The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Anyway, I wasn’t passive aggressive toward Mrs. Kimball.

  I was actually aggressive.

  I didn’t swear or anything like the kids with tattoos.

  I just sat there, trying to do shit that would drive her nuts, like sticking a pen cap on the end of my tongue by suction. I hated her so bad that seeing her squirm was more important to me than doing what I actually could have done to get a decent amount of work finished.

  Kimball looked like a cartoon of a teacher, right to the end of her little sixties flip. Maybe she had some kind of hideous scarring on her arms and throat, and that was why she covered herself from neck to knees with clothes she must have ordered specially from old Sally Field movies. No matter how hot it got in the LD room, she had on some kind of turtleneck with little initials on it and, like, a kilt or plaid pants. As soon as I came home each day, the first thing I’d do was boot up my mom’s laptop and delete Mrs. Kimball’s daily bulletin, which usually read along the lines of: “Mr. Molinari couldn’t tell whether Gabe was awake or asleep in class today, but since he completed the paragraph about five seconds before the bell…” Or my favorite: “Some of the freshmen will be taking the PSAT in spring, but these tests are for the college-bound student. He’d need a note from an MD psychiatrist to get extra time to do the tests anyway, and a written copy of all test results and Individualized Education Plans going back to middle school….”

  Mrs. Kimball apparently thought my mother didn’t know what the SAT was, or was more likely just being a bitch. “Gabe seems to have squeaked by with a B in Phys Ed….” She could make even something good sound like shit, if I was involved in it.

  I have observed that those who hate kids most teach Special Ed. Either they know they don’t have some kind of passion for history or writing, or they figure they can’t do any more harm with their fucking sadism, since their students were the heel of society’s loaf anyhow. There were kids who were crazy about Mrs. Kimball and Miss Nick, her equally thick but vaguely kinder younger colleague. I swear to God, like this one brain-damaged girl who graduated at, like, twenty-two, came back to visit the LD room, with her handler. She fed dogs at the Humane Society. That was the gift Mrs. Kimball had given her with her fucking diploma. It took me fucking five years to recover from Mrs. Kimball. Just the smell of that old-lady-drawer perfume she used to wear would make me want to throw up. The principal loved Mrs. Kimball, which he would have even if she’d been Saddam Hussein. The Mrs. Kimballs of the world took the Eds out of regular classes, where they had committed heinous felonies like doodling on the margin of a paper, which, of course, would disrupt the known universe. The LD guards would then stand over the six or eight of us in our pen, and hock us with statements such as, “How can you expect to pass if you can’t even remember to turn in the papers, Gabe?” They never figured out why you couldn’t remember crap, though I once told the skinny, batso psychologist, who floated from school to school on her Vespa, that I felt like most of my life was one of those films where a person has a camera attached to the front of a roller coaster. She said, “That’s…interesting, Gabe,” and the next time my mother came into a meeting, there was a note clipped to my folder: “Evaluate, possible psychosis?”

  Like, I’m no Einstein, but I grew up in a house where people communicated with more than clicks and grunts. I knew how to describe things. I knew what “ad hoc ergo proper hoc” meant. I couldn’t spell it. I could spell it now. That’s why God invented spell-checkers. I can write. But they didn’t care about what you thought, just how you spelled it. One time, this genius English teacher decided she’d give me a list of spelling words designed just for me. Cat. Book. Milk.

  This was a real fucking ego boost.

  But I shouldn’t have told my mother about it.

  It sent her over the edge. Without telling me, she stormed into the principal’s office, waving a copy of The Odyssey, saying, “Don’t you dare, ever, ever, give my kid a spelling list with ‘cow’ and ‘that’ on it. Never. My kid has read Homer. Have you read Homer? You probably think Homer’s your cousin’s first name….” I could have killed her for it at the time, butactually, now I think about it, she was, like, this little warrior. She didn’t always make sense, but she had the right beef.

  What’s really neat in an extremely sad way is that even her knack for humiliating me out of overprotectiveness is one of the best memories I have of the time before The Illness.

