We're All in This Together (17 page)

"You see the symbolism?" asked Mrs. Desjardins. She had followed the direction of my gaze. Her bright, interested eyes reminded
me of a seagull's eyes, the way it looked at a wrapper or a bit of foil lying on the ground—right before stabbing it.

"Yes," I said.

"Of course you do," said Gil. He spoke without removing his attention from his slate of letters. "These days I find that particular
image rather discouraging. I'll leave the deduction to you, George."

The frame was slightly off, and Mrs. Desjardins adjusted it with a finger. "It's obvious, but that's the fun. I mean we're
not talking about Immanuel Kant."

"You're embarrassing him," said Gil. "And for God's sake, leave Kant out of this."

"What I mean is we're not talking about rocket science. We're talking about the things that everyone does." Mrs. Desjardins
gave me a shrug and a roll of the eyes. She mouthed the word "Grumpy."

I had an odd, uncomfortable feeling; a prickle that started in my stomach and moved up through my chest in waves. This was
a sensation I associated with the time when I was small and my mother would go on dates. My grandmother, who often babysat
on these occasions, could perceive my growing nervousness as the hours passed. "Stop twitching, Georgie darling. You look
like someone just sang Irving Berlin over your grave. She'll be home soon." Now, looking back among the towering German nude,
Mrs. Desjardins's too curious eyes, and Gil sitting at the table with whatever it was strapped to his head, I had that same
sense of vague but insistent worry.

But in the next moment, the feeling dissipated. I realized that I didn't have time to be worried. I suddenly knew that I needed
to go home and try to talk to them. I knew that it was time to apply the principles of collective bargaining.

"Papa said he just wanted a couple of buds if you could spare it. He's kind of worn out."

Gil clucked at his letters. "I sympathize. Believe me. It's going around."

This comment elicited a sigh from his wife.

I stood, resisting the' urge to jump from foot to foot. I wasn't a bad kid. I wasn't Steven Sugar. I just wanted to make a
point, to have my say. It was like the dream in the mall. If everyone would just slow down, slow down and stop and listen,
then I could say what I had to say, and—

"The child is waiting, Gilbert," said Mrs. Desjardins.

"Fine," he said. He slid a few letters around his slate.

"Take a look, Dick," said Gil. The old man shifted himself in his wheelchair, pushed up on the armrests, and twisted his body
so that the mask of Richard Nixon strapped around the back of his head could see the word on his slate. As always, the disgraced
president's expression was arranged in a demented grin, framed by the absurd red bulb of a nose and the wolfish jowls. Gil
made a humming noise and nodded his head slightly, which gave the impression that Nixon was thinking it over.

Mrs. Desjardins crossed her arms. "You'll have to excuse him, George. He does this to try and psyche me out," she said. "
'Psyching me out,' he calls it." To my surprise, her sidelong glance appeared to contain a glimmer of real irritation. Then,
she sighed and shrugged and chuckled richly. "What a funny old man I have. First, the cancer thing, and now here's Richard
Nixon advising him on Scrabble."

With a grunt, Gil dropped back into his chair. "Okay. Dick thinks it's a good idea," he said, and told me to fetch the peppermint
tin from the upstairs medicine cabinet. When I came back down, Gil showed me his word:
nascent.
"That's you, kid," he said, and pinched a few dried sprouts onto a cigarette paper.

My grandfather had drifted off again while I was gone, slumped at the window with his mouth agape. With every exhalation a
lash of spit unfurled from the tip of his tongue before being abruptly reeled back in the shuddering intake that followed.
One of his hands lay clenched in his lap, squeezing a packet of plastic paintballs into plasma. I pulled the packet loose
and set the joint on the windowsill.

When I gave his shoulder a shake, the old man sagged to one side, like a stuffed animal that's gone loose with years. There
were peanut crumbs on the front of his shirt. He snorted, but didn't awake.

If he wanted to, Steven Sugar could not only vandalize the billboard, he could draw horns and a devilish goatee on Al Gore's
portrait, then defecate on the lawn, and go goose-stepping around in a circle with his lieutenant Tolson marching two paces
behind, both of them whooping like Indians and shredding the purloined sections of the
New York Times
and flinging the confetti in the air. He could do all that and more, and I doubted my grandfather would so much as stir.

