Calling Home (5 page)

I couldn't open my side of the car, so I crawled across the front seat and got out on the driver's side. My father hurried ahead, and I followed him, wondering if the car would be stolen. “I forgot to lock the car,” I said at last.

“Forget it.”

“There are thieves all over this town.”

“Forget it. They steal the car, we'll call the place I rented it from.”

We entered the restaurant. It was warm inside, and the lights were comfortably dim. My father strode across the room and chose a booth with large, plastic-upholstered seats. I slid into mine. My father opened a menu with a flick of his wrist. I had not seen him in years, and I was fascinated to look at him, although I could not simply sit and stare at him like he was a television. I looked sideways at him, and every time he looked down, or looked away, I looked at him carefully to see what he looked like, and to see how much he had changed. He was not as blond as I am, and not as muscular, and his hair had receded above his temples.

He looked handsome, in a thin, beat-up way, but he did not have a face that was easy to look at. He was quick, and his eyes went here and there, and he made a person feel that he was friendly, but in a hurry. He also made a person feel that he could get very angry in about two seconds.

“Slow service,” he said.

I nodded.

“Grown-up, practically.”

I made the same blank expression I make every time an older person states the obvious.

“What do you want? Here's a menu. Take your pick. I feel like a steak.”

We ordered New York steaks, both rare. As soon as the waitress, who had hair piled up nearly to the ceiling, had tucked her pencil into her bib and minced away, my father slid his water glass slightly away from him and said, “I'm here to talk about something fairly serious.”

I toyed with a fork and put it down.

“It's something I've been thinking about. And it's something your mother has been thinking about.”

I waited.

“I might as well plow right ahead, right?”

I tried to say “right.”

“How would you like to come live with me?”

I clasped my hands together to keep them from trembling, but I couldn't control them.

“I know this is sudden, but the situation is this. Now, you don't have to say yea or nay right now, but the situation is this: you and your mother don't get along. Correct?”

“We get along okay.”

“You have trouble getting along with her—which I can understand perfectly well—and like anyone your age, you could use a change of scenery.”

“I get along with her. There's no problem.”

“She says there's been a problem.”

I felt betrayed. I did not look at my father. I felt a tine on the fork like I was checking it for sharpness, a field tester the fork companies send out to check up on the quality of their products. “Sometimes we have arguments,” I said finally.

“Of course you do. Lord, I had arguments with her, too. It's not a big deal.”

“But we get along okay, basically.”

“She says you stay out till all hours and come back like you've been drinking.”

“That's not true. She just wants to get rid of me so she can carry on with her Ivy League boyfriends. She has them all wowed, and then they drop by and there I am, all imperfect and abnormal. It embarrasses her and makes her think of some way she can get rid of me and start all over.”

His face tightened like a hard fist, and I knew he didn't like to hear me talking about my mother that way, even if he didn't like her himself. He relaxed, though, and looked down in a way that made me stop talking. He nodded. “Sure. What you say is probably true. But there's more to it than that.”

“I don't know,” I said, feeling sullen, and wanting to be somewhere else, away from adults with their wooden, creaking plans for other people's lives, and yet, at the same time, not wanting to feel sullen, wanting to appreciate my father and enjoy his company, and also wanting him to think that I was a mature, sophisticated person, not some foul-tempered delinquent.

“She says you threw a jar of mustard at her.”

My mouth hung open all by itself.

“That's what she says,” he added, looking up at me like he was trying to read my mind.

“A jar of mustard.”

“She says you yell at her, and that she has no control over you, and that she is afraid of you.”

“A jar of mustard,” was all I could say.

“She says your grades stink.”

“That's not true,” I blurted, and then I sank back. I didn't want to lie right then, and I clasped my hands like I was getting ready to pray. “Actually, my grades haven't been all that good.” Excellent excuses bobbed into my mind: idiot teachers, thumb-worn books, doodled and defaced by decades of bored juniors, dull, itching, pimple-picking fellow students. But I didn't want my father to see me making excuses, either, so I moved the saltshaker a little closer to me and didn't say anything.

“So, to make a long story short, there are problems. Right?”

Neither of us said anything. He wanted me to agree with him, but I felt like my mother had complained about me to a higher power, and I hated her for it. I stared through my reflection in the window and watched the headlights and taillights glide by outside. They look comforting, cars do, at night when a person looks out at them and watches them go by, silent and pretty, like something that isn't really there, an illusion of other people living simple, quiet lives.

“The situation is that you don't have to decide anything right now.”

“It wasn't a jar of mustard.”

He didn't say anything.

“It was not a jar of mustard. You believe anything she tells you, don't you.” I suddenly had tears, and I couldn't talk, and I felt humiliated that my father was seeing me with tears on my face. I gripped myself hard.

“Tell me what happened.” His voice was soft for the first time, and I hated him for caring.

“It wasn't a jar. You picture one of those fat jars made of glass hurtling through the air exploding against the wall, almost killing my mother.”

He watched me.

“Isn't that what you picture?”

He looked thoughtful for a second. “Something like that.”

“That's not what it was. It was a plastic squeeze tube. One of those cylinders with a nozzle that you stand on a table when people eat hot dogs.”

“You threw it at her.”

“Yes, but it wouldn't have hurt her anyway, and I missed. She got one little speck of mustard on her eyebrow. Just one. That's all. She said I was a homosexual. Just dropped it out. It was the end of a long argument about her not having a job. I said she could get one if she really wanted one.”

My father held up a hand like he didn't really want to hear the entire argument verbatim. He rubbed his temple with his finger. He held out his fingers like they were needed to help the words get to me. “You give me mixed messages. You get along, you don't get along. You do well at school, you don't do well. And do you know what? I don't care.”

I waited.

