by T. C. Boyle
When the last bell rang down the curtain on Honors Math, Jeremy was waiting at the curb in his mother’s Volvo station wagon, grinning up at China through the windshield while the rest of the school swept past with no thought for anything but release. There were shouts and curses, T-shirts in motion, slashing legs, horns bleating from the seniors’ lot, the school buses lined up like armored vehicles awaiting the invasion—chaos, sweet chaos—and she stood there a moment to savor it. “Your mother’s car?” she said, slipping in beside him and laying both arms over his shoulders to pull him to her for a kiss. He’d brought her jeans and hiking boots along, and she was going to change as they drove, no need to go home, no more circumvention and delay, a stop at McDonald’s, maybe, or Burger King, and then it was the sun and the wind and the moon and the stars. Five days. Five whole days.
“Yeah,” he said, in answer to her question, “my mother said she didn’t want to have to worry about us breaking down in the middle of nowhere—”
“So she’s got your car? She’s going to sell real estate in your car?”
He just shrugged and smiled. “Free at last,” he said, pitching his voice down low till it was exactly like Martin Luther King’s. “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
It was dark by the time they got to the trailhead, and they wound up camping just off the road in a rocky tumble of brush, no place on earth less likely or less comfortable, but they were together, and they held each other through the damp whispering hours of the night and hardly slept at all. They made the lake by noon the next day, the trees just coming into leaf, the air sweet with the smell of the sun in the pines. She insisted on setting up the tent, just in case—it could rain, you never knew—but all he wanted to do was stretch out on a gray neoprene pad and feel the sun on his face. Eventually, they both fell asleep in the sun, and when they woke they made love right there, beneath the trees, and with the wide blue expanse of the lake giving back the blue of the sky. For dinner, it was étouffée and rice, out of the foil pouch, washed down with hot chocolate and a few squirts of red wine from Jeremy’s bota bag.
The next day, the whole day through, they didn’t bother with clothes at all. They couldn’t swim, of course—the lake was too cold for that—but they could bask and explore and feel the breeze out of the south on their bare legs and the places where no breeze had touched before. She would remember that always, the feel of that, the intensity of her emotions, the simple unrefined pleasure of living in the moment. Woodsmoke. Duelling flashlights in the night. The look on Jeremy’s face when he presented her with the bag of finger-sized crayfish he’d spent all morning collecting.
What else? The rain, of course. It came midway through the third day, clouds the color of iron filings, the lake hammered to iron too, and the storm that crashed through the trees and beat at their tent with a thousand angry fists. They huddled in the sleeping bag, sharing the wine and a bag of trail mix, reading to each other from a book of Donne’s love poems (she was writing a paper for Mrs. Masterson called “Ocular Imagery in the Poetry of John Donne”) and the last third of a vampire novel that weighed eighteen-point-one ounces.
And the sex. They were careful, always careful—I will never, never be like those breeders that bring their puffed-up squalling little red-faced babies to class, she told him, and he agreed, got adamant about it, even, until it became a running theme in their relationship, the breeders overpopulating an overpopulated world and ruining their own lives in the process—but she had forgotten to pack her pills and he had only two condoms with him, and it wasn’t as if there was a drugstore around the corner.
—
In the fall—or the end of August, actually—they packed their cars separately and left for college, he to Providence and she to Binghamton. They were separated by three hundred miles, but there was the telephone, there was e-mail, and for the first month or so there were Saturday nights in a motel in Danbury, but that was a haul, it really was, and they both agreed that they should focus on their course work and cut back to every second or maybe third week. On the day they’d left—and no, she didn’t want her parents driving her up there, she was an adult and she could take care of herself—Jeremy followed her as far as the Bear Mountain Bridge and they pulled off the road and held each other till the sun fell down into the trees. She had a poem for him, a Donne poem, the saddest thing he’d ever heard. It was something about the moon. More than moon, that was it, lovers parting and their tears swelling like an ocean till the girl—the woman, the female—had more power to raise the tides than the moon itself, or some such. More than moon. That’s what he called her after that, because she was white and round and getting rounder, and it was no joke, and it was no term of endearment.
She was pregnant. Pregnant, they figured, since the camping trip, and it was their secret, a new constant in their lives, a fact, an inescapable fact that never varied no matter how many home pregnancy kits they went through. Baggy clothes, that was the key, all in black, cargo pants, flowing dresses, a jacket even in summer. They went to a store in the city where nobody knew them and she got a girdle, and then she went away to school in Binghamton and he went to Providence. “You’ve got to get rid of it,” he told her in the motel room that had become a prison. “Go to a clinic,” he told her for the hundredth time, and outside it was raining—or, no, it was clear and cold that night, a foretaste of winter. “I’ll find the money—you know I will.”
She wouldn’t respond. Wouldn’t even look at him. One of the Star Wars movies was on TV, great flat thundering planes of metal roaring across the screen, and she was just sitting there on the edge of the bed, her shoulders hunched and hair hanging limp. Someone slammed a car door—two doors in rapid succession—and a child’s voice shouted, “Me! Me first!”
“China,” he said. “Are you listening to me?”