  There was this one night I got up, hungry, about one in the morning. And she was sitting at the table with her leg stretched out on two chairs doing a project for me that was due the next day. I never thought about why she had her leg up. But I bet it hurt her. She probably already had it then. All over her hair was this dust from sugar she’d been using to make igloos, and she was at that moment trying to see if she could fashion the lining of one of Aury’s old mittens into a polar-bear hide she could then hang over whatever it is Inuit people hang things over to dry. When she saw me, she looked up at me and just smiled. “Go to bed, honey,” she said.

  “Mom, give it up already. You’ve got an igloo there and a couple of people—”

  “Once you’re in college, you’ll do fine, Gabe,” she said, like she was talking to herself instead of me. “This won’t matter. They’ll have note takers for kids like you, Gabe. You have rights. Legal rights. Legal rights! You’re a very intelligent person, Gabe. It’s just that those burnout losers they call school counselors don’t get it….” She looked small and white and…melted, like the end of a candle on a saucer. I was in about seventh grade. I wanted, big-time, to cry or something. I had honest to God just found this three-week-old paper describing the project in my jacket, along with some linty chocolate-covered cherries. I remembered that it was due and that there also would be a test the next day, so my mother grabbed a cookie sheet and starting building a model of an isolated American culture so I could at least read the chapters and sleep. I got a piece of bread out of the drawer. And then she asked, “But, Gabe, what am I going to use for seals?”

  I thought she meant something to seal, to stick down the skin, so I said, “Well, how about just Elmer’s glue?”

  “I mean seals, animals, what they eat, and whales….”

  “I don’t think you need, ah, seals,” I told her. “I think they hunt them for pelts. Mom, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Do you think I could use sardines?” she asked me, her eyes redrimmed. She did use sardines. She baked them and coated them with colorless nail polish so they wouldn’t smell and people still stared at me funny when they passed my project. She was so OCD. But she gave a shit. She always gave a shit.

  The point is, Aury will never know how she was Before. I’m the only one who remembers that for her. Aury can’t, and “Cat” wouldn’t. Aury has her own…version of Mom. A good one. But I don’t think of it as the real one.

  When things got really hard, of course, I stopped bickering with Mom about anything, from homework to piano practice (no one had seen the piano teacher since Christmas). I have a theory: when you can get away with anything, you don’t.

  Except if you’re my asshole sister Caroline.

  She kept trying to sneak out the door to see Ryan the Hairy, in his car made almost entirely of body putty, and going wacko when Grandpa, who could hear like a bat, met her at the door while she was trying to slip out in her stockings, carrying her four-inch platform shoes. I think it was that, Grandpa trying to control the life of Princess Caroline, that turned the key, made her think the search-and-seizure adventure she’d only toyed with was an actual plan.

  I was going through Mom’s folders one week, looking up adolescent sexuality and stuff, and I saw this red folder. I picked it up because it was marked BULLSHIT.

  Inside it were poems. I only read one, but I copied it down. Since I read her poems later, I guess this was sort of a baby step, an early Julieanne Gillis, poet, effort.

  But it made me see how bad she was hurting, not only physically. And how much sh
e knew. You always like to think a person doesn’t know how sick she is, so you can tell her the same thing.

  Mirror, Mirror

  Giving up the girl

  Is like giving birth

  Giving up the girl hurts like hell

  When the girl was to understudy the prima, woman-to-be

  And was instead la femme très jolie.

  Giving up the girl is like stretching skin after burns,

  Because she was meant to be the ascension

  And turned out the summit, the diamond head of the pin.

  Giving up the girl is like hearing bone cut, your own,

  Leaving scars only I see.

  Because the woman didn’t turn out to be

  All she promised to be when she was grown.

  Was instead an apple that fell too far from the tree.

  It hurts to be the woman

  Who was the girl

  Who was me.

  There used to be a series of three pictures of Mom in the Houston Ballet the summer of her sophomore year at the U. of Colorado. They’re professional, probably done by a guy who wanted to sleep with her because she was only in the corps de ballet; but my father had them framed and lit, hung up as a sort of triptych in the hall.

  When Grandma Steiner came, she took them down and put one of them in each of our rooms.

  You would not call my grandmother subtle.

