Catapult Page 11

  “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Mom.”

  “Everyone was always saying it was icy. It was an icy morning in the wheat fields. But now I wonder if it wasn’t an easier thing to say than he was drunk again and that’s why he crashed.”

  “What are you going to do, Mom?”

  “What am I going to do? Tell me that.” Her mother is in her fifties, widowed, loyal to horoscopes. She is afraid of making decisions that work against her fate.

  The doves rear and carve open their wings, settle back.

  Her mother sighs. “I guess what you’re saying is that I have to go pick him up?”

  *

  She rinses her mug and overturns it on the rack, wondering as she does whether she’s ever seen ice in Texas. As a child, whenever she’d taken the two-day car trip down I-35 to visit her grandmother, the cramped Texas house was always sunk in a marvelous kind of heat. She and her brother sat very still in front of the muted TV, drained even of boredom. It is hard for her to imagine that house covered in snow, a cold morning, a crash of any sort.

  In Hollywood, drizzle mottles the windows.

  She goes back to the bedroom, where her boyfriend slugs out of the covers. Without his glasses, he has an amphibian look, his eyes all innocence. “Jill?” he asks. She knows she’ll have to get very close before he can read her expression, so she stays for a moment in the doorway and watches him.

  “Who was that? Is there something wrong?”

  She snorts to snuff out an unexpected sob. “My mom has a theory about my grandfather’s death.”

  “She called for that? Come back to bed for a few minutes.”

  It pours. Like an optical trick, the windows shimmer with water just as the clouds open up. Sun refracts through the room, and the day feels, abruptly, like another day altogether. Like the afternoon on a weekend after a holiday, all the presents opened, nothing in the world left to want. “Don’t we have jobs?” she asks him. “Aren’t we going to be late?”

  He lifts his glasses, returns his face to its proper shape. “Shit. What time is it?”

  The sun makes the room instantly hot. She feels like squinting. “Almost eight. But I need to get to work early so I can leave early tonight. Did you forget?” She feels irritable about the possibility that he has, and that’s a relief. It’s good to have a specific, sensible source for anger. She glares at him and hopes he sees it. “Don’t forget, please? Today is the fifteenth. Friday. We’re meeting Manny and her husband what’s-his-name for dinner.”

  *

  She showers quickly and rushes out, but once on the highway she leans back and lets the car drift through traffic. A carcass on the road turns out to be a palm frond. The exit ramp is strewn with lemon-yellow leaves. She gets off the highway early and takes the side roads toward the hills. She doesn’t, in fact, have to work until noon. They’ve cut back her hours at the lab, where she harvests cells with a razor blade from the scalps of rats. When she tells people about her job, it sounds more ghoulish than it is, less mind-numbing and banal. She doesn’t mind working less. She’s been filling the extra time by volunteering at a public-school program for homeless families. She teaches reading and math to Angelo, who’s shy and ten and moves clumsily, like a fat boy, though he’s not fat. Just big for his age. She likes him a lot. She thinks of him fondly as she parks the car and trots through the metal gates at the door, as she smooths and signs the smudged register there—right up until the moment she sees him lumbering up to her in the school’s conference room. Then, unaccountably, she feels dismay. His hair curls wetly down his neck. His mouth is bulging with something.

  She finds herself saying, sternly, “No candy, Angelo, while we’re working.”

  Out of his mouth slides something glistening and larval, with points. It lands with a wet plop on his math book.

  Angelo grins.

  “Is that an airplane?” she asks, incredulous.

  *

  The rats are smart, actually. No one gives enough credit to rats. When she first took the job, her colleagues at the lab made fun of her for naming them. They were hard to tell apart, the main difference being that some had a crop of pebbly tumors on their skulls, and some didn’t. “Harvest” is what she does to them. After nine years of higher education, she is a farmer like her grandpa was. But even without names—even bristly, corn-like in her hands—the rats are smart. She tries to remember that. She has to remember to bolt down the tops of their cages so they don’t escape and chew open the cages across the lab and feast on the mice. When that happened last summer, two separate experiments were ruined, two multimillion-dollar grants from two different federal institutions. That’s when her hours were cut back and her status as a lab technician changed to questionably proficient.

