re in a rut, Julieanne. And we call it life. What do we ever do for anyone? Pound nails for Habitat for Humanity once a year? What do we do for ourselves? Swill some wine with Peg and Nate twice a year? We don’t even make a real difference for our own kids. They see TV at their friends’ houses, even if we feel pure not having one at ours. Maybe if you’d just slow down a little, Jules, we’d be more on the same page. You’re so busy with all those lonely hearts, who are just going to do the same damned thing they were doing before the minute they finish reading the newspaper, and…your ballet…and guided running. What the hell is guided running? You sound like you need a seeing-eye dog…you don’t see the world around you and what you’re giving it and what you’re taking from it. Clothes and amusement parks and cell phones, Jules, the world has more to it than that. Or less. Or it should.”

Perhaps I should have tried to draw him out. Right then. I might have prevented something. Perhaps he was trying, unawares, to telegraph more than a message on improving our
mutual
lives. I thought he was just being the New Leo, idealist cynic. He’d always had a potential for this. I thought also of
Homo muchas erectus,
of trekking along with Vaseline on my face, getting wrinkles and heel blisters under the New Mexico sun, of living like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s parents in the potato barrens and piney woods of central Wisconsin, and mentally began poking holes in my diaphragm.

Within three months, there was the beginning of what Leo thought of as the real fly in the ointment. It would turn out, nine months later, to be a seven-pound, nine-ounce fly.

Gabe was just two years short of high school and Caroline was starting to notice boys, and we were starting over.

Leo was…stupefied.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

This had not been part of the second five-year plan.

While I hadn’t necessarily expected wild delight, the utter absence of any emotion at all when I told him was creepy.

“You always wanted another child,” I finally pleaded. I’d just given him a bubble-gum cigar. “I was the one who wanted to stop with two.”

“But we didn’t…”

“I thought you were fed up with all the doing and wanted to start being.”

“I meant we’d be free…not raising another life for eighteen years.”

“No one who has children is ever totally free, Leo. You know that. You don’t want this then.”

“I do. No, I do, Jules,” he said seriously, taking me tenderly in his arms. “Maybe this is a sign I’m meant to start over with this child and not make the same mistakes—”

“Mistakes? I think Gabe and Caroline are pretty fine examples of good—”

“No, I mean guide him or her more on the path….”

A few months later, he gave me a Mother’s Day photo of myself, floating supine on a raft in Lake Michigan, my belly like a risen dough above and below my red bikini, with an engraving that read “H.M.S. Darling.”

How could a person do that, and then do what he did later?

Right after my announcement, Gabe came into our bedroom. Doors never were anything to Gabe except a permeable membrane. “Gabe,” Leo called, freeing an arm to enfold his son, “you’re going to be a father! I mean, I’m going to be a father! Again. I mean, by the time I’m a father again, you’ll be almost old enough to be a father!”

He was right the first time.

I planned this as an exercise in creative writing. For about five minutes.

Then it hit me that if my mother knew that I wanted—even for a nanosecond—to dime Leo/Dad out for an easy A, she’d shit. Mom.

She can lay on the guilt. She denies it. She’d say, if you hate Leo, you’ll end up like him. You’ll bitch your own karma, she’d say. (Not that she isn’t brave and strong and there for us and witty and practical and all the junk everyone says about her; but she also is still seventies enough that, like Leo, she can say “karma” as if it were something totally real but invisible, like nitrogen.)

She wants me to still “love” Leo, “despite his weaknesses.” Like she would love me even if I were in prison. Which is an entirely different thing. Any mother would. If I were in prison, it would be for a decent reason. Like breaking Leo’s legs. Or a dumb one. Like possession of a joint. Whereas, with my so-called father, there ought to be a banner they fly behind a little Cessna during NFL games that says, LEO STEINER SHIT ON HIS WIFE AND KIDS BECAUSE HE COULDN’T KEEP IT IN HIS PANTS.

I always used to read my mother’s letters and journals.

She didn’t know for, well, most of my life; but it turned out that she didn’t really mind (I think the rant about invasion of privacy and boundaries was mostly for form’s sake). From my mother’s letters and journals, I know Leo is a stereotype. He tried to make it sound like he had some big epiphany, but he was really only an everyday guy who turned forty-nine and figured out he was going to die. He called what he was searching for “spiritual authenticity.”

Spiritual authenticity.

You’re supposed to respect your father, even if he does something stupid, because of stuff he did for you in the past: He ripped your moronic civ teacher a new one, in elegant lawyer language, when you built a model of the CN tower, with a rotating viewing platform, but got a D because you wrote your bibliography with the semicolons in the wrong place. Leo did that. Because he taught you to hold the bat level, to shave before you needed to shave, made sure you knew the words to “Officer Krupke” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” You’re supposed to forgive him even if he goes off the tracks a little, unless he’s a criminal or hits your mother or humiliates you or gives you stripes on your back with a belt because you don’t want to be a bird colonel like him, or something.

