The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  To be totally honest, I would like to see Caroline again.

  There was a time when I thought all the school shit I put up with before the real shit was my quota for one life. But apparently not, because everything else happened on top of it, which is so totally boring it happens over and over and over and over and nobody ever learns a damned thing about it because if they did, they couldn’t possibly bring themselves to breed. I’m certain of this. Maybe it’s a study. I could do research. It’s possible there’s a missing gene for fucking loyalty on the Y chromosome. Not to mention a missing gene for distinguishing between the smell of roses from bullshit on the X chromosome. My sister being the perfect example. My mother, well…

  Maybe I should write a memoir. My grandfather was famous. My mother is minorly famous.

  I could write about growing up young, gifted, learning disabled and dys-fucking-functional.

  No.

  My mother hates memoirs of any variety. She calls them “me-moirs.” If you talk to her about one, she’ll say there are a lot more interesting things in life to write about than yourself. You can point out that, in a sense, she wrote about herself in Myriad Disconnections. She would say, “I was not writing about myself. I was writing about events.”

  This has nothing at all to do with what’s the matter with her. She was always like that. You can’t tell people what to do with their lives for as long as she has without probably believing you know what you’re talking about. Never mind the irony.

  And yet, an interesting thing my mother used to say about shit that really hurts you is that writing it down drives a stake through its heart.

  Maybe I’ll make this thing I’m writing a long letter. A Letter to My Father, by A. Gabriel Steiner. I’ve written mostly about my sister. But there’s a lot more to tell.

  So, Pop, this one’s for you.

  EIGHT

  Lamentations

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  The Sheboygan News-Clarion

  Dear J.,

  My best friend and neighbor recently asked me if I would coach her in the labor room. Naturally, I was honored. Her children are like cousins to our two children, and I was both elated and a teeny bit jealous that my friend, whom I’ll call “Lauren,” was having a third—when my husband has insisted we had “two enough.” After ten hours of labor, her baby son emerged, a whopping nine-pound boy, and I said, without thinking, “Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that was Ben McAllister!” Ben is my two-year-old son. The whole room went quiet. Lauren then confessed right there that the baby was my husband’s child, the result of two sexual incidents when Ben was a baby. I confronted my husband, who begged forgiveness. He and Lauren’s husband—who will accept the child if we pay child support—want the friendship to continue. He has totally forgiven her. I guess he’s a bigger person than I am. All three say they would have told me sooner, if they hadn’t feared it would have hurt me and the friendship. I still love Lauren and I love my husband, but I don’t know if I can live the rest of my life two doors down from the reminder of his infidelity. He says even good people can make mistakes. I would move, but my husband’s job is here, and Lauren says that if we move, we’ll never know the child. I have a dilemma. I don’t want to disrupt everyone’s life.

  What should I do?

  Heartbroken in Hartford

  Dear Heartbroken,

  I have a dilemma, too. It’s knowing where to start. You have not said a single word about your own feelings of anger, which should be uppermost in your mind. You have been deceived and had your face rubbed in the evidence of your husband’s betrayal. Just what is it you “love” about “Lauren,” a woman who had no compunctions about having unprotected sex with your husband, exposing you to humiliation and possibly even disease, who now wants you to share in the life of the child who resulted from that callous act of disloyalty? And pay for the privilege?

  You say you want to stay in your marriage. Okay, you’re a free adult with a working conscience. Good people do make foolish mistakes, and have to pay for them; but I would have a very hard time parting with 17 percent of my family’s income for eighteen years because of a mistake preventable by a little self-control or a three-dollar package of condoms. Your call. But if you do stick with him, job or no job, you’re going to have to take the show on the road, far from “Lauren.” If you can’t see that, science has yet to create the lenses you need.

  J.

  “But Julieanne,” Leo’s dad said, “this doesn’t make any sense. I understand the words you’re saying, but I’m not grasping it. The Leo I know, the Leo I raised, couldn’t do this. He never even told his mother. You say he’s coming back?”

  “He says he’s coming back, Papa,” I told him.

  “Julieanne, your legs, did he hurt you?”

  “I…fell, Papa. I fell when we left the restaurant…a couple of nights before he left.”

  “Because if he hurt you, ever, in any way—”

  “Papa, he didn’t hurt me that way.”

  “Julieanne, now I know Leo has a cellular phone. I need the number for that. I need to talk to my son. I need to talk some sense into him before he goes too far down this road because he might not be able to find his way…”

  “Home, I know,” I said, wincing as my son got up and left the room, dropping his seventy-five-pound backpack (Gabe considered school lockers a riddle and a nuisance, and so carried his entire life with him like a turtle with a shell) and making a thud that caused the windows to shudder. Caroline, on the other hand, holding Aury, pulled her chair closer to get a better seat for the show. I knew I should have sent them out of the room, but I didn’t have the strength.

  There was a knock at the door. Cathy, with Abby Sun in her beautifully embroidered and very PC front pack (Cathy’s mother had somehow learned to spell out “I love Mama” in Chinese characters).

