Mean Boy (32 page)

Nobody had responded in all the madness except for me—I snapped to attention like a cat near a can opener. At this point, however, Janet was not being given a chance to elucidate. It had been decided after the not-pregnant-after-all announcement that everything coming out of Janet’s mouth was de facto lunacy.

“Oh, Jannie,” Stan kept saying as he shook his big pink head back and forth. “We would have taken care of you. It would have been all right.”

“You are crazy!” Maud was yelling. “Those university people have made you crazy!”

“… scholarship …” I heard Janet say. I held up my hand for silence then, but my mother grabbed it in both of hers and held all three hands against her chest.

“This foolishness
must stop now,”
insisted Lydia, quaking in her chair.

“… thesis …” said Janet. “Columbia, in New York
City
. ”

My arm twitched against my mother. “Hey,” I said. “What?”

“Oh my God,” said Maud. “I knew the mainland would ruin her.” She stood in the middle of the room and looked around, eyes finally settling on my mother. “I’m so
upset,”
she told my mother. “I’m so
upset
right now, Chrissie, I don’t know what to
do
.”

My mother released my hand and stood to go to Maud.

“I know, dear,” she said. Maud quieted as my mother took her by the elbow and steered her toward the kitchen.

“This is just
foolish
,“ huffed Lydia. You could see her fingers twitching, yearning to wrap themselves around a good, solid piece of hickory. A branch from a crabapple tree would do.

My father sighed in his chair. No one had yet gotten him a beer. Wayne was polishing off his own with the nearly-empty box of Turtles balanced on his lap. He looked like a kid at the movies.

“I’ve been offered a full scholarship,” said Janet.

“Janet,” I called, leaning forward. “What?” But Uncle Stan’s moaning drowned me out.

“Jannie, Jannie,” he keened. “Anything. We would have done anything we could to help you. You’d never even have to lift a finger. I swear. I swear you wouldn’t.”

Back and forth went Uncle Stan’s big pink head, a man’s disgraceful tears on his infant cheeks, which silenced us all after a while.

When Janet and I got drunk on Boxing Day at a roadhouse called Little Billy’s much-favoured by Wayne, she told me the pregnancy thing began as a joke. She and some friends in the Psych department, she said, had initiated what Janet called a “kind of half-assed consciousness-raising group,” which I gathered was basically a clutch of girls getting together to drink margaritas and complain about their lives. I’d heard around campus that the Psych department was a hotbed of radicalism and women’s libbers because they have two women professors on the faculty—the most of any department at Westcock. And both of them are Americans.

Janet’s biggest gripe to this group of hers was that she had packed on twenty or so pounds since arriving at Westcock and the collective Humphries response was, as she put it, “as if I had shot somebody in the face.”

Here I stopped her.

“Come on, Janet,” I said. “Not really.”

“You weren’t there, Larry,” yelled Janet—who, now that her secret was out, seemed like an entirely different person to me. She yelled over the music at Little Billy’s—even between songs, when the music wasn’t playing. She took huge gulps of draft between sentences, waved her fleshy arms around in outrage and slammed her mug on the table, sloshing draft all over everything.

“So one night I was ranting away about this,” continued Janet, “and my professor, Catherine, kind of joked—you should tell them you’re sick or something, like you have a disease, you can’t help it.”

“Your professor was part of your group?” I interrupted.

“Catherine, yeah,” said Janet. “Catherine started the group actually. So anyway, we’re all laughing, but then someone else says it won’t work, because if you’re sick, you usually
don’t get fat, right? So Catherine hits upon it: You should tell them you’re pregnant. How would that go over? And all night long, we talked about the ramifications of you guys thinking I was pregnant, and, Larry it was
fascinating
to critique the family on that level.”

I shifted position in my chair. “What do you mean, critique? What was so fascinating about it?”

Janet widened her eyes at me. “You saw yourself the way they acted! Don’t you think it was fascinating? I mean, Jesus Christ, your father! He was a case study in and of himself!”

I nodded, although it hadn’t occurred to me Dad’s behaviour was particularly fascinating. I’d just thought he was being old-fashioned, and kind of a jerk.

“So wait a minute,” I said. “You guys
predicted
that everybody was going to behave that way?”

Janet shook her head. “No, no, no, I didn’t plan any of this, Larry. We were just kidding around—I never thought I’d actually come out and do it. But they made me so mad at Thanksgiving, all these naughty-naughty grins every time I reached for the potatoes. What’s the big deal? Why is it any of their business anyway? Dad’s fat! Wayne’s fat! Why is it a national tragedy if Janet’s fat?”

“You’re right,” I said, nodding some more.

Mostly my part of the conversation was an exercise in trying to hide my annoyance at being made to feel a dupe. Janet had a point—it’s not nice to persecute someone for being fat. But it’s also not nice to lie to family. I was the only family member speaking to Janet at the moment and, although my parents thought I was doing it out of an altruistic impulse to act as the familial go-between, what I was really doing was waiting to hear how Janet had managed to get herself into Columbia University on scholarship. This was the only element of the saga I found remotely fascinating.

So Janet returned to her girl-group after Thanksgiving and told them what she had done. They were in awe of her, she said. And she was in awe of herself, that she had climbed aboard the ferry back to Cape Tormentine letting everyone in her family go on believing this cruel and fantastic lie.

“Suddenly nobody gave a shit whether or not I was having ice cream on my pie anymore.”

“I bet,” I said.

