I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (14 page)

Aunt Do, Russell, Ray, and I are waiting for my dad to come down from his cell. They chatter among themselves, excited to see my dad.

“How long’s it been since you seen your father?” Aunt Do asks me.

“Three years.” I’m guessing. All I know is it was some time before we moved in with the lawyer.

“How ’bout you, Ray-Ray?”

“
Long
time,” Ray answers, shaking his head. “Since he went away to Leavenworth.” You can tell Ray loves my dad. He’s got that kind of loyalty where it doesn’t matter what my dad did or how long he’s been gone—Ray has the same level of respect for him.

Me, I’ve been indoctrinated with midwestern values, where you accord love and respect to a man relative to how “good” he is. And by “good,” I mean does he not cheat, not lie, not hurt people, come
home at night, earn a living, and replace your bike chain when it falls off? That’s what gets my respect.

I’m contemplating this when my dad steps into the visiting room, beaming. We all jump up and hug him. He does that thing where he steps back to get a better look at me.

“What’s that thing on your face, child?” My dad has my chin in his large brown hand and is examining a giant zit tucked into the fold between where my nose ends and my left cheek begins. “Is it a pimple?” He really wants to know. “That sucker’s big.”

I’m a teenager now, and my dad notices everything, so there’s no lack of things to talk about on our visits. Besides my acne, he asks me about boys (they don’t know I’m alive), school (I’m underperforming, as usual), and whether or not I can dance (I can, but not in front of anybody). There’s still a sparkle in his eyes, but the usual fun energy between us isn’t there. I don’t know if it’s him or me. Probably a little of both. I think prison is taking a toll on him; after all, it’s been ten years since he first did time—he’s in his early forties now. The old age of youth. Or is it the youth of old age?

We’ve lost a lot of time. In the past five years, Yvonne and I have moved four times and I’ve grown five inches, gotten my period, gotten drunk, bought my first ounce of weed, been to New York, had three paper routes, spent a year studying ballet at Minnesota Dance Theater, smoked pilfered Parliament cigarettes as often as possible, and become a regular every Sunday at the Roller Garden. And my dad wasn’t there for any of it.

Moreover, there’s no way to really connect anymore on these visits. When I was little, I used to sit on Freddie’s lap, or we’d play Tic Tac Toe or Hangman, or he’d help me stay inside the lines of a
Mickey and Minnie
coloring book. It’s actually easier to talk on the phone than it is to visit in person because on the phone there’s no anxiety of having him stare at me, notice my zits, and gauge my reactions to everything.

I miss Leavenworth. It was a vintage prison, totally old-school—
the neoclassical gravitas of the building, the granite floors, and the tall ceilings. It’s like the Harvard of the federal prison system! By comparison, these new prisons have the feel of a Denver megachurch, or maybe a steroidal Extended Stay America. There’s carpet everywhere, and laminated furniture, and silk plants that are made of polyester.

It’s just not the same.

We slog through some more polite conversation, notable much more for what it doesn’t cover than for what it does. Many topics are off-limits, like what my dad did to get in here, how his being gone is affecting me and everybody else, how crazy Yvonne is getting, how she tried to kick me out, how our apartment has no running water, how bad school sucks, and how if he didn’t want the $3,000 from Yvonne, none of this would be happening.

Instead we practice the fine art of saying nothing too much.

“How was the drive down?”

“Winter sure was long this year.”

“Did you hear Cousin T. got popped? Yep. He’s in a maximum in Ohio now.”

We focus on the external and the mundane. We visit the vending machines and play a game of checkers. Mostly, it’s just like any other normal American family gathering. Except it’s happening in prison.

In what seems like just a few minutes, it’s time to get back in the Lincoln Continental. My dad says good-bye to everyone else before me—we all tacitly understand that you have to save the best for last—which makes me nervous. I’m anxious about not giving “enough” of a good-bye—I know he has all these expectations for a meaningful farewell, or at least I imagine he does. But I’m also worried about what I’m going to feel when he hugs me. What if I feel something? What if I feel nothing? This is why I don’t really like feelings. Because you can’t, as they say, win for losing.

