What's Important Is Feeling: Stories (9 page)

My mother made mistakes but played through, as if they were part of the piece. I grabbed my backpack and left.

At school I could barely stay awake. Matt Poncett was in my Spanish class, and he kept looking at me, smiling. I raised my hand. “Can I go to the nurse?”

“
¡
Hable en español!
” Ms. Vasquez said.

I shrugged and put my head on the desk. In the hallway after, Matt Poncett winked at me and said, “
Hola, amigo.
”

When I got home, Father Larry and my mother were napping on the window seat in the living room. They were on their backs, head to toe, legs slightly intertwined. Peter Gabriel sang, “
In your eyes, the light the heat
.”

For a moment I considered curling up between them, resting my head in the nook of my mother’s armpit, lulled by the mingling smells of sweat, coffee, and pH-balanced deodorant. Instead, I went up to my room. I turned off all the lights and lay in silence, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.

Later, I heard my mother on the phone. I peered through the crack in the door. She wore a bathrobe, paced.

“I’m not even a woman anymore,” she said. “There’s nothing left for them to remove.”

Then there was a long pause, and she stood, looking out the window.

“There’s no point in going through it again,” she said. “There’s nothing left.”

At dinner, no one was hungry.

“How was your day?” my father said.

Ramona shrugged. I could tell she’d been crying because she wasn’t wearing makeup. She always wore makeup, even to field hockey. She only took it off when she’d been crying.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said to Ramona.

“I’m full,” she said. “I’m going upstairs.”

I was playing
GoldenEye
when my father came up to my room. I didn’t turn around, but I knew it was him from the way he took the stairs, slower than the others, probably planning exactly what to say.

He came right in and sat next to me on the edge of the waterbed. I kept playing my game.

“Can I play with you?”

“If you want.” He picked up the second controller. “LTK. License to kill. One shot and you’re dead. You can be Bond.”

“What are the buttons?”

“Z shoots, yellow buttons walk sideways, down yellow and R-button ducks, B switches weapons, the joystick adjusts the sight when you have the sniper rifle. Hold down and the R-button at the same time to zoom in.”

“I’ll figure it out,” he said.

We played in the Temple level. I took three shots at him with a Cougar Magnum from behind a pillar, but he managed to duck out of the way. He threw a grenade, and I had to scurry backwards.

“Your mother,” he said.

“What about her?”

“She’s sick again.”

I picked up a rocket launcher, headed up the stairs. I could see on my father’s side of the screen that all he had was a throwing knife.

“I know,” I said. “I heard her on the phone. I think she was talking to her spiritual adviser.”

“Father Larry.”

“The one and only.”

I launched a rocket, but I was too far away and missed him completely. He disappeared out of sight. He had a sniper rifle now, and I didn’t know where he was going.

“What’s gonna happen?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s bad, right?”

“It’s not good.”

I walked back down the stairs looking for him. It was already too late when I saw him aim at me from above. One shot from the sniper rifle, and I was done. My screen filled with blood.

“You learn fast,” I said. My father put down his controller. His hands were shaking like he’d really shot me.

“It’s best of five,” I said.

“I have to do some work,” he said, and left me there. I sat by the window and watched for his car to leave. It stayed put that night.

The next morning Ramona said she was sick and didn’t get out of bed, so I went to school without her. When I got there, everyone knew except me. Apparently he’d shown the tape to his brother, who’d made copies and distributed it to a bunch of sophomores. There’d been a screening at Joe Bort’s house on his big TV.

“Why does everyone keep looking at me weird?” I said to Weinberg.

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Your sister made a sex tape with Matt Poncett. Everyone’s seen it.”

“What the fuck?”

“There’s supposed to be some kinky shit on there.”

“We got to get a copy of that tape,” Mike said.

I punched him on the arm.

“That’s my sister, you douche.”

“I heard she deep-throats him,” Weinberg said.

“That’s not kinky,” Mike said. “Impressive, but not really kinky.”

“There’s other stuff too,” Weinberg said. “She’s wearing her cheerleader outfit.”

