by Ann Packer
Sierra climbed over Ryan and went to Penny’s side. “We can tape it,” she said. “Really, it’ll be okay. We’ll tape it from the back, it won’t even show. Here, James, you didn’t mean it. Do you have any of that clear tape in your studio, Penny? I’ll bet you do.”
“Why did you do that?” Robert asked James.
“Because that’s the kind of person I am!” James shouted, and he flipped the two watercolor halves into the air, a gesture that should have given him a feeling of power but that backfired because they were so lightweight that their descent to the floor was drifting and leisurely. Furious, he bolted out of the living room, grabbed the Accord keys as he passed the table where they were kept, and yanked open the front door.
“He’s not allowed to drive,” Penny cried, and Ryan ran after him and somehow made it down the pitch-dark steps to the driveway in time to position himself between James and the car. For a moment they wrestled, James trying to shove Ryan out of the way while Ryan planted his feet and bent his knees and pressed against the car door with all his weight. James looked over his shoulder, saw his father and Robert and Rebecca coming, and with a murderous yell threw the keys as high into the air as he could and took off at a run. He ran down the driveway, past the turnoff for the shed, and all the way to the road. There, fury pulsing through him, he yelled again.
Bill hurried back into the house to search for flashlights while Sierra tried to tape the watercolor and Penny hoped she wouldn’t succeed. Penny was incensed and yet also somehow pleased by what James had done, for in crossing this line he had more or less demanded a strong reaction, and she had one in mind.
In 1957, around the same time Bill began bringing Penny to picnic at the Portola Valley property, a group of Benedictine monks from Hungary was founding a small boarding school for boys less than a mile away. By the 1980s, the Priory, as it was known, enrolled day students as well and had developed a reputation as a good place to send a boy who for one reason or another was in danger of going astray. Assisted by lay teachers, the monks, in their flowing black robes, taught according to Benedictine principles and every June graduated a group of fine-looking young men whose photograph appeared on the front page of the local newspaper. Penny had always liked the idea of the school, not for the Christian values but because the students, when she saw them around the village in their button-down shirts, struck her as the kind of kids who would treat their mothers with deference and respect.
“No,” Bill told her on the phone the next morning, pulled from an exam of a five-year-old with second-degree burns. “And please don’t tell my staff it’s an emergency when it isn’t.”
“No,” he told her that evening at dinner, the two of them alone at the table because James had refused to join them—with the certain knowledge, Bill figured, that once Penny was out of the house, his father would heat up the leftovers.
“No,” he said when she flipped the bedroom light on at midnight and announced that she couldn’t sleep, she was so worried—this was a new word—about James.
“Woodside High is so big,” she said, standing at the foot of the bed and glaring at him. “And his friends! It seems like a very bad place for him. I really think he would benefit.”
“Benefit.”
“From the structure. He’d have to do chores around the dormitory, he’d have to live with other kids again.”
“He wouldn’t live there.”
“Of course he’d live there! That would be the whole point! For all I care, he can live there and keep going to Woodside High.”
“I don’t think the monks would go for that,” Bill said, and that one tiny slip into “yes but” logic cost him another twenty-four hours of argument until finally she gave up on trying to convince him and called the Priory herself to set up an appointment.
Ryan, back in Santa Cruz but very worried about what was happening at home, spent hours each evening on the phone with Sierra, not talking about James but rather, because of James, extending the already significant amount of time they spent on the phone together.
“If you came here,” Ryan told her one evening, about an hour into a long, meandering conversation, “we could take a love-poetry class together.”
Sierra had already told him a hundred times that she didn’t want to go to college, but she went along with the fantasy because they always went along with each other’s fantasies. “They really have that?” she said. “A love-poetry class?”
“I’m not sure, but I bet they might. I met this woman at the Arboretum and she recited a poem to me.”
“I believe that.”
“I wish I could see your face right now. Are you smiling amused or smiling charmed?”
“I’m smiling loving.”
“Don’t you think it would be nice if James had someone to smile like that at him?”
“He’s young,” Sierra said, because that was what Bill always said and she trusted Bill to understand James.
“But don’t you think?”
“Of course. He will someday.”
“Oh,” Ryan said.
“What?”
“I’m thinking about you. What you’ll do someday.”
“Please don’t. Not tonight.”
And so he didn’t—bring up what they both knew, that Sierra’s days at home were numbered. Soon, neither of them knew when, she would come up with a goal for herself and be gone. Yet despite the dread he felt, or maybe because of it, Ryan saw the force that was going to carry her away as external. He and Sierra were like two golden leaves lying under a tree, knowing there was a big wind on its way. The Ryan leaf would be tossed up in the air, flipped over once or twice, and then deposited in the exact same place, while the Sierra leaf would be blown out of sight.
“You met a woman?” Sierra said.
