Breakdown Lane, The (7 page)

Just before the university opened for fall semester, Leo took me out for dinner.

We hadn’t even started our salads when he told me, “I’m taking early retirement.”

“We’ve been over this,” I told him, rearranging my shrimp into a wreath around my broccoli.

“I mean I’m taking early retirement now,” Leo told me, shoveling in his primavera pasta.

“Now. You mean
now,
now.”

“I mean, this year.”

“You mean, you’re thinking about…Leo, you’re not even fifty.”

“But I told you there’d be cutbacks, sooner than later, and that I’d get an offer. And I did. At my level, I can take early retirement, get a few years of full salary and then my full pension earnings. I can get benefits as if I’d been in the army. Dental, psychiatric…”

“We’ll need the psychiatric. Do you know what I make, Leo?” I’d just gotten a raise. “About twenty-two thousand a year.”

“And you have insurance….”

“All I have is catastrophic insurance!”

“Well, you and the kids will be covered. You’ll do just fine. We have our investments. I’m not going to sit around. I’m going to do some commodities trading with Dad. And some environmental work…”

“That should be lucrative.”

“But first, and I know you’re going to get uptight over this, I’m taking a real sabbatical. Not like the little trip before. A total break. I don’t mean a
total
break. I’ll be in touch with you every day by phone. But I’m going to take a real sabbatical. From all of it. I’m going to live in upstate New York, right by the Hudson River, with this great community of people I’ve been writing to for years. Before I go there, I’m going to visit some other people I’ve been corresponding with, in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Maybe I’ll stay with one of them on their places for a while. I’ve arranged for everything. The mortgage will be paid by automatic withdrawal….”

“Have you arranged for our divorce? Because basically, you’re deserting me, Leo.”

The air seemed to shimmer between us. My eyes did that separate move thing, waggling each one in an opposite direction, that they’d come to do in moments of deep stress or confusion. I shook my head to rearrange them. I shook it again. The wall between Leo and me was all but visible, shuddering. I could see it move. Even the waiter wouldn’t approach.

My husband looked at me with deep seriousness in his great brown eyes. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid, Jules. I don’t want to get burned out on our family, on family life, and skip. I mean that. But I have to…get away. For a while. I have to get away from homework and Gabe’s Individualized Educational Plans and the music blasting and Aury whining…for a while…so that I can stay in our marriage and renew our marriage. I can’t take any more daily pressure.”

Laughter, you know, is an irresistible human response. A survival mechanism. It’s like hunger or thirst or sexual longing. I laughed. Leo’s description of our family sounded as though he lived with seven severely handicapped children and a wife in a methadone program.

“You have to get away,” I said. “For how long?”

“No more than six months.”

“Six
months
?”

“I said
no more than
six months. You know how it was last time. I couldn’t stay away from you as long as I’d planned to. I missed my family. I love my kids, Julie.” I didn’t doubt that at all. “I love you.” I did doubt this. “I don’t even mind living…here.” He made it sound as though this, his hometown, was a grimy subway station.

“You’re frickin’ crazy,” I said, putting down my fork, whispering as the volume of noise in the room spiked. “I don’t mean, you’re crazy, like…Lee, honey, you big goofo, you’re crazy, cut it out! I mean
you need help
. You really need help. You have to get help, talk to somebody, before you even consider this…bullshit trip.”

“We’re not one person, Julie. We don’t have to want the same things at the same time all our lives.”

“I never said we were, though that was the gist of the vows we took. Remember that? I’m not saying we have to be joined at the hip, but this is extreme stuff, Leo. Say you see that. Don’t scare me. I feel like I’m in a room with a drunk.”

Leo took a long breath, held it, and let it escape slowly. He did this all the time now, and it made me feel as though he were blowing me out, like a candle. Leo’s long breaths were as annoying to me as a fork scraped along a plate. I wanted to reach out and backhand him. “
This
is help, Julie. This will be all the help I need. To help me plan a life that will be better for us and the kids.”

“And what is the alternative, Lee?”

“I don’t see one.”

“You don’t see one?”

Leo cradled his forehead in his interlaced hands. “The only alternative is…I can’t be here anymore, Julieanne. I have to get this out of my system. I have to get this
out.”

He meant this literally.

