The Gum Thief (22 page)

How are Steve and Gloria? Have we met Kendall yet? And where does Gloria get tonic for her gin? I think that's a plot point you missed. Maybe her family set her up with a beverage endowment. I've met a few trust-fund kids here, and I can already tell that there's nothing a fucked-up rich family won't do with their money.

Kyle is ready to go. We're headed to Piccadilly to meet up with some deejay we met at a party in Wimbledon two nights ago. The previous sentence sounds way more glamorous than it is.

Write me a letter, why don't you? Paper is more old

fashioned and warped, even when sent FedEx. My email address is
[email protected]
in case you're feeling modern and lazy. I check the address daily.

Bye, Roger.

Ta!

B.

DeeDee

Roger, I came to Staples but it was your day off. They wouldn't give me your home address, your phone's unlisted, and you have no Google existence. Are you a Unabomber or something?

Bethany left with that wretch, Kyle. She told me she was going to England the morning before the afternoon flight, and I botched it and screamed all the things you're not supposed to scream, which gave her the moral high ground and allowed her to slip into dignified silence mode-which inflamed me more. When numbnuts came to pick her up, I threw the Braun coffeemaker at him from the balcony. But what-I was supposed to let her run away and do something stupid, and say nothing? What sort of mother would I be if I did that?

What the hell is she going to do in England? England? Who goes to
England?
High school choirs, soccer hooli
gans, tea salesmen and pansies. She said she's going to Europe for half a year and she's going to get a job there because her father's mother was born in Brussels-some sort of European visa boondoggle. Yeah, right. They're going to smoke pot, meet losers, sit on trains and eat junk food. That's all young people do there, along with fucking around. I did the Europe thing once, except I had no illusions about what it was about. Sex and drugs. Period.

Oh God, I'm jealous. And I'm utterly sick with worry, though I think Bethany could hold her own in the gutters of Hanoi if she had to. I'm so lonely I can barely think. I got a terse little mini-email from her today, and it was way worse than hate mail. "Mom. I'm fine. Relax."

She's there with
somebody else,
and even if that somebody is that scheming prick, at least she has somebody.

Has she written you? Is she writing you? I hope she is. I think it's good she has one adult in her life she can talk to. I want you to grill all those twerps there at Staples and find out what you can about Kyle. Does Bethany email them? Did she get a job? Does she hate every minute of it and plan on coming home soon?

Sorry, I didn't ask you if you were fine. Bethany said you didn't have the flu, but that you were depressed about something, and she didn't know what, but now you're back at work. How is your novel coming? How can you concentrate on something that takes so long to do?

I'm off to a doctor's appointment.

I appreciate whatever help you can give me.

Bye. DD

Roger

DeeDee, I'm not going to act as a go-between between a mother and her daughter. Let Bethany enjoy Europe. She's hasn't written me, but she also isn't the type to do freaky, crazy shit like we might have done in the seventies. Yes, she wears vampire makeup, but it's only makeup-it's make-believe it's something to tide her over until something more real comes along. As for Kyle? He's a blank. A generic good looking kid with zero ambition and grades that stink-why else would he be working at Staples at, what, twenty-four? Kyles like him will be selling cellphone packages at twenty five, and by thirty they'll have their shit together enough to get a pickup and start a half-assed gardening service, and by forty they'll be in coke or meth rehab, but by then our Kyle will be almost two decades out of Bethany's picture. Whatever is between them, it's not going to last. You know it. I know it. So relax.

Today has been strange for me. To be honest, I miss my mother, which is something I never experienced when she was alive. Missing that mean spirited, sour judgmental old battle-axe is the
last
thing I would have expected, but today I was in an ATM line up at the bank, and there was this woman in front of me who, from behind, was the spitting image of my mother-the same hair colour and cut, and she held herself the way my mother did, her whole body bent in an arc. And she was wearing yellow ochre, my mother's favourite colour. I had no idea a simple colour could mean so much. Anyway, for the first thirty seconds I was looking at this woman from behind, I didn't make the connection that it wasn't my mother or that my mother was dead. I felt as if I were a teenager again, and I'd bumped into her there in the bank, and the moment she turned around and saw me I was going to catch shit for something I'd done wrong. But then the woman moved, and it wasn't my mother, and I felt socked on the jaw. My body felt all boneless and my eyes teared up, and then I got mad because the last thing I want in my life right now is more
grief
or
memories.
I'm sick of everything leaving my life, and nothing new ever coming my way.

What keeps me going right now, DeeDee, is the notion that, stripped of any form of protective coating-of stupidity, of youth, of ignorance, of money-of anything that might allow me to delude myself, I still manage to hang in there and go to that wretched Staples and stack the reams of twenty-pound bond paper and direct customers to the Maxwell House coffee promotional kiosk. It's a wonder I don't arrive one morning and drive through the front windows in my car, taking out as many people as I can in one grand, glorious gesture.

