“Well I’ve got some news.”
“Oh hell no!”
It just jumped out of me. At the top of my lungs no less. Dad and Mom both stared.
“No! No! No!” I screamed. “You can’t do this to me again! Not now!” I sucked in some air and blew out a sigh. I tried to lower my voice and sound reasonable. I got my volume level down a little, but my hysteria levels stayed right up there.
Halloween had been awesome. Real ghosts! Not that there was anything very Halloweeny about an old guy in a lawn chair, but still…
And I was invited to this party and a girl named Carrie Glover and I…well we became sort of an item. Nothing really serious, I guess, but I was just getting used to the idea of having a girlfriend.
And now this!
“Look, things are good here. People know me here! I’ve got friends. Can you believe it? Friends! Me! A few more months, I might even have a social life! We can’t go now!”
Dad looked like I’d just hit him up side the head with a brick. This was new to him. Emotional outbursts were not the norm in my family. We were supposed to be stoics, remember? Upholding the ancient traditions of Marcus Aurelius and all.
“Look, I know this is hard on you…”
I jumped in. “Hard? This is hard? Oh yeah this is hard! This is only the second time in my whole life I’ve gone back to the same school! I’m fifteen years old; I’m supposed to be forming meaningful peer relationships, right? I read that in the dentist’s office once…”
I was starting to unravel.
Mom gave me one of her stop-right-now-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you looks.
I stopped.
“Listen to your father,” she said and then gave him the hard look. This time it was her this-better-be-good look.
Dad looked stricken. “As I was saying…this has been hard on you, both of you, I know. The moving all the time, the instability…but my contract will be up at the end of the year. I needed a new job anyway and this looks like it’ll be perfect.”
“A full professorship with tenure?” I asked.
Dad sighed. “No. Not yet. It’s only three classes, part time. The money will be tight, but we get a deal on student housing. It’s temporary, I know, only until summer. But I’ll have time I can use to finish my book.”
Yes, the famous book. Soon to be on all the best-seller lists. No doubt, Steven Speilberg would buy up the movie rights for millions of dollars and we’d all move into a beach house in Malibu.
“Right.”
I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud, or that I’d put so much bitterness and sarcasm in my voice, or how bad it made Dad feel to hear me say it.
Mom did, though. “I think you’d better go to your room for awhile.”
I opened my mouth, but there was nothing there to say.
I went to my room.
I could hear Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen. Nobody was yelling or anything, but I could feel the tension in their voices. I sat on my bed staring at the cardboard boxes stacked in my closet and against the wall. I’d been thinking about actually unpacking them one of these days.
I guess I could let that chore go.
Dad. He was just like one of those ghosts. Obsessed. Pathetic. Moving from one loser job to the next.
What was the point?
How different was that from trying to guard a beat-up scrap of lawn from a bunch of kids when they can’t even see or hear you?
Or trying to hit on college girls that don’t even know you exist?
Or eternally plowing some supermarket parking lot?
There was probably a good metaphor in there somewhere. My dad; spending his life plowing up parking lots.
I must have dozed off, but it was more than an hour later that I heard a tap on my door. Mom pushed it open.
“You awake?”
“Sorta.”
“Can we talk?”
“Yeah.” I rolled over to make room and Mom sat on the edge of my bed.
“I guess we didn’t realize how hard this was on you. Seems like we’ve been living this way forever and that it was, I don’t know, normal.”
“Normal,” I snorted.
Mom sighed. “Normal for us anyway. This has all been hard for everybody, most of all for your father.”
“And you?” I asked. “You like this? Working all these crappy jobs? Living in these crappy apartments? Moving every six months?”
Another sigh. “How do you think your father feels? He’s given his whole life over to the study of a body of literature that would be lost forever if people like him weren’t there to keep it alive.”
“And what I tragedy that would be,” I muttered.
“Your father thinks so. And frankly, so do I. You know, I met him when I was a student in his Greek lit. seminar. He was a graduate student, teaching classes while he worked on his Ph.D.”
This was not new information. I’d heard my parents’ boy-meets-girl story before.
“My major was sociology, not classics, but I needed some literature credits and your father’s class fit my schedule.”
Mom shifted herself to get more comfortable. “We’d been reading The Iliad by Homer…I’d been reading it all week and it seemed so boring, just a lot of bloody battles and macho bragging.
“But your father…” She smiled, “…your father had this passion about it. He could see things in the story, things under the surface that I’d missed. He showed us that behind the bloody descriptions of the war, was a feeling of sorrow, regret…it was really an anti-war story…
“Anyway, I believe in what your father is trying to do. He lives to keep that the ideas from those ancient cultures alive. He’s an amazing teacher. I’ve seen that, and I believe in him even though things haven’t worked out very well so far.”
No kidding, I thought, but at least I kept my mouth shut this time.
“Your father and I talked, though and we’ve made an agreement.”
“An agreement?”
“We decided that this was going to be the last time.”
“The last time we move?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” Mom said grimly, “not exactly. The last temporary professorship for your father. He thinks he can finish this book and get it published.”
“I hope so; he’s been working on it for six years.”
She gave me that look and I shut up.
“He says he’s close. It’s doable, but if it doesn’t turn into a long-term professorship, he’s agreed to take a job teaching high school.”
I looked up, shocked.
Mom went on, “It would mean giving up his dream, everything he’s worked for all these years, but he knows how hard this has been on all of us, and he’s agreed. This will be the last time.”
Great. Not only do we move just when things are getting good, but I get a free side of guilt to go with it.
Mom looked at me hard. “We’ve got to give him this last chance. It’s only fair.”
She was right, of course; it was only fair.
But it still sucked.