A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (2 page)

TWO

My room is in the attic. It took years and many battles, but eventually my parents agreed to let me move up here. We were a “family-bed” family. I slept with my parents until I was almost three, and by then Jake was in the bed too. It kind of makes you wonder when they even had time to make Jake. Gross. Okay, moving on…So I guess the attic just seemed too far away to my parents. But I think what finally made them give in had nothing to do with family bonding; rather, it was my passion for Eminem. They can’t seem to hear the cleverness or the irony in his music; they can’t even call it music. They just call it noise—misogynistic, homophobic, racist noise—and thus we find ourselves locked in the archetypal battle of the generations. (Can’t you tell I’ve been studying up on my SAT words?) They somehow managed to survive the Backstreet Boys with little to no complaint, but Eminem just makes them crazy, and now I live in the attic.

I’m sitting on my bed doing my calculus homework when there’s a knock on the door.

“I come bearing Fruit-n-Freeze. Coconut or lime?” Jake calls as he starts up the staircase.

He sits on the edge of my bed and holds out both bars.

“Which one do you want?” I ask him.

He glances back and forth. “Lime.”

“Great,” I say. “I’ll take the lime.”

He hands it to me and smiles. “Just so we’re clear here: I really wanted the coconut.”

I know he’s come up here to make me feel better, and if he were a different kid or maybe a girl he’d probably try to talk about what happened at the dinner table, but for right now I’m so grateful that he’s just Jake and that I can count on him to sit here and talk about anything
but
what happened at the dinner table.

“Your feet reek.”

“Yeah,” he says. He looks at them proudly and picks a piece of lint out of the tangle of blond hair on his big toe. He flicks it onto my bed. We sit eating our melting Fruit-n-Freezes. One thing about living in the attic is that it’s seriously hot up here. Even in September.

“Are you going to the party at Darius’s on Saturday?” he asks.

“How do you even know about that?” This doesn’t square with what I imagined it would be like to have Jake in high school with me. He’s not supposed to know about parties happening at the house of a senior. And even though I always went to senior parties when I was a freshman, I’m taken by surprise. Jake is a
boy,
and freshman boys go to freshmen-only parties. Lucky for them they all grow up to be seniors.

“I just heard about it. You know. Around school. Are you going?”

“I don’t know,” I say, even though Cleo has talked about nothing but this party all week. She fooled around with Darius at the very end of last year. She doesn’t consider his not calling her or even talking to her on the last few days of school blowing her off because summer vacation was coming up and apparently there’s some special dispensation awarded to guys who act like dicks right before summer vacation.

“Look, Jake, I’ve got to finish my homework. Thanks for the Fruit-n-Freeze. You’re a prince.”

“Can I bring my homework up here?” There’s an armchair under the dormer window, with a trunk that serves as a coffee table. He nods in its direction.

“Sure.”

We sit in silence for the rest of the night doing our math problems with Coldplay’s
A Rush of Blood to the Head
playing quietly on the CD player and the smell of Jake’s feet wafting over us. I manage to avoid seeing Mom or Dad again until morning.

Friday rolls around, and the week has gone by without another mention of Rivka. Maybe I’m in the clear. Maybe I can will it or her or whatever this is to go away. When it starts to creep into my consciousness, I think of the vast ocean or the solitary tree stripped down to just its trunk—like meditating. Om. Om. See? Okay, I’m not naive. I don’t think that I suddenly have hyper-Buddha powers that can banish my unpleasant thoughts and even the thoughts of others. I know Mom and Dad haven’t dropped it. They’re just giving it time. But sure enough, it comes up again on Friday night at the dinner table.

We’re eating early because like I said it’s Friday night and I’m seeing a movie with Cleo, James, Henry, and Ivy. It starts in an hour. So at least I have a built-in escape strategy.

This time I decide I can’t just storm out of the room. I need to make my case.

