“I don’t know, I mean, I guess so,” I told him, even though I knew exactly what he meant.
A silence hung between us—like when you suddenly notice the dust motes dancing all around you in the late-afternoon sun and you wonder how the hell you didn’t notice them before.
“Why don’t we talk less about my failed attempt to be a novelist and more about you?” he finally said. “Are you a happy person?”
I’m not sure anyone had ever bothered to ask me that before, so I said “What do you mean?” to buy time and think of a clever answer.
I mean—when was the last time someone asked if you were happy and then looked you in the eyes in a way that made you feel as though they actually gave a shit about your response?
“Do you enjoy all that you are participating in?” he said.
“Like—do I want to quit anything?”
“It’s not a crime to admit such things. The Participation Gestapo isn’t hiding behind that plant over there. No Participation KGB, either. This is America. You are free to utilize freedom of speech—freedom, period. And I already know you want to quit something or you wouldn’t be so interested in my stupid little book, which is—at the end of the day, if I remember correctly—a hymn to the noble art of quitting. So let’s have it. What do you want to quit more than anything else in the world?”
“Soccer,” I said, surprising myself, although it was absolutely true. I’d hated soccer for a long time.
“Soccer. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next question: Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, I bet you do. Are you on the school team?”
I looked down at the counter, noticed the white grains of sugar scattered around the table. “I’m the captain and leading scorer.”
“So you’re good at it?”
“Sort of,” I said, even though I made the All–South Jersey Team as a sophomore, colleges were recruiting me, and scouts came to my games. But I didn’t really care about any of that. The attention was embarrassing. Made me feel like even more of a fraud.
“I bet no one ever told you this truth before, so here it is for the price of a cup of coffee.” He took a sip and then stared into my eyes before saying, “Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it.”
We locked eyes for a second.
He smiled like he was giving me the secret to life.
Try telling that to my coach and my father, I thought. I shook my head and then said, “I wanted to kill those little kids who were spinning around Unproductive Ted. And then I wanted to kill the kid’s dad, who throws Wrigley into the creek. And I’m not a violent person at all. I won’t even let my mom set mousetraps. Never been carded in my entire soccer career. No reds. No yellows. I’ve never wanted to kill anything before. Not even a weed or a spider. But you made me feel such intense feelings. The ending of your book made me so incredibly angry.”
Booker smirked in this awfully sad way and then looked out the window at nothing in particular. “Oh, please don’t blame me for your hatred. It was there before you cracked open my Bubblegum book. I can assure you of that. It’s in all of us. We at least need to take responsibility for our own share—especially whatever we let leak out.”
“I’m not trying to…” I said, but then stopped because I realized I was.
“You should read Bukowski’s ‘The Genius of the Crowd,’” he said, reestablishing eye contact. “That poem has a thing or two to say about hatred.”
“Who?”
“The great Charles Bukowski. Hero of nonconformists and blue-collar poets the world over.”
My family certainly wasn’t blue-collar, but I liked the sound of nonconformist.
I asked him how to spell the last name and typed the letters into my phone. Then I typed The Genius of the Crowd in, too, which I later read and loved. Reading that poem was like putting on the proper prescription glasses after bumping into walls for my entire life. Bukowski was able to sum up precisely what I had been feeling for many years, and he made it look so easy on the page.
“Be careful with the Buk’s poems,” Booker said that day in the coffee shop. “Powerful stuff. And please—whatever you do—don’t tell your parents I told you to read counterculture poetry, especially if they’re uptight types who send out family portraits as Christmas cards. Definitely don’t say a word about the Buk if they make you coordinate holiday outfits. Even non-Christmas-card-sending suburban parents tend to despise Charles Bukowski, which, of course, is why so many suburban kids love him.”
“How did you know they do that?” I asked, astonished. “My parents. The Christmas cards. Coordinating holiday outfits.”
“Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It’s a curse. Here’s something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. Your parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That’s the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can’t reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That’s another secret: They’re too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages.”
I opened my mouth to defend my parents because they really are good people, and I didn’t want him to believe that they whacked me, even metaphorically, but for some reason, no words came out of my mouth. The afternoon had gotten intense much too quickly.
“You seem like a weird, lonely girl, Nanette O’Hare. I’m a weird, lonely old man. Weird, lonely people need each other. So let’s just cut to the chase.” He smiled and took another sip of his coffee. Then he said the seven words that would change my life forever. “Would you like to be my friend?”
I nodded a bit too eagerly and was shocked to feel myself welling up.
“Well, I never under any set of circumstances whatsoever discuss The Bubblegum Reaper with my friends. So once we make it official, that’s it. We never talk about Wrigley or Unproductive Ted or the Thatch twins or any of it ever again. Understood?”
I had one more question prepared—and maybe to stop myself from crying, I asked, “Before I become your friend, then—on the Internet, I read that several publishing companies have offered to rerelease the book and you turned them all down. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I own the copyright and can do whatever the hell I want with it. I chose to quit publishing. I made that decision a long time ago. Publishing The Bubblegum Reaper was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“You want to quit—like Wrigley?”
