by Lisa Gornick
Afterward, we fight. “The chick lives like a slob,” you say. “I feel sorry for the kid.”
“She’s a wonderful mother.” My voice sounds tight and closed even to my own ears. “Lily is happy and healthy and open with everyone. Her teacher says she’s one of the most empathic children she’s ever known.”
“Reports who? Corrine?”
That night, you sleep turned away from me. In the morning, I have this idea of homemade English muffins. Not until the ingredients are mixed do I realize that they take an hour to rise. Anxiety I cannot explain creeps in.
The muffins are still rising when you come into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around your middle. Your hair sticks up and you haven’t brushed your teeth. You reach for a box of cereal and head to the refrigerator for milk. “I’m making English muffins,” I announce.
You pull your hand back from the refrigerator door in an exaggerated gesture and sit down at the table. I pour you a cup of coffee the way you like it, black and sweet, and give you the newspaper. I hull strawberries and scrape the seeds from a cantaloupe.
Ten minutes pass before you shoot me a look.
“A few more minutes,” I say. “Then I can put them in the oven.”
You roll the paper into a tube and slam the table. Coffee sloshes onto the floor. “Jesus Christ, can’t I just have a bowl of cereal? Or do I have to stand on ceremony for this production of yours?”
I start to cry. You get a sponge and wipe up the floor. You lean against the counter with your arms folded across your chest and your chin jutted forward. You seem to be inspecting me: skinny arms and legs poking out of a nightshirt. You shake your head back and forth and glare. “Don’t you know how to fight?” you say.
In the fall, we move back onto campus. We both take singles, though mostly we sleep in your room, where you have installed the double bed. I learn to fight back. Sometimes after an argument, you poke me in the ribs and grin. “Good job,” you say. “A real contender.”
*
When I tell you about Andrew, that I met him on an expedition to New York to visit Juanita, east for her book tour and by then my father’s live-in lover, that I had not wanted a man to get up from his café chair to come talk with me, you look at me with disdain. “You fool,” you say. “You arrogant little fool. Do you think you’re so astounding that men can’t control themselves with you? You invite it. You fucking invite it.”
Once you say it, I know you are right: there had been something open, available, in the way I held my head while I waited for Juanita, in the way I carefully folded my magazine, crossed my legs, sipped my cappuccino, lit cigarettes. I had watched myself as though I were blown up on a movie screen, twenty times life-sized, lifting my eyelids ever so slightly to glance around the room, careful not to reveal my unfamiliarity with the scene before me, my uncertainty as to how to find my way back to Port Authority should Juanita not arrive—which she did not during the hour before I left with Andrew.
And, if I am honest, I noticed him before he noticed me, recognized in him even though I did not then recognize it in myself that he was posing: a pack of European cigarettes on the table, a copy of Le Monde spread out before him, a leather bomber jacket across the back of his chair. I’d seen both that he was posing and that it was an interesting pose, one that Corrine and I might dissect over a long telephone conversation and a string of cigarettes, and now I can see that I must have arched my neck in a way that would have invited a tiger to bite.
Later that night, after Andrew had taken me uptown for Japanese food and then downtown for Brazilian jazz, I called Corrine.
“Did I wake you?”
“No. Lily’s been driving me crazy, climbing in and out of my bed. I just got her to sleep.”
“I met someone.”
“Shoot, girl.”
“He’s a law student, here in New York, but he grew up in Berkeley. He looks like a California boy, tall and blond, but there’s an edge to him. He seems to be always on the road. He spent a year after college running some kind of weavers’ collective in Guatemala, though it sounded like there was money in it for him too. This summer he’s off to South America. He carries a beeper in his pocket.”
When it comes to men, Corrine is a mistress of distinctions. She can talk about men with the same level of refinement that her mother can discuss upholstery. About Andrew, she asked what his hands and shoulders were like and what kind of car he drove. Does he listen? What does he read? What does his father do for a living? She wanted to know if I let him kiss me and what kind of kisser he was.
