Prep

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  And it wasn’t as if I actually thought he was insane. But as long as I felt the impulse to convince him that he was acting like it, weren’t our roles reassuringly entrenched? The worst thing would be to recognize him as a thirty‑nine‑year‑old man possessing certain virtues and certain foibles, making his way as he knew how.

  “I just think‑” But what was it that I just thought? “It’s like asking for someone’s autograph,” I said, and I knew the indignance was gone from my voice. “Just like, what’s the point? I don’t understand why people do it.”

  “Maybe not,” my father said. “But you have to admit that a lot of folks disagree with you.”

  “The Orschmidts’ son has a whole big collection of autographs,” my mother said. “Sharon was telling me that last summer when they went out to Los Angeles he got one from, Lee, you would know who this is, he’s a real big star. Oh, I’m terrible with names, but Sharon said the actor was just like talking to you or me.”

  The three of us were quiet.

  “So,” I finally said, “does Mr. Orschmidt still wear a wig?” There. I had given in.

  “Lee, I don’t think that’s nice to say,” my mother said. “Mr. Orschmidt is such a pleasant man.”

  “The fact that he wears a wig doesn’t mean he’s not pleasant,” I said.

  “Honey, on a man, it’s called a toupee, but I really don’t think he’d appreciate that kind of talk. In our day, people didn’t used to discuss private business.”

  “Back when your mother was a girl and dinosaurs roamed the earth,” my father said. “Right, Linda?” It was always like this: We rode over the moment, like a roiling river, on my mother’s back.

  “Oh, stop it,” my mother said. But we were fine, we were fine, we’d made it to the other side.

  Four minutes before the end of the first half, Ms. Barrett put me in for Norie Cleehan‑I was a fullback‑and then took me out again four minutes after the start of the second half. During my time in, Gardiner had scored two goals.

  I took a seat next to Maria on the bench. “Where’s your parents?” she said.

  I pointed across the field. A few parents had brought blankets or folding canvas chairs, but mine were just sitting on the ground. My father, probably, was ripping out blades of grass and blowing on them to make a whistling sound. It was another of his tricks that had once deeply impressed me.

  “Aww,” Maria said. “Mama and Papa Fiora. I bet they’re happy right now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “They’re so happy. They’re like, ‘Honey, did you see Lee get up in number twenty’s face? I’m proud of Lee.’ ” Coming from someone else, the remark might have seemed mocking, but Maria was worse at soccer than I was. She also was a fullback, and on the field, she moved in a leisurely way; sometimes, when the forward from the other team got too far past her, she’d stop altogether and just watch the forward close in on the goal, as if she, Maria, were not a participant but a spectator. This tendency made Ms. Barrett apoplectic. “Are your parents taking you out for dinner tonight?” Maria asked.

  I nodded. When my mother had said, “Daddy and I want you to pick somewhere nice,” I’d mentioned a Chinese restaurant because I knew that by nice she did not mean, for example, the Red Barn Inn.

  “That’ll be good,” Maria said. “Get off campus.”

  “Do you want to come?” I asked. I blurted it out before I’d really thought about it, because it seemed like maybe it was what Maria was hinting at. Also because‑surely this was offensive, but it was true‑a Chinese restaurant would probably seem nice to her as well.

  “Sure,” she said. “And Rufina, too?” Rufina was playing halfback then, her long ponytail bouncing behind her as she jogged up the field.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said.

  “Hey, look,” Maria said. “They’re waving at you.”

  It was true‑both my parents were. They would like Maria and Rufina, I thought, and they would like that I’d invited along friends, and it would make my father feel generous to take us all out; at home, my parents had always encouraged me to have other kids over to our house. I lifted my hand and waved back.

  In the afternoon, I rode with my parents to the motel. We had lost the game seven to two, and it had occurred to me by the end that the Gardiner coach had told her team to stop scoring. That would have been decorous and boarding‑school‑like, given that all the parents were watching.

  My mother and I sat in the car while my father checked in. They were staying at the Raymond TraveLodge, which I had found for them by looking in the yellow pages several weeks before; the room, which the motel could not guarantee as nonsmoking, would cost thirty‑nine dollars. “You played wonderfully,” my mother said.

