The Necessary Hunger

by Nina Revoyr

  Maybe because I was so preoccupied with thoughts about my father, I forgot to take the usual precautions. My window, which I'd opened at Wendy's, was still rolled halfway down. At each stoplight I came to, I pulled all the way up behind the car in front of me, and didn't look to either side. The light turned yellow as I approached La Brea. The car in front of me made it through the intersection, but I slowed down to a stop as the light turned red, and the nose of my father's Mustang just broke the plane of the crosswalk.

  It was only by luck that I saw him. I was half-leaning against the door, waiting for the light to change, when I looked into the side-view mirror to see if there was any gray still left in the sky. There wasn't, but what I did see was a young guy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, stepping off the curb and heading quickly toward my car. He was on the small side, with thin delicate features, and he wore a big, bulky Lakers jacket which seemed to engulf him. He walked toward me with such purpose that I just watched him approach, wondering if he was someone I knew. Then, when he was still about ten feet away, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.

  I didn't understand, at first, or believe, what was happening; it was like the interval between when you hit your hand against something and when the pain of it finally comes. I still didn't move as he got closer, as he reached the side of the car, as he raised the gun and tried to put the muzzle in the open window. It was like a slow-motion fantasy—not possible, not existing in real time—but somehow, finally, I snapped out of my daze. Then I did exactly what you are not supposed to do in that situation—instead of getting out and handing over the car, I pressed the gas pedal down to the floor. The light was still red, but I drove through the intersection anyway, ducking down to avoid seeing the cars that I knew were about to hit me, and also to keep from getting shot. Miraculously, though, I wasn't hit by another car, and I was just registering my thankfulness for the lull in the traffic when the back window, and then the front one, were pierced by a bullet, and cracks like spiderwebs blossomed out around each of the holes. Only then did I hear the gun's report. I kept driving, my head up just high enough to see over the dash, as my heart beat so violently that it seemed to take up the entire inside of my chest. I waited for another bullet, but it didn't come. At all the intersections I stopped at after that, I looked around frantically, as if expecting the same kid to step off of each corner. In another few minutes I made it home.

  I rushed inside, almost forgetting to shut the car door, and called out for my father. He, Claudia, and Raina were all sitting at the kitchen table, and when they heard my voice and saw my face, they just looked up at me for a moment, their eyes filled with concern.

  "What happened?" my father asked, standing up quickly. "Are you all right?"

  I couldn't explain to him, couldn't say anything, so I just grabbed his arm and pulled him outside. Raina, Claudia, and Ann all followed behind. When we got out to the driveway and my father saw the car, he pressed his lips together, and his nostrils flared, and he just stared at it for a moment. Then he walked up in front of the car and put his index finger into the hole left by the bullet, went around to the back and did the same thing. Behind us, I could hear Raina and Claudia saying, "Holy shit," and, "Oh my God." My father flattened both of his hands against the back windshield, and I saw a shiver go all the way through him.

  "Are you all right?" he asked again, looking at me.

  "I'm fine," I said. "Just freaked."

  "How did this happen?"

  "This kid tried to jack me at Manchester and La Brea. I was just sittin there waitin for the light to change, and he started walkin toward me, and he had a Lakers jacket on and I thought maybe it belonged to his brother or somethin, 'cos it didn't fit him, it was way too big. But then he opened it and there was a gun underneath and maybe that's why he was wearin that jacket. And I don't know what kind of gun it was but it looked fuckin huge, and he came up around the side of the car so I drove away, I drove through the intersection, and then, and then—"

  The words just stopped coming. Everyone was looking at me. I stared at the shattered windshield and noted, absently, that the reflected images of Raina and Claudia were oddly disjointed, as if Raina and Claudia themselves had been broken and then hurriedly put back together.

  "You could of been killed," Raina whispered. And somehow hearing this made me feel even more frightened, made the danger I'd faced more real.

  Although it wasn't cold that night, I started to shake badly. My father must have seen this, because he came over to me then. He stood in such a way that my left shoulder bisected his chest, and he enveloped me with his arms.

  "It's okay," he said. "You're home. And I won't let anything hurt you."

  I wanted to relax in his arms. I wanted to let go of my fear and lean into his chest and think everything would be all right. It didn't work, though, because I couldn't believe him—this was a man who was having trouble protecting even himself. I knew he meant what he said, that he would do everything he possibly could to keep me from being hurt. But I also knew that it wasn't enough.

  After the police came out to the house and told us there was almost no chance of catching the kid who'd shot at me, we all decompressed in the living room. My father brought me a cold beer and asked about every five minutes if I wanted something to eat. Raina had planned to go over to Stacy's, but instead she stayed home, sitting next to me on the couch the entire evening and making jokes about Dick Clark's hair until I laughed. I tried not to jump when firecrackers went off. At midnight, as the apple fell in Times Square on the television, we heard several reports of gunfire. I cringed, more than usual, and Raina shook her head.

  "That's a stupid fuckin tradition," she said.

