Life Is Funny (6 page)

“I'm not
worried,
” he goes. Then he sighs. “Changes can be hard,” he says. “We moved at a bad time. I know that. I'm
sorry.
”

I stay quiet and stare at his feet. There's a little hole in his sock under the big toe. A hair is sticking out of it.

“You know what I was thinking about today?” he asks me after a while.

“What?”

“I was thinking about that time we went camping. Just me and you. Remember the swing?”

It was Fourth of July weekend. I was about eight. We had a two-man tent and trail mix with M&M's in it. We each had a canteen and a sleeping bag. We used my mom's Skin-So-Soft oil to keep away the bugs and smelled like a couple of fifteen-year-old girls, according to my dad.

There was this lake, and a hill by the lake with a rope swing hanging from a branch higher than the roof of our house. There were about a million kids climbing up that muddy bank, waiting on line to fly off the rope. When you ran with it, the pebbly muck under your feet cut up your toes, but then you'd be sailing through the air, flying, floating, and you'd let go at the scariest, highest minute, and you'd fall about a zillion miles, and the water would suck you down in this freezing gulp, and you'd swallow a little of it from your Tarzan scream, or maybe from laughing, and it tasted like leftover Popsicle stick after the ice cream's been licked off.

My dad was the only grown-up in that line. He was the only father racing up the slope and throwing himself over the lake, letting out Tarzan calls and making huge splashes. The only adult who'd take me, and any other kids who weren't too scared, tucked under his arm like a football, for a two-at-a-time leap and drop.

His skin was slippery with lake water and sweat, and he smelled like old, clean undershirts, and he held you rough, his fingers gripping you tight enough to leave marks up and down your side by the end of the day. At the last minute, your nose squished into his chest, your ears sloshing with water and speed, glimmers of light flashing through the cracks between your head and his body, he'd lift and shove you away from him hard, so you wouldn't smash into each other on the way down, and you'd fall, screaming bloody murder and flailing to find the right way up before you hit the water.

“We had a great time, didn't we?” he goes.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I was thinking, here you are about to start tenth grade, and we haven't done anything just you and me since then. Just father and son.”

“Uh huh,” I go.

“That's important,” he tells me. “That father and son stuff.”

“Uh huh,” I go.

He wiggles his toes and then lifts his head up a little to get a better look at me.

“What I'm trying to say to you,” he says, “is that I remember being your age like it was yesterday, and it sucked. And I didn't have anyone to talk to, and I could have
used
someone.” He sits up now and takes a long swig from his mug. Then he burps. “So I just want you to know, you can come to me. I
want
you to come to me.”

The reason why it was just us alone that July Fourth was that he'd beaten her up a few days before. She had bruises all over, so she couldn't go out.

I remember wanting so bad for him never to come out of the water after a drop. Wanting him to be drowned and dead, down deep in the swampy bottom, so he'd never hit her again. And I remember feeling unbelievably guilty for being so happy when he'd pop up, spitting and whipping his wet hair out of his eyes, the coolest, best, most fun dad ever to fly me out in space higher and faster than I ever could have gone on my own.

*  *  *

Sam shows me around his dad's shop.

“Cálmate, Papi,”
he says to his father, who doesn't look so psyched to see me at first.
“El es cool. No es como su padre.”

They fix about twelve cars at once. Sam tells me his dad does a lot of it, but they have three mechanics—two Puerto Ricans and one guy from Albania who was a college math professor back home but can't find work here. Sam mostly does body repairs, not engine work. But I think he knows more than he's letting on.

“When it's fixed, let's drive it,” I tell him, while we stand around the Jag. The wheels are off, and it's hiked up on one of those poles.

“Yeah, right,” Sam goes.

A woman wearing skinny pink glasses and holding a briefcase steps into the garage.

“I'm serious,” I say while she looks around. “We'll take it out before you tell my dad it's ready.”

“I bet you don't even know how to drive,” Sam says.

“Excuse me,” the woman goes.

“So?” I say. “You do.”

“Excuse me.” The woman walks up to us. “You're Samuel?”

“Samuel?” I go, but as usual, Sam doesn't even blink.

He just shrugs at me, and then, real polite, he says to the woman, “Sam.” He holds out his hand. “You must know my mom.”

The woman shakes with him, smiling. “Annie,” she tells him. “Your mother was supposed to have written you that I'd be coming by.”

“I wrote her back to forget it,” Sam says. “No offense or anything.”

She's sort of staring at him through those pink frames. Something about the way she's looking makes my face get hot, but Sam is calm as anything.

“Sam,” I go, but then I don't know what to say next.

“Your mother wasn't exaggerating,” this Annie woman tells him. “I thought maybe she was using artistic license to serve maternal subjectivity.”

I don't know what that's supposed to mean, and I can't tell if Sam gets it either because he sort of ignores it.

“I'm really not that interested,” he says, but the woman's already pulling a card out of the side pocket of her briefcase.

“She made me promise to come take a look at you and to be encouraging if I thought you could work,” this woman says, handing him the card.

Sam holds it out so I can see it, too. Cooke Model Management Corporation, it says. Annie Sherman, Booking Agent.

“I got the impression from your mother that you and your father could use some money.”

I look over at Sam, while he looks up at her.

“There's a lot of money in modeling, you know,” she tells him.

*  *  *

Josh and Daniel are pissed that I don't hang with them. They're extra pissed because I guess Sam used to stay by himself and have all those girls, only now, since I sit with Sam at lunch, the girls are all over me, too. I know they're not there for me, really, but it's sort of fun. I stay quiet, to make sure I don't look like a jerk and to watch how Sam handles things. Mostly he's pretty cool to everybody. He never joins in with one girl trashing another. He never treats one better than the other. I wonder if he'll let it slip that he's going to try to be a model. That he has some interview coming up at his mother's friend's agency. I bet girls love that kind of thing. But Sam keeps his mouth shut. I guess he has all the attention he needs from them.

