Roomies (20 page)

And then he pulls into the parking lot of a U-shaped motel called the Moonlight, with a lit-up scripty sign like something out of an old Hollywood movie. There is a VACANCY light flashing red, but with the second
C
burned out. He turns the engine off and looks over and our eyes meet.

“Cable TV and everything.” He nods at the sign.

“For us, only the best,” I say, but he looks a little shaken so I double-check. “You’re sure about this?”

“It’s the only thing I’m sure of right now.” I hear in his voice that it’s the truth.

“I broke up with my boyfriend because of this,” I say. “I mean, there were other things but it was mostly because he was pressuring me. Isn’t that weird?”

“Not to me.” He shrugs a shoulder.

I look out the window, at that burned-out
c
, when I ask, “Have you ever… before?”

“Once.” He takes my hand. “For the wrong reasons. And it was pretty bad and I didn’t handle it all especially well so I decided to wait for the right reasons.”

“What if it’s bad again?” I ask, looking at him.

“Well, we’ll be bad together.” He smiles and I don’t hesitate when I reach for the door handle.

Dear Lo, (I like it! Though in an ironic twist, I am thinking of dropping MY nickname and starting college as Elizabeth for real.)

My father said no, to make a long story short, BUT he said he’d help me move into the dorm. So I won’t seem like Little Orphan Annie when I show up. And you’ll get to meet my gay dad if I take him up on his offer. Which would be weird since I feel like I’d pretty much be meeting him for the first time, too? Oh, and my mom is now threatening to come, too, so help me God. Anyway, I let the cat out of the bag and Mark is going to tell his dad to end it. So the you-know-what is about to hit the fan here.

I want to write about the Moonlight but I want to do it justice and I’m
so sleepy
. Mark didn’t bring me home until about 4 AM, and I’m exhausted so I write the easy stuff first.

Thanks for the photo. It’s fun to see you—are you wearing mascara, because your eyelashes really pop—and also to see Zoe. How’s the extended sleepover? Are your brothers and sisters better yet? I still feel bad about the missent e-mail. Won’t happen again!!!

Very cool about Keyon and the kissing.

When I get to this, I think maybe it’d be rude to not at least acknowledge what she told me? So I go for it.

This may make me sound naïve but I don’t know many black people. I have no idea why that is, except that I don’t seem to cross paths with any. There are a bunch of black kids in school but somehow we don’t end up talking much. That’s sort of screwed up, isn’t it? So much for the great melting pot.

Way too tired to tackle the Moonlight so I wrap it up.

And yes, totally room for symbolic knickknacks.

EB

I’m trying to think of a symbolic knickknack of my own to bring with me but I’m already in bed and the lights are off and I can’t be bothered to get up and look around. The only thing that comes to mind right now is the matchbox I swiped from the lobby of the Moonlight, which is sitting on my night table right now. And somehow not at least telling Lo a tiny bit about the Moonlight feels like some kind of lie by omission. So I add:

Yes: A matchbox from the Moonlight Motel.

No: My virginity.

Maybe so: Birth control?

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3

SAN FRANCISCO

My bedroom feels like a foreign country. During the Illness, every inch of my—
our
—space got covered with Gertie’s and P.J.’s toys, clothes, books, applesauce containers, and Dora sippy cups. Not sexy. I cross it off my mental list of Places to Spend Special Time with Keyon. Because I guess Ebb’s e-mail has made me ponder that. Since dinner at his house Monday, we’ve made out seven more times. Seven times in four days. Twice in his car, once at his house, once at Goodwill, and three times at the sandwich shop. We have to knock that off at work, to eliminate the possibility of Joe Senior catching us.

The point is, I need the entirety of the scoop from Ebb: where, when, how, what, why.

I mean, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I liked the idea of us both being virgins, the sort of equality it would give us to start out the school year. Now if I want things equal I have to—

“Sorry for the mess,” Mom says, coming in with a laundry basket. “We’ve been too wiped out to deal with it. This was way more brutal than I could have imagined.”

