Affective Needs

by Rebecca Taylor

  I turned on the sink, put in the plug, and started filling it with warm water. “You used mayonnaise.” I observed.

  He looked at the plate, then looked at me. “That’s what you said you wanted!”

  In the living room, my phone chimed. Someone had texted me. I pushed Eli’s sweatshirt into the sink to soak and dried my hands as I went to check. I figured it was my mom letting me know she would be working at the school late again, and to not worry about her for dinner. Other than Eli she was pretty much the only person I ever got messages from. But when I reached down and picked up my phone from the table, the name on the screen made me stop.

  “It’s my dad.” I turned toward Eli, unsure of what to do. He looked as shocked as I felt.

  “Does he think it’s your birthday or something?”

  This was totally a possibility, so I didn’t say no. I wasn’t entirely sure my father could tell you what month I was born in—never mind the exact day. “Maybe someone died?”

  “Maybe he’s dying,” Eli added around a mouth full of salami and bread.

  “Maybe it’s not bad? Maybe he won the lottery and he’s going to give me some money.”

  “Now you’re just being silly.” Eli swallowed and took another bite from his sandwich.

  It could be anything—but Eli was right, it was highly unlikely that it was good. I had often wondered what would be worse, having no father at all, or having one who forgot you were alive ninety-four percent of the time.

  Whatever the reason he was texting me now, it was apparently urgent enough to warrant a follow-up call because my phone was now ringing loudly in my hand. I just stared at it, not wanting to answer, or talk to him, and not feeling like I could just ignore him either.

  “Ruth,” Eli said from the kitchen. “You have to answer it. What if something is wrong?”

  He was right, of course. “Shit,” I whispered, and answered the damn phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Ruth?” I heard my father ask. Of course he would have to ask. It had been so long since he used this number, he probably wondered if it was still good. I wouldn’t even begin to think about how sad it was that the man couldn’t even recognize his own daughter’s voice.

  “Yes, this is Ruth,” I said, completely unable to keep the sarcastic edge out of my voice.

  “Ruth, hello!” he announced. “This is Dad!”

  His excitement immediately put me on the defensive. “And this is Ruth!”

  Silence.

  He had definitely heard the icy edge in my tone. The last time we had spoken, like six months ago, this is what our parting argument had been about: my “crap attitude.” He actually had accused my mom, not to her face but to me, of “poisoning” my mind and opinions against him. Which had totally made me ballistic and launched me into anger space because, for one, my mother never, ever says one bad thing about my dad—even though there are so, so many things she could say. And two, as if I couldn’t come to the conclusion that he was a complete asshole all by myself? Please, that was just so insulting.

  As the silence between us stretched, I could tell he was fighting the urge to get into it with me. Usually he would just bite my head off for being “snotty.”

  He sighed and cleared his throat instead. “Well, hey,” he started again, completely faking a good mood. “I’m glad I caught you. You must be really busy finishing up your senior year.” This was his lame-ass way of trying to say without actually saying that the reason we don’t ever talk is because I’m really busy, and it has nothing at all to do with him.

  “Yes, really busy,” I nodded and rolled my eyes.

  “And Princeton! Wow, I mean . . . although you were always . . . I tell everyone, my girl’s going to Princeton. Did I ever tell you that I went to Harvard?”

  I clenched my teeth to keep myself from saying anything because the only things my lips were dying to say were, My girl? Really? And, You’re seriously going to try and take any credit for my academic accomplishments? And, No one gives a shit where you went eighty years ago, especially considering it doesn’t even matter because whatever potential you did have was completely drowned in gallons and gallons of beer.

  “Not that I could have kept going,” he chuckled uncomfortably. “Pretty hard to support a wife and a newborn and go to Harvard.” He laughed again, as if this was all ancient history that no longer bothered him—as if he was clearly so over having all of his life’s dreams shattered by an unwanted pregnancy and being unfairly yoked to a woman and a child.

  Ha. Ha.

  It was some kind of miracle that I managed to not say any of this; my mother and therapist would be so proud and use words like progress. But in reality, there were just so many things I wanted to scream at him about, it was too difficult to choose a single angle to attack him from. It wasn’t progress in my emotional maturity; I simply conceded defeat in the face of too many acerbic insults flooding my brain all at once. It was impossible to choose just one.

  “Harvard? Impressive,” I offered flatly as if this were the first time I had heard this story instead of the hundredth.

  More silence.

  “Well,” he ventured again. “I suppose you don’t need to hear any of that from me now. You’ve always known how smart you are. Even when you were six. Just don’t go getting yourself pregnant and throw it all away.”

  My face felt like it wanted to explode and I realized I had stopped breathing. I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, and filled my lungs with as much air as I possibly could. I wanted to slam my phone against a brick wall and watch it shatter into a hundred thousand splintery pieces. I considered it a great testament to my ever-growing self-control that I somehow managed to exhale, inhale, then ask a simple question.

  “Is there something you want?”

  “Well, actually I was calling to invite you to dinner.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Why?”

  “Does there have to be a reason? Can’t I just take my girl out for dinner?”

