After dinner, I offer to help clear the table. “You’ve had a long day,” Granma says. “You can start helping out around here tomorrow. Or never, so far as I’m concerned.”
So I go back to the couch and sit and watch TV, which is great, because it means I don’t have to talk. There’s a baseball game on, but I don’t really care what it is. I just zone out. The next thing I know the TV is off and Mom is sitting next to me on the couch. She’s got her hand on my forehead, like she’s trying to see if I have a temperature, and the truth is, I feel pretty weird—like, wide-awake and tired at the same time, and just kind of not there. “Come on, Ben. Beddy-bye.” She hasn’t said that to me in a while.
It feels weird going to bed with Mom in the room. When I was little I used to climb under the covers with her and Dad on Sunday mornings, which is something they argued about, because Dad didn’t want it to become a habit . . . but that was years ago anyway.
When Mom goes to the bathroom, I quickly put on my pajamas. She comes back wearing her nightgown, which is faded yellow and has flowers like blue daisies all over it. “It’s all yours,” she says.
The bathroom has little green tiles, a lot of which are cracked or missing. It smells of lemon air freshener. The mirror is old-fashioned, with patterns cut into it, and the medicine shelf is full of prescription bottles—Granma’s medicines. I brush my teeth and wash my face, which wakes me up. Mom is already in bed when I come back in.
“Do you want to read for a bit?”
“Sure, okay.”
“Are you going to say okay to everything?”
“Just for the next few years.” I smile.
“Well, at least we can laugh,” she says, and turns on her bedside lamp.
My lamp casts a little circle of light on my covers, and it makes the rest of the room seem almost black. There’s a bright ring around the edge of what I can see. Mom is outside the edge.
“Which is the bed you used to sleep in? I mean, when you were a kid,” I ask. I don’t want her to fall asleep just yet—I don’t want to be left alone.
“This one. The bed I’m in.”
“So what was my bed for?”
“Sleepovers,” she says.
“Does it feel weird, sleeping in your old bed?”
“I’ve slept in it before,” Mom says.
“But I mean, with me here.”
She doesn’t answer for a bit, and I think she’s fallen asleep. Then she says, “When I was a kid, I really wanted a sister. It annoyed me that Mom and Dad got to sleep together but I was on my own. Like I was the odd one out. It’s nice that you’re here now—I don’t have to be lonely anymore.” Then she says, “No more talking. I’m tired.”
“Okay, good night.”
“Good night, Ben.”
I try to read again, and after a few minutes Mom’s breathing slows down and I can tell she’s asleep. After another few minutes I turn off my light, too.
But even with the lights off I don’t feel sleepy. All the sounds are strange. The fan is still on, creaking, and the window is open, and I can hear crickets outside, and even in the night it’s still hot. Granma has the TV on low, but in the dark, it’s like you can hear everything. She’s watching the news. . . . It’s not a big house, and the walls are thin, and for some reason I get this feeling like I’m just this computer or receiver or something, receiving all this information, like sounds and smells (the quilt on my bed is a little musty—it smells like towels that have been left in the cupboard too long); and it’s very hard for me to turn that feeling off. I don’t know if I’m happy or not but it’s like everything is very close, closer than normal, and sort of bigger than normal, too, like if someone put their hand or something right up against your face and held it there. It takes me a long time to fall asleep.
We spend the next day just doing stuff. Mom has a lot of stuff she has to do, like buy a car. So I help her do that, sitting next to her on the couch, and looking at carmax.com. There’s this whole world of people out there trying to sell you their car; it’s a little overwhelming. At least, that’s what Mom says. But it’s also kind of fun, imagining, like, maybe that will be our car. Maybe we’ll be like the people who drive around in a yellow convertible Chevy Camaro. (Mom says, “We are not those people.”) Granma brings us iced tea from the kitchen; the fan is spinning above, making noise; and Mom is clicking and saying, “What do you think?” and in my head it’s like I’m talking to Jake and asking him, What do you think? He has strong opinions about stuff like this. In New York we never had a car.
