Home Games

by Benjamin Markovits

  “This isn’t talking, this is just—you have no idea what actually goes on here. That’s fine. You’re a kid.”

  “That’s because you treat me like a kid.”

  “I just . . . I can’t have this conversation,” she says, and gets up. “I think we both need to cool down.”

  “I’m not angry,” I tell her, but it’s not true, because as soon as she walks out of the kitchen, I feel too mad to eat—the waffles are cold anyway, and everything’s sticky. For some reason, I hear Jake’s voice in my head. He’s teasing me: “Are you going to cry?” No, I’m not going to cry, I feel like shouting, but nobody’s there.

  The rest of the day is like any other summer day. I watch TV until Mom tells me to turn it off. I go see if Jake’s around—we play video games. Jake asks his mom if we can go out to the coffee shop, but she says I have to check with my mother first.

  “Forget it,” I say. “She never lets me go.”

  “Come on, just ask her,” Jake tells me.

  So I go back to my apartment and in fact she says okay. She’s in her bedroom with a bunch of clothes on the bed, but she goes out to the hallway and gets her purse. She gives me a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Thanks,” I mumble.

  I turn to go, but Mom says, “It’s hard for me, too, you know. I’m doing my best, but I don’t always get everything right. I know you have to grow up, but it’s like—I have to grow up, too. I have to let you.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I say, a little louder this time.

  She stares at me for a minute. “Look at me. Just to the coffee shop—eat what you want but then come right back. Wait for the lights to cross the street, but you know all that.”

  “Do you want me to take your phone, so I can call?”

  “Jake has a phone, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughs at me a little, because I sound grumpy again. “We can talk about that later, too,” she says. She means, getting a phone.

  I really can’t believe it—I can hardly wait for the elevator to take me back down to Jake’s apartment. “She said yes!” But he acts like it’s no big deal.

  “Bye, Mom,” he calls out. “We’re going!” We stand in the hallway, waiting for the elevator again. The twenty-dollar bill is in my pocket, and my hand is holding it so tightly that it’s started to sweat.

  New York suddenly looks different when we walk out through the apartment complex courtyard and under the arch. I’m not used to being out without a grown-up. I mean, you don’t even realize, when you’re out with your mom, that she’s making all these little decisions. About when to cross the street and which way to go. The buildings seem taller; the sidewalk is full of people; it’s like even the traffic is worse. I have to pay attention to everything, but Jake doesn’t seem to notice or care. For a second I think the doorman is going to stop us—like he’s a policeman or something, or a teacher and we’re running away. But we’re really just going around the corner to the end of the block, and then crossing the street, and then walking another block—under a bunch of scaffolding. Jake has this rule that you always have to hold your breath when you walk under scaffolding, but this one’s so long we start running all the way until we get to the Five-Star Diner.

  It’s three in the afternoon and the place is pretty empty. We get a corner table, so we can watch the traffic going two ways—down Amsterdam Avenue and along 86th Street, too. Jake orders a glazed donut and a Coke, so that’s what I get, too.

  “My dad wants me to move to London with him.” For some reason, when I say it, it feels like I’m bragging.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He says there’s this great school there, and we could have a whole house, just around the corner from the Beatles’ studio. Or something like that. It was weird. It was like he was trying to sell it to me.”

  “Addie says that when his parents got divorced, he could get whatever he wanted from them. He just had to ask. Nintendo Wii. Tickets to a Rangers game. He even got a dog. They let his sister get her nose pierced. It was like—there were no rules, you just had to ask.”

  So we start talking about what I should ask for. It’s kind of fun. Because Jake says, “It’s not just what you ask for, it’s how you ask for it. There’s a trick . . . you can’t just say, I want this. You have to say, Dad says that in England everybody has a dog, or something like that. . . .”

  “I don’t really want to go to England.”

  “But, no, you’re missing the point. That’s just what you have to say. You don’t have to mean it.”

