Touch

by Francine Prose

  Eventually, Kevin and Chris got used to the idea of my leaving. Shakes was the only one who kept telling me not to go. It was August, and I was about to leave so that I could start the school year in Wisconsin. He and I were sitting on big boulders right in the middle of a stream that ran through the state park, which we could bike to. The sunlight dappled the rocks and danced across the water. I’d had to give Shakes a helping hand as we walked from stone to stone. I was afraid he’d miss a step and fall into the stream, but he never did. He made it seem like an adventure. Like we were explorers, Lewis and Clark. Or Peter Pan and Wendy.

  I remember Shakes saying, “You’re shooting yourself in the foot, dude. Trust me. It’s going to be worse there than it is here.” I don’t know how he knew. Maybe it was that special intuition, that ESP of his. Maybe he meant that it would be harder for me without him and the other guys around. I remember every word he said that day. I especially remember him calling me dude. Because after I got back, a year later, none of them ever called me dude again.

  I remember telling Shakes, “If I’m going to shoot myself in some body part, better the foot than the head.”

  But I might as well have aimed for my head, and gotten it over with. Because living with Mom and Geoff was pretty much like going slowly brain-dead.

  In the beginning, Geoff was just dull. I’d never met a human being who could talk about himself so much and have so little to say. By the time I’d been there two weeks, I was the world’s number-one expert on Geoff. Not counting Mom, I suppose.

  I knew where he’d grown up (Detroit), the games he’d played as a kid, every course he’d taken in middle school, every teacher he’d had during his fabulous college career at Wayne State. Then the years of graduate school, and the PhD thesis that some big deal professor had said showed some original promise. Some original promise? That was Geoff’s moment of glory, Geoff’s fifteen minutes of fame. It had all been downhill since then.

  And now? Now Geoff did nothing but complain about how hard he worked, how little he got paid, and how retarded his students were. I felt sorry for his students, who probably didn’t know he said they were idiots who couldn’t add two and two. But to hear Geoff tell it, they worshipped the ground he walked on.

  Geoff wasn’t even good looking. He was tall and beaky and bald, with a shiny, bullet-shaped dome head. Believe me, he wasn’t the type of guy who’d be anybody’s favorite teacher. He wore those corny professor jackets with leather patches on the elbows. I wondered where Geoff shopped. Thrift shops, I imagined. Geoff was cheap. God forbid an avocado cost ten cents more than it did last week. Geoff could spend a whole meal on the subject of one overpriced avocado.

  Whenever Geoff went on about himself and how much everything cost, Mom would nod and smile as if everything Geoff was saying was fascinating and new, though probably she’d heard it a million times before I even got there. I guess Mom didn’t know Geoff well enough, or feel comfortable enough, to suggest we have dinner in front of the TV. She seemed to really believe that Geoff was smarter and more interesting than she was. I could see where she’d got that idea. It was definitely what Geoff thought. But I could have told her that he wasn’t half as intelligent as she was. I mean half as intelligent as she used to be.

  It occurred to me that, from a kid’s point of view, having your parents remarry was sort of like watching them get brainwashed. Something—someone—forced them, little by little, day by day, to think and say things that they would never have thought or said before.

  Secretly, I kept hoping that the brainwashing would wear off, and that the new marriages would self-destruct. I knew that every kid from a divorced family fantasizes about her parents getting back together. Still, I couldn’t help it. My other fantasy was that Joan and Geoff would meet and realize that they were made for each other. I imagined them running off together and leaving Mom and Dad to console each other, and maybe fall back in love, after they’d bonded over the subject of what creeps they’d married.

  Anyway, life with Mom and Geoff deteriorated rapidly. After a few weeks, Geoff must have decided that I was so impressed by Important Mathematical Genius Geoff that he could relax and let Spoiled Brat Geoff come out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mom had cooked chicken pot pie, which was one of my favorite dishes. I scarfed mine down as soon as I was served. By the time I looked up, Geoff was prodding his food with his fork and looking as if he’d found a dead rat baked inside the flaky crust.

