Falling

“Call me, maybe?”

I stared at her – at Jeannette – as I turned the car engine off. Or more precisely, I stared at her even harder, since I had been staring at her all evening. I said, “Did you just pull a line from that Carly Rae Jepsen song?”

She blinked, then smiled, abashed. “Oh, God, you’re right. Sorry. Emma’s been singing and playing that song nonstop. It’s all I can hear in my head nowadays.” Emma was her daughter, whom she was raising by herself. Emma was thirteen, a budding fashion designer, eco-activist, writer, archer, hip-hop dancer, social entrepreneur – she hadn’t quite decided yet which of her interests to pursue and seemed to keep adding to her growing list of passions every week. She was headstrong, mercurial, and bit of a drama princess who was absolutely certain the world had been specifically designed to torment her. She and Jeannette had taken years to come to terms with Jeannette’s divorce and had finally managed to establish a quiet truce in their relationship – only to have Emma hit her teens and have everything blow up again. Amazing how much you can learn about someone in one conversation when she lowers her guard and just decides to tell you everything.

I was dropping Jeannette off after a night of volunteering at the local food pantry, where we had both been assigned with the other adults to the back warehouse putting food bags together, while the teenage volunteers were up front handing them out to low-income families. I had seen her there before, but for some reason this night we had fallen to talking as we worked – and couldn’t stop talking. After we were done, her car wouldn’t start and AAA had to tow it to the shop, so I offered her a ride home.

She looked at me from the passenger seat while we were parked in front of her house. Her eyes narrowed impishly – and I felt myself slipping one more inch down the hole. She said, “Of course, that begs the question: how did you know that? I can’t imagine that an English Lit professor would normally be listening to teen pop songs.”

“My nieces,” I reminded her. I had told her that between the families of my brother and two sisters and various cousins, my family had enough tweens and teenage girls to form a volleyball squad. I was the doting but fuddy-duddy uncle. I had also told her how it was so strange that once my nieces and nephews started reaching puberty, the comments and the subtle pressure from my family for me to get married began to wane. Either they had finally realized that our clan had added enough human beings to the world’s population without my having to make a contribution, or else my siblings and cousins, at least, had laid off me when they finally crossed the point of total exhaustion raising their own kids. Or perhaps everyone had just given up when I passed forty and there was still no one on the horizon.

Amazing how much you end up revealing about yourself when a beautiful, thoughtful, crazy-smart woman pays attention to your every word.

She said, “The tune’s catchy. Sometimes when I’m cleaning, I dance to it with the vacuum cleaner, since you can be sure it’s blasting from her room.”

I cast my eyes down and nodded slowly, pleased with the image. I said, “And the lyrics are not half bad. It’s actually quite serviceable as poetry.”

“Do tell.”

“Sure. The imagery is fairly precise, and the turns of phrase are clever. The line ‘Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad,’ evokes the Platonic notion of soulmates, in which we long for our long-lost other halves and recognize them immediately when we find them. And this stanza…” – and I sang:

You took your time with the call,

I took no time with the fall,

You gave me nothing at all,

But still you’re in my way.

I explained, “Perfect rhyme and scansion, nice juxtaposition – indicative of the asymmetry of desire – and psychologically accurate. The boy is either indifferent or feigning indifference, which makes her want him even more.”

I was suddenly anxious that I was coming across as simultaneously frivolous and pompous – paradoxical as that may sound – but the momentum of my thoughts and an impulsive need to keep talking made me continue. “And that recurring line ‘But now you’re in my way’” – and again I sang the line – “is an exact metaphor for how love can just suddenly loom before you and block everything else, so that… so that nothing else exists.”

And with that piece of insight I stopped dead in my tracks, and a silence fell between us, and it suddenly became impossible to keep looking at each other. We both turned away. Suddenly we were both shy, after having talked nonstop for four or five hours. But our eyes found each other again and locked, and I could feel the joy coursing up in me, vibrating, from all the way down in my toes. I had to stop myself from bending towards her by force of will. In the same moment I imagined I saw a small movement in her, an ever-so-slight lean towards me.

“Oh. My. God!”

The exclamation took us both by surprise and we turned to the back of the car. Emma was scowling fiercely at us, arms folded across her chest, her face a fascinating mix of shock, consternation, fury, and – I don’t know how else to put it – grossed-outedness. A kind of expression only a young teenage girl can make.

Emma gave me a dirty look, got out of my car, slammed the door, and stomped to the porch of their house and stood there, fuming. Jeannette looked at me, brow furrowed and lips tight with embarrassment. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Well, thanks for the ride,” she said, and got out of the car and started walking to her daughter, fishing for her keys from her bag. Just before she went up the porch steps, she turned around and smiled and waved her cell phone and mouthed the words: Call me.

