The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Now, that is a sweeping statement. And remember, Julie, always use ‘I’ statements. That’s what Cathy, the guru of relationships who lives with her mother, says.”

  “What kind of sexist, homophobe bullshit is that?”

  “She lives with her mother, Julie. She’s thirty-five.”

  “I thought you were all for honoring the generations and interdependent communities and all that babble-on.”

  “You mistake codependency for respect, Julie. You mistake aberrant behavior for intimacy.”

  “I used to be proud of you,” I said suddenly.

  “Hmmm,” Leo said. “What changed?”

  “I used to be proud of you until you changed.”

  “Why didn’t you ever take my last name then?”

  This came to me as a direct shot from another galaxy. When we married, Leo couldn’t have cared less whether I became a Steiner or a Steinway baby grand. He liked being married to Ambrose Gillis’s daughter. I could think of nothing to say except, “Huh?” And, then, “But I let the children have your name.”

  “So you weren’t all that proud of me. Personally. You were like the up-town girl. Even here. Couldn’t get your nose out of the air. Did you ever think that got to me?”

  “Leo, that’s…” True, I thought. “Ridiculous,” I said.

  “And then after you became a media star…of Sheboygan and parts of Milwaukee County—”

  “Don’t make fun of my job,” I quavered.

  “Then don’t make fun of what I care about.”

  “What I’m worried about is what you don’t care about. I used to be proud that I wasn’t married to Mark Sorenson or Jack Ellis….”

  “Julie, it boils down to this. It wouldn’t occur to you to color outside the lines, so you can’t comprehend it or stand it that someone else does.”

  “I could if it didn’t mean that your children are never going to understand, and that I’m going to have to be mother and father to a toddler and two—”

  “You practically make all the decisions for them now anyway….”

  “Now, I’m married to Leo Steiner, Ex-Former Jerk.”

  “I’m not a unicorn anymore, just one of all the other horses, Julieanne, dear,” Leo said, batting his long, tangled eyelashes at me before turning over and dropping into sleep as easily as a man might disappear into a trapdoor.

  “Do you love Leo?” Cathy asked, as she replaced the dressings on my by-now green-and-yellow knees.

  “Of course,” I said. “I don’t know. That’s not the point. Did you love Saren?”

  “Of course. I don’t know. That wasn’t the point,” Cathy said. “I didn’t know anymore whether I loved her, because I got lost in the rage I felt and I couldn’t see anything else. And anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. What mattered is that the rage turned out to be useful, because one thing you can’t negotiate in therapy is a failure of commitment if one wants it and one doesn’t. And Saren didn’t.”

  “Was Saren really gay?”

  “I don’t know,” Cathy said. “Maybe not purely. I don’t know that anyone human really is. The most rampant sexual exhibitionist, the guy on the reality TV show with twenty women begging to marry him, is usually either a woman hater or doesn’t know which way he swings.”

  “That so?”

  “I don’t know that, either. As a fact. I know what I see in practice. What I conjecture.”

  “So, did Saren ever try to come back?”

  “She wants to be ‘friends.’”

  “Oh, Cath.”

  “She wants to meet Abby and compare her ultrasound pictures of her fetus with my daughter.”

  “Cath.”

  “We weren’t talking about Saren. I asked if you love Leo and how much you’re going to be able to stuff down—in terms of residual anger—if he does come back.”

  “You said ‘if,’ Cathy.”

  “I meant ‘if,’ Julie, and you know that there really is an ‘if ’ here. You can see it as well as I can.”

  What I could see as well as she could was Gabe standing in the arch beyond the dining room. Not standing. Gabe wouldn’t have stood. He was using his six-inch-long fingers to chin and chin and chin himself by holding on to the door molding.

  “Gabe!” I said, “you’re sandblasting!”

  He ignored me. “Aury was hot. She fell asleep in the Burley on the way home.”

  “Where’s she now?”

  “Still in the Burley?”

