by Grant Ginder
And so I move, careful not to attract the Pauls’ laser gazes, toward the mahogany table set at the center of the tent and start to forage as politely and inconspicuously as my current state of intoxication will allow. For the most part, the spread’s what you’d expect at an event like this: expensive cheeses, fresh fruits, scallops wrapped in bacon that are kept warm on an elaborate chafing set fueled by tiny devices whose source of power and heat I can’t quite comprehend. At the center of the table are two large pewter platters featuring mountains of dark caviar. I stare at the tiny eggs. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Murder, I think, before piling a large mound onto a tasteless cracker (spilling at least half down the front of my white oxford) and directing it into my mouth. Absolute murder. At least an entire generation of sturgeon has been wiped out. If only the little bastards could know how delicious they are. The Pauls start looking at me.
“Don’t let the feds get ahold of that shirt, champ.” I stop picking the tiny beads off my shirt and look up to see Chase (sans Annalee, hands respectfully in pockets). His lips start curling at the corners to form that Cheshire-cat smile. “Evidence of that caviar could get you five to ten.” I stop chewing and consider spitting the roe out while trying to mentally calculate how many tiny undeveloped creatures are already swimming in my digestive tract. “I don’t know how those sons of bitches do it,” Chase continues, “but they do. Dad says something like ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could get our hands on something none of the other tents will have, something a little edgy.’ And fucking voilà! The next day the Pauls show up with ten goddamned pounds of illegal fish eggs from Iran—this shit the UN’s actually banned. Can you believe that? Fucking illegal caviar. From Iran. Iran! Ten fucking pounds of it. Awesome.” Chase pauses for a moment to reflect on the power and the beauty and the contraband, and then starts noticing how much of those ten pounds are staining my shirt and how my eyelids have started dropping a little more than they should in the early afternoon and adds, “Well, it looks like someone’s been having a good time.”
A man in all white carrying a tray of champagne flutes walks by and Chase grabs two of the glasses and shoves one of them into my chest. “Tough gig, huh?” he says, motioning toward the field. A pickup truck has pulled close to the track and Light of Our Lives’ dead body lies in its bed, covered by a green tarp. “I bet Vance Alexander fifty bucks that fucker would win, and then he has to up and die on me. Goddamned horse.” The truck rumbles, then jolts, and then drives slowly through a crowd of spectators who nod to the deceased beast in deference. He gave it his best shot.
Even though the champagne’s become lukewarm, I finish the glass in two swallows before asking him where Annalee has gone. (I half expect him to tell me that she’s waiting for him—madras skirt off; a crumpled ball of orange and red—in an empty bus on the outskirts of the field.)
He laughs. “She’s fine. She’s with her friends. Look.” He points to another corner of the tent, where Annalee and two other girls who look just a little too much like her are talking in a circle that’s as tight as their large hats will allow them to form. Big hats. Everywhere. We wave and she waves back. “Man, I thought Californians were supposed to be laid back! Maybe you should be the one we’re worried about, huh?” He gives me a playful punch on the shoulder that, in my opinion, is a little too hard, a little too brash, coming from someone who’s fucking my cousin. But he’s mostly right, I think. He’s mostly right because I’m the one who just moved here (forty-eight hours ago) and I’m the one who took a year off and went back to California after Chase and I graduated from Penn and I’m the one who’s in a new place, new city, new job. I’m the one who’s becoming increasingly aware of my own displacement. Annalee’s been living comfortably and happily in Washington since she graduated Duke in ’03, making her two years older than Chase and me. She’s a pretty girl, I think, as I watch her awkwardly adjust the floral arrangement that’s been strapped precariously to the top of her blond head. Stunning, almost. Though, really, she’s never known it.
The flawless product of a mother whose obsessions include Vogue and cayenne pepper–based diets and a father who’d wished for an Aston Martin—not a daughter—Annalee spent most of her childhood staring into a mirror scrutinizing whatever inadequacy had been pointed out to her that day. (Too thin, too fat, too many freckles, not enough freckles, too much Gwyneth, not enough Gwyneth, etc., etc., etc.) It wasn’t a particularly uplifting activity, though it was one at which she certainly excelled. While many young girls spend their days committing Hannah Montana songs to memory, Annalee could—without stuttering—give you a rundown of the stats surrounding her blemishes: this mole’s grown 0.18 inch in diameter since last summer. Seven hair ends have split since breakfast yesterday. When we were younger, I’d found it impressive, if not entirely disconcerting.
As kids in Southern California, we’d always gotten along well, Annalee and I. Our parents—namely, my father and his brother—lived close enough to each other to allow for at least one playdate each week. We’d spend these mornings and afternoons and nights on the beaches of Orange County, dodging not only the Pacific’s crashing waves but also her mother’s attempts to convert us to whichever fad diet she’d read about that week. (During one such excursion, I’d returned home and had announced to my own mother that I had pledged my digestive tract to veganism. She responded to my proclamation by cooking veal for dinner and telling me that if I wanted tofu, I was more than welcome to eat it with the rest of my burlap-sack-clad friends, but that while I was living under her roof, I’d best check my dietary restrictions at the door.)
When she turned eleven, Annalee’s family moved to Chicago. My uncle, who had slid comfortably into personal wealth after inventing an obscure (yet highly expensive) bike lock used by nearly every East European cycling team, cited business needs and promptly plucked his wife and daughter from their comfortable California lifestyle and set them down in the wild, wild Midwest. He bought a sprawling mansion in Lake Forest—a decision that at once pleased his wife (thanks to the house’s sheer size) and horrified her (thanks to the house’s location in a region of the country known for its meat-and-potatoes approach to dieting).