  “You know what my mom told me this morning? She says we’re moving to Texas. Or she asked me if that’s what I wanted, but it was, like, this is not really a question, this is just something you’re telling me.”

  “Why does she want to go to Texas? London’s a lot cooler.”

  “That’s where she’s from. She says she wants me to get to know my grandmother. I’m like, I’ve met her, she’s like this old lady with one hand—it’s all kind of swollen up, it’s like this zombie hand.” But as soon as I say it, I feel bad. “I mean she’s fine, she’s not crazy or anything like that. She doesn’t smell like pee or anything.”

  Jake’s looking at me like I’m crazy. “What are you even talking about?” he says. “You know, everybody in school thinks you never talk, but you talk all the time. That’s what I try to tell them. I can’t get you to shut up.”

  “I just talk to you,” I say. But I feel embarrassed, maybe because he seems embarrassed, too. We sit in silence for a while and Jake starts playing on his phone.

  Then we go home. The whole thing lasts about forty-five minutes and afterward, for some reason, when he gets out on the seventh floor I don’t know if he wants me to come back with him—he kind of walks out when the doors open, and I say, “Okay,” and he says, “Okay, see you I guess,” and then the doors close and I go up three more floors to my apartment. It’s always that way with Jake. Sometimes I think he’s my best friend and sometimes I think he just hangs out with me when he’s bored because we live in the same building and I’m the only one around.

  That night, before turning my light out, Mom comes and sits on my bed for a minute. “Dad said there’s this great school in London just for Americans,” I start to tell her. “He said he wants us to move out there. There’s somebody in his office whose whole job is to find us a house and . . . just kind of make sure we have everything we need.”

  “I don’t want anyone to find us a house,” she says. “We have a house.”

  “It’s not a house, it’s an apartment. Anyway, if we have a house, why do you want to go to Texas?”

  “What do you want to do?” she asks me. I’m lying on my belly and she’s giving me a back rub.

  “It doesn’t really matter what I want, does it?” I say.

  “It matters.”

  “Not really. I can tell you’ve already made up your mind.”

  Mom takes a breath. “Ben, it’s my job to make the decisions, but I care about what you want, too.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen. I don’t want anything to change.”

  “Well, that’s not really up to me. There are some things I can’t do.” And she gets up from the bed. I roll over and look at her, and she bends down to give me a good night kiss. “You’ll have to talk to your father about that,” she says.

  A few days later the movers arrive. I’m busy playing Minecraft on Mom’s iPad. She’s usually pretty strict about screen time, but right now she doesn’t seem to be paying total attention to everything I do. . . . There’s a buzz on the entry phone, and then about a minute later the doorbell rings and three big men in brown uniforms are standing outside.

  “Is your mom around?” one of them says, and then she comes up behind me and lets them in. They lug a lot of stuff into the apartment—plastic bags and rolls of tape and flat cardboard boxes. There’s always somebody holding the freight elevator. And I can smell them in the house, because it’s another hot
day outside and they’ve been sweating.

  Their uniforms have their names written over the front pockets or kind of sewed on. A short, fat guy named Tomas says, “Hey, give me a hand here.” He has a foreign accent—at first I didn’t know he was talking to me. “Yeah, you. You know how to fold a cardboard box?”

  “No.”

  So he shows me, and then he carries a few flat boxes into my bedroom and gives me a roll of tape. “Why don’t you get started in here?” he says.

  Mom brings out a pitcher of ice water and lots of glasses. She sets them down on the table in the hall. I hear her say to Tomas, “He was supposed to go to his friend’s house. I didn’t want him to have to watch.”

  “It’s better if he helps,” Tomas says. I like Tomas, but I don’t like the way Mom talks to him. That’s something my dad used to complain about. She talks to everybody like she knows them. But if I close my bedroom door, I don’t have to listen. So that’s what I do.

