The English Teacher

FOUR

THEY ALWAYS CAME TO HIM, STUART’S GIRLS. LATE AT NIGHT, ON FOOT, THEY appeared like magic in the window.

“Hey,” Stuart said, a long pulled-out syllable that dipped deep down to a voice he didn’t possess with his family.

The girl’s words were quieter: “Whatcha doin’?” or “Come out and play, sleepyhead.” Sometimes all Peter could hear were the soft taps of her tongue in her mouth as she whispered.

Her face hung in the window as Stuart dressed. They were always pretty, prettier than any girls at Peter’s school. They were goddesses (he’d studied Greek mythology last year): Athena, Artemis, or Aphrodite nearly every night through a pane of glass.

The front yard, the driveway, and (with the plump one) the station wagon were Stuart’s midnight court. He never made a phone call or went on a date. They came to him. He never brought them inside, even when a covering of snow lay rumpled on the grass. Instead they each trod in it, not seeming to notice the frozen footprints of the night before.

The first one Peter saw was small and giggly, with twenty bracelets on each arm. From his perch on Stuart’s bed, he watched them frolic like ponies on the lawn. The next one had pale eyes and painted lips and with her Stuart sat soberly on the bottom step of the porch (Peter pressed his cheek hard against the window to see so far to the left), kicking the ground with his boot. With the third, Stuart didn’t seem to talk at all. When she came, he lifted the window and the screen in one quick motion and they began kissing right there, the cold air blowing in over his bare torso across the room to Peter, who squinted his eyes open to watch. This one, the one with the thick curves and butterscotch skin, he brought straight to the station wagon, and all Peter could see were their heads before they pushed the backseat down flat. Unlike in the movies, the car didn’t bounce or shake. No one could tell that two people were lying down in it, taking off their clothes.

Nights that there wasn’t a girl, he and Stuart talked. Around Vida and Tom, Stuart struggled for the fewest words possible, but in his room he had a lot to say. He was a philosopher, a mystic. Peter had never met anyone like him. He had answers to all the questions Peter had only begun to formulate.

“Are you a popular guy at school, Pete?”

No one had ever called him Pete before. He liked it. He saw that Stuart knew the truth about him so he didn’t dare lie. “No.”

“Good. If others like you, you are weakening your true being.” He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and for a long time he didn’t speak, just breathed noisily with his eyes shut. Then he said, “Chuang Tzu says that if you are mourned at your funeral, you’ve forgotten the gift God gave you. And if you grieve over someone’s death you’re a fool.”

“Why?”

“Because death is unimportant.”

Peter wished he could see it that way.

“Death,” Stuart continued, “is simply movement from one form to another. But what you want to achieve is formlessness, so that ultimately you don’t know — or care — whether you’re dead or alive.”

“How do you achieve that, formlessness?”

“Here.” Without untangling his legs, he reached down into the stack of library books by his bed. “Let me read you a little something.” He flipped through a paperback with cracked-off corners. “‘His body is dry like an old legbone. His mind is dead as dead ashes. His knowledge is solid. His wisdom is true! In the deep dark night he wanders free without aim and without design. Who can compare with this toothless man?’”

That night Peter dreamed he was losing teeth; he dreamed Stuart was a dry twig on the pillow in the morning.

Another book was about Eastern surgical practices. It had pictures, hundreds of pictures. Stuart showed Peter some of his favorites. “They’ve taken out this guy’s entire GI tract,” he said. “No anesthesia to knock him out, just a few needles there and there.”

Peter looked at the man — he was smiling at the camera, with his stomach on the table beside him.

“Surgery,” Stuart explained, “is their last resort, whereas here they hardly consider anything else. It’s all about using the knife. In Asia they have a one-in-three-hundred rate of cancer, and we have a one-in-seven. And for every eighty people they cure, we cure one.” To Peter’s relief he shut the book and lay back on his bed. “I told him to take her to Taiwan but he refused. He wouldn’t even bring her to this acupuncturist I found in Bristol. People would rather let people die than change their cramped little view.” He put his open hands up to the far sides of his eyes, then turned them in, as if he wanted to play peekaboo. He didn’t uncover his eyes for the longest time and when he finally did, his palms had pushed all the blood out of his cheeks. Peter watched how it flooded back in.

“You don’t like your dad very much, do you?”

