“You don’t have the GPA,” she said, looking at me squarely. “But I think you’d be a good addition to the program. I’m going to admit you, on the condition that you bring your average up by the end of the year.”
“That, wow, that would be fabulous.” I stuck my hand out and she shook it. “I’m sure I could do that.”
“Great,” Janice said, opening the door. “I’ll look forward to seeing you in the fall.”
Buoyed by Janice’s gamble, I cut back on trips to the doughnut shop and finished the year with the minimum grades required of me. I was moving to L.A., and though I had scarcely shown any volition for the change, once it was decided, I began to look forward to it. Most of my school friends were a year or two older and would be leaving for college in the fall. I was bored with my routine at the high school. I shrugged and let myself drift, borne along by chance.
Since I was going to spend the coming year with my father, I stayed with my mother that summer and got a job at a carpet store in town. On the weekends, I went to a small swath of lawn beside the lake and met up with Chrissy Taylor, my friend of the hour, who had recently fallen out with her sixty-year-old parents over returning home late from her junior prom. We claimed a patch of grass above the beach and the roped-off rectangle of algae-tinged water, greased ourselves with coconut oil, and lay back to discuss the few available guys who were not either former boyfriends or distant relations.
On one such weekend, we met two men who looked promising. Chrissy spotted them playing Frisbee on the lawn and managed to start up a conversation. Jack, the taller one, was a thick-featured fellow with an unfounded pride in his looks. (I later learned he had spent nearly a thousand dollars at the Barbizon Modeling School in San Francisco, learning runway turns and buying vanity shots for his “portfolio.” The handlers took his cash and neglected to tell him that he had wide-set eyes and the blunt nose of a boxer and would never be paid to stand in front of the camera.) Still, Chrissy liked a show horse, as she was a bit of one herself. She was lithe, with white-blond hair, a little-girl voice, and a weakness for sloe gin. The package turned men to putty.
She and Jack quickly paired off, which left me with Clay. “We would take you out on our boat,” he said, leaning back on the lawn, a smile breaking over his face, “except we don’t have a boat.” He had a chipped front tooth that I found oddly winning.
Later, the two of them swam out past the wading area and Chrissy and I went in after them, laughing and gasping at the cold, knowing in a wordless way that we would meet them at the buoys. It was near the end of summer. We were about to start our senior year. The ranks of eligible boys were thinning before us as we moved toward graduation. Out in the deep water, our new acquaintances reached the edge of the swimming area and sat on the ropes, and we breast-stroked toward them, pushing the world of sexual possibility before us in soft waves.
I was tired when I reached the boundary and pulled myself over one of the slick floats. Out there, fifty yards from the shore, it was easy to feel insignificant, a tiny fleck bobbing on the surface, the water a hundred feet thick below, turning darker and colder until it reached the lake floor. That lake was once a valley, and a few hundred people lived there before the county bought them out and dammed the river at one end. Underneath us, in the murky depths, were bridges and chimneys, foundations and old vineyards, the grape stocks still rooted in perfect rows. I had walked through it once, during a drought year, and though my mother assured me they’d been given sufficient warning, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all the inhabitants had drowned.
Chrissy and Jack were laughing a few buoys farther down. As I watched them, Clay pushed off from the rope, took a breath and dove under, the water closing behind him. I could just make out his arms, flashing like trout, and above them a line of bubbles headed my way. He surfaced close by and shook the water from his hair. “Don’t sink us,” he said, floating toward me and tugging on the rope.
A ski boat zipped by, and we rose on its wake, then over smaller ribbons of chop. I thought of that line from In the Night Kitchen, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.”
“What?” Clay asked.
“Nothing.” I guess I had been smiling.
“What?” he said, laughing and pulling his way toward me on the rope hand over hand.
I figured this was probably better than anything that would come after, bobbing on a thin rope, over a sunken town, with the crumpled hills black and green all around. We both stared at the shoreline, the guard shack, the toddlers scooping in the shallows, pretending the view was what held us there.
