Clifton blushed—but it was worse than that. Just at the moment I saw the bulge in his pants, Ben started tapping on the window. “Hey Clifton! C’mon!”
Shrug. I was blushing too now, but luckily, Clifton had already turned away to pick up his skateboard, anchoring it diagonally across his body. “I—better go,” he stammered. “’Bye, Martha!”
“Isolating the spots!” I blurted, to make him feel better, but then I worried that it sounded like I was referring to the spot in his pants. “Say hi to your mom, okay?” I added hastily. Poor kid. Or maybe poor stupid me.
Hildy couldn’t wait to get out of the house, of course, and since she had the credits she needed, she decided to graduate from Berkeley High a semester early. She hadn’t figured out the whole college thing yet. Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say she made the decision about graduating early instead of thinking about college, kind of like eloping with a new guy to get out of marrying the fiancé you didn’t really love.
Hildy was a B student. That is, she was the type who could get the only A+ in her entire grade in history, and then get a C in algebra. Hildy could’ve gotten an A+ in English, too. She was always coming up with these great analogies about whatever she read, and loved delving into things like symbolism and metaphor in the senior honors English class of Dr. Riggs, a former college professor who’d wound up teaching at Berkeley High after refusing to sign the loyalty oath during the McCarthy era. The problem was, Hildy would start a writing assignment about a book, and then not finish the essay on time because she’d still be trying to tie the book to current events, or to another book by the same author, or to a Japanese fairy tale. She’d go talk to Dr. Riggs about her ideas and ask for an extension, which you weren’t supposed to do at all, let alone adopt as a habit. But Dr. Riggs would always give her the extension. Then she’d get an A or an A+ on the essay, but at most a B in the class.
Matt Baskit was graduating a semester early, too. He was moving to some big commune down on San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville where a cousin of his was living, and where the residents did a lot of meditating. Matt told Hildy she was welcome to move there, too. Though I’m sure Hildy would’ve preferred an invitation more personal than “you’re welcome to,” she took Matt up on his offer. Maybe she thought the invitation was warmer than it really was, but mostly I think Hildy was just desperate to leave. Besides the obvious, she was convinced the stomachaches would go away once she was out of the house.
Whenever my father sent Hildy out for burgers or some other errand, he let her keep the change, so even though she wasn’t being paid by the hour, she’d been able to sock away some money. She didn’t seem bothered by the fact that Matt didn’t have the $25 deposit that the commune required. She fronted Matt his $25 as well as coughing up her own $25.
Partly, I think, Hildy was assuming Matt would help her find a job. He had an uncle who worked on the Cal campus at a sociology research center where they administered questionnaires about things like health and political beliefs. The research center needed workers to go through the pages of each completed questionnaire, key in all the information using a keypunch machine, and then feed the accumulated batches of computer cards into a tabulating machine. The uncle had said he could get Matt a job there, and Matt had told Hildy he thought his uncle could get her one, too. But it turned out that once Matt started, they didn’t need anyone else.
As if that weren’t shitty enough, Matt took up with some other girl at the commune and stopped paying attention to Hildy pretty much as soon as she moved in. I’m still not sure she ever got her $25 back from him.
I would’ve felt devastated by all this, but Hildy acted as if she’d understood from the start that things would work out the way they did, as if she’d known she’d have to leave shortly after moving in. She didn’t like meditating, she told me, and people at the commune weren’t as friendly as you’d think. Plus the stomachaches hadn’t stopped.
But Hildy, as always, kept going. She got herself a job at Gabel, a big bookstore down on University Avenue, and answered a want ad: some girl named Ann was looking for a housemate in a big, sunny brown-shingle with several other housemates and a shared kitchen. The place was in Oakland, but close to the 51 bus line into Berkeley.
