Blind Sight (17 page)

Grover itself reminds me of Acton a little bit, if you flattened Acton out. Sort of like Acton on a two-dimensional plane.

“You are now officially in suburbia,” Mark said, when we entered the town.

“We seem kind of far away from a big city, though,” I pointed out. “Like if this is a suburb of Chicago, it’s really sub.”

“It’s super suburbia,” Mark agreed. “It’s über suburbia.”

“Über-burbia,” I suggested.

“Über-burbia,” Mark said, nodding. “Well done, my young apprentice.”

We drove past the hospital where his mom works as a nurse, past a Dairy Queen where Mark worked one summer, and past Grover High School, where he played football and acted in school plays.

“Yeah, there it is,” he said, as we drove past the high school. “The scene of my troubled youth.”

“How troubled were you?” I asked.

“Oh, I had a ton of friends,” he said. “I wasn’t this amazing genius student, like you, but I did okay. I hung out with the jocks in football season, and the drama kids in the spring. You’re gonna see about ten million photo albums at my mom’s of this. Be prepared.”

The house where Mark grew up is a regular-sized house on a street called Maple, although I haven’t seen any actual maple trees on it. We pulled into the driveway and the front door opened and this really short woman all in pink clothes came out waving both hands and Mark said, “That’s my mom.”

“What should I call her?” I asked quickly.

“Everybody calls her Bubbles,” he said, opening the car door. “Hey, Mom.”

I got out of the car. The woman made a little rush at Mark, sort of bumping his chest with the top of her head, and he tried to catch her by the shoulders, but she had already moved away and turned to me. I wasn’t sure if we were going to hug, or what, so I just tried to stay physically neutral, and she clasped me by the elbows, and sort of flapped my arms up and down while looking me over. “So you’ve found Luke,” Mark said behind her.

“
You’ve
found Luke,” she said. “
You
found Luke, after losing him all these years, you stupid motherfucker.”

She’s this little tiny thing, this grandmother of mine, and she looks a lot younger than Nana. She doesn’t have any gray hair and she was dressed all in pink, with pink tennis shoes. She is a little bit chubby, or maybe what you might call voluptuous, and what with
the arm flapping and her being so much shorter than I am, I found myself, for the second time in my life, sort of confronted with a grandmother’s breasts. Only looking down this time, instead of up, and this grandmother wasn’t naked, which was a relief. I was still taking all this in, along with the fact that she had just called my dad a “stupid motherfucker,” and that I was supposed to call her “Bubbles,” when Bubbles released me and said,

“Okay, you better come inside before the neighbors all come out and try to take pictures of my movie-star son. Get the bags, Tony.”

“Careful,” my dad said to me, when we first went into the house, “we are in a knickknack booby trap.”

“I heard that, asshole,” Bubbles said.

First she gave us a tour of the house. Mark needed the tour too, because he had to see all the improvements. She has a new couch, a new TV, a new TV stand, a new washer and dryer, a new microwave, and a new shoe rack. I’m thinking that my dad must have given her the money for all these things, because after she showed us each item, she would do that head-butting thing at my dad’s chest and say, “That’s my good boy.” And each time my dad would try to grab her shoulders and she would move away. This seems to be the way they embrace each other. There are indeed pictures of my dad all over the house, in frames with fabric or lace around them. Almost everything in Bubbles’s house is trimmed with something, and most surfaces are covered with little figurines. Bubbles has a lot of collections. She has a collection of things that are strawberry themed, and she has a collection of miniature horses. There are groups of china angels, and groups of glass-domed paperweights with skylines of different cities under them. She also seems to like teddy bears, and birds.

In the hallway, there is a lineup of pictures of my dad, class photos and team photos, stuff like that. I can see from these that when he was my age he wasn’t some big muscle guy at all, he was actually more my size. Bubbles gave me a high-speed caption explanation of each photo:

“OkaycanyoubelievethisskinnybabyIhadtotiehimdowntocuthis
hairbrokehisarmfallingoffaswingsetatschoolIalmostsuedthosemoth
erfuckersandnowhewouldntsmilefortwoyearsbecausehedidntwant
noonetoseehisbracesokaynowwearesmilingseeandImadeallthecos
tumesforhisschoolplaysseehetookthisgirltopromshewasatramp.”

Later we had dinner.