But how can you respect what Leo would call callous disregard? Disregard is the worst fucking sin in the book. How can you want to keep the last name of somebody who did worse than hit your mother? Who turned out to be a totally selfish asshole to
everyone
?

Your father is supposed to be like…your address.

If that’s true, I want to be in the witness-protection program.

I wouldn’t have minded the A in creative writing, by the way.

I was going to begin by tracing the deterioration of our family through the names our parents gave us. I digressed. I tend to.

My sister Caroline and I were named, normally enough, for our grandparents. She was named Hannah Caroline, but called Caro because my grandma Hannah was still alive and well and around every day. I was named—brace yourself—Ambrose Gabriel, but always known as Gabe. My grandfather Gillis was named Ambrose; but no people in their right minds would actually call a kid that—it might as well have been Percival. When our poor kid sister came along, it wasn’t that there weren’t any grandparents left to name her after, it was that—it seemed to me—my parents had snapped their caps. They had replaced our little table and these sitting chairs they had on our, like, six-by-ten terrace with giant pots in which they grew tomatoes and peppers and one lousy stalk of corn. We were driving out to Farmer Griswold’s and driving back with dead chickens in a bloody garbage bag in the back of the Volvo. And I thought it was their joint decision to name her Aurora Borealis.

Aurora Borealis Steiner. I pointed out that this sounded like an ethnic joke. Dad blustered, then quickly put on his Zen-understanding-the-ignorant face and said, “The wind blows all the way from the sun and passes the earth, and pushes around the nitrogen, the oxygen…that’s what you see, the northern lights, the colors….” I nodded. I had taken science. “And that’s why, since she’s a new light on earth…”

Good Christ. I was embarrassed for the guy. If I ever go this whacked over the intersection of some chick’s legs, please shoot me with a .45.

I knew my father had fallen out of his tree. I knew before my mother did.

Anyhow, her name would not have been such an issue for the poor little crap if her initials had not been the same as those on this giant sign down the road from the big old Georgian two-flat where we lived.

It was a company called Atlas Breeders Services, and it dealt in prize bulls, or rather their…reproductive products. Until a couple of years ago, the company was called America Bull Semen. You see the problem.

In high school, I knew this girl who was crowned the Wisconsin Dairy Queen—and yes, there is an ongoing dispute with the soft-serve company of the same name—I’m not making that up. One of the privileges of her reign was to carry around in her purse a syringe of the ABS product, in case she should come upon a cow that needed a boost. She was completely shy when in her nonpageant personality, though she did have a body that wouldn’t quit, especially the udder area; but I digress. Anyway, she would have to stand there, smiling brightly, while goddamned
dairy farmers
made nice comments when she whipped out her inseminator. Not to mention what her very witty and suave peers at Sheboygan LaFollette High said to her about it. (What she told me actually bothered her most was having to eat ice cream every day of the summer. She started throwing it up on purpose, though she was not bulimic. After her year was over, even the smell of vanilla gave her a migraine. But she also has these dreams of her purse opening and, like, forty giant syringe inseminators spilling out.) She told me she wished ABS had never been invented.

Everybody had a great time with that sign. The people who worked there were always putting these little slogans on it. Like at Christmas,
We Deck Our Bulls So Cows Are Jolly!
And at Fourth of July,
Red-Blooded American Studs, No Bull-oney!
And my favorite, at Easter,
Our Studs Have Something Eggs-tra!
Kids in cars would go out and rearrange the letters for maximum vulgarity, under cover of darkness. The actual farm was about a million yards back from the road, and we never quite figured out why it or the
sign
was stuck right in the middle of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which was a pretty fair-sized town, with a halfway-decent university, though every kid in town feared the shame of having to end up going there. I don’t know why. I went there a year myself, and it was a good enough place. It was only deciding I needed to put more room between myself and the Midwest that made me end up at Columbia. That and wanting to see why my mother turned out like she did, the combination of the bravest and most superficial woman on earth.

It was also sort of a tribute to my grandfather, because he left a lot of money for us that we can’t have until we’re twenty-one, and I’m not yet. He did this before he and Grandmother blew up in a little plane on the way to the British Open. I’ve never read my grandfather’s books, exactly, but the Civil-War-guy-turned-sort-of-Robin-Hood he made up obviously had something “eggs-tra,” because in every book in the series, he “bedded” (that’s how Grandfather would put it) more wenches than James Bond could boast of in all his movies, and without aid of a cigarette lighter that turned into a ladder or a cannon or some goddamned thing. And because the books made so much money that he was once chairman of the National Book Awards. I suppose you theoretically need your grandfather more when you’re a little kid, but in my case, it was the reverse. Grandfather died when I was ten, and when I was fifteen, I could sure have used being able to pick up the phone and hear him say, “A. Bartlett Gillis here,” and be able to say, “A. Gabriel Steiner here.” This was during the period when my parents seemed to have lost their grip on real basic stuff like three meals a day while most other people their age at least had parenthood sort of down pat.

