“I hate it when you use big words,” she whines.
“I hate it when you write personal ads for me.”
“Okay. Whatever. Just spell it for me.”
“M-a-c…”
“Wait a minute. Are you pulling my leg?”
“I don’t know. Does it seem longer than the other one?”
“Carmellll,” Gloria says in a familiar whine.
“Sorry, sweetie. I’m just having some fun.”
“I need to hurry up and get this done. I gotta pick up Junior from school.” Gloria makes a face, clearly annoyed.
“Junior’s in school?”
“Yeah, I finally convinced him to go.”
“And it’s your job to drive him there and pick him up?”
“How else is he going to get there? Hey can I borrow your car?”
“Gloria, Junior’s twenty-three. You gotta make him grow up sometime.”
“You know he’s my baby.”
“He’s a baby, alright,” I mutter.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Did you forget about last time he stole your bank card and cleaned out your account?”
“He can’t help it. He’s got addictions. He caught it from his father.”
“Enough about his father. What about his mother? Did you ever hear of being an enabler?”
“I am not! How can you say that?”
“And why do you need my car? Where’s yours?”
“Gilbert had an appointment today. I lent him.”
“What’s the matter, Juicy’s got a big old king size, but no car for him?” I tease.
“Guess not,” Gloria says quietly. She sniffs.
“Don’t be getting all emotional, you. I’m just looking out for you. You’re such a damn pushover.”
Gloria sniffs again.
“Come on, sis. I’ll let you have my car.”
“You will?” She brightens.
“On one account.”
“What’s that?”
“You stop harassing me about this damned ad.”
“But you didn’t even finish hearing it.”
I stand up and walk to the coffee pot, my back to Gloria, pretend I need a warm up. “Hey, Gloria, what would you do if you won ten grand like Juicy?”
“I dunno.” She’s still re-reading her ad.
“I know what I wouldn’t do,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“I wouldn’t let some man get his hands on it.”
“All men aren’t bad, you know,” she says.
“Oh yeah. You mean like Gilbert.” I bite my tongue before I say too much.
“That’s not fair,” Gloria whines. “Gilbert’s the father of my children. I have an obligation to work things out.”
“Gloria, your kids are grown. Cut the strings.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” Gloria looks away as if she realizes what she’s just said. On the record, Jeremy’s an official case of father unknown.
When he was a toddler, Jeremy loved when Gilbert would come to the house. As soon as Gilbert walked in the door, Jeremy would waddle up to him and hold out his arms to be picked up. It was clear to me – Jeremy wanted a man in his life. Then Jeremy started to talk. He couldn’t say Gilbert. Instead, he’d run around the house shouting “Guilt! Guilt!” Ironic and funny, until Gloria heard him one day.
“What’s he saying?” she asked, squinting her eyes at Jeremy. “What?”
I couldn’t look at Gloria that time. Shortly after that, Gilbert stopped coming over.
“Winning that money around here would be a curse,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Like stink-bait. Guys like old Gilbert would come sniffing around looking for their meal ticket,” I say.
“Oh, Carmel.” Gloria sounds disappointed. “So cynical.”
“Not cynical,” I correct her. “Practical.”
Gloria gets a dreamy look in her eye. “Well, if I won that money I’d do something that would make us all get along. I’d start by sending Junior on one of them ministries to get him healed.”
I laugh. “Gloria. I don’t think being gay’s a disease.”
“Junior is not gay,” Gloria says forcefully. “I told you that already.” Then more softly, “He’s confused.”
“Does the booze help him get un-confused?”
She ignores me. “Then I’d buy me a big old bedroom set.”
“Oh Lord,” I roll my eyes.
“And Gilbert would come back to me.”
“Hallelujah,” I say, waving my hands in the air.
“And we’d spend all day in that king-size bed, like rich people, with fancy feather pillows and duvets and other French-sounding stuff that you can get for beds.”
“Well, you know what they say?”
“And we’d eat bonbons from a red satin box shaped like a heart,” she goes on.
