Authors: Joyce Maynard
How do you feel about that? she said. Leaving your friends. I’m asking because that’s what I had to do when I came here, and frankly, I consider it child abuse. Not that I’m a child, but from a legal standpoint, not to mention the psychological effects. All the experts could tell you that particularly during puberty, it is highly inadvisable for a person to have to form new bonds with new people who might or might not have anything in common with her. Especially if, no offense, she is used to living in a cosmopolitan city with things like jazz clubs and an art institute and all of a sudden the main attraction is bowling and horseshoes. When I tell my friends back home about this town, nobody can believe it. I’m not saying this applies to you, just a general impression.
I didn’t feel like telling her that in my case, I didn’t have any friends. Not anyone it would be hard to leave at least—just a few fellow outcasts at school, who shared the table in the cafete
ria where all the losers sat, when nobody else wanted them to sit at their table. Siberia.
In my case, I said, the problem wasn’t actually going away. It was getting left behind. Maybe there’s some kind of trend going on in the mother community, I said. Because it seemed like my mother was also trying to get rid of me. It looked like she and her boyfriend were planning to park me with my father and his wife, Marjorie, and her son who was my age who was probably my father’s favorite and their baby, who spit up on me every time they made me hold her.
I wouldn’t have thought my mother would do something like this, I said.
It’s sex, Eleanor said. When people have sex with each other, it affects their brain. They can’t see things normally.
I might have said here that the way my mother saw things even before she started having sex with Frank was not what most people would consider normal. I was wondering if Eleanor knew about the effects of sex because she’d had sex herself, or if she’d also read this in a book. She didn’t seem like someone who would have had sex yet, but she had an air of knowing a lot more than I did. If she spoke from personal experience, I didn’t want to let on that I had none myself, beyond what went on in my own bed at night. Though it did support her theory when I considered how recent activities seemed to be affecting my own brain. I thought about sex almost all the time now, except when I was thinking about what was happening with my mother and Frank, but that also involved sex.
It’s like they’re on drugs, I said. I was thinking about a commercial they had on television. It started with a frying pan on the stove. Then you see a pair of hands holding an egg.
This is your brain,
says the voice.
The hands crack the egg. The egg lands on the pan. You watch the white and yolk as they sizzle and change color.
This is your brain on drugs.
It turned out Eleanor was researching the question of whether, as a minor (she was fourteen), she could sue her parents. She was thinking about contacting a lawyer, but she wanted to read up on the basics first.
I wrote a letter to the boarding school I was going to go to, she said. To ask if they’d let me come anyway, and I could clean the bathrooms or something in exchange for the tuition. But I haven’t heard back.
I told her that as soon as the bank opened on Wednesday, when I was due to start school, it looked like my mother and her boyfriend were going to withdraw all her money and drive north together. She was probably packing right now. Maybe that was the real reason they wanted me out of the house. That, or more sex.
Is your mother always, like, dating a million guys? Eleanor asked. Barhopping and answering personals ads and stuff?
Not my mom, I said. My mom is the type of person—I stopped. She was no type of person you could describe, in fact. She was like nobody on earth, just her. My mom is—I started again. I wasn’t expecting this, but my voice started to crack in the middle of the sentence. I tried to make it look like I just needed to clear my throat, but it was probably obvious to Eleanor that I was upset.
You can’t even blame her, she said. It’s like he cast a spell on her or something. You might say he hypnotized her. These men just use their penis instead of some old watch on a chain.
I tried to look casual when she said penis. I had never known a girl who said that word out loud. My mother of course. When I had gotten poison ivy a few summers back, all over my legs and thighs, she asked if my penis was also affected, and just the summer before, when I’d tried to execute a superhero leap over a granite hitching post—but failed to clear it—she had asked,
as she knelt beside me on the ground, where I was groaning and holding my crotch, to show her my penis.
I need to see if this warrants a visit to the emergency room, she said. I definitely don’t want anything to jeopardize the functioning of your penis down the line, or anything to do with your testicles.
But I was used to my mother. Hearing Eleanor speak about this—a part of my own body that I’d never been able to speak of myself—seemed stranger, more intimate. Though from the moment she did, I had the sense that now we could talk about anything. We had crossed into the territory of the forbidden.
Her room’s next to mine, I said. I can hear them in the night. Doing it. Her and…Fred.
I figured I’d call him that. To protect his identity.
So, he’s a sex addict, she said. Or a gigolo. Possibly both.
Even now, I knew this wasn’t so. I liked Frank. That was the problem in fact, though I didn’t discuss this part. I liked him so much I had wanted to go away with him too. I liked him so much I had been picturing him becoming part of our family. These past few happy days he had been spending at our house, hanging out with my mother and me, I hadn’t understood that the place he would take was mine.
You don’t have some kind of Oedipus complex or anything do you? she said. Where you want to marry your mom? That sometimes happens with boys, though generally they outgrow it by your age.
I like regular girls, I told her. My age, or maybe a little older but not a lot.
If she thought I was talking about her, that was OK.
I like my mother in the mom way, I said.
In that case, you might consider an intervention, Eleanor said. That’s what my mother did with me, though in my opinion
they had it backwards. The person that needed the intervention was her, and her sicko boyfriend. But from a psychological perspective, it’s a very effective method.
If the situation is that this person’s put a kind of spell on your mom, you need to deprogram her. They did that with people who joined cults, back when that was really popular. There was a girl one time named Patty Hearst, from a rich family like the people on
Dallas,
who got kidnapped, and pretty soon the robbers, who were also political radicals and also extremely attractive, had her robbing banks.
