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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
September 1986
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
November 1986
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
January 1987
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
April 1987
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
June 1987
Chapter Thirteen
Copyright
To my mother and father, without whom—
Acknowledgments
Much gratitude to Neil Olson and Keith Kahla, as well as to the trusty Mikel Wadewitz. Thanks to many good friends, including Dan “Kitty” Casto, Benjamin Feldman, Raphael Gancayco, Jeffrey Golick, James Hannaham, Melissa Levis, Gillian Maimon, Maggie Malina, Sarah Saffian, Kate Steinberg, Maria Striar, and Akhil Unni. And special thanks to my brother, Daniel Murphy, for his love, support, and good humor.
It is my impression that the young cannot fool anybody, except those people who wish to be fooled.
—James Baldwin,
Just Above My Head
September 1986
As soon as he walks in, it’s uncanny, I know we’re both guilty. It’s quiet in the sub shop except for the sound of the hit radio station, and it’s quiet in the parking lot outside, nearing ten o’clock now. Nearly time for me to close the place and head home. But when he walks in, I’m hearing another sound in my head. Is it pretentious to say that it sounds like the violins in a piece of modern music, something sweet and pointed with meaning, but odd as well, like it makes the back of your neck warm because it doesn’t belong? Because it sounds wrong—doesn’t fit, doesn’t click—but you like it anyway?
He is black and looks rich. He doesn’t live in town; I’ve never seen him before. I know he must be one of the kids who go to St. Banner, the private school about five miles outcountry, because he’s preppy like them, and already he’s given me that look that says, “I see you, but I don’t see you.” It’s peculiar; he’s preppy like them, only more so, like he’s a parody of it all, and it’s hard to tell whether he knows it or not. He’s wearing madras shorts, a white button-down shirt, and tassel loafers, without socks, that look like he shines them every morning. There’s a fat gold watch on a black strap, and it leaps out at me like his glasses, little horn-rimmed glasses on a smallish nose. Behind them, his eyes are adjusting to the air-conditioning, and he’s got a haircut so clean it almost forms right angles over his temples.
Now he’s in the doorway, standing ramrod straight and holding a rolled-up magazine like a musket in both hands, and the impression he gives me is of the one black guy in an upscale clothes catalog, surrounded by white guys, and trying to look like the matter has never crossed his mind. I’m behind the counter across the room, wrapping up sliced pepperoni, watching him and feeling instantly self-conscious for us both.
He’s just standing there, his brow deeply furrowed, as though he’s contemplating some great question of life. Then he strides up to the counter, his loafers clacking against the floor. I keep my eyes on the pepperoni, pretending I’m not especially interested.
“Sir,” he says, very clearly and formally, like I’m the first person in the wilderness he’s come upon in days and he’s calling to me from an opposite riverbank. His voice is deep and cultivated. He almost sounds a little bit like a TV news broadcaster, or a Shakespearean actor.
Finally, I look up, hoping to seem as bored as possible. “Hey,” I say. “Can I get something for you?” I ask, aiming to sound distracted and to hit the r in “for” and thereby conceal my Massachusetts accent, which I’ve been trying studiously to lose all summer. It isn’t easy to do both at once.
He lets out a long, exaggerated sigh and looks heavenward. Then he puts his magazine on the countertop and folds his hands very neatly on top of it. I glance at the magazine. It’s The New Yorker, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen before, probably at a bookstore in Boston, where I go quite frequently when I have the time.
Then his eyes settle on me and he leans in to ask, in what seems to be a very searching, intimate way, “Do you make a focaccia bread pizza?”
He says this fancy word, focaccia, very slowly and precisely, as though he’s sure I’ve never heard it before. Unfortunately, he’s right, and I’m so flustered that before I can say something like I’m sorry, we’re out for the day, I say, like a complete provincial, “What might that be?”
He gives me a weary, benign smile and says in a deliberate, patient voice, “It’s an Italian bread. It’s very chewy, very dense. The Italians use it chiefly to make dinner breads, but you’ll also find that some of the better American pizzerias make a very fine pizza with focaccia dough.” Each one of these Italian words he’s careful to enunciate for my benefit, breaking them down into their syllabic parts and lightly rolling the r’s.
Obviously, he wanted to make me feel like a dumb townie, and he’s succeeded. All I can hope for is to make him feel crummy for his snottiness, so I say, “Well, I’m afraid this isn’t one of the better American pizzerias. It’s just B.J.’s Sub Shop in West Mendhem, Massachusetts.” I try to say this in a way that makes it clear I hold West Mendhem in as much contempt as he does.
He casts his eyes down to the magazine and smooths the cover with his long, spidery-looking hands. “I’m sorry. I guess I should have expected as much.”
His eyes are still downcast and I can’t tell if he’s faking contrite or if he really means it. He looks up, meekly. “Do you have any sun-dried tomatoes?”
“No,” I say, firmly this time. Then, triumphant, “They’re out of season.”
He looks up at me again, now with one brow arched wildly above his eye. Then, much to my surprise, he laughs right at me, a short report, deep and harsh. He looks down at his magazine, obsessively smoothing the cover, and goes on laughing. It’s more contained now, like what was going to be an assault on me he’s turned into a private joke for him alone to savor.
