Absolute Brightness (2 page)

Arrangements? Who was she kidding?

Because we didn't have a spare bedroom in our house and because both Deirdre and I had adamantly refused to give up our rooms to a total stranger, we were forced by my mother to spend the afternoon creating a suitable living space for Leonard down in the basement. We broke our backs clearing an area against one of the cinder-block walls and then stacking boxes five high to create a cozy cardboard corral just large enough to fit a twin bed, a small dresser, and a milk crate that was transformed into a bedside table. We found an old floor lamp down there, the kind that has several conical shades sticking out of it, and we hooked it up in case Leonard was the type of kid who read books. Mom bought a wastebasket with pictures of trains embossed into it. She placed the thing on the floor, stood back to appraise it, and then dismissed our objections by saying that we didn't know bubkes about what a boy likes. Judging from the look of the wastebasket, she didn't either, but we gave up arguing. To give the illusion of a doorway, we left an opening between two stacks of boxes; and then in a tragic attempt to provide the suggestion of privacy, Mom tacked up a piece of blue billowy fabric over the opening.

The fact that I ended up straining my back and having a bad attitude about our guest before he set foot on our property made no difference to my mother. When I complained about having to do all the heavy lifting, she said, “Well, having a boy around the house will change all that.” She turned her back on me and continued to tape up a few tattered Sierra Club posters that had been rolled up and lying around forever. This was another one of her brilliant ideas. She said the posters would be like windows that looked out onto vistas more breathtaking and awe-inspiring than anything Leonard would be likely to find in Neptune, New Jersey. Her choice of views included the wide-open wilderness of Yosemite National Park, the moon rising over Massanutten Mountain in Shenandoah National Park, and an uninviting stretch of Arctic tundra that looked a little too frozen to be anything other than deadly. I refused to be impressed by any of it, mostly because the whole
arrangement
was the most obvious desecration of the memory of my dead grandmother.

Allow me to explain.

After my nana Hertle died, no one knew what to do with her stuff. The furniture was too good to put out on the street but not fine or fancy enough to sell for a profit on eBay. Her clothes were exceptional only because they had belonged to her; her knickknacks, potholders, inspirational books, crocheted vests, tam-o'-shanters, collection of cocktail swizzle sticks, Ouija board, yoga mat, and electric juicer continued to sit there in her apartment gathering dust from one month to the next. My father still lived with us back then, and all the signs were that he was depressed. Who could blame him? His only mother had just died, and whenever someone (i.e., Mom) suggested that he drive over to Nana Hertle's place and box up her belongings, he claimed that it was too much for him. His short-term solution was to go to work, come home, watch TV game shows, and pay the rent on Nana's apartment.

But paying rent on a dead person's apartment was, in my mother's estimation, the same as throwing money out the window. So one day, without any warning, she drove over to Nana's apartment, dragged all the furniture out onto the curb, priced everything, sold most of it, and what she couldn't sell she boxed up and moved into our basement. The empty apartment was then sublet to a Polish couple with a newborn baby, and that was that.

I was only eleven when Nana died, so I wasn't expected to figure out stuff like this; but then no one else in my family did anything about it either. As a result, the boxes just sat there, sagging, molding at the edges, and smelling slightly of mildew. I think Mom was proud of herself for finally putting those boxes to good use while at the same time solving the problem of where Leonard was going to sleep. She kept repeating over and over that Leonard was going to love it, really love it.

For the next few days Deirdre and I lived in a state of suspended disbelief. Everything went on as it always had, and we tried not to think about the fact that life as we had known it was about to end. No one mentioned that a stranger, a boy, an uninvited guest was about to take up residence in our home, and no one uttered his name. We just went about our business. Looking back on it now, however, I realize that even if we had been ready to receive the imagined Leonard Pelkey into our midst with open arms, we still wouldn't have been prepared for the shock of that almost-fourteen-year-old boy who stood in our living room that first day.

