“But you will be in better shape financially. Your expenses will be reduced by nearly $25,000 per year,” Jules said. “And we have a small equity loan we could share, so if you give me power of attorney to supervise your expenses, you should be fine.” She rubbed her sore and stiff neck, arching her back, and cracking the vertebrae. This was enough, but when was enough ever enough for her parents?
“Okay, okay, don’t need to be so snippy, Julia.”
Was she being “snippy”? Jules didn’t think so.
“You always seem like you’re in a bad mood whenever you’re here. You used to be so much fun as a little girl, so full of life. We’d laugh until we cried. Remember? Your father’s a proud man—and a know-it-all. We have to be in control of writing the checks, don’t you see? Moving into a SafeHarbour efficiency unit? A tiny hovel on the first floor, with no view?”
She could see her father watching his ticker tape on his computer—studying his stocks in the next room. He was even more sullen after returning from seeing his dying brother, Wilson. And now his investments had tanked in the most disastrous stock market climate ever—in her life, anyway. But her father liked to buy on margin.
“Mother, he’s not still speculating after all that Mike and I have told him, is he?”
“You just don’t get it, do you, Jules?” Maybe she didn’t. Maybe they were playing her. Maybe she really didn’t have a clue. “Your father thinks he knows more than his stockbroker, who pleaded with him not to buy penny stocks to try to recoup his financial losses. When our stocks plummeted to below $10,000! So your father started using our Social Security checks to buy more penny stocks to cover previous losses. There is no more credit line. It’s been erased. Nada.”
Jules couldn’t breathe. She stopped being able to hear what came next.
What was Mike going to say when she told him? How was it even possible to lose so much money in a matter of months, with nothing for SafeHarbour rent and medical care? She didn’t want her parents to be thrown out on the street, but they weren’t helping matters.
“As I was saying, to my number one daughter, I don’t understand why you and Mike are so conservative in investing. That’s what your father is always telling me. He likes to think you’re not using real money when you buy on margin.”
Why did her dad think that way, as if borrowed money was Monopoly money? As if the money they were borrowing for her parents’ debts was Monopoly money, too? Maybe she was the one with a cognitive disorder.
Mike was a civil servant for the government, in the Department of Health and Social Services. His classmates in law school believed the average investor could never beat the stock market. Given that assessment, Mike and Jules had set up a college fund for Zoë that was managed by professionals at a discounted management fee. Soon Zoë would need those funds. They were almost certain their daughter would also receive some financial aid with her academic record and their financial documentation.
Mike worked hard taking shit from a sadistic boss in a thankless job. A Good Team Player: that’s what everyone at the office called Mike. Code for Kiss of Death. He was just high enough in the food chain to have a small coterie of junior hearing officers to supervise but low enough to have no real power. Still, he tried his best to see her perspective: that her parents depended upon her. The dutiful daughter. Not someone who reneged on obligations the way her father had. But Mike could lose patience with her. Geez, even she was losing patience with herself.
“I just don’t know what else we can do, Mother. We’ll all be ruined if you don’t change your lifestyle.”
“Now, now, Jules. I’m not worried. You’ll figure something out. Other responsible adult children must face their parents’ needs, too, mustn’t they?”
What was going to happen to all of them? There were consequences, sometimes irreversible. How was she going to pay for her parents’ assisted living bills now? Certainly not without cooperation from her sister, Joanne, or her brother. Was it even possible for Joanne to be approved for a loan? And Andrew had never chipped in for one goddamn Christmas gift, although he was in better financial condition than Joanne. Dentists had a good income; why was he so cheap? What had their parents done to him that was so unforgivable? She had to think of Mike and Zoë—their dreams, their future. What happened to The Narcissistic Mother, the book she wanted to publish? Jules was supposed to be the expert. Sometimes she felt like a fraud.
“Oh, Julia … We’re your family! Maybe we aren’t as close as we used to be. But that’s inevitable as you move away, isn’t it? But you were always the one with the long, unforgiving memory. An unreliable memory, if I may say so myself. A memory of a memory of your last memory. Always holding a grudge. Even as a little kid. No lightness in your nature. You just can’t move on, can you dear?”