My need to rush home coalesced into a frank realization: in my mind Steven Sugar was suddenly diminished, and I felt diminished
by association, as if we had somehow been allied. Here was an old man in a window, desperate to shoot his enemies with a gun
that wasn't even a real gun. Steven Sugar wasn't a fascist; he was just an asshole kid. The thought occurred to me with a
kind of amazement. This wasn't a fight; this was pointless.

This accomplishes nothing, I thought to myself. Why does Steven Sugar bother? I looked at Papa, slumped over, the thread of
drool now leaking over his unshaven chin. Why does
he
bother? It was like taking something apart, just because you could.

"This accomplishes nothing," I said.

As I lifted him straight in the chair, rearranged his hands, and brushed off the crumbs, I repeated these words aloud to my
grandfather, but he was beyond hearing.

14.

On the ride back to Dr. Vic's house the sound of approaching thunder alternated with the slamming of windows against the coming
storm, and made me feel as though I were being chased, but that I was winning, that I was ahead.

I tried to think of what I needed to say to them. The breadth of the treaty I was prepared to make astonished me. I felt big
and strong lunged. I was going to give them a chance. They would want to hug me; I was willing to let them hug me. They would
cry; and I was willing to cry, too. These movements were as plain and clear to me as the things I saw at the far end of the
rifle's scope, so clear and so plain that a child or a foolish person might attempt to reach around and touch the magnification
with their fingers.

The thickening humidity fell over my shoulders like a wool shawl. Garage doors began to jerk closed as I sped past, as if
my wheels were tripping invisible wires.

I was drenched in sweat when I reached the driveway and jumped off my bike running, letting it crash in the grass. At the
top of the porch, I looked back and noticed that the windows of Dr. Vic's BMW were down. My legs were pulsing, but I ran over
anyway, and rolled them up tight.

As I stepped into the house, my yell caromed through the high, spacious rooms. "Hello? Hello? I'm back!"

I ran down the hall and threw open the door to the living room. "I'm back!" I yelled again, the words crossing my lips even
as I saw that there was no one here either, just the drapes lapping in the open window, and a trapped fly buzzing around the
suitcases lined up against the wall.

The fly circled and abruptly dropped down onto the handle of the first suitcase in the line, my mother's indestructible old
Samsonite. The portmanteau's baby blue facing was dented from all the Greyhound luggage compartments that I had kicked it
into, cracked from all the third-floor apartments whose stairs I had used it to sled, and patched so neatly with duct tape
that it could almost pass for whimsical.

The careful tape job had always irritated me. I remembered watching as my mother sat on the floor of the apartment we rented
in Boothbay, a dreary little box of a place stacked on top of a diner, where the stench of bacon rose up from below, continuously,
with the substance of an awful, unceasing fart. Even at age eight, I was astounded by the sight of her crouched on the ochre-colored
shag rug, wearing her pajamas and a pair of rhinestone sunglasses, as she went about the meticulous process of trimming off
the strands at the end of each piece before laying them down like strips of papiermache. Did she actually believe there was
any repair she could make to this thrift store luggage that would fool someone into thinking we actually belonged somewhere,
that we had a house and a family to whom we were traveling home?

The sight of the suitcases made me uneasy. I told myself that Emma must have been preparing to throw some of our old things
away, or maybe she was going to donate it all to the Goodwill store, which is where most of it had come from anyhow. Of course
that was it. They were getting married; they must be expecting new luggage. Of course.

The insect jerked into the air again, fluttered hopelessly for a few seconds, and landed down on the last piece of luggage
in the line, a black suitcase with a Lufthansa sticker on the side. My mother's ex-boyfriend Jupps Boger had left it behind
when he flunked out of his graduate program and went to live in Norway, where his friends ran a hydroponic farm. "I love her,
you know? She is a tough one, with the boy and the going to school," Jupps told me the last time I saw him. My mother had
been in the airport drugstore, buying him a toothbrush and deodorant. "I am a fuck-up, you know, but less always since I know
her." In his zipperless leather jacket with pink piping, my mother's ex-boyfriend hugged his backpack like a little boy and
made a confession. "Your mother is very generous, though. Do you think, if I forgot my suitcase, she would bring it to me
in Amsterdam?" He attempted a sly grin, but his eyes were wet. "I have completely forgot my suitcase in order only to remember
it."

