Swim Back to Me (11 page)

“It’s still hot,” my father said. “But I don’t think it’ll be quite as bad as yesterday. I heard it was ninety-eight in the city. Unheard of.”

Don’t say it, I thought.

“You know what Mark Twain said, don’t you?” he went on. “He said, ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’ Not this week.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I’ll bet it was hotter here.”

“Oh, no doubt,” my father said. “No doubt.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Oh, Gladys will be off next week. Did I already tell you? We’ll have to fend for ourselves. I hope you’re in the mood to have pancakes for dinner.”

“I’ll try to be by then,” I said, and I left him sitting there and went back to my room.

And realized I’d made a terrible mistake. It was definitely going to be hot today—a beach day if ever there were one. I raced out of the house and up the street, but their car was gone. Now what was I going to do? The day would be endless. I trudged home, got on my bike, and rode down the hill to SCRA. It was only about nine o’clock, but it was crowded like midday, mothers clustered in the shade or in the baby end with their toddlers, the rest of the pool crammed with older kids. I had to pee, and I went into the men’s locker room, locked myself in a stall, and let the smell of mildew take me back eight or nine years, to the first few times my mother sent me in here by myself because I was old enough not to need to go into the women’s with her. The men’s side was much smellier, I’d found, and it was too crowded—less with people than with the suits some men left from one visit to the next, hanging from hooks, their voluminous legs drying in folds.

It was empty this morning; all the men were at work. Even in the summer they worked all the time, doing research or writing. My father was trying to finish his book by the end of August so he’d have the next few weeks to prepare for fall quarter. I didn’t know what Dan was doing. Taking the day off today.

I went outside. A couple of my friends from elementary school were playing Ping-Pong, and I decided against a quick dip in my shorts and headed for my bike. That night in the spring, when Sasha and I walked down here and she first met Cal: why had I left?

Gladys would have arrived at the house by now, and so I headed for campus, thinking I’d buy something at the Union, a candy bar or maybe a box of Jujubes. Halfway there, the notion of going to Harry Henry’s house popped into my mind, and there was a split second when I thought it was something I could actually do. I thought of the way Sasha had laughed when I said I wanted to bed Hillary, and then of the way she’d twisted onto my lap as if it were a place she knew well. Those kisses, and then the final one, around the corner from her house late that afternoon, the lime candy taste lingering, her lips soft and sweet and wet.

She came over again that evening, ringing the doorbell during a game of Scrabble my father and I were playing. Her hair was pinned up in a bun on the back of her head, and her shoulders were sunburned. She followed me back to the table and pulled up a chair, and for a while she whispered word ideas to me while on the other side of the board my father glanced at us from under his eyebrows as he moved his tiles around.

“I guess it’s not fair,” she said. “Two against one.”

My father raised his head. “Oh, that’s OK. Richard’s happier when you’re here.”

My face grew warm, and I kept my head lowered, my gaze directed at my tray. “Ha!” I heard my father say, and he laid all seven of his tiles on the board, reaching a triple word score with the last letter.

“Ouch,” Sasha said.

I turned and looked at her. “How was the beach?”

“Crowded. I went in up to my ass.” She glanced at my father. “Sorry.”

“What about everyone else?”

“Peter only went to his knees. Daddy went to his shoulders and then dunked, the freak. Mom went about mid-thigh.”

“Was it cold?”

“Freezing. Which is one of the reasons I’m glad we decided to go back to Connecticut. You can swim when you go to the beach there.”

I didn’t move, but I felt my pulse pounding in the back of my throat. I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at my father. I looked at the Scrabble board, letters marching meaninglessly here and there.

“When do you go?” my father said.

“Next Tuesday morning. Well, Mom and I go Tuesday morning—we’re flying. Daddy and Peter are driving the car back.” She turned to me, and I forced myself to meet her gaze. “We were going to tell you,” she said. “At the beach today.”

I shook my head, not sure I could speak.

“Are you going back to the same house?” my father said.

“We aren’t even going to New Haven—we’re going to Hartford. Daddy’s going to teach English at a boarding school near there. You actually have more of a chance to really
teach
with high school students—they don’t think they already know everything.” She looked away, her face stained with embarrassment.

