Then Ms. Westerfield says something I think I’m going to remember always. “Jules, I know your life hasn’t been wonderful so far. Your parents have been … less than perfect parents to you. But I promise you, when you go to college, when you grow into your adulthood—it will never be this hard for you again. You’ll be able to make your own choices. You’ll be able to walk away from people who don’t treat you well. You’ll be able to create your life the way you imagine it will be.”
I don’t know what to say. I know she’s telling me something important. She’s telling me exactly the thing I need to hear. It’s like radiant sunshine and I’m standing there basking in it.
“Thank you. I hope … I hope what you’re telling me is true.”
“It’s true,” she says and smiles.
Leigh and Timothy come inside. Leigh ends up spending the night with me. I think they’re all a bit skeptical about Howard’s change of heart and Ms. Westerfield doesn’t want me to spend the night alone, even though I’m certain Howard won’t show up again.
They don’t know Howard like I do. The food supply has run low. He’s got all the wood he needs for Aunt Doreen’s fireplace, even if the power doesn’t come back on for the rest of the month, and I’m sure he thinks Wendy will be back in a few days and the jig will be up anyway.
He also walked out wearing Jack’s expensive leather jacket, and who knows what else he’s already taken? He’s a louse who sponges off people and leaves whenever the welcome mat rolls back up. And he knows he’s burned the mat this time.
Wendy doesn’t show up in a few days, or even a few weeks. When she calls, I tell her what has happened and ask her when she plans to come back. She tells me I seem to be doing a great job and I’ll be fine.
I’ve already been writing checks off her checkbook to pay the utility bills for a few years. She’s right that I already know how to take care of stuff. But I don’t have much more cash left from the hundred she’s left me with. I tell her the milkman has expanded the grocery offerings they deliver, and since the storm I’ve been ordering my food this way. I guess she figures if I have shelter and food and don’t need anything else, she can keep partying.
We don’t have school for a whole month, but the electric power returns after a week.
Wendy stays gone a total of ten weeks, and by the time she comes back the seasons have changed. She comes back April 15th. Withensea looks ragged from the blizzard damage, but the weather has turned warm and sunny. She returns with Jack, which was her ultimate mission.
One day a few weeks after they get back I’m studying when I hear them come tearing up Alethea Road in two cars. Wendy screams out my name when she steps into the front room and says there are groceries in the car and will I please help her carry them in. As I walk out I see the VW parked in the driveway and a new car parked out front: a 1966 cherry red Mustang Coupe—the most radical car I have ever seen!
I wait on the porch and stare at the car. I say to Jack, “Wow. New car?”
“Here,” he says, and he throws me the keys.
“It’s your car,” he says.
I shoot a glare at him. “Funny one.”
“No, it’s for real. It’s your car. Take a spin.” I know he wouldn’t lie about the car. So I figure it really is for real.
“Why?” I ask.
This time Wendy speaks. “Because you did a great job taking care of everything and you put up with your father. You probably deserve a medal, he’s such an asshole, but a car is good, right?”
I smile at her. “Yeah, a car is great.”
“Go take it for a ride. You better get your license soon so you can drive it legally.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much. This is the most incredible thing you’ve ever done.”
When I jump into the car and start the engine I check the gas meter. I plan to drive as far away as possible.
Twenty-seven
Jules, 17 years | Summer, 1978
JAIL TIME
A WEEK LATER, after a quick Driver’s Ed class, I get my license. The teacher can tell I already know how to drive. He focuses on parallel parking and passes me on the second drive.
I love driving my Mustang more than almost anything. The paint blazes cherry red with a black hardtop and a black interior. It’s freedom in a metal frame. It’s wicked great!
I drive it to school every day, and on the weekends I drive it almost all the time. To pay for gas and stuff I get a job working part-time for the town newspaper. I do ad layout and work the copy machine.
When summer starts, I begin working full-time at the newspaper. Leigh and Timothy work down at the old amusement park at the other end of town. Everybody and their brother works there.
After work I head down to the game stands and hang out until they can leave. Timothy usually works a huge game with a bunch of clown heads. You have to shoot water from guns into tabs placed in the open mouths of the clown heads to win prizes. Leigh runs a ride called the Kooky Kastle. We love hiding in there and scaring people.
When we aren’t working, Leigh and Timothy and I pile into the Mustang and drive for hours. It doesn’t matter where we go. We drive out of Withensea into the nearby towns. Sometimes I drive all the way into Boston to visit my grandfather and Ruth. They love it, and it’s nice to be able to visit them more often now that I can do it on my own without having to take three buses and a trolley.
Meantime, Wendy and Jack booze it up and swallow whatever drugs they can’t inhale. Wendy earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology, and after her graduation in June she threw a huge party that hasn’t seemed to end. I wonder if she’ll party for the next ten years, which is about how long it took her to earn her degree.
