And Then Things Fall Apart (18 page)

Now, normally I hate the word “supper.” It seems like a word a toddler would make up because she couldn't say the word “dinner.” I also have issues with the words “knapsack” (why not backpack?) and “poncho” (you have to move your mouth too much to say it). But I didn't have the piss and vinegar needed to quibble with Gram about words when she was being so respectful about what was a very delicate situation.

As much as I do not know the precise ingredients in Spam, I also did not know if I was in trouble. Gram was acting all normal, but sly like the fox when the gingerbread man is on his snout.

Besides, why the hell would I be in trouble? I didn't break any laws. We weren't even doing it, weren't even that close. Then why did I feel so guilty? Then my gram, who I have decided is my new favorite person, said, “Wow. That Matt is cute.” Which is so not what any teenager would actually say in a million years, but I appreciated her trying.

“I know. I think I love him a little, Gram, I really do,” I said, because I wanted to share him, at least a little, with someone, and I guess the someone was going to be Gram.

I thought that she was going to hug me and say, “Oh, dahling, that's whundaful!” like Bette Davis, her eyes all shimmery, and then light up a Winston and sit down
to supper. Well, she did light a cigarette. She slid a pan of Spam and tomato slices under the boiler, then she leaned against the stove. She inhaled, thinking, exhaled, thinking and frowning, and then said:

“I'm going to say this once, so listen good. Have fun. But. Just be careful. I don't want a great-grandchild. I'm too young, for Christ's sake.” Then she poured two glasses of orange juice and pushed a plate of red, bubbly tomato and a charred pink square of Spam toward me. “And in a car? During the day?”

I stared at an empty plate on the kitchen table with a gray and pink starburst painted on it. It was easier to scrutinize dishes than look up at my grandma, because my cheeks were burning with mortification.

“Class it up, kid.”

And because I was blushing, because I was raised right, because there was a total halo of shame around my whole body, I knew she was entirely and absolutely right.

This whole heart-to-heart was before my skulking around Dad's lair. Looking back on everything, I should have said more to Gram. The timing was perfect. But real life never gets the timing right. I could have asked her about everything she knew about my parents. I wouldn't have had to see my dad's single bed or read a letter I had no business reading. I could have gone on believing that Dad was Tiger Woods and Mom was the Virgin Mary.

But Mom's not innocent by a long shot. I'm no mathematician, but looking at some of the statements, she was slowly taking money from the D&D accounts months
before
Amanda and Dad got all reckless and disgusting. Months. She'd been planning this for ages. Premeditated theft.

Then
Dad leapt into Amanda's arms and pierced navel. Because she was there, and hot. And I know from personal experience that sex or just hard-core making out is like a drug, and it can make you forget for just a short time how much life can hurt. And Dad's wife—my amazing, thieving, conniving, embezzling mother—had been leaving him slowly for months, maybe even years.

All this is too intense, like real-life-complicated-and-adult stuff.

And now I'm dizzy, remembering the night Dad moved out. Stuck on details like the shaving cream, the suitcase, Coffee. It feels like a tragedy I am reading about in a book, and also like it's happening right now. That night is
never
in the past for me. It is always happening in real time, in the present. Playing in the back of my brain on a loop.

I was standing, letting the foam slide from my skin like melted whipped cream, and then I put on a robe and went to my room.

I dragged a comb through my wet hair and lay on top of the covers. I smelled like menthol.

It was spring, a warmer night than the previous few, and raining. I listened to the drops hit the window, and I thought about nothing. My brain was in shock. Zombified. As flat and cold as porcelain.

Lightning, and thunder four, then three, then two seconds behind it.

I couldn't sleep.

After Dad left the house, gone forever, Mom stepped into my room, no knock, no nothing. She just took my hand and pulled me out of bed to the front steps of our house.

The white baselines in the baseball field across the street glowed. All summer long Little Leaguers yell “Hey battabattabatta” from nine a.m. till dusk, but that night, it was spring and storming and silent, except for the rain and the sky illuminating with whip cracks every few minutes.