My father was watching me. He cleared his throat and pushed his chair back. “I think I’ll leave you two,” he said. “Is that all right? We can finish another time? I have a little work I wanted to do tonight, anyway.”

When he was gone, I took the board and dumped the tiles on the table. Then I got up and went into the kitchen. I found an unopened box of cookies and tore the flap, taking some satisfaction in the fact that because of the tear it wouldn’t close neatly.

Sasha came in after me. “Give me some.”

I fished out a handful for her, then grabbed as many as I could for myself. “Let’s go outside.”

We went out front, down to the foot of my driveway. The heat today had been nothing like yesterday’s, and it was almost cool now. Sasha sat first, and when I sat I left several feet between us.

“I’m going to high school,” she said.

We’d finished eighth grade, but our school was a junior high that went through ninth; I had another year before high school.

“Freaky.”

“There are two thousand kids there.”

“God, two thousand?”

“Tell me I’ll make friends.”

I turned and looked at her. There were tears in her eyes, and her lips were red with the effort of not crying. “You will,” I said. “Of course you will.”

She put her hands in front of her eyes. Her shoulders shook a little, but after a moment she sighed and wiped her palms across her cheeks. She said, “You know last week? The Fourth?”

I didn’t respond.

“We finally fucked. After you left. We went to his apartment, I didn’t get home till almost midnight. I was so lucky—my parents were outside. When they came in I just pretended I’d been in my room.”

I had heard the words—
we finally fucked
—but I had kept them at a distance. Now they came close. I didn’t want to think about Cal’s dick pushing into her, but I couldn’t stop myself: the picture was insistent, unstoppable, he went in and in and in. I couldn’t stand it, and I blinked fast, but it stayed with me.

“I haven’t seen him since then,” she said. “I kind of—I kind of decided I didn’t want to. So it’s good we’re moving.”

Across the street, Yvonne Mazar held a garden hose over her flowers. She was a classicist, married to the dean of the medical school. She waved, and I waved back. Elegant—that was what my mother always said about her. She wore her hair in a sleek bun that reminded me of an apple turnover.

Sasha leaned down and scratched her ankle. “Why
did
you whistle at the dogs? I was thinking about doing it with you until then.”

I didn’t know where to look: at her, away from her, at Yvonne across the street. I stared at my knees. I was embarrassed and astonished, both at once.

“I really wanted to leave it here,” she said. “My virginity, you know.”

My heart was beating fast, which made it hard for me to follow what she was saying, to figure out what wasn’t making sense. “Hang on,” I said. “You knew you were moving last week? On the Fourth?”

She gave me a concerned, even a surprised look. “I knew a month ago. Six weeks. Before the end of school.”

“But the house on Dartmouth Street …”

“Richard.”

I stood up and walked a few paces. Across the street, Marvin Mazar had come outside and was standing on the doorstep, watching his wife. He was in his pajamas, it seemed. Striped shirt, striped shorts. Though maybe they weren’t his pajamas. Maybe they were just what he wore after work in the summer.

Suddenly I was incredibly tired. I felt the way I had when I’d tried to stay up till midnight on New Year’s Eve, back when I was little. This intense, almost dizzying tiredness, a tiredness that was like floating on a raft in a swimming pool. Snapping back to alertness was like having someone bump your raft—your arms and legs would flail for a moment.

“Richard?” Sasha said.

“I’m going to go in now. I have to go to bed.”

“It’s eight o’clock. Ten of eight.”

“I have to anyway,” I said, and I left her sitting there.

…

For the first time ever, a weekend arrived when I wished I were going to Oakland. On Saturday, I got Malcolm to ride up into the hills with me, and I spent the day stoned out of my mind, the two of us smoking every last particle from the bag of weed Cal had given me. Sunday morning I convinced my father to take me to Santa Cruz instead of the city, and we rode the roller coaster together, my father heaving a great sigh when our car finally came to a stop. After that, he watched while I went on the other rides, waving at me when I flew or twisted into view. He disappeared for a few minutes while I was on the pirate ship, and when I saw him again he was holding something in front of his chest, pale and indistinct like a bundle of fur. I wondered if he’d gone to a duck-shooting booth and won a stuffed animal, but it turned out to be cotton candy, a big cloud of it that he ate very slowly, small bit by small bit dissolving in his mouth while I went on several more rides.

