“You’re talking like an idiot, Brenda,” I say, but I’m not feeling as righteous as I was a moment before.
“Why do you think Ma keeps her stupid job, anyway? ’Cause she likes it? No! She’s been a nurse for twenty fuckin’ years, and she’s sick of it. It’s because they don’t make enough to put you through school on Dad’s job alone, and Ma can’t make that kind of money doing anything else.”
“That’s total bullshit. She does it because she loves it. It gets her out of the house.”
“That’s not true. She’s doing it so she can send you to school, so you can have everything you’ve always wanted. She told me so.”
I stare back at Brenda narrowly. “She did not.”
“Yes, she did.”
“When?”
“What, when? The exact day? The exact minute? I don’t remember. A few weeks ago.”
She’s standing over me on the bed, her arms folded across her chest, looking triumphant. I don’t say anything, because I don’t know if she’s lying or not, and I can’t prove that she is. But if she isn’t, I feel like shit—and she knows it now, and she knows that lying or not, she’s quelled me.
“Eric, look,” she says to me, softer now, sitting back down on the bed. “I didn’t mean to say those mean things. All I’m saying is, how can you tell me to think about other people when you don’t even know what it’s like to have any problems to deal with? You never have any problems at school. You never have any problems with Ma or Dad. You haven’t even had a girlfriend yet. You don’t even know what it’s like to be in love, never mind try to figure out if you’re still in love with somebody or not. So all I’m saying is, how can you tell me how I’m supposed to feel over what’s going on in my life? I don’t even know where I’m going in life. You’re all set.”
I look at her, stunned, then away. I don’t feel angry at her anymore, or anything—just a funny kind of blankness. I want to yell back in kind, to say, “What the fuck do you know about anything? What the fuck do you know about my life?” but I’m paralyzed; even if I wanted to say something, it would never come out.
She just stares at me with this look that says, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry,” and then she gets up and goes on packing. I go into my room and write out the note, then bring it back to her as she’s trying to close the zipper on the suitcase.
“Here’s the note,” I say, holding down the top of the suitcase for her.
“Thanks,” she says, hardly looking at me again. She opens up the notebook and starts copying down the note, concentrating as she writes. “You’re such a good writer, Eric,” she mumbles without looking up. “This says everything I feel.”
“It’s just a little note,” I say.
“It’s so good, I hope they think I wrote it.”
“I tried to keep it simple. I don’t think they’ll notice anything funny about it.”
She finishes copying it, signs her name with her trademark big flourish, rips the page out of the notebook, and folds it up.
“Thanks,” she says. “Now I gotta get my stuff in the bathroom.”
“I should get back to the shop.”
“Okay.” She stumbles toward me, giving me a mechanical hug and kissing me on the cheek. “I’ll call soon. I promise. Don’t worry about me.”
“Okay.” I hug her back, holding on even when I can feel her pulling away. My heart is beating in a funny panicky way; there’s something going crazy in there I want to let out so badly.
“Bren?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re wrong about me. I swear to God you are. I’m not perfect. I’m not, I swear.”
She smiles, kisses me again. “Whatever. Just forget that shit, okay? I was just pissed off.”
“But I’m not.”
“Okay,” she says, faintly impatient. “Don’t worry about it.” She stands back from me, still smiling. “Everything’s gonna be fine, okay?”
Something in me gives up. “Yeah.”
“I’ll just leave the note on the kitchen table, and it’ll be like you weren’t even here. Like you never knew I was leaving, okay?” she says, going into the bathroom and rummaging around in the closet. “That way you don’t have to lie or anything.”
“Okay,” I say, standing outside, half hearing her.
“You still there?” she says a moment later.
“Yeah.”
“You better get back to Sal.”
“All right. ’Bye, Bren.”
“’Bye, hon. I’ll call you soon.”
I go back out to the car. Later today, I’ll have to fake that I didn’t know she was leaving. I’ll have to arrange my face and the pitch of my voice into that expression and cadence that say, “I know nothing.” What I think to myself is that when the time comes, doing that—playing dumb, playing innocent, playing someone with no party to anyone’s machinations, even my own—shouldn’t be a problem at all.
