C H A P T E R
E I G H T
v
FOR TWO NIGHTS AILEEN FOSTER remembered her whole life. She could never get up the nerve to do anything until her nerves hurt unless she got up and did something. Maybe this is why she’d never done anything.
“You have done things,” a voice in her head protested, and began to tick off the list of her accomplishments, the same list she always brought out when she was certain she’d never accomplished anything.
This time Aileen cut the list off. It just didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if she’d built the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China. And she hadn’t. Now she had to act.
This was all she thought about all day. She thought about action while she cooked the little bit of breakfast for Ryan and Ross, Lindsay and Ash. Ashley was coming home late. She’d have to talk to her, too. Everything that Ida had said was sticking in Aileen’s head. What about Ashley? What did she do with her time?
Tina came and went as she pleased. It was almost as if she didn’t live here anymore. Aileen wondered if she would see her daughter anymore.
There are so many damned people in this house, Aileen thought, and not a one talks to the other.
She wanted to stand up and demand that everyone tell her something right now. She wanted to say, “You’re going to start telling me your business now.” Aileen remembered Winona, Kevin’s mother. How in her fifties she’d suddenly gotten assertive and demanded to know this and demanded to know that. Kevin was never able to stand up against his mother. In the end it had been Aileen who had taken her aside and said, “Listen old woman....”
So Aileen knew that once you forfeited the right to know, the right was gone. You couldn’t get it back. Once you stopped being dependable, you couldn’t demand that your children depend on you. She hated to admit it, but she knew she had stopped being dependable a long time ago.
Aileen was thinking about her family all day long. She was thinking about them as she drove out of Logan onto Michael, and then headed up through downtown to Windmill Cereals. She parked her car in the little parking lot. This building was old. It could not last much longer. Life would have to change for all of them. Very soon.
She thought of her children, flipping them over as she flipped boxes. Where had she failed? Didn’t all parents fail? No, Ida hadn’t. Ida had been a single parent, had to half raise two sisters and a nephew in the mix. She had managed not to fail. Who would judge her, Aileen wondered? God? No. It would be Mackenzie, Ryan, and Tina in the end.
She had failed her oldest, no doubt about it, and Aileen was sure she’d failed Tina by not being interesting enough. Martina had been born in the wrong body in the wrong place. Aileen could not see beyond the Midwest. She could hardly see past the Parkway, and everything Tina had done had been odd to her. She had never really encouraged it. They’d never seen eye to eye, and now Aileen realized that this was because she had always assumed that it was she who was right. What if she had not married Kevin? For a very long time she hadn’t been married to him. Ida had only been about the same age Aileen was right now when Tina and Ash were born. What if she’d given Tina to Ida? Ida knew her.
But then what about Ashley? It just wasn’t enough for Aileen to assume that Ashley was like her. She admitted she didn’t know Ashley, either. Ashley was afraid. Ashley was drifting. Ashley had what Ida liked to call- damn it, Mother- cheap beauty. Ashley was blond with blue eyes and breasts and that was all she had or all she thought she had. Aileen didn’t know what to do for her. She’d failed that child too.
Lindsay would be fine. Lindsay was what parents raised their children to be. She wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t too smart. She wasn’t bad enough to be hated, but Aileen also realized that she wasn’t good enough to be liked. Or pretty enough to be envied or ugly enough to be mocked. She just was.
And the same could be said for Ross. What the hell was wrong with her and Kevin? Ryan was a good kid. Aileen had always thought he wouldn’t make it, but Roy had helped him make it. Roy loved him. But Aileen and Kevin had taken pride in raising three children who were good because they were normal. Ross’s and Lindsay’s virtue lay in the fact- yes, that they would never stick out, never overreach themselves, never cause trouble. They were normal. Actually, Ida had always said they were mediocre.
“They’re not, Mother.” At lunch, Aileen caught herself talking to the mother who wasn’t there.
Ida had said, “Normal, mediocre. It’s the same thing. It just depends on how much value you put on being normal.”
“Well you like Mackenzie.”
“He’s not normal.”
And Aileen remembered almost shouting, “Yes, he is!”
He was her most handsome son. He was the one everyone said was the perfect blend of Kevin and Aileen. He had his father’s piercing eyes and in Mackenzie the Foster nose had been toned down. It was hawk like, not hooked. The whole top of his face was like a hawk. His smile was fierce, he had the full lips of his Italian great-grandfather. He only got more handsome as the years went by. And he was kind and sweet and smart. He was a heartthrob. All the boys wanted to be his friend. Her pride was watching him come down the stairs unconscious of his measured walk, his good clothes, the dash of cologne he wore, his gradually broadening shoulders. Watching her son in church, how he never realized how the girls were looking at him, was her pride.
So how could anyone that extraordinary have been ordinary?
He wasn’t normal. He was unusual.
Mackenzie was queer.