Stuart looked at him with suspicion, as if he were working for the other side. “He’s okay. He just dreams the dreams of suburbia. If you asked him what he wants most for his son Stuart, his hair-trigger response would be, ‘College.’ ‘But’”—Stuart’s voice became stiff and graveled—“‘how do you think the boy is doing since his mother’s death?’ ‘College.’ ‘Do you love him?’ ‘College.’”

Peter had heard Tom on this topic, but he didn’t want to reveal that. He pretended to be putting together the pieces himself. “Is it because he was the first to go in his family?”

“Thomas Marnelli Belou. Rhode Island School of Design. Class of 1952.” Stuart managed to protrude the ledge of his eyebrows to become Tom. The voice and accent were surprisingly accurate. “My father’s family came down from Shitsville, Canada, and spent three generations in a paper mill. Sixty years they stunk up their houses with their rotten-egg smell before they figured out how to sew and make the money for you, Stuart May Belou, to perch up in an ivory tower and laugh at your pitiful, smelly ancestors.”

Stuart lay in bed in the dark, though Peter didn’t think he ever slept. Peter tried to keep up with him but by midnight his body, like a child who wants to go home, pulled him unwillingly away from consciousness. When he woke up in the morning, Stuart was always gone.

“What about your mom’s side?” Peter asked the next night. “Did they go to college?” He liked to slip in questions about her. It made him feel closer to the Belous, knowing things about her. It made her feel less dead. Just saying “your mom” brought her so much closer to the surface of life.

“Same sort of thing as my dad’s,” he said without any attempt to recreate her voice. “She didn’t even go to college herself. She got married instead.”

Peter knew if he was quiet long enough he’d go on.

“She took me to look at colleges last spring — no, two springs ago. When I was in eleventh grade.”

“Where’d you go?”

“California. I had this idea I wanted to go to Berkeley. So we saw that and Stanford and UCLA.” The light was still on. Stuart was propped up with a pillow that loomed high over his head and bobbed when he spoke. It made him look a little like Marie Antoinette, and Peter kept wanting to laugh.

“It was a pretty weird place, California. The ocean’s a completely different color, like it’s been injected with some sort of dye. Mom loved it. She kept saying that if I went to school out there they’d all move. She came back really excited about that plan, but my father shot it down. Then she got sick and that was that.” With two hands he shoved the tall pillow under his head. He didn’t speak for several minutes, then he said, “Talk about mourning at a funeral. She was too well-liked. She wasted too many words and tears on others when she should have been looking inward.”

Peter thought how if Stuart died there would be only girls at his funeral. He could see them in tight black dresses all in a row, crying into soaked Kleenexes. Eventually they’d notice each other and the service would turn into a brawl, culminating at the casket, where they’d tear the clothes off Stuart’s corpse. The plump one would confess to her nights in the back of the car and the others would have to bow down and give her the crown: Stuart’s underwear.

The laugh he’d been battling exploded out of him.

“What?” Stuart said.

“Nothing.”

Stuart didn’t press him.

After a while Peter asked, “What does the Tao say about sex before marriage?”

“The Tao doesn’t say anything. ‘That which is sayable is not the Tao.’”

Peter waited for the real answer.

“The Tao doesn’t concern itself with the idea of sin. Sin becomes irrelevant when you are using your mental energy in the right way.”

Peter was patient. He listened to the metal number 7 slap onto the number 6 inside his clock radio, making it 11:57 P.M.

“Sex can be a form of intense meditation, if you do it correctly. It can be very truthful.”

Thinking about being with Kristina in the station wagon, Peter fell asleep with a very truthful hard-on.

Peter tried to explain these theories to Jason. But Jason was un-receptive. “I think that guy has found a way to justify going nowhere fast. He’s a total loser, Peter.” Jason was still angry he’d moved away. No other faculty kids their age lived on campus.

“The words of broken people come forth like vomit,” Peter quoted, he didn’t know from what.

On a science test, Peter explained in a long, unrelated essay the story about the search for the Lost Pearl and how Nothingness, who was not asked, had it all along.

Not only was he failing biology, but history and French were in question as well. And now his mother, the hardest grader in the school, was his English teacher at least until Christmas break, and Kristina was in that section.