A few of the guests have moved into the basement for a while, including a chick named Seraphina who decided to quit using heroin while she stayed with us, which makes me sure I’m never taking drugs in my entire life. She spent the first three days awake, either sick in the bathroom or shaking on the living room couch. She wouldn’t eat or drink much because she said her stomach hurt. Her nose was runny, she cried almost all the time, and she sweated like she was running a fever. Finally, she fell asleep downstairs and slept for three days. Even with Jack’s new favorite band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, blaring. The house never quiets down. Jack seems more withdrawn since Wendy’s graduation and they fight all the time and are generally unpleasant to be around, even when they’re sober.
At the end of July they were arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge outside their favorite dive bar. David and I weren’t around for the jail call. They had to ask a friend to bail them out.
David is spending his summer working as a golf instructor in one of the nearby towns. He’s taken up golf at college and become quite good. He has a girlfriend and when he isn’t working he spends time at her place or out with their friends. We rarely see him unless one of us happens to be up late when he comes in.
Toward the end of the summer I find Jack and David standing in the front yard, in the middle of an argument. I don’t even know how it started. It’s stupid because neither one of them has ever yelled at or even talked much to the other before.
When I walked into the yard, Jack is goading David, jabbing him with his finger in his chest. “Throw a punch, why dontcha?”
I’m thinking David will laugh it off and tell Jack to go kick a stone, but instead David throws a punch at him that glances off his cheek. When Jack turns back to David his eyes are insane. He turns into a monster and starts punching David hard in the face, in the chest, in the stomach.
I’m stunned. He might kill David. Wendy sits on a porch step, watching all of this impassively.
“Aren’t you going to say anything to stop this?” I run up to her and ask.
“Let them punch each other out.”
“They’re not going to punch each other out …” I want to say Jack will kill David, but I don’t want David to hear me and be offended. I scream at her, “Do something!”
> She sits there and I run down to where Jack has David on the ground, punching him, and starts screaming at him to stop. He doesn’t at first, but finally he seems to come to his senses. I can tell he’s high. He staggers and stumbles up the stairs onto the porch and inside.
David’s face is all bloody from what I think is a broken nose. I help him up and we hear horrible crashes coming from inside. Jack’s tearing the living room apart. We hear the sound of lamps flying, of crunching wood, and of glass shattering—followed by Jack’s howling.
We all hesitate—I think because we’re all scared about what we’ll find—but then we race in. Jack evidently punched the aquarium, shattering it and liberating the fish, which lie squirming around us on the carpet. His hand and wrist literally pump blood.
I run to the linen closet and grab a handful of towels. When I run back, Wendy and David still stand in the same place. I hand David a towel.
“Put this on your face,” I say to him.
“Call an ambulance,” I tell Wendy. She goes to the phone, screaming something about having to call the “fucking cops,” and dials.
I walk over to Jack and help him wrap up his wrist. I can see the monster has disappeared. For some reason, this makes me angrier. “What’s up, Jack?” I ask.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, David.”
David doesn’t respond. He stares at the fish I try to scoop up and put into a cup I grabbed off the coffee table. He walks upstairs holding the towel to his nose.
I hold pressure on Jack’s wrist until the ambulance arrives. They put him on a stretcher and take him to the hospital. Wendy rides along.
I stay with David although he doesn’t come out of his room all night. The next day he has awful bruises around his eyes, a big gash over the bridge of his nose, and scratches on his face.
Wendy sees him and says, “I’ll pay for the surgery to fix your nose if you want.”
“No thanks,” David answers on his way out to the golf course.
Later that night, I catch him staring at his nose in the bathroom mirror. “It looks like it’s broken. You should take her up on the offer to have it fixed,” I say.
David stares into the mirror. “I think it makes me look like Paul Newman. I don’t mind it.” He makes a mean face at himself in the mirror and leans over to shut the door.
A few days later, when we finally talk about the whole thing, he tells me he plans to stay with a friend until his classes start again. He says he doesn’t think he’ll come back to stay here because he doesn’t ever want to see Jack and Wendy again.
I don’t try to talk him out of going. I know he’s made the right decision and I don’t blame him. I would go, too, but I still have one more year of high school. We make a pact to call each other more often and check in.
As far as I know Wendy has no plans to take another three-month vacation. I’m not certain I can handle living with them for the entire school year, but I don’t have a choice. I have to stick it out.
Timothy’s been accepted at Harvard and plans to study something called “conservation biology.” Part of it concerns saving Komodo dragons and stuff so they don’t become extinct.
School starts at Harvard in September. We all drive into Cambridge several times and hang out in the city getting to know the campus with him. I figure we’ll be visiting him on the weekends during the school year. Leigh and I go with him and his family for the first of his Opening Days. We see his new dorm room and help him unpack his things.
Leigh and I begin our senior year one week later. That’s when everything changes.
Twenty-eight
Jules, 17 years | Fall, 1978
YOU WANT … YOU WANT TO BELIEVE
WHEN TIMOTHY LEAVES for college, Leigh and I begin to drift apart.
We rarely see each other during school because we don’t share any classes or study halls. Even our lunch times are different. She met a college guy the first week of school, and when she isn’t at school or majorette practice she spends most of her time with him. He goes to a community college in a nearby town.
