Love and Other Four-Letter Words

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Let's say someone waltzed up to me six months ago and asked for my definition of love. I wasn't so naïve at fifteen and a half to presume that love, or luv -- as my best friend, Kitty, always ends her e-mails -- only applies to sex-crazed teenagers, pressed against lockers, feverishly grinding groins in between classes. I'd probably have rambled on about the bond between mothers and fathers, parents and children. No doubt I would have sprinkled in choice phrases like "unconditional support," "mutual respect," "considering the other person's feelings."

Pull me aside now and quiz me about those same four letters, and I'd blankly stare at you, my jaw ajar, like those guys who sat behind me in biology all year. Kitty would say I'm jaded. I would say that's a major understatement, seeing how my entire life has been blown to smithereens. Unconditional support the way of the pterodactyl. Mutual respect? Only exists in the pages of the self-help books on Mom's bedside table. And my feelings definitely weren't being considered when Dad dropped the bombshell on that Sunday afternoon in early May.

I'd just returned from sleeping over at Kitty's, where we pulled an all-nighter because her boyfriend, Jack, called from his cell phone at three A.M. to report that he and two friends were on her back porch. Kitty had answered on the second ring, before her parents woke up, so we slipped into sweats and sneaked out the sliding glass doors. They were all wasted; I could smell it on their breath. And moments after Kitty and Jack disappeared into the pool shed, both guys conked out on reclining chairs, a gesture I tried not to take personally. I almost crept back into Kitty's room, but then I remembered an article I once read about an inebriated frat boy choking to death on his own puke. So I held a vigil until pinkish light accented the sky and the luvers reappeared on the deck: Jack's T-shirt inside out, three nickel-sized hickey's dotting Kitty's neck.

By the time I got home the next afternoon, my eyelids were drooping and my throat felt scratchy and dry. All I wanted to do was take a hot shower and burrow under my covers, but an eerie stillness permeated the house.

"Mom's in bed with a migraine," Dad reported in a hushed tone, pressing his outstretched pointer finger against his lips, steering me into the family room for A Discussion.

As I perched on the edge of our leather recliner, I tugged at the frayed strings on my cutoff jean shorts. Upon retrieving them from a bottom drawer on Friday afternoon, I'd discovered to my displeasure that they were snugger than last summer.

"Mom and I have been talking a lot these past few weeks...."

Dad's voice trailed off. I noticed that the creases that have been cutting into his cheeks all spring were obscured by a weekend's buildup of stubble.

"....And we've decided to get a trail separation."

Trial separation. The term hung in the air between us, like humidity before a thunderstorm. I began wrapping a thread from my shorts around my finger.

"What about our plan to go to California next year?" I asked. Dad is an English professor at Cornell, and mom and I were joining him on his sabbatical to Stanford at the end of June. Aunt Jayne, Dad's younger sister, just sent a photo of the half of a house she'd found for us in Palto Alto.

Dad began gnawing his fingernails, a habit he kicked five years ago, in solidarity with Mom, who was becoming a vegetarian because of her high cholesterol.

After a long silence, Dad somberly replied, "I'm going out there alone after all." My face froze. Alone? Maybe he meant alone, as in alone without Mom, as in alone with me. That had to be it. It was no secret that Dad and I were close, much closer than I am to Mom.

If the trail separation announcement was an atomic bomb, an obliteration of the belief that Mom and Dad were the 7th Heaven, we-have-problems-yet-we-gleefully-work-them-though type of parents, what was about to come was nuclear devastation. Armageddon. To quote that REM song, "the end of the world as we know it."

Dad got up from the couch, affixed his arm around my shoulders and delivered the final blow: I'm sorry.... It's just something I have to do.

I was stunned. Utterly, completely stunned. So stunned I couldn't speak, even though I was aching to scream, to rant, to demand an explanation for how he could desert me like this. All I could do was repeat, over and over in my head: Don't feel a thing. Don't feel a thing. Don't feel a thing.

It was only as I wriggled away from my Dad's arm that I noticed my finger was red and bulging. I twisted the thread so tightly it had cut off the circulation. Yet still, as I unwound the tourniquet to discover purplish grooves in my skin, I didn't feel a thing.

*** There was a time last summer when Kitty and I rode our bikes all over Ithaca, ending up at Stewart Park. As we unlaced our sneakers and waded into Cayuga Lake, a motorboat whipped by, towing a small boy on an oversized yellow inner tube. The kid, both hands gripping the plastic handles, wore a frantic expression on his face as his pleas to stop were swallowed by the rumble of the horsepower. The spotter was consumed with smearing on sunblock, the driver consumed with two bikini-clad women capsizing a Sunfish. Which left the boy two options: to catapult himself into murky waters, or to get dragged along, completely out of his control, until the powers-that-be decide to terminate his joyride. He chose the latter.

I kept revisiting that image over the next few weeks, as I watched my life being disassembled, one familiarity at a time. I avoided Dad assiduously until his late May departure, as soon as Cornell let out. And I only talked to Mom when absolutely necessary. Like when the conversation swung to the looming question at hand: next year.

