The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “You don’t have to, Julie,” Cathy said. “I would feel the same.”

  “I never learned to be wrong gracefully.”

  “You never had to,” Cathy said. “Welcome to how it is for the rest of us.”

  “Well, apparently I’m getting the crash course,” I said. “I should be pretty fluent in Being Wrong in just six weeks!” I called Caroline, and she reluctantly slumped to my side. Aury climbed onto my lap. “I let you down. That’s the worst thing a mom can do. You get that, don’t you?” Caroline slowly, terribly slowly, nodded. Aurora simply held me. “Well, if you ever let anyone down, and it wasn’t your fault, don’t be ashamed.”

  I wiped my eyes with my cuffs. Gabe handed me a pot holder. “Oh, thanks, honey,” I said. “This will work better.” At first quivering, a bit damp and shaky, all of us began to laugh truly.

  “What fresh hell is this?” I asked.

  “I know you didn’t make that up,” Gabe said.

  “No, I didn’t even make that up,” I said. “But I never got it before.”

  TWELVE

  Gabe’s Journal

  Tian’s dress was the color and had, what would you call it, the sort of sheen of something like cooked vanilla custard. That doesn’t sound so good. But trust me. It looked as though it would feel like warm custard in a bowl if I ran my hand along it. As if she knew what I was thinking, Connie Gleason, Cathy’s mother, said, “It’s filth the oil from your finger-prints would be putting on that fabric, Gabriel. You be keeping your hands off it. And she’ll be needin’ a shawl, a coat if you will…Gabriel, this isn’t the adventures in paradise she’s used to, you know.” I’m trying to write it to sound like she said it, but I don’t know how the hell you write a sort of cross between an Irish brogue and Sheboygan vowels. When I was at Columbia, in the special program, that whole semester when I learned one thing—that I shouldn’t be at Columbia—people kept telling me I had an accent. I never thought about it. I thought I sounded like people who read the news. When I went to Florida for school, nobody noticed. Nobody there is from there. When I finally went to Connecticut, nobody noticed because they never noticed anything but themselves.

  But back in Mrs. Gleason’s kitchen, that chilly evening before the winter formal.

  “How can we dance,” I asked, “if I can’t touch her?”

  “A gentleman doesn’t need to maul a woman to have a dance,” Connie said. “You touch her lightly, like this.” Connie took Tian in her arms, and Tian beamed up at her, looking as tiny and slender as Aury (Tian had given my two-year-old sister one of her silver bracelets and it fit her). This was even next to Connie, who was, like, five inches shorter than my mother. She looked light enough to pick up and hold, which I did sometimes, although Tian honestly hated it and kicked like a mad cat. They swayed together, Tian’s long black hair reflecting the kitchen lights. I watched that long mirror of hair and was nauseated. Whether it was sicko lust—well, not sicko, but more lust than I can tell you I’ve ever felt again in my life—or from knowing I couldn’t dance without breaking Tian’s arches, I didn’t know.

  “See Gabe? No touches.” Tian grinned at me, wiggling her bare shoulders.

  Connie’d made the dress for the winter formal with fabric my mother bought for Tian. As freshmen, we were not strictly supposed to go. But because Tian was an exchange student, she got to do everything the school had going during her semester. We didn’t find out it would be okay until there was only about ten days before the dance. There was no time for Tian’s parents to get money to her for a dress, and the Rotary would have let her go to Goodwill. Plus, she was about a size minus one. So my mom pitched in, and Connie could sew anything—as a matter of fact, I still wear shirts she made for me. She made me a wool sport coat. Imagine this. Making a coat. The idea is like making a refrigerator or some goddamned thing.

  Tian’s dress looked like someone in People magazine or something made it. We got this nutty-looking card later from Tian’s parents, with little silver trumpets and temples all over it, thanking my mother for “making our child have an American experience with a wonderful gift.” When Tian saw the plan Connie had drawn for the dress, she literally jumped up and down. “It is like a Cinderella dress. Can I take it home?” she asked Connie. “Will it be forever mine?”

