The Things I Want Most (14 page)

“Mike, you live here, so get the vacuum cleaner going.”

“I don't do work.”

I walked in, and Mike looked at me as if I could explain this one simple point to Sue. “Rich,” he said, “I don't do work.” Then he picked up the remote control and turned the TV back on.

Sue reached down to the set and turned it off.

“Damn.” Mike slammed the remote down on the coffee table. “I don't do work.”

“You're part of this family; you'll lend a hand. No TV until you get the living room and the hallways vacuumed.”

Mike kicked the vacuum cleaner. “I don't do work.”

Sue raised her voice. “You kick my vacuum cleaner again and it'll be the whole week without TV”

“I don't do work. I hate this fucking family. I wish they'd put me in a real family.”

Sue still had her voice up. “What you see on TV are not real families. Real families have to do something together about keeping the place clean.”

“Damn,” Mike shouted again, but he picked up the vacuum cleaner hose and turned the machine on.

Later on in our room, I made a crack about how much fun she seemed to be having with Mike's chore program, but she wasn't amused. Instead, she just lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Scattered around her on the covers were Harbour's log sheets and forms to be completed. Things were piling up on her. She was still getting ready for Thanksgiving, her office was a disaster as she prepared to upgrade her computer system for the coming tax season, and the conflict with Mike was eroding whatever bounce there was left. She looked too whipped to sleep. Tomorrow would be Joanne's weekly visit, which meant Sue would have to stop work for an hour or so, and I knew that with her office still torn apart, that would drive her nuts, too.

Sue is a complex person, inclined to burn the candle at both
ends, half believing that if she wasn't getting everything done right now she was failing somehow. “I don't have enough time” is a constant complaint, but then she is forever adding something else to her pile, and while she somehow gets it all accomplished, she often exudes tension when we are alone together. But there is another side to her as well, and you see it whenever a client walks into her office.
Here is a close friend of mine who needs my help
, you can see her thinking, and whatever stress she's under vanishes in an instant as she focuses her entire attention on that one person. And it isn't an act. Sue is genuinely interested in people, in the details of their lives, in what their children are doing, in how their parents are or what they have planned for the upcoming year, but most particularly, in what she can do for them.

I was troubled that Mike would be seeing less and less of this right side of her; that instead he was calling up the brusque, dispassionate “get it done now” persona by mindlessly fighting each step of her program. It looked like this saw-toothed half-pint would never understand that he could get anything he wanted, do virtually anything he wanted, if he would just say
yes
and give her a hug once in a great while; if he would just once walk into her office and say, “I have a problem, can you help me?”

I started picking the sheets of paper up off the bed.

“What are you doing, Rich?”

“I'll do the logs from now on, Sue.”

“You have to keep up with them every day, or else it gets away from you.”

“I know.”

Mike never had any friends to the house until the day he announced that Greg in his class had asked to come over.

“Great,” Sue said. “It'll be a nice break for both of us. Give me his phone number, and I'll talk to his mother. Maybe he can come over and play with you on Saturday?”

Mike shook his head. “I've already talked to him.”

Sue sat down and took his hand. “Mike, before someone comes over for the day, parents should talk. Who is driving who when, is he eating dinner here, what time does he have to be back, things like that.”

“His father is bringing him over.”

Sue shook her head. “No, Mike, I'm sorry. I have to talk to his parents first, and I'm sure his parents would want to talk to us first, too.”

“No,” Mike said, answering Sue's last statement.

“Believe me, Mike, Greg's parents will want to talk to us.”

“No, Greg always visits friends. His parents never talk to people.”

Sue stood and put her hands up. “That's not the way it's done, Mike. I'm sorry, but before he can come over I'll have to talk to his parents.”

“Damn, I hate this fucking family.” Then slam, slam, bang, bang, as he headed off toward his room.

Sue said to me, “He doesn't understand interaction—that people have to organize things.”

A half hour later Mike came up to me as I was painting the foyer and said sweetly, “Rich, Greg's father is on the phone. He wants to talk to you about Greg coming over to play with me.”

“Oh, so now you want us to arrange things?”

“You have to! You have to!”

“Okay”

My ears ached after Greg had spent the day with us. The child was bright, but unbelievably hyper. You had to watch him every last minute, or he'd be turning on the gas at the stove, poking one of the dogs until it snarled, running around
upstairs where the guests were, and screaming at the top of his lungs.

His father dropped him off with his medication and specific instructions on what worked best in getting it into him.

Medication? If this was what he was like drugged, I didn't want to be in the same county when he sobered up.

The next day I asked Mike, in an offhand kind of way, “Do you have any other friends at your school?”

“No. Greg is my best friend.”

The siege had been ongoing—day in, day out, nonstop—for the past two weeks.

“I don't do work.”

“Mike, it's your turn to help with the dishes.”

“I don't do work.”

“Mike: dishes—now.”

“I'm a slave in this family. I'm going to call Joanne and tell her to take me away to a good family.”

“There's the phone.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I love you”

“Damn, I hate this family.”

“Go to your room and think about your language. I'll get you later to do the dishes,”

Slam, slam, bang, bang.

I asked mildly, “Why did you send him to his room?”

“Because he said Tucking family.'”

“No, he didn't. This time he skipped the F word.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Ah,” and she grinned.

Out of such little things one draws hope.

But the next day when Sue called him, he went into his and Liam's room and smashed everything that belonged to him—his clock radio, his lamp, his puzzle, his pictures. He broke nothing of Liam's—only his own possessions.

“Mike,” Sue asked him, appalled and almost in tears, “why did you do that?” It's mine.

“It's not acceptable in this house to break things, even if they do belong to you.”

Mike's face was flushed and his eyebrows seemed to swell and hood his eyes. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I'm going to get you started on your chores.”