Jules listened to her mother’s words. How could all this be of her own construction? How could she choose between her parents and Mike and Zoë?
“I’m just glamorous, you know, a diva meant to be on stage,” her mother went on, a cracked vinyl, skipping tunes until the needle landed on her. “You were so tongue-tied in high school. Except when you sang in the choir. That beautiful vibrato I had taught you. How we loved to sing together! Those were the good old days! Then you changed. If I hadn’t stepped in to entertain your few-and-far-between boyfriends, you wouldn’t have had any. They knew a red-hot mama when they saw one, that’s for sure. I rescued you. I gave you joy—joie de vivre.”
Is that what her mother called it—“rescue,” “joy”? Jules’s heart pounded faster, until the pressure in her chest traveled upwards and became a throbbing headache in her skull. That petal-pink nightie. Her mother had called it Valentine’s Day pink.
“Well, of course you may speak to my gorgeous daughter,” her mother had said, two feet from where Jules was standing. “It’s for you, darling. A boy.”
The night John had picked her up for the Valentine’s Day dance, her mother must have been listening upstairs, just waiting for him. Having her evening manhattan. Dashing to put on the first dress she could slip over her head with a minimum of fuss, Jules still couldn’t outrun her mother down the stairs.
John stood there in the hallway, so tall and strong, looking down at his dress shoes, all polished. An odd look for a teenager.
Her mother’s outline shone through like the filament in a lightbulb. Naked. In a pink, transparent nightgown. “Now, you’ll take good care of my daughter, won’t you? She doesn’t go out on many dates, you know. Wants to be a psychologist or some kind of scientist. Who knows why?” she said, standing so close to John that he stepped back into the wall. He was holding a corsage near his thigh, clenching it so tightly that he was crushing it and coloring the soft pussy willow–gray carpet with the flowers’ pastel-pink petals.
Jules had grabbed John’s arm to escape, but her mother caught her by the back of the neck, laughing, as she looked not at her but straight into John’s eyes. “You never know with Julia. If she is even wearing underwear.” Still laughing, she turned to Jules. “Don’t forget to tuck in those dress labels. Yours is sticking up in the back. What an impression that makes on a young man.” She patted the label and tucked it under. “You do look beautiful, though.”
Jules thought she detected a glistening in her mother’s eyes.
“And mind you, John, my daughter sings like an angel. And she can be a lot of fun.”
“Are you listening to me, dear?” her mother asked, breaking into Jules’s thoughts. “We’ll move. Do you hear me? We’ll move … but we are too far in debt. We’ll end up on the street, homeless, if you and your brother and sister don’t help us. Dribbles and drabbles of money are not enough now. The collectors are after us. We’re in desperate circumstances! Forget about the little things now. Every family has some little commotion here and there.”
But Jules couldn’t. Neither could Andrew and Joanne, apparently. She remembered how her younger sister would lock her bedroom door and refuse to speak to their m
om when her boyfriends came to the door and she greeted them in a nightgown, just like she had with John. And there was another scenario entirely for her brother’s girlfriends. No girl was ever good enough for their mother’s one and only son. The Narcissistic Mother.
What would happen to Zoë’s college tuition? To Mike and her? She couldn’t imagine how they would react. A betrayal? A renunciation of their love? Could her book raise income? She still had the literary agent’s business card somewhere. Ginger Pressman, an independent agent in Palo Alto. She and Mike had sat next to her at the parents’ reception last June when Zoë was invited to hear a Stanford University presentation for prospective future freshman. Who knows? Maybe Ginger would remember her. Never say never. She had to believe that.
How many stamped postcards with a bland, general rejection note had she received? Boilerplate. Nothing personal. The manuscript didn’t fit the publisher’s profile. The Narcissistic Mother was now in its thirteenth year of research, notes, and spinning around in circles. Ever since Jules was denied tenure, she had kept on writing. But she was growing sick of it. She had a college-age daughter now who needed her attention. Her daughter’s dream choice was Stanford. Everyone deserved to have dreams. But in order to make her daughter’s dreams a reality, Jules needed to change. Now. And fast. And her parents had to change, too, or they all would be destroyed.