  It was as if she didn’t give a damn that, in just two weeks, she would be leaving me, that the time that had changed my entire life was over. It was fine with her as long as she could keep the princess dress.

  “Everyone will think I am rich from America, Gabe,” she told me seriously.

  “Where will you wear it?” I asked her.

  “Out to restaurant hotels. Out to parties that would be for my parents. At our home. They give many parties. We are Christians,” Tian explained, as if this were some sort of prerequisite for party giving.

  “She’s going to forget she ever met me,” I had told Luke on the phone.

  “That’s for sure,” Luke said helpfully. “I mean, what are the odds? You’ll never see her again. And they are Christians, Gabe. And you are being a Jew, a Jew all the way, from your bar mitzvah day ’til they cart you away…they don’t know you don’t know Rosh Hashanah from Rush Limbaugh. Plus, what are the odds you’ll ever see her again?”

  “You suck,” I told him.

  “Bet you wish she did,” he answered.

  I didn’t know whether I did wish that or not. My, like, molecules, wanted to screw Tian. But I was…fifteen. Just turned. There were scuz kids who had sex when they were freshmen, but that’s what they were, scuz. And so I had the equal feeling that the last thing on earth I wanted to do was put my grimy hands on the two perfect plums that held up her custard-colored dress, with no straps or anything, just a band around the top. Her unmarked golden skin, and that dress, and her hair. She looked like a ritzy dessert I could destroy.

  “Are you knowing how to waltz, Gabriel?” Connie asked.

  “Christ, Connie. I don’t know how to walk. And, I always wanted to ask you, how come you have an accent?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You have an Irish accent, and Cathy says—”

  “It’s true enough that I haven’t been in Ireland in thirty years and more,” she told us. “But I have my relatives. And what of it?” Her mouth was filled with pins, that afternoon in her kitchen. There were those little dishes and saltshakers with shamrocks on them all over Cathy’s house, except in Abby’s room. “I suppose I imitated my aunties, my grandmother’s sisters. It was crossing to America—”

  “We know the story,” I said.

  We’d heard it, like, forty-two times.

  “I did not hear it,” Tian said. I groaned, although not out loud. She was making the dress and this thing to go around my waist to go with it. I had to put up with the Titanic story.

  “It was the White Star Liner Titanic,” Connie began, removing the pins from her mouth one by one, while I made motions with my index finger like I was conducting an orchestra, “from England…”

  “I know this!” Tian cried, “Aaaah!” She jumped, having stabbed herself with a pin in a seam that wasn’t yet sewn down.

  “Have a care, little one,” Connie told her.

  “But I have heard of this in my school! The ocean ship sank in the Atlantic in the North. The water was less than zero degrees…”

  “Centigrade,” I explained to Connie.

  “And hundreds of people froze to death, and now no one is left alive. There was a woman who was alive until last year…” Tian went on.

  “My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were on that ship, in steerage, down below the decks where they kept the poor,” Connie said in her voice that was like she was saying a poem. “He was Henry Gidlow and she Constance Lyte Gidlow…”

  “Like a light?” Tian asked.

  “Yes, but with a ‘y’ not an ‘i.’ They were with their sons, Patrick and Michael, and their daughters Bridget—”

  “There’s always a Bridget,” I said to T
ian.

  “Be shut,” she scolded me.

  “And their daughter Maeve,” Connie continued.

  “But how were you…?” Tian began.

  “Maeve became friendly with a young man on the boat, also called Gidlow, from the same county, but not from the same branch of the family, a fifth cousin or somewhat, and it was during the crossing they married….”

  “How did they get married?”

  “By a priest who was along.”

  “And did he live?”

  “The priest? There were a number of ministers on the ship.”

  “No, the father of the…whoever. They didn’t really get married, did they, Connie?” I don’t know why I said that. I sensed it from something missing in her voice.

  “They got married enough for practical purposes.”

  “And did Maeve’s husband…”

  “He died, like any man of honor on that terrible night.”