Then Leigh drops out of majorettes because practice interferes with her boyfriend time. I drop out two weeks later. Without Leigh there to hang out with, twirling my baton for the football games holds no appeal.
At first we try to make time to see each other, but eventually we stop trying. I’m angry with Leigh. I can’t believe that after everything, all the years we’ve been inseparable, a guy could make her disappear like she never existed in my life at all.
She’s just been waiting for a ride out of Withensea on some guy’s white horse. But she pulls up my anchor and drags it along when she rides away. I can’t hold it. Eventually the line snaps.
Timothy and I were calling one another occasionally at first, but he’s grown busy with college life, classes, and meeting new people. I’m the dull hick from back home he’s outgrown. I stopped returning his phone calls to avoid talking to him. Eventually, he stopped trying.
My life has grown unbearably small.
My social life, outside of school, is nonexistent. It seems like there’s an emotional chasm between me and most of the kids I know. Over the years I’ve occasionally found small connections, but no one besides Leigh or Timothy has ever seemed capable of unconditionally accepting my life experience. The truth is, I’m too tired to start unfolding myself again. It’s exhausting to think about.
Folding in and guarding what is left feels better, so I spend my time after school either in the art room at school or in my room, painting and drawing. Alone.
High school becomes a dance I watch without hearing the music the dancers move to.
On the weekends I work at the town newspaper. They’ve promoted me to a position they call Junior Copy Editor. Complete gopher job. When I’m not fetching things I make up inane advertising slogans for the local businesses and try not to lose my mind.
In October, Wendy and Jack are arrested again for being drunk and starting a fight at the bar. They’re held for the night then released. When they come back to the house they have another fight about a chick Jack slept with. Jack tears the house apart again, grabs his things, and moves out. He takes another job sailing a boat and leaves the state.
Wendy responds by sleeping with so many different men I stop paying attention to their names and faces as they drift in and out. As far as I can tell, they’re the same man in different sneakers. I figure she has sex with these guys because Jack’s been having affairs on her and she’s pissed. I ask her if it makes her feel better to have sex with all these men.
“Absolutely.”
“Why? How?” I ask. “Don’t you feel used all over again?”
She laughs. “I’m using them!”
Life is just a long series of rationalizations for Wendy.
IT’S TUESDAY, THE week of Thanksgiving.
Timothy called last night to say he’s coming back from school for the holiday and that he’d like to spend time with me over the weekend. I’m surprised by the call and I’m doubtful if we’ll really see one another.
I know I’ll be spending our Turkey Day at Pier 4, where my grandfather takes us every year to celebrate this American tradition. We order stuffed lobsters. I wish we celebrated like normal families with turkeys and green bean casseroles and passing out in front of the TV, but we don’t. Wendy usually dresses up like she’s going to a rock concert.
Jack is in Mexico or the Bahamas or somewhere sailing boats and having affairs.
This year, David isn’t going to join us. His Thanksgiving will be with somebody from his fraternity. He’s become President of his fraternity, and I know he’s having fun. I don’t blame him for not wanting to come back.
So the group will be Wendy and me, my grandfather, Ruth, and Bethyl.
My grandfather doesn’t go to restaurants often. Maybe twice a year. But there’s something about this restaurant, on this day, with a branch of the Kennedy clan celebrating in a private space somewhere in the same restaurant.
He’s proud to be able to do this once a year and it gives him pleasure.
But today is Tuesday. Two days before Thanksgiving at Pier 4.
I walk into Shakespeare with Ms. Epstein. I love this class like no other, mostly because I love Shakespeare and Ms. Epstein reads it superbly to us.
As class starts, Marcy Drake, a cheerleader, calls me over to her seat. I’m curious and a bit nervous because although Marcy and I were friendly once, back in the days when I twirled my baton for the football team, she treats me like I’m invisible now. She asks me why I didn’t go out painting the seawall with the rest of the senior class the night before.
“I had no idea the seniors were painting the seawall last night.”
The painting of the seawall is an old Withensea High senior year tradition.
“Well, we were—and your mother was there too.”
“My mother?” I’m startled to hear this.
“Yeah, I saw your mother parked at the seawall with a guy. When we were done painting we went back to our cars. I needed a light and I walked over to their car, and …” Marcy pauses dramatically and a small, nasty smile spreads across her face.
“Your mother was busy in the guy’s lap.” She smiles at me like I should know what she means. I don’t.
She realizes this and decides to educate me.
“She was, you know … busy?”
I still don’t understand.
“Your mother was giving the guy a blow job,” she says loudly enough for several students nearby to hear.
Marcy starts laughing like a hyena. The other kids laugh as well. I turn and walk to my seat. I am embarrassed. Mortified.
And the next thing I remember is standing in front of my locker, staring at my coat, at the end of the day.
Big deal, Wendy gave a guy a blow job in a car down by the seawall. I’m sure it’s something lots of girls do. Marcy probably gives her boyfriend blow jobs.
The Belief in Angels Page 29