What It Was Like

by Peter Seth

  But it was what I expected. At least, I thought, I’m not going to be surprised by things anymore. That fake-comforting thought did not last for long.

  Record of Events #24 - entered Monday, 9:11 A.M.

  ≁

  I got to all my Monday morning classes even though I stayed up till almost 4:00 a.m. finishing two papers for Brilliant (one overdue), another one in French, and studying for three other tests – one that afternoon.

  “Can’t you turn off the light?” Roommate A whined from the top of the bunk bed. “Or go into the lounge?”

  “Sorry, man,” I said. “All my stuff is spread out here. Turn your head the other way.”

  He groaned and huffed, but he was turned over and snoring inside of five minutes. (And, to tell the complete truth, he never showed much consideration for me, as you will see.)

  I hit my three morning classes in a row and headed back to my room to change books before I grabbed some lunch. I’ll admit that I was dragging; I was a little demoralized. First of all, it was a Monday morning. And it was cold and gray. The clanking radiators hissed steam in the old dorms, but nothing got warmer. And I hadn’t seen Rachel all weekend, so I felt this void within me, this unfulfilled need. I had gotten myself addicted to Rachel Prince; now I was having some kind of withdrawal.

  As I slogged up the three flights of stairs, I couldn’t help but think about what I had said to my Dad the night before, about Rachel being the best thing that ever happened to me. All my life I had gotten mostly As in my classes, and now I was getting Bs and Cs and worse. All my teachers in high school liked me, but some of these teachers seemed to take a disliking to me for no reason that I could understand. I had never been behind in my studies before. Everything had come pretty easily, but I now was in a different place. I had always been one of the smartest kids in my class, and now I was just one of the guys, and not even that. At least I had Rachel. No matter how tough my week was, there was always Rachel-on-the-phone during the week and Rachel-in-the-flesh on the weekends . . . until now. Now everything was in question: How could I wait until next weekend to see her, and would she still be grounded then? How far would Eleanor go to keep us apart? And how far would we push back, in order to see each other?

  ≁

  I couldn’t get her on the phone for the next two days. Both 8:00 calls – I was staying true – failed: once Eleanor said that she couldn’t come to the phone, and once Herb said “she’s out with her mother. Sorry, kid,” and hung up.

  I didn’t know what to do: Write her a letter? Eleanor would probably get the mail before Rachel got home from school anyway. And what would I say in a letter? I love you, I miss you, and I want to see you? That was understood.

  Then, Tuesday night, in the middle of memorizing Mohs scale of the hardness of minerals, I got a call on the dorm phone in the hallway.

  “PHONE!” Someone pounded on the door for me.

  To say that my heart jumped would be accurate. It jumped because the loud door knock shocked the hell out of me, but it also jumped because I thought that it would be, might be, must be Rachel. I raced down the hallway, pulling on my Keds, hopping as I ran.

  “Hello?” I said into the phone, closing myself against the wall for “privacy.”

  “Hello?”

  “Nanci?” I said, instantly recognizing her voice, instantly disappointed. “How did you get this number?”

  “What do you mean, ‘How did I get this number?’” she shot back. “Rachel tells me everything. I thought you knew that.”

  Not everything, I hope, I thought, but I let it go.

  “OK,” I said. “Good for you. When did you last see her?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “How was she?”

  “Not that good, to tell you the truth.”

  Nanci seemed to have a lot of answers and she gave them to me: Rachel had been fighting with Eleanor over “a bunch of things; not just you.” I didn’t know whether that was good or bad news.

  “The harder Rachel pulls away from Eleanor, the tighter Eleanor tries to yank the leash –” said Nanci.

  “Why can’t she just call me?” I interrupted. “Did she tell you to call me?”

  “No –” she started, which dropped my heart. “I mean, yes! She asked me to call you and tell you to hang on.”

  “‘Hang on’?” I repeated. “That’s it? Why doesn’t she call me from a pay phone at school? I’m here in my room, during the day, between classes. Why doesn’t she call me then, when Eleanor isn’t around?”

  “You’d have to ask her that,” said Nanci.

  “I would ask her that, but I can’t talk to her!” I shot back. “Do you see my problem, Nanci?”

  “Heyyy,” she said, in a low, long note. “You don’t have to talk like that. I’m on your side.”

  I realized that there was no point in yelling at Nanci. There was really no point in yelling, period.

  “She told me to tell you that she loves you, and you’ll get through this.”

  “That’s what she said?”

  “In so many words.”

  “Well, what were her words?” I demanded.

  “Her exact words?” she replied tartly. “I don’t know her exact words. Next time, I’ll use a tape recorder.”

  She was breathing heavily, sounding a little exasperated, and maybe she was right to be. And she did have asthma.

  “OK, Nanci,” I muttered. “I’m sorry – I’m just a little, uh –”

  “I understand,” she cut me off. “No apologies necessary. No one said this was going to be easy, right?”

  Of course she was right. But, I told myself, Rachel is worth it.

