Summer Hours

by Amy Mason Doan

  “And now you wear it to remember him? That’s nice.”

  Another excruciating lull. Excruciating for me. Mrs. Haggermaker seemed perfectly comfortable.

  “My mother’s the gardener in our family,” I said. “I don’t know many flower names. I’ve been meaning to learn.”

  Silence.

  “I know a few. Flower names. But only because of those plaques they have in the park. I wish they had more plaques in parks.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  Plaques in parks? If I were her I’d revoke my scholarship on the spot.

  “Go mingle, dear.”

  Dismissed, I made the rounds, up and down the sloping flagstone paths, while she watched from her dewy lawn chair throne. When Mrs. Logan’s friends introduced themselves, I shook hands with the right amount of pressure and smiled on cue at jokes about the beer kegs waiting for me at Berkeley. The USC and UCLA alums teased me about our Pac-10 football standings. Though I would probably spend those fall Saturday afternoons anywhere but in a stadium, I played along. It was easier.

  I knew my part cold. When someone asked what I was going to study and I said I was leaning toward English, I added a line like “just what the world needs, another English major.”

  A guy in a Pebble Beach Pro-Am 1992 visor called me on that. He’d also majored in English, he said, “in the dark ages.”

  “Don’t be defensive about our major.” He clinked his beer against my lemonade and I felt a surge of kinship. Maybe we’d talk Yeats.

  Then he said, “English is an excellent back door to business school. You’ll stand out. Take some econ classes and you’ll be fine.”

  I bolted from the visor guy, only to get trapped on the other side of the patio by a tall, ginger-haired hospital administrator, selling me on the benefits of her joint JD/MD—“You only need the stamina for it.”

  I nodded, smiling, though sweat had pasted my green cotton sundress to my back and the blisters on my heels stung from rubbing against my good sandals.

  “Excuse me, I need to use the powder room.” I called it a bathroom at home, but in The Heights I found myself using expressions like powder room.

  I zigzagged and dodged and smiled without making eye contact and opened the first available door, escaping into the house.

  The game room. Electronic blasts, yells, sweat, and beer smells. Doug Tilton and Jack Chang played Sega on the floor, verbally abusing each other and pounding it out through their proxies on the screen. Marcus Lochery watched, stuffing his red face with tortilla chips and shouting instructions. They were neighbor boys in The Heights, but Eric hadn’t hung out with them in years, not since he’d met me and Serra.

  “How’s that feel, loser?”

  “Puss move.”

  I padded to the hall as quietly as I could, but Marcus arched his back over the leather sectional to stare at me upside down. “Miss Scholarship. You got away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your crew left you behind,” he said. “Not cool. I told them when they went upstairs. Santitas?” He rattled his jumbo tortilla chip bag at me.

  “No, thanks.”

  “No man left behind,” said Jack, his eyes locked on the robots. He punched his black controller maniacally. Louder—“No woman left behind!”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “See you, guys.”

  “Oh, we will see you,” Marcus singsonged over the battle sounds.

  It didn’t even make sense. They were messed up. Medicated to get through the party, with their parents just outside the glass French doors. Drunk or high on their Killer Green Buds. (They’d once snickered about their “KGB training” in front of me and I’d smiled, pretending I understood, but clueless until Eric explained.)

  “Rebecca, play Cyborg Justice with us,” Marcus yelled.

  “No, thanks.” Almost at the door.

  “Hey, Rebecca,” Doug said. “Will you go to all your classes at Berkeley naked? Like that Naked Guy in the paper?”

  “See you guys,” I said over my shoulder, hurrying into the hall.

  “You’ve gotten hot,” Doug said, laughing. “I remember the minute it happened. You had on white shorts and I thought, Eric’s skinny brainiac friend has a nice—”

  I slammed the door behind me, booking down the sunny hallway, away from the synthetic battle sounds. I slipped into the closest room and shut the door.

  “Rebecca! We’re just kidding!” Doug. I held my breath until his footsteps went away.

  Finally, blessedly alone. I leaned against the door, pressing my forehead to the smooth wood. I’d wait a full minute, and when I was positive the coast was clear I’d sneak upstairs to Eric’s room.

  I’d do my Francine Haggermaker impression, mimicking the way she twitched the corners of her mouth a few stingy millimeters whenever she called me my dear. I’d describe the scene on the patio. How I’d fled from the game room boys as fast as their video game prey.

  And the three of us would make the afternoon ours again by laughing at it.

  College boys waited: legions of them. If they got red-faced it would be from arguing about Shakespeare, Heidegger. Not Cyborg Justice. I was sure of it.

  “You hiding, too?”

  I whipped around, knocking my elbow against the door. An excruciating, tuning-fork pain shot up my arm.

  The puddling velvet drapes were shut so the only light came from the aqua glow of a fish tank.

  Mr. California stood near the luminous water, awash in blue light, studying the drink in his hand. The ice made a silvery sound as he circled it around the glass. His voice was low, amused. “Sorry I scared you. Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Rebecca, right? How is it out there?”

