He grabbed my hand but I stared the other way, out toward Catalina.
“Rebecca, look at me. I lost my head for a minute and I’m sorry—”
“It’s fine. Like you said. Everyone goes a little crazy the last week of summer.”
16
Hello, You
Summer after sophomore year
Letter No. 2
June 12, 1996
Dear Mrs. Haggermaker,
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since my first letter and half of my time as an undergraduate is over. I remain incredibly grateful for the Haggermaker Scholarship, and think of you daily.
While the last-minute closure of the Courier last summer changed my plans, and I’m sure you miss our dear old weekly as much as I do, I was able to secure a job at a highly promising media incubator in LA, and was enriched by grateful for learned a lot from the experience.
The senior employees made an effort to mentor me.
Others on the team went out of their way to
By the end of the summer I’d
My roommates and I moved into Plato House, a well-respected community housing complex close to South campus.
Sophomore year flew by, and I maintained a 3.4 average. I wrote twenty-four articles for the student newspaper, including a prominent feature on
I bit my pen, staring vacantly out the porthole-style Victorian window of the narrow attic bedroom I shared with Serra and Maggie in Plato House. We kept the window cranked open all the time, even when it rained, to combat the funk inside our peeling Victorian co-op: curried lentils, pot, a top note of decades-old BO.
How to describe my journalism pursuits this year?
I was still stuck on the custodial beat. My punishment for refusing to give up on the cat graffiti, which hadn’t abated.
“It’s a small story, Rebecca,” my editor, Brent of the ironic bow ties, had said. “Cute in a campus-color way, but small. When you have more experience you’ll see. Bring me something big.”
But when he was flattened by mono in November, I’d persuaded his fill-in to run what I thought was a decent article:
* * *
Cat Graffiti...or Rorschach Test?
Theories about unofficial campus mascot abound
By Rebecca Reardon
* * *
I’d not only written the piece—my longest yet, a whopping six column inches—I’d taken the photograph.
When Brent came back, he wasn’t pleased. He assigned me three hundred words on the new hand dryers in the football stadium.
I’d made a copy of the graffiti story for Francine because at least it had run on the second page, but now it seemed too silly to include.
I settled on:
I wrote twenty-four articles for the student newspaper, including a prominent feature on a
popular campus artist.
I’m looking forward to a productive summer interning for the County Chronicle in Los Angeles. I’ll be in the research department, though I hope to earn a byline before summer is over. I’m so grateful for the opportunity!
In my free time I plan to read John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Emerson in preparation for next term. As you can see from the attached syllabi, it will be a busy year, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I hope that you are well, and I am, as always, deeply grateful for your generosity.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Reardon
“Becc! You up there?”
“Yeah!” I sealed the letter and stamped it.
Thwack. Thwack-thwack-thwack.
Hacky Sack Glenn was in the hall. He was like the human pet of Plato House. I found the constant, muffled whacks of his little sand-filled bag meeting flesh comforting. But he drove Serra nuts.
“It should be against house rules to hacky sack in only a towel,” I heard Serra say, her usually sweet voice acid.
“Dude, I’m really sorry. I thought everyone was gone.” Poor Glenn. Our room was tight for three, but at least we had a window. Glenn’s $150-a-month converted closet, down the hall, was not only airless but so small he slept curled up, possum-style, on a crib mattress.
Serra bounded into the room, pink-faced and sweaty from loading the Stay Wag. She leaned against Maggie’s tall, many-layered bed. (We had no bed frames, so all three of us slept on teetering stacks of futon pads and mattresses that had been abandoned in the co-op over the years, with our own new mattresses on the top. Our housemates called us the Princesses and the Peas.) “I made the best mix CD for the drive, wait’ll you hear it. Are you ready?” She spotted the three balls of reject Francine letters on my desk and laughed. “I thought reporters were supposed to be good on deadline.”
“It’s hard to sum up a whole year.”
“Last summer I had a boring internet internship... That’s hard to say. In September I moved into the rattiest co-op on campus and, despite the CONSTANT hacky-sack noise outside my door...” this was shouted, for Glenn’s benefit “...I passed all my classes. I survived on Blondie’s pizza and Margaret’s Chocolate Margs, a tasty beverage invented by my second-favorite roommate, made from one part tequila and one part General Foods International Suisse Mocha...”
“Ugh, don’t remind me—”
“...the delightful concoction only made me throw up once. This summer my best friend and I will carpool to work in LA together. She’s interning at LACMA and I’ll be writing page-one scoops for the County Chronicle...”
“I’m an unpaid assistant to an assistant—”
“...and we’re going to have a total blast. Thanks again for the dough, Rebecca Reardon.”
* * *
This time my newspaper internship lasted nine days. Progress.
Nine days of carpooling to LA in the Stay Wag or Wag Dos with Serra, belting Indigo Girls. Nine days inside a real, big-city daily, the smell of newsprint and the vibration of the presses through the floor. Every morning, I passed the office of Harve Crane, a columnist who used to handcuff his leg to his desk until he filed his pieces, back in the 1950s. It was now a shrine, with a velvet rope across the doorjamb.