“I can’t,” she murmured, and she was talking to her lap, to the bed, to the floor. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.” There were footsteps in the room next door, ponderous and heavy, then the quick tattoo of the child’s feet and a sudden thump against the wall. “I don’t want anyone to know,” she said.
He could have held her, could have squeezed in beside her and wrapped her in his arms, but something flared in him. He couldn’t understand it. He just couldn’t. “What are you thinking? Nobody’ll know. He’s a doctor, for Christ’s sake, sworn to secrecy, the doctor-patient compact and all that. What are you going to do, keep it? Huh? Just show up for English 101 with a baby on your lap and say, ‘Hi, I’m the Virgin Mary’?”
She was crying. He could see it in the way her shoulders suddenly crumpled and now he could hear it too, a soft nasal complaint that went right through him. She lifted her face to him and held out her arms and he was there beside her, rocking her back and forth in his arms. He could feel the heat of her face against the hard fiber of his chest, a wetness there, fluids, her fluids. “I don’t want a doctor,” she said.
And that colored everything, that simple negative: life in the dorms, roommates, bars, bullshit sessions, the smell of burning leaves and the way the light fell across campus in great wide smoking bands just before dinner, the unofficial skateboard club, films, lectures, pep rallies, football—none of it mattered. He couldn’t have a life. Couldn’t be a freshman. Couldn’t wake up in the morning and tumble into the slow steady current of the world. All he could think of was her. Or not simply her—her and him, and what had come between them. Because they argued now, they wrangled and fought and debated, and it was no pleasure to see her in that motel room with the queen-size bed and the big color TV and the soaps and shampoos they made off with as if they were treasure. She was pigheaded, stubborn, irrational. She was spoiled, he could see that now, spoiled by her parents and their standard of living and the socioeconomic expectations of her class—of his class—and the promise of life as you like it, an unscrolling vista of pleasure and acquisition. He loved her. He didn’t want to turn hi
s back on her. He would be there for her no matter what, but why did she have to be so stupid?
—
Big sweats, huge sweats, sweats that drowned and engulfed her, that was her campus life, sweats and the dining hall. Her dormmates didn’t know her, and so what if she was putting on weight? Everybody did. How could you shovel down all those carbohydrates, all that sugar and grease and the puddings and nachos and all the rest, without putting on ten or fifteen pounds the first semester alone? Half the girls in the dorm were waddling around like the Doughboy, their faces bloated and blotched with acne, with crusting pimples and whiteheads fed on fat. So she was putting on weight. Big deal. “There’s more of me to love,” she told her roommate, “and Jeremy likes it that way. And, really, he’s the only one that matters.” She was careful to shower alone, in the early morning, long before the light had begun to bump up against the windows.
On the night her water broke—it was mid-December, almost nine months, as best as she could figure—it was raining. Raining hard. All week she’d been having tense rasping sotto voce debates with Jeremy on the phone—arguments, fights—and she told him that she would die, creep out into the woods like some animal and bleed to death, before she’d go to a hospital. “And what am I supposed to do?” he demanded in a high childish whine, as if he were the one who’d been knocked up, and she didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t.
“Do you love me?” she whispered. There was a long hesitation, a pause you could have poured all the affirmation of the world into.
“Yes,” he said finally, his voice so soft and reluctant it was like the last gasp of a dying old man.
“Then you’re going to have to rent the motel.”
“And then what?”
“Then—I don’t know.” The door was open, her roommate framed there in the hall, a burst of rock and roll coming at her like an assault. “I guess you’ll have to get a book or something.”
By eight, the rain had turned to ice and every branch of every tree was coated with it, the highway littered with glistening black sticks, no moon, no stars, the tires sliding out from under her, and she felt heavy, big as a sumo wrestler, heavy and loose at the same time. She’d taken a towel from the dorm and put it under her, on the seat, but it was a mess, everything was a mess. She was cramping. Fidgeting with her hair. She tried the radio, but it was no help, nothing but songs she hated, singers that were worse. Twenty-two miles to Danbury, and the first of the contractions came like a seizure, like a knife blade thrust into her spine. Her world narrowed to what the headlights would show her.
Jeremy was waiting for her at the door to the room, the light behind him a pale rinse of nothing, no smile on his face, no human expression at all. They didn’t kiss—they didn’t even touch—and then she was on the bed, on her back, her face clenched like a fist. She heard the rattle of the sleet at the window, the murmur of the TV: I can’t let you go like this, a man protested, and she could picture him, angular and tall, a man in a hat and overcoat in a black-and-white world that might have been another planet, I just can’t. “Are you—?” Jeremy’s voice drifted into the mix, and then stalled. “Are you ready? I mean, is it time? Is it coming now?”
She said one thing then, one thing only, her voice as pinched and hollow as the sound of the wind in the gutters: “Get it out of me.”
It took a moment, and then she could feel his hands fumbling with her sweats.
Later, hours later, when nothing had happened but pain, a parade of pain with drum majors and brass bands and penitents crawling on their hands and knees till the streets were stained with their blood, she cried out and cried out again. “It’s like Alien,” she gasped, “like that thing in Alien when it, it—”
“It’s okay,” he kept telling her, “it’s okay,” but his face betrayed him. He looked scared, looked as if he’d been drained of blood in some evil experiment in yet another movie, and a part of her wanted to be sorry for him, but another part, the part that was so commanding and fierce it overrode everything else, couldn’t begin to be.
