Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  “President Mandela had much to say that would apply to our graduates,” Liggins tells the audience, “but I would like to quote you all one particular sentence from his inaugural speech: ‘We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable rights to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.’ ”

  The crowd has grown silent; the dignity of Mandela’s words has compelled them to quiet and listen. John Liggins tells his graduating seniors, “All of you would do well to take the same pledge, to strive to build exactly the same society here in our country.

  “There is, of course, a great deal more to say, and under normal conditions I would be saying it. Probably too much and too long.” There’s a ripple of laughter from the students. John Liggins is a very popular president. “But I made a promise,” he continues, “given the unseasonable heat, to cut my remarks short today.” There’s a scattering of applause, particularly from the graduates, and Liggins laughs and says, “I guess I made the right decision.”

  And then he introduces the commencement speaker, some Los Angeles official—is he the mayor?—who begins his speech by assuring the audience that he will make no such concession to the weather. Standing at the podium, multiple white pages of his speech fluttering in the hot Santa Ana wind, this small, trim Latino man promises (threatens?) to give the whole speech and nothing but the whole speech. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment for your graduates, he tells the parents, and what he has to say may well change their lives. A groan escapes from the audience, but he ignores it and begins talking…and talking…and talking. After forty minutes, with no end in sight, Ruth leans toward Eli, across the boys,“I’m going to faint. I’ve got to find some shade.”

  Aaron gets up with her without being asked, to take her arm, to help her out of the amphitheater.

  “You’re going to miss Isabelle,” Eli warns, but all Ruth does is wave her hand as she makes her way out of their row. He looks at the twins, Ethan and Noah, and shrugs. “Your mother can’t take the heat.”

  “Neither can I,” Ethan shoots back, “but you don’t see me leaving.”

  “You’re fifteen and she’s…well, a lot older.”

  “Yeah, Dad, so what?”

  Eli doesn’t have an answer to that. And Ruth and Aaron don’t come back. It is only Eli and the twins who see Isabelle walk across the stage, radiating happiness, take her diploma, and stride with purpose into the rest of her life.

  —

  AFTERWARD, AS THE FAMILIES AND GRADUATES mill about outside the arena, Eli finds Ruth sitting at a small table under a tree. Her sandals are off, her eyes are closed, and she’s fanning herself with the now very rumpled program. Aaron stands miserably by with three bottles of water in hand.

  “Well, you missed her.”

  “Eli, I had a throbbing headache. I was dizzy and nauseous. My heart was going a mile a minute. Do you know what those are symptoms of? They’re symptoms of heatstroke. Should I have stayed in my seat? Is that what you wanted, your wife dead at her daughter’s graduation?”

  Eli considers this question. For a split second it sounds good to him, and then he says, “Of course not, but Ruth, we came all this way to see her graduate, and you missed the moment when—”

  “How did I know it was going to be this hot? Is that my fault? You know I can’t stand the heat.”

  And Isabelle, pushing through the knots of people, spots them. “Hey, Dad! Mom!” They watch her come to them, grinning, relieved, riding a bubble of celebration.

  Eli embraces his daughter and whispers in her ear, “My beautiful college graduate,” and the boys mumble, “Congratulations.” Aaron manages an awkward arm around her shoulder, a halfhearted hug. And then Ruth and Isabelle are facing each other.

  “It’s bloody hot.” Ruth doesn’t get up.

  “Oh, I know. I’m so sorry, Mommy, I know how much you hate the heat.”

  “I was sitting there and suddenly I knew I was getting heatstroke!”

  “Ruth.” Eli’s tone an admonishment to his wife, which she ignores.

  “The problem is they don’t have any other place to hold graduation,” Isabelle explains.

  “Well, could they have handed out water or hats or something?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Isabelle says again, as if the heat and the amphitheater, the lack of water and hats, were all her fault.

  “Isabelle was sitting in the same heat as you, only in that long black robe, which must have upped her internal temperature at least ten more degrees.”

  “So it doesn’t matter what I was feeling? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Isabelle and Aaron exchange a look: Here they go. The twins melt into the crowd. They don’t want to witness what they’ve seen countless times before: their parents, with over twenty years of resentment built up, going at each other until her mother starts to cry and her father apologizes.

  “Of course that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that today is Isabelle’s day and you should have—”

  “What? Died? Because it’s her day?”

  “Mommy, nobody said that.”

  “Your father did—I just heard him.”

  “Ruth, that is not at all what I said.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my ears!”

  “Why do you persist in attributing to me things I never said, things I never in a million years would say?”

  And they’re off. Only today Isabelle can’t take it. Isn’t it possible to put all this aside for one day? Her day. The day she’s so happy. Do they have to ruin it? Well, she won’t let them. She’ll flee the train wreck piling up in front of her. It feels very daring.

  “When they stop fighting,” she says to Aaron, “tell them I’ll see you all later at the hotel.”

  “You can’t leave.” Aaron is panicked. “It’ll only get worse if you leave.”

  “See those steps over there, the ones in the shade? Go sit there and wait it out.”

  Aaron doesn’t move. He looks wretched.

