by David Amsden
It was stunning. There really was no one back here. Every time I came with Dad to Ray’s there was this part of me that was convinced he was the only one who lived back here. I had never been in the car with anyone but Mom, so this was the first time I didn’t have to drive according to ten thousand rules. I was hitting fifty now, in fourth gear, going in and out of these little pools of yellow light from the streetlamps. Everything so new, the light hit the ground in the most perfect circles. There wasn’t even one bug or moth caught up in the bulbs yet.
“See, just watch this,” I was saying. “My foot’s going onto the clutch, and I’m shifting down, to go faster.”
“I can’t pay attention with you like this.”
“Relax,” I said. “We’re not going that fast anymore. Just watch. I’m shifting down, and now you’ll see, we’ll pick up a ton of speed.”
“Jesus!” Stacey said.
“I know, right?”
“Okay,” she said. “Now at least stop for a second.”
“Fine,” I said. “Okay.”
I stopped right in the middle of the road. I put it in neutral, tugged the emergency brake. I couldn’t get over it. I mean, you could just do stuff like that back here.
What happened is this: the year before, during my freshman year, just after all that fun went down with T.J., Dad tells me he’s leaving. He was moving out of Maryland. The best part is that Dad had met this woman through one of those dating services, not the want ads for love in the newspaper, but those ridiculous clubs that everyone was joining around this time, when suddenly there were no more married people and adults didn’t know what to do with themselves. Her name’s Mary, of all things. I think Dad has some fetish for foreigners, probably from growing up in a part of Maine where you often ended up dating distant relatives, because Mary’s Filipino. She’s crazy, too.
So Dad met her through this pathetic organization, on some ski trip. And Dad doesn’t even ski. But that’s how he met her, skiing. And after about ten minutes of deep reflection, he reaches the epiphany that he should move into her house, in this hick part of New Jersey with, I believe, one of this country’s highest densities of rat tails and cross-eyed people.
And look, I got the point by now. Dad was feeling pretty low. Since Jiffy’s shut down after that murder out back, he’d been working a string of ridiculous jobs, most recently at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Dad was at a point in his life where he was forty years old and would end up talking to you for an hour about rotisserie chickens and not even know it. And this Mary was a nurse. Dad was hoping some of it would rub off on him, I guess. I mean, the guy had been temporarily living with his brother for nearly a decade.
But this wasn’t how Dad put it when he sat me down one day, when we were at this bar, that same bar from when I was a kid, actually, a martini in front of him, a beer for me this time around. There we are when Dad very formally says—
“Hey there, feller, somethin’ I gotta talk to you about.”
“What’s up?”
“You know Mary?” he asked.
“Who’s Mary?” I knew who she was, but I had developed this smart-ass way of speaking.
“You know, the woman I’ve been seein’.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “The skier?”
“The nurse,” Dad said.
“Dad, I’m kidding. Chill. I know who Mary is.” I had never met her before, though.
“Well,” he said. “I’m gonna be movin’ in with her. Livin’ together.”
“No shit? Where does she live again?”
“Up in New Jersey.”
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t realize things were so…I mean, wow.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t I know it.”
“Do you even know her?” I asked.
But Dad sort of ignored this, went on to babble about how it’s really nothing, a four-hour drive that he’d do once a month. It was funny, the way I felt, sitting there, watching the bubbles in my beer shooting up and shattering against the surface, the bartender topping off Dad’s martini. I mean, I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about him leaving, but it was in the sense that if he walked outside, and a bus happened to drive right into him, and his organs ended up smeared all over the windshield, and they ended up having to use the wipers to get them off—well, I wouldn’t really care about that either. I’d thought about a lot of things in terms like that back then. I still do.
What’s really funny is when I get home that day the first thing I do is go straight to the fridge. And I take out the carton of eggs, open it up, just look at the eggs for a long time. I just stare at the things, these soft white ovals. I’ve always liked how eggs always have shadows on them, no matter the light. Then I pick one up, hold it above the sink, and break it in my fist. Then I take another, throw it into the sink, hard enough that the yoke flies up and gets me in the face. And then, you should have seen it. I’m taking all these eggs, and just throwing them, against the cabinets, into the walls, on the floor. I’m going crazy with these eggs. It was tremendous. There just weren’t enough of them. That’s the problem with throwing eggs into walls. There’s never enough.
For about a year Dad’s pretty true to his word. He drove down from Jersey about once a month, for a weekend, always alone, not once with Mary or her kid—I forgot to mention this little seven-year-old girl she had, Melanie. I’m sorry. I just always forget these people really exist. Anyway, she’s from Mary’s first marriage to some guy who Dad always referred to as a real lunatic.
Today, a Saturday, Dad had arrived in the morning, pulled up into Mom’s driveway in this absurd car I’m going to tell you about in a minute. We hung out all day, shot some pool, hit up the standard bar for Dad’s pre-nightcap, and ended up at Ray’s for dinner.
