Fall 2000 Charles River Review: A Family of Ducks

I am driving along Route 9 lined with strip malls and car dealerships and fast-food joints and gas stations--what comes to mind for most people when they think about New Jersey. I am driving to my parents' house to help them pack their car for their vacation. Even though I awoke well before dawn, I am already running late.

In the three weeks since Rachel has left, I have not once slept through the night. When I have slept it has been fitful and filled with dreams: I dream of dark men trying to hurt me--once the devil on a white motorcycle chased me screaming through the night. I pace the empty house, listening to the windows rattle and the floorboards creak below me. I dust off photographs of us and water the plants she left behind. The refrigerator groaned endlessly, and at one point I ripped the plug from the wall so sharply that sparks flew, like baby fireworks, and it would not go on again. There was no food left anyhow, and, at least for the moment, I felt better for having silenced it.

My parents are going to Atlantic City with their friends Marvin and Sophie, who live next door to them in their retirement community. Although I planned the trip, it was originally Rachel's idea. She suggested it many months ago. At the time, I thought it was a terrible plan as my father had recently had prostate surgery and was barely making it to the clubhouse. But some weeks ago, just before Rachel left, I woke up one morning and made the reservations. I had never done anything like that for them in my life. Maybe I wanted them to be proud of me for once--according to them, my life has been one failure after another. Maybe I couldn't bear to think about them cooped up day after day in that apartment with nothing better to do than make each other miserable. Maybe I thought it would somehow stop Rachel from leaving.

I am 31 years old, and I still live in the house I grew up in. I never went away to school, nor have I traveled much beyond the tri-state area. I quit college after six months, an ordeal which I'm not sure my family ever got over. At the time, my mother told me that it would be something I would regret for the rest of my life, though I cannot say this is true. My father still talks about it, arguing with me about how I should have gone--as though I somehow still might. Since then, I've worked all sorts of jobs from computer programming to driving a shuttle bus back and forth to the mall to being a bank clerk. But after a while, I couldn't stand it anymore. Call it a lack of discipline or outright laziness, but I can't see working on someone else's time. So I set up an office in my brother's old bedroom and started my own business doing graphic design for websites. I've been drawing since I was a kid--I used to be obsessed with comic books and for a short time had aspirations of making my own--and I figured I might as well put my talents to work. My parents, of course, never thought much of the idea--they think I should have a regular nine-to-five like my older brother Evan who is an accountant in the city. But it's not too bad, really. Beside the requisite stiff-necks and the fact that my eyes aren't what they used to be, business is better than I would have expected. In fact, the only real downside to the job is that it can get lonely as hell. I barely talk to anyone during the day, and when I do, it's usually by way of e-mail. Combine that with the fact that I am not the most sociable person you've ever met, and it can make for a more solitary existence than I might at times wish.

My parents moved out over three years ago because the stairs were getting too difficult for my mother, who has early emphysema. To this day, my mother says it was one of the biggest mistakes she ever made. While she's found some new friends in the retirement community, she says it's outright depressing living with all those old people: every other day someone is dead or in the hospital. That and the fact that she is cooped up in the house all day with my father, believe me, would drive a lesser person to the grave. Anyway, around the time they were gearing up to move out, they talked about selling the house: it wasn't so much that they needed the money as much as my father thought it would be just the kick in the ass I needed to get my life in gear. My mother told him to let me live there until I got my feet under me with my new business, but my father can be damn stubborn when he wants to be, and he went ahead and put the house on the market. Several prospective buyers came to look, and someone even made a bid on it. But it fell through at the last minute. Sometimes, especially of late, I'll find myself staring at the cracks running across my bedroom ceiling and wondering when the day will come that I will finally have a place of my own.

The sky is a deep gray; the radio says rain is imminent. People are driving as though the roads are already flooded. I stare into the cars moving slowly beside me, expecting to see Rachel somehow appear before me. Instead I see a young couple with a sheepdog nosing up against the window; a father talking to his child in a car-seat behind him; a station wagon packed with boys in basketball uniforms. Most things, I know, look good from a distance. But at this moment, I would like to be in any of those cars going anywhere.

