At the back of the house, Lee’s kitchen is small and dark. He gets two beers from the fridge and opens them under the handle of a silverware drawer, leaving the caps wherever they skitter to the floor.
“One bottle of draft.” He hands me a beer, and I try my best to take a sip in a not-losery way, like drinking beers on a Wednesday after school is a totally normal activity.
Lee continues to the living room where he flops onto a corduroy beanbag chair, shaking off his Birkenstocks. Pairs of shoes are spread everywhere in the room. He picks his guitar up off the floor and starts strumming in this casual, absent sort of way, making a low humming sound. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to sit and watch this performance or ignore it, so I just stand there and shift my attention between him and the rest of the room. Every surface is heaped with papers held in place by cups and mugs. The window ledge is lined with small cheap-looking toys, the kind of gifts you might find at the back of a convenience store — a Ms. Pac-Man eraser, a bendy Santa Claus — but also one of those brightly painted, bowling-pin dolls that hides other dolls inside it. Shelves climb most of the wall space, but they have more magazines than books squeezed into them. There’s one blown-up photograph of two blond boys with tennis racquets in a plastic frame. Other than that, I don’t see anything really personal or decorative. No plants or pottery. No posters or other artwork except a framed ink sketch, propped against the wall, of about a hundred eyes — all different sizes and shapes, staring off in different directions. It looks like it was done by a twelve-year-old.
After a few minutes, Lee looks up at me and tilts his head like there’s some sort of question I still haven’t answered. “Jesus,” he says eventually. “Do you need an invitation to sit down?”
“No.” Like some kind of obedient dog, I rush too quickly to the low couch across from him. I cross my legs and then uncross them, wondering which position looks more natural.
“They say chicks who pick at their bottle labels are sexually frustrated.”
There’s a neat white scratch through the logo of my bottle. I stare at it for too long a time, trying to think of the right thing to say back.
“That’s Fever,” Lee says. “You’re in his spot.”
I look down at a hairy orange cat staring up at me from the middle of the floor. The cat arches his back and shudders.
“Should I move?”
“Nope.” Lee reaches his bare foot out to run up and down Fever’s tail.
I pick up the bowling-pin doll and twist it apart, unpacking the smaller, identical dolls stacked inside. Six in total. We had one just like this in the kindergarten room at school. I used to think of myself as the baby — the hard little nugget deep inside — and Mom was the shell. I guess now I’m something in the middle.
“Russian,” Lee says.
“Yeah,” I say, though I didn’t know that.
Lee lights a cigarette with a Redbird StrikeAnywhere. He looks like he’s concentrating really hard when he takes the first drag.
“You can smoke in here?”
“Nobody here but me. My mom’s checking things out in Chechnya.”
I know I’ve heard of Chechnya, like there’s a hurricane or a war or something there, but I didn’t exactly absorb the details. “Cool.”
“Sure. She’s a professor.”
“Cool.”
“Right. So cool.” Lee’s making fun of me. He makes his lips thin and holds the cigarette between them. He narrows his eyes and stares.
“What?” I say.
“Fuck, I don’t know. Tell me something, Ketchum.”
“Like what?”
“Like what kind of music do you like?”
I know there’s a right answer, but I don’t know what it is. “Different stuff.”
“Different stuff. Like what? Like Alanis? You like her?”
“No.” I think through the music in Jed’s room, trying to remember something I actually like, but I’m taking too long to answer. “Smashing Pumpkins.”
“Smashing Pumpkins. OK. Everyone likes them.”
“I know.”
“I bet you like Porno for Pyros, too.”
“Yeah.”
“And the Trousers?”
“Sure.”
“They don’t exist.” Lee tucks his hair behind an ear. “But I’m glad you like them. That’s what I want to name my next band.”
In his eyes, I am definitely a total loser, but I don’t want to act impressed by him either, so I just shrug and pretend to look at a spot on my fingernail.
