Since You Ask

by Louise Wareham

  ‘I’m not going home.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To Sylvia’s.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you to Sylvia’s.’

  Outside it was hot, a dry wind lifting dust from the gutters, light on the river darkening, then lightening.

  ‘You’re so quiet,’ I said. His quiet made me nervous, made me suddenly want him—when the night before I had hated him.

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘But you’re okay?’

  He handed me his cell phone. ‘Call your friend, make sure she’s home.’

  She was.

  He stopped outside her building on 79th and Fifth. He opened the door for me, his eyes remote even as they rested on mine, the car still running.

  ’It’s okay,’ I said, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, not answering.

  I don’t know why I wanted him to call. Maybe I couldn’t stand things ending so badly. I couldn’t stand missing him and thinking about him and regretting all I had done. There had to be a way to make it right. Otherwise, I’d just have to live with it, to live with and live with it.

  He didn’t call that week. He didn’t come to school. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Beck asked.

  ‘You hardly talk,’ Henry told me.

  I called Frank’s cell phone but he didn’t pick up. I waited on Park Avenue but he didn’t come. It was Monday when I reached him, from the pay phone after school. Sylvia was waiting for me. Frank was in his car. He always spoke loudly when he drove.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘You didn’t come.’

  ‘I got tied up.’

  ‘Are you coming this week?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  Silence came into the phone like static.

  ‘I’ll call you later.’

  Sylvia watched me all careful when I hung up. She gave me this look my parents give me sometimes, as if I was going to do something crazy.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe Beck’s better for you, that’s all.’

  Then he was outside school. He had the car running and started driving as soon as I got in. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He didn’t want to talk. He waved his hand with his wrist. He played Etta James, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

  At home, he undid his shoes, his pants, and his shirt. He was erect. He ran his hand gently from the base to the tip. ‘I missed you.’

  He shouldn’t have said that, not touching himself.

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ he said.

  I lay naked beside him and he stroked my hair and maybe that was worth it, I thought. Just that. Him so calm and his hand on my hair. Afterwards, he lay on his back. ‘It’s not just that you’re young.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll hurt you.’

  ‘You don’t want to see me anymore?’

  ‘I’m not a nice guy Betsy.’

  I thought I’d have to go to the bathroom. I didn’t, though. ‘That’s such an odd thing to say. I’m not a nice guy,’ I repeated. ‘No one says that.’

  My father played guitar. He played on our boat Stewball and he played in the garden and he played with my parents’ friends in the living room. I could hear them from my room, singing ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ and ‘Someday You’ll Want Me to Want You.’

  I called Frank from home and from school and from the street. ‘Stop,’ he told me.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘I’ll call you when I can.’

  He didn’t, though. He didn’t and he didn’t and he didn’t. Worse than that, I knew he wouldn’t. My hands went cold just thinking about it. Beck came to school and it hurt each time I saw him, first because he wasn’t Frank and second because I felt guilty sick at myself for even thinking that way. I tried to be extra nice but I wasn’t very good at it.

  ‘This has to stop,’ my mother said one Saturday morning, the second Saturday since Frank.

  She brought a tray of food up to my room: eggs and two slices of toast and black jam. ‘Is this about Beck?’ She sat on the edge of the bed, pushing the tray toward me. The eggs were in wooden eggcups from Antigua. ‘He seems like a nice boy.’ She wore her hair straight and long, just past her shoulders. ‘I’m not saying I think he’s for you. I don’t. But I can see why you like him.’

  I took a sip of orange juice.

  ‘Is it someone else?’ she asked.

  I would never tell my mother about Frank. She had seen him and she hadn’t liked him. He was the kind of guy as I said, who would look at you on the street—and my mother didn’t like those men either. She looked away from them, her mouth pursed. ‘You couldn’t blame them for trying,’ she said.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  She would have told me not to see Frank again, if I told her anything. It would sound so easy.

  ‘Well, I can’t make you talk if you don’t want to. But you can if you want to.’

  She looked around the room. ‘You know, we should get you a new rug. Something more grown up.’

  I called Frank again, of course, the way everyone said not to—Sylvia and Henry and my mother and Beck of course if I had asked him. ‘It’s not a good time,’ he told me.

  ‘When is a good time?’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  It was like I was lying on the ground and something heavy was on my chest. At school, rain flooded the windows, streaming down the slick panes, into the flutes, down the gutters.

  ‘There’s always another guy,’ Sylvia said, walking home down Fifth Avenue, underneath her great black umbrella.

  ‘There is not.’

  ‘You didn’t even like him.’

  ‘I liked him.’

  ‘Love is a shadow, how you lie and cry after it.’

  ‘Plath?’

  ‘“Elm.”’

  At night in my room, the light of the streetlamp fell whitely on the tree, coolly on the sheets. I saw Frank stroking my hair before we made love, Beck singing in the playground. I saw Andrew, who waited at the school gates. His father owned a fish shop. He took me beneath the schoolhouse, or to the rough shore by the whitened trees. Andrew worked at the dockyard, his hands dry from the sun and salt.

