Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  “Sure.” I handed the phone to Seth. Pete and Andrea hovered next to me. I heard Linda walk out into the upstairs hall and stand next to the rail to listen.

  After Seth’s hello, I heard Max talking. Seth said, “Just a minute. I have to get a paper and pencil.”

  I grabbed one out of the drawer and handed it to him. He wrote what looked like a list, said, “Okay,” and hung up.

  He turned to Pete and me, hunched his shoulders, extended his hands in a classic imploring gesture and said, “What am I supposed to do now? Max made me promise I wouldn’t tell you where he is but he wants me to bring a bunch of stuff to Joe’s house.”

  Seth was thirteen. Amazed at the convoluted way Max’s mind worked, I laughed with relief. “Did he say how he wanted you to get the stuff there?”

  “I didn’t ask. He knows I don’t have a driver’s license. Joe’s house is farther away than my school. I’m not going to walk that far.”

  Seth read off the items from the list. I collected them and packed them in a duffel bag. Linda stayed with Andrea. Pete drove the three of us over to Joe’s house. It was almost a mile away. We parked half a block from the house to perpetuate the myth Seth could summon a magic carpet to transport him across town. When Seth got back in the car, he said, “He didn’t ask who drove me. He just took the duffel bag and closed the door. He probably thinks I drove myself. That’s what he would do.”

  Max came home after school at the usual time the next day and stayed and ate dinner with the other kids. I assumed he was home to stay. When I asked why he ran out of the house in the first place, he just shrugged. As soon as he finished eating, he went up to his room. A little later, I heard a car drive up, followed by the bounding thuds of Max’s feet running down the stairs. Then the front door was yanked open and slammed shut. It was a solid house but I could feel the reverberations from the slammed door through the kitchen floor. Later that evening, I got a call from the police. They wanted me to collect Max at the police station. Fortunately, Linda was home to watch Andrea. The man at the front desk at the police station looked me over with an unusually cold eye when I asked him where I would find Max. He pointed to the area where someone was screaming, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I suddenly felt sick. It was Max. The desire to walk back out the door was overwhelming. I was thoroughly sick of being a responsible parent.

  Probably because my mother was so unpredictable in her craziness, I worked hard to learn how to be invisible. Any notice was a potential threat. A friend once commented I’d perfected the opposite of the dramatic entrance. Max’s never-ending defiance of all forms of normal behavior focussed constant, usually critical attention on me. I found this a form of torture. At this moment I wanted to disown this angry, impossible child who blighted my life but it would have been like walking away from a bloody car crash. I tried hard to look like the caring parent I was, thanked the desk officer and walked back to the source of the noise.

  Max was standing in the merciless glare of a fluorescent ceiling fixture. His eyes were vivid red. His repeated profanity was slurred but unmistakable. He was engulfed in a marijuana fog I could smell ten feet away. It looked as though he was trying to get his ID out of his wallet. He ignored me when I said, “Knock it off with the language, Max.”

  It wasn’t the “I’m not going to acknowledge you” attitude all kids master early on. It was as though I really didn’t exist. Unfortunately, the three uniformed officers standing around him didn’t share Max’s belief I wasn’t in the room. They turned and looked at me with disgust. It was a look I had seen often from people who assumed I had the power to control his behavior and chose not to. I felt a great desire to pound all their heads together and scream. My face must have reflected this spasm of temper because the officer who appeared to be in charge frowned at me.

  I took a deep, slow breath, willed my voice to be calm and reasonable and addressed the frowning man. “What’s the charge, Officer?” I knew it wasn’t smoking dope. Max’s school counselor had told me the only pot-related arrests in Wilmette were for dealing. This was the land of high-priced lawyers. The police had arrested people in good faith and been burned too many times. And he wasn’t picked up for curfew violation, it was just nine o’clock.

  “You’re the mother?” I nodded. “Your boy looked like he might be in trouble. We just wanted to make sure he got home okay.”