Leonard was wearing capri pants (pink and lime-green plaid) and a too-small T-shirt, which exposed his midriff. He wore a pair of shoes that were more like sandals set atop a pair of two-inch wooden platforms. Both ears were pierced, though only one chip of pale blue glinted from his left lobe. He carried what looked like a flight attendant's overnight flight bag from the 1960s: The strap was hitched over his shoulder, lady style.

“Ciao,” he said to me as he smiled and held out his hand.

I took hold of his delicate fingers and gave them a quick shake, while internally rolling my eyes. He was way too different. Don't get me wrong. I like different. I am different. But when different goes too far, it stops being a statement and just becomes weird. I made up my mind right then and there that he and I would not be getting that close, and as a way of making my point, I turned on my heel and got out of there as fast as I could without knocking anything over.

From the dining room I could watch Leonard's reflection in the large gilt mirror that hung over the sofa on the far wall. He didn't see me, not at first; he was too busy entertaining my mother, telling her stories about his journey, talking about what he had eaten on the plane, who he'd spoken to, pulling out the contents of his flight bag and then explaining where he got everything, including the bag itself. I thought he'd never shut up.

“They gave me the bag on the plane because the air hostess said I was the most entertaining young person she'd met in a long while. It's vintage. I told her if she was any nicer, I'd have to do my Julie Andrews impression for her. She was, like, Who's Julie Andrews? I was, like, Are you kidding me?”

I was not in the least interested in what he was packing or what impressions he could pull off, but I was certainly intrigued by his appearance. He was like a visual code that was at once both a no-brainer to figure out and impossible to decipher. I mean, it wasn't just the fact that he was obviously gay. Please, I've watched enough TV to not be shocked by swish behavior. But there was something about Leonard that seemed to invite ridicule. Like he was saying, Go on, I dare you, say something, mention the obvious. The incredible thing was that no one said a word. Not Deirdre. Not Mom. And since I was out of the room, not me.

Leonard had a narrow face with plain Midwestern features. His mouth was tiny and unremarkable except for the fact that it was always in motion. A few freckles dotted the bridge of his nose and looked like they had been painted on for a musical performance in which he was to play a hillbilly. If it hadn't been for his eyes, two green pinpoints of flickering intensity, you might have missed him entirely. They were so bright, they made his whole head seem bright and biggish, sitting atop a narrow set of shoulders. His eyes were what held him in place, as if the sharpness of his gaze made him appear more visible to others, more present. The way those eyes could dart about the room and flit from surface to surface made it seem as though his life had depended upon his ability to take in every single detail, assess every stitch of your outfit, calculate the distance to each exit and the time it would take to get there. He did have the most adorable eyelashes I'd ever seen on a boy, long and silky and dark, but then he may have been wearing some product.

“I see you,” he said to my reflection in the mirror, which naturally made me crouch to the floor and then drag myself into the kitchen.

I had to warn my mother. I felt it was my duty to tell her that I had a very bad feeling, the same feeling I'd had a few years ago when Dad took up with Chrissie Bettinger, an event that of course led to my parents' divorce and to the subsequent destruction of our entire family. Nana Hertle always tried to convince me that I possessed psychic abilities. I told her I didn't believe in such things. But when I realized that I might have prevented my father from running off if only I had heeded my nagging premonitions, I began to wonder whether perhaps I did have a special power to foretell the future after all. If only I had said something at the time. So just to be on the safe side, after Leonard was settled into his makeshift basement bedroom and out of earshot, and Mom was back upstairs in the kitchen, I grabbed her arm and said, “Can't you see it? He's like a freak of nature. He's from another planet. I mean, what's he wearing on his feet?”

“Phoebe, let go of my arm,” she said, narrowing her eyes and putting on a very cool voice. “They're a kind of sandal. I think they call them huaraches. And you don't know. Maybe they're popular with the boys where he comes from.”

“Where? On Mars?”

My mother said I was pure evil and she refused to listen to another word. To get me out of her sight, she instructed me to deliver a handful of fresh towels to Leonard.

He was lying on his new bed in his basement lair. The aforementioned huaraches were kicked off, and he was gazing up at the system of pipes and wires suspended from the rafters as though he were looking at a field of shimmering stars on a summer night.

