Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online

failed to forgive on the day Jews forgive people every year, for the thirty years since his bar mitzvah. (I’d come to find out he did have a bar mitzvah, and once had owned a yarmulke, for about six months. He confessed his was the shortest Torah portion ever, the equivalent in Psalms of “Jesus wept.”)
    But Unitarian thought, with its B.Y.O.T. (Bring Your Own Theology, as Cathy called it), wasn’t enough. Leo kept morphing. He took his first solo vacation, ten days, to photograph petroglyphs. He nearly taught all of us hypnosis with a full hour’s carousel of slides of scrapings on rocks that might have been deer, or moons shining, but especially of a human figure Gabe called Homo muchas erectus, a fertility god apparently for some ancient Hopis or Zunis. He got them on a disc and rented a TV and a DVD player to show them to us. The kids looked at it as if he’d bought a Harley.
    Then, for Christmas, Leo gave Caro a sewing machine and some patterns for wrap skirts for her to sew her own clothes.
    She came to me in tears. “Mom,” she said, “Daddy wants me to look like I’m Amish.”
    He gave Gabe a table saw instead of the camera hookup to the computer he’d wanted so badly. Gabe was, however, game. They made a worktable, which Gabe still has, and which is, I admit, beautifully joined, not a nail in it. He gave me a pair of Adirondack chairs (from the Adirondacks, no less) to squeeze in next to the tomato tubs in place of our big chaise longues. This was apparently so we could watch the tomatoes grow and view the neighbors grilling bratwurst while we grilled Little Bear veggie burgers. I kept wondering, sitting uneasily in my easy chair, what would come next?
    What came next was that Leo bought a pair of barbering scissors and a book on haircutting, and spent a whole Sunday trying to get near Caroline’s head, with her dodging and warning him, “I’ll hit you, Dad. I’ve never done anything that bad and I don’t want to, but if you touch my hair, I’ll hit you.” We could afford Caroline’s haircuts, and he knew how much it meant to a young girl to have her hair look downtown instead of downriver. But Leo said he didn’t like seeing a twelve-year-old girl spend twenty-two dollars on a haircut. People could do things…themselves. To keep peace, Gabe gave in, and went to school looking like someone who had been mowed. Leo praised him for helping us become more “self-sufficient.” (Gabe comforted me later, telling me that his hair would grow back, and his peers thought he sort of resembled someone from the Goo Goo Dolls.)
    But I was peeved.
    Why, I thought, didn’t Leo just remodel himself? Or install some solar panels or something?
    He went after my makeup next, uncomfortable seeing me use one moisturizer in the morning and another at night. He asked me to give up wearing makeup and start using Sloan’s soap on my hair and Kiss My Face lotion (you can imagine what we call this lotion now) instead of Clarins on my neck and forehead. And to give up eyeliner.
    “Leo,” I told him, “you haven’t seen a woman who was awake and not wearing makeup since you were in eighth grade.”
    “That’s not at all true. Many women prefer the natural look. They don’t mind looking the way women were meant to look as they age. Plus. Do you know Caroline wears mascara?” He said this in the same tone he might have used had he accused her of freebasing.
    “So what? She only wears it for rec night at the teen center.”
    “She’s not even a teen! She’s completely caught up in a whole consumer thing—”
    “She is not. She’s about half as thing-conscious as Marissa or Justine or any other of her friends, especially that one…that girl who’s a model now.” I was flustered. We didn’t need the money I spent on goddamn moisturizer. It wasn’t going to change the fate of Third World nations.
    “It’s just all those jars, sculpted glass, blue bottles, all that packaging. That’s what you’re paying