I grinned and nodded. I waved at Emma and collected a glare in exchange. I started my car, and drove off.

* * *

When I got to my apartment building, I went past the entrance to the parking garage and kept on driving. There was no way my apartment was going to contain my energy, I would be bouncing off the walls if I went in now. I dialed the MP3 player in my car to the Jepsen song and played it over and over, singing along as loudly as I could (“I wasn't looking for this, but now you’re in my way”), feeling foolish and giddy and alive. The bounciness of the song fed my elation in a positive feedback loop, so that it took more than an hour of driving all across town before the charge began to subside and my brain started to function again and I finally decided it was time to head back home.

As I drove home, I thought to myself that if anything was to happen between Jeannette and me, I would have to win Emma over somehow – and make it up to her. Jeannette and I had virtually ignored her half the night, and that had been extremely rude and inconsiderate. I owed her an apology. But not an explanation. I would not explain to her that when you are falling, even when you’re far along in years, you’re always blind and thoughtless and stupid and embarrassing, and you always land back at thirteen. She would learn this herself soon enough.

* * *

Turning Emma around wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. A few rather expensive gifts (strategically chosen with Jeannette’s advice) helped. What helped more was my huge family taking to her instantly, and she taking to my nieces. She quickly found a place among them as a cousin in all but name. In fact, if there was any problem, it was Emma’s tendency to try to lord it over them. As Jeannette said, she could be a little domineering. But my nieces are all good-hearted girls, and they worked it out somehow and managed to keep her exuberance somewhat in check.

She couldn’t be stopped eight months later, though, from leading them dancing down the aisle in a procession of the wedding entourage at my and Jeannette’s wedding. Her expression was priceless: she was positively beaming from all the attention. The video of her dancing and leading the way was a minor YouTube viral hit: nearly 200,000 views last time I checked. They didn’t dance to Carly Rae Jepsen, though, but to Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” On this point, Jeannette and I put our foot down. It was our wedding, after all.

(July 2012)

 

A Valentine Trinket

My father loves telling this story of me when I was five:

It was Valentine’s Day morning on a Sunday. He woke me up early to help him bring breakfast to my mother in bed. He did the heavy lifting: fried ham, eggs over easy, toast, juice, and coffee on a breakfast tray. My help was nominal: I carried the rose. He basically just wanted to include me in the little celebration.

Nevertheless, I was really proud to be of assistance, he said. After he had carefully lowered the tray on my mother’s lap, I just as ceremoniously gave her the rose. But then he pulled out his Valentine’s present for my mom from the pocket of his robe: a small box wrapped in red foil. My mother opened it and was really happy to find the necklace inside. My father said I was smiling as I looked up at him and my mom from the side of the bed – in sympathetic joy, he thought, but the next words I said let him know that my happiness was, in fact, expectancy.

“What did you get me?” he said I asked.

My father and mother exchanged glances. My father said, “I’m sorry, Ray. It’s Valentine’s Day, so I only got a gift for your mother.”

My father said I was pouting as I said, “But you gave me gifts, too, last time.” “Last time” meaning Christmas, a couple of months before.

“Well… Valentine’s Day is different. Only certain people get gifts on Valentine’s.”

“Like who?”

“Oh, husbands and wives. Sweethearts. People who have boyfriends or girlfriends.”

My father said I looked unconvinced – and a little like I’d been betrayed. “Gina from school is my friend. She’s a girl.”

“Umm… okay?”

“So why didn’t you get me a gift?”

(July 2012)

Moira

We need to talk about Kevin.

He went there. The bastard went there, after he had sworn he never would. The fever of her outrage flushed Moira’s face, suffused her with warmth despite the chill of the deep, winter’s night as she strode on the sidewalk, further and further away from his house.

I got the bank statements today and noticed you made out a $2,000 check to him –

Don’t, she’d warned him. That had pulled him up short, if only for a moment.

I warned him from the start, she thought, pulling the coat she had thrown over her nightgown tighter about herself. I’m damaged goods, she had told him; I drag behind me a shitload of baggage. We can keep seeing each other the way we have; all you have to do is keep helping me out with my rent, my bills. But no; he needed more, he said. He needed to be with her. He wanted to take care of her; he loved her; there wasn’t a minute in his day that wasn’t interrupted by the thought of her.

I love you – the pause did not last very long – I love you, but I can’t let you keep giving him so much money.

He’s my brother.

