by Robin Palmer
So after my talk with Mom, I finished listening to the CD, and she drove over to Billy’s house to apologize and who knew what else. (While I may have been okay with their being together, I wasn’t at the point where I could deal with an actual visual of what might be occurring along with that without getting creeped out.) But even after listening to the CD a second time, I was no further along in my quest to figure out what Matt was trying to say or how he felt about me or what had happened that made him zip himself back up during the car ride home from his house.
I woke up to a buzz at around two a.m., on top of the covers with the lights still on, and immediately grabbed my phone. I felt myself relax a bit when I saw through half-open eyes that there was a text, only to come to full attention when I saw that it wasn’t from Matt—it was from Mom, saying that she was spending the night at Billy’s.
I felt the familiar whir as the adrenaline started to rev up inside of me—yes, I had essentially given her my blessing, but it didn’t mean she should actually go and do it. But just as quickly as it started, it slowed down. Why shouldn’t she give Billy a chance? Getting all mad at her for doing what I said she should do was just a way to avoid feeling bummed about the fact that Matt was acting weird and hadn’t called or texted. I waited for the anxiety to rev back up, but it didn’t. Instead, it conked out completely.
One of us should be happy, I thought as I turned out the light and got under the sheet.
I was at the kitchen table, eating pancakes—pancakes I had cooked in a pan on the stove instead of in the microwave—when I heard the door open.
“Bug?” she called.
I braced myself. It was too early to deal with her manic chatter that happened after she hooked up with a guy and was first in love. Especially when I was wallowing in Bumville because I had woken up to zero texts or e-mails from Matt.
“In the kitchen,” I called out.
I heard the sound of Billy’s footsteps following hers.
“Hi, honey,” she said as they walked in.
I studied them to see what was different, but other than Mom’s hair being a little messed up, they looked the same.
“Hey,” Billy said.
“Hey.”
He pointed to the pancakes on my plate. “Mind if I have some?”
And obviously nothing had changed with him. “Sure,” I replied.
He went to the drawer and took out a fork. Instead of breaking off a piece, he took an entire one.
Yup. Still the same.
“So what are you going to do today?” Mom asked as she poured herself some juice.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I saw there’s some new shows up at some of the galleries on Warren Street,” Billy said as he polished off the pancake.
This was how it was going to be now that they were together? So . . . normal?
“Maybe I’ll check them out.”
“I’m going to shower,” Mom said.
After she left, Billy grabbed some iced tea and joined me at the table. He pointed at my iPad. “Mind if I check the baseball scores?”
I pushed it toward him, amazed as he skimmed the sports page of the New York Times as if this was just another morning and not the one after the first night that he and my mother had probably had sex for the first time.
“You okay?” he asked as he looked up to find me staring at him.
“Uh-huh.”
“Is this weird for you, the fact that your mom spent the night at my place?”
“A little weird.”
He nodded. “I can understand that.”
“But not a lot weird,” I said.
A few minutes later Mom came back, showered and dressed. “Okay, Bug—we’re off,” she said, kissing me on top of my head. “I’m speaking at a meeting tonight in Hudson, so I’ll be home around nine.”
Billy stood up. “I think I’m done on set around five, so if you want to go catch a movie or something, text me.”
Things seemed exactly the same. Who would have thought?
Obviously, there was a new world order in place.
I could have just waited for Matt to get in touch with me, and then, when he did, pretended that everything was cool and not bring it up for fear of somehow making him uncomfortable or, even worse, mad. That’s what the old me in the old world order would have done. But the new me—the me who was getting used to taking risks; the one who, as much as I tried to hold back and not fall for a guy who in three more weeks would live 2,886 miles away from me, I had totally fallen for—couldn’t just sit back. The new me in this new world order wasn’t going to count on waiting for Matt to maybe feel like talking at some point in time. This version of me was going to point-blank ask him what was going on. And not via text. But by calling. On the phone. Right after I went to Stewart’s to fortify myself with an iced coffee.
Once back home, slurping the last of my iced coffee while watching George the goat (Matt and I had named him after watching a George Clooney movie on cable one afternoon) nuzzle Mabel the cow (had everyone around me hooked up?), I clicked on Matt’s number and prayed for voice mail.
No luck.
“Hey, I was going to call you,” he said.
Uh-oh. It was not a happy, excited “I was going to call you.” It was the kind of “I was going to call you” that you’d get from a doctor right before he told you that you had three months to live.
“You were?” I asked nervously.
“Yeah, I feel like I owe you an apology.”
“For what?” I asked innocently. I wasn’t earning any points in the point-blank event for that one, but whatever.
“For how I got all weird when we got to my house.”
“Oh. You weren’t—” I stopped myself. “Yeah. That’s actually why I was calling you. To see what that was about.”
