Prep: A Novel (29 page)

“I have to agree,” my father said. “One fellow I saw today, I thought, poor guy, he has a neck injury. Then I realized, nope, he’s just got his nose in the air.”

“No joke,” Rufina said. “And the kids are worse than the parents.”

“Nothing like inheriting a whole lot of money to make you think you must really deserve it,” said my father.

I stiffened. The actual word
money
made my skin crawl. Besides which, my father’s remark was probably something the priest at their church had said in a sermon, or something my father had picked up from
Reader’s Digest.

But Rufina just said, “You got it.”

“And, Maria, what about you?” my mother said. “Have you liked Ault?”

“Some good, some bad,” Maria said. “Depends what day you ask me.”

“Were you girls at the lunch?” my father asked. “What a ratfuck, huh?”

They roared with laughter, and I looked out the window. Why did he have to try so hard? No one expected that much from parents.

“What’s a ratfuck?” Maria said.

“Tell her, Flea.” In the rearview mirror, I could see my father grinning.

“It’s just a big, crowded event,” I said.

“That’s hilarious,” Rufina said. “I gotta remember that one.”

At dinner, Rufina ordered shrimp in lobster sauce and to compensate, though I doubted my father would know I was compensating, I ordered mixed vegetables. Rufina and Maria both ordered soda, which was not something we did in our family—at restaurants we always had water—but it probably wasn’t fair to hold that against them; most people in the world ordered soda at restaurants. When our fortune cookies came, we went around the table reading them:
You love sports, horses and gambling but not to excess; Your winsome smile will be your sure protection; You will be the best!
The dinner hadn’t been a disaster, really, everyone had liked one another, but it still had been a mistake to invite them. I’d had to remain on high alert, waiting.

Back on campus, when we were letting them off before I got out myself, Maria stepped out of the car but Rufina remained in the seat. “That was a good dinner,” she said, and she patted her flat belly.

“We really enjoyed meeting you,” my mother said.

Rufina looked at me, then my father, my mother, me again. “Are you—you guys are staying at the Sheraton, right?”

“The what?” my father said.

“I thought—” Rufina paused. “See, I told Nick I’d meet him there.”

Nick?
I thought.
Nick Chafee?
Then, because it has always been in moments of genuine surprise that I try hardest to act at ease, I said, “We can take you there. It’s not where my parents are staying, but it’s no problem.”

“Does someone want to clue me in to what’s going on here?” my father said.

“Rufina needs a ride to a hotel,” I said. I turned back to her. “It’s fine. We can take you.”

“Hold on just a second,” my father said. “What hotel are we talking about and just who is this Nick fellow?”

Rufina started to speak, but I interrupted her. “She needs to go to the Sheraton, which is where a lot of the parents stay. And Nick is in our class, and it’s not like you’re staying in a room with him, right, Rufina?”

Rufina nodded. Of course she was staying in a room with Nick.

Both my parents were twisted around to look at us, my father’s right elbow hanging over the seat. Maria had disappeared into the darkness.

“And I’m supposed to believe that?” my father said. He seemed not angry but slightly amused.

“It’s true,” Rufina said. “I’m staying with a bunch of me and Lee’s girlfriends.”

“Don’t you need permission to be away from campus?”

“I filled out a form in the dean’s office this morning.”

“Dad,” I said. “You’re not her father. Just drive her there. It’s none of your business.”

“None of my business?”

This is the point where, if I had been Rufina, I’d have gotten out of the car. Ride or no, I would not have wanted this proximity to another family’s fighting. But I wasn’t Rufina—Rufina was going to the Sheraton now, to get extremely drunk, probably, and to fool around with Nick Chafee. And with fooling around as the reward, our squabbling was only a distraction to be endured. I myself had never fooled around, drunk or otherwise, but even I knew how when you really liked a boy, all the little daily incidents shrank and slipped away. You carried around your anticipation of seeing him again and retrieved it when you felt bored or anxious, like a memory of something good.

“I’m not sure when it became your responsibility to decide what’s my business,” my father said.

Not now, I thought—couldn’t he see that the situation was not about us? We were only vessels, meant to carry Rufina through the night and into the arms of the boy who was waiting for her.