We never did hear from Jupps again, but we took his suitcase along with us everywhere we went, just in case. It was my favorite
suitcase, because it was the lightest; the only things it contained were a couple of pairs of medium-sized black briefs, an
empty pack of German cigarettes, and a yellowed
International Herald Tribune
from October 22,1995, with half the crossword completed. We had a moving ritual, my mother and I, of loading everything into
the car, and then taking a final walk through the empty rooms of our apartment. When we were certain we didn't leave anything,
I would pick up Jupps's suitcase, and say, "Let's ride, Jupps," and my mother would lock the door behind us.

The rising wind slapped the drapes against the sill, and as I stood in the doorway I became aware of my own breathing. I had
forgotten what it felt like to look at a line of luggage and know that our whole lives were inside.

Walking through the house, I paused at their bedroom, where my mother's closet had been cleared of everything but a few wire
hangers. On the third floor, I found the door open, and the room neat and empty. The walls were naked except for a few holes
in the plaster. The smart oak desk for which I had never thanked Dr. Vic was cleared. Fresh white sheets were on the bed;
the ragged old quilt of peace symbols that Nana sewed for me was gone, too, packed up with everything else.

I found myself at the window. A bead of rain splashed on the glass, then another. A ripple of dots plinked across the surface
of the lake.

The break in the weather, however, appeared to have no effect on Dr. Vic. My mother's fiance stood at the end of dock, a highball
in one hand and a dowel in the other, sipping serenely.

At the sound of my steps on the wood, he turned and squinted through his wet glasses. I stopped at the foot of the dock, but
he lifted his dowel in greeting. "Hey, how's it going?"

I didn't know what to do. It wasn't supposed to be like this. I was ready to accept their apology. I was ready to come back
to the bargaining table.

The rain had already gathered from a drizzle into a light, steady fall, and the shoulders of Dr. Vic's shirt were now dark.

There was a bench near him at the end of the dock, and I saw a carton of orange juice and a bottle of vodka sitting on it,
along with a stack of the compact discs that he had fished out of the water so far. Beneath the bench, the Laddies crouched
beside each other with their snouts resting on the planks, like a couple of vagrants huddled under a bridge.

Dr. Vic tossed back the dregs of his screwdriver. He raised the empty highball for me to see. Rain spattered in the glass.
The wind was kicking up, sweeping the lake, cutting tiny waves.

"I need more ice!" he yelled.

I didn't understand. I yelled, "I put up the windows of your car, so the seats wouldn't get wet!"

Dr. Vic looked at me without any seeming comprehension.

I made a rolling gesture. "So that seats of your car wouldn't get wet!"

"I need more ice!" He smiled and gave the empty highball a demonstrative shake.

Now I understood, and it scared me a little.

"Where's my mother?"

Dr. Vic cocked his head. His smile widened. "She left me! Hopped on the first choo-choo to Splitsville!" Flourishing the dowel,
he gave the empty highball a tap with the handle, the way a magician raps the brim of his top hat with a wand. "Abracadabra!"
he hollered. "Stepped the fuck out! And now no ice!"

In the kitchen, I found my mother's note dashed on a piece of lined yellow paper, stuck to the fridge:

George, went to pick up apartment keys from the realtor. Back by
six o'clock. Wait.

—
Mom

I was too late.

My gaze fell on the poem taped beside the note, one of Dr. Vic's old ones, inspired by the Fourth of July:

If She Were Tea (But She's Not Tea!)

By Victor Lipscomb

The beautiful fireworks blew up the sky

The way a beautiful woman can blow up a lonely guy.

If she were a box of tea

I'd have to keep her with me.

George Washington, see you later!

If loving her makes me a traitor,

I'd rather be a British.

I took a tray of ice cubes from the freezer, found a raincoat, and returned to the dock. Dr. Vic was face down on the wood
on his belly, as if he'd been shot in the back. I immediately knew that he had suffered a heart attack. He had had a heart
attack and it was my fault. I had screwed up the life of a perfectly inoffensive man, terrorized him for things he couldn't
help—for loving my mother, for being a dork—and now he was dead. I killed him.