A rust-spotted sedan drove past the entrance of the parking lot. Without speaking, Val and I climbed into the Jaguar, Val behind the wheel, me beside her. The car started up with a purr and spat chunks of gravel in its wake as Val steered for the road.
“Where?” she asked as she accelerated, heading toward the highway, which could lead us back home or… well, anywhere, really. “Which one should we fuck up first?”
For some reason, the name that popped into my mind didn’t belong to one of my classmates. Instead, I remembered the guidance counselor, one of the grown-ups, one of the people who should have been keeping me safe. Her name was Carol Demmick, and she’d kept a cruet of vinegar on her desk to sprinkle over the cut-up carrots she snacked on. The kids called her Summer’s Eve, or Douche for short (I assumed she didn’t know this). She’d called me into her office once in the spring of senior year, invited me to have a seat, asked me about my plans after graduation, and then asked me, gently, how my senior year had been going. It had been so long since someone at that school had looked at me with kindness, had spoken to me with anything besides indifference or contempt, that I told her. “Terrible,” I choked. The details came spilling out of my mouth: the kids who tripped me and shoved me, and knocked over my lunch, the graffiti on the walls of every bathroom, how even the teachers seemed to hate me, to treat me like I had some horrible disease that might be catching. The guidance counselor had looked at me for a long minute, her big, buggy gray eyes magnified behind the green plastic frames of glasses someone had probably told her were “hip” and “cool.”
“Addie,” she said in her too-sweet voice, her double chins quivering gently as she studied me. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but maybe, over the summer, you might think about a diet.”
I’d stared at her, stone-faced. Did she think I’d never considered a diet before? That the possibility had never occurred to me? That I was not, in fact, on a diet right now, the same one I’d been on for the past six months and stuck to rigorously until nine o’clock every night? And who was she to talk to me about my weight? She was a fattie, too! “You know what they say,” she continued, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression! And inside of every fat person there’s a thin person dying to get out!”
I bent down and snatched my backpack off the floor. What kind of first impression did she think she was making, with her calendar of kittens thumbtacked to the wall (Hang in there! read the legend beneath the little white kitty clinging to a branch) and her dyed-blond Mamie Eisenhower bob that had remained unchanged in all the years she’d been at Pleasant Ridge High? “I’ve got math,” I said.
Ms. Demmick’s plump face softened. “Addie. I can see I’ve hurt your feelings. That wasn’t my intention. I only…”
… wanted to help, I filled in as I walked into the crowded hall and let her door slam shut behind me. Sure. They all just wanted to help: the doctor, my mother, those boys who followed me down the halls, oinking—just trying to help! The girls I’d overheard in the bathroom—I mean, she’s got to weigh, like, two hundred pounds! That’s almost two of me! giggle, giggle—just offering their assistance! The world was just bursting with Good Samaritans, all of them dying to help out poor fat Addie Downs.
“Addie?” Val said from the driver’s seat.
I pulled myself back to the present, to the heated seats of the Jaguar, to my old best friend sitting beside me. “Who’d Dan come with?” I asked.
“Chip Mason,” she answered.
“First we’ll check around the country club. Maybe he’s on the side of the road. Then we’ll go to Chip’s.”
“Can we stop for doughnuts first?” She looked at me, wide-eyed and hopeful.
I bit back another gust of laughter. Vehicular manslaughter, then baked goods. Sure thing! Why not? It sounded like fun, and I hadn’t had any of that in a very long time.
TWELVE
“This can’t be right,” I said, peering through the window at the numbers on the houses as Valerie slowed the car to a crawl.
She squinted down at the class directory, open on her lap, then out at the dark street in the town of Aurora, a suburb forty-five minutes west of Pleasant Ridge. “Three-ninety-six Larchmont. This is it.”
“But it’s…” Val’s headlights washed over the white sign stuck in the lawn in front of the two-story clapboard building. FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: THANKS AND GIVING, SERVICES SUNDAY MORNING, 10 A.M., CHILD CARE AVAILABLE. “It’s a church.”
She cut the motor and unbuckled her seat belt. “Maybe it’s been converted into condos.”
I got out of the car and looked at the building, then studied the sign’s small print, which advertised AA meetings Wednesday mornings at ten and read, at the very bottom, CHARLES MASON, PASTOR. “Val,” I said. “When you were talking to Chip Mason at the reunion, did you happen to notice a black shirt and a white collar? Priestly garments? Rosary beads? A big wooden cross?” My father was Jewish but not observant, my mother had grown up Lutheran, and Jon and I had been raised as nothing in particular—we’d light a menorah in December and bring in a tree that we’d decorate, and there would be dyed eggs and chocolate rabbits in the springtime, without much in the way of explanation about what any of it meant—so I was a little bit vague on how you could recognize a churchgoing (or church-running) man.
Val made a face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Was I supposed to go to my high school reunion and listen to other people talk about themselves?”
“I guess not.”
“Bunch of breeders passing around pictures of their kids,” she grumbled, helping herself to a cruller from the wax-paper bag full of doughnuts we’d bought. “Like anybody cares.” She took a big bite. “Like all babies don’t look just like Ed Asner.”
