Touch (2 page)

I was eight when my mom left. One day, she just packed up and deserted me and Dad to be a free spirit or find herself or follow her bliss or whatever. I figured she just got sick of being a dentist’s wife in a Philadelphia suburb. First she followed her bliss to California, and then for some reason her bliss took her back to the Milwaukee suburb where
she
grew up. She got a job as a librarian in the public library, which is where she’s been ever since.

It wasn’t as if she totally abandoned us. All that time, she called every Sunday to tell us how sorry she was and why she’d done what she did. I talked to her a few times, but when she tried to explain, she just kept getting tangled, and nothing she said made sense. After a while, I told my dad to tell her I didn’t feel like talking. I didn’t want to hear her talk about finding her authentic self.

It was weirdly quiet and sad in the house with just my dad and me, but somehow we got along. Of course, I would have appreciated the peace and quiet more if I’d known how much worse it was going to be when Joan and Josh Darling moved in and supposedly cheered up our sad little family.

I’d been pretty mystified when Dad and Joan started dating, and then when they got married. I thought that Dad had married her just to get even with Mom. I knew he hadn’t gotten together with Joan for her chocolate chip cookies.

Even though I was already ten, they made me be the flower girl at the wedding. Joan nagged and pleaded and bullied me into dressing up in a frilly pink princess dress and scattering rose petals from a basket. I flung
the petals down the aisle of the church as if they were tennis balls that might bounce. No one noticed. They were too busy admiring Josh Darling, whom Joan dolled up in a pastel blue tuxedo with a ruffled shirt and short pants, and who got to carry the ring on a velvet pillow bigger than his head.

At first I was really upset that Joan was sleeping in my mom’s bed, but pretty soon I got used to it, and I could hardly remember when Mom had slept there. Joan was also divorced. I always thought that Dad should have had a man-to-man talk with Joan’s ex-husband to find out who Joan really was. One of the things I found hardest about our Brady Bunch combined–family life was how often Dad agreed with Joan, even when she was wrong, and how everything Josh Darling did was perfect, while all I did was make one mistake after another.

In fact, it was as if
I
was the huge mistake that Joan was trying to correct. What I ate, what I wore, how much TV I watched—Joan was full of helpful suggestions that were really criticisms disguised as advice. Maisie, why don’t you wear your hair like that pretty girl over there? Maisie, why don’t you throw out those smelly sneakers and wear some tight, uncomfortable heels? Maisie,
try on this flouncy skirt—it would look so attractive on you. What she really wanted was to change me into a miniature Joan.

As soon as my dad remarried, it drove my mom over the edge, and she started calling every day, sometimes twice a day, theoretically to see how I was adjusting to my new stepfamily. I remember thinking:
If Mom and Dad are still so obsessed with each other, they should have stayed together.
And though you’d imagine that having to deal with Wicked Stepmother Joan would have made me miss and appreciate Mom more, it only made me angrier. It was all Mom’s fault. If she’d stayed home and found her bliss in Germantown, or even Philadelphia, none of this would be happening.

Then, two years ago, I picked up the phone, and it was Mom. Before I could tell her that I was so busy that I had to hang up, Mom said, “Good news, darling! Geoff and I have gotten married! And—you don’t have to decide right away, take your time and think it over—but now that I’m finally settled, I’m wondering if you want to come live with us. Maybe you could just give it a try—”

I knew she’d had a serious boyfriend for the last year
or so. Dad had let that slip. But now, it seemed, Mom and this guy had a house—guess where? In the blissedout suburbs of Milwaukee. A big beautiful home they couldn’t wait to share with me. Mom’s new husband was a math professor at the local community college. I’d always hated math. It was strange, how Geoff’s job seemed to make my dad jealous—competitive, maybe—even though everyone knows that dentists make way more money than math professors.

Mom started begging me to come out to Wisconsin and live with her and Geoff. I knew that suburbs were suburbs: Milwaukee, Philadelphia, it would have been the same place. Same malls, same trees, same schools. The same kids, probably. And living with Mom and Geoff would probably be a lot like living with Dad and Joan, only minus annoying Josh Darling. Geoff didn’t have any kids of his own—or anyway, none that I knew of. And somehow I had the feeling that Geoff didn’t wear hooker underwear, and that he wouldn’t be especially interested in turning me into a younger version of himself.