“Business needs,” as it turned out, though, translated roughly to “abandonment.” After the move, Annalee’s father was all but present, opting to spend time with his family solely on long weekends and national holidays and the occasional birthday celebration—visits during which he’d forgetten his daughter’s name after four fingers of scotch and two illegal cigars that he’d obtained during his latest international jaunt. It was hard, she’d tell me in her monthly letters and during our weekly phone calls, but she had faith it’d get better. Although he’d never said it, although he’d never expressed it, she was certain that she was still his princess, still his little girl. Because, really, that’s all she’d ever wanted. She was right, I’d tell her, even though it hurt my stomach to do so. He was just a busy man. Always traveling. Always working. What with the bike locks and all.
Despite the infrequent visits from her father and the constant harassments of her mother—despite all that—Annalee turned out all right. She passed through adolescence with unprecedented grace and crystal-clear skin, luck that my aunt would attribute to specific portions of kale she ate during her third trimester of pregnancy. Upon graduating somewhere in the top quarter of her high school class (she wasn’t the brightest in our family—though she certainly wasn’t the dumbest), she attended Duke University, where, despite meager protests made on my part, she traded her judgmental mother in for sixty judgmental sorority sisters.
She took the hazing in stride, though, and laughed when the older sisters wrote “FAT” across her visible ribs with a red marker during pledging. (“They obviously haven’t met my mother,” she said during one of our weekly phone calls—a tradition we maintained through her time in Durham.) Four years later, she graduated, sandwiched somewhere in that same top quarter of her class, except this tim
e she was armed with a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology—a weapon, my brother claimed, that would be less useful than the paper on which it was printed.
And it was. Or it wasn’t, depending on how you look at it, I suppose. Using an article she had written on the cultural significance of colored loincloths among tribes in Papua New Guinea, Annalee managed to land a job as a “fashion assistant” at a Washington lifestyle magazine whose name I can never remember, and whose circulation can’t be more than three digits. Together we laughed at the prospect—at this job—and she told me that it’d just be a stepping-stone until she found something she deemed more worthy.
But this was when we were still talking weekly, before Chase had met her and had called her princess for the first time, before Belize.
I catch her eye again, and this time we share a smile and she rolls her eyes at me as she points to the bouquet strapped to her head.
Chase finishes his champagne and tosses the empty flute to the ground and as he calls me “champ” it dawns on me that I can’t remember the last time he called me by my real name. “Let me explain Gold Cup to you. First, you’ve got the south gate.” He points to the left. “It’s for folks coming from towns like Lynchburg and God-knows-where-else. Towns where people wear, like, J. Crew and American Eagle, and Abercrombie. I’m not talking about, say, Great Falls, Virginia. Or McLean. I’m talking about Virginia Virginia. You got me?” I don’t have him but I nod. “Good. Then, you’ve got the north gate.” He points to the right. “That’s where the D.C. folks generally come in. But—and my bet is you’ll learn this sooner rather than later—not all D.C. folks are created equal.” He laughs at his own joke. “For instance, you’ve got the kids who split the cost of a party bus to get them out there, throw on their only pair of Nantucket reds, pack a picnic, and call it a good time.” He pauses. “It’s cute. It’s nice. And there’s always some hot ass over there. State school girls. But it’s not us, champ. It’s Gold Cup purgatory. You’ve managed to escape hell with the Virginia trash, but you’re still sitting on some shit blanket eating Doritos and drinking brut. You follow?” This time he doesn’t wait for my response. “Then, you’ve got us.” Chase makes a wide, sweeping gesture with his arm as if he’s some feudal aristocrat showing some guest his plots of land. And I’ll admit, amid the madras and the seersucker and the tans, the plots are impressive. “Every year, Dad manages to throw together the best private tent at Gold Cup. Check out the Cap File this month, I’ll bet you a night of drinks that there’s a write-up on it, sans mention of the Iranian delight, if you know what I mean, compadre.”
“What about the actual races?” I ask.
“The what?”
“The horse races.”
He throws his head back and howls. “You kidding me, champ? No one watches the races. No one. Think about the Derby. You think Jessica Simpson goes down to Kentucky to see some goddamned horse run around a track? No. She goes to wear some hat that cost her a grand and throw back a few mint juleps. I swear,” he says, shaking his head, “sometimes you kill me. Absolutely kill me.” And then: “C’mon. Let’s introduce you to the masses.”
If I wasn’t exaggerating, and if the Latham, Scripps, Howard tent is, in fact, a castle and Kip is its reigning king, Chase its dauphin, and the masses their loyal subjects, then I am the distant relative who’s a product of inbreeding gone very, very awry. By any legal standard I’m drunk. My shirt’s covered in illegal caviar. I forget the name of every Susan, Bryce, Hunter, Valerie, etc., whom Chase introduces to me almost before I shake their outstretched hands. And then I step on a six-year-old. I manage to spill the remainder of my gin and tonic down the front of an LSH associate’s wife’s Lilly Pulitzer dress. I stare for a little too long when the cocktail forms a sticky river of booze and lime and carbonation that runs through the bronze canyon created by her mostly inorganic breasts.
I’m embarrassed. For her. For me. And in a moment of self-awareness, I worry that this situation, that this scenario and I may not be the best fit.
© SARAH KEARNEY
Grant Ginder is the author of This Is How It Starts. He received his MFA from NYU, where he teaches writing. He lives in New York City.
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COPYRIGHT © 2013 SIMON & SCHUSTER
ALSO BY GRANT GINDER
This Is How It Starts
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Grant Ginder
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ginder, Grant.
Driver’s education / Grant Ginder.—1st Simon & Schuster ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3607.I4567D75 2013
813’.6—dc232011048981
ISBN 978-1-4391-8735-7
ISBN 978-1-4391-8737-1 (ebook)