He hated Tess of the d’Urbervilles. There were so many words and so few of them were interesting. He wished for once they could read something pertinent to the life of a teenager in the twentieth century. He quickly fell behind in the assignments, and on the third day of class with his mother, he learned that Tess had had a baby. He searched the book for the scene of conception but found nothing. A kid next to him told him it happened with Alec d’Urberville in the woods at the end of chapter eleven. He read the pages, but all he could find was that they were lost in the dark, and Alec made a pile of leaves for her to sit on while he went to look for a landmark. Birds were roosting and rabbits hopping, and Tess was asleep when he returned. Peter waited for someone braver, someone whose mother was not teaching the class, whose crush of four years was not two seats diagonally to the left, to ask exactly what had happened. But no one did.

“What name does she give the baby?” his mother asked. She looked around for other hands, then called on Helen, who had all the answers. She always did; even back in first grade he remembered her lone arm in the air.

“Sorrow,” Helen said. And without waiting for his mother to ask why, she continued, “Because he was the result of her rape.”

His mother narrowed her eyes and tipped her head. He knew the gesture well, and so did Helen.

“She was raped. Alec raped her that night in the woods,” Helen insisted.

“A statement like that is insulting to my intelligence.”

From the four corners of the classroom the girls piped up in defense of Helen’s theory. “But she loathed Alec d’Urberville.”

“And she was asleep.”

“She wasn’t even conscious.”

“She never even wanted him to kiss her.”

“But she let him,” his mother said.

“That was only because he was making the horse go so fast and only said he’d stop if he could kiss her. And she wiped it off after.”

“She let him kiss her, regardless of the reason.”

“But Mrs. Belou,” Helen began, and Peter could hear in her voice how determined she was to make her point. She’d underlined practically a whole page and was holding it close to her face, her left fingers marking three different spots. “Listen to what it says here: ‘But, some might say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the Providence of her simple faith?’ and then he says she was ‘doomed,’ that it was a ‘catastrophe,’ that her ancestors had probably ‘dealt the same measure’ toward some peasant girls.”

“And if you look two pages later you will find Tess herself admitting to Alec that she loathes herself for her ‘weakness.’ She says, ‘My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.’ And then, a few pages further on, the narrator says that she had been ‘stirred to confused surrender awhile.’” His mother hadn’t even taken her book out of her bag yet. She knew it all by heart.

Helen retaliated: “Then why does he say, ‘But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature, and it therefore does not mend the matter.’ He’s calling what Alec did a sin, the sin of rape.”

“Don’t you have to say no out loud for it to be rape?” Kristina asked. Her boyfriend, Brian Rossi, gave her a nudge and a proud smirk.

“She’s been saying no to Alec d’Uberville from the moment she met him!” Helen slammed the book on her desk.

“But she was just doing that thing that girls do,” the new kid, Kevin, said.

“What thing?” several of the girls asked in the same indignant tone.

“You know,” Kevin continued, loving the sudden attention. “Saying no to get you to really want it from them.” Peter stole a glance at his mother, thinking she’d be ready to blow. But instead of getting ready to stop him, instead of even looking at Kevin, she was looking at Peter, as if he were the one who was talking. “I mean, how hard is it to avoid getting raped?” Kevin continued. “All you have to do is keep your clothes on. Any girl who gets raped secretly wanted it. She might think afterwards she didn’t, but at the time she did.”

Peter had always heard that his mother was so strict, so challenging. How had she won that teaching prize last year? Why did so many students write her thank-you notes from college? Why was she just standing there?

A few girls lashed out at Kevin, and finally his mother snapped out of her trance.

“I don’t want to hear another word on this subject,” she said. “Not another word. I am sick to death of you people coming in here year after year and whining about what happens to Tess. A senseless nitwit of a girl in the woods at night with a proven lecher is not rape. It’s stupidity.”

Lindsey put up her hand. “But—”

“Goddammit. I don’t want to hear your buts. Get out of here. All of you. Right now.”

There was a sick silent moment before Peter, knowing his mother was serious and would not back down, began packing up his books. Everyone else did the same.

Before he left the classroom, Peter looked back at her. There was something about the way she’d wrapped her arms around herself, or maybe the color of her sweater, that reminded him of the caterpillars they had in the biology classroom, the way they hung suspended from the neck, forcing their own heads to fall off.

On the stairs, Brian put his arm around Kristina.

Karen said to Kevin, “You’re gross.”

Kevin smiled up at her. “You won’t ever have to worry about it, Karen. No one will ever want to rape you.”