All through school, Hildy had been the type with a lot of friends, especially boys. She didn’t usually have a female best friend. But Ann quickly became just that. Ann was older than Hildy and had a really difficult family herself, with a severely disabled brother and no father, just a crazy mother who barely noticed Ann because everything revolved around the brother’s needs. Ann was finishing up her classes at Cal and applying to nursing school. She encouraged Hildy to sign up for courses at Berkeley Learning Pavilion, the community college where Ann had spent her first two years before transferring to Cal. Hildy started taking literature and psychology classes, and since the manager at Gabel let her do homework when it was quiet, Hildy had built-in blocks of time to study, read, and write. She started getting straight A’s, which made me really proud, but I didn’t say so because I didn’t want to sound condescending.
As much as I missed Hildy, my life was easier with her out of the house; my mother had less to bitch about. I still saw Hildy at Smoke and Records, where she continued to help out whenever she wasn’t at Gabel or in class. Also, she joined me and Drew whenever it was our weekend to be with my father. We were still a family—just without my mother. Maybe that should’ve given me a clue.
Ann insisted that Hildy needed to see a doctor about the stomachaches, helped her figure out who to go to, and stayed on her case until she made the appointment and went. Hildy found out she had stomach ulcers. She started taking medicine, which helped, but the doctor warned her that the ulcers could come back, so she should stick with bland foods if she could.
Spring came, and Brett got accepted at Humboldt State. Cornelia was going to UC Santa Cruz, and Greg Gold was off to Princeton. If everything went the way I hoped, I’d be at Cal in a couple of years— and so would Hildy.
part two
19
the list
It’s a mystery how my mother found a working ballpoint in the house. Whenever I tried using a pen at home, I’d wind up with a bunch of furious spiral dents—or, as I lost patience, ugly rips in a piece of newsprint or a paper bag or whatever else was lying around to test a pen on. My mother’s not throwing the pens away—her acting as if she were ever actually going to buy ink refills at the stationery store—was another reason I hated her. Not that the pencils were any better, with their chewed bodies, blunt points, too-light lead, and that setting-my-teeth-on-edge noise they made when I tried to use the mostly worn-down erasers at the end. It was as if all the writing implements in the house were mocking me for ever wanting to get anything done in life.
Somehow, though, while I was at school—senior year had just started a few weeks earlier—a blue ballpoint made contact with a jagged sheet of scratch paper that my mother must have found lying around in the kitchen. When I got home, she was on the phone. “Yes, that would be fine. I can have him there by noon,” she was saying, as she glanced up and handed me the piece of paper.
“What’s this?” I looked down at a list of eight or nine names and phone numbers. Dottie and Phil Starch—LAndscape 6-1944. Harriet and Stuart Minter—OLympia 5-8684. Helen and Manny Korngold— THornwall 8-2232. I understood that the list meant something, but I couldn’t remember what. It felt like trying to think of a word in a foreign language I had once studied.
“Yes, perfect,” my mother told whoever she was talking to. “Right. I’ll see you then.” She hung up the phone and turned to me impatiently. “It’s your list,” she said. “Of families that I’m sure would love to have you. I’d say you should start with the Starches. They’ve always had a soft spot for you, especially Dottie. And now that Logan is at that special school and the older brother is housebound, they’d probably love to have some company.”
I imagined my mother, aware of the pen sit
uation, reaching first for a pencil. Maybe she took out that sharpener that lay on its side in one of the desk drawers, a clunky contraption whose handle looked like a skinny green olive. Maybe she decided it was too much trouble to clamp the sharpener to the table. Maybe she tried to hold the sharpener together with one hand while turning the crank with the other, and then realized she didn’t have enough hands to push the pencil in at the same time. Or maybe she had just decided it was too much trouble to deal with pencil shavings. She would have riffled through the pens, delighted, finally, to find one with ink in it.
I looked at the paper again. The handwriting was rushed but confident; there was no apology to it. In fact, I suddenly realized my mother was dressed. Her hair was washed, held back neatly with a black stretchy headband.
“Mom, what—are you expecting me to live with these people?”