“A woman without a man…”
“Bonbons are French too.”
“Is like a fish without a bicycle.”
“Oooh. I can just picture it. Can’t you, Carmel?”
“I can, and it’s making me nauseous.”
“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gloria says, snapping out of her daydream.
“You know what I’d do? For real?” I ask.
“Hmmm.” I can tell Gloria doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to hear me say it.
“I’d pack up all my stuff into my rusty old Civic and drive as far as that money took me.”
“That’s what I’ll put!” Gloria exclaims, picking up her pencil.
“I wouldn’t stop until I was broke.”
“Loves to travel,” she says as she writes.
“I’d only stop if the wheels fell off my car.” I squint my eyes and talk dreamily, looking out the window at my lush green grass, at the Civic sitting in the gravel driveway. But no amount of squinting can make that car look better.
“Although interested in travel would cover Jeremy off in Ja – wherever.”
“And then I’d buy more wheels,” I persist with my story.
“We can’t really say interested in live chickens,” Gloria ponders, chewing on the pencil.
“I’d drive to the edge of the earth and look over.”
“That would make you sound like a nut…” she trails off.
“I’d go until my car fell apart and I was so broke that I didn’t have a hope of ever getting back.”
I feel Gloria staring at me. “I guess I can’t really say sensitive, can I?” she asks.
“Hopefully I’d be lost too. Just to be sure.”
“Not if I’m going to maintain honest.”
“That’s how damned bad I want to get away from here.”
My kitchen is silent. I keep my eyes on the window.
Finally, Gloria says, “You’re always so sure.” Her voice is soft.
“Hmmm?” I pretend I don’t hear.
“Don’t you ever have doubts?” she asks, picking at her fingernail.
A large cloud rolls quietly over the sun, casting a dim shadow on my front yard, making my “grass” look a little less lush.
I stand up and toss Gloria my keys.
“Don’t smoke in the car.”
just pretending
In my family I have a mother, a father and a sister, none of whom are real. Just like me. As if we’re all just pretending. About my fake mom, my so-called dad says that the sixties came and went and nobody bothered to inform her. She wears Birkenstock sandals, droopy socks and a horrible patchwork denim skirt that she wears high up over her pot belly, which stubbornly resists valiant efforts to make it budge, efforts that include hours too numerous to count standing on her head in the vain hope that it will force the migration of belly fat into the area of her flat chest. Tiny shoulders and a skinny neck incongruously support a massive head of fuzzy hair, once shot through with clever streaks of white but now gone nearly completely grey. She gives the impression
of a dandelion gone to seed. I vow never to be such a hopeless case. I’m secretly pleased we’re not really related.
She’s a socially conscious vegetarian with armpit hair and skin that smells like hemp. She’s no Einstein or genius. So last fall, after I met Joe Jackson on Geeks and Social Justice and we just kind of hit it off, she never caught on to what I was up to. She would drop me off at the library on campus, never suspecting that I was doing anything other than “studying.” She liked the idea of me being smart, even if she didn’t understand it. I had a floor I liked to go to in the main library. It was quiet, in a conspiratorial way. You knew people were all over the place, in the carrels and browsing the stacks, but no one made any noise. Sometimes I fell asleep there, numbed by fat books with old, smelly pages. No one asked me questions, and I could be whoever I wanted there; maybe I was even being myself.
Joe Jackson. I fell in love with his name. Can you admire a person for their name? Probably not. You can admire their parents for thinking up an agreeable name, so I admired Joe Jackson’s parents for their baby-naming aptitude. Then again, it was hard to imagine that Joe Jackson was ever a baby. He was at least six feet tall and all angles and points and unusual creases. Even his body structure was clever. I had to admire his parents for their engineering abilities as well.
When we met, Joe Jackson and me were logged on to Geeks at the same time, debating (but really sort of agreeing) over the whole English hegemony thing, hogging the group chat when Learningnerd posted Get a room! and we agreed to take our conversation private, both of us duly ignoring the sexual suggestion in Learningnerd’s post and pretending a purely intellectual interest in each other. Finally, we agreed that since we lived in the same city, we should meet in person to continue our debate. “Discuss the issues.”