“What do you think of that redhead with the contact lenses?” I ask him one day, near the last week of school. We're walking to his dad's shop.

“She's okay,” he goes.

I think she's hot. I'd ask her out, only I'm too shy, and I don't want a girlfriend anyway, because if she bugged me, I'm worried about what I'd do. So I just jerk off thinking about her instead. It always starts off with me asking what color her eyes really are, and then she takes out her contact lenses, and then she goes,
As long as I'm taking things off . . .
and she steps out of her jeans, and then . . .

“She's totally into you,” I say. “I bet she'd go all the way with you.”

“All the way?”
he says. He's always making fun of how I talk. “That means ‘fuck,' right?”

“Shut up,” I tell him.

“Okay, for real. Forget her. There's someone else I like,” he says.

“Who?”

“This Indian girl. She sits at that corner table during lunch.”

“One of those veil girls?”

“She doesn't wear a veil.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Her name is Sonia.”

“That eighth grader?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you even know her?”

“We had some art elective together once. She's smart. Real smart. She's fine, too,” he tells me. “You ever get a really good look at her?”

“Those girls don't go out with people,” I remind him.

“Yeah,” he says, like he figured it out a long time ago. “I know.”

We turn the corner into the shop, and Sam's dad knocks on Sam's head with his knuckles.
“Nos llegaron dos nuevas,”
he goes.
“Todo carrocería. ¿Los quieres?”

“He's got some new cars in,” Sam tells me. “All body work. You want to help out or something?”

His dad unfists his hand from that knuckle rap and puts his palm flat on top of Sam's head and just keeps it there. They're both raising their eyebrows at me, and for the first time they kind of look alike.

Suddenly I can see them knocking on our door to tell us the Jag is ready. I can see my mom opening the door, thinking it's my dad who forgot his key. They stare at her banged-up face and get a good look before she ducks away.

Your car's ready,
Sam would say to me.

Very good car,
his dad would say.

Thanks,
I'd go, trying to close the door fast.

Was that your mom?
Sam would ask.

Yeah,
I'd say, wondering how to get them out of there.

Who did that to her?

Nobody,
I'd tell them.

His father would say something to Sam in Spanish. Then his father would put his hand flat on top of my head. It would feel heavy and warm.

You call us if it happens again,
Sam would say.
Or call the police.

What are you talking about?
I'd go.
She just hit the dashboard when my father crashed the Jag.

You should call the police,
Sam would say.

It's not that simple,
I'd tell him, thinking about my father in jail and both my parents hating me forever.

“Drew?” Sam's going. “You want to hang out?”

“Nah,” I lie. “I've got to go.”

*  *  *

We spend most of Memorial Day weekend unpacking the Hamptons house and buying it new furniture. My mother's face is back to normal, and my parents are in a good mood. On Saturday afternoon my father sneaks me away with him to toss the football around on the beach while my mom conference calls with some new wedding clients about flower arrangements. Walking close to the surf, my dad pulls me in under his arm and asks me to start thinking about what I want for my fifteenth birthday. “I want you to stop hitting her,” I tell him, but the wind by the ocean and the breakers are pretty loud, and I don't think he hears.

After soft-shell crab in a restaurant with a sunset and ocean view, they hold hands while we walk through the town center past ice-cream shops and antiques stores. I walk a little ahead of them so nobody knows they belong to me.

“You're not
embarrassed,
are you?” my mom calls out.

“Stop it, Mom,” I say, trying to be loud enough so she can hear, but not so loud the whole street can.

They speed up and skip next to me, swinging their arms, just to embarrass me more.

“Come on,” I tell them.

People are looking at us now. My father kisses my mother right there in middle of the street.

“I'm walking back,” I warn them.

They laugh.

In about three weeks, she'll answer the phone wrong, or buy the wrong kind of toothpaste, or bring the wrong shirt to the wrong dry cleaners, and he'll bash her all over again.

*  *  *

In the back of the Range Rover, on the way home to Brooklyn, I try to figure out what to do. That's how I usually spend my time in a car lately, thinking about what to do. Maybe that's because the first time I saw him hit her was while we were all driving somewhere.

I was little. Four, or maybe five. We were going to Vermont for my first ski trip. My father had asked my mother to drive for a while, and then he got mad at her because she didn't put on her turn signal. Then he got mad because she changed the radio station, and then, after she didn't have the right change for the toll, he got mad again. When she said it was impossible to drive safely with him yelling at her like that, he fist-hit her smack in the jaw, and she swerved, and my stomach felt like it was on a sideways elevator, and he told her she better learn to drive safely no matter what he did, and he hit her again, and she swerved again, and I thought and thought about what to do, and by the time we reached the ski lodge, I still hadn't figured it out, and when my father told everybody we'd had a little accident and that she'd hit the dashboard, and my mother let him keep the lie, I started to cry, and someone at the ski lodge gave me a Tootsie Pop, and I still didn't know what to do.

*  *  *

Sam's going to his aunt and uncle's tomorrow in Pennsylvania, but the Jag is finished this morning.

Over the phone he'd wanted me to tell my father it was ready, but I didn't. I just walked to the shop on my own, like it was a regular day. Only it doesn't feel like a regular day. I don't feel regular. I feel mad. I was mad the minute I heard Sam's voice on the phone. I don't know why exactly, but I'm sick of his voice. I'm sick of him.

“You ready to drive it?” I ask Sam at the garage.

“You're killing me,” he goes.

“Just drive it,” I say. “You know you want to.”

“Nah.” He shakes his head. “It'll get you into trouble.”