  From the back seat, I laughed. I was still wearing my uniform, my hair still pulled back.

  “What?” my mother said. “You did.” Then she laughed, too. “You did!”

  “Which goal that Gardiner scored while I was in did you like better? The first or the second?”

  “Those were big girls on the other team,” my mother said. “What was my dainty Lee supposed to do?”

  We were both quiet, and it was a calm, unawkward silence; with lunch and the game behind us, it felt like things might be okay.

  “Oh, look.” My mother knocked on her window, which was rolled up. “Aren’t they pretty?” Twenty feet away, on top of a shed, two robins were perching and turning. “It looks like they’re having a party and waiting for everyone to arrive.”

  “But they’re worried that nobody is going to come,” I said.

  “Oh, but now‑” A sparrow alighted on the roof. “The first guest,” my mother said. Something about animals always pleased my mother‑whenever we were on the highway and passed cows or horses, she’d tap my brothers or me and say, “Look.” She did the same when we were passing bodies of water, or driving over bridges, especially if I was reading as we did so.

  “Lee, Daddy and I are so excited to see Ault,” she said.

  At this moment, my father emerged from the entrance. From the way his lips were set, it looked like he was whistling.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Maria and Rufina, when I knocked on the door of their dorm room, were both dressed up. Rufina had on a skirt and sweater, and Maria was wearing black pants and a button‑down shirt. A few minutes before, without showering, I had finally changed out of my soccer uniform into jeans. In my room, I’d found a note from Martha: My parents want to meet yours! Where are you? Call me at Sheraton tonight!! My parents were waiting in the car, and I crumpled the note and threw it away.

  “You guys look nice,” I said to Maria and Rufina. “But, I mean, we’re not going‑” Maybe they’d imagined I was inviting them to the Red Barn Inn. “We’re just going to the Golden Wok,” I said. “Is that okay?”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. “Sure,” Maria said. “That sounds great.” They definitely had thought we were going to the Red Barn Inn.

  In the car, my mother asked where they were from and whether they liked Ault. Rufina said, “Not really,” and laughed.

  “Why not?” my mother asked.

  “It’s just snobby,” Rufina said. “A lot of snobs.”

  How could she get away with making the most predictable complaint, and how could she do so having become beautiful? (And she’d go on to Dartmouth, and Maria to Brown. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I had it would only have increased my bewilderment. If you were beautiful and went to an Ivy League college, then really, who cared about everything else?)

  “I have to agree,” my father said. “One fellow I saw today, I thought, poor guy, he has a neck injury. Then I realized, nope, he’s just got his nose in the air.”

  “No joke,” Rufina said. “And the kids are worse than the parents.”

  “Nothing like inheriting a whole lot of money to make you think you must really deserve it,” said my father.

  I stiffened. The actual word money made my sk
in crawl. Besides which, my father’s remark was probably something the priest at their church had said in a sermon, or something my father had picked up from Reader’s Digest.

  But Rufina just said, “You got it.”

  “And, Maria, what about you?” my mother said. “Have you liked Ault?”

  “Some good, some bad,” Maria said. “Depends what day you ask me.”

  “Were you girls at the lunch?” my father asked. “What a ratfuck, huh?”

  They roared with laughter, and I looked out the window. Why did he have to try so hard? No one expected that much from parents.

  “What’s a ratfuck?” Maria said.

  “Tell her, Flea.” In the rearview mirror, I could see my father grinning.

  “It’s just a big, crowded event,” I said.

  “That’s hilarious,” Rufina said. “I gotta remember that one.”

  At dinner, Rufina ordered shrimp in lobster sauce and to compensate, though I doubted my father would know I was compensating, I ordered mixed vegetables. Rufina and Maria both ordered soda, which was not something we did in our family‑at restaurants we always had water‑but it probably wasn’t fair to hold that against them; most people in the world ordered soda at restaurants. When our fortune cookies came, we went around the table reading them: You love sports, horses and gambling but not to excess; Your winsome smile will be your sure protection; You will be the best! The dinner hadn’t been a disaster, really, everyone had liked one another, but it still had been a mistake to invite them. I’d had to remain on high alert, waiting.