Thanksgiving arrived. He and his mother had never hosted a Thanksgiving. They always ate at other people’s houses. Last year, like most years, they’d gone to Carol’s. Her son had been alive then, and they’d talked about basketball. He hadn’t seemed sad at all, and later Peter wondered if suicide could just come over you, like a cold, and the thought scared him for a long time.

The Belous, he learned, always stayed home and had very firm ideas about Thanksgiving. There had to be one of those dried-corn-on-the-cob arrangements on the front door, and a fat pewter turkey that they brought up from the basement on a table in the living room. The sweet potatoes had to have brown sugar and pecans on top; dessert could only be pumpkin pie. The meal was always served at five.

On Thanksgiving morning Peter woke up and felt it, the tightness in the air. He heard Fran scolding Caleb. He was surprised to see Stuart still in bed across the room. He was lying rigid on his back, arms at his sides, palms up. He was meditating, but his eyeballs were twitching against his lids and nothing about him looked relaxed. In the kitchen his mother and Tom were strategizing beside the raw rubbery carcass of a turkey: who would vacuum, who would do the beans, when the pies would go in, where people would sit. His mother looked like she did when she came out of faculty meetings.

He decided to skip breakfast and take a shower. It came to him that he didn’t like holidays. He never had. They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam you forgot to study for.

He stood wrapped in a towel before the photograph. He was used to her presence in the bathroom now. Water slid in beads off of his hair onto his shoulders. The frame was slightly steamed. She grew up as Mary May in Skaneateles, New York, a small town built around a large lake. Peter even knew how to spell it. He’d looked it up. She was an only child. She took piano lessons from her aunt Becky. Her favorite color was green. She met Tom when she was seventeen at a cookout in Plattsburgh, where he was training and she was visiting a friend. The picture had been taken before Stuart was born, Peter guessed. She looked so young, nearly his age, squatting there on a trail in the woods, tying her sneaker. He wiped the steam off of her. She was looking straight at the camera, straight at Peter, pleased by what she saw. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he whispered.

After he dressed, he decided to unpack the last of his boxes. Stuart had cleared off a shelf for his books, and the bureau Tom had brought up from the basement still had two empty drawers. He took his time. The energy outside his door made him uneasy. They were all setting up the living room for the guests and the meal. Stuart was moving furniture, Fran fussing about silverware, Caleb folding napkins. Their voices were louder than usual. He could hear his mother coming in from the kitchen to ask Fran something about glasses. She had forced a lilt into her voice. She was faking it, pretending that Thanksgiving was something special to her when all his life they’d tagged along at someone else’s holiday. She’d never stuffed a turkey or hung a decoration. It was nothing to her, nothing to him, and all day they’d have to act like it was, act like the Belous, to whom, despite death and rupture, Thanksgiving was still something sacred.

He was sitting on his bed rubbing his knees when his mother came in. “You look squeaky clean.”

He nodded. He wished she’d just acknowledge the act she was putting on.

“Could you do me a favor and walk Walt?”

“All right.” He was relieved to have an excuse to get out.

“Maybe you could get one of the kids to go with you.” She was wearing a tattered apron around her waist. Mrs. Belou’s apron.

He stood but she didn’t move out of his way. She was looking over his shoulder.

“I can’t believe you still have that old train book.”

Did she know what he’d hidden within its pages?

“It was my favorite book.”

“I remember.”

Still she didn’t move. He wanted to push her. Why was he so mad at her? She’d married Tom. She hadn’t messed that up. She’d never been mean; she’d never hit him or called him names like he’d seen Jason’s mother do. She seemed mad at him, too, wanting something from him.

“I put the leash around the knob on the front door,” she said, giving up, and left his room.

Walt was waiting for him, thwacking his tail against the door. Fran and Caleb were stacking plates. He waited until Caleb went to get more before he said, “Anyone want to go for a walk?”

She shook her head without looking up, then began counting the number of guests on her fingers. She had the ability to make him feel even smaller and less significant than he normally did. It had been nearly a month. When was she going to start treating him like a brother?

He clipped the leash onto Walt’s bucking collar.

“Can I come?” Caleb shouted.

“Sure you can.”

“Not too long,” Fran said. “We’ve got a lot more to do around here.”

It was typical Thanksgiving weather: overcast, colorless, and colder than it looked. Walt tugged hard to the left.