  “On the front walk, Gabe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t you ever think she might be a little vulnerable out there, a not-even-two-year-old kid displayed out there like a deli sandwich for some perv?”

  “Mom, do you think the pervs are out in Sheboygan today?”

  “Go get your sister and lay her down,” I told him, and turned back to Cathy. “I’m sorry I popped off at you.”

  Cathy had used the few minutes I spent on Gabe. She’d been busy. She’d written, in cursive, on the back of one of Aury’s coloring pads: Cook the main entering first. Then, fleece.

  “Why are you writing gibberish?” I asked my friend.

  “What does that say, Jules?” she quizzed me. “Read what I wrote.” I did. “Julie,” Cathy said, “what this says is, ‘Cook the main entrée and then freeze.’ What did you tell Gabe a minute ago?” she asked then.

  “I told him to get Aury.”

  “And?”

  “I told him to stop eavesdropping.”

  Cathy sat back, her graceful narrow shoulders sagging. “Julieanne, other than the cake and this restaurant thing, have you had any other falls? Have you had any trouble seeing? With your balance? Any sensations of pain anywhere?” Mute, I tried to stare her down, Anglo blue to Gaelic green. I had to look away first.

  “There’s something even more important than figuring out this deal with Leo. Like, what’s going on with you.”

  “With me, how?” I asked.

  “It’s time to go to the doctor, Jules,” said Cathy.

  NINE

  Gabe’s Journal

  They never fought in front of us.

  They would sooner have voted for Rush Limbaugh, that mean, fat, radio guy, for president.

  It was a rule of Good Parenting. And they didn’t break it. A few times, they had a discussion that strained the definition. In fact, Mom once dumped a whole can of powdered lemonade all over the floor. But they apologized to us later. Adults, they said, almost in unison, could be as ridiculous as children. I remember it because it was near the beginning of Caro’s what-the-hell period.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel good or resentful?” my sister asked, after the apology. “From most adults I know of, that’s an insult to adolescents.”

  As a result of this observation, Caroline was not allowed to spend that evening with her friends (not watching our school’s football game, but screaming “Shut up!” and braiding and rebraiding her hair under the bleachers at the high school).

  However (ad hoc but not necessarily proper hoc, and I’m not showing off, because any kid whose father is a lawyer learns at least gravestone Latin), the next day, my father’s e-mail program crashed. As the family computerian, I was the primary suspect. But I told Leo quite reasonably that I would not get up from a sound sleep to exact vengeance on Caroline’s behalf, that it was she, not I, who had been grounded and she who was furious.

  My father confronted Caro.

  In fact, he grilled her (for forty-five minutes, during which she never glanced left, the sure sign of a lie). She mounted a good defense, pointing out that she wasn’t allowed to use Mom’s laptop, and that screwing up Dad’s e-mail would have been as hard on her as on him, since she, too, had chat buddies from Milwaukee to Maui. With no physical evidence, he could not convict, even when Caro gave herself away by pointing out that the pulsing vein in my father’s forehead made him look like an irrational adolescent. He did say, “Caroline, you are perverse. Why would you want to lip off and get in trou
ble because we tried to do something nice, like apologize to you for upsetting you?”

  “You’re probably right,” she told him with a shrug. “I don’t think it’s entirely normal that you never fight. So you really didn’t have to apologize.”

  But that was back in the good old days.

  Before the Überfight.

  My best friend, Luke, and I had to strain that night to hear the hisses and snarls on the Friday night, after they got home from the restaurant, a couple of days before Leo left. My parents were in their bedroom, and my room was right next to it. And though they were screaming, nobody was taking care to be quiet and not wake the baby or any other damned thing. I tried turning my music up as a kind of gentle signal to them that they weren’t alone. I wasn’t playing Evanescence or even U2 or anything normal, it was West Side Story; but I had it on for a reason. Louder music had no effect. I looked at Luke and sort of shrugged. He sort of shrugged, too. One or two times at his house, I heard his parents, Peg and Nate, get into it, and he’d said something to the effect of, it’s their shit, don’t let it bother you, it’s a semi-sport for them. So, in the same circumstance at my house, we just went on with what we were doing. Which was writing a parody called Upper West Side Story because it was about Hasidic Jews, who were very prevalent, and very well off, in my grandfather Gillis’s old neighborhood, which I used to wander around with him. He would point to the men with the side curls and cashmere coats and say, “Diamonds.” Just “diamonds.” There wasn’t anything anti-Semitic about it. A lot of those guys really are diamond merchants.

