by Susan Conley
Lara’s undergrads are interested in things like intersectionality and gender fluidity and personal agency, and I try to keep up. She’s having a hard time balancing the two men she’s sleeping with. Each of them wants her to be exclusive.
“My students say they can tell right away.”
“Tell what?”
“When they’re in a sex-positive place.”
“A what?”
“A place that doesn’t shame their bodies and what their bodies want to do. You could decide to be this.”
“Be what?”
“You could be a sex-positive house.”
“A sex-positive house. Thank you for this. Thanks for this lesson in sexual semiotics.”
Semiotics was a word we liked to make fun of in art school, because what did it really mean? It was like a word that meant something no one really understood and that no one where I came from cared about.
I tell her I’m worried Sam is going quiet on me again.
She says, “It’s Kit’s accident. It’s making Sam think about Liam again. What Sam needs right now is more radical empathy from you.”
I do not know this term, radical empathy, and I tell Lara this.
She says radical empathy is the kind of empathy that makes you feel you completely understand someone else’s life. “Like you’re almost living their story.”
She often gives me things to think about that I haven’t thought of before, and these things live in my subconscious where I can’t shake them. She has a cultish following of students who love her, and I love her too. But I tell her that I didn’t realize she’d gotten a degree in psychotherapy.
She laughs.
“Lara, I’ve had so much empathy for Sam it’s almost radical. Please don’t talk to me about more empathy. I have almost no control over my son anymore, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’m very sorry, but you never had any control over either of your boys to begin with, and you need to finally understand this.”
Then she says she has to hang up and pay the toll. She and the media-arts professor she’s sleeping with are on their way to New York City to see a Laurie Anderson show. Lara is forever on road trips.
* * *
—
ONCE SHE AND I drove all day to get to her family’s trailer up near the Canadian border, because her younger brother had enlisted in the army and was giving us his CD player. All he’d asked for in exchange was some rum.
This was at the end of the Dirty Dancing summer. Kit had taken me to his island in his boat the day before, and then Lara and I got in her Corolla the next morning and drove away. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again.
She’d bought a small bongo drum at one of the county fairs, and I tapped the drum in my lap and sang to the radio and took photos out the window of the fields and farms and churches.
At one point she tried to explain her parents’ evangelicalism to me, and said they believed girls should do only girls’ work.
“What is girls’ work?”
“Darning.” She blew her cigarette smoke out the window. “Churning butter.”
“You’re lying.” I let the Nikon hang from the strap around my neck. It was the camera my mother had bought for me. She always believed good things required money, and she told me she wasn’t sure how, but the camera would help me leave the state one day.
“I wasn’t allowed to listen to rock music or wear pants.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
I kept coming back to Kit in my mind, and to his tapered fingers and the rough skin on his face. It had been the greatest summer of my life.
Lara said she was so tired of the way her parents quietly oppressed her, while her brother got to do what he wanted. She knew they weren’t going to give us the CD player without one of their religious screeds, and that we were going to need some of her brother’s rum to get through it.
We stopped for gas at a convenience store in a field surrounded by gutted cars, and a teenage boy at the gas pump said Lara’s Toyota was like a clown car because there were so many pretty girls getting out. But really there were just two of us, walking into the convenience store in our flip-flops like we owned it. We grabbed Twizzlers and Cokes.
When we got back in the car, the boy at the pump yelled, “You’re all so damn pretty!”
I thought I was someone who became pretty by being around other pretty people like Lara. I got this feeling that I was distanced from my body, and I hoped that she and I could get over the whole pretty thing soon. Then she squealed the tires, and we blew kisses at the boy.
THAT NIGHT I MAKE meatballs with egg and ricotta cheese as a peace offering for Charlie. He loves these meatballs. I’m hoping that in exchange for the meatballs, he won’t ask me to leave the house for Lucy and him.
Sam calls me on his friend Robbie’s cell phone and says, “Guess what I got on my math test?”
“Sam.” I grab a dish towel and wipe the raw hamburger meat off my hands.
“Guess again, Mom.”
“Okay. A ninety-one.”
“And again.”
“Eighty.”
“Way off.”
I can hear Robbie in the background laughing. Robbie’s father runs Maine Savings Bank, and Robbie seems to attend school half time and to play Fortnite the other half.
“Sam, I don’t care what you got on your math test, but you’re now making me care. How about you got a seventy?”
“Lower.”
“Now I’m mad, Sam.”
“Sixty-two.”
“Say goodbye to Robbie and get in the boat and come home.”
Robbie lives in one of the new McMansions on the mainland, with an electric gate and turrets. It’s a ten-minute walk from our dock, and it takes Sam exactly eighteen minutes to get down to the rowboat and row across the channel.
“Don’t do that again, please,” I say when he walks in.
“Do what?”
“Don’t go to Robbie’s house when you should be writing your English essay, and don’t call me about the math test you got an F on because you were smoking pot in the parking lot at McDonald’s.”
