The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  All the paper in the room whispered, You idiot girl. What have you done?

  She offered, “I don’t actually need braces.”

  “Sweetie,” Georgia said, “could you just give us a minute?”

  How had Rebecca forgotten the day? Monday, when the week’s proofs needed to be finished, so that they could be driven to the printer at five the next morning. That is, if she didn’t get in the way. “I was just getting this,” she said, picking up a reporter’s notebook from the floor. “I just needed some paper, that’s all. I wasn’t going to bother you.” Georgia offered her a vague smile, and Ira sat down and reached for the phone.

  Later that evening, David lay on his stomach on her rug drawing superheroes. Or villains; she couldn’t tell. His parents were at an ACLU fund-raiser. Rebecca sat on her bed with fractions. Nobody had called her and David for dinner. He mentioned that sometimes, during a crisis, he was picked up from school and driven to Oxnard or Long Beach and given a hamburger at Bob’s Big Boy on the way to the farmworkers or the longshoremen. Rebecca had never been inside a fast-food restaurant, but then the life of a public-interest lawyer was more glamorous.

  David said, “Your folks seemed really frantic when I got here.”

  Rebecca couldn’t see the purple ink on the ditto. Poor people don’t have teeth . . . She took too much, asked for too much. Her role in the family was avarice. She was not helpful, could not edit. She scooted to the bed’s edge.

  “It’s okay, Rebecca. It’ll be okay.” David tapped her arm lightly and spoke the way Judy spoke when he was heaving like Rebecca now was, preparing to cry.

  “Take them out.” She bared her embellished teeth. “I don’t want braces now.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t need them. Why should I get something I don’t need?”

  He seemed to consider. “Won’t they mind?”

  “They’ll be relieved.”

  “It’ll be hard, I bet.” David, who had always been there, leg to leg, understood: if you want to help poor people, you can’t be above them, can’t want Izods or jellies.

  His fingers pushed into her mouth. She rolled her tongue, that dangerous tongue, against her top palate. His were smaller fingers than the orthodontist’s—curious, tapping her teeth, skittering like mice. “This one’s loosest.” His eyes were blue-and-green classroom globes. Her tongue snuck down, brazenly licked his finger. He tasted of potato chips and eraser. She licked again.

  He looked up at her, but he didn’t say anything. For that moment, she was awake in a way she’d never been before. She was, she thought, electrified. Then, he looked back at her teeth.

  As he removed each spacer, the pain it caused on her gum and teeth abated, until her entire mouth was hers again. She hid the rubber bands in the trash, covering them with tissue, and they went into the kitchen and made toast with butter and white sugar. They found the sleeping bag in the broom closet and, shoving aside her math dittos and books and crusts of sandwiches, laid it on the rug. David, wearing his clothes, fell asleep right away. She changed into pajamas under her covers. David was turned away from her. She could see only his hair out of the sleeping bag. She still had electricity coursing through her.

  She put her forefinger in her mouth and pressed her tongue to it. Dried it off on her pajama shirt, licked again. She was trying to separate her own cells from herself, so that her tongue was foreign to her body and she could feel precisely what he’d felt. She tried to focus on the wetness, the spongy movement. But it turned out taste was the superior sense. Her tongue, insisting it was her own, tasted her skin, sweet with residue of sugar. She dried her finger on her sheets, licked once more, and the sugar was gone and her finger tasted the way it always did, sour and dirty, not like his at all.

  “Why are you doing that thing with your mouth?” Georgia asked the following Saturday as they toured open houses in Laurel Canyon that they could never afford, an activity Georgia loved and therefore only rarely allowed herself to indulge in.

  Rebecca quickly stopped sliding her tongue across the smooth expanse of her rubber-band-less molars. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You were. You keep doing it. You’ve been doing it for days.”

  “No, I haven’t.” As if this would prove her point, Rebecca began to read aloud from a spec sheet about earthquake retrofitting as she headed up a terracotta staircase. “All modifications have been made to ensure that your new abode is at the topmost level of resistance to seismic activity.”

  “In other words,” Georgia said from behind her, “don’t sue us when your house slides away.”

