by Dan Begley
Christ. “Yes, Mom, I do care. Okay? I care. I care because if he lets go, I’ll have to go out and buy a new suit for the funeral.”
I feel like I’ve been goaded into saying it, like she got together with Scott and the two of them came up with a plan to push and pile on the guilt and try to get me to do something stupid. Well, it worked. They got me. I snapped. And if she wants to keep staring at me till her face freezes like that—shocked and appalled—let her.
Fuck.
“Look, Mom, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But he’s not exactly my favorite person in the world, for obvious reasons.” What is it with these people? Doesn’t anyone get this? “Besides, I thought you’d be on my side, especially after what he did to you.”
She narrows her eyes. “What he did to me?”
“Yeah, Mom, what he did to you. Oh, come on, if we’re spilling our guts here, let’s spill them all the way. I’m not ten anymore.” But apparently she thinks I am, because her mouth refuses to work. “Fine. Then I’ll say it. He was screwing around and you kicked him out. He had an affair. There. See how easy that was?”
The blood instantly drains from her face, till it’s as white as her cotton blouse.
“That’s what you’ve thought all these years?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, god,” she whispers. “Then I am to blame for so much.” Her eyes dart around like they’re searching for the safety of high ground, but there is none.
“Mitch, I don’t even know how to say this. Your father didn’t have an affair. I did.”
Remember that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves is on the rooftop and the bad guys are blasting away, and the motion gets super slow, and Neo bends his body back at an impossible angle, and the bullets leave liquid tracks as they float harmlessly by? That’s me right now. My mother’s words are coming at me like those bullets—“Your father didn’t have an affair. I did I did I did I did”—and I’m doing everything I can to give them the slip, contorting my body as much as I can, but I don’t have Neo’s training or agility or special effects budget, and they plaster me square in the chest. I can’t breathe.
“When?” I eventually manage to get out.
She looks stricken, panicked, pale. “After Emily died. Your father and I were going through a miserable time. We were barely speaking to each other. I found someone I could talk to, someone who cared… and it happened.”
Jesus. My mom had an affair. “And Dad found out?”
“No.” She’s nasally now, sniveling. “I told him. I threw it all in his face. I wanted to punish him for not being there in the way I needed. I wanted to give him a reason to be done with me, with us, and go away. But he wouldn’t.”
No. Not then. Not for five more years. “But I don’t understand. Then why did he leave when he did?”
She wipes her tears away with the back of her hand. “I don’t know, Mitch. I don’t know. He just said he needed to go.” And I believe her, that she doesn’t know, since she wouldn’t hold anything back now, not after the damage misunderstandings and half-truths have caused all of us to this point.
A light breeze stirs through the trees, sending some leaves skittering into the pool, disturbing the surface of the pristine water.
“I’m so sorry, Mitch,” she says, and that’s the last time either one of us speaks, for a long time.
You’ve probably seen those newscasts where somebody does something bad and they interview the neighbors and coworkers, and they all say something like, “He seemed like such a nice guy”; “He’s the last person I would’ve expected”; “I never saw it coming.” And I always think: You people are morons. You saw him every day. You ate lunch with him. Your kids cut his grass. And you had no idea he had a meth lab in his basement and a hit squad of mafia hookers? Nothing odd about anything he said? Not even a goofy smile or weird sense of humor? Please.
That’s what I’m playing out in my mind the whole way home. I’ve known my mother for twenty-eight years. For twenty-three of those, while she was doing all those mom things—reading bedtime stories, checking my homework, putting on my Band-Aids, taking my temperature, cooking my pork chops, picking out my corsages—she’s been hiding the secret she had an affair. And I never got a whiff of it. And what about my dad and his part in this, and how it all sailed over my head? Shit. My entire universe was swimming with liars and connivers and secret-keepers, and I never had a freaking clue. Who looks like the moron now?
I go to see him Sunday afternoon, after basketball, and it’s awkward for all the obvious reasons. I haven’t seen him in months. I haven’t talked to him since his heart attack. I didn’t call before I came over. He’s my father.