“He always knows just where he wants to go, doesn’t he?” Caleb said. “Can I hold him?”

Peter gave him the loop at the end of the leash. Walt pulled Caleb hard and they both had to walk faster to keep up. After a couple of blocks Walt reached the long row of maples he was most interested in and slowed down.

“Isn’t it amazing how he’s only lived here twenty-three days and he has his whole routine?” Caleb said. “He loves that little patch of moss right here and next he’ll go to the little sap hole there on that one. I love the way that branch up there has actually fused with that one. Have you noticed that before? See? They’re two different trees that grew one branch. Isn’t that cool?” Walt jerked Caleb over to the next tree, to the sap hole. And then to a cluster of tiny mushrooms. “I think he’s like a mastodon, just the way his shoulders rise so high when he bends down like that.”

They walked on, Walt tugging then stopping, Caleb chattering, observing everything. He was a scrawny kid, the very smallest in the third grade as far as Peter could tell from the class picture he brought home, with dark blond hair that grew in thick tufts in different directions all over his head. Peter wondered what the other kids made of him and all his thoughts. Since he’d been there, Caleb had never had a friend over. None of them had, except for Stuart and the girls he kept outside.

“I love it when the sun’s like this, when you can look straight at it behind a cloud but still see its shape perfectly, like it’s naked.”

Peter was tempted to ask him about his mother, about how he could be so enthusiastic about the world and everything in it when his mother was dead. When Peter was Caleb’s age just imagining his mother’s death could leave him weak and shaky. He could remember the terror he would work himself into waiting for his mother to come home from a party, the slow circles of the red hand on his clock as it got later and later, the conviction that the phone would ring, the babysitter would come in, and Peter’s life as he knew it would be over. He had nowhere to go. He didn’t even know his father’s name. It wasn’t Avery like his, because his aunt Gena’s last name was Avery, too. He realized that that fear was gone now that his mother had married Tom. The Belous would probably have to keep him if she died.

They headed back to the house. Walt was tired. His arthritic back legs bounced lightly behind him, unable to carry the full weight.

“He’s an old man, isn’t he?”

“A hundred and twelve,” Peter said.

Caleb stopped and bent down to look Walt in the face. It was completely white.

“You are a sweet sweet dog. Yes you are.” He hugged him tight around the neck. Walt, realizing this would last a while, let his head drop onto Caleb’s back. Caleb’s eyes were pressed closed as if he were praying for the dog. The hug lasted a long time. Peter waited, and felt ashamed he did not love Walt more. He didn’t really care that he was so old. Walt had always been Vida’s dog. She was the one who did what Caleb was doing now, stroked him, whispered to him. He remembered watching her years ago through a window once. She was out on the field with Walt, running and laughing, wrestling with him on the ground, then lying there with her head beside his for the longest time. Peter had been so angry he’d poured Spic ’N Span in Walt’s water bowl, but nothing happened.

The guests began arriving soon after they got back. His mother had put on one of her school fund-raiser dresses and held a glass of wine, talking to Tom’s sister. Dr. Gibb came with a date. Fran sat at the kitchen table with her cousins, Jonie and Meg, who were in college. Tom took his brother out to his wood shop in the garage. Mrs. May called. The traffic was terrible and she’d be late.

Peter and Stuart lay on their beds as if it were nighttime. Their room was eerily tidy now that his boxes were gone. He thought of the picture in the train book. He wanted to show Stuart but didn’t know how to bring it up.

“Last Thanksgiving I was high until New Year’s, totally wasted, day and night,” Stuart said. “It was great.”

“Why don’t you do it anymore?”

“It shrivels your chi to the size of a fig seed.”

Peter snorted, thinking of Brian, Kristina’s boyfriend, the pothead.

“Not your dick. Your chi is your energy, your life force. It needs to flow easily. ‘The true man breathes from his feet up.’”

Neither of them said anything for a while, just listened to the sealike undulations of the party down the hall. This was a good time to show him, Peter decided. His heart began pounding.

“Want to see a picture of my father?”

“Your father?” Stuart had never asked about his father. No one had.

“Yeah. I found it when I was unpacking today.” He hoisted himself up and pulled out a small piece of construction paper from the book on the shelf.

Stuart started laughing. “This is all you have of your dad? She’s never even given you a photo?”

