Good Kids: A Novel (6 page)

“Can we go now?” I asked.

After my parents retreated to the study to compose an agreement on the sharing of resources, my little sister and I stayed on the sun-drenched first floor of the white Cape Cod. It was three-thirty
on a Wednesday. We had too many empty hours in which to consider what had just happened, so we invented a game a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old should not have been playing, called Googy. I was a retarded baby—Googy was my name—and Rachel was my mother. I ran to open the front door and escape into the woods by ramming my head against the door repeatedly, and she came up behind me and dragged me from the vestibule, shouting, “Googy, you’ll only make your brain even worse by doing that.” I gurgled and moaned, and rolled around on the floor, gripping my head in my hands—retardation and epilepsy were not yet rigorously differentiated for Rachel and me. I tried to learn to crawl and collapsed repeatedly, finally curling into a fetal position and pretending to puke on the floor.

I lay for a while in a sunbeam, like a dog. I ignored my sister’s demands that I rise, until she went upstairs to her room and I looked out the window and saw ashes falling from the sky. My parents were in the study, writing their agreement, and would not have been able to see. I thought of telling them about the evidence of fire, but in the end I walked up to Rachel’s room to see for myself what she was doing.

I knocked on the door. “It’s me,” I said. “Mom and Dad are in the study.” There was no answer, so I went in.

She knelt by her open window with a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip, with the economy-size box of kitchen matches beside her on the sill. She used a match to light a piece of paper and threw the match in a plastic cup of water, in which four other matches lay floating. She dropped the flaming page out the window.

“They’re letters to my future husband,” she explained. “I wrote them when I was eight.”

I watched her do this for another thirty seconds. Unable to say anything about it, I went to my room, and the object that didn’t feel tainted by my ownership of it was the acoustic guitar an aunt had lent me six months ago. I’d only learned six chords. But now I put it down only when my fingertips were in too much pain to touch anything, at which point I plugged in my headphones and
worked methodically backward and forward through my booklet of CDs, listening in my desk chair, until I could handle strings again.

By the following evening, each of the fingertips on my left hand had grown a cloud: calluses. From that point forward, I put down the guitar only to eat dinner and to walk to a licentious Cumberland Farms, where I bought and experimented with cigarettes. Nobody asked me where I was going.

Around ten o’clock that night, my father knocked on the door.

“I’ve come to have a little talk with you,” he said. “Nancy, Khadijah, your behavior, my behavior.”

He sat in my rolling desk chair. I put down my aunt’s guitar and sat on the floor with my legs tucked close to my chest, tapping an imaginary drumbeat against my knees in order to be musicianly. I waited. He opened his mouth several times and closed it again, like a goldfish.

“Do you know any songs?” he asked. “I can hear you a little from downstairs. It sounds like you’re playing a lot.”

I looked at the guitar. The truth was I was having a hard time with chords. I was also having a hard time with playing anything and singing at the same time. The one song I could pull off, sort of—it was actually easier than “Psycho Killer”—was “Heartbreak Hotel.” You could play “Heartbreak Hotel” as a bass line on the low E. And you barely had to sing and play at the same time. The singing was the call, the bass line the response.

“Sure,” I said. I picked up the guitar. I couldn’t sing very well. But the vocal was basically talking: “Since my baby left me (guitar: BUM BUM) / I found a new place to dwell (BUM BUM).”

My father spread his legs and clasped his hands in the space between them as I played and sang. He reached out and put his left hand on my right hand, which was still holding a tortoiseshell pick, hovering by the strings. Did he hear Nancy’s voice when he heard music, like I heard Khadijah’s?

“Not bad, Son,” he said. He held my hand, for three seconds, or four, and then he stood and left.

A
t seven the next morning, my father was perched on the edge of my bed, shaking me awake.

“How about you take the day off from school and come on a little trip to the dacha with me?” he proposed. “I tacked up a sign on a bulletin board downtown, and these people called. People who talk like gentle rednecks. We’re going to move our shit out so some nice rednecks with a truck can move their shit in. I’ve never met these people, but they say they’ll help us get our furniture in some mammoth pickup they’ve got and help us load it into storage. Would you care to participate?”