  Nanci and I hung up after she assured me that she’d try to keep “the lines of communication open” between Rachel and me. Which I had to thank her for. But I went back to my room – still worried, still uncertain about our future – back to my geology textbook, wishing I could become as hard inside as a diamond. Or at the very least, corundum.

  But I have to hand it to Nanci: the next afternoon, just at lunchtime, while I was changing books and eating a roast beef hero with extra ketchup and Nehi grape soda from Mama Joy’s at my desk, there was another “PHONE FOR YOU!”

  It was Rachel.

  “Hi, baby,” she purred. “At . . . last! Do you know that song? Oh, you can’t believe how much I’ve missed you!”

  I was whipsawed by two simultaneous reactions: extreme happiness to hear from her and extreme resentment that it took her so long.

  “Try me,” I said.

  “Aren’t you glad to hear from me? . . . Because if you’re mad at me for some reason . . .”

  What was I thinking? Here she was, finally on the phone, and I was wasting it.

  “No-no-no, I’m not mad at you, honey,” I stammered. “I-I-I just need to hear from you. . . . I guess I’m just mad at myself for needing you so much.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed.

  “Yes, I know it is,” I agreed. “But that’s the way I am.”

  “Good,” she said, satisfied.

  I didn’t know what was “good” about things, but I let it go.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her. “And where are you now? I have to know everything.”

  She laughed that musical laugh of hers, as if nothing were wrong, and said, “I’m nowhere. I’m at someone’s house for lunch.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Nobody’s.”

  I thought I heard some laughter – male laughter? – in the background, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “There has to be a way that I can call you and not have to go through your mother,” I said.

  “I was just in study hall,” she said, ignoring my statement, “in the library, reading about poison. Actually, poisons.”

  She seemed to be talking
to me and to someone else at the same time.

  “Why?” I asked her, trying to listen deeply into the phone.

  “Oh, no reason,” she trilled. “Just something to do.”

  “And you do ‘poison’?” I said deadpan, not playing with her.

  “I can dream, can’t I?” she sang back, laughing at something in the room.

  “Listen,” I said sharply. “Do you want to talk to me, or whoever’s there?”

  There was a long pause. What was she thinking? And was that the right tone for me to take? Was she mad at me now?

  “If I didn’t want to talk to you,” she said simply. “I wouldn’t have called you.”

  That put me in my place. What was I thinking, fighting with the girl I loved and missed so much?

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m crazy.”

  “Me too,” she murmured, and for a moment, we were back in The Zone.

  We made plans for Friday. Tentative plans. But, as I hung up the phone, it seemed to me like everything was going to be tentative from now on.

  ≁

  Leading up to that date on Friday night, all I thought about were two things: one, seeing Rachel on Friday night, and two, everything else. No matter what I was doing, what class I was trying to concentrate on, what book I was trying to read, what paper I was trying to finish, my mind kept reflexively flipping back to Rachel. Actually, that’s not really true because my thoughts of Rachel were actually subdivided into many sub-worries: How was she getting along with Eleanor and would she be allowed out on Friday? Was Herb still hassling her, and should she tell her father? And, lurking behind all these spiraling thoughts, where was Eric in all this? Was that who was in the room with Rachel when she called me?

  My mind kept spinning like that, on and off, for days. Nothing else seemed to matter as much.

  ≁

  Friday finally came around. I fidgeted, dreamed, and backtracked through my morning classes, then subway-and-bussed to the Island through the Valley of Ashes. That night, I was, as true as I could be, at the curb in front of the frightful Prince mansion at 7:58 p.m. sharp. Lucky me, she came running out the door so that I didn’t have to do my Eleanor-and-Herb-Happy-To-See-You Tap Dance. But, unlucky us, Rachel had been crying, her mascara running down her cheeks.

  She didn’t want to go where I wanted to go (my room), and I didn’t want to go where she wanted to go (a movie.)

  “I don’t want to go and sit in a dark room with you. I want to talk to you and be with you! Besides, haven’t you’ve already seen Anne of A Thousand Days – twice? That’s two thousand days.”

  She didn’t laugh. Instead, after some more back and forth between two stubborn people, we went to Jones Beach. I thought the beach could make everything right, but we sat in the car in the parking lot, fighting for too much of the night. Fighting and making up.

  “I know you’re under a lot of pressure –” I would begin.

  And she would cut me off with, “You have no idea what I live with.”

  One topic interested her and got her excited.

  “I have a new hobby,” she said. “Breaking up Eleanor and Herb.”

  Her blue-blue eyes sparkled in the light they caught from the floodlights in the parking lot.

  “They’re making trouble for us,” she said with glee. “I’m going to make trouble for them.”

  “Oh,” I groaned. “Don’t get involved with them!”

  “No,” she said. “It’s fun. She deserves it. She messes with my life? She knows nothing about how I can mess up hers!”

  She machine-gunned all these stories about life with Eleanor and Herb.

