The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “I don’t blame you for feeling like this.”

  “Dad, you’re breaking my heart.”

  “How would you feel,” he asked, and I had to fight myself, hold one arm like it was broken and in a sling, not to go to him, “if you were me and I were your son? If your own parents felt like you were something they wanted to wipe off their shoes?”

  “I’d feel like shit, Leon,” I told him. “I would honestly feel like shit. Hey, I would feel exactly like I do right now.”

  “Want a sub?” Cathy called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” I called back. “Roast beef and turkey and—”

  “Russian dressing. I know the drill,” Cathy called back.

  “I have to admit,” Leo said. “She hates my guts, but she’s been a good friend to you guys.”

  “She’s sort of the father I never had, Leon. Not that I haven’t enjoyed this, but I really have things to do….”

  He left then. I took my fist and put a hole in my headboard—it was kind of a lousy headboard—then, and semi-cried like a complete ass until I fell asleep.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Gabe’s Journal

  My mother went to physical therapy on Saturdays. If she could take it, after all the leg lifting with weights and the therapist rotating her ankles, she took ballet afterward. Sometimes Caro went with her. About half the time, she made it, and the rest of the day the rest of us all lived as if we were holding our breaths. She kept getting better, though, not worse.

  My father was coming back—without Amos—for the divorce. I kept hoping to start feeling weird and sad and drained and sort of nostalgic about Leo and my childhood and junk. But all I felt was dead to the touch, like the crooked scar on my knee from when I cut it down to the bone on a broken bike handle.

  The feeling never came back.

  It still hasn’t.

  The divorce just seemed like a normal fact now. Not even like something you’d change from tennis shoes to loafers for. And this was a thing that I would have thought as unlikely as a Martian installation in Klaus’s greenhouse, only a year before. The past six months had been the longest five years of my life.

  Now, the only thing I wanted was for my mother to look good in court. I didn’t want her to be limp and skinny, even though it would probably help her cause with the judge. We already knew that my dad was going to have to pay her some kind of money each month because she couldn’t work full time—unless she got married, which it was obvious she wouldn’t.

  She kept acting like she more or less couldn’t give a shit about Leo or Amos or anything. In front of us, at least. And I thought I knew part of the reason why. Sometimes, at night, I would hear her through the wall, singing along to some music, but more and more often, I’d hear her talking on the telephone. It was kind of comforting, even if she was crying while she was talking. It reminded me of when we were little, and we’d hear our parents, well, I suppose, screwing, my mom kind of making little whimpering noises and my dad gasping out her name, “Julie. Julie.” I wondered who she was talking to. It wasn’t Cathy, because Cathy now lived with us, though she was away then at a conference and afterward was going to see her brother in Denver. It wasn’t Stella, because she and Stella didn’t talk on the phone except to say “Later,” just to arrange to meet for coffee. That left my aunt Jane. But then, no one sane would talk for more than five minutes to my aunt Jane, and Gram was always around and about and went to bed at, like, eight-thirty. All my mom’s university friends, the professors’ wives, had ditched my mom like she never existed after Leo moved out.

  It was one night when my mother took Aury to a play for little kids that I sat down at her desk, to try to find out who the mystery talker was. It didn’t occur to me that I was violating my mother’s privacy by rifling her things. I didn’t think of her as a person with limits and a life apart. She was our mother. She belonged to us.

  Anyway, that night, I found two things of immense interest. One was a little magazine called Pen, Inc. Mom didn’t read magazines, and she was always hocking us to read books you couldn’t lift in one hand, like Anna Karenina, so I flipped through it. And there was her poem. Not the one I’d seen before we left for the Breakdown Lane. Another one. I don’t know if it was better. I don’t know anything about poetry except the Robert Frost poems she made us memorize when we were little, and the fact that you could sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” But it must have been more or less decent because they put it in this magazine.

  This is it:

  Remission

  I will have to pay for this remission,

  Shell out, with drooly dawns and stuporous mornings,

  Listen to winces, proffered help, tongues clucking or scorning.

  Pay with rage and fear and regret and mourning

  A new bruise on my hip, a fat lip, vertigo, nausea, all warnings

  That there’s a price tag on this holiday of health,

  No such thing, for me now, as a wealth

  Of it. I dance and sing, but in a closet, with stealth,

  As if to escape notice, forestall the time it takes its commission

  At the end of it, I shall remit,

  This isn’t joy. It’s intermission.

  I thought it sounded pretty damned bitter. It didn’t mesh with that perky-Julie phone voice I heard through the wall at night. “He did? And what did you do? Well, yeah, there may not be emergencies but it’s still a big responsibility. And accidents are emergency cases. Well, it doesn’t have to be mortal.” She sounded like a less stupid version of Caroline, talking to Mallory.

  But the really interesting thing was this folded piece of gray paper that fell out of the magazine. It was a note from a guy.

