There's Something I Want You to Do (7 page)

“Dad, I’m fucked up,” he says. “And it’s really fucked up that she’s here. I’m just saying.”

“I know,” I reply. “It’s hard on all of us.”

“Not as hard on you as it is on me. I didn’t think I could go back home today.”

“Where else could you go?”

“Somewhere,” he says. “Friends.” It’s true: he has many friends he could stay with. “I could actually, like, move out.” He waits. “But I’m not going to.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask. I have neither wisdom nor advice for him. All I have is curiosity.

“So I went to school this morning? And I found Alissa. I mean, we’re over, but we’re still friends, sort of. And I’m like, ‘My birth mom showed up, and she’s fucking nuts, and also she said I looked gay,’ and Alissa is like, ‘Yeah, wow, but she’s your mom and thinks you’re cute and you’re way
not
gay,’ and I go, ‘Who gives a shit?’ and she’s, ‘You should,’ and I say, ‘But she’s crazy,’ and this is when Alissa sort of gets that lightbulb look and says, ‘Well, the cool thing would be to put it all on your Tumblr. That’d be so great. ’Cause if your birth mom’s so weird and interesting, everybody will want to read it. Like: “Guess what, everybody, my mom showed up.” ’ ”

Somehow I have the feeling this has become a huge business with his friends within the past few hours and that they all have opinions about what he should do.

“And?” I ask.

“That’s what’s weird,” he says. “Like half of my friends already want to know if she’s got a blog herself. Because they want to check it out, like right now.”

“Maybe you could help her with a blog,” I say, trying to mediate. “Maybe you could help her set one up.”

“Yeah, I guess I can do that. But I have to hate her for a few more days.” He sits there quietly. “I have to really hate her a few days. I know she’s crazy. I
get
that. But I have to hate her for not being loyal to us.” He used that word:
us.
As much as I love Astrid, she didn’t use that word last night. It was all
you:
you have to do this or that.

So I tell Jeremy that he can hate Corinne for a while, and then he has to give it up.

—

The hatred lasts longer than we think it will. In the meantime we get Corinne to a psychiatrist, who puts her on lithium. There are no discernible effects at first.

Corinne tries to be inconspicuous down there in the basement and at dinnertime. I’ll give her credit for that. It’s hard for her, however, because right out of the blue at dinner she’ll start talking about wildlife creatures, some of them imaginary, that no one has mentioned in conversation. Wolves and lemurs figure prominently in her thinking, and all the while Jeremy is seething over there at his place at the table. He stares at Corinne with distaste as he bolts his food before he rushes upstairs and slams his bedroom door.

Three weeks later the atmosphere in the house begins to shift subtly, as if a low-pressure system had arrived after a long period of drought. One evening I am coming up the stairs and I see Jeremy and Corinne talking on the landing. Then, two days later, I see her in his room, sitting at his desk in front of his computer, and Jeremy is standing behind her, quietly giving her advice. I know better than to ask them what’s going on, so I knock on Lucy’s door and go in there. Lucy hears everything that’s going on in the house before anyone else does. It’s true that she likes to preach, but she has the soul of a Soviet spy.

“Hi, Princess,” I say. She’s lying on the bed reading a Harry Potter book.

“Hi,” she says.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Um, yeah.” She has her head propped up by an arm under her chin. On her wall she has a poster of some ballet star up on her toes surrounded by other pink-tutu-clad ladies. Adhesive stars decorate Lucy’s ceiling, and her lifelong doll, Eleanor, gazes at her with glassy plastic eyes from the bookshelf. Lucy continues to read while she talks to me.

“What’s going on between Corinne and Jeremy? Do you know?”

“You should ask them.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“So,” she says, putting the huge novel aside and looking up at me, “he’s helping her with
Runaway Mom
.” She waits for my reaction, and when I don’t say anything, she says, “He got tired of hating her. He decided she wasn’t going to go away.”

“What’s
Runaway Mom
?”

“That’s her blog,” Lucy says, sitting up and stretching. “He’s helping her with it. It’s going to be real popular. All the kids at school want to read it.”

“What? Why?”

“Daddy, didn’t you ever want to run away?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t think I ever did.”