  “It’ll serve them right.” Rebecca spoke the party line against the rich, although she was thinking that she’d love to live in this house, even if at any minute it would set sail for canyon and doom.

  “The more it costs, the farther it falls,” her mom said, pausing to look wistfully out a window on the landing. “Luckily, that means ours will just slouch.”

  Georgia turned the bronze fish handles of the Jacuzzi in the master bath, bounced on the striped window seat in one of the children’s rooms, pointed out the Mexican tilework on the backsplash. They stood for a while in the living room, looking out the two-story picture window to the kidney-shaped pool and, behind that, the tumble of chaparral and palm down the canyon.

  “Bourgeois pleasures,” Georgia said, leaning against her daughter and stroking her hair.

  Back home, as they were preparing lunch in their own, untiled kitchen, Ira came through the sliding glass door, clearly upset. “I just got off the phone with Peter Finkel, of all people.”

  “Finkel called?” Georgia asked, staring at the open refrigerator. “And you deigned to talk to him?”

  “I would’ve passed him off to you, but you were paying witness to conspicuous consumption. You won’t believe what happened.” As he talked, he took a red apple from a plastic bag on the counter and stared at it. Rebecca watched them from the kitchen table, where she was slopping lemon yogurt into a bowl. She was assessing. She’d had a good morning with her mother, but it seemed doubtful that she’d have a good afternoon with her mother and father. A good time with both parents was what she most wanted, but it was the slipperiest arrangement.

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “No, everyone’s not okay, and it’s my fault.” Ira placed the apple, a plate, and a knife on the table. “My nephew’s off searching for the perfect place for his camp that’s not a camp. As we speak. In other words, I ruined his life.”

  “Caleb?” Georgia brought over a peanut-butter jar.

  “Finkel took the bait.”

  Georgia affected a drop-jawed awe. “Why? A joke?”

  Ira quartered the apple and handed the pieces to Georgia. “Why’re you smiling?” he said. “This isn’t funny. Caleb’s out there with Finkel’s money looking for someplace where he can bring kids to re-create those camping trips Robbie took him on—whenever Robbie didn’t fuck it up. He wants to glorify an asshole. The thing is, Caleb was so young when Robbie killed himself. Thirteen! He never got to see what a schmuck Robbie really was. He’s chasing a dream, some ideal that never existed.”

  “We should all be so lucky to always think of our parents that way.” Georgia spread peanut butter on the apple slices, handed two back to Ira.

  “But it’s idiotic, and he has nobody telling him.” He chewed as he talked. “Whatever Robbie told him on those trips, all of Robbie’s life lessons—remember that, how Robbie was always trying to tell us his life lessons, reciting those clichés as if he’d made them up? Not that he actually lived those life lessons. All that money he borrowed from me. All those lies, those blatant, embarrassing lies. His convoluted excuses every time he got fired. That teenage girlfriend! Shit Caleb never knew about. I’m sure Mimi never told him. Should I?”

  “You need to calm down,” Georgia said. “It wasn’t Robbie’s love of nature that made him a loser. It wasn’t because he hid away in a mountain hut. You’re confusing causalit
y, which isn’t like you. It’s sweet, honestly. Caleb just wants to be near his dad, keep his dad alive. Remember what a darling boy he was? We should help him out.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do. Help Caleb reappraise his direction. I was planning to call when Finkel turned him down, offer sympathy, maybe an internship here, where we could get to know him, steer him, guide him toward purpose, utility, engagement. But it’s too late for that now.”

  “So listen to me,” Georgia said. “No, don’t make that face. We need to make sure it works out. That it’s not a total disaster. We can give him ad space. We can tell our friends to send their kids. Maybe Rebecca?”

  They turned to her for a brief moment of potential, during which she considered the lovely possibility of herself at camp. Such a generic lanyard-making opportunity had never been proposed before. But Ira shook his head. “I’m not sending Rebecca.”

  “Okay, but we can make this a good thing for him. And as a bonus, we get to piss off Mimi and Aaron.”

  Rebecca could tell from the mention of Caleb’s mom and stepfather that the conversational tone was to leave the tragedy of Robbie and enter the comedic realm of ridicule.

  “What about Mimi and Aaron?”