“How are you feeling?” I ask. I’m sitting in a chair across from his bed.
“Okay,” he says in a raspy voice.
My father has a bit of a Martin Scorsese look—the hair, the bushy eyebrows, even the glasses—but right now his skin is puffy and jaundiced, and he has enormous bags under his eyes, so maybe it’s the way Scorsese would look if he were on his deathbed.
“How long are they planning to keep you?”
“Another few days. They want me up and out of here as soon as possible. I’ll be happy to oblige.”
He tries to shift his position but pulls up short, wincing, and Leah, who’s standing right by his bed, helps him scoot to the side. She’s heavier than the last time I saw her, and maybe a bit more gray, but for the most part looks the same. The kids do not. Nathan has feet nearly the size of mine and that croaky on-the-cusp-of-puberty voice, and Jessica is walking now, and talking, and no longer uses a pacifier, and is nine.
“One of the joys of turning sixty, I guess,” he sums it up.
“That’s right. Happy belated birthday.”
“I’ll take it, since I’m still around to hear it.”
“And what’s the prognosis? You’ll be okay?”
He shrugs. “The heart attack did some damage. But they fixed what they could. Now I just have to be careful with my diet and get some exercise.” He pats Leah’s hand as if it’s something they’ve discussed before and he’s finally seen the light and is ready to get with the program.
The kids are watching one of those funniest home video shows on TV, caught up in that world. It’s odd to be in the same room as them, knowing they’re such strangers to me even though we share the same last name and half our DNA.
“Your mom was here yesterday,” he says. “She said you’re waiting to hear back on your book.”
“I heard. They rejected it.” I blurt it all out without thinking. “But if you talk to her anytime soon, don’t tell her. She doesn’t know.”
It’s a strange moment for us, my sharing a secret like that with him, both of us knowing I’m keeping it from my mom. But I guess I can trust him, since he’s had experience in the keeping big secrets hush-hush department.
There really isn’t much more to talk about, since I don’t want to ask him if he likes the food, or the color of the walls, or how his par-three golf course is running without him. This is probably enough of a reunion for one day, so I get off my chair.
“I just wanted to come by and say hi.” I pick at the belt loop of my shorts. “So I guess I’ll talk to you later.”
“Thanks for coming, Mitch,” he says. “I mean that.”
For an instant he gives me a closer look, and I’m certain he can see inside my head and all the questions burning a hole in my brain: Why did you stay? Why did you leave? How did we come to this? But then I realize it’s not that he suddenly gets me any better; I just might be starting to see him through different eyes.
My mom calls in the afternoon to apologize again and make sure I’m okay and ask me if there’s anything else she can explain. I tell her not to worry about it. I’m fine. I understand. I get it. She doesn’t need to keep beating herself up over it. Then my phone rings five minutes later and I think it’s her, calling to beat herself up over it again. But it’s not; it’
s Marie.
“Hey there,” I say, flushed with panic, afraid I’m on speaker phone and Bradley is standing right next to me. Only my cell doesn’t have speakerphone and Bradley is at Skyler’s.
“I hope this is okay, just calling you up out of the blue.”
“Yeah, absolutely. Call anytime. So what’s up?”
“Actually, I was thinking about your dance shoes. I forgot to tell you yesterday that it’d probably be a good idea to break them in before tomorrow night. Take it from a woman, a new pair of shoes can kill.”
I’d like to ask her how, exactly, they can kill, especially a pair of Betsey Johnson Aries bronze peep-toe platforms, since that’s what my heroine just bought. I refrain. Instead I ask a better question. “What’s the best way to break them in?” Duh. How about put them on and wear them around the apartment?
“Well, you may just want to put them on and wear them around your place. Do some light dancing. In fact…” she seems to be thinking on the fly, “if you want to, we could meet up tomorrow before the lesson, go over some moves from last week, get you used to the feel.”
“Yeah, I’d like that. What time?”
“Say… seven?”
