Rules of the Road (3 page)

Faith lifted a stack of fashion magazines from the table like they weighed six tons. She is probably going to become a model someday even though I warned her that smiling and twirling under hot lights has been medically proven to cause shallowness. I think it’s fine to look the best you can, but when that’s the biggest thing you concentrate on, you can miss the fun of life’s grungier moments like hanging around in men’s pajamas, eating pork fried rice from the carton with chopsticks, and not caring how much gets ground in the rug.

“Do you think he does miss us?” Faith asked.

“I think he’s got a disease, Faith, that keeps him from being the person he could be.” I learned this when I went to Al-Anon, a group that helps families of alcoholics. Faith didn’t go. “Faith is handling things,” Mom explained. “She doesn’t have the memories you do, Jenna. She was so young when your dad and I divorced.” It made me feel like some big infected boil that needed lancing. Faith always got off easy.

Faith looked at the cover of
Vogue
sadly. “Do you think he ever misses us, Jenna? I mean
really?
”

I grabbed a garbage bag. “I don’t know.”

“If he really cared about us, he’d stop drinking.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“
Well, don’t you think I know that, Jenna? What do you think I am, some moron?
”

Faith flung her hand across a corner of the table, knocked my personal pile of
Travel and Leisure
magazines on the floor, ran into her room, and slammed the door.

Part of me felt like kicking in her door, telling her to grow up. It wasn’t my fault she never saw Dad. It’s not like she was missing much. Everyone loses when Dad comes back.

I knelt down to pick up the travel magazines, knocked one off the top with an article about Texas. “Everything is Bigger in Texas” the headline read. I threw it at Faith’s closed door.

“
I don’t think you’re a moron,
” I shouted as Faith’s sobs filled the apartment.

I was standing at the stove, having just flipped my world-class grilled mozzarella and tomato sandwich in the pan. It was perfectly brown on one side, the mozzarella cheese was melting and oozing from between the seven grain bread. Ooze was the whole point of a grilled cheese sandwich—my grandmother taught me that.

I read my mother’s note that she had taped over the sink of dirty dishes:

It was signed, “YLM” for Your Loving Mother. Mom is an emergency-room nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and is working the night shift for the time and a half pay. We don’t see her much, which is hard, but Mom’s schedule is toughest on Faith. She needs more of Mom’s time than I do. Faith is at that age where she hasn’t seen enough of the world to know she can handle herself.

Mom works hard to spend time with each of us. She and I like to take long walks together all around Chicago—being Type A personalities, we do our best talking when we’re moving. The thing we’ve got most in common is our independent streak—we know how to take care of ourselves and we like being on our own. But sometimes my mother goes into guilt overdrive. Saying how she should have been tougher on Dad and left him sooner. Then she tries to make up for everything in my life that she thinks made me the social zero that I am today.

Wouldn’t you like to have a big party? she asks. I know we didn’t have your friends over much when you were younger, but parties are a good way to get to know more people.

Not really, Mom. I don’t like crowds much.

Maybe you should go to ballroom dancing class, Jenna. Having social dancing skills is always important later in life.

The boys come up to my armpits, Mom.

Maybe you shouldn’t work such long hours, honey. I’d like you to have time to just be a teenager.

I’m trying to make money, Mother. I like selling shoes.

I’m more like my dad than my mom. That used to scare me because I thought it meant I’d end up like him. But Grandma sat me down and said how God had managed to give me the best parts of my father (his sales ability, his business sense) without all the tragedy.

I studied my sandwich in the pan. It had achieved perfection. I put it on a plate with red grapes and dill pickles, counted fifteen seconds, the exact amount of time to wait before biting into a grilled cheese without burning the roof of my sensitive teenage mouth.

The phone rang. I waited two rings, three. Faith, the phone queen, wasn’t getting it, which meant she was still having her snit. Four rings. I grabbed it.

“Hello?”

“Jenna Boller, if you please,” said the familiar southern voice.

“Speaking.”

“This is Madeline Gladstone.”

I stood at attention.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I racked my brain.

I locked the storage closet before I left today, counted the money. Murray took it to the bank.

“Is everything okay at the store, Mrs. Gladstone?”

“It is.”

I waited.

“I have a proposal for you.”

“You do?”

“You drive? I assume.”

“You mean like a car?”

“That was the concept, yes.”

“I’ve had my license for six months.”

“You drive properly?”

“I guess . . .I mean . . .yes.”

Faith had just come into the kitchen to forage for food. She was opening and closing doors, shaking Tupperware containers. She was doing this while practicing model poses and expressions. Fashion models don’t smile much. They get paid to look like someone just pinched them from behind. Faith saw my grilled cheese, started toward it. I grabbed the plate, held it over my head. Faith tried grabbing it, but she’s only five eight. I had three inches on her. Grandma always said it’s a blessing to be tall.

“Come to my home tomorrow morning at seven o’clock, Jenna. You can drive me downtown in my Cadillac. After that we’ll see.”

“I don’t understand.”

Mrs. Gladstone sighed. “I need a driver.”

“A driver . . .?”

This was a full-fledged disaster waiting to happen. She gave me her address on Astor Street.