I got to see great rolls of newsprint, big as oil drums, in the docking bays by the parking lot. I eavesdropped on the reporters in the breakroom, covertly scribbling in my notepad when they used jargon I didn’t understand, so I could look it up later.
I convinced an editor on the metro desk to read my clips, hoping she’d let me help her with research if she got to trust me.
She flipped through my stack of articles, laying them out silently, one by one, on her messy desk. They looked puny, pasted onto black eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pieces of construction paper.
“Eco-friendly vomit powder, huh,” she said.
“I’m working my way up the masthead.”
“This isn’t bad, this graffiti thing.”
“Thanks.”
“Well, you’re making the most of a shit beat. And I respect that, so I’ll tell you what. Maybe at the end of summer you can shadow me to a council meeting.”
“Thank you! I’d love that!”
“No promises.”
But when I walked into the paper my second week I felt it in the air.
Closed doors, nervous phone whispers. The Chronicle’s classified ad revenue had tanked, and a bunch of veteran employees had taken buyouts. Including Gabe Hewitt, the fifty-nine-year-old editor in charge of me, the one who’d reluctantly agreed to my internship after I sent him a dozen emails.
“It’s a pretty good deal,” he said to the grim-faced colleagues clustered around his desk. “They’ve been wanting to get rid of my flabby butt for a decade.”
To me he said, “I’m sorry, hon, ask HR what they can do,” and gave me his dog-eared AP Stylebook and Libel Manual handbook.
The frazzled HR woman said, “I’m sorry, there�
�s nothing I can do,” and gave me a Chronicle windbreaker.
“But I’m working for free,” I said. “There’s a reporter in Metro I can help, Carla Dewey, she’s already read my clips—”
“Carla accepted a job at Disney.com this morning. Maybe next summer.”
So my internship floated away on Gabe Hewitt’s golden parachute.
I couldn’t break it to my mom. She’d bought me a secondhand Coach briefcase, $60, black leather. She’d subscribed to the Chronicle specially, reading it from cover to cover every night with her tea.
So even after the paper booted me, I continued leaving the house in my pantyhose and skirt and blazer and heels, a sleeveless shortie sundress and Keds in my Coach briefcase. I drove up to LA with Serra as if I was still expected somewhere.
I became an expert on the best public restrooms, changing from my reporter costume into my killing-time-downtown outfit at 8:50 a.m., then back again at 4:45 p.m. I could change in less than forty-five seconds; I was Clark Kent in the phone booth. I frequented libraries, parks, hotel lobbies. The Elephant Hotel, the Hyatt, the W.
I crisscrossed downtown LA—avoiding only a four-block radius around the CommPlanet office.
I memorized AP Stylebook and Libel Manual rules from my Chronicle parting gift (I was on allege. “The word must be used with great care. Do not say ‘he attended the alleged meeting’ when what you mean is ‘He allegedly attended the meeting...’”).
I nursed iced coffees, I people-watched. At 12:30, I ate my bagged lunches with Serra on a shady bench in the museum sculpture garden.
“You’re planning to keep up this ruse all summer?” she asked the third afternoon, scraping the last spoonful of her raspberry frozen yogurt. “Bumming around downtown all day? It’s not your fault you got canned.”
“She’ll still worry.”
“I’m worried.”
“Don’t be. And I’m not bumming around. I’m memorizing the whole AP Stylebook. I’m memorizing the streets of LA. By August I’m going to know them better than a cabdriver. It’s actually a great opportunity. It’ll come in handy when I’m a real reporter.”
“Uh-huh.”
The next morning I discovered a grand place for my studies: the Aquarius Hotel. A five-star, recently renovated. Sparkling restrooms, atrium lobby big enough that I didn’t have to worry about being outed as a non-guest.
I’d been there for an hour when a businessman sat next to me, disturbing my peace. He was simultaneously talking on his phone, spreading a travel-size cream cheese on a toasted bagel from the coffee kiosk, and eyeing my legs. When he finished his bagel he strode off with his wheelie suitcase, leaving his plastic knife and napkin on the arm of his leather chair.
Pig.
But under the napkin, his gold keycard glinted at me.
I palmed it and rode the elevator up twenty floors. The bagel man’s slob ways were my ticket to the rooftop pool: misters, music, padded chaises under shades big as sails, sweating glass urns of ice water in which lime rounds and mint fronds bobbed.
I claimed a lounger in a quiet corner by the glass safety wall, set the gold keycard on the table next to me so I’d look legit, and pulled out my AP Stylebook (I was now up to damn it. “Use instead of dammit, but like other profanity it should be avoided unless there is a compelling reason.”)
And no one bothered me.
The card was deactivated the next day, but I snuck in behind a squabbling family of five.
I was proud of myself for finding the perfect hideout, for dealing with the problem of my mother so creatively. There were worse ways to spend the summer.
* * *
The next day I brought my swimsuit. It was ninety-eight degrees by one o’clock, according to the sleek digital thermometer by the exit door. One hundred degrees by two. I spent the afternoon submerged in the shallow end, the edges of my AP Stylebook ruffled from splashes.
At three, when the wall thermometer hit 102, I came out for a drink—lemon-basil today—and that was when I noticed it.