  “And she live?” Tian urged Connie. Whenever she became fascinated with anything, Tian began dropping little bits of her English like flakes of paint.

  “She did live. She was my grandmother,” Connie said, “Maeve Gidlow Gidlow. She used to say that she was like Eleanor Roosevelt. When she got married, she didn’t have to change the monograms on her sheets! Not that she had monograms on her sheets. Or sheets to monogram.”

  Tian and I said simultaneously, “Huh?”

  “Sheets?”

  “No, Eleanor Roosevelt,” I said.

  “Her name was Roosevelt, too! Eleanor’s! Do you not know the name of the wife of the great reformer? She was more president than he. She said, ‘I am my husband’s legs.’ What are they teaching you in school? She was a distant cousin of Franklin Delano—”

  “It isn’t add up!” Tian objected suddenly.

  “What?”

  “This is not thirty years ago! This is seventy years ago. It is ninety years ago!”

  “I didn’t say that I was on the Titanic. And I didn’t say that was the last time I was in Ireland, did I now?”

  “Oh, you went back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Holiday,” Tian said.

  “No, to bring my grandmother’s sisters here, where they lived when they were very old women…I did this with my husband.”

  “His name was Gleason?”

  “Yes, and that was the only good thing about him. That and his hair comb. He was a rogue. In love with the bottle. I should have taken back my own family’s name….”

  “That would have been pretty…out there for your generation,” I suggested.

  “My maiden name? I just liked it better. That’s all,” Connie said. “It reminded me of better things. Better times. Better people. And it didn’t remind me of Gleason, who knows where he is now, but may he rest in peace if he’s dead.”

  “He wouldn’t be dead, Connie. You’re like, pretty young for a mother. And way young for a grandmother.”

  “We did those things younger then.”

  It was a nice conversation, which I had no reason to screw up. But I still said, “Back to the ship sinking. The way Cathy tells it, it sounds like you were right there on the bow of the Titanic, the last one alive, with your father holding you above the freezing water….” I guess I was sort ofrude. I think you have to be rude if you’re a fifteen-year-old boy. I’ve never met a polite one who wasn’t up to something. Maybe I was just being a putz. I was. After all, they were the only people I ever knew who had any contact with the Titanic. That deserves some respect.

  “It’s spoiling a tale you like to do, Gabriel,” she scolded me.

  “It is a tale, Connie!” I said. “It’s like a legend! It sounds so much more dramatic than it was.”

  “Don’t be rude,” Connie said. “It’s by our stories we remember ourselves. And what could be more dramatic? Do your own grandparents not talk about the death camps? And your grandfather about his battles at sea?”

  I was still totally pissed off for no reason. And not at Connie. In three days, I would take this girl and hold her in my arms (lightly), trying not to stumble—my mother was giving me the fastest crash course in dancing in history—all crazy with the world of what I felt for Tian. Then, after ten more days, she would leave. Boom. ’Bye, Gabe. Back home to go to restaurant hotels and become a doctor and marry some yutz who went from Bangkok to Yale, where she would probably ask me, if I turned up there—at New Haven, I mean, “Do I have met you?” I kicked a chair out from under the table and flopped down in it. And then, I looked up, and there they were, standing in the doorway of the house, where it opened in from the garage, my mother and Cathy.

  They stood there side by side. No one said anything.

  My mother’s face was the color of Tian’s dress. Tian, who was always doing stuff like this, ran and put her arms around my mother’s waist. But my mother, who would ordinarily have hugged her and then held her back and said something like Aren’t you the picture of an American debutante or some stuff, just stood there, staring past Tian at me.

  “Gabe,” said Cathy.

  “I will do it,” my mother said.

  “You’re the oldest,” Cathy said.

  I cannot tell you how fucking sick I would become of hearing this.

  “I will, Cathy,” my mother said. “Can you give Tian a ride home?” Tian looked confused.

