Important Things That Don't Matter Read online

  IMPORTANT THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER

  A NOVEL

  DAVID AMSDEN

  Mom:

  This book is yours

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: ADULTHOOD

  UP LATE WITH DAD AND SHIRLEY

  PRISON

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON COMEDY HOUR

  EDUCATION IS OVERRATED

  BELATED THANK-YOU NOTE

  CUT UP, NO BLOOD

  PART TWO: CHILDREN AT PLAY

  SIDE MIRRORS ARE POINTLESS

  FAMILY TRIP

  BLOOD RELATIVES

  LUCK?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PART ONE

  ADULTHOOD

  My God, I am young, young, and I didn’t even know it; they didn’t even tell me, that I was young.

  —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

  UP LATE WITH DAD AND SHIRLEY

  Dad will be waiting at the gate.

  That was the plan. It was late, well past midnight, like the latest I’d ever known the world with eyes open. Me and Mom were exhausted from the flight, me letting loose these dizzying yawns every twenty seconds as the plane taxied in, the whites of Mom’s eyes all stained with bloodshot tributaries. The tendons in my hand still stung from Mom’s squeezing it the second the landing gear opened up—she didn’t let go until it was clear we were down, clear no one around her was burning to death. Mom hated takeoffs and landings, was convinced we all got only so many. You’d see this in her eyes at times, and not just when planes were involved—this fear-stained look, like something tragic was coming right at her, right there nipping at her earlobes.

  I leaned my head on the little oval window, checked out the flat landscape: runways and windsocks, these sparks in the dark, going from two-to three-dimensional, thanks to the pinpoint flashing lights of white, green, blue, red. I looked at the lights until my eyes watered up, the colors blending inside them, forming these wild shapes. Then I’d have to blink and start over. Out in the distance you could see Dulles, all whitewashed and glowing, its roof like a frozen wave begging to crash.

  The plane stopped now, completely, fasten-seatbelt signs binged off, the overhead fluorescents flooded the cabin, making everyone’s face tough to stomach: all green-yellow, pasty. Their eyes were gray. People getting their bags out from the overheads now, the silence was broken up by the cracking of knees, fingers, shoulders, toes, elbows, necks.

  “Sit tight, honey,” Mom was saying, getting our things in order, putting my Crayolas back in their box—

  “Do you want to hang on to the red?”

  “Yes.” I had a thing for carrying the red one in my pocket.

  —and now my He-Man coloring book, now my die-cast Corvette Stingray and the G.I. Joe sniper expert who was into using the car as a skateboard. All shoved into her purse, next to her how-to-make-your-business-work book, or her how-not-to-stress-out-while-making-your-business-work book, or whatever she was reading, which always had something to do with self-improvement.

  I kept busy by smashing my forehead against the plastic window, feeling my nose turn to Play-Doh. I pretty much thought about half the universe in terms of Play-Doh then. In school we’d started playing with it, making Play-Doh alphabets, each of us assigned one letter. Twenty-five of us in the class, my name starting with an A, I got to do A and Z. This made all the kids wish I was dead, but, really, I could’ve cared less about the letters—I just liked eating the stuff, how it got all salty. You know, like ocean-flavored bubble gum.

  “Stop that,” Mom was saying.

  I was now pressing my open mouth against the window, inflating my cheeks. Drawing smiley faces on the plastic with my tongue.

  “I want to be home.”

  “Well, licking that filthy window’s not gonna bring home here any quicker,” Mom pointed out.

  Now Mom was saying come on, let’s go, said we’re ready and took my hand, led me out into the aisle in front of her. Mom kept her hand on my head as we skittered down the aisle, having to stop every second for old people, who all had to look at me with the same glazed empty smile. The stewardesses looked as sleepy as Mom standing in the doorway, their makeup starting to flake off, smeared like someone sent them through a carwash by mistake, waving good-bye, sleep well, bye, bye now, good-bye. To me one went—

  “Sleep tight.”

  —and the other, squatting down, went—

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite, you cutie.”

  —which always freaked me out, that little rhyme. I mean, do you know anyone who has any idea what bedbugs are? And, say you’re asleep, how can you make sure they don’t bite you? It’s funny, how when you get older, you realize half of what adults tell you as a kid is meant to turn you into a crazed insomniac by the time you hit twenty. I’m twenty now, so trust me. I know what I’m talking about.

  The tunnel leading to the gate was even brighter than in the plane, and cold. We’d been in Florida, so this was my first time feeling cold in about a week. At five years old this is a substantial chunk of time. We’d been visiting a friend of Mom’s, some lady she knew in high school who was stuck in Florida because her dad was about to die. You know, because old people are always going down to Florida to die. It was all sad, I know, but I didn’t really understand. Every time we went to the hospital to visit the dad I’d be stuck in some room with a thousand other kids my age, some daycare center run, as they all are, by a psychotic old lady. Not that I cared—there were enough crayons and construction paper in there that after fifteen minutes I’d have no idea where I was.

