Eleven Twenty-Three, page 6
And I never did. Even now, as his body rests comfortably in the plush surroundings of what I am sure is a very expensive coffin, I hope for the worst tomorrow, such as his corpse falling out of the casket or his soul being damned to wander listlessly around a very boring Purgatory with no dinner reservations.
I head up to my mother’s second floor apartment carrying my usual dinner Cabernet. I stare at the sticker she placed on her door, the one that says IN CASE OF FIRE, PLEASE RESCUE CATS. TWO INSIDE. Mom answers the door wearing old jeans and a blouse. Her brunette hair is disheveled and spotted with more gray strands than I remember there being four months ago. She is already drinking her first glass of dark wine, which means I will be listening to her drunken rants about Dad by eight-thirty or nine.
“You're fifteen minutes late,” she says. “I was getting worried. You sounded pretty groggy on the phone this morning when you got in.”
“Long flight,” I say, giving her a sincere hug. My mother always smells of sullen perfume and forlorn coconut shampoo, of the black Persian and bitchy tabby cat, of deep grudge-inducing loss and too much sleep. “Dinner smells good.”
“I made a roast. I hope that’s okay. It should be ready in just a few minutes.”
“Sounds splendid, Mom.”
“Okay, back up,” she says. “Let me take a good look at you.”
She gently nudges me to an arm’s length and looks me up and down. I feel like I am being sold into slavery. She grimaces when I grimace, and then we fall back into a hug.
“You look thin, son.”
“I eat steamed dumplings and don’t have a car there, Mom. It happens.”
“I am so glad to see you home safe, Layne. I don’t know what I’d do if I flipped on the news one morning and saw your face on the screen, involved in some kind of terrible international incident.”
“I really don’t think you have to worry,” I say, actually quite amused with the thought of starting some major capitalist travesty when I go back, especially with the Olympics coming in a few months. The Chinese don’t want any trouble from us pale-face runaways, after all.
“I love you, baby boy.”
And I love my mother; I always will. But I tend to love her with more conviction when I remember her giving off the fragrance of notebook paper and sports cars while standing next to my father, a wide smile beaming down on me from both of them.
I slip past her into the apartment, taking in the cat smell, the orange and black and white hairs scattered across the armrests of the couch and recliner, and the thick smoky air already reeking of another overdone pot roast. The apartment is how I remember it: under-lit, well manicured, and full of nothing but appliances and furniture that imply a lonely woman lives here. I wipe away some of the cat dander from the firm, unused sofa and sit down, watching my mother move haphazardly from the living room down the hallway and into the bedroom, and then back into the living room again. She looms over me, inspecting my black t-shirt, my wrinkly blue jeans, my deteriorating sneakers, my overgrown black hair, and mendacious hazel eyes. I quickly look away, ashamed of being ashamed.
“Read any good books lately?” I ask her, inspecting my mother’s overfilled candy jar looking useless on the coffee table.
“You look good, but tired,” she says, apparently not having read any good books. “Are you getting enough sleep over there? Are the beds comfortable?”
“I’m fine. It was a long flight, is all. The beds are okay, I suppose. Tara might disagree with me. She says the bed in our apartment feels like plywood with a sheet draped over it.”
“Is everything okay with you and that girl?” she asks, and I swallow away a momentary pang of irritation. Even after three years, Tara will apparently always remain that girl. I suppose it doesn’t matter.
“You mean Tara? Yeah, we're fine.”
“I’m sorry you had to come home early,” she says, sipping her wine. “I know that must have been hard to sort out with the university.”
“It’s okay. I just wish I was returning home under better circumstances.” I watch as the orange tabby cat, Percy, saunters by my mother’s legs, leaving a trail of hair on her nightgown. “By the way, Mom, uh, how are you coping with this?”
“About your father?” she asks, as if there’d be anything else for her to cope with other than the fact that she’s forgotten what the sun looks like. She smiles at Percy, who is on his haunches staring up at her. “Well, I’m—I suppose I’m fine. I mean, how does one react to the death of a cold mean-spirited asshole?”
“I’m not sure, Mom. Ask every other widow in history.”
“That’s bleaker than I’m used to from you, Layne. What happened?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I sigh. “It’s just an argument Tara and I had earlier. She’s pushing for the marriage thing again, and now she’s throwing down the marry-me-or-I-won’t-go-back-to-China gauntlet. It reminds me of all those ultimatums she gave when I asked her to move out of the apartment back in February. It’s really selfish and annoying, and furthermore, I’m going back to Suzhou whether Tara comes or not.”
“It certainly is unfair of her, Layne,” my mother says vehemently, as I suspected she might. “Don’t let someone pressure you into marriage like that. You do what you think is best. If you have to then leave her, but don’t give in to a demand like the one that girl is giving you.”
I can always count on my mother to take my side in every fight that girl and I have. Her unwavering support of my growing detachment from human existence has been one latent function of Dad’s departure when I was nineteen.
“I’m sure things will be fine between us,” I say. “I’m not especially worried about it. I’ve got other things on my mind right now.”