  I liked the dark best: cool stones at the dockyard, slate rocks by the ocean, fetid soil under the schoolhouse.

  Get up Get up Get Up, my father said, raising the wood blinds so they slapped against each other, sun whitening the walls. Macavity Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity. There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. He wasn’t the man who picked me up from the front porch of the house, beside the lemon tree in his creased cream white shirt. He wasn’t the man who turned the pages, sitting sleepy beside my bed. He hardly knew me—knew nothing of Ray and Beck and Frank—knew only that he was suspicious of me, eyeing me coolly, asking suddenly and too late, ‘What’s going on?’

  My mother said, ‘Stop it. Stop it. She’s just a girl. She’s just. She’s just—‘

  I heard them from my room, their voices carrying up the stairs. ‘All girls go through it, don’t they? Don’t they?’

  Then one day he sat down on the bed. The sun made him squint. His skin smelled of shaving cream. ‘You can’t keep moping around the house.’ The blinds were swinging at the top of the windows, after he had snapped them. His leg touched mine. ‘You think it only affects you?’ he asked. ‘We all have to live with it. Your mother and Eric and me. Your mother thinks you’re unhappy about this boy Beck. Is that true?’

  Even though he was my dad, he was still handsome: his even face, dark hair, dark blue eyes.

  ‘We thought you’d be happier with Raymond gone. We knew he made things difficult for you. But no one’s upsetting you now, are they?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  I cou
ldn’t think of anything.

  ‘You don’t talk to anyone. You’re rude to your mother.’

  He was wearing his Saturday clothes: pressed jeans and a crimson sweater, the collar of a white shirt just showing.

  ‘Can you say? Can you say anything?’

  It was so long ago: light of the moon streaking down the cockpit hatch, water slapping against the hull, nipping like fish. Ray smelled of toothpaste. He had the sheet in his hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dad had asked, stepping from the shadows and the silence of the foredeck, from the silence of my mother sleeping.

  ‘Nothing,’ Ray said.

  ‘Betsy?’

  And there it was: complicity—beginning of the endless lie.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ Dad said, leaning in, me straightening my back against the wall.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t said anything.

  ‘Speak up.’

  He didn’t know anything. He looked tired suddenly—and disappointed. ‘Stay at school if you can’t be pleasant. Or stay in your room.’

  He had a small mouth, or it went small when he was angry.

  ‘I’d like to go away,’ I said. ‘I’d like to go to boarding school.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To get away from Beck.’

  ‘What has Beck done?’ I shook my head. ‘You think if you go away you’ll escape this boy? But what about the next one? Have you thought about that? What will you do then?’

  ‘It won’t be the same.’

  ‘But it will. It will be just the same.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘Why would I send away my only daughter? Because she doesn’t like some boy anymore?’

  ‘It’s not him.’

  ‘You just said it was.’

  I couldn’t explain.

  He sighed. ‘I’m going downstairs. If you helped your mother around the house, I’m sure she’d like it.’

  ‘I’d like to go to boarding school.’

  ‘Well, you’re not going.’

  Beck let me sit on the bench while he played ball. My whole body got pins and needles worrying Frank might come.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Tommy asked, and I said, ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ he asked, smirking. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Beck was mad at me, of course. He had walked over to the fence real slow when I showed up the first time, like it was a great effort for him. He took me back, though—not because he wanted to, he said, not because he wasn’t angry but because he still liked me.

  He didn’t come to school the way he had before Frank. He didn’t sing ‘She’s the One,’ or get down on his knees and kiss my hand. I sat on the bench as he shot the ball and he didn’t look at me at all.

  Then one day finally Frank drove up, and Beck must have seen him the way he always had, but he kept on playing as if he hadn’t. Frank got out of his car, laying his long hands on his hips. When he saw me, it was like I was nothing at all. I was less than that—because he’d seen me once and tried me out and put me back. He didn’t smile at me or even register that he had seen me, so I thought I might throw up. I went all weak and chilled and I remembered this ferry I had once seen sunk in the ocean: the way it had been emptied out and they opened the valves, and as it started to sink suddenly I imagined all the water, cold and dark and heavy filling the hull.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Tommy said, and on the ground was a circle of blue gum embedded in the black tar and a glint of glass and I put my hand to my forehead. ‘He’s gone,’ Tommy told me, and I couldn’t get up because Beck would be upset, so I turned away from Tommy and the court and Beck. Trees were waving before the clean white brownstones. Tommy stepped next to me. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘hey,’ and he touched the back of my neck. ‘I’ll get Beck,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I told him and wiped my face again, keeping my eyes down, and I sat that way, not moving at all, not hearing anything or hardly seeing, my heart beating high up in my chest, and then it passed.

  Sylvia and Henry broke up senior year. Sylvia wanted to go out to the clubs, but Henry didn’t. He said she should go and he would meet her afterwards. Then she got a new boyfriend. He was a bartender at the Madison Pub. He was twenty-two and had been to the Rhode Island School of Design. Sylvia gave him a set of her keys and he came over after work. They went to clubs downtown and drove to Jersey City where he had an apartment.