I’m feeling quite bereft and uneasy now, having absolutely no idea what he finds so funny. “Are you quite all right?” I ask, loudly enough to top his laughter.
He makes a show out of pulling himself together, wiping his eyes and clearing his throat. Then, folded hands propped back up on the countertop, he gives me the same old earnest look he did the first time, the trace of a smile still on his face. “Yes. Please forgive me. I’m quite all right,” he says, then, just under his breath, mimicking me, “‘Out of season.’” A moment later, he’s looking at me earnestly again, as though he didn’t say a thing, as though I didn’t hear a word he said.
“Is there something else I can get you?” I ask, adopting the same patient, snotty smile he gave me. “I’ve got to be closing up soon and getting back to my fourteen younger siblings up in the hills.”
He looks at me, his face full of mock concern. “Fourteen siblings? Good God. How do you manage?”
“I feed them all from the same trough. It hasn’t been easy since both my parents drowned in the tub when they were making moonshine.”
He laughs now, and because it’s the same laugh as before, I don’t know if it’s mean or phony or genuine. “I see,�
�� he says, slowly, pulling his chin. “I see.” Then, suddenly businesslike, “Would you get me a slice of plain pizza, just warm, please, not scalding hot. And a Diet Coke with very little ice. Thank you.”
And with that, he retrieves his magazine, sits cross-legged at a table across the room, and deposits his head inside the pages, immediately engrossed in a riveting story. I notice how his loafers barely hang from his feet; at an angle, they reveal the white bottoms of his feet like half-moons.
I put his pizza slice in the oven and go back to wrapping the medallions of pepperoni. He’s distracted me; I’m forgetting that I’ve got a lot to think through tonight. Even in the summer, I lead a very full life and my mind is usually preoccupied, as it is tonight. As it was tonight, I mean. Because now I’m putting his pizza under foil, on a paper plate, then I’m getting him a Diet Coke from the dispenser with very little ice, and now, frankly, I’m wondering if I should call him up or walk it over to where he’s sitting, looking positively transfixed by The New Yorker. Because even though it’s five minutes to ten and I should be officially closing right about now, I’m thinking about the tedium of driving home in my mother’s beige hatchback with the strawberry air freshener and the little St. Christopher Pray for Us medallion hanging from the knob on the glove compartment. It’s the tedium of driving home in the dark in humid weather along the same route I’ve taken every night this summer, past the Cumberland Farms and the video stores and little white cape houses. Then coming home to a humid house with the dull buzz of my father’s Red Sox game coming from the television in the den, the screaming match between my mother and Brenda when Brenda comes in drunk around midnight, and the dull buzz of Joani struggling with a Dr. Seuss book, and me upset as usual that Joani’s twelve and she’s still learning to read.
I glance over at him reading, and I think that an authentic member of the St. Banner’s intelligentsia has walked into the sub shop where I work, in the intellectually barren town of West Mendhem, Massachusetts—and what am I? I wrote a twenty-page term paper on fatalism versus determinism in the plays of Eugene O’Neill this past spring that Mrs. Bissett said was the best piece of writing she had seen in twenty-one years of teaching. I just saw an Eric Rohmer film in Cambridge with my best friend, Phoebe Signorelli, last week. And I have an application to Yale University waiting to be filled out at home, and a sweatshirt to match.
“Here’s your pizza,” I say, putting it down in front of him with the Diet Coke.
He looks up briefly, seeming startled. “Oh,” he says. “Thanks so much.” He moves the pizza away from him slightly on the table and goes back to his magazine.
I pull out a rag and wipe down the next table. “You can pay for it up there when you’re done,” I say.
“Okay, thanks.” Not looking up.
I keep wiping. “How’s the Coke?” I ask.
He swats the magazine into his lap with much flapping. “I’m sorry?” he says, looking at me now, his deep voice rising flutily in irritation on sorry. Now I know I’ve spoken out of turn to one of the St. Banner elite, and I feel frightened and emboldened.
“Your Diet Coke,” I say. “How’s the ice?”
He peers over the top of his glasses and glances into the paper cup. “That looks just about perfect,” he says, and regathers his magazine.
I decamp behind the counter. He eats his pizza—in mincing, tentative bites, I notice—and I go about my business. If he wanted to, he could see me right now stooped, straddling a huge white bucket, pouring steel tureens of tomato sauce back into their container for overnight refrigeration. I start to feel stupid, start to ask myself what I was thinking when I approached him.
“Hello back there?” I hear his voice from over the counter. Surfacing, I realize I’ve spilled tomato sauce on my T-shirt.
“Uh-huh?” I ask, wiping off my shirtfront with a rag.
“Do you sell smokes in here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Smokes. You know, puff puff puff? Cigarettes?” He mimes someone inhaling furiously on a cigarette.
“Oh. No, we don’t.” I should have known he smoked. They all do up at that school, just like the Algonquins, who were a sophisticated group of literary friends in the early half of the twentieth century, by the way. I’m fond of them.