When my father walks into a casino, you'd probably think he was one of the nicest guys in the world. His whole face lights up, and I swear he looks ten years younger. I'd even go so far as to say there is nothing that makes the old man happier than a drink, a cigar, and a couple of dice. So I figured that Atlantic City would be about the best shot of getting him off the couch. My mother, on the other hand, grew up with a father who was in chronic debt to the bookies, and even now she can't bring herself to see the lighter side of gambling. Having said that, I know that these days she will take almost any excuse to get out of the house. Not only does she have to take care of my father who's useless around the house, but she says that his temper is worse than ever. So I figured she would be nothing short of thrilled to be able to sip a tonic in the hotel lobby, see a few unfamiliar faces, and eat a meal she didn't have to cook herself. Still, I knew I would have trouble convincing them to go. So I made arrangements for Marvin and Sophie to go too. That way my parents wouldn't have to spend too much time together, and they might actually enjoy themselves.

My mother introduced me to Rachel. This was back just before my parents moved out. My mother had gone with Sophie to the doctor to keep her company, and while she was waiting, she struck up a conversation with Rachel, who was one of the secretaries. My mother can be quite a talker sometimes, especially when my father isn't there hounding her. Anyway, my mother told Rachel about me and asked if it would be all right if I called her. I'm not too big on blind dates myself, but my mother kept after me, telling me how lovely this Rachel was and reminding me how lonely I would be living in the house by myself. That and the fact that I was in the middle of a longer dry-spell than I care to remember--well, I called.

My mother was right: Rachel was beautiful. She is beautiful. She has lovely hazel eyes and olive skin and long brown hair. God forbid anyone in my family wears clothes with any color--we're all navies and browns and beiges. But there was Rachel, standing in the doorway to her apartment wearing a bright green sun-dress, and I was nervous as hell. She suggested getting some sushi down the road, and I agreed even though I don't do raw fish. When we got there, I realized there was nothing else on the menu, and I sat there wondering what to do. Finally I confessed: "I'm afraid I don't eat sushi," I said.

"Really?" she said. "Why not?"

"Well," I said, hesitantly, "if you really want to know: worms. I heard you might get worms in your stomach."

Rachel laughed: "Well, why don't we just go somewhere else." But I wasn't that hungry anyway, so I just ordered some miso soup and rice.

Over dinner, Rachel told me all about herself: how her parents had died when she was a kid; how she had a mentally ill brother who lived in a group-home down by the shore (she visited him twice a week), how she thought about going back to school to become a nurse. "I was always interested in biology," she said. "The human body fascinates me."

"Not me," I said, swallowing my soup. "I faint almost every time I go to the doctor."

Whenever she laughed, she got three wrinkles on the side of her nose that made my heart leap. All through dinner she kept trying to get me to taste some sushi, but there was no chance. When she heard I could draw, she thought it was terrific; she said she'd never had any artistic talent. Against my protests, she insisted that I draw a picture for her and asked the waiter for a pencil and paper. So while she continued to tell me about herself, I sketched her, Rachel--holding a pile of worms in her chopsticks. Her laughter was infectious, and I was dizzy. I wondered what I had done to deserve such a break. I kept telling myself that in all likelihood she was just being polite to my mother, and afterwards, lying in bed trying to calm my racing mind, I told myself to forget her--I didn't have a shot in hell. When she called a couple of days later, I was surprised, to say the least. My mother suggested I invite her over for dinner that night, and she arrived with flowers--pink tulips for my mother. We all sat in the living room and talked for a while. Even my father seemed to like her. I remember watching Rachel and my parents, feeling my breath run deep. I kept thinking that the house I had lived in for nearly 30 years had finally come to life, all the time telling myself there was no way in hell it could possibly last.

Traffic is crawling and rain is beginning to fall; my stomach churns wildly, a habit it has gotten into recently. I pass the bowling alley where my mother threw me a party for my sixth birthday. And there is the skating rink where Rachel and I would go on rainy weekend afternoons. Up ahead is the shopping plaza where my father worked as a bank manager for 40 years. Sometimes it feels as if I've spent half my life driving up and down this road.