“Well, Martha, you gotta go somewhere.” Now she was putting some papers into overstuffed manila folders and throwing others in a paper bag filled with what she called “burnables.” No one else called them burnables, and I felt a wave of hatred of her just for that, just for her having so much in common with my father, the two of them making up their own words and definitions, making up their own rules, and acting like the rest of the world was stupid for not doing things their way.
“Mom! I can’t just call these people and ask if I can live with them. That’s just—this is ridiculous!”
“You’re being ridiculous. These are all people I know for a fact would be delighted to have you. I chose them for you! You know, ever since the Minters’ younger son died, they’ve been just devastated. They have that daughter Sarah, right? Isn’t she about your age?”
“Mom—”
“Stop it, now!” She was losing patience. “So don’t start with the Minters. Start with the Starches.”
“The Starches? How do you—” I had forgotten that even before kindergarten, Logan’s mother and my mother had known each other because there was some drop-off morning play group in the Berkeley hills where mothers could take their toddlers when they had errands or shopping to do.
“Martha, just start making calls. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have a place.”
“Mom, I don’t even know these people!”
“Of course you do! The Minters have known you since you were a baby. And the Starches—you and Logan were in a play group together, don’t you remember? And Helen Korngold babysat you a few times when you were a toddler. She adored you!”
My throat ached with the effort of not crying and not screaming. “What am I supposed to say to them? ‘My mom is kicking me out of our house, so could you please take me in? They’ll think I’m crazy!”
“Martha, stop being so self-conscious. What do you care what they think?” She adjusted her headband. “Now either make your calls, or start helping me. God knows there’s plenty to do to get this house ready for the Cal students.”
“But, Mom—” She hadn’t thought this through, that was all. She didn’t realize. “Don’t all the Cal students already have places to live? I mean, it’s September. School’s already going.”
“No, Cal starts at the end of next week. You think I didn’t check on that with the housing office?”
“But—”
She let out a sigh. “Martha, what is it?”
“Why can’t we just stay here and let the Cal students live with us? We could double up. Drew and I could share a room.”
“What, so you two can stay up talking half the night?”
“No! To save money.”
“My God, Martha, your perceptions are so lopsided! You have no comprehension of child development. Children of the opposite sex need their own rooms. Sharing a room like that would be damaging.”
“But—”
“I’ve rented the house out unoccupied. We can leave our furniture and kitchen things, and the books and records. But we need to be out. Now hurry up and get started!”
“Mom, why can’t Grandma and Grandpa help? I’m sure they’d send us money if you asked.”
“Oh, come on! I can’t have them rescuing us from Jules’s irresponsibility every time we need something.”
“Irresponsibility—what do you mean?”
“I mean the slipshod way he runs the store, what do you think I mean? He doesn’t know what hard work is.” I knew my father wasn’t normal, doing things like letting Bob and Terry and the other guys help themselves to their pay out of the cash register, which my mother said was a symptom of my father’s sick need to be seen as the good guy. But she acted as if my father never showed up to work. “Why do you think the store is failing?” she went on.
“The store isn’t failing!”
“—Because I stopped using my own money to pay his rent in the shop, that’s why! He can’t even make payroll.”
“But Mom, it’s not his fault! It’s just what’s happening on Telegraph, plus those, like, discount record places! And besides—your parents send you money all the time, and you just spend it on stupid stuff like antiques!”
“You watch your tongue, young lady!”
“Mom,” I cried desperately, “then why can’t we all move to an apartment? All of us together?”
“A crappy apartment? Children need homes, Martha.”
“Homes—but—where’s Drew going?” Shrug: a new level of panic. I hadn’t even thought of what she had planned for him. Wait, was she talking about Drew on the phone when I’d come in?
“I found a school for Drew down in Fresno—Plowshares. It’s like a boarding school, and it’s also a working farm. The kids have chores. Discipline.”
“A farm?” Farm the kid out, to a farm. Had that language coincidence somehow made a farm in Fresno sound right to my mother? Was she that far off her rocker? Fat farm. Funny farm. Why didn’t she turn it on herself, for once?
