The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (33 page)

“Not much.”

“What movies did you see this week?” Some kids, during the summer, read as many books as possible. Walter had decided he was going to watch a movie a day until school started.

“Okay, so on Monday, I watched this Japanese horror movie,” he said. “It was so creepy. You wouldn’t have made it through the first fifteen minutes. And then on Tuesday . . .”

I smiled as I listened to him go on. By the time I got to Stuyvesant, my nervousness and the hurt in his voice were gone, and things felt back to normal. Well, as normal as the fact that my best friend was a fourteen-year-old gamer and film geek.

“Okay, I need to go,” he said. “I’m meeting someone.”

“Who are you meeting?”

“A . . .
person
.”

Wait. What? “Is it a
girl
person?”

“I am neither going to confirm nor deny that.”

“Is it Amanda from the Saturday meeting?” He always denied it when I asked him, but I knew he had a crush on her from the way he always called on her first to share and gave her the Twelve Steps to read when he was chairing a meeting.

“It might be.”

“It is!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to,” I laughed. “I can hear it in your voice.”

He gave a heavy sigh. “I liked it better when we talked about you,” he grumbled.

POTENTIAL ISSUES I DECIDED MATT’S MOTHER MIGHT HAVE

• She drank.
  
• She was a kleptomaniac. (The mother of this girl in my grade, Frannie Berkowitz, was a kleptomaniac. So bad that her father had made a deal with the Holy Trinity of Barneys, Saks, and Neimans that when they saw her coming, a security guard would follow her around and make note of everything she stole and then just send him an itemized bill.)
  
• She suffered from depression.
  
• She had a gambling problem.
  
• She was obesely overweight.
  
• She was anorexic.
  

If I had more time, I could’ve come up with a bunch more, but that was all I could get through from the time it took to park and make my way to Matt. However, even if I had had all the time in the world, I doubt I would’ve guessed what it turned out to be.

“Okay, when you said hoarder, do you mean like
hoarder
hoarder?” I asked after he told me.

“Yeah,” he said, not looking at me as he ripped a clump of grass out of the ground.

“Like
TV
-level hoarder?”

He pulled up another clump. “It’s not like there are
dead cats
lying around, but it’s bad.”

“How bad?”

He couldn’t look at me. “Bad.”

At this rate, it would be next week before I pulled the full story out of him. But I knew what it was like not to be able to look someone in the eye; to be in that place of wanting more than anything to be able to share the truth of what was going on, while at the same time feeling like to do so was a complete betrayal that might make your world as you knew it come crashing down.

I put my hand on his cheek and steered his face up so that he was looking at me. “You can tell me,” I said quietly.

His eyes darted to the side a few times before he focused on me. “I know I can,” he whispered.

And with a deep breath, he did.

He told me about his mom. How before becoming an editor, his mother had written a novel that had gotten a lot of attention and great reviews but that she never wrote another one after that because his father felt that one writer in the family was bad enough.

How after the divorce, in an attempt to make herself feel better and give herself a new start, his mother had started buying things. New clothes. New dishes. New sheets and comforters. Then, when Matt’s father announced he was marrying the woman he had been having an affair with, and his mom moved them upstate full-time where they had more room, it started getting worse. Antique silver candelabras she got at a garage sale and planned to polish up but never got around to. An old butter churn she found at a flea market in Ghent that she was going to make into a table but never did.

Then, when the woman got pregnant, his mom started getting more out of control. Boxes of books off eBay. Record albums for fifty cents from an antique store in Hillsdale to go along with the turntable she had bought at a thrift store in Great Barrington. While their house was big—five bedrooms—soon enough her office was packed with stuff that once purchased often didn’t even make it out of their bags and boxes. Then, when Matt’s sister went away to college, her bedroom was taken over as well.