“Long and thin, broad, an Alfa. How he listens, that’s hard to say.” I paused to think it over. “I’d say he listens for the gist of things, and he gets that quickly, but he’s not too interested in the details. I don’t know what his father does, but his mother is a hotshot feminist professor at Berkeley, though maybe there’s some kind of family money because he has that rich-kid way about him. The kiss—he didn’t ask if he could kiss me, he just did it, but he did it so fast, a brush of the lips and with this air that of course he could kiss me, that it was as though it was nothing.”
“Did he pay for your meal? Did he talk about girlfriends?”
“He paid. American Express. No talk about other women, but I’m sure they exist.”
“I’ll sleep on it,” Corrine said. “It’s the beeper that’s got me. Sounds like a guy with a taste for dirty business.”
I was still in bed when Corrine called the next morning. In the background, I could hear Lily asking for cereal and the canned laughter from a children’s show. I looked at my clock. It was 11:00, 8:00 a.m. Corrine’s time. All I wanted was to get on a plane and sit in Corrine’s kitchen, drink coffee, and wait for the fog to break so we could ride over the Golden Gate to the beach, Lily singing in the back seat, a raft sticking out of the trunk.
“You’re in big trouble,” Corrine said. “He found his way into my dreams. I could see his bomber jacket and there was an Alfa too.”
“Why trouble?” I was thinking of you and how long it had been since I had slept alone and how you must be wondering why I didn’t come last night to your room.
“You got yourself a heartbreaker. One of those too-dangerous-to-resist guys.”
Everything felt stale. My hair smelled of cigarettes. There was dirt under my nails.
“Listen, Louisa, I’m not saying don’t go for it, just know what you’re doing.”
Corrine and I rarely call each other by our first names. It made me sit up and listen. “I’m just going to forget it, a one-night misguided adventure.”
Lily was laughing at something.
“Bets are you’re already sunk.”
*
After you tell me that I am a fool, an arrogant little fool, you punch a wall. We are in bed, in my dorm room, and little pieces of plaster fly onto the sheets. For a moment I think you might punch me too, and even though I know it would break my jaw, I wish that you would, that it would be you hurting me and me being comforted by you instead of you yanking on your jeans, grabbing your keys, and slamming the door.
You are down the stairs before I start to cry. You pretend not to hear me calling, “Bear, Bear,” through the open window until it is clear that people walking by are stopping to look up and I have to duck behind the curtain. In that moment, all I want is to take it back, my words that have, you tell me, wiped out all of your happiness in me, in my smell, in my touch, in our talks, in your certainty as you hike from gym to classroom to club that I am yours and the world is right. I want to take it all back, to say it’s nothing, truly, nothing. Nothing has happened, just a guy I met in a café, nothing will change, but I know that by evening I will board the train to the city, even more the fool than you know.
A week later, you let yourself into my room with the extra key we had made for you. It’s early morning, not quite light, and I am still asleep. I open my eyes and look at your face. I haven’t seen you since you punched the wall. Already I have slept with
Andrew.
You’re wearing a green sweater and in the gray light it looks as though the muscles have wilted from your face. Your mouth is loose and your eyes are drooping. You look post-operative, like someone whose chest has been torn open so a surgeon can tamper with his heart.
You sit on the edge of my bed, and I take your hand. For a long time, we don’t talk. I stroke your hand over and over. Then you lay your head on my chest and I stroke the angel wings in your back.
I kiss your hair. You sob, wetting the sheets and my skin. I pull you into the bed with me, shoes and all. I am crying too. When we make love, it is hard to tell which of us is making what kind of sound.
Afterward, you prop yourself on an elbow and study my face. “Your eyes are crooked,” you say.
“Thanks for telling me.”
“They are. And you have a pimple on your chin.” You stare at me as though you are studying a map. “There are a dozen other girls on this campus who’d take up with me in two minutes, a lot of them a hell of a lot less morose than you.”
I run my hands over your enormous arms. All you’d have to do to end your misery is press your thumb to my windpipe and snuff out my breath.
“Don’t cut me off,” you say. “Do what you have to do, but don’t cut me off.”