He brought some papers from his school, something called Students for a Democratic University (turned out he was WAY older than me, but I never did tell him I was only fourteen), and then he proceeded to try to convince me that democracy is a constructed concept that doesn’t really exist in any practicable sort of way. I lost him after a while but continued to nod and say hmm as though giving thoughtful consideration to his arguments. Soon, I realized he didn’t really need me to be listening, so I concentrated instead on watching his pointy bits as he gestured here and there over his remarkable thesis.
“I plan to pursue this more intently in my graduate work,” he said.
I could see he took himself way too seriously, but still an inexplicable longing came over me, made me want to watch his every move and listen, uncomprehending, to his voice. It was both delightful and dismaying. There was a time I would have thought myself too smart for that.
Joe Jackson and I continued in this way, week upon week. He would bring books or papers, editorials and articles, presenting them to me as suitors in the past might have presented flowers or boxes of candy. Between our meetings I would log on to the Geeks site to try to catch a glimpse of him, but I found him there less and less.
We walked on campus, where he held my hand awkwardly at first and then with more ardent concentration. I found his attempts funny but didn’t dare laugh because of how serious he was. I let him hold my hand, my fingers laced between his long fingers and bony knuckles, as though I’d given my hand up for good. After a while of walking like that it felt a bit like being towed around like sea-drift, but I didn’t know how to get my hand back and didn’t really think I wanted to, except my fingertips were getting numb, not to mention sweaty. I imagined pulling my arm inside my shirt and leaving him holding my empty sleeve.
Alternately, he was like a bright spot that I was drawn to and a sore, sinking place in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t make up my mind. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was acting dumb and wanting more of the same.
Someone tied up a baby goat near a patch of grass outside the student residences and the goat’s back was spray-painted blue. He gave me an explanation for that, but I forgot. Instead, the image of the blue goat settled like dust in my imagination.
“My dad’s a goat farmer,” I blurted. “Well, he was,” I added. “He died.” I looked at my sneakers sadly. Joe Jackson didn’t know what to say, so I filled in the silence. “We had chickens too,” I said. “On the farm.” We didn’t have a farm, my dad wasn’t a goat farmer, and of course he wasn’t dead. At least, my pretend dad wasn’t any of those things. But somewhere, out there, I had a real family, and anything could be true. Even a goat-farming dead father. But my counterfeit mother’s sister, my aunt Gabbie, did have a farm with goats and chickens, and we spent a lot of time there when I was young, so that was where my story came from. “We used to have to catch the chickens,” I said, trying to impress Joe, but my confession-lies weren’t getting much of a response out of him. I didn’t know where I was going with this, but I decided to try harder. “Once, my mother chopped the rooster’s head right off, right in front of us. Just to teach us a lesson.”
“What? Really?” Joe said, disbelieving. Finally, he seemed to be listening.
“We had a cousin, Norman, a small little fatty, who we teased.”
Joe Jackson’s gaze drifted to a group of girls sitting on the grass, talking. My voice got louder as we walked past them, and I stepped up my story.
“There was a rooster who chased us and pecked our legs until they bled. Roosters can be vicious,” I said, tugging his hand in emphasis. “So me and my sister, Trish, we climbed a hay bale to get away from the rooster. And Norman comes to try and get up on the bale with us, but Trish wouldn’t let him. She pretends she can’t pull him up. Then she stands up on the bale and shouts, ‘Run, fat boy, run,’ while poor Norman runs around the yard trying to get away from the rooster.” This part of the story is mostly true. I leave out the part where I joined Trish’s chant.
Joe Jackson was listening, but I had the impression he was just waiting for me to finish so he could talk more about his thesis.
