A Hundred Thousand Worlds (12 page)

T
here are apps you can buy that track the progress of someone traveling long-distance to visit you, or track your own progress toward someone. Valerie’s mother must have come with this software pre-installed. Val could have called from the road to say they’d be there in an hour, but she didn’t, and her mother is still standing on the porch when the van pulls into her driveway. Fred cuts the engine, and the front door of the house shoots open, firing two border collies toward the new arrivals.

“A van now?” her mother says, shouting to be heard over the enthusiasm of the dogs. “Are you one of the soccer moms?”

“The Civic died in Cleveland,” Val says, climbing down from the van to be greeted by Eero and Eliel, who demand her full and immediate attention. Eero, younger by five years, jumps up to greet her face to face, while Eliel nudges somewhat pathetically at her knees. Val retains a soft spot for the older dog, whom she associates more closely with her father, and after gently deflecting Eero’s attentions, she kneels down to embrace Eliel around the neck.

The house is a two-story A-frame her father built when Val was eight and his architecture firm was enjoying a string of boom years. It’s simple and intentionally rustic, with none of the self-conscious flourishes that adorned their house in Chicago, which had always seemed to Val more like an advertisement for her father’s professional skills than a real home. It had been intended as a summer retreat, but when her father got sick and left the firm, he and Val’s mother had moved here permanently so he wouldn’t be constantly faced with reminders of the person he’d been as
his faculties quickly dwindled. Her mother lives here by herself now with the dogs, and the house forms a perfect backdrop for her, its angularity complementing her roundness. Val thinks of her father constructing it this way: a circle inscribed in a triangle, floated onto a field of deep green. The image is one of a protective sigil, something arcane drawn for protection.

A little warily, the dogs go to investigate Brett and Fred as they load out of the van. They are not used to strangers and—since Val’s father died four years ago and her brothers, as her mother is quick to point out, never come around anymore—unaccustomed to men. Eero hangs back a second, then jumps up onto Brett, while Eliel waits patiently for attention from Fred.

“And these boys?” says her mother, easing her weight down the porch steps as if she’s testing the stairs for creaks. She has some vague complaint regarding her knees, but Val’s been unable to pin her down on which knee is ailing, much less force her mother to see a doctor. She looks quizzically at Fred and Brett. “I remember my Shura being smaller. And there only being one of him.”

“Babu!” yells Alex as he jumps out of the van. It’s a word he might grow out of any day, and Val holds the sound of it tightly in her mind, taking an impression of it to play back later. Alex runs across the gravel drive, Eero at his heels, and flings himself at his grandmother. With impressive stalwartness, she catches him in her thick arms and lifts him with an easy strength.

“Now this is my Shura!” she says, holding her head back to inspect him. “You’ve gotten big! Not
so
big”—she indicates Brett and Fred as baseline measures of bigness—“but big.” She sets Alex down, and the dogs are on him immediately, licking and pawing. “Who are your bodyguards, Lera?” her mother asks.

“These boys gave us a ride from Cleveland,” Val says. “Mom, this is Brett and Fred.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Torrey,” says Brett, setting down his bag and going to shake her hand.

“‘Mrs. Torrey’ he calls me,” she says, swatting his hand away and pulling him into a brief but firm hug. Fred must understand this is protocol and steps forward to receive the same. “Toropov is our name. Too ethnic for television, my Lera decided.”

“Give it a rest, Mom,” calls Val as she pulls one of her bags from the trunk. “You sound like the fiddler on the roof.”

“Your boy gets none of his own culture fifty-one weeks out of the year,” says her mother, louder than she needs to. “The few days I see him, I have to overwhelm him with Russianness.” She reaches down and grabs a hank of Alex’s hair, shakes it affectionately. “I’m going to read him Pushkin to put him to sleep.”

“You hate Pushkin,” says Val as she carries her bags up the porch steps.

“Bite your tongue,” hisses her mother, following her. “Aren’t you going to invite your bodyguards to stay for dinner?”

Since their hugs, Brett and Fred have been standing on either side of the van. It isn’t clear whether they’re waiting to make their exit or to receive further instructions. Val is aware that everyone is looking at her to see what will happen next, particularly Alex, who is giving her the same face he has when he wants to keep pigeons he’s found in the park as pets.