  Back on campus, when we were letting them off before I got out myself, Maria stepped out of the car but Rufina remained in the seat. “That was a good dinner,” she said, and she patted her flat belly.

  “We really enjoyed meeting you,” my mother said.

  Rufina looked at me, then my father, my mother, me again. “Are you‑you guys are staying at the Sheraton, right?”

  “The what?” my father said.

  “I thought‑” Rufina paused. “See, I told Nick I’d meet him there.”

  Nick? I thought. Nick Chafee? Then, because it has always been in moments of genuine surprise that I try hardest to act at ease, I said, “We can take you there. It’s not where my parents are staying, but it’s no problem.”

  “Does someone want to clue me in to what’s going on here?” my father said.

  “Rufina needs a ride to a hotel,” I said. I turned back to her. “It’s fine. We can take you.”

  “Hold on just a second,” my father said. “What hotel are we talking about and just who is this Nick fellow?”

  Rufina started to speak, but I interrupted her. “She needs to go to the Sheraton, which is where a lot of the parents stay. And Nick is in our class, and it’s not like you’re staying in a room with him, right, Rufina?”

  Rufina nodded. Of course she was staying in a room with Nick.

  Both my parents were twisted around to look at us, my father’s right elbow hanging over the seat. Maria had disappeared into the darkness.

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?” my father said. He seemed not angry but slightly amused.

  “It’s true,” Rufina said. “I’m staying with a bunch of me and Lee’s girlfriends.”

  “Don’t you need permission to be away from campus?”

  “I filled out a form in the dean’s office this morning.”

  “Dad,” I said. “You’re not her father. Just drive her there. It’s none of your business.”

  “None of my business?”

  This is the point where, if I had been Rufina, I’d have gotten out of the car. Ride or no, I would not have wanted this proximity to another family’s fighting. But I wasn’t Rufina‑Rufina was going to the Sheraton now, to get extremely drunk, probably, and to fool around with Nick Chafee. And with fooling around as the reward, our squabbling was only a distraction to be endured. I myself had never fooled around, drunk or otherwise, but even I knew how when you really liked a boy, all the little daily incidents shrank and slipped away. You carried around your anticipation of seeing him again and retrieved it when you felt bored or anxious, like a memory of something good.

  “I’m not sure when it became your responsibility to decide what’s my business,” my father said.

  Not now, I thought‑couldn’t he see that the situation was not about us? We were only vessels, meant to carry Rufina through the night and into the arms of the boy who was waiting for her.

  “Terry.” My mother shook her head slightly. Then she mouthed something to him‑I think she mouthed, Later. She recognized our role here.

  “I’ll say what I want to in my own car,” my father said, but even as he said this, he shifted from park to drive and we glided forward. I still don’t know if he was acquiescing to me, or to Rufina, or maybe to my mother.

  When we were back on the main road, I said, “It’s on 90. Do you know how to get on 90?”

  My father said nothing, and my mother said, “Daddy knows because that’s how we came in.”

  It could have been worse, I thought‑if we’d had to stop at a gas station and get directions.

  For the rest of the ride, which was almost twenty minutes, no one spoke. In the dark car, on the dark highway, we weren’t necessarily in Massachusetts‑we could have been anywhere. My father and my mother and me and this strange, pretty girl sitting across the seat‑for a minute, I could not remember her name. What was she doing with us? It made sense that the rest of us were in the car together, but her presence felt curious and perplexing.

  Then the disoriented feeling passed. (Rufina –of course.) So she and Nick were involved; now it seemed ludicrous that I had not realized this earlier. Beauty trumped race, apparently. Or was it possible that my belief about race and dating at Ault had simply been wrong? Or was I mostly right, but wrong to think that any pattern existed as a rule? There could always, of course, be exceptions. Sometimes‑more often than not, though it was not until I was older that this fact stopped surprising me‑things really were as they appeared to be. A boy and girl flirting, and then it turned out they were together‑only I could be startled by such news.

