I Have the Answer

by Kelly Fordon

  “Man, you’re totally screwed with that grade!” Gilbert said.

  “Try not to sound so happy,” Mark said.

  Gilbert followed him into Calculus and sat down next to him. “Just tell Boyle you had a death in the family or your mom is sick. Something. Make up some excuse. You’re so close! Save yourself!”

  Mark’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe when he got home from school. It looked like she hadn’t showered or combed her hair. Normally she had tennis or gardening club or was working at the library. He’d never seen her in her bathrobe at 3 p.m. before. She had baked chocolate chip cookies, his favorite. When she saw him, she got up and moved listlessly toward the fridge for the milk. Had she sensed the arm? Had she picked up on his distress? She poured him a glass of milk and sat back down across from him.

  Mark picked up a cookie. It was still warm. He bit into it.

  “These are awesome, Mom.” The hand gave her a thumbs up.

  “Thanks,” she said without smiling.

  Mark was just about to ask her what was up when Tricia blew through the back door, dumped her backpack on the floor, kicked off her combat boots, and passed through the room without so much as a glance their way.

  “No screens!” his mother called after her. “Do your homework!”

  “Whatever,” Tricia said. She clomped up the stairs.

  Her bedroom door slammed. Mark crammed the rest of the cookie into his mouth and picked up another one. The hand did a little finger roll, excited about a second treat. Luckily it wasn’t attached to his right hand or it would have belted him in the face while he was trying to eat. The thought made Mark giggle, and his mother stared at him.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She shook her head and filled her cheeks with air, puffing them out like a chipmunk. Then she blew it out slowly, making a prolonged whooshing sound. “I guess it’s just the SAT tomorrow,” she said. “I know how worried you must be! I just want you to take it easy. I just want you to know that we love you and we’re behind you.”

  Mark’s father called him into the living room that evening for a chat. Tricia was sitting on the couch scrolling through messages on her phone.

  “So.” His father set the paper aside. “Tomorrow’s the big day?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Mark said.

  “I hate to say it matters . . .” his father said. He shook his head and took a swig of his Heineken.

  “So dramatic, Dad,” Tricia said. She reached into the bowl of candies on the side table, unwrapped a chocolate kiss, and popped it in her mouth. “Is Mark going to spontaneously combust if he doesn’t get a perfect score?”

  “I wish you worried more, young lady.”

  “Unlike you, I’d like to keep my hair.”

  The third hand made as if to chuck his dad on the cheek with a friendly “buck up,” so Mark reached out with his real hand and did it. “Lighten up, Dad! It’s just a test.”

  His father stared at him. “I thought you’d be freaking out.”

  “I was just thinking I might take a gap year,” Mark said.

  “A what?” Tricia asked.

  “A year off from school just to roam around.”

  His father started laughing. “You? I’d like to see that!”

  “I think I’m going to do that too,” Tricia said. She peeled the wrapper off a miniature peanut butter cup and bit into it. “Can I come with you, Mark?”

  “Sure,” Mark said.

  His father licked his thumb and turned the page of his paper. “Stop eating all that candy, Tricia. Mark, you ought to get a good night’s sleep tonight. You need to be well rested for the test.”

  “I do what I want,” Tricia said, just as Mark said, “Sure, Dad.”

  “You are such a kiss ass,” Tricia said to Mark. She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Watch your mouth,” Mark’s father said.

  “Watch your mouth,” Tricia mimicked silently behind his back. The hand thought that was hilarious. It snapped its fingers in appreciation.

  Mark was heading toward the stairs to study when Tricia pointed to the front window. “Look, it’s Mr. Pastan and the Assassin!”

  “Now, now, that’s no way to talk,” his father said from behind his newspaper curtain.

  “That guy is such a jerk,” Tricia turned to Mark. “He doesn’t even care that his stupid dog traumatized Buster. Poor thing’s still under my bed! I wish we could do something.”

