A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (3 page)

“No wonder your breath always stinks, Jake,” Cleo teases him. “You’re a godawful brusher. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about the importance of circular motion?” She demonstrates. “See,” she says through a mouth full of foamy paste, “it’s all about the gums.” She takes out her toothbrush and swipes his nose with it.

He pretends to be disgusted and quickly rinses his face in the sink. He has on a pair of blue and orange plaid pajama bottoms, slippers I gave him last Christmas that look like bear’s feet (get it? He’s in his “bear” feet), and no shirt. Jake is really starting to fill out, and he tends to walk around shirtless whenever he can get away with it.

“Good night, ladies,” he says, and even though Cleo’s face is covered in apricot scrub and I’ve just started brushing my teeth, he flicks off the bathroom light.

I’m lying in bed. Cleo shuts down my computer after checking her e-mail and then turns to me and says, “Simone, are you sure you’re okay? You just seem kind of bummed out tonight.”

There it goes again. That burning in my eyes. That constricting of my throat. Why is this happening?

“Yeah. I’m fine. Just tired.” I fake a yawn.

She crawls onto the futon we put down for her on the floor. “Come on, Simone. Tell me what’s going on.”

Now I feel myself sort of cracking inside. It’s pitch black in here, and I figure I can get away with letting a few tears roll down my cheeks. There’s a long silence, and I wipe my running nose on my sleeve, being careful not to sniffle. Suddenly I realize that I
am
really tired, but mostly I’m tired of pretending that this isn’t bothering me.

“I’m just having a really weird week.” My voice is shaky.

Cleo waits.

“My parents told me that Rivka wants to meet me.” I say this knowing full well that Cleo doesn’t know who Rivka is, but I can’t think of what else to call her. My birth mother? The woman who gave birth to me? None of it feels right. But good old Cleo needs no explanation. She, unlike Jake, has the power of intuition.

“Wow,” Cleo says. “That’s heavy.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

Am I curious? How can I be curious? I’ve spent all my life fighting off that curiosity. I’ve locked it away. I’ve thrown it overboard. I’ve beaten it to a pulp. But here it is anyway, back from the dead. And even though I’m older and wiser and stronger, I seem to be losing the battle against it. But I’m not ready to admit this tonight to Cleo or to anyone else. I just lie there with my burning eyes open, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. They have almost no glow left in them. When you see stars in the sky, they are nothing but tiny dots. When you look at them through a telescope, they look more like little balls of light. They don’t look anything like the shapes on my ceiling—the shape we learn to draw as children, with five protruding angles. But then again, the heart looks nothing like the shape we learn to draw as children either, so there you have it. I start breathing deeply, and Cleo either believes that I’m asleep or is a good enough friend to let me get away without saying anything more.

THREE

It’s way too early in the morning for political debate, but here I am with my ACLU baseball jersey on outside the Organic Oasis.

“Do you have a moment for the ACLU? Do you have a moment for the ACLU?”

Jake and Dad have the parking lot entrance in the back, and I’m covering the sidewalk out front, where there are crates of fruit on display and bushels of fresh cut flowers. So at least it smells good out here. A few bleary-eyed shoppers stumble past me without so much as a glance in my direction. I decide that no one is in the spirit yet, particularly me, so I go inside to get a cup of fair-trade coffee.

Zack Meyers is working at the coffee counter. We haven’t had any classes together, but we obviously know each other’s names because there are only 198 juniors at Twelve Oaks Academy.

“Hey, Simone. You’re up early.”

I’m wondering if this is maybe the first time we’ve ever actually spoken to each other.

“Yeah, I’m trying to sign up members for the ACLU.”

“Cool.”

Zack has small wire-rimmed glasses and really red cheeks, and he always wears camouflage Converse high-tops to school, although I can’t see over the counter to confirm that this is true when he’s outside of school. He also has an earring (a small dangling lightning bolt), which is so eighties but somehow looks okay on him. He hangs around Amy Flannigan all the time. I wonder if they’re going out. He takes pictures for the school newspaper. I think I’ve seen him playing tennis on the courts at school. And, I realize this morning, he happens to be really, really cute.

He leans on the counter. “So, what’ll it be?”

“Just a regular good old-fashioned coffee. Hold the crap.”

Oh, no. Did he know that by “crap” I meant the milk or foam or hazelnut syrup? I’m suddenly terrified that he thinks I meant the conversation. I try to recover:

“Why don’t people just drink coffee anymore? Why does everything have to be all complicated?”

Now I’m sounding like an idiot. This is not an original or even remotely witty observation. It’s not like I’m the first person to poke fun at the world of Frappuccinos and fancy coffee.

“Well, at least it keeps my job interesting. Imagine if I only poured regular coffees all day. Where’s the satisfaction in that?” He hands me my coffee and smiles. I smile back. Then I realize he’s waiting for me to pay because there’s someone standing behind me.

I hand him my dollar twenty-five and say casually, “Thanks. See you around.”

I go back outside to find a few other baseball-shirted people with clipboards. I don’t recognize any of them, which leaves me wondering two things: (1) Why is it that only my mom enlists her family for membership drives? And(2) why do we have to start a full hour before anyone else?

I meet the other signature gatherers. They are volunteers, a retired couple in their sixties named Ann and Sy and a woman named Lena with short red hair who looks like she’s pushing thirty. Things are picking up—more shoppers are arriving, and some are even stopping to sign up. Just for sport, I step in front of a woman who looks like she’s doing everything she can to avoid contact with me.

“Do you have a moment for the ACLU?”