The meatballs are done, but they feel like a reward for Sam when there shouldn’t be a reward.
“Wow. You’re like completely out of control. What are you even saying? This is exactly why I called you and told you about my math test, to stop you from being mad to my face.”
“Well, now I’m madder to your face than I would have been if you hadn’t called. Why don’t you study? Why don’t you take yourself seriously? And what about your English essay?”
“I do take myself seriously, thank you very much. I take music seriously. I take basketball seriously. I finished the hubris essay after school with Mrs. Curtis.”
It’s like I haven’t heard him, I’m so worked up.
“What’s your hobby, Sam? Oh, wait. I forgot. It’s Instagram.”
Charlie comes out of my bedroom then. “Why are you being mean to him?”
“Because Sam called me from Robbie’s and made me guess that he got a sixty-two on his math test.”
I’m trying to adhere to the say-very-little strategy, but when Sam gets to me I can’t help myself.
“Stupid move, Sam.” Charlie fills his glass at the sink. “Really dumb. She’ll always get mad at you for calling her like that. Always.”
I put the meatballs on the table, and Sam picks one up in his fingers. It’s as if he never learned to use a fork.
Kit and I have tried to teach him about cutlery. Even Neanderthals had forks.
“Sam.” I hold up my fork. “This is a fork. Spelled F-O-R-K.”
He smiles.
“Good one, Mom,” Charlie says.
At least I’ve gotten them both to laugh.
* * *
—
AFTERWARD I MAKE THEM do the dishes.
When Sam stands up, he looks taller than he did yesterday.
He says, “I hate dishes.”
“We all hate them, honey.”
“Except Dad, who finds them relaxing.” He takes the lid off the compost under the sink and starts scraping the plates and handing them to Charlie. “I hate the seagulls too. God, they like to shit on the boat.”
“Don’t say shit.”
“Shit means excrement, Mom. It’s okay to say shit.”
“It’s a swearword, and we don’t swear.” I hand him the dish towel.
“Did I say I hate doing the dishes?” Sam smiles at me.
I go outside in my slippers to look for whales in the dark. The trees are tall black shadows, and the wind whips the whitecaps into little peaks.
I walk back inside when I can’t feel my toes. I say, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that my children would swear so casually.”
“Jillian.” Sam talks in his serious voice now. “Swearing is only normal.” He finishes drying the salad bowl and puts it on the counter upside down. “It’s what teens do. They swear.”
I ignore him.
Charlie says, “North Korea is about to launch another missile over the China Sea, Mom.” He’s still over at the sink. “Did you know this?”
“I do know this. The leader of North Korea is crazy. Please, please pour out all that water in the bathroom, Charlie. It looks like a bomb’s gone off in there.”
* * *
—
I GO INTO MY bedroom and change into sweatpants and call Kit from the bed.
He answers, which is sort of a miracle because he doesn’t believe in cell phones. He has a smartphone, but Charlie says it isn’t really smart because Kit does not let it do smart things.
“Pain report?” I ask him. “How bad today?”
The thing I worry most about is his pain, and how he doesn’t ask for help when it gets to be too much.
He tells me he’s very busy and can he call me back? Then he laughs. “All I do is physical therapy. Lift the weights up. Put the weights down. Push the weights in. Pull the weights out. When are you coming?”
“Friday. We’ll be there Friday.”
He’s in a better mood today, but I’ve decided not to tell him about the joint and the car and McDonald’s. I don’t need to protect my husband. It’s just easier while he’s in the hospital.
But then I can’t stop myself. It’s impossible for me to keep a secret from him.
I say, “You need to brace yourself, but Sam was smoking pot at McDonald’s last week while I was up there with you, and he put it on Instagram.”
“What do you mean, ‘put it on Instagram’?”
“The photo. He posted it.”
“Nice, Sam. Let me talk to him. Why don’t you put him on?” Kit coughs. “Let me explain some things about pot and the law and stupidity.”
I get up and stand in the doorway and wave Sam over.
He’s in his LeBron James jersey, making something at the counter involving peanut butter and cheese and pretends he doesn’t see me.
I put my hand over the phone and hiss, “Please get over here.”
He slides to the doorway in his socks and takes the phone.
“Hey, Dad,” he says, and smiles the smile I haven’t seen in days.
Then he lies on my bed with the phone for what seems like an hour, while I sit on the couch and look at old seed catalogues and think about the night Sam got stopped for speeding back in August.
At the time it hadn’t seemed like a big thing. His new friend Roman was with him in the car, and Sam had only had his license a month, so it was illegal for Roman to be in the car. The cop who pulled them over made them both get out and stand on the side of the road in the dark behind the Sedgewick cliffs.
Then the cop had climbed into the Subaru to search for drugs, but all he found was a pack of clove cigarettes. He asked Sam how old he was, and Sam said sixteen.
The cop said sixteen was too young to smoke cloves or Mary Jane or anything else, so from now on he’d call Sam “Shit for Brains.”
“Okay?” the cop had said. “Okay, Shit for Brains?”