In the agreement he and my mother had composed in the study, he explained, it was written that my mother would keep the house and he would keep our cabin in the Berkshires, the dacha to which he referred. His plan was to rent it to the rednecks for a year and ease our new state of scarcity. It was not clear to me how he was going to fund both new residences: the New York apartment and the Wattsbury apartment, in which Rachel and I would see him on weekends.

I was tired of my room by that time, and it was almost spring. I said yes. Leaving what was now my mother’s house at 7:30 in his green Subaru, we went west toward the hills.

“What have you been doing with yourself besides playing guitar,
Joshy?” he asked as he drove. “These past four days have been no good fun for anyone, I know.”

“I’m also listening to music.” I was glad to have an unimpeachably cool response.

He stroked his beard for a while. “You want an electric?”

“Yes.”

“You need an amp?”

“Yes. And two effect pedals, and three patch cords.”

“How much you think that’s going to set back your old man?”

I had walked to WATTSbury Music the previous afternoon, to ogle, and while there had calculated the answer to this very question. “Six hundred fifty bucks.”

He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Money is weird right now.”

I was silent. I knew I was owed.

“Cost be damned,” he said. “I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”

“Thanks, man.” I felt that, because of his fallen state and his congeniality, we were rockers together now, and
man
was a fit term of endearment. “That’s the shit.”

His eyes grew moist. “There’s a Richard Thompson show at Smith next week. I was thinking of going myself, but I’ll get you a ticket. You should watch some up-close finger action, right?”

“That would be really helpful. Thank you.”

“Resolved.” He thumped the wheel with his fist. “I hate to lose the cabin, but I’m going to use that money to be a father,” he said as he pushed the Subaru’s 4WD into gear. “To pay for a Wattsbury apartment, be here for you and your sister.” The Subaru growled earnestly. “I’m going to be riding the train or taking a plane just about every weekend. Essentially, I’m hocking the dacha to buy us some familial glue.”

Despite his loss of moral authority, these words excited me. So he was imperfect, as a husband. Were we not both rebels, in our way, nonconformists? I hoped we would go on long walks and talk about which drugs I should try, what I should say to women, whether I should hang a certain poster on my wall. I’d
been thinking about the poster, ever since Khadijah and I had gotten in trouble. It was on display in the back room of a head shop in Northampton: a black-and-white photograph of a young Parisian in a long wool coat, a radical of ’68, his arm cranked back to throw a rock. On the cobblestones, his shadow was watery and vast.

“What do you want to write essays about?” I asked. “Or, like, poem-essays?”

“The first one I’ve conceptualized is called ‘How Do We Make a Kid?’ The idea is that when we, members of my generation, were young, the iconography was all war versus children. The posters that said ‘War Is Bad for Children and Other Living Things,’ ‘Teach Your Children Well,’ imagery from Joni Mitchell songs, like ‘Ladies of the Canyon,’ say, where you’ve got these nurturing, peaceful women with children at their feet, flower children, the key motif being children . . . The idea was that war was destructive, and having babies, raising a brood, was a generative, positive act. I remember looking at your mother, thinking, We will be virtuous people, with our children and our garden. I mean,
War and Peace,
it’s an old dichotomy, isn’t it? But pretty shortly after we had children evidence began to accumulate that suggested having kids and raising them as comfortable Westerners was—is—an act of violence, consuming more of our limited natural resources than anyone should be allowed, and now . . . I’m curious, what is your sense of global warming? You’ve heard of it?”

I had, so I nodded. But I didn’t know what it was.