If you saw me, you'd probably think I'm a good ten years older than I actually am. It's not just the flecks of gray in my hair or the eczema on my elbows or my poor posture. It's something more than any physical attribute--it's something inside. Ever since I was a kid, I felt that way. Old. Out of touch. Over the hill. I can remember, and this is the goddamn truth, being seven or eight years old and worrying about what I would do when I retired! And in the playground, I was always the kid sitting along the fence watching the other kids tackle one another. Maybe it's because I'm extremely skinny, or that I was often ill as a child, but somehow it has always felt to me as if life were meant for other people to live. Not that I mind, really. The fact is, I don't understand why it is most people do what they do--most of it seems silly.

Rachel, on the other hand, is a bundle of energy--she's always on the move. She couldn't believe the way I lived after my parents moved out of the house. Dishes piled up in the sink, newspapers on the bathroom floor, empty shelves in the refrigerator. "You've got to eat," she'd say, bringing over a bag full of groceries. "You can't just work all day without eating." She was always trying to get me to eat more, or to take better care of myself, or to get some exercise--always trying to get me moving. After she moved in, she said we were going to start doing things differently. So we'd go shopping once a week on Saturday, and we'd cook dinner together at night, and one day every couple of weeks was designated "clean-the-house-day." The thing is, I don't think Rachel realized exactly how much I am a creature of habit. So, understandably, she could get pretty frustrated with me. I mean, I can be damn inflexible sometimes.

People say that opposites attract, and this may well be true. But what holds two people together is another story. And despite our differences, I believe that Rachel and I fundamentally understood one another. Rachel used to say as much herself: she told me on any number of occasions that before she'd met me, she'd never felt that anyone understood her. At night we would lie in bed for hours talking about everything. She would tell me about a quandary at work with one of the clients that had upset her, or some decision she was facing about her brother at the group-home, or about the little she remembered of her parents. I would tell her about a project I was working on, or a story my mother had told me about someone in the retirement community, or about how I would get fevers all the time as a kid. Sometimes we would just lie there and make jokes. I do all sorts of impersonations from Sylvester Stallone to Ronald Reagan and they used to break Rachel up. We would laugh until our stomachs ached, and our laughter seemed to chase itself around the room. In those moments, the entire world seemed to shrink down into my bedroom, as though nothing existed beyond those four walls. Sometimes I think that it is this very capacity--the capacity to make the world feel a little bit smaller for another person--that ultimately binds two people together. And for a while anyway, and in spite of our countless differences, that is exactly what Rachel and I did for one another. Having said that, I can't help at times wondering whether it was this very thing that drove her away in the end.

I pull onto a back road that runs parallel to Route 9. The streets are quiet here--it's Saturday morning and people must be sleeping in. You'd be surprised by how nice some of these places are--huge, beautiful houses with trim green lawns and lush groves of trees.

For a long time Rachel spoke about moving out of the house--almost from the day she moved in. It wasn't that she didn't like the house; she just thought it would be good for us to get a fresh start--to have a place of our own. So every now and then we would drive around to an open house or two, to see what was available. Mostly they were dumps, as you'd expect, and we'd drop the subject for a while. But then, just about a year ago, we saw this lovely yellow house with a rolling yard, a big back deck, and a picket fence to boot. Rachel just loved it, and I thought it was pretty great myself. "Let's just do it, John," she said to me, excitedly. "Let's go for it."

But I needed to sleep on it. So I told her I would tell her in the morning.

"What if it's gone?" she said, nervously.

"It will be okay till tomorrow."

I scarcely slept that night, tossing and turning. I sat on the couch and paced the house--I even went for a walk in the neighborhood; my mind would not rest. I kept thinking how great it would be to have a new place of our own--and what a beautiful place it was! But a second later I was worrying about the money, and about moving out of the old house, and what about the fact that we weren't even married yet? Back and forth I went all night.

Finally, just around dawn, I woke Rachel up and said, "Okay. Let's do it." Her face flushed and she kissed me and could hardly wait till nine o'clock to call the broker. She was already talking about what kind of landscaping we could do on the garden that summer. But when she got on the phone with the broker, her face suddenly dropped. I had never seen her look quite like that before. "What?" she kept saying into the phone. "How can that be?"

She hung up the phone and stared at the floor. "It's gone," she said. "Someone else bought it."

