Читать книгу Replacing Dad - Shelley Fraser Mickle - Страница 3

I remember thinking that the last thing on my mind ought to be my mother. It was my birthday. I was turning fifteen, and she and I were on our way to the Highway Patrol Station to get me my learner’s permit. Now, the thing is, I kept telling myself it was a little nuts for someone like me—fifteen, five foot ten already, and with a few girls already acting like they liked me—to be worrying about my mother. I was wondering what in the hell I could do to get her to just break through where she was. I was sick of her always wearing dark glasses and humming “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and cooking me and Mandy and George brownies every night like she was June Cleaver.

I know about Mrs. Cleaver, because when I was twelve I slipped on my bike in the rain on the main street of Palm Key, and Mr. Tuttle couldn’t stop the Wonder Bread delivery in time. I got to stay in bed at home for a good long time with a broken leg and five cracked ribs, watching all these “Leave It to Beaver” reruns. Of course old June cooked all her brownies in the afternoons ‘cause she didn’t have to work. But I’m not complaining about the brownies—they were out of a mix, guaranteed good, and served warm and gooey like I like them. And I’m not really saying I minded my mother singing “Don’t Worry,Be Happy,” all the time either, even though her voice is not much better than the sound of somebody blowing a flute with a hole in it. It’s just that being around someone who is trying like hell to act like Richard Simmons doing a fat-melting video—when all the time you know that inside, they’ve hit bottom—didn’t fool me.

When you get right down to it, the alternative would have been worse, I guess. But the point is, when someone around you is miserable, even if they do everything in the world to pretend not to be, don’t you know?

And so that’s where I was: living with June Cleaver. And it didn’t fit. It wasn’t my mother. It’d been six months since my father had moved out. He was living with this teacher in the same school whereI went. She taught fifth grade, was my sister Mandy’s teacher. My dad was the principal there—still is—which means he’s lord over everything K through twelve,which also means he’s lord over not much, since no more than a hundred kids go to the Palm Key School.

So my mother and I were heading up the walkway to the Highway Patrol licensing place—Mom in dark glasses, the curve of her shoulders like she had a fifty-pound backpack tied on, and a smile that Carol Burnett couldn’t have come close to. (Saw a lot of Carol reruns, too.)

My mother’s short. Even on my fifteenth birthday, she came up to only about my armpit. And in the face we look a lot alike, which can sound kinda weird for a guy to say he looks like his mother. But we both have this dark skin from some Italian great grandmother who decided to turn up just in us, and both our noses are these same long things that look like we’ve had them sharpened. My mom, though, wears glasses, little wire things. I’ve asked her several times if she’s an old hippie, but all she says is that back when she was in school, everybody was, or at least was sympathetic to the cause: peace and good food and save the Earth and all that. I guess really my mother’s hair’s too curly to have been a good hippie—unless she’d gone for the Afro look—but the glasses she still wears seem to me to make her look a good bit like John Lennon’s lost cousin.

My mother’s an artist—at least when she has time—mainly does watercolors. It’s my father who was the real hippie, my mother says. He was the one who grew a beard and wanted to do something socially important. Teaching school and then rising to principal of Palm Key High and then moving in with the fifth­grade teacher sure seems socially important.

Outside the Highway Patrol Station, my mother stopped and put her hand on my arm, and I could see the June Cleaver look in her eye, twinkling and carrying on like a damn hyper Christmas light. “Don’t worry, Drew, you’ll see, this’ll be a piece of cake.” She touched my arm. (My mother still touched on me quite a lot, even more since Dad had left, like she was afraid any minute I wasn’t going to be there either. I gave up touching on her when I was about twelve, had now just started thinking about how it felt: kissing her, mashing my lips up against her cheek when I was five or six, maybe even most recently at ten. (Now,right off, you can tell I’m not normal.) And I could be walking down the street, or working on my fishing boat motor, or just staring at a shear pin—at least everybody was thinking that’s what I was doing—while inside my head I was wondering if my mother’s cheek was going to be anything like touching Heather Wilson or Mary McVane or any of those other girls who’d been stopping to talk to me when they didn’t have anything better to do. The week before, we’d had this sex conference with the coach in the gym. The girls had gone into one side and us into the other, and the coach had said it was time we learned all about diseases and prevention and stuff. He said recent research showed that a seventeen-year-old boy thought about sex once every nine minutes. When I timed myself over the rest of the day, I found out I had that beat by two minutes already.)

Mom walked up the Highway Patrol steps in front of me, then turned and said it all over again. “Now just don’t worry about a thing. You can take this test as many times as you want to.”