  We stayed up for another two hours, still hearing firecrackers and the occasional gunshot. I drank another cold beer, and then another, until my body relaxed enough for me to go to bed. I let Ann sleep in my room just to have some company, and put the pillows over my ears to shut out the noise from outside. It took me another several hours to get to sleep.

  When I woke up in the morning, I was still a bit dazed from the alcohol, and surprised to find the dog in my bed. Then I remembered the events of the previous night. They seemed incomprehensible, though, like the strange, distorted incidents of a nightmare, and I wasn't completely sure, for a moment, whether or not they'd really happened. I went outside to look at the car, and discovered that it was gone. The paper had been picked up already, so I went back inside and found Claudia and Raina at the kitchen table. Claudia looked up when she saw me.

  "Happy 1987," she said.

  "Yeah, wonderful," I said. "Hey, where'd the car go?"

  Claudia got up and poured me a cup of coffee. "Your father took it down to the garage," she said.

  "They're not open today, are they?"

  "No," she said, as she poured some milk into the cup, "but I think he just wanted to get it out of our sight."

  I nodded, and then sat down in the chair beside Raina.

  She turned and looked at me. "How's it goin?"

  "All right, I guess,"

  "Did you sleep okay?"

  "Yeah, I did. I think the alcohol helped."

  She nodded seriously. "Beer's a good thing."

  I thanked Claudia for the coffee, took a sip of it, shook my head. "That was a crazy thing to happen, though," I said. "Especially on a holiday."

  Raina grinned. "Well, at least you started the new year off with a bang."

  Claudia rolled her eyes, and I just looked at Raina, and then finally, we all started to laugh.

  My dad got home about twenty minutes later, and cooked a huge breakfast of French toast, home fries, and sausage. After we ate, I called Telisa, Q, Stacy, and Natalie to tell them what had happened. They all expressed horror and concern, but I realized, in the middle of the first conversation with Telisa, that this wasn't really what I was after. I discovered that as I spoke to people, and described the scenario over and over, it seemed to diffuse its power somehow. It made th
e shooting less a real, threatening event, and reduced it, at least for a while, to just an interesting story, a topic to mull over with friends.

  I spent the rest of the day watching the bowl games on TV, and by evening I was feeling close to normal. It seemed like several weeks had passed since I'd driven away from that kid at the intersection.

  When we got the car back from the garage three days later, the first thing I did was press my hands against the new windshields. It was hard to believe that they'd so recently been shattered. I drove the car immediately, just cruised around for a while, to get over my fear of being in it. With Raina in the passenger seat, I went back to the corner of Manchester and La Brea—it looked harmless and uneventful in the daylight, and the lunchtime traffic passed through as if nothing had happened.

  My strategy worked—after seeing the intersection, and driving around for half an hour, I was fine. And while I didn't forget what had happened, of course, I put it away somewhere, in a compartment in the back of my mind. This was how I'd always dealt with the violence around us; this was how most of us dealt with it. You had to keep a certain distance, a certain mental control; if you thought about it too much, you'd go crazy.

  CHAPTER 13

  On the day after New Year's, my team resumed practice. We still had a few days of vacation left, and by throwing myself back into basketball, and back into my life with Raina, I was able to distract myself from what had happened with the car. My team practiced at eight a.m., on mornings so cold we could see white tufts of breath in the air. Every morning after practice I'd have a long breakfast at McDonald's with Telisa and Q, and then get home just in time to see Raina off to her practice, which started at the much more reasonable time of noon. I watched All My Children, One Life to Live, and the first part of General Hospital while she was gone. Then she came back and we fixed ourselves some lunch; together we watched the rest of General Hospital, and then The Oprah Winfrey Show. One day I arrived at home wearing one of my team's new practice jerseys, which had been designed by Coach Fontaine. There Is No "I" In "We", it said in bold blue letters.

  "Yeah, right," Raina said. "I'd like to see how your 'we' would be doing if a certain 'I' wasn't throwin in twenty-four points a game."

  I laughed. It did not escape my attention that she knew exactly what I was averaging. She had been keeping track. I was happy.

  Every day at four o'clock we left for the park—stopping at the liquor store for a minute or two in order to chat with Mr. Wilson—and after dinner we headed down there again. I always kept my eye out for the kid with the big Lakers jacket, but he never appeared; after the games started up, I forgot him. Normally we played with the regular pickup crowd—all guys—but a couple of times Letrice, Tracy, and Telisa showed up too. Telisa didn't play at the park much anymore—schoolwork and Shavon had become her priorities—and I was happy to have her there. Usually a few of the Inglewood Families would be hanging out by the picnic tables, and occasionally one or two of them would join us. We'd play full court if we could, three-on-three if we had to, Tracy leaving the court every once in a while to chase after Chris, who tended to wander. If there was a storm, though, the park would be empty. Raina and I would go down to the courts anyway, and I loved it when we played in the rain. We'd be the only people out there, and we'd laugh and act silly, bouncing the ball in big puddles in order to splash each other. Raina's clothes would get wet and cling to her body, thin cloth outlining the curves of her hips and breasts. I'd see the rain that collected in the hollow at the base of her neck. I'd see it stream down her arms and legs, so smooth it seemed to be caressing her; she'd turn her face up toward the sky, and I'd want to trace with my fingers the paths the water followed down her cheeks and forehead. Her whole body was slick and wet and I wanted to move against her, feel her skin sliding over my own.