“Ah well,” he said. “Scientists have been sure for a long time, but no one’s hardly ever a hundred percent on anything in science, so journalists ask if they’re sure, and the scientists say, well, pretty sure, so journalists say it’s not sure. Anyway, we’re making the climatic conditions under which civilization has been constructed permanently defunct, by building houses and driving cars and having children who will do the same. If my ancestors had stayed in Ireland, with luck we’d all be living in a farmhouse and dying young and lamenting our wasted promise over glasses
of whiskey, and thereby living less destructively, better preserving the planet, contributing less to drought and starvation. Creating drought and starvation is what we’re doing, you know, right now. It might as well be the blood of third-world children powering this Subaru, which is designed for the portage of first-world children. I mean, I’m just saying. It’s not your fault. What do we do when the way we always thought we were building a peaceful future turns out to be another kind of killing?”

I tried to think of a countercultural response. What was the radical thing to say? “We have to compensate for existing, basically,” I said.

He wrinkled his nose, as if I had mentioned a vulgar activity, such as Jet Skiing, or skiing. “Nah. Too Protestant.”

We were silent again, for a quarter of an hour. The strangeness of the silence grew and grew, until finally he punched me in the arm, experimentally, a comradely gesture he’d never tried before.

“You know me and Nancy are in love with each other, don’t you? We wouldn’t do this, make all these changes happen, if we weren’t in love. But I suspect we’re the love of each other’s lives.”

“I understand.” I apologized to my mother in my head as I said it.

“Sometimes things just become very clear, and there’s not much you can do about it when it happens to you. God kind of taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘Sorry, buddy, your life isn’t over there, where you’ve been headed, it’s over
here,
you have to change, or you won’t be fully awake anymore.’”

“Are you and Nancy going to live together?”

He shook his head. “Nancy and Khadijah are moving to Cambridge.” He spoke slowly and precisely. “Nancy’s been courted pretty avidly by a couple schools around Boston for years. It’s late in the hiring season, so she’s taking meetings next week.”

“But what about Khadijah? There’s two more months of school.”

“She’s going to do her last quarter at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Nancy’s going to commute to Wattsbury. Those two can’t be running into each other at the grocery store, Nancy and Arty.
Things in that family aren’t as polite as they are in this one, right now. Fact is, things have been hard between Nancy and Arty for some time. She said it’d be better if he and I didn’t wind up in the same room. But you and Khadijah should stay in touch.”

“Oh, we will.”

He looked at me. “I don’t know if I’d talk about it to your mother too much, if you two actually get to be close friends or something. Might be weird. On the other hand, your mother’s kept her cool.” His eyes went shiny again. “She’s really been quite cool.”

Now, with the sun high in the pines, we turned right onto the long gravel driveway, and the cabin bumped into view. My father had built it ten years ago, with bearded friends. A Monopoly house, a perfect cube, unpainted sides, pine green roof. Outside, a circular clearing in miles of woods. Within, a potbellied woodstove, a loft with foam mattresses, a steel ladder in lieu of stairs.

A man and a woman waited at the end of the driveway, leaning on the hood of a red Toyota pickup.

“We can’t call it the dacha anymore today,” my father said. “If we do, these people will think we’re assholes.”

He killed the engine, jangled the keys. “Shit, I was promised a big truck. That pickup is supposed to take all our furniture to the storage space in Stockbridge. If that dinky-ass motherfucker is supposed to be the Big Truck, I will shit my brain.”

He flicked off his sunglasses and waved to the couple. They waved back, struggled into motion. The man was fat and slow, the woman thin and slower. With every step, she dumped her weight on her left leg, forcing it to drag her right. Her lame right foot scraped the ground at a diagonal, like a peeler skinning a potato.

“Look at them move, Son. These people are poor. The businessman in me says, Don’t touch this shit. But I’m an old lefty. I think you give people a chance.”

We got out of the car, made introductions. The renters were named Steven and Alexis.

“Listen, friends,” my father said. “With all due respect. This is not the truck that is going to haul my furniture.”

Steven made a face that said
I am a beacon of positivity.
“One and the same,” he chimed, as if to confirm good news.

My father looked at the truck, acclimating. “May I have the deposit, then, please?”

Steven took a pale blue document from his pocket and presented it to my father. My father examined it.

“I stated explicitly: a certified check.”

“That’s the closest we could do.” Steven wedged his thumbs through the belt loops of his soft, strained jeans.

“You guys don’t have a bank?”