  “Maybe we can,” Mark said.

  “Ha ha!” Tricia said. “I’m in! What are we going to do?”

  “Don’t you kids say one word to him.” His father put his paper down and looked at them sternly.

  Mark walked over to the front door, Tricia behind him. “I didn’t think you had it in you,” she whispered.

  Mark flung open the front door.

  “Oh, Mr. Pastan!” he shouted.

  Mr. Pastan stopped in his tracks and stared up at him. Mark stared back. Behind him, he could hear Tricia giggling. “What are you going to say?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”

  Mark continued down the front walk toward Mr. Pastan, Tricia trailing behind him.

  “You know, Mr. Pastan, your dog cannot go around biting other dogs.”

  Behind him, Tricia said, “That’s right.”

  “Now it’s payback time,” Mark continued. “As my father likes to say, ‘When you least expect it, expect it.’”

  Mr. Pastan stared at Mark stone-faced for what seemed like an eon. Then he let go of the Assassin’s leash.

  “Oh shit,” Tricia said.

  Mark heard the sound of Tricia’s feet and the screen door slam behind him, but he didn’t turn around. For several seconds, Mark and the Assassin eyed each other. When the dog didn’t move, Mark finally glanced over at Mr. Pastan. Mr. Pastan was looking down at the Assassin in disbelief. Mark took a step backward toward the house keeping his eye on the dog.

  Mark took another step backward and the Assassin’s ears went up. Mark froze. But then the Assassin turned his head. He appeared to be homing in on something Mark couldn’t see down the road. What was it? A rabbit? A squirrel? Mark took another step backward while the Assassin wasn’t looking. He had almost reached his front steps.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Tricia whispered to him from the door. “Run for it.”

  Mark was just about to turn and make a break for it when the Assassin barked and raced down the sidewalk toward the intersection, his leash dragging on the ground behind him.

  From the doorway, Tricia started hooting. “Go, go, go!” she yelled.

  Mr. Pastan shouted a word that sounded like “Bark!” in a language that might or might not have been Russian.

  When it was clear the Assassin was not going to stop, Mr. Pastan stormed off after him like a soldier charging into battle, his long-handled pooper scooper extended in front of him.

  “He’s gone, Mr. Pastan!” Mark called after him. “He’s free!”

  The Visit

  Summer 1976

  My mother and father decided I could use a companion, so they invited a distant cousin to come stay with us over the summer. Although I wanted to spend my summer reading in my fort (alone, if possible), I knew better than to share that preference with them.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “My cousin Tom’s daughter. She’s eleven, like you,” my mother said, smiling with teeth.

  “Terrific.” I smiled back, trying to mirror her expression. Smiling with teeth was non-negotiable for my mother. I had been taught to offer up my smile like a slice of cake to everyone I met.

  This cousin arrived two days later, on a plane from Grand Rapids, Michigan. My mother had grown up outside of Grand Rapids, but I had never been there. One time when I asked her why we never went back, she dismissed the question by quoting some famous guy. “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

&n
bsp; Cousin Tom was the only relative still living near my mother’s childhood farm. Her parents had both died when my mother was in high school, so she had little reason to go back. Cousin Tom had never traveled to Washington, D.C., or anywhere else, according to my mother, and I had never met or even heard of his daughter before.

  When I learned that her name was Janice, I pictured a heavy-set girl with braces, glasses, and possibly a limp, but the girl who appeared in the gateway at the airport was three inches taller than me and looked like she weighed half as much. She had long black hair and light blue eyes and wore a comb in the back of her Guess jeans like all the cool girls in my class.

  “Hello!” my mother said, smiling with teeth and throwing her arms around her.

  “Hello,” Janice said to us, no teeth.

  “Oh dear,” my mother said as we hauled Janice’s giant green suitcase off the carousel. “How am I going to fit this in the Mercedes?”

  Once the bag had been hoisted into the trunk and we were all settled, my mother looked back at us in the rearview mirror and asked Janice if she had enjoyed her flight.

