Dear zoe, p.7
Dear Zoe, page 7
every time my Dad shifted. The bus didn’t stop at all until we were down on the level and the sidewalks started in our neighborhood. At one stop, a boy got off and looked back and gave Em a big wave. She lifted her hand but probably not high enough for him to see.
As we got closer to our corner I found myself staring at the back of the bus, not wanting to look anywhere else. When the bus stopped, I put my face in Em’s neck and hugged her to me. Our house was back over my right shoulder and I felt like it was looking at me.
“See you tomorrow, Em.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t worry, okay?”
“Okay.”
I released the buckle and she slid off my lap to the floor.
My Dad said, “Watch the holes,” and she went around them like puddles, down the steep steps and out of the line of sight I was keeping.
She said, “Thanks,” so softly I wasn’t sure I’d even heard it but somehow my Dad did.
“No problem, sweetie. See you tomorrow.” Then I could feel him look at me.
“You sure you don’t want to get out too?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
He waited to make sure Em got in safely, then my Dad wrestled the truck into gear and we headed home.
Jimmy Freeze
It’s weird how I’m starting to feel like you’re grown up. Not on the outside. I still picture you as little. But I feel like I can tell you anything and you’ll understand, even though you never got old enough to know about some of this stuff. Like about Jimmy Freeze.
In our neighborhood you can sit outside on your porch at night or take a walk, even in the summer when everyone’s windows are open, and not hear much of anything except some crickets and once in a while a car going by. But in my Dad’s neighborhood little pieces of people’s lives come at you through all the ratty old screens. Sometimes it’s laughing but usually it’s a television or a stereo turned up really loud or a lot of times it’s yelling. Even though we live in a neighborhood with sidewalks, the houses are a lot farther apart than at my Dad’s and people could probably be as loud as they wanted and you wouldn’t hear them unless you happened to be walking by. It’s weird how it seems like even though people in my Dad’s neighborhood live close enough to touch each other through their windows they don’t care who hears what they’re saying or doing. It’s like the whole street is a dysfunctional family and the houses aren’t really houses but different rooms in one big long house. At first it’s just noise, like the crickets at home only deeper. But after a while your ears get pretty good at sifting through all the racket and picking out something to listen to. Sitting out on my Dad’s porch at night is kind of like having fifteen or twenty stations devoted to reality radio, except there are police sirens about every two minutes. Taking walks is like slow channel surfing. Once, my Dad and I were walking Keisha and Frank and we passed a house where this couple was screaming like they wanted to murder each other and I asked Dad if we should call the police or anything. Mom and David never fought until recently, and even when they do it’s more by not talking so I might be a little naive about stuff like that, but I never heard anyone talk to each other like Dad and I were hearing except in the movies, like in a Mafia film or something where the Italian wife finds out the husband has been keeping an apartment for some girl about eighteen. But my Dad said not to worry. When we passed again half an hour later they sounded like they were making their own porn video. My Dad started walking real fast but you had to be about six not to know what was going on in there.
The other weird thing about my Dad’s neighborhood is that you can almost never see any stars. It’s closer to the city than our house, plus with all the crime in the area they’ve put up enough streetlights to light a parking lot at the mall. That was hard for me to get used to at first because I’m used to seeing stars all the time. Mom and David stenciled the whole sky on my bedroom ceiling when I was about seven with this kit David bought at Nature’s Wonders. Before bed he’d make me lie down and close my eyes while he turned on all the lights in my room to charge up the glow-in-the-dark paint. We’d count to fifty together and then he’d turn them all off and come and lie next to me. When I opened my eyes it was like we were out camping somewhere. He taught me all the constellations and after a while I was able to find them outside too. And not just the ones everybody knows, but other ones like Leo and Gemini and Draco the Dragon. When I asked my Dad if he could ever see stars in his neighborhood, he said, “You mean like movie stars?” and he was serious, so I just said to forget it.
The quietest house on the street was probably my Dad’s next-door neighbor the Freezes. One of the reasons it was so easy to sit on the porch and listen to other people around the neighborhood was that there wasn’t any interference close by. The house on the one side of us was vacant and the Freezes were in the other. They were this older Hungarian couple and even though I never heard of the Hungarian name “Freeze” before, we learned in school last year how lots of families lost their real names at the Statue of Liberty so I guess Freeze is possible. They lived by themselves, or that’s what I thought until one night after I’d been with my Dad for a couple of weeks we heard yelling coming from their house. I was so used to having to listen hard to hear what was going on around us it was weird to have their voices hit us in the side of the head like that. It was mostly Mr. Freeze and another male voice that Dad told me was their son Jimmy, which didn’t make sense to me. I had never actually seen Mrs. Freeze but Mr. Freeze looked like he was about seventy and Jimmy sounded pretty young. Not as young as me maybe, but he didn’t have any of that deep, echoey quality in his voice grown-ups get.