  I was surprised that he knew my name. Eric’s dad had never bothered to learn it. “It’s a wonderful party. Thanks for inviting me.”

  “Donna does a good job on this stuff.” His smile said, You and I both know I didn’t have a hand in the invites or anything else. He flicked his head up just long enough for me to read sympathy in his eyes. “May I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” Please don’t ask about my major.

  He stared at his glass, running his index finger around the lip. “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sorry. I hate when people ask that before they say what the favor is. It’s like asking someone if they have plans before you admit what god-awful social event you want to drag them to.” He drained his drink.

  “I hate that, too.”

  “The favor is, will you check in on Eric for me next year? Make sure he’s okay?” He raised an eyebrow, biting a lip. As if bracing for me to say no to this small assignment.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have email?”

  “I get an account from school.”

  “Good. His mom’s worried about him. You hear about kids going off to college and getting depressed, you know. His dad moving out, me in the picture, staying here so often... It’s a bit of a mess. Last week he...” He shook his head.

  “What did he do?”

  “Oh...” He chuckled. “He wrote me a note. A short but extremely heartfelt and...creative note. Let’s put it that way.”

  Oh, E.

  Eric didn’t tell me everything. Mostly, I had to piece things together from jokes and nicknames, the moods he couldn’t entirely hide from me. From the lateness of the hours when he appeared at my door, seeking political asylum with me and my gentle mom, who fussed over him.

  But enough had slipped out over the years, and I could see the scenes at Eric’s house playing like a film: the silence between his parents bursting into fights, his father camped out in the pool house with bottles of Belvedere. Then reappearing in the breakfast room behind his paper as if nothing had happened.

&n
bsp; I knew it had gone on for ages. Silence, screaming, simmering, truce. And the in-between parts, when all three Logans were just bracing for the next cycle.

  Until a few months ago, when Mr. Logan decamped to a penthouse condo in LA and Mr. California moved in. Though the official story was that Donna Logan’s handsome new boyfriend was only “keeping a few things” there after selling his house up the street, because he also owned places in San Francisco and Mexico.

  “So will you check in on him for me? I feel...responsible.”

  “Sure. We’ll email and talk a lot, Mr. McCal—”

  “Call me Cal. Everyone does. Easy to remember, because that’s where you’re going to college, right?”

  I smiled at his little Berkeley joke, shocked that he’d taken note of my plans. “Cal. Eric and I will stay in touch as much as we can, from across the country.”

  “I’d be grateful. He’s more...breakable than he seems. Don’t you think?” He looked up at me, forehead creased in worry.

  I nodded.

  Breakable. This man the three of us had mocked all year, this walking postcard for California, had expressed perfectly with a single word what I’d feared watching Eric’s bitterness grow. Eric was still only pretending he didn’t care about his parents splitting up. But soon he might forget it was an act. You hardened, then you shattered. Like glass.

  “Do you live in The Heights?” He waved his drink in the air, indicating the study, the pool, the flown-in palm trees, the chunky security guard who patrolled in a golf cart. He said The Heights with the same isn’t-it-absurd inflection Eric used when he said Mr. California.

  “We’re just outside, facing the gate.”

  “That great old rancher? The brown one with the railroad ties?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then your family was there before they built all this.”

  “Yes, me and my mom. It’s not her favorite topic.”

  “I’ll bet. She must’ve been furious when it happened, literally outside your door. Did she chain herself to the bulldozers?”

  When my mother bought our house, there was nothing on the hill across the street except scrub oaks. I used to play there. Now our place kind of looked like the carriage house for The Heights. An observation I would never share with her.

  “She says it’s better to accept reality and move on. She gets upset if I call it...” I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Oh.” I bit back a smile. “I have this secret nickname for The Heights.”

  “Out with it.”

  “You won’t be insulted?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “The Blights.”

  He laughed. “You let us off easy.”

  “Our road used to be called North Way, before the developments. But I guess that wasn’t fancy enough, so when they paved it they changed it to Bird of Paradise. I still forget sometimes.”

  “So you haven’t quite accepted reality and moved on?”

  I smiled. “I guess not.”

  “An idealist, then. A vanishing breed.” He smiled to himself, fidgeting with a blue model car on the desk. It was his car—a 1950s or ’60s convertible with bright chrome flares.

  I wondered what he’d say if I told him how I sometimes watched him in the real one. You sang along to the radio last Tuesday, that song about two lost souls in a fishbowl. You really belted it out. Pounded that dash with every note.

  The urge to say it, to see if he’d laugh, hit so hard it startled me, warming my cheeks. “I should go.”

  “Of course. You’ll want to be with your friends.”

  He walked me to the door, as if I’d come calling. His left hand floated behind the small of my back, touching only my thin cotton dress. I felt his fingers there somehow, sensed a subtle shift in the inch of air between the fabric and my skin.

  When we passed the aquarium, he asked, “You have one?”

  “No, but it’s supposed to be good therapy, looking at fish. Not that I mean you need therapy. I just. I read an article about that.” I didn’t need a mirror to know my cheeks were a lost cause now, pink headed for scarlet.

  He laughed. “I do like looking at the suckers. They are excellent little therapists.”