  “They both have these nasty, controlling tempers,” she said. “Maybe it’s what they have in common. . . . But anyway, it’s easy to get them fighting. The other day, she threw a glass at him, but I think she missed on purpose. Still, I’m waiting for one of them to draw blood. Then I’ll get my father involved. That will be interesting!”

  I didn’t like seeing her so amped up on anger and spite.

  “Don’t be like them,” I said, reaching for her, to pull her close. But she pushed my hand away.

  “Why shouldn’t I pay them back in the same way that they’re treating me? I mean, what do they expect? . . . And do you expect me to deny my experience?”

  She had a point, but that didn’t make me any happier. And it certainly didn’t make her amorous or physically responsive. Which was always my objective. I’m sorry, but I’m a guy.

  I finally made us get out of the car and walk on the beach. That made things a little better. We took off our shoes and walked down the sand, holding hands. It was romantic and everything, with the stars and the blackness and the glory of the waves, rising up and destroying themselves and all that, one after another after another. But something felt wrong. We were together, but we should have been happier.

  “I’m so alone at school,” she said.

  I kind of liked the sound of that – no Eric – but I was sympathetic.

  “I want you to have friends,” I said. “Just as long as they’re not boys.”

  “Ha!” was all she said.

  Without further elaboration, there was nothing I wanted to add. “Don’t make things worse” my father always says. I should have been content to be walking on the beach at night with the girl I loved and who loved me. I think.

  I didn’t ask her about her “grandma money” or if she contacted that lawyer yet. I didn’t ask her about her anti-college plans. I didn’t ask about when and if she were getting that new Mustang because that would have brought her back to complaining about her father. I didn’t want to say anything to upset her. I just wanted to be with her, with no complications or shadows. Maybe that totally carefree state doesn’t exist, but that’s still what I longed for. The Zone.

  Even though the beach is eternal – especially this beach at night, when you’re alone with the black waves – I was constantly aware of the time. I knew I had to get her back by midnight. I was not going to be responsible for Rachel breaking her curfew. I wasn’t going to give them another reason to punish her.

  “We should go,” I said.

  “I don’t wanna go,” she said, walking close against me.

  “I know.”

  When we got back to the car, she leaned against the fender, and I cleaned the sand off of her feet, brushing them lightly.

  “Stop tickling,” she squealed, wriggling her foot, but I could tell that she liked my touch. Most times, she was a very affectionate, physically responsive girlfriend. I had to make sure that continued.

  I had enough time to take her home by way of Nathan’s. I thought the carnival atmosphere – the people, the games, the noise – might distract her into some kind of happiness. It was a good try. She liked the ice cream sundae we shared. I liked the way she wiped some hot fudge off my cheek and licked it clean from her finger.

  I tried to give her a good pep talk on the way home – how she should try to do better in school (she told me that she was flunking a couple of courses, which was completely absurd for a girl of her intelligence), how she should try to stay out of fights with her parents and lay low, how she should avoid dark thoughts and be positive about our future. Actually, it was not so different from a pep talk I needed to give myself.

  When we pulled up to the curb in front of her house, we just sat there for a moment.

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” she said. “I don’t mean to be mean. But sometimes everything that happens just gets all jumbled up. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”

  “What about tomorrow?” I asked her. I knew that the possibility of an affirmative answer was remote, but I couldn’t help it. I had to ask. I had to make the effort.

  She snickered once, bitterly. “No, she’s already told me that I have to do all my overdue schoolwork tomorrow, and she’s going to check me. She
got a letter from this obnoxious assistant principal who has it in for me, so I’m really trapped. ”

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t tell her that I was probably going to do the same thing, minus Eleanor’s supervision.

  “I’m just trying to keep everybody happy,” she said. “And not drive myself completely insane. Everybody wants something.”

  “I’m not everybody!” I felt a chill as I said the words.

  She took a long pause, then started to apologize. “I know that things weren’t supposed to be this way, baby,” she half whispered. “I’ll try to call you, but they’ve been watching me all the time lately. You know her.”

  “It’s OK,” I said, touching her hand. “As long as we have each other, we just have to be positive. We’re young. Time is on our side.”

  She looked into my eyes and said, “I don’t think I can wait that long.”

  Then, fighting back tears, she jerked open the car door handle – I thought she might rip the damn thing off the Ford – and ran up the clattering flagstone path and into the house.

  I watched her all the way. I wondered if Eleanor and/or Herb were at a window, watching me watch her. At that moment, I really didn’t care.

  I waited there a good long minute, looking at the house, that phony fortress, wondering what was really going on inside there, what they were doing to her.

  Then I drove away.

  Another night of love, shot to hell, with my beautiful, complicated, troubled girl.

  ≁

  I waited the next day for the call that never came. I tried to concentrate on the work I had – the papers to write, due and overdue, the reading to do, the tests to study for – but Rachel was always somewhere in my mind. When I was not with her, I was simply not exactly myself. Something was missing: I felt her absence as if it were a part of me, a part of me that was gone. And there was so much that worried me from last night. What was happening to us?