Rules for Life

by Darlene Ryan

  You might say the sparks were there between us from the beginning.

  “So what’s the potential evil stepmother like?” he asked.

  “That’s the thing. I hardly even know her. How can my father marry someone I barely even know?” I flopped against the cushions again. “We’re having dinner tonight.”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Her name’s Anne. She started working on the show back in January,” I said.

  “You mean the blond with the big—” I shot him a warning look “—teeth?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “You never see Anne on air.”

  “Maybe you’ll like her.”

  “Yeah and maybe I’ll spontaneously combust too.”

  “Oh, come on, Izzy. Give her a chance.” Rafe gave me his best pretty-please smile. Easy for him. His parents have been together about a week less than forever.

  “I never told you that my mom and dad were married twice, did I?” I said, sliding down so I was sitting on my tailbone.

  “What do you mean, ‘twice’?” Rafe said.

  “They were married and they had Jason. Then they got divorced. I think Jason was about two. Then a couple of years later they got married again and had me.”

  “But then they stayed married.”

  “Only because my mother was crazy about him. And she could do everything. So it didn’t matter that he’d get caught up in some project and stay in his shop for two days, or that he didn’t notice Jason had flushed someone’s shoes down the toilet.” I sat up. “See, husbands are like your dad. They have practical cars and sensible hair and they come home for supper. That’s just not my dad.”

  “If your dad gets married, it could be great,” Rafe said. “A whole new life.”

  Except I didn’t want a new life, thank you very much. I liked the old one.

  “Kiss me,” I said. “I have to go home and get ready.”

  Rafe leaned forward and his mouth came down on mine and his tongue slid inside. For a second I couldn’t breathe and it seemed as though I could hear the rush of hummingbird wings in my ears. And the thought flashed through my mind: Was that what Dad felt when he kissed Anne?

  4

  I stood in the bathroom, one leg hiked up on the sink, carefully pulling the razor up my left shin. Tricky work. The Lady Sophisticuts razor (cuts, get it?) was supposed to adjust to the contours of my curves. What it generally did was knick me somewhere. I’d been suckered by a catchy TV jingle again.

  I thought about pitching the Sophisticuts and swiping my dad’s razor. It was his fault I was doing this anyway. But Rule #23 got in the way: A woman should have her own razor and her own bank account.

  Somehow I managed to shave both legs without severing any major veins. Then I filled the tub with hot water and eucalyptus oil and soaked until I was totally pruned. Spencer wandered in while I was drying off. The eucalyptus made him sneeze. He swished his ginger tail at me and stalked off.

  What to wear? Skinny blue skirt with the slit because if I’d gone to all the trouble to shave my legs, then they were going to show. Purple shirt because it was my favorite. The bracelet Rafe gave me for Christmas—a string of amber beads—because I always wore that.

  Then I took down my wooden treasure box from the top of my dresser and sat on the bed with it. It was about a foot long, maybe eight or nine inches wide. Set into the wooden top was a teddy bear, sitting with his head tipped to one side. It took forty-three pieces of wood—six different kinds—just to make that bear.

  My dad made the box when I was nine. It’s what he does. He makes things out of wood—mostly furniture. It seems bizarre that anyone would pay hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars for a chest or a bed, but they do. Of course a lot of the stuff he makes now is for the TV show.

  I lifted the lid of my box and took out my mother’s silver and amethyst bracelet. I fastened it on my arm above the beads and put the box back. (Rule #20: Chocolate chip cookies and good jewelry go with everything.) My mother might be dead, but she was still my mother. I knew that, even if my dad seemed to have forgotten.

  I did the fast makeup thing and twisted my hair back into a low knot.

  Ready. Now what? It was only five to six.

  I wasn’t good at waiting. I ended up at the computer trying to finish the script for my video. I got so into the words I didn’t even hear Dad and Anne come in.

  Suddenly, there they were. We kind of smiled at each other awkwardly because we had met before, but we didn’t know each other. Anne had short, dark hair that curled all over her head. She was a couple of inches shorter than me and at least seven or eight years younger than Dad.

  But what struck me was that she was nothing like my mother. My mother had shiny blond hair the color of corn silk. And even when she was mad at you, her eyes never stopped smiling. She was almost as tall as Dad, with long, long legs. He’d tease her and say he only fell in love with her because she had legs up to her neck.

  “What are you working on?” Anne asked, gesturing at the computer.

  I gave her the short version of my project.

  “It would make a good history project, as well,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, shutting down the computer.

  “I have my dad’s collection of 78s,” she said. “Let me know if you need some music from that era.”

  Seventy-eights?

  “Vinyl records,” she explained, guessing from the “duh” look on my face that I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Old ones. And I have a turntable to play them on.”

  “Um, thanks,” I said. Great. Here she was being nice to me and I hadn’t even decided yet if I wanted to like her.

  I turned to my dad. “Is Jason meeting us here?” I asked.

  “I left him three messages but I haven’t heard from him.”