The bigger his father’s life got (a new wife, two more kids, a
New York Times
bestseller) the smaller his mother’s became—swallowed up by more and more stuff. He talked about not being able to breathe when he came home, and the nightmares he had where there would be an earthquake and everything would roll into his room and smother him. And yet, like in my life with Mom, to the outside world, it all looked okay. The lawn was still mowed; the bills were still paid (well, in our case, they weren’t, but we hadn’t known that, thanks very much, Barney). The elephant in the room may have grown bigger and bigger over the years, thanks to a steady diet of crazy, but as long as it was well dressed and didn’t pee on the carpet, what was the big deal if it was there?

Sure, if anyone had come over and had seen how out of control things had gotten, something would have had to have been done, but there was an easy solution to that: just don’t invite anyone over. He said it had been somewhat manageable back when the clutter had been contained to rooms that had doors, and he could just make sure they were all closed before a friend came over; but in the last two years, things had started to spill out into hallways and onto counters. A year before, for Christmas, he and his sister had bought his mother a gift certificate for six sessions with a personal organizer, but before the first three-hour session was over, the woman had taken Matt aside and told him that she couldn’t help them and that he should look into getting his mother professional help. Other than their handyman, she was the last person from the outside world who had been in the house.

“I didn’t expect my mom to be home when we stopped by there yesterday,” he said. “And I was scared she was going to come outside and invite you in, and it would turn into this whole deal.” He shook his head. “I keep thinking that if I just plan well enough, I can keep this stuff under control, you know? And if I keep it under control, it’ll somehow give me enough time to come up with a solution and fix it.”

Boy, did I know that one. I nodded. “I get it. Believe me.”

He took my hand. “I know you get it,” he said quietly. “That’s why I wanted to tell you. And because to not tell you felt, somehow, like . . . a lie.”

That’s what I was learning. That leaving stuff out was sometimes just as bad as making stuff up.

He pulled me down so we were lying on the grass. As we held hands, not talking, I watched the cotton candy clouds move across the blue sky, listening to the steady rush of the waterfall in the distance and the soft rustling of the giant trees as they swayed in the breeze. I thought of a list I had made about a year earlier during one of Mom’s deeper depressions—the one where I was holding the mirror up to her mouth to check her breathing a few nights a week rather than a few nights a month—called Perfect Moments. Like the time when I was six and had the stomach flu and Mom held my hair back as I threw up and then rubbed my back as I drank ginger ale. And reciting the lines from
The Way We Were
with each other as we lay in her bed and ate popcorn. And listening to the studio audience clap and whoop at the end of the taping of the pilot for
Plus Zero
when Mom took her final bow.

As I lay there, the sun on my face, so relaxed I wasn’t even worried about tick bites that might have led to Lyme disease, I knew that this moment would be added to the list.

The first perfect moment my mother was not a part of.

Matt rolled over and propped himself up on his arm. “I didn’t plan for this to happen.”

I rolled toward him and propped myself up as well. “Telling me about your mom?” I asked.

“No. I mean, yes, that, too, but I’m talking about you and me,” he replied. “After that first night down by the river, I thought that it would be fun to hang out with you while you were here, but I didn’t plan on, you know . . .”

I felt a switch flip on in my stomach. “What?”

He looked at me—really looked at me, in a way that I never felt seen before. Instead of breaking my gaze, I kept still and
let
him look at me, not worrying that he’d see something less than perfect; not fidgeting so that by being a moving target I was less likely to be found out and he’d leave.

The corners of his mouth lifted into a smile.

“Falling in love with you,” he said.

I would have been lying if I had said that, sometimes right before I fell asleep, I hadn’t thought about this moment and what it would feel like and what I would say and what it would mean. What I hadn’t counted on was how it wasn’t those five words that cracked my heart open—it was how his voice shook when he said them, and how his hand got all clammy. It was how a little crease appeared between his eyebrows and lines appeared on his forehead as he held his breath, waiting to see how I’d react, as if pleading for me not to laugh or cringe or reject him. As if he were saying, “Okay, I just unzipped my skin and this is what’s underneath and I’m really putting myself out there, so think carefully about what you say because your response is going to be singed on my brain forever.”

