Vibes

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  I can't even make myself say goodbye.

  LOU'S

  Lou's is the weirdest restaurant in our town, which is why everyone likes it. The décor revolves around one thing: the name Lou. Pictures of people named Lou cover the walls like wallpaper. Lou Reed, Lou Dobbs, Mary Lou Retton, Lou Gehrig, King Louis the Fourteenth, Emmylou Harris, Louis Gossett Junior, Lou Costello, Louis L'Amour, Lou Rawls, Louis Armstrong, and, my favorite, Luciano Pavarotti. If a customer comes up with the name of a famous Lou and his picture isn't on the wall, they get a free appetizer. But no one has ever been able to.

  My favorite thing about Lou's restaurant is the fact that the owner's name is Fred. Don't bother asking why he named his restaurant Lou's. He'll just shrug and toss a basket of warm garlic bread at you. The bread is so good, you stop asking questions.

  I hardly ever get to come to Lou's, but I can't enjoy it. Mallory is barely speaking and I can't even begin to think of a coherent conversation starter, so here we are, both doing impersonations of people who are utterly absorbed in the fascinating process cheese undergoes as it congeals.

  "Don't you like Italian?" Mallory finally speaks, his fork halfway to his mouth. The question sounds like an accusation. I hear in the back of his mind the phrase two-timing bitch.

  I pick up my fork, which I have just set down, and lift a lasagna noodle to look at the filling underneath it. "This is really good. I don't know what's wrong with me."

  "Oh, there's nothing wrong with you." He stabs angrily at a meatball, and I know the charade is over. "Today you spent the afternoon with a guy who looks like he was carved by Michelangelo. There'd be something wrong with you if you didn't want to be with him."

  "Mallory, I'm sorry—"

  "But I'm hideous and you can't bear the sight of me," he says bitterly. He sets down his fork and stares angrily at a picture of Lou Ferrigno on the wall.

  "You're not hideous."

  "Flattery will get you everywhere," he says miserably.

  "I didn't know this would happen."

  "Why did you kiss me yesterday?" His eyes burn me like two hot coins.

  I get a flash of him thinking about our kiss and what it had meant to him. It made him so happy. And now he's miserable, because of me.

  And Gusty is miserable, too.

  "Mallory, I wanted to see how it felt to kiss you. You know?"

  "Because you have a fetish for infected pustules?"

  "Because I like you and I wanted to see if it could work."

  He shakes his head at me. I search his thoughts, but all I get is an acute ache right in the middle of his body, a terrible ache that he doesn't think he can ever soothe.

  "Are you going out with him or what?"

  "No."

  "But he wants to, right?"

  "I don't know. I think so."

  "You don't know. You think so. Which is it?"

  "I think he does, but we didn't really talk about it."

  "Do you like hurting people?"

  "Hey, I didn't know he liked me!"

  "Are you trying to tell me you couldn't see he wanted you? The way he looked at you and hung around you? I saw it. Eva saw it. Hildie saw it and was totally horrified. Everyone saw it."

  "I was confused." Gusty was always thinking how sick I was. How could I have known he wanted me?

  "And yesterday I decided to try for you myself. I thought you could see beyond the surface in people. I thought you could see the real me under all this fucking infection!" He scratches at his red cheeks with all ten fingernails. My hand goes out to stop him from hurting himself, but he recoils. "I thought you said you'd go out with me because you wanted me instead of him."

  "I didn't even know he was an option!"

  "And you treat Jacob Flax like he's your little pet. If you don't like him you should let him go."

  "He hangs around me!"

  "Right, Kristi. You're a victim in all this," he sneers.

  I feel so terrible, I can only stare at my lasagna. The cheese has become inert matter.

  Mallory tosses a twenty onto the table and gets up to leave. I watch him slam through the front door of the restaurant and walk down the street toward his house.

  Now that I'm alone, I remember that the restaurant is full of people. No one is talking, and everyone is pretending not to look at me. I can feel their thoughts as they zip by. That poor boy. That girl is so selfish. How can she let him yell at her like that? Is her skirt made out of an inner tube?