Cousin Mike wasn’t around because he had entered this new phase in life where if he wasn’t getting stoned, or at least lighting something on fire, or getting in a fight, or getting a tattoo of a pot leaf on his bicep, he was at his mother’s house, at Aunt Edie’s, up in his room staring at a wall. And now he’s in the army. But I already told you that—
But Stacey was there, and that I liked, because I hadn’t seen her in forever. Dad had this weird friend Donnie come over too, some guy who I guess Dad had known for a long time but who I certainly had never seen. I’ve noticed that divorced parents often have these types of acquaintances: people who just seem to show up, but were really there the whole time. I mean, remember Floyd? You haven’t already forgotten about Floyd, have you? Like really, who the hell was Floyd?
He was a freak, this Donnie, and both me and Stacey could just tell, just by the way he ate and how he insisted on using one of those curly children’s straws with his red wine. It was purple, that straw, and it gave you the creeps, which is why the minute dinner was over, me and Stacey told everyone we were going out for a bit, to drive around in my Honda.
“Okay,” I was saying to Stacey now. We were still stopped, still right in the middle of the road. I don’t think these roads even had names yet. “Put your hand over mine and you’ll see.”
“You’ll go slower this time?”
“Will you chill?”
“Promise me you’ll go slower.”
“All right, all right.”
So Stacey puts her hand over mine. The past few years had been rough for her. Since her parents divorced later, she had to deal with thinking all the time about which one she was supposed to love and which one she was supposed to hate—stuff I had been lucky enough to avoid. I think that’s part of why she kept dropping out of high school, because she was sort of a wreck and no one was listening. She kept getting moved into different ones, so even though she was eighteen, she was only one grade above me. Point being, it didn’t feel like we were that far apart in age anymore. Besides, I’ve always got on well with older people. Most of the time when people meet me they think I’m at least five years older than I really am. I’ll probably look a hundred when I’m only fifty. After all, I didn’t even have a license an
d I was still the one teaching her how to drive here.
“Okay,” I was saying. “See my foot? I’m down on the clutch, and putting it into first. This is the tricky part. If I lift up too quick, we’ll stall, like this—”
“Jesus!” Stacey said. “Isn’t that bad for the car?”
“Only if you do it like every five minutes,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
I did it again, without stalling, going slow and easy, not so much for Stacey’s comfort, but so she could see how to do it right. That way I felt even more adult, and professional, two qualities that had started to become important to me. I don’t know why.
I put it in second now, then third, and we just coasted around. Stacey kept her hand on mine. I liked it. I like that stuff, how with family you can not see someone for years and then out of nowhere they’ll put their hand on you and it’s fine.
This was especially nice because around this time something had started happening that I wasn’t too fond of. I guess it started up just after all the fun went down with T.J., but I feel like blaming him is sort of cheating. Anyway, something was happening, and I wasn’t liking it. With girls, I mean. I had broke up with Claudia the year before, just started treating her like I hated her until she decided not to talk to me anymore, like it was a mission or something that I had no control over. And ever since then if any girl touched me I’d get real uneasy. Sometimes I still get it, a lot, actually. A girl will touch me, on the back of my neck or wherever, and I just want them to get off. It’s like they’re accusing me of something.
But I’m leaving things out, things I said I’d mention. When Dad got into town earlier that day he had a surprise. He had bought me this car. And not just any car, but a Mercedes.
Dad had picked up this 1970 rust-gold Mercedes sedan from a New Jersey junkyard. I don’t know. I guess it’s a popular thing to do in that part of Jersey, buying stuff from junkyards and calling it new. So he bought it, fixed the engine, because Dad was always into fixing things. I swear, if he had rich parents he’d have been a doctor, probably a damn good one too.
But this Mercedes was something. The only piece of the interior left was the driver’s seat, which I’ll admit was in stellar condition, hardly a crack in the leather. But still, that didn’t take away the fact that Dad had to use a lawn chair for the passenger’s seat, and a mattress cut in half for the back.
“Pretty nice, huh?” Dad said when he got out in Mom’s driveway. “Got me all the way here without a problem.”
“That’s some car,” I said. “It really is.”
These kind of moments started to occur a lot back then, and I never knew what I was supposed to say when they happened. I could just so clearly see that I was on my way to becoming Mom’s kid completely. I was fine with this, because Mom’s certainly a better example of pretty much everything than Dad, but I still felt bad for him. You could just feel him losing his own kid, even I could feel it, and I was the kid. You felt it all up in your bones, behind your eyes even. And you thought: what’s an adult worth once something like that happens, once he doesn’t know his own kid anymore?
“Sure is,” Dad was saying. “And I’ll tell you somethin’. The amazing thing is that it’s got climate control—that still works.”
Dad can’t get enough of things like this. A car can clearly be an old piece of junk, but say something obscure like the climate control is still functioning, that’s when Dad gets all obsessed. He won’t even notice the rest of the car. He’ll lay down under the thing, stuff enough rubber bands and whatever else up in the engine, just so it’ll move and he’ll have an excuse to use the vintage climate control. Told you he should have been a doctor. All they do is make a living jumpstarting people who should be dead.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Climate control.”
“To the exact temperature you want,” he said.