“Terry.” My mother shook her head slightly. Then she mouthed something to him—I think she mouthed,
Later.
She recognized our role here.

“I’ll say what I want to in my own car,” my father said, but even as he said this, he shifted from park to drive and we glided forward. I still don’t know if he was acquiescing to me, or to Rufina, or maybe to my mother.

When we were back on the main road, I said, “It’s on 90. Do you know how to get on 90?”

My father said nothing, and my mother said, “Daddy knows because that’s how we came in.”

It could have been worse, I thought—if we’d had to stop at a gas station and get directions.

For the rest of the ride, which was almost twenty minutes, no one spoke. In the dark car, on the dark highway, we weren’t necessarily in Massachusetts—we could have been anywhere. My father and my mother and me and this strange, pretty girl sitting across the seat—for a minute, I could not remember her name. What was she doing with us? It made sense that the rest of us were in the car together, but her presence felt curious and perplexing.

Then the disoriented feeling passed. (
Rufina
—of course.) So she and Nick were involved; now it seemed ludicrous that I had not realized this earlier. Beauty trumped race, apparently. Or was it possible that my belief about race and dating at Ault had simply been wrong? Or was I mostly right, but wrong to think that any pattern existed as a rule? There could always, of course, be exceptions. Sometimes—more often than not, though it was not until I was older that this fact stopped surprising me—things really were as they appeared to be. A boy and girl flirting, and then it turned out they were together—only I could be startled by such news.

When we dropped off Rufina, she walked through large automatic glass doors beyond which were a rose-colored carpet, a table with a huge vase containing dozens of flowers, a chandelier above the flowers. We pulled away, and none of us spoke on the ride back, either.

In the campus driveway, my father turned off the car but left the headlights on. It was nearly eleven o’clock, the time for Saturday curfew, though only a fraction of the students would be sleeping in the dorms tonight.

My father set his hands on top of the steering wheel. “I won’t be—” he started, and his voice came out squeaky from not talking for so long. He cleared his throat. “I won’t be attending chapel or brunch tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see you at Christmas, Lee.”

“Are you joking?” I said, and my mother said, “Terry!”

“I’m not joking at all.” He didn’t look at either of us.

“Honey, why—” my mother began, and he cut her off. “I don’t need to be subjected to this kind of treatment. Not from anyone, and especially not from my sixteen-year-old daughter.”

“It wasn’t—” I said, but he cut me off, too. Probably during the drive he had been planning what he’d say. His voice was steady, simultaneously angry and calm.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you, Lee, but I can tell you this much. You’re a disappointment. You’re selfish and you’re shallow and you have no respect for your mother and I, and I’m ashamed of you.”
Your mother and me,
I thought—even at that moment, that was what I thought. “When you started at Ault,” my father continued, “I said to myself, I’ll bet there are a lot of kids who’d think real highly of themselves going to a place like that. And I thought, but I’m glad Lee has a good head on her shoulders. Well, I was wrong. I’ll say that now. We made a mistake to let you go. Your mother might feel different, but this is not what I drove eighteen hours for.”

No one said anything, and my mother pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. Sometimes when my mother cried, I caught her tears, and I very much did not want to catch them now.

I swallowed. There were many things I could have said in this moment, and the one I chose was, “I didn’t ask you to come.”

“Lee!” My mother’s voice was anguished.

Abruptly, my father was unfastening his seat belt, opening his door, stepping outside, pulling my door open as well. “Get out,” he barked. “Right now.”

“No.”

“I said get out of my car.”

“It’s Mom’s car, too.”

My father glared down at me, shaking his head; apparently, there were no words left to express my repugnance.

“Fine,” I said. I stepped out, folded my arms, and stood facing him. “You can tell me how terrible I am. But maybe you should think about how you act. You think it’s so funny to embarrass me and say weird things in front of my friends, and when I get upset, you pretend like you didn’t do anything.”

“Embarrass you? Is that what taking those girls out for dinner is called?

“Oh, right. Like we go out for one meal and then I’ll just ignore how you act the rest of the time.”

