Swim Back to Me (5 page)

The next day was a Saturday, and I slept in, not waking until my father opened my bedroom door to tell me he was going to his office. It was 9:42, very late for me; between my inability to sleep all morning and my dearth of boners, I was turning out to be a lousy teenager.

“Sorry,” my father whispered. “I just wanted to tell you, I’m going to work.”

“I’m awake now,” I said, pushing up on one elbow and rubbing my face. “You don’t have to whisper.”

He glanced at his watch. His voice still low, he said, “There’s a chance I’ll be late getting home today.”

“OK.”

“One of my doctoral students is bringing in the first half of his manuscript. Rather interesting work, in fact—he’s looking at the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, the so-called court-packing plan. He said three o’clock, but he’s not terribly reliable.”

“Dad, it doesn’t matter.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “I thought we’d go to the Legion of Honor tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Around one-thirty? They’re exhibiting some marvelous early Rembrandt drawings.”

When I heard the front door close I got up and had some cereal and then went to Sasha’s, realizing only after I’d rung the bell that my arrival might blow open some lie she’d told.

Peter opened the door. He was still in his pajamas, and I was relieved to see them all at the dining table.

“Come in, Richard,” Joanie called. “We’re having French toast.”

“Not quite the breakfast of champions,” Dan said from his place at the head of the table, “but I think I’d rather be in the middle of the pack and eat well, wouldn’t you?” He waved me in. “What shall we call it? The breakfast of mediocrities? Doesn’t have quite the right ring. Come in, sit, eat, please—I need some help here.”

Sasha was picking at her food and frowning, and she glanced at me but didn’t speak. Everyone else was more or less finished, but Joanie fetched me a plate heaped with French toast and bacon, and when I sat down Dan slid the syrup in my direction.

I was unscrewing the cap when, under the table, Sasha’s foot came down on mine, hard. I looked at her, but her face was unreadable.

“Nice day, wot?” Dan said in a fake English accent.

Sasha let out a barely audible snort, and I realized I’d interrupted a fight. I cut off a bite of French toast and shoved a piece of bacon into my mouth.

“T’isn’t cricket,” Dan said to Sasha, “your staying behind.”

“OK, it isn’t cricket.”

“It’s meant to be gor-juss,” he went on, leaning harder on the accent, and now I had it: they were going to Muir Woods. I’d heard about it last Sunday:
We’ve been in California for nine months and we still haven’t seen the redwoods!
I’d been in California for thirteen and three-quarters years and I still hadn’t seen them.

“Besides,” Dan continued, “if you don’t go, your mum will be the only bird along.” The way he said “bird” sounded like “bud”—your mum will be the only bud along.

“Stop it,” Sasha said. “Stop it with the accent. And she’s not a bird. You sound like an idiot.”

Dan put his palm to his chest. “Harsh verdict,” he said, but in his own voice.

“Would you say ‘chick’?” she went on. “It’s basically the same thing.”

“Joanie?” Dan said. “Care to weigh in?”

Joanie shrugged. “What’s wrong with ‘woman’?”

“Your daughter,” he replied, “is not, strictly speaking, a woman. Yet.” He turned to me. “Semantics aside, we have an excellent expedition planned for the day. We’re going to Muir Woods, and we’d love to have you join us.” He drummed his fingers on the table, then leaned way back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and said to Sasha, “
Why
wouldn’t you want to go? That’s what I don’t understand.”

She rolled her eyes. “I told you—I have a French test Monday and I’m really behind.”

He looked at me again. “What do you think? It’d do you good. ‘For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?’ I’m on a quest today, Richard—you can join me.”

“You’re an atheist,” Sasha said to him.

“Agnostic, actually,” he said. “But it’s a metaphor. And it’s less a quest for than a quest away from. As, in many ways, it was for Emerson.”

I liked the idea—a lot more than Rembrandt drawings, early or otherwise—but I said I had homework, too, and for the next twenty minutes, as her parents and Peter moved around the house getting ready, Sasha and I stayed at the table and hardly said a word. The French toast was tepid, but I worked on it anyway, methodically sliding each bite through the pooled syrup before putting it in my mouth.

At last they left. “Thank God,” she said as we heard the car back out of the driveway. “I thought I might kill them.”