“Look. You guys know my position on this. I just don’t want to know anything. And it’s not because I’m running from something; it’s because I don’t care. You may think that I have some gaping hole in me or whatever your touchy-feely parenting books tell you, but I don’t feel like I’m missing something and I don’t have a longing or whatever and I just wish you would drop this.” I can’t believe it, but I feel my throat constricting and my eyes burning. I think I’m fighting off tears.

“Oh, honey.” Mom lets out a sigh. Now she’s annoying the crap out of me. “Whatever you decide is fine with us, you know that. We don’t want to force you into anything. It’s just that Rivka—”

“Will you just stop it! Jesus Christ!” I push my plate away from me and throw my napkin on top of it. “Can’t you just leave me alone?” I’m shouting now. I know I seem irrational.

Dad and Mom exchange glances. I’ve lived with them long enough to read their unspoken language. They’ve decided to let it go tonight—both the topic and my outburst. There’s an awkward silence.

Dad clears his throat. “So you guys,” he says, “don’t forget about the membership drive tomorrow.”

Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent the better years of my youth at the local organic market trying to guilt shoppers into joining the American Civil Liberties Union. Mom has been on staff at the ACLU for twenty years. It was her first job out of law school, and now she’s the legal director. Can you imagine going to the same office every day for twenty years? And she’s still in the windowless nine-by-twelve room that she was first assigned. She thinks it’s cozy.

Twice a year they have membership drives, and Dad and Jake and I are all called into service. The truth is I actually like doing it because I can get into some pretty heated arguments with opinionated shoppers, and the older I get the more skilled I am at arguing the need for things I believe in, like freedom of speech, women’s choice, and gay rights. And also, I have to admit, even though right now I feel like strangling her, I’m proud of my mom.

“I’ll be there,” I say, “but for now I must say goodbye and good night.”

I stand up.

“Wait,” says Dad. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” He gestures to his cheek. I roll my eyes and look over at Mom. I can’t make a clean getaway without kissing them both. This isn’t typical. They don’t demand kisses anymore. But I know they feel sorry for me.

I kind of groan and quickly kiss Mom and then go over to Dad. He slips me twenty bucks. On the other hand, I decide, being pitied does have its upside.

The movie, by the way, totally sucks. And that says a lot about how bad it is because I’m not the most discriminating moviegoer. I like everything—sappy over-the-top dramas, gross-out comedies, pretentious art-house films that we have to take a trip into the city to see, and even gory slasher flicks. But this one took a battering ram to my low expectations, and I won’t bore you with the details.

The theater is on Highway 33 a couple of miles out of town. Roxie’s Diner is across the road and there’s a fish market next door, which always struck me as an odd location for a fish market because you’d really have to want some fish to make the drive out here. The diner makes sense. See a movie, eat a burger with fries and a milk shake. But see a movie, buy a piece of fresh-frozen Icelandic cod? That I don’t really understand.

After the movie we leave our cars in the parking lot and walk up the road a little way to a huge cornfield. I don’t live in the boondocks, even though I know this is how it’s starting to sound. We’re only a thirty-minute drive from Boston, and as I mentioned, our town has an organic market. We also have a Starbucks, a chain bagel store, and even a fancy Asian fusion restaurant that charges twelve dollars for a spring roll.

We push our way through the stalks, which are fairly high this late in September, and find the clearing that’s been our late-summer-early-fall after-movie hangout for the past few years. It’s sort of chilly, and James is kind enough to lend me his flannel shirt.

I lie down on my back and look up at the stars. Cleo lights a cigarette. James lights a joint. Just so you know, this is
not
where this story becomes a morality tale about teen smoking or drug use. For the record, I think smoking is nasty, and I tell Cleo this all the time. She doesn’t really smoke that much. She would never light a cigarette in the morning or even in the middle of the day. Cleo only smokes at night when she’s hanging out with friends at parties or in cornfields. As for the joint, I don’t smoke pot, and it isn’t because I’m a prude or because I’m judgmental or because I choose to “just say no.” It’s not because I’m afraid of disappointing my parents, because I’ve a pretty strong hunch that they smoked a lot of it in their pasts. Who knows, maybe they still do. No, I don’t smoke pot because I’ve found it to be an extremely unpleasant experience. It immediately sends me into the recesses of my own head: I can’t hold up my end of any conversation, and I fixate on things I would rather leave alone. But I have to admit I kind of like the smell and the silly side it brings out in these friends of mine.