“That’s weird,” she says. “Everyone else does.”

—

Corinne lives across town now, in a little one-bedroom apartment. My mother goes over there on Friday and takes her to Bible class. Corinne gets disability payments from the government, although we worry that those funds will soon be cut off. She comes over here once or twice a week for lunch or dinner. Everyone is mostly getting used to her and her ways, but Astrid has taken up smoking cigarettes (though not my brand) on the front lawn after dinner, a bold move for a woman in midlife.

One time I went to Corinne’s blog. Just one time. I opened up
Runaway Mom,
and I read what Corinne had written there a day or two before.

How many chapters does life have? It has many chapters, and you’ll notice that when the passenger train you’re on is headed in the wrong direction, it’s often moving so fast that you can’t get off it without hurting yourself. I threw myself off the particular train I was on and was seriously injured for years. I wish I knew what God wanted from us. I don’t think He wants anything from me anymore, but I think He once did, and He said so. Sometimes you run away to leave something behind, and sometimes you run away to get somewhere. I did both. At least I didn’t kill myself. At least I didn’t murder anyone.

That was all I wanted to read of her blog. I went out to the garage and opened a beer and smoked a few cigarettes out there in silence. I was thinking.

When I was about eight years old, I took my sled out to one of the city parks. This was the day after a huge snowfall, many inches, but the sledding hill was packed down by the time I got there, and quite a few kids had their boards and saucers and sleds, and they were all screaming happily. I climbed up that hill and flew down on my sled, and after about thirty minutes I was screaming happily, too. I was out there so long I got frostbite on the tips of my toes, and when I came home my mother put me into the bathtub with lukewarm water. I was so happy, I didn’t care about the frostbite, and it didn’t hurt too much. It just burned. And I didn’t think I would remember that day—you don’t really think you’re going to remember those times when you’re happy—but I did. It’s funny, the staying power of happiness. I finish my cigarette and put out the stub in the empty beer can.

I can hear Astrid calling to me out the back door. “Wes?” she says. “Wes? Where are you?”

“Out here,” I yell from the garage.

“Come in, honey,” she calls to me. “It’s suppertime.”

So I get up from the floor and go into the house, where they are all waiting for me.

Chastity

On a Wednesday morning while he’d been shaving, Benny Takemitsu heard a woman’s scream from down the block. He’d propped open the bedroom window with an old hardback that he planned to read someday, and the May air, carrying the scream, blew in softly over his desk and made the papers tremble. He rushed to the window, the soap still on his throat. How far away was this woman? Benny couldn’t tell. And what kind of danger was she in? Nothing was specified. The scream began on one tone and then rose higher as it increased in intensity like a police siren.

Through the venetian blinds, he saw the early-morning sunlight flooding everything, including the blossoming lilacs near his building. Two floors below, a jogger accompanied by a border collie had stopped, and both the jogger and the dog were turned in the same direction.

Benny felt the scream burrowing into his body. The sudden jolt of adrenaline made his heart race and his hands clench. Maybe the screaming woman was in an apartment somewhere, screaming at her husband; maybe he’d forgotten her birthday.

After he finished shaving, Benny sat down on the chair and put on his socks, thinking of the miscellaneous human noises that had disturbed him after he had moved into this building. Two blocks down, a corner bar, Schnitzler’s, became a pandemonium factory during summer nights. At closing time, young men, emptied out onto the sidewalk, would bellow their warrior-challenges into the darkness, and the women occasionally lifted their voices in high-pitched alcoholic outcries. Lying in bed, Benny imagined their flushed, belligerent, happy faces.

And the young couple in the next apartment over! During the summer, when their windows were open, their prideful love-yelps acquired carrying power. One of these days, she’d get pregnant, and then her baby would do all the screaming.

At his desk, he moved aside some bills and his checkbook before beginning to write an e-mail to his girlfriend:
Dear Reena, I miss you so much. I just heard something, and I thought u might be interested. Somebody made a noise. Yelling. A scream maybe. It’s funny about noises like this in the city. You fry the eggs, you listen to the radio, you check your e-mail, you go on as if nothing has happened, you

But no: there it was again. A second scream. He put on his shoes, ran down the stairwell, and stepped outside. He turned northeast. The day presented him with brick and asphalt, scraggly warehouse-district trees, a school bus, a construction crane in the distance, the sun shining over them all. A scream—but no screamer. Another jogger passed by and frowned at him. Overhead, a large black bird was flapping around, chased by a sparrow or a starling. He couldn’t tell one bird from another. Stopping for a moment, he saw a ringlet of red hair on the sidewalk, as if someone had violently yanked it out from someone else’s scalp. Benny went back inside and after breakfast set off for work.

