Chapter Nine
The bus stop was very quiet the next morning. I thought perhaps someone would recall the questions I had posed the previous day and ask “How did you know?” but they either attributed it to coincidence or had forgotten thanks to the previous night’s tumult. The Ranch kids were dazed, and The Barrio kids confused as to why.
JD, who lived in one of the houses perched directly on the side of the road that our neighborhoods shared, broke the silence:
“I didn’t see no headlights this morning coming from Ranch Ranch,” he said. “So that party must have gone pretty big and pretty late, eh?”
Those of us from behind the wall exchanged looks, wondering for a moment if we were all thinking the same thing.
“My parents were still in bed when I left,” said Shay.
And with that the testimonies started to flow.
“My dad was up, but he was hunched over the kitchen sink just staring into it.”
“Mine told me they were calling in sick.”
“Mine, too. They told me through their bedroom door when I knocked on it.”
“I didn’t even see mine. I just saw their cars in the garage.”
“What time did yours get home?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep. Never heard them.”
“Mine woke me up. They came in laughing and talking too loud.”
“Mine woke me up with all their screaming and yelling,” said Nub.
“They were fighting?”
“Nope,” he grinned, and everyone laughed.
Blaine laughed loudest of all as he stood by Lana, trying to encourage her to see sex from a lighthearted perspective. But of course with Blaine, haughtiness was always a possible motive. His parents had never associated much with the others even during the early days of the development, unless they were the ones throwing the party, and last night they had reaffirmed that tradition by staying away. So Blaine could have also been relishing the fact his parents managed to avoid embarrassing themselves, unlike the rest of us plebeians.
I, however, remained stoic, and not because Nub beat me to a joke that I could have just as easily made about my parents. Miggy noted my expression and approached me.
“What’s so not funny?” he asked.
“It’s happening,” I said. “Already happening.”
“It’s just one day.”
“It’s just the first day,” I snapped back. “They got them. Pulled them right in to see how fun it is to stay home. They’re taking advantage of people’s sadness.”
“Oh, come on,” Miggy waved me off. “You make them sound like criminals. What’s in it for them?”
“Same as everyone else, but they get to take credit for getting it started. They get to be the coolest losers.”
“Damn, man,” Miggy chuckled. “You’re tough. So they want to have a good time, go out in a blaze of glory, what’s wrong with that?”
“Because they think they deserve it.”
“Don’t they?”
“They think that way about everything,” I said, my voice rising. “If they want it, they deserve it.”
He seemed to see my point, or at least how passionate I was about it.
The bus turned at the intersection by the tree line that shrouded the factory and made its way toward us.
“Well,” Miggy said, feeling it necessary to put a conclusion on our conversation. “You can still hope it’s just one day. You don’t know for sure if the other parents are gonna play along.”
He was right, and I could have waited over the next few days to see whether the remaining parents were falling in line. But I was now insatiably curious, and not just about their willingness to stay home and dance away their anguish, but how they were going to wrangle the time to do so.
I imagined they would all be plotting their time off throughout the day and coming to some decisions by nightfall. I wondered how much information I could garner by visiting multiple homes for some reality checking, as I suspected they would all claim they were simply taking time off, but that many would actually be quitting their jobs or conjuring up an injury or illness.
Throughout the school day, I concocted my route and schedule. I thought initially I would have to limit my gathering to the houses with fences in back, but as I considered the homes lining the wall, I realized each of them had at least one empty unit next to it, which would provide me with access. The reliance not just on stealth but on coincidence also infused some doubt into my planning, but I convinced myself that even if I didn’t happen upon a conversation at just the right time, I could collect clues about their finagling from what was being said in the course of the scene I did happen to view. With that in mind, I estimated I could obtain a decent amount of knowledge by merely spending fifteen minutes at each house. Some would be a wash, just people staring at a television or performing some chore, but with four houses per hour over a couple of nights, I could compile a solid sample size that would give me a legitimate sense of what was driving the reappearance at The Ranch.