We sat in Bubbles’s kitchen nook and drank lemonade out of glasses with strawberries printed on them, eating grilled-cheese sandwiches (according to Bubbles, Mark’s favorite food), and talked, sort of. My dad would ask Bubbles how work was going and Bubbles would say something like, “You want see some shit, come to work with me. I got this woman now, whole right side of her body looks like burnt ham. Three kids, husband. Husband is like, What are the options? I’m like, Options? Options are you get in there and tell her you love her, you sack. See, they laid off two of the psych nurses, so there’s nobody to counsel these people but us.” And then Mark and I would say, “Mhmm” or “Wow” and then Bubbles would say, “We all had to take this seminar: sensitivity training, they called it. I’m like, I’ve been a nurse for thirty-five years, you think I need to be more sensitive? Let me tell you something, when the shit goes down, you don’t need to be more sensitive, you need to act right. This guy, he wants to stand out in the hallway while his wife is lying there half dead, and he wants to know if we can skin-graft her back to normal. You think I should be sensitive with this guy? The other day, Nancy got this guy …”

And it kind of went on like that.

So here I am, sitting at the desk in the room that my dad grew up in. It’s kind of a small room. It’s a little bit sad, in some way. Maybe it’s not sad. I don’t know. Above the desk is a shelf, with three trophies and two framed pieces of paper. One is a certificate commemorating Anthony Boyle’s completion in something called “Polar Bear Swim Camp,” and the other is my dad’s high school diploma. Two of the trophies are for Grover High City Champs, and the figurines above
the plaques are carrying footballs. The third trophy isn’t as big as the football ones, and is for Mark Franco: Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Drama. It’s a Golden Globe award. There is a photo on the desk, in a frame with gold stars, of Mark standing on a stage holding the award. It looks like the picture was taken off of a television screen. I’m going to go to bed now.

Luke turns off the desk lamp and gets into his father’s old twin-sized bed. The sheets have a slightly musty, flowery smell. Mark is sleeping on the couch in the living room, and Luke can hear his father turning over, sighing, thumping a pillow. It is the kind of house in which you can hear what other people are doing in other rooms, quite distinctly. Luke stares at the ceiling. He waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

After lunch, Bubbles went to work. Mark had Luke drive them to a place called Kickapoo Park, where Mark said there were some good running trails. They did not talk much in the car, because Luke was concentrating on driving well, and Mark was pointing out more things along the way: “That’s where my friend Brian lived,” or “God, they have a Chinese restaurant there now? That used to be a Wendy’s.”

When Mark and Luke got to the park, they found a trail that looked promising, and ran it fast. Luke noticed the humidity, and the presence of bugs, conditions more similar to Delaware than California. Mark suggested running over to the lake and taking a dip to cool off. They removed their running shoes and socks and their sweat-soaked T-shirts at the lake’s edge, and waded in. The water was fairly muddy at first, but refreshingly cool. In the distance, they could see powerboats on the lake, and someone water-skiing.

“On the other side of the lake is where the country club is,” Mark said. “We weren’t members, though. My friends and I used to sneak in at night and do shit, you know. Drink beer. Get high. Try to scare each other.”

“Well, we could do that tonight if you want,” Luke said.

“Ha. Can you touch the bottom here?”

“I can kind of bounce off it.”

“So you okay?” Mark asked.

“Oh yeah,” Luke said. “I can tread water for a long time. Or I can bounce.” Luke demonstrated this.

“No, I mean with being here. Meeting Bubbles. It’s a little awkward. She’s a piece of work, I know. And believe me, she’s actually mellowed a lot.”

“Why do they call her Bubbles?” Luke asked.

“I don’t really know. She used to drink.”

“Oh,” Luke said. “She doesn’t anymore?”

“No.”

“She seems nice,” Luke said, lying.

“Luke,” Mark said. “Really?
Nice?
”

“Well, I don’t know,” Luke amended, partially. “I didn’t actually form a concrete opinion or anything like that.”

“She’s been a little pissed at me,” Mark said. “Because I told her that I knew about you, and I didn’t ever tell her, and I didn’t … you know … do anything until now.”

“Oh. Is that why she called you …?”

“A stupid motherfucker?” Mark laughed. “No, that’s normal. You see where I get my foul mouth now. She’ll call you that too, if we stick around long enough.”