  *

  Angelo’s math book is stained with saliva from the toy airplane. She suggests they read instead. She pulls out a book about witches, about magic and trolls, but he points instead to a book that describes each and every kind of truck with an insidious level of detail. They’ve read this book before. Dump truck. Bulldozer. Tractor.

  There is no story. But because she thinks of herself as good with children, she makes a story up. She says, “The suspicious tractor nursed a fear that he could not rid himself of his evil captor.”

  Angelo says, “Stop.” He lifts his rounded shoulders. “The book doesn’t talk like that.”

  “Sure, it does.”

  “Does not.”

  She is surprised by his intensity. He almost never crosses her, barely even talks. But now this large, black-haired child has pulled his arms inside his T-shirt and seems to be glaring at her. Each of his eyelashes looks separate and knowing, like the antennae of something that should crawl away.

  She pours out her voice cheerfully, reads every tedious detail. She reads about earth movers and military scrapers and snow-plows, but she can’t help adding just one little elf on principle—on the theory that she can teach Angelo how to be a child, poor kid—and Angelo, fed up, crawls under the table. He takes off his shoes and builds a wall between them. He adds to the wall his backpack, a Transformers lunch box, and a plastic goat.

  She feels, out of proportion, hurt, and yet, for reasons she can’t understand, she goes on relentlessly reading. “The elf was friends with the Great Wizard, who was a kind of God. Some trucks were under His control and were magic, and the other trucks were just trucks.”

  *

  In the car on the way to dinner that night, she gets into a fight with her boyfriend. They don’t fight often, but when they do, the fights descend upon them, elaborate and unique as snowflakes. What they’re arguing about, bewilderingly, is the National Park Service. She’s seen a documentary. “America’s best idea,” she quotes. He says, cheerfully almost, “Catering to middle-class romantic notions of ‘wilderness.’” She can’t understand what his angle is, why he opposes birds and woods. She wants to go camping. She wants to have gone camping when she was a child.

  “You’ve been to Yosemite!” she accuses him. “You washed your face in that stream.”

  “Is that what this is about?” He sounds surprised. “You want to go? We can go if you want to go.”

  She finds herself speaking very fast. “That’s not the point. It’s not personal. It’s about democracy and human dignity. It’s about everybody, regardless of who you are, getting to experience some little corner of wildness for themselves. Isn’t that only fair?” she asks.

  Rain makes the gray concrete black. She’s pleased, then ashamed, by his hurt silence.

  “We’re lost,” she says.

  “We’re turned around,” he says.

  *

  The dinner begins poorly. The Thai restaurant is cave-like, windowless, lantern-lit. The tables are too close, so as they wind their way to their seats, they have to touch strangers hunched over plates and beg their pardon. By the time they sit down, Jill feels an overwhelming urge to apologize to everyone. She’s nervous. “Sorry the place is so pac
ked! I heard it was good, but maybe not!” Across the table sit Jill’s boyfriend, her friend’s husband, two of Jill’s colleagues. She has invited people from work to ease the tension of meeting someone she hasn’t seen in years, but now, ridiculously, she can’t remember one of those coworkers’ names. It’s Anna and Somebody.

  She does her best to look busy examining her napkin. It has been folded into a crane.

  “Cool?” she says to Manny, who’s sitting so close their elbows touch.

  “Absolutely,” her old friend assures her, glancing down at the menu. “There’s nothing better than a really hot curry.”

  She smiles back, relieved. Manny’s open-mouthed way of chewing edamame is endearingly familiar. Didn’t she used to eat licorice like that? Didn’t they used to sleep in the same bed every Saturday night? For a few minutes—after Jill finishes her first two beers and before the third one comes—the brilliant spices in her curry make her hands seem to pulse and everyone else across the table seem too far away to matter. She lets cold, cold water slide in little strokes down her throat. At some point Manny tells her, conspiratorially, between bites, that she’s pregnant. “It’s like I’m somebody’s spaceship, some little fetus driving me around! But he—” She nods at her husband across the table. “—doesn’t understand.”