“Well, is there anywhere around here within walking distance where I could get some at this hour of the night?”
“There’s Cumberland Farms about two miles away. Do you have a car?”
He laughs shortly. “No, I don’t have a car. I walked here. I’m a foot traveler.” He lifts one leg stiffly in the air, holding a loafer aloft.
“Oh.” I smile a little, stiffly as well, as the remark seems to call for brittle sour humor. “Do you go to S.B.A.?” I ask him.
“Do you mean do I go to Mendhem?” he says, faintly disdainful.
I forgot that little difference—that the local people, the townies, call St. Banner Academy by its initials, S.B.A., short and serviceable as a landmark when they’re giving directions to the Topsfield Fair or the roadside summer corn stands outcountry. Everyone at St. Banner calls it Mendhem, as though the name of an entire town only existed to indicate the ninety-eight-year-old school that sits on one hundred acres of prime wooded real estate at the foot of Lake Chickering, as though in the world of exclusive boarding schools West Mendhem constitutes no more or less than the home of St. Banner Academy. Frankly, I don’t know if it does constitute more than that—other than a thorn in my side.
“That’s right, I forget you guys call it that.”
“Well, now you won’t,” he says briskly, then, with a big heave of duress, “Yes, I go to Mendhem. Or at least I will, as of next week when studies commence.”
For all his obvious boredom, he’s at least given me a straight answer. “Why are you back so early?” I ask, refilling the napkin holder and trying to match his idly conversational pitch.
“I had to come early for Minority Acclimation Week,” he says in a disgusted singsong. “It’s me, a scholarship girl from the Bronx, and about nineteen Orientals who are all ready to just go-go-go!” This is followed by the frantic mimicry of someone running wildly in place, eyes wide, tongue wagging.
I’m taken aback by this outburst, and laugh weakly, which he mimics as well before collapsing back into dourness. “Are you a freshman?” I ask.
“I should be a freshman—in college.” He says the word college like it’s a curse, but I notice he’s at least relegated the magazine to a chair. “But I’m starting as a senior because this is my third stab at the great boarding school experiment.”
“Oh,” I say, careful to hedge my curiosity. He’s starting to give me the inside story on boarding school life, something hidden to me on the opposite side of private woods and high stone walls. “Why’s that?”
“Because I was kicked out of the first two. Haven’t you ever read The Catcher in the Rye? Don’t they make you read that in your school so you’ll learn all about postwar adolescent anomie?”
“I did read that.” I bristle. “When I was thirteen. On my own time.”
He throws back his head, then, in a long, insufferable drawl, “Precocious you!”
“Precocious,” I say aloud, appreciatively, before I can stop myself. I can’t help it. It’s a good word. I finally looked it up a few months ago after seeing it half a dozen times and scrawling it down under “Words Undefined” in my notebook. That, along with prolific, another new favorite of mine. But now that I’ve said it, I’m embarrassed.
“Yes! You!” He nods emphatically. “Precocious!”
“I like to think,” I say feebly. Then, to keep him on the line, “What were you kicked out for?”
“For civil disobedience.”
“For what?”
“For smoking at the first one. Then, at Exeter, for flunking.”
“You flunked?”
“Only for lack of effort,” he says blandly, as though he doesn’t really care whether or not I know why he flu
nked. “I knew it was coming. They had been warning me for four months. Then they called me into the advisory room with all the gorgeous oak and they told me not to come back after the winter break. They said that they had cut me more breaks than anyone ever before. Because they didn’t want to lose me. But that I had pushed them to it, perversely and defiantly, even in the face of their concern. So I packed my trunks and I took a slow train to Virginia.”
As he tells me all this, offering slow, deliberate segments of information, he stares blankly out the window of the sub shop onto the barren parking lot. He’s silent when he finishes, reaching for his magazine, rolling it up and holding it to his lips like a chalice. It feels like someone’s big moment in a play, the moment they reveal all, the moment they lose themselves in memory and all you can hear is the buzz of the spotlight that bathes them, alone.
“It sounds dramatic,” I say.
He snorts, and turns to me. “It’s tawdry and cheap. But moi”—here he clutches the magazine and speaks into it intimately, like a microphone—“moi, je ne regrette rien.”
“Me, I regret nothing,” I say—like I’m taking an oral exam in the language lab.
“Ah,” he says in a mock-deep voice, deeper than his regular voice. “You know your Piaf.”
“I take French,” I say.
“Have you been?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Not yet. Maybe next summer.” I hope he doesn’t probe further. Besides Montreal, and Disney World when I was ten, I haven’t been anywhere.
He doesn’t probe. “I have. My French teacher at Exeter told me they’d love me there,” he says, entirely to himself.
“Did they?” I ask absurdly.
“I went before he told me. I suppose they did. But I don’t remember. I was too young.”
Why do I see him at eight or nine, in the same glasses and loafers, only in boy’s sizes, prowling skeptically around the Louvre, or under the Eiffel Tower, accompanied by—whom? His mother? His father, a diplomat? Family friends who’ve taken him along? A nanny? Frankly, I can’t picture him with anyone.
Getting Off Clean Page 1