“Yes! So can we end all this literary talk and simply be friends already? True friends are better than novels! Better than Shakespeare plays! Any hour of the day! Fake friends, on the other hand—well, I’d rather smash open my skull with a solid-gold Bible than endure the slow poison of a fake friend!” When a few other patrons looked over at us, Booker thumbed his nose at them and then smiled at me.
I laughed. “Is this just a way for you to get me to stop asking questions about your book?”
“No, it’s a way to move beyond the book. The book’s there—stagnant. It never changes. We evolve as people. I’m not the same man who wrote that book twenty-some years ago. And you won’t be the same girl in love with Wrigley forever.”
I blushed because he was right about one thing: I absolutely was in love with Wrigley. I’d even begun hanging around the pond in our town where turtles sun in the summer because I was secretly hoping that Wrigley would magically show up—like I could think him into existence, as we do when we read fiction. I felt my cheeks burn and changed the subject by saying, “So why did you agree to meet me today? If you hate talking about your book so much?”
“I love free coffee in real cups and saucers,” he said
without missing a beat. “Buy me a cup of black and I will meet you every single week forever and ever.”
I smiled and pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. “What happens when we become friends?”
“No way to tell now. I think we just have to give it a try and find out. There are no guarantees when it comes to such treacherous things as friendship. It’s a tricky business.”
“You were Mr. Graves’s friend when he was my age, right?”
“We corresponded. Yes.”
Mr. Graves was one of the few adults I admired. I wanted to do whatever helped make him the person he turned out to be.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re friends now.”
“Good.”
And that was it.
Booker and I became friends.
We met regularly—sometimes for coffee at the House, sometimes in his garden, where he has a pet turtle named Don Quixote who sits eternally between two miniature windmills that have faces and arms holding swords, which makes Booker laugh and laugh every time he looks at his pet, which is daily. Initially, we didn’t talk about his book even once, although I continued to reread it dozens of times. I kept my word, even though I also kept accidentally calling Don Quixote “Unproductive Ted,” which made Booker angry. “That’s not his name!” he’d yell whenever I slipped up.
And if you are one of those pessimistic people who think that an old man can’t befriend a teenage girl without some sort of perverted, deviant ulterior motive, let me end the witch hunt right here and now. Booker was as grandfatherly as they come and never once did or said anything inappropriate or sleazy. No funny business at all ever went on between us. I loved him like I loved walking through summer grass barefoot, like I loved a warm mug in my palms, like I loved driving on a long road as the sun sets in the distance. It was a good, safe, simple sort of friendship—well, at first, anyway.
5
He Never Told Anyone Else What I Did
It was our usual lunch period, except it was Valentine’s Day. Mr. Graves and I were alone in his classroom, talking about Booker. We had turned two desks sideways and were watching a flock of birds perching on the wires just outside the windows. We were also laughing and smiling and trading info like old friends. He turned to say something at the same time I did. Our faces were so close—I could smell his aftershave and see where his razor had irritated his neck just below his jawbone—and when I looked up into his eyes, suddenly I was full of electricity.
I didn’t plan to do what I did next.
That was when whatever we had ended. And I’m pretty sure it was why he quit teaching at the end of the year, too.
It just sort of happened spontaneously, like when you see a spider crawling up your bedroom wall and you reflexively shiver. Or maybe like the first time you accidentally stumble upon Internet porn and your skin tingles and you want to stop looking, but you just can’t, and so you click on more and more links.
I clicked Mr. Graves’s link without his permission.
I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t know what happened, but it cost me. I’ll never forgive myself. The worst part was that I knew I was ruining everything as I leaned in, and yet I didn’t stop. He turned his head away at the last possible second and I kissed his cheek. His face reddened as he removed my hand from his neck, and then he whispered, “What are you doing?” When I tried to let him know I could keep the secret with a smile, he yelled at me, saying, “You can’t do that! Ever! Do you understand, Nanette? You’ve crossed a line.” His words felt like a slap across the mouth. I suddenly felt so stupid. When I started crying, I couldn’t stop. I sobbed and sobbed. He used the phone in his classroom to call for the nurse. I didn’t even know her name, but she came and led me to her office, and I got to lie in a bed surrounded by a white curtain and feel guilty for the rest of the day. I told her I had cramps, and she didn’t ask any further questions.
The next day, Mr. Graves’s door was locked during his lunch period and the lights were off. I peeked through the little rectangular window, and no one was in there. My attempted kiss had driven him to the dreaded teachers’ lounge, a place he had often told me he hated, saying, “Some teachers are even worse than the students when it comes to making their peers feel awful.” He never told anyone else what I did—or at least I was never called down to the principal’s office—and I never heard about it again.