“Mrs. Gladstone, I’ve only driven a twelve-year-old Honda Civic, never a
Cadillac.
”

“That will change tomorrow, won’t it? Good night.”

“But—”

Click.

I felt the color drain from my face. I put the plate down.

“Who was that?” Faith asked.

I hung up the receiver, sat down on the wobbly stool by the sink. “I’ve never driven a Cadillac.”

“You’ve never been in a Cadillac,” Faith countered, grabbing half my sandwich.

Morning. Five forty-four.

I lay in bed looking at the ceiling; a spider’s web hung between the corners, camouflaged against my ivory walls. A fly buzzed around it.

“Stupid,” I said to the fly, “you’re going to be brunch.”

The fly buzzed closer to the web, too close. He struggled against the sticky threads. The spider came down from a string on the ceiling.

Any last words, fly?

The spider watched the fly until it stopped moving, then dug in.

Life and death played out before my very eyes.

You don’t see these things if you clean your room regularly.

Five fifty-five. The alarm blared. I turned it off, eased my
numb self up. Headed for the shower, wondering if Dad made it to Sueann’s; rounded the picture wall of family photo memories.

Mom glaring at a roasted pig at a Hawaiian luau.

Faith modeling a surgical pants suit at a hospital charity luncheon.

Me at the beach, submerged in sand from the neck down, “Beware of Teen” written across my stomach.

My grandmother, like I always remember her—bent over her Singer sewing machine, bright fabric everywhere. The photo was taken in her tailor shop on Clark Street before she was diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s disease that took piece after piece of her memory until her old self was all but gone.

Grandma was my best friend. She understood everything about me—how serious I could get, how hard I worked at my part-time jobs. When I was twelve I won the
Chicago Tribune
“Blood and Guts Award” for selling more daily and Sunday subscriptions than any paper kid in the city or suburbs. Grandma said she always knew I was going to win something big. She took me out to dinner at Wok World, my favorite Chinese restaurant, and stuck my winner’s plaque right on the table by the low sodium soy sauce.

Two years ago Mom and I brought her to a nursing home. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Faith rode with us in the car for two blocks, but she couldn’t handle watching Grandma just stare out the window. Faith jumped out at North Avenue and ran home crying.

I visit Grandma at the home. Take the 151 bus up Sheridan
Road past Belmont Harbor to Shady Oaks Nursing Home where she lives. Her roommate Gladys always remembers me. Grandma remembers me sometimes. Mostly she remembers how I used to visit her when she lived in Wisconsin when I was small.

I bring her flowers sometimes. Daisies are her favorites. I used to read to her from the newspaper, but she got depressed at how bad the world has gotten. Mostly I just sit with her and smile when she looks at me with her scared eyes. I tell her how when I get my own car I’m going to take her for a ride and we’ll have a picnic with fried chicken and lemon cookies like we used to when I was little. Then I stand by the memory board I made her. It’s a bulletin board with “I love you, Grandma” across the top in red felt letters. Below are photographs of me, Mom, and Faith, pieces of fabric like she had in her shop, a few postcards of Chicago, the satin ribbon she braided my hair with when I graduated from eighth grade, her huge flowered hat that she’d wear to church on Sundays. She goes up and touches the board sometimes, particularly the fabric; rolls the tweeds and silks between her fingers and for that moment she seems connected. Before the Alzheimer’s got really bad she said to me, “Jenna Louise Boller, I’m counting on you. As this thing gets worse, you’re going to have to help me remember.”

If I were God I would wipe out every disease in the world beginning with the A’s: AIDS, Alcoholism, Alzheimer’s . . .

It was 6:56
A.M.
A fine summer mist covered the expensive brownstones on Astor Street. I never got to talk to my mom about Dad or Mrs. Gladstone or what a person needed to know to be the driver of a demanding rich person. I was extra loud in the kitchen making my breakfast to hopefully wake my mother up, but there are just so many times you can drop a stainless steel bowl without seeming suspicious and Mom slept through all of it. I thought of all the good drivers I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what made them that way. They just got behind the wheel, drove, and didn’t run into things. The not running into things was important.

I stood in front of Mrs. Gladstone’s ritzy three-story brownstone building. It was surrounded by pink and white azalea bushes and a black and bronze fence. I was wearing my khaki suit and my stacked heel leather shoes that were very good for driving. I pulled back the gold lion door knocker, gave it a ram.

A curly haired woman in a black maid’s uniform opened it.

“I’m Jenna,” I said, smoothing down my hair that had reached warp-frizz.

She looked me up and down, uncertain, then led me into a hallway that was filled with things that looked old and expensive. The wallpaper had gold peacocks and thick stripes, a grandfather’s clock with gold around the edges bonged seven rings.

“I appreciate promptness.” Mrs. Gladstone walked slowly down a spiral wooden staircase like a queen. She stepped onto a fat oriental rug. Her gray eyes studied me. A huge oil painting that looked like Mrs. Gladstone in better days hung over the fireplace the next room over.

This was not a place where you hunker down and have a grilled cheese.

“And what do you think is the most important qualification for being a good driver?” She asked this like we’d been talking for a while.