At first we thought that that sad pile of torn paper could be put back together like a puzzle. But it quickly turned out to be hopeless; the dried-out pieces broke in our hands, that old gravity furnace made it so hot up in my room, and so dry, that four winters had pretty much destroyed it. After a while we both gave up; there was no way to get it all laid out and then tape it together.
“I’m so sorry, Karl,” she said. Her eyes were clear and calm, like the Mom I remembered; I almost cried right then.
“It’s okay, really,” I said. “I pretty much have them all memorized. I’ll miss them but I don’t
need
them.” It was true; even now, just telling Mom about it, I could see all of the four notebook sheets in my mind’s eye, and read all sixty-two tasks, spaced two lines apart in case he wanted to add notes (which he sometimes did up till he died), all in Dad’s neat bookkeeper’s hand lettering. In fact, right now, it would have been so nice to just sit and look at them, or even to stretch out for a nap and read them till I fell asleep.
“Sweetie?” Mom asked.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m just kind of absorbing that it’s really gone, right now.”
“Tiger, I’m so sorry, this is the kind of thing that happens when we let anger get into our energy.”
“I guess it is, Mom.”
“This is the kind of thing I wanted to protect you from.” She sighed and wiped her eyes. “Actually I don’t protect you from much, do I? And your father didn’t either, I guess neither of us could.” She looked at me, straight and clear and sane as anything, and said, “I’m sorry, Karl. These last few years must have been awful for you.”
And something just broke. Not like a dam, crashing slowly down, but like the whole world just ceased to be. I was there in the void with nothing at all, and before I knew it I was running down the stairs, running like a crazy bastard, vaulting over Hairball, out the front door, and on down the street. I didn’t hear her call after me or anything. Probably she didn’t, come to admit it, but it would have been nice if she had, I can tell you that. It would have been fucking nice.
I ran and ran; like Dad used to say, “the wicked flee when no man pursueth.” I ended up in City Park, sitting on a bench, breathing like I’d just come up from five thousand fathoms, hands on my knees, panting like a pervert with a peephole into the girls’ locker room. I was two miles from my house, and I’d probably just broken all my previous records—speed, distance, and lunacy. I wanted to cry but I was breathing too hard to do anything but breathe.
I stayed on that bench, by the pool, which had been closed for the season and drained that week. I was a long way from the playground or the basketball courts, just among the picnic tables, but with the cold and rain the day before, no one had planned a picnic I guess, so there was nobody in sight. I sat there because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, and stayed until my breathing was slower and I started to come back to myself a little.
It got dark after a while, and I was getting hungry. I looked at my watch, not sure what to do, and saw I had time enough for some basics, and my wallet had enough, so first I walked the mile and a half back to the downtown, taking side streets where I didn’t know anybody so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.
Come to admit it, I was kind of ashamed of how I’d behaved, and really having a hard time figuring out how any guy could be as fucked-up as me and still remember to breathe. Mom acted okay for the first time in years, and I just lost it and ran out on her. Shit-jesus, God only knew what that might have sent her off into. Maybe she was smashing the rest of the windows and looting all my money cans, or more likely she was off with the super super ladies now getting really drunk, even more weird ideas, seriously horny, and a lot of sympathy. I’d have to go home eventually, but I admitted to myself I was just too chickenshit to think about that now, too afraid of what I could find.
Plenty of cash in my wallet. Kathy had let me do my shift without my McDorksuit before, when I’d been locked out or not able to go home; I should find a pay phone and call her.
I could get a single room at the Carrellsen tonight; probably Paul wouldn’t be able to smuggle me into his basement, and there was nobody else I felt comfortable asking, and besides, this was Marilyn’s night on the front desk, and she was a real bud. Getting a room would set me back a couple days’ work but it beat trying to get by on four hours of McSleep.
I took a deep breath and kind of put it in perspective; by dawn Mom would be passed out drunk for sure. I had reset the window sash lock earlier that day. I could sneak in and get what I needed for school, neat and easy, at around eight in the morning or so. Then when she got home from work tomorrow I could try to have it together enough to tell her . . .