While Granma sets the table for lunch, Mom starts making phone calls about schools. “Don’t even think about it,” she says to me. “This is, like, a whole summer away. This is, like, pretend.” But it’s not pretend: it’s going to happen. In five or six weeks, I’m going to go to a brand-new school where I don’t know anybody.
Granma says, “Let’s eat,” but my mom is still on the phone, waiting on hold and sometimes talking to somebody. I try not to listen in, and eventually Granma gets annoyed. “You can do that later,” she says. “We’re all getting hungry here.”
Then when we sit down they have a kind of quiet argument. “There are just a lot of things I have to get done,” Mom says, and Granma tells her, “You don’t have to do them with Ben hanging around. He’s the priority right now.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” And so on. I just eat my bologna sandwich and pick at the carrot and cucumber sticks Granma put in a bowl on the table.
After lunch, we have more errands to run. Mom has to get her Texas driver’s license renewed. “It’ll be an outing,” she tells me. “It’ll be fun. Come on—let’s get out of the house. We can’t sit around here all day. We’ll go for a treat.”
So we borrow Granma’s Volvo and drive to some office building with a big parking lot around it. It’s really incredibly cold in the waiting room, but finally they call our number, and some guy at a desk takes Mom’s photo with a little camera; she puts on a big frozen smile and signs some papers. Afterward we go to Half Price Books (I think that’s the treat), which is around the corner, but for some reason you still have to get in the car. It feels like everywhere we go in Austin, we end up by the side of some busy road or highway. For a few seconds, when we walk outside, I warm up again, but every time we go inside I start shivering.
Half Price Books is more of a warehouse than a bookstore—the ceiling is made of big square panels. Some of them are missing, and others have been turned into overhead lights. You can hear the hum of the air-conditioning everywhere.
Mom wants to buy a present for Granma, to say thank you for having us. They have a lot of big art books, including a book of photographs about New York. I show it to her, to be funny, and she flips through the pages for a second but gives it back. “That’s not really what I had in mind,” she says. But she looks at me, too, like, Are you okay? After that, I just wander around—it’s a good place to play hide and seek, and I amuse myself trailing after Mom without her knowing it. Eventually I get bored and let her see me. “Oh, there you are,” she says, like she’s been looking for me, which she hasn’t. “Find anything good?” but I shake my head.
There’s a comic book section near the checkout, and Mom says, when we’re waiting in line, “You like comic books.”
A bunch of kids are standing around, laughing and reading one of the stories. They have long shorts and key chains coming out of their pockets and look about fifteen years old.
“What do you mean, I like comic books?” I have to talk quietly, so nobody can hear us, but I hate doing that, because then everybody knows I’m having this embarrassing conversation with my mother.
“You’re always asking for comic books.”
Sometimes parents get this idea of you, because of something you said like three years ago, which for some reason they keep bringing up. “Jake likes comic books. I think you’re thinking of Jake.”
“I know the difference between you and Jake.”
; “Apparently not.”
“Tell me you didn’t bug Dad for about three weeks to let you buy some issue of Dead Man Walking or something like that.”
“The Walking Dead. And did Dad let me?”
“No. It was like fifty dollars. Maybe they have it here. Go look.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I say, feeling suddenly angry.
“What? What am I doing?”
“You think I’m going to talk to those kids and make friends. I’m not going to talk to those kids.”
“Calm down, Ben. All I said was, why don’t you check out the comic books. I offered to buy you something.”
But the same thing happens at the swimming pool. About five minutes walk from Granma’s house there’s a neighborhood pool in the middle of a park, and when we get back from Half Price Books, sweating like pigs in the old Volvo, Mom says, “I could really use a dip.” So we put on our swimming things and Mom pulls a dress over her head and we walk down the middle of the road to the park.