  Matthew McDougall here. I know you don’t remember me, Julieanne, but I remember you. I sat behind you in art class at PS 17, and I was madly in love. You danced with me exactly three times at Rec, to “God Only Knows.” You said it was your favorite song. It was Paul McCartney’s favorite song, too; and he used to drive his kids nuts by playing it over and over in the car. In fact, I have a daughter, who’s eighteen, and I drive her nuts playing it in the car. I read your column from time to time in the Herald, and when I saw your poem in Pen, Inc., I decided to write. I don’t know if you’ll ever get this, but if you do, call me and we’ll catch up. Fondly, Matt.

  His phone number was on the letterhead, and his name was followed by MD. A doctor. Probably the class nerd. It made me think about what it would be like if my mother were ever to have a…date, or what have you.

  Maybe he was the one she talked to on the phone.

  But if he’d read the poem, he knew she had MS.

  So why was he flirting with her?

  I’d read enough MS pamphlets to realize that people fled from women with MS, even if they’d loved them before. They deserted them because they could get stumbling and ranting and disgusting, though it wasn’t their fault, and just meeting the base physical needs of people with the worst cases could practically kill the people who took care of them. So far, my mom’s case seemed pretty mild, but you never knew. I put the gray paper back into the magazine, carefully making sure it was on the same page, and cut open the bills with the paper knife. I had always been pretty adept at my mother’s signature, how she’d respond to a dunning letter, how she’d schedule a speech. The bills were part of my routine. I just printed them out and signed them, along with permission slips, answers to letters, Caro’s detentions, and anything else that came along.

  It was the next day, after I spied on her, that my mother started having her bad spell.

  It was short, and really the last one she’s had since. But it was fairly awful.

  I never wished Cathy was home more than I did that week.

  It began with a little more trouble with her eyes. She would press her good eye basically against the computer screen as she wrote, her fingers moving. It made me think of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller. It gave me the cre
eps, to be honest. I had to drive her almost everywhere there for a while, and it was speech season, when hospitals and stuff were having their year-end banquets.

  The week before my father came back was the week of my mother’s Interferon treatment. She gave herself the shot, and it was routine. But this time, I heard her, from the bathroom, say, “Shit!” and I asked if I could help her. “No,” she said. “I got a damned blood return. I hit a vein. Go away.” This was…a little not Julieanne. Her shot finally administered, she came out and literally slung some hash at Aury and me, Caro having departed for her evening’s revels.

  “I hate fried eggs,” Aury whined, looking at the quivering runny orb on her hash cake. I couldn’t blame her. I eat them hard-boiled or scrambled, but a fried egg creeps me out. It reminds me that it’s one cell.

  “Fine,” said my mother, dumping Aury’s portion in the flip-top trash can. “Don’t eat.”

  Aury began to cry. “Gay,” she said, sniffling, “make me a PBJ.”

  “Don’t you dare, Gabe,” my mother said. “I’m sick of her picky eating crap. That was perfectly good corned beef and potatoes, Aury.”

  “But the egg was touching it,” Aury whined, beginning that passionate snort of rage and sadness that made snot come out her nose and made smoke come out the ears of any adult in earshot.

  “Get up then,” my mother said, grabbing Aury’s arm and hauling her to the door of her room. “And leave the table. And don’t come back.” She turned to me, then. “Not good enough for you, either?” she asked. “I can dump yours out, too.”

  “I was just kind of caught up in the floor show here,” I said, raising both hands in surrender.

  My mother checked her swing, but she almost slapped me in the face. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Fuck this!” I yelled, jumping up. “First you crap all over a little kid—”

  “I did not! I took her forcibly to her room, which even Doctor Spock said was okay. And I gave her perfectly normal, even banal food, and she wouldn’t touch it. She whines constantly. She never stops.” I put my plate on the dish drainer. My mother picked up the plate and, with satisfaction, broke it in half across the sink. “Go ahead and make your own god-damned meals,” she said.

  “Would you like that?” I asked her. “Would you feel more like a martyr than you already do?”

  “I’d like you to shut up and go to your room.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I lay there suffering, waiting the obligatory half hour before she came in saying, Gabe, I’m tired. Gabe, I’m sorry. Gabe, I still miss your dad and our old life so much.

  But she didn’t.

  I knew she was dreading what tomorrow would bring, the nausea, the chills, the veg out. It didn’t last long, only a couple of days, but she dreaded it. Still, I didn’t give a damn. She was acting like a complete asshole. And instead of apologizing, what she did for the next hour was to bang around the house, slamming doors, picking up all of Aury’s scattered toys and throwing them in a trash bin that she carried with her, shouting to Aury that if she didn’t want her toys, well, her mother didn’t want to trip over them so she’d give them to a child who could pick them up. I went in and got Aury, and put her to sleep in my bed. She’d cried so hard she’d thrown up, so I changed Aury’s bed, too. You ungrateful bitch, I thought. And she kept it up.

  “Look at you, her protector,” Mom mocked me. “Do you think I’m a lousy parent, too? Like he does? Do you think I’ve lost my mind?”

  “Currently,” I said honestly. “Not permanently.”

  “Well, fuck him and fuck you,” said…my mom! My mom who never swore in front of us, for whom a softly uttered “damn” was acceptable only for a traffic accident or a tornado warning. “By this time tomorrow you’ll be free to eat and do whatever you please, because I’ll be in bed, shaking and stiffening up. Have a ball!”

