“Who?”
“Darlene Garrison. Michael, sometimes …” Now she was fiddling with something on his desk. “Sometimes I don’t think you pay attention to anything except these books of yours. Darlene owns the beauty parlor A Cut Above; she does my hair. Her daughter, Jeralyn, is in your grade.”
Michael had no idea who Jeralyn Garrison was, so he lied again. “Oh yeah, I think so.”
“Where’d you get this?” His mother held up a Union Jack bumper sticker.
“I found it at the Sears auto store when I was there with Grandpa. He told me I couldn’t put the British flag on his Ranger. I told him I had no intention of doing that; I bought it ’cause I liked it.”
Michael saw the familiar glaze come over his mother’s eyes. He remained silent because he knew that if he kept on talking, if he asked her a direct question even, she wouldn’t hear him. She was in the room, but her mind wasn’t. Her heart might not be in the room either, but his mother rarely talked about what lay in her heart, so it was hard to tell about that. When she placed the bumper sticker gently back on his desk and turned to face him, he was compelled to speak despite knowing it might be futile.
“Do you ever miss London?”
Grace looked at her son. He doesn’t look a thing like me, does he? I don’t have blond hair, my skin isn’t so pale, my eyes aren’t green. If I hadn’t been there when the doctor pulled him out from inside of me, I would never believe this person was my flesh and blood. But he was, he is, she thought. In some ways, he’s all I’ll ever be able to truly call my own.
“No,” she lied. “I told you before, it’s a crowded, loud city. Dirty, no space to breathe, no clean air. I can’t believe you remember it; you were only three when we left.”
“I don’t really have memories, but impressions. I don’t know, I just get the feeling that I would like it.”
He doesn’t even sound like me, Grace thought. He never does. He says things that just don’t make sense, that make me question why I ever became a parent, why I ever wasted my life raising him. “You mean you just get the feeling that you’d like it better than here.”
And the change had begun. Michael saw his mother’s lips press against each other to form a smile that meant to convey anything but joy, her head tilt to the right, and her eyes fill with disbelief. Their roles had reversed. She was the emotionally reactive teenager and he was the insightful parent. Experience had taught him this conversation would not be any different from any other conversation he’d ever had with his mother about London or what their life was like before she brought him to this place, the place where she grew up, or what their life could be like if they moved back. Nothing important would be disclosed, nothing important would be shared between mother and son. And so he just went back to reading.
His mother paced the width of the room, once, twice. She hated when Michael asked about London. For her it was another lifetime ago, a mistake. No, not a mistake entirely. What should I call it? she thought. She couldn’t come up with a word. As always, the mention of London and her past made her fidgety, confused. The only thing she was certain of was that it was part of her past and that’s where it should remain. Yes, it should remain buried and silent. Because when she thought of London, all she thought of was him, Michael’s father. The man she ran away with and the man she eventually ran from. The man she once loved and would always love. The man she never wanted to see again. “Do me one favor,” Grace said before leaving her son alone. “When you get married, be a better husband than your father was.”
A cold sensation of fear trickled down Michael’s neck and found its resting place on his heart. It squeezed, it constricted, until Michael could hardly breathe and had to consciously put down his book and gasp, gasp for a breath that should have come easily. But his mother saw to it that it didn’t. She had to mention marriage and becoming a husband, didn’t she? If Michael didn’t know better, he’d think his mother was punishing him for bringing up London. And maybe she was. Lately she had been acting so erratically he had no idea what she was thinking. All he knew was that whenever his mother, or anyone for that matter, insinuated that he should get married and become a husband, he panicked. It just felt wrong. The only thing that made him feel worse was that, to everyone else, it felt perfectly right.
Just as his breathing returned to normal, he heard the medicine cabinet open, which could mean only one thing: His mother needed some comfort. Maybe it was the white pill; perhaps tonight it would be the blue pill. It didn’t matter. Michael didn’t have to see into the bathroom to know that his mother was taking a pill to calm her nerves. A pill before bedtime was the only thing that seemed to help her these days. That and a nice glass of white wine.
What happened to the mother who used to help me with my homework after dinner? Explain to me how to figure out percentages and the differences among the three branches of government. When did she stop wanting to help me and start wanting to create me in her image? Now Michael was pacing his room, back and forth, trying to figure out why his mother was no longer on his side, pacing, pacing, pacing, until he forced himself to stop moving. He gripped the windowsill and looked out into the night. The moonlight allowed him to see only a few yards of the dirt road; the rest was hidden in darkness, out of his reach once again. Why do I hate it here so much?! Maybe, just maybe, it had to do with what was taking place downstairs.
“Again with the wine,” Michael’s grandfather snickered.
“Should I drink whiskey?” Grace asked. “Would that make you happy? Oh, that’s right, there’s nothing that would make you happy.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that!”
“And don’t you dare tell me what to do!”
That was different. Michael’s mother didn’t usually talk back to her father. Guess the pills and the wine weren’t working as quickly to calm her as they usually did.
“Maybe if you weren’t drinking all the time, you’d be able to straighten out that son of yours.”
“You leave him out of this,” Grace said, much quieter. Ah, now the pills are kicking in. “He’s a good boy.”
“He ain’t no boy!” his grandfather shouted. “He’s like that fairy husband of yours!”
“He’s nothing like Vaughan!”
“Is too! A sissy boy and he ain’t gonnna ’mount to nothin’! Mark my words!”
“You shut your mouth, Daddy! Shut it! Michael is not … like that. He’s perfectly normal!”
But Michael knew his mother was wrong. He wasn’t normal. His grandfather didn’t have to come right out and say it; Michael knew what he was. He stared at his reflection in the window and he could see it in his own eyes. What he saw made him disgusted, scared, but yes, just a little excited even though he knew what he was seeing wasn’t right. Tomorrow at church he would pray that it would all go away, that he would be able to change who he was, but tonight … tonight he would lock his bedroom door, block out the sounds coming from downstairs, and think about R.J. And he would convince himself that it was the most natural thing in the world.
chapter 2
Not a word was spoken during the half-hour drive to church. It would be optimistic to think that Michael, his mother, and his grandparents were all engaged in private meditation, but the truth is, they had nothing to say to one another. At least nothing that would be appropriate to say en route to God’s house.
They took Grace’s gray Ford Taurus, complete with its new fog light, but Michael’s grandpa drove because Grace, who sat in the back with Michael, was too tired to drive. Hungover was more like it, but no one contradicted her. Why point out the obvious? So the only sounds that filled up the emptiness were the whir of the air conditioner, the crunch of the tires on the dirt road, and then the softer hum when they merged onto the highway. And of course the sounds that filled Michael’s head.
He turned to look at his mother, silent now, eyes closed, trying to sleep, summoning the strength to make it through another sermon perhaps, and heard the words she shouted to his grandpa last night: “He’s perfectly normal!” It wasn’t the first time he’d heard her say that or words just like it; they often argued about him when he wasn’t in the room and he imagined that their arguments were louder and their words more tactless when they knew he wasn’t in the house and there was no chance of his overhearing. Yes, the words bothered him, but worse was the sound of his mother’s voice, hopeful, a bit defiant, but mostly desperate because she knew even as she spoke the words that they weren’t the truth.