“To the degree,” I said.
“Want it?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Want it? This car?” Dad said. “It’s yours.”
What’s sad about this, though, was it was like he wasn’t even seeing the Honda Prelude he was parked right next to.
“Dad, that’s something,” I said. “But, see, Mom got me this car, this Honda right here.”
“This Honda’s yours?” he asked. “This Honda right here?”
I nodded.
“Jesus Christ, that’s a nice car. Mom’s doin’ well, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She really is.”
“The business really took off?”
“I guess it did.”
Her little company really was something to brag about—there were four employees in our basement now—but it was funny: I didn’t want to talk to Dad about Mom. I almost felt sort of protective of her, like if I told him about her life, and about the life I had with her, he’d find some way to take credit, at least in his head. Luckily, Dad was already changing the subject.
“I used to have a Honda,” he was saying. “You remember that? A little blue Civic?”
“Of course,” I said. “There was always candy on the floor.”
“You remember the candy?” he said.
“Caramel Creams,” I said. “I’ll always remember this time when you were supposed to pick me and Mom up from the airport, but—”
“Well, this is somethin’,” Dad was saying. He wasn’t really paying attention to me anymore. I was okay with this. “This is a hell of car, isn’t it?”
I just nodded. Then we just stood in the driveway for a moment, loitering. And Dad was obviously still caught up in this moment, with my Honda Prelude, because right now, as me and Stacey came back into the house, Dad was still talking about it, with Ray and this Donnie guy. And he wasn’t just talking about it the way normal people talk about things.
Me and Stacey park the car in the driveway, come in through the front door, turn the corner into the dining room, and you should have seen it.
There’s Dad, standing on the dining room table, Ray and Donnie around him laughing like sea lions, saying—
“A goddamn Honda! This sporty little Honda!”
“A Honda!” Donnie yelled.
“Exactly!” Dad said. He started jumping up and down on the table.
“No jumping on the table,” Ray said.
“A Honda!” Donnie yelled again, like making sure he understood.
“These are our parents,” Stacey said to me. “Do you realize that?”
“That’s my Dad on your dad’s table,” I said.
“Hondas are junk anyway,” Ray was saying.
Ever since Ray moved into this big house, and started making some real money, he had constantly been trying to adopt a classier lifestyle. For him, this just meant calling Hondas junk and eating brie cheese all the time. Like say you were over, he’d throw a thing of brie at you, and these little bright white wafer crackers. He said the crackers were the most expensive crackers in the cheap-cracker aisle. That’s a typical Ray joke. And if he was trying to be extra sophisticated, he’d heat up the cheese a bit, like the French do, but in a microwave. It did taste pretty good warm, I have to say.
It could also make a pretty fantastic mess if you were Dad and happened to be standing on a table and laughing to death and yelling about a Honda and didn’t even realize you just stepped right into the cheese.
“Oh shit!” Dad said.
“We’ve got an emergency,” Donnie said. “Cheese down, cheese down.”
“Shit!”
“No worries, no worries,” Ray said.
“The cheese is down.”
Dad was getting off the table now. He took his sock off, just placed it in the pile of brie. The sock was brown, with little maroon diamonds stitched on it.
“No worries,” Ray said again. “The whole fridge is filled with brie.”
Me and Stacey didn’t see what was so funny about this comment. In fact, we figured things had maybe settled down to the point where we could announce our pre
sence in the room. So we walked over and sat down with the three of them. But they didn’t even notice us.
That’s how hard they were laughing at what Ray had said.
“A whole fridge of brie!” Donnie was saying.
“I know!” Ray said.
“My sock’s in the cheese,” Dad pointed out.
Stacey looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Then she reached over for the wine and took a sip, straight from the bottle. It wasn’t a normal bottle either, but one of those jugs, I don’t know what they’re called, with the funny little circular handles. She took another sip, passed it to me. Dad and them were still laughing, but it was like the second we picked up the bottle some radar went off in all of them. They sensed something was wrong, missing, which is why Ray was suddenly saying—
“When the hell did you get back?”
“We’ve been sitting here with you guys the whole time,” Stacey said. “We never went out, decided not to.”
“It’s true,” I said.
“Car still working?” Dad asked.
“The Honda!” Donnie said.
“Don’t get all smart with me,” Ray was saying to Stacey.
Avoiding conflict with types like Ray and Dad is about the world’s easiest thing: you just refill their glasses, like Stacey was doing right now for Ray. They were drinking out of plastic cups, the classy clear kind. There was a stack in the middle of the table, and, after topping off Dad’s glass, and this Donnie character’s, Stacey grabbed two and filled them for me and her.
So we just sat around now, drinking the wine, talking about whatever. I guess it was more like they kept talking and me and Stacey listened and then looked at each other and sort of grinned. Like yes, no matter what, these people made us.
After a while the phone rings, and Stacey gets up and answers it. Since I was fifteen, I was extremely interested in other people’s phone conversations, especially people around my age. I was always slightly convinced they had something to do with me. Stacey had that girl smile all over her face that’s so obvious.
She was saying—