When my mom suggested my coming out to live
with her, it might have seemed like a good idea—if only to get even with Joan and make everybody realize what a bad job Joan was doing of being Sitcom Mom. I think I could have forgiven Mom, that’s how much Joan annoyed me.

But to be honest, the main thing that stopped me was: My friends were here. Shakes and Chris and Kevin. I couldn’t make friends like that anywhere else. It would be sort of like starting my whole life over from scratch.

I can’t remember a time before the four of us were friends. I’ve known them practically since I was born. To be exact, I’ve known them since preschool. In fact, our preschool was called Little Friends. And that was what we became.

When we were toddlers, nobody thought it was the tiniest bit strange that my three best friends were boys. And by the time we got to grade school, we’d already been friends for so long that it seemed perfectly normal. I was friends with them before I figured out, from watching the kids around us, that girls were supposed to play with girls, and boys were supposed to hang out with boys. But by then, I wasn’t going to drop my best
friends and find appropriate new female friends.

Chris and Kevin and Shakes were the kids I had play-dates with on weekends and hung out with after school. They were the first ones I invited to my birthday parties, the ones I wanted to sit next to in class. And from kindergarten on, we were on the same bus route.

First I got on the bus, then Shakes, then Kevin, then Chris. We saved seats for each other, and our seats moved steadily back through the bus until we grabbed the last row. We knew that when we started ninth grade, we would be demoted and exiled all the way to the front of the bus again and have to slowly work our way back until we were seniors. By which point, we’d be able to drive, so it wouldn’t matter.

Mostly, on the weekends, we walked to the town park and played games that involved a lot of running around and yelling and pushing each other. I never felt that my friends went easy on me because I was a girl. I was as strong and tough as they were, I ran as fast and yelled as loud. In the summer we swam at the town pool and played basketball. In the winter we watched DVDs, usually in Shakes’s basement, and played video games.
No one at school seemed to think I was strange. No one even called me a tomboy.

I just
liked
being around them. It was easy, it was fun. They’d known me before my mom and dad’s divorce, so I never had to explain the difficult and personal parts of my life. I never had to give them all the background information that would bring them up to date.

In every bunch of friends, I guess, people get assigned certain roles they play in the group—and then they
become
that person. Kevin was the goofy one who could always make us laugh. Chris was the sweet one who smoothed things over if we got on each other’s nerves, which hardly ever happened. And Shakes was…well, he was just amazing. I never stopped being impressed that someone with so many physical problems could figure out how to get around his disabilities and hold his own, even if we were playing basketball or video games that required major hand-eye coordination.

I used to love to watch Shakes meet new people. “I’m Shakes,” he’d say. You couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that a kid with some weird kind of palsy, even a mild case like Shakes’s, would make you call
him that, and
dare
you to react.

I admired Shakes for being so tough and cool. Even when something was hard for him, he never whined or complained, he never even seemed discouraged. He’d just laugh that funny crooked laugh, and find his own way to do whatever he wanted. There was something really special about him, as if his having been born a little messed up had taught him a different and better way of being a human being. He was always nice to the kids whom the other kids picked on.

Even when he was little, you could see him stopping and thinking before he said anything, maybe because it was harder for him to talk. And he’d say these totally poetic things. Once when we were at Chris’s house, watching some honeybees fly around, Shakes said you could watch them singing to each other and thanking the flowers for their nectar. In grade school, he was elected class president more often than anyone else—not because the other kids felt sorry for him, but because even people who hardly knew him could see what a model human being he was.

Unfortunately, his health problems weren’t limited
to tics and twitches. Shakes missed school a lot. Not weeks or months or anything, but he spent more time out than most kids. And I knew he spent a lot of that time going to see various doctors and specialists.

But when he came back to school after being away, you weren’t supposed to notice that he’d been gone. You didn’t ask Shakes how he was. Somehow you knew not to do that. You always took up exactly where you’d left off before he was out sick, as if you were finishing a sentence that had been interrupted in the middle.

