He felt like he'd been in hell for several hours by the time they got up from the table after dinner. The knot in his stomach was the size of his fist by then, as he watched them settle into the same chairs where they always sat, and had been sitting before dinner. He looked around the room then, and he realized he just couldn't do it. He went to stand close to his mother, in case she had an urge to hug him. It didn't happen often.
“I'm sorry, Mom. I have an incredible headache. It feels like a migraine. It's a long drive, I think I'd better go.” All he wanted to do was bolt for the door and run for his life.
She looked at him for a long moment with her lips pursed, and nodded. She had punished him adequately for not going to synagogue with them. He was free to go. He had done his duty, as whipping boy and scapegoat. It was a role she had assigned him for his entire life, since he had had the audacity to arrive in her life at a time when she thought she was finished having children. He had been an unexpected and unwelcome assault on her tea parties and bridge games, and had been soundly punished for it. Always. And still was. He had been a major inconvenience to her, and never a source of joy. The others took their cues from her. At fourteen, Ben had been mortified to have his mother pregnant again. At nine, Sharon had been outraged by the intrusion on her life. His father had been playing golf, and unavailable for comment. And as their final revenge, he had been brought up by a nanny, and never saw them. As it turned out, the punishment that had been meted out to him had been a blessing. The woman who had taken care of him until he was ten had been loving and kind and good and the only decent person in his childhood. Until his tenth birthday, when she was summarily fired and not allowed to say good-bye. He still wondered sometimes what had happened to her, but as she hadn't been young then, he assumed that she was dead by now. For years, he had felt guilty for not trying to find her, or at least write her, to thank her for her kindness.
“If you didn't drink so much and go out with such loose women,” his mother pronounced, “you wouldn't get migraines.” He wasn't sure what the loose women had to do with it, but he didn't ask her. He took her word for it, it was simpler.
“Thanks for a great dinner.” He had no idea what he'd eaten. Probably roast beef. He never looked at what he was eating in their house. He just got through it.
“Call me sometime,” she said sternly. He nodded and resisted the urge to ask her why. It was another question no one could have answered. Why would he want to call her? He didn't, but called anyway, out of respect and habit, every week or so, and prayed that she'd be out so he could leave a message, preferably with his father, who barely managed to squeeze three words in between hello and good-bye, which were almost always “I'll tell her.”
Adam said good-bye to each of them, then said good-bye to Mae in the kitchen, let himself out the front door, and slipped into the Ferrari with an enormous sigh.
“Holy fucking shit!” he said out loud. “I hate those people.” After he said it out loud he felt better, and gunned the car. He was on the Long Island Expressway ten minutes later going well over the speed limit, but his stomach already felt better. He tried to call Charlie, just so he could hear the voice of a normal human being, but he was out, and he left an inane message on the machine. And as he drove home, he found himself thinking of Maggie. The picture of her in the Enquirer was awful. He remembered her looking better than that. In her own way, she was a cute girl. He thought about her for a few minutes and wondered if he should call her. Probably not, but he knew he needed to do something that night to restore his battered guts and ego. There were plenty of others he could call, and when he got home, he called them. Everyone was out. It was a Friday night, and all the women he knew would be out on dates with someone. All he needed was a little human touch, someone to smile at, talk to him, and hold him. He didn't even need to have sex with them, he just wanted someone to recognize the fact that he was a human being. Seeing his family took all the air out of him, it was like having his blood sucked out of him by vampires. Now he needed a transfusion.
Sitting in his apartment, Adam ran through his address book. He called seven women. All he got were their answering machines, and then he thought of Maggie. He figured she was probably working, but just for the hell of it, he decided to call her. It was after midnight by then, and maybe she was home. He fished into the leather jacket he'd worn that night, at Vana's concert, looking for the little scrap of paper where he'd written her number. He went through all the pockets, and then he found it. Maggie O'Malley. He dialed the number. He knew it was ridiculous to reach out to her, but he had to talk to someone. His mother drove him crazy. He hated his sister. He didn't even hate her. He disliked her, nearly as much as she disliked him. She had never done anything with her life except get married and have two children. He would have been happy talking to Gray or Charlie. But he knew Gray was with Sylvia, and it was too late to call. And he remembered that Charlie was gone for the weekend. So he called Maggie. He felt a rising wave of panic, as he always did when he went home, and now he really was getting a migraine. Somehow, just being with them, brought back the worst memories of his childhood. He let the phone ring a dozen times, and no one answered. A message machine finally came on with several girls' names on it, and he left his name and number for Maggie, wondering why he'd bothered. Like everyone else he knew, Maggie was out that night, and as soon as he set the receiver down, he knew it was stupid to have called her. She was a total stranger. He couldn't explain to her what seeing his family did to him, or how much pain his mother always caused him. Maggie was some silly girl he had dragged around with him that night, for lack of someone better. She was just a waitress. Seeing her in the clipping his mother had used to torture him had reminded him of her, and he was relieved now that she hadn't answered. He hadn't even slept with her, and the only reason he had kept her number was because he had forgotten to take it out of his jacket and toss it.
In spite of his mother's dire warnings about potential alcoholism, and telling him that even migraine headaches could result, he poured himself a drink before he went to bed, and lay there after he did, trying to recover from the strain of the evening on Long Island. He hated going home and seeing them. It was an exquisite form of torture. It always took him days to recover from it. What was the point of having him, if they were going to treat him like an outcast all his life? He lay in bed, thinking of them, as the headache his mother had warned him about began to pound. It took him nearly an hour after that to fall asleep.
An hour later, he was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang. He dreamed that it was monsters from outer space, trying to eat him alive, and making strange buzzing sounds while they did. And all the while, his mother stood laughing at him, waving newspapers in his face. He put the covers over his head, and dreamed that he was running screaming from them, until he realized it was the phone. He put the receiver to his ear, and was still more than half asleep when he answered.
“…llo…”
“Adam?” He didn't recognize the voice, and realized as he woke up that the headache was even worse than it had been when he went to bed.
“Who is this?” He didn't know, and no longer cared, as he rolled over in bed and started to go back to sleep.
“It's Maggie. You left a message on my machine.”
“Maggie who?” He was still too out of it to understand.
“Maggie O'Malley. You called me. Did I wake you up?”