by Marly Swick
When it is time for bed, his mother says he can sleep on the futon and she’ll sleep on the sofa in the living room. She carries the box fan into the spare room and sets it in the window so it will blow on him. His mother asks him if he is going to put on his pajamas, and he says no, he and his dad just sleep in their underpants. She rolls her eyes and kisses him good night on the forehead. “I missed you,” she whispers. “I’ll just be in the next room if you need anything.” Then she turns out the light and shuts the door. He hears her walking down the hall and wonders why she doesn’t just sleep in Vonnie’s room, in the big bed. He thinks it has something to do with the fact that his mom isn’t a lesbian like Vonnie is. He knows that Vonnie is a lesbian and that Frito doesn’t like lesbians. He always refers to Vonnie as “one of those damn dykes.” His dad explained that lesbians love other women and that there was nothing wrong with that, he should just ignore Frito, who could be ignorant about some matters. His dad said hate causes a lot more trouble in this world than love does. And Teddy wanted to ask him, “Do you still love my mom?” but he figured his dad would tell him to “mind his own beeswax,” which is another of his dad’s expressions.
He knows that his dad has girlfriends. Sharon, the woman who painted the lettering on the van, for example. His dad has a lot of snapshots stuck to his refrigerator, and one of them is a picture of his dad and Sharon whitewater rafting in Colorado. They have on matching red plaid shirts and are laughing with their arms around each other’s waists. And Teddy could tell that she really likes his dad. When she came to paint the van, she brought some homemade brownies and a present for Teddy: a set of watercolors and a pad of paper. She smiled and laughed at everything his dad said, even when it wasn’t funny. She is pretty, too. He could tell that Frito had a crush on her the way he hung around and kept complimenting her on what a great job she was doing, even when she was only using stencils.
On the round table next to his dad’s bed, next to the picture of his dad’s dead brother, there is a picture of the three of them in a silver frame. His mom, his dad, and Teddy sitting in between them on the porch swing holding a Popsicle. His mom and dad are both smiling. His dad’s arm stretches along the back of the swing, his fingertips resting on her shoulder. They don’t look like they are going to get a divorce.
After Teddy and Vonnie were asleep, Giselle sat with the phone on her lap, debating the wisdom of calling Dan. On the one hand, he was the one who pulled away, so it would seem that he was the one who needed to take the first step back. On the other hand, what was wrong with her meeting him more than halfway if that’s what it took? After all, this wasn’t some run-of-the-mill lovers’ quarrel. They were fighting for their lives.
It was still only nine o’clock in California. She dialed the number. When his mother answered, Giselle hung up like some teenage girl afraid to seem too forward. She stared at the phone in its cradle and then at her hand, which seemed to have acted on its own accord, some involuntary nerve impulse. She couldn’t believe she had done something so juvenile. It seemed she was regressing day by day. And the worst part was that she was sure Luisa knew it was her. She was ashamed of herself. You would think, at the very least, tragedy would bestow dignity and maturity. Mourning Becomes Electra. And here she was, trapped in Gidget Goes to Nebraska.
She got up and sat down at the kitchen table, where Jess had left her yellow legal pad and pen lying out. Everything was so complex, maybe it would be better to take the time to compose her thoughts. She had always expressed herself more clearly on paper anyway.
Dear Dan,
This afternoon I had this insight into what you must be feeling. How it must seem to you that I still have a child, so I can’t know how you feel to have lost your only child. Well, it’s true that I’m still a mother, but in some ways it’s worse because I . . .
No, she scratched that out. Wrong tack. She shouldn’t get into this comparative misery index. She started over.
Dear Dan,
This is so hard. I miss you all the time. Sometimes I think we just didn’t have enough time before this hit us. Maybe if we had been married ten or fifteen years already, we’d have accrued enough good years to better withstand such a shattering blow as losing our child. But Trina was born a month before our first anniversary. We barely had any history before Trina. She was our history. So it’s natural we wouldn’t know how to proceed from here.
She froze, pen in midair, and sighed. Accrued. Proceed from here. It sounded like some sort of legal brief. Maybe it was the yellow-lined paper. She imagined Dan scribbling professorial comments in the margins in green ink, red ink being too authoritarian. Maybe — she sighed and set the pen down — it would be best to wait, to be patient and wait for him to make the first gesture in his own time. He knew where to find her. It wasn’t as if he could just forget about her. They were still married, after all. She was still his wife. Their clothes were still hanging side by side in the closet.
By the time he wakes up the next morning, his mother has been to the store already for Bisquick and maple syrup. The batter is ready to go, sitting in a blue bowl. He and Vonnie have a contest to see who can eat the most pancakes, and she wins. She eats five to his three. Then she winks and lets out a huge belch just like a man. His mother says, “That’s disgusting!” but she laughs. Then the phone rings. Vonnie answers it and hands it over to his mother, mouthing something to her that he can’t make out. But he sees his mother’s face tighten up like a pinch. He is trying to eavesdrop when Vonnie drags him into the other room by the sleeve of his T-shirt. She sets him down in front of the TV, snaps it on, and hands him the remote. Then she says she has to take a shower. As soon as he hears the water turn on in the bathroom, he mutes the volume. After a couple of minutes he can tell that his mother is talking to his stepfather. Some problem with the house. His mother is mostly listening, saying “uhmmhumm” and “oh” a lot. Her voice sounds small and shaky, like a little girl’s. Once she says, “I see,” and then, “It’s up to you, I guess.” Then, “I don’t know what to say.” And finally, “Okay, then, talk to you tomorrow night.” He unmutes the volume as she hangs up.