“My mom comes along and catches us. She hauls us down from the bale and makes us go with her to the chopping stump. She keeps on saying, ‘I’m going to teach you a lesson,’ over and over while she shakes Trish by the arm. She makes us wait there.” I shook my hand free from Joe’s and continued. “And a few seconds later she comes back with the axe in one hand and the rooster in the other.” I held up one hand and then the other, as if to demonstrate how she wielded these two items.
Joe Jackson caught his breath and I escalated my story, making sure to include as many horrible details as possible. I told him, “For some reason, the rooster didn’t struggle. I don’t know if he felt the authority in her hand, gripped around his neck.” I shook my fist. “Or maybe he knew it was futile to fight back.” I looked at Joe; his face was pale. At least I had his attention.
“Without saying a thing, my mother held his body on the chopping stump, her hand on his chest. I bet she could feel his heart beating. If you had asked me before, I would have said she didn’t have something like that in her. Boy, she sure surprised me.” I shook my head and gave a low laugh that very nearly sounded sinister. “Without a second to let us catch our breath, chop, she did it.” I made a chopping motion with my right hand into my left palm. Joe flinched.
“The little head rolled one way and the body went the other way, blood pumping out of his neck.” I laughed out loud, spit flinging from my lips. “Finally, the body fell over and the head stopped rolling.”
“It was dead silent,” I told Joe, “and then Trish says, ‘Cool.’ And she looks at our mom and says, ‘Can you do it again?’” I laughed when I delivered the last line, as if it were the punch line to a lengthy joke.
“Wow,” Joe Jackson finally said. “Your sister – what a jerk!” I had expected Joe Jackson to laugh when I told him about Trish’s response. That’s what other people did when I told them that story – they laughed. But just then I remembered that Joe Jackson was a vegetarian. The story must have resonated differently with him, I thought. And yet, I wanted something more from Joe Jac
kson, at that moment, but I’m not sure what. So I made up an addendum to the story, on the spot, to try to really impress him.
“That night, my mother did a terrible thing,” I said. My face was hot with the lie, but I was enjoying the deception. “She served up his tough little carcass for supper, his whole body – it still looked like him! He was plucked and roasted to a shiny brown and laid out on the good serving platter.” I made myself stop there. I was getting carried away.
“Did you eat him?” Joe asked, horrified.
“Well, they did.” I pointed my finger in the air at my imaginary family. “I said I was sick, and my dad let me leave the table.”
“That’s an awful story,” he said. “Your family sounds crazy.” We didn’t talk much after that, and we didn’t hold hands any more that day. I knew I had crossed a line, some invisible line, but I felt justified, mad that he was so sensitive, offended that he made me feel like I’d done something wrong. Who does he think he is, anyway? I kept asking myself. I realized later what upset me most was that he had dared to judge my pretend family.
The next time I met up with Joe Jackson, he was cool to me – still put off, I guess, about the chicken story. I made it up to him by letting him kiss me outside the biology building, with its freaky sponges and sucking, amorphous creatures. He bent down and I stood on my tiptoes so our lips could touch. I’d never kissed a boy before, unless you counted Ricky Gerolamy in grade six, but that was on a dare and neither of us even got off our bikes. Besides, that was gross. Kissing Joe Jackson turned out to be nice. His lips were warm and soft. He pressed his body against mine. My stomach turned somersaults. After, we went inside to check out the aquarium. I think we both felt better.
It was almost the end of the term. I had the vague understanding he was planning to go home when his exams were finished. Home meant back to his small town, with whoever his family was – he refused to talk about them, even when I asked. He expected me to take his leaving as a matter of fact and so I did, hiding my feelings of rejection and impending loneliness.
He invited me to a year-end party in one of the residences. The party involved dressing up in your best clothes and bringing the cheapest bottle of wine you could possibly buy. Joe Jackson brought the wine. I packed my outfit from last Halloween into my backpack – a retro white ‘70s tuxedo that I thought was funny. My mother dropped me at the library, where I would be “studying,” and made sure I had bus fare to get home. I changed in the public bathroom and ran across campus to meet Joe Jackson.
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