Breakdown Lane, The (11 page)

I had actually stopped wishing I could become comatose until I turned twenty-five.

It was not a good time in my life for me to grow big shoulders and take on my mother’s problems. This is a shitty thing to say, but true.

However, Cathy’s face convinced me I had no choice. She looked like some kind of warrior goddess, with that look that says they’d be glad to kill you with a knife if you don’t listen. I knew I was beat.

“She edits stuff out of them, too,” I told Cathy wearily. “The letters. She has to. Some of the people write seven pages, both sides. Or e-mails that have three parts. She has to boil them way down, but she never changes their real words unless they have really crummy grammar. And she has to protect their identity. Like, if they say they teach at the middle school, she’ll say they teach at a church preschool or whatever if that has to be in there. Usually, she leaves all that identifying junk out completely unless the woman’s husband is a cop who sells drugs or whatever. She makes him a judge then, or she makes him from way somewhere like Illinois.” Cathy was writing this down. “She tries to pick different topics every week. Like, she doesn’t want a string of columns about, when should you have sex in a new relationship, or how can I tell if he’s cheating on me? She mixes them up. Aging parents. Fights with your sister where she won’t speak to you for a year. You know.”

“We’ll have to tell her we’re going to do it,” Cathy said, tapping her teeth with Aury’s Scooby-Doo pencil. When we did, my mother turned her face to the wall and rolled herself up in Leo’s yellow blanket.

“If you don’t want us to, we’ll stop right now, honey,” Cathy soothed her.

“I can’t,” my mom said, and I could hear that she was crying. “I can’t do it, and I can’t not do it. I don’t want to lose my job. What if I lose my job and Caro gets a ruptured appendix? When Justine had a ruptured appendix, her parents had thirty thousand bucks in unpaid coveralls to pay for. I’m too stupid. I can’t think. I start to think of one thing and something else comes barreling along like a train and whams it right out of my mind….”

“I feel like that all the time,” I said. “I feel like I’m listening to fifty different conversations all at the same time and I can’t understand any of them, particularly if I get bored….”

“I do, too,” my mother said. “But this is worse. It’s like my head is talking to me. I hear funny little noises. Like pipers piping or little kids talking…that aren’t there. Aurora asks me for a glass of milk, and I have to think about what ‘milk’ means. It takes me a minute. More. And when I try to talk, it comes out up in the wind. I mean, upside down. And if I concentrate on it, it gets more bad.”

Cathy and I exchanged glances. Whatever else she did, my mother never made a mistake in grammar. Even Aury knew the difference between “lie” and “lay.”

“And what else?” Cathy asked.

“I don’t want to…talk it,” my mother said. “Just pick out a sweater that has nothing to do with love.” And we knew that she meant “letter” and not “sweater.” I felt a cold line of sweat under my chest.

She was asleep before we left the room.

Naturally, I picked the one that interested me most, since at LaFollette, a gun rack is about as common an accessory on a car as a CD player. At this time, the governor had suggested it might not be a bad idea if there were not just armed guards in high schools but armed faculty. Which would have meant that Mrs. Erikson might have been able to shoot my sister during their little pep-rally grapple.

“Do you think this kid has a problem?” I asked Cathy.

“I think this kid’s family will be a headline in about five years if something doesn’t change fast.”

“So it’s a good one.”

“The American Association of Pediatrics says that having a loaded gun in a house where there are children is so dangerous it’s like…well, a loaded gun.”

What I didn’t tell Cathy was that I owned a gun, though I hadn’t known that I did.

I’d been going through my father’s drawers, looking for one of those strap T-shirts they call wife beaters, though my mom always made him call them “muscle tees,” so I could wear it under a sort of see-through shirt that also was Leo’s, when I found a handgun. It was in its box. It was a .38 special. There were no bullets. I could have shit a brick.

Now, my father had been a conscientious objector. He’d been willing to go to prison rather than to Vietnam, although being married and in law school got him out of that anyhow. He told me all the time that if a little kid with a bomb strapped to his clothes walked up to him, he’d rather be blown up than shoot the kid. This was before he got into yoga and stuff. He was always like that. He said that guys who hunted were afraid their dicks were too small, and in those words.

