Things I’ll Never Say (24 page)

One and two and three
and.

“I have
real
waltzes I could play for you,” I say.

She shakes her head. “We're waltzing to this, aren't we?”

Technically, yes. We are waltzing and the music is playing, but no — not that there's any use explaining that.

My best friend, Ingrid, said once, “Your mom is like the biggest Meat Loaf fan ever.” She's been subjected to many Meat Loaf dance parties. “Possibly the only one left.”

“Meat Loaf still sells a hundred thousand albums every year,” I told her. “Mom is very invested in his career.”

“What career?” Ingrid said. “Did he get a sweet gig in the cafeteria?”

I don't know what it is about Meat Loaf that Mom loves, besides his flair for the dramatic and his rugged good looks, obviously. Maybe he reminds her of being young.

I feel something sharp, and I wince. Mom is digging her fingers into my back now. “Not you, Imogene,” she says.

It takes me a second to figure out what she is replying to. Mom has a tendency to say sentences that don't follow one another exactly. It's like trying to keep track of all of the key changes in Verdi's
Requiem.

I think. Oh, right. About none of her children loving her.

“Of course I love you,” I say.

I don't say, Maybe if you were sober more often, or if your memory wasn't cut up like the paper snowflakes Magda and I used to decorate the house with, maybe then . . .

Mom likes to say that I care more about marching band than her. Not entirely true, although on most days I'll admit that I
like
marching band more than I
like
her.

“You used to love me best,” she says, “and now you don't ever come home.”

Mom likes to say that I spend all my time with Ingrid and Greg. Greg is my boyfriend, except his name is actually Gano, but for some reason Mom can't remember that and just keeps calling him Greg instead.

Mom surprises me by dipping me low. She giggles. I love her laugh. Sometimes I forget that there are things about my mother worth loving, that there are moments worth remembering. It's because every good moment is really just a pause, a rest, a beat before the cacophony of the rest of her crashes in.

“I came home tonight,” I say. Meat Loaf has moved on to “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth.” Also not a waltz. “All my friends went out, but I still came home.”

Marching band starts two weeks before school, so while other kids are busy sucking up the end of summer, I am standing in a perfectly straight line, holding my trumpet (three pounds doesn't sound like a lot until you're all feet-together-stomach-in-elbows-out-shoulders-back-chin-up for eight hours), trying to memorize the notes, the steps. School starts tomorrow, and everyone else in band is at the end-of-marching-camp party that Big Thunder (a ridiculously popular, ridiculously huge tuba player–football player hybrid) is throwing.

I wanted to go. Parties make you forget. They let you forget that your mother is at home, profoundly sad, expertly manipulative. They let you dance regular dances, zero waltzes, zero heavy implications of participating, and they make you think that making out with your boyfriend in front of everyone is okay and they make you feel like you have friends.

But I don't say “party” to Mom because parents don't like “parties.” Correction: Ingrid's parents and Gano's parents don't like “parties.” They have “rules.” Mom doesn't seem to care much what I do. But I don't tell that to Gano. Parents are
supposed
to have rules. I'm
supposed
to have a curfew, like he does. A parent that worries, like his do.

So I pretend.

I look over Mom's shoulder and there's Magda. When did she come in? I should've paid closer attention to the time. Ended this sooner. Magda stares, her head tilted, assessing.

One and two and three
and.

Think and think and quick.

This is not a place where Magda should be, not a time when Magda should be here. I've worked hard. I've worked so hard to keep all this away from Magda. To tell her that Mom is sleeping. To act like the things Mom says are funny and not scary. To shut her out from the waltzing. To never let her become Mom's unwilling partner.

I stop waltzing and hug Mom. Magda steps forward and I shake my head. She waits a second, then walks down the hallway.

I just want to protect her. I bring her with me whenever I can. Set her up at Ingrid's kitchen table, coloring, while we do our homework. Get a neighbor to watch her after school.

“Oh, you never hug me anymore,” Mom says. She grips tighter, and her icicle fingers give me prickly goose bumps.

I pull away. She smiles.

“You could have invited Ingrid and Greg here,” Mom says. She reaches her hand out. “You lead now.”

Mom almost never wants to let me lead. I switch to the dominant position easily, putting my hand on her back, feeling the sharp knots of her spine, guiding her legs gently. I don't want to break her. My mother always feels like she is on the verge of shattering.

I would never bring Gano here. Obviously, Ingrid has been over. We've seen each other through a lot of shitty times. Like when Ingrid's father died and we spent the wake lying on the cool unfinished cement floor of her basement, allowing the mold to get in our noses, the dust to settle on us, the spiders to weave webs in our hair. We slowed our breath and willed our hearts to beat less.

I feel stupid even missing my father around Ingrid, because my father is just
gone
, not
dead
, like hers.

But Gano is still amazingly unaware of everything. I want to keep it that way. He thinks I'm normal. I don't want him to see our apartment: wine-stained carpet, the cracked glass coffee table. Or meet Mom: the waltzing; her wide-open, vacant fish eyes; the way she jitters around the room, never still.

I don't want him to know that part of me.

I just want to be the Imogene he knows: mediocre at trumpet but good in school, fun at parties, great at kissing. That Imogene is bright and happy. That Imogene isn't silent and shadowed.

I'm trying to figure out how to turn into her permanently.

“They're busy,” I say. Meat Loaf sings “Heaven Can Wait.” A terrible song. Definitely in 4/4 time.

“I would love to be a teenager again,” Mom says. She trips over one of my feet. “No responsibilities.”