  “Mom, you need to lie down,” I said.

  “I never need to lie down again!” she screamed. “I’ve lain down for the best part of the past six months. My husband accidentally left me for a jam maker, my son refuses even to fake doing homework, and my daughter is probably the town whore.”

  “You forgot Aury.”

  “Oh yes, the flower of your father’s age. Or wait, did he get a new pistil or whatever they call it? The previous apple of your father’s eye. Don’t stand there and look at me. Leave! Leave, like every other stinking rat—”

  “It’s either stinking rat or rat leaving a sinking ship, Mom. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Shut up!” she shouted, advancing on me. I grabbed her wrists and held her arms down. “I hate you,” she sobbed.

  “I hate you right now, too,” I told her.

  “I hate what I have that passes for a life.”

  “Do you want me to call a suicide hotline?”

  “So they can tell me suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem? Well, what about a permanent problem? One that plays with you like a cat with a mouse. One day, your leg. The next week, an eye. Left hand Tuesday. Right hand Wednesday. Neck so stiff you can’t turn it. What about that? And how you feel about the person it makes out of you?” She pounded her fists together. “Gabe! I wish I could say I’d make it up to you. I don’t know how you feel, but I can imagine. Like I’m the child, and you’re the parent. I wish I could say, if I get better, or if I get some money, I’ll buy your childhood back, but you get only one. And I used yours up. But, Gabe, you don’t know how I feel, with all these little crappy things picking at me and my life…”

  “It sucks,” I said, and I meant it. She had a right to go ballistic. But she had no right to treat us like shit, because we were the only people in the world she could depend on. On the other hand, I could see how you could hate that—being dependent on the people who were supposed to be dependent on you. It would make you want to treat them like shit.

  By then, she had finished breaking plates and throwing Aury’s toys away—of course, I took them back out of the trash—and gone to bed. I wondered if I would end up hating both of them, her and Leo.

  I had saved my most recent letter from Tian. And I figured this would be the time to read it, when I needed it most

  Practically the whole front of the letter was stamps, and it was so pitifully short. Yeah, English wasn’t her first language, but she had a way of being sweet and yet distant that was unbearable. She had “so much sorrow” over my mother and father.

  I am without the words to say this. These were such good people to me. I come from a stable family, and it is difficult to imagine my father describing himself that way. Perhaps he is having a mental illness and will get better presently. And so, Gabe, you must be very brave, because it will pay off. I am now a junior in my school because of the acceleration. I went to school all through my holidays. It was so that next year I will apply to Yale. And I will go the year after. I would like to see the United States again, and have ice cream. I remember my days there like a dream that girls have in a legend. Will Yale be far from Sheboygan? [As the moon, I thought. As far as the moon.] I will hope you will come over and see me. Your friend, Tian.

  The “your friend” didn’t help.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried getting over her. I dated, for a while, in the laziest sense of the word, a girl called Rebecca, not an Ed. She was cute, along the lines of Easter, sister of Joyous, all long legs and purply red hair, nearly as tall as I was. But then I’d get one of Tian’s letters. And her handwriting, even the spicy smell of the paper she’d written on, made me sick, as if I had the flu. Nauseated. Sweating at night. I’d fake having to work or take care of my mother two weekends in a row to avoid seeing Rebecca before I got over it. I thought that if I weren’t a Jew, I might become a priest, because it was obvious I was never going have Tian, who would marry some Yaley doctor, just like Luke said, about five minutes into her internship. After a while, Rebecca told me gently she thought she wanted to see other people. I put up a minor struggle, for the sake of it
looking right. But it was kind of a relief. I mean, I had proved my point. I’d dated a regular girl at fucking LaFollette. And I had no desire to do anything else.

  That night, after my mother went bonkers, was when I called Tian. It probably cost about eighty dollars, and over there, it was, of course, about four in the morning. Her dad had a shit fit until she told him it was Gabe from Sheboygan United States, and then he was all nice.

  “Why is it?” Tian asked.

  “Why’s what, that I called?” I replied. “I…miss you. Still. I miss you like you don’t miss me.”

  “Wait,” Tian said. “I miss you. I don’t have a boyfriend. But I am practical. If I miss you all the time, I get depressed and I cannot do work or be a good person to my friends.”

  “My mother’s so sick.”

  “I know. It is horrible to think of beautiful Julie sick and weak.”

  “And my father is a bastard.”

  “Don’t say that, Gabe. It’s worse for you than for him to say that.”

  “That’s what my mother says. She says I have to think of my own karma.”

  “She’s right. Because if he will be a bastard, hating him can make you into a bastard.”

  “So, what’s new?” Well, there was a lot new. A lot of social parties and a lot of dancing parties and very hard schoolwork, not like Sheboygan, and a trip to Italy planned with her choir, and…she just had so much good going on in her life, I wanted to hang the hell up on her, too.

  “Gabe, I know you are so sad,” she finally told me. “I wish I could come and kiss your mouth.”