He was useless, and he knew it. He’d never been so purely sick at heart and terrified in all his life, but he tried to be there for her, tried to do his best, and when the baby came out, the baby girl all slick with blood and mucus and the lumped white stuff that was like something spilled at the bottom of a garbage can, he was thinking of the ninth grade and how close he’d come to fainting while the teacher went around the room to prick their fingers one by one so they each could smear a drop of blood across a slide. He didn’t faint now. But he was close to it, so close he could feel the room dodging away under his feet. And then her voice, the first intelligible thing she’d said in an hour: “Get rid of it. Just get rid of it.”
—
Of the drive back to Binghamton he remembered nothing. Or practically nothing. They took towels from the motel and spread them across the seat of her car, he could remember that much . . . and the blood, how could he forget the blood? It soaked through her sweats and the towels and even the thick cotton bathmat and into the worn fabric of the seat itself. And it all came from inside her, all of it, tissue and mucus and the shining bright fluid, no end to it, as if she’d been turned inside out. He wanted to ask her about that, if that was normal, but she was asleep the minute she slid out from under his arm and dropped into the seat. If he focused, if he really concentrated, he could remember the way her head lolled against the doorframe while the engine whined and the car rocked and the slush threw a dark blanket over the windshield every time a truck shot past in the opposite direction. That and the exhaustion. He’d never been so tired, his head on a string, shoulders slumped, his arms like two pillars of concrete. And what if he’d nodded off? What if he’d gone into a skid and hurtled over an embankment into the filthy gray accumulation of the worst day of his life? What then?
She made it into the dorm under her own power, nobody even looked at her, and no, she didn’t need his help. “Call me,” she whispered, and they kissed, her lips so cold it was like kissing a steak through the plastic wrapper, and then he parked her car in the student lot and walked to the bus station. He made Danbury late that night, caught a ride out to the motel, and walked right through the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Fifteen minutes. That was all it took. He bundled up everything, every trace, left the key in the box at the desk, and stood scraping the ice off the windshield of his car while the night opened up above him to a black glitter of sky. He never gave a thought to what lay discarded in the Dumpster out back, itself wrapped in plastic, so much meat, so much cold meat.
—
He was at the very pinnacle of his dream, the river dressed in its currents, the deep hole under the cutbank, and the fish like silver bullets swarming to his bait, when they woke him—when Rob woke him, Rob Greiner, his roommate, Rob with a face of crumbling stone and two policemen there at the door behind him and the roar of the dorm falling away to a whisper. And that was strange, policemen, a real anomaly in that setting, and at first—for the first thirty seconds, at least—he had no idea what they were doing there. Parking tickets? Could that be it? But then they asked him his name, just to confirm it, joined his hands together behind his back, and fitted two loops of naked metal over his wrists, and he began to understand. He saw McCaffrey and Tuttle from across the hall staring at him as if he were Jeffrey Dahmer or something, and the rest of them, all the rest, every head poking out of every door up and down the corridor, as the police led him away.
“What’s this all about?” he kept saying, the cruiser nosing through the dark streets to the station house, the man at the wheel and the man beside him as incapable of speech as the seats or the wire mesh or the gleaming black dashboard that dragged them forward into the night. And then it was up the steps and into an explosion of light, more men in uniform, stand here, give me your hand, now the other one, and then the cage and the questions. Only then did he think of that thing in the garbage sack
and the sound it had made—its body had made—when he flung it into the Dumpster like a sack of flour and the lid slammed down on it. He stared at the walls, and this was a movie too. He’d never been in trouble before, never been inside a police station, but he knew his role well enough, because he’d seen it played out a thousand times on the tube: deny everything. Even as the two detectives settled in across from him at the bare wooden table in the little box of the overlit room he was telling himself just that: Deny it, deny it all.
The first detective leaned forward and set his hands on the table as if he’d come for a manicure. He was in his thirties, or maybe his forties, a tired-looking man with the scars of the turmoil he’d witnessed gouged into the flesh under his eyes. He didn’t offer a cigarette (“I don’t smoke,” Jeremy was prepared to say, giving them that much at least), and he didn’t smile or soften his eyes. And when he spoke his voice carried no freight at all, not outrage or threat or cajolery—it was just a voice, flat and tired. “Do you know a China Berkowitz?” he said.
And she. She was in the community hospital, where the ambulance had deposited her after her roommate had called 911 in a voice that was like a bone stuck in the back of her throat, and it was raining again. Her parents were there, her mother red-eyed and sniffling, her father looking like an actor who’s forgotten his lines, and there was another woman there too, a policewoman. The policewoman sat in an orange plastic chair in the corner, dipping her head to the knitting in her lap. At first, China’s mother had tried to be pleasant to the woman, but pleasant wasn’t what the circumstances called for, and now she ignored her, because the very unpleasant fact was that China was being taken into custody as soon as she was released from the hospital.