by Alix Ohlin
After a couple of minutes I stood up, leaving the wrench on the grass. Then I saw Angus—even from a distance I could make out his red hair—running toward me in his military posture and knees-up gait. He grabbed my hands and pulled me into a spin that landed us with a thud on the ground.
“I can’t get the thing off,” I told him.
“I know. I’ve got a bolt cutter,” he said. He set to work, his hands fast and sure. A short while later the metal nozzle crunched and a small spray of water spurted from it onto the grass. He handed me the sprinkler head, then ran off to the next person.
I trudged down the fairway looking for Wylie. Down the slope ahead of me, a sand trap lay cut across the grass like a ditch, almost silver in the moonlight. Up by the green my brother was crouched over a sprinkler with a bolt cutter. His backpack was very well supplied.
“I’m done with mine,” I said. “Angus helped me.”
“You only did one?” he said. He ripped the sprinkler loose, an expression distantly related to a smile twisting his mouth, and ran off to find another.
For a few minutes I walked around the golf course without seeing anyone, still holding my sprinkler head, then found everybody gathered on the bank of a pond. We threw our confiscated goods into the water, where they splashed and sank, and Irina beamed at me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful?” There was a lot of manic, happy whispering. I would have liked to join but didn’t feel entitled, due to my total incompetence.
Stan led us to an exit road on the far side of the development, and Angus said, “Let’s all scatter and meet at the apartment.” Irina gestured for me to walk with her, but I shook my head and said, “I’m going with Wylie.” For a second my brother stood there on the sidewalk tensed on the balls of his feet. Then he just shrugged, and people started peeling off.
The moon shone on the reflective surfaces of signs warning of children playing, one-way traffic, resident parking only. Slouched under his backpack, Wylie soldiered on, his fists clenching and unclenching with the rhythm of his hurried steps. I kept waiting for the absolute perfect thing to say to appear in my mind, and the longer I waited, the more absolute and perfect that thing had to be. Meanwhile his silence was so conspicuous that I could practically see it surrounding him. When he was little, instead of refusing to eat food he didn’t like, Wylie just stuck it into a corner of his mouth, sitting at the table like a deranged gerbil, his cheek bulging with brussels sprouts until my mother, half laughing, ordered him to spit it out.
He went inside a 7-Eleven and came out with a bottle of Wild Turkey in a paper bag.
“Could we stop for a second?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because my feet hurt and I’m tired.”
He shrugged again. On the next block, a small, disconsolate playground occupied a patch of dirt. I sat down on the merry-go-round, and Wylie stood punching a tetherball around its pole. We passed the bottle back and forth. Then he pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it, and we shared that too. I felt slightly better.
“So what’s next?” I finally said.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Didn’t I just ask?”
He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “We’ve got a whole summer’s worth of stuff planned. Our launch program will roll out activities on a regular schedule. A city experiencing escalating chaos will have to ask itself if its priorities are in the right place.”
“You think so?”
He sat down next to me, and the merry-go-round shuddered slightly under even his delicate weight. We started to spin, slow but definite, pushing off with the soles of our shoes.
“Lynnie,” he said, his voice urgent and guileless, “what does it mean to have beliefs if you don’t act on them? Doesn’t every single moment of our lives come with a choice attached? You might say these are philosophical questions with no practical bearing, but what I’m trying to tell you is that philosophical questions are the only questions there are.” He lay back against the spinning platform and spread out his skinny arms, the cloth beneath his armpits yellowed with sweat.
“Where are you living?” I said.
“I sleep wherever. Sometimes I camp. I scrounge food from dumpsters. I don’t want to get mired down in trappings. I don’t want to consume.”
“Except for Wild Turkey.”
“Flexibility,” he said, “is the difference between ideology and dogma.”
Across the street, a light went off and slipped us further into darkness. I couldn’t see his face anymore, and but for the rank smell I might have doubted he was there. I let my feet drag in the dirt to stop the spinning. “Listen,” I said. “Speaking of flexibility, I really wish you’d come home. Just for like an hour or something.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Wylie, you’re being so stupid,” I said. “Of course you can.”
We wandered slowly back to the apartment, talking about nothing in particular. Sirens rose and fell in the distance, and the wind flapped my hair across my face and into my mouth. By the time we arrived the party was in full swing, music playing, Irina slow-dancing with Angus, the baby cradled in between them. There was some Wild Turkey left, and also beer and gin. The dog, annoyed by all the commotion, got up and padded into the other room to sleep.
Seven
We all lay sprawled on sleeping bags, the sounds of breath and snores mingling in the quiet with the rising clatter of birds. Sledge woke me by licking my ankle and prodding his wet nose repeatedly against my foot. Irina was next to me, her head inadequately pillowed on Wylie’s stomach, with Psyche pillowed in turn on her more ample body. Angus was nowhere to be seen. Sledge licked me again, this time on the cheek, and whined in my ear. I didn’t know why he always picked me. I rolled over, got a dangerous close-up of Stan’s hairy armpit, and rolled back again.