Mom didn't say anything. We sat, sheltered on the concrete porch step, watching the water come down.

The electricity in the sky was amazing.

Thick veins of neon white light ricocheted across the field. The wind was soft, the drops as fat as grapes.

And it fit us—the rain, the storm, the night. We were both damp, me from my bath, Mom from her tears, and without saying a word or even looking at each other, we both stood and held hands and ran, barefoot, screaming like maniacs across the slick black pavement to the field where
we pushed our feet into the outfield grass and tossed our arms wide, spinning in circles.

We looked like happy children. We looked like Wiccan witches in our white robes, our heads thrown back to feel the rain on our faces. We looked like a mother and daughter on the eve of the Apocalypse.

It used to be an important and good memory that made me feel that it was me and Mom against the world. But after everything, in the here and now, this memory makes me feel like an accomplice. I didn't know that you could love and hate your parents totally separately
and
equally.

But you can.

And I do.

JAGGED TRAJECTORY

We share genes,
My mother and I.
Our twinned laughter chimes,
Our hair blushes pink in tandem.

The reflection stares at its source.
Distorted with lies, age,
And embezzled trusts.
You are not what you seem.

You are a selfish faux mother demanding to know
Who is the fairest?
Insisting the hunter bring back my heart.
Your integrity of convenience is useless.

Esther and me,
We two pirouette under a bell jar,
Pale ballerinas spinning in unison
Away from betrayal.

Matt and I have indeed done things for the very first time together. Intimate things. Romantic things. I'm trying to be fair. I'm trying to forgive him by remembering how amazing he can be. When someone is stabbing you in the heart, your first instinct is to grab the murderer's wrist and pull the knife out of your chest. Same as when you are betrayed/shocked by your beloved boyfriend's nonvirgin status. You just want to keep him the hell away from you and your innocent, trusting, and so-hot-for-him-it-can't-help-it body. But what do I really have to do here under the hundred-pound coverlet but think about the state of affairs (ha)? I have only been focusing on the physical stuff that we do because it is what seems to matter the most to me—right now, anyway.

Matt and I go on dates, lots of them, sometimes in groups and sometimes just us. We do so much together that we could write
The Budget Guide to Dating in Chicagoland
guidebook. We go to a lot of all-ages shows. We jump around
in the front and then go for doughnuts afterward or for sushi or Thai or Ethiopian. We go to the movies and eat popcorn with extra butter oil. We (try to) get pierced. We bake cup-cakes from box mixes and eat them while trolling YouTube for funny shit. We drive, at my insistence, to independent bookstores in Oak Park and buy books and drink coffee, and Matt wears fake hipster glasses and pretends he is as into books as I am and gives himself a white cappuccino foam mustache to make me laugh. We go to Grant Park and walk around the rose gardens and kiss during the corny light show at Buckingham Fountain. We Netflix. We Wii. He tries to put the “friend” in “boyfriend,” and I love him for it.

I also love that he drags me into the real world. I'm in my head so much that I might as well pitch a pup tent in there and stay indefinitely. Matt thinks of me as a regular girl, a regular girl with a body he wants to adore. How does one say no to that? I'm not saying he is perfect. Actually, he is quite annoying and pushy and can be a real jock asshole when he wants to be, but overall, big picture, whole package? He's mine. And deep down, in his heart of hearts, a place I think of as the chocolate chewy core of a Tootsie Pop, a place where his very personhood resides devoid of gender and hormones, etc., he honestly and truly
cares
about me.

My parents were hours away from the Great Move-Out, and although I wasn't privy to the whole business, like birds before an earthquake, I sensed that it was coming. Part of
me wanted to stay in the house, absorbing every last droplet of our family that was still under “our” roof. I wanted to clock as many hours, minutes, seconds, as I could before it all metamorphosed into the home of a broken family, a single mother and her disturbed teenage daughter.