Later, in the parking lot, Clay told me to stop by a bar in town, where he would be working that night. “I get off around eleven. Swing by and we’ll go take a hot tub.”
I loved his ease with this proposition, even though I was sixteen and had no hope of getting into a bar. It was a far cry from the high school boys who stammered and fumbled and kicked the cement planters in the quad before blurting out their invitations. I couldn’t stand the terror in their voices, a terror not of me, or of the prospect of my rejecting them, but of the duty of taking initiative. There was often a note of relief in their voices when they came to the last word, as if they couldn’t believe they had given voice to a request, and the answer was nearly immaterial.
Clay may have been like them at sixteen, in fact he almost surely was, but he had passed through that now into some zone of sexual comfort. I looked him over. He was handsome, in a rough sort of way, an affable country boy with a broad back and slim legs. I figured I’d never see him again.
Late that night, I drove around town with Chrissy and a few other girls, trying to find someone to buy us beer. “That guy looks good,” Chrissy said, pointing to a middle-aged man in front of a supermarket. He was pacing stiffly, hands stuffed in his windbreaker.
“No way,” I told her. “You are not qualified to give advice in this matter.” Earlier that year she had asked an undercover cop to buy her a bottle of gin. He said “Sure,” took her money, and slapped the cuffs on her. There were probably two undercover cops in the whole town, and she managed to pick one of them.
“Fine,” she said, laughing her baby-doll laugh. “You choose.”
I remembered my own bad eye for security guards. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you take me by that bar?”
“You’re not serious.”
“Sure, why not?” I figured I might as well get into trouble through the front door.
Chrissy dropped me off on a side street and I walked toward the glow of neon, my heart thumping in my chest. I peered in first through a window. It was a sports bar, pennants hanging from the ceiling, a long pine counter bristling with taps. I took a deep breath and went in.
Clay stood up from below the bar, a pair of dripping beers in each hand. “Hey!” he said, setting the bottles down. “I didn’t think you’d show up.” He looked different with his hair dry: it was curly and cut close to his head, almost blond. He beckoned me to the counter and wiped it down with a towel. “What can I get you?” he asked.
His boss was at the other end of the bar, talking on the telephone. I recognized him as a swim coach from the high school. I never swam on the team, so he probably couldn’t peg my age, but out of caution I twirled until my back was toward him.
“Nothing for me. I’m fine,” I told Clay, a rasp in my throat.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s on the house.”
I stared at him, weighing my options. Maybe he did think I was older than I looked, but sooner or later he’d find out. I put my hands on the counter and leaned toward him. “I’m not twenty-one,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t even be in here.”
Clay let me hang there for a minute as he glanced around the bar, his face unreadable. Beside us were two men intent on a game of dice. Farther down, the boss wrapped the phone cord over his knuckles like a boxer preparing for a fight. Clay took it all in, then bent close to my ear and replied in a stage whisper, “This is a bar and g
rill. People bring their kids in here.”
Clay and I spent the rest of the summer together, and I finally discovered what had made Molly Bloom so breathless. For the most part, the two of us had nothing in common. His father was a trucker, his mother a housewife. Clay had never been south of Stockton. During the day, he worked for a tree company, trimming oaks away from power lines. On the weekends, he played basketball on a city team or talked his crazy cousin into taking his ski boat out on the lake. This was an all-day affair. They’d pack a case of beer and while away the afternoon carving perfect rooster tails across the water.
From Clay I would leam bits of local wisdom, such as, Never piss by the side of the road during dope-harvest time. That was when the growers took amphetamines around the clock and sat in the trees with shotguns, guarding their patches. He had known a man who once stepped off a back road to take a leak and had both his kneecaps blown off.
Jack, his friend from the lake, was sometimes in the business of raiding other people’s patches. He’d wait for a moonless night, put on camouflage gear, and rip some hapless grower’s crop out by the roots. Clay regarded this with a certain contempt—it took months of digging and watering to raise a crop and only twenty minutes to pick it clean—but he had a grudging admiration for Jack’s commando style.
