The Expectations

by Alexander Tilney

  At eight that morning, just like every Wednesday, Ahmed was down in the basement calling his father. It was five p.m. there, and every Wednesday the secretary put a forty-five-minute appointment on the sheik’s calendar, even though he would never have forgotten to be there ready for the call.

  Ahmed dialed the same long number, happy at least that no one would want to use the phone at this hour, and his father picked up—“Allo?”—as though he didn’t know who it would be. Ahmed saw the boy his father imagined on the other end of the line, his hair neatly parted.

  They talked for several minutes, Ahmed assuring him that schoolwork was going well and his roommate was still very helpful. In just the same way, Abdul Rahman talked only about the things suitable for his son to hear. Very soon it would be Parents’ Weekend, and both of them thrilled and worried with the idea of it.

  They came to the end of their conversation. Ahmed wondered who in the dorm had ever heard him speaking Arabic. His father said, “work with good cheer.”

  As usual Ahmed waited for his father to hang up first. But this time the receiver scraped against the cradle and when the scraping stopped, the phone hadn’t pressed the cut switch and Ahmed could still hear the connected phone line.

  Ahmed stayed there with the receiver against his ear, feeling the humid basement air across his scalp, and now he faintly heard his father beginning to hum a tune. Ahmed listened to the quiet, absent, repetitive humming, and saw his father’s fully carpeted office with the windows looking out toward the gulf, and the leather blotter across the wide lacquer desk, and he was there with his father in the mundane joy of straightening all his papers before going home, making sure everything was in good order. Ahmed remembered again that it was evening there, the light starting to turn thick, and as he listened to his father putter over these last few things, he closed his eyes to hold back everything he had left to do that day.

  * * *

  After soccer practice Ben came back to the room to discover that Ahmed had gone to the bookstore and bought a red Game hat with SJS and ST. JAMES SCHOOL across the front.

  “You can’t wear a St. James hat at school,” Ben said.

  “To cover my hair.”

  “It’s ridiculous!” Ben was suddenly breathless, and he had to put effort into keeping his voice under control. “You can’t advertise the place you are already.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ben again felt in himself the teacher, the coach. “What if you were at home, just sitting on your couch, and you wore a hat that said ‘Home’ on it. Who are you even saying ‘home’ to? You’re already home.”

  “That sounds nice. Why not do that?”

  “You just can’t.”

  Ahmed looked at the hat he had bought, now so much less than it had been a few minutes before.

  “Perhaps I could wear that hat?” Ahmed looked to where Marlboro Racing hung on the post of Ben’s lofted bed, and Ben followed his gaze.

  “Which one?”

  “The red one?” Ahmed pointed. “With the race car on it?” His r’s fluttered at each end of “race car.”

  “The Marlboro hat?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  Ben hesitated.

  “You are often telling me that my clothes are too formal. I would look less formal in it. Of course it will still be yours.”

  Ben looked away from Ahmed. “I sewed a piece of webbing in the back so it would exactly fit me, so I don’t think it would even fit you.”

  “Can I try? Maybe we are the same size.”

  Ahmed stepped over and reached for the hat, and Ben thought of knocking his arm away, but then he thought of the hair down in the trash can. This would be a kindness; Ahmed would remember this. Ben could have a steadfast heart.

  Ahmed lifted the hat off the post and pulled it first over the back of his head and then down over his brow.

  “It fits!” It fit him perfectly. Ahmed looked at Ben and his smile dimmed. “I shouldn’t have it.”

  “No, it’s fine. Wear it for a while. Maybe we’ll get you a Red Sox hat eventually or something.”

  Ben decided to leave the room. He couldn’t blame Ahmed for any of it.

  “We’ll go to the Dish for dinner?”

  “I’ve got a couple things to take care of. I’ll be over later.”

  And without explaining, he went to his closet, pulled out his big Prince racquet bag, and walked out. Down the steps, out the back door into the heatless air, toward the eternal Dragon and the courts behind. He half worried now that Rory would spot him and want to play.

  The building was dark as he approached but in the light from the streetlamps you could still see the newness of the window frames and door handles. How could his father have gathered the money for this and now have none left? Ben pressed the thumb latch on the side entrance and wondered whose job it was to lock the hundreds of doors to all the campus’s buildings at night and then unlock them again in the morning.

  In the dark he walked through the lounge, waiting to hit his shin on something. At the doorway to the back annex he felt for the recessed switch plate, then flipped up all the switches. He turned off each light until just the farthest court, tucked against the emergency exit, was lit. His bag went under the wood-slat bench and he tied his shoes, then stepped onto the clean court and shut the door. It was so beautiful.

  He slapped the dead ball up to the front wall. It lay down on the floor, and he scooped it up again and skipped closer to the wall and hit the ball high up so that it came back to him at shoulder height, and he took it out of the air and kept it on the front wall for three more volleys before tipping it with the frame and sending it spinning across the court.

  He brought the edge of his racquet underneath the ball and flung it into the side wall, then volleyed it four more times, then let it bounce, and by this time it was coming up off the floor a little. Now he took his racquet back and instead of hitting at the ball, he just twisted his body and let his arm relax, and then the ball made a new sharp sound against the wall.