* * *
Brenda was wrong, of course, when she thought her leaving would be no big deal. I was in the family room staring blankly at MTV when I heard my parents come in; the sound of my mother’s cheery “We’re home with steaks!” when they came through the door made me briefly ill. I forced myself into the kitchen and listened to my mother, still in her nurse’s uniform, babble about some funny thing that had happened at work while my father unpacked groceries; the whole time, Brenda’s letter—my letter—sat innocently on the kitchen table like a mail bomb waiting to be opened.
“Where’s Joani? Where’s Bren?” my mother asked brightly. “We gotta put on the steaks!”
“Joani’s at Eddie’s,” I said, truthfully enough. “Isn’t Bren still at work?”
“She gets off Saturdays at three,” my mother said. “What’s this?” she said, picking up the letter and unfolding it. She hadn’t read for more than ten seconds before she said “Get this out of my sight,” dropped it back on the table, and walked upstairs like a zombie. We heard the bedroom door slam, and, in a moment, the sound of her bawling from within.
“What the hell is that?” my father said, picking up the letter and pulling out his reading glasses. He mouthed it silently as he read.
“What is it?” I forced myself to say, convinced that I reeked of phoniness.
“It’s from your sister,” he said, dead. “She moved out.”
“What?”
I’m certain he looked at me keenly for a moment, his eyes narrowing and leaking behind the glasses, before he said it again, in a deadpan that made my blood chill: “She moved out. She’s sick of all of us, and she’s movin’ out.” He shrugged. “Fancy that, huh?” he said with a weak laugh, his eyes glassy, then walked upstairs. I heard the bedroom door open, then close, softly.
I picked up the letter, looked at my words in Brenda’s fat handwriting, and said aloud, “I hate you.” But I didn’t know if I was saying it to Brenda, or myself, or both.
Brenda didn’t come home for Thanksgiving at Auntie Lani’s, even though Frank stopped by, hoping she’d be there. Of course, her absence dominated the day, even though no one spoke about it directly, which probably would have been much easier to take. Instead, the aunts clucked over my mother and hugged her, saying, “These are the times to get through,” which made my mother nod tightly because she couldn’t stand their pity.
Now Christmas is coming, and none of us are feeling yuletide. My mother took second shift at the nursing home through the holidays, so she doesn’t get back until eleven o’clock, and since this is also the big season for cheese and cracker sales, my father comes home late every night as well. These days, everybody eats at odd hours from big platters of lasagna and manicotti that Grandma makes. She’s become the de facto head of the household, and she’s thrown herself into her job: when she’s not cooking, she’s showing Joani how to sew or praying for Brenda over her rosary beads.
Brenda has called once, on a Sunday night, and I didn’t get to talk to her. Instead, I sat at the top of the steps and heard my mother’s sid
e of their brief conversation, just long enough for my mother to try to keep her cool, lose her cool, inveigh against Brenda’s selfishness, and get hung up on by Brenda. Since that phone call, my mother hardly mentions Brenda, and when someone else does, her face darkens, as does my father’s. Joani wants to know when Brenda’s coming back, and I tell her soon, soon, and when she does, she’s going to be really fat, because she’s having a baby, and you’d better not laugh at her, Joani. And Joani promises gravely not to laugh, so reverent has the Ianelli family made her toward the process of baby-making.
But no one really talks much about Brenda openly, and there’s a funny kind of civility to this house now, without her blasting music and her predictable screaming matches with my mother. It’s as though Brenda’s become some kind of ghost, as though invoking her aloud will bring bad luck. I wonder over the instinct in my family to fill Brenda’s absence with silence instead of talking it into habitability, the instinct to treat her leave of absence—a minor thing, a temporary thing—like the gravest betrayal, like a kind of household death.
* * *
“The age of anxiety has come, and now there will be no peace,” Charlie intones dramatically. “West Mendhem is now paying the price for its years of evil depravity.”
“In the end, the hate you take is equal to the hate you make,” Phoebe says.
“Do you really think all this stuff is that simple of an equation?” I ask.
“Totally,” Phoebe says. “Don’t you understand the laws of karma?”