  Since it's impossible to slip between the noodles of my lasagna, I do the next best thing. I quietly leave.

  MOM UNMASKED

  There's no way this could be chance. To have so many things go wrong in one day must mean that there is a cabal of red-eared, sharp-toothed, halitosis-ridden demons having a great deal of fun at my expense. I must be at the center of a cosmos-wide conspiracy, because when I get home after my disastrous date with Mallory, I find Minnie Mouse's litter box on the front step.

  The second I see the litter box I know what happened. I was so flustered when Mallory showed up I probably didn't close my bedroom door after I got dressed and totally forgot to padlock it. Naturally this is the night that Mom decided for the first time in fifteen years to make osso buco, which probably smelled so delicious to Minnie that she jumped up on the dining table and proceeded to lick the roast with her rough pink tongue right in front of Mom. I love Minnie, but she's a total pig.

  See how it all conspires together?

  What I don't comprehend is Mom's bizarre reaction.

  I find her sitting on the couch, still wearing her overalls and tank top. The spatula is on the glass coffee table in front of her, lying in a dribbled puddle of grease. She is holding something slender and white that glows on the end. She raises the white thing to her lips and sucks on it. She releases air from her lungs, only it's not air. The smell is unmistakable.

  My health-nut doctor mother is smoking a cigarette.

  I have to blink to make sure I'm really seeing this. My mom doesn't smoke. Smoking when you're a doctor is like playing the banjo at the Metropolitan Opera. It isn't supposed to happen.

  The smoking isn't even the weirdest thing.

  She takes a puff and slowly lets out the smoke before dropping her head in her hands. She hunches over, her elbows leaning on her knees, and she whimpers a little.

  My mom is crying.

  I have never seen my mother cry, never once in my life. We went to her grandma's funeral when I was six and she was totally dry eyed. She watched proudly as the Greek Orthodox priest sang over her grandmother's dead body, and then we went to the open casket to say goodbye. There she knelt and kissed a cross that was placed on my great-grandmother's chest. She whispered into my ear, "Do you want to kiss the cross, too, honey?" but I said no. I could only stare at the steel gray braids wound around my great-grandmother's head. Someone behind me said that she looked peaceful, but I didn't think so. She just looked very, very still.

  When we got back to the pew I noticed everyone was crying except for my mom. "Why aren't you crying, Mom?"

  She looked at me coolly and said, "Medical school hardens you."

  That's her excuse for everything. She talks about medical school as if she's recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. If anyone ever asks her what her surgery residency was like, she visibly shudders and changes the subject. I once asked her if she was happy when she got into Johns Hopkins, and she told me she was terrified from the moment she got her acceptance letter to the second they handed her the diploma. Mom loves being a doctor, but she hated every minute of becoming one.

  She never cried about it, though. Never once. She's proud of this fact.

  So to find my med-school-hardened mother crying on the couch is a bit of a shock. I consider sneaking back outside, but then the door clicks shut behind me. She hears it and leaps to her feet. She drops the cigarette onto the carpet and stamps it out with her toe. Then she pretends I didn't just see her do it.

  "Kristi!" she sa
ys loudly, and laughs. "You're home already?"

  "Yeah."

  She nods spastically and begins diagnosing. "That Mallory's isotretinoin treatment looks pretty ripe. He should have his derm adjust the dosage. And you know, Gusty's growing so fast, I thought I saw a little scoliosis there. He should get checked, but it might just be his posture. Are you taking your vitamins?"

  "Why are you crying, Mom? And smo—"

  "Actually, I have a question for you." She visibly straightens. I hear her thinking, Who's in trouble here? She has remembered her advantage. "Who is our furry friend?"

  "Where is she?" I whisper.

  "She's safe. Ann picked her up."

  "Mom!"

  "We're going to figure this out," she yells. "How long has she been here?"

  "Just a couple months," I say, hoping the darkness in the room will mask my face. I can't lie to my mom without smirking. It's a curse.

  "I see that smirk, Kristi. How long?"

  "Two years."

