The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  “Was it me?”

  He shook his head, then spent time moving his lips, then sighed. “Seriously, Jeff, I don’t know how to say this again. It wasn’t you—it was never you. But you saw what it was like. Your mom, she likes wine. When she got sad, I got sad, I drank, too, maybe more than she did. When her father died, she really went off the edge. It had started before, but it was all downhill from there. And so quick. Maybe you don’t know that—”

  “I know she’s falling off the edge again, and I don’t want to be the only one trying to hold her up. I’m in eighth grade—”

  “Exactly!” he said. “It’s not your job. There wasn’t any future there. In that house. You saw it. You were young, but you saw it. It was toxic, you know? I was drinking too much and suffocating. You’re suffocating—”

  “I’m not—”

  “I would take you with me if I could.”

  “I wouldn’t go.”

  “I… I guess I know that. Your mother and me, we fought so much.”

  I stood up from the sofa. “All parents fight. Houses are too small not to fight whoever you’re living with. I fight with Mom. But not everybody takes off.”

  “Right. Look, that’s done. I’m sober now. Almost two months. Since I met Erica.”

  Sober. That explained why he looked as good as he did.

  “I’m not going to argue it all over again. I just want to tell you that I’m making a change. We’re moving out of the city, Erica and me. Fresh start.”

  I didn’t see that coming. “Moving? You can’t. Where?”

  “Florida. In a couple or three days. Erica’s parents live down there.”

  You don’t want to hear the rest. Stupid forty-five-year-old father with skinny jeans and a baby. His head was a stupid solid rock. He didn’t hear a word I was telling him. He just said what he wanted to say and it was meaningless, so I won’t bother repeating it. Except this bit, when I moved to the door to leave.

  “Jeff, wait,” he said, reaching out but not touching me. “When you go off someplace, sometimes you see where you are better, you get what I mean?”

  “Uh… no, Dad, I don’t get what you mean. I know you’re not coming in with money for us, that’s obvious. You’ll need it for diapers.”

  When he drew in a sudden breath of air, I couldn’t tell if he was getting ready to smack me or cry. Neither. He smiled. It was a dumb smile, like he knew the moment I got up that he was getting himself off the hook.

  “It’s like you’re in a different place,” he said. “And you see yourself better when you’re in that different place. Without all the noise around you, everybody talking, drinking, getting mad… without all that, you see it better. You see yourself better. The way you’re living. The way your life is going. And you can change it. Rearrange things. Leave. Clear all the noise out. Clutter, that’s what it is. Clutter. You understand?”

  Sure, I understand. You’re illiterate. And I’m clutter.

  I said, “Uh-huh.”

  “I guess I didn’t really know when I was with you and your mother what I was doing being a father.” He said this as if it was some big piece of knowledge and I should be happy he’d discovered it.

  “Then it’s too bad you’re back in the business,” I said.

  He punched the couch instead of me. This was always the first reaction of anyone in my family, lash out first. Me, him, my mother. We all do it.

  A pot lid clanked, and there was splattering and hissing from the kitchen.

  “Hold on, stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  He trotted his skinny legs across the floor and disappeared into a hallway. People are always doing that. Going into another room. But you know what? After all this time I’ve figured out a good thing. When people leave, I get to fill up the space myself.

  While he was back there, I peeked into the bedroom. I didn’t see anything but a slim brown arm sticking out from the sheets.

  Before he returned, I was on my way downstairs to the street.

  CHAPTER 12

  UNDER A FAKE SKY

  After stumbling three and a half laps around the main room of Grand Central with Dad’s voice sputtering in my head, I finally spied Mom pacing near the escalators. She saw me and shot across the floor and kissed my cheek. She smelled of mustard.

  “Well, what did the bum say? I’m sorry. Your father. What did your father have to say? I should have gone with you. I feel better now.” She stood with her feet spread apart, as if waiting for a punch.

  “He’s moving to Florida.”