The neighborhood around Granma’s house is really quiet: all the cars are parked in driveways, and there are these big trees on the sidewalk that arch over the road, so it’s not too hot. It’s about five o’clock and it’s like you can feel the sun over the trees trying to get in.
It’s crazy, two days ago I was in New York City, walking down Broadway, and now I’m here.
There are kids at the pool, splashing around, or lying on the grass by the side—even though the grass has ants in it. Some of the boys wear T-shirts even in the water. But I don’t see kids on their own. Everybody has somebody to talk to. And I realize that for two days I haven’t talked to anybody who isn’t Mom or Granma. It’s amazing how much noise kids make. You really notice it when you’re not part of it. And all the noise sounds different, because of the water, kind of louder and farther away at the same time. Mom jumps in the pool and swims a couple of lengths but then she comes out again and lies on a towel with her sunglasses on.
“I just like feeling myself get dry,” she says.
“How long are we going to stay here?” I ask.
“We just got here, Ben. Go swim or something. Find some kids to play with. There are a lot of kids here your age.” I think her eyes are closed, though it’s hard to tell, under the sunglasses; she sounds sleepy.
“Mom, that’s not how it works.”
“How does it work?” But she’s not really paying attention.
“It just doesn’t work—you have to know somebody. Nobody wants to hang out with some weird kid they don’t know.”
“You’re not that weird. Give me five minutes,” she says, still with her eyes closed. “For about the past two months I’ve been dreaming of these five minutes.”
So I leave her alone and swim a few lengths, even though I’m not a good swimmer. And when I come out again Mom looks like she really is asleep. She’s just kind of baking in the sun and for some reason I feel sorry for her, or happy for her, or something. So I let her sleep and go for a walk around the park. There’s a basketball court and a little kids’ playground, with a sandbox and slides, and a small creek or river next to the court, where the water isn’t even going anywhere, it’s just kind of slimy and covered in reeds. Some grown-ups are playing basketball and talking a lot; it’s hard to tell if they’re angry or having fun, and I watch them for a while and think about my dad. And then when I come back to the pool, Mom sits up and sort of shakes herself, and says, “All right, Ben. We can go.”
The next day Mom buys a car, a secondhand Toyota Corolla. Granma drives us to East Austin, and the guy who sells it to us is a grad student. He looks about twenty-five and has a goatee and an earbud, which seems to be playing something, even when he’s talking to us. He just got a job in Boston—he’s one of those people who tells you stuff about himself even if you haven’t asked.
“I was going to drive it over,” he says, “but the truth is, it’s not that good a car. It’s fine, but for the first time in my life I’m going to be making, like, grown-up money, and so I thought, Buy yourself a grown-up car.”
Mom just smiles at him, the way I sometimes see her smile at guys, so maybe they think she’s being friendly but really she thinks, You’re a jerk. Afterward I have to choose whether to go back in Granma’s Volvo or with Mom, and I’d rather go with Granma but I don’t. At least the air-conditioning works in the Toyota, but it makes a clanking noise and the vents drip on your leg if you’re sitting in the front seat. The whole car smells like dirty laundry. Mom lets me sit in the front seat. I can tell already that she loves this car.
“I haven’t had a car in fifteen years,” she says. “We can go anywhere.”
It’s funny, because in New York she used to argue with Dad about money—she liked expensive things. When she fixed up the kitchen in our apartment she ordered these countertops from Italy, and my dad was like, “I can’t actually believe how much this stuff costs.” But he let her do it because it was her project and he thought she didn’t have enough to do—which doesn’t mean they didn’t fight about it. One thing I realized is that if you don’t say anything, your parents will just argue in front of you because they think you’re not really paying attention. But now that we’re in Austin she buys this really crappy car from some student and she loves it. I don’t get it.
Back at home, Granma says, “You could probably use some wheels as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.”
And she takes me outside again. It’s just starting to get dark, you can see the sun going down behind the trees.