  The worst thing about having no money was that it was coming at the wrong time. If he had already been at the school for two years—a couple girlfriends in his past, reliable crowds at his squash matches, a reputation for drinking now and then but nothing crazy, always the right comeback at the right time—the news that his family had no money could be glamorous. He would be facing real life while the rest of the school sailed around in complacency. Other kids would catch themselves worrying about exams or who to sit with at lunch and then they would remember that Ben had real things on his mind.

  He would have had two years of skiing in Sun Valley and hanging on the beach on Martha’s Vineyard, two years of mountain biking in the woods, two years of buying every third pizza, of letting someone else do the math when the check came. Cab to town? Bus to Boston? Tickets to Phish at the Garden? Gas when they got invited to grad parties? Vasque boots for a backpacking trip? All the things Teddy had done and talked about. A couple CDs every few weeks at Sonic Boom, packages of Maxell tapes from the bookstore. After that, suddenly having no money would be a trial to face down instead of an identity, or a barrier to forming any identity. Guys would say, “My parents took care of your ticket, man. It wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  Then, with this foundation, when he decided to withdraw, he could depart on a cold morning. His friends would come out and shake his hand with some sort of strange envy, and the girls he had dated would come too, and Alice would be there and they would all watch the car pull away. They would wait for him to turn around and look between the horizontal filaments of the back glass, but he would keep looking straight ahead until the car was several minutes off campus.

  But to be both out of money and obscure—there was no, absolutely no glamour in that. When the news of his family’s emptiness got around—if enough people were even interested enough for it to get around—he imagined people saying, “Oh yeah, Weeks…Well, he was going to wash out anyway,” or
“Wasn’t he supposed to be good at squash?” all while still thinking about that thing Lily Jarvis said at the toaster bar earlier.

  Now the ball was warm enough to sit up off the back wall, and for several forehands Ben just coiled up his body and let it unwind, and the ball leapt to the front wall and traveled back flush against the side wall, perfect, and up off the back wall right to where the racquet face lashed it again.

  Ben hit it crosscourt and began hitting backhands, and the sense of no-effort was even stronger on this side, with his hips turned almost entirely away from the front wall and his shoulders half a turn farther around and then the lean toward the ball and the arm and racquet unfurling, and the ball’s weight on the racquet face confirming the mechanical rightness of every part of the movement, like testing the shape of a bell with a slim hammer.

  Ben shifted farther up the court and hit a crosscourt volley that caromed front-wall then side-wall and arrived at his forehand, and he hit crosscourt again front-wall-side-wall and the ball arrived at his ready backhand.

  It seemed to him now that his only task was to see the ball, and the rest of the valentine-shaped movement was taking care of itself. Sweetness passed all through his body. Again and again he hit it, losing any possibility of counting how many volleys it had been, and he almost wanted to close his eyes and see for how long the system could cohere.

  Why couldn’t all of squash be like what it feels like to hit alone? Why the moment during the match of trying to decide what to do with the ball? If only it didn’t take so much money to create this place, this equipment, all the component parts of this experience. Without all that paraphernalia, it seemed that the ball, the racquet, the court, even the matter making up his arms and legs and torso, all of it had come together so that Perfectness could have a place to escape its usual hiding place.

  Ben started to feel a little bored with volleys, and so he began hitting drop shots, trying to place the ball in the nick every time. He knew that this would get boring too, and that for the really good stuff he would have to wait, he would have to move through the boredom into the second and third and fourth periods of absorption. Not since the Um Club had Ben entered this kind of trance past past past past past past boredom. Ben felt a few moments of worry that he wasn’t getting his work done, that he might miss dinner or even check-in if he kept going, but he couldn’t bring himself to step off the court to look at the time, and so he kept hitting and kept hitting.

  * * *

  Price was there in the dim vestibule as Ben left the courts. The coach was clearly trying to create an effect by appearing this way, and Ben tried not to betray surprise.

  “I heard.”

  Ben wished this could mean that Price had heard about hazing or Ahmed having his head shaved.

  Price sighed, and to Ben it seemed that he was playacting his idea of a concerned person. “People get overextended.”

  Ben stayed quiet.

  “You’d never be asked to leave. Your dad…” Price looked around at the room they stood in and held his hands out to all of it.

  Ben shook his head. “It’s the rest of the family knowing.”

  “Russell Weeks is the same—?”

  “My uncle.”

  “Ah ha. Quite the i-dotter.”

  “And he and my dad…”

  Price let there be silence between them.

  “Don’t blame your father too much. Sometimes people trying their best do things we couldn’t have imagined. But you’re fine here, Ben. You’re part of the Tide. When I ask for money, it comes with exactly no questions attached to it. We can part the seas.”

  Ben suppressed a shudder.

  “And think about it this way: this problem can feed you. It can help you go to the inside. All the kids from those other schools, they’re just playing because it’s something to do. For you, you’re playing to survive, to cling to your home, to keep existing in the form you recognize. They don’t stand a chance against that.

  “Now go shower and get some sleep.”

