The Other Way Around (4 page)

“Sorry.”

“But I mean that's really not the point. The point is your future, Andrew.”

Maybe, but it's not the first thing that popped into your mind. “I know,” I say.

“I mean do you think about the future, honey? I'm not going to be able to take care of you indefinitely.”

“What's for dinner, Mom?”

Mom looks annoyed and reaches for the stack of takeout menus in the middle of the table before she gets my point. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering what's for dinner.”

Mom stands up from the table quickly. Her chair tips back but doesn't fall. “Order what you want,” she says and huffs down the hall to her bedroom. “Your father called,” she says over her shoulder. “He wanted to know if he could postpone your birthday dinner until next weekend. I figured you wouldn't mind since it's already a month past your birthday.”

I guess we're both fighting dirty now.

After Italian takeout and her third glass of wine, Mom tries again. “What do you want out of life, Andrew?”

It's definitely her third glass of wine if we're getting into the open-ended existential-type questions. Hmmm, how to answer? To live in the same place for more than two years at a time? Friends who actually speak to me outside of school? A hand job by somebody other than myself? Somehow I know none of these answers are what she's looking for. “I don't know.” She sighs. But I'm really not trying to be irritating at this point.

I just don't have the answers she's looking for. For someone who has worked for so long in education, she's really pretty dumb about kids.

“What did you want out of life when you were my age?”
I say it kind of quietly. I don't want her to think I'm being completely serious, but maybe I am.

“I wanted to go to college so I could get a good job and make my parents proud,” she fires back at me with almost frightening automaticity.

Seriously Mom?
I'm thinking.
That's the best you can do?
Did she not realize I was asking her a legitimate question? I know that Mom was the middle kid, and her older sister, Madeline, married a rich guy, lives like twenty minutes from their parents, and has this total high-class lifestyle. Uncle Kris kind of did the rebellious thing, so I guess Mom just got stuck in the middle. I know she likes her job. She likes being head of the school and all that. But I'm not just any screwup student. I'm
her
kid. She's staring at me now. Not in a mean way, but really staring, as if the intensity of her gaze is going to unlock my secrets. This is when I start to feel uncomfortable. What if she's right? What if there's something wrong with me because I don't have a college in mind or a career I'm planning for? What if I have some freak version of like mental mononucleosis, and I'm destined to be lazy for the rest of my life and like work in a Laundromat folding other people's underwear while making up weird stories about them and listening to my iPod? I really want to believe there's more than just Mom's version of how to be a successful human being. But I have no proof and so far no definable skills beyond what seems to be an above-average power of observation. If given a choice, I think I'd rather be living a semi-decent life than just hyperactively observing everyone else's.

I get up and start loading my plate into the dishwasher. I'm trying to ignore The Stare, which threatens to burn a hole in the back of my head. When I look up again she's pulled out her
overstuffed weekly calendar, and she's flipping ahead, marking something down.

“Your Uncle Kris and Cousin Barry are coming for Thanksgiving,” Mom says.

I let the fork fall from my hand into the sink. It clatters into the disposal. “What? Seriously? What about Mima's?”

“It's just one year, Andrew. We can go to Mima's next year. I really think Kris needs me to reach out.”

Why? You'll spend the whole weekend doing work, and Kris and Barry will eat all our food, sit on the couch, and watch football.
“Well, maybe I can go with Dad,” I suggest. As soon as it's out of my mouth I wish I could suck it back. That kind of comment has to be carefully researched or else it elicits the pity look.

“I think your father has plans,” Mom starts.

“Okay,” I say quickly, hoping to stop her. I look down and intensify my search for the fork in the disposal.

“He's going to the Bahamas.”

“Okay.”

“With that fitness instructor of his.”

“She's a physical therapist,” I mumble.

“What?”

“Nothing.” What's the point? Mom loves the idea that Dad is like this middle-aged cliché who drives a sports car and dates a younger woman. Truthfully, Dad's car isn't that nice and Melissa isn't that much younger than he is. But maybe it's easier for Mom to think that way.

