The Affinities (5 page)

Hi Adam. My name is Lisa and I'm hosting the next Tau get-together. You'll be invited in a general mailing, but since you're new I wanted to introduce myself and make the invitation personal. The time is two Saturdays from now. Show up at 4 if you want to help set up, 6 if you want dinner, 8 if you just want to socialize. The tranche house is close to the Rosedale subway station and details will be in the mailing. Anyhow, please come!!! The first meet-up always seems intimidating but it's really not, take my word for it. Can't wait to meet you!

It was nice, and under other circumstances I would have welcomed it. But given the question mark hovering over my future, I had to send a noncommittal response.

*   *   *

I grieved for Grammy Fisk in my sleep that night. I couldn't grieve by daylight because she wasn't dead. But in my dream the loss was complete. I woke up calling her name. No one heard me, fortunately, and the sound of the wind at the window was lonely but oddly comforting, and eventually I was able to drift back to sleep.

*   *   *

Grammy Fisk's presence had operated in the family the way carbon rods function in a nuclear reactor: she damped down a potentially explosive force and turned it to useful work. Without her, we were bound to reach critical mass. The unstable radioactive core was, of course, my father.

But most of my week in Schuyler passed relatively quietly. Each day began with a trek to the hospital, some visits longer than others because my father was getting briefings about options for Grammy Fisk's extended care, either in a dedicated facility or at home (an option he ruled out pretty quickly). The sessions by Grammy Fisk's bedside grew more brief as the reality of her situation began to sink in.

She never registered our presence in any meaningful way. Her eyes were motionless behind the papyrus of her eyelids. Still, I talked to her. I told her about school, I shared my ambivalence about Jenny and our future, I even mentioned the Affinity I'd joined. These were the kinds of things I had once discussed with her and with no one else. Sitting beside her vacant body, I was able to imagine her responses. She spoke to me the only way she could, through the medium of memory and longing.

I also made a point of spending time with my stepbrother, Geddy. Grammy Fisk would have approved, but I didn't need to be pushed. I liked Geddy. At twelve, he was chubby and quiet and easily intimidated and more bookish than he liked to let on, all of which reminded me of how I had been at his age. (Except for the chubbiness: I had been one of those kids who needs to be encouraged to eat.) On the Wednesday before I left, Geddy took me up to his room to see the posters Mama Laura had grudgingly allowed him to tack up on the wall.

Geddy would probably have placed on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, had he ever been diagnosed. His serial obsessions (which included kites, architecture, LEGO, stories about heroic animals, and the band My Chemical Romance) were what he preferred to talk about, which was why my father had banned all these subjects as dinner table conversation. The posters Geddy had been allowed to put up were a picture of Rockefeller Center (“It was designed by the architect Raymond Hood. He also did the Tribune Tower in Chicago.”) and a concert photo of Gerard Way. A small wooden bookcase housed his subscription copies of
Popular Mechanics
, the only magazine my father let him read, and a few ancient Albert Payson Terhune novels, also donated by my father. In one corner was the meticulously tidy desk on which Geddy did his homework. He owned a laptop for school purposes, but he was allowed Internet access only an hour a day and under supervision. He cherished an old click-wheel iPod, which neither my father nor Mama Laura had yet learned how to police for forbidden files, loaded with slightly out-of-date goth and emo bands.

At one point Geddy said he wished he had more bookcases and more books to put on them. I guessed he was getting a little tired of Terhune's collies. But he didn't have unguarded access to downloads, and I knew from experience how difficult it was to buy and keep paperbacks without my father's surveillance. “Geddy,” I said. “You want to see something?”

He shrugged and stared, which meant
yes
.

The house had an old-fashioned attic, with a ladder you tugged down from the ceiling of the third-floor hallway. The attic was the family's memory hole, rarely visited. We waited until the coast was clear, then clambered up the ladder. The attic was where I kept books during my adolescence, hidden in the far corner of the room, where the roof slanted down to the floor, under a layer of exposed pink fiberglass insulation.

