The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  We saw how she was.

  Leo had to have seen it, too.

  He didn’t let it get in the way.

  Anyhow, my kid sister, Aurora Borealis, was a cute little kid with black hair and blue eyes and freckles, who, like the Dairy Queen in my class, got lousy comments from other kids through no fault of her own. Just like my mother, through no fault of her own, got a wiring whack in her head. And we, through no-fault birth, got Leo.

  I thought I was protecting my little sisters by keeping one off the street and one off my mother’s hands. My mother thought she was protecting us by saying she was fine, even when she was trying to make both her eyes work together. My mom’s best friend, Cathy, thought she was protecting my mother by muttering threats about her wish to maim Leo. My Steiner grandparents thought they were protecting my mother by making noodle casseroles and keeping the lawn mowed and selling their Florida condo. My father thought he was protecting us, as if he gave a crap, by pretending it was work driving him bonkers, not just his wanting to get away from his life—which included us. Everybody was running around trying to get everything to behave like normal, so Caro and I could pretty much do what we wanted. And that was how we hacked into the computer and set off on a trip with a fake excuse that would never have got past anyone who had been paying attention.

  In the end, of course, nobody protected us at all.

  FIVE

  Exodus

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  The Sheboygan News-Clarion

  Dear J.,

  I am a Catholic. Fifteen years ago, when I was an altar boy, my friend and I desecrated the host before mass by peeing on it and then drying it out over the radiator, as a joke. I never thought about this except as a boyish prank, until I realized things in my adult life so far have gone very badly—relationships, jobs, failure in school, and so on. I have confessed this and received absolution many times. Do you think I am under a curse from God?

  Worried in Warrenton

  Dear Worried,

  No, I don’t think you are under any curse. You may be carrying a certain amount of guilt. I think that if you spoke with a counselor, you might be able to uncover other causes for your perception of failure in pursuits that have nothing to do with your religion, and you may be seeing this prank as the cause. After all, if you were given absolution, you have removed any stain from your conscience. Often, people suffer for years over a particular event no one else knows about that has far less significance to anyone but them than they ever believed, once they look at the big picture through therapy. Good luck.

  J.

  “It’s a girl!” the obstetrician cried, and though we already knew that—forty-two-year-olds had to have amnio—we couldn’t believe the tiny splendor of our daughter. Nothing had ever been so…perfect in miniature. I had forgotten. The idea that I had created this little life to stall my husband gripped me with remorse. I kissed a blessing on her head, whispering, “I wanted you, personally. You’re my honeycake.”

  Leo and I clasped arms to hold her on the bed in the birthing room. Gabe and Caroline came in, horrified with embarrassment at the evidence of their parents’ physiology, and held her awkwardly, their natural graceful stances transformed into grasshopper elbows by unaccustomed awe.

  “Way, Mom,” Gabe said.

  “She’s pretty,” said Caro. “She has hair.”

  Kodak moment.

  Then Leo announced her name, and we all looked at him as if he’d dropped his transmission.

  If the impending arrival of Aurora was the domestic equivalent of my leg tingling, her actual arrival opened the door for Leo’s departure. Leo had been sliding and, perhaps by force of will or lifelong restraint, holding himself back. Overnight, he was a downhill racer. I’d been okay with the free-range chicken and even philosophical about the garden o’ tubs. We’d always both been good, green liberals. Never cared much what anyone thought of our choices, really. But Aurora Borealis Steiner?

  It was Caroline who said it. “What’s with her name?”

  “It’s a mythic, and scientific, term for the northern lights, what we see in Door County,” Leo said.

  “Oh,” Caroline said.

  “It’s Latin,” Gabe said, “Like Ursus arctos horribilis.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Grizzly bear,” Gabe said.

  “What’ll we call her?” Caro asked.

  I said, “Probably Rory.”

  Gabe said, “Probably Shorty.”

  Leo spent the entire night of her birth slumped over his laptop in the recliner at the hospital sending out bulletins to who knows whom. I tossed and nursed and worried.

  But why was I worried? Leo was still wry, smart, cute as a hoodlum, just a little more habitual a complainer than he always had been. He would cope with this new child, as he did with everything, by coming around slowly. And as he did, the nuttiness would evaporate, like sweat after a steam. He’d turned forty-nine and realized he was going to die, I decided, and had wanted to try to litigate with the universe. People often went through stretches of grazing the loco weeds before settling into the back forty. That was the simple version. The one I gave Gabe at first. And I had no real reason to think otherwise. Leo was my husband and college sweetheart. My best friend of the other gender. We had a history as old as Moses. I don’t think husbands and wives remain the soul mates they were at twenty for all their lives. Especially if they have families. That doesn’t mean they don’t have good marriages. I figured I’d ride it out and we’d have a cute kid, who, when she turned sixteen, would change her middle name to Jane.

  Seventeen months after Aurora’s birth, Leo announced he was taking a “mini-sabbatical.”

  “You’re taking a semester off?” I asked, astounded. “Now? What for? It’s not a great time for this, Lee.”