I spend these last few moments we have together pissed—pissed that I’m expected to fulfill some kind of pent-up need he has for con
nection, pissed that I’m now facing a six-hundred-mile ride home, pissed that I have to come here. After all, I didn’t commit a crime.

So when it’s finally my turn, I give my dad the hug. And vow never to come back here again.

PAUL CALLS ME THE MOMENT
my shift ends. Six-oh-two
P.M
. It’s the phone equivalent of standing outside the door of the TV station, waiting for me to come out. I take this as a good—not stalkerish—sign. It means he is just as excited to restart our relationship as I am.

I pick it up. “Hello?” I have no idea why I’m pretending I don’t have caller ID.

“Hello, hello?” He sounds extra cute.

“Hi!” I’m smiling. He’s totally with me. I can feel it. That whole messy business where he was too scared to start a relationship? History. Ancient history.

“When are you going to be here?” He wants it to be soon, I can tell.

“I’m just leaving work.” I want it to be soon, too.

“Good. Hurry.”

“I’ll be right there.”

I’m very calm as I drive down the 101. In the past six months, I’ve seriously taken up prayer (owing to last year’s “nervous breakthrough”), and this is exactly the type of situation that calls for tapping into a higher power. I used to sneak around on god, hoping to get away with the occasional “freebie”—stuff I wanted that I knew-slash-suspected god didn’t want
for
me—but those days are over. If it’s not in my highest good, I don’t want it. Prayer is where I put all that into words.

So I whisper to myself, “Dear Universe, I don’t know why you made Paul call me again, but whatever it is you want me to do here, just tell me, and I’ll do it. Because I don’t have a clue. I mean, you
and I both know there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to walk away from this guy, so if he’s not right for me, please,
please
remove him from my life.”

That sounds good. But then I figure I should throw in some kind of clause to cover unforeseeable contingencies. “And, god, whatever your will is for me, please make it
really big,
like billboard-size big, because I’m nearsighted. Thanks a lot.”

I’ve heard that once you make a sincere prayer, you should consider everything that happens afterward to be part of the answer, so from now on, I really gotta pay attention.

A chill runs up my arms as I exit the elevator.
This is your home.
That’s what the chill says. It reminds me of something I heard a spiritual guy say once, that you’ll know when something is the truth because of the way it feels: not like you’re getting new information, but like you
just remembered
something you’ve already known for a long time.

That’s what this is like. As I walk down the long hallway to see Paul for the first time in 5.5 weeks, I remember what I knew the moment I saw his picture. This is my home.

WE FINALLY SOLD THE HOUSE
(minus my dad’s $3,000), and we’re now living in a place Yvonne bought on the “good” side of Lake Harriet. Not that the other side was bad exactly, it was just a little less good.

My new school is loaded with middle-to-upper-middle-class teens sporting straight white teeth, alligator shirts, and Tretorn tennis shoes. I own none of these things. I haven’t even
heard of
these things. Plus, I have a big gap between my front teeth.

I’m definitely bringing the fourteen-year-old awkward to Woodrow Wilson High. My skin is brown from a long summer spent mostly at Main Beach, my hair is puffy, and to put it frankly, I’m a tad peculiar. I’m full of non sequiturs, I bounce off the walls, and
I’m kooky, which isn’t really charming until after one graduates from high school and moves to the part of town that used to be gay and is now home to people who purposely wear ugly glasses.

I take stock of what I have to offer in trade on some social standing and it’s quickly apparent that barring a sudden run-in with a jar of hair relaxer (which probably would
change my life
) the only thing I really have going for me is that I possess a mean round-off and front handspring, and I can do the hell out of the splits. Add that to a voice that “carries” (as many a teacher has charitably put it), and I’ve got just one shot at high school happiness:

Cheerleading.

I’m pretty definitely an extrovert, but I also have a very pronounced timid streak that makes me pathologically afraid of asking for anything that I want. And auditioning is asking, right? (So is flirting. Another thing I am turning out to have trouble with.) The only thing I can get up the nerve to ask for is a job, but only as long as it’s a job I don’t actually want.