  “What?” she said. “No, don’t say that. Jeff? Really?”

  “Florida,” I repeated. “Palm trees. Alligators. Beaches. He’s going. In fact, he’s practically gone. But he stayed long enough to say goodbye, because he’s such a great guy. Plus, he’s sober, has been for two months.”

  I guess I wanted that to mean something.

  She snorted. “So he says.”

  “But guess what? He doesn’t have any extra money to give us. He told me child support shouldn’t change because you lost your job.”

  “The pig! I’ve already let him get away with too much. And how in the world is he going to move halfway across the country with no money? Tell me that.”

  “Maybe the baby will fly them down there.”

  “Baby?” Her face went pale as ice. “Jeff? What baby?”

  “His new girlfriend is all pregnant.” I made the word sound as dirty as I could.

  She slunk back against the wall and moaned behind her hands for what seemed like minutes in the huge room. People on the escalator were staring, so I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and scanned for someplace to sit. There weren’t any seats that didn’t have restaurants attached to them, so we sat on the marble steps leading down to the bathrooms and let people rush around us.

  “I don’t understand him,” she whispered into my shoulder, still sobbing. “Jeff, I just don’t understand him. And I’m the idiot who married him!”

  “Mom. You’re not the idiot. Believe me. He was wearing skinny jeans.”

  I sometimes get calmer when people around me blow up, and that’s the way it was now. As we huddled together, I kept my arm on her shoulder. I smelled mustard again.

  “You had lunch?” I said lamely.

  “Didn’t you? He didn’t give you anything? Bum!” She opened her wallet. “Get yourself something. Here.”

  Five dollars.

  “I had lunch. Plus an apple for dessert. I’m fine. Put it away.”

  Swallowing my spit and going hungry turned out to be a good thing, because when it came time to buy tickets home, Mom was so afraid to use her bank cards she decided to use cash and really had to scrape the insides of her bag to pull together enough.

  When we ran to get the last off-peak train, she said, “This is just for a little while, Jeff. I promise.”

  As the train rumbled out of the tunnel into the gray light, Mom blinked her eyes dry into her window reflection, and I realized two truly hilarious things about today.

  The first was I didn’t even mention St. Damien’s. Funny, huh, after all that?

  The second? I still wanted to love my dad. Inside me, I wanted to.

  When I’d seen his face today, the same face I’d been looking up to all my life, it tingled something in my chest. I was drawn to him. Like his girlfriends are, I guess. I hated him, but that came second. Hating him came when he opened his mouth and when he turned and left you. I wanted to love this worthless guy who couldn’t wait to be out of the room. How dumb is that?

  I was just nine when my parents broke up.

  There were no quiet discussions behind closed doors or whispers the afternoon my father decided to leave our house. It was the day Tom Bender and I watched Duck Soup. There’d been shouting, but not very much. I had stopped laughing long enough to hear one quick, lame firework—“That’s it. I’m outta here!”—and he was gone.

  The rest has just been the ashes settling down.

  CHAPTER 13


  HELP ME

  This is just for a little while, Jeff. I promise.

  Except they don’t tell you that once you start sliding, that slide becomes a free fall. You never catch up to how fast your luck runs away. By the time you realize you have to do things differently, those things don’t work anymore either.

  One of the first to go was comics. Not a big thing, but still. Mom didn’t notice that I stopped buying them or asking for them, or if she did she didn’t make a deal of it. I’ve loved comics forever, following the arcs of the stories. Gone. Then every other day I skipped buying lunch. You can’t stop altogether or not pretend to eat, because cafeteria monitors might notice and pull you aside. The days I skipped I still brought a paper bag to put on the table in front of me. When I got home, I put my lunch money back in Mom’s change purse. She never noticed. That was actually easy, the food part. School lunches are only so-so to begin with.

  Mom had canceled trash pickup and cable and Internet a few days after she was fired. She canceled the house phone, too, but kept her cell phone.

