Good Kids: A Novel (2 page)

The kente cloths lifted slightly when a brisk walker passed by. I knew from the acknowledgment of Kwanzaa at school that the cloths were used for sacred rites, by the Akan people.

“I wouldn’t want to kiss that beard,” Khadijah said, her face pressed against her legs.

“Your mom dresses Republican,” I responded. “That’s one of those lady blazers.”

“Your dad dresses like a homeless person.” She was actually sobbing now. “He’s in public but he’s wearing sweatpants.”

“Don’t cry,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.” It was something I had learned to say from movies, but I meant it.

Khadijah was always pretty, but crying, she was so beautiful my face was going to burn off. I found the discovery that tears enhanced beauty nearly as disorienting as everything else that was going on. At any rate, I realized it might be acceptable to reach out and touch Khadijah, now that I had told her not to cry. I laid my hand on her head. When she didn’t object I stroked her hair slowly. I liked the feeling of doing this too much to stop.

She jerked her head back. “I think that maybe I should tell my dad and you should tell your mom.”

“That’s out of line. It’s kissing.”

“True.” She thought for a moment, calmer now. “Whatever they’re doing, if we told on them, it would make it bigger.”

With nothing to do, my hand, the one that had been stroking her hair, was shaking. I sat on it.

“We can’t leap to conclusions,” I said. “I don’t want my father’s reputation to suffer. My parents have an excellent marriage.”
A kiss,
I thought, hearing a new voice in my head that I hoped was the voice of adulthood,
means nothing at all.

We sat and watched through the gap in the cloth as the Dads walked away and turned a corner. We found them where they’d left us, in Produce.

“Did you survive our absence, darlings?” Nancy asked. She and my father were peering at us, I realized, to make sure we hadn’t seen them. “Did anything bad happen?”

There was a soldierly expression on Khadijah’s face, an expression
you already saw on Hillary Clinton sometimes, in 1994. Her eyes were pink, but her face was dry. She shrugged. Smiles dawned on the faces of the grown-ups. They were concluding they hadn’t been caught.

“Mom, please don’t be paranoid,” said Khadijah. “We’re fine.”

W
hen my father and I came home from Gaia Foods, he kissed my mother on the mouth and sliced the pears. I watched him to see if he looked guilty, but I couldn’t see his face as he stood at the kitchen counter chopping. My mother slid a pizza from the oven, spun the greens, and asked about his day in her low, steady therapist’s voice, the way she always did. If she knew anything, it didn’t show on her face.

“Did the anthro guy try to get his new courses in the major?” She dialed down the volume on
All Things Considered
to give her full attention to his answer.

“He tried, and then he asked us to articulate our needs. He’s a whore.” My father plucked the grapes from their stems and dropped them on the pears. A grape fell to the linoleum, and he stepped on it without noticing.

“Does he make you angry?”

“Do I seem angry? Not particularly. He’s a nice whore.”

“So nothing’s wrong?”

“I’d like to banish him to a comfortable island before he kidnaps more of my students and conscripts them, that’s all.”

My mother nodded as she fanned the steaming pizza with a mitt. She’d sensed something was off about him—did she know? Was there more to know than what I’d seen? She called my little sister, Rachel, who shuffled in with her library book about an Arab girl forced into marriage, her hair wild with static from reading in the corduroy beanbag. I didn’t want it to be dinnertime.
I was usually ravenous all hours of the day, but now I was too jumpy to eat. I drummed my fingers against the fridge, the radiator, the bowl of greens.

As we sat at the table, my mother, my father, Rachel, and I, I stood my mother next to Nancy.

Nancy, like my father, taught at Wattsbury College, a small liberal arts school whose campus sprawled a square half-mile between the Wattsbury town common and the lumberyard. From the common you could see its glassy library, from the yard its columned gymnasium. It had redbrick dormitories jacketed in ivy, but it was smaller than any school in the Ivy League, and sported a color scheme I’d never seen elsewhere: The stucco business school and the observatory were lemon, the administrative buildings sherbet orange. It was as if a more whimsical civilization had ruled Massachusetts in days beyond remembering, and fallen, stranding a colony in our midst. Whereas my mother taught psych at a college twenty minutes west, in the shadow of the Berkshire Hills. It was my high school duplicated five times over, beige blocks, concrete.