I picked it up, like you would pick up a snake. It was heavier than its graceful shape would have indicated, with a long barrel. And clean. I could tell he’d never used it. I then went through all his drawers and didn’t find anything more interesting than an old package of rubbers and a hemostat, which at the time I had no idea what he would have done with, but which I now know meant he and my mother occasionally smoked a joint. Or they had when we were babies or something.

Why would he have a gun?

Was he secretly afraid he might run into some trouble out there, roaming among the real marginals? Did he have some psycho idea that he was going to protect us from foreign invaders? Was he suicidal? If he had it, why had he left it behind? Why had he taken his laptop but not his sidearm, partner?

That was when I knew that Leo really had lost his marbles…. I took the thing and threw it as far up onto his top shelf as I could, back behind the tuxedo shoes Leo had to wear every year to the Chancellor’s Ball. It made me sick to my stomach to think that Aury could have found it, although Aury could not have reached the top drawer of my dad’s chest.

Then I sat down on the floor of the closet and tried to think back hard, really concentrate, on the way he behaved the day he left. What he did. What he talked about. All of it had been sort of standard fare. All of it had been sort of Leo and sort of nuts.

We all got to go in late to school that day, because his plane didn’t leave until noon.

Leo sat us down on the couch. He held Aury on his lap. My mother was in the bedroom. She refused to come out. He explained his “sabbatical.” He explained to us about the people he’d been writing to, who were regular, educated people who just saw life as not having to be this big rat race, about the plot of clean land he wanted to buy, with a stream and maybe a prairie meadow. He explained that it was going to be like tearing out his heart to be away from us until the end of winter, but that this was something he felt he had to do and, when we were older, we would remember that he had done this, and that when people tried to discourage us from doing things that might seem unusual but that we felt we had to do, we’d have him as an example of why trusting your own instincts is always the right thing to do. No punctuation.

Then he started to cry. Not like you cry at a movie if you’re a guy. Like you cry if you’re a baby and you fall. “I love you so much, son,” he’d said, kissing my head.

“I love you, too,” I told him simply.

“Caroline, I remember the first moment I saw you,” he said.

“I don’t,” Caro replied, her face as still as unbroken water, not a flicker, not a ripple.

“Aurora,” Leo said then, and held Aury against his chest. He rocked her and kissed her. Caroline looked at him as though he stank.

“What if your instincts tell you to quit school?” she asked suddenly.

“Caroline, I know what you’re—”

“No, Dad, tell me,” Caro persisted, as Aury climbed down and wandered off into the room she shared with Caro. (She had slept in my parents’ room until she was eighteen months. And my dad insisted that the ‘guest’ bedroom should be a library or office, where he could read in peace. Natually, Caro went nuts about having to share her room with a closet full of Care Bears.)

“If your instincts tell you to quit school in the traditional sense, but find a way to get the credentials to make a living, then you should do that,” my father said.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Caroline said.

“I have no idea what he means, either,” said my mother, appearing in the doorway. Looking as though she’d drunk a quart of champagne and forgot to change out of her ball gown. She was wearing a satin nightgown and had on some kind of boots. “I know he means you can get a degree by being homeschooled instead of going to the public institution; but I have no idea what he means when he says it’s okay if his instincts tell him that he can justify leaving his kids for six months under any circumstances short of having a brother who’s dying and living in Saskatoon who needs his help to save the family wheat farm, and we already know he doesn’t have that.”

“Julie, this isn’t helpful,” Leo said.

“I’m not trying to be helpful. I’m trying to be rational.”

“Julie, what if I died?”

“Are you asking if I would object?”

“That was a shitty thing to say, Mom,” I put in.

“Don’t swear, Gabe,” she warned me.

“Julie,” my dad pleaded, “what if I died? You’d have everything you have now, and in exactly the same way. The plane tickets I’ve gotten are the cheapest possible fares; I have people to stay with who’ll help contribute to my room and board and so on in exchange for my helping them work out some legal issues they have. I have health insurance and so do you. This whole thing should cost me in the neighborhood of a thousand bucks. You spend that much in six months on clothes.”

“I do not,” my mother snapped.

“You do, too,” Leo said.

“I do not,” said my mother.

“I see the bills,
Julie
. You do, too,” my father said patiently, in his lawyer’s voice. “My point is, I’m not leaving you stranded. Aury is in day care part of every day, which is enough time for you to do your job, if you actually do it instead of spending half the time gossiping on the phone with Cathy.” Cathy, sitting at the kitchen table, sighed audibly. “Cathy, I’d appreciate some time alone with my family, and I don’t mean that unkindly,” Leo said.