Well, I’d figure out what to tell her later.
I’d left home without any books, and I was done with everything but the windows, but I didn’t want Harris and Tierden to see me just catching a nap in here. It was always possible they’d figure out the way I’d been avoiding having to double-clean the windows. Since it had rained all day Saturday, the McPuddle by the window was all filled up. They’d make their big splash, I’d wash the windows that I had to wash anyway, and we’d be all even and done.
So I wanted them to think I’d already gone home for the night, and therefore I was hiding from their view, since they never got out of that car. I was sitting reading on the bathroom floor, with the bathroom door propped open. I’d fished out a Sunday
Toledo Blade
that wasn’t all grody from having been in the trash, and was trying to keep all the Watergate crap straight because Harry would be telling us what to think about it tomorrow.
Instead of the big splash, I heard a knock on the window. I came out of the bathroom. Marti was looking in the window like a puppy in a pet store. I went outside, but she didn’t come right in the door, so I walked up to her. She stood like she didn’t want to be touched.
“Locked out?”
“My parents were fighting. Mother was yelling at Dad because he created an ugly geek daughter, and I will never get a date because I’m too brainy and too weird and I’ll never learn to do anything like a normal person, and my boyfriend is the biggest fag in the high school. Dad was blaming Mom for having contaminated his genius blood-line with crazy drunken whore blood. I don’t think they noticed when I left, which was six hours ago, and they might not have noticed yet. I drove halfway to Cleveland, and then realized I only had enough money for gas to make it back here. So I turned around and now I’m here. Are you going to let me in?”
“Of course. I only came out because you didn’t move.” Once I had her seated at the counter, and put a couple of the remaining hamburgers in front of her, she just kind of sat there, head down, like the kind of rescued baby animal situation when you know you’re going to be up all night but the poor little thing isn’t going to make it.
“I’m locked out, too,” I said, lying or maybe not. “I have a room at the Carrellsen. There’s room on the bed for two, or there’s a couch in the room; either way I’m pretty much a gentleman. Might take some smuggling to get you up there, but we’ll manage.” I picked up one of the burgers. “If you’re not going to eat that, I’ve always got room.”
“Help yourself.” She sat there while I finished. “Are you just waiting for the assholes to splash water on the windows?”
“Pretty much. Then I have to hang out here till I can clock out. Get a nap if you need one, and I’ll wake you up when it’s time to go to the Carrellsen.”
“My first time checking into a hotel room with a guy. My mom will be so proud.”
She slept, and I read the paper. It got close to closing, and Harris and Tierden didn’t show up, so I finally just washed the windows, woke Marti, and clocked out. Marti parked her car on the side of the Carrellsen that you can’t see from the front desk.
I went in the front entrance, chatted with Marilyn for a minute, went up the steps towards my room, descended the stairs to the side entrance, looked all around the parking lot to be on the safe side, and gestured for Marti. She slipped out from between two parked trucks and hurried into the doorway beside me. I pulled the door closed, careful to keep it quiet, and we went up the stairs together.
“How close is the front desk?” she breathed in my ear. “Where do I hide if she comes up the hall?”
“About a mile and a half beyond some closed doors,” I said in my normal voice, “and Marilyn won’t leave that front desk to walk the halls. She’s the only staff here, and she’s so conscientious about staying at the desk that I don’t think she ever takes a pee break for her whole shift.”
Marti made that snorting, fizzy laugh, pinned her back against the wall, and moved sideways like she was in a commando raid in a movie, quietly singing the
Mission Impossible
theme—“Bump-bump-bump bump-BAH-DUMP, Bump-bump-bump bump-BAH-dump.” I about bust a gut. “Come on,” I said, “We should get into the room anyway.”
As I closed the door, Marti said, “Well, yeah, okay, I
am
a hopeless romantic, but this is the cheapest-looking hotel room I’ve ever been in, exactly like the kind of place I always figured I’d be staying in when I started having real adventures out in the real world, and I think this is cool.”