  “Julie,” she said, embracing me and removing the baby’s utterly unnecessary knit hat. Abby’s hair was a seal pelt that would have kept her warm in a Sheboygan blizzard, and it was Indian summer. “Julie, I can’t tell you what to do until I understand….”

  “I don’t know that I need you to tell me what do or that there’s anything that I can—”

  “We were just trying to get to the bottom of this,” said Gabe Senior.

  “I don’t know if there is a bottom of this,” I said.

  “My father took a powder,” Caroline blurted. “That’s what Grandma Hannah called it. She said, ‘He took a powder, the little putz….’”

  “Caroline!” all of us said together.

  “Well, she did!” Caroline’s upturned brown eyes glittered with mischief. She liked seeing the ox gored. I don’t think any of us, three days after Leo’s departure and the day the Steiners had rushed to help out when my knees ballooned into festive purple pillows, entirely knew what had happened, or was to come.

  Hannah put Aury down for her nap. She told Caro to go into her room and get started on her homework. “I don’t have any,” Caroline said.

  “Think of some, Hannah Caroline,” Grandma Hannah commanded in a tone that brooked no sass. “Get a head start.” She slouched away, but, we were to learn momentarily, never went beyond the wall outside the living room door.

  I felt that those of us who remained, the adults, were some kind of NATO committee, trying to come up with an extradition order.

  “These people,” Hannah began, when she returned, “these hippies he’s been writing to. Julieanne, you know that I love you as my own child, so you won’t be offended when I ask you, is there a woman among them that he’s…well, skirt chasing?” Hannah is the last person on earth who would have known that phrase. “What did he take with him?”

  “Clothes, his camera, nothing, really,” I told her. “He had everything in a duffel bag.”

  Caro stuck her head back in then: “He got a lot in that bag, though! Because he’s been buying those clothes from Travelwise that you can scrunch up to the s
ize of your hand. They have coats you can put in your pocket, and wash and they’ll dry in an hour and come out wrinkle free.”

  “Tencel,” Cathy said, “the big lie.”

  I rubbed my head. My eyes, like a sea creature’s on stems, were acting independently of each other again. “I don’t think anything like that’s going on,” I told my mother-in-law. “I think what he really wants is to figure out what he’s going to do with his life after the university. And this is just his way of doing it. He’s having his adolescence.”

  “But there’s more to it,” Hannah said.

  “I think he wants to feel young again. Free to do what he wants—”

  “He’s got a wife and children,” said Hannah. “That’s what he needs to want to do. It doesn’t matter that he needs to feel free.”

  “That’s his whole point,” I told Hannah. “He thinks he never got the chance to feel that way. He thinks I saddled him with babies and houses and—”

  “Julie, you sound like you’re taking his side!” Cathy interrupted. “It takes two to tango. Your understanding passes all understanding. Now, did you try to talk him out of this, or did you encourage him, like you did when he took his…other little trip?”

  “I never encouraged him to do that. I allowed it, and grudgingly. And with this one, I put my foot down. I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not want him to retire and I did not want him to leave….”

  “And…” Cathy prompted me.

  “Do you see him here?” I asked her, putting my arms out to cradle my goddaughter, Abby, who popped her thumb in her mouth and, wise little math genius she would certainly be, went to sleep.

  “You two discussed everything,” Cathy went on.

  “Not recently,” I admitted. “He’s spent more time on the computer and at the yoga center than with me.”

  “That’s what you wrote to that guy about his wife’s e-relationship with that friend of hers in Austin. You wrote that the proportions of time should be exactly reversed, that intellectual infidelity was just as dangerous as the other kind, that confidences in the secrecy of cyberspace were just as potent and perhaps even more so, than confidences between the desks….”

  “That’s what you told me to write. Intellectual infidelity,” I reminded her.

  “It is a nice phrase,” Cathy said with a sigh. “Well, we’re not sure that’s what happened here. All we know is we have a guy—”

  “Who turned forty-nine and figured out he was going to die someday,” Gabe called from the family room. “If I hear that one more time, I’m gonna puke. Why didn’t Luke’s dad do this? Or Justine’s?”

  “Justine’s dad is kind of a scum,” Caroline said.

  “But Dad is a clean-living, miso-eating saint, Caroline!” Gabe yelled back. “So what’s your point, roundhead? His not being a scum should have kept him from doing this, not the opposite.”

  “I think Dad thought about life more,” Caro whispered.

  “Thinking about life too much is not necessarily a good thing,” Hannah told her. “Some things you do; some things you think about. Some things you think about you’re better off if you never do.”

  “Amen,” said Gabe Senior. “I have to lie down for an hour or so, Julieanne. Do you mind? Will you keep your feet up and keep those ice packs on?” I nodded dutifully. Like all Jewish men of a certain age, even those who’d spent their lives selling marbles and kite string, Gabe Senior had, for me, the authoritative quality of a physician.

  “I’ll be here, Mister Steiner,” Cathy said. “I’ll look after her.”

  “I’m going to try to make some dinner,” Hannah told both of us, “with what scraps of food I can find in this refrigerator.”

  “There are a whole bunch of mushrooms and some boxes of tofu in the pantry, Hannah,” I told her.