  “It was fine,” Janice said. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, looking out the window.

  My mother’s mouth twitched. “Well, I just want you to know we are so happy to have you this summer. You and Marie are going to have so much fun. Have you ever been here before, Janice?”

  “No,” Janice said, “I’ve never been anywhere.” She said this with exasperation in her voice, the same tone I sometimes imagined using when my mother chastised me. What about this knife, Marie? You cleaned the whole kitchen very nicely, but you left this knife here on the counter. Is that the way we do things?

  “You are in for a treat, Janice! This is the big city!” my mother continued. “I moved here when I was twenty-two. I had never been out of Michigan until then, so you’ve got me beat!”

  We dragged the suitcase up the stairs to my room and heaved it onto the other twin bed. What could this girl possibly have stuffed inside it? I only owned three pairs of pants, three pairs of gym shorts, three T-shirts, and three dresses for church. I had one pair of sneakers and one pair of dress shoes. My mother didn’t like clutter. Clutter is what led to Grandma Jean’s problem, she said.

  “You keep piling up and piling up and one day you’ll find you can’t even get through the front door.” This was true of junk that attached to your body as well as junk that filled up your home.

  My mother had suggested I show Janice around the neighborhood, but when I asked her if she wanted to go outside, she said, “I really need a nap.”

  If I were a guest in a stranger’s house, I would have shadowed the host even into a tar pit. But Janice seemed to keep her own counsel, an option I had never considered.

  After I left Janice in the bedroom for her nap, I found Gert in the kitchen doing dishes. Gert was from Jamaica, and she’d been with our family since I was six weeks old. When any of my classmates asked me what Gert did in our house all day long, I said she was my nanny.

  “She’s not your nanny,” my mother always corrected me. “She’s the housekeeper. You don’t need a nanny because your mother is not working. Remember that. I gave up my job to take care of you.” My mother had been a secretary before she had me, but my father was a successful lobbyist, so she no longer had to work. She said she had quit working to care for me, but I saw so little of her with the garden club and tennis club and who knows what, that she might as well have been off somewhere running a Fortune 500 company.

  My mother liked Gert to wear gray uniforms with white piping, so she had purchased three of these getups and hung them in the hall closet. Every Tuesday morning, Gert arrived in the passenger seat of a light blue Chevrolet Nova from some undisclosed location, hung her jeans and T-shirt in the closet, and changed into one of the three uniforms. During the week she lived in the third-floor bedroom, and every Sunday morning she hung her dress back up, changed into her street clothes, and left for her two-day break.

  If anyone had ever asked me, I would have said that Gert was the person I could not live without. After school, Gert and I enjoyed tea and toast while watching The Brady Bunch. On Saturday nights when my parents were enjoying date night, we watched The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. On Wednesdays and Fridays, when Gert did the laundry, I sat in an old, tattered armchair next to the dryer and read. Gert was the person who walked me to school on the first day of first grade. And Gert was the person who sat next to me all night in the hospital when I needed an IV to combat dehydration induced by the stomach flu. My parents were in Europe at the time.

  I told Gert that Janice was in my room taking a nap.

  “You be nice to her,” she said. “You know she got to be sad since her mommy left.”

  This was something my mother had not mentioned, but I didn’t dare let on or Gert would have clammed up. My mother had once castigated Gert for informing me that there are people in the world who don’t believe in Jesus.

  “I know,” I said, “but she could make an effort.” According to my mother, any outcome could be put to right if one made an effort.

  Gert clanged a cup down on the yellow Formica counter.

  “Listen here, little Missy. There’s trouble in this world you know nothing about. Don’t go telling that girl how she should or shouldn’t behave until you’ve lost your own mother in a hot minute.” Gert shook her head and made the clicking sound with her tongue.

  When Janice emerged two hours later, she was wearing a frilly white shirt with her Guess jeans. She said she was ready to go outside.