“You know I only steal from assholes,” Jack said in his own defense. “Mayton and Hummer, they’re both total assholes.” Besides, any day now his modeling career would take off and he’d have cash to burn.
I didn’t like Clay’s friends, couldn’t talk to him about books or politics or music. But the man was unfailingly kind. And he never played the cat-and-mouse games I’d put up with from high school boys. Years later, when we had gone our separate ways, he would still drop by to visit Mother and Jim now and then, bearing a bottle of wine.
At the end of the summer I packed up my car, and Mother drove with me down to Los Angeles. I was glad she came along, because my clutch cable snapped in the middle of the Central Valley, and every weirdo and meth addict cruising Interstate 5 pulled over to offer us help. That was the beginning of a bad run for the Honda, but we made it to my father’s house late that night. My mother went to sleep in a hotel, and the next morning she flew home.
I started school at Fairfax the following week and quickly saw that there would be no slipping out for midmorning doughnuts. The campus was ringed by a chainlink fence, topped with barbed wire leaning in toward the school, in case there was any confusion about who was being curtailed. Guards patrolled the halls with walkie-talkies, and there was always someone manning the front door, which let onto Melrose Avenue with its garish lure of tattoo shops, clothes stores, and juice joints.
During my first week at school, I ducked into the first-floor bathroom on a break between classes and found a girl sitting in the sink, head down on her knees.
I stopped in front of her. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” she said, not looking up. She was birdlike, dressed in black, her hair spilling over her shoulders.
“Are you sure?”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were wild and bleary, but she fixed on me and a childlike candor broke over her face. “I smoked a sherman,” she said.
“A sherman?”
“You know, Mary Jane and angel dust.”
I remember thinking, At ten in the morning? as if the only thing shocking were the hour. Early or late, this concoction wasn’t treating her well. She gave me a terrified look. “I feel sick,” she said. Then, in the same breath, “I better go to class.” Still, she made no move to climb out of the sink.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t you wait here awhile?”
We both knew this was no use. Out in the hall, the bell rang, and soon a female guard would come check the bathroom for laggards. But I didn’t think she would last very long perched on her desk in the classroom.
“Look, I have to go,” I told her, patting her on her back. “Try drinking some water.”
Later someone would point out that it was a bad idea to try to mother someone on PCP, and it was then that I realized what a country girl I had become—friendly to strangers, dressed in pastels. I considered myself a misfit among my rural schoolmates, but over the years I had grown more like them than I’d known.
Most of the year I lived in that house with Leslie and my father is a blur. Certain days I spent when I was seven and eight are preserved more clearly than any in those months. I remember that I missed my mother, missed Clay, felt too old for high school, too young around the students in my college courses—a kind of halfling. My room was white and set at the east end of the house, so that the sun lit the side of my head in the morning, and then over the course of an hour swung around to the little southern balcony, which was too weak to stand on. Now and then I cracked the balcony door and smoked, leaning out over the black railing and the bougainvillea and lemons in the yard. I never worried that anyone would notice the butts I stubbed out in the curlicues of wrought iron. Leslie, my father—the balcony seemed too far from their attention. I suppose I was lonely. I remember crying myself to sleep one night over an infant with cancer I’d seen on the evening news—serious, theatrical weeping. At one point my arms shot into the air in a gesture of query and rebuke, a widow’s gesture, fist-shaking at the heavens. I was all of seventeen.
It seems to be another girl who came home from school and ate three bowls of shredded wheat, one after another, chewing with the dutiful, bored appetite of a horse, and then turned on the radio and danced in the bathroom to work it off. When my sister recalls that year, she remembers those cereal bowls, stacked on my dresser and beside my bed, the dried plaque of milk that wouldn’t scrub off.