“Not the black ones,” I pointed out.
“Funny,” said Val, who knew as well as I did that of our class of 280 or so, fewer than a dozen had been black, bused in from Chicago as part of a program to give them more academic opportunities, then bused back home before they had a chance to join any teams or make any friends. The chance that one of them had felt connected enough to the class to actually show up at a reunion was slim.
I pried the Class of ’92 guide out of Valerie’s hands and found his name in the directory. “Reverend Charles Mason,” I read. “Reverend. As in, God.”
Val frowned. “Huh. Now that you mention it, he was talking about working on his service. I figured he just meant tennis or something.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. Together, we walked up the flagstone path that led from the street to the church and climbed the half-dozen steps to the front door. Val cupped her hands around the pane of glass and peered through the window. “Pews,” she reported. “Big cross up front.” She took a step sideways to the next windowpane. “Um. Sign says Christmas organ concert on the seventeenth, but I don’t see anybody there…”
“Excuse me!”
Val turned around. “Duck!” she hissed. I hopped off the stairs and crouched in the shadow beside, invisible as I’d wished to be back in high school, as a man in striped pajamas and a bathrobe—the elusive and now holier-than-us Chip Mason, I presumed—came from behind the church. His hair was thinning, his belly strained the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and he looked weary… although, in his defense, it was very late. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, then looked more closely. “Valerie?”
Val raised her hand and managed a weak wave. “Hi, Chip.” She lifted the wax-paper bag. “Want a doughnut?”
“Is everything all right?” he asked, now sounding more puzzled than angry.
“I… came… for…”
Oh, shit, I thought, and leaned forward, ready to spring out of the shadows and defend us… or run.
“Salvation!” Val continued. “Just lately I’ve been… you know… thinking about God and stuff.”
God and stuff. Kill me now. But Chip Mason actually seemed to be buying it as Val came tripping down the steps and onto the frost-crinkly lawn. “T
here are things in my life… things I’ve done that I’m not proud of.” She stood close to him as she looked down, head bowed, then up, tossing her hair and angling her body even closer to Chip’s paunch. “And it’s been years and years since my last confession.”
Chip frowned. “You know this isn’t a Catholic church.”
“Oh, of course.” She gave a shrill little giggle. “Of course not. But I just thought, you know, with someone who knew me… and knew God… it’d be, like, a setup! Blind dates are always better when there’s someone who knows both people.”
“Maybe we could talk about this on Sunday,” he said. “Come to services. I’d be happy to speak with you after.”
“Okay, but… well, it’s just that there’s something that’s really been on my mind. I had… I guess you’d call it an epiphany last night.” She led Chip to the car, and when they were directly beneath the streetlamp, she turned her head and mouthed the words Find Dan.
Great. I waited until she’d unlocked the car and somehow sweet-talked Chip Mason into the passenger’s seat, where, presumably, they could arrange her night out with the Almighty. Then I bent over and hustled along the side of the building. The church was two stories, and behind it was a one-story brick addition that looked like living quarters—I could see a light through one of the windows, a stove with a kettle on it, a vase of red carnations on a cluttered kitchen table. I peeked through the window. No sign of Dan. Breathing deeply, I walked to the door of the rectory, or the parsonage, or whatever believers called the place where the priest lived. The door was closed but unlocked.
I turned the knob and stepped inside to a short entry hall with a coatrack and a pair of winter boots and a snow shovel at the ready, leaning against the wall. The kitchen was empty: I saw a woodcut of praying hands affixed to the wall, underneath a noisily ticking plastic clock, and a box of Entenmann’s cookies on the counter. The powder room was neat and vacant. The living room had stacks of church newsletters and different religious and self-help texts on the shelves. A leather-bound Bible sat open on the wood coffee table. There was nobody on the couch or in either of the armchairs that sat across from it. I hurried down the hallway to the bedroom. Unmade double bed, vacant; closet with shirts and pants on wire hangers, ditto; bathroom with a glassed-in shower stall with a Waterpik and a tube of Rogaine next to the sink.
I pulled back the shower curtain and peered under the bed. There was nobody there. No signs of anyone, either—no kicked-off pair of shoes, no jacket draped over a chair, no droplets of blood in the sinks.
I slipped through the front door, closed it behind me, and dashed around the building, ducking back behind the hedge, then creeping forward until I could see Valerie’s Jaguar. The motor was running. Plumes of white smoke rose up from the exhaust pipe. The windows were fogged. I squatted down, shivering, figuring that any minute Father Chip would conclude his spiritual counsel. He’d go back to his house, I’d get back in the car, and Val and I could figure out where to go next. The minutes crawled by. The door stayed shut. My knees creaked as I adjusted my position and held it until my thighs were shaking. Finally I approached the car, thinking that maybe I could knock on the back window as a signal to Val that it was time to go… but as I got closer, I could see through the window that the driver’s seat was empty. Pastor Charles Mason was sitting in the passenger’s seat, and Valerie had climbed on top of him. His mouth was open on her neck, and one hand groped her breast through her black lace body suit.