  My first thought was that I was going to kill Jason for leaving me to do this all by myself. That’s what Jason did. He acted like a shit sometimes, and where did that leave me? Because he was three years older he’d gotten to be the selfish, rebellious one, and by the time I came along, all that was left in the box was nice.

  And then for a second I wondered if he was out getting wrecked somewhere. Had he fallen off the wagon, off the straight and clean path he was on these days? That was mean of me. I wondered if I was ever going to stop thinking that way.

  “Ready?” Dad asked.

  “Sure,” I said. I was a lot more ready than Anne, who looked queasy and uncomfortable.

  We had dinner at a little Greek restaurant. Anne and Dad talked about the show and I talked about school and we were all very polite.

  I was back in my jeans with my feet on the back of the couch and my head on the floor—I was hoping for inspiration to hit so I could finish my script—when Dad came in from taking Anne home. They’d dropped me off first.

  “So, what do you think?” Dad asked, picking up the pile of mail from the table by the door and shuffling through it.

  “I told you what I think already,” I said.

  “So tell me again.”

  “Okay. I don’t see why you want to get married.”

  He looked up. “How can you feel that way now that you’ve gotten to know Anne?”

  “The only thing I know about Anne is that she has a collection of old records and she doesn’t like black olives.”

  He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “All I want is to be happy. I want us to be a real family again. Is that so bad?”

  “Well, what have we been up to now, Dad?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “I don’t think I do,” I said stiffly. “What’s so wrong with our life?” I dropped my legs to the floor and sat up. “We always have birthday cake, and turkey at Thanksgiving. We have clean underwear and toilet paper and all the bills get paid on time. We’re a family. You and Jason and me. Even Mom. She’s still a part of this family even if she is dead. No one’s in jail. No one’s getting st
oned on the street—not even Jason anymore. What are we if we’re not a real family?”

  “I want a wife,” he said, dropping the mail back on the table. “I want someone to share my life with, someone to talk to.”

  “We talk,” I said.

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “I know, but …” His voice trailed off.

  “I mean, I thought we had a deal. I could tell you anything and you could tell me anything.”

  “And I don’t want you to stop talking to me,” Dad said. “It’s just that … I’m the parent … I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to be telling you so much.” He held up a hand like he was trying to block any objection I might make. “And I know it’s my fault. I told Anne that.”

  My Greek salad began to burn in my stomach. “What do you mean, ‘told Anne’? Told her what?”

  “I asked her opinion, that’s all.”

  “She doesn’t even know me,” I said. My voice sounded sharper and louder than I’d meant it to.

  Dad blew out a breath. “You’re missing the point,” he said. “For God’s sake, Izzy, you’re sixteen years old and you know everything about my life.”

  “And you know everything about mine. So?”

  “I’m your father. It’s too much information.”

  I wrapped one arm around myself. “Is that what you think? Or is that what Anne thinks?”

  He shook his head. “We’re completely offtrack here. This has nothing to do with Anne.”

  Nothing to do with Anne? I almost asked what color the sky was in his world.

  “It has everything to do with her,” I said. I was breathing hard, trying not to scream at him. “You never had a problem with us talking about stuff before. You never wanted to get married again. And you were happy—or at least that’s how you acted.”

  “People change. I’ve changed. I told you that,” he snapped. A vein in his left temple pulsed. “I love Anne. And I want us to be a family the way it used to be. That’s not wrong.”

  “The way it used to be,” I snorted. “You mean Mom and Jason and me, ’cause you were never around.”

  “Stop right there,” he shouted. His arm whipped out and one finger pointed at me. “I have listened to you, now you listen to me. It’s my life. I love Anne. She loves me. I’m going to marry her.”

  I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my mouth to be able to string words into sentences.

  The silence seemed to push us farther apart. I thought about jumping up and launching myself, wailing and flailing, at him. But I didn’t. I think about doing those kinds of things, but I never follow through. I don’t know if I’m too practical or too chickenshit.

  “I have some work to do,” Dad said finally, in a flat voice. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I stared at a chair instead of him.

  “We’re not done,” he said from the doorway.

  I looked down at my right hand. The two pages of script I’d been holding were twisted into a mangled paper rope.

  I felt the same way.

  5

  I sat on the radiator in Mrs. Taylor’s English class, trying to soak up some heat. Inside, the pipes clanged and banged and shook, but all that came out were little puffs of barely warm air. Behind me, rain hit the windows, pooled into little rivers and ran down the glass.

  Lisa dumped her backpack onto her desk and dropped into her seat. “My feet are wet,” she grumped, undoing the laces of her boots and kicking them off. “Why don’t they cancel school on mornings like this? Why don’t they cancel life?”

  She stretched her legs into the aisle. She was wearing hot pink-and orange-striped socks with individual toes—like gloves for your feet. She’d gotten them for fifty cents at the Sally Ann. On her they worked. On me they would have clashed with my hair.

  “You know this?” Lisa asked, yawning.

  “I guess so.” I fished an elastic out of my own bag and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. It was getting curlier by the second. “What about you?”

  “What’s to know? It’s English. You write a lot about symbolism, allegory, how everything means something else.”

  “Or nothing.”

