by Ann Packer
“Yes, you do.”
My socks were damp. I had to turn them right side out again, and when I finished I brought my moist fingers to my nose and smelled sweat and rubber.
“OK, it’s Cal,” she said. “From last night. The guy in the vest.”
“I know who Cal is.” I pulled on one sock, then the other. “What are you going to do with him?”
“Nothing. Talk.”
“He’s who you called,” I said. “God, I can’t believe this.”
She seemed not to hear me. Still on her knees, she swiveled away from me and craned her neck, and then she saw him; I could tell because she brought her fingertips to her lips.
Now I had a rival. She began meeting him after school, at his apartment, and after the first few times this happened—Sasha simply not showing up for the afternoon bus home—I wasn’t surprised when she announced to me that she was going to start riding her bike to school instead of taking the bus. She said it was because it was spring now, and because riding the bus was for losers, but she didn’t make the excuses with much energy, and I didn’t argue. I switched, too, so we could still go to school together, though of course I had to make the ride home by myself. My afternoons reverted to the old style: a snack, homework, the click of my father’s bicycle as he returned from work.
“I don’t think you should go to his apartment,” I told her, but she didn’t care. She said he was teaching her to meditate, that they smoked, pigged out on Fritos when they had the munchies, sat on his balcony and sunned themselves. The pencil she’d used in her hair on the day of the Walk turned out to be the pencil he’d used to record his pledge the night before, and she guarded it like a treasure, keeping it in a special wooden box on her dresser.
“Are you, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend?” I asked her one afternoon when we happened to meet at our bicycles after school.
“It’s complicated,” she said, but her face filled with color, and I felt something heavy lodge in the middle of my body.
We still got together, but unpredictably—when Cal was busy. I was at her house one afternoon when Dan said, “So you didn’t want to work on the planning committee, too, Richard Appleby?” and Sasha, without giving me time to respond, said, “Richard missed the first meeting and they’re being ridiculously strict about attendance.” Another time, Joanie told me she was sorry to hear my mother was ill, and Sasha shot me a hard stare and then explained later that in order to get out of the house one evening, she’d said I was upset about a health problem my mother was having, and she was going to take a walk with me.
We were at Tressider when she told me this, the student union on campus—throughout the fall and winter we’d often ridden our bikes over and either bowled a few games at the crummy bowling alley or just bought sodas in the little store and absorbed the scene: guys with long hair, girls with bare feet, the sound of someone beating on a bongo drum.
Today, we sat at a table on the terrace and passed a single can of Coke back and forth. “Why did my mother have to be sick?” I said. “Why did she have to be in it at all? Couldn’t you just say we were going to ride bikes?”
“They didn’t want me to go out. They’re being ridiculous these days. I had to think of something they couldn’t say no to.”
“Well, now what am I supposed to do? What if your mother starts asking me questions?”
“She won’t.”
“She might.”
“She won’t. She’s worried about you. She won’t ask you questions.”
I felt my throat squeeze, and I half stood and pushed my chair backward.
“Watch it,” said a voice from behind me, and I turned and saw that I’d nearly run over some girl’s toes. She was pretty, with long straight hair parted in the middle and a leather cord around her neck.
“Sorry.”
“It’s OK, honey. Just be more careful. There are other people in the world, too, you know.”
I pulled my chair back to the table and sat down again. My face was on fire, and I looked away from Sasha, focused on a pigeon pecking between the tables, bobbing for crumbs.
“Do you think she’s sexy?” Sasha said quietly, leaning forward.
I didn’t care. I was furious at her, furious at the girl, furious at Joanie. She didn’t need to be worried about me. She had said to me once that I could trust her if I ever wanted to talk—About your mother, she didn’t say, about what she did to you—and I’d thought of trying to explain that it really wasn’t that big a deal, my father and I were doing fine. People never seemed to believe me, though—Mrs. Bloom, my science teacher from last year; Malcolm’s mother, who’d cornered me once—and so I’d learned not to bother.