  I could actually feel my heartbeat pulsing in my temples. “Don’t call me that.”

  “What?”

  “My girl . . . don’t call me that.”

  He sighed, as if the problem was me and he, once again, was having to deal with my unreasonable crap attitude and he was completely the victim here. He was the long suffering estranged father whose reputation had been sullied by the toxic efforts of his embittered ex-wife—he just knew it.

  I in no way wanted to have dinner with my father, but I said, “Fine.” There was no use trying to dodge it. The embittered ex-wife, would just make me go anyway. In truth, she had been begging me for years to try and “mend fences” with my dad. Without putting it in these exact words, she held out hope that I would one day learn to forgive him for being him.

  She completely believed this was possible for me because, apparently, she herself had managed to forgive him—eventually.

  “You know, I’m not the evil incarnate you seem to think I am,” he said.

  Just then, I heard the door to our garage open; my mother was home. I didn’t want to get into with him in front of her. “When and where?” I asked.

  “When and where what?”

  “Dinner,” I tried really hard to keep the knives out of my tone. “Where do you want me to meet you and when would you like me to be there?”

  “Oh.” He was surprised I was letting the I’m-not-evil comment go so easily. “How about next week? Thursday? I can make reservations at Tony’s.”

  My mother walked into the living room, leaning to one side to counterbalance the weight of her overloaded computer bag. She let it slide to the floor as she eyed me with a questioning expression. She saw Eli was standing in our kitchen stuffing his face, so she was trying to figure out who I was talking to.

  “Sure, whatever. Just text me the time when you’ve made the reservation,” I said and pushed End before he could say anything else.

  “Who was that?” my mom asked.

  �
�Dad.” I stared at my phone in my hand, still unsure of what had just happened. Was I seriously going to be suffering through a meal with him, alone, in just over a week?

  “Oh!” my mom said, and busied herself unzipping her bag and taking out her laptop. “Well . . . so it sounds like you’re meeting him for dinner?”

  I sighed. “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything at first, just kept digging around in her bag like there was something super important in there that she just couldn’t find. When she finally stopped and stood up, she took a deep breath. “That’s good. . . . Did he have anything else to say?” She was trying to sound casual, but her lips rolled between her teeth, a sure anxiety tell.

  “No.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Should he?”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, no. Just . . .” She looked to the kitchen. “Eli, are you staying for dinner?” She turned back to me. “We could order from King Luie.” It seemed to me like she knew something, something about my father that she wasn’t telling me.

  “Sure,” Eli said, even though he had just finished both his sandwich and mine. He was a bottomless pit. “I’m always up for the King.” Eli, the traitor, had also sensed something wasn’t quite right with my mom. He was clearly helping her change the subject—I could totally tell. There was something not right about your best friend and mother teaming up against you. Lucky for them, restraining myself from unloading on my father had completely exhausted me. I didn’t feel up to interrogating her about what was going on—not right now, anyway. I would get it out of her later anyway. She was a total sucker for the, Mom, I really need to talk to you about blah, blah, blah. It was an occupational hazard of working in mental health—she always wanted to help. Everyone.

  I reached down and picked up the remote. “It’s almost time for Jeopardy.”

  “Perfect,” my mom said, relieved to have dodged whatever is was about my meeting with my father that was making her squirm. “Eli, you call your parents, I’ll order the food.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mr. T was killing me—and everyone else apparently. We all let out a collective groan. Which, I suppose, was exactly what Mr. T wanted to accomplish with this brand-new hell he was imposing on us.

  “Cooperative learning,” he continued, holding up his hand to ward off the well-articulated complaints he could feel rising. “Being able to work well in a group is a no-joke necessary skill you guys are going to need out there.” He pointed to the door of the class. “Beyond that door is the real world, and whatever you may think about your considerable skills, you all pretty much suck at working with other people. After graduation, some of you will be working in jobs which will require you to work as a member of a project team. Now, it may be true that some of you will be holed up in a top-secret government basement where you will only need to socially interact with a complex database because you lack even the most rudimentary of social skills necessary for most corporations.”

  Was it my imagination, or did he actually look at me when he said that?

  He smiled. “But a few of you may actually find yourself one day”—he held up both his hands gospel style—“and I know this is hard to swallow”—he gulped loudly—“needing other people to help you solve problems.”

  He paused for dramatic effect, looking around the room at each of us. One bad thing about Mr. T not actually being a full-time high school teacher was that he often went way overboard with the theatrics. He really loved listening to himself pontificate.

  “So, for the rest of the semester, one objective for this course will be to help you develop the skills necessary to work effectively as part of a team.”

  We didn’t like it, but we listened. The thing about Mr. T was, one, teaching high school kids wasn’t his full time job. Out in that real world he had just pointed to, he was an aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin. This was the only class he taught at Roosevelt High; the school had to contract someone from the outside world to meet the intellectual demands of this class. Because of this, fair or not, we respected Mr. T more than most of our other teachers.

  The second thing about him—and this might have even been the real thing that made us sit up and listen—was that Mr. T didn’t bullshit you too much. If you turned in something subpar because you were tired the night before, he’d hand it back to you and say, “You’re better than this. Do it again.”

