Casebook (5 page)

“Your holiday weight,” he was saying.

She made a
moo-ey
sound.

“Oh, come on. I love your tummy. Your tush and your tummy are the only overtly sexual parts of you.”

I went inside. I didn’t want to hear more. I felt unsafe, all of a sudden, as if wolves were biting at our walls. For a long time, I turned on one side, then the other, bumping into Hector; I couldn’t sleep. In the morning, though, it was just our house, sun on the kitchen cupboards, my mom whisking eggs, Hector and Charlie already at the table drinking OJ. The Boops played jacks on the floor. Eli must have left in the night.

“The girls said they heard a stampede on the roof. And this morning, I found the front lawn covered with paper airplanes.” She got out the camera and was taking photos when Sare drove up.

“Better get the picture before the sprinklers go on, ’cause that’s going to be one mess.” I could always charm my mother. But nothing about me was magic to Sare.

^*1
This is where I got the idea to change a name or two. I’m thinking maybe I should make every single character in the book a redhead
.

^*2
You did give me most of our good lines. I suppose you had to so as not to appear arrogant. As arrogant as we in fact were
.

14 • The Year of the Mutants

Dante, Max, and Miles G. wanted to get into mutants, too. From then on for a year we had blowout Friday nights with five or six guys sleeping over. We named ourselves the Jocular Rabid Rabbits and sewed mutants in the tree house, which we called the Jocular Rabid Rabbits’ Pad. Simon taught us all to sew. To this day, I’m the only one in the family who can mend with an even stitch or reattach a popped button. That was the most social time of our childhoods, Hector’s and mine.

One night, Boop Two screamed, seeing her former toy headless, ragged-necked, with fluff coming out. After that, the Mims informed us that we had to buy our own animals to mutilate, with allowance money.

“How many
millions
do you need to borrow?” Eli asked on the phone. “I have money, too, Reen. I’m not going to let that get in the way.” How could he have millions? I wondered, with a shiver. My parents talked about other people’s money. Hector’s aunt paid his tuition. Charlie’s grandfather paid. My mom and dad felt like they were the only parents at the school who were actually writing checks out of their own salaries. But none of the families we knew had millions.

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
Godfather
s. 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 TRIED 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
.”

“
On
ly 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.