“You know what I’m really into?” he asks.
“No.”
“Ancient Greek music. I mean, the stuff we know about.” He turns his guitar around like a cello and plucks out three aggressive, springy notes. “It’s heavy metal, basically, but without amp. A lot more simple. Totally Zen, if you’re into that.”
I don’t want to be embarrassed again for pretending I know something I don’t. “Who’s Zen?”
For a second, Lee looks like he might answer me, but he just shakes his head and makes a clicking noise out the side of his mouth. “Man.”
“Weird eye picture,” I say, changing the subject.
Lee stops strumming. “By the way, Ketchum, who told you about my brother?”
“What brother?”
“You said something about it at Drifters.” He looks at me for a long moment.
“No. I asked about my brother.”
“Yes. But also . . . ” He nods at the bookshelf, and I look again at the photo of the blond boys holding tennis racquets. I remember, then, saying that weird thing about an evil twin at the bar. As soon as I think the worst, Lee says, “Take it easy. He’s not dead or anything.”
“Is he here?”
“Fuck, no. You ever see the music video for that song ‘Jeremy’?”
I know the video. A little kid snaps and kills a bunch of people at school, splattering their white shirts with blood. I change the channel when it comes on. Videos like that on TV, even commercials for horror movies, still give me scary thoughts that follow me around forever. If I want to stay normal, I can’t look at things like that. Some days I don’t even look at the knife holder in the kitchen. I’m afraid that if I see it, I’ll snap and kill someone in their sleep. I’m pretty sure I could never actually do it, but it’s the thinking that’s bad. The thought will go around and around for weeks sometimes.
“He’s like that kid,” Lee goes on. “He’s never hurt anyone or anything yet, but he needs to live in this very specific way.”
“Scary.”
“Just the way it happened, man.”
I want to say I’m sorry, that I obviously didn’t know he actually had an evil twin, but I also don’t want to talk about it anymore.
Lee nods at the eye sketch. “He did that.”
“It’s interesting.” Except that now I’m noticing that a single, mean-looking slit is pointed right at me. I turn to look more directly at Lee.
“No, you’re right. It’s totally messed.” Lee stops playing for a second and pinches the bridge of his nose. “The last time I visited my brother, he said he was going to pick my eyeballs out with the corner of a Post-it note.” When Lee starts strumming again he laughs a little bit. “Jed doesn’t seem so bad now, right?”
“Your brother sounds sick, maybe. Jed’s just selfish.”
Lee puts his guitar down and pulls Fever up onto his lap. He looks like a truck mechanic with his cigarette hanging off his lower lip. “Jed’s a pretty little stray and the world wants to feed him. Plus it’s not like he knows your mom’s dying.”
“He could call.”
“You don’t get it. We slept under tarps on the side of highways. We ate leftovers off all-you-can-eat breakfast plates at the Holiday Inn. We showered, like, every seventeen days. We were totally incompatible with society.”
“That’s gross.”
“If freedom is gross, I’ll take it.”
It doesn’t sound like freedom; it sounds
like being broke and stupid and selfish. “So why did you come back then?”
“Other shit I want to do.”
“The band?”
“I’ve got school in January, looks like.” This surprises me but also gives me a hopeful sort of feeling about Jed, for Mom’s sake. Mom was so proud of Jed for getting into school. The summer before he took off, she talked on and on to him about being in university in the seventies as if this were relevant information. She took him to the bookstore in August and spent, like, two hundred dollars on school supplies. It makes me so mad that she wasted her money on him like that. She probably won’t be around when it’s my turn to go to school. She won’t be around for any of the things I’m supposed to do with my life, and he just totally abused her time.
“Where are you going to school?” I ask.
“Montreal. You know I was born there?”
“Do you even speak French?”
“Nope. Moved here with my mom when I was two. Divorciados.”
“That’s not French.”
He drops the smoke into his beer bottle and swishes it around. “Close enough.”
