Be Mine (7 page)

Oh, I see now, there aren't any scratches. Just keep doing what you're doing.

But it had, actually, scratched up the legs of the coffee table, and those scratches were still there—a bit of blond etched out of the mahogany, a secret message written by a prisoner, in code, with his fingernails.

It seemed that Chad was purposely refusing to talk about Berkeley with Garrett. Whenever the subject of California, of dorm life, of San Francisco or the ocean came up, Chad changed the subject to tacos. More cheese. Are there any more onions? Please pass the salsa. After a while, Jon drew Garrett out on the subject of hunting, of motorcycles, of cars. Garrett talked about a red Mustang he was fixing up. He kept it in his garage (he does still live in his parents' house, which he now refers to as his). On the weekends and after classes he works on it. Once or twice I thought I saw a look pass over Chad's face—pity, boredom, contempt?

Or was it simply the curiosity, and the lack of comprehension, a college boy from California would naturally have for the life of a hometown boy studying auto mechanics at the community college? A path not taken. Never even a path. For only a split second I wondered if it would have been, somehow, better, to have raised Garrett, rather than Chad. A boy with a keen understanding of motors. One who stuck close to home, whose work was physical and dirty and crucial.

I never would have thought so when I was reading Greek myths at bedtime to Chad, or driving him to piano lessons, begging him to practice (then letting him quit when he didn't).

I never would have thought so those summers when I told him, no, he shouldn't get a job. He should enjoy himself. He would only be fifteen, sixteen, for a whole leisurely summer once in his life.

Early on, I could see how competitive he was, but I never once said, "Chad, you don't always have to be the best at everything, you know," although there were times I should have said it. Even in second grade, he had to be the best reader, the boy to finish his math sheets first. Later, he had to win the essay contests, have the highest scores on the standardized tests.

Was it only an illusion, or did he always have them, too? It always
seemed
that he did, but, surely, that couldn't have been the case.

Still, I never once let go of the idea that everything had to be
just so,
did I? He had to have all of it—the lessons, the software, the whole Scholastic encyclopedia, sent to us one by one for six months in the mail, although he almost never used them. Occasionally, I took one off the shelf and paged through it myself.
Apples, Arizona.
I wanted his life to be ordered like that. I'd read about it in a child development book. The importance of order. His homework supervised. His self-esteem promoted. I never buckled him into his baby seat without double-checking that it was correctly installed. I never let him ride even his tricycle around in the driveway without his helmet on.

Would it have been better, or any different, if I'd provided, instead, the kind of house the Millers, who'd lived down the block from me when I was growing up, had provided for their children? The garbage spilling out of their garage into their yard? The older children watching the younger children while the parents worked? Unspayed cats living and procreating in their backyard—some with little cat bites taken out of their ears, rolling in the dirt of their front yard, interchangeable, yowling all night, sneaking down the block to shit in my sandbox.

Once, one of their cats came up on our front steps carrying something dark and bloody and writhing in its mouth while my mother and I were sitting on the porch, drinking lemonade and waiting for my father to get home from work.

"Oh my god," my mother said, leaping to her feet. "It's got a rat."

But in high school I got to know one of the Miller boys. Not well—just chatting in the cafeteria, and we had one class together—but well enough to find that he was a warm, funny boy. He laughed mostly at himself. It was easy to tell him the story about his cat bringing a rat to our house. ("Hey," he said, "we always wondered where that rat went!") His hair was red and tangled and he always smelled, I thought, like dandelions, and it was clear that what I had imagined taking place in his house because of the disorder—violence, neglect—had been something else, something I couldn't imagine.

I poured myself another glass of wine and pushed my plate away. Jon reached across the table and stroked my hand. He said, looking at me, but speaking to Chad, "You know, your beautiful mother here has a secret admirer."

I opened my mouth to protest, but nothing came out.

"Yeah?" Chad asked, and put his taco down. "What's that all about?"

"She's been getting secret love notes in her mailbox at school."

"From who?" Chad asked.

"Someone who's in love with her, naturally," Jon said.