Three blocks west, in the hot, wavering air between me and the ocean.
CommPlanet, in chunky blue-green letters on the roofline of a silver high-rise. The C like the globe formed into a chomping Pacman mouth.
I left without toweling off.
* * *
“You’re quiet,” Serra said on the drive home.
“Am I?”
“What’d you do today?”
“Oh. Read in the main library again.”
“Maybe you should go to the pier tomorrow. Get some fresh air?”
“I think I will.”
But the next day I returned to the Aquarius, to a chaise directly facing the blue sign. I came back the next day, and the next.
After a fourth afternoon of staring at the bold blue-green letters so long they danced across my sunstroked eyelids when I shut them, I rode the elevator to a pay phone in the lobby and pulled a business card from my briefcase.
“McCallister here.”
“Hi, it’s...it’s me.”
If he didn’t recognize my voice, I’d hang up.
A pause. “Hello, you. What a nice surprise.”
“I was just calling to say I felt bad. For how I took off last summer.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I wasn’t very mature.”
“You were extraordinarily mature, considering what an idiot I was.”
I felt the warming in his voice behind my knee, on my neck, my lips. Between my legs. I leaned my forehead against the cold glass door of the booth and closed my eyes. “You were right. It was crazy for us to... It wasn’t a good idea.”
“But it was highly enjoyable. And highly memorable.”
“Well. That’s all I wanted to say.”
“Wait, how was your year? Are you up in Berkeley?”
“I’m... Oh, no. I’m in LA. I was working at the County Chronicle but they downsized. I seem to bring a curse to whoever hires me.”
He laughed. “Not CommPlanet, at least, it’s going gangbusters.” A moment’s hesitation, a husky lowering of his voice. “Hey, you know I would’ve called you. I didn’t know where. Or if you wanted me to.”
“I know.”
“I thought about you this year.” A pause. Wind, flapping; he was outside, on his boat. “If you’re bored, I’ll bet they could use your help at the incubator again. I was just in there last week. They’re on their fourth round, hiring like mad. They’ve taken over three whole floors on Wilshire. Signage and everything.”
“Really? I haven’t seen it. But I’ve got my summer pretty mapped out.”
“Sure, sure. I just thought... Hold on a sec.”
I recognized the creak of the door to the cabin, stair thumps, the bounce in his breathing as he settled back on the bed. He’d carried me down into the bedroom, to speak in private.
“You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“What I meant is, if you wanted to grab a coffee, or go for a little sail sometime, I’d like it very much.”
“I’m not a sailor.”
He laughed. “No certification required. You’d be my guest.”
“Still. I wouldn’t want to pretend to be someone I’m not.”
His voice grew more serious, confidential, as if we were in that dark study again, hiding away at a party. “I thought about that all year. About you. Maybe I was...hasty.”
I’d told no one about my humiliation on the boat last August. I’d returned to school, determined to forget. I’d gone on three dates a week, sometimes more. Piling on memories of other smiles, voices, bodies.
I’d had dates to the chancellor’s ball, Fondue Fred’s restaurant. Study dates at Caffè Strada, group dates at football game bonfires. Dates to frat parties.
Don’t say frat, Rebecca, red-faced Ke
ith Furyg had scolded me, pumping a keg in the Kappa Ep courtyard during Pimps and Hos. Say fraternity. Would you call your country a cunt?
I’d had kisses. Rushed, wet, tasting of beer, right out in the open. I’d messed around with a funny sophomore in my anthro seminar and a shy journalism grad student, and while these nights were satisfying in their way, the pleasure didn’t last past 2:00 a.m.
I missed patience, the sweet, smoky taste of scotch. And the gut thrum of the forbidden.
Instead of obscuring my memory of Cal, the hours I spent with boys at school slid to the edges and collected around it, like a frame.
Nearly a year since I’d spoken to him last, and he was still in the center. The picture varied but it was always shining, intact: him across a café table, tilting his chair back and laughing, hanging over the wall of my cubicle and drumming his hands. Leaning over the wire safety rim of his boat and smiling lazily, a moment before...
I gripped the phone tight. “Maybe I could think about the job.”
17
She-Ra
July 11, 1996
Two weeks after I started working at CommPlanet again, Cal left me a message, asking me to go to San Diego Comix-Fest to take notes on a friend’s presentation. “Sorry to ask because, I won’t lie, it’ll be a snooze.” It sounded like he was outside.
I told Stephen and he said, “Whatever.” Distracted, half-hidden behind the pink tent of the Financial Times. “Record your mileage.”
The convention center was overflowing with people dressed as She-Ra and Batman and a bunch of characters I didn’t recognize, and some boring people—the money people, I guess—who were dressed in suits or trim dresses like I was.
The presentation was called “Advertising Opportunities in Massive Multiplayer Game Platforms.”
Cal’s friend hadn’t exactly packed them in. And we didn’t have any of the costume wearers. I took a seat four rows back and diligently took notes.
Half an hour into the presentation, someone picked my jacket up from the seat next to me. I whispered a protest and then saw who it was. Not a stranger in a costume or a suit.
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