It was my second hangover in as many days, but either I hadn’t drunk as much last night or I was getting used to the condition. I felt surprisingly fine. I opened the front door and followed the dog down the stairs to the gravel parking lot. The sun was bright yet mild, the street empty, and morning glories I hadn’t noticed before bloomed full and blue. Sledge nosed around in the weeds and relieved himself on a prickly-looking shrub with orange flowers. Above me, the apartment door opened and Wylie stepped onto the landing, squinting. “Are you leaving?”
I shook my head. “Not unless you come with me.”
He made a face. “You can’t make me.”
“I can try.”
He walked down the stairs, glacier-slow, scowling all the while. At the bottom he called to the dog, who ignored him, being otherwise occupied pawing the dirt and then sniffing it, over and over. Finally he lost interest and trotted to my side, sitting down on his back legs, his face attentive and alert, apparently awaiting further instructions.
“Man, he really likes you.”
“It’s unrequited.” I climbed the stairs, and Sledge followed me. I made like I was going inside, and when he scampered in, I closed the door behind him. On the other side of the plywood I could hear his shocked and aggrieved complaints. Having outwitted him gave me an undignified but real sense of satisfaction. Then I went back down and faced Wylie. “Listen,” I said. “You can come now or a week from now, but you do have to come home. I mean it, I’m not leaving until you do. I honestly don’t care if you want to vandalize golf courses and eat food out of dumpsters, but you can’t not talk to Mom. Seriously, you can’t do that.”
In the ensuing silence a jet plane cut across the sky, heading for the Air Force base, trailing a precise white line.
My brother turned his scowl to the ground, to the plane, and reluctantly back to me. “She doesn’t understand.”
“I don’t care,” I said, holding up the keys to the Caprice. “The car’s parked on campus. Let’s go.”
We pulled up at the condo just as my mother was leaving for work. At the sound of the car maneuvering boatlike into the driveway she turned from locki
ng the front door and froze.
After a single night in Wylie’s apartment the small condo loomed like a four-star resort: elegantly furnished, indulgently large, with washed windows and manicured grounds. For a second I felt a glimmer of revulsion, an almost physical sensation akin to nausea, or a sneeze, and shook my head at my new sympathies. I was turning into the eco-freak Patty Hearst.
Wylie got out of the car and faced her, saying nothing. She looked like she wanted to scratch his eyes out; he looked like he was waiting for her to do it. I felt ignored and beside the point, which almost came as a relief.
“You look terrible,” she said to Wylie.
“So do you,” he said.
I could see him looking her up and down, passing judgment on everything from her office job to the big brown purse weighing down her right shoulder. Back in Brooklyn, on the receiving end of all those late-night messages, I thought that Wylie had patterned himself on our father, with his scientific terminology and pseudo-academic pursuits. But now, seeing the two of them together, it occurred to me that he was much more like our mother, with the same rigid insistence on getting his way, the same tendency to withhold his emotions from the world. She unlocked the door and held it open.
“You’re coming in this house, right now, and you’re not leaving until I say so.”
Wylie glanced at me and snorted, and I said, “Please.”
As he passed her, she wrinkled her nose and told him in a level, furious voice that he looked disgusting and smelled like a farmhand, and that she shuddered to think by what behavior he had come by such a smell. She said she hadn’t raised him to live in a ditch and disappear for months at a time, and asked whether by doing these things he hoped to send her to an early grave. “Is that your goal?” she kept saying. She elaborated on this theme for the next half hour, while Wylie stood in the living room, head bowed, in the posture of a martyr. Finally, as the barrage showed no sign of letting up, he started for the white couch, and she said, crisply, “If you think you’re going to set your filthy behind on my clean furniture, then you think wrong.”
She called Francie at the office to explain she’d be late due to “unforeseen circumstances,” and then turned on the shower and stood outside the bathroom tapping her foot until Wylie stepped inside.
While he was showering she made scrambled eggs, fried bacon, brewed coffee, and put bread in the toaster—each gesture, from stirring the eggs to putting juice on the table, executed with the oppressive accuracy of the truly angry. Not knowing what else to do, I set the table, which was getting to be my main contribution to the household.
When Wylie came into the kitchen his hair was flowing loosely down below his shoulders, still wet and gleaming red-brown in the morning sun. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a plaid short-sleeved shirt I recognized—my heart turning over in my chest—as my father’s, and he smelled like strawberry shampoo. Our mother nodded at a chair, and he sat down, in what seemed like the first step in some ritual indoctrination. I kept waiting for her to bring out the clippers and shave his head, like at boot camp, but instead she brought out a spatula and served eggs. Wylie and I ate enveloped in stiff silence, throughout which she would not stop staring at him, even as she sipped mechanically at a cup of coffee. I shifted in my seat. She stared and stared.
If Wylie noticed it, he gave no sign. He tucked his long hair delicately behind his ears and ate two servings of bacon and eggs. The silence didn’t seem to bother him even a bit. He put away five pieces of toast, an entire sliced tomato, and three glasses of juice.
When he finished, my mother ordered us to do the dishes, then wiped her lips with a napkin and gathered up her purse and keys.
“I have to go to work now, because that’s what responsible people do,” she said. “You will be here tonight when I get home at five.” She waited for Wylie to answer, but he didn’t. “Lynnie,” she added, and I nodded to make it clear I understood.