"A crackpot," I said, and sipped from my glass. I could taste the grapes in it. Melted, oversweet—a sweetness like something rotting. Something green, left too long in the sun, withered on the vine. "Or someone making fun of an old lady."

"Or somebody sucking up for a grade," Chad said.

Jon gave him a cold look. "How would you suck up for a grade by leaving anonymous notes?"

"Well, maybe he'll come around later and reveal his true identity after he flunks a test or something," Chad said. "It's brilliant, really." He picked up his taco and bit into it, as if he were satisfied with his explanation, as if the conversation were now over.

I couldn't help defending myself. "I don't give tests," I said.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot," Chad said with his mouth full. "You don't flunk anybody either, do you?"

I shrugged, a little sheepishly. I am, I admit it, an easy teacher. So many of my students have had hard enough lives—been in jail, been pregnant teenagers, had parents abandon them, failed miserably all through school—that I hate to make their lives any harder. With some exceptions, these are older people and inner-city kids who've found their way to the community college despite the odds, despite themselves. But Chad had never liked the whole idea of it, even when he was eleven years old. "It's not a college," he'd said, "if you can get a degree in auto mechanics or air-conditioner maintenance. That's not
college
." I never tried to explain.

"No," Garrett said. I looked over at him. "I know who it is," Garrett said.

"Who?" Chad said. "Do tell, bro." He put his taco down again.

"It's Bram Smith. My Auto II teacher. He was joking one day about this gorgeous teacher in the English department, that we should all go over and sign up for a lit class. I knew right then that he was talking about you." Garrett looked over at me.

Was I drunk?

Was I imagining that Garrett was looking at me appreciatively, that his eyes softened on my face as if he truly thought I might be the teacher his Auto II instructor had described as gorgeous?

I shook my head. "Bram Smith," I said. "But I don't know him."

"He's part-time," Garrett said. "He's great." Garrett smiled. "Apparendy he thinks you are, too."

Chad sighed and leaned back in his chair. His eyes were narrowed in Garrett's direction. "How old's this redneck?"

"Chad," Jon said, drumming his fingers on the table, annoyed. "Are you jealous or something?"

"No," Chad said. "But if some greaser is stalking my mother I think I ought to—"

"
Chad,
" I said—in that tone, and immediately regretted it.
Saying
it made it obvious that I was
thinking
it:
Garrett is a "greaser.
" I softened, and said, "I don't think anyone's going to bother to
stalk
me."

"He's about thirty, I think," Garrett said.

"Well he better stay away from my mother." Chad was still looking at Garrett as he said this. Was I mistaken, or did Garrett, looking down at his plate, suppress a smile?

The discussion was over, and dinner was over, and in the bright overhead light of the kitchen, scraping plates, I felt such an emptiness—too much wine, and I'd barely eaten anything—that I was surprised I didn't simply float away with it. From the living room, I could hear Jon and the boys laugh about something. The television. I could feel the white wine in my chest, rising out of me, burning and fragrant, as if I had been sipping perfume all night, as if I had eaten a cheap bouquet of grocery store roses and now could only wait for them to pass through me, to be shat out, flushed away.

Bram Smith.

Maybe, once, I'd glimpsed someone who might have been Bram Smith, Auto II instructor, at an all-faculty meeting.

But could that have been him—a tall man in an olive green T-shirt, muscled, with dark hair and one of those mustache and beard combinations that went only as far as his upper lip and chin, neatly trimmed, both elegant and masculine, the kind of man I'd quit looking at ten years ago at least, and who, I thought, had also quit looking at me?

A
HEADACHE
this morning, and that dull sense of dread and insatiable appetite that is a hangover. Still, I got Chad's laundry done, packed his suitcase, made breakfast by 6:00
A.M
., and Jon and Chad left for the airport. When I said I wouldn't be going with them they seemed—relieved?

Fine, let them go alone together. No one has to worry that I'll cry at the curb, that I'll mope on the way home.

"Bye, Ma," Chad said so casually that it was as if he were off to soccer practice, and he'd be home by lunch. "I'll call you when I get there," he said, and kissed my cheek.

