Down the Shore

by Stan Parish

  “I’m on probation.”

  She took a step back and covered her mouth with her hand to show me how mortified she was. I had seen her do the same thing as Roxie Hart in Chicago.

  “Oh my God, I’m such an idiot,” she said. “I totally forgot. I swear I’ll stop being so stupid someday. Listen, I’m not going to bother your bartender. Promise. I’ll give my brother the bad news. Say good-bye before you leave, OK?”

  • • •

  Anyone still at the party had stayed too long. Jocelyn’s little brother was tormenting the band by sitting in while the singer took a break, asking them to play one song after another while he struggled to come in on time, too drunk to stay upright without the mic stand. Roger chased him off when the singer finished smoking, and the band played “Free Bird” to celebrate their liberation from the wasted nephew of the host. Roger was red-faced and smiling, spinning his date around the dance floor with a glass of bourbon in one hand. The Ladies had been put to bed, which gave him an hour to cut loose and bask in the afterglow. Roger didn’t have school in the morning.

  We were packing up and hauling trash when he filled the barn’s back doorway, blotting out the light from inside with five bottles of champagne in the circle of his arms, condensation soaking his shirtfront.

  “Hey, can you kids finish this stuff for me? It’s past my bedtime. Thank you, all of you. One of the great catering staffs right here. Tom, where’s your mom?”

  He spotted her before I had a chance to point her out. He seemed less drunk when he spoke to her, and I watched him press a bank envelope into her hand. They embraced for a long time. I had heard Jocelyn inviting people back to the house and figured she had found what she was looking for.

  Someone passed me a coffee mug full of champagne, which I gulped down when I saw my mother coming toward me. I checked my watch—nine hours until my first class.

  “Can you make sure that charcoal makes it back into the van?” my mother said to Todd, her captain.

  “I got it,” Todd said. “Do you need a lift to the Ivy? We’re all going for drinks.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t need,” she said. “Tom’s driving me home. That champagne went straight to my head.”

  • • •

  “I’m having a smoke,” my mother announced, as I turned onto the empty country road. “As long as you don’t mind.”

  I shrugged. We did this dance where I gave her shit for smoking, even though we both knew I smoked too. The first time she saw me with a cigarette, she’d looked at me as if I carried one of those Canadian antitobacco labels with pictures of black hearts and half-amputated jaws. I tried not to smoke around her after that.

  “Do you want one?” she asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

  “Can you watch out for deer?”

  My mother lit her cigarette and took a long drag.

  “Don’t talk to me like some friend of yours because you’re driving me around. Is it that girl from school?”

  “What girl?”

  “What did she really want?”

  “Dessert,” I said, wondering if she could see my face flush in the dark.

  “Did she ask you for pot?”

  “No.”

  My mother said nothing, so I turned to face her.

  “She didn’t.”

  “Watch the road. Hold this.”

  She passed me her cigarette and wrestled out of her chef whites, which she tossed into my backseat. She was wearing a gray Bruce Springsteen T-shirt underneath, a souvenir from some concert at Jones Beach before I was born, worn to transparency under the arms and torn around the collar. She took one last drag before she tossed her cigarette and rolled the window up. When I was little, she would come home from jobs like the one we’d just left, pay the baby-sitter, and then sit on my bed to tell me about the dessert she had saved for me, smelling like sweat and smoke and her conditioner, which was how she smelled now, sealed up with me inside the Ford Explorer I had paid for with the money I made selling drugs.

  “Should I meet them at the Ivy for a beer?” she asked. “Should I pretend I don’t know about your fake ID and take you with me? You know what? Let’s go. I owe those guys. And then we’re going home. And don’t let me catch you with a drink in your hand.”

  “You won’t,” I said.

  • • •

  The Ivy Inn sounds like one of those Princeton establishments trying to siphon off some of the university’s cache, but the squat ivy-green building had been a beer-and-a-shot joint since it opened in the ’60s, a bar where servers from around town got drunk after their shifts. It was the last place I wanted to go right then.

  “Where are you going?” my mother asked as I drove past the bar.

  “I’m not parking out front. The cops watch that lot all night waiting for people to stumble out and get into cars.”

  “Can you pretend that you don’t know that stuff? I hate hearing you talk like that.”

  “You asked.”

  “Even if I ask, then.”

  The bouncer looked up and down the street before he waved me in, but he held up his hand as my mother followed.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, smiling. “Need some ID.”

  “Cute,” she said, brushing past him.

  Things were slow inside, and the room was strangely bright without the usual pack of bodies to absorb the light from beer signs and the jukebox and illuminated coolers full of packaged goods. There were a few career alcoholics stationed at the bar, a Mexican crew running the pool table, and my mother’s team at a table in the corner. Eric, the head bartender, had worked for us once upon a time, but he made more sense here, flipping bottles end over end, pouring blind, breaking up fights. He wore the Ivy’s signature polo shirt, which read CHARMED, I’M SURE across the back. The armbands on his sleeves were notched to accommodate his biceps. Eric spent his days lifting at Gold’s Gym on Route 1.

