The Lesson

by Welch, Virginia

  Gina was about to make a sympathetic comment about Kevin’s poor, injured shipmate when it dawned on her that he was joking. Duh! He’d hoodwinked her again. What a nut. She laughed out loud.

  “You called me at this hour to tell me a drunk sailor joke? I think you’ve been drinking.”

  “No. Just wanted to hear your voice. What are you doing?”

  “I was reading a book,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you’d be asleep or I wouldn’t have called. What are you reading?”

  “True crime.”

  “Gina, Gina. You’re always reading that stuff, and it’s always the same, some guy killing off a young pretty girl or several young pretty girls. You shouldn’t read so much of that blood and gore. You’re just putting all kinds of awful ideas in your head, scaring yourself half to death.”

  He had a point. Lately she could hardly settle down in front of the TV at night without first checking her bedroom and tiny bathroom to make sure they were devoid of intruders. But she didn’t want to admit this.

  “But it’s interesting. I like to see how they follow the clues to the killer. Forensics and stuff.”

  “History is interesting too,” said Kevin. “I have lots of titles I could lend you.”

  “What? Like Patton’s biography? Or Revisiting the Battle of the Bulge? Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll stick to true crime. Less mayhem than all that World War II stuff you read.”

  “If you studied history more you’d have a better understanding of contemporary politics. These things are linked, you know,” said Kevin.

  “You sound like my father.”

  “Well, it’s true. You can’t separate World War II from current events. History is a continuum, not a bunch of independent events. Yesterday determines today, and today determines tomorrow.”

  “I have a philosophy professor I’d like you to meet,” said Gina.

  Kevin laughed. As he did, Gina pondered how different he seemed over the phone than in person. His essence, sweet and natural, was distilled on the phone. Wrapped in his masculine voice, Gina would even call his essence attractive. But in person his clothes obscured all that. But then, why would a normal guy care so little about how he appeared to others? Kevin was a mystery.

  “Kevin, I’m cold just standing here in my living room. Isn’t it freezing on the dock? By the water?”

  “It is. But hearing your voice on the phone warms me.”

  There he goes, getting mushy again. He was hopeless.

  “Kevin, I’m tired. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, but I gotta go to bed.”

  “And I have only a few minutes before I have to report. Good night, Gina.”

  “Good night, Kevin.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Jacobs’ Home, Cornell Drive, Santa Clara

  By Sunday morning Gina had determined that the best way, or at least the easiest way to handle things was to simply not answer the phone. But oddly her phone didn’t ring this morning. She expected Kevin to call her to invite her to ride with him to church again. But the phone in the living room was silent as she showered, got dressed for service, and ate breakfast. The entire time she was readying herself for church she pondered the phone that did not ring. Had it become unplugged? She checked the connections at the wall and behind the base. Everything was in order. She lifted the receiver to check the dial tone. She heard the familiar buzz―the line was good. Why didn’t he call? It bothered her that he didn’t call. But then again, it bothered her that his not calling bothered her. Why should she care?

  The drive to the church on Miramonte Avenue seemed quieter than usual, which of course it was and which made her thoughts all the louder. She decided to take the slow route today, starting at the Alameda. It soon became the El Camino Real. Through Santa Clara she drove, past the car wash and the Mexican restaurants, past See’s candy store at Pomeroy Avenue, one of her family’s favorite places to buy gifts on holidays. Then Sunnyvale with its new car lots, then Mountain View with its secondhand stores, light after light. She didn’t care about the slowness. In fact, she didn’t even notice. She was too busy rolling over in her mind the events of the evening before to care about all the red lights. They just gave her more time to think.

  She continued to think and think all through the sermon. Whatever Pastor preached about this morning was wasted on her, because she was too busy preaching to herself. I like him, but he dresses weird and is inexperienced with girls. I should probably break it off for good. It can’t possibly lead anywhere. But is there any real harm in spending time with him? He likes my company and I like his. Maybe I’m seeing too much into this. Why can’t we just be friends? I’ve made it plain to him how I feel about him but he just keeps coming around. He has no money and no education and he drives a dumb car. It’s lopsided for a girl to date a guy when she’s getting a college degree and he isn’t. My parents would freak if I brought him home, him in those strange clothes and carrying that big black Bible. And on and on throughout the entire sermon.

