I was half-asleep when my cousin Theresa poked her head into the bedroom my brother and I were sharing and said it was too hot, she was going to drag her mattress out to porch, did we want to come?
Jeffrey immediately said no, but I thought it sounded good. The porch was screened-in and right on the street. There would be a nice breeze. I didn’t think my parents would like it very much, but I said yes anyway.
It was that kind of vacation. There was this feeling of anything goes, of none of the usual rules being true. We were vacationing with my cousins on my father’s side, Theresa, Dani, and Anne, all of whom were older than me. Theresa was the closest to my age, two years older. Dani and Anne were in high school. They were with us because their father had died the April before. He’d been painting his house, and fallen off a ladder. He fell the worst possible way, right on his head. When we’d gone to pick up my cousins for the trip, I’d noticed the side of the house was still half-painted.
While we were here on the Jersey short, my Aunt Millie was taking a trip back to the “Other Side,” Scotland, to see some of her and my Uncle Lee’s relatives. My Uncle Lee had been born in Scotland, although he’d met my Aunt Millie after he moved to the United States.
Theresa, Dani, and Anne had been getting away with murder during this vacation. My father was usually so strict with my brother and me, but he’d let the girls pretty much whatever they pleased. If they didn’t want to come out to dinner with us, he didn’t make them. If they refused to answer direct questions or sighed when my mother asked them to use suntan lotion, he didn’t say anything. The night Anne went down to the boardwalk and didn’t come home until nearly 2 a.m., he didn’t even yell at her.
I guess he wasn’t sure how to act around them, given what they’d been through. I felt exactly the same way, though it wasn’t like I had much of an opportunity to act any way. Dani and Anne were always going off to the beach by themselves. Theresa, who was usually friendly to my brother and me, spent most of her time in her room, writing in her diary.
A few days before, I’d done something I wasn’t very proud of. I’d looked at Theresa’s diary while she was down at the boardwalk with her sisters. I’d tried to find the exact day it happened, the day her father had fallen from the roof. But it was just blank pages for those days, and for the weeks after. Most of what Theresa had been writing since we’d been on vacation was about a boy in her class named Roger who she was hoping to get to kiss her next year, her imagining how it would be to be his girlfriend. Little pep talks to herself that she had a chance with him.
I was disappointed in Theresa, writing about something like this and not about her father dying. And I was disappointed in myself, for reading even though it wasn’t what I’d been looking for.
* * *
“So,” Theresa asked, “if you could pick your son or daughter from the end of a long glass tube, which would you pick?”
Out on the porch, we’d set up our mattresses side by side, wedged in between the wall and the smelly couch that none of us would dare sit on. We were lying on opposite ends, Theresa’s feet on the side where my head was. We’d been out there for about a half hour by then, and neither of us still was able to sleep. Every so often Theresa would say something that didn’t make a lot of sense, like she was letting me in on the middle of a conversation she was having in her head.
Still, it was nice she was even talking to me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Like in that song ‘Year 2525.’ Would you pick a boy or girl?”
Now I understood what she was talking, this song they kept playing on the radio about what it was going to be like in the future. The girls played the radio to rock music all the time, another thing I was surprised my father let them do. It was a nice change of pace from the country music my father would have been playing, though I also liked country music, especially Johnny Cash.
“I don’t know. Probably a boy.”
“I would pick neither. I’m never going to have any children. Even if I was able to pick them out of a glass tube, I still wouldn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s just better not to have a family. It gets you in trouble. Like, I just finished this book about a girl, she finds out that her family isn’t even her real family.”
“Is she adopted?”
“Not even. What it turns out is, that she’s just some girl these people picked up off the street and raised as their own, because they want her to marry her brother, who really is their son. They want their family to stay together always and this way, by having her marry the brother, they think they can control it. Isn’t that the grossest?”
“Pretty gross,” I agreed.
“That happens, though,” Theresa said definitively. “That kind of stuff happens all the time. At the end, the girl kills her own mother, who of course isn’t her mother, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Because, you never know, do you? You never know who’s your family. You never know if they’re really on your side. Milliebe they’re not. Because, how can you tell? They could be anyone. You could be anyone.”
Theresa’s voice was choked, angry. I understood there was something at stake here. But I had no idea what it was, or what I was supposed to say.
I said, “Look at our feet.”
“What?”
“Look at our feet. We jiggle them in exactly the same way. You see?”
It was true. As Theresa had been talking I’d been staring at her feet, rubbing against each other as she rocked them back and forth, and recognized it as exactly what I did when I was nervous or restless.
“Yeah, so what?” Theresa asked.
“So maybe that’s the way you can tell if someone’s in your family. If they jiggle their feet the same way you do. Maybe that’s all it is, and it’s so simple a thing and all you have to do is know about but nobody does, not even scientists.”
Theresa was quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, “Geez, Chris, where did that come from?” And then she laughed, so loud I thought it would wake up everyone we’d left inside.