  “For job offers. I need to give them a number.”

  Our car stunk because Mom would throw our garbage bags in the trunk until she found a trash bin to lob them into, but each day she’d come out of the bathroom saying, “How do I look?”

  “Great,” I’d say. “They’d be idiots not to hire you.”

  I never knew who “they” were. Clinics? Visiting nurse services? Temp agencies? Maybe there wasn’t anyone, not really. She never volunteered facts when I asked. Most of the time, she was cranky or sleeping when I got home from school.

  She started shopping for groceries at the cheap-food warehouse instead of the superstore, and she did it on off-hours, when no one she possibly knew would see her going there. I went a couple of times. The people wandered, leaning on their carts and shifting slowly from aisle to aisle like zombies, touching things, considering, putting them back.

  I saw people and places I never had before. My shoulders ached so much when I flopped on my bed after school, I realized I’d been hunching all day, like a boxer guarding against a hit he knows is coming.

  Mom began selling things she said we didn’t need. We would load the car after dark so no one would see and she’d sell the stuff the next day. I didn’t want Rich to see us losing our things, so I stopped inviting him over. We hung out at his house or not at all.

  I was planning to ask her “Do we have any savings?”—but I snooped out from some bank statements in her room that we didn’t. Dad had been paying eight hundred and fifty-five dollars every month for a while, but it dipped in half at the beginning of the summer, which I guessed was why we couldn’t afford St. Catherine’s anymore. But it was also pretty clear that Mom hadn’t expected the hospital to fire her in January. She hadn’t saved much: a little over five thousand dollars, which sounds like a lot but went fast. I figured out that monthly checks to a guy named Mr. Andrade must have been rent. They went up two hundred dollars a month in March, when she was job hunting, so the five thousand was nearly gone before she even got the job at Fairchild Manor.

  Every few days a letter appeared in the mailbox from a Bridgeport address. They were addressed to her in jagged handwriting but without stamps. Who was putting stuff in our mailbox? One of her old boyfriends? Skip? Ron? I sure didn’t open them.

  End tables, the coffee table in the living room. Two old wall mirrors. Plant stands. Table lamps, floor lamps. Air conditioners. Everything became what we could get for it. She had a deal with a couple of pawnshops in Golden Hill. What she couldn’t pawn at one, she could at the other.

  “The love seat, how much do you think it’s worth? And the chairs. As a set they’re worth more, right?” she was asking me. “Help me decide.”

  Help me. Can you imagine your mother saying this to you? I wanted to scream, but I coughed up an answer for her. “Let’s sell them together. I think we should.”

  “Me too,” she said, with a nod and a smile. “I love you.”

  Do you? I wondered. Maybe she loves me because I help her. Or maybe like me she doesn’t really know how to love someone. Wasn’t it her duty to have a job to support her child?

  Sometimes movers came to the house if the furniture she was selling was big. She said she hoped it looked like old things going out and new things coming in. For the world, it was about the way it looked. For us, it was about the dollars. Soon the living room was clear, then Grandpa’s old room, which Mom started filling with boxes and trash bags like a dump.

  “You don’t use your desk anymore, do you? I always see you on the bed.”

  “Yeah. No, let’s do it.”

  “Great. There’s a demand for kids’ furniture downtown. They’ll take it at both places, so I can drive up the price!”

  “Good, Mom. Good.”

  Our stuff leaving the house was like selling body parts.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE GIRL IN MY CLASS

  Wednesday. Third period.

  Keeping my eyes down, I waded through the halls to Mr. Maroni’s room. Most desks were filled and the kids had their new books. I searched my pack, but I must have left my copy at home. I hadn’t read more than a few pages anyway. Nothing new.

  I found a desk in the back, sat, and realized I couldn’t breathe.