  “Oh it’s cold,” I was saying.

  “I thought you told winter to go away before we got back,” Mom said, taking me by the hand.

  “I did.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I did, I swear.”

  “Then why’s it still cold?”

  “I don’t know. When are we going to be home?”

  “I know, sweetie,” she said, all patting my head. “Real soon. I’m tired too.”

  He’d be right there at the gate.

  That was the plan. With Mom pretty much everything pivoted around some master plan—she hasn’t had the best of luck and I guess it’s her way of keeping tragedy at bay. I don’t know. I just know that this plan went: Dad would be there, at the gate, so happy to see us, his moustache doing that thing it did when he smiled, where it looked all caught up in some breeze. And he wouldn’t be sleepy, not a bit. He worked nights at Jerry’s and knew these hours, knew hours ten times later than this. He’d take us to the baggage claim, and he’d carry all our bags. Dad would have the car nearby, that little blue Honda, and before me and Mom knew what was what, we’d be at home, in bed, asleep, at home, finally—

  “Shit shit shit,” Mom was suddenly going.

  Out of the tunnel now, we were standing at the gate.

  “Shit,” she said again.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh excuse me. Damn it. I’m sorry,” she said. She looked around the gate some more. The plane hadn’t been too full, and most of the passengers were already on their way to the baggage claim. So the gate was pretty much empty, buzzing with the kinds of lights I can’t stand. You know, the kind that are never turned off. They burn out instead.

  “Goddamn it. Damn it.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your father’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he’s lost.”

  “Maybe. He was supposed to come with Shirley.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’
t know. Damn this.”

  “We’ll be home soon?” I wanted to know.

  “Oh I’m sorry,” Mom said. She closed her eyes, now took a breath, took another, like suddenly she was asthmatic. “Let’s get our bags. Maybe your father’s down there.”

  Shirley moved into our house that year, 1986. Dad and Mom had been renting out one of the basement rooms since they moved in, for extra cash. The first boarder was an old lady whose family found her one day, apologized to my parents, drove her away, and put her in a nursing home, where she died a week later. Then we had Shirley, the first in my lifetime. I always liked her a lot.

  She was twenty-seven, the same age as Dad, just younger than Mom. She had this boy-short brown hair, a pointy nose, these big glazy brown eyes, a jawline like a boomerang, and lips that could mess men up if they looked the wrong way, which they were always doing anyway. There was something else about Shirley that men in 1986 fell apart over: she happened to be an ex-Playmate, had been out in L.A. for years, living at the Mansion, serving up cocktails to whoever in one of those old-school pink bunny getups. I’m not even kidding.

  Then she got the splendid news about her mother: that one night out of nowhere she had axed her father to death while he was sleeping, cut his hands and feet off first, clogged the toilet with them, then went after his insides. She lived in some crap apartment, which is how the cops caught her: with the toilet clogged, the downstairs neighbors got flooded, called the super, and you can figure out the rest.

  Which is why Shirley was living with us, back in Maryland, back to Rockville, her hometown from years ago. She was settling jail stuff (her mom got life), burial stuff (there was no funeral), and legal stuff. The lady was about to cash in on a small inheritance that would screw up her life forever.

  Dad wasn’t anywhere around the baggage claim either, which is why Mom was again going—

  “Goddamn it. Damn this.”

  “Maybe he’s just lost.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “Maybe. I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  The baggage carousel ground on: the angled aluminum conveyer belt, moving all clumsy, so slow. I wanted to put my foot up on it and see what would happen, put it right up here and—

  “Don’t do that!” Mom snapped.

  “But—”

  “No.”

  “But I was just—”

  “Honey, I’m at the end of my line here. I’m at the end.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where the hell is your father?”

  I only had this small Spiderman backpack, used it as a carry-on, so we were just waiting for Mom’s suitcase, one of those gigantic kinds with wheels and a leash. It was the last to come out.

  “I see it, Mom. Can I get it?”

  “Another time,” she said, pulling the thing over the moving rubber railing. “Come on. Let’s check for him out here.”

  We went out to where the cabs and buses pull up. The lights everywhere were this dusty yellow glow. You know, the kind that lights up every parking lot in America after a certain hour. There was lots of concrete, a few men directing traffic. It smelled like car exhaust and garbage, was so cold my joints felt freeze-dried. There weren’t many people, and those around were disappearing quick, into cabs, into cars, fading out there into the parking lot, this spread of cars all shiny and still under the lights.

  God, was it cold, really so cold—

  “Mom, I’m freezing.”

  “Me too, me too.”

  “When are we going to be home?”

  “I’m cold too,” is all Mom said. “I know. I’m cold too.”

  Shirley lived downstairs with her boyfriend, this nine-foot-tall German guy with thin blond hair down to his chin. I liked him too. He drove a gold Porsche 922. You know, the kind that wasn’t around for long, the kind that looked like a cheese wedge.