I would tell my parents I was visiting Miggy, knowing that they would never call his house for fear of speaking Spanish, and would return just before the hour became unreasonable, with the excuse in hand that “it’s a school night” carried no heft since we weren’t doing anything during the last week of school, anyway.
I enjoyed my expanded reality checking even more than I had imagined I would. The two-day quest for truth was an exhilarating mix of reconnaissance and enlightenment, and had me thinking that the return of the adults may not be so bad after all. Now there was something to see through the glass other than spent, mute people too tired to ponder or debate their choices. They were still sad and frustrated, but they were chatty about their condition, ready to plot against it by any means possible.
I heard people calling doctors and insurance providers while I crouched in the abandoned yards next door, close enough to their bedroom windows to also catch sight of them squinting and pacing with guilt as they tried to stick to the script composed in their heads. I watched them through the small windows above their kitchen sinks as they sat around countertops with pads of paper and calculators and estimated how much vacation or sick leave they had banked. At times I didn’t even have to scale a fence to know what was happening; I could hear the arguments clearly enough from outside the property lines, listen to them fight over quitting their jobs, sometimes one wanting to quit while the other thought it unwise, sometimes both wanting to quit and each making the case why the other should be the one to stay employed, sometimes both agreeing that they would join the send-off and by what method, but disagreeing on their next move: where they would live, what they would do, how they would start over, which credit cards they would keep, which they would cut up, if there was any way they could avoid paying their debts, any way to keep their name away from the impending bankruptcy, and what stories they would tell others in the future, what the re-write of their history would be.
And though occasionally I missed picking up on how they were going to find the time to spend in the home they were going to lose, I would instead creep up on their plans to contribute to the festivities. They tabulated how much they had to offer, if they could pitch in a barbeque, a DJ, a band, a bounce house for the kids and one for the adults, how much it would cost to fill a rubber wading pool with cheap vodka on ice, how much effort it would require to turn a patch of the land beyond the fences into something resembling a softball field for a parents vs. children series.
None of the other children knew about these plans. I never saw any of them in the same room as the parents as they looked ahead to what the summer would look like, and what the fall would bring. We were left out of the exit strategy just as we had been left out of the plans for our entrance. And once again the parents had the best intentions. They were trying to “recapture the sense of community we had in the beginning.” I knew this was their rationale because I heard that same line coming from about every house I checked. And by th
e fourth house on the first night I remembered it was the line that Mom had propagated at the party, and that Dad must have done his fair share of disseminating it as well.
Just as the other parents were imitating my parents’ words, most had to imitate their actions, too, in terms of procuring the time off. Only a handful were able to start their vacation immediately, specifically the ones who quit their jobs, while the rest needed a few days to lay the foundation for what was to come. But even their scant presence marked a dramatic change in the atmosphere at Ranch Ranch. Some of us tried to play on the construction site, but there were a couple of men drinking beer in a garage near enough to see us, so we couldn’t raid the materials or throw any of them off the second floor or smack any of them against the wood frame. We headed for the lame little promotional playground with our bikes and skateboards, but there was a woman across the street puttering back and forth between her garage and her front yard, pulling weeds and trimming bushes, occasionally pausing to size up her house as though getting to know it again, or taking one last look, so we couldn’t have our way with that structure, either. We rode around the neighborhood looking for a place that was not under any coincidental surveillance, but found none. Every block had a garage door open, with a waving parent inside it. Blaine’s parents were home, and Blaine wasn’t with us, so we had no access to the tunnel. When we headed for the gate, a voice from a nearby garage asked us where we were going, and we were so unaccustomed to answering that question that we froze and changed course. We went to Nub’s house because his parents were still working until the end of the week, so we used their backyard fence for access to the open range. But a few minutes into our ride a grown-up head peered over a fence and asked us what we were doing. We ignored it but then another head popped up a minute later and also asked us what we were doing. We stopped and looked at each other, once again unable to find an answer. All we found was self-consciousness. The Children’s Dynasty was over.