“She doesn’t have any. I think they split up before I was born.”

Stuart looked at the creased, smudged drawing and shook his head. “Jesus. That’s really pathetic.”

Peter wished he’d just hand it back. He didn’t know why he’d showed it to him anyway. He felt hollow in his chest as he waited.

A car pulled up at the curb and cut its lights. Stuart tossed the paper back to him and swung off his bed. “That’s my grandmother!” he called, flinging himself out of the room spastically, like a little boy. Peter put the paper back where he’d always kept it, ever since the day she drew it, and followed him out.

Mrs. May was not old-looking but she moved slowly, as if all her muscles were sore. She gave Peter a nod when introduced but not a hand. To his mother she didn’t even give a nod. When it was time to eat, she sat stiffly on the couch in a boiled wool suit while her grandchildren fetched her a glass of milk and another slice of turkey from the buffet. Peter watched the Belou kids hover near, vying for her scrutiny. He thought his mother should make more of an effort with her, but Vida sat on the other side of the room, nibbling and sipping. He hoped she got drunk. He liked her when she was drunk. When he was younger she’d peek in his room when she came back from parties. If he spoke to her, she’d come sit on his bed and tell him all about where she’d gone and which of his teachers were there. She always seemed so happy after a few drinks: she’d smooth his hair and say how lucky she was to have him. And he’d be so relieved she hadn’t died that he’d hug her tight and she wouldn’t pull away.

She was telling school stories now, the raunchy one about the prank on the school nurse. Her eyes were shiny and overfocused, as if she were on stage.

Tom talked quietly to Mrs. May. They spoke of Skaneateles, and of Connecticut, where she’d just eaten a noontime meal with her sister and her brood of children, grandchildren, and even two great-grandchildren.

Quietly, to Tom, she said, “I never envied my sister her six children. Now—” She threw up her hands, then quickly collected them in her lap again.

Tom’s head bobbed in understanding.

Vida imitated the nurse’s long shrill shriek when she found the sausage in her purse. A boom of laughter followed.

Peter saw no resemblance in the dull face of Mrs. May to the picture of her daughter in the bathroom.

“Vida’s a hoot, isn’t she?” Peter heard Tom’s brother say to him at the door.

“She is,” Tom said, confused, like he’d bought an appliance with too many features.

The hugs with Mrs. May were long and tight. Peter and Vida stayed clear, then joined the others at the door to wave as she moved slowly to her car.

“Funny old fish,” Vida whispered loudly.

Then Thanksgiving was behind them, a long weekend ahead. That Friday, a cold rain fell. They played Parcheesi, Yahtzee, Stratego. Peter and Fran made frappes. They drank them in front of an afternoon movie about dolphins. Stuart groaned at all the Christmas ads. At one point they were all — Stuart, Fran, Peter, and Caleb — under the big afghan on the couch. Who knew where Vida and Tom were? Who cared? All his life Peter had always known exactly where his mother was; knowledge of her whereabouts was crucial, like knowing you had clothes on. But now he was free of that.

When the movie was over, Fran studied his profile. “You have that funny kind of earlobe. The kind that sticks to the skin on your face, like webbed feet.”

Peter didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Look.” She batted her mobile lobe. “We all have the dangly kind.”

Later, he looked at his ears in the mirror. He looked at his mother’s at dinner. It was true. Neither of them had the dangly Belou earlobes.

Before dinner, Tom took him aside and scolded him: the wood box had been empty for several days now. Keeping the box full was one of Peter’s chores, but he didn’t like it because it meant going down to the basement alone. Mrs. Belou’s things were down there, in boxes and garment bags, crouching in the corner.

He couldn’t explain that to Tom, so he apologized and picked up the canvas carrier. Halfway down the stairs he saw Caleb in the yellow and blue dress, zipping Fran into the red and white one. Their backs were to him. Fran’s bra strap was beige. He didn’t want to see them in their mother’s dresses. Before he even registered what he was doing he was back in the living room empty-handed. Tom shook his head and took the carrier from him.

Within seconds Tom returned.

“I apologize, Peter,” he said formally, as if they had just met. “I didn’t know they were playing with”—he paused—“costumes.” He sat down on a hard chair in the corner that no one ever used, and looked at his feet.

It was the pale-eyed girl who came late that night. After Stuart had gone to her, Peter got up and eavesdropped through the front door. They were on the steps as usual, arguing about Christ. Peter was disappointed; he wanted Stuart to be talking about him.