“Damn, I hate this fucking family.”

“Follow me, and we'll find the vacuum cleaner.”

Mike stamped his foot and screamed, “I had a bad childhood.”

Sue walked over to him, and he flinched back as if he felt he was going to be hit. “Don't you ever, ever,” she hissed, “pull a poor-orphan act on me. That was then, this is now, and besides, people have been coddling you, standing up for you, feeding you, clothing you, worrying about you, ever since you were taken out of your home. Now it's time to start walking forward on your own.”

“I don't do work.”

“Oh, yes you do.”

“I did have a bad childhood.”

“I couldn't care less.”

Sue had started calling the children's home once a week and speaking to Kathy. “It may just be,” Kathy had just told her, “that the honeymoon is over and you're getting a new crop up out of those awful roots. So be careful. I know you guys are experienced
parents, but you might be confronted with something totally beyond your experience. Still, despite everything, Mike might be open to some sort of responsibility. He's never gained that sort of weight before, and he's never been off meds. The one big thing to remember is that regardless of what he might say, his own image of himself is the most important possession he has. Somehow, not getting involved is tied up in that. Maybe that allows him to feel independent, more in control, less like a castaway, less like a foster child? I don't know.”

Later, Sue repeated Kathy's remarks to me. “There's something there,” she said, poking her forehead with her index finger. “Something I'm missing.”

We were into Stevenson's
Kidnapped
at night, just before bedtime. Mike would read one page, I the next, and so on. Mike was laughing over the old Scottish word
lug
, which meant “ear.”

“I really like that,” he chuckled, pulling at his own ear.

“Mike,” I said, putting the book down for a moment, “what else is it you like?”

“Huh?”

“What sort of things do you like?”

“Nothing.”

“You like root beer, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what else do you like?”

“What do
you
like?”

“Mmmm,” I thought, “well, I like red dump trucks, old barns, stone walls, a good book. I like baked macaroni with cheddar cheese. I like a lot of things. What do you like?”

His features worked themselves up in a caricature of a thoughtful little woodchuck. “I really don't like anything.”

“You play your cards close to the chest, don't you?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you don't like to tell anybody what you're feeling.”

Silence.

“Well, is that true, Mike?”

“Yes.”

“Mike, you have to do some vacuuming before dinner.”

“Whatever.”

“Mike.”

“Damn. I'm a slave in this family.”

“Mike.”

“Whatever.”

“Mike, get up.”

“You're not my boss.”

“Get up, short stuff.”

“Damn.”

“Don't you dare kick that vacuum cleaner.”

The more Sue pushed Mike to lend a hand, the more Mike would retreat into the TV. At first we were ambivalent, and knowing how his TV time was restricted in the children's home, we allowed him free access after dark, before bed. But now we were starting to screw down on it.

“Mike,” I said, “you shouldn't just run upstairs after dinner and turn the TV on. You have to help clean up. Now, go see Sue. She's waiting for you.”

Silence.

“Mike.”

“Damn, I can't even watch my show.”

“Mike. Come on, the boys will be home any day, and Sue is trying to get things ready.”

“Damn, if those sons come in here, I am going to kill myself.”
And he slammed down the remote control on the coffee table. Pieces of it flew across the room.

For just a fraction of an instant Mike looked frightened. Then he recovered. “I don't care. I don't do work. I want to go to a good family. I'm going to hurt myself.”

Phyllis had left. Lots of smiles and protestations about Mike not bothering her, but we knew.

“Were down to having half the rooms empty,” Sue told me, shocked, “and Louis was only going to be here for a couple of months to begin with, so he'll be out in a few weeks.”

“Four rooms open,” I answered back slowly. “I don't even feel like making coffee and tea any longer. There's just one or two people showing up downstairs.”

Sue flopped back on the couch, and for a moment her defenses were down and so was the chain mail armor. I could hear it in the quiet texture of her voice—a relaxed and oddly confused Sue, who seemed to be wondering how things could turn out this way. “We depend on that income.”

I shrugged. “This is supposed to be a quiet place, but Mike's screaming or fighting half the time.” I was thinking that I had meant it about dropping the coffee and tea in the morning. Up until a few months ago, I had enjoyed the early routine— getting up at five or five-thirty, straightening up the barroom and kitchen, making a couple of pots of fresh coffee, putting hot water on, baking muffins. The guests would start trickling down around six, and within a half hour we'd all be chattering together
around the big table in the barroom. A good gang who enjoyed each other—Rick, Phyllis, Ralph, Theresa, and others who came and went for short periods—getting ready for work or school, bantering, watching the news, going outside to warm up the car, and then dashing in for a cup of hot chocolate to go and a shouted good-bye. Sue would usually come downstairs, too, sleepy and tousle-headed, starting her day wanting to touch base, listen to a couple of stories, and joke. But this morning there was only Ralph, reading the paper and rolling his eyes at the ceiling, where somewhere above him Mike was yelling, and Sue had started having her coffee in her room.

Sue shook her head. “How do normal people handle a child like Mike?”

“ ‘Normal people'?”

She laughed at our old joke. Normal people were people who stayed with the same job for thirty years. They didn't build their own house on top of a mountain or then, in late middle age, buy a monster that had to be completely redone. Instead, they bought a raised ranch in a development and stayed with it until retirement. Normal people had two little pampered children instead of six self-willed little characters. Normal people didn't cut wood; they burned fuel oil. In normal families men watched football on Sundays, while I wasn't even sure how many men were on a football team and usually read or napped or took a walk in the woods after church on Sunday, or perhaps had to pack a bag and drive to the airport to catch a flight somewhere. You know—normal people. They were a strange race, and from our view—outside looking in—seemed to live extraordinarily orderly lives without much upset or angst. Normal people.