Slob - Ellen Potter [10]
It’s her voice that is unusual. It’s velvety. It brushes against your eardrum and slips down your ear canal and it makes you feel like everything will turn out okay, no matter how bad things look at the moment. Which is a good thing since Mom is a 911 dispatcher for the NYC Police Department.
Every year, she gets Christmas cards from people who have spoken to her on the 911 line, thanking her. They address the letters to The Woman with the Beautiful Voice or The Lady Who Sounds Like an Angel. The guy who distributes the mail always knows who they mean and he drops the cards on Mom’s desk.
“What’s cooking, good-lookin’?” she asked.
“Nothing much,” I answered a little glumly.
“How’s the radio thingy coming?”
She thinks Nemesis is a satellite radio. Well, she thinks that because I told her that. It was a lie. I also lied about where I got the parts. I told her I have a friend whose father owns a junk shop. She would be furious if she knew Jeremy and I were crashing demo sites.
“It needs work.”
“It looks fine to me,” she said. “Very . . . scientific.”
“It doesn’t matter how it looks. It has to work. And so far, it doesn’t.” I try to be patient with her.
“How was school?”
“Same old. How was work?”
“Same old.”
We were both lying, of course. There was no way I was going to tell her how school was. It was too gruesome. And there was no way she was going to tell me how work was. Again, too gruesome. Although lately I think Jeremy gives her more anxiety than the stuff she hears at her job.
For instance, this was the conversation at dinner:
“How was the math test, Caitlin?” Mom asked Jeremy.
“It was fine, Zelda,” Jeremy said.
They have this thing. Mom refuses to call her Jeremy. She thinks it’s ridiculous. So Jeremy refuses to call her Mom and uses her real name instead.
It drives them both insane.
I try to stay out of it, though.
“You know, Owen,” Mom said, “you look thinner.”
I rolled my eyes.
“No, really,” she said. “I see a difference. Around your face, I think.”
“Watch, I’ll probably only lose weight on my face,” I said. “Then I’ll have a tiny pinhead attached to a fat body.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Owen.”
“He’s being sarcastic, Zelda,” Jeremy said.
“Besides,” Mom said, attempting to ignore her, “you were thin once. I’ve seen the pictures. You were very well proportioned.”
“Can we not talk about this?” I said.
Mom frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, “Oh, jeez. Sorry, honey. Of course.”
She misunderstood. She thought it was the past I didn’t want to talk about. Actually it was the fact that I had once been skinny. That embarrassed me. I felt like I had failed some tests along the way. Like I had started out with fine biological potential and through my own weakness had wrecked it. I still had a bag of my old clothes from two years ago sitting in the back of my closet. Normal-sized clothes. I should have dumped them, but I didn’t want to. They reminded me of what I once was. The stupid thing was, though, I couldn’t look at them either, because they reminded me of what I once was. Consequently, they just sat there, taking up too much space. Much like myself.
After dinner I flew through my homework, which was laughable, and took the elevator downstairs to apartment 5A. I pressed the buzzer, and in a minute the door was opened by a small, wiry man with skin the color of a Bit-O-Honey candy bar. This is Nima. He’s Tibetan, but he grew up in India and only came to New York a few months ago.
“Tashi-deley,” he mouthed to me as he held a phone to his ear, and he nodded for me to come in. It was the dinkiest