  I gestured at the room around us. Despite the intervention of a cleaning team (Leo hadn’t objected) our living room looked like an abandoned base camp on Everest. Unfolded clothes, identifiable as clean or dirty only by smell. Empty juice boxes, collapsed at the waist. Game pieces that crunched like ice cubes under my feet when I went to the bathroom, which wasn’t often, since I hadn’t bounced back from Aurora’s birth the way I had from the other kids’. That concerned me, and it wasn’t only my age. I was having trouble reading my mail, even with my new prescription reading glasses. I heard funny things, like little flute solos, that no one else could hear. It was getting harder to ignore everything.

  Just the week before, I’d thrown a little shower for Cathy and turned it into a disaster.

  A year after Cathy lost Saren, Cathy had decided to take a real partner for life. She’d adopted Abby Sun, four months old and an edibly adorable papoosenik, from China. I’d made rum punch with floating sherbet ovals molded with some old Play-Doh forms and stuck with little umbrellas (my Sheboygan interpretation of floating junks), almond cookies, and trail mix of seasoned nuts and crackling noodles. There was plenty of baby passing, and friends of Cathy’s from the rep and the newspaper who’d never met Aurora when she was born brought unexpected gifts for her as well as for Abby. Aury, who was pushing two, kept kissing the sleeping infant and saying, “Baby Abby.” It was fun. Stella Lorenzo announced she’d become engaged, to Tim Downer from the Sunday magazine. I hugged her and said, “Broken hearts…”

  “And limp dicks…” Cathy put in.

  “All over Sheboygan!” I finished, and she blushed. We all laughed.

  “You’ll be a good wife, Stella,” I said.

  “I’ve had enough practice!” she said.

  “I mean, you’ll be a good wife not because you have big brown eyes and big boobs, which doesn’t hurt, but because you have a big heart and, I know from working in the newsroom, an amazing tolerance to suffer fools with grace and see the good side of anything.”

  “That just about describes the perfect person,” Cathy said. “So Stella, I know this isn’t the usual question, but do you have a sister wh
o’s gay?”

  We cracked up, and I went to get the cake.

  It was when I, returning from the kitchen with the big sheet I’d had made in the shape of a sun, tripped over nothing anyone could see, dropped the plate, and stepped on it that things went jelly-side down.

  I knelt in the mess and cried, and try as I might, I couldn’t stop. If I began to laugh, it only released fresh spasms of crying. As if at a signal, women began consoling me with stories of emotional troughs and peaks in their forties and how theirs had been much worse and how nobody needed to eat cake anyhow since we’d had all that trail mix. Stella got down on her knees with the club soda to get the yellow frosting out of the carpet. Only Cathy pulled me aside before she left and suggested I see a doctor. She told me not to worry, that it probably wasn’t anything serious, but that anemia or even a bad inner-ear infection could cause these kinds of wobblies.

  It wasn’t until long after that she admitted she’d been covertly watching me walking and dancing for a long while and knew that this was no ear infection.

  Whatever the reason, I was in no shape to become a single parent while Leo took a semester off. I was even more dumbstruck when he announced he’d spend part of that time away from home.

  “What? Are you kidding?” I asked. “Doing what? Where? For how long? Not a whole week at a time!”

  “No, just a month at first, maybe two weeks later on,” Leo said, and I thought, Huh? What did this man just say? It was like the old joke, do you walk or take your lunch to school? “I have the accrued time. I thought one thing I’d do is take a look at land in upstate New York. Perhaps consider buying a plot. Far from, and yet convenient to, the City,” he told me with seductive delight. Privacy, seclusion…and Broadway! Closer to my sister Janey and Pete. Perhaps as a vacation home, maybe more later on in our lives. He’d already planned to meet, along the way, with some of the people he had corresponded with. I could come if I wanted, but, he hurriedly added, he knew I needed to get back to work, and he’d already asked his mother to come down from the cottage, where the elder Steiners now lived permanently, to stay part of the time with us.

  “How could you have missed it?” Cathy would later ask. “It was just like Perplexed in Prairieville, or whoever it was, whose husband took bike trips with her sister because they both loved bikes. Julie!”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I’d insist, knowing I was indeed Senseless in Sheboygan. “I know he was having menopause for guys at first. People go through this all the time and nothing happens.”

  And sure enough, nothing did. Leo wrote to us and sent beautiful pictures of “intentional communities” where twenty people shared one snow-blower and jointly purchased twenty hardcover books each year. There were group suppers and yoga classes. “You should see my downward dog!” he wrote.

  And yet, the moment his plane touched down at Mitchell Field, twenty-four days later, it was I who felt I’d come home. He was better for his adventures. Tanned and ebullient, Leo seemed literally to have fewer lines in his forehead. Pitifully grateful to see the kids, he kept calling them into our room just to look at them. He told me that the sight of me holding Aury reminded him of a Cassatt painting. We made love ferociously—the kind of sex married people don’t have, the kind that leaves rug burns on your knees. That night, watching Aurora sleep, Leo literally cried. He said her black hair shined in the dark and how nothing he’d done could give him back the month of her changing and growing he’d missed, but that he wouldn’t have known that if he hadn’t missed the month.