  “Thank you.” I didn’t tell them I wasn’t sure if he was living at his home at the moment. Sometimes it was just too complicated to explain Max logic. Each “fuck” spewing from Max’s mouth earned me a further glance of contempt from the officers. They finally released him into my custody. I thanked them and followed Max’s weaving figure out to the street. He lunged off in the opposite direction from my car. “You might consider going in the same direction I do in case someone’s looking out the window.” My voice was sarcastic. I had experienced more than my fill of Max’s anti-social behavior in the last 24 hours. I was sick of kindness and consideration for Max’s feelings. No one gave a damn about my feelings. Why couldn’t someone be kind to me for a change?

  “Fuck them. I’m not going home with you as long as Dad lives there. I don’t care about those pigs.”

  I felt helpless fury watching him stagger off. Damn it. I hated this life I was leading. Why did everyone assume I had taught Max to behave in a way I would never condone? I was so law abiding I even stopped at red lights if there were no cars visible for ten miles in any direction. Because of Max I had spent more time in police stations than an inept bank robber. When he turned the corner, I had the fleeting wish he would just keep walking.

  At that moment I would have given years of my life to be free of this impossible boy. I decided this had to be the low point of life with Max.

  Max and Joe both showed up at our house after school the next day. They looked normal. They had obviously had more sleep than I did.

  Max said, “What’s for supper?” This was pretty much his normal opening conversational gambit when he came home from school. He was clearly taking lessons from his father. I was so used to hearing it in some form or another I just answered with little thought. But I was tired and feeling crabby. It was hard to muster up any warm, fuzzy, nurturing feelings.

  “Chicken pot pie.” I nodded at Joe and faced Max with my hands propped on my hips, effectively blocking his path through the kitchen.

  “So what was last night’s drama all about?”

  Max elbowed me aside and started up the stairs to his room. “Nothing you would understand.”

  I moved back so Joe could follow then raised my voice so Max could hear me as he clanged up the metal stairs to his room. “Try me. You’d be surprised at what I can grasp.” But he didn’t answer.

  The other children were eating by the time Max and Joe came back down. Linda rolled her eyes. Her voice sarcastic, she said, “After your dramatic departure a couple days ago, I kind of hoped you were never planning to darken our door again.”

  Joe looked embarrassed but Max’s face didn’t change. I’m not sure he even registered her taunt. Max couldn’t multi-task. He concentrated on what was most immediately relevant. On this bitter cold winter afternoon, that was eating. I doubted if Joe’s mother had packed Max a lunch.

  When I came back downstairs after giving Andrea her bath, Max and Joe were gone. My car was still in the driveway. Joe’s car was gone. I assumed they had gone to his house. I don’t think there’s a guide for proper manners when your teenage kid has sort of run away and you know where he is and have just fed him and his run-away host. I decided I better check with Joe’s mother to find out how she felt about Max staying in her house.

  Joe answered when I called. He said his mother and father were out.

  “I just wanted to be sure they don’t mind having Max underfoot.”

  Joe made no audible sound, yet I had the odd sensation I was hearing him think. He finally said, “They like Max. He talks to them.” There was another brief silence, then he said. “The
y’re research chemists.” I decided that was as good an answer as I would get so I thanked him and hung up.

  The two boys showed up, eating like starving stevedores for the next two days. The following day Max arrived alone. He still wouldn’t talk about what had triggered his abrupt departure earlier in the week.

  When Pete got home they both acted as though nothing had ever happened. As far as I was able to determine, they didn’t discuss the incident. I never knew if the trigger that sent Max careening into the bitter cold barefoot had been so trivial that neither of them could remember it or so terrible that neither of them was willing to broach it again.

  I asked Pete again if he could recall what had caused the whole scene. He just looked at me with a blank expression on his face and went back to reading his paper without comment or any change of expression. Max’s response had been similar. The rude way they dismissed me was irritating but I was used to it. It was something my father had always done when a date came for me. Pete, Max and my dad were so similar in their ability to ignore anything they didn’t want to acknowledge, it worried me. If my father was an example of selective rudeness, we were in for a rough time.