Years later, when we talked about that time, my father was regretful: “We wanted you to come for so long, but then that year was really bad for us. I was doing the night shift at GM and working on the Rainbow Coalition during the day, and then my back went out. I was lifting this part, and I just felt something pop.” A shudder went through him, as much at the memory of that immediate pain—his disk had torn—as at the months that would follow. “I needed somebody to tie my shoes, to bring me a glass of water. We were living on my disability check.”
So that was the crux of it: we were depressed and had no money. From a distance, it seems simple. Back then, it felt thick as a swamp.
For months after his back injury, my father couldn’t sit down. He could either lie or stand, and he couldn’t stand for very long. He went to a physical therapist, who prescribed an inversion bed: a canvas cot on a fulcrum. It came with a pair of heavy plastic boots with metal hooks curling off the heels. He buckled them on, fit the hooks over a bar on the end of the cot, and leaned backward. It was adjusted for his height, so that when he laid his arms at his sides the cot hovered parallel to the floor, and when he raised them over his head the cot tipped backward to a slant and he hung by his ankles. Draped there, blood running to his head, my father said the guy who invented it was a genius. For ten minutes at a stretch, his vertebrae un-stacked and the injured disk was relieved of a terrible pressure. Still, it made him nervous—all that cantilevering in the midst of pain—and he liked me to stay within shouting distance.
Not long ago, Hana, my only school friend from that time, called me up. We had lost touch in the decade intervening, and yet she remembered everything—the birthdays of every member of my family, my grandparents’ names, the time I argued with a Texan in the elevator of her parents’ condo over a racist remark. “My mother still remembers seeing you walk down Fairfax with your carburetor. Remember the Lemon? That thing was broken more than it ran. I guess you couldn’t afford a tow.”
“It couldn’t have been the carburetor,” I said dully.
“Whatever. Some part. She still talks about that. Or how she used to pay you to drive me to school.”
I was curious to hear these stories, but Hana’s clarity underscored my stupor. I thought, This is what it’s like to be old. You reach
back into the past and there are huge holes, as if someone had pawed through a fragile web.
Hana went on, antic with memories: how we spent our Saturday afternoons at the Farmer’s Market looking for movie stars (our only luck: Dom DeLuise buying provolone with his mother) or smoked pot out of a tin can in her bathroom, blowing it out the tenth-floor window while her mother crocheted in the next room. On Friday nights, we put on frosted lipstick and short jeans skirts and waited in line for an hour in front of the Hard Rock Café, inching forward on the sidewalk in our high heels; eavesdropping on conversations forward and behind; staring in the windows at the square-jawed waiters, the platters of fries and Caesar salads, the happy tossing heads; reading too much into the glances of men passing by in their cars. On most nights, when we reached the door, we were carded and turned away.
Finally, I had to ask her: “Did I look like I was sleepwalking?”
Hana laughed this off. “Oh my god, remember that thing your father used for his back? He was in it that time and we snuck out for ice cream and when we came back twenty minutes later we could see him in the window, still hanging from his feet.”
She laughed, but a wave of sorrow swept through me. I had left him there, frightened and in pain. Somehow, I missed his frailty. Or rather, his frailty had overwhelmed me.
One afternoon in the middle of that winter, I gave my father a ride to the chiropractor. It was February and I hadn’t seen rain since I left my mother’s house in September. Down Wilshire Boulevard the light had a thick, grainy cast. My father stared out the window, muttering to himself, deep in some private argument.
I took a corner and suddenly he came to. “Please, could you go a little slower?”
“How slow?” I coasted to a crawl. I was an incubus behind the wheel. Before we set out he had asked me to baby-sit for my sisters that weekend. He felt that I owed him at least one night a weekend; they couldn’t afford to hire a sitter.
“Leslie and I are having a really hard time right now,” my father said. “We need this time.” When he saw that I was hardened to his woes, he went on the offensive: “You know, you haven’t been doing that much around here. The kitchen is a mess; you’re basically doing your own thing, going to school, going to UCLA. I think this is pretty reasonable what we’re asking of you.”
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