Wish You Were Here

by Barbara Shoup

  “Black roses?” Ted says. “He sent you black roses?”

  I shift to the far corner of the seat, trying not to smile, but Mom glances back and sees me, and she starts smiling, too. When Ted repeats, “Black roses?” one more time in a wondering tone, we can’t help it; we both crack up. Ted looks at Mom with this oh-no-not-again look on his face, which only makes us laugh more.

  We calm down eventually, but Ted’s still looking anxious when we get to our house. He pulls into the driveway and stops the van. We all sit there awkwardly until Mom reaches over and turns the engine off. “Come in?” she says. He smiles then, a slow smile that seems to spread throughout his whole body. The two of them seem rooted there, their eyes locked on one another.

  Oh, God. Again. Lately, the two of them are worse than teenagers. Mom’s always coming in with her lipstick smeared and her clothes wrinkled, acting embarrassed and apologetic—as if I’m her father instead of her kid. I feel like her father sometimes, pacing the floor, worrying that she’s dead in a car accident, or getting myself all upset imagining her and Ted together at his apartment. It’s driving me crazy. I mean, shouldn’t I be the one sneaking around having sex? Shouldn’t I be the one forgetting there’s anyone in the world but me? Okay, here’s how bad it really is: I can’t even imagine myself with a girlfriend, let alone imagine myself forgetting there’s anyone in the world but me and her. The way things are going, I figure I’ll be the last person of my entire generation to have sex, if I ever have sex at all. Which I could adjust to a whole lot easier if I weren’t continually subjected to these two.

  It’s begun to rain, a cold, steady downpour that streaks the windshield silver. “You guys wait here,” I say. “I’ll get Mom the umbrella.”

  I slide the door of the van open and bolt for the front porch. From the little window near the coat closet I can see them. Their two shadows become one for a long moment, and I’m ashamed of how I feel. Jealous. It’s pathetic. What? Do I want Mom to be miserable just because I am? Apparently I do because I have the urge to do something really terrible. I don’t even know what, just—terrible. Mean. The kind of thing Brady used to do to Layla when he thought one of her romances was getting too serious: stroll through the living room stark naked with a hard-on, maybe cut the tips off the rubbers in the drawer of her bedside table.

  Get a grip, I tell myself. Get real. And I turn the porch light on to give Mom and Ted fair warning that I’m on my way back to the van.

  seven

  When Dad calls the next day and I try to explain to him why the roses weren’t such a great idea, he says, “Bud, what you’re telling me is Ellen’s lost her sense of humor. Love’ll do that, you know.” He laughs. “I see it’s going to be up to me to provide a little balance in your life until she gets her shit together. A little craziness. Drugs, sex, rock and roll. Well, rock and roll anyhow—after all, I am your father. So, hey, I’m working Crosby, Stills and Nash tomorrow night. You want to go?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “Yeah, I’ll go.”

  “You want to take a friend?”

  Like who? I feel like saying. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have friends anymore. Well, actually, I could invite Stephanie Carr. Flaky as she is, she’s been nice to me since Brady left. She worries about me; she’s constantly trying to talk me into going out and having some fun. But if I invited her, Dad would assume I had something going with her, and it’s not worth trying to convince him that I don’t. So I just say, “No thanks.”

  “Okay if Kim goes with you, then?” he asks.

  “Kim?”

  “Yeah. Kim. Is that some kind of problem?”

  “No, no problem at all,” I say, and spend the next twenty-four hours in a state of total anxiety.

  But for once things go better than I hoped. I pick her up at Dad’s house around six, and she says, “Well, hi, Jackson,” as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be going out with me. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, her curly hair pulled back in a barrette, she looks younger but also not as ditzy as she looks in her workout clothes. She chats about people at the health club, tells me about some book she’s reading that supposedly proves that red meat can kill.

  When we drive by Pizza Hut, Tom Best and Eric Harmon walk out. They wave when they see me; then they see Kim in the front seat and stop dead in their tracks. Their eyes bug out. They think she’s my date.