  “What’s their worst nightmare? That we’ll brainwash Caleb, bring him to the dark side.” Georgia wiggled her fingers to summon the occult. “The spooky radical left.”

  “But that’s hardly what he’s heading out to—”

  “That’s not the point, Ira. The point is, they can’t differentiate between narcissistic homesteading and class struggle. As far as they know, if we’re involved, he might as well be joining the Sandinistas. Which means we’ve won. If only in their imagination.”

  “No, you’re right, you’re right.”

  “It’s sort of funny, actually.”

  “I’ll concede. It’s not unfunny.”

  They began smiling at each other, and Georgia shrugged shyly, and Ira’s face softened into proud, childish delight. Rebecca licked her spoon, happy as she always was when her parents rallied together in their contempt for someone else. It would be a very good afternoon, after all.

  But Georgia turned to her, pursing her lips. “You didn’t have another orthodontist appointment, did you?”

  “Why?”

  “But you had rubber bands. He gave you those spacers, those bands. Weren’t you supposed to keep them on?”

  “Oh, give her a break, Georgia,” Ira said, and Rebecca could tell he didn’t want the good mood spoiled either.

  Georgia turned on him. “You don’t even see it, Ira. You don’t even notice. Where’d they go, Rebecca? Where’d they go?”

  Rebecca put her hands around her yogurt bowl for support. “I took them off, but wait, listen. It was so that you don’t have to pay for braces. It was because I don’t need them. And so why should I have them?”

  Ira stared at her. “Why on earth would you be so wasteful? We already paid for that appointment. Now we have to pay for him to put them on again? Do you know how much it costs each time you even look at the orthodontist?” He stood up from the table. “Where’s this money supposed to come from?”

  Rebecca sat very still.

  Georgia said, “Rebecca, would it hurt you to think about someone besides yourself?”

  Ira dropped his plate in the sink and slid open the door to the backyard. “You just took them out? Without asking?”

  “Wait, Ira,” Georgia called after him, her anger like a Santa Ana wind. “You’re just going to leave? We’re not done here. Wait.”

  In bed that night, Rebecca imagined David wearing a white button-down, just like the one Ira sported in the photo of his and Georgia’s city hall wedding. He’d come to take Rebecca to Mississippi. They were needed, he whispered, crouching by her bed. Unionionion had just been practice; this was real: squash the scabs, shame the property owners, organize the powerless masses. They’d asked for her specifically, Ira’s daughter. Rebecca’s hair was long, her dress mini. Swung on David’s back was the guitar that had been handed down from Woody to Arlo to him.

  He said, You don’t need to worry about the rubber bands.

  She asked, How’d you know I was worried?

  He winked. Teeth, he said, shrugging. Bourgeois pleasures.

  Besides, he added, it was worth it. Meaning his fingers pressing on her lips. Meaning the pile of rubber bands on his thigh. Meaning her slippery tongue on his finger.

  On the way to Mississippi (or should it be Soweto? Managua?), he crushed her, that is, he lay upon her, his chest pushing on her chest, his legs pressing against her legs, so she couldn’t flitter away, so she belonged.

  For the next week, Ira and Georgia remained morose, bickering. Each of their outbursts, while ostensibly about grants not received, subscriptions canceled, egregious fact-checking, the wrong kind of dish soap, seemed to have only one true subtext: What were you thinking, Rebecca? Selfish, stupid Rebecca.

  And then, one morning, Ira ran into the kitchen waving the New York Times. “Check this out!” Rebecca had a spoonful of buckwheat flakes halfway to her mouth. Milk sploshed. Georgia was eating pink Dannon with one hand, holding a paperback open with the other. They leaned toward what he showed them, front page, above the fold: exxon abandons colo. shale oil project. The prognosticator stood above them, delighted. What he’d said would happen had happened.