Conversely, I also wanted to be as far away from the whole thing as possible. Weird, right? I'd bum around the hallways after school, mill around the parking lot, meet Matt for impromptu early dinners just to stay out as late as I could before dragging myself to our doorway and letting myself in. Who would be home? Would there be fighting? Noisy lovemaking? Dad packing? Mom weeping? Spin the dial. Let's see what happens. I had a recurring nightmare that I'd arrive home exhausted and homesick to find Amanda in an apron, pearls, and high heels saying, “Keek! You're just in time for
supper
!”

So the Saturday that Dad moved out, I was on the fence about going to the Art Institute with Matt. It would be a whole day away. I had begun to think of myself as my parents' babysitter. Who the hell knew what they would get up to without my constant surveillance? They might eat the poison under the sink or stick bobby pins in light sockets.

Matt's parents were museum members, so it was a cheap date and I'm into art. Who isn't? “It'll be good for you,” Matt said. “We might even have fun. I'll get you a latte in the dining room.” And he looked at me like I was a little kid whose
puppy had just gotten hit by a car and he would do anything to cheer me up.

Chicago loves tourists. There are hundreds of thousands of them at the Art Institute on any Saturday, and they all stand in front of Seurat's
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
. They take pictures of it, and then they get real close to see all the dots. And then they go to see the Renoirs, the van Goghs, the Monets, and the Picassos.

Okay, it is perhaps the most impressive art museum in the world. But when you grow up going there, the tourists from Japan and Germany and Ontario, the security guards staring you down, the art safari mentality of everyone visiting—it kind of gets on your nerves. My favorite is
Nighthawks
, the Hopper painting of the diner, because it reminds me of getting coffee at Dunkin' Donuts on Clark and Belmont with the Squirrel and Matt. I am the woman in the red dress. I love Gustave Caillebotte's
Paris Street; Rainy Day
because it is so gigantic you feel like you are on the street in Paris, and everyone seems a little depressed and has an umbrella, like they are all under their own little bell jars, and looking at it makes my heart sprout little wings. The painting is so good, it is like reading a book in one glance. So, right off the bat Matt and I went to see my two favorite paintings, and then I let him pick where he wanted to go.

That day was overcast, and the whole museum seemed melancholy. Matt and I usually talked when we were out
in the city, if not about anything important, at least about whatever was happening at the museum or bookstore or restaurant. That Saturday I didn't feel like saying anything about anything. And Matt didn't push it. We walked through the museum as solemn as undertakers, holding hands, Matt pulling me forward a little to the exhibit he wanted to see, and me just going along with it. I thought he might go all
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
and take me to the Chagall windows to make out, but he didn't. Then I thought he might take me to see the Diane Arbus photographs in the basement, but although he knows me pretty well, he is not a mind reader.

American Gothic
? Warhol's
Mao
? He took me, of course, to *trumpet fanfare* the Arthur Rubloff paperweight collection(?), which I thought was the lamest and most ridiculous idea ever and exactly the kind of jock-brained notion he would have.

The paperweights were in a small dark gallery, but each globe was a little world of sparkle flowers, each shiny and liquidy like delicious hard candies for a god from outer space. They were dazzling, reflecting off mirrored shelves. Tourists were not that into them, so it was calm and library-quiet. Matt and I had decided not to talk at all by that point and instead mimed our delight and interest with wide eyes and broad head nods. We held hands tightly as we peered at a whole series of coiled snake paperweights, which were
miraculous. Green snakes, black-and-yellow-striped snakes on gravel, totally realistic and creepy.

According to the wall copy, glass paperweights became popular in the 1800s when the postal service got dependable and everyone started writing letters like crazy. People needed the weights to keep their papers together. I could so use one now to keep
my
pages together. Funny how my life is.

So there we were, holding hands, looking at these paperweights, and I wasn't thinking of anything in particular, just staring at the beautiful objects, when suddenly Matt was wiping my face with his hands and flicking tears from my cheeks with his long wrestler-calloused fingers.