“They can’t stay, Mom,” she says. “They’ve got to be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”

Her mother looks at her with fierce disappointment. “It’s a long drive to Chicago, and getting dark already.” Val realizes the decision was never hers to make. “They drive you all the way from Cleveland and you’d put them back on the road in the dark?” She waits for her mother to add a scathing
This is the way I raised you?
but thankfully it doesn’t come. “We’ll feed them and they can sleep in the attic.” She looks at Brett and Fred, making some inscrutable calculation in her mind. “Are you two . . .
goluboy
?”

Brett looks at Val, then back at her mother. “I’m not sure,” he says. From somewhere in her teenage past, a spring of mortification wells up in Val. The house and the commanding presence of her mother have worked an awful magic: she is fifteen again.

“She’s asking if you’re gay,” says Val, realizing she doesn’t know the answer to this.

“I am, Mrs. Toropov,” says Fred. Val is surprised less by the answer, which is news to her, than by the graciousness and openness with which it’s given. It is possible he is one of those boys who are especially good with mothers. “But Brett here is as straight as they come.”

“Hmm,” her mother says, heading into the house. “Only asking. With Lera’s friends . . .” She throws her hands in the air. New developments in the world like acknowledged homosexuality she’s taken to treating with a bemused curiosity that points itself toward acceptance rather than understanding. She seems to think of them the way she thinks of the Internet: fascinated that it is there but utterly uninterested in how it might work.

As if she’s leading them in a parade, they all follow her into the house: one daughter, three boys, and two dogs. “There’s an extra mattress down the hall. It’s musty a little.”

“We can’t stay, Mrs. Toropov,” says Brett, but it’s a halfhearted declaration, and would have carried more weight if he’d tried it from the window of the van. Now that her mother has gotten them into the house, it will be impossible for them to leave.

“You’ll stay, and you’ll stop calling me that,” orders her mother. “No one wants handsome young men to call her an old lady’s name. It’s Hildy, and I’m hearing no more debate this evening. Shura, tell me about your trip.” She and Alex disappear into the kitchen, where Val is sure she is feeding him terrible things, things she has stockpiled for this visit. Val stands in the living room with Brett and Fred, the three of them able now for the first time to assess what has happened, the manner in which their lives have been hijacked by a senior citizen in drawstring pants.

“I’m sorry,” Val says. “She wasn’t always like this. She was born in Decatur.” The change happened sometime in the year after Val’s father died. Val sometimes thinks that when her mother lost the role of supportive housewife and, later, caretaker, she replaced it with a kind of stock character, a bit of comic relief. But when she does, she becomes aware of how
often she imposes ideas about herself on her mother, and the unfairness of doing so.

“She seems great,” says Brett, smiling.

“If she’s feeding us,” says Fred, “you don’t need to apologize.”

Even as an adult, Val doesn’t want to hear that her mother is great; she wants her mortification to be confirmed so it is not something in her head. But it’s an inhospitable sentiment, and it reminds Val how unkind she’s been since the hotel parking lot in Cleveland.

“Also, thank you,” she says, her head lowered. “I should have said before. You didn’t have to drive us all this way.” This she addresses to both of them, but then she turns to Brett. “I know you must have better things to do than draw pictures for a nine-year-old the whole trip.”

“He’s a cool kid,” Brett says. Val wonders why the feeling this elicits is the inverse of being told her mother is great. It’s as if she wants to be credited for everything good about Alex despite everything that’s wrong with her own mother, as if she’s the fulcrum on which the balance of three generations shifts.

“And thank
you
, Fred,” says Fred, “for keeping me entertained even though you were driving the whole time.”

“He likes you,” Val says to Brett. “And I shouldn’t have bitten your head off yesterday.”

“You’re a riveting conversationalist,” Fred continues to no one but himself, “and all around a real catch.”

“I get overprotective,” says Val.

This moment of reconciliation is curtailed as Val’s mother emerges from the kitchen. “You, the skinny one,” she says, pointing to Brett, who is no skinnier than Fred. “My Shura says you’re a fancy comic book artist. You know how to cut potatoes?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Brett.

“You call me ma’am again, I break your fingers. For you I have two jobs. You cut potatoes and you keep Lera out of my kitchen. And you, with the face.”

