After that first morning, Didi showed up at my carport every school morning. It was my own personal miracle. At school, I took over all note-taking in the classes we had together like world cultures and English, advanced placement classes that Didi could have aced if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t want to. Instead, I fed her answers when she got called on and sat next to her during tests so she could copy off of me. We even developed a vast language of hand signals for me to use to flash her test answers. In spite of the fact that she was naturally better in world cultures and English than I was and it would have taken less time and work for her to actually study, she insisted on cheating. After school, we went to her house, where I did her homework in the classes we didn’t have together, like science and her slow-boat math.
I loved our division of labor, the fact that I did all the labor. It helped me and everyone else understand why Deeds Steinberg would be friends with Cyndi Rae Hrncir. While I worked, Didi jumped on the Net to research the only subjects she was truly interested in: bands, astrology, and weirdo diets. She would always fire up a joint. She said it helped her concentrate.
A couple of times in those first weeks, Didi got me to take a few hits. Maybe it kept “consensual reality at bay” for her, not for me. When I smoked all I thought about was my dad waiting to get on the lung transplant list. Mom had started telling me to be thankful that I’d had him for as long as I had and to stop always thinking of myself. I had my whole life ahead of me plus I was lucky and had inherited Daddy’s steady nerves. What did she have, she asked me?
I tried not to make things any harder on her than they already were. Mostly, I made myself not think about what was happening to Daddy and that had been impossible the few times I’d smoked. Then his face would bob up in my mind like a balloon that I couldn’t press down, swollen from all the steroids he took to fight off infections.
Numbers, though—numbers took me away. At night when I lay in bed trying to go to sleep, the only thing that could block the sound of the ventilator pushing air into my father’s ruined lungs was numbers. I’d hoard the extra-credit problems from my AP calculus class to work at night. I’d start trying to figure out what the area underneath a soccer ball would be if it followed a path defined by the curve y = 20 sin x over 2 yards and a vast calm would flood me.
The one good thing about Daddy getting sick was that he absorbed all Mom’s attention and she didn’t have any left over to scrutinize my new friend. If she had, Mom would have forbidden me from ever seeing Didi again.
Every morning, though, the miracle of Didi pulling the Skankmobile into our driveway repeated itself and I would jump in, devouring air, avid for the first real breath I’d been able to inhale since Didi had dropped me off the night before. Maybe it was sympathy, my breathing problems. Like when my uncle Anton gained fifty pounds when Aunt Geneva got pregnant. Because Daddy’s lungs were getting worse. Pretty soon he had an oxygen line clamped to his nose all the time and hardly ever got out of bed.
Didi’s father, on the other hand, still got around fairly well. He even managed to tape his radio shows from the studio he’d set up in their garage. Mr. Steinberg always treated Didi more like a grandchild than a child. Like there was a real father somewhere doing all the hard stuff like discipline and all he had to do was the indulgent, grandfather stuff like hand over the keys to his Mustang and never check what time she came home at night or whether she’d done her homework or brushed her teeth. He’d converted their garage into a studio and Didi and I helped him tape his shows there. He let us pull the old vinyl records, black and shiny as a cockroach’s back, out of their covers and cue them up on one of the three turntables he used. I loved the names of the albums: I Sing the Body Electric, Bitches Brew, Pithecanthropus Erectus, Black Pastels, Ezz-thetics, Descent into the Maelstrom.
Nobody else had ever talked to me the way he did. “Cue up this side for me, babe. Mingus in Stuttgart.”
“Which cut, Mr. Steinberg?”
“Mr. Steinberg? Who let my father in here? I told you Mort. Mort!”
“I’m sorry. Mort.”
“Okay, third cut. Now, listen to this. It will freak your bird.”
All I knew about Mr. Steinberg—Mort—was that he was the black sheep of a wealthy Jewish family somewhere back in Chicago and had a small trust fund that allowed him to do what he wanted: to be a disc jockey at a failing radio station and play the jazz records he loved so much. I knew that he called Didi babe and she called him Mort and that he believed and taught Didi to believe that, against all evidence to the contrary, her shit did not stink.
There was nothing Didi could do that Mr. Steinberg wouldn’t find charming and cute and forgivable, from getting in a fender bender with his beloved ’Stang (“It’s only money, babe. It can be fixed. Thank God you weren’t hurt.”) to flunking English (“I met that teacher of yours and she’s a real chromosome case. Don’t sweat it, babe.”) to getting expelled for skipping (“You can learn more hanging out at the mall, or wherever it is you go, than that factory for bureaucrats will ever teach you. Assholes.”).
When Mr. Steinberg got too weak to tape his show, Didi knew it was the end. That’s when she got even more hard-core about “keeping consensual reality at bay.” Her mother always had lots of pills around the house and Didi started dipping into them. Percocet, Ativan—she especially liked “the floaty ones!” She stopped asking me about my father and I stopped asking about hers. Talk was for things you could change. When all the “sharing” and “feelings” in the world wouldn’t stop one cough from being wrenched from one pair of ruined lungs, talk was worthless. Didi and I knew that. She knew I had her back just like she had mine and talking about it only made it worse.
