Heart of Glass by Wendy Lawless Page B

messed up and adrift at this point in my life. But so was he. The difference was I was twenty. He seemed to look at me as if I were one of his projects—like his apartment. He was trying to fix me up. But it was a way to avoid his own problems, his own lack of success. It was easier to focus on me and my faults rather than turn and look at himself. Honestly, it was exhausting and making me kind of hate him. I even started to dislike the way he smelled; he gave off this peculiar cheap-plastic-toy odor from this dandruff shampoo he had started using. I couldn’t stand it.
    A little after five, we walked down to Out of Town News, where I briefly peddled magazines and newspapers before starting at the ART. Michael handed me the car keys,and I gave each of the boys a peck on the cheek. Tommy and Michael had a short and scenic walk back to Brustein’s house on Brattle Street, and I went to get the car, parked on Mass Ave, behind the newsstand.
    I fired up the Dodge Dart and started down Brattle Street, passing Michael and Tommy, who were trundling along the cobblestone sidewalk, talking too animatedly to notice me driving by. I was planning a return romp to all the scenes of the crimes of my teen years—a Wendy Lawless nostalgia tour. They weren’t the happiest of memories, but they were mine. I turned right onto Mount Auburn Street, past the hospital where my mother had been rushed in an ambulance on Thanksgiving just three years before, hemorrhaging from an IUD she’d gotten when we lived in London—out-of-date and overworked, it had given out and attacked her insides.
    I passed the sprawling Colonial we had lived in on Fresh Pond Parkway before being evicted for not being able to pay our rent, our situation made even more pathetic and ridiculous by Mother, who noisily accused the landlord of raping her, even brandishing her torn Pucci panties as proof to the moving men as they were carrying our belongings out.
    There was the Howard Johnson where I once saw Pat Metheny and where my mother liked to befriend sad, drunk ladies, insisting later that I drive them home after she bought them martinis and cheeseburgers. Onto Belmont Street, past the public high school whose keg parties my sister and I had sometimes crashed in the summer. Then up the hill to our old house, on Ivy Road.
    The house that the three of us had last lived in as a family was a stately brick two-story, with a sunporch and large rhododendron bushes flanking the windows. A narrow brick path led up to the front door, and terra-cotta tiles lay in scalloped rows on the roof. A year later, my mother had moved away—I didn’t know where—and hated my guts. My sister was at Stephens College in Missouri, safe, for now, from our mother’s fury. Even though most of my memories in that house were so hairy, I was still happy to see it. After all, it had been my home, or one of them anyway. The brick house looked ordinary and serene to me now; I no longer felt that impending sense of doom I used to experience pulling up to the curb on my way home from school. The past had somehow been defused, exorcised by the house’s new owners or perhaps just from my few months away.
    Switching off the engine, I got out of the car. I walked to the edge of the front lawn, looking into the lit windows of the house. I could see a woman and a man sitting at a dining table, a young girl clearing dishes. Outside in the dusk, the wind blew gently through the lone tree on the front lawn, which was thicker and taller than I remembered.
    Then, from under a bush, there came a cat. It was a lilac-point Siamese, with the same pale blue, almond-shaped eyes, crooked tail, and trim, sinewy build as my cat Gus, who had lived in this house with us and had been such a comfort to me and who, I felt, knew me in a way only the two of us could understand. Meowing, the cat walked right up to me and rubbed against my legs, so I knelt down to pet this otherGus. My cat