“But you should have heard the way they started talking afterward, Larry. Once the shock had worn off, talking like I wasn’t there anymore. Well, she’s going to have to come home, that’s all there is to it. She can’t go back to school like this. We’ll get her room ready. Maybe Mike Sutherland will give her a job at the
cwap
, Mike owes us a favour. Or Wayne—you could use a hand at the museum, couldn’t you, Wayne?

“And Mom’s like, Oh, she shouldn’t work, she can’t work in her condition.

“And Dad’s like, No, I mean afterward. She’s going to have to do something with her life.

“And finally I say, Everybody? I’ve only got five months to go before I graduate. And do you know what my mother says, Larry?”

In fact I do. I can guess exactly what Maud would have said.

“She looks at me and she goes, ‘But dear. What would be the point of all that now?’ ”

Janet stares as if she’s expecting I’ll throw up my arms in outrage.

“Wow,” I remark.

It’s enough for Janet. “I know!” She hoists the pitcher of draft to top off both our mugs. “My group just couldn’t believe it. But Catherine was fascinated.”

A lot of fascination going on.

“Catherine—you know, she’s not from here,” explained Janet, “so she finds all this of great interest from a sociological perspective. She’s from New York, from a family of intellectuals.”

“I don’t see what’s so interesting about it,” I interrupted. I was getting tired of Catherine. I imagined her perched up among the clouds, goggling down at us through some kind of huge celestial microscope. “It’s just parents being parents.”

“No, it isn’t, though,” said Janet. “It’s class. That’s the difference between where Catherine’s from and where we’re from. That’s what’s so fascinating.”

“
What’s
fascinating?” Our beer had begun to shimmer in its mugs because I was tapping my fingers so hard against the table. Maybe Catherine was a Vulcan, like Mr. Spock.

“We have no class,”
said Janet. “I mean, there’s no middle or upper class. There’s just one class.”

“Who?” I said.

“Us,” said Janet, gesturing back and forth with her hand, at herself and me. Then, to my discomfort, she expanded the gesture to take in the whole of Little Billy’s. A few feet to her left was a drunk in a too-small Snoopy T-shirt. His fly gaped open beneath a white halfmoon of belly, and one eye was closed and he weaved back and forth in front of the jukebox playing air guitar to the flute part of “Kung Fu Fighting.”

My chair was digging into my back. My body seemed to be rearing itself farther and farther away from Janet the more she talked.

“You keep talking about this whole thing like it’s a case study,” I told her.

Janet looked down at her beer for a moment. “Well—it kind of was a case study, really. You all were. Catherine suggested I write a paper on it.”

I reared even farther back in my chair, so that its feet shrieked against the floor. “What do you mean, we all were?
So you had the devastated mother, the evil father, and then—what—the asshole cousin?”

Janet laughed. When I didn’t, she composed herself. “I don’t think you’re an asshole. My father is not evil. My father—” Janet looked away from me suddenly, toward where the Kung Fu Fighter was now steadying himself against the jukebox. She blinked a bunch of times before turning back. “My father is a very sweet man. But he’s not the most progressive guy in the world, Larry, you’ll agree with me on that one, right?”

I shrugged, even though I agreed. I wasn’t in the mood to agree out loud.

“I mean, he’s a product of his culture and time and place, just like the rest of us are.”

“Why are you always lumping me in with everything?” I moaned.

Janet cocked her head and gave me a blank, innocent look, like a curious dog. “Because you’re a part of things, Larry—you don’t stand outside the system you inhabit any more than I do.”

“But you do,” I argued. “If you’re writing about it and critiquing it like you said, you’re—you have to make yourself an outsider.”

“That’s by necessity. How am I supposed to analyze—”

“That’s just what I’m saying,” I said, leaning forward and feeling my neck heat up. “If you’re going to analyze it objectively, you’ve got to stand outside of things, you’ve removed yourself.”

“Well,” said Janet. “For the purposes of writing the paper, I guess. But I don’t claim to—”

“I do that too, though,” I shouted at my cousin, for we were on our second pitcher of beer at that point. “I do that too. Because I’m a poet. I do that too.”

I sat back. Janet regarded me. It was the first time I had
ever announced myself in such a way to any member of my family. I
do
poetry. I’m
studying
poetry. Sometimes even, I
write
poetry. But never:
because I am a poet. I lay claim to this, because I am a poet
.

Janet’s the one to appeal to now, after all—the guru to go to—she whose good graces must be sought and won. I like almost nothing about how she did it, and yet the fact that she did it—with no scholarship, with undistinguished high-school transcripts, with no familial support or expectation—is inescapable.

And how did Janet do it? The process, it seems to me, was two-fold.

One: she got herself an ally. Someone powerful. Someone with contacts. Write this paper, Professor Catherine told Janet, and I will oversee it. I will give you the name of journals where you might get it published (and who would have thought there were journals out there for psychology and sociology the same way there is for poetry?). I will send it along to my friends at Columbia, promised Catherine. I will set you on the path.

Two. Two is more complicated. Two involves the internal Janet. Two was Janet taking a giant step backward, like in a counterintuitive game of Simon Says. Remember that game? I hated it, because I hated most games as a kid—anything involving strength or speed or stealth. Mostly I hated the pointless suspense of Simon Says, the kid at the front barking orders—giant steps, baby steps, half-steps, and bunny hops, sending you back if you made the fatal mistake of executing a bunny hop that hadn’t been legitimized with the preface “Simon Says.” All those games were essentially the same dynamic: inuring yourself to someone else’s arbitrary whims.