A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life Read online

  This time I decide I can’t just storm out of the room. I need to make my case.

  “Look. You guys know my position on this. I just don’t want to know anything. And it’s not because I’m running from something; it’s because I don’t care. You may think that I have some gaping hole in me or whatever your touchy-feely parenting books tell you, but I don’t feel like I’m missing something and I don’t have a longing or whatever and I just wish you would drop this.” I can’t believe it, but I feel my throat constricting and my eyes burning. I think I’m fighting off tears.

  “Oh, honey.” Mom lets out a sigh. Now she’s annoying the crap out of me. “Whatever you decide is fine with us, you know that. We don’t want to force you into anything. It’s just that Rivka—”

  “Will you just stop it! Jesus Christ!” I push my plate away from me and throw my napkin on top of it. “Can’t you just leave me alone?” I’m shouting now. I know I seem irrational.

  Dad and Mom exchange glances. I’ve lived with them long enough to read their unspoken language. They’ve decided to let it go tonight—both the topic and my outburst. There’s an awkward silence.

  Dad clears his throat. “So you guys,” he says, “don’t forget about the membership drive tomorrow.”

  Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent the better years of my youth at the local organic market trying to guilt shoppers into joining the American Civil Liberties Union. Mom has been on staff at the ACLU for twenty years. It was her first job out of law school, and now she’s the legal director. Can you imagine going to the same office every day for twenty years? And she’s still in the windowless nine-by-twelve room that she was first assigned. She thinks it’s cozy.

  Twice a year they have membership drives, and Dad and Jake and I are all called into service. The truth is I actually like doing it because I can get into some pretty heated arguments with opinionated shoppers, and the older I get the more skilled I am at arguing the need for things I believe in, like freedom of speech, women’s choice, and gay rights. And also, I have to admit, even though right now I feel like strangling her, I’m proud of my mom.

  “I’ll be there,” I say, “but for now I must say goodbye and good night.”

  I stand up.

  “Wait,” says Dad. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” He gestures to his cheek. I roll my eyes and look over at Mom. I can’t make a clean getaway without kissing them both. This isn’t typical. They don’t demand kisses anymore. But I know they feel sorry for me.

  I kind of groan and quickly kiss Mom and then go over to Dad. He slips me twenty bucks. On the other hand, I decide, being pitied does have its upside.

  The movie, by the way, totally sucks. And that says a lot about how bad it is because I’m not the most discriminating moviegoer. I like everything—sappy over-the-top dramas, gross-out comedies, pretentious art-house films that we have to take a trip into the city to see, and even gory slasher flicks. But this one took a battering ram to my low expectations, and I won’t bore you with the details.

  The theater is on Highway 33 a couple of miles out of town. Roxie’s Diner is across the road and there’s a fish market next door, which always struck me as an odd location for a fish market because you’d really have to want some fish to make the drive out here. The diner makes sense. See a movie, eat a burger with fries and a milk shake. But see a movie, buy a piece of fresh-frozen Icelandic cod? That I don’t really understand.

  After the movie we leave our cars in the parking lot and walk up the road a little way to a huge cornfield. I don’t live in the boondocks, even though I know this is how it’s starting to sound. We’re only a thirty-minute drive from Boston, and as I mentioned, our town has an organic market. We also have a Starbucks, a chain bagel store, and even a fancy Asian fusion restaurant that charges twelve dollars for a spring roll.

  We push our way through the stalks, which are fairly high this late in September, and find the clearing that’s been our late-summer-early-fall after-movie hangout for the past few years. It’s sort of chilly, and James is kind enough to lend me his flannel shirt.

  I lie down on my back and look up at the stars. Cleo lights a cigarette. James lights a joint. Just so you know, this is not where this story becomes a morality tale about teen smoking or drug use. For the record, I think smoking is nasty, and I tell Cleo this all the time. She doesn’t really smoke that much. She would never light a cigarette in the morning or even in the middle of the day. Cleo only smokes at night when she’s hanging out with friends at parties or in cornfields. As for the joint, I don’t smoke pot, and it isn’t because I’m a prude or because I’m judgmental or because I choose to “just say no.” It’s not because I’m afraid of disappointing my parents, because I’ve a pretty strong hunch that they smoked a lot of it in their pasts. Who knows, maybe they still do. No, I don’t smoke pot because I’ve found it to be an extremely unpleasant experience. It immediately sends me into the recesses of my own head: I can’t hold up my end of any conversation, and I fixate on things I would rather leave alone. But I have to admit I kind of like the smell and the silly side it brings out in these friends of mine.