“I don't care,” he continued, “because all I am looking for is a good excuse to have you come live with me. I want you around. I want you to be a part of my life. You're almost a man. I want to see more of you.”

The words made his face change color, a pale, lunar white with specks of pink, and I saw that he cared for me very deeply. I resented his caring, but I also felt pleased that he was paying so much attention to me. I also realized that he was serious. He wanted me to live with him.

“I'm doing pretty well. I design safety devices for airplanes. Ejection seats, things like that. I have a nice house in Newport Beach. You can walk to the ocean. It's not a ratty city like this hellhole.”

I opened my mouth to say that Oakland wasn't such a bad city, but I shut it again.

“You would like it there. I wish I'd grown up there instead of that stupid apartment off Fruitvale. I have some money, Peter. Not tons of it, but enough so that, for the first time in my life, I can really help you. If you get your schoolwork in order, you can go to college. I can afford any school you want. I feel like I owe it to you.”

“I'll be a senior.”

“I know. You don't want to leave and take up another life right now. I appreciate that.”

I nodded dumbly. He wasn't understanding what I was thinking, though. I wasn't really thinking anything. I was numb. His caring for me seemed like such a waste on his part. I felt sorry for him.

“The situation is this: I want you to fly down and visit me in a couple of weeks. Just walk around, see what the town looks like, just spend a weekend doing not much of anything.”

I looked at my swollen, goofy reflection in the spoon.

“I'll send you a ticket. What do you think? Can't hurt to pay a visit, can it?”

The steaks came after a while, my father looking over his shoulder to see why things were taking so long, talking about airplanes and Chinese tungsten and drumming his fingers on the table like the world would be a lot better if he could run it and get things done on time.

When I put my hand on the door knob, my hand was trembling, and so cold the brass knob felt warm. I let the door close behind me softly, and I let the darkness of the stairs take me in like I was made of sugar and I was slowly dissolving.

“Did you have a nice time?”

I felt the banister. “It was all right.”

My mother leaned in the doorway of her bedroom. The light was behind her; I could not see her face. “Nice of him to come see you,” she said, sarcastically but in a voice so smooth you would have to know her to understand what she meant. “He's a success now. Isn't that a wonderful thing?”

“He's not so successful. His clothes are too big for him.”

“So are you. He's wasting his time with you. You ought to be put to sleep.”

“Thanks.”

She sighed, and it was as though all the misery of all the times, everywhere, stood there in the doorway wearing a blue bathrobe. “Oh, Peter. You know I don't mean that. You're just so much trouble, that's all. And I worry about you.”

“You lied to him.”

“Oh?”

“You told him I tried to kill you.”

“What?”

“With a jar of mustard.”

She laughed.

I locked my bedroom door, and sat on my bed. I wished Lani was there to talk to, but all I had was half a bottle of Cream Sherry, really terrible, sweet-sick brake fluid.

I could, I knew, kill myself. This was a very real thought. It seemed like a logical alternate route. But as long as Mead's parents thought Mead was alive, it was almost like having Mead alive and well, happy somewhere.

I practiced his voice. “Hello, Mother …”

And I shivered. I felt like Mead. I felt clever, and quick.

I wept, calling Mead's name.

7

Walking in the darkness, the body feels alive, but as it approaches the well-lit place, it begins to change; it slows and thickens and stops. The body stands for a long time, as if it never has to go anywhere ever again, and it doesn't, really, because now it is not a living body, but something else. No one can see. No one sees the important, obvious thing standing in the dark beside a hedge.

Then the transformation. The arm lifts, falls. The rot-wet lungs inhale. The dead guts grumble and the foot goes forward to the place on the sidewalk where the light just begins. Blood rises into the tissues that have not tasted blood since the terrible change and they warm and swell, and feeling wends along the nerves invisibly, like massive amps along a frayed cable.

And by the time the first number is touched, the change is complete, and the tongue is poised, the ears alive with the electric tones the finger makes on the face of the telephone.

The phone rings. It is like the first sound ever made in the world, a dry purr that lasts just long enough for a heartbeat, a soft noise, but metallic, too, the love coo of an old robot.

It rings once.

Only once. The phone is answered quickly, and the woman's voice says, “Hello?”

Her voice is different this time. More afraid, and more hopeful. “Hello?” she repeats. “Mead, is that you?”

“Mother. Yes, it's me.”

And it is Mead. It is Mead, standing at the telephone in the dark, listening to his mother's sobs. “Mead,” she says. “Where are you?”

“Don't worry, Mother. Please—don't worry. I'm all right.”

The streetlight barely ignites the darkness. Blue-white smears the dark at the end of the street where a gas station is still open, a twenty-four-hour station with a man in a glass booth, waiting.

A car door opens, too quietly. A head leans, and a voice asks, “What are you doing walking around in the middle of nowhere?”

Nothing makes any sense. I am not Mead, but I am not anyone else, either.

“Are you all right?”

The voice answers. “Sure. Of course I'm all right.”

“Get in. We can drive up into the hills and look at the view.”

“That's a good idea.”

“Come on, get in. Don't just stand there like a zombie.”

I don't move, my body not quite mine.

Angela drove up Lake Boulevard, across the Warren Freeway, into the hills. The spice of eucalyptus was everywhere. The tires crushed leaves and seedbells under its tires. The air had the taste of delicious medicine.

“Who were you calling?” she asked at last.

“Calling?”

“You were on that pay phone.”

“Really?”

“Of course. That one beside the insurance company?”

“I was calling no one.”

“How do you do that?”

“I was calling up Time. You know, that voice that tells you what time it is. I don't carry a watch.”

But the truth was—as soon as I had made one of those calls, I tried to forget about it. The few moments in which I became Mead frightened me, and I wanted to deny that they had ever happened.