Strike that. I'm not a psycho.
If
anything, I'll probably drink too many vodka Breezers and get mellow out by the back door, where the girls take their smoke breaks. Guys don't smoke any more. Notice that?

It's fun when I'm buzzed and throwing tennis balls to my dog, Wayne. The girls get such a kick out of it, and for a ten-minute window they can think of me as a real person.

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.

Imagine seeing the grocery store's checkout girl grow horns.

Imagine growing younger instead of older.

Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

Break time is over.
I'm
training to work as an aisle associate in the Personal Digital Assistant aisle. That's "PDA" in our high-tech world here.

Roger

Roger

DeeDee, I thought over the letter I sent two days ago and realized it was a depressing pile of crap and you need something like that like you need a hole in the head. So
I'm
sending you these daisies-at least, that's what the picture on the screen showed. I was going to throw in a little silver Mylar balloon with "Sorry" printed on it, but that might make you retch. I promise not to write such a depressing letter again.

Roger

Roger

To Bethany c/o YHA London-Hampstead Heath Hostel

4 Wellgarth Road

London, England VIA your secret FedEx number

Bethany ... first things first: write your mother, okay? She's going nuts worrying about you. Enough said.

Next: I'm glad you told me you visited Joan. The last while has been kind of rough and, yeah, I'm having trouble these days, but Joan isn't what you'd call a fountain of sympathy. I can make up all the excuses I want, but the fact is, I merely lie in my bed in the morning and don't get out. Especially at this time of year. I ask you, why do we even bother having wakefulness? Dreams are way more interesting than real life, and in dreams you never have to get out of bed. For that matter, why does life bother going forward? No matter what organism you look at ... an amoeba or an elk or whatever, it does everything it can to advance itself-it tries to not be killed, it tries to mate, it tries to not be eaten. What's the nature of this divine computer program that drives everything to go
forward?
Why doesn't DNA sometimes say to itself, "You know what? I'm tired of this survival shit. I think I'm going to pack it in.
It
ends here."

Guess who had to put up the Christmas displays this year? You guessed it. God, how fucking depressing. I feel like Mr. Rant. Think about it: who cares a flying fuck whether or not an office superstore wishes them a seasonal greeting? I find it offensive. I'd prefer if, in December, a large office supply corporation held a "Just Pretend It's February" promotional campaign.
If
a company did that, I'd camp out in their stores all through December. The most seasonal thing you'd see would be a cardboard groundhog on a fake Groundhog Day reminding you to upgrade your PC's memory card.

BTW, in the new year I'm going to be a PDA Associate. I took a three-day training seminar taught by what appeared to be an eleven-year-old who had no social skills; welcome to the twenty-first century. Everyone understood what the guy was saying but me, and
man,
did I feel old, so to make myself feel less old, I forced myself to memorize the entire PDA user manual to learn all there is to know about these suckers. I can now tell you how to program one into sending your mother a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call on her II7th birthday-assuming you wanted to. I truly wish to see the shock on everyone's faces when I effortlessly show users how to flip between the Gregorian calendar and the calendar used by the Japanese imperial family. I know they're all waiting for me to crash and burn, but they're not going to get that satisfaction. Using a PDA is easier than I thought it would be, and it's fun and gives me something to do when I can't force myself out of bed.

I sound like I'm in a worse space than I am. I'm only mad at the world.

You can't hear Wayne howling. He's got some kind of bug and won't eat properly. I'm probably going to take him to the vet this morning, which will sorely tick off Fearless Leader-we're understaffed today, Dell Day, no less. Oodles of shit is going to hit a massive fan 'blade.

Fun sending a FedEx ... never done it before. I feel like a confident industry professional, and it's great having the drop-off box outside the store's front door. It's like we have our own private mail system.

Don't happy, be worry. Oops ... other way around.

R.

Zoe

Hi, Dad. I really love
Mowie
Maui and today I found a clam. We had a swordfish for dinner last night. I have my own room and it has free soap. I have to go now.

Zoe

The Epke Family

At this, the most special time of the year, it brings great pleasure to wish you and yours the best for the holiday season.

Dear Friends, Excuse the impersonal "mass mailing" of the family newsletter, but email is so mechanical and I don't want to handwrite a hundred Christmas cards!

Chances are you were at our wedding mere weeks ago. Joan has made an honest man out of me. Our honeymoon was a blast, and young Zoe overcame her fear of waves and was a paddle-boarding fiend on our Maui "Wowie" adventure. Returning to the "real world" was pretty darn hard!

The new house is coming along well, although we lost momentum fixing it up in spring and there are still several walls with unpainted plaster patches. One room we will certainly have to fix up is the nursery because, yup, there's a "bun in our oven"! Expect big things early next summer! And Joan wants to make sure I tell everybody that she's quit smoking, but only until fall, when she promises to be lighting up again. Between then and now, I'm sure we'll be having some pretty energetic debates on that topic!