  It’s easy to make the boxes, and kind of cool. They start out flat, like a picture on a page, and then turn into something real, something three-dimensional, that you can put stuff into. But I don’t know what to put in. Everything I have ever been given is on the shelves or in the chest at the foot of my bed. Mom is bad at throwing things away. Even baby things, like the stuffed elephant I used to sleep with every night but haven’t slept with in ages. For some reason, I call him the Bursar. He just stands there on a shelf, holding up a few books. His legs have gone floppy; he has to balance on his trunk.

  After a while, somebody knocks on the door, and Mom comes in. I’m back to sitting on my bed, playing Minecraft. The boxes are still empty.

  “Do you need a little help deciding?” she says.

  “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. The guy just said, ‘Get started.’”

  For some reason, this sets her off. “What do you think we’re doing, we’re packing up.” A piece of tape has stuck to her dress; her hair has come loose; she’s got a pencil behind her ear. “Anything you don’t want to take on the plane needs to go in a box.”

  I look around my room—it’s a mess, but it’s also, like, my whole life.

  And after a minute, Mom says, “Maybe it’s easier to start with what you need. I mean, what you want to take with you now. I’ll give you a suitcase. Don’t take too much, just what you can’t live without for the next few months.”

  “I don’t really need anything. Apart from clothes.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pack your clothes.”

  You can hear the guys making noise in the rest of the apartment, talking and moving boxes around. For them it’s just a job, they’re having a good time.

  “Mom?” I ask her. “What are they going to do with the rest of our stuff?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like sofas and beds.”

  “It’s all going into storage. You know that this apartment doesn’t belong to us, we just rent it. I’ve discussed all this with your father. London’s expensive, too—he says there’s no point in keeping two apartments. In Austin, we can live with your grandmother, but when we get a place of our own . . . they can ship everything to us. All our old things. It’ll be like coming home.”

  “What am I going to sleep on tonight?”

  She looks at me, puzzled. “Your bed,” she says.

  “I thought they were taking it away.”

  And she smiles at me, like I’m a little kid. “Oh, honey, not tonight.” Her voice has gone all soft. “After we leave—today they’re just doing all the prep work.”

  “I still don’t understand why we’re moving to Texas.”

  “Ben, I thought we talked about that already.” Her voice has gone hard again. “I want you to get to know your grandmother, and she can help out, and I can go back to work.”

  “It just seems like . . . the whole reason we’re . . . I thought the reason you didn’t want to go to London with Dad is because . . . this is our home. But then we’re going away anyway.”

  “Do you want to go to London with Dad?”

  She looks at me and there’s only one thing I can say. “No.”

  “Because you know that moving to London is not really . . . Dad is going to be working all the time. We’re not gonna see him anyway. So the only reason to move to London is not really a reason at all.”

  “So why didn’t you tell him to stay here?”

  “I tried to say everything I could. . . . I probably said too much. Your father loves you very much. But he also loves his work, he loves being an important person . . . and sometimes, when you’re a dad, and you come home after work . . . you don’t feel like such an important person anymore. There’s nobody you can tell what to do, there’s nobody you can . . . I mean, you can try.” And she laughs a little, but she doesn’t sound happy. “He can’t really give you and me performance incentives.”

  “Are you getting a divorce?” I ask.

  She sits down next to me on the bed. “I don’t know what we’re getting. But I figure, there’s no point hanging around here, waiting for him to come back. Might as well go home.”

  “This is home.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says again, and starts stroking my hair. “It isn’t for me anymore.”

  Jake was at soccer camp in the morning, but after lunch I take the elevator downstairs to see if he’s back. Mrs. Schultz answers the door.

  “Can Jake hang out?” I ask.

  But Jake has come out already to see what’s going on. He’s still wearing his soccer uniform—blue nylon shirt and shorts, with high blue socks and cleats.

  “I have to pack up my room,” I tell him. “Maybe you want to look at some of my stuff. I can only take a few things to Austin.”