  Cleo and I met Ivy in first grade on the handball court during recess. She had a mean serve and braids down to her butt. We let James and Henry into our little circle in third grade because James was the skinny wimpy boy and Henry was the fat boy and none of the other boys seemed to want to play with either of them. The five of us became inseparable.

  So much has changed since then, small changes like how Ivy’s talent turned out to be acting, not handball, and how she replaced her braids with a three-inch crew cut. And how Henry grew out of his baby fat, and now the boys who used to tease him take orders from him because he’s captain of the basketball team. Of course there have been bigger changes too, to all of us, complicated changes, far too many to mention. Now we all have our own lives and we aren’t inseparable anymore, but we still enjoy going to the movies, gossiping about everyone else at school, the occasional joint, and hanging out in the cornfield.

  “So, Cleavage”—this is Henry’s new nickname for Cleo—“what’s up with Darius? Has he weighed in on your weighty new friends?” Henry gestures to Cleo’s boobs, which she’s exhibiting proudly tonight in a T-shirt she should have retired even before this summer’s growth spurt.

  Ivy takes a long drag from the joint. “You’re such a child, Henry.”

  “I kind of feel like touching them. Can I?” James leans in as if to make a grab. Now, I know that makes him sound like a big perv, but like I said, we’ve been friends since third grade, and besides, we all know that James is gay.

  “Go for it.” Cleo leans forward. He sort of pokes one and then quickly pulls his hand away. “Yep, they’re the real thing.”

  Cleo makes a slight readjustment. “Like you would know.”

  “Hey, what about my turn?” Henry reaches over.

  “Go fondle your own boobs.”

  Everyone laughs. Ivy lies down next to me and puts her head in Henry’s lap.

  “We’re smart people, right?” Ivy asks. “Well then, tell me, geniuses, why is it that we didn’t think of smoking this joint before the movie?”

  Aside from the sound of my friends’ voices and the occasional car passing out on Highway 33 and the rustling of the cornstalks in the autumn breeze, it’s stone quiet out here. There’s a blanket of stars in the sky. There’s no moon to speak of. I feel sheltered, protected, safe. I’m sitting in this cocoon in the middle of a cornfield on the outskirts of a town I’ve lived in since birth with a group of friends I’ve known forever, and yet when James points out that I’m quiet tonight and asks if everything is okay, I just say that I’m tired and that I think I need to go home.

  Cleo is spending the night. Lucky for us my parents are asleep, because she reeks of smoke and is still a little high. As is the rule in our house, I tiptoe into their room and whisper that I’m home. I always stand outside their bedroom door for at least a full two minutes listeni
ng with almost superhuman strength for the slightest rustle of the sheets or any sound that might indicate that they’re engaged in…well, you know. See, I can’t even bring myself to say it. I’m far more terrified of discovering my parents mid-act than I am of being busted for drinking.

  Mom turns over and mumbles, “Hi, sweets. Give me a kiss.”

  I know this routine. I’m no fool. I lean in, and she takes a long, deep, and noisy sniff of me. She rolls back over. I’m clean.

  She lets out a yawn. “Night-night.” She’s asleep again before I shut the door behind me.

  Cleo and Jake are both in the bathroom brushing their teeth. He’s like a little brother to her too. She’s known him since he was born, and she’s an only child, unless you count her dad’s new kids in Scottsdale, which Cleo most definitely does not. In fact, she pretends that she can’t remember their names, which for the record are Carly and Craig. I think Jake has always been kind of in love with Cleo, and that might freak someone else out, but I think it’s sweet.

  “No wonder your breath always stinks, Jake,” Cleo teases him. “You’re a godawful brusher. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about the importance of circular motion?” She demonstrates. “See,” she says through a mouth full of foamy paste, “it’s all about the gums.” She takes out her toothbrush and swipes his nose with it.