I draw you into my arms, spider and prey.
*
It’s a hot May day when my father calls to explain about the conference in Helsinki and the paper he’s presenting on variations in the architecture of the genetic code and how he must have completely overlooked my graduation when he promised to attend. I hold the phone from my ear as he gives me the details. Outside, everything is a Technicolor green. Two bare-chested boys throw a yellow Frisbee on the lawn. A girl in an apple-red T-shirt reads with her back against a tree. My father has never visited me here, never met you. Listen, you brat, I say to myself. He paid for your four years here. It’s too late for a pity party.
I place the phone closer to my ear and wait for a break in my father’s stream of words. “Fine, Dad, no problem, no big deal.”
“I sent you a little present in the mail. It’s not much, but it’s the best I can swing for now.”
Although you think Andrew buys me the car, I buy it with my father’s check, which arrives two days later. On a bulletin board at the Wawa market, I see a file card for a used Datsun wagon, $650. Because I do not want to ask either you or Andrew to drive me to the owner’s house eight miles outside of town, I buy the car sight unseen.
The week before graduation, I mail my books and three cartons of winter clothes to Corrine. I call the dean’s office and arrange for my diploma to be sent to my father’s address. I leave you a note that I am going to Ocean City, Maryland, to look for a job. Please believe me, I write. I am going alone. I hear it’s easy to get a job if you get there before Memorial Day. My father canceled coming to graduation and everything has turned so complicated that I no longer want to wear robes and go through the ceremony. I add, I love you. I know that sounds crazy but I do. Then I telephone Andrew, who I think is in Martinique for the week, to leave a message on his machine.
A girl answers the phone. “I’m housesitting for Andy,” she says and then giggles. “Is there a message?”
*
I remember only a few things from the three weeks I spend in Ocean City before you arrive. I remember driving in from the north that first night, past the white high-rise condominiums, past the seafood restaurants that line the highway in the center of town, into the original resort of peeling clapboard houses, little stores with umbrellas and beach towels and suntan lotions, and then, at the south side of town, a honky-tonk boardwalk with rides and haunted houses and, at the end, a pier.
I don’t remember how I find the room in Mrs. Ford’s boardinghouse, whether there is a vacancy sign in the window or an ad in the paper, only that Mrs. Ford is wearing nylon support knee-highs under her sandals, her white hair so wiry you can see each strand. “I’m not going to lie,” she says about the room, “it gets hot up here. But then you get the best view in the house.” I peer out the small window. In the dark, I can’t tell what I am looking at.
“My Harry loved this room the best,” Mrs. Ford says. “He’d always say, ‘Don’t rent that attic one.’ Mornings, I’d find him sitting up here staring out, he’d say, at the blue, blue sea.”
When I wake, sunshine is splattered over the bed, across the little desk at the window and around the pile of my typewriter, suitcases, satchels, and book bag. In the morning light, I can see that the floor, scrubbed until the wood is almost white, slopes toward the door. It’s like being on a ship. From the bed, I can hear the gulls and smell the salt air and the residue of things being fried. Standing at the window, I can see Harry’s blue, blue sea.
By noon, I have a job at Mattie’s Schnitzel Haus, a German restaurant twelve blocks to the north. Arlene, the hostess, interviews me. “Ever waitressed before?” she asks.
“No,” I admit. Arlene looks me over and then smiles. “Well, at least you’re honest. Most girls come in here with baloney stories about having worked for some uncle in his French restaurant in Baltimore.” She wets her lips and then pulls them back to check in her reflection on the chrome cash register that she has no lipstick on her teeth. “I’ll give you a try. Just remember, mornings and lunches, this is a family place—pancakes, eggs, burgers, and Monte Cristos. Lots of kids, lots of spilled Aunt Jemima’s. After dark, we get the middle-aged crowd. Then we do steaks and seafood and the German theme stuff: Mattie’s Wiener schnitzel, apple dumplings, that kind of thing. Thursdays through Sundays, there’s a three-piece cha-cha band and Mattie’s wife sometimes sings. Dinner’s served till twelve, but you don’t get out till two since you got to do the breakfast setup. Night’s the good money, but if you’re fast on your feet you’ll do all right on the seven-to-three too. And don’t tell anyone I hired you without experience.”