“Do you think Jed will go back to school?”
“Probably not. Jed already knows everything, right?” Lee winks at me.
“Do you even like Jed?”
“Sure. I thought you didn’t.”
“Maybe that’s true.” Do I like my brother? It’s a weird thing not to know. I pick at my beer label then stop because Lee’s watching me.
After a long pause Lee says, “The thing is, the two of you are really different.”
I make a face like I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s obvious we’re different, but I want to know how it looks to someone else. Specifics.
He leans in like he needs to get a better look at me. “You’re sort of weird and nervous.” His eyes move up and down. “The weird part’s not bad. But you’re definitely afraid of me.”
“No.” I make a snorting noise, but it’s too sudden and totally unconvincing.
He gestures to the spot next to me on the couch and cocks his head. “May I?” I shrug and slide to one side, my face and armpits getting warm. For a second I’m afraid Lee isn’t Lee at all. That Lee is still off with Jed somewhere and this is his no-name evil twin. But I’m also pretty sure that I don’t really think that: it’s my brain making up a reason for feeling so nervous. It does that.
Lee crosses the floor and drops down next to me. I smell his greasy hair and warm, sour breath. I notice his right hand has one long, dirty thumbnail. It feels like this is some kind of test, his sitting next to me. Lee doesn’t want to help me unless I’m cool enough, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to act. He rolls his head back and looks up at the ceiling. I stretch my legs out in front of me and try to look totally relaxed.
“Jed didn’t talk much about his family.”
“I’m not surprised.” But part of me is surprised. What did they talk about all that time? Mom probably thinks about him a thousand times a day. Worried herself into getting cancer.
“Gotta go meet some people.” Lee claps my knee suddenly and it makes me jump. It could have been funny, but Lee looks totally surprised and even sorry to have startled me. “Shit, man. Did you forget I was here?”
I stand up then, feeling like an extreme reject and just wanting to go. “No. Thanks for the beer.”
“Hang on.” Lee gets up, too, and goes to the bookshelf and pulls out a chubby pink paperback. “Read this sometime.” He tosses it to me and, thank god, I catch it. The cover says Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “Get educated, all right?”
I leave Lee’s house with the book and walk through the tree-lined streets, out of my old neighbourhood and back to our apartment. We never looked for the phone number.
The next time I visit St. Barf’s, Mom is awake and reading a giant book: Don Quixote. She has a bunch of big books like that at the hospital. She says she’s trying to make up for lost time, but what’s the point of reading a bunch of stories and information that you won’t ever get to use or think about in your actual life? Anyway, she puts the book down and asks me to get the cards from the bin beside her bed.
“How’s everything settling at school?” she asks.
I stack the cards up on the little table. “Fine, I guess.”
“Any tests coming up?”
“Nope.” I wish Mom didn’t still annoy me. Why would she ask me about tests? Would she rather I just go home and study for tests instead of hanging out?
“You’re lucky you don’t have SATs. I still have nightmares about them,” Mom says. “Can you believe that?”
“It’s believable.”
“It’s funny,” she says. “I can be any age when I’m dreaming. Does that happen to you yet?”
“I’m not sure.”
Mom shakes her head. “Maybe you’re too young. I don’t know. You get to be my age and every time you wake up, it takes a little while to catch up with who you are. How old you are, everything that’s happened. I’m always saying, Relax, Lorna. High school was a million years ago. And that’s when I really freak out.” She smiles. “Because it hits me exactly how long ago that was.”
I shuffle the cards quickly, the breeze lifting the hair on my arms. “You’re not that old.” It doesn’t sound like the right thing to say to someone who is dying.
“It’s always a shock anyway. You run through all the years since you were seventeen, twenty. You think, where did all that time go? What’s there to show for it? You’ll see.”
My whole entire life happened since Mom was about twenty. That’s something, but I don’t mention it.
“Do you ever dream about our old house?” I ask.
