Joey’s feeling of bereavement was giving way to irritation, because, no matter how much she denied that she was doing it, she couldn’t seem to help reproaching him. These moms and their reproaches, there was no end to it. He called her for a little support, and the next thing he knew, he was falling short of providing support to her.
“So how are you on money?” she said, as if sensing his irritation. “Do you have enough money?”
“It’s a little tight,” he admitted.
“I bet!”
“Once I’m a resident here, tuition will go way down. It’s just this first year that’s really hard.”
“Do you want me to send you some money?”
He smiled in the darkness. He liked her, in spite of everything; he couldn’t help it. “I thought Dad said there wasn’t going to be any money.”
“Dad doesn’t necessarily have to know every little thing.”
“Well, and the school won’t consider me a state resident if I’m taking anything from you.”
“The school doesn’t have to know everything, either. I could send you a check made out to Cash, if that would help you.”
“Yeah, and then what?”
“Then nothing. I promise. No strings attached. I’m saying you’ve already made your point with Dad. There’s no need to take on horrible debt at high interest, just to keep proving a point you already made.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Why don’t I put a check in the mail to you. Then you can decide on your own if you want to cash it or not. You won’t have to discuss it with me.”
He smiled again. “Why are you doing this?”
“Well, you know, Joey, believe it or not, I want you to have the life you want to have. I’ve had some free time for asking myself questions while I’ve been fanning magazines on the coffee table, and whatnot. Like, if you were to tell me and Dad you never wanted to see us again, for the rest of your life, would I still want you to be happy?”
“That is a bizarre hypothetical question. It has no bearing on reality.”
“That’s nice to hear, but it’s not my point. My point is that we all think we know the answer to the question. Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That’s what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that’s kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, just in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn’t. I’ve told you a little bit about my own parents, for example—”
“Not very much,” Joey said.
“Well, maybe sometime I’ll tell you more, if you ask me nicely. But my point is that I’ve given some real thought to this question of love, regarding you. And I’ve decided—”
“Mom, do you mind if we talk about something else?”
“I’ve decided—”
“Or, actually, maybe some other day? Next week or something? I’ve got a lot of stuff to do here before I go to bed.”
A silence of injury descended in St. Paul.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just really late, and I’m tired and I still have stuff to do.”
“I was simply explaining,” his mother said in a much lower voice, “why I’m going to send a check.”
“Right, thank you. That’s nice of you. I guess.”
In an even smaller and more injured voice, his mother thanked him for calling and hung up.
Joey looked around the lawn for some bushes or an architectural cranny where he might cry unobserved by passing posses. Seeing none, he ran inside his dorm and, blindly, as if needing to barf, veered into the first john he came to, on a hall not his own, and locked himself into a stall and sobbed with hatred of his mother. Somebody was showering in a cloud of deodorant soap and mildew. A big smiling-faced erection, soaring like Superman, spurting droplets, was Sharpied on the stall’s rust-pocked door. Beneath it somebody had written SCORE NOW OR TAKE A CHIT.
The nature of his mother’s reproach wasn’t simple the way Carol Monaghan’s was. Carol, unlike her daughter, was not too bright. Connie had a wry, compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity to which she gave Joey access only behind closed doors. When she and Carol and Blake and Joey used to have dinner together, Connie would eat with her eyes lowered and seem lost in her own strange thoughts, but afterward, alone with Joey in their bedroom, she could reproduce every last deplorable detail of Carol and Blake’s dinner-table behavior. She once asked Joey if he’d noticed that the point of almost every utterance of Blake’s was how stupid other people were and how superior and put-upon he, Blake, was. According to Blake, the morning’s KSTP weather forecast had been stupid, the Paulsens had put their recycling barrel in a stupid place, the seat-belt beeper in his truck was stupid not to shut off after sixty seconds, the commuters driving the speed limit on Summit Avenue were stupid, the stoplight at Summit and Lexington was stupidly timed, his boss at work was stupid, the city building code was stupid. Joey began to laugh while Connie continued, with implacable recall, to list examples: the new TV remote was stupidly designed, the NBC prime-time schedule had been stupidly rearranged, the National League was stupid for not adopting the designated-hitter rule, the Vikings were stupid for letting Brad Johnson and Jeff George get away, the moderator of the second presidential debate had been stupid not to press Al Gore on what a liar he was, Minnesota was stupid to make its hardworking citizens pay for free top-of-the-line medical care for Mexican illegals and welfare cheats, free top-of-the-line medical care—
“And you know what?” Connie said finally.
“What?” Joey said.
“You never do that. You really are smarter than other people, so you never have to call them stupid.”
Joey accepted her compliment uncomfortably. For one thing, he was getting a strong whiff of competition from the direct comparison of him and Blake—an unsettling sense of being a pawn or a prize in some complicated mother-daughter struggle. And although it was true that he’d checked a lot of judgments at the door when he’d moved in with the Monaghans, he had formerly declared all manner of things to be stupid, in particular his mother, who had come to seem to him a font of endless, nerve-grating asininity. Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.