She stops and lets out an exasperated sigh. “No, I absolutely do not have as much as a second for the ACLU. I am sick to death of the ACLU.” I feel like pointing out to her that a moment technically can be a second and that already she has given about fifteen of them. “Can’t you find anything better to do with your time? Why stand out here advancing the work of an organization that is trying to tear apart this town?”

I’m not really sure what she’s talking about, but I’m ready to dig in for a fight. Is this about gay marriage? Abortion? I mean, abortion is a debate I feel like I can contribute a powerful perspective to. It goes like this: I easily could have been aborted, right? I was lucky and wasn’t, and I was adopted by a loving family. But I still believe in a woman’s right to choose, even knowing what a close call my very existence is. This woman is talking about something else, though.

“There is history here,” she tells me, and she is so angry now that she’s turning red and kind of whispering and spit is flying everywhere. “You can’t erase history. And more importantly, you can’t erase God. No matter how much money you raise.” With that she walks away.

Lena sees me looking confused and comes over.

“I’ve come across a few like her today. They’re all pissed off because of the town seal case.” She explains that she doesn’t mean the aquatic mammal (this I’m sure is supposed to be a joke, but maybe I look like a child to Lena), she means the town seal, which has four quadrants with a book, a tree, a bell, and a cross. Now, I didn’t even know that we had a town seal, and I would bet you anything that you’d be hard pressed to find five people in the Organic Oasis or beyond who do. But I guess that’s starting to change with this case. Maybe Mom told me about it and I didn’t really pay attention, but more likely she didn’t tell me about it because you know how it is—she’s my mom and she spends most of her time trying to extract information from me about my life. It doesn’t happen the other way around.

So we have a town seal. The book symbolizes learning. The tree symbolizes growing. The bell symbolizes freedom. And the cross—well, that’s obvious. The seal is on our town flag, which I guess flies above the town hall, although I have to admit I’ve never noticed this.

Mom stops by in the afternoon, and when I ask her about the case she points out the irony of the bell and the cross positioned next to each other on the seal. The cross, she tells me, infringes on the freedom of anyone who is not a Christian. This makes total sense. I mean, I don’t believe in God and I have to live in this town too, so why should I have to live with that cross in my face all the time? Suddenly I’m indignant. I totally believe in this case, and I wish I could turn back time and have an informed argument with that uptight bitch from this morning. The funny thing (well, one of the funny things is that of course I didn’t even know we had a town seal, so saying that I have to live with it in my face all the time is pretty funny) is that technically speaking, Mom is a Christian. So is Dad. So, I guess, are Jake and I. Like I said before, my parents don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in God. We don’t go to church or pray or do any of those things. And even though whenever someone asks me what I am, I say, “Nothing,” my parents come from the Christian tradition: Catholic in my dad’s case, Episcopalian in my mom’s. And as far as I know they didn’t go through any kind of ritual to erase their Christian pasts and become something else. Doesn’t this mean that to the rest of the world we’re Christians, no matter how we define ourselves? I guess the important thing is that having a cross on our town seal infringes on the freedom of not only those people who practice other religions but also people like my family and me. People who call themselves nothing.

Darius’s party that night is kind of a bust for me. Cleo disappeared early on with Guess Who into a bedroom upstairs, and I’m bored and about to go home at the shockingly early hour of ten o’clock. I’ve had about half a beer from the keg; it was warm and tasted like pee. I think a day of nonstop conversation with complete strangers, many of whom were unpleasant, didn’t exactly leave me in the mood for small talk. The music is loud, the bass is turned up way too high, and my head is throbbing to the beat of some awful techno trash. I know I sound like an old lady here, but it really has been a long day and the music is just unbelievably atrocious. I wander around the party with my head lowered, avoiding the throngs of people I have no interest in talking to and, okay, I’ll admit it, scanning the floor for a pair of camouflage high-tops.

I’m thrilled to find James in the backyard sitting on a lawn chair.

“Hey, baby.” He motions for me to sit on his lap.

“Hey.”

“Why the long face?”

“I’m just beat.”

“This is getting to be a theme with you.”

“Okay. I’m beat, and this party totally blows.”

“Speaking of totally blowing, have you seen Cleo and Darius?”

I smack him on the chest. “You are so foul.”

“No, I’m just jealous.”

“Why?” I ask. “You want to be upstairs with Darius in his parents’ tacky bedroom?”

“No, but it would be nice if not every guy at these parties were so terminally straight. I’d like at least the illusion that I could meet someone.”

“You could take me home and see if you get lucky.”

Cleo drove me here, and our arrangement was that if she just happened to lose me during the party for any reason (gee, what could that be?) and couldn’t find me later, she would assume that I found a ride.

We climb into James’s car and I say, “Home, James.” This joke somehow never gets old to me.

James drives a rattly 1988 Volvo. I think it may be louder in his car than it was at the party. He’s talking about his summer at the Rhode Island School of Design again and how much cooler all the people were there than they are at Twelve Oaks and how he can’t wait to go off to college in New York City and get out of this town. I know why he has this fantasy about going to college in New York. James had his first boyfriend over the summer, and Patrick is starting his freshman year at NYU. He broke up with James at the end of the program at RISD and told him that there is just too much happening in New York City and he doesn’t want to be thinking about someone who lives far away.

Poor James. Darius’s party was far from the antidote he needed tonight for his broken heart.

When we pull up in front of my house I say, “Want to come inside?”

“So that whole thing about me getting lucky wasn’t a joke?”

“Of course it was a joke, you homo. I want to know if you want to come inside and eat some ice cream and see if there’s any stupid girly movie on cable.”

James takes a minute to think it over and then takes a pass. I don’t push him on it. I have a pretty good idea of how he’s feeling tonight. So I kiss him goodbye and stand on the sidewalk in front of my house watching the one working taillight on his Volvo fade into the night.