Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  Offsetting her self-imposed demotion was her rise in Tanner Evans’s estimation. Not only had the thought of her with Tanner not left her; after she publicly declared herself a Crossroads person, the thought had acquired new urgency. Certain people who thought less of her for going religious might think again if they saw her with Tanner Evans. This was a calculation, but her feelings had quickly fallen in line with it. She imagined holding one of Tanner’s hands in hers, touching the tips of his long fingers one by one. She imagined his hands clasped on her belly, the way she’d seen them clasped on Laura Dobrinsky’s. She imagined him writing a song about her.

  At the Grove, on the Friday after her first Crossroads meeting, she resisted the urge to find him and tell him what she’d done. She’d enjoyed the meeting, and she planned to go to the next one, but as soon as she saw Tanner arrive with his guitars she wondered if she’d capitulated too easily. If she’d offered more resistance, he might have kept pressing her, and teasing her.

  The Bleu Notes were playing without the Natural Woman that night. By the time their first set ended, Becky was putting chairs up on tables in the empty dining room. The urge was there but she resisted it. And was rewarded when Tanner came looking for her.

  “Hey,” he said, “I saw Rick Ambrose. You know what he told me?”

  “No.”

  “You actually went! I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d totally pissed you off.”

  “You did piss me off.”

  “Well, and apparently it worked.”

  “Yeah, once. I’m not sure I’ll go back.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  She shrugged, trying to maintain her resistance.

  “You’re still pissed off with me,” he said.

  “I still don’t see why you care if I’m in Crossroads.”

  She hoisted a chair onto a table, feeling his eyes on her. She expected him to ask what she’d made of Crossroads. Instead he asked her if she wanted to stay for the second set.

  “I’m not allowed in the back room,” she said, “except to get drink orders.”

  “You work here. No one’s going to card you.”

  “Where’s Laura?”

  “She went to Milwaukee for the weekend.”

  “Well, then, I don’t think I’d better.”

  Tanner looked away, blinking. He had wonderful eyelashes.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s cool.”

  All the way home and well into the night, she revised the evening in her head. Her chance had come and gone so suddenly, she hadn’t had time to think it through. Had she said no because she considered it unethical to sneak around behind Laura’s back? Or was it because the idea of being a temporary replacement, a second-stringer, was insulting? If only she hadn’t said no so quickly! Deflection of male advances had become a reflex, because until now the advances had always been deflection-worthy. But what if she’d stayed for the second set? And hung out afterward with Tanner and the band, and let him drive her home, and then seen him again the next day, and the day after that, while Laura was in Milwaukee?

  She didn’t get a second chance. The following Friday, Laura was back at the Grove, playing with Tanner, doing harmonies with him and then a solo song at the piano, “Up on the Roof,” that Becky fled into the kitchen to avoid hearing even distantly. That Sunday, she almost didn’t go to Crossroads, since there seemed to be nothing further to be gained with Tanner by going. But when seven o’clock rolled around she experienced a pang of actual loneliness, not a feeling she was used to. She threw on her only halfway scruffy coat, a corduroy jacket that Clem had outgrown, and ran-walked down to First Reformed, arriving just in time to be chosen by Rick Ambrose as a dyad partner.

  The instruction was Share something you’re struggling with that the group might help you with. Ambrose led her to his office, which he had the privilege of using for dyad exercises, and offered to share first. His dark eyes uncharacteristically cast down, rather than boring into hers, he spoke of being frightened by the size and intensity of the group he’d helped create, the power that so many kids had given him over their lives. It was hard for him to maintain humility, and he worried that his relationship with God was suffering, because the horizontal relationships within the group were so compelling. “It’s easier to pray when you feel weak,” he said. “It’s easier to pray for strength than for humility, because humility is what you need to pray in the first place. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I haven’t really tried to pray yet,” Becky said.

  “That’s the next step,” Ambrose said. “I don’t just mean for you. This group started as a Christian fellowship, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’m a little worried about what we’ve unleashed. What I’ve unleashed. I’m worried that, if it doesn’t end up leading us back to God, it’s just an intense kind of psychological experiment. Which could just as easily end up hurting people as liberating them.”

  Even by Crossroads standards, his disclosure seemed extreme to Becky. She was flattered by his openness with her, which she took as another token of their affinity. But she was only a high-school kid, not his spiritual adviser.

  “I know it’s a sore subject,” she found herself saying, “but one thing my dad is good at is keeping religion front and center. It’s always made me uncomfortable. But maybe it was a good contribution he made to the group?”

  Ambrose winced. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “I mean, it’s great, what you’re doing. I’m not a pray-er. I like that I don’t have to do that. But…”

  But what? Suggest that her father be reinstated in Crossroads? She cringed at the thought of him and his Christ talk at a Sunday-night meeting. She would quit the group in a minute if he came back.