  “Yeah, well don’t write that down,” Lisa said. “It’s not what Mrs. T. wants to hear.”

  Lisa and I had been friends since third grade, when I caught Matthew Hetherington trying to look up her dress while he gave her an under-duck on the swings. She was my fun friend—the absolute best person to hunt for retro stuff with at the thrift store or to go with to get your ears double pierced.

  That was the way my friends were. They all fit into some category, like movie friends or honors math friends.

  Lisa yawned again, then leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes.

  “What’s with you this morning?” I asked.

  “I stayed over at my dad’s,” she said. “The munchkins got up at five and guess whose bed they climbed into? One second I’m asleep and the next I’ve got sticky fingers yanking my eyelids up.”

  “Does it bug you?” I leaned back until my own head was against the window frame and hoped the question sounded casual. “I mean, that your dad got married again and everything?”

  “Nah. Andrew and Sam are cool little guys most of the time and I like Haviland okay, even though I think her name sounds stupid.”

  “What about your mom’s husband?”

  Lisa opened her eyes and turned her head to look at me. “You’re kidding, right? I haven’t bought a CD or a concert ticket since my mom met Sean. I got to meet Keith Dunst of Technical Virgins. If my mom and Sean ever split up I’d go live with him.”

  She put her hand on the radiator. “Geez, haven’t the prisoners started shoveling coal down in the dungeon yet? Oh, I forgot.” She put a hand to her cheek in fake surprise. “They have to write an English test first.”

  I rolled my eyes at her.

  For a second I considered telling Lisa about Dad wanting to marry Anne, even though it wasn’t the same as her family at all. For one thing, Lisa’s mother wasn’t dead. Her parents were even friends. And her father was nothing like mine. Lisa’s dad drove a minivan. He’d never missed a single school concert or parent-teacher night or anything Lisa’d been in. I’d bet he’d never stayed out all night. Plus Lisa liked what’s-her-name—Haviland. I didn’t even know Anne.

  It wasn’t the same. Not at all.

  6

  “Can’t sleep?”

  I started and squealed like a bagpipe with asthma. “Jason! Don’t do that.”

  He grinned. “Sorry.” But I knew he wasn’t.

  “Look what you made me do.” The spoon was sinking in the pot of spaghetti sauce.

  Jason tossed his leather jacket over the back of a chair. “I’ll get it. I’ll get it,” he said, elbowing me away from the stove.

  He stuck his head over the pot. “Mmmm, smells good. I’m starving.” Then he reached in and grabbed the spoon. It was about to go under for the last time. “Oww! Hot! Hot! Hot!” The spoon clattered onto a burner, spraying drops of sauce everywhere.

  I whacked him on the arm with the back of my fist. “Get out of the way and don’t help me.” I dropped the dirty spoon in the sink and got another from the drawer.

  Jason was waving the fingers on his right hand in the air. “I’m hurt,” he protested.

  “Run them under some cold water,” I said. He pushed past me and I couldn’t help it; I checked his face, his eyes, half expecting him to grab the spoon out of my hand and start eating the sauce right out of the pot.

  I remembered Jason sitting behind me on the counter once when he was wrecked, eating marshmallows because they were the first things he touched. He pulled the bag open in the middle and ate them one after the other, talking really fast the whole time. Nothing he said made any sense and I could see the white goo stuck all over his teeth.

  I didn’t eat marshmallows for a long time after that.

  But Jason did
n’t look stoned this time. Jason hadn’t been stoned for quite a while. So why did I hold my breath whenever he walked in? Why did I check his eyes, smell his clothes, count the number of times he wiped his nose?

  He sat in the chair opposite me and slid down so his long legs were under the table and his head was against the back of the chair. His hair was the same color as mine these days, but cut short and spiked. I could feel his blue eyes on me. Spencer appeared and jumped into Jason’s lap. Jason gently stroked the fur under the cat’s chin. Spencer’s eyes closed and he began to purr. Traitor.

  Jason sat there looking at me, with his cocky smirk, not saying anything until finally I looked at him. Which he knew I would. He’d been doing that since I was four and he was seven.

  “So where were you last night?” I demanded.

  He arched his head back and laughed. “Working. How was dinner?”

  “Working? At 6:30? What were you doing? Playing dinner music at the Holiday Inn?”

  “Good one, Iz.” He licked his index finger and made an imaginary mark in the air. “I’m teaching a music class for kids.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. It was possible, I decided, although I was having a hard time picturing Jason as a teacher. Then again, he’d know every scam and excuse for getting out of practicing.

  “So? What was the big dinner out all about? It’s 11:30 at night and you’re cooking.” He paused. “Something’s wrong,” he added in a singsong voice.

  I stopped stirring. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”

  “All I got was a message that Dad wanted us all to have dinner. Actually I think it was three messages.”

  I took my time, looking all around the room as though I was trying to find something, before I dropped the words, “Dad’s getting married.”

  “Of course he is,” Jason said.

  “He’s probably asked her by now.” I gave him a big, fake, chipmunk-cheeked grin. “Dinner was your chance to meet the bride. I think you blew your shot to be ring bearer.”