  “I have a paper to turn in, A.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “Not this time. I’ll see you later, okay?”

  There’s no way out for him. Not now, not for another year, until he goes away to college and never comes back. “Okay,” he says finally, and Isabelle is gone, swallowed up by the crowd.

  She pushes the guilt down, away, away from her just for today as she weaves through the milling families, recognizing somewhere inside her that she made the decision to leave without any of her habitual agonizing. Should she have stayed and mediated her parents’ argument? Should she have tried harder to head it off? Should she have stayed to protect Aaron, as she has countless times before? Should she have been a better daughter? Those questions would have trapped her into indecision if not for Daniel, who is waiting for her.

  And then her eye is caught by a swirl of primary colors shimmering in the heat: Deepti’s extended family—her mother in a rose-colored sari shot through with gold thread, her older sister in shades of green and blue, Aunt Priya, the doctor, dressed in bright yellow silk. And in the middle, startling in contrast, is Deepti in her long black gown and tasseled cap. Her father, Ajay, stands proudly on the periphery of all these colorful women in his woven sandals and starched ocher shirt, content to watch them flutter around his beaming daughter.

  “Isabelle!” Deepti calls to her, and the two roommates embrace. “We did it!”

  “We did!” And suddenly, in that split second, Isabelle is overcome with a sense of loss. “I’m going to miss you so much!”

  “I know. I know!”

  “I won’t see you every day. How can that be?”

  “You’ll visit me in the Bay Area. Promise me?”

  “Of course I promise,” Isabelle says, because she wants it to be true—that she will take a trip to San Francisco sometime soon, ev
en though the days and weeks past graduation are a fuzzy blur to her now.

  And then she spots Nate and his parents and grandparents, Rose and Bernie, and a couple of aunts and uncles and their children, all of whom Isabelle knows. So many Litvaks have come out from Long Island for this. Isabelle waves to them over the heads of the people.

  “I’ve got to go.” Isabelle gives Deepti one last hug, her eyes on the fast-approaching Nate as she takes off in the opposite direction. “I will come!” are the last words Deepti hears.

  “Isabelle, wait!” Nate calls out.

  “See you at dinner,” she shouts to him as she slips through the crowd and is lost from view. The last thing she wants to do now is acknowledge her connection to the whole Litvak clan.

  —

  THE WALK FROM THE AMPHITHEATER to Daniel’s house is quick and smooth. As soon as Isabelle is down the hill, the campus empties out, the way it does on any Saturday. And walking through the shaded groves of ancient oaks and eucalyptus feels good after all the hours of sitting in the sun. It’s only when the buzz of voices recedes and the quiet beauty of the Chandler campus reinstates itself that Isabelle can allow herself to realize that this is the last day she will walk these paths, see these buildings, live here…see Daniel.

  She stops in front of Lathrop Hall and fixes it in her mind’s eye. Remember the twenty-seven steps you took every Tuesday. Remember the red tile roof and the elegant arch over the front door. Here is where your life changed, on the second floor, in that derelict office Daniel keeps for himself.

  Something extraordinary happened, she knows it. Somehow Daniel guided her toward a vision of herself that is singular, unique, divorced from everyone else’s expectations—a writer. She has to let him know how grateful she is.

  —

  DANIEL HAS BEEN WAITING ALL WEEK. He really didn’t expect her on Wednesday, or even Thursday. He knew it would take longer than a day or two to rewrite the pages. But Friday he was at the living room window every few hours, and when she didn’t show up, he knew it had to be Saturday, even though Saturday was graduation. Sunday she was leaving with her parents, back to Long Island for a summer job in her father’s law firm, she’d told him. And then? She doesn’t know.

  All morning he waited for her. Maybe she’d come with her pages before the ceremony. But she didn’t. So he knew that somehow she’d come after. And it is late afternoon and he is pacing in his living room and then he sees her, flying down his front path. She’s still wearing her long black robe, and it’s flapping open to reveal bare legs and sandals. She isn’t just coming to him, she is rushing toward him.

  He opens the door and she sails through. “Daniel…Oh, Daniel…How can I go back to Long Island with them? They’re already driving me crazy! My mother’s sure she has heatstroke and my father is yelling at her and the twins are mortified and Aaron, poor sweet Aaron, is beside himself and I left! Can you believe that? I ran off and left them all there to sort it out!”

  “Good.” Daniel says this unequivocally, and it immediately calms her down.

  She tosses her body into a living room chair and a small smile starts. “It is good, isn’t it?”

  He nods. He knows something about dealing with selfish parents.

  “If it had been any other day, I would have pleaded with them to stop arguing, begged my mother not to misunderstand, pushed my father to apologize…”

  “Sounds exhausting,” Daniel says, his tone mild, neutral. He doesn’t want to encourage a conversation about her parents.

  “Don’t you think they could have held it together for one day?”

  “Apparently they didn’t want to.”

  Apparently not. A sobering thought. She reaches into the pocket of her gown and takes out the much-folded eight rewritten pages and hands them to him.

  “Come into the kitchen,” he says. “I have lemonade.”

  “You do? You bought lemonade for me?”