He wouldn’t even look at me in class, and then one day I was suddenly transferred out. My adviser, Mr. Bryant, wouldn’t tell me why, but his stiff, awkward manner made me feel like I was Abigail Williams in The Crucible.
After some time had passed, I stopped by Mr. Graves’s room between periods and, standing in the doorway, asked him if we could speak. In a cold, distant voice, he said we could meet at the school counseling office if Mr. Bryant was present, and that was when I knew I’d never share another private lunch with my favorite teacher ever again, that whatever we’d had was dead and gone forever.
And I was right.
6
Living in a Regularly Updated Catalog
My parents never were bad people, at least according to modern American standards. They fed me. They took me shopping in the most expensive clothing stores so that I looked like everyone else at my school whose parents had money. They made sure we lived in one of the best school districts in the state and maybe even the country. They never abused me in any way and were always encouraging me to do what they thought I wanted to do, but that was the big problem. I didn’t want to do what I was initially doing as their daughter. Only I never told anyone.
My mother is an interior designer. She’s still attractive and is constantly updating her wardrobe, which means we shopped for new clothes at least twice a week. All through high school, we also used to go on these mother-daughter dates every Sunday morning, where we’d have brunch in the city and then go to the opera or maybe a movie or more shopping. I liked going. I really did. But then my mother began to use this time to make confessions to me, like we were sisters or friends rather than mother and daughter. I remember one time when we were seated at a window table on the top floor of the Bellevue, sipping mimosas—Mom tipped the waiters very well, so they never even blinked whenever she ordered two mimosas, regardless of the fact that I was obviously underage—and my mother said, “Does the way your father eat ever bother you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The way he munches and breathes through his mouth at the same time so everyone can see what’s inside. Like he’s a cow chewing its cud. He does that even in restaurants. I’ve tried to bring it up only to save him from his own embarrassment, but he flies into a rage now whenever I even mention the word chewing.”
I scanned my memory and couldn’t think of a single moment when my father’s chewing had annoyed me, nor could I remember my mother ever speaking about it directly to him, even though we ate dinner together as a family every night. And this was when I realized that my parents had a secret life independent of me—that they fought when I wasn’t looking or behind the bedroom door in whispers maybe and then put on a show when I was around. I understood this chewing conversation about my father was going to be a turning point for me. Maybe you think I’m stupid because it took me so long to figure out that my parents really didn’t love each other anymore, but I had always believed that my parents were exactly who they appeared to be. Why would I think any different?
I started to notice other things about Mom—like how she could be in the most miserable mood, complaining about every aspect of her life as we were shopping for groceries, and then she would run into one of her clients in the cereal aisle and her entire demeanor would immediately shift. “Hello, Mrs. So-and-So!” she’d practically sing as if she were suddenly in a musical. A smile would bloom on her face, and her eyes would open so wide they looked like they might fall out of the sockets. Mom always asked about the woman’s family loudly and then brought up some sort of personal tragedy in a co-conspirator’s whisper—such as bad medical
news or a husband’s drinking problem or a neighbor the woman hated—before Mom would work in a decorating project that “really should be taken care of immediately if you want to maintain the resale value of your home because, after all, updating is the best investment in your most important investment.” Mom was always going on about how a family’s home is the most valuable thing they owned, and yet so many people didn’t invest with fashionable updates. “Ridiculous!” she’d yell when it was just her and me. “Asinine!”
I remember vividly a time when all this happened in the food court at the mall. We ran into Mrs. Shaeffer and her daughter Rebecca, who was in my class, but no one really knew Rebecca, because she was always out of school with severe asthma. If she showed up at school seven times a year, that was a lot. Mom asked Rebecca a million questions about her health, to the point where I was starting to get embarrassed because it was painfully clear that Rebecca didn’t want to talk about it. I remember she kept taking hits of her inhaler after every answer she gave, even though she didn’t seem to be out of breath. The funny thing was that Mrs. Shaeffer watched the conversation with this look that suggested she absolutely loved my mom, simply because Mom was asking her sick daughter questions and looking concerned. Maybe no one else spoke to Rebecca ever. I don’t know. But once Mom finished with Rebecca, she made her move, saying to Mrs. Shaeffer, “So—are you ready to bring that Windex-blue kitchen out of the nineteen seventies and into the twenty-first century? You’ll double your investment when you sell your house. Guaranteed. Money in the bank.”
It seemed like Mrs. Shaeffer didn’t care all that much about updating her kitchen or selling her home, but she didn’t want to disappoint my mother, either. I remember thinking that Mom was bullying her into spending a lot of money on something that Mrs. Shaeffer seemed sort of indifferent about. And it was the first time I ever really disliked my mom. I hated her a little bit that day, even though I fully realized that it was her job to sell, and her ability to persuade people to update their homes was what paid for the lifestyle we enjoyed—only I wasn’t really enjoying “our lifestyle” deep down inside, and I was beginning to believe that neither were Mom and Dad.
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