  “Run and dress, sweetie,” Connie told her, slipping the formal over Tian’s head with anxious speed. Tian grabbed her jeans and ran for the bathroom, emerging fully dressed and slipping on her loafers moments later.

  My mother said, “Come on, Gabe. We have to go home. Tian, Connie, Cathy, we’re sorry. You were having so much fun….”

  “It’s you we’re thinking about, Julie darling,” Connie said. “Whatever you need. No matter how much…”

  “I know,” my mother replied, smiling a faded version of her toothpaste smile.

  We got into the car and drove past the ice-cream place that used to be my grandparents’ store, past the Italian restaurant, past the strip mall where I used to buy my model airplanes.

  “Mama?” I finally said, knowing it was the word I still used only when I was in trouble at school or wanted money.

  “I have multiple sclerosis, Gabe,” she told me, putting a piece of her hair behind her ear the way Caro did when she was trying to think.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked. I thought of Jerry Lewis on TV all night.

  “It’s not fatal,” my mother said quickly. “It’s a disease of the brain and the spinal cord. I don’t know everything about it yet. It’s, uh, a deteriorative disease. I don’t know how I got it. It’s from a virus. If your immune system is predisposed to get it, you…get it.”

  My gut killed me. “How do you get over it? Will we get it? What do you take for it? Deteriorative? What the hell does that mean? Like Alzheimer’s?”

  “No,” Mom said, “no, not like that! Well, in the worst possible scenario, like that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I could be…ill…like I was…before,” Mom said softly. “But maybe not. Maybe I won’t ever get that bad again. That was from multiple sclerosis. And stuff that came before. The stumbling, and the numbness, that time in my legs at ballet? And my hands. Sleeping all the time. It affects different people in different ways, and it affects the same person in different ways at different times. Back in the spring, when I felt funny, that was all this.”

  “Not all the time? You won’t be that way all the time?” I asked again.

  “No,” she said, tightening her hands at ten and two. She’d been teaching me to drive. She went on, “It can get pretty bad, maybe not right now, Gabe. I have decisions to make. Like if you were diabetic. You could eat more protein and lose some weight. Or you could start taking insulin shots right away. I have choices like that. Try homeopathic—no, naturopathic things. Extra vitamins. Or what they call the smaller series of pills. Valium for the shakes and the nerves. Antidepressants…”

  “Because you’
re depressed.”

  “Well, it hasn’t really sunk in yet…but when it does, I guess I will be. Or the big guns. I can start right now before it gets any worse and take…cancer drugs.”

  “Cancer drugs?”

  “Some people think that they keep MS attacks, or whatever you want to call them, from getting worse. It’s pretty accepted now. You know? I thought I was nuts. Didn’t you, Gabe?” She tried to laugh. She couldn’t quite make it. “Gabe, I’m so sorry. The doctor said it could be very mild. So I could be normal. Just like I am now, Gabe. Not like I was a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be able to work and to dance—”

  “Will you be able to take care of Aury? Until Dad…”

  “Of course. And you and Caroline.”

  “Will you ever get, you know what I mean, forgetful?”

  “I don’t know. I’d say no. Or not very often. I might have to take shots.”

  “Shots? You hate shots.”

  “Well, that’s how you take the cancer drugs. The drugs slow it down. Shots, then pills. I’d just have to…uh, deal.” Her attempt to talk like I would made me want to cry.

  “What do you have to do eventually, to kill the virus or what have you.”

  “It’s not curable, Gabe. You can’t kill a virus. It goes away if it’s a cold. But not this. I’ll have it as long as I live.”

  “You have to be kidding me.”

  “I’m not. But we have to tell Caroline, and the baby, together.”

  “Are you, like, going to get sick right away? And have to go to bed again?” I thought, What about the formal? Would I have to stay at home and babysit my mother? “We…when? Mom, you have to stop and get some coffee or water or something.”

  “I don’t need anything,” my mother said. “We’ll go home now, Gabe, and get on with it…and dinner—”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “So you might never get sick or you might get so sick you can’t get up but there’s no warning….”