Election (6 page)

The three days at home had been good for me. I'd discovered this great yoga program on cable, and had learned how to meditate along with the host, the calmest, most sweet-voiced woman in the universe. She told me to imagine my heart as a big red valentine throbbing in my chest, and advised me to release all the negativity I'd allowed to build up inside it. So I did. I let go of my jealousy and anger and need to hurt the people who'd hurt me. Once I did that, there wasn't much reason left for me to even want to be President.

But a funny thing happened that morning when I got back to school. Kids I didn't even know came up and shook my hand, telling me what a cool speech I'd made and how they were definitely going to vote for me. A girl in a wheelchair gave me a thumbs-up. This greasy-haired sophomore arsonist told me I kicked ass. Some of the nicer teachers flashed me sly, private smiles. Mr. Herrera even winked. These two weird freshman guys—bug-eyed Nintendo geeks—invited me to a party they insisted was going to be totally wild.

It was just like the yoga lady said: Expel the negative,
and the positive will come rushing in to fill the void.

IT WAS THE MOST
interesting election I'd seen in my nine years at Winwood. There was a buzz in the hallways, an excitement that couldn't be accounted for solely by the novelty of sibling competition. There was just this sense throughout the whole school that for once we had an election that offered a real choice.

Paul was running as a visual image—the Student as Hero. Idealized in pastel colors, he presided over our corridors like some kind of benevolent, otherworldly spirit. There was something at once comforting and unnerving about those portraits; you'd see people standing in front of them for improbable lengths of time, studying them like paintings in a museum.

Tracy had taken the opposite tack. She seemed to be running not as a student, but as a professional politician. Simple as they were—plain red letters on blue cardboard, the
i
in her last name dotted with a bold white star—her posters had clearly been designed by a graphic artist and manufactured by a printer at no small expense. You got the feeling she was running for State Legislature.

Tammy's posters weren't posters at all, just cryptic messages scribbled on notebook paper, affixed to unlikely surfaces—a file cabinet, the seat of a chair, the inside of a bathroom stall.

“Vote for Tammy,” they might say. “She's inexperienced and kind of lazy.”

Or: “Election? What Election?”

Or: “Go Ahead. Make the Stupid Choice.”

It got to be a little game. You'd walk into a classroom and see the words “Why Not?” scrawled across an otherwise empty blackboard. You'd unscroll your fold-down map of the world and not be surprised to find a pink index card taped to the Horn of Africa, bearing the following statistic: “Two out of three coffee drinkers prefer Tammy to fresh-brewed.” If you saw a wad of paper on the floor, you'd bend down and uncrumple it, just in case.

THE BRUNCH WAS
my father's idea. He'd been feeling isolated and thought it would be good for all of us to get together on neutral ground to celebrate Tammy's birthday.

“We're still a family,” he reminded me. “Whatever happens, we can't let ourselves forget that.”

He told me this in the bedroom living room of his small, mostly unfurnished apartment in Rock Hill Gardens, an ugly complex overlooking the Parkway. I'd stopped in on my way home from Lisa's, as I often did, to watch the ten o'clock news with him on the tiny portable TV Mom used to keep on the kitchen counter.

We'd grown a lot closer since the separation. At home he'd been kind of distant, not really interested in talking about anything but sports. Here, though, maybe
out of guilt or loneliness, he seemed to feel a powerful urge to explain himself, to make me understand the circumstances that had driven him out of our big, comfortable house into this garage-sized studio.

This new phase of our relationship had begun the day I helped him move, against my will and at my mother's insistence. For two hours we lugged boxes and suitcases and household furnishings from the parking lot to the apartment, communicating in our everyday language of grunts and gestures, with a few words tossed in to avoid confusion. We were grappling with the dead weight of his new mattress when he looked at me, his face pink with effort, and said something totally unexpected.

“No one knows what love is,” he told me. “If someone says they do, they're full of shit.”

I didn't reply. We steered the mattress through the doorway, letting it fall with a muffled
whump
to the carpeted floor.