“Yes, a farm. In fact, Dottie Starch told me about it. You know, she had to look into these schools for Logan, and that’s how she heard about—”
“But Mom, Drew isn’t anything like—wait, when?”
“I’m driving him there this Saturday morning.”
“But Mom—” I didn’t even know where to start. “Where are you going?”
“Home to New York!” she answered, as if nothing could be more obvious.
“But your home is here, Mom! And we’re here, don’t you care? Plus, I have to apply to college soon. I need your—”
“Martha, don’t you understand what I’m up against? Drew has no chance when he’s around a psychopath like Jules, not to mention—”
“Mom, I thought you cared about family! And college!”
“What, has Jules brainwashed you, too? You don’t recognize his destructiveness? The black and blue marks all over me? And that seductive crap he pulls with Hildy?”
“Mom, you can’t put Drew in a boarding school! He’s just a little kid! And besides,” I added hopefully, “isn’t it too expensive?”
“That’s the whole point of renting out the house, Martha. Money. For what’s really important.”
My mother had recently discovered Drew’s stash of army men under his bed. I was worried she’d think they were shoplifted, but that didn’t seem to cross her mind. Instead, she was furious that after all she’d taught him about army men symbolizing everything that was wrong with our society, Drew still showed lousy judgment. Violence and war and Hollywood standards of masculinity—Drew had swallowed the whole establishment package, hook, line and sinker. It was all because of his sick identification with Jules, whose approval he was obviously trying to get by liking symbols of violence, which Drew unhealthily equated with masculinity since Jules, the only male role model Drew had, was a violent louse.
“It’s natural for boys to identify with their fathers,” she was saying. “The problem is when the father is sick in the head. The way things are going, Drew’ll be a juvenile delinquent by the time he’s twenty.”
“Twenty? Mom, juvenile means—” I hated my mother. Sh
e was stupid, she didn’t smell good, and she was a bitch—the biggest bitch I knew. Let’s face it, the biggest bitch I’d ever heard of.
“A boy needs a father,” she went on. “A healthy role model, in a healthy family situation. Otherwise—well, I can see the handwriting on the wall.” She was like Cassandra in Greek mythology, she said. Cassandra could perceive the future, but no one would believe her. . . .
I staggered upstairs to the bathroom, clutching the list and panting with rage. Bitch! Bitch! I’d done everything for her, and it was all for nothing. I yanked open the top drawer of the bathroom linen chest, hating her even more for what was in there: faded puke-green towels with holes in them, alongside a dried up old piece of steel wool. I slammed the drawer shut and opened the second one, then the third, as if I didn’t know there was nothing comforting in there. No little heart-shaped rosewater soaps or fluffy pastel washcloths or scented candles or Kleenex. Not even a cup for drinking water. Of course not. Just the opposite: more shitty towels and, in the very bottom drawer, an old extension cord that probably didn’t work, alongside some jars of screws and nails that I remembered my mother being proud of having “organized.” The nails weren’t even new; half of them were rusty or bent. And she thought she was so great for collecting them in a jar and storing them in a stupid place.
I let the list flutter to the floor, leaving the bottom drawer open. I was getting lightheaded from panting, and the back of my neck was hot. I let my body slide down onto the cold tile. I grabbed the jar of nails, took one out and twisted it between my fingers. I chose a straight, new-looking one, thinking of tetanus. Which was a completely stupid thought, since I knew I was up to date on tetanus shots. Shots were the type of parental duty my mother took seriously, because they hurt.
Dizzily, my heart still racing, I pulled up the left sleeve of my tur-tleneck. I quickly dragged the nail across the inside of my wrist. But it was pathetic, kind of like I was trying to light a match and falling flat because I was too scared to give it the force it required. “Ouch!” I said aloud, my eyes stinging with tears. I watched the scratch as it formed, white, and then pink. It didn’t bleed at first, but it stung really badly. I threw the nail in the bottom drawer, not bothering to put it back where it “belonged.” Shrug. Shrug. Some suicide attempt! All I’d done was add more pain to the enormous pile of shit called my life.
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