Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “We have five, right now,” said Khadijah. “My mom has a friend who knows a lot of people who— We couldn’t have found them ourselves. Three of them are out here, one’s in Boston, one’s in New York.”

  “I’m so psyched for you,” I said, clawing crescent-shaped wounds in my leg. “These baguettes are choice.”

  “Do people want huge loud music when they smash the house?” Julie asked Todd.

  “I don’t care deeply about what they want, it’s that I want to make it weird and delicate and mournful. I suspect that that’s what they, the patrons, so to speak, really want, deep down, when they break their houses. Also, it’s let’s not fuck with the neighbors too hard by playing something super fucking loud. Also, Khadijah has made such beautiful houses, the music should feel sad when you see them destroyed. She’s such a masterful craftsman.”

  “Shut up,” Khadijah said. To us: “He made this top.”

  The top sported not one but three small mustard-colored owls. As the dinner wore on, with Khadijah and Todd explaining the difficulties of long distance, I felt this reunion was not enough. I wanted more one-on-one conversation with Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn after so many years of silence, with so many years more of silence to come. When everyone was drinking Thai iced coffee, the meal winding down, I found it necessary to continuously remind myself to sit up straight. To hide my grief, I went to the men’s room.

  The men’s room was organized around a communal urinary trough. Water cascaded down the tiles into a basin of gray stones, to which stones there must have been attributed some cleansing or deodorizing or muffling effect. They coated the floor of the trough, so that you peed on them, rather than directly into the trough itself. I checked that no one was looking, and scooped up the most substantial stone I could find. I washed it in the sink with cucumber soap from the dispenser, dried it, and put it in my pocket.

  I approached the host at the front. “You don’t have a Sharpie or a marker around, by any chance, do you?” I asked. “Sorry to be a pain.”

  This wasn’t breaking any of the rules Khadijah and I had just made, I reminded myself.

  The host stroked his own cheek with one hand, to help himself remain calm. “No problem,” he said, and pawed through a drawer in his little podium until he came up with a black Sharpie and thrust it violently into my hand.

  I scrawled a circled A on the stone. The horizontal shaft was crooked. It looked more like a geometry proof than an anarchy sign. But Khadijah would remember the object to which it referred. We couldn’t have the kinds of conversations I wanted us to have, but I could leave her with this. I don’t actually know you, but I see something in you no one else can see. You were a rebel, remember? I squeezed the stone, to feel its hardness, and thought: You were like this.

  Back at our table, Khadijah was debunking a celebrated whalebone sculptor, Todd and Julie listening with their hands on their chins. None of them were looking at me. As I sat down, I slipped the stone into Khadijah’s apple-green-handled tote bag, which was leaning against her chair.

  When the bill arrived, Todd seized the plastic folder, held it to his chest, and took his wallet from his back pocket. I put my credit card on the table. Khadijah took her tote bag from the floor and rooted for her purse. She stared into the bag, gape-mouthed. I could tell she had the stone cupped in her hand.

  Todd was now flagging down the waiter, oblivious. Julie was trying to get Todd to take her credit card. They’d seen nothing.

  Khadijah dropped the stone back in the bag. I could hear it whish against the cloth. She turned her face from me, to stare at the wall.

  Outside, the four of us embraced and told each other we would do it again.

  As I drove Julie’s VW home, she pointed out a clear passage through traffic in the left lane of Olympic Boulevard. I steered sharply, and we were in it, and Koreatown moved so fast outside our window it became abstract. We floated past Authentic Korean, where the children had been drawn. The white neon Authentic Korean sign flickered spastically, a little life.

  When we got home, the house was spotless. A woman came and cleaned every other Saturday. She did the laundry, full of foul gym clothes, washed the sheets and towels, polished the floors—I didn’t know everything she did, and neither did Julie. We only recognized its effect. The clear surfaces, the neon smell of cleaning agents, the dustless clarity of the air. I walked in through the front door and looked through the high-raftered living room into the wide marble kitchen, and remembered the Bank of Boston, how it had asked to be smashed, that spring day in Wattsbury, with the stone. I’d been thinking Julie and I should have sex to put Khadijah behind us. But now I wanted the punch of honesty—the rock through the glass.