“Fuckin’ A,” Charlie says. “What comes around goes around.”
“Exactly,” Phoebe says, brushing hair out of his eyes.
The three of us are sitting in study hall together in the cafeteria, talking low at a far table so that Mr. Parker, this period’s study hall monitor, doesn’t separate us. We’re talking about what Phoebe, in typical hyperbolic fashion, calls “the local Armageddon”—what everyone around town is calling a crime wave, even though since the murder of Kerri Lanouette, to date unsolved, there have only been a handful of events, like the robbery of that old woman out by Boxford and a few other random incidents, like car thefts. All these things could have been carried out by anyone—God knows they could have been carried out by West Mendhem kids themselves, bored and restless on a Friday night—but people in town seem more and more convinced that it’s all coming from Leicester, that slowly, inexorably, the invisible barriers that separated West Mendhem from the neighboring city for so long are crumbling, and that this is just the first stage in the transformation of West Mendhem into a jungle, which seems to be a popular metaphor these days around here.
The paper has begun publishing nightly boxed “Security Tips” (“Always leave a light on in your window when you’re away late at night, or even the television!” and “Don’t open the door for a delivery man or meter reader until they’ve shown you full and proper identification”). Lots of people are talking about buying a gun—“Just a little one”—to lock up in their nighttables, away from the kids, and in masses, the weekly “Lord hear our prayer” call-and-response always leads off now with “For the safety and sanctity of the young and old in our community, in the streets, and in our homes.”
So “Exactly,” Phoebe says, looking away from her dog-eared copy of Siddhartha and brushing hair out of Charlie’s eyes. He blushes and shakes his hair back into his face, dopily, like a dog, when she does so. “All these years, people in West Mendhem totally dick over these Hispanics in Leicester. First they leave the city, and destroy the economic infrastructure, and then they won’t even allow housing to be built in West Mendhem that these Hispanic families can afford, so they can send them to decent schools—if you wanna call this shithole decent—and get out of their shitty cycle of poverty and despair. And now they’re uprising, and they’re coming after their oppressors. I, for one, am surprised that it didn’t happen sooner.”
“You can fool some people sometime,” Charlie starts to whisper-sing in a horrible Rastafarian accent, miming steel drum on the cafeteria table, “but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
“Metengarten, keep it down,” Mr. Parker barks across the study hall in the voice he usually reserves for when he’s reffing bombardment in gym class. There’s a little ripple of laughter in the cafeteria directed at our table.
Phoebe makes a jerking-off gesture behind Mr. Parker’s back—she’s hated him ever since he flunked her in gym for wearing clogs—and looks gravely at Charlie, then me. “Exactly,” she says again, and they share a portentous glance, my two stoner revolutionary friends.
Phoebe and Charlie are still seeing each other, although the relationship seems to be more about taping Grateful Dead concerts for each other and having stoned sex than any real philosophical bond. There was tension between the three of us for a while, until one night when we all got high in Phoebe’s parked car. Charlie went off into the woods to piss, and Phoebe and I finally had it out. I said I felt like the two of them were conspiring to edge me out, but then Phoebe said that, completely to the contrary, they wouldn’t even be able to go out if they didn’t have my endorsement, which they did, didn’t they? And that I was their biographer, their chronicler, and someday I would write the story of their great romance (“It’ll have epic sweep, like everything you’ll write,” Phoebe said brightly.) And that she and I weren’t a good romantic match, anyway, that I needed someone less bohemian and ethnic, more urbane and aloof—a woman to worship as well as love, like Daisy Buchanan, or Ellen Olenska from The Age of Innocence.
Then she said, “Charlie might be my spatial lover for the time being, but you’ll always be my mind lover,” and she kissed me on the head. I guess that was what I wanted to hear, but it was too late to pursue it, anyway, because Charlie came back to the car, oblivious, as usual, to the tension. He fiddled with the radio until he found “Lisa Says” on WFNX, turned it all the way up, and we sang it at the top of our lungs all the way into Lowell, to which we drove for no good reason other than that it was Jack Kerouac’s hometown.