  In Aury’s room, today, the picture of my mother looks like this little arched doll, even her fingers are extended like they were little ballerinas, she’s on pointe, in what I think you call an attitude. In the one I have, she’s a blur, on purpose; she’d been in a series of pirouettes. I don’t remember what Caro’s was. When she took off, she took it with her. She’s sentimental.

  SIXTEEN

  Gabe’s Journal

  What I thought when Caro woke me up about two in the morning was that Mom was sick or that Grandma, who was always clutching her heart over some new outrage (like that Caro had stolen ten bucks from her purse), had actually had a heart attack. But instead she said, “Gabe, major truce. I’m sorry I yelled at you. No kidding. Do you have money?”

  I had birthday checks and such, in the credit union at the U., totaling about two hundred bucks. “I’m not lending you any. Ask Ryan,” I told her. “Have him sell a couple of his lake pipes.”

  “No, it’s for…I have this idea. We’re going to fix this.” She brushed a middle piece of her blonde hair behind her ears, like she did when she got serious. I thought about the pictures of Mom in our hall. When Caro danced, she looked almost like Mom.

  “Do you still take ballet?” I asked.

  “No,” Caro answered.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Semester off,” she told me.

  “Grades,” I said.

  “No,” Caro said honestly, “I didn’t think she could pay for it. That’s why we have to fix this. We have to find Dad.”

  “Find Dad? As in, Doctor Livingston, I presume?” I asked, punching my pillow and preparing to dive back into it. “Get out of my room. Go howl with Justine or Mallory at the Taco Bell.”

  “This, all this,” she went on, shaking me until I sat up. “Listen. We can get Dad to come home. I can. If we can find him. See?” she went on. “He probably found out about Mom from somebody, like one of his old friends. And he’s freaking out. When you have a midlife crisis, what you want is to be a kid again. You want less responsibilities. I heard this in family dynamics. So you would never want a wife with a chronic illness and one kid with learning disabilities…and a brat teenager, which I know would be me,” she said. “But once he gets here, because he’s probably totally homesick, he’ll see she’s not so bad—and, you know Dad—he’ll want to fix everything. And we’ll be back to normal.”

  I shook my head. “We’ve tried and tried to call him.”

  She stared at me. “So have I.”

  “So if he got any of the messages, he knows what’s wrong here.”

  “If he got any of my e-mails,” she said.

  Caro looked like a scared little kid. She bit one side of her lip. “Kid, I’m sorry.” I sort of awkwardly put my arm around her.

  “That’s why we have to go get him, Gabe!” she whispered, sitting up and jerking away, wrapping her arms around her knees. “He doesn’t get how serious this is. Gram and Gramp are going to file a hubus petition against him, or whatever it is. For desertion. Freeze his assets…”

  “I’d like to freeze his assets,” I said, quoting Grandpa Steiner.

  “They’re going to sell the house,” my sister said then.

  I sat up higher, reached over, and grabbed my sweatshirt and rubbed my face. “What do you mean?”

  “To Klaus and Liesel. They’re going to sell the house and…I heard the whole thing. They’re going to let us rent our place from them, but Klaus is going to put up a big greenhouse or bug house lab in our backyard. In our backyard…”

  “When’d you hear this?”

  “I heard Mom tell Cathy and Grandma. Like, a couple of days ago, they came up while we were at school, and she told them the whole thing. That’s why we have to act fast.”

  “We can’t stop her from selling the house,” I said. “I heard Grandpa say that if he can take out both their money and junk, she can sell the house without him.”

  “Yeah, but if we find him fast enough, and he gets the message, and Gabe, you know I can talk him into anything….”

  So I listened.

  Turned out it was no spur-of-the-moment idea. She had it all down, in a folder with our spring-break schedule taped on the outside. A folder! My sister! While there was nothing wrong with Caro’s wiring, at least when it came to logic, I didn’t think my sister cared to do much planning at all, beyond deciding on Thursday to go shopping on Saturday. Actually, she’s very smart. And she has Leo’s gene for knowing exactly what she needs.

  The folder she showed me was filled with e-mails. They were all Dad’s e-mails, and they were some fascinating reading.