He sighed. “I feel like I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
Oh, God. That was even worse than the “I was going to call you.” Hadn’t we already been through this with the girlfriend thing? In movies, that was the kind of sentence that was usually followed by “I have a wife and three kids.” At least it was in the Lifetime one Mom and I had watched together the other night in her bed when she couldn’t sleep because she was nervous about the scene she had to shoot the following morning, which took place in bed after she sleeps with Billy’s character for the first time. (“Thank God you didn’t make me sell those arm weights at the estate sale, Bug,” she had said.)
“See, my mom . . . she’s got . . . some issues,” he said.
That was the big deal? “Join the club,” I laughed.
He didn’t. “No, I mean it,” he said seriously.
“What kind of issues?”
“I’d rather tell you in person. Meet me at the waterfall in an hour?” he asked.
On the drive over, I decided I wouldn’t do what I usually did, which was play out all the different scenarios of what Matt might say, and how I would feel when he did, and what I would say in return, so that I showed up having had the experience way before it happened and acted according to my version rather than the real one. Instead, I took what they called in meetings “contrary action,” and called Walter.
“What’s the matter?” he asked suspiciously when he answered.
“Nothing. Why would you think something was the matter?”
“Because now that you have a boyfriend I barely ever hear from you.”
“Okay, (a) he’s not my boyfriend, at least not officially,” I replied, “and (b) that’s not true! We talked two days ago.”
“No—you talked two days ago,” he replied. “About him. And then when you were done, you said you had to go.” I was used to Walter getting all grumbly and complain-y, but this was different. Underneath the grumbling I could hear the hurt. Which made m
e feel awful. I had become his Maya.
“Walter, I’m so sorry—”
“Whatever.”
“No, it’s not whatever,” I said. “You’re right—I’ve been a shitty friend, and I’m sorry. I’m glad you told me.”
“Apology accepted,” he sighed. “Just try not to be that girl, okay? I hate when people ditch their friends when they start dating someone.
“So what’s going on?”
“Not much.” Sure, it was a lie, especially in light of Mom and Billy hooking up, but I didn’t want to talk about that. “What about you?”
“Not much.”
“What movies did you see this week?” Some kids, during the summer, read as many books as possible. Walter had decided he was going to watch a movie a day until school started.
“Okay, so on Monday, I watched this Japanese horror movie,” he said. “It was so creepy. You wouldn’t have made it through the first fifteen minutes. And then on Tuesday . . .”
I smiled as I listened to him go on. By the time I got to Stuyvesant, my nervousness and the hurt in his voice were gone, and things felt back to normal. Well, as normal as the fact that my best friend was a fourteen-year-old gamer and film geek.
“Okay, I need to go,” he said. “I’m meeting someone.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“A . . . person.”
Wait. What? “Is it a girl person?”
“I am neither going to confirm nor deny that.”
“Is it Amanda from the Saturday meeting?” He always denied it when I asked him, but I knew he had a crush on her from the way he always called on her first to share and gave her the Twelve Steps to read when he was chairing a meeting.
“It might be.”
“It is!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to,” I laughed. “I can hear it in your voice.”
He gave a heavy sigh. “I liked it better when we talked about you,” he grumbled.
POTENTIAL ISSUES I DECIDED MATT’S MOTHER MIGHT HAVE
She drank.
She was a kleptomaniac. (The mother of this girl in my grade, Frannie Berkowitz, was a kleptomaniac. So bad that her father had made a deal with the Holy Trinity of Barneys, Saks, and Neimans that when they saw her coming, a security guard would follow her around and make note of everything she stole and then just send him an itemized bill.)
She suffered from depression.
She had a gambling problem.
She was obesely overweight.
She was anorexic.
If I had more time, I could’ve come up with a bunch more, but that was all I could get through from the time it took to park and make my way to Matt. However, even if I had had all the time in the world, I doubt I would’ve guessed what it turned out to be.
“Okay, when you said hoarder, do you mean like hoarder hoarder?” I asked after he told me.
“Yeah,” he said, not looking at me as he ripped a clump of grass out of the ground.
“Like TV-level hoarder?”
He pulled up another clump. “It’s not like there are dead cats lying around, but it’s bad.”
“How bad?”
He couldn’t look at me. “Bad.”
At this rate, it would be next week before I pulled the full story out of him. But I knew what it was like not to be able to look someone in the eye; to be in that place of wanting more than anything to be able to share the truth of what was going on, while at the same time feeling like to do so was a complete betrayal that might make your world as you knew it come crashing down.
I put my hand on his cheek and steered his face up so that he was looking at me. “You can tell me,” I said quietly.
His eyes darted to the side a few times before he focused on me. “I know I can,” he whispered.
And with a deep breath, he did.
He told me about his mom. How before becoming an editor, his mother had written a novel that had gotten a lot of attention and great reviews but that she never wrote another one after that because his father felt that one writer in the family was bad enough.