  There had been this one time where Shirley and her boyfriend were the only ones with me at the house and a small crisis broke out: Mom and Dad had just bought one of those pop-top campers, the cheap kind that looked like Smurf huts, and Dad had taken Mom’s puke-green Volvo to the shop to get a trailer hitch put on. You won’t believe what happened. The man at the shop forgot to put the emergency brake in place when he put the car up on the lift. So while he’s working, the Volvo ends up rolling backward, right into his face, shatters his neck in two. The guy was dead on the spot.

  So there’s Dad, stuck with the car on top of a dead mechanic and the cops were saying they needed it for a few hours, to try to make sense of everything. And Dad had to get to Jerry’s, for the late shift. He called Shirley at the house and before I know what’s what, she and her boyfriend are shoving me into the hatchback part of the Porsche since there’s no backseat, crammed me in under the curved glass, kept in place by a thousand sofa cushions. You should have seen how fast this guy drove. I could hear the engine back there, really hear it, the ball bearings screaming at each other, how it went from low to high over and over, how it turned dead silent for a split second between gears. I closed my eyes and suddenly we were flying to the moon. We’d hit a pothole and to me we had just grazed an asteroid. Sharp turns and we were circling Saturn’s rings. We were off to meet Sally Ride, who I knew was pretty with long curly brown hair. We were off to meet her, and all the other astronauts we wouldn’t shut up about in school ever since they blew up in the Challenger.

  Me and Mom were running through the whole airport now. Or at least Mom was walking fast and I had to keep pace by running. It was quick, fragmented, all panicked. The big windows of Dulles jet black with night, the walls and ceiling the whitest thing I’d ever seen. The night cleaners were out with their humming wax machines, and the floor—so bright and smooth you thought you were running around inside an ice cube, everything flashing silver with each step. I was so tired, but had to keep going, had to stay with Mom.

  She looked so worried, so scared, her eyes all dry-looking now, more yellow than white. We went back to the gate, back to the baggage claim, down the east wing, the west wing, over and over, everything white or black, these cool crisp lines, the floor blending into ceiling, ceiling into floor, all lit with invisible lights, my shoulder popping in and out of its socket as Mom yanked me in ten thousand directions. Mom was sort of murmuring the whole time, whispering to herself, nothing I could make out too clear. Every now and then we’d pass a couple, or a family, or two friends, some sort of groggy reunion. Looking at these clean people, I felt so embarrassed my teeth hurt.

  Mom stopped, stood still for a moment. She said we needed a phone. Mind you, she didn’t mean a pay phone—she’d already tried one of them, called home and got only rings. She was now talking about one of those phones you never want to use, the kind found in places like malls and airports that broadcast over the loudspeakers. The kind of phones, basically, used only by people whose lives are messed up. Even when you’re five the last thing you want to be in the world is the type of person who relies on these phones.

  So I said—

  “Mom, maybe he’s outside. Maybe he’s—”

  “We were just out there. What do you want from me?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mom said. “Not you.”

  Then she said we have to use this phone. Mom said she was at the end of her line. She picked up the receiver, which was bright red. It was the type of phone you picture in a tank or submarine, and even in there it’s a last resort. Normally, there was an operator to relay your message, but it was so late right now that the operator was off, and you had to do it yourself. So Mom followed the directions, dialed whatever combination of numbers you had to dial to get on the loudspeaker, and suddenly there was this audible click. You could hear it. She hadn’t spoke yet but you could hear we were on. Yes, that’s us. We are the ones using this phone. Help us. We are the ones who need it. We are the ones in need. We are the ones going—

  “This call is for Joseph Ames. This call is for Joseph Ames….”

  It wa
s never cool hearing Mom refer to Dad as Joseph, weird enough when she called him Joe instead of Dad. Kids hate things like this, these reminders that there’s so much you don’t know.

  “Joseph, this is Susan. Your son and I have been looking all over for you….”

  I swear it was the only sound in all of Dulles, really so loud, ricocheting off the walls, off the windows. I wished it would just break through the glass and be gone, but all it did was keep colliding with itself instead.

  “We went to the gate, Joe, and then to the baggage claim. You weren’t there. You weren’t. So we went outside, and didn’t find you. You weren’t outside, Joe, so we went back to the gate—”

  She broke off.

  “Joe, we are at the emergency phone. In the south corner. If you hear this, please could you come and pick us up?”

  When she hung up I asked what are we going to do now. Sit tight, she said, we’d sit tight for a bit, that was about all we could do. If everything went well, he’d be here soon enough. Dad will, and we’ll be home.

  The hour or so we waited by the phone, sitting on the floor right under it, felt like forever, even though I was asleep the whole time, sprawled out with my head on Mom’s thigh. Mom was tapping me awake now. My spine felt stiff. I was pretty sure we were the only people in the world who had ever been awake this long and this late.

  God, Mom was crying—

  “Mom?”

  She stood up, took my hand, sort of yanked me to my feet, started walking.

  “Mom?”

  She picked up the pace, me taking these little skip-steps to keep up.

  “Mom?”

  “I…I don’t know—”