Having no alternative myself but to get out of that room then, because I could not breathe and my thigh felt as though I’d stuck the fork in it—symptoms I’d come to realize were the way my body expressed stress in the way other people got headaches, or so I thought—I got up from the table and walked along the exact center of the carpet runner. The room of diners seemed lined up on either side of me like rows of animals in cages, noisily honking and growling. The door of the restaurant was just ahead. I opened it. When we’d come in, there had been four steps that led up to the foyer. But when I stepped out of the door, the steps dissolved and I saw a sheer cliff, with the sidewalk, its silvery particulate surface glittering in the lamplight, at the foot. It was no more than five feet from the top of the cliff to the sidewalk. I jumped and landed hard on both knees.

“Julie!” Leo cried, standing behind me. I looked up. He was standing at the top of the flight of stairs, which I could now see very clearly. I looked down at my knees through my stockings. My skin was bleeding as if grazed by a chainsaw. I held up my hands to Leo, who lifted me in both arms, though he was not much larger than I am, and carried me to our car. In the car, he asked me if he should drive me to the hospital. Sobbing, I shook my head. At home, Leo bathed my knees and plucked out stray specks of cement. He massaged Polysporin into the scrapes and taped on gauze pads.

It wasn’t until X rays ascertained that neither of my knees was fractured that he began to pack.

I sometimes wish I had been expelled from high school.

But there you have it. Not even a rebel.

I never did anything wrong.

Or right.

Our father’s excellent double life made school even more fun. There were a few people who used the pretext of “I-know-what-you’re-going-through-my-parents-got-divorced” but the Steiners were not unknown in Sheboygan, and this was a chewy little mess.

Not that I didn’t hate the fucking place. Sheboygan LaFollette didn’t have huge gangs of kids with assault rifles or anything. It was just tediously crappy. Like, I did the lights for their stupid drama club shows for two years—you haven’t lived until you’ve seen some girl play Maria who’s about six inches taller than the guy playing Tony, and who’s obviously Swedish and has a jaw like a backhoe to boot, singing “Somewhere,” and you know that this has got to be sick and wrong, and then she falls on the bed without bending at the waist, like someone cut her down with an ax. It was a sin against nature, not to mention drama.

But the truth is, school…school and I never hit it off. There were the requisite roaming squads of junior psychos, who would probably grow up to be pig farmers or investment bankers, who tormented Caroline because she was sort of a tomboy-ditz instead of a full-blown ditz, wearing sporty clothes like the kind girls wear in New York (black short pants, white shirts; it’s a uniform) instead of the sleazy knockoff 1970s My Little Hooker clothes her friends like the very excellent Justine had. They also tortured me, mainly verbally, though I could so not have cared less, for general peculiarity, calling me “Ed” (shorthand for special education) or worse, “Forrest Gump,” which is not really that heartwarming a movie, if you ask me.

I just spent two fucking hours on physics.

Why they make you take physics and history at what’s supposed to be a Barney college for “high creatives” (read that, learning disabled kids, more or less literate but unable to prove it), where I’m trying to learn creative writing and light and sound technology, is a mystery to me. I know the motherboard better than I know my mother. Do I have to know the chemical reason that makes quartz an electrical conductor?

Regarding my mother. That, what I said, is not fair. She’s not my confidante, the way she thinks, but I trust her. I…love her, although she’s psychotically overprotective and nearly clinical…some of the time. But she’s been through a lot. You can’t blame her. For being one parent with half the wattage physically, she’s a goddamned good one.

I also “know” Leo. I’m acquainted with my father. That’s special, isn’t it? I
know
my father. Even though I’ve seen him precisely twice in what? About four goddamn years? These days, he visits his folks like once a year, which is very nice for his parents, isn’t it? I visit him with Grandpa and Grandma Steiner, never alone. We go out for pasta. He can’t spend too much, because, though he practices law where he lives now, he doesn’t make a lot because he basically lives in Bumblefuck, Eygpt, and Joy, his soul mate, wants every fucking thing under the sun, and it all has to be made in Italy or France or whatever. This is fine with Leo, of course, though he once wanted my mother to use, like, dishwashing liquid on her face.

My sister Caroline (now “Cat”), of course, writes. She writes of the joys of the Happy Valley, where she has been homeschooled, probably to the point of now having the ability to put on her own hair mascara. She can’t even spell. I can’t spell, but she
could
spell, if she wanted to. She thinks she’s a genius because she’s read all the Danielle Steel books the Devlin girls had. That was their library. Danielle Steel and all these books this one lady wrote about the pastor and the butcher and the baker in this one town.