“Some people think it's a plant you have to water,” he went on, checking to see if I was paying attention. “I believe your mother subscribes to this metaphor.” He hesitated. “You know what a metaphor is, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little surprised to hear a word like that coming out of his mouth.

“Most people use metaphors to talk about love and that's why they get it wrong. It's physical, Paul. It's a
feeling you carry around in your body. I'd lost that with your mother.”

I stared down at my sneakers, as though trying to see through them to the clenched toes inside. It didn't seem possible that he was telling me this, any more than it seemed possible that he had actually traded Mom for Mrs. Stiller. Mom was slender and quiet, a pretty, thoughtful woman with a soft laugh. And Mrs. Stiller…

“She's fat.” I just blurted it out. My father's girlfriend was a loud fat woman who sold real estate.

He nodded. “I thought I'd be disgusted by her body, but I wasn't.” His eyes grew slitlike as he gnawed on a thumbnail. “I was moved, Paul. By the sight of her.”

I stood there, trying to breathe. My lungs didn't seem to be working right.

“She's gross,” I said. “She's a fat fucking pig.”

He took a step in my direction. I wanted to make him mad, but it wasn't working. This crooked little smile started to take shape on his face.

“You know what? She doesn't eat any more than you or me. She's just heavy. There's nothing she can do about it.”

He reported this to me as though it were some marvelous fact, something I'd want to share with my friends.

“Heavy?” I said. “She's a fucking sumo wrestler.”

I tried to say something else about what a tub of
fucking lard she was, but I was too busy choking back sobs. My father moved closer, laying one hand on top of my shoulder. He put his arm around me and pulled me against his chest. He smelled the way he had the last time I'd hugged him, way back in third or second grade.

I HADN'T GONE
out in a long time, and Mom was all excited, like it was prom night or something. She supervised my hair and kept trying to get me to change into a dress.

“Mom,” I said. “Would you get real? These guys play Nintendo like nineteen hours a day. I'll be overdressed if my socks match.”

“Are they cute?”

“Cute?” I clutched my head. “These guys sleep in their clothes, Mom.”

She waved her hands in surrender.

“All right, all right. Forget I even asked.” She started backing out of the room, but stopped in the doorway to offer one last piece of advice. “Believe me, honey. A little lipstick never hurt anyone.”

So I put on some lipstick, just to make her happy. It didn't look bad, though I might've cared a little more if
there'd been someone in the world I wanted to kiss who had the slightest desire to kiss me back.

The party was across town, and Mom had enlisted Paul to drop me off on his way to Lisa's and pick me up on the way home. He was waiting in the living room with his coat on, impatiently tapping his foot. He jumped up when he saw me, and told me I looked great. Being in love had turned him into a much nicer person.

“Doesn't she?” Mom smiled, brand-new wrinkles tugging at the corners of her eyes and mouth. “Your baby sister's growing up.”

She kissed us goodbye and stood alone beneath the porch light, waving as we backed out of the driveway.

“Poor Mom,” I said.

Paul nodded, frowning as he wiggled the gearshift. He'd only been driving for a couple of months.

“I wish she'd get out more,” he said. “Meet some new people. Lisa's mom belongs to a singles' group. She's out on a date tonight.”

“Really?” I tried not to sound too interested. “What are you guys doing?”

He shrugged. “Hang out. Maybe watch some TV.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes, long enough for me to realize that it was the first time we'd ever been alone in a car. It was amazing in a quiet way, the kind of moment we couldn't have even imagined as little kids, pinching and tickling each other in the backseat. On
long drives I used to fall asleep with my head in his lap. Sometimes, out of the blue like that, even when I was mad at him, I'd suddenly remember that Paul was my brother and I loved him. He looked at me, almost like he could read my mind.

“You know that brunch tomorrow?”

“Yeah?”

“You mind if I bring Lisa?”

The speedometer glowed on the dashboard, a ring of luminous green.

“Do what you want.”

We turned down Grove and stopped in front of number 71.1 unbuckled my seat belt and reached for the door handle.

“Hey,” he said. “Whatever happened with you two anyway? ”

“Why don't you ask her?”

“I do. She never answers.”