The books I stashed there had never been discovered, and Geddy's eyes widened when he saw them. Their spines were curved and in some cases broken—they were mostly used books from a secondhand shop on Main, now closed—but the colors were bright, the covers intact. Nothing special, mostly science fiction and mysteries straight out of the fifty-cent bin. But Geddy gave me an awed look. “Can I see them?”

“See them, read them—whatever you want, bro.”

“But they're yours!”

“I'm finished with them. You can have them if you want.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Just don't get caught. But if you do, it's okay to blame me. I'm the one who brought them into the house.”

It was as if I had offered him a cache of jewels. It was funny but sad, the gratitude that came brimming out of his eyes.
They're just old books
, I wanted to say. But that would have been disingenuous. There were some good stories in there. Stories big enough to hide inside. And I imagined Geddy needed all the hiding places he could find.

*   *   *

The family achieved critical mass the night before I left.

That afternoon, driving back from the hospital with Aaron while the rest of the family rode in my father's big-ass Navigator, I had raised the subject of the family's finances. I was under no illusion that my brother had my best interests at heart. Aaron was five years older than me, more athletic, better-looking, arguably smarter, and a vastly better exemplar of what my father considered the family's core values. He could also be a colossal dick. But I needed to know what was going on, and I thought I might get a slightly more objective answer from Aaron than I would by asking my father.

“The thing is,” I said, “I'm going to need to know about tuition and expenses for next year. I have arrangements to make.”
Or not make.

“You'll have to talk to Dad about that. But this isn't a good time for him. So be considerate, Adam. You're not the only one who loved Grammy Fisk. Dad didn't always see eye-to-eye with her, but she's his mother. And basically, he's lost her. It would pretty callous to start talking about money at this point.”

“I know. Obviously. But—”

“And it's not just that. The business is looking a little shaky these days. We've got the crisis in the Gulf pushing gas prices up, which means cartage costs are killing us. Farms aren't upgrading equipment, and we've got chain stores undercutting us everywhere. I mean, it's fucking ruthless out there. We'll survive, I think, but we're on real slim margins. As for the family, if Grammy has to go into a full-time care facility, that's going to be a gigantic expense.”

I told him I knew all that and understood it. I just needed a heads-up on my own future.

“Well, true,” he admitted. “And it would help clarify things for Jenny, too.”

“Jenny?”

“Yeah, Jenny. Sooner or later you're gonna need to fish or cut bait, Adam. No offense.”

Jenny and I had been friends since grade school, but we weren't engaged, though Aaron and my father may have drawn their own conclusions. I was far from sure I wanted to marry Jenny, and I wasn't sure Jenny wanted to marry me. In fact we had avoided the subject as if it were radioactive.

And I resented Aaron for pressing me on it. But it was true that Jenny had an interest in knowing what was in store. “Then I should talk to the old man tonight,” I said.

“Okay … but cut him some slack, is all I'm saying. You might not like what you hear, but he'll be honest with you, give him that.”

I gave him that.

*   *   *

But in the end it wasn't my financial problems that pushed us into a meltdown, it was Geddy—or my father's contempt for him.

The weather had been warm and sunny for a couple of days now, and Aaron had proposed a family barbecue as a therapeutic change from hospital cafeteria meals. So my father stoked the grill, lofting clouds of fragrant hydrocarbons over the grassy plain of the backyard, and Mama Laura brought out slabs of raw ground beef from the kitchen on a plastic platter. Geddy, in his bathing suit, had been running through the sprinkler as it watered the lawn. My father watched him with a somber expression. And when Geddy came running over to check the progress of the hamburgers, my father said, “Laura, look at the boy. Look at your son there.”

Mama Laura turned to see. “What about him? Come here, Geddy. I'll fix you a burger soon as they're ready.”

“He's almost thirteen years old. Pardon my French, but it looks like he's growing himself a fine pair of boobs. Is that normal?”