And this was a difficulty. Aileen turned that over in her head again and again. She had to deal with the fact that this might mean that she had never known Mackenzie. Ida had known. Ida had known about Ian. None of this was news to her. For God’s sake, Cedric Fitzgerald and Father Hanley knew! Aileen had to deal with the fact that the remarkably good looking son that she took so much pride in for never noticing the ladies checking him out, had been spending the bulk of his time checking boys out, and would never look at a lady. She had to deal with the fact that that nice Ian Cane who came over all the time was her son’s boyfriend. Aileen spent a while playing around with that concept. Then she went the next step. This didn’t mean a friend who was a boy, like Vaughan. This meant that Mackenzie had kissed Ian. That Mackenzie and Ian did things together. This might even mean that Mackenzie wasn’t a virgin anymore. How does a boy lose his virginity to another boy? Is it even possible? Aileen didn’t know if what was hard to deal with was the idea of Mackenzie sleeping with a boy, or Mackenzie sleeping with anyone.
In the end she decided it was best not to think about some things.
After work, Aileen drove right over to the house on Michael Street. She hadn’t been through the iron gate, up the brick walk, up the wide stair onto the porch in a long time. She’d forgotten what a happy old house this was. She felt a little safer now, knowing Mackenzie was here. She knocked on the large door. Vaughan answered it, smiling.
“We’re all in the kitchen.”
Going down the hall he walked a little ahead of Aileen. She wondered why he wasn’t surprised and why he wasn’t wondering how Mackenzie would take all of this. And then she knew that Vaughan was really too much like his mother and father, and that he was surprised and probably was wondering what to say, but that his face would never betray this.
She looked around the kitchen. Luke and Tina were present, Mackenzie stopped talking. Ian looked startled too. The two other boys, Aileen did not know.
“Mom,” Mackenzie said. Tina’s eyes just narrowed. But she smiled a little, looking interested, as if she couldn’t wait to see what would happen.
“I- ” Aileen started. “I came to see you.” She included Tina. “The both of you.”
“I think you need to talk to Kenzie more,” Tina said.
Aileen looked at her daughter, and then said, “I think you might be right.”
She looked at her son.
Vaughan and Ian looked at Mackenzie, and he nodded.
“Well, you heard the lady,” said Vaughan. “Let’s get out. Amateur, Tolliver. This means you too. Shake a leg and we’ll reconvene in the BBC-arium in five minutes.”
They all picked up their things, and with a minimum of noise were gone. It was just Mackenzie and Aileen.
He sat at the large, round kitchen table. She put down her purse, and in her trench coat, hair still tied in a bun, sat down too.
Neither one of them spoke at first, so Aileen said, at last, “I came to bring you home.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“It’s your home.”
“Mom, it’s not my home if I can’t be me there,” Mackenzie said.
“Who says you can’t be you?”
“Can you accept me? Can you accept your gay son? Gay Mackenzie?”
“Is that what you’re calling yourself, now?” Aileen said.
“Mom, I am gay.”
Aileen put a hand up and said, “Yes. Yes, Mackenzie. I’m starting to realize that. But you’re also my son. And I would like you to come back to my house. Besides,” she added with a smile, “the other kids there are boring.”
Mackenzie raised his eyebrow and grinned.
“I’m sorry,” Aileen said, taking out her cigarettes. “But there’s just a time when you’ve got to face it. I’m sure it’s my fault, but they’re boring as all hell. Except for Ryan—and he just gets stranger and stranger because of what’s happened. Roy hasn’t been around in a few days.”
“He’s probably nervous about everything.”
“Well, I suppose,” Aileen took a drag off her cigarette. “But hell, Ryan needs him. And I need some sanity,” Aileen told her son.
“Can I bring Ian?”
“To live?” said Aileen.
“To eat with us. To be a guest. Like he was before?”
“Only it won’t be like it was before. Will it?” said Aileen.
“It will,” Mackenzie said. “Except no one really knew what it was before.”
Aileen sighed, her cigarette dropped ashes. Mackenzie pushed an ashtray across the table for her.
“Of course you can,” she said, wondering how she would negotiate this with Kevin.
“But Dad- ” Mackenzie started, obviously thinking about the same thing.
“I- ” Aileen put up a hand to silence her son, “will take care of your father. Now, the whole Ian thing... Is he at home? I heard- ”
“His dad hit him in the face. Hasn’t been around here, though. Ian doesn’t ever want to go back, and Cedric won’t make him.”
“No… Of course he won’t. Well, I have a few other errands. Give your mama a hug before I go.”
“Don’t forget Tina,” Mackenzie said, standing up and letting his mother wrap her arms about him. She smelled of cigarettes and Primo perfume from the counter of Osco’s drugstore. It had never smelled so good. Suddenly Mackenzie said, “I thought you wouldn’t come. I thought you didn’t care, maybe, and that- ”
Aileen took her son’s face gently.
“I will always care.”
And then she turned around and walked out of the kitchen.