Which is why I said the only thing I could think of.

“Well, I love you, too.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After I got my period the first time when I was twelve, for the two weeks following, everything I did was commemorated by saying “This is my first fill-in-the-blank since I got my period.” This is my first shower/breakfast/algebra test/time I’ve had to pour cold water on Mom’s face to wake her up since I got my period.

And the same thing happened after Matt and I said “I love you” to each other.

This is the first Stewart’s iced coffee I’ve had since officially being in love
. (Bought approximately forty-five minutes later because of whatever weird chemical they put in it to get you hooked.)

This is the first slice of Debra’s banana cream pie Matt and I have shared at Luna 61 since we said “I love you” out loud
. (Eaten that evening because love makes you hungry.)

This is the first time I have walked into my kitchen and found my mother and Billy Barrett making out since I have joined the ranks of people who say “I love you” to people of the opposite sex
.

That one—which happened on day three of being officially in love, when I walked into the kitchen to get some carrot cake—was the first time I had seen Mom and Billy kiss off set, period. Even with my love high—the blissed-out, perma good mood that made it so that I did not curse out drivers who decided to pass me because they felt I was going too slow down Route 9, even though I made a point of going five miles over the fifty-five-mile speed limit—it was more than a little weird.

“Bug. I didn’t see you,” Mom said after I cleared my throat.

Most likely because she was too busy going for the gold in Tonsil Hockey. Is that what Matt and I looked like when we made out? I hoped not because it was not at all attractive. “I just wanted to get some carrot cake,” I said, making my way to the fridge.

“Oh, I think I may have had the last piece,” Billy said sheepishly. “Sorry.”

Now that it seemed as if he was going to be in our lives for an extended period of time, I was going to have to set some ground rules around the food stuff.

I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. “Still no paps?”

“Nope,” Billy said. “We’ve been ignoring each other on set.”

One of the things I had been worried about when Mom and Billy hooked up was that the paparazzi were going to stake out the house like they had after her DUI, making it look like an airport rental car lot with their Pontiac Grand Ams and Chevy Cavaliers. But one glance at TMZ showed that summer seemed to bring out more bad behavior in celebrities, so they were busy with an overabundance of cheating scandals and drug busts.

I grabbed a rice cake and went back to my room to finish uploading the photos I had taken that afternoon over in Athens and Catskill. It gave me the creeps to be over there—Matt said that he had always thought of it as a place where, if you pushed hard enough, you’d find bodies buried in the wall—but the old Victorian houses with their peeling paint made for cool photos, especially if you pimped them out with Hipstamatic and Instagram. Over the last few days Matt had been hounding me to let him take a picture of me. A few times he had even succeeded, while I was driving—but I quickly made him delete them. I may have been in love, but I wasn’t so checked out that I was willing to change my stance on photos of me.

As I uploaded one of a porch that looked like it was about to crumble into dust, my e-mail dinged. Now that Mom was so busy, she had stopped sending me videos that were made up of stock shots of sunsets and smiling babies and Olympic runners set to songs like “I Believe I Can Fly” and “That’s What Friends Are For.” (“Bug, it’s not spam,” she would say when I would complain. “It’s very motivational stuff that can change your mind-set and your energy field and the outcome of your entire
day
!”) But because Walter’s birthday was coming up in a few weeks, that had been replaced by links to various movies and video games that he thought might be good gifts for me to get him. (“Not only would the Criterion versions of
The
Royal Tenenbaums
and
Rushmore
bring me hours of enjoyment, but they would bring
you
enjoyment, too, ‘cause I’d even let you watch them with me!” he had written in an e-mail the night before.)

This e-mail, however, wasn’t from Mom. Or Walter. It was from CalArts, congratulating me on being chosen as a high school fellow for their August intensive.