I wasn’t sure if that was the truth, or even if I appreciated what she’d said. (My mom could get on my nerves big time.) For quite a while she’d been convinced that I had some kind of wire loose, which made me see stuff backward. She was dying for me to have a learning disability, something somebody could fix. Neither she nor my dad could ever accept the fact that I am slow. Dumb Drew is what I’ve been called a lot. But I find that most people don’t usually get both brains and good sense. They’re either book dumb or living dumb. And in that sense, I figure I’m going to be lucky. (If I can at least kick this sex thing. Wonder why, if I’m so slow otherwise, I’m so fast in this other department?)

In fact, in the last few years my mom and dad had been having this ongoing thing about how slow I am. He said I was lazy, didn’t care, wanted to do something to rebel against him. She said he was too cheap to get me tested; she was sure I saw words backward and something could be done about it. My father, though, said I was being dumb on purpose, that it was tough being the principal’s kid, trying to be perfect like everyone would expect. I hate to disappoint him, but I never was after perfect. And now it wasn’t going to matter anyway. I figured when they found out I was a pervert, my grades were going to seem like nothing.

So there my mother was, telling the highway patrol cop that I might just read all the words on the test backward, which of course embarrassed the hell out of me. Told the cop she’d like to sit close to make sure I didn’t read all the STOP signs as POTS signs. And then she laughed. My mother has this crazy laugh; she’s so little that it sounds like she’s borrowed a tuba. And I guess by carrying on with the cop, she thought she’d loosen us all up. But he said, “Don’t worry, lady, if he can’t tell Stop from Pots, he ain’t passin’ anyway.”

That sure filled me with great confidence. So when he put my head into the eye-check machine, I called all the P’s B’s and all the M’s W’s, which, if nothing else, proved that my mom wasn’t nuts or trying to cheat.

Then the cop pulled out my test score. “Seems to me, “ he said to my mother, “he sees upside down and inside out, too—or maybe you already know that.”

Right away I established myself as a potential driving freak.

When the cop told me to follow him into this room and sit by myself and take the written part of the test the best I could, he left me there and slapped me on the back on his way out. “Shoot, don’t worry, kid,” he said. “We got eighty-year-olds taking this test and passing.”

For a while I wasn’t able to do anything or get started. I just sat there counting up all the times I could take the test before I turned eighty. I saw myself on one of those three-wheeled bicycles, carrying groceries back to the nursing home. And I’d always be bumming rides or taking the bus or hitchhiking. I’d have to skip the prom, and I’d never get to take a girl out to the cemetery, where everybody goes to park.

I got myself so worked up I couldn’t read any of the questions or have them make sense. I could barely breathe, and my pits were dripping. I counted every third word and chose an answer based on the last letter of that third word. It was a complicated system, but it gave me answers. Then I went out into the waiting room. And while the cop graded my paper, my mother and I prayed.

The thing was, you see, since the divorce my mother had gotten a job at the county dump, was driving an hour every day back and forth, and had had to put George in day care. And there was no way for us to get him before my mom stopped for him on the way home, which was usually close to seven. My father, who Mom calls George the First, wasn’t much help. He said he was too busy being the principal. So if I could have gotten a car, any old car, when I turned sixteen, and had my real license, I could be the one to back my mother up. Do all the things she now wasn’t home to do. She was counting on me.

“Sorry, kid,” the cop said. “Want to take this booklet and sit over there and study it awhile and try again in a few minutes?”

It was almost dark when I got out, walking with my mother back to our car in the parking lot. I’d passed on the third try, after I’d changed my system from choosing every last letter of the third word to the fourth. My mother hugged me. “Wanna drive home?” She handed me the keys.

I opened the door to the car, got in the front seat behind the wheel where I’d been only a few times before, and most often as a kid playing. With a learner’s permit, I had to have with me somebody with a license every time I drove, and we both knew that meant mostly her. She looked at me. “Go ahead,” she said. Under her breath, high and faint, she was humming, reminding me of the electric buzz of a light bulb about to wear out.

“Guess we better use these.” She laughed, pulling out the straps to the seat belt. “It’s the law, now, you know,” which she said like she wasn’t worried a bit about sitting in the death seat.

I turned the key in the ignition, put my foot down on the accelerator.

In a few minutes my hair was blowing back in the wind from the open window.It was a twenty-minute drive to Palm Key, and on the way home we had to stop to get George out of day care and to pick up Mandy at a Girl Scout meeting over at the church. When I turned onto the highway that in about ten miles would lead across the bridges into Palm Key,I gunned it. When I could, I glanced over at my mother. She was gripping the handle of her purse in her lap like she was hanging onto the handle of a trapeze. Yeah, we were really bookin’, now. Loose. Our hair wild. I would have driven us straight out of The Here and Now, would have pushed my mother through to the other side of I-didn’t-know-what (but had to be better than where we were). If I could.

But when I looked down at the needle on the speedometer, its spidery little hand was hanging on forty, just sitting there like a line I hadn’t even known I’d drawn.