She left me sitting there and went to the phone in her parents’ bedroom. When she came back she said Cal couldn’t come for another hour or so, and did I want to wait with her?

She was wearing the same blouse she’d had on the day she accused me of looking at her boob, and as she reached for her juice glass the slit fell open. This time I did look: she wasn’t wearing a bra, and her breast was round and pale and angled outward. Her nipple was small and tight, the color of an underripe strawberry.

She went over to the sliding door. “Let’s go outside.”

I followed her to the patio. The sun was high, and the plate glass windows reflected the entire yard: the patio with its wooden furniture, the flower beds full of spiky purple agapanthus and low-lying white impatiens, the high fence that ran along the edge of the property. And Sasha, too: standing near the picnic table with her hands on her hips, dressed in her blouse and cutoffs, her bare legs glowing white in the bright light. I took a quick look at myself: as runty as ever, Richard with his big ears and his slightly too-small brown-and-orange striped T-shirt. “You need new clothes,” Gladys had said to me a week earlier, standing in front of the dryer folding laundry.

I wondered: Would Cal park in the driveway? What if the Hoppers, who lived next door, happened to be outside?

Sasha went back in for a deck of cards, and we sat at the table and played double solitaire, the sun climbing higher, an occasional light breeze stirring the highest leaves of the trees on the other side of the fence. For a little while I could hear the Hoppers in their backyard, talking quietly. Teresa Hopper was from Peru, and her voice had a singsong quality. Her husband’s was duh duh duh, and hers was d’ dee d’ dee dee d’ day. They were in their seventies. He was a Nobel Prize winner; he’d done something or other in chemistry that about three people in the world understood.

Thirty minutes went by, forty. At fifty I found myself getting nervous. I sort of wanted to leave. Then suddenly there was something at the side of my head, warm and moving, brushing my ear—as if a squirrel had jumped onto my shoulder. “Ah,” I said, leaping up and swatting at my head and neck; then I turned around and saw Cal grinning at me.

“Damn,” he said. “I nearly had you.” He circled the table and stood behind Sasha, who was trying not to smile. He put his hands on her shoulders, then moved one hand to her forehead and pulled her head to his belly. “You were too perfect,” he told me. “I had to try.”

Sasha had seen him coming—he must have held a finger to his lips. Tiptoed up behind me, stealthy as a thief. I hadn’t heard the gate open. Hadn’t heard his car door slam.

“So this is it,” he said, stepping away from Sasha and looking around. It was the first time I’d seen him since the night at SCRA, and he seemed different. His hair was in a ponytail today, and he had a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt.

He walked over to the house, cupped his hands at his eyes, and peered through the windows. “Nice setup,” he said over his shoulder. “Professor Horowitz has done very well for himself.”

“Professor Levine,” I said.

“What?”

“I told you,” Sasha said. “We’re renting. This is the Levines’ house—they’re in Rome.”

“Prego,” Cal said. “Of course you did. If Daddy gets to stay at Stanford, you’re going to buy a nice, big house.”

“He is staying,” she said. “But we’re not going to buy a house. We’re going to rent again—probably in College Terrace.”

This was good news to me—that they might move to College Terrace. I’d been wondering where they would live next year, worrying it might be farther away.

“All right then,” Cal said. “You ready, baby? We got no time to waste.”

Sasha’s cheeks turned pink, and I wondered if she was embarrassed by his bad grammar. I looked away, and when I looked back she was climbing onto the picnic bench and draping her arms over his shoulders. “Whoa,” he said, laughing a little, “let me get my balance.” He reached for her legs, squatted, and lifted her onto his back. His tanned forearms crossing her white thighs: I got up and began sweeping the cards together, gathering them into a loose pile and then into a neat stack.

“What time do you have to be back?” he asked her.

“Five. At the latest.”

“Then we better hurry. Going to a party,” he explained to me. “In the Santa Cruz mountains.”

I wondered if Sasha knew how far away that was: a solid hour in the car each way. “I’ll put the cards away and lock up,” I told her. “If you want.”

“That’d be great, man,” Cal said. “Thanks. You’re too heavy, baby,” he added, and he bent his knees and loosened his grip on her legs. “Get your stuff and let’s go, all right?”

She made for the house, and I continued with the cards, giving them a shuffle for good measure and sliding them into the box. Sasha was back in a moment, a shoulder bag of Joanie’s in her arms.