  “Whoa, it’s family night in America,” he said when he saw us. “What can I get you? Shots?”

  “No shots,” my mother said.

  “I can’t hear you,” Eric said. “I think you said, ‘Two shots.’”

  “Am I seventeen?” my mother asked. “I’ll have a Bud Light. And he’ll have nothing. Hey, Eric, how often does my teenage son come in here?”

  “Him? Never. I don’t think I know this guy. He’s your son?”

  “Jesus, are you all comedians? Don’t let me catch you serving him.”

  Todd was calling to her from the table.

  “I got it,” Eric called after her, as she grabbed her beer and walked away without so much as reaching for her wallet.

  “I’ll have a ginger ale,” I said.

  Eric dropped an ice-filled glass below the bar and poured a shot of whiskey into it before unholstering the soda gun.

  “Accident,” he said. “My bad.”

  I put my name down on the dry-erase board by the pool table and leaned against the wall to watch and wait. Roberto, who owned the bodega on John Street, was on a four-ball run. He shot pool here every weekend, dressed in sweatpants and shower sandals like he was hanging out in his garage. The older guys all dressed like Roberto, like they had given up, but the younger ones slicked their hair and pressed their polo shirts to come down here and play. I wondered what was happening back at Roger’s as Roberto sunk the eight ball on a bank shot. Someone handed me a cue.

  I never won at the Ivy, and I was down three balls when I noticed Eric talking to my mother. She was sitting by the taps, as far from me as possible, and he was circling back to her between orders, leaning on the bar with his heavy, ropy forearms stacked on top of each other. He had been hitting on her for as long as I had known him, but her complete lack of interest made it less difficult to watch. She looked ten years younger in jeans and a T-shi
rt, even with the grandma clogs she wore on jobs. People sometimes mistook her for my much older sister, and I lived in fear of some waiter mistaking one of our dinners out for a date, but we probably looked too much alike for that. I missed a short, straight shot, and looked up to find my mother standing on the foot rail of the bar. She was arm wrestling with Eric, pushing down on his left hand with both of hers, laughing as he forced a yawn and closed his eyes.

  “You gonna shoot?” Roberto asked. “It’s you.”

  I tried to focus on the game. Eric had a thing with steroids and probably with speed, and the idea of him alone with her in his shitty condo by the airport made me want shells for the shotgun that my mother kept unloaded in the closet. Part of me wished I was already overseas so she could live her life, part of me wanted to stay here forever. Roberto sank the eight ball; we shook hands. Mark, our bartender, reached for my cue.

  “You suck at pool.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought I saw you fall in love with that desperate housewife.”

  “Jesus, did you see that? She scared off that hot blond chick.”

  “Did that girl ask you for weed?”

  “Yeah, maybe. How’d you know that? Did your mom say something?”

  “No,” I said. “Wild guess.”

  “She asked you too?”

  “She asked me first.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Mark said. “So you’re at Lawrenceville and your mom’s still working you like this?”

  “Not that often.”

  “Well, good for you. It’s a pain in the ass to do two things at once.”

  Eric had talked my mother into taking a shot with him, and I watched her wince into the back of her hand as she held the empty glass out to him. I shouldered through the crowd as Eric moved down the bar.

  “Hey, can we go?”

  “Hey!” she said. “Did you clean up at pool?”

  “Not really. I’m ready to get out of here.”

  “Already?” Eric asked, pulling a beer from the tap.

  “I have school tomorrow.”

  “At least come up with a better story. Tomorrow’s Saturday. You can tell me you’re too fancy for my bar now. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

  “He does have school,” my mother said, grabbing a handful of my hair and tugging my head back and forth. “That’s how people get ahead in life, Eric. They go to school on weekends.”

  She seemed genuinely glad to see me, as if we had just run into each other here.

  “Well, it’s not a school night for Mrs. Alison,” Eric said, winking at her. “He’s a big boy. You don’t need to tuck him in, right?”

  For a second I was afraid that she would stick around, and I would have to go home by myself and lie awake waiting to hear her car in the driveway like I was five years old again. Instead, my mother stiffened, and blinked as if she had just remembered something.

  “You know what?” she said to me. “Let’s get out of here. I’m wrecked.”

  “Hey, I’ll call you this week,” Eric said.

  She gave him a tight smile, and dropped one of Roger’s crisp hundred-dollar bills on the bar.

  “That’s for them,” she said, pointing to Todd’s table as she shouldered her purse.

  • • •

  My ears were still ringing from the band at Roger’s when we got back to our empty house. My mother disappeared into her room and turned off her light without saying goodnight to me, which was strange because she always said goodnight, even if it meant waking me where I had fallen asleep reading by a night-light to save on electricity, which I was about to do. I was nodding off midsentence when my door swung open.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I sat up, squinting in the light.