I wanted to say something, or reach out to her, but all I could do was stare at her wilted face. And then without a word she got up and walked toward the kitchen. In the days since she has left, I have gone back to that moment countless times, the stillness of the room, the beating of my heart, and the image of her small silhouette against the florescent lights before she vanished.

Come to think of it, I find it very hard to believe that my father's temper is actually getting worse. As far back as I can remember, he would blow up over the silliest things. For instance, one evening when I was ten, the four of us--my parents, Evan, and I--were sitting around the table eating a steak dinner when my father stood up and went looking in the refrigerator.

After a moment, my mother called: "What are you looking for, Dave?"

"Ketchup," he said, sliding bottles around the refrigerator. "You have any ketchup in the house?"

My mother looked at us with this hazy, awful look in her eyes like she didn't know whether to cry or laugh or run away. Finally, she said: "I forgot to pick it up today."

"Christ," muttered my father, returning to the table.

"I'm sorry, Dave. I forgot."

We sat there in silence, scraping our plates, waiting for him to say something else. After a moment he swallowed his drink and put his glass down with a sudden bang. "I mean, I work all fucking day, Eva. Do I have to take care of the shopping too?"

"Come on, Dad," said Evan. "She forgot."

My father's face went blood red: "Keep your mouth shut until you're spoken to."

After that, we all sat there staring at our plates while he worked himself into a fury. "What the fuck do you do all day that you can't take care of one goddamn thing!" And before we knew what was happening--because who can really remember it all anyway--a glass went flying against the wall behind my mother. "You sit there and cry," he said to her afterwards, before putting on his jacket and storming out of the house, slamming the door behind him. All because there was no ketchup. Believe me, if there was one thing you learned growing up in our house, it was to hit the deck.

I pass a lone jogger on the street. He is soaked with the rain, and there is something peaceful in the simplicity and rhythm of his movement. Lately, especially at night, I go for long walks in our neighborhood. I stand and watch people eating dinner, or sitting in front of the television set, or reading books to their children. What it is I am hoping to get from these walks, I cannot say, but I walk for hours like this, late into the night. Sometimes, staring into the windows from the silent streets, I feel so still inside, such a lack of anything at all, it is as though there is no longer anyone left inside.

Just about a year ago, and not so long after we lost the house, Rachel told me she was going to start seeing a psychiatrist. She said she felt depressed, as if her life weren't going anywhere.

"Maybe you want to sign up for some classes," I said. "Start working toward your nursing degree."

But she shook her head: "I think I just need to talk to someone."

"What's wrong with me?" I said, lightly.

"Sometimes it's easier to talk to someone you don't know."

After her first session, she came home and flopped down on the couch: "This is exactly what I need, John." She said that she felt completely comfortable with the doctor, and that she'd really gotten a lot off her chest.

"Like what?" I asked.

"Just stuff that's been on my mind."

"Like what?" I asked again, feeling an odd sinking inside. But she said that she was too tired to talk about it and instead locked herself in the bathroom and took a long, hot bath.

I pull back onto Route 9 where the traffic is as thick as before. I see a gas station and consider calling my parents to let them know I will be late. But I don't feel much like stopping. I imagine my father thumping around the apartment, cursing and mumbling to my mother about her useless son. I see his tight, red face, the veins pulsing in his temples, as though his head might explode. Sometimes, as a boy, I thought of taking a pin to see if it would.

Few things got him as angry as those comic books. When he caught me drawing or reading them, he would tell me to "stop fucking around like a little girl." Sometimes, he would grab them out of my hands and tear them in half right in front of me. So mostly I did it on the sly; I kept my comic books hidden in the back of my closet. Still, I should have seen it coming. After all, he hated those comic books.

One afternoon when I was 13, I came home from school and went to my bedroom to draw. Usually I had a couple of hours before my father got home. But when I went digging in my closet for my comics, they were gone. All of them. There must have been 200. I ran to my mother who was in the kitchen. "Ma, where are my comics?" She stood over the sink without saying a word. "Ma," I said again. "Where are my comics?"

She turned to me with tears in her eyes: "They're gone, Johnny," she said. "He got rid of them."