“Really, thanks, man,” Cal said, and he dug into his pocket and tossed a joint onto the table. “ ’Preciate it.”

Sasha’s eyes met mine, and she looked away.

“No problem,” I said, and I waited until they were gone, then pocketed the joint, took the cards inside, locked the doors, and left.

I didn’t smoke it. Not that day, not the next, not the next. Sasha asked, and I said I was saving it, and that became the plan. I hid it in a Band-Aid box under the sink in my bathroom. It was in with a bunch of other stuff: a half-used travel-size Crest, a bottle of dandruff shampoo, an inch-thick stack of Kleenex with no box. No one ever opened that cabinet; no one had opened it in years.

Soon, I had to go to my mother’s again. This time, my father was going away for the weekend himself, to visit his cousin David in Seattle. I was glad about this: I thought he was lonely. When we left, his overnight bag was on the backseat next to my pack.

My mother was in a good mood when I arrived. There was a vase of pink carnations on the coffee table, and she had gotten her hair cut—just a little, but enough to make it look neater. She had fresh lipstick on, and she smiled as she got dinner ready, asking me to tell her about school, and which of my teachers would I miss next year, and was I glad it was almost summer.

“Did I ever tell you about the job I had picking strawberries?” she asked a little later, once we were at the table. She had, but I shook my head, and she went on. “This was ’forty-eight, maybe ’forty-nine. Usually in the summer I worked at the library, shelving books—my mother had worked there during the war, so the director knew us. But that summer your aunt Alice needed a job, so I had to find something else. I saw a notice in the drugstore downtown, advertising for strawberry pickers, and for some reason I thought it sounded like fun. A hundred degrees out in the sun every day—I don’t know where I got that idea. But my father said they’d never take me, so I took it as a challenge.”

I was cutting minute steak into pieces and chewing them slowly, half listening to her and half thinking of what Sasha’d told me about the party in the Santa Cruz mountains, how she’d eaten a hash brownie and gotten higher than she’d ever been before. I was worried about what they might be doing this weekend—maybe going to another party where she’d try mushrooms or even LSD.

“Are you listening?” my mother said.

I looked up at her. She had a thin face, thinner now than before. Perhaps because of this, her lips seemed swollen, overfull. The lipstick had worn off; most of it was on her glass now.

“Yes,” I said. “You saw an ad.”

“So I went out to this farm,” she said, “about three miles outside town, and there were already crews in the fields, but I rang the doorbell on the farmhouse, and a grizzly old lady came to the door—I swear, she had whiskers. And I told her what I wanted, and she pointed to the barn, and I went out there and found Mr. Fisher.”

Mr. Fisher was the farmer. He had a hundred acres, strawberries and lettuce and artichokes. This was outside Salinas. When I was younger my parents sometimes took me for a drive down there, to where my mother had grown up, and inevitably we would pass what my mother called “Mr. Fisher’s”—never “Mr. Fisher’s farm” or “Mr. Fisher’s land,” just “Mr. Fisher’s.” At some point I learned that Mr. Fisher was a man she’d worked for, the summer she was eighteen, but for a brief period in my very young childhood I’d heard “Mr. Fisher’s” as “mist or fishers,” and when we drove by I looked hard to see if I could figure out which it was.

The next part of the story was that my mother joined a crew of migrant workers—Mexican—whom Mr. Fisher hired for the season and housed in a long bunkhouse with a corrugated roof. The story was about how my mother worked hard to prove herself, and how by the end of her six- or seven-week stint working with them, the Mexican women all doted on her.

“They cried on my last day,” my mother was saying. “They’d embroidered a tablecloth for me, sitting up late after work—I can’t imagine what it did to their eyes. And they gave it to me just before I got in my car for the last time and drove off. And do you know what I felt?”

I knew what she felt. I hated this part of the story.

“Nothing,” she said. “I felt nothing. Not gratitude, not shame. Nothing at all.”

We’d both finished eating, and I pushed back my chair and cleared our plates, hoping we could move to the TV now.

“Would you like dessert?” she said.

I was surprised by this; she never served dessert. “What is it?”

“Cake.” She went to a paper bag on the counter and took out a small pink box, fastened with tape that she cut with a knife. She lifted out a cake, only four or five inches in diameter, iced in white and decorated with yellow swirls.