  “Jeanette, do you know how salty this is? Have you tasted it? Are you trying to kill me? Are you trying to send my blood pressure skyrocketing through the roof?” He threw his bowl like a discus, skimming it across the tabletop. It clattered to the floor. I watched flecks of chicken and potato and cream hit the walls, like blood splatter in a horror film. Then Geoff stalked out of the room.

  “I guess his blood pressure’s already through the roof,” I said.

  “Oh, dear,” was all my mother said.

  “Excuse me?” I said to Mom. “I thought it was delicious.”

  But Mom only shrugged and got a sponge and started cleaning the walls and the floor.

  After that, Geoff’s tantrums got worse. He was never violent or threatening. Nor was his fury always directed at us, exactly. Once, when he couldn’t find a piece of paper he needed to do his income taxes, he hit himself in the head so hard that the college honor society ring he always wore broke the skin and blood trickled down his forehead.

  Once, when his tie came back from the cleaners with a stain still on it, he got a pair of scissors and cut out the dirty spot and told my mom to take it back to the cleaners so they would know what he was talking about. Once, for some reason I can’t remember, he had to pick me up from school. A teacher had kept us a few minutes late, and when I finally ran out the door and got into Geoff’s car, he screeched away from the curb so fast that the whole school turned to look.

  At moments like that, I was glad that no one in the school knew me. Otherwise, it might have bothered me that I hadn’t made one single friend. Nobody was mean to me, nor did they try to make me feel like a freak or an outsider. They just didn’t seem all that interested in me, in where I’d come from, or who I was. They all seemed to feel as if getting to know me would be too much work. They’d all known each other practically since birth. They had all the friends they needed already, so why should they bother making a new one? Or maybe they sensed something I didn’t know myself. I wasn’t going to stick around all that long, so why should they go to the trouble?

  Also, I kept thinking that because I’d become friends with Kevin and Chris and Shakes so early and stayed friends with them for so long, I’d never learned—I’d never had to learn—how to actually make friends. It was as if I’d missed school on the day they taught that lesson. Maybe there was some trick to it, something you could do to make other kids want to hang out with you. I didn’t get it, and I totally didn’t get how to make friends with other girls—which, I knew, was what I should have been doing. Half the time, I didn’t understand what the girls in my new school were talking about, or why they cared about the things—clothes and makeup and movie-star gossip—that seemed important to them. I didn’t know how to start a conversation with them, and after a while I stopped trying. I knew my mom was sort of worried about it, but she had enough to deal with, coping with Geoff’s temper tantrums.

  I could handle the loneliness. But the bad news was, I had no one to tell about what a baby Geoff was. I emailed and texted Shakes and Kevin and Chris. But it wasn’t the same as being in the same town and seeing them every day. Sometimes it took them—even Shakes—a few days to answer, by which point I’d forgotten which one of Geoff’s fits I’d been complaining about. At least Geoff had no interest in acting like a father. He never said, “Call me Dad.” I don’t think he had any desire for me to think of him as my dad. He was the baby that Mom had signed on to take care of. Which made me the ugly stepsister, the rival for Mom’s affections.

 
; Geoff’s impersonation of a grown-up reminded me of Joan’s Brady Bunch Mom act, her Doctor Joan Marbury, Therapist miniseries. The difference was that Geoff occasionally stopped acting and let his true self creep out. So that was another thing that Mom and Dad had in common. Both of them seemed to have a weakness for bad actors.

  Meanwhile, Dad and Joan seemed to have some kind of weird intuition for when Geoff had just had a major tantrum. That’s usually when the phone would ring, and it would be Dad or Joan, or both of them on separate extensions, calling to see how I was doing.

  “Fine,” I’d say.

  Then Joan would say she heard something in my voice that she didn’t like. If my dad wasn’t already on the phone, she’d put him on. He was supposed to tell me: If I wanted to come back and stay with them, I had only to say the word.