  “Where would you go?” she said. “Let’s say you could go anywhere.”

  “Fiji.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded and waited for her to ask me why.

  “I wouldn’t go anywhere,” she said. “I was thinking about that tonight when I was watching you. I was wondering where you were in your head. I used to think about all the places I’d go, but I just don’t anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s an age thing.”

  “Are you saying I’m old?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not old.”

  “Right,” she said, “of course I’m not.”

  She shut my door.

  • • •

  Smacking the steering wheel to stay awake at red lights on my way to school. My short Saturday schedule meant English and then econ before I could go home and back to sleep. I cut through the glassy modernist dining hall to get a cup of coffee before giving my Modernist Literature reading one more shot. The cover on my copy of The Waste Land was badly creased where I had rolled on it after losing consciousness halfway through a section titled “What the Thunder Said.” I had no idea what the thunder said, and I needed caffeine and Advil and a place to read in the twenty-five minutes before an hour of small-group discussion. Lawrenceville used the Harkness teaching method, in which twelve students and one teacher sit around an oval oak table to talk about the Ottoman Empire or the impact of privatization on capital market growth. It aims to foster engaged and egalitarian discussion, which makes it hard to sleep in class. I took my coffee for the road.

  The sprawling campus was deserted except for a few distant figures speed walking awkwardly under the weight of their books. I shouldered through the door of Memorial Hall and moved down the cool hallway of the old building as quickly as my coffee would allow. The stairs were solid blocks of stone, each bearing an indentation deep enough to hold water thanks to two centuries of climbing and descending students. I was headed for the second-story teachers’ lounge, which was usually empty on weekends. The door was closed, and when I opened it, the head of the English Department looked up from an interview with a woman in a navy business suit. Mr. McCarthy had been on the disciplinary board convened to hear my case, and while he had voted against expulsion, it was clear that I had used up whatever currency or empathy I had with him. Most of the faculty I had been close to kept their distance now, there being no time for redemption between my arrest and the end of the year.

  “Mr. Alison,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Can I help you? We’re in a meeting here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, backing away, closing the door. “My fault.”

  I crossed the grassy circle that’s the focal point of campus, designed by the same architect who did Central Park, and ringed by the boys’ Circle Houses, where the boarders lived for their sophomore and junior years. Day students were also assigned to a house and I had been in Hamill, where the administration put everyone they weren’t sure what to do with: the son of a cotton magnate who hung a Confederate flag in his window, Canadians, a clique of kids from Taiwan.

  In the library, I took the wide stairs down to the basement and a windowless science reading room with plush couches that no one really used. The motion-sensing lights had already been tripped when I opened the door, and it was Clare who turned his head to see who was invading his solitude. We hadn’t really spoken since we’d put two hundred miles on my car and decided to spend the next four years at the same school in another country. There was a pause after I sat down, a conversational game of chicken.

  “Hey,” Clare said, “did you get a housing assignment yet?”

  “I’m in Andrew Melville.”

  “That’s the hotel, right? I was gonna request that one. Is that OK?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  The only thing we had to talk about was our future shared living arrangements, which was almost funny to me. I settled into the couch and waited for Clare to say something else. And then I realized that he had no book in his hands, that his bag was closed, that he had just been sitting there, staring out across the room. I took out my book and t
ried to find my place.

  The WXPN weatherman reported a record high on the heat index as I drove my mother to my high school graduation. She did her makeup in the vanity mirror; I spun my tie into a four-in-hand at a long red light. We jogged across the parking lot together, and she split off toward the seated crowd while I joined my class behind the chapel, where they’d been marshaled in an alphabetical and single-file line. The girls wore short white dresses for the ceremony while the boys sweated in blue blazers and long pants. I could see the families gathered around the sunken bowl of grass in the middle of campus where our chairs sat empty in the sun—parents and grandparents and godparents squinting at the long formation in the distance, wondering which upright streak of navy blue or white was theirs. I spotted Clare, separated from me by the letters A through S, hands in his pockets, sunglasses hiding his eyes. I wondered where his parents were this afternoon.

  The crowd dispersed as soon as the ceremony ended, seeking shade. I saw my mother making her way through clots of family members toward the empty chair I was leaning on. She stopped in front of me and spread her arms.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered in my ear, before pulling back and looking me in the face. “Look at you. You’re done. You’re leaving.”

  Her eyes were wet, full of pride and something that looked, to me, like fear. Was she afraid for me or afraid to be alone? I couldn’t tell, and couldn’t ask. It was just the two of us, and I had spent all morning waiting to feel embarrassed and to hate myself for feeling that way, but that wasn’t happening now. And then Clare was standing at my mother’s shoulder, his hands in his pockets again.

  “Mom, this is Clare.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Alison,” Clare said. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Diane,” my mother said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  When I saw Clare stiffen, I tugged on my right earlobe—a gesture my mother and I used at parties to communicate that it was time to shut up or change the subject.