In Between Days

Today is the day Mom is going to speak to me again, the mantra echoed in my head as I sat on the old, wooden picnic bench in the small backyard of Mom’s group home. Placing my phone in the middle of the picnic table, I selected the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, one of Mom’s favorite songs. The aging woman before me no longer resembled the “punk rock girl” she once was. Art, also known as my dad, nicknamed her “Punk Rock Girl” way before the Dead Milkmen’s 1988 classic came out. That woman disappeared when I was ten. Trapped in her body and mind, she hadn’t spoken since.

Tim, my older brother by eleven years, had given up on her, but I hadn’t. Her eyes spoke to me whenever I played her favorite punk music. Her favorites became my favorites. Music was our method of communication, and the only thing that connected me to her.

Old photos of Mom reflected her various punk phases. She and Art met their freshman year of college during her “Nancy Spungeon years.” Back then, Mom’s hair was platinum blond, just like Nancy Spungeon, the girlfriend of Sex Pistols’ bassist, Sid Vicious. Mom wore lots of makeup with fishnet stockings and tight, leather mini-skirts that barely covered her butt. A few years later she went through her Patti Smith phase with black hair and no makeup. Patti Smith was her all-time favorite.

Perpetually unkempt, Mom’s hair was wiry gray and in disarray because she wouldn’t let anyone comb it. In sweltering hot weather, she insisted on wearing sweatshirts and sweatpants. She had also gained at least a hundred pounds over the years. She was nothing like that punk rock girl. A few days before her forty-seventh birthday and my eleventh, Mom left home and never returned. After spending years in an institution, she moved into this group home on the North Shore, an hour and a half away from my home.

During our bi-monthly visits, Tim usually sat in the car. He never saw the point in visiting. Since he was the one who primarily raised me, he harbored a lot of resentment toward both me and our mother. As a teenager, he had the responsibilities of an adult. As a successful geoscientist, Art was never around, traveling from one face of the Earth to the other. He cared more about his work than his own family. Ever since I was a little boy, we only saw him one or two months out of the year.

Because I wasn’t like most guys my age and was always more than a little weird, Tim resented me, too. With all my freak-outs over the years, I couldn’t go away to college. Instead, I took classes online. I was safest at home, away from people, crowds, and noises. During the day, I was mostly alone, except for the occasional housekeeper and gardener. As an MIT graduate, Tim was a research scientist for some big pharmaceutical company in Cambridge. Living in the country, surrounded by acres of wooded land, Tim drove over an hour each way to work.

As usual, Mom’s face lit up when I sang along to the song. I even spotted a smile as if she recognized my voice. Unfortunately, Tim interrupted my serenade.

“Come on, Jordan, we’ve been here for ages,” he said, barely acknowledging Mom’s presence, standing at least ten feet away. Rain started to spit, causing spots on Tim’s glasses, which would no doubt start to annoy him. Glancing at my watch, I discovered we had only been there for thirty minutes. Tim could be so impatient.

“I gotta go,” I said to her, turning off the music. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.” Putting my hood up, I followed Tim to his Subaru Forester.

“You should appreciate what I do for you,” he said, getting in the car. “You waste an entire Sunday coming here for nothing. I know, to you it’s not nothing.”

Halfway through the ride home, Tim’s phone rang. He immediately answered, acting as if this was some long-awaited important phone call.

“Hey,” Tim said in a disappointed voice, a sign this wasn’t the call he expected. “No,” he sighed irritably. “Deal with your own problems.” Tim paused as the person on the other end spoke. “What about your parents?” Another pause, followed by a more irritable sigh. “You promise it’s just for the summer?” A pause again. “Fine, okay...yeah...yeah.” The call ended and Tim tossed his phone inside the console. “We’re having a guest for awhile,” Tim said. “Remember Jamie Perron, my punk ass friend from school?”

Tim had a lot of “punk ass friends,” so I wasn’t sure which one he meant. Tim was plain and boring with no sense of adventure. Unable to remember this friend of his, I shrugged my shoulders,

“He’s been living with this girl for the past six months and then he goes and cheats on her with a dude so she naturally kicks him out,” Tim explained. “So you know what he does? He comes crying to me. He needs a place to crash for the summer until he leaves for London in the fall. He’s doing this teacher exchange thing.”

“How did he cheat on her with a dude?” I asked. The whole scenario was weird to me.

“Huh?” he said, surprised I chose to speak since I rarely spoke in the car, usually lost somewhere in my own thoughts. Tim and this punk ass friend peaked my interest. “A dude is a guy...you know, a man.”

“Yeah, I know that,” I said. “So why would he cheat on her with a man if he has a girlfriend?”

“Because he can’t make up his mind,” Tim said. “I know he’s always preferred dudes, but every now and again he falls for a girl and it never lasts. I’m surprised this one lasted as long as it did. I can’t believe he moved in with her.”

“He cheated on her with a dude so...so that means he had sex with another man?” I asked.

“Ooo, someone’s curious today,” he said. “Yeah, that’s what it means.”

When I was eleven, not long after Mom went away, Tim bought me a picture book that explained everything anyone ever needed to know about sex. That was the extent of my education. The book didn’t include pictures of two men or two women having sex. I never had a girlfriend and I never thought to ask Tim any sexual-related questions. Sometimes stuff came out and I woke up in sticky sheets. No one told me anything.

“Do you think Art would mind?” I asked.

“Do you think he’d mind what?”

“Jamie staying with us for the summer.”

“Art won’t be around, anyway, so why would he care?”

Shrugging my shoulders, I slouched in my seat, already freaking out with the idea of having someone else live in our house.