I retired to my room so as not to overstay my welcome at Miggy’s house, and finally started to read Lord of the Flies, which I was supposed to read in school earlier that year, but had skimmed and faked my way through an essay that received an “A”. Mom tapped on my door and came in to invite me to dinner, claiming to have read somewhere that families who sit down to eat dinner together produce more successful children. I accepted; not to insure my future, but because I was still determined to combat becoming a cliché of a surly pre-teen, to challenge biology and circumstances and become something surprising rather than typical. I wanted my words to hold sway once the red and white sign signaled my chance to spill them, so that Mom and Dad could not dismiss them as the ranting of an angry boy.
Not that I could actually resist those feelings. They were a given. My charge was to see how civilized a veneer I could construct, which I supposed was a valuable skill to possess in the adult world that I couldn’t reach soon enough. So we sat together at the table off to the side of the kitchen and ate macaroni and cheese and cauliflower, and Mom said “Isn’t this nice?”
Dad and I agreed, and she shared with us more specifics on the dinner table study: how it was conducted and how success was defined and how time together affected personal well-being.
“Is it that simple?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Dad said, sounding prepared to defend Mom rather than listen to my point. I saw this as a chance to practice my restraint and continued.
“Does just sitting at a dinner table make all those things happen? Or do certain people sit at dinner tables?”
Following through on his implied posture, Dad remarked, “Are you saying we’re not those kinds of people?”
“No. I’m just asking questions.”
“And they’re good ones,” Mom chimed in.
“You think so?” Dad confirmed with her.
I realized that I could thrust my chin in his direction all I wanted, but when it came to Mom, he was going to be very protective.
“Yes,” she assured him before addressing me. “And I would say even if we weren’t, the act of sitting together would help us become those kinds of people.”
“But only if we weren’t,” Dad grinned. “And that’s a big ‘if’.”
I had found a weak spot in him and understood that winning the battle against my age depended on my ability to resist pounding that spot, but my understanding was losing the battle with my impulses.
“If we really were those kinds of people,” I teed up my insult before swinging through it, “would we get so touchy about it so quickly?”
The satisfaction I felt was brief, as though my swing had produced a beautiful, soaring shot that seconds later splashed into a water hazard. They looked at each other to help themselves stay calm.
“Look,” Mom said. “I know you’re in that in-between stage now, and that’s a difficult time. But could you at least try to be nice?”
“That’s my plan,” I pleaded, which was certainly true, but hard for them to believe.
“Implement it,” Dad said, and we spent the rest of our time at the table eating and asking questions that could be answered with one word.
I heard them later on debate whether they still wanted to take me on that trip to the coast that weekend or if they would be better off taking it on their own, maybe get a hotel room for a night and make it something special rather than strenuous.
“It’s not going to take away the strain,” Mom offered. “It will still be here when we get back, and may be even worse.”
“You really think he’d resent not coming?” Dad asked, but wasn’t really asking. “He’d be relieved.”
Which I agreed with at first. But then, much to my surprise, the possibility of being disinvited by my parents started to hurt, in a much different way from the kind of hurting I was used to. The ache of not being able to attract the girl you wanted, the pain of not being as good at a game as you thought you were, the separation from your old home and from things you liked to do…all of these hurt, but when I thought about those things, they were kind of supposed to happen. This, on the other hand, was not supposed to happen.
“I could see leaving him behind so I won’t have to watch him eat,” Mom said. “It’s like watching a dog that climbed up onto the table.”
Dad laughed. “You’d think he hadn’t eaten for days. Did you hear him breathing while he was biting and chewing?”
“It was like an obscene phone caller trying to eat and do his thing at the same time.”
Now they were both laughing. Dad then changed the tone.
“And would it kill him to offer to help?” he said. “He just left everything for us to clean. And he didn’t thank you for making dinner.”
“Or ask to be excused,” Mom added.
I felt like bursting through the door and shouting “Excuse me, but I’m a little out of practice from eating by myself or with other kids all the time!”
But instead I retreated in the exaggerated tiptoe that always marked my in-home eavesdropping. And rather than back to my room, I went downstairs, quietly opened the door into the garage, then sat in Dad’s car with the windows rolled up.
I didn’t want them to hear me cry.
If they did, then they would know I was listening in on them.