In truth, the only thing his mother had been guilty of being stupid about was Joey himself. Granted, it had also seemed very dumb of her to be, for example, so disrespectful of Tupac, whose best stuff Joey considered unarguably genius-level work, or so hostile toward Married with Children, whose own stupidity was so calculated and extreme that it was flat-out brilliant. But she would never have attacked Married with Children if Joey hadn’t been so devoted to watching it in reruns, she would never have stooped to doing her embarrassingly off-base caricatures of Tupac if Joey hadn’t admired him so much. The actual root cause of her stupidity was her wish for Joey to keep on being her little boy-pal: to continue being more entertained and fascinated by his mother than by great TV or a bona-fide genius rap star. This was the sick heart of her dumbness: she was competing.
Eventually he’d become desperate enough to drive it into her head that he didn’t want to be her little boy-pal anymore. This hadn’t even been his conscious plan, it was more like a by-product of his long-running irritation with his moralistic sister, whom he could think of no finer way to enrage and horrify than to invite a bunch of his friends over to his house and get drunk on Jim Beam while his parents were with his ailing grandmother in Grand Rapids, and then, the following night, to screw Connie extra-specially noisily against the wall that his bedroom shared with Jessica’s, thereby inciting Jessica to crank up her intolerable Belle and Sebastian to club-level volumes and later, after midnight, to pound on his locked bedroom door with her virtuously white knuckles—
“God damn it
, Joey! You stop this right now! Right now, do you hear me?”
“Hey, whoa, I’m doing you a favor here.”
“What?”
“Aren’t you sick of not telling on me? I’m doing you a favor! I’m giving you your chance!”
“I’m telling on you now. I’m going to call Dad right now.”
“Go ahead! Didn’t you just hear me? I said I was doing you a favor.”
“You fucker. You smug little fucker. I’m calling Dad right now—” while Connie, stark naked, bloody-red of lip and nipple, sat holding her breath and looking at Joey with a mixture of fear and amazement and excitement and allegiance and delight which convinced him, like nothing before and few things since, that no rule or propriety or moral law mattered to her one-thousandth as much as being his chosen girl and partner in crime.
He hadn’t expected his grandmother to die that week—she wasn’t that old. By hurling shit into the fan one day before she passed, he’d put himself extremely in the wrong. Just how wrong was evidenced by the fact that he was never even yelled at. Up in Hibbing, at the funeral, his parents simply froze him out. He was left to stew separately in his guilt while the rest of his family joined together in a grief that he ought to have been experiencing with them. Dorothy had been the only grandparent in his life, and she’d impressed him, when he was still very young, by inviting him to handle her crippled hand and see that it was still a person’s hand and nothing to be scared of. After that, he’d never objected to the kindnesses his parents had asked him to do for her when she was visiting. She was a person, maybe the only person, to whom he’d been one-hundred-percent good. And now suddenly she was dead.
Her funeral was followed by some weeks of respite from his mother, some weeks of welcome chilliness, but by and by she came after him again. She exploited the pretext of his frankness about Connie to become inappropriately frank with him in turn. She tried to make him her Designated Understander, and this turned out to be even worse than being her little boy-pal. It was devious and irresistible. It started with a confidence: she sat down on his bed one afternoon and launched into telling him how she’d been stalked in college by a drug-addicted pathological liar whom she’d nonetheless loved and his dad had disapproved of. “I had to tell somebody,” she said, “and I didn’t want to tell Dad. I was down getting my new driver’s license yesterday, and I realized that she was in line ahead of me. I haven’t seen her since the night I wrecked my knee. That’s like twenty years? She’s gained a lot of weight, but it was definitely her. And I got so frightened, seeing her. I realized I felt guilty.”
“Why frightened?” he found himself saying, like Tony Soprano’s shrink. “Why guilty?”
“I don’t know. I ran out of there before she could turn around and see me. I still have to go back down for my license. But I was terrified that she was going to turn around and see me. I was terrified of what was going to happen. Because, you know, I am so not a lesbian. You have to believe that I would know it if I were—half my old friends are gay. And I definitely am not.”
“Good to hear,” he said with a nervous smirk.
“But I realized, yesterday, seeing her, that I’d been in love with her. And I was never able to deal with that. And now she has that kind of lithium heaviness—”
“What’s lithium.”
“For manic depression. Bipolar disease.”
“Ah.”
“And I totally abandoned her, because Dad hated her so much. She was suffering, and I never called her again, and I threw her letters away without opening them.”
“But she lied to you. She was scary.”
“I know, I know. But I still feel guilty.”
