Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

“I don’t have any news,” Corinne says. “Well, I mean, it’s all news, it’s all news to me. What isn’t news? This bright shiny kitchen is news! And Lucy: you certainly are the newest thing.” She looks at all of us, one by one. “Oh, have pity on me,” she says, and then she begins to cry, and all the women move toward her.

—

Once I’m upstairs, I knock on Jeremy’s door. He doesn’t say “Come in,” but I go in anyway. I’ll spare you the details of his room. He’s lying on his bed with his eyes closed. His shoes are off and his big feet are sticking up at the end of the bed in their white socks, and he has an arm flung across his face, covering his eyes. I am amazingly proud of my son. I love him so much, but I have to hide it.

“Jeremy,” I say. “You’ll have to come back down eventually.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s unfair. She’s unfair. I mean, she’s, like, crazy. And I…and I’m supposed to love her, or something? Because she was once my mother? Fuck that.”

“I need to say something to you,” I say. “I just can’t think of what.”

“Please, Dad. None of that wisdom shit, okay? I hate wisdom. I just fucking hate it.”

“Okay,” I say. “You’re in luck. I don’t have any.”

“That’s good. Can we talk about something else? No, I know: let’s not talk.”

So we don’t talk for a minute or two. Then Jeremy says, “You know, this isn’t so bad.”

“What?”

“Oh, having your mother show up and act crazy. That’s not so bad. I mean, you know how I’m studying world geography now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, like, the point of world geography is not where the countries are, but what people actually do, you know? I mean, take a country like, for example, Paraguay. You know where Paraguay is, right?”

I nod. But I actually don’t know where it is. Near Bolivia?

“So”—and here he sits up—“so, okay. Anyhow, Paraguay is like this nothing country in the middle of South America, and they don’t even all speak Spanish there, but this weird Indian language like Sioux except it’s South American, but the point is, when you look at conditions, it’s not all happy days down there. Well, maybe it’s happier now. But what our textbook said? Was that they had, you know, torture parties there. Once. Where torturers get drunk and turn the dial up to eleven. Like they did in Chile. And Argentina. People get their fingernails pulled out and electrodes and stuff. I read about it. I’ve been reading about it. Torture. Like in Cuba, and in Europe when it was medieval? And in Russia. They’d hook you up to an electric board and zap you. And your body would dance around on the electric table. Total pain. I mean, compared to torture, this is nothing.” He lies back on his pillow. He closes his eyes. “My mother showing up and being crazy? That is nothing. That’s not even waterboard ing.”

He gives me this lecture while staring at me with great bravery.

I go back downstairs, and the five of us have dinner. Jeremy doesn’t join us. That night, lying in bed and looking up at the ceiling fan in the dark of our bedroom, Astrid and I agree that I will have to investigate halfway houses for Corinne, and I will have to get her to a shrink so her moods can be stabilized.

—

The next morning, Jeremy does not join us for breakfast, and when I look outside, his bicycle is gone. And then, somewhat to my surprise, Corinne reappears in the morning light uncomplaining, saying that she experienced a good sleep. What will my ex-wife do all day? My mother says that she will look after Corinne for now. Perhaps they will go for walks, and my mother will expound about Jesus and how He is coming again to gather us up. As for Jeremy, he can’t be upset forever. Lucy gives me a goodbye-daddy kiss before she boards the school bus. She seems unaffected by recent events, but then Corinne is not her mother, and she probably wants life to get back to normal.

That afternoon around four o’clock, as I am writing up a repair order on a faulty water pump, Jeremy comes bicycling into the garage. He looks around and sniffs appreciati vely. He surveys the containers of brake fluid shelved in the Parts Department. I don’t want him to give me any shit in here in front of my coworkers, so I don’t smile although I am glad to see him.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he replies. He takes off his helmet and shakes out his hair. He’s impressive: you can see why girls love him.

I put down my ballpoint pen. We walk into the customers’ lounge and sit down on two vinyl chairs in the corner, next to a table on which are scattered old issues of Field & Stream and Cosmopolitan. All the customers are gone, so we’re there alone. Jeremy stares at me for a moment, as if it’s my fault that I met Corinne in the first place and made love to her eighteen years ago, so that he was born.

“Dad, I’m fucked up,” he says. “And it’s really fucked up that she’s here. I’m just saying.”

“I know,” I reply. “It’s hard on all of us.”

“Not as hard on you as it is on me. I didn’t think I could go back home today.”

“Where else could you go?”

“Somewhere,” he says. “Friends.” It’s true: he has many friends he could stay with. “I could actually, like, move out.” He waits. “But I’m not going to.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask. I have neither wisdom nor advice for him. All I have is curiosity.

“So I went to school this morning? And I found Alissa. I mean, we’re over, but we’re still friends, sort of. And I’m like, ‘My birth mom showed up, and she’s fucking nuts, and also she said I looked gay,’ and Alissa is like, ‘Yeah, wow, but she’s your mom and thinks you’re cute and you’re way not gay,’ and I go, ‘Who gives a shit?’ and she’s, ‘You should,’ and I say, ‘But she’s crazy,’ and this is when Alissa sort of gets that lightbulb look and says, ‘Well, the cool thing would be to put it all on your Tumblr. That’d be so great. ’Cause if your birth mom’s so weird and interesting, everybody will want to read it. Like: “Guess what, everybody, my mom showed up.” ’ ”

Somehow I have the feeling this has become a huge business with his friends within the past few hours and that they all have opinions about what he should do.

“And?” I ask.

“That’s what’s weird,” he says. “Like half of my friends already want to know if she’s got a blog herself. Because they want to check it out, like right now.”

“Maybe you could help her with a blog,” I say, trying to mediate. “Maybe you could help her set one up.”

“Yeah, I guess I can do that. But I have to hate her for a few more days.” He sits there quietly. “I have to really hate her a few days. I know she’s crazy. I get that. But I have to hate her for not being loyal to us.” He used that word: us. As much as I love Astrid, she didn’t use that word last night. It was all you: you have to do this or that.

So I tell Jeremy that he can hate Corinne for a while, and then he has to give it up.

—

The hatred lasts longer than we think it will. In the meantime we get Corinne to a psychiatrist, who puts her on lithium. There are no discernible effects at first.

Corinne tries to be inconspicuous down there in the basement and at dinnertime. I’ll give her credit for that. It’s hard for her, however, because right out of the blue at dinner she’ll start talking about wildlife creatures, some of them imaginary, that no one has mentioned in conversation. Wolves and lemurs figure prominently in her thinking, and all the while Jeremy is seething over there at his place at the table. He stares at Corinne with distaste as he bolts his food before he rushes upstairs and slams his bedroom door.