At last we headed home. Pine trees soared on either side of the road, and the sky was visible only in jigsaw fragments, deep blue behind the dark green. I looked over at my father, thought of the moment during the drive to the Trinity Alps when he told me Dan might be leaving. I was a fool. This last month—the smoking, the laughing, the kissing,
the house on Dartmouth Street
—my heart raced at the extent, at the sheer length of her lie.

I spent Monday alone in the house, relieved Gladys was on vacation. I cleaned my room, throwing away schoolwork from the last two years and then, for good measure, all the work I’d saved from elementary school, too.

But Tuesday morning I couldn’t stay away. I walked up their driveway and took note of the car, its trunk open, several suitcases lying inside.

“Richard Appleby!” Dan said when he answered the door. “I knew we’d see you again.”

I went in and looked around, at the empty shelves and moving boxes, at the two carry-on bags sitting in the entryway. “Hate to be leaving, Richard,” he said to me, his lips curved in a wry half-smile. “You know how it is, though. The academic life.”

The sliding glass door was open, and I went and pressed my nose to the screen, looked out at the patio.

He came up behind me and stood there without speaking. At last, his voice low, he said, “Do you think we should have made her tell you sooner?”

I stood still.

“I can’t decide,” he went on. “I can see it both ways.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “But she’s our daughter. That’s what it came down to.”

“It’s OK,” I said.

“There, I knew you were sensible.” He turned back to the room. “Didn’t I always say Richard Appleby was sensible?”

I turned, and there were Sasha and Joanie, standing near the front door with their bags in their hands.

I followed them out the front door. In a moment Dan was behind the wheel, and Peter and Joanie were side by side in the backseat. The front waited for Sasha, but she lingered.

“Here,” she said to me, “hang on a sec,” and she got a notepad and pen from her purse. She bent over, raised her knee a little, and used her leg as a surface for writing. Finished, she tore off the paper and handed it to me. “It’s dumb, but I didn’t know you were coming over.”

Dan gave the horn a little toot. “Sash,” he called through the open door. “Parting may be sweet sorrow, but missing your flight is just plain old sorrow—and a few hundred bucks to boot.”

“O-K,” she said over her shoulder. She offered me her hand. “We started with a handshake—maybe we should finish that way, too.”

Her note was in my right hand. I switched it to my left, but then Peter rolled down his window and yelled goodbye, and I leaned down so I could see across him to Joanie and wave at her, too, and somehow in the middle of all of this Sasha got into the car.

I looked at the note. “See you at Harry Henry’s house,” she’d written. “Out back near the cabana.”

She closed the door and rolled down the window. “Bye,” she called, and Dan tapped the horn twice and pulled away.

That’s not the end of the story—not quite yet—but I’ll say now that I never saw her again, and I’ve often wondered what happened to her. Where would she have landed, in academia or as far from it as possible? Close to Dan and Joanie, or as far from her parents as I ended up from mine?

I am married now, and the father of three, and while I do have a career that involves desks and table lamps, I also take my family backpacking every summer, and at night, in the mountains, when our campfire has burned low, we lie flat on our backs and stare at the vast, starry sky, until one of the kids complains about a rock under his shoulder or another says she needs to pee, and then we get up and settle in our tents for the night.

How do people do it, pry themselves from their pasts? “Pry” makes it sound dramatic, but it isn’t. I wish I could say my life in the natural world began with a transformative experience: like the fishing weekend with my father, only successful. An epiphanic trip to the mountains, a hike along a rushing river that taught me how I wanted to live. But that’s not how it happened. The course of true progress is boring. You don’t just suddenly become an outdoorsman, just as you don’t just suddenly become assertive and independent, ridding yourself forever of your shabby victim rags. It’s incremental. Think of that frog, the one in Karl’s picture. There wasn’t a single moment when he passed into maturity, a single instant when an observer could cry, “Look, he’s a frog now!” No, it happened slowly, beginning with four tiny bumps, four promises of the legs that would widen the world for him beyond anything he could conceive of in his watery tadpole dreams.