“But why isn’t there any documentation of the thirty-two previous years if on the night of his birth the North Star led everyone to his cradle and they celebrated the arrival of the king of kings? If all this Christmas crap actually happened, why do we know so little about his life? Why was he a poor carpenter instead of a beleaguered messiah?”

Peter could only hear a whiny murmur.

“They’re feeding you lies, Diane. You’re like some peasant in the Soviet Union who believes Lenin is still alive. You’re like …” and his monologue went on until Peter was certain she was crying.

But she was back again the next night, and Peter heard Stuart telling her about that trip to California. “We rented this convertible in San Francisco. Mom refused to let me drive up all those hills because it was a standard, but she was hopeless. It was like she’d forgotten how to drive. We kept rolling down backwards and stalling and going down one-way streets, the whole town honking at us. One time there was this poor guy on a bike and our car rolled down straight toward him and he had to lift his bike up onto someone’s porch to avoid being killed. She kept forgetting where our hotel was. God, we bickered the whole time, more like brother and sister than mother and son. It was really funny.”

“My father and I went on a trip like that once—”

“But what was really funny is that we had this one day when we didn’t speak. Not a syllable. She was mad, I was mad, and we were both too stubborn to give in. And I had my interview at Berkeley that day. She came with me and after the interview the admissions lady gave us this tour of the place and we all ate together at this fancy dining hall but Mom and I never looked or spoke to each other the whole time. That lady must have thought we were a really screwed-up family. Maybe that’s why I got in. Mom was stubborn as a goddamn mule sometimes.”

Peter moved quietly away from the door. He wasn’t sleepy, but he didn’t want to hear any more. He was starting to know more about Mrs. Belou than he knew about his own mother.

Mom wore lipstick called Desert Rose. Mom told me cotton candy was made of ghosts. Mom broke her ankle when when she was eight months pregnant with me. Mom knew French. Mom helped raise four thousand dollars for the public library. Mom hated Spiro Agnew almost as much as Nixon. Mom gave dad a black eye once when they were having sex. With her elbow. She didn’t mean to. That’s not true! Yes it is, Fran. Remember how she used to say “Holy mackerel?” “Holy mackerel, you look lovely.” “Holy mackerel, he’s a pig.” Mom loved birch trees best of all.

Your mother, they always said in a completely different tone of voice. They never said Vida. Your mother needs a new pair of shoes. Your mother’s so bony. Your mother said she’s going to replace the rug in here.

Your mother, they always said, as if they were trying to give her back.

On the way to school the following Monday, his mother gave him a lecture in the car. His grades, she said, were abysmal. He had to start trying or he’d flunk out.

“I do try, Ma. I try hard.”

“You need to work something out with Stuart. You can’t talk to him and do your homework at the same time.”

“I like talking to him.”

“Fine. But after you’ve done your work. Should I have a word with him?”

“No.”

“Don’t start thinking about throwing your future away, too.”

“He hasn’t thrown anything away.”

“He’s a dropout.”

“He didn’t drop out. He finished and he got into a really good college.”

“But he didn’t go. I call that dropping out.”

“He’s going next year.”

“Right.”

“He is, Ma. He told me. He wants to learn Chinese.”

“Chinese,” his mother said, threading her cigarette stub through the crack in the window. “And what’s this ‘Ma’ business?”

When he got home that night, Stuart was waiting for him.

“Hello, Mole.”

Peter dumped his books out on the bed. Huge French test tomorrow. He’d have to tell him he needed to study.

“How was your day, Mole?” Stuart was lying on his back with his legs straight up and his fingers laced through his toes.

“All right. How was yours?”

“Do you know what ‘mole’ means, Mole?” He was using a tone he usually used on Fran.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think you do. Otherwise you’d already be apologizing profusely for having told my father my plans for next year.”

“I never told him,” Peter said, indignant, the truth on his side.

“But you told your mother.”

Had he? He had. “I—” was defending you, he wanted to say.

“I wanted to tell him — at the right time. I never thought you’d go scurrying to your mommy with it. He came in here tonight like I was the Second Coming. It was disgusting.”

Stuart sat up and stretched his elbows unnaturally, nearly behind his head. Peter didn’t know what to say. His heart was racing.