  Linda was in the process of picking a college. Unlike the mothers of most of her friends, I didn’t have to nag her to send for brochures or get recommendations and transcripts. She obviously couldn’t wait to get away. Her main criterion was that the school be as far away from Wilmette as possible. She said, “I’m going to find a school in another part of the country. And I’m never coming home until Max leaves. He ruins everything for me.”

  I cut in. “I know he hassles you about the car but…”

  “Hassles! Hassles! He almost broke my arm yesterday when I wouldn’t give him the car keys. You said I could drive to Sally’s house after work. But he snatched the keys and bent my wrist when I wouldn’t let go.”

  “I thought you did go to Sally’s house.”

  “Yeah. But my stupid brother drove me there. We were going to go to the mall and Max wouldn’t drive us there unless we let him come with us. Then he drove us crazy talking about motorcycles. He can’t get it through his head we don’t care about motorcycles.”

  “What do your friends say when he pulls stuff like this?”

  “They’re nice about it. They all have brothers and sisters who give them a hard time.”

  “Are any of their siblings like Max?”

  “Are you kidding? No one’s as bizarre as Max. At least they believe me when I say what a nightmare he is to live with. Did you ever try to explain Max to a stranger? It’s like trying to explain a marauding water buffalo to someone who has never seen an animal larger than a rabbit.”

  Chapter 44

  I was sitting at the drawing board in my studio on the third floor across from Max’s bedroom finishing the visuals for a sales meeting at a large medical supply company. I had resigned my teaching job at the Art Institute of Chicago three years earlier but I had wanted to keep Ann two days a week. Driven by a Puritan streak, I did enough freelance artwork to pay her and pay for the psychologist Max was still seeing.

  The roar of a motorcycle down in the alley drew me to the window of Max’s room. He and another boy were admiring the boy’s motorcycle. Nothing unusual. I went back to my drawing board.

  Max’s interest in motorcycles hadn’t abated. He still had days when he followed me around the kitchen talking about motorcycles as I made supper. Or guns. He didn’t seem to care that I had no clue what he was talking about. Anyone other than Max would have realized I had no interest in either subject. I was polite because I could see both topics were important to him so I nodded a lot and made appropriate noises. I often suggested he find someone who knew what he was saying and could give him feedback but I might as well have been talking to myself.

  When I went downstairs, I was surprised to find Max alone. I didn’t hear the motorcycle leaving. That’s because it didn’t. Max had just bought it. I wasn’t really surprised. I checked to be sure he had all the correct paperwork then I sat next to him and looked him in the eye. “Let me warn you of one thing, Max. If you ever get picked up for any traffic violation or smoke dope and ride your bike, I will get rid of it if I have to take it apart and distribute the pieces in trash cans all over town.”

  “That’s not fair.” He watched me, clearly trying to figure out why I would say such a thing. He obviously failed at this because he made another try at faking me out. “You won’t know if I smoke dope.”

  I just looked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. I have a great sense of smell. I can smell pot the minute you walk in the door.”

  “How come you don’t say anything?”

  “I do. Frequently. You just tune me out.”

  He was looking worried. “You couldn’t take the bike apart. You don’t have the right tools.”

  “Max, I can take anything apart.” I sounded as nasty as I felt. “If I can’t find the right tools, there’s always the sledgehammer. I’m good with a sledgehammer.”

  I could see he believed me now. He looked horrified.

  I felt like a Borgia but surviving Max was a no-holds-barred kind of life.

  Dan, our local gun and motorcycle expert, took Max over to the park and watched him ride the bike. Dan owned three of them and still had all his body parts. I decided that qualified him as an expert. He said Max rode it well. He sounded surprised. Max tended to be ungainly but the bike seemed to smooth out his tendency to flail his arms.

  We were scheduled to leave for Florida in two weeks. We had traded in the VW bus and now had a large Oldsmobile station wagon with a trailer hitch. No trailer: Pete needed the hitch to haul canoes for Boy Scouts. Max wanted to bring the motorcycle to Florida. He checked out motorcycle carriers we could haul. Pete vetoed this. Pete had to go to New York the day before we were to leave. He said he would fly down and meet us in Fort Lauderdale. I was not looking forward to driving for three days but I was keen to get away.

