Real Live Boyfriends (13 page)

“And you think a good plan for earning that money is to sign a lease for ten thousand dollars a month?”

“It’s not like
you’re
earning much,” snapped Mom.

“Since your mother passed, you haven’t finished your Web site, you haven’t written any newspaper columns, you haven’t—”

“What’s your idea, Mom?” I interrupted.

“A meatloafery,” she said.

“What is that?”

“A restaurant,” said my mother. 3 “With brick ovens the way they have at fancy pizza places, so you can see into them and watch the meatloaves cooking.” Dad put down his fork and looked at her in astonishment.

“People come in,” Mom went on, “and on their table is an assortment of ground meats, different kinds of bread crumbs—like maybe garlic bread, rye, pumpernickel—and ingredients in pretty little dishes.

Ketchup, barbecue sauce, onions, roasted garlic, maybe Dijon mustard, maybe chopped tomato.”

“Back up,” I told her. “An assortment of ground meats?”

“Of course,” said Mom. “I’m thinking lamb, pork, veal, beef and turkey to start. Then we can have chicken and buffalo, too, once business picks up.

Buffalo meat is very current.”

“Just raw on the table?”

“Sure. How else are people going to make their own meatloaf? The best meatloaves are a mix of meats. You would know that if you’d tried the one I made on Sunday and looked at the cookbook like I asked you.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded her.

Mom went on, ignoring me. “At MeatMix we’ll be letting people choose the mix they’re in the mood for!” letting people choose the mix they’re in the mood for!”

“MeatMix?”

“That’s the name of the restaurant. Or maybe MoodMeat. Or maybe KitLoaf? Juana thought of KitLoaf.” She took a drink from her wineglass.

“You’re going to have hygiene issues,” I told her. “All those people mixing up raw meat.”

“We’ll have rubber gloves,” said Mom. “So people can actually mix with their hands. That’s half the fun of making meatloaf, feeling it squish between your fingers. It’s not the same if you use a spatula.” She stood up to clear the table.

“Meatloaf takes an hour to cook,” said Dad, as if coming out of a stupor. “What are people going to do while they wait for their food?”

“There’s going to be a full bar!” snapped my mother, as if he were an idiot. “People will bond.

They’ll talk over recipes and give each other tips.”

“Not everyone is as into meatloaf as you are,” Dad cautioned.

“Comfort food is a new trend in restaurants,” Mom said.

“Are they gonna eat in the same place they cooked?” I wanted to know. “Like on a table covered with scraps of raw meat?”

“An hour is a long time to wait for your meal,” Dad said. “I don’t know if just drinks will cut it. Isn’t this a family kind of place?”

“If you’re letting kids in there, the hygiene issues are going to be even more serious,” I argued. “What if they get snot in their meatloaf? What if they drool?

Are you really going to just stick a snot meatloaf in the oven and serve it to a customer? Even if it’s the customer’s own snot?”

“I’m not certain you’re going to find investors for this, Elaine,” my dad said gently.

“Why are you two so unsupportive?” Mom exploded. “All I do is support, support, support both of exploded. “All I do is support, support, support both of you, all the time!”

“It’s ten thousand dollars a month,” said Dad. “In the year before we send Ruby to college.”

“This kind of attitude is just what I’m talking about!” she cried. “You can’t even imagine for a single second that something of mine is going to be a success, can you? You can’t think that it might make money and
pay
for Ruby’s damn college.”

“It’s a meatloafery,” I said. “You’re not even a chef.”

“It’s
make your own
!” she said, stamping her feet.

“Elaine,” said Dad, in a pleading tone of voice. “I’m not trying to be unsupportive. I—”

“You’re cutting me down!” said Mom. “Neither of you lets me even finish explaining my business plan.

You think you’re so quick, so clever, making me feel stupid. But is that a positive way to deal with other people? Is it?”

I knew she was partly right. But she was so unsympathetic. She was living with two broken people, two people deep in the pain of Reginald.4 My grandmother was dead. My true love had turned cold.

Dad’s mother was gone. And Mom acted like our sadness was one big irritant: an obstacle in her quests for smoked meat, yogic enlightenment and performance-art fame.

“I’m cutting you down because it’s a stupid idea,” I told her.

The rest of the evening did not go well.

1
I still eat things with eggs and dairy in
them, not because it doesn’t upset me the
way
those
are produced (it does), but
because I’m not perfect. Also, my quest for
deliciousness, especially in the form of
baked goods, makes it pretty much
impossible to say goodbye to butter. But
maybe I’ll give it up when I’m older and
more mature
.

2
Muffin: Bland person. Mildly pleasant, but
lacking

in

spice,

novelty

and

deliciousness
.

3
Perhaps I should note here that my
mother has no culinary training, no
business experience and, apparently, no
sense of her own limitations
.

4
Reginald is what Doctor Z and I call the
grieving process, or a process of
accepting the difficult things that have
happened. Because phrases like
grieving

process
make me throw up a little bit in
my mouth
.