  Jill licks her burning lips. In a moment of exuberant clarity, she thinks she sees how the unfamiliar present of her friend connects to the past they once shared. She reminds Manny about the time they lined up their dolls behind her mother’s car so she’d drive over them when she backed out. Jill’s almost whispering, only half joking, swigging from her empty bottle.

  “I don’t remember that,” her friend says. “That’s creepy.”

  Jill looks at her. “We were in our anti-girl stage, remember? We despised all those papers we had to sign to get babies from cabbages. We wanted to be pioneers with rifles.” She casts around for a way to remind her. “We thought it was a horrible injustice people hadn’t yet developed signs to communicate more meaningfully with other species.”

  Of course it sounds like a joke. Manny laughs. She scoots her chair back, glistens resplendently with sweat.

  Jill remembers then that Manny hasn’t had any beers—obviously, she’s pregnant. She’s pushed out on that little one-man boat, and Jill is still on shore. Forlornly, she lifts her rumpled napkin from her lap, tries unsuccessfully to work it back into a crane.

  “So,” Manny says, too perkily. “What have you been doing lately?”

  “Volunteering,” Jill shrugs. “With a homeless kid.” She has a rehearsed story for times like these, a humorous story about the lab and the bald rats she breeds, but she feels a sudden, pressing need to underscore her impersonal good intentions. Isn’t she trying to help the homeless? Isn’t she better because of that? “This kid’s a little terror, actually.” She finds herself exaggerating Angelo’s behavior, making things up. “Today he threw a tantrum and ran around screaming obscenities. The F-word, worse than that. He put a toy airplane in his mouth and threatened to chew it up and swallow the bits. He’s crazy.”

  “That sounds a lot like your brother as a kid.” Manny must see something in Jill’s face, because she puts a gentle hand on her sleeve. “But you were always so good at dealing with Ryan. I’m sure you’re doing a great job.”

  Her boyfriend inserts himself in the conversation by reaching across the table with chopsticks. “Ryan? Was he a bad seed even when he was little?”

  Manny’s lips are oily. “Oh, no. Is Ryan still getting into trouble?”

  Jill’s boyfriend raises his eyebrows, defers to Jill, who’s still working on her napkin crane.

  “He’s fine,” she says, breezily. “He’s got a job at FedEx, actually. He sends things.”

  *

  Once, when she was twelve and her brother was five, he ran in a fury out of the house. He’d been angry that their mother had left for work, furious that his Tonka truck had a bad wheel, desperate in a way only he could get, tears and snot making his face look raked with claws. “Damn. Fuck. Roar,” he’d yelled at her. Then he’d run in his socks across the snowy yard. “Oh, no you don’t!” Jill told him, as he fist-climbed an old ladder by the shed and crawled across the icy roof. She stood shivering in the doorway, her breath a dragony puff of smoke. She should go after him, she knew. She should follow him up the creaking ladder and somehow drag him back down. If she got him to his room, he’d tire himself eventually—he always did—but it seemed impossible right then to move across the threshold.

  It was midwinter, had been winter for many months. Every night, the same.

  Before he threw himself from the shed, he threw his Tonka truck. A drift of snow swallowed first one, then the other. They made no sound at all, which was interesting and oddly pleasant, as if she’d been let off the hook, granted reprieve for a crime she hadn’t known she’d committed until it was over. She watched the spot where he’d fallen with singular intensity, seeing nothing but the broken drift until, gradually, each of the other parts of the night came back to her. The shed with their garage-sale bikes, the sagging house with its yellow lights, the snow so soundlessly dropping.

  Mine, mine, mine, she thought.

  Backyard swing, stop sign at the corner of Washington and Pine, the whole silent neighborhood.