  We finally dragged ourselves home from the park around ten, showered, and went straight to bed—both of us sleeping long hours, I suppose, because we'd worked so hard during the day. Our days were filled with basketball, and there was no homework or school to distract us. For a change of pace we'd watch the sport instead of playing it, either on TV or in person, at the USC, UCLA, or Long Beach State women's games. USC was not the same team that year without Cheryl Miller; it was like a basketball game without the ball, a beach without the ocean. There was nothing to distinguish them now from any other college team, and I was going to their games more from habit than out of a real desire to see them play. A few times, at the games, we spotted old college stars who were playing pro ball in Europe or Japan; they had come home to California for the holidays. Even the youngest of them was five or six years older than us, though, so we didn't have much to say to them. We tended to stick with our AAU friends, although only a few of them would show up on a given day. The group of us would sit halfway up in the stands, and I'd see Raina eyeing the high school seniors who were in the reserved seats behind the home team's bench. These were the players who'd signed early letters of intent with those schools, and they were proud and self-aware as peacocks. I noticed that Raina looked down at them almost hungrily. I imagine she wished her future was as determined as theirs.

  We spent a lot of time together during the latter half of vacation. Normally we both retreated to our rooms for a couple of hours in the afternoon or evening, but that week we were always in each other's company. Every morning Raina would ask if I'd slept okay, and it was a good question, because often I hadn't. I'd wake up every other night or so, the gunshot still echoing in my mind, the image of the shattered windshield appearing for just a moment on the darkness of my ceiling. I was glad that she was making such an effort—it seemed to say that she considered our relationship important. The time between us, though, had taken on a different quality. On the one hand we were always together, but on the other we didn't talk much unless there was something meaningful to say. This made sense, I suppose. After what we'd been through in the last couple of weeks, it was impossible to go back to being casual.

  * * *

  On the first Friday after we returned to school, Claudia and Raina went out to dinner by themselves. I was sure they were going to talk about Raina's future. She'd been even more obsessed with the subject lately than usual, despite, or maybe because of, the temporary reprieve we were having from games. Because neither of us was playing for a week, there were no scouts watching over us and making note of our every move—although we still couldn't get through the evening without some fast-talking coach tying up our phone line. I liked that they couldn't come to watch us for a while; not seeing all the college people made it easier for me to ignore their existence. While Raina made lists and charts about the pros and cons of the schools she was considering, I just skimmed over each new letter I received and stuffed it away in my files. My father, meanwhile, always wanted to talk about the choices I had, and Claudia brought the subject up too. Not to mention that Raina had started asking my opinion of this or that coach, this or that program, this or that city or state. It seemed like the person who was least interested in my future was me.

  Because one half of the household was having a special night together, my dad figured that the other half should too. I was not in any mood to be chummy, though. Earlier that day I'd learned from Letrice that Rhonda was back in jail, and not because she'd done anything. She'd simply been in the car when her boyfriend was pulled over and then arrested for possession, which was enough to violate the terms of her parole. No one knew yet how long she'd be in this time.

  My dad, however, had no idea about this. He made not one, but two of my favorite dishes—beef curry and yakisoba—and I wondered what favor he was planning to ask. What my dad had in mind, though, was worse than any favor—he was giving me this royal treatment because he wanted to talk.

  I had just taken my first bite of curry when he cleared his throat and put his fork down. "So Nancy," he said, "what's your thinking on the school situation?"

  I finished chewing, swallowed, took a sip of my drink. "I don't
know."

  "Have you at least narrowed it down a bit since we met with all the coaches?"

  I shrugged. "Yeah, sure, I guess. I mean, I know I don't want to go to UCLA."

  "Listen," he said, trying to catch my eye, "I don't want to rush you, but you've got to start thinking about this a little more seriously. You're going to be going on your campus visits pretty soon, so you've got to figure out which five places you want to see."

  "I know," I said, looking down at my food. "You're right."

  My father took a sip of his water, and then looked at me closely. "Nancy, why have you been having such a hard time with this? I mean, I know it's a tough decision to make, but it's almost like you'd rather not even deal with it at all."

  I didn't look at him, but nodded. "Yeah, I guess that's kind of true."

  "But why?"

  I could tell that he was looking at me searchingly, but I kept my eyes on Clyde, who I had for the night, and who was sitting in Raina's chair. It always made me feel uncomfortable when my father tried to have a serious talk with me, especially when it related to my future. I cast around for something to say which would give him an idea of how I felt. What I came up with was, "I really like being in high school."