“Do you want to talk about your father?” my mother asks so quietly that I almost have to ask her to repeat herself. “We could, if you need to.”
“We don’t need to talk about it. And if I did, I’ve got to be honest, Mom: I don’t think it’d be you I went to.”
“Look, Layne, no matter what happened between your father and I, he’s—he’s still your father. I understand that. Even if he was married to someone your age when he died—”
“And it’s comments like that one, right there, why I couldn’t go to you,” I point out, standing up and heading toward the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine. “It’s just too close to you, Mom, and truthfully, it hardly matters to me. I’m much more concerned over how you would take him dying than I myself would. Dad’s family, his sisters and brother and the grandparents—none of them have called us. No one is expecting anything of either of us, Mom. We could probably not even show up tomorrow morning and no one would think anything of it. I believe that even his own flesh and blood would have to admit that he was kind of a, um, bad person.”
My mom guzzles down her wine and says, “Trust me, son. They would definitely think something of it if we didn’t go. I think it best we show up, keep our mouths shut, and respond with nothing but the most positive descriptions of our lives if anyone asks. But forget about your father for a minute. After all, he forgot about you and me for years—”
“Nice one,” I say, drinking a full glass of Mom’s cheap Pinot and then pouring myself another.
“Something has been going on lately back here in town. You probably don’t know about it since you’ve been away—and I did want to talk to you about that later.”
“Fantastic,” I mutter, sipping from another glass and hovering over the kitchen sink.
I look around. All of the dishes are put away. Everything is tidy and resting in its correct place. The roast is drying out peacefully in the oven. My mother’s kitchen—my mother’s entire life—is a clean, well-tended museum exhibit, a perfectly dead replica of a human home where everything stays neat because no one is alive here to disturb it. A part of me wants to burn this place down, just to see the change.
“I’m only saying that you don’t have to completely forsake America, son. You have a degree in History, in case you haven’t forgotten. I’m sure you could find some worthwhile career closer to home, if you’d just stop being pissed off at what happened with the girl last spring—”
“Before I left, I was a waiter at Applebee’s, Mom. I had parents come in and eat at my table. Once I had an old student and his jerk-off friends sit in my section, and then the little bastards actually had the guile to ask me for Long Islands, and when I asked if they were kidding, you know what they said?”
“Something mean?”
“Yes, Mom. Something mean. They asked what it mattered to me, since I probably got Olivia drunk right before I violated her. That’s what they said.”
“What do you want, Layne? Teenagers are heartless little wretches. You know that.”
“The point I am making,” I say carefully, “is that things weren’t exactly peachy here when I left. China—a country on the opposite side of the planet—just seemed like a really good idea at the time. You know?”
“I’m simply suggesting that maybe when your contract is up, maybe you should move back to Florida and work on getting your life together again. That’s all, son. I just want my baby boy closer to home.”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about the school thing anymore, if that’s okay,” I declare, clenching the wine glass and begging to God for one of the cigarettes that I know I left in the car. My mother doesn’t know I smoke. “What else did you want to talk about?”
She rests her glass on the floor, and Shelley, the Persian that sheds too much, pokes his nose down and smells the basin. Mom begins to slowly, methodically pet him, running her hand through his thick black fur just above his eyes, down his back, and through the staticky raised hairs on his tail. She hums softly to herself. As I watch her, I have to blink away tears.
“Mom?”
She stares at the closed blinds covering the window, as if she can see anything out there. For the first time I realize just how dark it is in her living room.
“Mom.”
Even in the dank lamplight, I can see the first tear run down her cheek and hang precariously from her jaw. It suddenly becomes very important to me that that single drop of sadness not let go, not ever fall to the floor.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go to Dad’s funeral tomorrow,” I say off-handedly.
The tear falls to the floor.
“No, no,” she says, shaking her head, tossed back into reality. “I’m going. And you need to, as well.”
“What did you want to bring up a minute ago?”
“I wanted to talk about what’s happening across town,” she says matter-of-factly.
“You mean here in Lilly’s End?” I ask.
“Yes, here in Lilly’s End. Did you notice anything strange today as you were driving in?”
“It was…rainy. It looked a little beaten up around town ever since Hurricane Brooke came through. But other than that, no—”
“Everyone has been very sick lately,” she says, standing up and breezing past me to check on the pot roast.
I head back into the living room and sit down on the couch, thinking about what she said. I look over at my mom as she tries to manage dinner. When she opens the oven door, unappealing smoke pours out and she has to quickly remove the food and set it on the counter next to the pot of mashed potatoes and a big plastic bowl full of steamed vegetables, now cold. She makes noises with spoons and a carving knife and curses under her breath. Then she shrugs to herself and comes back into the den with me.
“Let’s just give the roast a minute to cool,” she says. “By the way, it may be just a tad overcooked. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “What do you mean, everyone is sick lately?”
“Something in the air, maybe. A virus. Some bug. I don’t know. Across the End for weeks now, people have been throwing up and their eyes have been red and dry and everyone’s been coughing a lot. It’s like some kind of smog or something is making everyone sick. It even made the Orlando news, it’s been so bad, and I’ve seen medical people in town, too. Asking questions. Testing the air. Things like that.”
