Such a beautiful, simple thing.
I turn my nose away, because I think if I catch another whiff, I’m going to cry.
“I’ll miss you, Peej.”
But she’s already fallen back asleep.
Dealing with the Keyon issue seems the easier of the two things I have to face, since it’s in person and immediate. As I hurtle my way toward the sandwich shop on the Hell Taraval, I promise myself I will not avoid this, or him, one more day. I should be using this time to work out what I’m going to say, but I can’t get Ebb’s stupid father off my mind. What possible reason could he have for telling her he’s in Italy when he’s not? What kind of a parent would do that?
I’ve had the thought all week that it could be Ebb who’s lying. Maybe despite her claims of not wanting drama, telling me her dad is in Italy is some way to make her life seem more dramatic and exciting than it is. Maybe her mom never was seeing her boyfriend’s married dad. Maybe there is no boyfriend, and no virginity, or no loss thereof.
Maybe she is a psycho-compulsive-liar-roomie who is going to stab me in my sleep some night.
I’m grasping, I know. Trying to rationalize the option of pretending like I don’t know anything about her dad, and pulling the plug on the friendship before it really gets started.
When I walk into the sandwich shop, Keyon is helping an early customer and barely glances at me. I go in the back to stow my messenger bag and put on my apron, and find Joe racking the bakery delivery. Despite my promise to myself not to delay, I’ve got cold feet and tie my apron as slowly as possible while I watch Joe work.
I wonder if Keyon will look like his dad when he’s older. If he’ll have that ashy gray hair around his sideburns, and if his cut abs will give way to the comforting little paunch, like Joe’s.
“Need help?” I ask.
Joe turns, a loaf of rye in each hand. “You can help me with my son.”
“Um, okay?”
“Found him in the kitchen at four this morning, halfway up to his elbows in my Cherry Garcia.”
I wait. Keyon was awake when I was awake, in the wee hours, both of us thinking our thoughts.
“No one eats my Cherry Garcia. Unless it’s an emergency.” Joe racks the rye, and when he turns around I’m there to hand him two more loaves.
“Did he… say what this emergency was?”
“Didn’t have to.”
We move on to the sliced sourdough. I remain silent. Because what can I say? It’s complicated. And I don’t know if I should even be talking about it with Keyon’s dad.
“I’m not tryin’ to take sides,” he says. “Maybe you two changed your minds or what have you, or he did something stupid. Just don’t let it fester.” Joe turns back to the bread rack. “The longer it festers, the more I gotta spend on ice cream.”
I hand him two more loaves of bread, then go out front. Keyon is washing his hands.
“Your dad is really worried about his Cherry Garcia supply,” I say, sidling up to him at the sink. My stomach is kind of churny.
“What?” He reaches for a paper towel and dries off. I watch his face. He really does look bothered about our lack of communication. The way a boyfriend would.
“I miss when we were making business plans for our Mr. Potato Head empire.”
I meant to make him laugh, I guess, or lighten the mood, but he’s still got that bothered look on his face when he says, “So you wanna go back to being… friends?”
And I realize that’s exactly what it sounded like. “No. I mean, that’s not what I meant.” I turn on the water and wash my hands while Keyon watches. I think about his hands, and his hand holding mine, and how I like the way his skin looks next to mine, and about that very first kiss, in Yasmin Adibi’s yard.
“You meant you’re leaving in a couple weeks and so am I. I know. It’s…” He kind of kicks his toe into the rubber floor mat. “It’s bunk, is what it is.”
Honestly, he looks like he could cry. It stops my heart for a second, and it occurs to me: Maybe Key is going through the same stuff I am, about leaving home and saying good-bye—not only to each other, if that’s what we do, but to everything that’s always been the way it is for him. The sandwich shop, the hallway in his house with the pictures of him and his brother goofing around, his mom’s cooking, his dad’s gentle sort of toughness and rightness.
I put my arms around him in a hug, my hands still wet. He holds me tight and doesn’t let go until we both hear the conspicuous throat-clearing of a customer.
EB,
Nineteen days.
Wow. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling now. I mean for me it’s only going across the Bay. I can’t even begin to know what it would be like to go even a few more hours further. Farther. Further?
Delete. Delete. Delete.
It feels disingenuous to make my usual small talk before I drop the bomb.
After work, Keyon and I sat in the back of the sandwich shop and split a piece of cheesecake and I told him about the whole Ebb situation. He thought for a minute, then asked, “Would you want to know, if you were her?”
“Yeah,” I said instantly.
He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. “For real? Think about it. Think about how low that is. Your own dad telling a huge-ass lie that basically says: ‘I don’t want you.’ Think about how it’s gonna feel to her.”
I shook my head. “I know it’s going to suck. But I hate secrets.” I met his eyes, his warm eyes. “That’s something to know about me, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “It is known.”
Then we looked into each other’s eyes and made contact. I don’t mean eye contact. Something more. Communication. Like the kiss at the gallery. Telling me: This is not friends who make out, if I still had any question about that. This is more. “Here’s a secret,” I said, my heart hammering, and hammering again now to remember it. “I like you.”