  We were writing the parody to get out of writing a comparison of the real Romeo and Juliet (which I’m not sure, but I believe I have been forced to read every year since seventh grade) and the movie with the pretty redhaired girl and Leonardo DiCaprio. You could do a project to replace the paper, in groups of two or four.

  We talked on the phone after school Friday, and I said it was an especially good idea because we could make it a kind of double-reverse pimp because we lived on the upper west side of Sheboygan.

  “Is school on the east side, then?” Luke asked.

  “Uh, yeah, Einstein. Other than us, there’s only a south and a north side. The east side would be in Lake Michigan,” I replied.

  “Get all pissed off, okay?” he’d said on the phone. But he showed up an hour later. “Jesus. I naturally assumed there was an east side of Chicago. There’s an east side of New York, and it has an ocean.”

  Luke was more or less my best friend. He more or less still is.

  Back then, he was the kind of kid who was a little marginal himself; but he made up for it by being this football hero, with a ton of speed but no size. And no fear. So, in other words, a pretty decent running back, by Sheboygan standards.

  I should point out, he was my friend strictly at home. And from four P.M. Friday until Sunday dinner. He lived down the block, but, in school, he only nodded at me like we knew each other from church or something. He was afraid people might judge him wrong if he acknowledged hanging with an Ed.

  I didn’t hate Luke for this then, and I don’t now, it being a fact of life of predator/prey balance that they call school, which teachers know all about, even though they keep saying, “Our school has a zero tolerance policy for bullying,” and such shit. School is a game park for the lions and a sort of living hell for the antelopes—at least for the first ten years, until the antelopes either stop giving a damn, get wise enough to fight back, or go nuts.

  I admit, I did feel it was a little fucking ironic that Luke could be brave enough to outrun some teeth-gnashing, slavering moron whose father had been feeding him raw liver and steroids since he was seven, and who wanted to break Luke’s fucking legs backward, and not have the nerve to be seen with someone he had no problem with when he went to the cabin or even to Florida with us. We horsed around and had a decent time as long as no one else he knew was there.

  The minute someone higher on the food chain appeared, he was like, right, do I know you?

  My mother, who noticed more about my social life than she should have, went crazed when Luke had his last kid-type birthday party, a sleepover and a big cookout and junk, and invited only the football team guys who would condescend to hang with him—basically right in front of me, three yards over. These were not first stringers, but special teams or bench sitters, as well as one tight end who was more or less a nice guy to everyone, although a known jock. There were no quarterbacks, even second string.

  And no me.

  Which was the first time that ever happened.

  He explained—well, I heard his mother explain, or rather I heard my mother’s response to what I assume was his mother’s explanation—that “the team” was kind of like a cult. The coach encouraged them to socialize only with one another during the season to build a dependent unit that would work like a single organism. This was semi-true and semi-bullshit, but probably exactly something a coach like Sobiano would say, but utter bullshitfulness nonetheless.

  “And how do you think this makes him feel, Peg?” I heard my mother ask. I was lying on the couch, behind a barricade of my mother’s omnipresent bolsters (different colors in every room), feeling divided between wanting to rip the phone out of the wall or simply grab it and say, like an electronic answering machine: “The Steiner-Gillis family is not able to take your call now….”

  I was writhing in shame.

  Because she didn’t let up.