Mom had already taken a leave of absence from her job as an art teacher in the middle school. And in a manner of weeks, a faceless family who'd agreed to sublet from us back in February would be pulling into the driveway, stocking the cupboards, peeing in the toilets of the home I've lived in since I was two years old. This is all I know about them, from the realtor's letter that lay open on Mom's Dresser:

1. The man's name is Dr. Oscar Mueller.
2. He's going to teach statistics at Cornell and his wife will work at Vet School.
3. They're from Cincinnati.
4. They have one teenager.

I am a fifteen-year old guy, joeshmoe wrote, and I spank the monkey once a day, my morning ritual.

That's it? responded pistol99. I jerk off more frequently than dentists brush their teeth.

Whenever I think about Oscar Mayer Wiener-boy whacking away on my mattress, I feel a pulsing between my legs. I didn't tell anyone that, but I did describe to Kitty how, probably because he's from Ohio, I picture him to have moppy, golden hair, freckles, and a blade of grass in the corner of his mouth. Which Kitty said was preposterous, because, to the best of her knowledge, there are no farms in Cincinnati.

I suggested to Mom that we rent a town house in Fairview Heights for the year, until the Oscar Mayer Wieners clear out. When I was in fifth grade, my friend Shelly and her mother moved out there after her father ran off with an undergrad. It doesn't take a psychotherapist to recognize that after the trauma of separation, the best thing we could do was to keep everything else in our lives as stable as possible.

But that's when Mom started up about New York City, where she lived two decades ago, where she met Dad. And then, a few weeks later, she signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side.

"That translates to uptown and west of Central Park," she chirped as she popped a strawberry in her mouth. She'd just returned from the five-hour drive and was sitting at the kitchen table, thumbing through Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway.

"Whatever that means." I shrugged.

Mom peered at me over the rim of her reading glasses. I was tempted to add that the title of her book should be changed to Ignore Your Daughter and Do It Anyway. But I didn't. Instead I grabbed a strawberry out of the pint, rinsed it in the sink and started upstairs, my throat tightening, making it difficult to catch my breath.

That's been happening a lot in the past month, these breathing attacks, like a fist strangling my neck, transforming a simple inhale into a task as huge as scaling Mount Kilimanjaro. No manner how much I yawn or stretch my arms in front of me, all I get are shallow gasps that make my chest ache.

It happens whenever I think about Dad. How I barely say anything when he calls, just fine this and fine that and do you want me to put Mom on now? How I locked myself in my room and blasted my CD's, that morning Mom drove him to Syracuse Airport. How I gnawed the inside of my cheeks until they were raw as he pounded on my door and eventually called to Mom: I don't know what to do, Roz...I'm going to miss my plane. I couldn't make out Mom's response, but the knocking stopped soon after.

"Life's a car ride," Kitty said when I described my decaying home life. Ever since she got her license everything is a driving metaphor. "Sometimes it's cruise control down smooth highways...and other times it's potholes on rural roads."

"Yeah, well, I forgot to pack my motion sickness bag," I snorted.

I know just how much Mom would react if she heard that.

You're being melodramatic, she would say, swatting the air with her palm. Well, Mom's one to talk, seeing how she's a regular emotional roller coaster. Typical for an artist or a Cancer, of which she is both. Mom thrives on change, constantly seeking new tastes, new landscapes, new routes to the grocery store. When Mom is on a peak, I wish she came equipped with a volume knob, so I could turn her down. But land her in a valley and it's tears, headaches, hives, you name it. When she was little, her older brother nicknamed her Onion because she cried so much.

I'm exactly the opposite, like Dad. We're much more even-keeled. We'd opt for our favorite pasta place rather than Thai-Cuban-Scandinavian restaurant that just opened downtown. And Dad used to joke that Mom emoted enough for the three of us. I guess that's one way to put the fact that we keep a lot to ourselves. We don't let the entire population see every emotion we're feeling every second that we're feeling it.

I didn't even cry when Mom returned from the airport and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom with the tub running. Or when she emerged, eyes bloodshot, and asked what I wanted for my birthday, which was three days later. All I said was: For none of this to be happening.

It's not like I expected turning sixteen to be Hollywood-esque, with a shiny Miata in the driveway and a boyfriend at my side. I haven't even gotten my learner's permit yet, and the closest I've come to romance is a guy I kissed at sailing camp last summer. I didn't even like him that much, but Kitty thought I should do it, for the experience. After all, more than one hand had groped inside her bra, and a center fielder from the soccer camp across the road was hinting around her shorts.

Just open up your mouth and pretend you're writing the alphabet with your tongue, Kitty coached.

Well, I barely got to E before he began pressing the hard bulge in his swimsuit against my right thigh. And the kiss was so slobbery, the first thing I did when I got back to the bunk was chug a gallon of Scope.

So I knew better than to expect sixteen to be the time of my life, but I never imagined it would be like this. Whoever coined "sweet sixteen" must have had some Norman Rockwell delusion of poodle-skirted girls rocking around the clock with boys who used words like swell. All before their nine o'clock curfew, of course.