  Mom once told me how she’d been breathless for weeks after Grandpa died. Always trying to get the air inside, always finding it squeezed out of her. My chest was being crushed, too. I felt like crying it all out right there, but instead rubbed my face hard with both hands, then looked up. Mr. Maroni was perched on the corner of his desk.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s been a few days. You’ve all got your forms signed by a parent, or, as they say, a guardian, so we’re good. And you’ve all finished The House on Mango Street, yeah?”

  Murmurs across the room. He looked around. Not at me, good thing.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. A hundred and ten pages, people! So, you have probably figured out that Sandra Cisneros has written a different kind of novel here. Short but deep and resonant. One in which there is tremendous beauty, sharp, even jagged writing, as well as beautiful turns of phrase and meaning, if we’re smart, which we are, and take the time to read closely.”

  “We smart!” a kid called out, and his friends chuckled.

  “Indeed,” the teacher said offhandedly. “But you don’t have to be a great reader. I’m actually not. There’s the choppiness, of course, and a few sentences I have to read a couple of times to get the flow of, but it’s really… you just have to pay attention. And if you pay attention over the very few pages of this book, you’ll read something that will live inside you the rest of your lives.”

  “Did you give us a tapeworm, Mr. M?”

  A few more chuckles and someone gagged.

  “No, Sam. Teachers are prohibited from giving out tapeworms until second semester.”

  He got the bigger laugh.

  “So. What I’m saying is that this story might make you feel something that lasts.” He cleared his throat, started walking around. “Thoughts to start us off? Tell us something brilliant. Or not. Let’s begin a discussion. What did you like about it?”

  I was watching him as if from the back row of a theater. Far away and a bit fuzzy. Josh was at the next desk flipping the pages slowly. Short chapters. Titles in big letters.

  He raised his hand.

  “Yes, Joshua.”

  “Well, it’s a small thing, but I liked when she—Esperanza—was talking about legs and shoes—”

  “Ooh! Josh likes girls’ shoes!” someone said.

  “Zip it,” Mr. Maroni snapped. “Josh, go on.”

  “What I mean is, it’s like what girls think. Or these girls, anyway. The stuff they say when guys don’t hear them. The lemon shoes and red shoes and pale blue ones. The long legs. It’s like listening in. Like overhearing.”

  “Yes. Good. You are listening in, yeah? Her voice is so close, the narrator’s, so c
lose to your ear. She allows you to hear and see what she hears and sees. Good call, Joshua.”

  He crossed the front of the room, then returned. “Are there parts that made you feel, mmm, emotions? Or that serious things are being touched on in the middle of all the colorful life that’s going on, shading it in different ways?”

  No one. He ran his eyes over us, one by one. Still no one. I felt nervous for him.

  “Well, how about this? The title, right? The House on Mango Street. Setting aside for the moment whether there actually is a street with that name, what is a mango?”

  “A fruit!” someone said. “I think.” Some laughs.

  Mr. Maroni started roaming again. “Yes! A fruit. And what does a fruit do? What does every fruit do?”

  Colin Anderson looked around to make sure I was listening, then said, “Sit in a bowl?”

  It was the kind of thing I would have blurted out last year in Mrs. Tracy’s class. Now I listened to someone else say it. Poor Colin. It died in silence.

  The teacher grinned sadly. “No one? Anyone?”

  You’re thinking the poor kid would suddenly throw his hand up and prove his brilliance and everybody would love him by his totally appropriate and sensitive answer and give him all kinds of love and money, right? Nope. I just sat there.

  Someone shifted in the front row.

  “Well…”

  It was the girl who had frowned when I read the back cover of that book. Anna. She was tall and quiet. This was the first time I remembered her saying anything at all.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, fruit ripens and is good for a while, then it starts to rot and you can’t eat it. I think that’s why she calls it that. Mango Street. Because by the end, she wants to leave it behind. The house, the street, the neighborhood. It’s not good anymore. She needs to go. I mean, that’s not the only reason to go, but I think she also means ‘mango’ to be seen like that, as a metaphor. Maybe.”