“You look glum, Joshua,” my mother said. “What’s wrong?” She flashed me clown faces: a cartoon frown, a madman smile, the gape-mouthed stare of a person struck with a pie.

Was it that my father thought Nancy was hotter? “Your outfit’s strange, Mom,” I said.

My mother’s clown face disappeared. She looked at me probingly, twisted a lock of her long brown hair. She wore a denim button-down over a pleated denim dress. “It’s not really an outfit,” she noted.

“In this family,” my father said, “we permit women freedom of dress.” He reached into my mother’s hair and rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. “Your mom looks nice.”

“Notice he didn’t actually defend what I was wearing,” said my mother. But she was smiling. There was something about this, her smiling at my father, after he’d kissed Nancy, that was intolerable to me.

“We ran into Nancy Dunn and Khadijah at Gaia today,” I said. My father glanced at me and resumed chewing.

“Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn,” said Rachel. She had memorized the names of all the girls and most of the boys in my class, knew our social hierarchies better than those of her own grade. “She’s pretty, unconventionally.”

My father waggled his eyebrows. “I bet Josh liked
her
outfit.”

Rachel made the sound like the crescendo of a police siren that to seventh graders signifies the detection of lust. I blushed and dropped the subject.

When we were done eating, my father cleared the table while my mother headed for the stairs. Every evening, immediately after dinner, she performed her rituals: a hundred prostrations, a seated meditation, the pouring of water into twin orange cups.

“Why do you do that stuff?” I called to her. It was the first time I’d raised the subject in years; she never spoke of it. I looked to see if my question had provoked a telling reaction from my father, but he had his head in the cabinet over the sink, where we kept the wine. “Does it ever bother you that the rest of us don’t believe in it?”

“No,” she said, turning on a step, crossing her arms. “It would be worse for you to become a Buddhist because I’m a Buddhist than for you to not be a Buddhist.” It was the same answer she’d given when I was in junior high. “I do it because if I didn’t do it I’d be”—she lifted her hands and wailed like a ghost—“crazy.”

I knew what she meant. Nine years ago, there had been a period of experimentation with violence. When Rachel was in toilet training, my mother had made her potty fly. The kick was more fluid, more natural, than the ones I’d seen her execute when she picked me up at soccer practice. It was a surge of strength from her heart to her leg. The potty leapt across the living room with its lid open and landed upright at my father’s feet, splashed pee on his sandals. She apologized to me, because I’d seen it, and I pretended to be upset because I felt it was expected. But I liked my parents’ fighting, even when it frightened me. When I saw it I could feel that they needed each other, sharpened each other. I felt some of what they felt, the fear of getting hit mixed with joy that somebody might give enough of a shit about what you were saying to hit you.

What I wanted right now was for them to scream at each other. “Dad,” I said, as my mother disappeared upstairs, “don’t you get sick of Mom doing insane groveling in the bedroom? Doesn’t it annoy you?” My mother paused on the landing and listened.

My father spun a bottle of wine against his palm. “No, Joshy,” he said. My mother continued her ascent. “It’s restorative. The equivalent is when I watch baseball, or read popular history.”

The thump of my mother’s prostrations sounded rhythmically from the master bedroom. My father uncorked his bottle of red and took it to his study. Rachel went to the phone to call one of her friends—it was Friday night. I stood and sat down, stood and sat down again.

“Why are you being weird?” Rachel asked.

“This is what I do when I’m thinking about a Russian paper.”

I went out to the yard and lay on my back in cold grass and stale snow. The gray branch of a sapling shivered. What I’d seen in Gaia might have been a dream, to judge from the way the world marched on. Had my senses tricked me? Was I one of those adolescent males my mother talked about who had manic breaks, who lost their minds forever in episodes of grand hallucination?

I yanked grass out of the ground, my arms stretched to either side, and filled my hands with snow. I pounded the earth. “I saw it,” I said.

I rose and walked inside, through the kitchen to the closet in the hall. My father’s barn jacket hung from a chipped white hook. I stepped into the closet and closed the door. It was dark. I pulled on the quilted jacket, warm and capacious, like a bed. I ran my hand over the corduroy on the right side until I found what I was looking for, stuck in the grooved cloth, and tasted them for sweetness, to make sure they derived from cookies: crumbs.