“If I had told my mother something like that, she never would have told my father. She would have known it was mine to tell.”

Peter left the room and found his mother dumping frozen peas into a pot.

“Why the hell did you blab to Tom about Stuart?” He’d never sworn at his mother before.

“You mean about going to college? He’s overjoyed.”

“I told you not to say anything.”

“You did?” She had her fake understanding-teacher voice, like he was telling her the dog ate it.

“I did.”

He waited for her to expose him, to give him a speech about the truth and the power of words, but all she did was pitch the pea box in the trash and take a sip of her drink. Then she said, “Let’s not get mixed up in other people’s battles.”

“Let’s not blab everything you hear.” He turned to leave but she caught him tight by the arm. He could feel her thumb pressing through his muscle to the bone. It burned.

“I’m not your whipping boy, Peter,” she whispered. “And you’re not theirs.”

He let go a few frustrated tears in the bathroom. Mrs. Belou’s smile was unsympathetic today. She wanted them out. He took the picture off the wall and put it facedown on top of the toilet so he could feel sorry for himself in peace. He stayed in there until he heard Stuart leave their room. Then he grabbed his French books and bolted down the hall to Caleb’s room. Caleb was reading a five-hundred-and-twenty-page book about horse farming.

“Have you heard the one about the horse who walks into the bar?” Peter said.

“No.”

“Horse walks into the bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”

Caleb waited for him to go on.

“That’s it.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a short joke. I don’t remember the long ones very well.”

They both returned to their reading.

At dinner all of his stepsiblings were silent and sulky. One by one Tom tried to draw them out, but they resisted. It was Peter’s turn to do the dishes with Tom. When he was through, he found them in the living room, speaking in low voices. They stopped when he came in. He headed for his room, then paused in the hallway. They resumed.

“It’s like something out of a bad movie.”

“She’s sick.”

“Totally unsubtle.”

Peter had no idea what they were — then he knew. The picture. He’d forgotten to put it back on the wall. The realization was physical, like something shattering inside him, his skin pricked from the inside by all the shards. He’d have to explain, release his mother from blame. He’d wait and tell Stuart later; maybe he’d think it was funny that Peter talked to her sometimes.

But later Stuart did all the talking, his mind whipping around his usual topics like a race car: the body, the Tao, Eastern medicine, college….

“I’m rethinking the plan. My stomach has been sort of sinking ever since it was”—he gave Peter a forgiving smirk—“revealed. I would like to go back to California.”

“To Berkeley?”

“No. Just to live. Forget college.”

Peter felt responsible for this devastating change of heart. His stomach began to sink, too. “Why?”

“It was pretty amazing there.”

“I thought you said the water looked fake.”

“It did. Everything did. But that’s what’s cool about it. Every morning you felt like you were stepping onto a movie set, made especially for you and your day. Mom said the place made her feel twenty years younger. She must have said that twenty times. You know what it was? The place was hopeful. Full of hope.” His head fell off his elbow, and he stared up into the swirls of plaster on the ceiling. Peter waited for him to say this place was full of death, but he didn’t. In the silence, he remembered again the misunderstanding about the picture. He didn’t want them to think his mother would do such a horrible thing, but confessing was impossible. How could he explain the disgusted look their mother had given him?

“I got mad at her for saying it so many times, that stuff about feeling younger. Because each time she said it it was like she was having the thought for the first time. The thing is, she was. She was having the thought for the first time each time. The tumor was sitting right on her temporal lobe, erasing the thought as soon as she said it. My father hadn’t wanted her to take me, but she’d insisted. I thought he was just being an asshole. And then he was calling all the time. Practically every time we went past the hotel desk there was another message from him. And then when he met us at the airport she just sort of collapsed into his arms, as if she’d just run a marathon. You’d think I could have put it all together. If it were on TV you’d be screaming at the kid: ‘She’s got a brain tumor, you moron! Can’t you see that?’” He pushed the heels of his hands hard into his eye sockets. “But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Peter dreamed his first dream of her. The dream had no plot; it was just a moment, her in his room, his old room, in a shiny yellow raincoat. He moved toward her with no idea what he would say or do, with no idea if she was real or imagined. But when he reached her, all uncertainty was gone. He hugged her tight, so tight, and breathed her in and she smelled like flowers and old leaves, and then he was crying, aching, and she held him close until the tears running into his ears woke him up.