I run the bus schedule through my head, for the trip that way, and I think I’ve got enough of a grip on it to know it’ll work. “Sounds great.”
And then, because Bradley’s not around and not going to be, I stroll to my bedroom, lace up my new shoes, and salsa a good part of the afternoon away.
CHAPTER TEN
My comp class on Monday is normal, just like they’ve all been for the past week. For some reason, I figured after Molly visited my office and got my number, things would get weird. Like she’d sit in class and pull out her black book and thumb through it, pretend to dial a phone, chat with me, mouth all sorts of distracting things. Instead, she wears her T-shirts and speaks her mind and gives me fits and does great work. We’re in a bit of a rut, if you want the truth, but it could be worse.
I leave for the studio after dinner and, as it turns out, I do not have enough of a grip on the bus schedule running that way: I miss a connector and wind up there at 7:45, forty-five minutes late. But Marie shrugs it off and we still manage to find a corner of the floor not being used by the fox trot crowd. We work on the underarm turn and hammerlock, and I do feel the difference being in dance shoes. I’m more in contact with the floor, and the spins and turns flow more freely, and we have such a good connection during this warm-up time that once the real lesson starts, we stick together and don’t change partners, which technically isn’t forbidden—Steve and Jennifer do it—but draws the ire of the group in the form of boos and catcalls, especially from Rosie. Even Adonis seems to notice, and when the lesson is over, he calls us over, presumably to have us scrub the floors or write five hundred times on the blackboard, “We will learn to play with others.” But that’s not the reason at all. Instead, he tells us that he had his eye on us all evening, and we looked great and have a ton of potential, and he wants us to be in the Showcase in November.
“The what?” I ask.
“The Showcase. Basically it’s a big dance party for all the students, but before the party starts, we have a few couples demonstrate certain dances. The two of you really have the salsa down, and I thought it’d be a great chance to show off your stuff.”
“Wow,” I say. “So this would be dancing in front of… people?”
“Just other students from the various classes. It’s a friendly crowd. No judges, no rotten tomatoes, no trophies. I promise.” He pauses. “Of course, you don’t have to decide now.”
Good. Because that’s what I’ll need: time. Which is what I’m sure Marie would like too.
“I’m in,” she says.
What is it with this woman? No asking questions, no hedging, no wanting to look at things from a hundred different angles. No wonder she just picked up and moved from North Carolina.
I should just say no. I don’t have the time. I’m teaching. I’m scribbling away at my chick-lit novel every opportunity I get. I haven’t cracked a book for my dissertation in two weeks. I’ll have to keep up this whole Clark Kent secret identity gig for so much longer. Besides, it’s dancing.
“Fine. Yeah. Sure.”
Marie is pleased, Adonis more so, and he says he’ll do everything he can to help us work on a routine, including putting in extra time before or after lessons, whatever works with our schedules. This is exactly what I’ll need, plenty of extra time, but I can see it also means more comings and goings at odd hours, more mishaps trying to figure out the bus schedule, more looking like a bumbling, irresponsible idiot when I show up late. I need a more reliable means of transportation than a fleet of Bi-State buses. In other words, I need a car.
I drove a beat-up Cutlass in high school and it got me where I needed to go: school, a few concerts, dates. I sold it when I went off to Wisconsin for college and did like everyone else in Madison—got a bike. I haven’t owned a car since; my legs or bike wheels or the bus or MetroLink or a girlfriend’s car or Bradley have always been just fine. But now I inhabit a different world: I’m a Showcase dancer.
I go to the lease lot Tuesday morning and tell the guy I sell pharmaceutical products and need a car for a while and what kind of car does he recommend. He shows me cars that are far too big and expensive, since, of course, he makes the mistake of assuming I actually do sell pharmaceutical products and make that kind of money, as opposed to being a PhD candidate/writer/teacher and making that kind of money. I look at the compacts, something that’s fuel efficient, but those seem tiny, so I finally settle on one that isn’t the kind of car I’d always dreamed about when I dreamed of getting a car, but it has four wheels and it’ll do: a sandstone metallic Chevy Malibu.