  The word? What she really meant was words. I knew which words Joan wanted to hear. Joan, I mean Mom, I’ve finally come to my senses and realized you’re a better mother than my real mom ever was. Joan was competing with my mother just like Dad was competing with Geoff. I couldn’t help wondering: What were they competing for?

  Another thing I wondered was: What if I’d “said the word” right before Christmas, when they and Josh Darling went to the Bahamas for the holidays, and never told me, let alone asked if I wanted to come along? What word, exactly, would I have said. Help? Would that have done it? I guess I must not have said the right word, because I didn’t go back to Pennsylvania even once during that whole school year I lived in Wisconsin. Dad and Joan always had something important to do during my school vacations.

  One night, after dinner, Mom had gone to a board meeting at the library, where she worked. I was watching Top Chef.

  Geoff came home from teaching. He walked into the living room and sat down in the chair. He kept shooting me filthy looks because I guessed he thought I was supposed to jump up and offer him the couch. And I probably should have, but I didn’t want to.

  Geoff said, “Hand me the remote, will you, Maisie?” I very politely asked Geoff if he’d mind waiting until the end of the show, so I could see who won. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I’d learned my lesson from being around Joan. I’d never get satisfaction.

  Geoff said, “Actually, I do mind.” Then he did a surprising thing, by which I mean a thing that surprised even me, and by then I was so used to Geoff, I was rarely surprised by the childish stuff he did.

  Geoff stood up and came over to me and grabbed the remote from my hand. I was so shocked, I held on to it, so that for while we were sort of wrestling for the remote, like kids. Except that Geoff wasn’t a kid. He was stronger. He got it. He won.

  I stood up and watched him victoriously—triumphantly!—switch from channel to channel. Click click. Are you getting this, Maisie?

  He said, very fake-calm, as if we hadn’t just practically had a physical fight, “We pay a fortune for a hundred channels of cable, and there’s nothing to watch. We should probably cancel.”

  When Mom came home, I followed her to her room and told her that I wanted to move back and live with Dad. I was careful to say Dad and not Dad and Joan. The school year was just ending, so it was pretty convenient. Mom cried, and made a big show of being sad and hurt, and I guess she really was. But in the end, she did the same thing that Dad did. They both seemed relieved that I was giving them a break in which to try and make their repulsive, brainwashed second marriages work out.

  That was how I moved back home in June, as soon as school in Wisconsin ended. Or maybe I should say: that was when I moved back to Pennsylvania, the place that I thought of as home—that is, when I’d been in Wisconsin.

  The first thing I did after I said hello to Dad and Joan and Josh Darling was go to my room and call Shakes and arrange for him and me and Kevin and Chris to get together. It made me feel better to be talking to Shakes as I looked around my old room and saw how much Joan had “straightened up.” Shakes was so glad to hear from me, it took him a few moments to be able to say my name. I wondered if his physical problems had gotten worse in my absence.

  It was already evening, and Joan and Dad were making a big production about how tired they were from the travel and stress of picking me up at the airport. And how much I was supposed to appreciate the glorious reunion dinner and us all being together again.

  Shakes and I arranged to meet the next day. He’d call Chris and Kevin. If the weather was good, we’d bike to the park. If not, we would meet at Shakes’s house and figure out what to do.

  In my mind, I was already there. I was polite and pleasant and kept my elbows off the table. I heard, as if from a great distance, Joan yakking on and on about the success she was having with a woman who’d been bingeing and purging for years. I could tell myself that Joan talking about some puking woman while she expected us to eat was funny, because, in my mind, I’d already gone to a place where I would see my friends, and things would be funny, for real.

  I couldn’t wait for the next day. I was so happy and eager to see them. The good feeling lasted for one night.

  Because the next day was when I found out how different everything was and how quickly people can change.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I woke up to a chilly, drumming rain. No chance of that group bike ride to the park.