The first night, I spill ice water in someone’s lap and keep two tables waiting over an hour for their dinners. The cook, an old albino guy with skin so pale it hurts to look at, yells at me, and when a lady asks, “What exactly is the Wiener schnitzel?” I realize I have no idea. The second night, a man with an open shirt and lots of gold displayed against his chest hairs pinches my butt and a woman screams when I serve her a lobster platter with a cigarette butt smashed in the claw. A few days later, they give me the breakfast-lunch shift, and I slip in the kitchen, the plates crashing around me, egg yolks running yellow down my calves and blood from my palms staining the white uniform.
I want to cry, everything hurts so much, but I feel too humiliated to let the tears come. “What did I slip on?” I whisper as Arlene peels a butter pat from the bottom of my shoe and Mattie starts to yell, “Who the fuck is dropping butter? What you trying to do, kill this gal?” One of the other waitresses wipes syrup off my knees with a warm damp cloth, and the cook hands me a plastic cup with some whiskey in it and says, “All right, kid. Just take it easy.” I swig. My heartbeat slows.
“You’re christened, love,” Arlene says. “A bona fide waitress.”
*
Then, one lunchtime, I look up and you are there, sitting big and beaming in a T-shirt and shorts at one of my tables. You’re suntanned and your arms look like tree trunks. For a moment, I feel irritated that you’ve just arrived without giving me any notice, but then you wink at me, raising your eyebrows in mock appreciation of my legs, and I smile.
I pretend you’re one of my customers and bring you coffee and a menu. “How’d you find me?” I ask.
“You said a German place. Lots of Wiener schnitzel in Cincinnati.” And so we resume, without the bother of words or discussion about the terms of our arrangement: why you, who should be beginning a training program at a Wall Street bank, are running a beach stand; why I, who should be, well, I don’t know quite what but something other than carting platters of sauerbraten. Nor do we mention Andrew (off somewhere, Peru would be my closest guess), Andrew by then mos
tly an idea, an idea linked with a fantasy of exotic adventure: the medina in Tangier, the casino on Lido, a train cutting through the Andean clouds.
You move in with the younger brother of an Ivy Club friend, a skier and party kid from the University of Colorado who through a college buddy of his own landed a job at a fancy restaurant, the kind of place you hate, with a circular drive and valet parking, JACKET AND TIE REQUIRED FOR OUR GENTLEMEN GUESTS. The apartment is a summer version of a fraternity house, with girlie posters on the walls, the bathroom a swamp of wet towels, the refrigerator empty except for beer and packets of sweet-and-sour sauce. When I stay with you, which is most nights, I bring my own towel and carry a roll of toilet paper.
Within days, you have fallen into a routine. You paint your nose with zinc oxide, grab your fins from under the bed, and then walk to the corner, where you buy a pile of newspapers, two carry-out coffees, black and sweet, and three cherry Danish. You blow up the rafts, lay out the beach chairs, and stack the umbrellas. After the flurry of morning customers, you settle into whichever of the rental chairs is left to read the papers and have your breakfast. Midday, you get someone to watch the stand while you bodysurf for an hour: in and out of the water, your arms flung straight before you, your concentration as complete as the hour when you study the stock pages. Days that I work the dinner shift, I man the stand for you—watch you skim the waves, sometimes thirty yards or more before you crash into the sand, picking yourself up, shaking the stones out of your swim trunks, pushing your hair from your eyes, squinting to see if I am watching, and then grinning at me before you head back into the sea.
The night you arrive, we make love. For me, it is as it has always been between us since that first morning in your dorm room: languorous, satisfying in a more reverent way than Corrine and I had imagined sex might be. Afterward, you lie on your back with an arm stretched out as a bolster for me. You stare at the ceiling while you talk. “I feel like an animal with you,” you say.