“Why do you necessarily think that everyone in Leicester wants to destroy West Mendhem, and that no one in West Mendhem is capable of doing this stuff themselves?” I ask Phoebe now, fed up with her Sandinista talk.
“Oh, come on, Eric,” she says. “It’s the age-old class struggle. If you have, you want to keep it, and if you have not, you want to get it.”
“But why do you think Leicester is filled completely with have-nots?”
Phoebe looks exasperatedly at Charlie, who goes back to doodling skulls in his notebook. “Eric, let me introduce you to a basic fact,” she says in her annoying singsong schoolteacher voice. “In this society, most dark people are poor and oppressed, and the object of their resentment is usually—” and here she gestures comically around the cafeteria—“white people!”
“Phoebe, that’s not always true,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, “you name me two nonwhite people you know in West Mendhem who don’t fit that bill.”
“But everybody in West Mendhem’s white,” Charlie interjects, too loudly, earning us another shush from Mr. Parker and another round of titters.
“That’s not true,” I say. “What about Akhil and Malini Patel, and Jennifer Hsu?”
“They’re Oriental, or Middle Eastern or something. They don’t count,” Phoebe says.
“How can you say they don’t count?” I ask. “They’re not white.”
Phoebe looks at me like I’m the biggest idiot of all time. “Eric, their parents probably work for some electronics company on Route 128. I’m talking hardcore seriously oppressed minorities that are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and hunger and stuff. You know, drugs and welfare and babies and all of that. Let’s face it, they’re the have-nots, and they’re all just across the border.”
“Well, you’re right,” I concede to Charlie, “there aren’t a lot of them in West Mendhem. But it’s not as though rich black people or Hispanic people don’t exist.”<
br />
“Name one you know,” Phoebe says.
“Michael Jackson!” Charlie bursts out, then buries his head in his arms and laughs convulsively at his own stupid joke.
“Yeah, right,” Phoebe says, “and your other good friends Lionel Richie and Oprah Winfrey and Vanessa Williams.”
“And the Cosby family,” I add.
“Of course, the Cosbys,” Phoebe says. “All good friends of yours, right, Charlie?”
Charlie looks up. “Yo, word up.” Then he starts gurgle-laughing again.
Suddenly the school secretary’s voice crackles over the intercom: “Eric Fitzpatrick please report to the principal’s office. Eric Fitzpatrick please report immediately to the principal’s office.”
Now Charlie laughs twice as hard, and Phoebe looks at me wide-eyed, as does the rest of the study hall, including Mr. Parker. My legs go weak and my heart is suddenly pounding; I’ve never been called to Mr. McGregor’s office before in my life.
“What the fuck do you think that’s about?” Phoebe says.
“I don’t know.” I stand up and gather my books. “I wasn’t expecting a summons.”
“Maybe Ray wants to discuss the meaning of life with you,” Charlie says, still finding everything wholly amusing.
“Maybe,” I say blankly, pushing in my chair.
“Come to my locker and tell me at the end of seventh, okay?” Phoebe holds out her hand to me.
I take it limply. “Okay.”
As I walk out, a few kids, stupid underclassmen, make low you’re-gonna-get-it noises. “Hey,” Mr. Parker announces, deadpan, “zip ’em up or I’m gonna write out some yellow slips.”
It’s the middle of fifth period, the halls are completely empty, and all the way to the office, I’m terrified, thinking, What is it? What is it? And then, halfway there, I stop cold and think: Does this have to do with him—Brooks? Did someone see us together one of those afternoons—or that night he was picked up—and they’ve just waited until now to do something about it? What if the police are going to be in there, and they want to question me? Then I just start walking again, and I think I’ll just play it cool. I haven’t done anything wrong. If they saw us together, I’ll just say we’re friends. I’ll say we met—we met in the town library, and we’re working on—we’re starting up a joint literary magazine between S.B.A. and West Mendhem High—to promote good relations, or something like that. Nobody could have seen us together like that, I’m thinking, determined. Brooks isn’t a criminal, except for some drug use. And they can’t touch me. Still, when I step inside the glassed-in anteroom to Mr. McGregor’s office, I’m shaking and there’s sweat running down my back and armpits underneath my shirt.
Getting Off Clean Page 16