Absolute Brightness (16 page)

My head was buzzing and my mouth tasted sweet and sour at the same time. I thought I might throw up right there behind the exhausted azaleas, but then I would have to get up and go somewhere else, and I didn't know where else I could go. So I grabbed a handful of dirt with each fist and squeezed it tighter and tighter. I squeezed it so tight that soon the pain in my hands was greater than the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

How could she? How could she have made up a story like that just to get Dad in trouble? Even after Dad set Chuck straight, explaining that sometimes ex-wives can be pretty brutal, Chuck would have Dad's name in his blue binder. Jim Hertle would become a part of Phase Two whether we liked it or not.
What a performance
, I thought. Tears were a nice touch. I knew Mom hated Dad, but I had no idea that she was capable of this. No wonder she didn't want Deirdre “present.” Deirdre would have flatly denied everything and exposed Mom for the vindictive and spiteful person that she had revealed herself to be. But like she said, you live with a person, you find out they're capable of something and you can't help wondering what else you don't know about them.

 

eleven

“THAT YOU?” SAID
Chrissie Bettinger's voice through the sad little copper grating of the intercom in Dad's apartment building.

“It's me,” I said. “Phoebe.”

“Your dad's not here.”

“'S okay. Can I come up and maybe wait for him?”

I guess she was busy weighing the pros and cons of my presence inside her apartment or maybe she was checking out her surroundings to see if the place was presentable for an unannounced visitor. In any case, there was a longish pause before she buzzed me in.

Dad and Chrissie lived in a third-floor studio apartment. It was the kind of place where all you could do was look out the window and wish you were someplace else. The view of the parking lot was not at all impressive. Once I was inside the room, Chrissie offered me a seat and asked if I wanted a Diet Coke. What could I say?

“Sure,” I replied as I pushed aside a stack of outdated style magazines featuring B celebrities with unflattering hairstyles and failed relationships. I took a seat at the table with the turquoise top and the chrome legs. It used to be
our
kitchen table. Years ago when I was just a kid, before Mom had redecorated and relegated the thing to our basement, I'd eaten all my meals off that shiny tabletop. I'd spilled drinks there, banged fists, shed tears.

Chrissie kept her eye on me all the way to the refrigerator and never stopped talking. She'd probably heard all about how I had gotten into the habit of stealing stuff right after my dad ran off, and she was afraid I'd lift one of her semivaluable knickknacks when her back was turned. But her kind of stuff was the kind I didn't steal, which is to say that I never stole people's personal stuff.

The mall was where I went to pocket makeup and underwear and the occasional food item. It was all just crap and I could've bought it all three times over. I had the money. It's not like I was poor. I don't know why I did it, really. Maybe it was the thrill, the feeling that I was getting away with something that I knew was wrong. Maybe Leonard was right; maybe I was just hoping to get caught. In any case, when I finally did get caught stealing a pair of earrings from the Dressbarn, they called Mom. She was pissed that she had to come pick me up, sit in an airless office, and discuss her children with people she didn't know from Adam. I pretended like it was my first time and explained to everyone that I'd stolen the earrings to make up for the loss of my father. Mom didn't buy it, but she recognized that my excuse was going over big with the gal in the polyester skirt who was presiding over the whole affair, so she shook her head thoughtfully and said, “It's been a year of a lotta loss for us.” We drove home in silence, but when we got home, Mom gave me a good talking to about how I could jeopardize my future and the family reputation. It didn't stop me from stealing, but still, never in a million years would I have taken one of Chrissie's knickknacks.

Chrissie had a thing for porcelain dolls, china horses, multicolored blown-glass clowns, small statuettes of Indian gods and goddesses, plaster angels, paperweights, and perfume bottles in the shape of antique cars—all of it basically junk. But the way she had arranged the stuff on a series of shelves almost tricked you into believing there was something there worth admiring.