  After service Gina waited in the foyer for Bonnie and the kids to emerge from the Sunday school area. Before long she heard Benjamin call her name. She looked up to see him tugging at his mother’s arm, dragging her toward Gina. Bonnie held Sarah, fast asleep, in her other arm. The girls greeted one another, and Gina picked up Benjamin and kissed his face. He returned the sentiment with plenty of slobber. She reached into her purse for a tissue, grateful that kissy slime was only on her face and not her clothes.

  “Kevin’s not here?” said Bonnie.

  “No.”

  “Heard from him?”

  “Not today.”

  “You don’t look so good,” said Bonnie. “Why don’t we go somewhere for lunch so we can talk?”

  Gina was still terribly upset about last night. She’d made such a mess of things by agreeing to go out with Kevin. She needed time to sort it all out. She needed to think, not talk.

  “I can’t today, Bonnie. I haven’t seen my parents in a while. I’m going to drive over to their house right now and have lunch with them.”

  The girls agreed to get together soon.

  The dread of talking to her parents heightened Gina’s sense of despair. As she drove the nine and one-half miles south toward her parents’ house on Cornell Drive, she braced herself for the usual barrage of questions. Stay calm, she reminded herself. Don’t get into an argument. Don’t let it happen again. More than anything she hoped her parents wouldn’t talk about Michael. If they brought up his name she would refuse to respond. She would not argue with them. The strife level between she and her parents had escalated since the break-up, and no matter how hard she tried to keep things on an even keel, somehow their conversations always ended up at a high crescendo, especially with her mother. Nevertheless her parents always seemed genuinely glad to see her.

  Or were they glad to see her leave?

  Gina pulled up to the curb in front of the old family home. Cornell Drive, developed in the early 1960s, was an elbow-shaped street of comfortable, middle-class ranch houses built side by side with two-story homes, all painted in California pastels or Mexican-style stucco white. Killarney Farms, the subdivision where Cornell was located, had been appropriately named: the two-story homes were designed to look like barns.

  The Jacobs’ house was typical of ranch homes built in that era, when land was cheap and sprawling homes were the right of the middle class. The house was painted dusty rose, which had grown dustier over time, with a two-car garage to the left, and two boxy picture windows to the right, each looking into a child’s bedroom. There were two more bedrooms in the back of the house, a small one for another child and a large master bedroom. And of course, it wouldn’t be a true ranch house without a long, dark central hall. The front yard had once been ideal for yard games like all the others in the neighborhood, with grass and trees and shrubs. But eventually Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs got tired of all the yard work, or rather, they got tired of nagging Gina and her three sisters to do i
t every Saturday morning, so they covered most of the yard with a sunny, flower-bordered cement patio surrounded by a wooden wall. It made a pleasant and private place to sit at the end of the day when the evening cool set in.

  Gina pushed opened the squeaky iron gate, and as she entered the familiar walled patio area, there was her father’s peach tree, which he had planted in an open spot in the cement, left open just for this tree, on the side of the patio nearest the front door of the house. She saw the profusion of tall rose bushes in every color directly under the two bedroom windows, where they received the late day sun. She put her nose into a baby pink bloom and breathed in the perfume of many long ago summers. Under the rose bushes Gina’s father had planted a long row of lush, pinkish-red begonias which, Gina saw with the pleasure of old times, were growing as happily this year as they did every year.

  Mrs. Jacobs heard the iron gate and met Gina at the front door. Her mother had been, as usual, in the kitchen to the left of the small foyer, wearing a faded cotton apron as she stirred sugo, spaghetti sauce, at the stove. It was the Jacobs’ custom to attend early morning Sunday mass and have a large family dinner in the afternoon. Other families might eat out on Sundays. The Jacobs did not. The biggest home-cooked meal of the week was always served on Sunday, and it always included pasta, in one form or another, with sugo.