  "Hmm. Interesting." Mom starts pacing the room. "That's right around the time your dad left. Also the time I had to start working so much. Also about when my allergies began. Also when you put the padlock on your door. Interesting."

  "At least I'm not a secret smoker!"

  "Don't change the subject."

  "I was thinking maybe I'd try smoking myself," I muse.

  Mom stares at me like I've just expressed interest in heroin, but she shakes it off. "Hey! You're the one in trouble here!"

  "Well, you can't exactly get on my case about dishonesty," I say, pointing to the mangled cigarette on the carpet.

  From the way she looks at me, for a second I think she's really going to let me have it, but instead she shakes her head and goes to the bookcase. She pulls a huge book about the endocrine system from the top shelf, opens it, and from it takes a pack of cigarettes.

  My mouth gapes.

  She drops the book onto the coffee table and it falls open. It isn't a book at all, but a box, cleverly disguised. Inside it are all kinds of things a health nut isn't supposed to have: cigarettes, a lighter, Hostess cupcakes, and a fifth of tequila.

  She crams the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and flicks her lighter at it. "I need a smoke. And anyway, there's no point in getting mad at you for living a double life if that's what I've been doing." She sucks hard at the cigarette, holds the smoke in her lungs for a second, and lets it out slowly. "Ah!" she says. She pulls her ponytail holder out and shakes her hair loose. Suddenly she looks like a slightly overweight hippie chick. She does not look like my mother.

  "How long have you—"

  "I started in high school," she tells me. "I quit after college. But when your dad left..."

  I stare at her. I have no idea who this woman is. "Doctors aren't supposed to—"

  "What? Be human? I smoke three cigarettes a day, five if a patient takes a dive." She holds up her hand, five fingers extended. "You'd be surprised how many doctors smoke."

  I can't believe I'm hearing this. "How have I not smelled it on you?"

  "When was the last time you let me give you a hug? About two years ago, right?"

  I have to admit, she's right about that. I haven't let her too close for a long time.

  "Honestly, Kristi." She sits back down on the couch, leans her elbows on her knees again, and stares into space. "I didn't expect my life to be like this. You know?"

  "You're chief of surgery."

  "I'm a paper pusher. I miss surgery."

  "Go back," I say, hoping to soften her up before we get back to the topic of Minnie's furry fate. "Give up the job. Say you made a mistake."

  "Do you know how many political sutures I had to tie to get where I am?"

  "Untie them."

  She closes her eyes and I think she's distracted, but then I get a flash of Minnie through her mind and she straightens. "I have to think about what to do about the cat. In the meantime you can go visit her at Ann's."

  "Mom, I need Minnie."

  "Minnie? Like Minnie Mouse?" She smiles at me. She doesn't seem mad at all that I've been secretly waging biological warfare on her for two years. Somehow, finding Minnie made a curtain drop away. From her thoughts I can tell Mom is actually glad I've been pretending with her, because she feels guilty about pretending with me. "When you were little you always loved Minnie Mouse's fat shoes. Remember those Mary Janes she wears? You wanted a pair so bad. I looked everywhere trying to find them, but none of them looked right."

  I feel a tear working loose from my left eye. What will I do without Minnie's yellow eyes beaming love at me? "Mom, I have to have Minnie. I love her too much."

  "Kristi, I can't have a cat in this house. It makes me sick. You know that!"

  "Then I'll live at Aunt Ann's."

  Mom takes another long pull on her cigarette. "Let me do a little research, okay? There might be a solution here."

  I search through her mind, and I can tell she's open to negotiations. I might get to keep Minnie somehow, but I've pushed Mom as far as she can be pushed tonight.

  She leans back into the couch and the leather makes a squeak behind her. "How was your date?"

  I sit in the fluffy chair opposite her and put my feet on the coffee table. I'm not supposed to do that with my shoes on, but it seems all rules are suspended for the night. "Not good. Mallory is mad."

  "Because you really like Gusty, right?" She raises her eyebrows Groucho Marx-style. "He's a real hottie."

  "Mom!"