Didi’s parents dealt with their fear like bears, each Steinberg denning up in his or her own pain. Mr. and Mrs. Steinberg never had much in common to begin with. They just didn’t fit together. Him: bald, glasses, a vinyl nerd with no interest in humans unless they had recorded on Blue Note before the Second World War. Her: twenty, thirty years younger, beautiful as Natalie Wood, barely speaking English and always vaguely pissed off in a petulant way that made her look like a Pekinese dog. They, literally, didn’t even speak the same language. They were an even less likely couple than my parents. One day, I overheard Didi and her mom arguing and out of the jumble of furious Spanish, Didi hissed the phrase “mail-order bride.” I never asked Didi about it and she never brought it up, but suddenly her parents made a little more sense.
It was a surprise when Mr. Steinberg died before Daddy. After the funeral, there was a reception at Didi’s house. A few neighbors dropped by. Some of the other oncology patients and the nice nurse who wore the fish smock showed up. None of Mr. or Mrs. Steinberg’s family came. No friends. There was no one to wrap their arms around Mrs. Steinberg and make her feel safe enough to cry. Instead, Mrs. Steinberg opened Mr. Steinberg’s liquor cabinet, took out a bottle of Chivas, filled a snifter, and never faced life without a glass in her hand from that moment forward.
When Mrs. Steinberg finished the Chivas, she bought a white plastic bucket of margaritas and kept it in the freezer. She scooped a frozen margarita out for every meal and several snacks during the day. Overnight, her fragile, doll-like beauty disappeared and she developed the poochy gut and spindly legs of the serious boozer.
Didi unhinged a little less dramatically. For the next few weeks, I walked to Pueblo Heights because I never knew when, or if, Didi would be going to school. Even though I’d barely spoken five words to any of my teachers, I went to all of Didi’s and told them about Mr. Steinberg. I begged them to cut Didi some slack, to give her special assignments she could do at home. My workload got pretty intense finishing my work, Didi’s normal assignments, and all of her special makeup projects. But I was actually happy to have extra stuff to do since Didi was immersing herself in two activities: groupieing and getting wasted on the West Mesa. I don’t know why I had faith that in time she’d come back. Maybe because I could no longer imagine my life without her.
I didn’t mind being stuck at my house since it gave me more of a chance to be with Daddy. That was when I noticed how my mother’s peculiarities had blossomed. The sicker Daddy got, the worse her nerves were. The only time she left the house was to go to her new church. When she wasn’t at HeartLand, she was on the phone talking to other members whom she called “sister” and “brother.” She ended all her conversations with them by saying, “Bless you.” She had taken to telling me things like “Give Satan an inch and he’ll become your ruler.” And “What you weave in this world, you wear for eternity.”
She was happy when the Skankmobile stopped appearing in our driveway every morning. I’d spent my whole life catering to my mother’s peculiarities. So, when she insisted that I start wearing one of the long denim skirts with an elastic waist that all the women at her church wore, I just put it on. Right over the jeans that I rolled up so they didn’t show. Then, as soon as I was out of her sight, I’d yank the skirt off and stuff it in my backpack. When she informed me that Didi was “an agent of Satan,” all I did was nod. There was no point in arguing. There never had been.
Seeing me leaving the house in the long skirt and not riding with Didi made my mother hum with righteous joy. She relaxed and one night, about a month after Mr. Steinberg’s funeral, she went out for groceries and left me alone with Daddy to watch the History Channel. Right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, he huffed out one word, “Stars.” My father loved looking at the sky. His favorite thing about Albuquerque had been how clear the sky was, how many more stars he could see here than in Texas.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” I said. “Mom’ll get mad.”
Daddy didn’t waste any more of his breath arguing. Instead, he just raised his hand and pointed his finger toward the window where a bit of night sky, a few of the stars he wanted to see, were visible. His skin seemed stained by grape juice. When I pressed his purplish fingers, a dead white spot remained for minutes.
I bundled him up in the quilted camouflage jumpsuit he used to wear when he went hunting back in Texas. He hadn’t had it on once since we’d left Houdek. I tried not to notice how the suit drooped on him like a little boy in his father’s clothes. I disconnected him from the big tank of oxygen that stood in the corner and hooked him up to the little portable canister he used on the rare times when he left the bedroom.
“Your chariot, sir,” I said, pushing the wheelchair up to where he sat on the edge of the bed, breathing hard from the exertion of getting dressed. He waved the chair away and tried to stand on his own. When he started wobbling, I angled the chair under him and he half-fell into it.
When I pushed him outside into the cold night air, he closed his eyes so that even the lids could drink in the wild, free feeling. Then he opened them, pointed his finger to the sky, and, one word at a time, exhaled the names of the stars. Big. Dipper. Little. Dipper. Ursa. Major. Ursa. Minor. North. Star. When he finished, he said, “Can. Always. Find. Your. Way. Home.”
Because there was a little smile on his face, I laughed as if he’d made a joke and said, “Yeah, Daddy, now I can always find my way home.” Then, exhausted, he fell asleep and I pushed him back into the house.