FOREST LODGE
Andrew had sung happy birthday to his mother to appease her, knowing so little did so much. There had been no time to see any of them for so many years. Why had she expected anything different this year? But his dad would understand. He always did.
There was no way he was depleting his own family’s savings to help them. Enough was enough. He hoped he never had to actually be there in person for one of the family celebrations. Unless Jules came to her senses. That could happen, couldn’t it? But he hoped not. Would his parents actually end up in public housing without his sisters’ support? Destitute? How much more could Jules take?
Time moved in reverse. Moving backwards always made him feel sick. He went back to years and years ago, when he left for Forest Lodge—the night of the car accident, right after the first heavy snowfall. Forest Lodge, an old-fashioned turn-of-the century converted log cabin, housed an outdoor skating rink and could fit snugly into a Norman Rockwell painting. Postwar suburban housing developments, where most of his friends lived, encircled the lodge. On cold winter nights like that night, he could count on all his friends being there, eating hot dogs and checking out the girls before going out on the ice to slide and glide in front of them.
He was a sophomore at Hoban High at the time. License still warm in his hand from passing his driver’s test, Andrew had wanted to take out the Bermuda-pink Thunderbird with its porthole window. His father had special-ordered the sports car and it was only one week old. No one in Akron, that he knew of, had such a car. Not even the O’Neills. They had boring, fussy cars—old people cars. But the Thunderbird … all the girls would see him driving it and want his number. And then maybe he wouldn’t be so bored. Akron was for old people—never anything to do.
“Trust me, Dad. I’ll take real good care of your new car,” Andrew pleaded. He hated how his voice sounded—unnaturally high, childish, even girlish. Ever since the priests at the Church of the Holy Innocents school had forced him to wear a pink hair bow for a week as punishment for chasing a ball onto the girls’ side of the playground, he worked extra hard to make sure nothing about him was girlie. His dad sympathized with him, at least. Like father, like son. After all, his dad told him he had been forced to wear pink hair bows as a kid, too. Little Barbie.
“My car still smells new. Why can’t you take Mommy’s?” His father always called their mom ‘Mommy,’ except when other people were around, in which case he called her “Mother.” His best friend’s dad did the same thing. Always felt a bit weird. Like his father hadn’t grown up yet. Andrew hoped he would be a doctor. Or a dentist, if he couldn’t get into medical school. But he would never call his wife—assuming he got married—“Mommy.”
Andrew knew his father would be proud of his driving skills. They had practiced in empty parking lots all summer. He knew how to be like his father: a good driver. He sensed he asked for too much sometimes. This might be one of those times. Jules had never gotten to drive their father’s new car. But his father always claimed boys could do lots of things better than girls … like driving.
“Well …” his father said.
“I don’t know why I don’t get to drive Daddy’s T-bird first,” Jules protested. “I’ve had my license for over a year!” She gave Andrew a pleading look. “Can I at least come with you?”
Never disappoints, Andrew thought, shooting a glare at her. He could always count on his sister to tag along. But she could be a passenger, if that would help him get what he wanted. He could put up with almost anything if he could get the hell out of that stifling house. Nothing could be more pitiful than staying at home with the old folks.
His father was relenting. As usual.
“Come on, Dad. Where are the keys?” Andrew asked, all hulked up like a quarterback in his dark quilted ski jacket. “We want to get out of here.” It was a done deal, he knew it. The T-bird was his for the night. Free at last.
His father reached into his pocket and threw the keys hard. Nice, Dad. Andrew just shrugged without blinking, catching the keys square and solid in his fist. His dad always seemed angry at him—at everyone in the family, actually, and he didn’t know why. Outsiders thought his dad was mild mannered. Andrew knew better. Still, he wanted to be more like his dad. Guys had a special way of bonding.