“Julie asked me to be here with her, and so I’m staying, and I honestly don’t mean that unkindly, either, Leo,” Cathy said.

At that moment, Aury came back with my father’s old pajama pants, which she’d taken from his bottom drawer, and her
Big Book of Childhood Poems
. “Nighty?” she asked. “Dada reada story?” She thought that if she could get Leo to put her to bed, he would have to stay. That was when I started to bawl, and punched a hole in the drywall behind the window seat. I quickly covered it with one of the bolsters. The hole is probably still there, because my mom left the bolsters and made new ones when we moved.

Leo got up and walked over to my mom. He put his hands up through her long hair as she stood there, with her arms locked at her sides. “The softest hair I ever felt,” he said. “Julieanne. My girl.” She grabbed his wrists.

“Please, Leo,” she begged him, “please don’t. I ask this of you. I’ve never asked anything serious of you. Look at Aury. Please.” He picked up his huge panier with the big frame and hefted it onto his back.

“Don’t you know how this feels to me, Julie?” he asked, in genuine wonder. “I’m scared to death.”

“Awwww, shit, Leo, it must really suck,” my mom said, dropping her hands, suddenly no longer pleading.

“Well, it does, Julie.”

“You ought to be going to a nice, big hospital with cheerful wallpaper, Leo,” my mom said. “Either that, or you are the most coldhearted—”

“Take care of your mother, guys,” he said to us.

“That would be, uh, your job description,” Caro said.

“Caroline, let me give you a hug, please,” Leo answered.

“Go…hug a tree,” she said. I knew what she wanted to say, but our little sister was there.

“Dada!” Aury screamed, as Leo walked toward the door, where we could see the cab outside the window. My mother had refused to drive him to the airport. So had my grandparents, who would not even answer the telephone to say good-bye. “Dada! I want to come! Take me, Dada! Good girl! I’ll be good!” She fell down and began to kick her fat little legs, and her face got red, then purple. Leo, crying hard, opened the door and closed it behind him.

We all ran over and picked Aury up, as if we were playing blanket toss at a picnic. As she kicked and sobbed, my mother began to sing that old song Elvis turned into “Love Me Tender,” the one she sang all the time to my little sister, “Aura Lee, Aura Lee, maid with golden hair…” She turned Aury away from her, so that Aury couldn’t kick her or hurt herself, and hugged Aury’s arms firmly down at her sides. Aury screamed so piercingly that Caro shut the windows. Finally, she seemed to deflate.

“She’s okay,” my mom said. “She held her breath too long. She’s fine. She’ll be a little dizzy.” My mom got up and laid both her palms against the front window. We went to stand beside her. We heard a car door slam. It was Liesel and Klaus. He waved. At them.

I’m sure that I’ll hate people more in my life than I hated Leo at that moment. I’ve even hated Leo more since that moment. But the truth is, probably because of hormones, I thought about that fucking gun.

This is how it felt, the first time I was laid low.

Days of dark-edged linen light revolved around nights and mornings of thick bunting, in which occasionally I was touched by shadows that moved. I was either freezing and burning in a clammy bed. Simply getting up to go to the bathroom was not like moving, but like making a long list, a Thanksgiving list for the grocery store—swing feet to floor, measure distance to door, hold the bladder with one hand like an expectant belly until the destination; don’t forget to lift nightie, to use tissues. Moving my legs was like dragging unevenly filled bags of sharp-edged rocks. I would make my path, clinging onto the bureau, the bedstead, the sink, and finally the wall. I never looked into the mirror.

After a long, dirty braid of those days, I woke up. And I was myself. Suddenly and completely.

It was a Sunday morning, because the children were asleep. The house was quiet and clean.

I could see a brown cardinal on the branch outside my window, picking at a suet cake Aury and I had long ago mounted on the half-gourd feeder she’d made at school. I watched the bird’s guarded, eerily serpentine movements, observed the separation of feathers on her modest little beige cowl, and realized suddenly that
I could see the bird!
My vision was not blurred. I did not have to focus by closing one eye. I lofted my legs easily over the side of the bed. My thigh tingled, a sparkling of miniature daggers, but I could stand, first swaying like a boat in the wake of a larger vessel, then settling, calmed, still. I walked into the bathroom. I got into the shower and washed every cleft and hillock of my body, rinsing my hair over and over with animal delight. I put on my own socks, my own jeans, a white shirt that smelled of starch. I buttoned it myself.