  He pretends to be disgusted and quickly rinses his face in the sink. He has on a pair of blue and orange plaid pajama bottoms, slippers I gave him last Christmas that look like bear’s feet (get it? He’s in his “bear” feet), and no shirt. Jake is really starting to fill out, and he tends to walk around shirtless whenever he can get away with it.

  “Good night, ladies,” he says, and even though Cleo’s face is covered in apricot scrub and I’ve just started brushing my teeth, he flicks off the bathroom light.

  I’m lying in bed. Cleo shuts down my computer after checking her e-mail and then turns to me and says, “Simone, are you sure you’re okay? You just seem kind of bummed out tonight.”

  There it goes again. That burning in my eyes. That constricting of my throat. Why is this happening?

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Just tired.” I fake a yawn.

  She crawls onto the futon we put down for her on the floor. “Come on, Simone. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Now I feel myself sort of cracking inside. It’s pitch black in here, and I figure I can get away with letting a few tears roll down my cheeks. There’s a long silence, and I wipe my running nose on my sleeve, being careful not to sniffle. Suddenly I realize that I am really tired, but mostly I’m tired of pretending that this isn’t bothering me.

  “I’m just having a really weird week.” My voice is shaky.

  Cleo waits.

  “My parents told me that Rivka wants to meet me.” I say this knowing full well that Cleo doesn’t know who Rivka is, but I can’t think of what else to call her. My birth mother? The woman who gave birth to me? None of it feels right. But good old Cleo needs no explanation. She, unlike Jake, has the power of intuition.

  “Wow,” Cleo says. “That’s heavy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  Am I curious? How can I be curious? I’ve spent all my life fighting off that curiosity. I’ve locked it away. I’ve thrown it overboard. I’ve beaten it to a pulp. But here it is anyway, back from the dead. And even though I’m older and wiser and stronger, I seem to be losing the battle against it. But I’m not ready to admit this tonight to Cleo or to anyone else. I just lie there with my burning eyes open, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. They have almost no glow left in them. When you see stars in the sky, they are nothing but tiny dots. When you look at them through a telescope, they look more like little balls of light. They don’t look anything like the shapes on my ceiling—the shape we learn to draw as children, with five protruding angles. But then again, the heart looks nothing like the shape we learn to draw as children either, so there you have it. I start breathing deeply, and Cleo either believes that I’m asleep or is a good enough friend to let me get away without saying anything more.

  THREE

  It’s way too early in the morning for political debate, but here I am with my ACLU baseball jersey on outside the Organic Oasis.

  “Do you have a moment for the ACLU? Do you have a moment for the ACLU?”

  Jake and Dad have the parking lot entrance in the back, and I’m covering the sidewalk out front, where there are crates of fruit on display and bushels of fresh cut flowers. So at least it smells good out here. A few bleary-eyed shoppers stumble past me without so much as a glance in my direction. I decide that no one is in the spirit yet, particularly me, so I go inside to get a cup of fair-trade coffee.

  Zack Meyers is working at the coffee counter. We haven’t had any classes together, but we obviously know each other’s names because there are only 198 juniors at Twelve Oaks Academy.

  “Hey, Simone. You’re up early.”

  I’m wondering if this is maybe the first time we’ve ever actually spoken to each other.

  “Yeah, I’m trying to sign up members for the ACLU.”

  “Cool.”

  Zack has small wire-rimmed glasses and really red cheeks, and he always wears camouflage Converse high-tops to school, although I can’t see over the counter to confirm that this is true when he’s outside of school. He also has an earring (a small dangling lightning bolt), which is so eighties but somehow looks okay on him. He hangs around Amy Flannigan all the time. I wonder if they’re going out. He takes pictures for the school newspaper. I think I’ve seen him playing tennis on the courts at school. And, I realize this morning, he happens to be really, really cute.

  He leans on the counter. “So, what’ll it be?”

  “Just a regular good old-fashioned coffee. Hold the crap.”

  Oh, no. Did he know that by “crap” I meant the milk or foam or hazelnut syrup? I’m suddenly terrified that he thinks I meant the conversation. I try to recover:

  “Why don’t people just drink coffee anymore? Why does everything have to be all complicated?”