Because we weren’t allowed to ask him how he was feeling, I got used to looking closely at him, to see how he was. I’d stare at him especially hard when he’d come back from being absent, as if to reassure myself that he was still okay. So maybe the fact that I looked at him longer and more carefully than I looked at the others was also why I felt I knew him better than I knew Chris and Kevin. And I knew them really well.

Sometimes I wondered if Shakes had developed other abilities—extrasensory powers—to make up for his physical troubles. We all thought he was psychic. He often called or emailed or text-messaged me at the
exact moment I was thinking about calling or emailing or text-messaging him. And lots of times I’d think of some song, and Shakes would start to hum it. Kevin and Chris and I joked that we’d better not have any negative thoughts about Shakes, because he would know. Actually, we never thought anything negative about Shakes, so it was never a problem.

And what about me? Who was I in the group? Before my mom and dad split up, I was just another kid. But after that, I was the angry one—which translated into the nervy one, the daredevil, the one who acted first and thought about it later.

On Halloween, I was the one who went up to the scary house on our street and rang the doorbell. I was the one who climbed the fence and got our ball when someone hit it into the yard whose owners had the snarly dog. And when a teacher announced that anyone who said one more word would get detention, I was the one who said that fatal one more word. Maybe it would have seemed strange to someone else—someone who wasn’t one of us—that I, the girl, was the one who took all the biggest dares and ran the biggest risks. But we
didn’t think like that, we didn’t think about being a boy or a girl. At least not yet, not then.

I used to have friends who were fun to hang out with. Friends I cared about, and who cared about me. And now I’ve lost that. I’ve lost all of that. It’s true that some bad stuff happened, but maybe we could have forgotten it if not for the TV show inside Joan’s head, the lawyer-courtroom drama in which she gets to play the brave, heroic stepmom of the girl who’s been assaulted—no,
molested
, no,
inappropriately touched
—by her three best friends.

I’m still thinking about the dream, and about Doctor Atwood asking me what it means—isn’t the answer obvious?—as Joan slides the tray of chocolate chip cookies into the oven. Under her apron she’s wearing a skirt that’s way shorter than what I would wear if I were a mother and a professional psychotherapist Joan’s age.

Because if we’re talking about
inappropriate
, what about the way Joan dresses! And what about her wanting me to dress like that, too! Joan keeps trying to do all sorts of mother-daughter bonding stuff, like shopping
trips to the mall. It always creeps me out, because Joan insists on trying on—and buying—outfits you’d expect to see on some slutty high school girl. She always seems disappointed when I buy jeans and sneakers and T-shirts. That’s when she really shows how mean she can be. She’ll pick up some filmy little Band-Aid of a dress and say, “This would look so pretty on you, Maisie, if you just lost a little weight.” It’s evil, pure evil. I’m not even fat. I just have big boobs.

Everything Joan does is embarrassing. She has a boxing coach who makes her run up and down the steps of city hall, like Rocky Balboa, at nine o’clock in the morning, when the whole town can see!

Now, Joan turns away from the oven, straightens up, and when she faces me, she actually claps her hands with joy.

“Cookies in ten minutes, Maisie dear! Chocolate chip!”

“Thanks, I’m not hungry,” I say.

It’s strange how sometimes you can turn your back for one minute—one minute—and by the time you turn around, the whole world’s completely different. My mom—my real mom—says that about computers, and cell phones, and the most basic technical stuff. My dad is always blathering on, if you let him, about how drastically dentistry has changed since he started out in the profession.

Of course, when I finally left Dad and Josh Darling
and the Evil Stepmother and went to live with Mom and Geoff, I stayed away a lot longer than a minute. I stuck it out for a whole school year. Eighth grade, as it happened. Unfortunately, for me. It’s hard to believe that it was only last year. It seems like another lifetime.

Why did I imagine that life with Mom and Geoff would be any better than life with Dad and Joan? I guess I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. I was fighting with Joan all the time. She was getting nastier, letting her true nature show. Every so often, I’d complain to Dad, but he only shrugged and looked sad and said that it was a pity that Joan and I didn’t get along better and appreciate each other’s good points. Which made me think that Joan was probably complaining about me, too.

