“I want to. I just said that.”
“No, you said you’d just seen it.”
“And that I’d like to take you.”
“But you already saw it. And plays are expensive. You’re always telling me that.”
“Daley.”
“I can’t believe you saw it with somebody else’s kid.”
I sit back in the chair and cross my arms over my chest.
My mother laughs. “You’re acting a little bit like a two-year-old right now.”
Before I know it, the chipped beef smashes against the wall. My mother is still holding her fork and knife. Her voice is very very quiet. “Leave this room right now. I do not want to see you until morning. Any privileges you had are gone.”
I stand up and start down the hallway.
“I swear, Daley Amory, you are like a wild animal every time you come home from your father’s,” she says, before I slam my door on her.
6
On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, Garvey comes home from college. A friend drops him off. I hear him shut a car door and shout something. Then he is there in our apartment for the first time, his long lanky body making everything — the sideboard, the desk, the walls — seem smaller. He is growing a sparse rust-colored beard, nothing like the hair on his head, which is thick and dirty blond. His eyes are small chips of blue in murky water. He smells like the sleeping bags in the shed on Myrtle Street. I breathe him in. I cannot get enough of it. I have missed him so much more than I knew. He has to peel me off of him to introduce himself to Pauline, my babysitter. He makes a point of shaking her hand, even though she’s across the room and has to take off the oven mitt for the macaroni she’s just about to take out of the oven.
“So you’re taking care of the pipsqueak.”
“We take care of each other.” She smiles at me. I hear her accent—each otha—more distinctly with Garvey in the room. She comes every day after school until my mother gets home at seven-thirty, and we laugh a lot. At first I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have Nora. She’d moved in with her sister in Lynn and came sometimes to take me out to Friendly’s and didn’t seem to be working at all, but my mother thought I should have someone younger, and less expensive. Pauline is in tenth grade and her boobs are growing so fast they pop the buttons off her shirt. We’re always finding buttons and cracking up. I see my brother taking all this in.
We eat the macaroni on the sofa. Garvey drills Pauline with questions: where does she live, what’s that neighborhood like, does she have siblings, did her parents grow up here, has she done much traveling, where would she like to go most? Maybe we’ll all take a trip there, to California, one day, he concludes.
And then Mom comes home and Pauline leaves.
“Wow,” my brother says, smoothing down the back of his hair. “Va va voom.”
“She’s barely fifteen,” my mother says.
“She’s not going to be able to balance on two feet if she grows any bigger.”
“She’ll manage just fine.” My mother hangs up her coat and gives my brother another hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you,” she says through gritted teeth. She always grits her teeth when she’s feeling affection.
“It’s good to be here. Nice pad, Ma.” He swings his head around. “You got some serious loot from the big house.”
My mother eats the rest of my macaroni standing up. We’re all still standing up. I’m not sure why.
“How’s it going there?” she asks him.
“Oh, fair to middling.”
“Yeah?” Meaning she wants to hear more.
“I’ve been in school so long.”
“Garvey.”
“I’m just saying. I was in boarding school for four years before this. Everyone else runs around like they’ve been let out of a cage, and I feel like it’s just another cage. A less interesting cage, actually.”
“Three and a half more years. That’s all. Then it’s over forever.”
“Yeah.” He slumps to the sofa and puts his boots up on the coffee table. Mom doesn’t tell him to take them off. He pulls out a new pack of cigarettes, smashes both ends into his palm a couple of times, unwraps the cellophane, then slides one out and lights it. “Then I get to go out and find my perfect career that will swallow up the rest of my promising life.” He blows out a long stream of smoke. “It all may be quite moot. I wasn’t able to register this week for next semester’s classes. Dad’s a little late on the payments, it turns out.”
My mother sits down on the couch beside him. “You’re joking, right?”
“I am not joking.”
“You need to talk to him about that. Tomorrow.”
Garvey taps the ashes onto his jeans and rubs them in. My mother brings him an ashtray but he doesn’t use it. “I don’t need his money.”
“Garvey, you need this degree.”
“I can pay for it myself. Brian Foley pays his own way. He works in the library I think. I visited him a few weeks ago.”
“UMass only costs three hundred dollars a year. Of course he can work it off. Harvard is several thousand.”
“So I’ll go to UMass. Harvard is a bunch of self-inflated morons. They all walk around in tuxes on the weekend. I’m not kidding. I met this bartender last weekend and he’s starting a moving company, furniture and crap, and he asked me to do some jobs for him. Might have to miss a few classes, but it’s good money.”
“Please talk to your father.”
“No.”
“I’m worried now.”
“I’m worried too.”
My mother gets up and rinses off the plate in the kitchen. She takes her time. Eventually the dishwasher squeaks open and the plate is slotted in. I know there’s nothing else for her to do in there but she stays in there, thinking.
I watch Garvey smoke.
“Dad and Mrs. — I mean Catherine—are married now,” I say.
“I heard. A little Nassau combo platter: divorce, wedding, and a nice golden tan for the holidays.”
“Frank’s got your room.”
Garvey snorts. “I’ll have to show him my Playboy stash.”
“He already found it.”
“Really? Cagey bugger.”
“He’s weird. “
“With a mother like that.”
“How’s Heidi?”
“Who?”
I give him a look.
“She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s very dependable.” He says the word dependable with nunlike primness, tilting his head, pursing his lips.
I laugh and that eggs him on.
“He shows up at precisely the right time, he says precisely the right things, and he always, always has a condom.”
Frank has condoms. When we’re really bored, Patrick and I sneak them out of his room and fill them with water and lob them at Elyse. She calls them greasy balloons and shrieks whenever she sees one.
“Do you have a new girlfriend?”
“Not really.”
“What about Deena?”
“Who?” This time he really doesn’t know who I’m talking about.
“That girl in your apartment in Somerville.”
A grimace, as brief as a gust of wind, passes across his face. “I never had anything to do with her.” He’s a bad liar. He keeps talking to cover it up. “She’s a very fucked-up young woman.”
That’s what she said about you, I want to say but I don’t. I don’t want to push him any lower than he already is.
“And you, my little hermitoid. What is going on in your sixth-grade world?”
I knew he’d ask this and I know just the kinds of thing he likes to hear so I prepared just the right story. “Funny you should ask,” I say, warming up. He smiles and I continue. “There’s this new boy, Kevin.”