Given the caliber of her friends—including her best friend Mallory Mullis, who I gather from hints may actually have a brain but has apparently taken great care to keep it under wraps, to the point of appearing to be the dimmest bulb since Edison’s prototype—you can hardly be surprised. She writes that Mallory knows all the names of a horse’s parts—like “shoulders” are called “withers,” and why?—but can’t add and subtract as well as Aury can. “Math is so non-esentel,” my sister writes.

I think personally that “Cat” is non-esental.

I shouldn’t have been shocked by all the stuff she did after my dad left us.

But I fucking was.

I don’t answer her letters. I read them, though. Sometimes I send her e-mails. (“Paradise” does have cable, though Cat says it’s a rule that no one eats anything that requires washing a plate. If you have to wash the plate, the food is not good for human consumption.) I answer with e-mails that say, “Noted.” My mother is glad we stay in touch, though I would hardly call it that. My mother would forgive Jeffrey Dahmer if he just apologized nicely. She says Caroline will “come around.” I should “love” Caro, according to my mother, because one day she’ll come to her senses. As if she had any senses to come to? She’s just being a self-centered kid, my mother says. Why didn’t I get to? Why didn’t little Aurora?

My sister tells me all about Dominico, her true love. (That’s a good name for a guy, isn’t it? It’s as rich as “Aurora Borealis.”) And about how unfair I am basically to Leo and Joy (Joy is short for Joyous; she changed her name from “Joyce”). How if I would just come and visit…

I’m sure. I’ll get right on it.

I never would have believed it was possible for her.

Not that I care. Big loss. So bad. So sad. Caro was like a vacuum when she was here; she just used oxygen and occupied space. (Would that be a vacuum?)

And it’s not that I don’t see her point. It was total, rotten, humiliating dregs right here in River City after my dad split, and especially after Caroline and I found out for ourselves that he’d split for good.

It’s that I didn’t think my sister was like, whatever, Cyndi Lauper or somebody, all kinds of brains and heart behind a goofy exterior; but I didn’t know she was no deeper than a sunburn. I didn’t know she’d turn fifteen and go static. Full quota of Leo genes, I guess, that didn’t express themselves until the last chip was down. I shouldn’t speak of her in past tense. But she is so past tense. The house we found on our Incredible Journey (more about this later) at the end of the street with no name, just off Rural Route 161, is just about the right place on earth for my sister. She belongs there, the reigning Crown Princess of the Shitheels, lady-in-waiting to Queen Joyous, in the Shitheel Capital of the World.

Do I come off as a bitter jerk?

Well, I’m not a jerk.

But I’m still pissed off, even though my own life has turned out better than I had a right to expect. It’s like, I knew my sister as well as my mother knew Leo. And we were…related. Like, almost twins. Fraternal twins. Not even eleven months between us. Her six and me seven, me dragging her back to the house, blood all over her head, yelling for Leo at the top of my lungs, after she coldcocked herself on the neighbor’s mailbox when she tried to do a wheelie on her little goddamned Barbie BMX. Me, like, ten and her nine, me holding her dress back for her so she wouldn’t puke all over herself, right in the goddamned women’s john at the funeral home when Grandpa and Grandma Gillis died. Me thirteen and her twelve, me walking in on her, with only her underpants and shirt on and the bolster between her legs, unable to look at her for two weeks, not that I wasn’t capable of jerking off to the point of passing out, and her paying me back for this by hitting me across the back of the shoulder with a canoe paddle. Me fourteen and her thirteen, me having to pull one of the eighth-grade sociopaths off her when they rated me with the “Ed” crap. She kicked a guy in the nuts who had six inches and fifty pounds on her, and she didn’t even know I was watching (neither did he; and I had a foot and twenty pounds on him).

She was tough, I’ll give her that.

She did crazy shit that was not totally unadmirable. She tried out for cheerleading and was so agile given all the dance my mother made her take that she made all the squads only so she could publicly explain, at the pep assembly, how she would rather have her premolars pulled out without lidocaine than stand in front of a bunch of Neanderthals and shake her ass in a tennis skirt. She used the word
ass
. This was in eighth grade. I thought Mrs. Erikson was going to slap her across the chops. I saw the hand of the tiny blonde bitch in the white athletic shorts, a PE teacher who was the cheerleader adviser, actually go up, into the backhand position, then drop and grab Caro by the elbow. I saw Erikson look out of her little weasely blue eyes and notice the principal standing nearby them.