He smiled, dazzling but somehow shy, and after a second, said, “That ain’t a secret, Lo.”
We grinned some more, and finished our cheesecake, feet touching under the table. Eventually we stopped making googly eyes at each other and I said, “I have to tell her. I just do.”
I start the e-mail again:
EB,
So I have to tell you something. I thought actually this might be better said over the phone but then I thought it’s nice to have some time to think about how to react and stuff. You might be really mad at me. Just… don’t shoot the messenger, okay? If I were you I think I would want to know this.
Okay. I don’t think your dad is in Italy.
I went to the gallery last week and he was there. I’d seen a flyer at this coffee shop I always go to and I was all, “Isn’t that EB’s dad’s place?” and Zoe and I wanted to do something different, so we went. We were only there like five minutes and it didn’t seem important. Then we went again this past Sunday to see this other artist and your dad was still there. I mean I guess I’m assuming it was him. He gave us his card. Neil. But maybe he has a partner who happened to be handing out your dad’s card? He talked like he was the owner, though.
He’s fit and good-looking for someone his age and has sort of a New York accent? Maybe he’s having money problems and didn’t want to tell you? Dads can be weird about money.
Why am I making excuses for him? I guess I don’t want it to be true, either, that he’d lie to her like that. Hurt her.
I’ve been thinking all week if I should tell you. Maybe it’s none of my business. Keyon thought maybe I shouldn’t. But I feel like if I didn’t tell you it would always be between us in this awkward way.
I’m sorry to add to the drama. If I did. Maybe there’s an explanation.
Lauren
After sending, I get a message from my dad. In the mood I’m in, I tear up to see his name in my in-box, and imagine him down the hall, in bed and propped on pillows, e-mailing me.
Hon: Enjoyed our gelato date the other night. I just want to say I’m proud of you. For a
lot of reasons. Also I’ve attached a picture of my foot.
He’s such a weirdo goofball.
I love him.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10
NEW JERSEY
I wake up to Lauren’s e-mail on Saturday but I’m already late for work with Tim so I don’t even have time to think about writing back right away, which is probably for the best. But the whole drive to work, I get increasingly steamed—at Lauren, for not telling me she’d met my dad when it first happened; at my dad, for being a liar, if he even is. There must be some kind of misunderstanding. It makes no sense.
Lauren says she’s sorry.
But I don’t want her to be sorry. I don’t want anybody to be sorry. Not her, not my dad. Not my mother. Not even Alex, or Mark’s dad. What I want is for everyone to, I don’t know, get along. Get real. Be real.
When I arrive at the address Tim gave me, I sit in the car for a minute with my phone in my shaking hands. I don’t know which one of them to e-mail first. Or if I should e-mail either of them at all.
Maybe because it’s easier, because I’m in the habit, I pick Lauren.
I start typing. I am thinking about how she knows that I have no relationship with my father. How she knows I would love to stroll into his art gallery and have it not be horribly awkward. Does she think they’re going to be buds? And she knew he told me he was in Italy. She’s supposed to be my friend. Isn’t she? Why didn’t she say something? Confront him! I’m miles upon miles too far away to confront him but she was right there, in the flesh. And who does she think she is, telling me how to take this news, not to be mad at her? When I read what I’ve typed, it says this:
There must be some kind of mistake. And that’s pretty fucked up that you did that.
I stop to take a deep breath and look at the words—I never use the f-word and it all looks sort of foreign—and I think what to say next but then I’m so angry that I just hit Send.
For a second I’m sick with regret… or something… but I mean it.
Fucked.
Up.
Then it’s like some kind of truth spell has been cast on me and I can’t stop myself from telling it like it is. Tim asks me around lunchtime if I want an early shift or late shift the next day and I tell him neither. I’m sort of done with this town and its gardens and I want at least a few weeks off from the weeding and clipping and mulching—time to, I don’t know, stop and smell the roses? So I tell him I would like today to be my last day, if that’s okay, and he grouses a bit but he gets it.
Later, Mark texts and asks if he can see me after work and I tell him no, that I need a quiet night to myself—maybe to pack or make lists or read or daydream, even if it’s daydreaming about seeing him (though I don’t tell him that last bit). I seem to suddenly realize that I can’t live the next few weeks in a constant state of frenzy, like a passenger on a sinking ship.
And then, after work, I find my mother on her computer in the kitchen at home and I say, “There’s something I have to tell you. That guy I’m sort of seeing, Mark, it was his dad that you were going out with.”
Though we never talked about it explicitly—never named names—there was a part of me that assumed she connected the dots that first night, when I said I recognized him, that he had a son, but now, from the look on her face, I’m not so sure.
“Well, I hope he’s a better man than his father is,” she says, sort of sadly.
I say, “He absolutely is.”
For a second I think about bringing up my father—also no prize—but then she already knows that and I’m still thinking it’s all just a big mistake.