I walked out into the kitchen and broke brown eggs into a blue bowl. I poured milk onto the eggs and shook rosemary, pepper, and salt on top of the floating orange islands, then whisked in shredded cheese. The butter was melting on thick slices of wheat bread when Cathy came scuffling out of the bedroom with Aury in one arm and holding Abby Sun by the hand. “Oh, holy Christ!” she cried, ruffling her auburn spikes and literally taking a step back, as if she’d seen her great-grandmother Gleason, who Cathy told us died on the
Titanic,
scrambling eggs at my stove. “You scared the hell out of me! I thought the house was on fire. I was getting ready to evacuate the troops.”

Gabe and Caroline appeared, Gabe somehow…changed, grown, unfamiliar to me in his low-slung pajama bottoms, his chest broader, strapped with new bands of muscle, a wisp of hair below his navel. Perhaps I simply hadn’t seen him undressed in a long time.

“Mom,” he all but whimpered, bewildered, finger-combing his hair. “What are you doing up?”

“I got better,” I said. “That’s all I can tell you. I woke up, and I was better. Do you want some eggs? I’m starving.” We all sat down and ate the eggs and toast spread with Cathy’s mom’s homemade raspberry jam. “How long have you been here, Cath? How long was I…out of it?”

“Two
weeks,
” Caroline said. “Either Cath or I’ve been sharing a bedroom with two babies for two weeks, Mom. I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Sorry I couldn’t sleep on the hall floor, Princess Caroline,” Cathy said. Caro pursed her lips and tossed her extravagantly blonde hair (perhaps blonder than before?). An eerie sense stole over the table.

They were talking to each other like…like mother and daughter.

“Are you going to stay up now, Mom? Are you over having catatonic depression?” Caro asked.

“Is that what I had? I don’t think it was. And anyway, I’m sure Cathy already has an appointment to find out what it really was.” I reached around Abby to squeeze Cath’s arm tenderly.

“Caroline!” Cathy reproved my daughter, and Caro rolled her eyes. “Well, Julie, you’re right. You’ve got your appointment on Thursday. Let’s
hope
that’s what it was, because depression, and she’s certainly earned it, responds really well to medication….” Cathy was cutting Aury’s toast upinto one-inch squares, and Gabe was twirling the lid onto the top of her Princess Jasmine sipper cup, which she refused to give up. They were not just a family. They were also, all of them, talking about me as if I weren’t there, as if I hadn’t made the food they were eating, as if I were a house-plant they hoped didn’t have scales. What would they do if I did, douse me with coffee and leave me outside? And yet, the smell of the coffee was as overpoweringly sensual as anything I’d ever experienced with a baby, or a man, at my breast. I wanted to pour the creamy liquid into my hands and hold it close to my face, touch the beans, feel their shape and smell them individually. Orange sections with trembling drops of juice suspended on their lips transparent as tears. The sounds of a child chewing with an open mouth, swish, gnash, gnash, smack. No flutes. No far-off voices. No sound of wet wind’s constant baritone humming through a dark cave. Sunday morning ordinary.

Without saying anything that would have hinted at my asking for permission, I got up, opened the front door, and brought in the newspaper. I didn’t imagine the gaze Cathy and Gabe exchanged. After years of practice, with my fingernail, I was able to flip to the front of Your Life, my section, immediately. I sat down with a second cup of coffee—coffee I could taste!—and read my column, yes, with the paper at arm’s length, but without reading glasses. I read it once. I read it again. “What in the hell is this?” I asked.

“We…sort of…thought…” Cathy began.

“I’m going to get fired!” I spluttered, the coffee sloshing over the rim of the table. “You can’t…insult people! You can’t…use vulgar…Gabe! You know better than this!”

“Relax, Ma,” Gabe told me, with an exaggerated feline stretch. “He likes it! Cathcart says you’re pushing the outside of the envelope. He’s sent you, like, four e-mails, saying the readers are calling in, and they’re crazy about the new Gillis….”

“They’re like…give ’em hell, Julie!” Caroline said.

“That’s not
me
.”

“Did you ever…want it to be, not so you?” Cathy asked.

“What?”