We talk terms of the lease and I’m a little thrown, since I don’t know how long I’ll need it. At least till the Showcase, possibly longer, so I settle on a round number: three months. We do the insurance and paperwork, and I sign my name a hundred times and I write a check and he gives me the key, and just like that I’m pulling out of the lot, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel of my brand-new car.
I kick off Wednesday’s class with a freewrite, and here’s the way it works: a student brings in a prompt—a poem, a quote, a picture, anything to set their minds abuzz—then they all scribble away till I call “time.” It’s more a stream-of-consciousness sort of thing—no concerns about grammar or spelling or punctuation—and tends to jiggle the wires on the creative side of the brain, which is good for them. This morning, a pimply- faced kid named Patrick uses his iPod and docking station to play the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” It’s a good choice, I think, since who can’t come up with something after that melancholy melody and those lyrics? They get busy in their notebooks, then I stop them when three minutes are up.
“I like that song,” pint-sized Jan says brightly, like she’s found a new friend. “Who sings it?”
Now, I have to remember that these kids have been weaned on the likes of Baby Boy Da Prince and Ludacris and Insane Clown Posse, not acoustic ballads of the sixties by mop-topped Brits. Also, as their instructor, I am a font of equanimity, nonjudgment, and encouragement, and to say anything that casts me otherwise would be a mistake. However, with her peers, she’s fair game.
“You gotta be kidding me,” snorts Pete, with a blend of disbelief and disgust I find just right. “Ever hear of a freaking band called the Beatles?”
“Sure,” pint-sized Jan says, trying to shrug it off. “Just not that song.” But you can tell he’s gotten under her skin, rattled her a bit, so she does what any female in the class would do backed into a similar corner: sends up a flare to Molly.
Molly heeds the call. “Hey, I agree with him. You probably should know that. Since I’m sure he knows everything about every other classic song from forty years ago. Like who did, say, ‘The Ghetto.’”
Pete pretends to bite his nails, frightened kindergartener style, then elbows the guy next to him, li
ke Watch this. He turns to Molly. “Sorry, didn’t quite hear you. Were you talking about ‘In the Ghetto’ by Elvis, or ‘The Ghetto, Part 1’ by Donny Hathaway?”
There’s something of a gasp from the class, since this is the first time all semester that anyone, including their instructor, has been able to sting her. Even Molly looks a little dazed. But before she has a chance to gather her wits, get back on her feet, and kick his ass into tomorrow—this is Molly we’re talking about: it’s only a matter of time—I ask for volunteers to read their freewrite.
Patrick’s hand shoots up immediately, which is a bad sign, since it means he brought the song in for the specific purpose of playing it, then talking about why he played it: in other words, he set us up. Unfortunately, he’s the only volunteer, so I’m forced to give him the floor, which he uses to gloomily tell us that he’s been playing the song nonstop, since yesterday all his troubles did seem so far away, but now it looks as though they’re here to stay, and of course it’s because of a girl: she cut him loose and he can’t seem to get over it and at the moment he’s stuck. A chorus of sympathetic “Aws” rains down from the girls, and I can see, musically speaking, that we’re about to leave “Yesterday” behind and move on to the Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” Jangly braceleted Donna is chomping at the bit.
“What’s your favorite food?” she asks him.
“Pizza.”
“Then eat it whenever you want. With extra cheese. It’ll make you feel better.”
Pam: “And ice cream. Eat a ton of ice cream. Ice cream helps you get over anything.”
Estella: “Go shopping.”
Tory: “Hang out with friends.”
Cassandra: “Get a facial.”
The guy Pete elbowed earlier sits up. “What?”
“Don’t look at me like that. I read that Denzel gets one once a month. And no one better tell me that Denzel’s not fine.”
A guy named Lou starts to stir in the back. Lou wears a braided gold chain and sleeveless shirts that show off his muscles, and with his sleazy good looks you get the feeling Lou might know a thing or two about messy breakups, especially causing them.