I’d only met Geoff once, when he and Mom came to Philadelphia for some sort of academic conference. I think he was interviewing for a better job, which he didn’t get. Geoff seemed mind-blowingly dull—but nice enough. Harmless, you might say. I began to think that living with him might be an improvement over Sitcom Mom Joan, who was anything but harmless.

Sitcom Mom insisted we eat dinner “as a family”
every night. She was constantly telling us about these horribly dysfunctional households she was seeing in her practice—imagine, they actually ate their evening meal in front of the TV! No wonder the American family was in so much trouble! She liked to quote statistics and studies that proved that the combination of food and television led to poor grades, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, obesity—and worse. Joan loved saying “and worse” in a scary, tragic tone, but, knowing Joan, I couldn’t imagine what she thought was worse than obesity.

At those moments I tried not to look at my dad, who was trying not to look at me, so neither of us would have to acknowledge that that was what we used to do when we lived with Mom. We often ate with the TV on. We’d liked it, it had felt comfortable. And it didn’t mean we never talked, or that we weren’t close. We had our conversations at other times—breakfast and bedtime, for example. But maybe Joan was right about the TV not helping families stay together. It certainly hadn’t done much for our family.

Those long-ago dinners with Mom and the TV seem like heaven now compared to the torture meals
with Joan making me and Josh finish our sentences and keep our elbows off the table. Elbows off the table! Is my dad hearing
that
? And why doesn’t he defend me as I plunk my elbows down beside my plate and keep them there until Joan flips out and starts asking why I’m trying to undermine her? Undermine
her
? It has nothing to do with her. Okay,
almost
nothing. Elbows off the table isn’t who we
are
. But that isn’t quite true, either. It isn’t who we used to be. We
are
those no-elbows people now. And I don’t recognize us.

Anyway, it’s only
my
elbows that have to be off the table. Darling Josh can put his entire face in the plate, and Joan will say, Josh, darling, look at how much you’re enjoying your food!

So I was also getting a little sick of Josh doing everything right and me doing everything wrong and my dad not sticking up for me.

Every evening, there was an argument. Dinner became such a nightmare that, if I were Joan, I would have welcomed the noise and distraction of TV. Things got so tense that Darling Josh stopped eating, and
then
, let me tell you, everyone got worried. I felt a little guilty.
Honestly, I had nothing against Darling Josh. The poor kid had had to live with Joan since—well, even before—he was born.

I couldn’t help thinking that they wouldn’t notice if
I
never ate. They wouldn’t notice if I choked and fell off my chair and turned blue. It made me want to be even more unpleasant to Joan, so another fight would start. She’d ask me a simple question—How was school? Did I like my teachers?—and I’d say, “Why do you care? I don’t know why you’re asking since you don’t really care.”

So I can’t pretend that every argument was Joan’s fault. But she couldn’t let anything go. She’d whine on and on about how she was trying to be loving and caring, and I was heartless and ungrateful and had no reason to treat her that way. Which I didn’t, I guess.

Anyway, I kept thinking that she was only pretending to be hurt. I had the feeling that everything she said was something she’d learned in therapy school or that she’d scripted, in her mind, for her imaginary TV show. If she was as anti-television as she claimed, why did she act—and dress!—like a character on a soap opera?

All this time, Mom was still calling, asking me to live with her. And so one night, after a particularly wicked Joan-fight, I said yes. Okay, fine. I’ll come out at the start of the school year.

I guess I wasn’t really thinking about the consequences of my decision. To tell the truth, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just so angry at Joan.

Dad pretended to be against my going to Wisconsin, but I think he was secretly relieved, and he agreed that “a little cooling-off time”—I knew he’d gotten the expression from Joan—might make family life go more smoothly when I came back. He didn’t seem to think that the move was permanent. So maybe he knew more about Mom and Geoff than I did.

Only Kevin and Chris and Shakes were sad. They were so destroyed, they actually
told
me they were sad, even though it was completely uncool for boys to say how sad they were.

