The Science of Herself (10 page)

“Hey, cookie.” My mom was always happy to see me; it's still one of the things I like best about her. “How was school?” I think she was pretty, but most kids think that about their moms; maybe she wasn't. Her hair was blond back then and cut extremely short, her eyes a light, light blue. She had a little snow globe on her desk only instead of a snow scene there was a miniature copy of the sphinx inside, and instead of snow there was gold glitter. I picked it up and shook it.

“Have you ever heard of a book called
The Meathook Murders
?” I asked. I was just making conversation. Mom's not much of a reader.

Sure enough, she hadn't. But it reminded her of a movie she'd seen and she started to tell me the plot, which took some time, being complicated and featuring nuns with hooks for hands. My mom went to Catholic school.

She kept forgetting bits of it and the whole time she was talking to me she was also typing a letter, up until the climax, which required both hands. My mom showed me how the sleeve of the habit fell so that you saw the
hook, but only for a second, and then the nun said, “Are you here to confess?” just to get into the confessional where no one could see. And then it turned out not to be the nun with the hook, after all. It turned out to be the policeman, dressed in the wimple with a fake hook. He ended up stabbed with his own fake hook, which was, my mom assured me, a very satisfying conclusion.

Somewhere in the middle of her recitation Professor Knight came in to pick up his mail. Back in the fifth grade, during the Christmas concert, when we all had reindeer horns on our heads and jingle bells in our hands and our parents were there to see us, Bjorn Benson told me that Professor Knight was my father. “Everyone knows,” Bjorn said. But Professor Knight had a daughter named Kate who was just a year older than me, and I'm betting she didn't know, nor his wife neither. Kate and I were at the same school then, where I could keep an eye on her. But by now she was at the junior high and I only saw her downtown sometimes. She was a skinny girl with cow eyes who sucked on her hair. “Stop staring at me” is about the only thing she ever said to me. She didn't
look
like my sister.

I kept meaning to ask my mom, but I kept chickening out. I wasn't ever really supposed to believe in the alien abduction story; it was just there to be something funny to say, but mainly to stop me asking anything outright. Which I certainly couldn't do then, not when she was working so hard to keep me distracted and entertained. Besides, Professor Knight didn't even glance our way; if he was my father I think he would've wanted
to know how school was. But then I was suspicious all over again, because the moment he left, my mom started talking about my dad. The wonders he was seeing! The friends he was making! “On the planet Zandoor,” she told me, “they only wish they had hooks for hands. Instead, they have herrings. Your dad could get stuck there a long time just dialing their phones for them.”

She ran out of steam, all at once, her mouth sagging so she looked sad and tired. My response to this was complicated. I felt sorry for her, but it made me angry, too. I was just a kid, it didn't seem fair to make me see this. So I gave her the note Mrs. Gruber had said to take right home to her a couple of weeks ago. I was just being mean. I'd already read it. It said Mrs. Gruber wondered if I didn't need a male role model.

And then I was relieved that Mom didn't seem to mind. She crumpled the note and hooked it over her head into the wastebasket. “I've got a job to do, cup-cake,” she said, so I went home and played
The Legend of Zelda
until dinnertime.

But she was more upset than she let on. Later that night Victor Wong dropped by, and I heard them talking. Victor worked in the computer department at Pacific Gas and Electric and was my mom's best friend. He was a thin-faced, delicate guy. I liked him a lot, maybe partly because he was the one man I knew for sure wasn't my
dad—wrong race—and wasn't ever going to be my dad. He'd been coming around for a long time without it getting romantic. I always thought he liked Tamara though he never said so, even to my mom. If you believe her.

“Hey, don't look at me,” Victor said when she brought up Mrs. Gruber's note. “I'm a heterosexual man and everyone who meets me assumes I'm gay. I'm a hopeless failure at both lifestyles.”

“There's not a damn thing wrong with Nathan,” my mom said, which was nice of her, especially since she didn't know I was listening. “He's a great kid. He's never given me a speck of trouble. Where does she get off?”

“Maybe the note wasn't aimed at Nathan. Maybe the note was aimed at you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I think you do,” Victor said. But I certainly didn't, although I spent a fair amount of time puzzling over it. I could make a better guess now. Apparently my mother used to flirt outrageously during PTA meetings in a way some people felt distracted from the business at hand. Or so Bjorn Benson says. He's still a font of information, but he's a CPA now. I doubt he'd lie.

“How you doing, Nathan?” Victor asked me later on his way to the bathroom. I was still playing
The Legend of Zelda.

“I just need a magic sword,” I told him.

“Who doesn't?” he said.

This brings us up to Saturday afternoon. The car wouldn't start; it put my mom in a very bad mood. She was always sure our mechanic was ripping her off. She had a date that evening, a fix-up from a friend, some guy named Michael she'd never even seen. So I left her getting ready and biked over to Bertilucci's Lumber and Drugs. My plan was to price a new game called
The Adventure of Link.
Even though I was such a great kid, and had never given her a speck of trouble, my mother had steadily refused to buy this game for me. I already spent too much time playing
The Legend of Zelda
, she said, as if getting me
The Adventure of Link
wouldn't solve that problem in a hot second. Anyway we couldn't afford it, especially not now that the car had to be repaired again.