  “Yes. Well, Stefan did. I don’t go to the market.”

  “Oh, right,” she says, and now she’s openly grinning, simply entirely happy to be here. “Did he get a job?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Wasn’t that part of the bargain?”

  “It was.”

  “Are you going to send him back?”

  Daniel looks stunned. “No, of course not. He’s my son.”

  In the kitchen he pours her a glass of cold lemonade and sits down at the kitchen table to read the pages. All the windows in the room are open to catch whatever breeze might be brave enough to come, and the door to the backyard stands open, as well. Isabelle walks to it as Daniel reads.

  What she sees is a large and overgrown space, but there are old fruit trees struggling along at the back of the lot and a flagstone patio that would be welcoming when the weather was cooler.

  She doesn’t turn around. She knows that behind her Daniel is reading her work, but the two of them are very far from those beginning days when she needed to monitor his reactions.

  Daniel reads quickly. He’s mainly interested in the scene between Melanie and the motorcycle cop who stops her just minutes after her last robbery. Isabelle hadn’t paid enough attention to that scene. It was an opportunity to see Melanie scared and then rising above it, using all her moxie to take control of the situation. And this time, in these pages, Isabelle has done it.

  Melanie’s car is pulled over. The cop approaches. Her heart is thumping through her chest. This is it, she thinks, this is where it all ends, but no, the cop is talking to her about a nonfunctioning rear taillight. He tells her he has to write her a “fix-it ticket.” And that would be the end of it, she would be off the hook, but Melanie can’t leave it be. She provokes. Ah, good, Daniel thinks as he reads. This is what he had been hoping she’d do.

  Isabelle stands in the doorway and sheds her heavy robe. She’s supposed to turn it in, she knows, along with her cap, which she thinks one of the twins took from her, but in her hurry to get to Daniel, she didn’t do it. Under her robe she wears the thinnest of sundresses and a pair of bikini underpants and that’s all. She knew it was going to be blisteringly hot. The hem of the dress barely covers her thighs, and the top looks more like a chemise with ribbons for straps.

  Daniel focuses on the expanded final scene Isabelle has written. Melanie gets out of her car and asks to see what the cop is talking about. They walk around to the rear and he points to the left taillight. The red plastic is cracked. The light doesn’t work. Does she see? The trunk, just inches away, is filled with objects stolen less than ten minutes before, objects taken at random—a set of steak knives, a quilt off one of the beds, a crystal pitcher, two dresses. Small and useless things.

  The adrenaline rush, perversity, heedlessness, push Melanie on. She brings up the robberies with the cop. Everyone in the neighborhood is talking about them. Who could be doing this, robbing all these houses?

  “Professionals,” he tells her, head down, writing out the ticket, paying little attention. “The jobs are too clean for amateurs.”

  “Maybe it’s just a really smart amateur,” Melanie finds herself saying for the thrill of it, to see if she can teeter on the edge and not fall off. “Maybe it’s somebody with a point to make. Or maybe it’s an act of desperation from someone who feels like he has no other avenue. Maybe these robberies are saving someone’s life.”

  The cop looks up at her quickly. Has she said too much? Crossed the safety line? His eyes don’t leave hers, and she makes herself stare right back at him as if the secret she owns wasn’t pushing against the back of her throat, desperate to leap out.

  “You’ve been watching too many cop shows,” he tells her finally, and smiles.

  She smiles back. “I guess so.”

  Yes! Daniel is pleased: so much better. He looks up from the pages to see Isabelle standing there, her back to him, her body outlined against the flimsy cotton of her dress, which has all but disappeared in the light and the breeze from the back door. His breath catches and he
has to wait a minute before he can say, “Isabelle…” And she turns around and looks at him. “The pages—they’re very good.”

  She nods, taking it in. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she says softly, “for you to say that. For you to believe I could be a writer.”

  “You have to believe it.”

  “I do now. You gave me that.”

  She walks back into the room, closer to him. “Daniel, I don’t know how to tell you how much this has—”

  He stands up. He can’t tolerate a long speech of thankfulness. He doesn’t deserve it. “You did the work.”

  “But without you…” She shakes her head at the thought, understanding somehow that she must be quiet, that he can’t accept what she wants to give—her enormous gratitude. But he must.

  She moves closer to him, and they stand less than a foot apart. Silent. Anything might happen now. They both know it. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and moves her body to his and lays her head in the curve of his shoulder.

  He’s conscious of the girth of his stomach in contrast to the slender young arms she wraps around him and the lean, eager body he feels along the length of his. He holds her and finds himself doing something he hasn’t thought to do in thirty years: he prays. Then he puts his lips on her bare shoulder and tastes salt from her perspiration and smells something young and floral and utterly mesmerizing—Isabelle.

  She slips the strap of her dress from her left shoulder, her head pressed against his chest as she does, her eyes closed, and he gently, tenderly, carefully allows his lips to travel across the perfect flesh of her collarbone, down to her breast and then her nipple. Her hand goes to the back of his head and time stops, and then he straightens up and so does she.

  He steps back first and they look at each other. He lifts the strap back onto her shoulder. It may be the most selfless gesture he’s made in a decade.