  “I was just worn out, Jules,” he told me, as we stood in our underwear late that night in the kitchen, toasted bread, and smeared it with peanut butter. “That’s all. Tired of being a good boy. But, hell, I am a good boy. A lifer. Must be genetic.”

  “There’s a lot worse things a person could be, Lee,” I said. “Not everyone has to be Jack Kerouac.”

  “I thought I would once, though,” he said wistfully.

  “We all thought we would once, honey,” I told him, encircling his shoulders with my arms. “If you wanted to so badly, why didn’t you?”

  “I was expected to do what…I was expected to do,” he said. “My only rebellion was”—he smiled crookedly—“falling for a WASP in a leotard.”

  Would I have ever thought to ask him, Leo, were you anything more than a little tired? Like, a little tired of me? Would it have occurred to me to sneak a peek at his e-mail, since I knew the password was “Innisfree.”

  Two weeks later, Leo decided the Unitarians were too conservative and suggested we visit a Tibetan retreat center south of Madison on Sunday afternoons.

  I dug in my heels. Sundays were…well, sacred. I liked to spend Sunday afternoons proofing my column and reading the Times. I suggested he take Aurora Borealis.

  “The name’ll knock ’em dead,” I told Leo. “She can meet some nice Swedish kids called Tenzig and Sorgay.” He didn’t seem to see the humor.

  He brought me books about the way quantum physics and human creative thought were both wave-based. I bought him the Stephen Jay Gould book about why people believe nutty things. He bought Aury Math-O-Mozart blocks. I bought a wide-screen television, which was, in our family, akin to buying an Uzi. (Gabe and Caroline literally knelt in gratitude and placed their foreheads against my hand.)

  When Aury was ready for preschool (it was really a sneaky form of day care, where they charged you more because they used chalk instead of crayons and had a creative-movement teacher come in twice a week; the kid was only one and a half), Leo suggested I homeschool her instead, giving up my column and perhaps taking on a couple of other students. I suggested he homeschool Aurora.

  “If anyone ever needed homeschooling, it was Gabe,” I said. “Do you know the crap he put up with from kids…and teachers? Eight years of torture because he’s smarter than almost anybody in school and has every learning disability short of a Martian implant? Why didn’t you care then? Why was it so important that the kids go to public school because you work for a public institution?”

  “That’s the whole point, Julieanne,” Leo said. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes with Aurora as I did with the older kids.” Leo looked up mildly. “I knew you’d object to this.” He held out a sheet of paper. “I’ve prorated our economic contributions to the family. Since Aurora was born, and you went part time, you work at home, and I provide the benefits; it’s only…well, fair, that you perform a greater share of the household management.”

  “Fuck you!” I told him. “I already do. Do you use fabric softener on the towels when you dry them, Leo?”

  “Of course,” Leo sniffed. “Who wants old, brittle towels?”

  “Beep!” I said. “Wrong! If you use fabric softener, the towels will lose their absorbency and that’s what towels are for, Leo!”

  “When Gabe and Carol went to school…Jules, schools are no longer benign places. They’re containment facilities. They’re…holding tanks for the social misfits we’ve created with our poisoned fast food and our McMansions and our…”

  I left him nattering, took my bike, and rode to Cathy’s, where we spent the afternoon drinking margaritas. It was just plain old foolishness, I thought.

  It was foolishness all right. But it quickly became clear that it was neither plain nor old.

  SIX

  Ecclesiastes

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  The Sheboygan News-Clarion

  Dear J.,

  I finally confronted my husband with his repeated infidelities. He suggested that our marriage might prosper if both of us had other sexual relationships, a sort of open marriage that would keep us a couple but give us both diversity. I’m not sure I want to do anything like this. Yet, we have two young children, and I want my marriage to stay intact. Could this be a stage?

  Leery in Lancaster

  Dear Leery,

  It could indeed be a stage. Or it could be a loud warning bell that your husband is seriously seeking a
way out of your marriage. The only way to find out is definitely not to try experimenting with other relationships. It is to find a good counselor, who specializes in such issues, and there are even some husband-and-wife teams in the area. (Please phone the front desk at the newspaper for a list of names.) It’s imperative that you work together to see what the real issues are at the bottom of this pattern, and they could surprise you. Your husband could feel sexually neglected or insecure for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Most open marriages, as they call them, end in divorce rather than harmony. Make any choices or agreements contingent on previously attending a weekly counseling session, together and separately. And keep me posted.

  J.

  Just before the university opened for fall semester, Leo took me out for dinner.

  We hadn’t even started our salads when he told me, “I’m taking early retirement.”

  “We’ve been over this,” I told him, rearranging my shrimp into a wreath around my broccoli.

  “I mean I’m taking early retirement now,” Leo told me, shoveling in his primavera pasta.

  “Now. You mean now, now.”

  “I mean, this year.”

  “You mean, you’re thinking about…Leo, you’re not even fifty.”

  “But I told you there’d be cutbacks, sooner than later, and that I’d get an offer. And I did. At my level, I can take early retirement, get a few years of full salary and then my full pension earnings. I can get benefits as if I’d been in the army. Dental, psychiatric…”