  “Go on, Jake,” Mrs. Schultz says. “It’s nice to have company when you’re packing.”

  So Jake follows me back to my apartment; his cleats click against the tiles. I know what he’s thinking about. For my last birthday, Dad gave me a Syma quadcopter drone with a camera, which we like to take to Central Park—it’s loud enough to make everybody stare at the sky. Jake always wants to hold the controls.

  We spend most of the afternoon messing around with this drone, even though my room is really too small. It’s hard to control, and it keeps crashing against the ceiling and wiping out. Jake thinks this is funny, but I worry the blades might break. (The box says in capital letters NOT FOR INDOOR USE. The first time I showed it to Jake, I said, “What kind of idiot would fly a drone inside?” But then we started doing it anyway.) We haven’t gotten much packing done when Mom comes in to say there’s food on the table.

  “Can Jake stay for supper?”

  “I’m sure he can, but let him just run down and check with his mom.”

  I say to Jake, “Everything I don’t take with me is going into storage. So maybe there’s something you want. Except this,” I add, holding the drone controls in my hand and trying not to smile.

  Jake starts to go over everything carefully. It makes me feel funny to see him looking like that at all my stuff. He puts his hand in the chest of toys and starts digging around. A lot of this stuff is stuff I haven’t played with in years—I can’t even remember half of it, but some of it I do remember, and it makes me feel like, I don’t know, it makes me feel old. Like I’ve already outgrown a lot of things that used to make me happy.

  But Mom says, “The food’s getting cold. You can do that after.” So Jake runs down to check with his mom.

  At supper, all Jake wants to talk about are my baby toys. He’s making fun of me for keeping all these old toys. But he’s also joking about what he should take. Part of what I don’t like is that I can tell when my mom is . . . I don’t know, listening or judging. Sometimes she doesn’t like Jake as much as I do; she doesn’t think he’s nice to me. Or she doesn’t like the way I act around him.

  Tomas is still there and the other two men. I can see them carrying boxes into the hallway. Their truck is parked in the courtyard, but t
he freight elevator is slow and it takes them five or ten minutes to go down and come up again and get another load. Every time they come back they’re sweating even more than before, and Mom says, “I think there’s some beers in the fridge. You’ve earned them,” but Tomas shakes his head.

  “Water is fine,” he says, and one of the other guys says something to him in a language I don’t understand. They both laugh.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow to finish up,” he says.

  Meanwhile, I get this stupid idea that Jake is going to ask for the Bursar. Just as a joke, just because . . . he thinks I don’t care. Or maybe to make fun of me. For some reason, that’s all I can think about, and I can’t finish my spaghetti. It’s going to be too embarrassing for me to say that I don’t want him to take my stuffed animal. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that, if he asks. I’m going to have to say okay. Either way he’ll laugh at me.

  Afterward, Mom lets us finish up a tub of chocolate chip ice cream. “No use letting it sit in the freezer.” Then we go back to my room and Jake starts looking through my things again. He’s gone kind of quiet.

  “I guess I don’t need anything,” he says. There are toys all over the floor and on my bed, piles of books and a whole tangle of jump ropes and yo-yos and stuff like fishing nets for the beach. “Mom says my room is already too messy.”

  “Well, if you want something, you can have it.”

  “That’s okay, I guess,” Jake says. I keep thinking he’s going to make fun of me for something, but he doesn’t; he can’t even look me in the eye. It’s like . . . when he gets a bad grade in school, that’s what he does: he sort of turns his face away from the teacher. A few seconds later, in break time, he might be just the same, laughing or whatever, but it’s like I can see the muscles in his face, making him laugh when he doesn’t want to.

  Mom walks into the room and says, “Okay, Jake, I’m gonna have to kick you out. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  Suddenly I say, “You can have the drone if you want, I guess. I don’t really play with it anymore, except when you come over.”

  He looks at me for a second. Then he says, “That’s all right. That’s like your best thing. You should take it to Texas.”