For a moment I just stood there, feeling knives in my temples and a throbbing in my heart. And then I was running, out the door, down the front steps, out into the street. I could still see the garbage truck four blocks away and I ran after it. My feet slapped the pavement, and tears ran down my cheeks. I kept running and running, well after the garbage truck rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, wishing my father dead, telling myself over and over I would never go home again.

After Rachel started seeing the psychiatrist, I always felt as if she were hiding something from me--as if she were always thinking about something else. When I asked her if something were bothering her, she'd say, "No, nothing at all. I'm just feeling inward." Every now and then I would find myself getting angry at her--if she didn't call me when she was supposed to, if she told me she was doing something with a friend on a Saturday night, if she said she wasn't in the mood to make love. Sometimes I would yell at her--"Why don't you think about someone else for a change!"--and she would barely talk to me for days afterward. Then I would apologize, only it would happen again a few days later.

A few months ago, Rachel went out to dinner with her friend Cheryl. I stayed home and worked, and around 11 o'clock, even though Rachel wasn't home yet, I got into bed. By 11:30, I started worrying that something might have happened to her. It wasn't until well after midnight that I heard the front lock. I waited for her to come upstairs, but she didn't, and after a few minutes, I went down to the living room. Rachel was on the couch with the newspaper. "How was dinner?"

"It was really fun," she said. "Delicious too."

I stood there for another moment, but she was reading the paper again. "I thought you'd be home earlier."

"Since when do I have a curfew?" she said, glancing up from the paper.

"I'm not saying you have a curfew. But at least you could call."

"We were having a good time. That's allowed isn't it?"

"Don't patronize me, Rachel," I said, sharply.

"Who's patronizing who, John? I just went out for dinner."

"I mean, you don't call. We never go out anymore. We hardly see each other at all," I said. "What the fuck kind of relationship is this anyway?"

"That's exactly what I'm wondering," she said, throwing down the paper. "I mean, Christ, John, just because we're involved doesn't mean I need to be swallowed whole!" And with that, she walked out of the living room and closed the kitchen door behind her.

I stood there trembling, listening to her pick up the phone and dial. I could hear her talking to someone through the door. Several times I told myself to go outside for a walk--to cool down for a while. But moments later, I was walking toward the kitchen and before I knew what had happened I reached for the green phone and tore it from the wall. I was surprised at how easily it dislodged--it came off clean, hardly chipping the paint. "Don't walk away from me," I said quietly.

Rachel looked at me as if she didn't know whether to cry or scream. And then she ran towards me and shoved me backwards: "You fucking animal!" she shouted. I was wearing socks, and I slipped and ended up on the floor. Her hands were swatting like bats around my head. "You fucking psychopath!" She ran to my desk and swept my drawings to the floor, screaming I was a control freak, a tyrant, and that she was sick and tired of it. And then she was quiet, staring into the mirror above her dresser; somehow we'd ended up in the bedroom. "Look at me. Look what this relationship has done to me." She was crying now and pointing to her face streaked with makeup. "I look like an old woman." Her shoulders heaved as she said this. In truth, she did not look so much old as she looked as if someone had given her a couple of black eyes. I tried to wrap my arms around her, but she scrambled away like a cat from water. I walked into the living room, listening to her sobbing from behind the bedroom door, berating myself for what I had done. Even now I don't understand why I reacted so. At this moment, I would go to great lengths to have that evening to do over again.

Goddamn these traffic lights. I don't even know why I offered to help in the first place--it's just a matter of throwing a few lousy suitcases in the trunk. I think about heading back home, but the thought of the empty house spooks me. What will I tell my parents about Rachel? For three weeks I have been telling them she's been busy. They must think she is sick, or perhaps excessively clean from all the time she has recently spent in the bathroom. And when that excuse ran thin, I told them she was shopping in the city, or dealing with her brother on the shore, or buying milk for dinner. Once on an impulse I told them we were going to the Florida Keys for a mini-vacation. I spent the entire four days hiding in my house, watching my business fall apart, praying my mother wouldn't run into Rachel.