  “I did something wrong tonight,” I said.

  Julie turned to face me, sucking her lips. I took a breath. I told her about the stone from the urinal trough, the Sharpie, the look on Khadijah’s face as she scooped it from her bag.

  Julie’s neck twitched as she listened. Finally she flinched as if an insect had bitten her. She took the rose-hip soap bottle from the kitchen sink and threw it against the wall. She dropped to her knees and pulled me down to sit next to her, our backs to the island.

  “From now on, she and I don’t talk,” I said, and she squeezed my hand like she was escorting me from a shark tank.

  The security system issued a copacetic beep. I had lived in the house long enough to know that this meant Current Setting: Armed. Julie had hit the button that conveyed we were in for the night. The alarm would go off if somebody breached our invisible wall.

  I harbored a family feeling toward the security system, this robot that kept us safe. Once, I had pushed the button that caused it to declare its setting aloud, its voice emanating from a small, powerful speaker, and it had spoken a little like David Byrne. I felt that even though Julie and I were the only humans in the house, we shared our home, even now, sitting on our kitchen floor on an autumn night, bare feet on cool tile, with buzzing presences: the Oenervians in the picture frames; Jeremy and his cohort; the children on the mirror; the ambitions that hovered over us like animated billboards; the shame of our little betrayals; the possible lives we’d abandoned for each other, for this.

  6.

  What Kind of Honesty Do You Think Is Going to Come out of Me?

  Three days later, Rachel and my mother flew in for the party celebrating the third-season premiere of Julie vs. Animals. This was a form of tribute. They wanted to show they didn’t look down on Julie for making television, although my mother hadn’t said this explicitly.

  “I’m curious to know what your life is like in Los Angeles, and I hope to come to appreciate it,” she had said on the phone. “Even though it’s probably my idea of hell, over there.”

  My mother had asked my sister to join her pilgrimage, and Rachel had said yes. They’d both met Julie several times, but in Wattsbury, down in the snow and the smell of soba noodles, my mother’s turf. Rachel would be nice to Julie without being cowed by Julie in Julie’s own fiefdom. Rachel would be Virgil to my mother’s Dante, in Probably-Hell. In the thirteen years since the divorce, Rachel had filled the spousal role in my mother’s life, the role of protector, of Dad.

  I picked them up at LAX while Julie spent the morning with her parents. The two families planned to converge on the Grove for lunch, but my mother’s plane was on time, traffic from the airport nil, and we arrived forty-five minutes early. Rachel and my mother squinted at the Grove, with its fountain, trolley car, its Mediterranean village, its cobblestones. Its “Farmers Market,” a dense village of outdoor taco places, bars, and chocolatiers.

  Rachel noticed an Anthropologie across the cobblestoned boulevard from the Apple store and informed my mother she was going to buy her a dress.

  “Here, Mom,” she said, “is where we will maximize your chances of finding the one good man in Wattsbury.”

  My mother unfolded her damaged golden glasses and put them on to inspect the goods through the window. “This
smacks a little bit of internalized oppression, pathetically trying to be youthful,” she said. “But that might be an interesting kind of pathetic to try being.”

  It was in Anthropologie that we ran into the Oenervians. Both of our parties had arrived at the Grove early, and each had happened upon Anthropologie unbeknownst to the other. Julie and Vanda were browsing neo-Victorian lampshades, Samson standing apart with his arms crossed, bemused, manly.

  When I saw them, my mother was already modeling an outfit for Rachel. “It’s you, Mom. It’s sexy.” My sister’s tone was diagnostic. “You have these amazing gams. You gotta show them a little.”

  “Gams?” My mother made one of her neutrally inquisitive therapist faces. “What are gams?”

  “Legs. Your legs. Get the dress. Get the hippie top, sure, but also get the dress.”

