Freedom [133]
Jonathan’s mother, Tamara, who’d clearly once been a total babe and was still quite a bit of one, showed Joey the luxurious bedroom and bathroom that would be solely his. “Jonathan tells me you’re Jewish,” she said.
“Yes, apparently I am,” Joey said.
“But not observant?”
“Not even conscious, actually, until a month ago.”
Tamara shook her head. “I don’t understand that,” she said. “I know it’s very common, but I will never understand it.”
“It wasn’t like I was Christian or anything, either,” Joey said by way of excuse. “It was all part of the same nonissue.”
“Well, you’re very welcome with us. I think you might find it interesting to learn a little bit about your heritage. You’ll find that Howard and I aren’t particularly conservative. We just think it’s important to be aware and always be remembering.”
“They’ll whip you right into shape,” Jonathan said.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be a very gentle whipping,” Tamara said with a milfy smile.
“That’s great,” Joey said. “I’m definitely up for anything.”
As soon as they could, the two boys escaped to the basement rec room, whose amenities shamed even those in Blake and Carol’s great-room. Tennis could practically have been played on the blue felt expanses of the mahogany pool table. Jonathan introduced Joey to a complicated, interminable, and frustrating game called Cowboy Pool that required a table without a central ball-collection mechanism. Joey was on the verge of suggesting a switch to air hockey, at which he was annihilatingly skilled, when the sister, Jenna, came downstairs. She acknowledged Joey, barely, from the pinnacle of her two-year age advantage, and began to speak of urgent family matters with her brother.
Joey suddenly understood, as never before, what people meant by “breathtaking.” Jenna had the unsettling kind of beauty that relegated everything around her, even a beholder’s basic organ functions, to afterthought status. Her figure and complexion and bone structure made the features that he’d so admired in other “pretty” girls now seem like crude approximations of beauty; even the pictures of her hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was thick and shining and strawberry blonde, and she was wearing an oversized Duke athletic jersey and flannel pajama bottoms, which, far from concealing her body’s perfection, demonstrated its power to overcome the baggiest of clothes. Everything else that Joey rested his eyes on in the rec room was notable only for not being her—was all the same second-class blah. And yet, when he did steal a glance at her, his brain was too unsettled to even see much. The whole thing was weirdly tiring. There seemed to be no way to arrange his face that wasn’t false and self-conscious. He was painfully aware of smirking stupidly at the floor while she and her amazingly unawed sibling bickered about the New York City shopping expedition she intended to make on Friday.
“You can’t leave us the Cabriolet,” Jonathan said. “Joey and I are going to look like a couple of life partners in that thing.”
Jenna’s one evident defect was her voice, which was pinched and little-girly. “Yeah, right,” she said. “A couple of life partners with jeans hanging halfway down their ass.”
“I just don’t see why you can’t drive the Cabriolet to New York,” Jonathan said. “You’ve driven it there before.”
“Because Mom says I can’t. Not on a holiday weekend. The Land Cruiser is safer. I’ll bring it back on Sunday.”
“Are you kidding? The Land Cruiser is a rollover machine. It’s totally unsafe.”
“Well, you can tell that to Mom. Tell her your freshman car’s an unsafe rollover machine and that’s why I can’t take it to New York.”
“Hey.” Jonathan turned to Joey. “You want to go to New York for the weekend?”
“Sure!” Joey said.
“Just take the Cabriolet,” Jenna said. “It