Geddy had an amazing ability to go stone-faced and silent when confronted with criticism, but he was self-conscious about his weight and this one took him by surprise. His face turned red, then white. I saw the tendons stand up in his neck as his jaw clenched. Impressively, he managed not to cry.

Mama Laura winced. “He's a little portly but it's just baby fat.”

“You should get his hormones checked. See if he's normal.”

I said, “Of course he's
normal
.”

My father shot me a hostile glare. Aaron, across the patio table from me, rolled his eyes:
Oh fuck, here it comes.

“Is that your diagnosis?” my father asked. “What happened, did you get a medical degree without me knowing about it?”

For most of my life I had revered or feared my father, depending on his moods or mine. Even after I grew out of the fear, I never argued with him. It had never seemed worth the trouble. And Grammy Fisk had always been there to rein him back when he stepped out of bounds. He would never have said what he just said had Grammy been at the table with us.

“Get on inside,” Mama Laura told Geddy in a tight voice. “Put on a shirt for supper. Something short-sleeved out of your closet. Go on now. Go.”

Geddy hurried into the house, shoulders hunched.

My father dug a spatula under a beef patty and turned it. “Thank you for your opinion,” he said to me. “Not that I asked for it.”

“You humiliated him.”

“You think I hurt his feelings?”

“You think you
didn't
?”

“And do you imagine that boy can go through life without getting his feelings hurt once in a while? He needs toughening up if he's ever going to make it through school. I guess you think you're protecting him—”

“I guess I'm thinking I shouldn't have to.”

“What you
have
to do is show some respect. We need to get that straight, if you're coming back to Schuyler.”

And I said, “Am I coming back to Schuyler?”

“Aaron told me you talked to him about this. You know the situation, Adam. Your grandmother had some money, and that worked out to your benefit—and that's fine, but whatever Grammy had tucked in the bank needs to help with her expenses now. I know we've disagreed on certain things, you and I, but I also know you're not selfish enough to want that money for yourself. So I'm afraid you're homeward bound, unless you can make some other arrangement on your own hook. And you're welcome here and always will be. But that doesn't entitle you to pass judgment on me. Not when I'm setting the table you're eating from. Which is what we need to do right now. Laura, pass out the paper plates. Everybody line up! Aaron, get the corn out of the boiler.”

Mama Laura, who had sat through all this with an inscrutable expression and her small fists clenched, said, “Shouldn't we wait for Geddy?”

“Once he's in his room it can be hard to pry him out,” my father said.

So I offered to go get him.

I found Geddy on his bed with his face buried in a pillow. He sat up and wiped his eyes when I came in. I helped him change into jeans and a fresh shirt. Then I took him out to the KFC on Main Street. I figured that way we could eat without choking on the food.

*   *   *

At the restaurant I told Geddy a secret: my father had asked the same question (
Is that normal?
) about me. More than once.

I had never carried the kind of extra weight Geddy did, and boob-droop had not been among my otherwise comprehensive suite of adolescent concerns. But there had been plenty of
is-this-normal
moments when I was growing up. My incessant reading of books, my disinterest in high school sports. My father had never quite accused me of being (to use his word of preference) “queer,” but that inference had never been far away. I was not, as it happened, queer (at least, not in the sense he intended), but neither was I what he believed or expected any son of his should be. And for him, that was a distinction without a difference.

“Did he hate you?” Geddy asked.

“He doesn't hate either of us. He just doesn't understand us. People like us make him uncomfortable.”

“Is that a thing?”

“What?”

“People like us. Are there people like us?”

“Well, yeah. Of course there are,” I said.

And Geddy beamed at me. It was a little heartbreaking, how badly he wanted it to be true.

*   *   *

I left Schuyler the same night. Only Jenny Symanski (and Geddy, of course) seemed genuinely sorry to see me go. Jenny wrapped her arms around me and we exchanged a kiss, sincere enough that Mama Laura blushed and looked away.