  “They might be very expensive. I can’t even find the price tag, can you believe how stupid I’m becoming?” I was delighted to hang out with Rachel, pleased to hang out with my mother. But part of me, slightly more powerful than the part of me happy to see them, urged me to wait a few more moments before saying hello to the Oenervians, who had not seen me yet. I had an apprehension that the Paquette/Beckermans and the Oenervians would not swoon for each other.

  “I can afford it, Mom,” Rachel said.

  “Are you in a long-term financial position to go around buying people dresses?”

  “I could not drive around L.A. gathering women and buying them dresses in Anthropologie, no. But this particular dress for you, yeah.”

  “How stable is your job, really?” My mother took off her glasses and looked at Rachel gimlet-eyed.

  “I work for the state of Massachusetts.”

  It was time to face the Oenervians like a man. I swallowed and called Julie’s name. My mother’s face took on the same amusement and triumph it’d taken on when Khadijah had called in 1994. When I introduced her to Vanda and Samson, she and Vanda exchanged smiles that were mildly incredulous, as if they were saying “We actually birthed these people.” I could feel myself floating to earth; there were stores of humility and selflessness in our mothers’ faces, a variety of feeling I had forgotten about. Much the same way I had forgotten about snow.

  My sister purchased the semisexy dress for my mother, and we made our way as a group of six through the Grove.

  Our destination was a restaurant on the far side of La Brea. On Rainwater’s lime-colored walls there were large black-and-white photographs of monsoons in progress. A waiter sat us at a big table in the middle of the room.

  “Ms. Beckerman,” said Julie, “that dress looked amazing on you. Your daughter is an excellent personal shopper.”

  “Please, call me Virginia,” said my mother. “But thank you.”

  “Beckerman?” Samson addressed his daughter. “I thought it was Paquette.”

  “We have different last names,” I explained. “I got my father’s and Rachel got my mother’s.”

  “To be equitable,” Virginia said, smiling at the Oenervians, who were all Oenervian. They nodded, serious, open-minded. Rachel reached out and adjusted my mother’s glasses, to convey that she was being weird.

  My mother still taught psychology at a small, nonselective college in the Berkshire Hills—a department at a fancier school might not have allowed her to remain openly Jungian and Buddhist. She was wearing a red wool dress with a high waist and short sleeves, and the same John Lennon spectacles she’d worn for fifteen years and repaired with an equally ancient eyeglass-repair kit she kept in the old desk given to us by my father’s friend from the Lampoon. (The desk had remained with my mother in the divorce.) To be Jungian is to feel at the bottom of one’s soul the permanence of problems. (“Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really finally die away. Even Paul was left with a thorn in the flesh.” “The Stages of Life,” 1930–31.) To be Buddhist is to feel the impermanence of everything else. The glasses perched on my mother’s nose crookedly; there would have been a kind of futility, for my mother, in throwing them away and buying a pair that would sit, for a while, noncrookedly, before they, too, fell into disrepair. Her hazelnut curls, half gray now, exploded from behind her head, as if she were falling through life, the wind blowing her hair around her as she fell. Her face signaled bemusement at this flight, when it wasn’t marred by flashes of dismay at same.

  Across the table sat Vanda and Samson, engineers, Vanda of investment portfolios, Samson of medical technology. They solved things, or so I imagined. The Oenervians looked aerodynamic to me, as if they were propelled upward through life, as if air pressure smoothed their hair and clothing as they rose. Vanda’s hair was a dark shell combed backward from her forehead. Samson was owlish in his round tortoiseshell glasses, his thick, side-parted black curls flat against his head, his hands folded. His eyebrows, bushy and soft, were impossibly still. (My own father’s eyebrows were rarely idle; even when his mouth relaxed, his eyebrows continued insinuating.)

  “My ex-husband and I agreed to the different last names before we got married,” my mother continued.

  “A fair contract, right at the start,” said Vanda. “I applaud you.”