  "I have eyes." She crushes her cigarette out right on the glass of the coffee table. She seems sad again as she watches the last of the smoke rise from the dying ember.

  "Why were you crying?"

  "Oh God." She chuckles sardonically and gestures toward the kitchen. "I thought when your dad dropped you off this afternoon that maybe he'd come in to say hi. And I was going to offer him something to eat. So dumb."

  This is the first time my mom has ever hinted that she wanted my dad to come back. Two years ago, when we found his note on the kitchen table, she crumpled it up and said, "Damn him." And that's how every sentence about him has ended from then on. He didn't call for Mother's Day, damn him. He didn't come back for Christmas, damn him. He didn't send me a birthday card on time, damn him. She was mad enough for the both of us, so I decided it was my job to be the one who missed him.

  Now she's sad. She's really sad.

  And that makes me mad. But instead of being mad at her, I'm mad at my dad.

  It's kind of a relief.

  "Anyway, kiddo." Mom gathers up her goody box. "You forgive me for all this?" She holds up the box like it's a visual aid.

  I nod at her. "It almost makes me like you more."

  "You're not going to be a smoker?"

  I remember how Mallory's cigarette almost made my ribs turn inside out. "I'm not going to smoke," I tell her. My face is totally smirk-free.

  "Okay. Good." She puts the box back on the top shelf. She comes over to me and kisses both my cheeks, Greek style. "I love you, you know that?"

  "I love you too," I tell her. "Even though you smell like an ashtray."

  We look into each other's eyes, our too-big eyes that look almost buggy. I usually never like seeing myself in Mom, but tonight I don't mind. Tonight I'm glad I came from her.

  In fact, I'm proud. My mom is a bad-ass smoker. Cool.

  DAD DROPS THE BOMB

  When I first get to Aunt Ann's for Dad's big talk, Minnie refuses to come near me even though I'm wearing her favorite outfit—the pantsuit I made from blue silk curtains we inherited from my great-grandmother. Her yellow eyes scream, Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! She doesn't understand that in some situations I'm as powerless as she is.

  Dad is sitting on Aunt Ann's couch under a photo of Buddhist monks creating a mandala, a circular pattern made out of brightly colored grains of sand. Aunt Ann said that after she took the picture, someone opened the door and the beautiful mandala was blown away. The monks, who had worked on it for five day
s, laughed.

  "Ignore the cat, Kristi," Dad says, and pats the cushion next to him. "The cat will come around—just give her time."

  "She hates me."

  "No she doesn't. She's just confused."

  He pats the cushion next to him again.

  I sit on the chair farthest away from him.

  Dad pulls at his collar like it's itching his neck. He gives me a brief smile, but it's wiped away from his face too quickly. Smiles that are meant to hide something never last very long, especially when the smile is hiding guilt. I can feel Dad's shame dripping off his every thought. I almost feel sorry for him.

  "Do you want something to drink?" he asks me.

  "No."

  "I do," he says, and goes to Aunt Ann's small liquor cabinet. He pours himself a whiskey, straight up. That was the drink he had a lot when he was being sued for malpractice, when he started going downhill and thinking about how worthless he was.

  I think questions at Dad, hoping that he'll want to ask them: How is school? Who are your friends? What have your grades been like? Did you make those amazing clothes yourself? Are you dating anyone? Would you like to come see Africa? How have you managed through the past two years? Did you miss me?

  "Kristi, I have something I have to tell you. I'm not staying home for too much longer." He says all this with his back to me, as though the wall in front of him is named Kristi and he has really bad news for it.

  I watch as he slowly screws the lid back onto the whiskey bottle. I remember that Aunt Ann hates whiskey but she keeps a bottle on hand for Dad. I wonder if he knows that.

  "I came back home to file for divorce."

  I swallow. This is not a surprise, but I feel as though the wall named Kristi has just fallen on me. Minnie chooses this moment to jump into my lap. I'm startled, but she is headbutting my arm and purring really loudly. She still loves me—she's just mad. I scritch behind her ear, exactly in the spot she loves, and she collapses into a lump on my knees.

  "I'm in love, you see," Dad murmurs.