  Wayne moved to New York that year. He and my mother sat in the garden drinking white wine. I watched them from the window: my mother’s white blond hair shining in the afternoon light, his body stretched out in his garden chair, wine glass on the metal armrest.

  Beck graduated and got into the Marines finally. He went in the fall and didn’t write at all. He called from boot camp in Virginia. He said, ‘Hey, girl, who’s the one who’s loved you since, like, forever?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘You thought I’d forgotten you, right?’

  ‘No.’

  “Cause, like, that ain’t ever going to happen.’

  He was eating potato chips. I could hear the crackling of his packet. ‘Like, never. You know. ‘Cause I’m, like, your destiny.’

  I laughed.

  ‘No don’t fucking laugh, ‘cause it’s true.’

  Then he went quiet. He was probably remembering Frank.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got this phone card.’

  ‘Do you like the Marines?’

  ‘You like it—it’s fucking over.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Betsy, I hate it. I fucking hate it. Excuse my language.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well—whatever.’

  Henry and I went to the reservoir after school, him in his running pants with a packet of Gauloise cigarettes in his pocket. He hardly ever smoked, but Sylvia’s new boyfriend did so Henry had been trying to. We walked the bridle path where the dirt was dark and soft and moist, the trees high and thick as they are in England. Only some kinds of people could go from one person to another, Henry said, and Sylvia was one of those.

  In the spring, we took the subway to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The tulips were flowering red and gold and pale blue, and Henry took the photo that he later sent me at Fairley. Young orthodox couples sat on benches under the elm trees, the girls’ hair shiny and loosed and brushed.

  Henry pressed the fruit of the maple seed with his thumb. ‘Do you ever think about us going out?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  His eyes were the brown of polished wood. ‘I think it would be nice,’ I said.

  The maple seed split under his thumbnail. ‘But… ?’ Henry asked.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But you wouldn’t really want to.’

  ‘Maybe I would. I just—’

  ‘You just what?’

  ‘Look at Frank.’

  ‘You’re not seeing Frank, are you?’

  ’I still like him.’

  ‘You don’t like him.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You like me.’

  He looked at the maple seed as if at an insect he had just crushed.

  I wished I could go out with Henry. I wished he would just lean over and kiss me. At the same time, I knew that if he did, I would move away.

  ‘That’s true,’ I finally said.

  ‘But you’re not over him?’

  It wasn’t that either.

  What it was—and what Henry didn’t know because I didn’t tell him—was that just the thought of Frank made my whole body hurt, that just a glimpse of him, real or imagined, of his dark hair or his leather blazer or his pressed shirt, made me sick inside. What Henry didn’t know was that none of these things ever happened with Henry and I didn’t desire him.

  I studied late at night, when no one else was up. I had my books and notepads and
pens all lined up. I made up index cards with information on them and carried them about in a red card folder. I still wanted to be a doctor, though I didn’t study enough. I didn’t concentrate. I got up and walked around my room and hung pictures and photographs on my walls: trees and the sea and photographs of Sylvia and Henry and me. My favorite photo was of Antigua: Eric and me sitting on the steps of the house, him in a green T-shirt, me in a blue dress my mother had made for me. Raymond was above us, leaning back against a pillar, his mouth turned down as if someone had just insulted him.

  Some nights, I stayed up until morning. I lifted my window and sat on the ledge. The brownstones across the street were dark inside. Then day began to glow and the birds came out.

  In May I came out of school, and there he was: not leaning against a car, not holding some orange soda or cigarette, but upright in a uniform that was stiff as cardboard, tailored.

  ‘Jesus,’ Henry said as Beck took off his hat.

  His hair was even shorter than usual. His shoes were shiny and big like the shoes of a child. Then he winked and it was as if I remembered him, in that moment, as if he moved inside my skin like hot sun. He picked me up, carrying me down the street the way men carry women in old movies.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked, setting me down, pointing to his uniform all bashful like the day we met. ‘You like it?’

  He wanted me to like it. He wanted it so much, I smiled at him. ‘Yes, I like it.’

  ‘I thought you would. I thought, you know, I’d come up here and surprise you.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I make you nervous, right?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘I make everyone nervous.’

  ‘You look good.’

  ‘You think?’

  People stared at him. We walked down Lexington and people turned to look. The green of his uniform brought out the color of his eyes. The shade of his Marine hat made them look deeper. He didn’t smoke anymore, he said, not in the street, not when he was in uniform. ‘It doesn’t look right,’ he told me, ‘throwing the butt in the gutter.’

  ‘Hey. Look,’ I said. ‘This is where we met.’

  It was 79th Street, the crosstown bus billowing black smoke.

  He took me by the shoulders, moving me over to the wall.

  ‘I missed you so fucking much.’

  He acted like we were as close as ever sometimes, like months didn’t go by without us seeing each other, even when we were both in the city.