FOR SIX OR SEVEN MONTHS
Diane and I had been trying to get pregnant, dancing to the joyless tune of calendar and thermometer. On doctor's orders, I traded in my briefs for boxers, which I found uncomfortable, and we restricted ourselves to the sexual positions most
likely to facilitate conception (not that we'd been that wild to begin with). When it was over, Diane lay perfectly still for ten minutes, hugging her knees to her chest as she visualized the hoped-for collision between sperm and egg.

All that hard work took its toll. Despite my wife's misgivings, I found it increasingly difficult to perform on demand for several consecutive nights without the aid and inspiration of dirty magazines. It wasn't that Diane objected to pornography on feminist grounds; she just disliked comparing herself to the women in the pictures, whose bodies seemed to her so effortlessly and inhumanly beautiful. After a few inconclusive fights, we struck a tacit bargain, whereby I was allowed to consult my magazines as long as she could pretend not to know about it. Practically speaking, this meant that I spent a lot of time in the bathroom right before sex, trying to coax myself into the right frame of mind.

And sometimes even that wasn't enough. After losing my erection on a couple of occasions, I took the advice of a TV sexologist and began fantasizing about women other than my wife. One night it would be Ellen DiNardo, the sexy new art teacher, and the next it would be Michelle Pfeiffer, or Mary Tyler Moore in her incarnation as Laura Pétrie.

One night, shortly after the Candidate Assembly, as Diane impassively spread her legs, I closed my eyes and
pretended she was Tracy Flick. The fantasy was vivid and explosive; we were fucking without tenderness beneath the bleachers during an important football game, the noise of the crowd barely muffling our animal grunts and exchanges of foul language. Skirt pulled up, tights yanked down, she thrashed her head from side to side on the confetti-speckled pavement, arching her hips to meet my powerful thrusts. I came with a series of violent shudders that racked my whole body. I was barely finished when Diane shoved me off of her, drawing her knees to her chest as the doctor had instructed. I rolled onto my back, raggedly panting, my skin filmy with sweat. Diane turned her head and studied me with what I took to be mild interest.

“Jim,” she said, “would you turn on Jay Leno?”

A PRETTY GIRL
I'd never seen before answered the door and took my coat.

“I'm Dana,” she said; “Jason's my stepbrother.”

Jason Caputo and Lance Breezey, the Nintendo geeks, were in the living room, drinking beer and playing Super Mario Brothers. It didn't seem like much of a party.

“Am I early?”

Lance shook his head, working the controls with furious concentration. All sorts of annoying sounds emerged from the TV as the little cartoon men jumped and shot fireballs.

“You're right on time,” he assured me.

“Where's everyone else?”

Jason looked at me for the first time since I'd arrived, his excited face opening into a slow, crazy-eyed smile. His hair was a mess of cowlicks, his pink and green rugby shirt too tight even for his painfully thin body. He looked like he'd just rolled out of bed after a long illness.

“You
are
everyone else,” he told me. “We wanted to keep things intimate.”

I followed Dana into the kitchen, surprised that a dork like Jason could even have a stepsister as cool as her, a girl you wouldn't have been surprised to see dancing on MTV, her body loose, her face a mask of sultry boredom. She wore baggy overalls and a tight, striped jersey that didn't reach her navel. Her dark straight hair fell at a severe angle across one eye.

“I'm glad you came,” she said, grimacing as she twisted the cap off a beer bottle. “Those two drive me crazy after a while.”

“Where do you go to school?” I asked.

She handed me the beer. “Immaculate Mary.”

“Do you like it?”

“It's okay. At least we don't have to go through the
bullshit with the makeup and clothes every day. You can show up looking like a wreck and nobody even cares.”

I took a tiny sip of beer, holding my breath so I didn't have to taste it.

“You wear uniforms?”

“Yeah.” She pushed the hair out of her face, momentarily exposing a large shapeless birthmark spreading from her cheekbone to her forehead. It was amazing how thoroughly it was concealed by her haircut. “Blue knee socks, gray skirts, white blouses. Five days a week. And saddle shoes.”