I head upstairs to the shower and let the water run until it’s almost too hot to bear, then wash off the brown from the dirt that seems to seep into my every pore during work hours. Afterward, I sit at my computer, hair dripping, and try to write an e-mail to my dad. But I really don’t know what to say—Are you really in Italy?—and I find myself, instead, writing this long note to Mark.
I tell him that I love him.
That the time we’ve spent together in these past few weeks has meant so much to me.
That he’ll never really know how badly I needed him to come along. At exactly this point in my life.
That I look forward to a million adventures with him, even if they never happen, even if we only manage a few.
And then I realize that this is also how I’ve felt about Lauren all summer, but I’m so furious at her I can barely think. This whole time she’s been acting so morally superior about everything and now I find out she’s been lying to me, and sort of stalking my dad? What was that crap she was spewing about not being able to keep secrets from people she cares about?
I am pretty sure Keyon’s dad would not approve.
She hasn’t responded to the e-mail I sent this morning and I am sure she is hoping for me to write again to say that I get it, that I’ve calmed down and that I understand—to let her off the hook—but when I look inside myself I don’t even see a glimmer of forgiveness.
I can’t live with this girl.
Can I?
I save the e-mail to Mark as a draft—because it seems silly to send it to him now, when he has no idea why I’m getting all sappy on him—and I start to root around the Berkeley website. When I go to Living at Cal, then Living with a Roommate, I see a link for Getting to Know Your Roommate and click on that and start reading.
Roommates do not need to be best friends.
Good, because that ship has sailed.
However, we do expect you to be fair and honest, and to take responsibility for your own behavior.
My point exactly! Why didn’t I visit this site earlier? Before things went horribly wrong?
I read on eagerly and the next part sort of cracks me up. Because it’s this long list of fill-in-the-blank icebreakers that they suggest will help you get to know your roommate better. Things like If I were an animal, I would be a… or A food I would never want to eat is… That’s not how you get to know someone! And anyway, the ice between Lauren and me has already been broken. Shattered.
Fill in this blank: Stalking someone’s father is…
Then I find a whole section about a Roommate Agreement—This might have saved us a lot of heartbreak!—but it turns out it’s mostly about study habits and bedtime and cleaning and personal property, though there’s a whole section called Conflict Resolution that makes me wonder why I ever thought having a roommate would be a good idea in the first place.
And then all of a sudden I am looking for a Contact tab.
So that I can write to someone in Housing, and inquire about getting assigned a different roommate, or a single. But they don’t make it easy. And who’s to say a different roommate would be any better? Lauren may be a liar but at least she’s not a drug dealer or a hippie freak. When I’m so irritated by the website that I can’t bear to look at it another second, I close my laptop, hard, and go downstairs. My mother is now under a throw on the couch, watching some Lifetime movie.
“Mom?” I say, and I can hear surrender or maybe just defeat in my voice. “I need advice.”
She looks about as surprised to hear the words as I am to say them.
“I’ll make us some popcorn,” she says, kicking off the throw, and I tail her into the kitchen.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10
SAN FRANCISCO
… fucked up
The words blur on the screen. No one has ever used those words in direct relation to me or anything I’ve done. And I don’t think Ebb should be using them now. I go over and over it, from my first impulse to check out the gallery to the circumstance that led me back the second time, to the decision to tell Ebb what I knew.
That first day was simple curiosity! Going back was Zoe’s idea!
Lying about where he was is all on her dad.
… fucked up…
Seriously, Ebb?
Who doesn’t check people out ahead of time anymore? Everyone Google-stalks crushes, new friends, siblings, potentia
l employees. Facebook is like 98 percent about stalking, if you think about it, and somehow that’s okay. But because I’m old school, because I got off my ass and onto my own two legs and went physically to the gallery, now I’m “fucked up”?
I bet every penny in my checking account Ebb looked me up online that first day she e-mailed.
Which, by the way, was all her idea.
She started it.
Oooh we’re gonna be best friends and we need a microwave and my mom’s having an affair and I slept with my new boyfriend and I’m bringing my favorite socks!
Okay, Ebb. You want a friend and roommate who’s going to lie to you and pretend nothing bad is happening when it obviously is, you want a roommate in denial—like your mom—that’s great.
But it’s not going to be me.
By Sunday, I make a shoe box in my head, put Ebb and everything about her into it, and shove it into the back of my mental closet so that I can enjoy my date with Keyon. A real one this time: at night, me and him, no Zoe. And he’s meeting the parents, which is somewhat terrifying. All the kids are home, and all except Francis are running around like insane people.
“They’ve finally got their energy back after the flu,” Mom says, smiling, as if this is good news.
Dad is on his hands and knees, using the mini-vac on the trail of crushed Cheerios that consistently appears between the kitchen and living room. “Did you warn Keyon?”
“Yeah.”
And I warned them about Keyon.
It was this excruciatingly awkward conversation, for a bunch of reasons. One is that it’s not the sort of thing liberal white people in cities like San Francisco are used to talking about. We’re all so determined to prove how open we are, how down, how so not thrown off-kilter by things like interracial dating.
We are, though. Some of us. It’s how it is.
Another reason: because of how my dad reacted.
Roomies Page 17