The same could not be said for Chrissie herself; she obviously put all her effort into her knickknacking. I knew for a fact that Chrissie considered herself a dead ringer for Julia Roberts. But even if Julia had been contracted to play a piece of Jersey trash who had stolen someone else's husband, she would've never smoked Newports or kept Cheez Whiz in her fridge, and she certainly wouldn't have answered the door wearing a tie-dyed halter top, cutoff jeans, and no shoes.

Chrissie had been one of Mom's “helpers” at the salon. She started out as a part-time shampooer, worked her way up to doing comb-outs, and then made a name for herself as an ace blow-dryer. For a while there was talk about her applying for her license and taking over the spare chair in the salon. But then Dad started fooling around with Chrissie, and that changed everything for everyone.

For a while, Mom was about the only person in Neptune who was unaffected by the change; she kept insisting that there was a big misunderstanding about exactly which Chrissie everyone was talking about.

“Not
my
Chrissie,” she would say. “That could never happen. No. Remember, I gave Chrissie her first job.”

Also, as it turned out, her first serious relationship.

Especially in the early stages, Mom maintained a level of denial that was truly impressive. When someone said that they had spotted the two of them together walking out of the multiplex on a Friday night, Mom considered it a coincidence. When someone saw Dad pumping gas into Chrissie's Honda Civic down at the Mobil station on Division Street, Mom held to the idea that her husband was just being a Good Samaritan. Her behavior was the stuff that keeps daytime talk shows on the air.

Deirdre and I knew better. Chrissie had once confessed to us that she thought our dad was “hot.” After that, I kept an eye on Chrissie. And Dad. Every time he entered the salon, I couldn't help noticing how Chrissie perked up, fluffed out her dyed-red hair, expanded her bustline, and bared her teeth in an effort to attract. It was like watching one of those nature programs on public television where the bizarre mating habits of some forest-dwelling female primate seem perfectly understandable to her male counterpart, while to us they just seem gross.

Dad was acting pretty weird as well. He signed up at a gym and actually went. Who knows what tortures he submitted himself to there, but when he came home, looking exhausted and invigorated at the same time, he went on and on about the virtues of a good workout and how it was just the thing he'd been missing in his life.

Mom couldn't see what was going on; she didn't want to. I was only twelve at the time, and even then I knew that forcing her to face the truth wasn't a good idea. It was June, and she was up to her eyeballs in other people's French twists, baby's breath, and mother-of-the-bride anxiety. June is traditionally the biggest month for weddings, and weddings are the most compelling reason for a new hairdo. There was a lot of traffic in and out of Hair Today around that time, so it wasn't surprising that Mom didn't have five minutes to sit down and talk sensibly with us. Even so, we knew that she was still months away from revising her opinion of Dad. She needed him to be his old self in order for her to complete her idea of herself, in the same way she needed us to shut up about what was happening so she could get on with the business at hand. Her eyes were closed to anything that didn't support her public point of view about our family life and her business; and her point of view was that everything was just fine.

At the time, Deirdre and I made the fatal mistake of letting things run their own course. But if there's one thing I've learned during my years on this planet, it is this: If things are allowed to run their own course, they will definitely go in a downhill direction.

And sure enough, that's what happened. One hot night in August, there was a big fight that involved tears, slammed doors, and a broken floor lamp. Dad left the house. Mom packed his stuff in boxes, and the next day she left it all sitting on the front lawn to be picked up at his earliest convenience. This was major. I tried to understand what was happening, but at the time, adults seemed directed by passions and logic that couldn't exactly be explained by my then-favorite authors. I felt like I was in over my head. Only the melodramatic goings-on of
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë came close; but without the nineteenth-century setting and consumption and wild dogs baying at the moon on the untamed moors, Mom and Dad seemed like amateurs who couldn't hold a candle to Cathy and Heathcliff. They were just Jim and Ellen, another unhappy New Jersey couple headed for divorce court.