Anyway, Mrs. Freeze was mostly crying while Jimmy Freeze and his Dad went at it and pretty soon Jimmy came flying through the screen door and took all the steps down to the sidewalk at once and headed up the street toward the flaming smokestack. He was tall and thin with curly hair a girl would kill for and his bony elbows flapped like wings when he ran. His house got quiet again and he never came back, at least not while my Dad and I were sitting there.
I fell asleep pretty early that night. Dad and I had to leave the house by 6:45 for him to get me to school on time, which was no picnic for either of us since I get my quality of not being a morning person from him. At about two o’clock in the morning two things woke me up at the same time. One was Frank standing on my chest and breathing in my face and the other was the music coming from the house next door. Once my Dad started selling Frank’s brothers and sisters Frank started sleeping with me like I might be able to protect him. My Dad said nobody wanted the runt but I think he was telling them Frank wasn’t for sale. Anyway, Frank never got up in the night so I guess the music must have woken him before it woke me and he wanted some company dealing with it. I admit I care a lot about what other people think but one thing I will never like no matter how cool it is is rap. I don’t get it and I never will and apparently Frank and I had similar tastes because he was looking about as confused as I’d ever seen him. He kept looking to his left and then back at me for an explanation of the evil spirit that had invaded our walls. I lifted him off my chest and put him under the covers with me and tried to wait it out. If my Dad ever woke up he’d be outside and banging on the Freeze’s door in about eight seconds but my Dad had his usual six beers on the porch and he woke up in the middle of the night exactly never.
The music pounded on my wall for what felt like six hours but was probably twenty minutes before I remembered my window was open and I got up to close it. When I peeked behind the blind I could see Jimmy Freeze’s window just to the right and a little below mine. His blind was pulled too but I could see a dancing blue glow coming out from behind it from a TV or something. The music was so loud I couldn’t believe his parents weren’t making him turn it off. And it was that awful stuff, the really heavy, driving cop-killer stuff no white kid should even be allowed by law to listen to. I mean, you like rap, okay fine, I can deal with that. But you can’t tell me you can relate to some gangbanger if you’re a white kid, even a white kid from my Dad’s crappy neighborhood, so don’t even try to convince me. What he was listening to pissed me off almost as much as the fact that he was blasting it into my room at two A.M. and I got almost mad enough to lean out the window and yell at him myself and I would have if I thought he even had a 1 percent chance of hearing me over the woofers that must’ve been the size of kettledrums. So I just reached up to close the window, knowing it was going to do exactly no good whatsoever, and that’s when I saw the shade flutter and someone walk past and the music stopped. I waited for a minute, my hands were still up over my window, looking at Jimmy Freeze’s shade, and when it fluttered again and the music started again I felt dizzy and I had to lean my head against the screen to keep my balance. Because you’ll never believe what he was playing. It was so out of place my brain refused to recognize it at first, but Jimmy Freeze was playing James Taylor singing “Sweet Baby James.” And he was blasting it just as loud as he’d been blasting DMX a couple of seconds earlier. You know how sometimes when you’re dreaming you can actually figure out you’re dreaming and sort of control the magic for a little while until you’re brain finishes waking up? I started to think that’s what was happening. Because David used to play James Taylor all the time before you died and for a second I thought maybe I was dreaming that he was in the house next door. And since I could control the dream I made it so he was eighteen years old listening to the record by himself without any thoughts of you or me at all, but just using it to fall asleep after a date with a new girl he’d liked for a long time but never asked out before. I always pretended I didn’t like James Taylor but even I had to admit he had about the best voice to fall asleep to I’d ever heard, and David doesn’t play him at all anymore so that made it feel even more like a dream. I closed my window and came out from behind the blind and hurried up and got back into bed like I’d been doing something I shouldn’t. I grabbed Frank and pulled him in with me and we lay there listening together. When the song ended it got quiet for a minute and then it started again. I don’t know when I fell asleep or how many more times it played but I assume he never switched back to the rap because Frank never woke up again. That’s the first night I ever spent with Jimmy Freeze.
My Dad
Being with my Dad every day those first two weeks was a real eye-opener for me, even though I didn’t find everything out right away. I mean, I’m not stupid. I’ve known my Dad was a screwup for a while but I never really knew how he went about it.
He basically does nothing. Not nothing nothing, like sitting around and watching TV, but the kind of nothing that can fill up your whole day. He goes to the gym. He works on whatever vehicle he’s got to keep it mobile. And he always has at least six unfinished projects going on in the house. It used to belong to my Pap, one of his slum rental properties when he and Gram were still married, but when they got divorced they sold all of them except the “best” one, which they gave to my Dad. He says since he doesn’t pay any rent he wants to put all his extra money into “improvements” so he can sell it. Who would want to buy a nice house in his neighborhood I don’t know. He says he wants to buy the empty lot next to my Gram and build a house himself, but if the time it takes him to patch a three-by-three hole in the drywall of the living room is any indication, there’s no rush on the housewarming invitations. He spends a lot of time with his family too. I have eleven cousins from his older brother Tony and his younger sisters Geena and Theresa and I think he goes to every baseball game, wrestling match or school play that one of them’s in. He’s always going over to Gram’s to fix something in her house and when he goes he usually comes home with dinner for both of us. Then he goes out maybe every other evening to make a few deliveries in the truck but never for very long. Getting up early to take me to school was something new for him and you might think he’d find something productive to do with those extra morning hours, but when I asked him once what he did after he dropped me off, he said he crawled into the back of the truck and took a nap and then went to Starbucks. And even though I’d kill for a nap every morning, it was kind of weird to hear a grown-up admit to it without sounding like he felt even a little bit guilty about it.