My Grandpa Steiner still talks to me like I’m ten, but Grandfather (we had to call him that) always talked to me like I was twenty—even when I was five. “How goes it, colleague?” he would say. He listened to whatever I said, though he rarely listened to a full sentence, without interrupting, from anyone else. When he died, he and Grandmother never meant to leave us in the can financially. He could never have imagined that we would have needed our trust funds for regular life instead of a nest egg. He totally worshipped the ground my mother walked on. He just wanted to prevent Caro and me from blowing our (his) money on ’Vettes when we were young and dumb. My sister Caro would have blown it all (she now calls herself “Cat” and a person who calls herself Cat cannot be counted on; anyone can see that).

On the other hand, Grandpa Steiner, far too old to be worrying about us, was a total mensch when we needed him. He even sold their condo they were so proud of. All I’m saying is Grandfather Gillis would have done the same thing. But I digress. Again.

Back to my sister Aury and her name. At first, I thought her name, and the fresh-kill chicken, and the magazines and newsletters my dad got from people who lived in teepees and shared one truck, were just outgrowths of my father’s health obsession. I thought the health obsession came about because he couldn’t sleep. He told me he couldn’t sleep because of his work. He had migraines. He was
chief legal counsel
to the chancellor at Wisconsin State in Sheboygan (which is sort of like being the manager of the McDonald’s but
in Milwaukee
instead of Evansville), and it drove him nuts. He had to deal with lawsuits by parents over idiots who fell out of fucking second-story windows after getting trashed at frats, and with female professors of Pac-Island Studies who thought they were being denied tenure because the school wanted to give more money to the business-school guys.

He said to me, “The big clue was when everyone at work started to look like some kind of animal to me. I would say to myself, here comes the chair of the law school, Pig. There’s the secretary, Ferret. There’s my office mate, Clark. He looked like a Boston bull terrier. I was losing my mind, and I was scared to death I would slip up at some point, and say, ‘Excuse me, Pig, would you take a look at this discovery motion?’ It’s interesting, law.”

He also said it made him mental to have to deal with how many ways people could fuck up perfectly good lives. (As if he wasn’t about to be named Most Valuable Player in this area? And as if my mother didn’t get almost famous doing just that: she came to think that fucking up your life was in your DNA, part of being an air-breathing, bipedal hominid.)

Anyway, he became a basket case. He went to UW in Madison for a sleep study, and we got to see the videotape of him with electrodes stuck all over his head and body, which was at least more interesting than his slides of Stone Age man, apparently even more fixated on his genitals than my father. My dad
borrowed a TV for this,
which was like borrowing a live ram for a Passover pageant or some goddamned thing. (We had never had TV, as a daily staple of life, like other kids. We had to get it on the street, me usually at my friend Luke’s house. This was weird—kids would ask you, like, how do you live? But it was far less weird than what was to come.) Anyway, we sat in the living room and watched Leo sleeping under the effects of sleeping pills in this little white motel-type room, and it about put us under. He was twitching his arms and legs about every other second. No wonder he never got REMS. He hadn’t slept, in the usual sense of the word, for years, though he as sure as hell
looked
the part to us. We spent, like, months of our childhood with board games and badminton sets in our hands, waiting for Leo to wake up, and watching him sleep.

I don’t know if the whole sleep business was a head fake to prove to us he needed his “sabbaticals” from his very stressful life, or real. I was just a kid, and I didn’t realize then that it was sort of an American tradition to up and leave your wife for a bimbo before you hit fifty. It
would
be pretty difficult to
fake
twitching seventy times a minute.

My mother was giving
him
stress advice: take long walks at night, Lee, go swim at the Y, go scuba diving. Instead, he would stay up late on the computer. I would pass their room, and see the tiny blue fire of his laptop glowing, the way other kids would see the TV screen in their parents’ rooms, though we didn’t have one. I said that, didn’t I?

We saw how she was.

Leo had to have seen it, too.

He didn’t let it get in the way.

Anyhow, my kid sister, Aurora Borealis, was a cute little kid with black hair and blue eyes and freckles, who, like the Dairy Queen in my class, got lousy comments from other kids through no fault of her own. Just like my mother, through no fault of her own, got a wiring whack in her head. And we, through no-fault birth, got Leo.

I thought I was protecting my little sisters by keeping one off the street and one off my mother’s hands. My mother thought she was protecting us by saying she was fine, even when she was trying to make both her eyes work together. My mom’s best friend, Cathy, thought she was protecting my mother by muttering threats about her wish to maim Leo. My Steiner grandparents thought they were protecting my mother by making noodle casseroles and keeping the lawn mowed and selling their Florida condo. My father thought he was protecting us, as if he gave a crap, by pretending it was work driving him bonkers, not just his wanting to get away from his life—which included us. Everybody was running around trying to get everything to behave like normal, so Caro and I could pretty much do what we wanted. And that was how we hacked into the computer and set off on a trip with a fake excuse that would never have got past anyone who had been paying attention.