“I didn’t know I’d asked you to ignore anything. I’m thirty-nine years old, and I’m pretty comfortable with myself, Lee. And that’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for you. I’ll tell you one thing I don’t feel the need to do and that’s make excuses.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Congratulations.”

And then—I don’t remember any anticipation or foreknowledge of this, only a stunned awareness that it had already happened—he raised his right hand and slapped me across the face. His hand was hot, and then my face was hot, and tears were splashing onto my cheeks, but I think they were only because of how much it hurt. And the thing I did, before I met my father’s eyes, before I said a word or lifted my own hand to feel my jaw and cheek, was look around. We were near the chapel, and about thirty feet away, illuminated as he passed under a lamppost, was a classmate of mine named Jeff Oltiss. Our eyes met. His expression, especially from that distance, was unreadable but, I thought, not unsympathetic. Jeff was not someone I knew well—we’d been in Ms. Moray’s English class together our sophomore year, but that was it—and we never spoke after this, and for the rest of my time at Ault, I thought of him only as the person who had seen my father slap me. If I ran into him today on the street in San Francisco or New York—he could be married, have children, be an astrophysicist or an accountant—that is all he would be to me: the person who saw me get slapped by my father. When we were still at Ault and passed in the dining hall or gym, we did not talk or greet each other, but I felt that a recognition flickered between us. He knew.

I turned away from him, back to my father. “You’re an asshole,” I said, and I was sobbing by then.

“And you’re an ungrateful little bitch.” He kicked shut the back door, slid into the front—before his own door closed, I heard my mother’s voice but could not make out what she said—and revved the engine. Then they were gone. To get back to my dorm, I’d need to follow Jeff through the arch that led to the courtyard. But instead I walked in the opposite direction, out onto the circle. Standing there in the vast expanse of grass, treeless except at the edges, I looked around at all the big partly lit buildings and then at the glowing stars overhead. Out there on the circle, it was not so bad. Inside, in the light, surrounded by furniture and magazines and throw pillows and picture frames—then it would be bad.

When the phone rang early in the morning, it was as if I had been waiting for the call. I jumped out of bed, hurried down the steps to the common room, and yanked open the door of the phone booth. “Lee,” my mother said, but she couldn’t speak because she was crying so hard.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom, I’m sorry. I want you guys to come back—”

“Daddy’s checking out now,” she said. She breathed deeply several times. “He wants to get an early start. But, Lee, I hope you know that he loves you so much and he’s so proud of you. I hope you know that.”

“Mom—” My chin was starting to shake, my lips were curling out.

“And we really looked forward to this weekend, and I’m sorry it had to turn out like this.”

“Mom, it’s not your fault. Mommy, please. Please don’t cry.” But I was crying, too. Over the noise of her own tears, I don’t know if she noticed. “Why don’t you come back?” I said. “Even if Dad doesn’t. You’ll like the chapel service.”

“Lee, I can’t. He wants to get on the road. What I want you to do is I want you to call him in a few days and just say you’re sorry. And I know he was wrong, too, and he shouldn’t have hit you and it makes me very sad—” She was gasping again.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It didn’t hurt. Really, Mom, it didn’t hurt.”

“I have to go, Lee. I love you. Okay? I love you.” Then she’d hung up, and I was holding the phone, listening to nothing. When I got back to the room, I saw on Martha’s alarm clock that it was not yet six-thirty.

Later, when we referred to it—there was nothing that ever happened to my family that did not become a joke or anecdote—it became the weekend from hell, when it was unclear whether my father or I had behaved more atrociously. In my mother’s version, everything could be traced back to the fact that Lee was looking at one of those trashy magazines she loves and Dad started teasing her and then you know how two people with tempers can get into it. Also, my mother always asked after Rufina and Maria, both in her letters and in conversation when she’d call them “the Spanish girls,” or else “the girl with the boyfriend and the other girl.”

It was the last time my father ever hit me—he’d done it when I was growing up, spanking more than slapping, and really only when my brothers and I were being either completely wild or willfully disobedient—and it also marked the beginning of a long period during which I did not cry in front of either of my parents.