59 :: your basic mom :: 7/23/01
Jakob and Freya are waiting at the bus stop. They're headed out to an Indian restaurant, one of the places up on Devon. Jakob is holding a brown paper bag containing a six of Leinenkugel's. Jakob's only been up to the Indian neighborhood in the high northern reaches of Chicago once before, but he really enjoyed it. He grew up in Ohio suburbs, a place where ethnicity was regulated to Chinese restaurants in stripmalls, and now here he is in Chicago, where there exist entire enclaves with singular identities. Indian restaurants and video stores and music shops. On a street where people wear saris, he is the alien: the urban landscape once again becomes strange, he temporarily regains the ability to see the city with clarity. He loves that.
Despite that, he's crabbier than he'd like to be. He's hot and the air is humid and he feels covered with a sheen of sweat and city grime. Three buses have gone by in other directions. (Advertisements: Eat the World: Foodlife at Water Tower Plaza. Rule the Planet. 7.27.01. Also an outdated Moulin Rouge one.) Plus he's half-thinking about this paper he needs to write for this conference— it's currently little more than just a mess of notes. And once he starts thinking about that he starts thinking about how, immediately after that conference, he's going to need to jump back into teaching. He hasn't designed a syllabus for next semester: in fact he has only the most hazy idea of what he wants to cover. His life feels dominated by a whole series of separate ideas that don't connect; designs that cannot be interlocked into a pleasing larger pattern. He feels disassembled, incomplete. He tried to talk to Freya about this but she only responded with noncommittal noises: mm. Mhm? This only served to compound his irritation. What he really wanted was for her to help him talk through it. Sometimes he has a feeling that a woman who was also in grad school might be able to understand him better: he secretly feels a bit appalled that Freya never even finished college. But even if she wasn't able to talk him through it, she could at least have changed the subject: even that would have helped.
What Freya is thinking about is her half-brother. She finally called her mom back to figure out how Tim had gotten into trouble. The news was worse than she thought. Normally it's something that Freya thinks is not really a very big deal: he dyes his hair blue without asking, or he gets in trouble with the principal for skateboarding down the junior high's front steps. (For fuck's sake, Freya had thought: you build this oppressive prisonlike environment, and then you expect the kids to respect it?) But this time she's actually worried a bit. Tim had gotten caught selling Internet pornography to the other kids at school. She's not sure if he was selling disks or printouts or what, because she only got her mom's pretty hysterical version of the whole thing. I thought you needed a credit card to get at that—that stuff, her mom had said. Timmy doesn't have a credit card. How could he find that stuff—that—that filth? Freya didn't feel like giving her mom a primer on the abundance of free pornographic images: what she really felt like doing was getting through to Tim and figuring out just what was going on with him, why he did it. Can I talk to Tim? Freya had said. Let me talk to Tim. But Tim was out with Paul, his dad (her stepdad). Will you have him call me? Freya asked. Maybe I can make some sense of this whole thing. —Well, her mother responded, I hope you can, Freya. I sincerely hope you can. Terse. As though the suggestion was brazen. What the fuck?
She has about zero hope that her mom will actually pass on the message. Or she'll pass it on in some way that garbles the message: your sister wants to have a word with you about this whole business. Freya wants to reach Tim, sort him out, help him find a rightful way through this world. She supported Tim when he dyed his hair and skated on school property: she thinks those are valid strategies for dealing. (She remembers telling Tim the story of how Mom freaked out when she got the big tattoo on her left shoulder.) She thinks that this porn business, on the other hand, is probably not so cool. She'd like to hear what he has to say about it. But she knows that this desire is at cross-purposes to what her mom desires, which is to hear Freya sympathize: to get Freya to agree that Tim is a bad kid; to get Freya to admire Mom's stoic heroism in bearing up under the burden. Thank God he's still a minor, her mom had said, otherwise this might be in the papers. The papers!
—Hey, she says to Jakob.
—What, Jakob says.
—What's your mom like?
Jakob thinks for a second. That's a big question, completely out of the blue. There is, of course, a whole vast database of memory to rifle through, indexed along chains that follow an inarticulable order. An image of his mom tending to day lilies behind the garage flickers here. A grimy green bucket that he thinks of as his mother's gardening bucket, a pair of shears. Getting a haircut from her in a 1970s kitchen. Wallpaper with orange lozenges. A sentence: who's my best boy? A memory of her in a severe suit, going off to a new office job in what must have been the mid-1980s. Jakob in a room with his first girlfriend, Sarah, his hand on Sarah's lanky legs, Sarah's shorts unsnapped: Mom here is a knock at the door and a voice. Jakob? Jakob? Mom here is a catalyst to frenzy. Opening the door finally, exasperated—what? His mom regarding him with a complex expression which he still cannot fully interpret. He does not know how to sum up these various threads and he is too cranky to try.
—I don't know, he says. —She's just your basic Mom, I guess.