How after the divorce, in an attempt to make herself feel better and give herself a new start, his mother had started buying things. New clothes. New dishes. New sheets and comforters. Then, when Matt’s father announced he was marrying the woman he had been having an affair with, and his mom moved them upstate full-time where they had more room, it started getting worse. Antique silver candelabras she got at a garage sale and planned to polish up but never got around to. An old butter churn she found at a flea market in Ghent that she was going to make into a table but never did.
Then, when the woman got pregnant, his mom started getting more out of control. Boxes of books off eBay. Record albums for fifty cents from an antique store in Hillsdale to go along with the turntable she had bought at a thrift store in Great Barrington. While their house was big—five bedrooms—soon enough her office was packed with stuff that once purchased often didn’t even make it out of their bags and boxes. Then, when Matt’s sister went away to college, her bedroom was taken over as well.
The bigger his father’s life got (a new wife, two more kids, a New York Times bestseller) the smaller his mother’s became—swallowed up by more and more stuff. He talked about not being able to breathe when he came home, and the nightmares he had where there would be an earthquake and everything would roll into his room and smother him. And yet, like in my life with Mom, to the outside world, it all looked okay. The lawn was still mowed; the bills were still paid (well, in our case, they weren’t, but we hadn’t known that, thanks very much, Barney). The elephant in the room may have grown bigger and bigger over the years, thanks to a steady diet of crazy, but as long as it was well dressed and didn’t pee on the carpet, what was the big deal if it was there?
Sure, if anyone had come over and had seen how out of control things had gotten, something would have had to have been done, but there was an easy solution to that: just don’t invite anyone over. He said it had been somewhat manageable back when the clutter had been contained to rooms that had doors, and he could just make sure they were all closed before a friend came over; but in the last two years, things had started to spill out into hallways and onto counters. A year before, for Christmas, he and his sister had bought his mother a gift certificate for six sessions with a personal organizer, but before the first three-hour session was over, the woman had taken Matt aside and told him that she couldn’t help them and that he should look into getting his mother professional help. Other than their handyman, she was the last person from the outside world who had been in the house.
“I didn’t expect my mom to be home when we stopped by there yesterday,” he said. “And I was scared she was going to come outside and invite you in, and it would turn into this whole deal.” He shook his head. “I keep thinking that if I just plan well enough, I can keep this stuff under control, you know? And if I keep it under control, it’ll somehow give me enough time to come up with a solution and fix it.”
Boy, did I know that one. I nodded. “I get it. Believe me.”
He took my hand. “I know you get it,” he said quietly. “That’s why I wanted to tell you. And because to not tell you felt, somehow, like . . . a lie.”
That’s what I was learning. That leaving stuff out was sometimes just as bad as making stuff up.
He pulled me down so we were lying on the grass. As we held hands, not talking, I watched the cotton candy clouds move across the blue sky, listening to the steady rush of the waterfall in the distance and the soft rustling of the giant trees as they swayed in the breeze. I thought of a list I had made about a year earlier during one of Mom’s deeper depressions—the one where I was holding the mirror up to her mouth to check her breathing a few nights a week rather than a few nights a month—called Perfect Moments. Like the tim
e when I was six and had the stomach flu and Mom held my hair back as I threw up and then rubbed my back as I drank ginger ale. And reciting the lines from The Way We Were with each other as we lay in her bed and ate popcorn. And listening to the studio audience clap and whoop at the end of the taping of the pilot for Plus Zero when Mom took her final bow.
As I lay there, the sun on my face, so relaxed I wasn’t even worried about tick bites that might have led to Lyme disease, I knew that this moment would be added to the list.
The first perfect moment my mother was not a part of.
Matt rolled over and propped himself up on his arm. “I didn’t plan for this to happen.”
I rolled toward him and propped myself up as well. “Telling me about your mom?” I asked.
“No. I mean, yes, that, too, but I’m talking about you and me,” he replied. “After that first night down by the river, I thought that it would be fun to hang out with you while you were here, but I didn’t plan on, you know . . .”
I felt a switch flip on in my stomach. “What?”
He looked at me—really looked at me, in a way that I never felt seen before. Instead of breaking my gaze, I kept still and let him look at me, not worrying that he’d see something less than perfect; not fidgeting so that by being a moving target I was less likely to be found out and he’d leave.
The corners of his mouth lifted into a smile.
“Falling in love with you,” he said.
I would have been lying if I had said that, sometimes right before I fell asleep, I hadn’t thought about this moment and what it would feel like and what I would say and what it would mean. What I hadn’t counted on was how it wasn’t those five words that cracked my heart open—it was how his voice shook when he said them, and how his hand got all clammy. It was how a little crease appeared between his eyebrows and lines appeared on his forehead as he held his breath, waiting to see how I’d react, as if pleading for me not to laugh or cringe or reject him. As if he were saying, “Okay, I just unzipped my skin and this is what’s underneath and I’m really putting myself out there, so think carefully about what you say because your response is going to be singed on my brain forever.”