  Then her brother emerged from the snowdrift, wailing. She went to him. She went to him in her socks. His little body was slippery and hot, despite the dusting of snow and ice that covered him. She kneeled down and pulled his wet head to her chest. “Shhh,” she said to him. “Look, look.” He was having trouble breathing. He was gasping and couldn’t get enough air to sob. “You jumped off the shed and landed someplace else. I’m not really your sister. That’s not really your house. It looks similar, but it’s not the same place. You escaped! The Wizard came and took you away. Relax, relax. You’re not even here. It’s okay.”

  *

  When they get home from the Thai restaurant, Jill says something disparaging about Manny’s husband, but not because she doesn’t like him. In fact, she’d found him funny and smart, effortlessly bearded. She’s just feeling surly, every thought grinding itself down to smaller, grittier thoughts.

  “But they seem pretty happy!” Jill’s boyfriend says, as he arranges their leftovers in the refrigerator.

  His beard is patchy. He’s been learning German, and has words on index cards taped to all their furniture. He touches the one on the kitchen faucet, like a talisman, before filling a glass with das Wasser and drinking.

  “But predictable, you have to admit that.”

  “You had a nice time, I saw you.” He sets his glass of water down. “Come on. What makes you so committed to turning everything around so you’re unhappy?”

  Good question. Jill squints at him, preparing for another fight. The problem with living with someone is that your every act can be transformed into another example of their larger theory of you. In fact, Jill has her own theories to slot him into—points about his absent missionary father, his need for domestic reassurance—but the feeling of a fight redounds before it starts, turns back on itself.

  She walks forward and butts his ribcage with her head, ram-like.

  He says, “Whoa, there,” and rights her head, setting it against his chest.

  Her love for him has always been the underdog. She roots for it as if from a distance. She imagines what they must look like through the uncurtained window, the picture of tranquil domesticity they must now make. He smells like cilantro and beer, like curry and rain. And underneath that, he smells like himself, like nobody else, his body alarming because it is already so familiar.

  *

  Just before she’s about to climb into bed, her mother calls again. She sounds like she’s chewing something—a piece of gum? A fingernail? “I’m tired,” she complains.

  Jill nods, lifts the long tendril of a spider plant like the tail of a rat. Regretfully.

  “My horoscope, listen. ‘Mercantile ene
rgy makes love into an exchange.’ It’s true! He’s twenty-eight, isn’t he? Why can’t he drive himself from here to there? Why can’t he get to a store and buy his own food? Jill—”

  Jill hangs up the phone. Just like that. Then she calls her mother back. She does this very calmly, making sure she hears a dial hum before she presses out the numbers. She takes a new tone this time. But of course it’s an old tone, too—wasn’t she always reprimanding her mother? Wasn’t she always, as a teenager, lecturing her when Ryan got in trouble again at school?

  “You know it doesn’t work like that. Be reasonable. You can’t just be done parenting when you choose.”

  “Oh, that’s good, coming from you.” Her mother chews and chews. Jill can hear her molars grinding, the sluice of her saliva around something soft. A caramel, a phone cord. “One day, you say, Poof. I wipe my hands of all this! I got other things to do! In a state three days away.”

  Jill draws a breath across the miles. “I’m not his mom.”

  *

  But she was, in a way. She knew the trick. Whenever he threw a tantrum, whenever he started crying and couldn’t stop, she just said, You’re not even here, and he’d quiet down. He’d hang on her every word, fix her with his wet, red eyes. The Wizard, remember, has taken you away. You can’t see or hear Him most of the time, but He leaves signs to remind you. Everything is a sign. This Christmas tree, and that clock, see how strange they are, almost glowing? See how the squirrels just stand there and stare at you? See how mysterious that snowman is? See that scary shadow the mailbox casts, that cloud descending, isn’t the weather off? Listen to how funny I sound—doesn’t my voice sound funny to you? You should be careful. You left the old world behind and now there’s another one for you. You should try to get used to your new world.