***

Back in my room I flip briefly through my copy of
Romeo and Juliet
. Flirting with the idea of writing a killer essay that will
make Ms. Tuttle swoon, I turn on my laptop and open a new file. But then I check my e-mail a few times, nothing there, and surf Google Images for pictures of the Bahamas. It's way too early for most of the puny mountains around here to be making snow, but out of habit I check the ski and board report for upstate New York. My snowboard is hanging unloved and unridden in the garage. All those hours of raking leaves and shoveling sidewalks, just hanging there out of reach.

I love that release at the top of the trail where I surrender my momentum to gravity and whatever coordination of skills I can put together. My toes squish into the front of my boots and all my organs seem to press forward. Once I'm heading down the trail, I just move my body and react to whatever obstacles come my way. Skiing used to be something Mom and I actually liked to do together. But every time I bring it up, Mom just sighs and talks about how busy she is and wouldn't it be nice to have time for things like skiing.

I check a travel site for plane fares to Indiana, where Mima lives. Too late and too expensive. There's the bus, but the bus is smelly and full of weirdos. It's really a last-ditch option. I click back over to my Word document and stare at the blinking cursor for a while. Finally, I decide I'm too tired to start writing anything now, and I close the lid.

I can't fall asleep right away. I'm still kind of annoyed about Kris and Barry. I was looking forward to a few days off from school, although I really can't say why. Now I guess I'll look forward to Christmas, but that feels really far away. Maybe I'll see if Dad wants to take me
and
Melissa somewhere cool. Doubtful. But I close my eyes and think about a steep slope and two feet of fresh powder.

“You know how I know you're gay?” Barry says.

I shrug, knowing there is no way to avoid the punch line.

“You go to an all-girls school,” he says and barks out a short, choppy laugh, sending a round of Doritos splinters all over the front of his shirt.

“You know how I know you're gay?” I counter.

Barry looks uncomfortable. He's not used to me turning his favorite jokes back on him.

“Your name is Barry,” I say and go back to what I'm writing.

Barry looks puzzled. “That doesn't even make any sense,” he says. Without giving it too much more thought he launches into the next assault. “Hey, you know how I know you're gay?” He doesn't wait for a response. “You write in a diary!” He grins at me triumphantly. The orange Dorito dust encrusts the corners of his mouth. I should know better than to respond, but I do anyway.

“It's not a diary; it's a journal. And if you must know, it's an assignment for school.” My face burns a little, even if it's only Barry.

Barry doesn't miss a beat. “You know why you're gay?”
he continues. “Cuz you're doing homework, and it's not even Sunday.”

Now I'm just annoyed. It's not like I was even writing anything profound. I was mostly just doodling in the margin of a blank page just to avoid conversations like this one. “Wouldn't that just make me studious, diligent, fastidious, or even conscientious?”

Barry stares at me, his mouth hanging ever so slightly ajar. “Whatever, dude.” He selects a particularly large Dorito chip from the bag and stuffs it in his mouth whole. The crunching noise seems to be his punctuation mark. He goes back to watching some rerun of
That '70s Show
on TV and leaves me alone for a little while.

Barry's dad is my mom's brother, Kris. My annoyance about their visit is twofold. For one thing, Barry is pretty much the bane of my existence. He's annoying, and he smells, and he seems to be pretty much incapable of having a conversation that strays beyond the following topics: classic rock bands, reality TV shows, boobs, and anything at all related to the playing or watching of ice hockey. There's only one of those subjects that I find remotely interesting, but hell if I'm going to talk about tits with my Neanderthal cousin. Besides, he probably wouldn't believe it and would use whatever I said as an excuse to ask me if I'm gay.