The fact is, my parents may very well suspect something. Rachel used to talk to them often enough, and even if my mother hasn't run into her, it is entirely possible she called Rachel at work. Rachel and my mother got along extremely well--my mother always wished she'd had a daughter. Anyway, if they do know, they haven't said anything, which is fine by me. The last thing I need in the middle of this is some sort of commotion with my parents. I can just see my father shaking his head and saying, "I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did." He thought we should have broken up ages ago. Sitting on his patio drinking a scotch, he would say, "It's like they say, John, 'shit or get off the pot.'" He said that if we weren't at least engaged after nearly four years together, something must be wrong--we must not be right for each other.

The morning she left, I sat on the bed, watching her pack the last of her things. "I always thought we'd get married," I said.

"Maybe if we hadn't fought so much," she said, pausing and looking out the window. Then she faced me. "I mean, it's just been too much, John. I can't do it anymore."

Against my better judgment, I asked her to reconsider: Wasn't there anything I could do to make her change her mind? I even offered to see a psychiatrist. "Oh, John," she said, wiping tears from my face. "Don't do this to yourself." She kissed me on both cheeks. "You'll see it's for the best." Finally she kissed me on the lips. And then she was gone. I sat there for nearly an hour, watching the front door, waiting for her to walk back in. But all that came back that afternoon was the old silence of the house, the familiar stillness. I crawled into bed, cursing myself for ever believing it could have turned out differently.

I am 30 minutes late. The single-story houses speckling the well-tended lawns of the retirement community "Covered Bridge" remind me of graves in a graveyard. Maybe it's my black mood or the fact that a breakup can make you see everything in terms of loss, or that it's pouring rain and dark and there is no one on the streets. But there is something particular to this place: people come here to die, and I can't help wondering how many years my parents have left.

When I pull up to their complex, their new Oldsmobile is parked out front. The old car had a leak in the vinyl roof, and though my father fought it every step of the way, my mother finally convinced him to buy a new one for the trip. And to my surprise, I see him, my father, 68 years old, stooped, dragging, walking toward the car with a suitcase in each hand. He wears a blue nylon jacket and black rubbers on his feet. Even from across the lawn I can see rivulets running off his bald scalp and down his face--the taut, raised muscles of his jaw. Behind him is Marvin, also carrying a suitcase in each hand. Normally, he wears a torn T-shirt and faded black slippers, but today he is wearing bright red pants and dress shoes that beak out beneath his long raincoat. He is larger than my father, stout, and seeing him dressed so, I imagine that in his younger years he was a handsome and dignified man. Though he seems to be managing better than my father, each walks as if on ice: shuffling, sure he will fall.

Behind Marvin my mother wears a bright red raincoat Rachel bought for her, and a plastic wrap on her head. She carries a transparent umbrella and a green pocket book which Rachel also gave her. My heart thickens when I think of telling my mother that Rachel has left; she will be devastated, though I am sure not altogether surprised.

Sophie is dressed more fashionably than my mother; even her wrinkles and a close-call with breast cancer cannot obliterate the glamour she possessed as a young woman. Like my mother, she wears red lipstick that glows against the dark sky. They laugh like a couple of teenage girls on their way to a party. The four of them, one right after another, shuffling along, remind me of a family of ducks, though from what I know, it is usually the mother duck that goes first. I stand in the rain for a long moment, acutely aware of the tenderness of their age and the imminence of their death.

My father's face flushes when he sees me watching, but I feel like joking. "Hey, Dad," I say. "Why don't you and Marvin here have a race to the car? Winner gets a free meal on me at the hotel." My father just keeps walking toward the car, and I remember how Rachel once said that I was so out of touch with my emotions that I always joked at the wrong time.

I walk over and reach for the bags. "Come on, old man. I'll take it from here." But his grip on the bags is tight like a vice. It always seems strange to me, the power to hold, to clutch, in babies and old people, desperate strength seeming to come from nowhere.

"You can't take care of shit, Johnny," he says. "How hard is it to get somewhere on time?" Gin sparks his breath. And I realize that in their impatience, Marvin and my father are walking without their canes.

"Come on, Dad, you'll kill yourself."

"Worry about yourself," he says. "You're good at that."

"For God's sakes, let him help you, David," shouts my mother through the pouring rain. He keeps walking, stubborn, defiant, and I wonder if he feels good about this--whether I am offering him the opportunity to take control of things again.