Deirdre did nothing to help me get a grip on the situation. She removed herself from the scene, sulked in her room, and told me to stay out of it. Mom cried, got angry, and by mid-September had fallen into a major depression. For the first time in my life, I could sit in the living room and read a book for hours without being disturbed. Rather than making me happy, however, this only made me sad and caused me to wonder what the hell had happened to my family. I wanted the old life back. I wanted Dad.

A month later, Mom got out of bed and made up her mind to go on. If anyone dared to mention Dad's name in her presence, she simply smiled. If that didn't work, she increased her wattage and blinded them with her positive attitude about her new life. This had the desired effect of dissuading people from ever bringing up his name and convincing them that maybe it was a good thing, after all, that she was rid of the guy.

Chrissie went on to become famous in certain circles. She was branded “a home wrecker,” and though it marked the end of her career as a hair stylist, she landed a well-paying job as a cocktail waitress at a dive called Jeepers that was situated right off the Parkway.

Because Dad had set everyone's unhappiness in motion, he couldn't offer much in the way of comfort; and since he wasn't around, he was no help in sorting things out. He stayed away and was very slow at returning my calls. Once when I ran into him by accident at the 7-Eleven, he jotted down his new address on a paper napkin and slipped it to me just in case I should ever need it. Each time I considered traveling the fourteen blocks to his new apartment building, however, I felt like a total traitor and scrapped the idea. What would I have said to him anyway? Begged him to come home? Told him to leave Chrissie? None of it made sense, and so in time I learned to keep him out of my mind and just go about my business. But that day my business led me straight to him. I thought that if I could just see his face, I would be able to tell what was what and if Mom had been telling the truth.

*   *   *

“How's school?” Chrissie asked, handing me a Diet Coke in a can.

“Over,” I said.

“Oh. Right,” she replied. “I'd ask how things are at home, but I better not 'cause that's prob'ly why you're here. 'M I right?”

I stared at her painted toenails, a deep shade of purple and definitely do-it-yourself.

“When's my dad coming home?” I asked her.

“He should be home any minute.”

The TV news was reporting on some fourteen-year-old boy over in Oaklyn who had just been caught with an arsenal of weapons under his bed and a plan to kill a lot of people. Some gal with a blond pixie cut and puffed bangs was arching her eyebrows at us and saying how the boy had been plotting for six months and was discovered “in the nick of time.” The subtitle read
PLOT FOILED
. The father of the boy was up next.

After the commercial, the father's big face appeared on the screen, and he began telling us that his son was a nice, normal kid who hung out in his room playing with the computer most of the time. Then they showed the arsenal of weapons hidden under the boy's bed—pistols, rifles, knives, hunting gear, and two thousand rounds of ammo.

“Isn't he usually home by now?” I asked Chrissie.

“He'll be here.”

She jumped up and went into the other room (the bathroom), but I could still hear her loud and clear.

“Wanna paint your nails? What's your favorite color? I'm crazy about this purple. Deadly Nightshade, it's called.”

I could tell she wanted to chitchat and possibly even bond with me over girl stuff like nothing ever happened between us, as though we weren't enemies at all. But I couldn't let that happen. Not for a minute.

As she placed her tragic little plastic carryall of nail supplies between us on the table, I said, “What's the story with your hair?”

She looked at herself in the full-length mirror that was propped up against the wall.

“Why? What's wrong with it?”

I told her all about Leonard's hair theory, about how a woman just keeps repeating the same hairstyle from a time in her life when she was at her peak in order to make herself appear younger than she really is. I also explained to her that because I hadn't yet reached my heyday, I was still totally at liberty to experiment, try out different looks. But judging from
her
hair, I told her, I figured that maybe 1990 or '91 had been her really good year.

“You don't like me, do you?” she remarked.

Just then Dad's key turned in the lock. For once he got the timing right. Up until that moment I hadn't realized how much I missed the sound of his bag dropping in the hallway or his casually kicking off his shoes. I wanted to run to him and throw my arms and legs around his body, burrow my head into his all-day work smell, and feel the scratch and tickle of his beard against my neck.