  When we dropped off Rufina, she walked through large automatic glass doors beyond which were a rose‑colored carpet, a table with a huge vase containing dozens of flowers, a chandelier above the flowers. We pulled away, and none of us spoke on the ride back, either.

  In the campus driveway, my father turned off the car but left the headlights on. It was nearly eleven o’clock, the time for Saturday curfew, though only a fraction of the students would be sleeping in the dorms tonight.

  My father set his hands on top of the steering wheel. “I won’t be‑” he started, and his voice came out squeaky from not talking for so long. He cleared his throat. “I won’t be attending chapel or brunch tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see you at Christmas, Lee.”

  “Are you joking?” I said, and my mother said, “Terry!”

  “I’m not joking at all.” He didn’t look at either of us.

  “Honey, why‑” my mother began, and he cut her off. “I don’t need to be subjected to this kind of treatment. Not from anyone, and especially not from my sixteen‑year‑old daughter.”

  “It wasn’t‑” I said, but he cut me off, too. Probably during the drive he had been planning what he’d say. His voice was steady, simultaneously angry and calm.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Lee, but I can tell you this much. You’re a disappointment. You’re selfish and you’re shallow and you have no respect for your mother and I, and I’m ashamed of you.” Your mother and me, I thought‑even at that moment, that was what I thought. “When you started at Ault,” my father continued, “I said to myself, I’ll bet there are a lot of kids who’d think real highly of themselves going to a place like that. And I thought, but I’m glad Lee has a good head on her shoulders. Well, I was wrong. I’ll say that now. We made a mistake to let you go. Your mother might feel different, but this i
s not what I drove eighteen hours for.”

  No one said anything, and my mother pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. Sometimes when my mother cried, I caught her tears, and I very much did not want to catch them now.

  I swallowed. There were many things I could have said in this moment, and the one I chose was, “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “Lee!” My mother’s voice was anguished.

  Abruptly, my father was unfastening his seat belt, opening his door, stepping outside, pulling my door open as well. “Get out,” he barked. “Right now.”

  “No.”

  “I said get out of my car.”

  “It’s Mom’s car, too.”

  My father glared down at me, shaking his head; apparently, there were no words left to express my repugnance.

  “Fine,” I said. I stepped out, folded my arms, and stood facing him. “You can tell me how terrible I am. But maybe you should think about how you act. You think it’s so funny to embarrass me and say weird things in front of my friends, and when I get upset, you pretend like you didn’t do anything.”

  “Embarrass you? Is that what taking those girls out for dinner is called?

  “Oh, right. Like we go out for one meal and then I’ll just ignore how you act the rest of the time.”

  “I didn’t know I’d asked you to ignore anything. I’m thirty‑nine years old, and I’m pretty comfortable with myself, Lee. And that’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for you. I’ll tell you one thing I don’t feel the need to do and that’s make excuses.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  And then‑I don’t remember any anticipation or foreknowledge of this, only a stunned awareness that it had already happened‑he raised his right hand and slapped me across the face. His hand was hot, and then my face was hot, and tears were splashing onto my cheeks, but I think they were only because of how much it hurt. And the thing I did, before I met my father’s eyes, before I said a word or lifted my own hand to feel my jaw and cheek, was look around. We were near the chapel, and about thirty feet away, illuminated as he passed under a lamppost, was a classmate of mine named Jeff Oltiss. Our eyes met. His expression, especially from that distance, was unreadable but, I thought, not unsympathetic. Jeff was not someone I knew well‑we’d been in Ms. Moray’s English class together our sophomore year, but that was it‑and we never spoke after this, and for the rest of my time at Ault, I thought of him only as the person who had seen my father slap me. If I ran into him today on the street in San Francisco or New York‑he could be married, have children, be an astrophysicist or an accountant‑that is all he would be to me: the person who saw me get slapped by my father. When we were still at Ault and passed in the dining hall or gym, we did not talk or greet each other, but I felt that a recognition flickered between us. He knew.