He pretends to be watching something — he doesn’t even know what — when she walks into the living room. She doesn’t say anything at first, so he mutes the volume again and says, “Who was that?”
She looks as if she didn’t hear him, but then she says, “That was Dan.” She looks down at her hands in her lap. “He says someone broke into the house and stole some stuff. They bashed in the back door.” She shakes her head and sighs. “The police don’t have any clues.”
“Wow,” Teddy says. “What did they steal?”
“I don’t know. The TV and VCR, the stereo —”
“My computer?”
She nods.
“Oh, man,” he says, “that really sucks.”
She nods and pats his thigh, not really paying any attention to him. “Dan thinks we should move out. He wants to give the landlords notice and put our things in storage.” He can hear her voice crack like she’s going to cry, but she clears her throat and continues in a stronger voice. “He’s going to call back tomorrow night. So we don’t have to decide right away.” She stands up. “I’m going to wash the breakfast dishes.”
Teddy flips through the channels — without cable there aren’t many choices — and he can’t find anything that looks good. He is pretty shocked about the burglary, mad about losing his computer that his uncle gave him, but if it means they don’t have to go back there to live, it’s worth it. He never wants to go back. He doesn’t know why his mom would want to go back there either.
He shuts off the TV and looks out the window at the street, to see if maybe Brent’s out there riding his bike. He doesn’t see him, but he can see Brent’s house and there’s a car in the driveway, so he figures they’re probably home. Brent has a baby sister named Melody. Only nine months old, too young to walk yet. Last night she was crawling around in her pink rubber pants. At one point
Brent’s mother put her down on the carpet in Brent’s room and told them to watch her while she helped Brent’s father for a minute in the backyard. When they weren’t paying attention, the baby picked up a floppy disk and put it in her mouth the way babies do. Brent grabbed it from her and yelled, “No! Bad girl!” The expression on her face broke Teddy’s heart. “She’s not a dog,” Teddy said. “You should be nice to her.” Brent looked at him as if he were a weirdo. When Brent went out of the room to get them some ice cream sandwiches, Teddy picked up the baby and cuddled her. He remembered that smell of powder and wet diaper. He kissed the soft, wrinkly folds at the back of her neck. Then he heard Brent’s footsteps thundering up the stairs, and he set her down so fast that she was bawling by the time Brent burst into the room. “What did you do to her?” he asked suspiciously. Teddy shrugged. “Nothing,” he said, “I didn’t do anything.” He was relieved when Brent’s mother heard the crying, swooped up the baby, and took her away.
In the bathroom he can hear Vonnie singing. She’s a good singer. At first he thought it was the radio, but then she dropped something, cursed mid-sentence, and started the song over again. He walks into the kitchen and says, “Is it okay if I go over to Brent’s for a little while?”
His mother nods and looks at her watch, just barely glancing at him. “Okay. Be back by eleven-thirty. Just in case your dad’s a little early.”
“Okay.” He can see she’s upset, but he doesn’t know what to say. “Thanks for the pancakes. They were really good,” he says.
“You’re welcome, honey.”
He is walking out the door when his mother calls out his name and says, “Maybe I’ll just come get you. I think I should introduce myself to Brent’s mother.”
Teddy freezes, trying to think what to say. He doesn’t want her to go over there.
“What’s their last name?”
“Ronalds,” he says.
If he says that Mrs. Ronalds isn’t home, his mother won’t let him go over there. But he definitely doesn’t want his mother to go over there and see the baby sister. He’s afraid she’ll start crying. She might even tell them about Trina, but he doubts it. He knows she feels just as guilty as he does — she has told him so more than once — although he doesn’t really see why.
“Okay” — he nods — “cool.” He figures he’ll just come home early, before his mom has a chance to go over there.
“See you later,” he shouts as the door slams shut behind him. He races down the stairs, relieved to be out of there and eager to tell Brent all about the robbery. He seriously doubts that Brent has ever been robbed, since there isn’t any crime in Nebraska.
They were shopping for Teddy’s birthday presents. It was the first time she could remember being alone with Ed in years, since before Teddy was born, although there must have been other times. When Ed called to suggest that they go shopping together, she had hesitated. She knew that Teddy harbored this secret fantasy that his parents would get back together. Didn’t most kids? There were countless movie and sitcom plots that revolved around this very issue. She had grown up on the cusp, between the sweet, comic movies like The Parent Trap (in which Hayley Mills plays her own twin sister) where the kids plot and scheme to get the parents back together and — presto! — they are just one big happy family again, and the more contemporary movies in which the divorced parent sits down with the hopeful child and has a serious heart-to-heart, giving him or her the straight dope about how sometimes things just don’t work out between adults — this doesn’t mean we don’t love you, because we do — but Mommy/Daddy and I are never going to live together again, pumpkin, capeesh?