The real reason that Barry and Uncle Kris's visit is so annoying is that it supplanted one of my the few family rituals I actually like. Every Thanksgiving my mom and I visit my dad's mother at her assisted-living home in Indiana. My grandmother Mima is pretty much the coolest member of my family. She refers to my dad, who happens to be her son, as “the schmuck,” even when Mom asks her not to.

“Why?” she'll say. “He is a schmuck.” And then Mom will get all quiet and leave the apartment for a little while. When Mom gets pissed at Mima, I usually find her down by the pool. It's pretty much the best part of that place besides the food. The pool at Shady Acres is enclosed in this giant glass dome. It's all steamy and warm in there, almost like a greenhouse. It's like our own little tropical vacation.

I don't know if Mima gets too intense for Mom sometimes or if it's just that she knows she doesn't have a leg to stand on in that argument. I appreciate what she's trying to do. You know, protect some sainted image of my father in case he decides to show up again someday and attempt to have some kind of relationship with me. But it's a little hypocritical, considering that Mom does her fair share of Dad-bashing when we're at home. She's just a little more passive-aggressive about it. But really I just prefer the honesty; I mean, it's not like I haven't noticed that he's been pretty much AWOL for the past seven years. It's not like he's been off climbing Mount Everest or saving the children in Africa or in prison, for god's sake. He's the development director at a history museum. Which, when he's in a pissy mood, he describes as schmoozing people for money. When he's feeling good he gets all starry-eyed about “going back into the field someday.” I'm really not sure what he's talking about. I mean, what field? I think this is just something he tells himself so he doesn't have to admit he hates his job.

It actually might be kind of cool if he were in prison. I wouldn't mind visiting him. It would be kind of interesting to visit someone in prison. I bet you could get a lot of those meals that come in partitioned trays. I used to love eating Lunchables, before Mom figured out they had the nutritional value
of the cardboard they were packed in. That's the way the food comes at Mima's house. Every night we fill out this little card saying what we want for our meals for the next day, and then they deliver them, just like that. All you have to do is heat stuff up sometimes. I guess I kind of like things when they're neat and organized. Somehow I don't think that's the kind of mind-blowing revelation that Ms. Tuttle is looking for.

It would really annoy me if anyone read this and thought that I was a bad student because I'm lacking a male role model in my life. Because I really don't think that's the case.

Having two parents is kind of an outdated model family at this point in the twenty-first century. In fact, most of the kids I know live with one parent or the other, or are part of some kind of blended family. They used that term in our eighth-grade health class back in public school. It's kind of a nice way of labeling a whole bunch of people who don't necessarily want to be family but are forced to think of themselves that way. The term always made me think about putting a family in a food processor and chopping it up until the parts were even and indistinguishable from one another. Which, frankly, doesn't sound all that great to me.

Mom and Dad and I aren't really part of any blended family. We're just like three extra ingredients that ended up in the world. We don't belong to anyone else, and we barely belong to each other anymore. Back when my parents first split up, Mom and I lived with her parents while she figured things out. That wasn't so bad. Norma (my mom's parents wanted to be called by their first names) used to take me on outings to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which I nicknamed the Boring Museum for Adults, or to see a youth concert at Symphony Hall. The
latter were a little better since she usually brought candy in her purse. Plus there were naked statues. It wasn't ideal, as far as entertainment goes, but it felt good to be part of something a little bigger than just me and Mom, or me and Dad at his condo in New York City.

I used to spend half the time with Dad at his condo. But then we moved to Boston and getting back and forth became more and more of an issue, so I just stopped seeing him as much. I kept waiting for him to make it an issue with Mom—you know, that he was being denied his parental rights or whatever—but he never did.

I overheard them on the phone once. Well, I overheard Mom's end, anyway. I could tell she was complaining about his lack of involvement with me because she was saying “he” and “his” with extra emphasis combined with phrases like
school-work
and
Boy Scouts
Then I could tell he was arguing with her because she said, “Well, I'd like to have some time to find myself too, David, but some of us are busy raising a child.”