Slob - Ellen Potter [34]
Grrrr. That was approximately the sound that came out of Jeremy’s mouth. Unlike Mom, she has no training in keeping her cool.
Mom was right in the end. It was not a kids’ puppet show. It was about this lady puppet that has loads of boyfriend puppets, and after about fifteen minutes, most of the puppets had no clothes on. Mom made us all stand up and leave.
“Sorry about that, guys,” Mom said when we were outside the theater. I wasn’t sorry I’d seen it though. It was kind of fascinating in an embarrassing sort of way, but when Jeremy whispered that one of the boyfriend puppets reminded her of Andre, I was glad we’d left when we did.
To make up for it, Mom bought tickets for us to take the Circle Line, a boat that sails around the island of Manhattan. It was a very touristy thing to do, which means it was also expensive. Normally Mom would have said that we couldn’t afford it, but maybe she thought the bracing watery breezes would purify our brains of the puppet show contamination.
It worked in a way. Ten minutes after the boat set sail, I forgot all about the naked puppets and all I could think about was Gilligan’s Island. It was one of the shows I was watching on the Freakout Channel. In case you don’t know it, it’s this show where these people get stranded on a desert island and are always trying to find a way to escape. But they’ve made the island pretty comfortable with these nice huts and they put on plays and have golfing competitions and turtle races, which makes you wonder if the reason they never escape is because they don’t really want to.
Manhattan is an island. Of course, everyone knows that, but it’s so smooshed with buildings and people and police sirens and street fairs and restaurants that it’s easy to forget it. You think it’s the center of the universe when you’re in it. From the boat, though, you can’t believe how puny it all is.
“Weird,” Mom said in this dreamy kind of voice.
“Yeah,” both Jeremy and I said at the same time. We all understood each other. All three of us were outside on deck even though it was cold. The wind was making us all squint, and Jeremy’s hair was flying every which way.
“Our mother and father took us on the Circle Line one time,” Jeremy said.
I sucked in my breath. There was a moment of silence during which I was grateful that I had the island of Manhattan to focus on while waiting for someone to say the right thing. I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be me.
“I bet they had more sense than to take you on it in frickin’ arctic weather,” Mom said.
That was the right thing to say.
We laughed, not the least because we’d never heard Mom say “frickin’” before.
“No, it was summer,” Jeremy said. “And remember that kid on the bridge?” she said to me.
I nodded, actually surprised that I did remember.
“What about the kid on the bridge?” Mom asked. She was half smiling at us, as though this just was an everyday conversation rather than the first time we had all spoken about my parents since we came to live with Mom.
“The kid was standing on one of the bridges, and right before the boat went under the bridge, he pulled down his pants and mooned us,” I told her.
“And remember what Dad did?” Jeremy said. “He laughed so hard that Coke shot out of his nose, and that made Mom laugh so hard that she started snorting. Remember how she snorted when she laughed hard?”
We stayed out on deck the whole trip, even when everybody else went inside the cabin. By the time we reached the pier, my fingers were stiff with cold and Jeremy’s face was as red as a radish, but I think I can safely say that we all went home feeling better about everything than we had in a long time.
After an early dinner I went into my room and right away turned on Nemesis. All that talk about my parents made me more determined than ever. Their faces appeared so clearly in my mind—my dad’s black moustache that twitched when he was about to say something funny. The kind green eyes that always had tired pouches beneath them. My mother’s eyes were