Half-brother, he had tried to correct her.

Brother. Again, her tone had silenced him temporarily.

The flap-flap-flap of her plush slippers on the ice-cold concrete was the only sound in the crystalline silence of the empty street. With growing despair, she glanced through the frost-laced windows of the darkened houses as they glided by. They were black apertures into empty containers, she was convinced; no one was inside them – no families sleeping, no kids; no dogs, cats, hamsters – nothing that lived and breathed.

I know he’s your family, and I know that marrying you means I have some responsibility for him, too. And I want you to be able to help him. But –

Please. Stop.

– you’re just enabling him. You’re not helping him any if you keep bailing him out every time he gets into trouble. He needs to man up. He needs to stand on his own two feet.

And how’s he going to do that if the loan sharks break his legs, you fat son of a bitch? she yelled at him silently, lengthening her stride. Man up? What about you? I asked you to promise me one thing: to never bring him up, to never ask me about him, to let me keep that part of my life my own – with no accounting. How much of a man are you to break your word?

The money I’ve been putting in your bank account monthly – I wanted you to have money for the things you need and the things you want. She knew another “but” was coming. He kept doing that: saying one thing then pivoting on that word to take it all back. But I didn’t expect you’d be sending him almost everything I give you.

I don’t have to justify myself to you, she’d said through gritted teeth. It’s my money.

Of course, but to spend it all on him –

She started slowing down, the rage finally spending itself. Her face twisted in grief, though she knew no tears would come. She had not cried since her teens. What am I supposed to do? she continued arguing with him in her mind, since she in her fierce pride had not been able to bring herself to do so earlier that night. I know Kevin’s a drunk and a fuck-up, and someday he’s going to be found stiff and cold in an alley. I know that until you took me in I was on a slow road to the same place. But when my stepfather would slap me around when I was a kid, it was Kevin who would come into my room afterwards with ice for my bruises and a dishcloth to wipe away the blood. Do you think there isn’t anything I would do now – no matter how useless in the end – to make sure he stays alive and in one piece?

I need to make sure you act responsibly. So I’m afraid I’ll need to close down your account. You let me know when you want to buy something and I’ll either get it for you or give you enough money for it – but then I’ll need to see the receipts afterwards. Fair enough?

She had glared her hatred at him, and he could not meet her eyes. He was just another coward at heart after all – just one who used his money rather than the back of his hand. He shifted in discomfort on his side of the bed, then reached over to switch off his lamp and turned his back to her to go to sleep. She had remained frozen in place, still leaning against her pillow, the magazine she had been reading when he broached the forbidden subject out of nowhere still resting on her lap. The left side of her body was bathed in the glow of the lamp on her side table. When his breathing had become deeper and started coming out from his nose in soft whistles, she got out of bed, went down the stairs, and stamped off into the night.

Her headlong rush finally lost momentum and came to an end at a crosswalk. She stopped at the curb, stared across the street to the sidewalk that continued on the other side and went on into the distance, into the darkness. What was she doing? Where could she go? Back to a crappy waitressing job and a shoebox of an apartment? Tonight? In her nightgown? She hadn’t even had the presence of mind to stuff her purse into her coat pocket when she left his house like a shot.

She looked back the way she had come: twelve, maybe fifteen blocks she had covered in a straight line, swept along by her fury. She felt sick at the thought of going back, but her anger had dissipated now, and she became aware of how the breeze had numbed her face and legs and was seeping in through the openings in her collar and cuffs. She began the long trudge back, her soul shriveling with each heavy step she took through the icy air. And yet her resolve hardened as well. She thought of Kevin out there on a night like this; she hoped the radiator was finally working in that fleabag motel room he lived in.

When she got back in the house, she stood over a heat register to get warm through before going back upstairs and climbing quietly into bed. She switched off her lamp and lay down, staring at the shadows in the ceiling, tamping down the revulsion that rose like a wave with each sibilant breath the man beside her exhaled. She mapped out in her mind what she had to do.

When the window started letting in the cold, dawn light, just when she thought he was about to wake up, she would crawl under the covers, pull down his pajama bottom, and slowly blow him. He liked it when she took the initiative – it gave him the illusion that she desired him. Then she would ride him until his turgid body collapsed into itself in release. Afterwards, she would make him breakfast and apologize, with downcast eyes. Later in the evening when he came back home, after servicing him some more, she would plead with him – somehow convince him not to cut her off. She would have to remember to keep her voice plaintive and placating.

Nights were long in winter; dawn was still a long ways off – a blessed reprieve. She pulled up the comforter to her chin, and waited.

(July 2012)