“That’s…terrible,” I say. “I think I may have seen some of those medical people on the way over here, actually. Did you get sick too?”
“A little bit. But I don’t go out that much really, so maybe I was able to avoid it. But anyway, I just want you and that girl and Hajime to be careful, that’s all. With the nightmares, too.”
“I’m sorry?” I say, but am sure I heard her correctly. Tara’s dream, of Mr. Scott writing out the plotline that will lead to our own deaths, reverberates in my mind, and I swallow. “Nightmares, Mom?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, baby. Let’s eat. Tell me all about your China trip.”
Over dinner—which is admittedly terrible but in a good way that makes me feel nostalgic and even slightly glad to be back home in Lilly’s End, despite the sickness floating in the air and the nightmares that run rampant and the rain that hasn’t stopped for more than an hour since I got here and the fact that my mother is acting even more off than usual and will probably cause a major scene at my father’s funeral tomorrow morning—I tell her about my trip thus far. I tell her about the well-behaved students and the uppity tenured professors who make several thousand Yuan less than me a pay period. I describe the carvings that line the underside of bridges as you take boat rides down the ancient canals of Suzhou, and the Triads who show off their elaborate full-body tattoos of dragons and beautiful sultry women as they smoke Bai-sha cigarettes. I smile as I describe the KTVs and the private booths where Tara and I get drunk with our new expatriate friends and sing dancey renditions of the theme from Friends. She nods at all of my short anecdotes where I describe the times I almost unwittingly paid for the services of prostitutes, who our friend Nalan Minghui calls “long fingernail girls.” When I go into detail about Suzhou and Shanghai at night—about the lights and busy streets and strange stomach-churning smells and constant stares from the elderly and total cold shoulder from the college-age kids who are too cool to look at the bumbling American and his voluptuous red-headed girlfriend, my mother sips her wine.
She keeps telling me how exciting all of this is, and how she understands. She insists she can visualize the places and moments I’m describing, the same way she did when she was a kid and read Pearl S. Buck for the first time. But she doesn’t understand, and I know it. And she knows I know it. I don’t think she understands anything anymore outside of this apartment.
“Well, it sounds fantastic,” she finally says. “I can definitely see why you’re in no hurry to move back. Forget what I said earlier about getting a job here, baby. I think where you’re at sounds like a great adventure.”
“No, Mom,” I say. “What you suggested, about moving back and starting over again here—it is a good idea. Lilly’s End is a nice place to live. It’s just—I’m not—well, my contract was for a year. Let’s just wait and see what happens when I’m done. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says, and leans forward over the tiny table at the corner of the dining room and gives me a gentle kiss on my forehead. “Will you meet me here tomorrow morning? I didn’t want to ride alone. Can we go together?”
“Of course we can. I already assumed we were.”
“Thank you.”
My mother then begins clearing our plates and carrying them to the sink. I watch her as she cleans up. Percy stands on the kitchen counter and watches her as well.
“By the way,” she says, “don’t party too hard tonight.”
“What makes you think I was?” I ask, grinning.
“I haven’t forgotten about Hajime, son. You two have always been trouble. Besides, something tells me that tomorrow will be very interesting, aside from just the funeral. Very…profound. We’ll both have to be strong tomorrow.”
“I imagine we will,” I agree, fingering the keys in my pocket.
“And with that bug going around…it’s funny. I only felt really ill a few times, but when I did, it was always late at night or just before noon. I hope you and Tara don’t catch it now that you’re home.”
PARENTHESIS
I never wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I majored in American History in college, to be honest. Maybe I didn’t want to be anything. There were a lot of those types, I think, the ones who focused their entire college career on a subject they would speak of with James Barrie-esque fancy, idiotically drunk on the miscalculations of their own innate talent. It wasn’t as if they really did have a shot at becoming a costume designer for Broadway musicals, or the guy who argues politics with Hannity and Colmes. None of these people was ever going to be on the first manned expedition to Mars, nor were they going to work as a script supervisor on the show Heroes. They weren’t going to be anything, other than maybe the guy who brings you a two-for-one draught of beer at Friday’s who happens to have a degree in political science, or costume design, or American Studies, or History. They were all future nothings. So was I.
I graduated from college with no clue what to do next. I had a vague idea about attending grad school, but my grades the first time around weren’t awe-inspiring except maybe in their absolute adherence to mediocrity, and the necessary GRE scores to get into the schools I liked were more intimidating than I cared to deal with at the time.
So I just sort of slipped into teaching. What I promised myself wouldn’t last more than a year while I figured out what I was going to do next quickly became the next four. I was looking at a Tier 5 contract. After the head retired and died shortly thereafter and one of the other guys transferred to Pensacola, I became a veteran of the history department. I judged at our annual pie eating contest-cum-fundraiser for breast cancer. I went to basketball games. I got involved with the school debate team. The administrators thought I was great.