It’s been nearly an entire week. Finally, everyone is better, and Dad is out with Gertie and Marcus and Jack, and Grandma has P.J. and Francis. All so that Mom and I can clean up in peace.

“It’s okay.” She still sort of looks like she should be in bed. I take the basket from her and start heaping clothes and blankets into it. “Sit down,” I say, pointing to my desk chair. She does.

“Did you have fun at Zoe’s?” she asks.

“Yeah, actually. It was weird at first to not have a hundred people running around screaming, but I got used to it.” And got used to sleeping till ten every day, and used to staying up till one every morning, and used to her parents leaving us almost totally alone so we could talk and talk and talk and make videos and zone out with
Buffy
marathons and share clothes. It was, I guess, a taste of what college life will be like. Only without Zoe.

Mom laughs. “A hundred. Is that how it feels to you?”

“Sometimes.” I pick up a pajama top and quickly drop it again. “Is it possible that I just touched vomit?”

“Very.”

I fold my sweatshirt sleeve over my hand, pick up the rest of the stuff, then add my sweatshirt to it before washing up in the bathroom, with steaming hot water. When I come back into my room, my mom is crying. Not hard. More leaking and sniffling.

“Mom? Are you okay?” Crying, for her, is not uncommon. The woman has taken more than her share of rides on the hormonal roller coaster. “You’ll feel better after you catch up on sleep.”

“It’s not because of the flu,” she says, brushing tears away with the back of her hand. “Well, it’s partly because of the flu. But I was thinking about how much you do for us. How your life isn’t how I pictured it. What you’ve had to take on because of…” She waves her hand toward the general vicinity of my sisters’ beds.

“Mom, don’t, please, don’t worry about it.” I lie back on Gertie’s stripped mattress. “I’m used to it.”

“Sometimes I think back to when it was only you and me and Dad,” she says, searching fruitlessly for a box of tissue.

I return to the bathroom for a roll of toilet paper to bring to her. “Here.”

“It was so… Lauren, it was so wonderful. We were so happy, you can’t even imagine.”

I’ve heard this story many times. They were so happy, so happy about me, and they thought if one kid was great, more would be even better, and they tried and tried and tried forever, it seemed, until they were magically fertile again and Jack came along, followed by the rest of them. A vicious cycle of happiness.

“You’re happy now,” I remind her, sitting on the floor by her feet. “This is what you guys wanted.”

“Do I look happy, Lauren?” She points to her splotchy face, then blows her nose. We laugh.

“Well, not right
now
. But epic family flu is not a normal day.”

“True. But days like this make me think about the road not taken. The what-ifs. What if we’d gone on being a family of three? Or what if we’d stopped with Jack? I think about what kind of life we could have had, what we could have given you….” The tears start up again.

I fold my arms on her knees and rest my chin on them, eyes turned up to her. I can’t think about Gertie and Peej and Marcus and Francis not existing, or us being different than we are. And I know she can’t, either. Despite what she just said, I
know
she loves being their mom as much as she loves being mine. “Mom. You’re exhausted. Why don’t you go take a nap. I can handle all this.”

She doesn’t move, except to keep unraveling more toilet paper. “It’s been hard on you.”

“It’s fine, Mom!”

“Dad and I can’t go back in time and change everything….”

“I don’t want to change
anything
.” Now I am starting to tear up, seeing her so upset and talking as if my life has been this disaster. I blot each of my eyes on the knees of her jeans. She rests her hand on my shoulder.

“Lauren. Honey. These aren’t the rantings of a worn-out mommy. I’m trying to make a point.”

I sit back so I can see her face. “What.”

“Dad and I decided that… we… we want you to know that you’re free. For the rest of the summer and when school starts, we’re really going to let you go.” She straightens up and blows her nose one more time. “We want you to really. Feel. Free.” Her fist pounds her knee with each word.

“Um, okay.”

My head spins for a second. I’d better not be catching this flu.