  I heard the motorcycle early the next morning. It was still dark. The clock radio read 5:13. Weird. Why would Max go anywhere now? We were planning to leave as soon as rush hour was over. I went down to make coffee and found a note on the counter.

  DEAR MOM

  I AM RIDING THE BIKE TO FLORIDA. LEE IS GOING WITH ME. HE IS PAYING FOR GAS AND FOOD. I TOOK A BAG OF COOKIES AND MADE 4 SANDWICHES. WE HAVE SLEEPING BAGS. HIS PARENTS SAID IT’S OKAY. THEY WENT TO OHIO. DON’T WORRY. I WILL BE CAREFUL.

  LOVE MAX.

  I read and re-read the note, hoping it would look different if I just read it to death. I wanted to call Lee’s parents to find out if they were really in Ohio only to find their phone was unlisted. I didn’t know where they lived. I couldn’t drive to their house and hope Lee slept late so I could intercept them. My panic was kept in check by the grim stoicism I had acquired to survive Max. I knew there was nothing I could do other than have the police pick them up. And I was sure this was a potentially bad idea. I didn’t know what Max would do if he was pulled over. I may have been mentally maligning him but maybe not. So far, he had managed to go beyond my direst imaginings. I was afraid he might decide to go off road and cut across a field rather than pull over.

  I called Pete at his hotel in New York. He mulled it over.

  “Don’t call the cops. I know you hate motorcycles. But this is how boys grow up. I’m glad he had the sense to bring another kid with him. How big is he?”

  “What difference does Lee’s size make?”

  “If he’s bigger than Max, they’re less likely to be hassled.”

  “He’s no bruiser but he is bigger than Max.” I didn’t tell him the boy looked like a wimp and didn’t seem to understand the body shifts needed when riding on a two-wheeled vehicle. Max had told me Lee’s parents wouldn’t buy him a bike when he was younger because they were afraid he would get hurt. I wondered if they really knew how he was getting to Florida. I hoped they weren’t the kind of people who liked to sue.

  The trip with only thr
ee kids was peaceful except for a short, violent bout of food poisoning from a hamburger Seth ate. I stopped at a hardware store and bought a bucket, offered him sympathy but kept driving. He felt fine the next day. By then it was warm and we stopped at every Stuckey’s we passed until we had our fill of peanut brittle. This was a rite of passage when we got below the Mason-Dixon Line.

  Max arrived in Fort Lauderdale about seven hours after we did. He looked tired and triumphant. His trip home was less fortunate. The bike broke down south of Chicago. Max made an arrangement with a service station to leave his bike there for a fee. He and Lee hitched rides home. Max wanted Pete or me to rent a motorcycle carrier and drive him to the gas station where he had left his bike. Pete was unavailable. All his spare time was taken up with Boy Scouts. I refused. There were practical reasons. It would have been a long, tedious drive with a trailer attached to the car and would have required dragging Andrea and Seth with me. We had just spent three days cooped up in the car. This time Max would be with us. The dynamics were bad when these three got together. If there had been a good reason to make the effort, I would have done it and tried to make the best of it. But this was in the realm of favors and Max had used up far more than his quota of these long ago. I didn’t even feel guilty.

  Max added this to the long list of ways I had failed him. His mental list of the ways everyone in the family had wronged him was long and detailed but hopelessly skewed. It completely disregarded the idea any of us might have had any rights or even opinions of our own.

  As Pete had predicted, the motorcycle trip bolstered Max’s confidence. Now he didn’t feel guilty when he drove off to pick up a friend at midnight. There was an element of calculation in this. He always waited until I had picked up Pete from the station, served him dinner and he had gone to bed. Max knew I would only waken Pete if there were a life-threatening emergency.

  The Oldsmobile was currently our only car. In Wilmette a high end station wagon was close to invisible. I rarely heard Max leave but I often heard him come home. I protested. He looked at me with opaque eyes and brushed past me. I hid the keys. The first time I was distracted and left the keys on the counter, he took them and had a duplicate set made.