either, the story may be all over the school population by now, courtesy of instant messaging. “Actually, there was an incident.” How to present this to minimize Jesse’s disapproval? “Nothing major.”
He covers his face with his hands. “Fucked for life, that’s what I am. Fucked for life, because my mom had to go and volunteer at the dance.”
“Calm down. All that happened was that I told Spencer McKay to hide when I found him in the girls’ washroom dealing dope and Mr. Harkness was around the corner.” Much as I want it to, this summary does not sound like a description of nothing.
“Are you kidding me? What do you mean that’s all that happened? What more could have happened?”
I could have beckoned Harkness over is what, and said, “I think we’ve got a live one here,” Spencer could have been suspended and/or handed over to the police along with tough cookie Jill, parents could have been called, and endless earnest discussions about drug use could have ensued, and I had prevented all that, more credit to me. I say, “You’ve still never smoked dope?”
“It’s called weed, Em. And no, I haven’t. I don’t drink, either.”
We drive on a minute in silence. “Why not?”
“Shut up.”
“No, really. If everyone else is doing it, why don’t you?”
“You know why — because I’m an athlete.”
I should be happy that Jesse’s dedication to athleticism has given him a reason not to drink and smoke, but how long can he resist what I think of as the inevitable rites of teenage passage? Rites I underwent repeatedly at his age.
He says, “I’d better stay home from school tomorrow, so I don’t have to see anyone who was at the dance.”
“You’re overreacting. I’m sure it’s all forgotten now. And would you prefer that I’d ratted him out?”
I wish I’d used a different expression, one that sounds less like Edward G. Robinson issue, but he doesn’t mock me for it or complain. Instead, he ejects his CD from the car stereo player, says, “You can put your classical shit back on,” places his CD into his Discman, plugs his headphones in, and turns up the volume, shuts me out.
A few minutes later, I reach inside my jacket pocket for a tissue, touch something unexpected, examine it with my fingers inside the pocket, mutter, “What’s this?” Luckily, Jesse’s music is playing too loud for him to hear me, so I don’t have to explain that what I’m touching feels like a foil packet about two inches long and one wide. Luckily, I have the presence of mind to leave the mystery packet in my pocket. If it’s what I think it is, it can only have been placed there by Spencer.
The packet burns a hole in my mind all the way home and is still giving off heat when we go inside the house. Jesse heads up to his room right away, and when I can hear his music playing and know he’s settled in at his computer, I deke into the kitchen with my jacket still on, pull out the packet, unwrap the foil, count three thin, neatly rolled joints, and wrap them back up. I hide them in a deep green ceramic vase that has stood untouched on a high shelf for months. I could flush the contraband down a toilet or bury it deep inside a garbage bag, but my subconscious murmurs that the painkilling effects of weed might one day be of help with my frozen shoulder. And my immediate objective is to keep from Jesse any reminder of my collusion with Spencer.
Soon after, Jesse forgives me for the dance incident; that is, he forgives me after he chats online with friends and finds out that the main gossip story of the night did not involve my actions or inactions but was about two boys who had a fistfight, during which wannabe thug x had metaphorically kicked wannabe thug y’s ass by bloodying his nose. According to eye-witness accounts, Harkness, ever ready to face conflict and terror, stepped into the fray and his shirttails became untucked, and oh, the drama.
The threat of social ostracism due to my parenting removed for the moment, Jesse resumes his normal behaviour. He drops his clothes and belongings all over the house, is appreciative of the chicken cacciatore I made him for dinner, and spends two hours on his computer doing thirty minutes’ worth of math to the accompaniment of loud hip hop music. At one point, he entreats me to enter his room and listen to a song when I pass by in the hall, and he hugs me — payment for my servitude — when I bring him the fresh pineapple and cut-up apple he requests as a post-dinner snack.
At ten-thirty, when I remind him it’s bedtime, he’s watching television. He tells me to chill and let him watch one more play — always one more play, one more possession, one more batter, one more pitch, to the end of the quarter, there’s less than a minute left, see? — and when we’ve watched the one more together, he gets up, brushes his teeth, goes to his room, dives into bed, and waits for me to come say good night like I’ve done every night since he was a baby.
I stand in his doorway and lift my bad arm, reach up and stretch it in the doorframe, try to breathe through the ache. “Did you get all your homework done?”
“Most of it. I can finish my reading for English at lunch tomorrow. Or in my history class. The history teacher’s boring as shit, anyway.”
“That’s an excellent plan. Maybe you can save more time by eating your breakfast in the shower. Or sleeping there.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm, Em.”
“What do you have left to do?”
“Read another chapter of The Catcher in the Rye. I read some of it on the plane.”
“How are you liking it so far?”
“I can’t stand the guy. What a boring wuss.”
Such is parenthood: a favourite, formative novel from my youth, one of the few books I read in an English class that I liked, is to Jesse boring, its hero weak.
I don’t know why I bother, but I say, “Holden Caulfield is considered to be one of the truest voices in American literature.”
“True to who? Weird loners everywhere?”
Well, yes.
I wasn’t always a loner. In high school I had a set of equally alienated friends to get stoned with on weekend nights, in university I found fellow students who shared my disregard for modern architecture, and when I was a newly minted young professional, I had work friends to grouse about the office with, over drinks or at brunch. In the year or so that Henry and I were together before Jesse was born, in the first, self-sacrificial stage of our relationship, we socialized like mad: we went to and gave dinner parties for his writer/artist/journalist friends, we attended book launches, theatre performances, and art gallery openings, we heard jazz musicians play in smoky clubs, we behaved like the other couples of our circle.
Jesse’s squalling, demanding infant presence put an end to any inessential adult outings on my part for a few years, but by the time he could be left with a babysitter for more than two hours without either of us breaking down (not until about age three), I’d lost interest in arts talk, political talk, most talk. Spend time with the same people, I find, and topics, points of view, and anecdotes tend to repeat. Spend time with the same people and the radical ways in which I differ from them — in opinions, attitudes, and tolerance for repetition — become apparent. The many ways in which they irritate me crystallize into clarity too, and sooner or later (lately sooner), I express that irritation, say something obnoxious or critical, regret my words, and want to crawl under a rock afterwards and never come out in public again.
I sometimes fantasize about living alone, in the wild, where I would see no one and I could drop all pretence of conforming to societal normalcy. I could let my hair grow out long and grey and wear it in braids. My eyebrows could get scraggly, I could wear shapeless clothes — the same ones every day — and no makeup, and talk to myself out loud, and eat and gain weight and not care, and keep whatever irregular sleeping and waking hours I chose, and never worry about opening my mouth and saying the wrong thing, because there’d be no one to hear me act the fool, or be rude, or reveal the gaps