  “And what about you?” Ambrose said. “What are you struggling with?”

  To reciprocate his openness, she told him that she had feelings for Tanner Evans. That Tanner was the reason she’d joined Crossroads. That, if she was not mistaken, Tanner was interested in her, too. That she wanted to pursue a relationship with him, but she didn’t think it was right to get between him and Laura. What should she do?

  If Ambrose was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I love Tanner,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever had a better experience in this group. If everyone were like him, I wouldn’t be worried about where we’re going. He really did find his way back to God, and he had a beautiful way of keeping it light.”

  “But Laura,” Becky suggested.

  “Laura gave me constant shit. And I respected that. If Laura’s got a problem with a person, the person’s going to hear about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “But Tanner is mellow, and that cuts both ways. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is. But I can tell you my impression, which is that Laura was always the one driving that relationship. For Tanner it was more like the path of least resistance.”

  Helpful information.

  “But maybe,” Becky said, “I should just keep away?”

  “If you want to be safe, yes. Do you want to be safe?”

  She already knew that safety, like passive aggression, was a dirty word in Crossroads. Safety was the opposite of risk-taking, without which personal growth could not occur.

  “It’s not your job to hide your feelings,” Ambrose said. “It’s Tanner’s job to deal with them, and with his own feelings.”

  Like her father, Ambrose had told her what to do while claiming not to, but it didn’t bother her when Ambrose did it. The problem was how to show her feelings. She loved safety! Her entire life to date had been organized around it! But since she’d blown her chance with Tanner, it was now up to her to take some kind of initiative, and she didn’t like the image of herself coming on to him. It would be extremely unsafe, not to mention difficult to manage if Laura was in the vicinity, and she wasn’t sure she’d be good at it anyway. She decided instead, as a semi-unsafe measure, to write him a letter.

  Dear Tanner,

&nb
sp; I was lying when I said I was still mad at you. In fact, I owe you a big debt of gratitude for introducing me to Crossroads. After just three weeks I can feel myself expanding as a person and taking new risks. You were right that I was just holding my breath. Well, I’m not holding it anymore. I’m trying to be more forthright about my feelings, and one of those feelings is that I’d like to get to know you better. If you feel the same way, maybe we can meet up sometime and take a walk or something? I would like that very much.

  Your friend (I hope),

  Becky

  The letter, which she rewrote and copied three times to get the tone right, terrified her. She sealed it in an envelope, tore open the envelope to read it again, and sealed it in a new envelope that she then hid in her dresser. It was waiting to be delivered to Tanner, in person, forthrightly, the next time she saw him, when Clem returned from college for Thanksgiving.

  She was glad that her father was the one to bring her brother home from the train station, so that she could pointedly exclude him when she invited Clem to take a walk with her. Since the summer, Clem had grown a sort of beard, and let his hair go long, and somewhere acquired a black peacoat. He looked a lot more than just three months older. As they walked in the low afterschool sunlight, he in the peacoat, she in his corduroy jacket, she had an elated sense of her own imminent adulthood; of their new formidableness as the pair of older siblings. They were the next generation. They had to be reckoned with.

  From their mother’s letters to him, Clem had learned that Becky had joined Crossroads. He approved, but he wondered why she’d done it.

  “I was mad at Dad,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I’m more interested in why you were in it. I mean, now that I’m there and I see what it’s like. Some of those exercises…”

  “The exercises weren’t that big a thing until Dad left. I stayed in for the work and the music. The sensitivity training was just a price you had to pay. There were enough other guys like me that we could pick each other as partners and talk about books or politics.”

  “Did you ever do a screaming exercise?”

  “I didn’t mind that one. It was better than the hugging. You were supposed to go around the room and give people hugs. Which, A, there were kids that nobody wanted to hug, and B, how did you know if a person wanted a hug? You were supposed to ask if it was okay, and the answer was supposed to be yes. I remember walking up to Laura Dobrinsky and asking her, and her saying no. She told me she wasn’t into doing things unless she really felt them. And I’m thinking, thanks, Laura. Glad we got that straight. I’d really been worrying about whether you felt like hugging me.”

  “What do you think of Laura?”

  “She’s got a real gift for humiliating people. You wouldn’t believe the way she spoke to Dad. She was at the center of that whole mess.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “It wasn’t just her, but she was definitely the ringleader.”

  Though Clem had explained it to her at the time, Becky had only a sketchy sense of why their father had left Crossroads. Her understanding was that he’d preached too much, and that Rick Ambrose had asked him to leave. She wasn’t feeling very loyal to him, but she was offended to think of Laura hurting him. “What did she do?”

  “The whole scene was horrible. I can’t even tell you.”

  “I’ve been talking to Tanner Evans, at the Grove. He and Laura play there every Friday.”

  “Good old Tanner.”