Sam hadn’t known whether to agree or not.
He had explained all this to me while I sat in my wooden chair behind the house in the dark, searching for whales. He told me that he’d said nothing to the cop. Then the cop said, “I didn’t hear you. When I say Shit for Brains, you say okay. Okay, Shit for Brains?”
“You smoke cloves?” I’d interrupted him. “Cloves? Sam. How gross.”
“Mom,” he’d said, as if this was an answer to my question.
I had to take it as a yes, which is one of the concessions I’m still learning about with the teenagers, where you receive the bad information like the cloves and wait for what’s really coming, which is inevitably worse.
The cop had made Roman and Sam stand side by side on the road near the estuary and promise they’d never smoke anything ever again.
“No Mary Jane,” Sam had said to me in his ironic voice, and smiled. Then he got up from the grass where he’d been sitting next to me and went inside.
Overall, I felt the conversation had gone pretty well, and I was truly relieved. I wasn’t as wrung out or fried as I usually was after talking with Sam about hard things, and I believed he’d told me the truth.
I’d called Kit that night. The boat was back in port, so he answered from the room in the basement where he slept at Dyer’s house. I said I didn’t want to worry him, but a strange cop down from Augusta who no one seemed to know in Sewall had just pulled Sam over, and it sounded like police harassment. “I mean, he called Sam Shit for Brains.”
“He did what?” Kit had laughed and laughed and seemed almost happy Sam had been pulled over. “It’s good if he got scared a little, Jilly. Don’t baby him.”
“But Shit for Brains? There’s something creepy about it.”
“The cop was just trying to scare a boy. I’ll talk to Sam. I’ll set him straight. Put him on. Get him on the phone.”
“He’s up in bed. Wiped.”
Then I told Kit that I loved him and missed him so much I could not say.
When I’d woken up in the dark later, I could hear the lapping sound of the water on the rocks. I love that sound. It’s the sound I want to die listening to. But I was certain then that Sam had been smoking pot in the car, and that he and Roman had just hidden it from the cop well. Or maybe the cop had found the pot, and this was why he’d called Sam Shit for Brains. Either way, I saw how Sam had probably lied to me, which was the really scary thing.
* * *
—
I’VE GONE THROUGH ALL the old seed catalogues by the time Sam comes out of my bedroom.
“It was a good talk?”
“All good.” He nods.
It takes restraint not to press for more. The LeBron jersey is so big on him it’s like a dress, and I have to work hard not to smile at his skinny legs.
He asks if I want to do A-Reader, which is short for the Archer Family Reading Hour he named three years ago. It’s a way to say he’d like to read with me without having to say he’d like to read with me. A sweet leftover from when he was young that he hasn’t let go of.
I follow him back to my bedroom and take the left side of the bed, near the door. Sam takes Kit’s side, near the window. Talking is against the rules during A-Reader. You just read.
I’ve started a book about Robert Scott’s doomed trip to the South Pole, written by a crew member who found Scott’s dead body.
Sam’s reading The Hunger Games again. I think it’s his third time and that he finds the story soothing. Though what this says about his anxiety, I almost don’t want to kno
w. We made him wait until he was twelve before we gave it to him. Kit read it first to see if it was okay. He reported that he saw no way we could keep it from Sam. It’s hard to keep anything from Sam. He’s always in our business. The best part was how he lit up when we finally said yes.
Every few minutes now he laughs at something in the book and takes some barbecue potato chips from the bag he’s brought into bed.
Charlie comes in and lies down on top of us, and we can’t really move our arms. We stay like this for several minutes, sort of suffocating. Then Charlie starts reading the book with Sam, turning the pages for him.
In profile Charlie looks even more like his father: same square jaw and eyebrows so thick and dark you think they’re pretend.
“How would you choose to die?” Sam asks him. “Early in the war? Or would you walk into the woods and die later?”
“Sam,” I say. “Please.”
I’m feeling jumpy about Robert Scott’s chances at the South Pole. His crew is exhausted. “Do we really have to talk about death?”
“The woods,” Charlie says, ignoring me. “I’d walk into the woods.”
Then he buries his head in my shoulder. I can’t tell if this is an expression of spontaneous emotion or if his nose itches. I don’t care. I don’t move.
Charlie smells like toast and something sugary that must be his new hair gel.
“Me too,” Sam says. “I’d choose to die in the woods.”
Charlie thinks it’s too crowded in the bed, and he climbs out and stands at the window and looks at the ocean.
“It’s like you and Dad are divorced or something,” he says. “Dad’s been gone so long.”
“It’s not like that at all.” But my heartbeat ticks up, because of how big Kit’s absence feels.
I close my book and tell the boys they can leave Maine when they grow up, but they can never go to the South Pole. “It’s too dangerous. I forbid it.”
They both assure me that they won’t travel to the South Pole. Sam goes so far as to say that he is reluctantly taking the South Pole off his bucket list. I know he doesn’t have a bucket list.