  An auspicious beginning to lunch. Julie kept her chin down, her eyes up, a dedicated psychology student at the seminar table, clinging to the professor’s every word. Rachel, for her part, did not fight Julie for alpha. Lanky, like me, she assumed a laborer’s slouch in her chair, legs stretched to one side, an arm slung over the back; in her jeans and plaid shirt, she was, for the moment, relatively butch, Julie’s amicable foil. Her hair, which she’d recently had pixie-cut, made us look even more alike than usual. We looked like half a band. I placed my palm on the top of her head and took it off again.

  “Rachel, Julie tells me you have an interesting job,” said Vanda, “working on poverty.”

  “Oh, well,” said Rachel, “I try to keep people off the streets. Try being the word.” Everyone looked at Rachel, inviting her to continue. Rolls arrived with green flecks. “What we’re working on now is, no matter what, you don’t let people bum around in a shelter. It’s counterintuitive, there’s a part of us that wants to believe there’s someplace you can always go. But we’ve found, that on Christmas, shelters are empty. People have some other situation they can go to temporarily. And it’s far, far more expensive to put somebody in a shelter for a few nights than it is to pay somebody’s rent. So we’re designing a program where it’s, if you have a problem paying your rent, you notify the state, we pay it.”

  Murmurs around the table, of “So interesting.”

  “Like, there’s this ritual, with underclass teenage girls in Boston—when you find out you’re pregnant, you go and spend the night in a shelter, so you can get Section Eight housing later on. But we don’t let you get evicted, and we tear down the shelter, which is crawling with bugs and criminals anyway.”

  “See, I think that’s genius,” said Julie. “God, Rachel, you’re doing something so real and important. I’m just glad there are people as smart as you figuring out new ways to take care of poor children, instead of making TV. Everything here is spit in the wind by comparison.” She turned to my mother. “You must be so proud of her.”

  My mother was. She was blushing. “Your show isn’t spit,” she said. “It’s educational.”

  “It’s fascinating, this policy,” said Samson. “But if you’re paying people’s rent, my question is, There must be a mechanism in place for preventing abuse of the system?”

  “It’s complicated to get into,” said Rachel, batting away the question with the back of her hand. “But even if people do get some free rent they don’t totally need, it’s cheaper for Massachusetts than maintaining all these shelters, where you have to have security and maintenance.”

  For the first, time, Samson’s eyebrows jumped. A twitch of skepticism. Immediately, the eyebrows fell back under his control and went still.

  “The ritual of going to
the shelter when you get pregnant,” I observed, “is kind of like the upper-middle-class ritual of moving back in with your parents after your first internship and you can’t find a job in New York, or whatever. Or it’s like the ghetto version of being all but dissertation in grad school and letting your parents help with rent. It’s like, Time to fall back on the Man. Just listening to Rachel talk about it, I want to go take a month off at my dad’s loft.”

  My mother tipped back her head and released a laugh that started at a high note and swooped. “Or my mom’s house,” I amended. My mother smirked and patted my hand.

  “Um hmm,” said Rachel. “I’m not sure the analogy holds, Josh. You clearly want to crash at Dad’s. That might be understood as ‘falling back on the Man.’ But I would hesitate to characterize a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl in Dorchester as wanting a week at a shelter.”

  Vanda spoke. “I think what Josh was saying,” she offered, “was that they’re both cultural habits. The struggle is to figure out a way to help a person break a habit, exercise will.”

  Rachel opened her mouth to respond to this incriminatingly Ayn Randish comment. Beneath the table, I kicked her solidly in the calf. She closed her mouth, fished the lemon wedge from her water, and bit it.

  But my mother, unlike Rachel, could not be prevented from saying whatever she was inclined to say. I didn’t feel comfortable kicking her.

  “I respect that, Vanda,” my mother said. “But who do you blame, when a teenage girl from a marginalized minority group in a culturally isolated urban area plays into an economic system designed to exploit her?” My mother’s voice was friendly, and I believe she wanted both to defend Rachel and to clarify Vanda’s position. But Vanda’s expression soured. It was the discrepancy between my mother’s words and her conciliatory tone, I think, that rankled: academic condescension. Vanda studied one of the monsoon photographs.

  “Of course it’s very sad,” said Samson. “But ultimately, there are people who make themselves something out of nothing every day in this country.”