I saw, watching them from the back porch as they were backing down the driveway, that they were laughing.

At me?

Another slate gray day, but a little warmer, and the breeze seems to have something in it—a dampness, or a spray, it seems, of spit, something living, bacterial even, an impulse, a compulsion toward life, no longer simply a frozen denial of it.

After they left, I went back to bed and had a dream:

I took an apple out of the crisper and bit into it. It was soft, like a sponge. Salty, warm, it made me gag. It tasted the way I imagined an animal's heart, or a man's testicle, would taste if you ate it, but I couldn't help it, I kept eating.

Why?

A sense of duty? A longing for adventure?

A hunger? A repulsion?

The whole time I was eating it (and I ate the whole thing—seeds and core and stem and all) I was gagging, and wondering.

T
HIS
afternoon in my mailbox (I checked one last time before I left to go home) a piece of white Xerox paper, a heart drawn in the center of it, and, written in tiny block letters:

DO YOU EVER THINK
OF ME? WHEN I
THINK OF YOU, I THINK OF YOUR SOFT
BROWN HAIR AND WHAT IT WOULD
BE LIKE TO PRESS MY FACE
INTO IT, KISS YOUR
NECK, AND FINALLY
BE ABLE TO TELL
YOU ALL MY
DESIRES.

Stupidly, I'd unfolded it in the hallway. I should have folded it back up right away when I saw what it was and taken it into my office to read it, but, seeing it—the heart, the careful tiny lettering—I was frozen before it, I was turned to stone there at my mailbox in the main office with Beth only four feet away from me at her desk, and half a dozen people either coming or going, and Sue reaching around me to get her own mail. "Sherry," she said.

When I could finally glance away from it, I saw that Sue was reading the piece of paper in my hand. "Jesus," she said. "This guy's serious. Sherry?"

"What?" I asked, and she burst out laughing.

"Good lord, Sherry, you siren. You man magnet!"

Finally I was able to fold it back up. She followed me back to my office door where, twice, I dropped my keys trying to unlock it. She laughed, loudly, again, then said, "Your hands are shaking! Come on, do you know who this is? Are you holding out some vital piece of information from your best friend?"

I whispered back to her, "I don't want to talk about this in the hall."

"Oooh," she whispered back. "You
do
know something."

When I'd finally managed to get the door open, I cleared some books from a chair so she could sit down, and told her, "I do think I know who it is."

"Well, do tell!"

Sue:

I have loved Sue for twenty years, as long as I've loved Jon. We first met at a part-time English instructors' meeting, where she made a joke about the department chair's taste in clothes. "It's like she's trying to spontaneously combust. Everything she wears is made from petrochemicals."

Sue herself was wearing a crinkled tie-dyed skirt, sandals. It was late August. Her hair was a solid golden mass down her back, all the way to her waist. Her teeth were so white they looked like paper, and this was before everyone had those teeth, before tooth-whitening systems were sold in drugstores. Hers were simply brilliant because she was pure, and young, and didn't drink coffee or red wine or smoke cigarettes. She did, already, carry the bit of extra weight around her hips, which would turn into this middle-aged softness, and which would be exacerbated by driving everywhere she went and being too busy with the twins to exercise.

Back then, she was a runner and a cross-country skier. A smell always wafted off of her of evergreen, as if she'd brought northern California with her to the Midwest in her hair when she'd moved here.

Today, she looked tired.

In the unflattering overhead light of my office, I could see that the little pouches she'd always had under her eyes had turned, now, to real bags with deep creases beneath them and a bluish fluid filling them. Since fall, it seemed, she'd gained another ten pounds, which she didn't have room for, and hadn't bought new clothes to go with them. The buttons of the white blouse she was wearing were straining against her flesh, and even the sleeves of it were pulled tight across her arms. Her hair, which she'd cut short long ago, looked badly dyed—hennaed—and dry and gray beneath the reddish brown, making her look as if something—rust, blood?—had been sprayed on her from a low-flying plane as she was walking under it.