“Did you just ever want to…tell it like it is? The way we do when we talk about the letters?”

“I don’t know,” I said, appealing to Cathy with my eyes. I set the newspaper down. “You know, I don’t know anything anymore. You guys are probably right. I should be thanking you instead of blowing up at you.”

“Well, we didn’t know any other way to write it, so we wrote it honestly,” Gabe said.

“I thought I was being discreet, and objective and polite. Wasn’t I? I was…”

“Dull,” said Gabe.

“Thanks, son,” I said with a sigh. “Oooh, I hate your being right.” I allowed myself a sharp little laugh, one I couldn’t stifle. “I just
hate
it!”

“Mom, don’t take it wrong,” Gabe said in his soothing like-Leo voice. “You were barely there for two weeks and totally out of it for…We had to do something,” Gabe said, sternly now. “Cathy has been totally great. She knows everything about human relationships….”

“You did the right thing. I’m only snarky because I’m embarrassed.”

“You don’t have to be,” Cathy said. “Really. Julie, we’re your family.”

“I know you feel lousy, Mom, and not just about being sick,” Gabe said. “Because nobody’s heard from Dad…”

“Really?” I asked, looking into every pair of guilty eyes, until each of them looked away. “He hasn’t called?”

“He send a card!” Aury said cheerfully.

I burst into tears. “I feel so…forgotten! I wake up, and my kids have a new mother. Cathy, don’t take that the wrong way. You’re better at it than I was.”

“Julie! ”
Cathy cried, horrified. “Julie.
Stop
it. I’ve stayed here and helped these kids handle grief, fear, and American history, and yeah, I’m proud of it. But it’s not like you wouldn’t have done the same thing. You would have, and you would have painted a room or two on top of it. You don’t owe me anything.”

“I do, and I can’t ever pay you back.” I gripped my coffee mug, now cold.

“Julie, listen. If you’re ashamed, it’s normal. But it’s not fair. Look, the husband you and everyone else believed was perfect took a long walk off an emotionally very short pier over the past several seasons, and because you’ve been handing out tea towels and sympathy…no, wait, Julie, you think you should have seen it coming and maybe you could have, but you didn’t. You’re a person, and we’re programmed to believe people we trust will treat us right. And Leo is behaving like about the most coldhearted piece of shit in the lower forty-eight if he isn’t in Hawaii by now—the way he walked out on his screaming baby makes it impossible for you to ignore that there’s more going on than he said, Jules. And that scares the shit out of you. It would anyone—”

“Wait!” I almost shouted, more violently than I meant to. I was crying harder now. The little girls jumped. My head drummed. I didn’t want to have this deconstruction played out in front of my children, because perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn’t true. Perhaps I really still had a husband who was even now recovering from his midlife crisis and heading home to me. I tried to cling to this, just as I kept clinging to the paltry hope that I’d only succumbed to a bout of…the flu or something for the past fort night. “Wait!” I tried to make my voice familiar, jokey. “Caroline Jane! Gabe. Don’t you have somewhere to go? Like, the moon?”

“I’m actually fine here, Mom,” Caro said. “It’s very dramatic. And it’s nice to hear you call me something other than ‘Hannah’ or ‘Connie’ or ‘Janey.’” Connie was Cathy’s mom.

“You can be a little shit, Caroline,” I said. “That wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh, I know that,” said my daughter. “And I know I can be a little shit.”

“I’m not going to stop right now,” Cathy insisted, pouring more coffee for me. “Even if you want me to. When you got sick, it seemed to correspond exactly with when Leo left. So on top of everything else, you’re not just an ordinary bat from the bat farm, you’re really wacko! Institutional quality! What does all that mean? Except, what if you’re not? What if you’re really sick, if you have a malignant brain tumor—which you don’t—the blood tests show you don’t have any cancer cells in your body. But what if you have something else? What’s going to become of the kids? What’s going to become of you? And then, you wake up and feel good for the first time in weeks, and you think you’re over all of it, and you find out your pal and your kid have taken over your job! What’s left? Where’s Julieanne Gillis, the swan of the Seventh Street Ballet Studio, the woman Saren used to call on to stand in front and show everyone the combinations for every show—and people said, she’s forty? She’s got teenagers?” I could feel tears on my face, and that sense, even at this moment, was a noteworthy pleasure. “Where is that Julie now? Where is she?”