I’d lost track of how many times I’d crashed out in one of these rooms, so “cool” was not a word that would have occurred to me. The Carrellsen was old; it had been a railway hotel, then a bum bin, and though for the moment it was back to being sort of a hotel, it made most of its money off the bar on the ground floor, and you could tell it would be a bum bin again in a few years.
The room had hairy gold wallpaper with a red rope pattern on it, and a tall ceiling. There was an ancient radiator that had been painted so many times it looked like it was made out of dirty yellow snow and the spring thaw was on. The gray-beige carpets were the color of the local mud. The furniture was a lumpy old double bed, a desk taken up entirely by a TV, a hard-back chair that looked stolen from somebody’s dinette set, and an old couch, one of those thirties designs that was all curves, sagging so much it looked like Dr. Seuss had drawn it. The bathroom contained a greasy mirror, two big towels, two little towels, and one really ancient pink toilet that didn’t match either the tiny sink on a stand or the old claw-foot tub with an aluminum-tube circle above it, from which hung a plastic shower curtain dirtier than Mom’s bathroom floor.
“Well,” she said, “embarrassment time if you want to be embarrassed. What do we do about showers and jammies and all that?”
“Humph,” I said. “Well, we each get a bath or shower, then get dressed in our dirty clothes, and come out and sleep in them. That’s what I’d say.”
“Or,” she said, “how much of a gentleman are you? We move the coverlet to the couch, where I’m going to sleep. You won’t need it, this place is too warm anyway. We each take a shower and come out wearing a towel, with our dirty clothes on hangers. We hang up the dirty clothes on the rack so they at least get some air. The second one out turns off the lights and then you get into the bed, because you paid for the room, and I get under the coverlet on the couch, in our nice clean skin. That way we just wear our stinky clothes for a few minutes tomorrow morning. Unless, of course, knowing there are naked ta-tas in the same room is going to keep you awake all night.”
Hunh, no naked ladies in my life for seventeen years, and now twice in a day. By the time I was thirty I might get to touch one.
I wanted to flip a coin to see who got first shower, but Marti insisted that paying for the room trumped on that, so I got my shower, tied on the towel, and went out and got between the sheets. I figured if I was already asleep I could trust myself to be a gentleman.
I drifted off but woke when she sat on the edge of the bed. “Um, Karl, this is embarrassing. I need your help for something.”
“It can’t be any more embarrassing than anything else today has been,” I said. “What do you need?”
“There’s this cream,” she said, “for my acne. When I get a real bad flare-up, like I’m having now, it itches and gets sore. And I’ve got a patch on my back I can’t reach. Could you, um—”
“Just get me the stuff and I won’t open my eyes till you tell me you’re stretched out on your stomach,” I said. “Then you close your eyes, unless you want to be struck with awe at my manly equipment. I rub it in where you say, and get back under the covers, and we reverse the process. Duck soup.”
In a minute she had it all together and was lying on the bed, with the sheet down to her waist, on her stomach. In the light of the crappy little lamp, all I was looking at was a frizzy mop of blonde hair and a bare back with one big angry red patch on it, but Jesus fucking God she was beautiful, and if you don’t understand that, I’m sorry for you.
When I went to rub it in, I could see the skin was badly broken and erupted down in the lower part between her shoulder blades. “That looks awful,” I said.
“It doesn’t feel good, either. But the cream kills the itch and dries it out. You have to kind of work it in.”
“Let me know if this hurts.” I rubbed a little of the cream in, and she said, “You can rub harder.” So I did, and reflected that here I’d been wishing to touch a naked girl and I was getting to. Obviously God or somebody had one hell of a sense of humor.
Once she wasn’t itching and hurting, it kind of turned into an overall back rub; she just seemed so small and her skin was so soft, and, well, we had the time. “That couch looks like it’s uncomfortable,” I said. “Not to mention like it’s probably rough on your skin. There’s room in the bed for two of us to sleep without touching.”
She breathed in and out before saying, “If you turn out the lights, and we both get under the sheet, are you gonna turn into a crazy rapist?”
“I don’t think so.”
I don’t know if she peeked but I didn’t; it wouldn’t have felt right.