This was back before either of us were born, Eleanor said. My mother told me about it. The man who kidnapped her had this thing called charisma, which affected her to the point that Patty Hearst started wearing army clothes and carrying a machine gun. When her parents finally got her back home, they had to send her to all sorts of psychiatrists to help her get back to her old self. It can be confusing for people, figuring out who the bad people are and who are the good ones. Or maybe nobody’s really so good, which was probably why Patty Hearst got messed up with the bank robber people. She just had so many problems already, it made her vulnerable.
This would be my mother all right.
He brainwashed her with the power of sex.
If that was really the case, how would anyone get her back again? I asked. (I wasn’t going to say normal. Just back to how she was before.)
Sex is too powerful, Eleanor said. Nothing you could do now would neutralize it.
In other words, the situation was hopeless. My mother was a goner. I looked at the stack of books at my feet. One was open to a photograph of a hillside on Prince Edward Island, rolling fields, ocean behind. Eleanor, when she saw the book, had pointed out that the girl in
Anne of Green Gables
lived
there, but that was a whole different story. Once Frank took my mother there she’d never come back.
Just in case your parents’ divorce didn’t screw up your personality enough already, Eleanor said, this boyfriend business will probably leave you with major neurosis. For your sake, I hope you’ll make a lot of money in the future, to pay for all the therapy you’ll need.
As she spoke she was chewing on her braid, which might have been her substitute for food, it occurred to me. She had gotten up from the leather chair now so she was standing in front of me in the reading room, which made it possible for me to see that she was even skinnier than I might have imagined. She had also taken off her glasses, which revealed dark circles under her eyes. In one way, she looked really old, but also like a little girl.
I see only one hope for you, she said. I’m not saying to kill him or anything. But you need to find a way to get him out of your world.
I don’t know if that’s possible, I said.
Look at it this way, Hank, she said. (Hank? I had no idea where she got that.) Either you get rid of him. Or he gets rid of you. Which one is it going to be?
B
ACK AT THE HOUSE
, F
RANK AND
my mother were getting ready to paint the storm windows. I wouldn’t have thought this would be the kind of job two people who were about to leave the country forever would be interested in, but maybe she was thinking she’d sell our place to get money for the farmhouse on Prince Edward Island. In case what she had in the bank wasn’t enough. She’d want our place here looking nice.
Hey, buddy. You got back just in the nick of time, Frank said. Want to help scrape these with me?
My mother was standing next to him. She had on a pair of overalls she always used when she was working in the garden, back when we had one, with her hair tied back in a bandana. They had all our storm windows out, and a paint scraper, and some sandpaper.
What do you think? she said. I’ve had this paint sitting around for a couple of years now. Frank said the three of us could knock out this job in no time if we all pitched in.
I wanted to paint with them. It looked like they were having fun. She had brought the radio outside, and they were doing some kind of Labor Day weekend countdown of hits. The song on at the moment was Olivia Newton-John, doing that number from
Grease
about summer love. My mother was holding the scraper like it was a microphone, pretending to be Olivia Newton-John.
I’m busy, I said.
A hurt look came over her face.
I thought it would be a fun project for us to do together, she said. You can fill us in on what you learned at the library.
I learned that my mother had been brainwashed. That the inside of her brain, if we could see it now, under the influence of sex, would resemble a fried egg. That her only hope lay in my getting rid of Frank. I didn’t say these things but I thought them.
Frank had put a hand on my shoulder now. I remembered the other time he’d done that, the first day I met him—how he’d told me he needed my help. Looking in his eyes, I had believed I could trust him.
I think you should help your mother here, son, he said.
Not angry, but firmer than I’d heard out of him before. Here it came, the thing Eleanor had warned me about. Him taking charge. Now I rode in the backseat. Soon I wouldn’t be in the car at all.
You’re not my boss, I said. You’re not my dad.
He withdrew his hand, as if he’d touched hot metal. Or dry ice.
It’s OK, Frank, my mother said. We can take care of the job, just the two of us.
I went inside and turned on the television, loud. The U.S. Open tennis match was on, not that I cared who won. One channel up, baseball. Then some infomercial for women who wanted to trim down their thighs. I didn’t care that my mother and Frank would hear me watching the show—same as I heard them, through the wall in my bedroom—or that when I was finished eating my sandwich, I left the plate and my empty milk glass out on the table, instead of putting my dishes in the dishwasher the way I normally would.
I drifted over to check on Joe, still lying on the floor of his cage, panting in the heat. I got a spray bottle and rinsed it out, squirted water on his fur to cool him off, then squirted some on me.
I lay on the couch, watching the infomercial and flipping through the book I’d brought home,
Mysterious Maritimes: Land of Dreams
. I picked up the newspaper and studied the headline again. Reward offered. Ten thousand dollars.
Remove him,
Eleanor said.
Get him out of your world.
I thought about a dirt bike. A video camera. A paintball gun.
I remembered a catalog I read on the plane, coming home from Disney with my father and Marjorie, filled with all kinds of amazing things to buy that you never knew existed before, like a hoverboard and a popcorn machine to put in your own home and a clock that showed what time it was in cities all over the world and a machine that turned your bathtub into a Jacuzzi and solar-powered tiki lights and a pair of what looked like rocks, only they were really outdoor stereo speakers, made from fiberglass, for neighborhood cookouts and parties. With ten thousand dollars, a person could buy every
single thing in the catalog, except for the items that weren’t interesting anyway.
After they took Frank away, my mother would be sad, but she’d get over it and eventually realize it was for her own good that I did it.
Y
OU PROBABLY WONDER WHY YOU
don’t have a brother or sister, my mother said one time. This was during one of our meals together, where she liked to bring up topics to talk about while we ate our frozen dinners. I was around nine years old at the time, and I had never wondered why I didn’t have a brother or sister, but I nodded anyway, understanding, even then, that this was a subject she wanted to explore with me.