  Joan dropped me off at Shakes’s house on her way to the office, where she was going to snoop around in the private souls of the poor, miserable losers who paid her to hear them spill out all their secrets.

  Of course, this was before everyone decided that it would be good for me to see Doctor Atwood. This was before I became one of those people, paying someone who didn’t want to listen to what I didn’t want to say.

  My real mom had been a close friend of Marian, Shakes’s mom. My mother had no problem babysitting a kid with a mild disability. Later, Shakes told me that, all during that time, he was having seizures. But he never had them around us, so I never saw them. I guess his mom must have warned my mom, and my mom must have said she could handle it just so long as Marian told her what to do if something happened.

  I could hardly imagine what Joan would do if a kid had a seizure. Probably scream and call 911 and flirt with the ambulance guys. Whereas Geoff would just wait and do nothing and then accuse the poor kid of faking a seizure just to divert attention from the person everyone should have been paying attention to—namely, Geoff.

  Marian knew she could leave Shakes with Mom. So when we were little, Shakes and I got to hang out even more than we otherwise would have.

  The only problem with Marian was that you had to stay on your toes, because you couldn’t call Shakes Shakes around her. She’d say, “His name is Edward.” Otherwise, I’d always liked her. But I liked her even more when Joan dropped me off at her house, and Marian couldn’t have been chillier to her.

  Marian said, “Doctor Marbury,” and barely opened the front door. I wondered if that was because she was still loyal to Mom, or if Shakes had told her what I’d said about Joan always saying things like, “This dress would look so pretty on you, Maisie, if you shed that extra poundage.”

  Joan had never tried to make friends with Marian. Shakes’s house was my territory. It belonged to him and me, and Chris, and Kevin. Joan had never shadowed it with her evil presence.

  Marian pulled me inside the house and shut the door even as Joan was blabbing on about what time she would pick me up. Then Marian squeezed me until I pretend-coughed, and we laughed.

  She held me at arm’s length and said, “Oh, Maisie! We missed you so much! It feels like you’ve been gone for a hundred years. My God, look at you. Look how you’ve grown. You kids are getting so big. Pretty soon, you won’t be kids anymore.”

  I wished she hadn’t said that.

  “We’re really still kids,” I said.

  “I don’t think so, honey.” Marian laughed and lightly kissed the top of my head, and my hands flew instinctively to the front of my T-shirt where they covered the breasts I’d grown since the last time
I’d been here.

  That was another thing—the main thing, really—that had happened in Wisconsin.

  I’d gotten a whole new body during my year away. I’d grown breasts and a weird curvy ass. I’d gotten my period, too. I felt like a spectator watching my body do whatever it wanted, without my knowledge or permission. I felt like someone who’d been tricked into thinking she had one body, and now—surprise!—she had another.

  I was glad that I was living with my mom when all these changes happened. It was almost as if my body had been thoughtful enough to wait until my real mother was around. Mom was cool. She kept telling me I looked great. She said, “Feel free to ask me anything, Maisie.” I knew she meant “anything about sex.” But if she couldn’t even say sex, how could I feel free to ask her about it?

  Anyway, there was nothing I wanted to ask. It would have been hell with Joan, listening to her lecture me about the mystery and beauty of being a woman.

  Since I didn’t have any friends or anyone I could talk to, I spent my time in Wisconsin secretly checking out other girls at school to see if the same thing was happening to them. Which it was—but not as much. They were growing these neat little buds up around their shoulders.

  Me, on the other hand…I looked in the mirror and turned around, and by the time I turned back, I had these gigantic mega-boobs, the kind movie stars pay fortunes for. I’d gotten them practically overnight, for free. But I didn’t want them. Where had they come from, anyway? My mom was small-breasted, so it must have been some rogue gene from a busty great-great-grandmother, lost in the reaches of time.

  That was why I’d sort of liked being invisible in my Wisconsin school. I was able to deal with the changes without it being public. No one knew what I’d looked like before, so no one paid attention to how different I looked now.