Looking over my shoulder, I slid my chair back again, carefully this time, and squeezed out of it. Leaving Sasha with a puzzled look on her face, I went over to the little convenience store where we’d bought our soda. I had a pocketful of change, and I picked up a bag of potato chips and got in line to pay. I looked out at the terrace and saw Sasha sitting at our table with a bored look on her face. The girl I’d almost hit still stood behind my chair, talking to a table full of other girls. She kept flipping her hair away from her face, which I guessed was sexy. Her breasts were on the small side, though. Malcolm had brought a Playboy to school a few days earlier, and I remembered the huge breasts on the centerfold, and the way she had her tongue sticking out a little, just enough to lick her upper lip. We spent lunch paging through the magazine, sitting behind the portables so no teachers would see us. Bob liked the women who held their breasts in their upturned hands, but I thought they looked weird, as if they were about to hand them to you, like little pets that wanted to be cradled.
It was almost my turn to pay. The cashier was a middle-aged woman with pale, fat arms. When I was much younger my mother and I sometimes met my father at the faculty club for lunch, and afterward she and I would stop at this store for Wint-O-Green Life Savers, which I would chew at home in front of the bathroom mirror once it was dark out, desperate to see the famous sparks.
I set the chips on the counter and reached into my pocket—and then suddenly I didn’t want them anymore. I left them sitting there and went back outside.
“What the fuck was that?” Sasha said when I got back to the table. “You didn’t even buy anything?”
I shrugged.
“Look at that guy,” she said in a lower voice, angling her head toward the guy at the next table. He had long dark blond hair in a ponytail, and he was bent over a notebook, writing quickly. Spread out on the table in front of him were four or five open books.
“What about him?”
“Daddy is so fucked up. He says the students here aren’t serious. ‘It’s not Yale, that’s for sure.’ That guy hasn’t stopped writing since we sat down. Last year all Daddy could talk about was how the students at Yale don’t know anything about living. Now the students at Stanford don’t know anything about hard work.”
I thought of the afternoon when Dan came home so angry. I’d thought he was mad at his colleagues, but maybe I’d been wrong.
“He has to stop complaining,” she said. “He has to relax and leave me alone.” She was blushing, and I knew what she was thinking: so she could see even more of Cal.
The next day was a Saturday, and I slept in, not waking until my father opened my bedroom door to tell me he was going to his office. It was 9:42, very late for me; between my inability to sleep all morning and my dearth of boners, I was turning out to be a lousy teenager.
“Sorry,” my father whispered. “I just wanted to tell you, I’m going to work.”
“I’m awake now,” I said, pushing up on one elbow and rubbing my face. “You don’t have to whisper.”
He glanced at his watch. His voice still low, he said, “There’s a chance I’ll be late getting home today.”
“OK.”
“One of my doctoral students is bringing in the first half of his manuscript. Rather interesting work, in fact—he’s looking at the
Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, the so-called court-packing plan. He said three o’clock, but he’s not terribly reliable.”
“Dad, it doesn’t matter.”
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “I thought we’d go to the Legion of Honor tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Around one-thirty? They’re exhibiting some marvelous early Rembrandt drawings.”
When I heard the front door close I got up and had some cereal and then went to Sasha’s, realizing only after I’d rung the bell that my arrival might blow open some lie she’d told.
Peter opened the door. He was still in his pajamas, and I was relieved to see them all at the dining table.
“Come in, Richard,” Joanie called. “We’re having French toast.”
“Not quite the breakfast of champions,” Dan said from his place at the head of the table, “but I think I’d rather be in the middle of the pack and eat well, wouldn’t you?” He waved me in. “What shall we call it? The breakfast of mediocrities? Doesn’t have quite the right ring. Come in, sit, eat, please—I need some help here.”
Sasha was picking at her food and frowning, and she glanced at me but didn’t speak. Everyone else was more or less finished, but Joanie fetched me a plate heaped with French toast and bacon, and when I sat down Dan slid the syrup in my direction.