He ran out of the kitchen and Jules, grabbing her jacket, ran after him. She better not hang on after we get there, he thought. Just at the flashpoint of changing his mind and leaving her behind, he decided he needed to escape fast before their father changed his mind. So he didn’t stop her from getting in the passenger seat. But he wanted to.
As soon as they were well out of sight of the house, Andrew accelerated with a vengeance. Skidding block after block downhill towards Forest Lodge, swerving from one side to the other on Crestview Avenue, the T-bird spun around and around down the street, almost doing 360s. Andrew kept on flooring the engine. It was like flying. There wasn’t another car or person in sight—he was so lucky sometimes! He imagined he was a driver in the Indy 500, feeling the freedom of life and all the fun he would have once he left Akron for college. He was counting the days to high school graduation. Two more years. Only two more years.
Black ice. He panicked and froze. Before he realized it, his sister had grabbed the wheel. As they struggled, fighting over the steering wheel, the car started skating out of control towards the lodge, towards the housing development surrounding the rink. After jumping the curb and plunging into a snow bank, a huge, twisted oak brought the T-bird to an abrupt halt.
The porthole was covered. Andrew couldn’t see out of the front window either. Shakily, his heart feeling like it was pulsating through every vein in his body, he muscled the door as far open as he could, squeezed out, and trudged through snow to the front of the house. The owner was already standing there, front porch lights on, startled to see the cockeyed T-bird. Andrew didn’t look back to see if his sister was okay. The homeowner waved him inside without a word and gestured to the hallway phone. Andrew called home.
“Hi, Dad?” Andrew cleared his throat. “You have to come get us.”
Silence. Andrew could hear a deep, threatening sigh on the other end. “What have you done now?” Their father’s voice was hard.
“We had a little accident,” Andrew gulped. He looked up; Jules was standing near the front door, waiting.
His father hung up without another word. Andrew and Jules waited there in the house, fidgeting. Ten minutes later, their father arrived in his silver Buick Riviera, his second most favorite car, and said something, probably an apology of sorts, to the homeowner. Andrew saw him write his telephone number on
a sheet from his prescription notepad. Then he grabbed Andrew’s elbow and twisted him out the front door. Jules followed. Andrew wished he could be anywhere else.
Chesterfield dangling from her lip, his mother stood up from the kitchen table as they walked through the kitchen door. She spit out something—he didn’t know what—but the cigarette didn’t eject. Then she laid into him. “Goddamn it. Driving crazy in this weather. Now that fucking car’s going to cost a fortune to fix. You think money just grows on trees around here.” Their mother looked so full of rage that she could bite a chunk out of her own arm. He recalled her saying she had actually done that once so she wouldn’t hit Jules.
Andrew looked down at the melting snow still on his shoes, the blood-red linoleum all wet and slippery like the afterbirth from a newborn baby.
“It wasn’t my fault, all right?” Trying to head off the inevitable. “I hit an ice chunk. Could’ve happened to anyone.”
“Well, but it didn’t, did it?” His mother’s voice was whiskey hoarse. “It’s a privilege to drive his new car. Now your father’s afraid of the damage to that guy’s yard. Maybe even a lawsuit. More money wasted on you.”
Andrew nervously fingered his black-and-blue ski jacket while their father stood quietly in the kitchen behind Jules, waiting for his mother to finish. He was too quiet. Then his father moved towards Andrew, dangerously close, and Andrew’s back petrified. He looked over his shoulder, then down at his boots. He knew what was coming.
He felt a crack as his arm was torqued, wrenched into an ugly angle. His father dragged him upstairs. Shoulders hunched, head down, he lost his breath. Then numbness. As the belt slap-slapped against his back and head, he curled like a fetus, trying to avoid the hook of the belt hitting his eyes. All he remembered after that: the toilet flushing, over and over again. And blood washing down the drain, swirling in the toilet bowl.
A couple of hours later, in his boxers, bare legs showing, Andrew limped towards the couch in the solarium. His mother and sisters seemed to have ignored what had been going on upstairs. His little sister, Joanne, he could understand. She was too young, and she was busy watching TV. But Jules knew. She knew, all right.
Things Unsaid: A Novel Page 5