There’s a shed by the side of the house that’s just full of old bikes. Mom comes out, too, to help me look at them. She gets very nostalgic. “Mostly they’re girl bikes, but I had a BMX phase when I was about your age,” she says. But they’re all in totally unusable condition. The tires are flat, the chains are rusted. They’re really dusty, and even Mom says it’s pointless; she keeps getting bitten by mosquitoes. My hands are sticky with cobwebs. It’s still hot and sweaty outside and when I rub my hand across my forehead, to keep the sweat out, the cobwebs stick in my hair. I feel disgusting. Granma stands in the backyard watching.
“They’re perfectly good bikes,” she says. “They just need a little fixing up.” I guess it makes her sad to realize that this stuff she’s been keeping for all these years is just junk; it’s not worth anything. Nobody wants it.
I look at Mom, and Mom says, “I think we can afford a new bicycle.”
So in the morning, after breakfast, we drive down to this bike shop by a creek or something, next to another busy road, but there’s a park opposite. It’s one of those shops with a big glass window two stories high. There are hundreds and hundreds of bicycles, all shiny, in different colors and sizes.
Mom says, “Just pick one,” but I can’t choose. It’s, like, what kind of kid am I? Am I the kind of kid who rides this bike or that one? But the truth is, I’m not really any kind of kid, at least, not the bike-riding kind. In New York, I stopped getting bikes for my birthdays when I was, like, seven years old—it was just too much hassle to find a place to put it in the apartment, and wheel it down in the elevator, and cross over at the traffic lights on Central Park West, before I could ride it.
Finally Mom gets fed up and picks a Schwinn Frontier mountain bike for $300. It has a blue frame and big black tires. When we walk out of the shop, I can’t tell if I’m happy or annoyed, but Mom says, “It’s a bike. Who cares what it looks like. . . . I mean, if this bike isn’t covered in dirt inside a week, it’s a waste of money. Come on, you should break it in.”
And we take it across the road to the park before we go home.
For five minutes I’m just gone—in New York Mom hardly let me walk to the diner, but here, anything goes. It’s like even after all those years she was still scared of New York.
There’s a concrete path along the creek, covered in pebbles. It curves in and out—it’s fun to ride on, it’s like riding a wave. Just
the noise of being outside is intense, I’m not used to it yet. It’s like the heat itself makes a noise, a kind of pulsing noise, as you go in and out of the shade. You have to keep going because it’s so hot that if you stop you sort of suffocate, but if you keep pedaling like crazy, the wind cools you down a little, and after five minutes I really have no idea where I am, but it feels great, even if I’m a little worried that Mom is going to be worried, so eventually I turn around and head back. The path is pretty good, but there are cracks in it where you can build up speed and jump, and tree roots growing under it, and sometimes you have to duck under the trees. The leaves are scratchy; the branches or twigs have some kind of green moss growing in all the cracks. There are also a lot of bugs flying around, and by the time I get back to Mom, who doesn’t look worried at all but is just sitting on a rock, I’m in a real sweat, and there’s salt in my eyes, and dust in my sweat, and my palms are dirty from trying to dry them against my shirt.
“You look happy,” she says as I pull up next to her. Then she says, “You don’t have to make that face. I didn’t mean to spoil it.”
Right now that’s all I really want to do—just ride my bike around the neighborhood. The streets around Granma’s house are wide and almost empty; most of the houses have driveways, so there aren’t even that many cars parked along the curb. And there are trees along all the sidewalks that spread their branches across the road, so there’s plenty of shade.
The asphalt is pretty rough and covered in twigs and pecans, so you can hear your wheels cracking them as you go. On my bike it takes me, like, no time at all to get to the swimming pool, so I can lock it up against the chain-link fence, jump in, just literally kind of stand by the pool for three minutes afterward in the sun, until I’m dry again, and hop back on the bike and head home. Or wherever.
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