“I heard he’s hung like Mark Wahlberg,” Mike said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

“It’s not really his dick in the movie,” Weinberg said. “They used a prosthetic.”

Ramona was in her room and wouldn’t come out. My mother was in the hallway, pleading at the door. Father Larry sat silent on the stairs.

“Just talk to me, Ramona,” my mother said. “That’s all I ask.”

Ramona didn’t reply, but we could hear her crying.

“She’s been crying all day,” my mother said.

“It’s okay to be angry,” my mother said to the door. “Anger is a healthy stage of grief. I’m angry myself. But maybe if we talk about it we can start to come to terms with it.”

“I don’t think that’s what she’s upset about,” I said.

“Of course that’s what she’s upset about,” my mother said.

Ramona yelled something. It sounded like “Go away,” but you couldn’t really tell.

My mother turned to the priest. “You try to talk to her. Maybe she’ll listen to you. You’re so good at this type of thing.”

“That might not be the best idea,” I said.

Father Larry stood up. When he opened her door, she started shrieking.

“Get the fuck out,” she yelled.

Father Larry walked in and shut the door behind him. The shrieking continued.

When he came out he said, “I don’t think she wants to talk to me right now. Sometimes you have to give a person space to make peace on their own.”

The shrieking went back to being sobbing.

“I can’t bear this,” my mother said. “You try, Zach. Try to talk to her. She looks up to you.”

“She doesn’t look up to me.”

“She does,” Father Larry said.

“How do you know?”

“You’re her big brother.”

“So?”

“Just try,” my mother said.

“Leave her alone,” I said, and went up to my room.

Eventually my mother stopped banging on Ramona’s door. She and the priest were probably in the living room. He let her cry into his palm. He told her about Job, about Jesus.

When my father came home, Ramona wouldn’t talk to him either. She didn’t come down for dinner. The priest was still there, and we had pizza. Father Larry took the last slice of sausage and pepperoni. “You guys can’t eat pork anyway,” Father Larry said.

“We don’t keep kosher,” I said.

“Maybe we should,” my father said. “Maybe then God would like us more.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

“I’ll bring a couple slices up and see if Ramona wants any,” I said.

She didn’t answer when I knocked, so I opened the door and let myself in. I didn’t see her at first. She lay on the floor behind her bed with her legs together and straight ahead, arms folded across her chest. She wore a frilly nightgown that I hadn’t seen in ages, since before she got breasts, legs. It was only a few years ago that she was a kid, that we both were.

“Hey,” I said. I put the plate of pizza on her desk. She wasn’t crying anymore, just staring at the ceiling.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.”

“Do whatever you want,” she said. I took a bite.

“I assume you heard,” she said.

“I heard.”

I had been planning to give her a piece of my mind, let her know how embarrassing this was for me, how stupid she’d been. But looking at her on the floor in that nightgown I couldn’t.

“Everyone will forget about it by tomorrow,” I said.

“They won’t.”

I leaned against her bed. Her phone vibrated.

“You gonna get that?”

“Leave it.”

“You know what the good thing about high school is?” I said.

“What?”

“It’s only four years. Then it’s over.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You only have two years left,” I said. “And it’s almost summer. Everyone will go away and forget all about you.”

Ramona started crying again.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. I knew she knew I didn’t mean it, but I said it anyway, and she let me say it. “It will all be okay,” I said.

Father Larry was over every day now. He’d be there in the morning when I woke up. He made the coffee, burnt the toast. He always had the Sports section, so I’d read the Living/Arts instead. You couldn’t say anything because my mother was right there. She was going to die soon; you weren’t allowed to complain. No one said this specifically, but we all knew. Ramona even went back to school.

People called her Deep Throat behind her back, and sometimes to her face; they called her Ramona Jameson, Ramona Does Dallas. If I were at all tough I would have punched a few lights out, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I mostly stopped going to classes and got high in the woods or in Weinberg’s Jetta. I knew Mike had a copy of the tape.

I’d stopped masturbating entirely. Every time I started I would picture Ramona getting it from behind in her cheerleader outfit. In my head, she would be crying, makeup dripping like blue paint onto the floor, spreading all over the walls and ceiling, tinting everything deep blue, so blue it was almost black.