“Me?” asks Fred.

“Shura,” she says to Alex, “show him where the mattress is in Dedulya’s study and help him lug it upstairs.” Val feels a twinge from hearing the room at the end of the first-floor hall still referred to as her father’s study, even though it serves now as a storage closet for unneeded household things and items she and her brothers have never bothered to reclaim or remove from their parents’ house. “You,” says her mother, pointing at her menacingly. “Sit yourself on that couch and don’t get up until dinner is ready. Never do I get to take care of my own daughter.”

G
ail loves Ron’s neighborhood in Chicago, dotted as it is with Eastern European churches that look like they’ve been delivered from some outdated version of the future. When he first moved here ten years ago, right after their parents had kicked him out, the streets of Ukrainian Village had been full of little babushka ladies and bearded Cossack-looking gentlemen. Now it was changing, smoothing out like wrinkles in a shirt until there was nothing left but the middle class. But the churches are still there, foreign, unsettling, and strange.

A plastic bag of Chinese food in one hand and a six-pack of Goose Islands in the other, she trudges up the back stairs of Mac’s American Pub to Ron’s apartment. The food at Mac’s is lackluster, the clientele are mostly White Sox fans, and the bar vomits loud drunks into the street at last call, but Ron figures living above a bar is saving him a couple hundred a month in rent. He’s on the phone when she gets there, still at work hours after he’s gotten home.

“Well, we’re not going to cede them that point,” he says as he opens the door. Once Gail’s inside, he continues pacing, gesticulating as if the person on the other end can see him. “We’re not going to cede them any points, we’re not giving them an inch.” Not for the first time, Gail’s heart breaks a little at the sheer bigness of Ron’s apartment. There ought to be a law against one person having this much living space.

“I’ve got to go,” says Ron. “My sister’s here. Don’t do anything until tomorrow. Okay? Okay.” He hangs up the phone, sets it on the counter, and then puts up his hands as if it might be covered in herpes.

“I work with idiots, is what it is,” he explains. “The firm should be called Mouthbreather, Moron and Manchild.”

“Mouthbreather, Moron, Manchild and Pope,” says Gail. “If you’re fantasizing, at least give yourself a partnership.” She puts the beer and food down on the counter. “I brought provisions.”

They hug, Gail trying to assess whether or not he’s bonier than last time she saw him. He looks healthy, but it’s a stretched kind of healthy. It has an intensity and determination to it that she doesn’t like.

“How was the train?” he says, holding tight to her. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the station.”

“You’ve got fancy lawyer things to do,” she says. “I can take the L. I’m a big girl.”

“You’re getting to be,” he says.

“Don’t start on me, Jack Sprat.”

“Is this why you brought food? You assume I don’t eat?”

“You think any of this is for you?” she says. “Get plates.”

“Plates,” he says. “You New Yorkers are so uptight.”

Ron’s the youngest, three years younger than Gail. He’d still been living with them when Gail came out to their parents in a letter written in her University of Chicago dorm room, drunk on bad wine and Frank O’Hara poems. When they told him Gail would no longer be welcome in the house since she had chosen a life of sodomy and debauchery, Ron first explained to them that lesbians didn’t engage in sodomy, and then informed them that he, on the other hand, did. Four hours later, he showed up at Gail’s dorm with a black eye and a suitcase.

“I went to the place on Division,” she says, “and got a slew of stuff. I should have let you pick.”

“You’ve got to go to the South Side for decent Chinese,” he says. He opens a beer and hands it to her, then one for himself. “We should go to Won Kow while you’re here, sit in Al Capone’s booth.”

“Al Capone died of syphilis,” says Gail.

“I’m sure they’ve cleaned it since.” He dumps half the container of lo
mein onto a plate; it slumps out like a dead octopus. “Do you think this place uses MSG?”

“No,” says Gail. “I don’t think about it at all.”

“So tell me about the life of the mind,” he says, once they’ve settled into the couch and are picking apart various dishes with chopsticks.

“I’m getting dumped off
The Speck,
” she says, carefully choosing a crab Rangoon.

“No shit?”

“Zero shit,” she says, taking a swig.

“What are they moving you on to?”

Gail shrugs. “
Admiral Animorph & His Danger Rangers
?”