  Gina hugged her mother, Maria, who exclaimed over Gina and her surprise visit. When Mr. Jacobs heard the commotion in the kitchen, he got up from his chair in the family room where he read the paper and his many Catholic books every day and came to get his hug too.

  “Oh, it’s Gina!” he exclaimed. He gave her a big bear hug.

  “Dad, you’re killing me.” She said this between lips squished painfully against her father’s face. Gina’s usual exclamation only made him hug harder. Their private joke. He gave her a big smooch on the cheek too. Her parents’ enthusiastic reception made Gina happy that she had decided to come today. Maybe it would be a good visit after all.

  She put down her purse in the family room next to the Christmas tree and then returned to the kitchen to tie on an apron that she pulled from a drawer by the sink. Once she had protected her dress from the plopping sugo, she got down to the real business of cooking which, in the Jacobs household, meant testing the sauce by dipping a chunk of cheap white bread into it, sometimes repeatedly, to determine if it was thick enough or too acidic. Often when Mrs. Jacobs was not at home, Gina and her three sisters tested the sugo after school, a scientific exercise they repeated with diligence—to confirm the reliability of test results, of course—until they had consumed an entire loaf of bread.

  While they chatted Gina set the table and made a green salad. Mrs. Jacobs was busy slicing roast beef, boiling green peas, and preparing drop biscuits. She opened the oven to check on the French-baked potatoes. Gina peered inside and heard the lovely sizzle of hot olive oil and saw the gently browned potatoes. Mrs. Jacobs was the only person Gina knew who prepared potatoes this way. She peeled them, cut them lengthwise into long quarters, heavily salted and peppered them, drizzled olive oil over them, then baked them on a metal cookie sheet until the tips browned and the canoe-shaped centers turned soft and mealy. Mrs. Jacobs plunged a fork into a near one to test its doneness.

  “Too hard,” she said, closing the oven. “Another ten minutes.”

  When lunch was ready, Gina took her usual place at the kitchen table next to her younger sister, Benedetta, or “Babe” as her family called her, age eighteen. Next to her was little Maria, age thirteen. Nina, twenty-two, lived with her husband and baby in Sunnyvale. Mr. Jacobs, with his wavy ebony hair and tanned skin, sat at the head of the table. Mrs. Jacobs sat across from Gina, who was squished between the table and the wall. The kitchen eating area was barely big enough to seat the five of them, but it had always been that way, even when six shared the table, but no one seemed to mind. The Jacobs’ kitchen table filled the eating area so fully that only the youngest or the skinniest daughter, usually Gina, sat in the narrow space between the table and the wall. Set into the wall behind Gina was a large picture window that looked over the side yard where Mr. Jacobs’ citrus trees grew. The side yard was narrow too, not more than ten feet wide, so that the citrus trees were very near the window and blocked the limited view. But this was a good thing, because without the thick summer foliage of the citrus trees their view would have been a six-foot redwood fence flanked by the family’s metal garbage cans.

  They bowed their heads as Mr. Jacobs said grace. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  As soon as he was finished they began to pass the dishes around the table. Gina took a large helping of roast beef with lots of rich brown gravy. She took an equally large portion of spaghetti with sugo. She took a modest helping of everything else. Everything on her plate looked so good she didn’t know where to start. She looked at her sisters, who were busy eating. She was even glad to see them today. It was wonderful to be with her family and enjoy familiar foods.

  “Bite any dogs lately, Dad?” said Gina, between mouthfuls. She looked up at her father.

  “Just one,” he said. “Last week. I was on Franklin Street, old lady Fournier’s place. But he won’t bother me again.” Mr. Jacobs chuckled at the memory.

  “What happened?”

  “That old widow should keep her little bugger in the backyard behind the fence if she wants her mail,” he said. “I was just coming up on her place, pushing my cart, and out comes her dog. White, yappy little thing. Yap, yap, yap. I told him, ‘Go home, go home boy!’ but he just kept jumping and yapping like he was afraid I was going to break in and make off with his bone.”