  Before Dad left, Caro had downloaded all Dad’s saved e-mails onto Mom’s computer, slugging it “Caroline’s Diary,” thus ensuring that Mom, who was pathological about not invading our privacy, would never look at it. Then, when Caro got her own laptop, she downloaded the whole schmear from Mom’s onto hers.

  They started a couple of years before, with a man named Aimen and his wife, Mary Carol, who had started what they called an “intentional community” in New Hampshire. The first place it had been housed had been a gutted Kmart, where the people just partitioned off their individual “living spaces,” but since then, the people involved had all moved to the same neighborhood—too much closeness being too much of a good thing. As far as I could tell, they all believed in the same ethical stuff—like universal health insurance, keeping kids out of public schools, buying all their organic food in big bunches from farmers and sharing it out among the families. The families, I gathered, now all lived on the same couple of blocks in a town in New Hampshire, but in their own houses. They saved a lot of money because the whole group of them—Caroline said she had figured, from reading all the e-mails, that there were eight or nine families—co-owned only two vans and a truck as their only vehicles and, like, one snowblower and one TV, which they used only for movies and seeing stuff of outrageous significance, like the Olympics or 9/11. They had a meeting each week, “and it can get a little uproarious,” said Aimen, who had been a Marine and whose wife, Mary Carol, was the New Hampshire State Champion Skeet Shooter. Caroline asked me what a skeet was. I had no idea, but I thought of the gun in Dad’s drawer.

  Aimen wrote, “We make joint decisions, such as curriculum, and when there are people who want their kids to read only novels that have modern social themes, and people who want their kids to commit Shakespeare to memory, and everyone over the age of fifteen has a vote, we have to do some real diplomatic negotiation. But we have a nice mix.” Rituals, he wrote another time, “are one way we stay a community. The com
ing-of-age ritual at thirteen is a big one. Nothing religious about it. No. We don’t ‘do’ religion; those who have their own faiths practice those faiths in their own way. But we think attaining maturity is a big deal, as have most indigenous cultures, and we have a feast, with gifts, an engraved Book of Life for the young person to fill with his or her own memories….”

  It sounded right up Leo’s alley, especially given the sprinkling of names throughout, some of which were normal, but others of which were obviously chosen by parents who really wanted to crawl down into the earth and be it. There were kids named Willow and Muir and Diego. I hoped they were kids, anyhow.

  There were various others, some from some fucking hostile survivalist nuts Dad didn’t correspond with for long. But the next big batch were from two locations. The one we could tell was sort of in upstate New York, because the Hudson River was mentioned; and one was in Vermont.

  The one in Vermont had a return address of crystalgrove@popper.net, and it was another community like the one before, only more so. Everybody who lived there had, like, three full outfits of their own, period. They lived in what they called “little houses” (an attachment had a picture of one of these) that were like something Aury would play in, but they had real rooms, only tiny-sized and with everything built into the walls. Your bed folded down. Your desk folded down. Your goddamn kitchen table folded down. This was supposed to encourage you to be outside more and at the Gathering (this sounded to me like some creep horror movie, about people who went to paradise and got turned into clones), which was this big lodge with a table longer than the one in the Last Supper and a lot of little ones—I assume for the children—where everybody ate every single meal together, and every single meal was made from stuff that was grown at the place, even the meat. The kids went to regular school, but they had to work on the place every Saturday as their “tithe.” (I looked it up and it meant their tenth or percentage or something.) Adults had regular jobs, but—this blew me away—they put all their money together! I mean, one worked at a garage, and one was an orthodontist, and they put all their paychecks in one big pot and paid everything out of that. They were totally in it for life! Some people only worked for the place, farming and sewing and canning and junk. There were pictures, though, and the place was beautiful-looking. Like a magic place, with a waterfall the kids were playing in. The waterfall was supposedly connected to a pool with a hot spring. I hadn’t ever heard of a hot spring in Vermont, but why not? They have them in Alaska. There was a class of graduates and what colleges they were going to, and some of the high school kids who went to a mountaineering camp—they had a big banner in front of them that said STRONG PROUD BODIES—including one really cute girl named Jessica Godin. The old lady—she said she was an old lady—who wrote to our dad seemed totally nice. Her name was India. She said it was her real name because her parents were teachers and she grew up in Delhi.