“In the Australian area. At the banksia, you know what I mean, with the crazy yellow flowers that sort of look like toilet brushes? They probably weren’t in bloom last time we went, I’ll show you next weekend. She’s a volunteer at the Arboretum, she teaches in the English Department. I’m standing there and she walks up to me and says, ‘A morning glory satisfies me more than a book’ or something like that. I said, you know, ‘Hi, nice to meet you,’ and she said that was something Walt Whitman said, and did I know his poem about a child asking what grass is. And then she recited it—it was very long.”
“What grass is?” Sierra said.
“Grass, not grass. Ha, I didn’t even think of that.”
“James would have.”
“I’m not sure.”
“No, he would have. I asked him.”
“You asked him . . .”
“If he’s smoking. Weed. He is.”
Ryan was silent.
“We did at sixteen.”
“We were seventeen. And that was different. We were together.”
“Are you really surprised?”
“No, I guess not. I just want him to be good.”
“Good like a good boy?”
“Good like happy.”
“She won’t make him go.”
“I hope not.”
“She can’t.”
“You mean my dad won’t go along with it.”
“Right.”
• • •
The appointment at the Priory was set for Friday afternoon. James sat in the kitchen and waited for his parents: his mother because she was the one taking him and his father because he had the car.
Penny came in first, breathing hard because she’d had to hurry up the hill from her studio. Her clothes were old and paint-stained, and there was a faint band of sawdust at her hairline. “I’m still mad about the watercolor,” she said, “but I just want you to know, this is not a punishment. It’s for your own good.”
“Said the prison guard as he slammed the door of the cell.”
; “I know I can’t convince you, so I won’t bother trying.”
“It was pretty old.”
“What?”
“The watercolor.”
“You are perverse,” she said. “Does it not occur to you that a remark like that only makes me angrier?”
“But you said it’s not a punishment.”
She left him sitting there and went to wash up and change. While she was gone, Bill arrived, ten minutes behind schedule and rattled by his tardiness, which had begun with a mother hailing him in the parking lot as he got into his car. “I meant to ask you,” she said, her feverish toddler balanced on her hip and resting his flushed cheek on her shoulder, “if you have any thoughts on apple juice.” Which Bill did, and which he communicated as succinctly as he could, the main point being that if she was worrying about apple juice, then everything that was actually in her control would most likely be fine; but it set him back several minutes and aggravated him enough that once he was in the car he replayed the scene in his mind and instead of reassuring her, he told her that she ought to get her child home and into bed rather than worry about protecting him from the knowledge that there was sugar in the world and it tasted good.
It bothered him even to imagine talking like that.
“Mom said I’m a pervert,” James said once Penny was back in the kitchen and Bill was handing her the car keys.
“Oh, I did not,” Penny said.
“She did,” James said. “I’m not complaining, I’m just saying. I doubt they’ll want a pervert at the Priory.”
“James,” Bill said, “it’s just a visit. It might be interesting. Haven’t you always wondered what goes on back there?”
“Haven’t you?”
Bill hesitated.
“I mean, it’s really nice of you to bring the car home and everything, but I notice you aren’t going with us.”
“Do you want me to?”
“What do I care?”
And so they all went, the three of them silent under a bright blue sky, passing stands of daffodils and tiny, poisonous lilies of the valley. The school was set way back from the road, at the base of a hill dotted thickly with pine trees. They didn’t see a single person as they made their way to the office.
Surprisingly to James, it wasn’t a black-robed monk who greeted them but a barrel-chested middle-aged man wearing a striped necktie, named Mr. Calhoun. After politely welcoming them into his office, he talked about the Benedictine principles on which the school had been founded. “We’re looking,” he said, “for the best in every young man who comes to us,” and he gave James a smile full of manufactured warmth.
James slouched in his chair. On the walls were black-and-white photographs of the monks before the school was built, and it occurred to him that he didn’t know the difference between a monk and a priest. Obviously priests weren’t allowed to get laid, but what about monks?
After about twenty minutes, Mr. Calhoun led them around the campus, which was exactly as small and shady and devoid of people as Woodside High School was huge and exposed to the sun and crowded. Penny matched her stride to Mr. Calhoun’s while Bill and James walked behind them. At the dormitory James saw a pair of boys playing Ping-Pong and pictured himself standing at one end of the table and slamming the ball at his opponent, who in James’s imagination turned into Robert and crouched with his forearms hiding his face.
Mr. Calhoun described the eleventh-grade curriculum and said transfer students did very well thanks to the Priory’s excellent academic advising. Arriving at the chapel, he mentioned that mass was celebrated every morning but that the boys were not required to attend. The entire school came together in chapel once a week and on certain special occasions. Spiritual guidance was always available by appointment.