I knew they were the only ones who would really miss me. They warned me not to go. But they also knew how obnoxious Joan was. They were the ones I called and emailed and texted after family fights when I was
supposedly “cooling off” in my room.

I think they kind of respected me for finding a way—a pretty extreme way—to let Joan know what a monster I thought she was. They thought I was brave and cool to move halfway across the country just to show the world that I preferred my real mother to the Wicked Stepmom.

Eventually, Kevin and Chris got used to the idea of my leaving. Shakes was the only one who kept telling me not to go. It was August, and I was about to leave so that I could start the school year in Wisconsin. He and I were sitting on big boulders right in the middle of a stream that ran through the state park, which we could bike to. The sunlight dappled the rocks and danced across the water. I’d had to give Shakes a helping hand as we walked from stone to stone. I was afraid he’d miss a step and fall into the stream, but he never did. He made it seem like an adventure. Like we were explorers, Lewis and Clark. Or Peter Pan and Wendy.

I remember Shakes saying, “You’re shooting yourself in the foot, dude. Trust me. It’s going to be worse there than it is here.” I don’t know how he knew. Maybe
it was that special intuition, that ESP of his. Maybe he meant that it would be harder for me without him and the other guys around. I remember every word he said that day. I especially remember him calling me
dude
. Because after I got back, a year later, none of them ever called me
dude
again.

I remember telling Shakes, “If I’m going to shoot myself in some body part, better the foot than the head.”

But I might as well have aimed for my head, and gotten it over with. Because living with Mom and Geoff was pretty much like going slowly brain-dead.

In the beginning, Geoff was just dull. I’d never met a human being who could talk about himself so much and have so little to say. By the time I’d been there two weeks, I was the world’s number-one expert on Geoff. Not counting Mom, I suppose.

I knew where he’d grown up (Detroit), the games he’d played as a kid, every course he’d taken in middle school, every teacher he’d had during his fabulous college career at Wayne State. Then the years of graduate school, and the PhD thesis that some big deal professor
had said showed some original promise. Some original promise? That was Geoff’s moment of glory, Geoff’s fifteen minutes of fame. It had all been downhill since then.

And now? Now Geoff did nothing but complain about how hard he worked, how little he got paid, and how retarded his students were. I felt sorry for his students, who probably didn’t know he said they were idiots who couldn’t add two and two. But to hear Geoff tell it, they worshipped the ground he walked on.

Geoff wasn’t even good looking. He was tall and beaky and bald, with a shiny, bullet-shaped dome head. Believe me, he wasn’t the type of guy who’d be anybody’s favorite teacher. He wore those corny professor jackets with leather patches on the elbows. I wondered where Geoff shopped. Thrift shops, I imagined. Geoff was cheap. God forbid an avocado cost ten cents more than it did last week. Geoff could spend a whole meal on the subject of one overpriced avocado.

Whenever Geoff went on about himself and how much everything cost, Mom would nod and smile as if everything Geoff was saying was fascinating and new,
though probably she’d heard it a million times before I even got there. I guess Mom didn’t know Geoff well enough, or feel comfortable enough, to suggest we have dinner in front of the TV. She seemed to really believe that Geoff was smarter and more interesting than she was. I could see where she’d got that idea. It was definitely what Geoff thought. But I could have told her that he wasn’t half as intelligent as she was. I mean half as intelligent as she used to be.

It occurred to me that, from a kid’s point of view, having your parents remarry was sort of like watching them get brainwashed. Something—someone—forced them, little by little, day by day, to think and say things that they would never have thought or said before.

Secretly, I kept hoping that the brainwashing would wear off, and that the new marriages would self-destruct. I knew that every kid from a divorced family fantasizes about her parents getting back together. Still, I couldn’t help it. My other fantasy was that Joan and Geoff would meet and realize that
they
were made for each other. I imagined them running off together and leaving Mom and Dad to console each other, and maybe fall back in
love, after they’d bonded over the subject of what creeps they’d married.

Anyway, life with Mom and Geoff deteriorated rapidly. After a few weeks, Geoff must have decided that I was so impressed by Important Mathematical Genius Geoff that he could relax and let Spoiled Brat Geoff come out.