On Sunday, after the last show, the Judge takes my mother and Lisa and me to the Auburn Inn, orders us clam chowder and roast beef. He does not ask me how my college applications are going. It is understood that I will be going to Dartmouth, his alma mater. My grades are just good enough, and I test well. The Judge gives thousands of dollars each year to the alumni fund. On the sly I am sending applications to Bard, Oberlin, and
NYU
, places with theater programs I’m interested in. There’s another thing I haven’t told him yet—I’m not going out for crew again in the spring. I’ll be spending that extra time at the Dramat. Even Lisa doesn’t know.
“That boy . . .” says the Judge.
“Who?”
“The Macbeth boy. He was a little short for the role, didn’t you think? A little pudgy.”
“Yes,” I say.
“The girl who played Lady Macbeth wasn’t too bad.”
“I thought she was very good,” says Lisa. She fishes for my hand under the table.
My mother finishes her Rob Roy before the appetizers arrive. She signals to the waiter for another one.
“I’ll have a glass of cabernet,” I add, before the waiter can go.
“You will not,” says the Judge.
The waiter looks from one of us to the other. An old man, patient, a little bent in the knees. He has seen all this before. My mother sips neatly from her water glass.
“He’s not eighteen until February the third,” my father informs the waiter.
“Oh, go ahead and let him, Malcolm,” says my mother.
“That’s all right,” I tell her.
“Where are you applying to college?” my mother asks Lisa, after she has some of the second drink inside her. She is in that phase of the evening where she is still happy, listening to some tinkly music in her head. She smiles impersonally.
“Um, Yale, Harvard, Brown . . .”
“Ah, then, you and Bruce will be apart next year.”
“Well, there are the vacations,” says Lisa. She squeezes my hand again. Her palms are always clammy. “And I’m a good letter writer.”
“I’m sure you are,” says the Judge. I can see that he’d like the food to come so that there’s something in my mother to ground the booze. As if I’m a puppet and he’s pulled a string, I casually slide the bread basket in my mother’s direction.
The room is filling up. Our reservation was on the early side, the way the Judge likes it. I see my math teacher, Mr. Willis, sitting opposite his wife. They lift and lower their utensils in a companionable silence. I smell lobster bisque at other tables. I would have liked some lobster bisque. They make it with sherry here.
“We’re going to Boston in the morning,” the Judge tells Lisa. Now that she’s been dispatched to a different part of the country for her college years, he feels friendlier to her.
“Oh, what will you be doing?” she asks politely.
“The Fine Arts Museum, of course, and then we have special passes to the new John F. Kennedy Library, which we have not yet seen.”
“The museums in Boston really are inferior,” comments my mother.
We talk of museums and cities and I have the feeling that none of us, even my father, actually knows what he is talking about, is sure of the truth of even his least statement. When we cannot think of things to say about museums and cities, we talk about the food. My mother orders two more drinks.
The waiter clears away our dishes and hands a dessert card to each of us.
“Cherry cream pie!” cries my mother. “It has been so long since I’ve had cherry cream pie!”
I’m worried; I can see the haze coming up in her eyes. Some memory, some fragment of childhood has been suddenly retrieved; I don’t want to hear what it is.
The Judge’s hand comes down on her small, fragile one like a clamp. “Very good then, we’ll order you the pie.”
Lisa orders a lemon sherbet—she watches her weight. I should watch mine, too, but I get a brownie à la mode, out of general ill temper. The Judge orders a Drambuie, his standard after-dinner drink. “I’ll share it with you, lovie,” he says to my mother. Her smile trembles. I know what he’s doing—claiming the drink for both of them so that she can’t order another of her own. I can see the rest of their evening. She’ll draw a scalding bath and lie in it, her skin
reddening, the hot fumes inducing a confusion and sleepiness reassuringly akin to that of inebriation. The Judge will call out from the bedroom, where he is reading the
New York Times.
He will quote President Carter and Brzezinski, and say just what he thinks of what they’ve said. He will ask her what she thinks of what he thinks of what they’ve said, but she won’t answer. Every ten minutes or so he will heave himself out of his chair and knock lightly on the bathroom door, on the pretext of seeing if she needs some soap or an extra towel, but really in order to make sure that she has not drowned. And perhaps on one of those visits he will steal a glimpse of the hair between her legs, the naked soft thighs. She is still shapely, still youthful when all is said and done, just a shade past fifty. On those evenings when she looks at him with clear eyes, remembering who he is, who she is, he is glad to come back to her.
The students exit the day’s last class into darkness. Six thirty, and the dining hall is a brilliant bubble of glass. Aviva sits with her friends, Seung with his. Afterward they walk in the snow. Aviva’s toes and fingers always hurt in the cold. She wears boots with fur linings, the thickest she can find.
Seung shows her yet another of the secret places he knows. The Science Building is built into a hill, leaving a crawl space beneath one corner of the foundation. A steam pipe exits into the crawl space; the temperature in there must be eighty degrees. They wedge themselves under the slanting foundation, unzip their jackets. The gravel floor is not uncomfortable. They can sit here, unseen, watching the snow fall, stripped down to their shirts. Outside, the lit snow, the dark figures exiting the buildings.
“It’s beautiful,” Aviva says.