James wanted to see where the monks lived, but Mr. Calhoun said their area was private, and James found himself wondering again about the sex lives of monks. Now that he was thinking about it, he remembered that priests weren’t even allowed to jerk off. Monks, either? What about the students? Asking this question was the kind of thing he once did all the time, but now that he was older he often caught himself partway through a statement or action only to realize that continuing might mean undesirable consequences. Typically, this happened too late to abort the whole thing but too early to proceed without feeling guilty or stupid. This annoyed him greatly. If he was going to realize something was a bad idea, he wanted to realize it beforehand. He had confided this to Rebecca once, and she had remarked that since he knew how often he did the wrong thing (she’d said something a little nicer than this, he couldn’t remember what), he should always stop and think first. “Always when?” he asked, and she said, “Always always. Before you do or say anything.” Which was so useless that he disregarded it completely. It was like saying he should stop and think before he breathed.
Mr. Calhoun gave them a large packet of papers before they left. “We’ll look forward to hearing from you,” he said, and then he put a hand on James’s shoulder and added, “Good luck to you, son.”
Walking to the car, James felt a ferocious sense of doom. He didn’t want to go to this school, but suddenly he didn’t want to stay where he was, either. He wondered what would happen if he dropped out of school and worked at a gas station. He’d always sort of enjoyed the smell of motor oil, and it would drive everyone in his family crazy.
“Well,” Penny said, “I thought that was very interesting. James, wouldn’t you like to live in a dorm? Don’t you think that would be fun? Then you’d be just like Rebecca and the boys.”
“Robert doesn’t live in a dorm,” James said.
“Well, he did,” Penny said. “He used to. Remember how much fun he had?”
James snorted. Whenever Robert had come home from Michigan, he’d spent all his time complaining about college life, especially the lack of privacy, which James found funny since that was the one thing he refused to give anyone else.
They drove toward home and Penny said idly that she had nothing in the house for dinner. “Now that it’s just the three of us, I actually sometimes forget to go shopping.”
Bill said, “The good news is that no one ever forgets to eat.”
“That’s not true. I sometimes realize at three or four in the afternoon that I haven’t eaten all day.”
“That’s what I mean. You remember because you get hungry.”
James stared out the window. He was supposed to be at detention, and he figured touring the Priory was better than that. It had gotten to the point where he owed detention for cutting detention, and in the last month or so, pretty much since the car accident, he’d been intercepting letters about his delinquency from the vice principal.
“Dad?” he said.
“Yes?”
“What religion are monks?”
“Why, they’re Catholic,” Bill said. “I’m sorry. You didn’t know that?”
“No, I did. I just wanted to make sure.” James hesitated. “So monks are priests?”
“Not exactly. Monks aren’t ordained. They don’t celebrate mass.”
“Celebrate. Ha.”
“That’s what it’s called, James,” Penny said, glancing over her shoulder. “It’s very sacred.”
“I’m not sure,” Bill said, “that the word ‘sacred’ can be qualified. I think something either is sacred or it isn’t.”
“You sound like Rebecca,” James said.
“Rebecca sounds like your father,” Penny snapped. “I don’t know why everyone always says it the other way.”
James stared out the window and resolved to keep quiet. They approached the turn for home, and when his father kept on driving he didn’t even voice a pro forma objection to being dragged to the grocery store. The only way to avoid being restless was to be very, very tired, and he leaned his head against the door. “Everyone else has a religion,” he
muttered, but so quietly that neither parent heard him.
By the time they got back home it was dusk, and James was realizing he didn’t know where the parties were this weekend. Someone had said something about a bonfire on the beach, but without knowing whether it was tonight or tomorrow, let alone which beach, he might as well know nothing.
At the top of the driveway was Sierra’s old green VW Beetle.
“Ryan must be here,” Bill said, and though James was pleased by the idea and the distraction it represented, he said, as dully as he could, “Whoop-dee-do.”
The three of them carried the grocery bags up to the house. Ryan and Sierra were in the kitchen, holding hands across the table and sipping from mugs of the heavily scented cinnamon tea she bought in bulk at a health food restaurant in Palo Alto. Ryan wore an old Sand Hill Day T-shirt that had been Sierra’s originally; it was so small on him that the front image was distorted, the school’s famous tiny green sprout growing from a terra-cotta pot stretched to look like a shallow pink pie pan.
“James,” they both said, getting to their feet.
“Studly shirt,” James said.
“How was it?” Ryan said. “I didn’t want to hear by phone, so I had Sierra drive down to get me.”
“Well, I was driving down anyway,” she said. “But we both wanted to find out as soon as possible, so we turned right around and drove back.”
“You act as if I took him to look at a prison,” Penny said. “It’s a school.”
“No, no, not at all,” Sierra said, “we’re just really curious. Was it nice?” With her right hand she reached over her head and drew the hair away from her left temple, a habitual gesture of hers that James found sexy, the way it caught her bare elbow pointing at the ceiling for a moment.
“It was very nice,” Penny said.
“It was very nice,” James said. “Very. I saw some righteous-looking playing fields. But I could never go there.”
“Why not?” Ryan said.
“Well, because of something Mom said earlier. She said I’m a pervert and it’s true, so I could never go there because Catholics aren’t allowed to jerk off.”