  She said, “Embarrassed? You’re honestly trying to tell me you think Gabe would be embarrassed at a birthday party for a kid he’s known since he was ten years old, who has been with us to our family’s summer house, who’s spent a hundred nights sleeping over here, because he doesn’t play football? He watches football, Peg.” Silence. “He plays pool. Chess. Well, that’s hardly the point, Peg…the point is that if our positions were reversed, and Gabe told me it would embarrass Luke to have Luke meet his other friends…I know how kids are, Peg. I know how kids are. But not all kids are the same.” In a minute, she was going to start comparing me to Boo Radley, and say I was like a mockingbird, and I was going to get up and stick my ball cap in her mouth. “Whatever you say, Peg. But giving Luke the message that it’s…I know I can’t manage his social life, Peg, nor can I manage Gabe’s….”

  In any case, after one of these kinds of incidents, thankfully very few (because even my mother did not like to be as interfering as she knew she was capable of being), she would come to me, usually sitting on the end of my bed at night. She’d pat the back of my calf. Both of us knew I wasn’t asleep. The routine was unvarying and yet always unique in its ability to simultaneously make me want to hug and strangle her. I know it hurts; don’t deny it hurts. You’re the better man. I admire you for forgiving him. What kills me is, she actually does. Admire me. She says she looks up to me because she says I protect the sparrows, the gist of which I haven’t the fuckingest.

  But she was right. It is humiliating to be sort of publicly iced by the friend who liked you even when you finally got the khaki baggies you wanted but then forgot to wear a belt. Still, you learn quick that fifty percent of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing. I didn’t want to go to beer parties with a bunch of fucking dorks with IQs in the double digits, but I would have liked to be asked to go, which is an entirely different thing. By the way, the thing about the hundred percent of nothing. I didn’t make that up. Satchel Paige, the black legend in baseball, did. He might have been, like, as good as Sandy Koufax or whoever, but he never got a chance to pitch in the real majors instead of the Negro League until he was so far over the hill, he was like forty, and I think he was a fastball pitcher, not like Nolan Ryan with his bag of tricks. Anyhow. I tried not to have this problem of Luke avoiding me, which was his because he had no balls to speak of in that regard and mine because I did embarrass people, cause maximum awkwardness between us. I will say he tried, too, not making up too many excuses when I would call him and he was waiting for a better
offer. He would just say, “I gotta do something, Gabe.” The way of the world, colleague, my grandfather Gillis would have said. Almost any person who catches a five-pound bass will put it on the stringer and try to catch a seven-pound bass. Take my father. Please.

  And after all, I was no saint. See, a Special Ed is prejudiced against another Ed, too. There are degrees. And the thing is, I don’t look the part. My mother thinks I’m incredibly handsome, and I’m not; but I’m not bad-looking. I look like any other guy, a little taller and cleaner cut than most. I look like Leo. The other guy I sometimes hung out with then, you could…well, tell. His eyes were too far down and too far apart, although he was a nice guy and could fix anyfuckingthing immediately. You would just set this disassembled washing machine in front of him, and he would start to hum a tune no one knew the name of, and he would have it back together in like, ten minutes, which came in very handy, for my mother and me, at our low point. There are…categories of Eds, you know. The most defective have emotional shit and terrible parents and were adopted when they were abused first or too old for it. And I didn’t have that whole wagon train of baggage. Then. I didn’t have behavioral issues. I wasn’t mentally challenged. And stuff. And I didn’t want to hang with the lowest rung of LD kids, the ones whose parents, like, drank so much when their kids were fetuses that they had brains that were like oatmeal with raisins, with just a thought here and there, but mostly mush, but who also could play Rachmaninoff. I wasn’t that kind.

  I just did all the homework for the semester the first week and then forgot to turn any of it in, is all. I marked the first three circles on the test in the right order and then missed one and ended up with all of the rest wrong, like you button a shirt with the holes and buttons not matching.

  Anyhow, one of the ways Luke could justify his own geeky side, without having to insult me or give an excuse to his more studly friends about why he hung with Steiner, was working together on class shit. So we were doing this English project, for which we also got credit for a special, like music, and what we were doing was writing a musical. A parody. I said this already.