Somewhere in the distance, a farmer was burning his fields. The sky to the south was painted with smoke and the whole town smelled sweetly of it. On my way to the store I passed the Yamaguchis'. Ms. Yamaguchi took self-defense with my mother and was very careful about gender-engendering toys. Her four-year-old son, Davey, was on the porch with his doll. As I biked by, he held the doll up, sighted along it. “Ack-ack-ack-ack,” he said, picking me off cleanly.

I spent maybe fifteen minutes mooning over the video games. I wanted
The Adventure of Link
so bad I didn't even notice that Jeremy Campbell had come into the store, although if I'd looked into the shoplifting mirrors I could've seen him before he snuck up behind me. He put a hand on my shoulder and spun me around. He
was with Diego Ruiz, a kid who'd never been anything but nice to me till this. “Come with me,” Jeremy said.

We went to the front of the store where Mr. Bertilucci had temporarily abandoned the counter and Jeremy went around it and pulled the new copy of
Playboy
out from underneath. “Have you ever seen this before?” he asked me. He'd already flipped open the centerfold and he put it right on my face; I was actually breathing into her breasts, which was maybe all that kept me from hyperventilating.

“My mom says I have to get right home,” I told him.

“Do pictures of naked women always make you think of your mom?” he asked. “Does your mom have tits like these?”

“I've seen his mom,” Diego said. “No tits at all.”

“Sad.” Jeremy put an arm around me. “I'll tell you what,” he said.

“Take this magazine out of the store for me”—he tucked it inside my jacket while he talked—“and I'll owe you one.”

I would have offered to buy it, but I didn't have money and Mr. Bertilucci wouldn't have sold it to me if I did. I really didn't see how I had a choice in the matter so I zipped my jacket up, but then it occurred to me that if I was going to shoplift anyway I should get something I wanted, so I went back for
The Adventure of Link.

Soon I was at the police department, talking with a cop named Officer Harper. I got my one phone call
and caught my mom just as she and Michael were about to leave the house. Since my mom had no car she was forced to ask Michael to drive her to the police station. Since they were planning on a classy restaurant she arrived in her blue dress with dangly earrings in the shape of golden leaves, shoes with tiny straps, and heels that clicked when she walked, tea rose perfume on her neck. Michael had long hair and a Star Trek tie.

We all sat and watched a videotape of me sticking the game under my jacket. Apparently most theft occurred at the video games; it was the only part of the store televised. There was no footage at all of Jeremy, at least none that we saw. I was more scared of Jeremy than Officer Harper, so I kept my mouth shut. Officer Harper told my mom and Michael to call him Dusty.

“He's never done anything like this before, Dusty,” my mom said. “He's a great kid.”

Dusty had a stern look for me, a concerned one for my mother. “You and your husband,” he began.

“I'm not her husband,” Michael said.

“Where's his father?”

Apparently we weren't telling the police about the alien abduction. “He's not part of the picture,” was all my mother would say about that. “Is there any other man taking an interest in him?” Dusty asked. He was looking at Michael.

“Christ.” Michael blocked the look with his hands, waved them about. “This is our first date. This is me, meeting the kid for the first time. How do you do, Nathan.”

“Don't kids with fathers ever shoplift?” my mother asked. She was looking so nice, but her voice had a tight-wound sound to it.

“I'm only asking because of the
Playboy.”
Dusty had confiscated the magazine and inventoried it with the other officers. Now he put it, folded up discreetly, on the metal desk between us.

This was the first my mother had heard about the
Playboy.
I could see her taking it in and, unhappy as she already was, I could see it made an impact. “I do have a suggestion,” Dusty said.

It was a terrible suggestion. Dusty coached a Little League team called the Tigers. He thought Mr. Bertilucci might not press charges if Dusty could tell him he'd be keeping a personal eye on me. “I don't like baseball,” I said. I was very clear about this. I would rather have gone to jail.

“A whole team of ready-made friends,” Dusty said encouragingly. You could see he was an athlete himself. He had big shoulders and a sunburned nose that he rubbed a lot. There were bowling trophies on the windowsill and a memo pad with golf jokes on the desk.

“And I suck at it.”

“Maybe we can change that.”

“Really suck.”

My mother was looking at me, her eyes narrow, and her earrings swinging. “I think it's a wonderful idea.” The words came out without her hardly opening her mouth. “We're so grateful to you, Dusty, for suggesting it.”

So I was paroled to the Tigers. I was released into my mother's custody, and she wouldn't let me bike home by myself, and she was feeling bad about Michael's spoiled evening. So she hissed me into Michael's car, apologizing the whole time to him. She suggested that we could maybe all go to the miniature golf course together. Michael agreed, but it wasn't his idea, and he and my mom were still dressed for a first impression.

I couldn't have been more miserable. I was hoping hard that Michael would turn out to be a jerk so that I would only have ruined the date, and not the rest of my mother's life. I hated him the minute I saw him, but you can't go by that. I could pretty much be counted on to hate every guy my mom went out with. This was easy since they were all jerks.

My mom was so mad at me that she couldn't miss. By the time we got to the fourth hole she was already three strokes under par. The fourth hole was the castle.