  “Do you want to see my fort?” I said.

  “Your fort?” She looked at me like I had just crawled out of a garbage can. I wasn’t sure if she was disgusted by my suggestion or my clothing. I looked down at my cutoff jeans and dingy gray T-shirt and was suddenly ashamed. Up until that moment, I had been in the habit of trying to ignore my appearance, even though my mother had told me on more than one occasion that dresses were the best option for people like me who have a “great future behind us.”

  Janice and I walked across the street.

  “You have to crawl through the chain-link fence,” I said.

  “I think I can handle that,” Janice said.

  She was so skinny she made it through the hole without snagging her frilly shirt or getting it dirty on the ground. Inside the fence there was a yellow sign indicating the forest was now a construction site. My father had told me someone wanted to build forty houses in the woods. The neighborhood was fighting it, but I had seen men wandering the woods taking pictures and measuring, so it was pretty clear the construction was moving forward. It made me sad to think that my fort would be demolished and there was nothing I could do about it. My neighbor Cassie and I had built the fort about a hundred yards down a footpath. We’d constructed it as a lean-to beneath the hollow of a honeysuckle bush, so it had smelled heavenly since April.

  Inside, we kept an old paint tarp from Cassie’s father’s workroom along with a long stick that served as a broom and two tree stumps for chairs. Cassie was a year older than me, and over the past year, she’d stopped coming to the fort in favor of tennis practice. She had set her sights on Wimbledon and spent all her time hitting tennis balls against the wall behind the public library.

  My favorite thing was to bake chocolate chip cookies and bring them out to the fort with a book and a pillow. I’d rest the pillow against a tree stump and stretch out on the tarp. Before Janice arrived, I had spent most of the summer in this way, except for the days when it rained and I had to read in bed. I preferred the fort because I loved it and I loved to read, but also because seeing me at home “lounging around doing nothing” irritated my mother, and she was apt to find chores for me if she caught me in the act.

  “Yuck,” Janice said, when I’d swept and laid out the tarp. “You sit on this old thing? What about the bugs?”

  “They don’t bother me,” I said.

  “Well, they bother me.” She made
another face, frosting on top of her routine disgust.

  “So, you don’t want to stay?”

  She shook her head.

  “OK. Let’s walk down to the 48th Street Park instead.” I folded the tarp back up.

  “So what do you like to do back home?” I asked when we were back on the street. In the front yard of the Andersons’ house, cute Michael Anderson was cutting the grass. He stopped mid-row, turned off the lawn mower, ran a dingy gray rag across his forehead, and called out, “Hi Marie.” I was surprised he remembered my name. When I waved, I half expected glitter to shoot out from my fingertips. Then I realized he was looking at Janice, not me. Janice did not even seem to notice that we were interacting with the god of 48th Street.

  “Mostly I just hang out with my friends,” she replied. “Or go to the mall.” We walked on in silence. I glanced back once and saw that Michael Anderson had resumed mowing.

  My mother would not approve of Janice at all, I realized, and it wouldn’t be long before she let Janice know.

  “If you smile the whole world smiles with you, but if you cry, you cry alone,” was my mother’s favorite saying. My mother made all of her pronouncements with such authority. It never dawned on me that she could be wrong about anything. She believed that her father had made the choice to turn to alcohol instead of the Lord. And her mother had given into food rather than fueling herself with God’s love.

  “When life gets you down,” she said, “you pray for guidance. You march right into the battle armed with the Lord.”

  That night at dinner, Janice sat at the end of the table opposite my father. My mother and I sat in our usual spots on either side of him.

  “Let’s pray,” my mother said.

  Janice looked over at me, eyes wide, as my mother held her hands out. Everyone grabbed hands except for Janice, who ignored us. She kept her own hands folded in her lap and stared down at her plate. When my mother realized that Janice was not going to participate, she frowned, then bowed her head again and said grace with a little more force than usual.