  “Probably recognized your uniform. Did he get you?” Gina had seen her father come home with dog bites before. Wasn’t pretty.

  “No, I got him. I was about to smack him with a rolled up magazine when I remembered I had pepper spray on my hip. Just gave him a shot of that. Didn’t cure the yapping any, though. Made it worse.” He laughed again, a big, burst-out-loud laugh. “He won’t come after me or my cart anymore.”

  Mr. Jacobs loved to get the best of the dogs on his route in old Santa Clara, but Mrs. Jacobs shook her head and rolled her eyes when they met Gina’s, and they shared a smile. Though they had heard it many times before, they both thought the mealtime mailman-dog scenario amusing, certainly more amusing than a dog bite.

  “How about you, Mom? Like your new job?” Mrs. Jacobs had recently been hired as a secretary at the university in the Theater and Dance Department.

  “Yes, I like it. People are nice. I’ve made a few friends. It’s hard to work though because of the noise in that old warehouse.”

  “What noise?” said Gina.

  “Those dancers up on the second floor. The girls come in looking so delicate and light in their skimpy work-out clothes, but they sound like a herd of elephants when they hop around upstairs. I can hardly think. At Santa Clara Unified it was quiet nearly all the time. We had to deal with irate parents once in a while, but it was nothing compared to the daily dancing herds on the second floor of the Theater and Dance Department.”

  “Maybe you should join them,” said Gina, teasing.

  Everyone laughed, including Mrs. Jacobs. She was naturally pretty with thick, dark Sicilian hair and porcelain skin, but she had become somewhat round over the years. The picture of her pirouetting in tights in a class of slender ballerinas was a funny one.

  “I’ve heard there’s a position opening up in Bannan Hall. I plan to apply for it,” said Mrs. Jacobs.

  “Same kind of work?” said Gina.

  “Yes, but in the Business Department.”

  Gina was getting caught up with family news, especially her sisters’ doings, and was enjoying every little detail of family, food, and comfortable surroundings when Mrs. Jacobs turned to her.

  “You dating anybody?”

  “No,” Gina answered. Red crossing lights began to f
lash in her mind. She heard the distant whistle of a locomotive chugging recklessly down the tracks. She knew better than to step in front of it. “But I have made a friend.” She said this as casually as she could, without lifting her eyes from her plate. She hoped her nonchalant response would convey C-A-S-U-A-L as in F-R-I-E-N-D.

  “A friend?” said Mrs. Jacobs. “Not someone from that cult you joined, I hope.”

  Gina willed herself to stay calm. Why did it always have to be this way? Well, she wasn’t going to take the bait, not this time.

  “Kevin is in the Navy,” she replied, skirting the religion issue.

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “At a private home in Cupertino. Through friends.” That was the truth; no need to give more details than necessary. If her parents knew why she had been in Cupertino that night, well, if you want a bull to charge just wave a red flag. Nosiree, no bullfights today. She wasn’t even going to step into the ring.

  “What’s his rank?” asked Mr. Jacobs, suddenly interested.

  “Second class petty officer. He’s a hull technician.”

  “He’s a plumber,” said Mr. Jacobs, not bothering to look up from his plate.

  Uh oh, here comes the weeping and wailing.

  “You dumped a lawyer to date a plumber?” Mrs. Jacobs stopped eating and was rapidly turning red in the face. “I can’t believe you dumped a lawyer for a plumber!”

  “Kevin’s not a plumber!” Gina spat back. “And I didn’t dump Michael!”

  Despite her many preparatory self-sermons to remain calm, she was losing it. But typical of all her conversations with her mother, she got angry so fast that by the time she realized she was angry, she was too angry to care.

  “He’s trained to do all kinds of important stuff besides plumbing,” Gina thought to add, “like deck repair and welding. He knows how to repair metal and wood and fiberglass and how to install insulation. He can fix anything,” Gina said, directing her words to her father, “including cars.”