  “I know. It’s kind of strange that he’s with Laura.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I mean, they’re both musicians. But he’s so nice, and tall, and she’s so—midgety. You know what I mean?”

  Clem spoke sharply. “Laura can’t help how tall she is, Becky.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You shouldn’t be hung up on superficial appearances.”

  Becky felt stung. She had made, she thought, an innocuous point—that Tanner’s superficial appearance was extremely pleasing, Laura’s less so. All she wanted was that Clem agree that they looked strange together.

  Instead, he launched into a telling of how Tanner and his musician friends had doubled the size of Crossroads. She appreciated the confirmation of Tanner’s social status, but Clem seemed to have changed more than just physically. It wasn’t just the beard, the hair, the peacoat. It was that he seemed more interested in talking than in listening to her. As they sat on a picnic table in Scofield Park, watching tree shadows lengthen on the yellowed grass, she learned the reason.

  The reason’s name was Sharon. She was a junior at U of I, and he’d met her in a philosophy class. As he related to Becky how he’d boldly asked Sharon on a date, and how, on that date, they’d had a heated argument about Vietnam, and how amazing it was to find a woman who could more than hold her own in an argument with him, Becky had the unprecedented sensation of not wanting the details. Of being, herself, less interested in listening. The antipathy she felt toward Sharon, the discomfort it caused her to hear about Clem’s happiness, was inappropriate. It seemed to confirm, retrospectively, the inappropriateness of other things about her and Clem’s friendship. When he went on to effuse about what a revelation it was to experience a powerful animal attraction for the first time, and intense animal pleasure, by which he apparently meant full-on sex, and what a revelation it would be for Becky, someday, when she was ready for it, to connect with her own animal nature, her ears started roaring and she had to walk away from the picnic table.

  Clem hopped off the table and followed her. “I’m such an idiot,” he said. “You didn’t want to hear about any of that.”

  “It’s okay. I’m glad you’re happy.”

  “I just wanted to tell somebody, and you’re the person I always want to tell. You’ll always be that person, Becky. You know that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

  It took her a second to get the joke. She laughed, and things were right with them again, and so she told him about the money from Shirley and what their father had said. Clem’s response was “Fuck him. Fuck that guy.”

  Things were right with them again.

  “Seriously, Becky, that is so fucked up. That money is yours. You totally earned it, Shirley loved you. You can do whatever the hell you want with it.”

  “What if I want to give you half of it?”

  “Me? Don’t give it to me. Go to Europe, go to a great college.”

  “But what if I want you to have it? You could transfer to a better school next year.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with U of I.”

  “But you’re smarter than I am.”

  “Not true. I just never had a social life.”

  “But if U of I is okay for you, why isn’t it okay for me?”

  “Because—I don’t mind farm kids. I don’t care what kind of room I’m in. You should be at Lawrence, or Beloit. That’s the kind of place I picture you.”

  That was the kind of place she pictured herself, too.

  “But with sixty-five hundred dollars,” she said, “I could still go there. And you could save your half for graduate school.”

  Only now did Clem get that she was offering him thousands of dollars. In a calmer voice, he explained that she had two choices, either to keep all of the money or to share it equally. Singling him out was hurtful to Perry and Judson; it looked bad. And since three thousand dollars wasn’t enough money to make a difference to anyone, whatever the old man might think, she should keep the entire sum.

  His analysis made perfect sense—he was, in fact, smarter than she was, also more considerate of other people’s feelings, also less greedy—and she was undeniably happy to think of keeping all the money. But her gratitude made her even more inclined to share it with him.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “Don’t you see how bad it would look?”

  “But Dad’s going to kill me if I keep all of it.”
/>
  “Let me talk to him.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, I want to. I’m sick of this pious shit.”

  Night had fallen when they returned to the parsonage. Clem marched straight up to the third floor, and it was strange to be Becky then, sitting on her bed one floor below, hearing him and her father fighting over her. She didn’t know Sharon and didn’t want to, but it seemed to her unlikely that Sharon fully understood how good a person Clem was. He came back downstairs and appeared in her doorway.

  “I set him straight,” he said. “Let me know if he bothers you again.”

  Her passbook, which had been radiating unease in its drawer, settled down as soon as its five figures were secure. She had the money, and this seemed right to her, since she was the sibling who most wanted money and had the clearest idea of what to do with it, and now Clem, the only judge who mattered, had certified that it was right. Her father couldn’t be any colder to her than he already was, and when her mother expressed her own unhappiness Becky threw her off balance by inviting her to join her in Europe the following summer, and by promising to spend the remaining money on education. Though not originally her idea, the invitation was a brilliant stroke. Her mother had no great selfish interest in seeing Europe, but family life was like a microcosm of high school. Her mother wasn’t popular, and Becky’s invitation was gracious.