In real life, she seemed to be handling it okay. She got new friends, bad-girl friends. She was a celebrity. She got to be Lady Macbeth in the school play; everyone said she was right for the part.

I didn’t have much interaction with Ramona or any of them. My mother was busy meditating with her priest, reading poems about ficus trees, telling herself that every living thing dies. She wore Indian saris, and in the evenings she would burn incense. She’d been losing weight. It mostly showed in her face.

One night she came to my room and looked like she was about to say something important, but she just said, “Zachary,” as if it were not yet my name but still a single sperm that had spilled from my father’s body into hers and rattled around like a pinball, or a recurring dream, before settling into that place she no longer had, growing slowly and deliberately of its own accord.

Father Larry gave her a cross. She wore it on a chain around her neck that also had a Star of David and a tiny amethyst. Father Larry held her hand; I was glad he was there. I didn’t know what happened when he was gone, when I went upstairs and my parents were alone together in their bedroom.

At some point, my father returned to his nighttime excursions. He’d stopped for a couple weeks after my mother’s news, but it didn’t take him long to get back to it. Things seemed close to normal. Ramona got a new boyfriend. He was one of the popular kids.

One night, I picked Ramona up from play practice. It was May now, and the stars were almost as bright as the glow-in-the-dark ones on my ceiling. With the window open, you could smell charcoal and propane. The air smelled like baseball; it smelled like what I imagined sex would smell like. I didn’t ask Ramona if I was right.

We drove through the center of town, past the icecream place and the local sports bar. On benches outside the former, middle schoolers sat in gender-segregated groups. They pushed hair from their eyes, inched toward each other like weak magnets. Behind a streetlamp, brave tongues danced beginner’s tangos, shyly at first, gradually growing comfortable, learning to dip and dash, braces clinking and scraping like braking trains.

Next door, on the patio, men loosened ties, wiped frost from their mouths. They held cigarettes at arm’s length so their wives wouldn’t smell it on them. I imagined Ramona was watching them out the window, wondering if her husband would be the same, or if she’d ever have one.

“How’s the play going?” I said.

“It’s whatever,” she said.

We were coming to our street. As I turned the corner I saw my father’s car zip off in the other direction.

“Where do you think he goes?” Ramona said.

“Let’s find out. I’ve seen how they do it in movies. You just have to stay two car lengths behind.”

“He’s getting on the highway,” Ramona said.

We passed a string of side-of-the-road motels. I kept expecting him to pull into one, into a space he knew by heart. Ramona and I would linger in the shadows. A door would fly open. A woman would be standing there, eyes alight, silk robe slipping open. My father would approach; the woman would take him in her arms like he was a lost child. They’d disappear into the room. The blinds would close.

He kept driving. I followed.

“He’s getting off,” I said. We were in Waltham. We got on another, smaller highway heading toward Lexington. In the distance I could see Wal-Lex, a rollerskating rink. Everyone used to have birthday parties there when we were kids. It looked open. I wondered if they got a big nighttime crowd, nostalgic adults skating two by two.

My father signaled and pulled into the Wal-Lex lot.

“Dad’s going rollerskating?” Ramona said.

“Maybe he’s meeting someone here.”

When we got inside it was pretty empty. There was a lone skater, a woman in a low-cut black cocktail dress. At a table, a chubby guy ate pizza and watched her. Everything looked smaller than I remembered.

“Over there,” Ramona said. She was pointing to the arcade area. “I think I just saw him go that way.”

We walked over cautiously, stopping behind a pinball machine to peer out at him. He stood at one of the games. I think it was
Street Fighter II
. From his pocket he pulled rolls of quarters. He rested them in the nook between the screen and joystick.

Dad inserted coins and began to play. His hands moved across the buttons carefully, not desperately like most people’s do. He played the way he stood in the rain, with a focused intensity, unaware of his surroundings, gazing deeply at the pixilated men who tore at each other’s bodies like crazed dancers or violent lovers.