“How long are we going to stay?” Luke asked.

“Well, I wanted to talk to you about that. The … uh … person I saw last night? I haven’t seen that person in a long time and … I kinda want to see that person again. Like maybe on Saturday? Only if that’s okay with you, though.”

“Oh,” Luke said. “Tomorrow? Okay. Yeah, that’s cool. Won’t Bubbles be upset, though? We just got here.”

“Well, I thought I’d just go in the afternoon,” Mark said. “And you can hang out with Mom, which is probably better anyway,
because that’ll give you some time just the two of you. And I’ll come back on Sunday and we’ll stay until Tuesday if we can both stand it?”

This was not exactly what Luke thought he was agreeing to, as he had imagined that Mark would take him with him to Chicago. Luke had not anticipated being left behind, and tried to think of a plausible objection other than, “Don’t leave me here alone.”

“What are you going to tell your mom?” Luke asked.

“I’ll say that it’s a work thing. She won’t ask, though. And I mean, it’s really you she wants to see, I think.”

Bubbles had not said anything along the lines of, “Sit down and tell me all about yourself, my long-lost grandson.” Luke had thought she might be more curious about him, but so far the only question Bubbles had asked Luke was if he had any dietary restrictions. Even that had not been phrased in question format. Bubbles had said, “I don’t know what you eat,” when she gave Luke a grilled-cheese sandwich.

“There’s that barbecue on Sunday,” Luke reminded his father. Bubbles was planning a sort of Franco family reunion, and several of Mark’s uncles and cousins would be there.

“I’ll be back Sunday morning.”

Later, Mark and Luke had stayed at home and watched TV since Bubbles was still at work. They were unable to sprawl in their usual way in any of Bubbles’s chairs, because of the knick-knack element. Mark ordered a pizza.

“Everyone knows about me, right?” Luke asked Mark at one point. “In your family, I mean?”

“Yeah, Bubbles spread the word,” Mark said. “And I bet everyone said, ‘Oh shit, really?’ and that was pretty much it. We’re not exactly the Royal Family. I guess compared to your family, we’re kinda … I don’t know. There weren’t any Francos on the
Mayflower
. Hey, are you really okay with me going tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

Luke knew that Mark felt guilty and that “sure” was not a word
that normally satisfied people. Luke didn’t know if Mark felt guilty about abandoning him with a stranger in a house full of china teddy bears and pillows shaped like strawberries with someone who said things like, “Well, if you ask me you could use a little meat on your bones,” when you told them you were a vegetarian, or guilty about going to Chicago to have sex with someone who was either a celebrity or married. Possibly, Luke thought, Mark felt guilty about leaving Bubbles with a seventeen-year-old stranger that she never knew about who didn’t have the sense to know a good steak when he saw one. Luke himself felt guilty for not providing the necessary words that would release his father from any of these possible guilt sources. The phrases formed themselves in Luke’s head: “Hey, that’s great,” and “I’m happy to stay here with your mom,” or “Don’t worry about me,” but Luke did not say any of these things.

Luke, listening now to his father turn over once again on the pullout couch, wonders how Mark would feel sleeping in Luke’s room in Delaware. Luke wonders how his father would feel if Luke brought him to Delaware and left him there by himself for a whole day with Sara and Nana.

Mark coughs.

Luke stretches himself out, and smacks his ankle against the wall. Mark coughs again. Luke inhales for a count of four, holds the breath for a count of four, exhales on a count of four. He does this ten times, then increases his breath to a count of five, then six. Luke tries to quiet the chemical processes within him. He visualizes the neurons in his brain moving to a resting potential, a quiescent state where the neurons keep their ionic charges separate. There are something like a hundred billion neurons in Luke’s brain, working in large network systems: talking to each other, processing information, giving commands, and making associations. Luke does not want them to do this. He does not want chatter. He does not want ideas. He does not want to connect the dots.

Luke can take deep breaths, consciously slow down his heartbeat,
relax his jaw. He can visualize running the perfect race and his body can learn this visualization. Luke can think about sex, and then decide not to think about sex.

Luke cannot keep potassium away from sodium in his brain, or sodium separate from chloride, simply by conceptualizing this, and trying to relax. “Resting potential” is a bit of a misnomer. An extraordinary amount of energy is needed to make things still, to keep things separate, to be silent, to think nothing of nothing.