One of the girls in my homeroom, Mara “Call Me, Okay?” Moline, is a captain of the JV cheerleaders and, as such, is teaching the “clinics” for the upcoming tryouts. I don’t know what possesses me, but I ask her about it.

I should backtrack a moment. When I got to Wilson, I was like a bedraggled refugee who’d been rejected by three other nations—junior high schools that were the rough equivalents of, say, Hungary or Poland or Greece—and had somehow landed in Denmark. On the one hand, I couldn’t believe my luck. My new country was clean, and safe, and had a high standard of living. On the other hand, the Danish were all so blond! So beautiful! So well-bred!

And further, I had no idea how to speak Danish.

I had always had a popular streak in me, but once I got to Yvonne’s, bad hairdos (pigtails) and emotional disturbances (a very special combination of anxiety and compulsive talking) had sent my
social value plunging a good 50 percent or more. I needed some kind of rescue package.

One thing living in foster homes does for you is that you get a lot of fieldwork in the social sciences, and if you pay attention, you can apply it in ways that can make the difference between four years of social hell and three years of relatively fun weekends at keg parties plus one final year where you’re totally over it. As a result, I looked around my homeroom and made a vow:
I’m going to figure out who the popular kids are at this school, and I’m going to be one of them.

However (and it’s a big however), high school popularity has a
scent
that absolutely
cannot be faked
. It’s a supersecret formula no one in the world has ever cracked, although the Axe body spray people may kill the rest of us trying. Teenagers intuitively know how social status is to be accorded: to whom, how much, and what kind. A given individual can lose status but can never gain any
past a certain point
. Even dating the most popular boy (or girl) in school will only get you plus or minus a 20 percent differential. (Which you then lose when you break up.) Why? Because if you could gain any more from dating that person, they wouldn’t want you in the first place.

In other words, there’s nothing anyone can do to
make
themselves become popular. Otherwise everyone would be doing it—even the Goth kids who pretend they don’t care.

I developed this theory during the first seven months of the 1978–79 school year, a time during which I was abjectly invisible, unless you were sitting behind my home-done “bubble” haircut during the science movie.

As I moved forward with my fieldwork, I saw that the only way to get popular was to somehow have the popular girls
ordain
you as a popular person. Obviously, this observation is not a huge breakthrough—anyone who’s ever seen Alicia Silverstone remodel Brittany Murphy into a cute girl already knows this. But remember,
Clueless
was still seventeen years away from the multiplex when I hit Wilson.

It turns out I’m in luck. Mr. Harrington’s homeroom is, for the class of 1982, a sort of popular-girl clearinghouse. In the same way South America churns out beauty queens, the last names beginning with the letters L through M tend, in my school, to produce bumper crops of girls who have that perfect combination of good looks (but not too good: too good is bad) and confidence that comes off as superiority and bitchiness to anyone in the theater department or the marching band. These girls are also incredibly centrist—so traditional they make Regis and Kelly look like members of a terrorist organization.

So homeroom is about location, location, location. Those fifteen minutes a day put me in the proximity of some of the most influential girls in school, and eventually, one or two of them decide to talk to me. Which is how Mara “Call Me, Okay?” Moline ends up answering my query about cheerleading by tryouts.

Of course, I balk.

“COME ON!! JUST DO IT!!” she cheers in her perpetually urgent way. “I’LL TEACH YOU EVERYTHING!!”

I hem and haw for a moment, fearful of actually letting it be known that I would even consider being a cheerleader. What if I fail? Then people would know I wanted to be a cheerleader but got rejected. That would be a fate more like social quadriplegia—where you get hit by a car but
don’t
die. Besides, wasn’t cheerleading for girls from nice families, with brothers who played football in the fall and hockey in the winter? I don’t have a brother. I don’t have a family! All I have is a mom, whom I don’t call Mom, because she isn’t really my mom, nor do I want her to be.

Not exactly cheerleader material. Especially in this place.

But cheerleading does have two things to recommend it: First, it is considered a sport, so the uniforms are provided by the school, free of charge. And I don’t have money. But even more alluring is the bigger, more tantalizing carrot that cheerleading dangles. It could do
for me what I don’t have the power to do for myself, and that is
make me normal
. Or at least normal-like.