  Now I’m sounding like an idiot. This is not an original or even remotely witty observation. It’s not like I’m the first person to poke fun at the world of Frappuccinos and fancy coffee.

  “Well, at least it keeps my job interesting. Imagine if I only poured regular coffees all day. Where’s the satisfaction in that?” He hands me my coffee and smiles. I smile back. Then I realize he’s waiting for me to pay because there’s someone standing behind me.

  I hand him my dollar twenty-five and say casually, “Thanks. See you around.”

  I go back outside to find a few other baseball-shirted people with clipboards. I don’t recognize any of them, which leaves me wondering two things: (1) Why is it that only my mom enlists her family for membership drives? And(2) why do we have to start a full hour before anyone else?

  I meet the other signature gatherers. They are volunteers, a retired couple in their sixties named Ann and Sy and a woman named Lena with short red hair who looks like she’s pushing thirty. Things are picking up—more shoppers are arriving, and some are even stopping to sign up. Just for sport, I step in front of a woman who looks like she’s doing everything she can to avoid contact with me.

  “Do you have a moment for the ACLU?”

  She stops and lets out an exasperated sigh. “No, I absolutely do not have as much as a second for the ACLU. I am sick to death of the ACLU.” I feel like pointing out to her that a moment technically can be a second and that already she has given about fifteen of them. “Can’t you find anything better to do with your time? Why stand out here advancing the work of an organization that is trying to tear apart this town?”

  I’m not really sure what she’s talking about, but I’m ready to dig in for a fight. Is this about gay marriage? Abortion? I mean, abortion is a debate I feel like I can contribute a
powerful perspective to. It goes like this: I easily could have been aborted, right? I was lucky and wasn’t, and I was adopted by a loving family. But I still believe in a woman’s right to choose, even knowing what a close call my very existence is. This woman is talking about something else, though.

  “There is history here,” she tells me, and she is so angry now that she’s turning red and kind of whispering and spit is flying everywhere. “You can’t erase history. And more importantly, you can’t erase God. No matter how much money you raise.” With that she walks away.

  Lena sees me looking confused and comes over.

  “I’ve come across a few like her today. They’re all pissed off because of the town seal case.” She explains that she doesn’t mean the aquatic mammal (this I’m sure is supposed to be a joke, but maybe I look like a child to Lena), she means the town seal, which has four quadrants with a book, a tree, a bell, and a cross. Now, I didn’t even know that we had a town seal, and I would bet you anything that you’d be hard pressed to find five people in the Organic Oasis or beyond who do. But I guess that’s starting to change with this case. Maybe Mom told me about it and I didn’t really pay attention, but more likely she didn’t tell me about it because you know how it is—she’s my mom and she spends most of her time trying to extract information from me about my life. It doesn’t happen the other way around.

  So we have a town seal. The book symbolizes learning. The tree symbolizes growing. The bell symbolizes freedom. And the cross—well, that’s obvious. The seal is on our town flag, which I guess flies above the town hall, although I have to admit I’ve never noticed this.

  Mom stops by in the afternoon, and when I ask her about the case she points out the irony of the bell and the cross positioned next to each other on the seal. The cross, she tells me, infringes on the freedom of anyone who is not a Christian. This makes total sense. I mean, I don’t believe in God and I have to live in this town too, so why should I have to live with that cross in my face all the time? Suddenly I’m indignant. I totally believe in this case, and I wish I could turn back time and have an informed argument with that uptight bitch from this morning. The funny thing (well, one of the funny things is that of course I didn’t even know we had a town seal, so saying that I have to live with it in my face all the time is pretty funny) is that technically speaking, Mom is a Christian. So is Dad. So, I guess, are Jake and I. Like I said before, my parents don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in God. We don’t go to church or pray or do any of those things. And even though whenever someone asks me what I am, I say, “Nothing,” my parents come from the Christian tradition: Catholic in my dad’s case, Episcopalian in my mom’s. And as far as I know they didn’t go through any kind of ritual to erase their Christian pasts and become something else. Doesn’t this mean that to the rest of the world we’re Christians, no matter how we define ourselves? I guess the important thing is that having a cross on our town seal infringes on the freedom of not only those people who practice other religions but also people like my family and me. People who call themselves nothing.