The Wenchery of Cricket and Kim!

Parent Questionnaire

Please fill this form out as soon as possible so

we can begin helping your child in his or her

college applications process
.

How do you see your child?

As little as possible
.

What kind of education do you want for your

child?

One that doesn’t require me to fill out stupid
questionnaires. Also, one that’s free
.

What

are

your

child’s

strengths

and

weaknesses?

Ruby is self-involved and neurotic. She may be a
repressed lesbian
.

She may be an anorexic
.

As for strengths: she is superb at making
stingingly unkind remarks
.

From your observation, what subjects is your

child most interested in?

Staring at the television. Moping. Acting
superior
.

What is your educational background, and that of

your spouse?

Nothing that prepared us in any way for the
horrors of raising a teenager
.

—written with black Sharpie in my mom’s large,
loopy cursive on Dittmar’s printout
.

My senior year went on.

Without Noel.

Without Noel.

I worked at the zoo.

I did a lot of homework.

I swam after school.

Without Noel.

I sent away for college applications.

I walked Polka-dot.

I went to therapy.

Without Noel.

Doing all these things, I cried a lot.

My dad cried a lot too.

My mom butterflied a lamb, stuffed it with rosemary and garlic and invited people over for dinner.

The headmaster made me write a formal apology note to Dittmar promising never to disrupt his class again. During CAP Workshop, my Noel radar was in such a massive frenzy, I felt like I was going to have a panic attack every time I went—but I managed not to by taking off my glasses and letting the whole room blur, then singing retro metal songs in my head, ignoring everything Dittmar or anyone else said.

We

will

We

will

ROCK

YOU
.

(
Clap!

Dum

dum

Clap!)1

I still knew where he was, and my heart bounded every time he spoke, but Noel was just a soft outline of himself, not real Noel with his mouth in a thin line, making jokes with hateful, hateful Ariel Olivieri. I didn’t feel guilt over his knee, which was still heavily wrapped, or guilt over wakeboarding with Gideon. At least, I didn’t feel those things until I put my glasses back on and stopped singing in my head.

Mom brought an
entire dead piglet home
and dismembered it. She ground bits of it up to make sausage and left its head sitting in the fridge while she researched ways of serving it.

I dared to suggest that this was a deeply inconsiderate and even cruel thing to do when one of the people you lived with had been a vegetarian for three years, and in response, Mom filled out Dittmar’s parent questionnaire with the most obnoxious things she could think of to write and shoved it in my backpack. And as a performance artist, she writes obnoxious things
professionally
.

I found it at school during Calc. At first I thought, Ag, I have to turn this sheet of full-on madness in to Dittmar and he’s going to think I’m even more insane than he already does. It’s really going to hurt my chances in terms of getting any actual advice from him for my college applications—plus he’ll show it to the other teachers and they’ll all think I come from a completely certifiable family, and that’s even without knowing that we found my dad this morning sitting in the shower stal wearing only his underwear and staring blankly at the tiles.

But then I thought: I don’t have to give this paper to Dittmar.

I can tell him my parents keep not filling it out.

Eventually, he’ll forget about it.

I know better now than to throw any kind of incriminating document in the school trash can, so I ripped the questionnaire into tiny, tiny shreds and flushed it down the toilet.

“It was liberating,” I told Doctor Z later. “Like I said, I’m not letting this badness in my life. I’m flushing it down with all the poo.”

The upside-down picture wasn’t on her desk anymore. I was grateful because it was seriously distracting. Likewise, Doctor Z wasn’t wearing an orange poncho or patchwork skirt or anything else so incredibly crafty and horrific that it detracted from my ability to have a therapeutic experience.

“My mother did this nasty thing,” I went on, “but I didn’t have to let it in. I mean, I have enough things in there tainting my brain. I don’t need that.”

“Good.”

“I also didn’t have to give the questionnaire to Dittmar. Even though he told us to turn it in.

Sometimes, it’s just better to ignore what you’re supposed to do and do what’s best for
you.
” Doctor Z nodded. Then she asked: “What else do you think is tainting your brain?”

“Oh,” I said. “Just my dad’s depression, missing my dead grandma, our carnivorous household, Meghan always off with Finn, Nora always off with Kim and Cricket, Hutch in Paris, total isolation, mental ill ness, people who are cruel to animals, the question of whether to grow out my bangs, college applications, guilt over Noel, guilt over Gideon, major heartbreak and self-loathing. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Well,” Doctor Z said, crossing her legs, “can you flush any of
that
?”

“How could I flush it?”

“You tell me.”

“These are not the kinds of things you can flush.”

“Why not?”

“They’re not pieces of paper. They’re situations.”

“What if you put them down on pieces of paper?”

“You’re not serious.”

“Sure. That can be a very therapeutic thing to do.

You write out a problem that is bothering you, and then you flush it. Or burn it. Destroy it in some way as a gesture of setting yourself free.”