  “Where are they?”

  “There are two...see. In that cave?”

  He pointed, careful not to touch the glass. He was a lefty. The hairs on his left arm touched the skin of my right arm. He smelled like something clean and sharp and adult. Scotch or shaving cream or whatever rare mixture he used to polish the wood on his boat.

  “Oh, yeah.” Two narrow blue fish glowed in the toy cave.

  “I think I’m becoming a hobbyist.” He gestured at a small sailboat on the bottom, nestled against a curving plastic landmass, complete with trees and docks. Elfin red script on the side of the boat said Summer Hours. “Got it from a catalog. It’s not a perfect replica of mine, but close. I picked the island because it’s shaped like Catalina. My happy place.”

  “I’ve never gone there. I’ve always wanted to.”

  “Of course, it’s closer to Atlantis in this setup.”

  I trailed my finger along the Plexiglas protecting the antique wooden table. Its perimeter curved up, in case of spills. Mrs. Logan’s contribution to the hobby, I guessed.

  “Have you named them?”

  “That’s Jack and that’s Stephen. After these characters—”

  “Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. From Patrick O’Brian, right? I read those last summer.”

  He glanced up. His eyes were light blue, bright even against his golden skin.

  “That’s right. Didn’t know anyone your age read him.” He smiled, bit his lip, stared down thoughtfully at his fish tank again.

  I clenched my hands together, digging my nails into my flesh, to resist clapping them on my cheeks to hide the redness.

  “I should find Eric.” I opened the door and stepped into the hall.

  “Rebecca?”

  I turned, but he was still looking down at the fish tank. “You take care of yourself, too.”

  * * *

  I shut Eric’s bedroom door behind me and collapsed on the carpet next to him.

  Some guys taped dirty pictures on their ceiling; Eric had plastered his in movie posters. Out of the Past and The Third Man and Metropolis, Freaks, and Nashville. He’d run out of room on all the vertical surfaces.

  Serra rolled to her side on the bed above us. “I saw you playing lady-in-waiting.”

  “You should’ve bailed when we did,” Eric said. “They were like those ghosts in Poltergeist who fed on Carol Anne’s life force.”

  “I may have a few drops of life force left.”

  Serra studied me. “You’re sunburned, have you looked?”

  “I’m just hot, it must be ninety still. We need music.” I sat up and dragged the red plastic crate from under Eric’s bed.

  Music would drown out the party. It was still going strong without us, the clinking glasses and polite adult laughter amplifying as they rose from the yard, pressing into the room. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the guest of honor had gone AWOL.

  “My mom knows how to throw an awkward party, huh?” Eric said. Watching me, trying to figure out why I was edgy. “I can’t believe she invited Marcus and those guys. It’s so fake.”

  “I can’t believe Mrs. Haggermaker came out of her crypt twice in one month,” said Serra. “She must be so psyched about your brilliant future, Becc.”

  “She knows Eric’s mom from the gardening club.” Francine Haggermaker was also on the charity board for my mom’s hospital and donated money to the Berkeley art museum and the film preservation society at USC. The woman had her bony fingers everywhere.

  “Are you going to have to, like, visit her all the time now?” Serra asked. />
  “No. Just write her once a year till I graduate. Fill her in on my classes and internships and whatever. Sort of a...scholarly update. I guess it’s customary. My mom already bought me special stationery, it’s so annoying.”

  “What does that come to, like thirty-thousand bucks a letter?” Serra said.

  A twinge of guilt, because though Serra had a grant from the Latina Artists’ Network, she was taking out a mint in loans. The least I could do was not grumble about my good fortune around her.

  I pushed my glasses up my nose and hunted in Eric’s mess of CDs and tapes for the cassette I wanted: Upstairs at Eric’s. So ancient we had to tighten the spools with a pencil after every use. I’d bought it at Goodwill for Eric’s sixteenth birthday, along with a T-shirt of Alfred Hitchcock’s plump, mocking face above a movie clacker. Both were intended as gag gifts, but he’d said they were his two favorite presents that year.

  I slid the cassette into the chute, snapped it shut, and pushed the silver play button.

  I lay back on the carpet, curled close to the speaker. Eric’s long pianist’s fingers tapped the top of the boom box from the other side, picking out the background synth. His nail beds were stained bloodred.

  “E,” I said. “Did you get in a fight with...you-know-who?”

  The fingers stopped dancing. “Who?”

  “You know. Your mom’s... Cal. Did you leave him a mean letter or something?”

  The hand disappeared from view. “You could say that,” Eric snorted. “I left a little message on his boat, that’s all. A little welcome-to-the-family note. In Krylon Firetruck.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “What’s this?” Serra peered down, delighted.

  “Eric vandalized a certain sailboat.”

  She laughed. “What’d you write, homewrecker? No, devil? One letter off from his name.”

  “Give me some credit for originality.” Eric peeked over at me. “Come on, he deserves it.”

  It wouldn’t take much to show Eric I was on his side. I know he deserved it, E. What a weirdo. What a jerk.

  He thinks he’s so charming, such a stud.