However, it just made sense to pick out his presents together, particularly since she didn’t have a car, and now that Teddy was getting older — his tenth birthday — she found herself more at a loss picking out boy toys. Despite the women’s movement and all this talk about gender bending, the aisles at Toys “R” Us were still as clearly divided as public lavatories: girls on this side, boys on that side. The girls’ stuff was still predominantly pink. About the only difference that Giselle could see was Veterinarian Barbie. In her day, Barbie had been a nurse.
“How about this?” she said, holding up Veterinarian Barbie. “It seems apropos, given the kennel and all.”
Ed laughed. “Sure,” he said, “why not?”
Giselle put it back on the shelf. She avoided looking at the little girls toys, ages three and younger, as she walked around to see what Ed was holding. Some tall neon-colored poles made of Styrofoam. “Fun Noodles,” he said. “For jousting.” He bopped her on the shoulder with the shocking-pink pole. “I think he’d get a kick out of these. What do you think?”
“Okay,” Giselle nodded. “I think I’ll go look at the books and videos. I’ll leave the action stuff to your discretion.”
They had already picked out his big present: a bicycle similar to the one Teddy had back home. A miniature Harley-Davidson. Since she didn’t know when or if they would be going back to California, she hadn’t objected. She had gone along with Dan about giving notice and putting their stuff in storage. Beyond that, she didn’t know. One step at a time. They had both been too chicken-hearted to press the issue, anxious to avoid a big showdown.
She threw a couple of books into the shopping cart. Abridged and illustrated classics. Robinson Crusoe and Call of the Wild. She knew that Dan would object if he were there, but he wasn’t there, was he? He had remarked once that you might as well give the kid Cliffs Notes.
Earlier, at lunch in the Garden Cafe, conveniently located in the same strip mall as Toys “R” Us, Giselle had asked Ed how Teddy seemed to him. “Do you think he’s all right?” she asked anxiously, half afraid to hear his answer. Because if Teddy was not all right, whose fault was it?
She panicked when he didn’t answer right away. She supposed she had expected him to dismiss her fears, to shoot right back with some pat, hale-and-hardy response: “Relax, he’s fine” or “Give him a few more months, and he’ll be as good as new.” The verbal equivalent of a slap on the back. And while she would have been relieved on the surface, down deep she would have been thinking what a simpleton he was, how unattuned to life’s complexities.
“I don’t know.” He worried the little turquoise post in his ear, turning it back and forth as if he were winding a watch. “He seems to be doing okay, but it’s hard to know, you know, about down deep. ’Cause he’s a good kid, and I know he wants us to feel okay.”
Giselle nodded and mumbled, “Yeah.” The waiter set down the bill. Ed grabbed it and waved away her offer to pay her share.
“I read something about how they hadn’t done any follow-up research about kids in Teddy’s position, but that they are almost certainly at increased risk for acute and chronic emotional and behavioral disturbance,” she said, quoting from the book she had seen lying on Dan’s desk.
“Yeah, well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.” Ed shook his head. “You think I should make an appointment for him with that psychologist? I’ve been sort of putting it off, I guess.”
“I think it would be a good idea,” she said. “Couldn’t hurt.” Not that their therapist back home had worked any wonders.
Ed nodded and reached for his wallet. “It’s a hell of a thing. He’s had a couple of bad nightmares. Wakes up shouting and crying. Of course, he had some of those even when he was real little, so — who knows? — maybe it’s not even related. But that’s the thing, something like this changes everything. You keep looking for signs he’s screwed up. Like I noticed he seems sort of obsessed with George, my brother, the one who died?”
Giselle nodded but didn’t interrupt. She couldn’t remember ever hearing Ed go on like this, at length. It might have been his personal best in contiguous sentences uttered.
“He asks a lot of questions about him. You think that’s normal behavior for a ten-year-old?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be. Then again, ma
ybe it’s symptomatic.” It dawned on her suddenly that he hadn’t lit up a cigarette. “You quit smoking?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too. When my daughter was born.” She had almost censored that last part and then thought, Why? She couldn’t very well spend the rest of her life editing out such a big part of it.
He reached across the table and laid his large suntanned hand on top of her pale fidgeting fingers. “I know you’re doing the best you can,” he said. “And Teddy knows it, too. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”
Her eyes filled up and she snatched away her hand to grab her paper napkin and blow her nose. What happened to all the anger? she wondered. She remembered him as edgy and moody. Pounding his fists into doorframes and dashboards. “You’ve changed,” she said hesitantly, afraid he might take offense. “You used to be so angry.”
He popped a mint from the change tray into his mouth and offered her the other one. “It’s the first time in my life I’m doing what I want to do.” He shrugged and smiled. “It feels pretty damn good.”