Responsibilities? Who gets Magda ready for school? Feeds her dinner? Makes sure that our bills are paid? Wakes up in the middle of the night and checks that Mom is still breathing?

“I'm done waltzing,” I say.

It's best to end before she gets to “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” or else she'll insist that we sing it together. And she makes me do the wailing female part. Then complains that I'm not theatrical enough. And she stomp-waltzes, complete disregard for my feet, in triple time, during the peak of the song.

My mother smiles and waltzes away, into the kitchen. I sit down on our worn leather couch. I love used furniture. I think that even if someday, for some reason subpar trumpeters make a lot of money, I might still buy secondhand furniture. Bobby must love old couches, too, because even though he has his own apartment, most nights he sleeps here. I think he's trying to make up for all the time he and Mom didn't have together. Mom had Bobby when she was fifteen and promptly left him with our grandmother to raise. Even when she met Dad and had me, Bobby only came over on weekends, like a cousin or a friend.

Mom comes back into the living room with one of her slim plastic bottles. This is where we are at in this whole thing. It's no longer a game, like tossing bottles off of balconies. It's just there, just is.

Mom smiles. She begins to waltz again. Alone.

I picture Magda sitting in the bottom bunk, tapping her fingers on the bars of the bed frame like it's a xylophone. I wake up sometimes to her tapping, and I reach over the side of the bed, grasp Magda's hand, wait until I hear her raspy breaths. Then I go back to sleep.

I know that someday Magda will realize how screwy we are. For now, I try to absorb it all. Take all Mom's crazy, all her waltzing, all her unattached sentences.

I just want to give Magda a chance.

“Let's duet ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light,'” Mom says. “Duets are like waltzes, right?”

(No. No, they are not.)

Ingrid says that there's no way Gano can really love me if he doesn't know this part of me. She says our backgrounds make us who we are.

That's what I'm afraid of.

Sometimes I think I am like an experimental composition — full of dissonance, phrases that don't mesh together, mixed rhythms and styles.

Mom sips and waltzes and addresses half of her increasingly nonsensical comments to me and half to Meat Loaf. I sit patiently and wait. The thing about dances is that they always end. One can only da capo for so long. She'll be done soon.

I will accept that in the morning Mom will not remember that we waltzed or that my boyfriend's name is not Greg or that she's supposed to take care of us.

My band director calls what I am about to do “muscle memory.” When you do something enough that you just start to do it without thinking. I will wait until she passes out, and then I will pick her up — she breathes like a fish when she is passed out, big gape-mouthed gulps — and put her into her bed.

Routine.

I will make sure Magda has brushed her teeth. Tuck her into bed. Then I will go out to the party. Make my voice hushed as I tell Gano that I sneaked out of the house. Pretend to be nervous. Pretend that someone cares if I am gone or not. Kiss and kiss and kiss. Be the Imogene I like to be.

And then I will come home, and I will make sure that my mother is not dead, and I will make sure that the front door is locked and the stove is off, and I will make sure that Magda is still sleeping, unaware, and then I will go to bed, and in the morning I will stretch my muscles, erase my memory.

Start again.

Just about the time the sun drops behind the trees, me and the guys show up in Rick's backyard. His parents only pretend to be keeping an eye on us while we take over the fire pit. “Over here, Luke,” Rick says, and I join him on a log that serves as one of the benches around the fire pit. I stow my backpack behind the bench and pretend, along with all the other guys, that we're not watching the road for our girlfriends. But I'm watching for Sarah. And scoping out a private space in the tall grass that slopes down to the creek. It's the perfect place to be together. As in t
ogether
together.

Me and the guys sit around the fire, cracking stupid jokes about one another while our girls slowly filter in and join us. Our stash stays behind the benches until dark, when we pull out the warm beer and water bottles filled with vodka. Vodka is our drink of choice because everyone knows parents can't smell it, even though my mom grounded me for a week in June because she swore she could.

But I'm not here for the vodka or the chance to rank on the guys. I'm just passing time until Sarah and I can be alone.

Rick starts bouncing a soccer ball on his knee, and we all count to see how long he can balance it. Tomorrow at dawn, we'll all be standing on the school soccer field doing the same. By noon tomorrow, we'll each know if we're playing this season or sitting it out.

I'm hoping to be a starter. But I let soccer practice go this summer. I let it go for Sarah. And missed even more practices when I was balancing between Wendy and Sarah. But no one knows about that.

I poke the fire with a stick and wait to recognize her car's headlights. There's serious heat between me and Sarah. It's been hot ever since we connected last May at this very fire pit.

The minute I spot her car lights pulling up, I swear the heat creeping around my ribs goes red. Her car door slams and her voice reaches me, making that hot spot spread out. It sounds like she's talking to Rick's girlfriend as they wander into the backyard. Without actually making it look like it's the plan, each girl finds her guy. Their moves prove familiar after an entire summer of Friday nights.

Sarah wanders toward the fire pit and toward me. Man, she's amazing in every way. And she's mine.

She's got this great smile flashed on me. It makes the sweet burn of wanting to be with her all the stronger. Worries about tomorrow's soccer disappear. When she sees me, that high-beam smile blurs the reality that this is our last Friday before school starts. I love my Sarah.

As Sarah slides a leg over the wood bench and leans into me, I reach to her thigh and rub the inside of it with my thumb, pulling her closer.

Someone pops open a beer. Sarah slides a bit away and reaches behind our bench to pull a water bottle from my backpack. But she doesn't open it; she rolls it between her palms. Then she leans so close I can smell the lemon in her hair. “Can we go somewhere alone? So we can talk?”