The silence lasted while I did the dishes and Wylie dried them and put everything away. I was looking forward to hitting the couch and checking on my old friends in celebrity television, with maybe a side trip to the Weather Channel. But Wylie’d started jittering—tapping his toes, just like our mother, and glancing out the window every fifteen seconds—and I felt compelled to pick up where her staring had left off.
He looked at me, annoyed. “Are you going to do this all day?”
“You heard Mom. If you leave, my life won’t be worth living.”
“Lynn, leave me alone. Where I’m going, you can’t follow.”
“And where is that?”
“To the bathroom.”
“So you’re not leaving, right? Promise me.”
Wylie sighed, and I stared at him until he nodded.
“Okay,” he said, “promise.”
I let him go. I stretched out on the couch, feeling drowsy— still tired from the night before—and when I woke up there was a coin of drool on the couch cushion and a woman on television extolling the long-lasting clean of a brand-new detergent. The house seemed ominously quiet.
I jumped up, checked the bathroom and the bedroom where I’d been staying, then doubled back to the living room and kitchen. It wasn’t like there were a lot of places he could hide, but I kept circling through the condo, purposeless and rushed, the way you do in dreams. The Caprice still sat in the driveway, its ivory paint glowing dully in the yellow light of the afternoon. I hopped up and down on the baking asphalt and then headed around back, where my mother maintained a small patch of lawn, and on a shady strip of ground along the side of the house I found Wylie, still moderately clean, snoring in the dirt.
One arm was flung over his side in a gesture of total exhaustion. He looked as if he’d literally fallen down asleep. For a couple minutes I sat in the weeds and studied him: the veins roping down his tanned legs, the slack fabric of my father’s too-big shirt against his chest, his nicks and bruises and scars. With shorter hair and glasses, I thought, he’d look eerily like the pictures I’d seen of my father as a young man. Did my mother see this too, every time she looked at him? I didn’t know how she could stand it. Seeing him now, exposed and asleep and alive, was almost more than I could handle.
I reached out and flicked my index finger against the thickly callused sole of his right foot, which he moved. I flicked the other foot and he moved that one too, then moaned softly. I flicked his arm and said, “Hey. Wake up.” He nestled his cheek deeper into the dirt, apparently too comfortable to budge. “Let’s play cards,” I said. “Or Monopoly. I’m bored.”
After some more flicking and a couple of well-placed pokes, he opened his bleary eyes. The circles beneath them had faded to a vaguer blue. “What are you, six years old?”
“I bet I can still beat you at hearts.”
“In your dreams,” he said.
“My years away from the game have only sharpened my thirst for victory,” I told him.
He sat up. He’d tied his hair back again, and although it was still shiny and thick, he’d managed to rub some dirt and weeds into it during his nap. He was looking like his old self again. “Youth and ability are on my side,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We spent the afternoon playing cards and drinking orange juice in the quiet living room, listening to so-called edgy pop music on the radio. I had the feeling that our truce would hold as long as I didn’t mention guerrilla tactics, mother’s wishes, alternative lifestyles, or weird friends. As a result conversation was limited. We stuck to the game and, in a hobby that dated back to childhood, the construction of elaborate snacks from whatever we could find in the kitchen. After a multi-course meal involving peanut butter, chips and salsa, bananas, ice cream, and popcorn dusted with Parmesan cheese, another round of napping ensued.
Our mother came home at the dot of five, and she didn’t come alone. Two seconds after I heard her pull into the driveway, a second car parked alongside the curb. David Michaelson stepped out into the street wearing another Western-style s
hirt and blue jeans held up with an elephantine silver buckle that would have been useful for attracting the attention of search-and-rescue planes overhead. Two young men then emerged, each a variation on the theme of David Michaelson: beefy, with dark curly hair and thick chests, but slimmer and clean-shaven. They had to be Donny and Darren, the sports stars.
“Oh, God,” I said.
Wylie didn’t even look up from his most recent snack, an open-face sandwich layered with tuna fish, cheddar cheese, shredded carrots, and olives. “And you wonder why I don’t like to come home.”
The Michaelsons helped unload countless grocery bags from our mother’s car and conveyed them up to the front door, as Wylie and I braced ourselves in the living room.
Our mother came inside first and greeted us with a brisk smile. “Children,” she said.
We were having a dinner party. Our mother established headquarters in the kitchen and ordered everyone about: arranging for the unstocking of groceries, the placement of appetizers, the ordering of cocktails.
“Lynn,” David said. “Wylie. What can I offer you both to drink? I believe we’ve got a full bar.”
I looked at Wylie, who sat with his head bowed, licking tuna juice off his thumb. “I’ll have some wine,” I said. “I’m sure Wylie wants a beer.”
“Alrighty then!” David slapped a large hand on my shoulder and went back into the kitchen, crossing paths with his sons, who sat down and slouched back in their chairs, so far that their muscular legs were almost parallel with their heads. Their faces were pale. I knew they both spent a lot of time playing hockey, but couldn’t remember which was Donny and which was Darren.