  Yes! I think. I get this kind of loose feeling inside and run this mind trip, imagining she really is my date and what we’ll do together later in the back of the van.

  “Jackson?” she says, jolting me back to reality.

  “Yo!” I say, thankful for the darkness that hides my red face—not to mention any evidence of my hard-on. I reach for the dash, rummage through the tapes there for 4 Way Street, stick it in the tape deck. I calm myself down telling her about how Brady and I always had a preconcert concert to get ourselves in the mood for the real thing. I tell her about the time we told our parents we were going to a leadership conference with the student council but really drove to Chicago to see the Grateful Dead. How Brady forgot his tape case and we didn’t dare go back to get it, so all we had was one Dead tape that we found in the glove compartment. How he said, “Tradition, Jackson. That’s the trouble with people these days: they don’t care about tradition,” and insisted that if Aoxomoxoa was all we had, then we’d play Aoxomoxoa for the whole four-hour drive.

  “Who is this guy, Jackson?” Kim asks. “Brady.”

  “My best friend,” I tell her. “He ran away.”

  She asks me when he ran away, then why, then what do I think about it, how do I feel? She’s truly curious to know what would make a person do something that drastic. Which makes talking about Brady easier. Plus, she doesn’t know him; she can be objective. He’s never done anything to piss her off.

  She says, “What does he look like?”

  “Pudgy,” I say. “Kind of like an oversized eight-year-old.”

  She laughs. I tell her how he won’t wear anything but T-shirts and jeans. How his hair sticks straight up in the back like he just got out of bed, how his shoelaces are always untied. How he always wears his baseball cap backward.

  I think this will make her laugh again. Instead, she asks, “How does Brady feel about himself, about the way he looks?”

  “He doesn’t give a damn,” I say. “He likes being a mess. It drives his dad crazy. Mr. Fitness, you know? Mr. Burton gets up at five every morning so he can get in a six-mile run before he goes to his law office.”

  “But I bet Brady doesn’t actually like being a mess,” Kim says. “Don’t you think everyone would like to look good? Don’t you like it, Jackson? You certainly seem different since you’ve been working out. I mean, look at you, sitting in the driver’s seat not even slumping,” she teases. “And I was noticing yesterday at the gym that your body’s starting to change. Here, for instance.” She reaches over and squeezes my right bicep lightly.

  It tenses—Jesus, I tense all over at her touch, and even though Kim does this kind of thing all the time, I have to say to myself, stay right here, man, okay: breathe, no wet dreams. It’s funny, really, the way she regards each human body as a particular challenge—the way a sculptor might view a block of marble. I actually like her.

  Here’s the shocker, though: I’ve gotten to like working out, too. At first, I went just to keep Dad happy. I couldn’t have been more surprised when, in no time, Kim was adding weight to the machines. I’d nearly kill myself to do the full number of reps because I thought it was hilarious what a big deal she made about my progress. I don’t tell her so now, but she’s right about my body changing. I’m no Mr. America, but if I stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom and flex my arm, I can see it harden.

  We get to Market Square Arena early enough for the sound check. First the amps, then the mikes. The stagehands call out, �
�Test Graham, test David, test Stephen.” The band roadies test the guitars, the keyboards. The percussion roadie strikes the drums repeatedly.

  “Where’s Oz?” Kim asks, and I point him out high above us, crawling around on the rigging like a circus act. At first, it scares her to see him up there. But she calms down when I tell her he’s been doing it since before I was born and he’s never fallen yet. Stephen Stills comes out at one point, and Dad scrambles down the rope ladder. Stills points at one of the amplifiers. Dad nods, making a gesture that seems to say, no problem. Stills slaps him on the back, laughs, and disappears.

  “Does Oz know him?” Kim asks.

  “He knows them all,” I say. “All the groups from the sixties that still go out on the road, anyway. He was on road crew for all of them at one time or another, before he came back and married Mom.”

  “Wow,” she says, her eyes glued to Dad back up on the rigging.