We fell into a routine pretty quickly but somehow the newness of it helped me, sort of forced me to concentrate on my days in blocks of minutes or hours instead of just letting them pass. I got in the shower at 5:45, stayed there until the hot water ran out, did my makeup, dried my hair, let the dogs out, then woke my Dad at about 6:30. I don’t know why I got ready faster at my Dad’s but I did. We’d eat cereal together with SportsCenter on in the background without saying much of anything. When I think about it, there were a lot of mornings neither of us said a word until we were almost to my school, like even though our bodies were in motion we were both waiting until the last possible minute to admit that the day had actually started. If you were watching us for the first time you might think we were mad at each other but we weren’t. Dad was usually the one to break the silence:
“You got everything you need?”
“Yeah.”
“You do your homework?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Got money for lunch?”
“No.”
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
“Am I picking you up here or at Em’s school?”
“Em’s”
“Three-thirty then?”
“Yeah.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too. Bye.”
“Bye.”
The part about doing my homework was just conversation. He never asked me that question at night. It was weird, though. David rode me all the time about homework and I was always forgetting to do stuff, forgetting about tests. I didn’t do it on purpose, I wasn’t trying to rebel or anything, it just happened. With my Dad it was like I knew he’d never remember to ask so I started remembering on my own. I’m not saying I became a star or anything. My grades had already gone to shit and it was too late to do much about it but at least I didn’t end up having to repeat tenth grade, which for a while was no guarantee let me tell you.
Anyway, he picked me up at the elementary school pretty much every day and he was usually on time, which I knew meant he was trying real hard. Sometimes Em rode the bus home but mostly she came with us. She never looked at my Dad if he was talking to her but she started answering his questions looking out the window and I could tell she was starting to like him. She never asked when I was coming home again until the last day of school, but I’ll tell you about that later.
When Dad and I got home I’d do my homework. My Dad doesn’t have a computer so I couldn’t chat online with my friends and I had to do all my typing in the computer center at school but it wasn’t too bad. Every couple of days before bed I’d call and talk to Mom for a little bit. Once she realized I was staying for a while she started to get real sad on the phone, apologizing all over the place and telling me the thing with Justin was nothing, just something stupid I’d understand someday and not to worry about it. I told her I didn’t leave because of that but I don’t know if she believed me because she kept on saying she was sorry over and over again. I told her she was saying sorry to the wrong person and she got real quiet. Other than that we got along okay.
Most nights my Dad and I just hung out at home, out on the porch or walking the dogs or watching sports or a movie. My Dad never went out at night although I got the feeling that wasn’t always the case because people called all the time and he just told them, No, not tonight, like it was an exception. Sometimes people came to the door, but if it wasn’t family he’d talk to them real low at the door and come back and say it was no one. When I was little and used to sleep over at my Dad’s a lot he always had a girlfriend. It was never the same one for very long and most of them were these total bimbos from the gym who were always trying to bribe me to go to bed early, which they were too stupid to figure out just made me want to stay up later. But there weren’t any girls those first couple of weeks either. It was almost like Dad and I were on vacation together again, somewhere we didn’t know anybody. Although my Dad’s street wasn’t exactly Disney World.
Something else you should know about my Dad is he still keeps the wedding picture of him and Mom on his dresser. You wouldn’t even recognize her. I mean, it’s Mom and she’s still pretty and everything, but not beautiful like now. And she’s so young. Not just young to be getting married, but not much different than some of my friends. It looks like a prom picture more than a wedding picture. My Dad has on this really bad white tux with a ruffled shirt that has a little blue just on the ends of the ruffles and he has all this really curly black hair that must have all fallen out before my first memory of him. Mom’s dress is real simple, just like you’d expect, except she’s so skinny it kind of pooches away from her bony shoulders and it seems like you could look right down at her boobs if you were up above her. Her hair is all Farrah Fawcetty and her head is on my Dad’s shoulder real corny, like you see in the newspaper announcements, and her smile is kind of nervous, especially in her eyes. It looks like she knows she’s making a mistake but she’s just trying to get through the day so she can start figuring out what to do next. Or maybe that’s my imagination since I already know the rest of the story, but I can’t figure out why my Dad would want to look at that picture every day, even if he still loves my Mom, which is something I’m not really sure about. The only thing I can think of is it’s a picture of one of the only really important days of his life and he needs to be reminded that he once did something that was worth doing, even if it didn’t work out so great. I don’t know.