  7. Landscaping’s Edge

  FALL ADVANCED INTO LATE OCTOBER. EVERY DAY WHEN THE school woke up the foliage had become even more intense, making clichés about fire and explosions seem meaningful again and then inadequate. The ground became cluttered with leaves. There was mist some mornings that reduced everything else to blacks and hunter greens. A single young maple in front of the chapel screamed calmly all day and into the electric lamplight at night.

  The second tests that counted came and went, the first major papers. Fifth-formers sat in the college advisor’s office, nodding as they were told to consider some schools other than the top few, and sixth-formers started second and third drafts of their application essays.

  Ahmed joined the yearbook staff and found a study group of other international students. When Ben’s absorption in classes or soccer fled he worried that his name was now on a list that would be seen by a few people, and then a few more. And then it was time for Parents’ Weekend.

  Ben’s mom had called and said that Kenyon Family Weekend fell on the same date, and they thought Teddy needed them to go out there.

  “Let’s just say he could use the supervision,” she said with a failed laugh. She explained that she wanted to let his dad go to Kenyon alone so she could come up to SJS, but Harry had hurt his hand and needed her to drive. Ben decided to believe her.

  “Say hi to Dad for me,” he said.

  Helen covered the phone receiver with her palm and was saturated by her anger with Harry.

  The St. James Parents’ Weekend notice had sat on the pile of mail next to the kitchen phone for two and a half weeks. It was on the slightly heavier stock of magazine subscription cards and fundraising solicitations. Helen put the notice on top of the pile, knowing he would see it and hoping he would say something, but she knew he wouldn’t bring it up. It had been hard enough for him to go up with Ben, wincing over the outstanding balance, half expecting some administrator to take him by the sleeve.

  That Saturday, she finally went outside as he was raking the lawn. It seemed to her that the walls of their house might store their conversation and they wouldn’t be able to escape it again.

  His body still looked so right to her, long and properly braced against each stroke of the rake. Against her dread was the good smell of the leaves.

  “Let’s go up there. It’s his first Parents’ Weekend.”

  “But it’s Teddy’s, too.”

  He kept raking, its sound part of the wind’s sound. “Harry, it’s too late. We can’t keep putting it off. Let’s try to borrow some money, or just go on financial aid.”

  “But we’re so close. The rezoning proposal is before the town board now, and they meet December first.”

  She remembered his reaction from the first two times, at the beginning of their marriage, that investments of his had gone beautifully. She had thought it was a kind of good taste and appealing lack of braggadocio that he had seemed a little surprised, happy in a sheepish way, unsure exactly what to do with the profit but putting what she guessed was a prudent amount away and then paying for a trip to Lake Como. She wondered more often recently whether his surprise had in fact been surprise. She had loved him for never seeming to have money on his mind.

  Money had always dominated her family’s mind, and her father’s mood. Helen was the youngest of six. She knew very early that even the fact of six kids meant you weren’t the right kind, and because she was the sixth it was vaguely her doing. Her father taught at Pritchard, a declining private day school near Gloucester, Massachusetts, where boys with good families but bad academics could go. As a teacher his pay was meager, and even after he was promoted to dean it was not quite enough. Later from her friends she learned to be glad that her father didn’t drink, but at the time she had wished for some variation to the solemnity. Enrollment at Pritchard went down and the new headmaster brought in his own dean, and her father went back to being a teacher. In the morning her parents poured water over yesterda
y’s tea bags.

  Their mother taught piano lessons in the house, and all of the children went through the lessons as well. One shapeless weekend afternoon as Helen was trudging through “To a Wild Rose” on the upright, she started trying to figure out the jingle from the Alka-Seltzer commercial, and soon she had the little up-and-over tune. She heard Isaac and Anne laugh from the kitchen. The house breathed. Her father’s footsteps came to the threshold behind her, and Helen decided to sing out “plop plop, fizz fizz, oh, what a relief it is” and she heard her father laugh too, and the pleasure of hearing his laugh traveled up and down her body.

  She came to the end of the jingle, and even though she was a little tired of it, she started again. But her father said, “Let’s come back to substance, Helen.”

  So then to meet Harry, who loved her exactly for this kind of playfulness. Harry had joked about practicing his handshake before she took him home, making it the world’s firmest just for her. His giving smile had almost never failed to bring people over to him, but her father was as closed to Harry as he was to the Pritchard boys: letting them taste how it would feel if people didn’t defer to their money.

  As adults the siblings had dispersed, moving far away from that substance. Every so often she talked with her sister Anne, a nurse in Florida, and they laughed that, of all of them, Helen had stayed closest to home.

  But even after she was free of her father’s judgment, she still carried the vague wish that Harry’s wealth were a more direct reward for something he had done himself. It would have pleased her if he had been an inventor who had created a thing everyone needed. When she thought of that it made her wince at her own naïveté.

  Eventually Harry’s first investing successes began to feel like failures when the companies he had cashed out of went on to multiply in size. He had made almost twenty percent on each deal, but what if he had held on? And so he began to hold for a little too long. But this impulse was tempered by his business partner, and they did more than well enough for what seemed like a long time. And then his partner left.