I was unscrewing the cap when, under the table, Sasha’s foot came down on mine, hard. I looked at her, but her face was unreadable.
“Nice day, wot?” Dan said in a fake English accent.
Sasha let out a barely audible snort, and I realized I’d interrupted a fight. I cut off a bite of French toast and shoved a piece of bacon into my mouth.
“T’isn’t cricket,” Dan said to Sasha, “your staying behind.”
“OK, it isn’t cricket.”
“It’s meant to be gor-juss,” he went on, leaning harder on the accent, and now I had it: they were going to Muir Woods. I’d heard about it last Sunday: We’ve been in California for nine months and we still haven’t seen the redwoods! I’d been in California for thirteen and three-quarters years and I still hadn’t seen them.
“Besides,” Dan continued, “if you don’t go, your mum will be the only bird along.” The way he said “bird” sounded like “bud”—your mum will be the only bud along.
“Stop it,” Sasha said. “Stop it with the accent. And she’s not a bird. You sound like an idiot.”
Dan put his palm to his chest. “Harsh verdict,” he said, but in his own voice.
“Would you say ‘chick’?” she went on. “It’s basically the same thing.”
“Joanie?” Dan said. “Care to weigh in?”
Joanie shrugged. “What’s wrong with ‘woman’?”
“Your daughter,” he replied, “is not, strictly speaking, a woman. Yet.” He turned to me. “Semantics aside, we have an excellent expedition planned for the day. We’re going to Muir Woods, and we’d love to have you join us.” He drummed his fingers on the table, then leaned way back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and said to Sasha, “Why wouldn’t you want to go? That’s what I don’t understand.”
She rolled her eyes. “I told you—I have a French test Monday and I’m really behind.”
He looked at me again. “What do you think? It’d do you good. ‘For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?’ I’m on a quest today, Richard—you can join me.”
“You’re an atheist,” Sasha said to him.
“Agnostic, actually,” he said. “But it’s a metaphor. And it’s less a quest for than a quest away from. As, in many ways, it was for Emerson.”
I liked the idea—a lot more than Rembrandt drawings, early or otherwise—but I said I had homework, too, and for the next twenty minutes, as her parents and Peter moved around the house getting ready, Sasha and I stayed at the table and hardly said a word. The French toast was tepid, but I worked on it anyway, methodically sliding each bite through the pooled syrup before putting it in my mouth.
At last they left. “Thank God,” she said as we heard the car back out of the driveway. “I thought I might kill them.”
She left me sitting there and went to the phone in her parents’ bedroom. When she came back she said Cal couldn’t come for another hour or so, and did I want to wait with her?
She was wearing the same blouse she’d had on the day she accused me of looking at her boob, and as she reached for her juice glass the slit fell open. This time I did look: she wasn’t wearing a bra, and her breast was round and pale and angled outward. Her nipple was small and tight, the color of an underripe strawberry.
She went over to the sliding door. “Let’s go outside.”
I followed her to the patio. The sun was high, and the plate glass windows reflected the entire yard: the patio with its wooden furniture, the flower beds full of spiky purple agapanthus and low-lying white impatiens, the high fence that ran along the edge of the property. And Sasha, too: standing near the picnic table with her hands on her hips, dressed in her blouse and cutoffs, her bare legs glowing white in the bright light. I took a quick look at myself: as runty as ever, Richard with his big ears and his slightly too-small brown-and-orange striped T-shirt. “You need new clothes,” Gladys had said to me a week earlier, standing in front of the dryer folding laundry.
I wondered: Would Cal park in the driveway? What if the Hoppers, who lived next door, happened to be outside?
Sasha went back in for a deck of cards, and we sat at the table and played double solitaire, the sun climbing higher, an occasional light breeze stirring the highest leaves of the trees on the other side of the fence. For a little while I could hear the Hoppers in their backyard, talking quietly. Teresa Hopper was from Peru, and her voice had a singsong quality. Her husband’s was duh duh duh, and hers was d’ dee d’ dee dee d’ day. They were in their seventies. He was a Nobel Prize winner; he’d done something or other in chemistry that about three people in the world understood.