“So cool. Right? I'm going to call it ‘my boxed set.' Get it? Boxed. Set.”

“Yeah,” I said without the slightest inflection. “I get it.”

“It's neato.”

I felt I ought to explain to Leonard why “neato” was a word he needed to drop from his vocabulary. If he expected to make friends during his stay in Neptune, I told him, he couldn't talk like that. He just stared at me like I had something stuck to my face.

Finally I said, “What?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering if you've considered a career in television news broadcasting. You have the ‘on-air' face for it. Not exactly the hair, but definitely the face.”

I couldn't believe my ears. He had puffed up his pathetic chest while making his brilliant diagnosis, as if to make himself appear larger or more important. But he had the puny rib cage of a kid who had survived early illness. If I had had the presence of mind, I would have responded right away by saying something brutally frank. I might have explained to him why I would never in a million years consider handing out bad news on a daily basis to an unsuspecting nation while wearing a cheerful face, a plunging neckline, and a dated hairstyle. It was a hideous idea. The fact that my hair color at the time was magenta and my left nostril was pierced with a garnet should have convinced anyone with eyesight and half a brain that I had plans, and those plans did not include an “on-air” face.

But Leonard had just arrived from Mars, so perhaps he didn't understand the signals, customs, and facial expressions of the inhabitants of planet Earth. I decided to let it go. I opted instead to stomp up the stairs and in so doing express my impatience with the whole conversation. At the same time, I could get as far away from him as I could manage in a house so small and cramped. I slammed the door and retired to my room to read
Madame Bovary
. As Emma Bovary went careening around the streets of Rouen in the back of a closed carriage, making mad and passionate love to Monsieur Léon, I silently made a vow to myself never to speak to Leonard again, because as anyone could see, he was a loser.

 

two

OUR FIRST MEAL
together was a form of early-twenty-first-century torture. Over spaghetti and meatballs, Leonard tried to figure out the situation between my parents. Why were they no longer together? Where was Dad living now that they had separated? What happened to make him leave? Was it actually a divorce? Were they planning to get back together? Mom tried to deflect each one of Leonard's questions.

“He's a missing person.”

“Don't ask.”

“Could we change the subject?”

“More meatballs?”

“Enough.”

When Leonard persisted, she decided to take another tack.

“You know the way a snail abandons its shell?” she said, spooning a second helping onto Leonard's plate whether he liked it or not. “Well, that's your uncle. Only he moved way faster than a snail. And he wasn't alone.”

Whenever Mom talked about my father, she never mentioned the word “divorce”; it was against her Catholic religion. But then, it wasn't her style to say much about anything—for example, she didn't go around explaining to people why Chrissie Bettinger, a girl whom she had given every opportunity and had housed under her own roof, ran off with her husband. Not that she had to explain a thing to the folks in Neptune; everyone knew the whole story.

For a while, Mom was big news and the regular customers of Hair Today salon were privy to a ready supply of fresh details about the breakup. But even after all the screaming and the fighting, after that morning when we woke to find all of Dad's belongings sitting in a pile out on the front lawn, after all the lawyers had served the legal papers and the whole thing was officially over, Mom fought against the idea that she was the type of person who could get a divorce. If asked, she said she was “separated.” She once told Deirdre and me that if word got out about the divorce, it would ruin her as a hair stylist. But really, word was out, and she was in denial.

There are photographs of my mother from when she was a younger version of herself, and no matter what was going on, she always managed to smile for the camera. She smiled as she entered the room with the knotty-pine paneling; she smiled as she looked adoringly at her father, who was holding up a raw steak and wearing a
KISS THE COOK
apron; she smiled when she was caught with pink curlers in her blue-black hair and not a hint of makeup; she smiled in her wedding dress standing against an obviously fake autumnal backdrop; she smiled as she pointed to the Motel 6 outside Phoenix where she and Dad stayed on a cross-country road trip; and she smiled as she sat by the ocean with pint-size versions of me and Deirdre playing in the background.