The next day, when the phone rang, I was taking close-ups of the kitchen radiator for photography class. I was pouring small amounts of water on the radiator, trying to make it look like one of the ominous steaming props I’d seen in a Nine Inch Nails video.

My mother answered. I knew from her face that a person of significance was on the line; in moments of drama she assumed a meditative reticence. As a general rule, the events that caused my father to go bombastic caused my mother to go still.

“It’s for you,” she said.

I took the receiver and said hello.

“This is Khadijah,” came a small, effortful voice. “How are you doing?”

So that was what my mother’s portentous blankness had meant:
It’s a girl
. This was unprecedented. My mother made a face I had never seen her make, a mix of triumph and amusement, and jogged upstairs.

“It’s really good to hear from you,” I said. I punched myself in the back of the neck, three times, as the words came out.

Khadijah asked how the Russian Club had fared on Language Day. I gave a nuanced account. She provided an overview of the French Club’s fiscal woes. When she fell silent, I looked outside, trying to think of a way to say, Why did you call me?

“The snow appears to be melting.” I slurred the words, to sound casual.

“What?” she said.

“Snow is melting,” I enunciated, enraged at myself.

“True.” She drew a breath. “Maybe you’d like to meet. Maybe you’d like to meet up, downtown, and discuss that thing that we saw happen.”

“Yes.” I took the cordless into the bathroom and shut the door. “Yes. I feel insane. I am becoming an insane person.”

“That,” she said, “is exactly what I hoped you would say.”

I sloshed uphill, past the common, the Bank of Boston, the head shop, Al Bum’s Records, the fire station, the townie bar. In half an hour I was kicking the muck off my Doc Martens, on my way to the back table at Classé Café, where she was already seated, homework spread before her.

“I have proof it’s not just kissing,” she said, after we’d ordered carrot cake and herbal tea, and she’d put away her binder. “They’re in love.” She said this in a perfunctory manner, looking out the
window at an incense salesman on the sidewalk who moved as if he’d had three strokes. I asked her how she knew.

She reached into her backpack and unrolled a charcoal still life: a pineapple. “Grotesque, right? I draw like an ape.”

“All the pineapples are like that,” I said. It was true. Ms. Chumly had made everyone do a charcoal drawing of a pineapple, and no pineapple had been an unqualified success. The halls were blackened with grenade-like fruit. The effect was austere. It made you think about how every student who drew a pineapple was someday going to die.

“Even so, my pineapple particularly sucks,” Khadijah said. “So last night, after we put away the groceries, I show it to my mom so she can see I got an A—she has a rule that she has to see all my grades on everything—and my dad walks in and laughs at my pineapple and then he leaves.”

I sipped from my cup of Lemon Zinger. I looked directly at her with my eyebrows raised, something I’d seen male love interests do in romantic comedies.

“My mom looks at him like she’s going to throw a knife at his back. She picks up my pineapple and goes, ‘There’s a friend of mine who’s seen your work, who told me you’d be a great artist if you had the proper training.’” Khadijah paused for effect. “She was talking about your dad. Isn’t it obvious, when you think about it?”

I stared at her, trying to figure out if she was right.

“Do you think I’m overdramatic? My parents say I’m overdramatic.”

“No way.”

“Oh my god, thank you for saying that.” She threw her arms across the table and laid her head beside her plate, to signal a lifting of a great burden from her shoulders.

The bad news: It was possible that Nancy and my father were committing a crime against our families. The silver lining: There was a conspiratorial feeling growing between Khadijah and me. We were being drawn together in a game.

That night, I walked through the last snowstorm of the year to
CVS and bought a Gillette Sensor Excel razor. I studied the pictures of hair on bottles until I began to comprehend conditioner and pomade, how each might amplify the benefits of the other. I bought a Neutrogena antiacne scrub, a witch hazel toner. The next afternoon, I asked my mother to take me to the JCPenney in the all but gutted Mountain Farms Mall, known locally as the Dead Mall, where I picked three rugby shirts, and to Payless, at the nameless, less thoroughly eviscerated mall farther down Route 9, known as the Live Mall, where she bought me a pair of running shoes. As the fresh snow melted on the springy new track at the college, I went for the first run of my life.