  The next day, the Los Angeles Times, in an editorial about Exxon’s abrupt pullout from its $5 billion project, praised Our Side Now’s “prescient, insightful coverage of the damaging cycles of boom and bust,” adding, “As usual, we could all benefit from heeding that feisty rag.” In the days that followed, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Tides Foundation all called with intimations of increased funding. Ira gave interviews—to In These Times, the Nation, and Mother Jones—until his quote was stone-sharpened. Rebecca could hear him on the kitchen phone, saying, “Only the wealthy will be shielded from the shock waves of the bust. For the thousands of workers who were hired to build Exxon’s grandiose Shangri-La, who were urged to take on debt to join the so-called American dream, the bottom will drop out. In small towns across Colorado, towns like Parachute, Rifle, and Escadom, we’ll see hunger, homelessness. But thanks to generous bailouts from the Reagan administration, Exxon will emerge unscathed, its managers relocated, their padded paychecks protected.”

  The OSN board meeting, held that week in their living room, took on the beer-bottle clanks of a party. Rebecca could hear the shouts bleeding through the door; she stayed alone in the kitchen with a bag of Pepperidge Farm.

  Each Milano cookie was like an unformed baby. If it were a fetus, it should have the chance to be aborted. That was every mother’s right. But Rebecca wanted hers as born babies, and she laid them in a circle on the blue-flowered plate, heads touching, feet splayed, a circular nursery.

  She raised the plate and set it back down. It wasn’t enough. She was trying to make it up to them, to get them to understand—despite what she had done, despite the money she would cost them to re-rubber-band her teeth, she hadn’t changed, would never change. She remained the Rebecca they had loved.

  To adorn the cookies, Rebecca went into the backyard and found honeysuckles wrapped around the rotting plank fence that separated her yard from the neighbors’. But these blooms offered too little: a drop of tepid juice and the same sickly beige as the cookies. For what she wanted, she had to brave the way-back, where banana peels swam in the brown water of the compost bucket and Ira’s tomato vines curled up the wire fence to the alley.

  An aloe owned half of the way-back, its limbs like a dragon’s spine. Crouching beneath it, she could hear the oceanic laughter of smokers far away on the brick patio in front of the house. She reached for the orange, shrimp-shaped nasturtiums, plunking them into a brown lunch bag, but there were only six. Needing more, willing to steal for them, she came around the side of the house, past the smokers—“Hey, Rebecca! How’s it going, sugar?”—to the fro
nt yard, where the neighbor’s nasturtiums spilled over clay planters.

  She heard him before she saw him. Over the sidewalk, under the fronds of the palm tree lurking on their front lawn, David scraped his skateboard to and fro.

  She hadn’t seen him since the evening he’d removed her rubber bands, and he looked shorter than she thought he should, after all those nights imagining him. He stuttered to a stop and said, “Hey, Zoomy.”

  “D’you want to do something?”

  “Not really.” But when she didn’t move, he relented. “Okay, what?”

  She couldn’t say.

  “What?” he repeated, levering his board with one foot.

  She tried a cryptic message. “Let’s say there was a huge crisis somewhere, like Nicaragua, well, like there already is, duh, and you needed to go help, they asked you to choose someone to bring with you. Who would you pick?”

  David itched a mosquito bite on his elbow. “Are you trying to talk about superheroes? Do you even know anything about superheroes? Because it doesn’t usually work that way.”

  She was mortified. She’d actually believed he’d say, “Of course I’d pick you.” She’d actually hoped that he, too, had been lying awake, imagining the two of them together. How idiotic she’d been. Rebecca thought about how Ira had told her that there would be a nuclear war in her lifetime. Would her skin fall off? Would her shadow burn into the sidewalk? Fine. Let it happen now.

  She ran to the door at the side of the house. He called after her: “Iron Man?”

  Back under the kitchen’s fluorescents, the nasturtiums appeared limp, their petals closing. She felt a surge of chaos, the sort of throat constriction that used to precede a tantrum. Goddamn it all to hell. How could this convey both her apology and the pride she felt in her parents? She threw the blooms in the garbage, but alone the cookies were albino, anemic, and she fished the flowers out again, laid them stringily between the cookies. She opened the drawer of aging spices and sprinkled cinnamon, a scattering of paprika. It was inadequate but would have to do. Balancing her offering, she kicked open the door to the living room. Six people sat on the floor, four on the couch, three propped against the fireplace. These were the people Rebecca spent her days with, but she was nervous. Nobody needed flowers the way they needed justice or equal pay, or like Judy, her hand jutting out as if throwing an invisible football again and again—“Can I just say . . .”—needed a chance to talk.