I wish she had hit my sister. We could have won a lawsuit. The dough would have come in handy later. Though it turned out I have gotten scholarships for the young, gifted, and maze-brained. Turned out I didn’t need Gramp’s stash. I’m going to take it, and probably invest it some way. I thought I’d give it to Mom, but Mom doesn’t really need it anymore. It’s so strange, that part, when we were so totally shit up the creek financially not that long ago. It’s hard to forget the peanut-butter period. Kids aren’t supposed to notice that. But I did. I knew Cathy was paying for most of the food when she moved in with us, after my father took off for good. I knew she was living there not just to help my mother through her rough periods. She was also living there because my mother couldn’t have survived the Early Desertion era without Cath’s financial help, unless we moved to a trailer.

But I digress again.

And again.

Caroline.

She lives in the land of ceremonial moon dinners and consensus decisions and desks made of doors scavenged on garbage day or “liberated” from construction sites (of people who actually plan for and
buy
their doors). She lives among the strawberry fields (literally). Her boyfriend Dominico’s brother is named McGuane. Their sister is Reno. It’s a theme family but I don’t know what the theme is. (I told you this crew down by the riverside is a real brains trust.) Leo—our
dad
—lets Dominico sleep with her at their house. And he did when Caro was only fifteen, too.

Not that this is something I didn’t envy at one time.

But self-denial has its pleasures, too. Hormones over mind is apparently our family’s crowning trait. That and not seeing your ass because you’re looking at your elbow. I’m kind of determined to prove nurture over nature. I like knowing I’m not an idiot.

Still. The whole road trip we took to find our father, when he stopped calling us, was Caro’s idea. She figured out how to transfer Dad’s e-mails to Mom’s computer before he left, and she figured out how to use them in reverse date order. To make our map. I give her that.

And there were nights out there I never felt closer to anyone in my life (don’t get the wrong impression, here; I mean close, platonically), like she knew what I was going to say before I knew it. Times she was so quick on her feet mentally (Caro is a spectacularly gifted liar, a truly Olympian liar). She
so
kept us from being sent home on a bus with a nice juvie officer and a couple of granola bars.

I will never forget that. And in a sense, I guess that part of my life will always be…part hers.

But fuck. I don’t miss her. She might have blown off Mrs. Erikson. But she clearly had this destiny as a cheerleader-of-the-mind anyhow. Bawling, snot running down her face in a bubbling cascade with the tears,
I have to, Gabe; I can’t deal, watching her like this; I’m afraid, Gabe.
…I was supposed to feel all sorry for her. Fuck! I wasn’t fucking scared to death? Didn’t she maybe notice that jumping through the woods, going to no school, and getting a nice piece of one of the Bounteous Devlin sisters (there were five—did I already say this?—Joy was the middle one) might have held some appeal for me? Chucking it all and forgetting about good old Mom, Semi-Suicidal in Sheboygan? Giving up being what I actually was, too young to be a nursemaid and wage earner and replacement best boy for my Steiner grandparents, and soul mate and half-assed father to a very cute but screwy and scared little kid? Didn’t she think I maybe wanted, on some totally selfish level, to be Leo Two, The Movie?

But I digress. Shit. It’s one of my problems. If I hadn’t spell-checked this, it would have said,
“Its on o f my problem.”
I think Leo might have wanted an actual, right-and-left-brained son instead of a topiary son.

To be totally honest, I would like to see Caroline again.

There was a time when I thought all the school shit I put up with before the real shit was my quota for one life. But apparently not, because everything else happened on top of it, which is so totally boring it happens over and over and over and over and nobody ever learns a damned thing about it because if they did, they couldn’t possibly bring themselves to breed. I’m certain of this. Maybe it’s a study. I could do research. It’s possible there’s a missing gene for fucking loyalty on the Y chromosome. Not to mention a missing gene for distinguishing between the smell of roses from bullshit on the X chromosome. My sister being the perfect example. My mother, well…

Maybe I should write a memoir. My grandfather was famous. My mother is minorly famous.

I could write about growing up young, gifted, learning disabled and dys-fucking-functional.

No.

My mother hates memoirs of any variety. She calls them “me-moirs.” If you talk to her about one, she’ll say there are a lot more interesting things in life to write about than yourself. You can point out that, in a sense, she wrote about herself in
Myriad Disconnections
. She would say, “I was
not
writing about
myself
. I was writing about
events.
”

This has nothing at all to do with what’s the matter with her. She was always like that. You can’t tell people what to do with their lives for as long as she has without probably believing you know what you’re talking about. Never mind the irony.

And yet, an interesting thing my mother used to say about shit that really hurts you is that writing it down drives a stake through its heart.