—

That night, Benny began his daily walk along the Mississippi, avoiding the park at the end of the street where he had once been mugged. He still retained a limp from being hit in the leg that time with a baseball bat. They had struck him from behind and just above the knee. He hadn’t seen them. It was like being struck by God. When he had fallen forward, a large man had reached into his pocket and grabbed his wallet before Benny could twist around to see who it was. The mugger had grunted quizzically as his fingers wormed inside Benny’s trouser pocket before he took what he wanted. Well, the wallet had only been a wallet. Benny had canceled the credit cards and gone to the DMV to replace his driver’s license. Tonight the air above the river smelled of vegetation, a green turtle–like aroma thick with reptilian life, but despite the attractions of the watery stink, Benny did not cross the street to the sidewalk beside the river until he had passed the unlit park where demons sat coiled patiently in the shadows waiting for him.

On both sides of the Mississippi, outdated buildings with limestone foundations that once housed mills—flour and lumber and woolen mills, once the source of the city’s wealth—stood in bleached floodlight like museum artifacts that no one was permitted to touch anymore.

He detoured past a coffee shop and through the front window saw his friend Elijah, a pediatrician who had moved to Minneapolis from the Bay Area a few years ago. His friend was sipping espresso and reading a copy of
City Pages
in the corner. Benny went inside.

“Doctor.”

“Takemitsu.” The pediatrician took another sip of his espresso. “Funny. You don’t
look
Japanese,” he said automatically, for the hundredth time, peering at his newspaper. They’d been friends ever since they’d met at a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party precinct caucus, where they’d both volunteered to be delegates to the county convention. They canvassed in their neighborhood, and on Election Day they both drove oldsters to the polls.

“What’re you reading?” Benny asked.

“The sex advice column. I’m married, so it’s irrelevant. How’s tricks, by the way?”

“Tricks? Oh, the tricks are fine,” Benny said. He sat down. “So, Doctor, you’re not home again? How come you’re hanging out in a downtown coffee shop at this hour? What’s the appeal?” The questions were all rhetorical, a means to get conversation started. Benny knew perfectly well why his friend was sitting there.

Elijah seemed to droop for a moment. He had a heavy five o’clock shadow and bags under his eyes, and he pretended to ignore his friend. “Fuck you,” he said tiredly. “I’m decompressing. Just came back from rounds at the hospital, and I’m not ready for the homecoming. I’m embittered. See me? An embittered man sits before you. Would you explain to me what got me into doctoring? I can’t remember now.” Benny said nothing. The doctor shook his head. “It’s hard to witness, kids being sick, kids with mitochondrial disorders, kids being brave, et cetera. I feel like Ivan Karamazov or somebody like that. See how fat I’m getting?” He reached inside his coat and snapped his suspenders. “And what about you, Mr. Architect?” Elijah, his spirits visibly lifting at the prospect of irritating his friend, leaned back and finally grinned affectionately at Benny. “Did you design any big-box stores today? In one of those new beautiful Bauhaus strip malls they have now? Fluorescent lights and linoleum to remind us all of our proud humanity? Man, I do love strip malls. Incidentally, you kinda look like a vampire tonight.”

“That’s how you know I’m Asian. All the great vampires are Asian.”

“I’ve noticed. Except you don’t look Asian. You just look like a vampire.”

“Vampires are hot.”

“Benny, you sound like a girl when you say that,” Elijah said, still smiling amiably.

Benny shrugged. “So I sound like a girl. Big deal. Girl vampires have it going on. Anyway, people dig sexual ambiguity. They find it attractive. And Reena likes me.”

“
Likes?
What about
loves
? And she doesn’t live here, does she? Your pale vampire complexion hasn’t moved her to move here, I’ve noticed.”