“You’d be great on that,” he says. “Lesbian lemurs.”

“Sapphic sea otters.”

“Dyked-out dugongs.”

“What the fuck is a dugong?” she asks.

“It’s like a manatee.”

“So why not say manatee?”

“I thought we were doing alliterative.”

“Forget all that shit, how’s your superhero life?”

He blushes. One of the things she loves about her little brother is that he actually blushes. As much as she knows it’s not true, part of Gail has always thought of her own sexual orientation as a natural result of growing up in a house full of boys. Their older brothers are scrappers, three-sport athletes, and mighty chasers of women. But Ron has always been the family’s resident alien, kind in a family that values toughness, quiet among men who bellow. When he started at a law firm that specialized in blocking deportations, he proudly declared to Gail that “being a rich lawyer is probably the only thing that would get me back into that house. So I’m going to be a poor lawyer forever.” And if he didn’t manage to dodge at least a modest amount of money, he could always say he fought on behalf of Mexicans and the like, which would kill any chance of reconciliation.

“Everything’s terrible and everyone is awful,” he says. “At least once
a week, I have to remind myself how much progress has been made, and that we’re not shooting people as they hop the fence, and that there’s a million kids in schools who will never get deported. Then I get to work and someone has made it his mission in life to kick some poor cabdriver out of the country. Has dedicated himself to ruining this guy’s life in the service of some abstract idea of I don’t even know what.”

“Tin-pot Hitlers,” she says.

“Don’t go Hitler,” he says, sighing. “I spend all day trying not to think of them in terms of Hitler.”

“You’re doing good work,” she says, holding out the neck of her beer to be clinked.

“I’m shoveling shit against the tide,” he says, clinking.

For a while, they stare out the window at the intersection. His apartment has a pseudo-turret, a bubble in the northwest corner of the room that hangs out onto the street. It’s perfect for people watching, especially after a sporting event. Tonight the corner is quiet. The people heading into the bar aren’t drunk enough to be interesting yet, and neither are the people leaving this early. Later, this corner will be bro-tacular, and they’ll be through the six-pack and into whatever else he has on hand, commenting on each drunken hookup or faux fight.

“You talk to Mom?” asks Gail. Independent of each other, they both got back in touch with their mother two years ago around Christmas. Neither of them admitted it to the other for a year, and even more surprising, their mother never mentioned to Gail that she’d heard from Ron, or vice versa. They both had excuses for why they’d broken down and made contact, Gail’s involving rum and Prince’s “Another Lonely Christmas” playing on Hot 97.

Ron takes a long swig of beer, then holds the bottle against the side of his face. “Two months ago,” he says.

“Three,” says Gail.

“I’m in the lead,” Ron says.

“She say anything remarkably awful?”

“No,” he says. “It’s better when I’m not dating anyone. I feel this weird compulsion to tell her about it. You ever get that?”

“I’ve never dated anyone.”

“Drama queen.”

“I’ve never been dating anyone when I’ve talked to Mom.”

“But would you tell her?”

“Maybe,” says Gail. “Maybe I’d tell her in totally gender-neutral terms. Maybe I’d date someone named Pat or Terry and tell Mom all about her so she could have dreams about me and a banker in a Brooks Brothers suit when in reality I’m banging some Sarah Lawrence prof I met at Cubbyhole.”

“Sarah Lawrence prof?” says Ron, scooting forward.

“It was hypothetical,” says Gail. There’d been an M.F.A. student from Hunter, briefly, but that was hardly the same thing. “You know Mom reads all my comics?” she says, changing the subject.

“So do I,” says Ron, defensive. “I’ve got a whole long box of them.”

“Aw, you even know the word ‘long box.’” Ron had never been her kind of geeky when they were growing up. It was her older brother Tom who had gotten her into comics, giving her his issues of
R-Squad
when he was done with them.

“But Mom?” says Ron.

“It’s all we talk about,” Gail says. “She talks about the Speck and Iota like they’re real people. She asks me how they’re doing. She’s going to be crushed I’m not writing it anymore.”

“You’ll have to tell National to give you another hetero fantasy couple to write,” Ron says, hauling himself up from the couch. “You want another?” he asks, which is not really a question at this early stage of the night.