“We want to give you back some of what you haven’t had for a long time. No responsibilities as far as the kids. No having to check your schedule with ours. No ties, no—”

Whoa. I hold up my hands, stopping her. “Mom. Mom. I get it.” My heart pounds. I want her to go nap and stop talking. I add, “Thank you,” so I don’t sound ungrateful. I get up and start putting clean sheets on Gertie’s bed.

“Do you really get it?” She stands, comes over, and takes my wrist. “We don’t want to hold you back. We want you to fly out of the nest and… soar, Lauren.”

She’s serious. She and Dad have probably been talking about it all week while I was at Zoe’s. Plotting my free, soaring future, which is somehow here, now. They’ve been discussing how great and unburdened I would feel to get this news that the role I’ve played in my family since Jack was born is so very over.

I don’t feel soary and unburdened.

I concentrate on smoothing out Gertie’s top sheet. She likes it tight around her body. She likes it when I put her in bed and tuck everything in so that it’s a struggle for her to even move her arms. “
Now you’re my prisoner
,” I always tell her, with an evil laugh, and she loves it.

“You rest, Mom. Let me get the house in shape, and then I’ll embark on my… freedom.”

She finally agrees to take a nap. I get the laundry started, do the dishes, disinfect the bathrooms, and run the vacuum.

Obviously they need my help, and they’re kidding themselves if they think otherwise. They want me to “soar”? Ha! Good luck keeping things around here in order while I’m off soaring. What does that even mean? I’ll have a huge class load, and a campus job, hopefully, and maybe a boyfriend, and I have to make all these decisions about that boyfriend and I won’t even be able to escape to Zoe’s house, or have her around to demonstrate how to breathe into a boy’s ear or teach me how to use the smart phone I’m going to get, and, honestly, my parents
need
me. They need me! They would be better off if I didn’t go to college at
all
, is the actual truth. I could put it off. I could…

… stop everything from changing.

I wind the vacuum cord back around its holster.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

When the house is in order and there are clean blankets on my bed, I close my bedroom door and pull those blankets over my head and have a good cry.

EB—

Wow. Just, wow, if I read your yes/no/maybe so right. I’m eagerly awaiting more. I mean, as much as you want to tell me. So I guess we won’t put a VIRGIN CENTRAL sign on our dorm door now?

Things with Keyon are holding steady. I don’t think we’re really like boyfriend/girlfriend, though. (BTW it’s kind of the same here re: black people, only here we pretend it’s not like that.) I think we’re friends with benefits. Limited benefits. Though I feel like a floozy saying it (“floozy” is one of my grandma’s favorite words), that could possibly be a good arrangement? Something that would not lead to heartbreak. Isn’t it enough to like and have affection and warm feelings and trust, and not have to “be in love”? Or even really date? Are you in love with Mark?

I’m also justwowing about your dad. He said NO? Why??

Quite possibly this is more questioning than is really polite.

By the way, you’ve sort of mentioned more than once the weirdness of having a gay dad, but honestly, it’s not that weird. Not here, anyway. I can see how it would be weird for you as his daughter, but as a SITUATION it is not weird at all. When is the last time you saw him? Did you already tell me that?

Here, I imagine writing,
If you want to talk weird, weird is that I already met your dad when I went to his gallery last Saturday. It was sort of an accident. Now THAT’S weird!!
But I don’t want her to feel hurt or mad or whatever about that and there’s no reason to tell her, and it’s not like me and her dad had this long talk. It was like hi-bye and there’s no chance he’ll remember me. Why stir things up?

I’m back home. My family is more or less recovered. My mom had this big talk with me today about how they want me to “be free” and “soar” and apparently this means I’m no longer needed in the family. That’s not what they mean but that’s a tiny bit how it feels. Less like “Fly, little birdie!” and more like “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out of the nest.” I don’t know. Thinking about it sort of makes me want to cry. Okay, I did cry. Before. And maybe a little right now!