“Oh, for the love of God,” I said, loud enough for them to hear if they’d been listening, which clearly they weren’t. I waited until the car started rocking back and forth. Then I thumped twice on the window and turned my back. A minute later, the driver’s-side door opened and Chip Mason climbed out into the night, smoothing the tented front of his bathrobe.
“Addie?” he said, peering at me. “Is that Addie Downs? My goodness, you got thin!”
“And you got religion!” I said.
I could see the moonlight gleaming on his bald pate as he cleared his throat. “I was hoping to see you tonight,” he said. “I wanted to apologize for my role… in…” He cleared his throat again and looked at me. “I’ve changed,” he said. “I’m a different person now.”
“Good for you,” I said as Val came tumbling out of the driver’s seat, patting her hair into place and looking like a vampire who’d just gotten a fresh infusion of blood. “We need to be going.”
“Will I see you on Sunday?” asked Chip Mason.
Val gave him a silvery-sounding laugh as she slid behind the wheel. “We’ll see,” she said. I climbed into the car and we drove off, leaving Chip standing there in his bathrobe.
“No Dan?” asked Val, who didn’t sound especially hopeful.
“No Dan,” I confirmed. “Oh, and by the way, what was that all about?”
“I was creating a diversion,” she said, as if this was obvious. “And it was hot. Very Thorn Birds.”
“Val,” I said, “Presbyterian priests aren’t celibate. They’re allowed to get married.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed to hear it. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Val pulled over to the curb underneath a streetlamp and grabbed the class directory from where it had gotten wedged between the seats. “You know what? Maybe we should just go see if he’s home.”
I felt my stomach clench, but I didn’t say anything as Val pulled open the class guide, located Dan’s address, plugged it into her car’s GPS, and started to drive.
THIRTEEN
The New Year’s Eve party was Valerie’s idea, and I was surprised that my parents went for it. Maybe I shouldn’t have been: Valerie, my mother used to say, could charm the bark off of trees, and she made the event sound like the most exciting thing that had ever hit Pleasant Ridge, or at least our cul-de-sac. “A New Year’s Eve celebration,” she’d decreed from my bedroom floor, where we’d assumed our customary positions, head to head, propped up on our elbows on the carpet, with our feet pointing toward opposite corners of the room. Val, in her usual jeans and boy’s button-down shirt, was flipping through a copy of Mademoiselle. She hadn’t changed the way she dressed now that we were in high school, but she’d started reading about clothes, and she’d show up at the bus stop with her hair puffed up with mousse or gloss painted on her lips. I was in jeans of my own and an oversized sweatshirt that fell past my hips, working through a bag of Cheez Doodles, holding each puff underneath my tongue until it dissolved. “For the neighborhood.”
“Not for other kids?”
She shook her head. “A grown-up party. A dress-up party.”
“Like tuxedos?” The men on our street wore suits, or at least shirts and ties to work, but on weekends they were found mostly in jeans or khakis and polo shirts.
“They can rent them if they don’t have them.” She flipped onto her back and gazed at the puckered plaster of my bedroom ceiling. “And the ladies should wear evening gowns. We can have a champagne toast at midnight, and we’ll decorate with those little white Christmas lights.” She bounced up off the floor onto her toes and clapped her hands twice, sharply, in front of her chest. This was a move I recognized from the cheerleading squad, and I wondered unhappily whether Val was planning on trying out in the spring, whether that was what the Seventeen subscription and the cans of TRESemmé mousse meant. “Let’s ask your mom right now.”
We found her on the sunporch, curled up in a pile of cushions with a legal pad half covered in looping black cursive on her lap. She’d had her most successful card yet the year before, a birthday card with a cartoon drawing of a little old lady with white curls and a cane on the front. Think of it this way: You’re not just getting older, the front flap read… and then you’d open it to reveal the words You’re also getting shorter. I wasn’t sure exactly why it was funny, but it had been selling, as my mother said, like hotcakes.
“A New Year’s Eve party?” my mom asked. Her hair was more silver than brown
by then, her big blue eyes hammocked in a nest of fine wrinkles. I could see words on the notebook page and also, in the margin, a column of numbers. She worried about money, I knew—sometimes, late at night, I’d hear my parents whispering about the costs of Jon’s therapists, credit-card bills, and insurance deductibles. My father had papered the town with his Honey-Do flyers, even venturing into other towns to put them up, and my mother was never without her notebook, not in the car or at the kitchen table, not even, I suspected, in the bathroom.
“New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” Val explained. “We can invite everyone on the street.”
My mom propped herself up on her elbow. “Do you think your mother would like that?”
Val nodded. That summer, Mrs. Adler had had a new boyfriend, a man named Randy, who was, Val said, a stockbroker. On Sunday nights he’d sleep over, and I’d see him leaving Val’s house in his suit and tie on Monday mornings, off to join the other dads at the train station. But in November, Randy disappeared, and Mrs. Adler spent even more time than normal lying on the couch, blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling with the silent telephone balanced on her chest.
“Were you thinking of a potluck?” my mother asked. We’d have one of those every winter. Everyone on the street brought a dish—tuna casserole with crumbled potato chips on top, ziti studded with chunks of sausage, baked beans and franks—to the Basses’ house.
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