Thirty minutes went by, forty. At fifty I found myself getting nervous. I sort of wanted to leave. Then suddenly there was something at the side of my head, warm and moving, brushing my ear—as if a squirrel had jumped onto my shoulder. “Ah,” I said, leaping up and swatting at my head and neck; then I turned around and saw Cal grinning at me.
“Damn,” he said. “I nearly had you.” He circled the table and stood behind Sasha, who was trying not to smile. He put his hands on her shoulders, then moved one hand to her forehead and pulled her head to his belly. “You were too perfect,” he told me. “I had to try.”
Sasha had seen him coming—he must have held a finger to his lips. Tiptoed up behind me, stealthy as a thief. I hadn’t heard the gate open. Hadn’t heard his car door slam.
“So this is it,” he said, stepping away from Sasha and looking around. It was the first time I’d seen him since the night at SCRA, and he seemed different. His hair was in a ponytail today, and he had a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt.
He walked over to the house, cupped his hands at his eyes, and peered through the windows. “Nice setup,” he said over his shoulder. “Professor Horowitz has done very well for himself.”
“Professor Levine,” I said.
“What?”
“I told you,” Sasha said. “We’re renting. This is the Levines’ house—they’re in Rome.”
“Prego,” Cal said. “Of course you did. If Daddy gets to stay at Stanford, you’re going to buy a nice, big house.”
“He is staying,” she said. “But we’re not going to buy a house. We’re going to rent again—probably in College Terrace.”
This was good news to me—that they might move to College Terrace. I’d been wondering where they would live next year, worrying it might be farther away.
“All right then,” Cal said. “You ready, baby? We got no time to waste.”
Sasha’s cheeks turned pink, and I wondered if she was embarrassed by his bad grammar. I looked away,
and when I looked back she was climbing onto the picnic bench and draping her arms over his shoulders. “Whoa,” he said, laughing a little, “let me get my balance.” He reached for her legs, squatted, and lifted her onto his back. His tanned forearms crossing her white thighs: I got up and began sweeping the cards together, gathering them into a loose pile and then into a neat stack.
“What time do you have to be back?” he asked her.
“Five. At the latest.”
“Then we better hurry. Going to a party,” he explained to me. “In the Santa Cruz mountains.”
I wondered if Sasha knew how far away that was: a solid hour in the car each way. “I’ll put the cards away and lock up,” I told her. “If you want.”
“That’d be great, man,” Cal said. “Thanks. You’re too heavy, baby,” he added, and he bent his knees and loosened his grip on her legs. “Get your stuff and let’s go, all right?”
She made for the house, and I continued with the cards, giving them a shuffle for good measure and sliding them into the box. Sasha was back in a moment, a shoulder bag of Joanie’s in her arms.
“Really, thanks, man,” Cal said, and he dug into his pocket and tossed a joint onto the table. “ ’Preciate it.”
Sasha’s eyes met mine, and she looked away.
“No problem,” I said, and I waited until they were gone, then pocketed the joint, took the cards inside, locked the doors, and left.
I didn’t smoke it. Not that day, not the next, not the next. Sasha asked, and I said I was saving it, and that became the plan. I hid it in a Band-Aid box under the sink in my bathroom. It was in with a bunch of other stuff: a half-used travel-size Crest, a bottle of dandruff shampoo, an inch-thick stack of Kleenex with no box. No one ever opened that cabinet; no one had opened it in years.
Soon, I had to go to my mother’s again. This time, my father was going away for the weekend himself, to visit his cousin David in Seattle. I was glad about this: I thought he was lonely. When we left, his overnight bag was on the backseat next to my pack.
My mother was in a good mood when I arrived. There was a vase of pink carnations on the coffee table, and she had gotten her hair cut—just a little, but enough to make it look neater. She had fresh lipstick on, and she smiled as she got dinner ready, asking me to tell her about school, and which of my teachers would I miss next year, and was I glad it was almost summer.