  “Tofu,” she said dourly. “Gabe! I need some chicken, skinless, four breasts, some rosemary, French bread, some rice, normal, and a dozen eggs….”

  “I’m going to nap, Hannah,” Gabe Senior explained.

  “Nap later. I need to cook now,” his wife told him. “And Caroline, you don’t need to sit there looking pretty, although you do look very pretty. I want you to straighten this place up. I want you to get all your dirty laundry out of your room and your brother’s—”

  Outraged, Caroline cried, “My brother’s…! I’m not going to do his laundry!”

  “So he can take Aurora to the park in the bike holder, which I know you wouldn’t be caught dead doing, and play with her while we straighten this place up.”

  “Abby’s asleep,” Cathy said. “I’ll do the laundry if Caroline dusts and picks up, because then I can talk to Julie.”

  Cathy didn’t know about the night I’d spent on Friday. I was yearning to tell her, but I wanted it to be face-to-face, and everything had happened so fast. I’d spent the evening pleading with Leo as he tried to sleep, begging him to at least talk things over with Cathy—I wouldn’t need to be present—before he decided to leave. Though he’d held me gently, and kept nodding as if to say he understood my panic, though he’d even tried to make love to me, nothing I could do or say would budge him. “What if I sell the house while you’re gone, Leo? What if I decide to move to New York…City? Not some burg on the Hudson River?”

  “You can’t do that, Jules; it’s a community-property state,” he’d reminded me.

  “I could forge your signature,” I threatened him.

  “If you need to do that, go ahead,” Leo said. “I don’t think it will accomplish what you want.”

  “Who the hell are you, the Dalai Lama?” I asked, jumping out of bed, the pain from my battered knees immediately shoving me back down like a rough hand. “What is this, do-what-you-think-you-need-to-do-to-satisfy-your-needs shit? Zen? Leo! Don’t you give a shit what happens to us? To this house? To the holy tomato plants?”

  “It’s all immaterial,” Leo said, lying back against his astronaut-foam pillow. “The material is immaterial.” He grinned. “I just said that to getcha, Jules. You know I care about all that stuff. But you can handle it. You’re a very capable woman. We have a lawn-care service. You have a strong support system of good friends. You have my parents. And a creative outlet. Sufficient money for all the face cream you’ll need. The children will help. I’m not worried. And I’ll be in constant touch.”

  He had not been in constant touch. He had not been in touch at all. He had not left an itinerary, explaining that his travels might take him to people in one location where they lived, or in another, though he’d insisted that the big, brown envelope he’d given me contained a detailed list of addresses and telephone numbers where he could be reached or where messages could be left. There was none. All it had really contained were copies of our wills and insurance papers, the number of the pager he had purchased to augment his cell phone, and a funny card, a line drawing of a guy in a little car driving in circles, signed with love to me. “I have friends in Wyoming who live in the mountains in the summer, because the cabins they have aren’t plumbed, but rent in town during the winter, where they do whatever kind of skilled work can take them over the tourist season, when they don’t want to go near the town, unless they sell art….”

  “What makes you think I give a shit about any of this, Leo?”

  He’d seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “As if I give a good goddamn what a bunch of selfish, aging drifters do for seasonal work. You want to know something? Personally, that kind of life sounds worse to me than…than camping.” Leo knew I considered camping a sin not for but against nature, a form of primitive subjugation disguised as recreation, a way for men to beat their chests at the dawning and women to wash the same dishes fifteen times a day, and with sand. “What would you do with your things, while you were slipping back and forth between worlds? Between the town and the mountains? Your clothes and books?”

  “Libraries have books, Jules. And most people don’t have our clothing needs. You realize that most people who work at home
don’t need twenty pairs of shoes, nine of which—”

  “Are black, right, Leo. You’ve only told me that fifty times. But I also give speeches, and I’m on the board of the theater, and I have a life with friends, for which I need clothing. I’m not going to debate this with you, Leo, as if I were Imelda Marcos and you were Gandhi. Neither of those things is true. Do you realize that if you hadn’t got your golden parachute, or whatever—”

  “Hardly,” Leo said dryly.

  “Well, your silver parachute from the university, from taxpayers, Leo, you wouldn’t be free to play out this little game, this little midlife Ulysses crap. You aren’t like those people with the bandanas, Leo. You might want to be, but you’re a guy with a degree in business, a corporate lawyer, who sucked off the public tit….”

  “That would distress me, if I were listening, Jules,” he said, and yawned. I knew he was faking the yawn. “How I feel is, I did my time. I tried to do some good for others. I know I did some good for a few. But I didn’t do myself any good, slugging down handfuls of Tagamet, living without passion—”

  “Living without passion?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I didn’t either,” I said. “I’m not talking about whether our sex lives conform to the numerical national average, Lee. I’m talking about passion for these three people named Gabriel, Caroline, and Aurora Borealis.”

  “That’s just why I’m doing this. I want to bring as much richness into their lives as I can in the time I have with them.”

  “By leaving them?”

  “By rediscovering my own playfulness…”

  “You mistake shallow for playful, Leo. You think selfish people are wise. You’re a fucking idiot.”