"How about it, Marvin?" I reach for his bags, which he relinquishes without argument. "You got your lucky dice?"

"Don't worry about me," he says. "Worry about your father, who is ready to murder you." I carry the suitcases to the trunk and pile them next to the others.

Sophie puts her hand on my shoulder. "It's a wonderful gift you've given us, John. Your father is thrilled, whether he says so or not."

My mother kisses my cheek, and I suddenly think I might cry. "Sorry I'm late, Ma."

She nods towards my father who is already in the front seat: "Your father who hasn't moved in three months, suddenly has ants in his pants." She smiles momentarily and then frowns: "How's Rachel?"

"Good. Fine. Busy," I say, averting my eyes. I am a boy again trying to hide the fact that I have stolen a comic book from the DC Comic store. "She sends her love."

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Did something happen?"

"Ma, will you get in the car already? It's pouring." I kiss her and say goodbye to everyone. "Drive carefully."

As I pull out, I look in the rearview mirror and see that the Oldsmobile hasn't moved. What now? I run over and knock on my father's window. His face is red and angry. Beside him, my mother looks up at me and tries to cover her smile. All four of them are squirming in their seats. But no one says a word; I cannot understand the problem.

Then it hits me and I smile. "What seems to be the problem, Dad? Why aren't you leaving?" This is unnecessary, of course, but I can't resist.

My father's eyes spark like a muffler on cement and he says through gritted dentures: "I can't get this damn seat belt on."

Sophie is in the back seat, her smile is taut as she struggles to keep it down. "None of us can," she says. "The new car. . ." Marvin is muttering to himself and when he sees me watching, he shrugs and throws up his hands. I suddenly feel much older and my heart surges for Rachel; I want to laugh with her and tell her how funny and sad it all seems.

My mother now is trying her hardest not to laugh. "What the hell is so funny?" asks my father. I cannot see his face as he is facing my mother. But I think that even he cannot fail to see the humor of the situation. My mother's body is trembling and as her face crimsons, she looks beautiful, younger than she has in years. "What the hell is so funny?" asks my father again. But my mother, it seems, is back in high school with the teacher telling her to stop laughing, which only makes it funnier. I try and stifle my own laughter. Then there is a squeak in the back seat, which is Sophie laughing. Marvin glares at her to be quiet, but it is too late: my mother bursts into laughter. Tears roll down her face, and I laugh with her, unable to remember the last time I have laughed so. Sophie is laughing and even Marvin smiles. It is only then, after my father backhands my mother across the face, that I realize he is not smiling at all.

The car goes silent as my mother covers her face with her hands. My heart races and I grip the car door tightly. I hear Sophie whisper: "For Christ's sake...."

I glance at my mother, trembling now in her seat, and then at my father who is staring straight ahead. "What the hell are you doing, Dad?"

He turns to me and says, "Mind your own goddamn business."

I reach through the window and grip my father by his neck. My body is shaking. His neck feels oddly frail. I squeeze tighter still, but he does not say anything, nor, to my surprise, does he even struggle. He simply looks at me in silence. His face is boyish, his expression empty, as though he is not even thinking about what he has just done. "Let him go," says Sophie, and Marvin is now working to pull my hand away. But I am not trying to hurt him anymore, I am only trying to understand.

I let go suddenly and stand back from the car as the downpour soaks me through. My breath is heavy and I am thinking about Rachel now, wondering how she glimpsed it all so clearly. I look around the puddles in the parking lot, at the rain-soaked lawns and the baby blue houses around me, and I half expect to see her appear before me. But I am shaking my head, as if to ward something off. I wonder whether in leaving, she has somehow freed me too. I miss her worse than ever.

I turn to face the car where it still stands. My father grips the steering wheel as though he were already driving. Beside him, my mother stares out at the falling rain; Marvin and Sophie look down at their hands. There is a silence, sterile and old, that seeps from the car, and I imagine their ride to Atlantic City will be frozen like that, in icy silence. I wonder how they are going to get there if they can't even get their seat belts on.

I open each door and buckle them in, slowly, one by one. And then, without a word, as though I am no longer there, they drive away. I am drenched and alone, and I stand in the pouring rain for some time.