  She’s in love with him. I’ve watched plenty of women fall in love with him, so I know the signs. It won’t be long before she starts thinking about marriage. Part of me says oh, not again. Part of me fantasizes that things might actually work out between them. I mean, marrying Kim wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to Dad. I worry about him. He’s not the most careful person in the world. Bouncing around from girlfriend to girlfriend the way he does, he could get AIDS or some other disease. Or he might not. It’s the good news/bad news thing: if he does manage to stay healthy, he’ll get old. He’s a good-looking guy now, young looking, but that can’t last forever. What happens when the women he wants don’t want him?

  Not my problem, I know. Brady was right when he used to say, “Hey, your parents are supposed to worry about you.”

  So I concentrate on not worrying, on watching people fill up the auditorium, and pretty soon Dad scrambles down from the rigging, his work temporarily done, and takes us backstage to watch the concert. Stage right, we lean against speakers twice our size, careful of the tangle of thick black wires all over the floor. We’re so close to the musicians that the changing lights make us change color, too. We can see the order of songs taped to the floor.

  Spotlights crisscross the audience. Faces leap out, white as mimes’ faces, then disappear. Arms wave as if in slow motion. Smoke swirls up like fog. Brady would crack up: I get a perfect shot of his mom and her friend Marlys. The two of them are out of their front-row seats, boogying, holding up their cups of beer. There are these college guys next to them, loving it, egging them on.

  I can’t help getting pulled in by the music myself. When they play “Our House” near the end, I swear I get as sentimental as if I were forty, remembering that song from when I was young. Actually, I do remember it from when I was young. Really young, though—maybe three. It was Mom’s favorite song then; we used to sing it together.

  Mom asks me later, “Is she nice? Your dad’s new girlfriend?” She’s leaning against the kitchen sink, watching me eat a slice of cold pizza.

  “She’d never feed me this crap,” I say. “Her entire reason for living is to convert the universe to tofu and bean sprouts.” I feel a twinge of guilt making fun of Kim, but I know Mom expects it, needs it. “Man, the two of them bicker constantly about food—the other day, it’s Dad who starts in. He goes, ‘Over my dead body we’re having tofu for Thanksgiving.’”

  “Thanksgiving,” Mom echoes. “Jackson, you’re not serious.”

  I raise my right hand, pizza and all. “I swear it,” I say. “And Kim says, ‘It might just be over your dead body, Oz. The human body is like a car. If you want it to run well and look good, you’ve got to keep it tuned up, cleaned, and waxed. But you’ve got to give it the right fuel, too. You wouldn’t put steak or greasy pork chops in the gas tank of your car even once, would you?’ Dad goes, ‘Oh, for Chrissake.’”

  Mom giggles. She says, “Why does this remind me of Laura?”

  I roll my eyes.

  Laura was his last girlfriend, a recent convert to the New Age. She said too much attention to the body was a clear sign of a soul trapped in the lowest chakra. Older, wiser souls understand that the body itself is of no consequence—it exists merely as a shelter for the spirit. According to Dad, it was this kind of thinking that caused her to go from a size eight to a size fourteen in less than six months, thus causing him to move on.

  Sometimes he says to me, “Jackson, never trust a person under thirty.” A couple of years ago, he went through a phase of testing every woman he met. Bottom line, if she hadn’t heard of Che Guevara, he wouldn’t even consider dating her. But it didn’t take him long to conclude that relationships with women who had heard of Che Guevara involved a smorgasbord of deeper problems: children to raise, jobs they’d love to quit the moment they got married, brains fried by acid. Dad said that too many of them held the tiresome conviction that if women ran the world, it would be a better place. And, invariably, they had bad thighs. Very bad thighs.

  What he really wants is a woman who will adore him and not need him: a pretty unlikely combination, if you ask me—but he never asks, so I don’t say. I stay mellow. Dad’s girlfriends come and go. They’re nice, most of them. They want me to like them, and usually I do. But I don’t get attached to them.

  “Is she nice?” Mom asks again.

  “She is,” I say. “She’s no rocket scientist, but she’s nice.”