  Mr. T didn’t let us slide by on our natural talent, probably because he was the grown-up version of us. He worked with people with big brains all day long, in a career field some of us—not me, but some of us—hoped to be in one day. We respected him because he actually was smarter than us, so he wasn’t afraid of us.

  “So.” He clapped his hands. “Since we are so few, but now thankfully an even number at least”—he nodded to Porter who was three rows behind me—“three groups of two, pair up!”

  Before I even got all the way turned around in my seat, everyone else in the class was coupled with someone else. Everyone except, of course, Porter Creed.

  Even my coworkers—my “peers”—would rather not work with me unless they absolutely had to. Now, thanks to Porter, they didn’t have to. I could just imagine, from the moment Mr. T uttered the words cooperative learning, all four of the other regulars were eyeing each other behind my back, pointing fingers—You and me, right? Quickly shoring up their partner decisions before they got stuck with me or the special-ed psycho.

  As everyone else began shuffling toward each other, pushing chairs and moving desks, disrupting the ordered balance of the room, I glanced at Porter. A wave of nervous dread rolled through me.

  He was sitting in his seat, not moving, and from the look on his face, which appeared to be one of extreme disinterest, I wondered if he had even heard what Mr. T’s instructions had been. Like the day in the cafeteria, he didn’t look at me, didn’t make the normal sort of eye contact one would expect from a future cooperative learning partner—even though I got the feeling he knew I was looking right at him.

  It made getting up out of my chair and walking toward him practically painful.

  When there were only a couple steps between us left, his eyes shifted to me. I couldn’t help it. I stopped right where I was, wondering and waiting for him to say the same thing as before: What do you want?

  But he didn’t.

  “I hate group work,” he declared. It made me wonder if this was some sort of refusal to comply with the general instructions and a not-at-all-subtle hint that I could just turn myself around because this wasn’t going to happen. Would Mr. T push the issue if Porter flat out refused to do this? I thought of Porter that first day I had seen him, yelling, pushing against the hands holding him until he was eventually carted away by the police. Mr. T wasn’t a regular teacher, and I wasn’t sure he had been fully briefed on the special case that was Porter.

  Nothing about Porter’s body language or facial expression gave me the impression that it was okay for me to pull up a chair and join him. Every part of me wanted to say, Look, psycho, this is my grade were talking about here. And I realize you clearly don’t give a shit about your abysmal future educational opportunities, but I have every intention of standing up on the stage at graduation in four months and being the valedictorian of these assholes. I’m not about to let you screw that up just because you “hate group work” and have a clinical noncompliance-with-authority problem.

  If it were Bella Blake et al pulling this shit, that is exactly what I would have said. Except this wasn’t Bella or her friends. This was the guy I had witnessed straining under the weight of two cops holding him down, the guy with that look of naked desperation I hadn’t been able to get out of my head.

  So, instead of saying any of the words running through my head, I said, “So do I. So does everyone. But I don’t think we really have a choice.”

  The corner of his mouth, just barely, rose for half a second. If I hadn’t been looking closely, I might have missed it. I took this as my chance to grab
a chair and sit down.

  “Look,” I said, placing the chair in his vicinity but not right next to him. “This doesn’t have to be hard. Honestly, I usually do all the work in group efforts anyway. Actually, I prefer it.” I looked to see that Mr. T wasn’t within earshot; he was standing next to Ryan and Helen, who appeared to already be arguing about who would be doing what. I turned back to Porter and dared to lean slightly closer to him. “Just so we’re clear, all I need is for you to put your name on the final piece and just say that we worked fifty-fifty.”

  Porter didn’t answer me right away; he didn’t even look at me right away. He sat there, reclining back in his chair with his super-long legs stretched out in front of him while his hands rested on the desk. After a moment more, his fingers started tapping out a rhythm on the fake wood surface.

  I leaned back in my own chair. Was he just going to ignore me? I sighed, my breath rushing out of me as a noisy complaint.

  Porter looked at me with his eyes first, those deep blue pools, then turned his head as well—his expression questioning. “What makes you think I would want to put my name on your work?” Clearly implying with his tone that my work might possibly be substandard.

  I actually felt my eyes go wide while my pupils constricted into sharp laser points. Was I seriously having my academic capability questioned by a special-education kid who, until recently, had to have his every move supported and monitored by a grown-up? My heart pumped hard in my chest and I felt a sheen of sweat form on my palms. Every inch of my body begged me to verbally castrate this guy.

  Then, he smiled at me. “Is this how you want to”—he raised both his hands and made air quotes—“‘help me?’”

  My blood made whooshing sounds in my head. I had been such an idiot, thinking he was maybe going to blow up the school or something—not that he could possibly have known what I was thinking, but still. My hand-flapping behavior that day was still a source of enormous embarrassment to me. Not to mention the root of the rumor that had tenuously circulated, among some of the lesser assholes, that I had it bad for this guy who was now sitting in front of me, mocking me, in his dirty jeans and faded T-shirt that looked like it probably hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine in months and—