She told him many other secrets in the months that followed. Secrets that proved to be like candy laced with arsenic. For a while, he actually considered himself lucky to have a mom who was so cool and forthcoming. He responded by disclosing various perversions and petty crimes of his classmates, trying to impress her with how much more jaded and debauched his peers were than young people in the seventies. And then one day, during a conversation about date rape, it had seemed natural enough for her to tell him how she herself had been date-raped as a teenager, and how he mustn’t ever breathe a word of it to Jessica, because Jessica didn’t understand her the way he did—nobody understood her the way he did. He’d lain awake in the nights following that conversation, feeling murderously angry at his mother’s rapist, and outraged by the world’s injustice, and guilty for every negative thing he’d ever said or felt about her, and privileged and important to be granted access to the world of grownup secrets. And then one morning he’d woken up hating her so violently that it made his skin crawl and his stomach turn to be in the same room with her. It was like a chemical transformation. As if there were arsenic leaching from his organs and his bone marrow.
What he’d been dismayed by tonight on the telephone was how completely unstupid she had sounded. This, indeed, was the substance of her reproach. She didn’t seem to be very good at living her life, but it wasn’t because she was stupid. Almost the opposite somehow. She had a comical-tragical sense of herself and seemed, moreover, genuinely apologetic for the way she was. And yet it all added up to a reproach of him. As if she were speaking some sophisticated but dying aboriginal language which it was up to the younger generation (i.e., Joey) to either perpetuate or be responsible for the death of. Or as if she were one of his dad’s endangered birds, singing its obsolete song in the woods in the forlorn hope of some passing kindred spirit hearing it. There was her, and then there was the rest of the world, and by the very way she chose to speak to him she was reproaching him for placing his allegiance with the rest of the world. And who could fault him for preferring the world? He had his own life to try to live! The problem was that when he was younger, in his weakness, he’d let her see that he did understand her language and did recognize her song, and now she couldn’t seem to help reminding him that those capacities were still inside him, should he ever feel like exercising them again.
Whoever was showering in the dormitory bathroom had stopped and was toweling off. The hall door opened and closed, opened and closed; a minty smell of tooth-brushing wafted over from the sinks and into Joey’s stall. His crying had given him a boner that he now removed from his boxers and khakis and held on to for dear life. If he squeezed the base of it really hard, he could make the head of it huge and hideous and almost black with venous blood. He so much liked looking at it, so much enjoyed the feeling of protection and independence its repulsive beauty gave him, that he was reluctant to finish himself off and lose hold of that hardness. To walk around hard every minute of the day, of course, would be to be what people called a prick. Which was what Blake was. Joey didn’t want to be like Blake, but he wanted even less to be his mother’s Designated Understander. With silently spastic fingers, staring at his hardness, he came into the yawning toilet and immediately flushed it.
Upstairs, in his corner room, he found Jonathan reading John Stuart Mill and watching the ninth inning of a World Series game. “Very confounding situation here,” Jonathan said. “I’m experiencing actual pangs of sympathy for the Yankees.”
Joey, who never watched baseball by himself but was amenable to watching it with others, sat down on his bed while Randy Johnson dealt fastballs to a defeat-eyed Yankee. The score was 4–0. “They could still come back,” he said.
“Not going to happen,” Jonathan said. “And I’m sorry, but since when do expansion teams get to play in the Series after four seasons? I’m still trying to accept that Arizona even has a team.”
“I’m glad you’re seeing the light of reason finally.”
“Don’t get me wrong. There’s still nothing sweeter than a Yankee loss, preferably by one run, preferably on a passed ball by Jorge Posada, the chinless wonder. But this is the one year you kind of want them to win anyway. It’s a patriotic sacrifice we all have to make for New York.”
“I want them to win every year,” Joey said, altho
ugh he didn’t have strong feelings about it.
“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you supposed to like the Twins?”
“It’s probably mostly because my parents hate the Yankees. My dad loves the Twins because they’ve got a tiny payroll, and naturally the Yankees are the enemy when it comes to payrolls. And my mom’s just an anti–New York maniac in general.”
Jonathan gave him an interested look. To date, Joey had disclosed very little about his parents, only enough to avoid seeming annoyingly mysterious about them. “Why does she hate New York?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it’s where she came from.”
On Jonathan’s TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over.
“Very complex mix of emotions here,” Jonathan said, turning it off.
“You know, I don’t even know my grandparents?” Joey said. “My mom’s really weird about them. My entire childhood, they came to see us once, for like forty-eight hours. The whole time, my mom was unbelievably neurotic and fake. We went to see them one other time, when we were in New York on vacation, and that was bad, too. I’d get these birthday cards three weeks late from them, and my mom would be, like, cursing them for being so late, even though it wasn’t really their fault. I mean, how are they supposed to remember the birthday of somebody they never get to see?”
Jonathan was frowning thoughtfully. “Where in New York?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in the suburbs. My grandmother’s a politician, in the state legislature or something. She’s this nice, elegant Jewish lady who my mom apparently can’t stand to be in the same room with.”
“Whoa, say that again?” Jonathan sat up straight on his bed. “Your mom is Jewish?”