  “Well, that’s good.” Mom sighs, and I remember the thing that both of us are always trying to forget. She still loves him. Looking at her lost in her own thoughts, I have a sudden vivid memory of her standing in exactly the same spot years ago, watching Dad. He was sitting at the table—in the same place I’m sitting now—eating chocolate ice cream, his favorite food.

  It was night. I was supposed to be in bed, but I was thirsty, so I’d come downstairs to get a drink of water. When I got to the kitchen door, though, and saw them there, I stepped back into the little bathroom across the hall.

  I could still see them. Dad lifted a spoonful of the ice cream and offered it to Mom. It was soupy and a big glop fell on the table. She laughed, took the single step you have to take to get across the small room, and in a dancelike move, bent and licked it up just like a cat. She knelt then and let Dad feed her the rest from the spoon. He looked at her a long time. He took his fingertip and slowly painted chocolate lines on her cheeks, her nose, even on her eyelids. Then just as slowly, he licked them away, both of them laughing, a strange laugh I’d never heard before.

  Obviously, I know now what was going on between them. I know what happened when Dad picked her up and carried her to their bedroom, and knowing only makes it hurt more to remember. I mean, maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about the divorce if I thought they’d never loved each other. Or even if they’d loved each other once and then something happened to make them stop. But Mom never stopped loving Dad. I see it on her face sometimes—for no more than a split second—when he walks into a room. And Dad still loves her, too. Or who she once was.

  When he talks about the way Mom used to be, it’s as if he’s talking about a friend who died or disappeared, someone I can never meet. Her hair was long and wavy. She wore floaty clothes, bracelets that jangled. Once I heard him say, “The way Ellen held the guitar, singing, you’d have thought it was made of gold.”

  They don’t say it, but I know it was having me that changed her. It’s not my fault they got divorced. I know that. But I can’t help believing they’d still be together if I hadn’t been born.

  eight

  I know things are seriously cranking up between Mom and Ted when Mom says, “Jackson, Ted would like to take you down to Bloomington for the day. You know, show you around. Honey, it would please him if you’d go.”

  It’s the last thing I want to do. I mean, what are we going to talk about? I imagine horrible dead silences between us. But I say, “Sure, fine,” because I’d look like a real jerk if I said no.


  Ted’s okay, though. He’s got this brand-new CD player in his van that has a “random” function; he’s like a little kid with a new toy. I get in and he hands me a pile of CDs and says, “Pick ten.” He sets up the machine then, and we’re perfectly happy cruising along the highway, constantly surprised by what plays next. I say what a great invention the random function is, and he agrees and somehow we get on the subject of weird inventions, gimmicks that’ve made people millions of dollars. I think of Brady then. The way he was always coming up with something no one else would even consider.

  I tell Ted about the science project we did when we were in the fourth grade. “That year everyone was into Atari,” I say. “Our moms were always yelling at us to go outside or read a book, but all we wanted to do was play Pac-Man or Donkey Kong or Space Invaders. We’d sit in front of the TV screen for hours on end, clutching the joystick.

  “‘Absolutely no more,’ Brady’s mom said finally. ‘I can’t stand it.’”

  “That’s when Brady had the idea for the science project,” I tell Ted. “‘Does Atari Really Improve Your Hand-Eye Coordination?’”

  I tell Ted about the skills test he made up. How many times could we bat a tennis ball against the garage wall without missing one; how many baskets could we hit in a row; how many volleys could we get in before the Ping-Pong ball went flying across the basement floor, out of control?

  “Then, of course, we had to play Atari to test our hypothesis,” I say. “We’d do the skills test first every day, recording the results on a chart. Then we’d play Atari for thirty minutes, sixty minutes, ninety minutes, two hours at a stretch and test ourselves again to see how the various lengths of time affected our hand-eye coordination.”

  When Ted groans, I tell him Brady’s dad thought the project was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard of, too. “This is completely unscientific,” he said to Layla. Of course, she thought it was brilliant. But then, Layla always thought Brady was a genius.