“On Mowers?”
“Yeah. Do the Sokolovs still live there?”
“I heard they moved West.”
“Maybe one day I’ll buy it back.”
She glances up at me from her cards. “Yeah? It wasn’t a perfect house. The roof leaked and the kitchen was too small.”
“So you didn’t even like the house?”
“Not especially.”
I look at the Halloween picture on the bedside table with Mom, Jed, and me in cowboy costumes. People get sappy about the past because everyone’s always smiling in pictures. I’m sure everything sucked as much then as it does now. I bet I wanted to be Strawberry Shortcake or something that Halloween, not some stupid cowgirl. Jed was the one obsessed with the Wild West. He had that lame talking knocker on his bedroom door: “Dodge, Kansas. Leave your guns at the door.” I should tell Lee about it, see how cool Jed looks after that.
“What do you like dreaming about then?” I ask.
“I dream about water,” she says.
I figure she’ll start talking about almost going pro, but instead she says, “Remember in the summers when I’d take you guys to the dock after the sun went down? You were the brave one, just diving in. Jed was more of a chicken.” Mom closes her eyes and starts singing the old song that would get us to jump off the dock, her voice all crackly like an imitation of a dying person on TV: “Two little ducks, sitting on the bank. One swam off and the other one sank . . . ”
I look over at the door, but no one is listening. “Yeah, I remember.”
“You told me once that you wanted to swim right down to the bottom of the lake and push the sun back up again. Remember that?”
“No.”
“It was sweet. My summer baby. You wanted everything to last.” She turns her head a little toward the window. The street lights are coming on; every day they’re a little earlier. “How’s your Dad?”
I want to go back to talking about those nights when I was little. “How come you never swam with us at night?”
Mom looks at me. “Didn’t I?”
“You never taught us to swim like you.”
“Is that what you wanted? I’m sorry.” And she actually looks sad about it, though I didn’t say it to make her feel bad. “I always thought you t
wo had your own things you were interested in,” Mom says. “Tennis. Stuff like that.”
“Yeah.” And I guess I don’t remember ever wishing that she’d teach me, exactly. It just strikes me now that it’s a little weird she didn’t. Did she think we wouldn’t be good, or did she just want to keep it to herself?
“I suppose I always wished my mom could have taught me piano,” she says.
“But your Mom died, so she couldn’t.”
After I say that completely stupid thing, Mom takes a slow, shaky sip of juice and for once I’m glad this requires enough concentration to stop talking. I reshuffle the cards. When she puts the cup down, she says, “You should get to do the things you want. You and Jed both.” Her face is sad again, and I wonder if I’m the reason for it. I feel guilty for not having done anything cool or interesting by this point in my life. It would be better if she could die knowing I was talented or something.
Mom reaches for the roll of wine gums on the bedside table and kicks them toward me with her fingertips. “Take these, will you? They don’t taste right to me anymore. My teeth are shot.”
“Thanks.” I put the pack in my jacket pocket.
“Payback for watching the plants,” she says. “How are they holding up?”
“Fine.”
“Herbert?” Shame punches around in my stomach. Herbert is Mom’s old ficus tree. After Jed left, she moved Herbert to his room for the best sun. By now, I’m sure he’s a dry stump, brown leaves everywhere. I just forgot about him. I don’t know what my problem is sometimes.
“Uh huh.” I count the cards out loud, like she’s interrupting my dealing.
“Watering him?”
“Yes!”
“Not too much; not too little.”
“I know, I know.” It’s highly unlikely she’ll ever be in a position to catch me in my lie, and I feel guilty for the relief this gives me.
Mom’s staring directly at me when I finally look up again. Her skin is getting see-through near the temples, but her eyes look the way they always have: the same deep, rich colour of apple seeds. They’re prettier than most brown eyes, prettier than mine, and I’m glad to notice this now, but I’m sad, too, because I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before.
Catch My Drift Page 25