Getting Over Jack Wagner Read Online Free PDF

star.”
    Mom’s lipsticked mouth pinched shut like an olive, aimed and fired. “You had a rock star’s face sewn onto a T-shirt? One of your T-shirts? One of the T-shirts I bought you new for summer?”
    â€œIt wasn’t sewn,” I pointed out, the only glitch I could find. At age ten, I still possessed some amount of guilty fear around my mother. I didn’t lie to her. I rarely disobeyed her. If I was going to blaze a man’s face into one of the T-shirts she bought me new for summer, I was at least going to be honest about my methods. “I got it ironed on. At the mall.”
    She planted one hand on each hip, like a TV mother, her wet nails splayed like sharp wings. Mom was master of the TV-mother moves. TV-mother angry = hands on hips. TV-mother annoyed = arms folded across chest. TV-mother disappointed = arms folded/head shake combo. Her neck and face were flushed deep pink.
    I was about to explain the innocent circumstances surrounding the decal—a misguided trip to Everything Ts, the hissing steam, the seductively loud Van Halen on the radio, and the intense peer pressure I was getting from my friend Katie (whom Mom already disapproved of because Katie’s mother let her eat pixie sticks)—when she looked in the shadowy direction that was my father.
    â€œLou,” she said. “Are you listening to this?”
    My father—then he was Dad, later I would remember him as Lou—was seated in the darkest corner of the living room, ensconced in his old green recliner. If the man wasn’t at work (a job I knew nothing about except that it required him to wear dark suits, come home late, and be perpetually sullen) chances were he was in it. The chair was like his own mini-universe, where he lived alone in his drab corduroys and wrinkled, untucked Oxford shirts, with a dark foamy beer and a messy newspaper, playing slow jazz albums that dipped and sighed and seeped like a moat around his feet.
    The chair was an ugly, threadbare monstrosity. A memento, my father said, from back when he was a “bachelor” (a distinction he liked to make, and often, as if he once belonged to a completely different species). He and the chair were starting to age together, even resemble each other, like the elderly and their pets. As the chair sagged, so did my dad, drooping at the shoulders and softening at the gut. Cushion foam was falling out in tufts, like middle-aged hair.
    Needless to say, Mom hated the chair. She hated the ugliness of it, the greenness of it, the music and memory that separated us from it. But most of all, she hated the cat scratches. At some point during Dad’s crazy bachelor days, the chair had been ravaged by a cat that belonged to one of his ex-girlfriends. It was weird, as a kid, to imagine Dad with any woman other than my mother. But the reality of that woman and her cat sat in our living room every day. What kind of woman lets an animal rip up her furniture? Mom would mutter, as she jabbed around the chair with the nose of the vacuum cleaner, though I’m sure the answer terrified her: the kind of woman who was carefree and spontaneous, the kind of woman who took in strays and fed them fish sticks, the kind of woman who, after sex, left scratches on men’s backs.
    Once, after school, I caught my mother trying to stitch up the cat scratches. Dad was at work, my sister Camilla was at one of her alpha-child extracurricular activities, and Mom was hunkered like a burglar on the living room floor: intense, sweaty, and brandishing a mini-sewing kit in her hand.
    From the kitchen doorway, I watched her. It was the most disheveled she had ever looked. Her hair was pinned up sloppily in a couple of my ribboned barrettes and her shoes were kicked off, revealing the dirty soles of her nylons. Straight pins were lined up between her lips and she was mumbling through them as she poked and prodded at the stuffing leaking from the chair. My instinct was to