Cleo and I met Ivy in first grade on the handball court during recess. She had a mean serve and braids down to her butt. We let James and Henry into our little circle in third grade because James was the skinny wimpy boy and Henry was the fat boy and none of the other boys seemed to want to play with either of them. The five of us became inseparable.

So much has changed since then, small changes like how Ivy’s talent turned out to be acting, not handball, and how she replaced her braids with a three-inch crew cut. And how Henry grew out of his baby fat, and now the boys who used to tease him take orders from him because he’s captain of the basketball team. Of course there have been bigger changes too, to all of us, complicated changes, far too many to mention. Now we all have our own lives and we aren’t inseparable anymore, but we still enjoy going to the movies, gossiping about everyone else at school, the occasional joint, and hanging out in the cornfield.

“So, Cleavage”—this is Henry’s new nickname for Cleo—“what’s up with Darius? Has he weighed in on your weighty new friends?” Henry gestures to Cleo’s boobs, which she’s exhibiting proudly tonight in a T-shirt she should have retired even before this summer’s growth spurt.

Ivy takes a long drag from the joint. “You’re such a child, Henry.”

“I kind of feel like touching them. Can I?” James leans in as if to make a grab. Now, I know that makes him sound like a big perv, but like I said, we’ve been friends since third grade, and besides, we all know that James is gay.

“Go for it.” Cleo leans forward. He sort of pokes one and then quickly pulls his hand away. “Yep, they’re the real thing.”

Cleo makes a slight readjustment. “Like you would know.”

“Hey, what about my turn?” Henry reaches over.

“Go fondle your own boobs.”

Everyone laughs. Ivy lies down next to me and puts her head in Henry’s lap.

“We’re smart people, right?” Ivy asks. “Well then, tell me, geniuses, why is it that we didn’t think of smoking this joint
before
the movie?”

Aside from the sound of my friends’ voices and the occasional car passing out on Highway 33 and the rustling of the cornstalks in the autumn breeze, it’s stone quiet out here. There’s a blanket of stars in the sky. There’s no moon to speak of. I feel sheltered, protected, safe. I’m sitting in this cocoon in the middle of a cornfield on the outskirts of a town I’ve lived in since birth with a group of friends I’ve known forever, and yet when James points out that I’m quiet tonight and asks if everything is okay, I just say that I’m tired and that I think I need to go home.

Cleo is spending the night. Lucky for us my parents are asleep, because she reeks of smoke and is still a little high. As is the rule in our house, I tiptoe into their room and whisper that I’m home. I always stand outside their bedroom door for at least a full two minutes listening with almost superhuman strength for the slightest rustle of the sheets or any sound that might indicate that they’re engaged in…well, you know. See, I can’t even bring myself to say it. I’m far more terrified of discovering my parents mid-act than I am of being busted for drinking.

Mom turns over and mumbles, “Hi, sweets. Give me a kiss.”

I know this routine. I’m no fool. I lean in, and she takes a long, deep, and noisy sniff of me. She rolls back over. I’m clean.

She lets out a yawn. “Night-night.” She’s asleep again before I shut the door behind me.

Cleo and Jake are both in the bathroom brushing their teeth. He’s like a little brother to her too. She’s known him since he was born, and she’s an only child, unless you count her dad’s new kids in Scottsdale, which Cleo most definitely does not. In fact, she pretends that she can’t remember their names, which for the record are Carly and Craig. I think Jake has always been kind of in love with Cleo, and that might freak someone else out, but I think it’s sweet.