She unbuttons his shirt, warming her hands on his chest. He leans his head against the dirty concrete wall. She never
fails to be stirred by this gesture of his, the way he bares his throat to her, like a dog acknowledging the stronger creature in a fight. It strikes her to her depths. She kisses him gently, then imperiously, crawling onto his lap and holding him fiercely around the waist with her legs.
The paths have emptied. The snow is thickly cratered with footprints that cross this way and that and fall into each other. Aviva and Seung emerge into a private field. He stands behind her in the tracks, his wide hands on her shoulders. He takes three large steps away from her.
“Stand tall,” he says. “Keep your arms straight at your sides. Like a board.”
He knows she’ll do it on the first try. Her trust in him is absolute. Obediently she lets herself fall. She watches the dark sky rise up over her and then rush away again. Then she lies, safe, in Seung’s hands.
“Again,” she murmurs.
They do it over and over. But they agree she can’t catch him; he weighs so much more than she does.
A week before the Christmas break Aviva buys an enamel mug for each girl in Hiram and fills it with M&M’s, Hershey’s Kisses, miniature Reese’s cups, caramels, peppermints, licorice sticks. The slashed bags of sweets carpet her room. She bought too much and doesn’t know what to do with it all. She spent a long time in the drugstore, comparing the heavy packages glittering with colored foil. She was first drawn to the aisle by a pressing desire to treat herself, to bring a bag of M&M’s back to her room and gorge on it until her head swam and her hands shook with sugar tremors. At the same time she told herself no, no, you mustn’t, and so she stood there, paralyzed, unable to make the purchase, unable to leave the store.
Then the brilliant solution occurred to her. There was a way to have all of these delights and not sicken herself, not just the M&M’s but the Kisses and caramels and everything
else, a way to handle the lovely wrappings and inundate her room with the smell of chocolate, mint, and raspberry. The candy would not be for her but for others. How wonderful! But when she carried her armloads to the counter, her confidence faltered; she believed the cashier lady could see right through her to the insatiable greed inside. The amount on the register was so high that Aviva had to go back to the bank for more money.
For two nights she stays up very late, drawing the name of each girl onto a mug with thick metallic ink. Her roommate is sleeping and the overhead light is off; her desk lamp shines a small bright circle on her careful industry. She feels like the girl Rumpelstiltskin trapped in a room to spin hay into gold. She is dazzled by the riches all around her. Every so often, when she cannot bear it anymore, she unwraps a Kiss and places it in her mouth, closes her eyes, and stops her elfin work for a while. The result is such a flood of want that she has to lie down and grip the metal foot of her cot until the impulse to tear at the packages with her teeth and stuff unwrapped candies into her mouth, swallowing paper and foil, passes. She manages to hang on, shuddering.
The night before holiday dismissal she will leave a mug in front of each door. The thought of each girl emerging the next morning in her nightgown, with her toothbrush and face cream in hand, to find her gift, fills her with unspeakable pleasure and justifies all the pain of the preparations. To make sure she will not touch the leftovers—every mug has been stuffed to the brim—she gathers the extra sweets
and dumps them into a shoe box which she leaves by the sick elm tree behind Hiram for the squirrels. Within hours there are bright scraps all over the yard, the birds diving and screaming and pecking at each other, and even the box itself has been gnawed at and scattered. Señora Ivarra, Hiram’s dorm head, is furious, convenes a dormitory meeting. Aviva raises her hand and turns herself in. A would-be fornicator, an accomplice to drug use, a sneak, and this is what she is finally publicly reprimanded for: littering. She weeps, genuinely ashamed. The other girls stare at her, aghast. “Whatever gave you the idea?” asks the señora. Aviva shakes her head, cannot look the señora in the eye, lest the señora see the flecks of frenzy there.
For Christmas break I rent a car and drive myself home to Jordan. I need to avoid the train, the possibility of seeing Seung and Aviva there again. I don’t know that they are already on their way to Chicago. When I hit the New Jersey state line I find I can’t bear to face everyone just yet: the Judge, my mother, my brother Dan—Andy and his wife are with her family in Maine. I am supposed to be home in time for dinner. I drive beyond my exit, my mood lightening as I cross into Warren County and then Pennsylvania. When I reach the Poconos I have to ask myself where am I planning to go, what is the point? It is past eight o’clock. I turn around.
My father answers the doorbell. “You might have stopped at a pay phone,” he says. My mother comes up behind him, her face pale and depleted now that the day’s makeup is scrubbed away. To my surprise I find myself apologizing repeatedly, a wetness coming up in my eyes. “Now, now,” my mother trills, happy to have something to do or say. “It’s all right. You’d think you’d committed a crime.”
The streets of New York are lined with a gray, shimmering slush, a slush the color of a rich lawyer’s tie. There are hours before the flight that will take them to Chicago. They are departing from here rather than Boston because Aviva’s mother found a good deal on tickets out of LaGuardia. Aviva doesn’t remember her mother ever using the phrase “a good deal” before. She and Seung walk along Madison and Lexington Avenues, but stop in few stores: the slim saleswomen and fey salesmen in these tiny bright boxes do not like Aviva’s purple-feathered vintage hat or Seung’s canvas knapsack. When they get to Bloomingdale’s they look hopelessly for a bench where Seung can massage Aviva’s bloodless, stinging toes.
“This is no good,” she says. “We have to find someplace else.”
She knows the name of a hotel, the Dorchester; her parents used to stay there on trips to the city, the ones from which they brought back pungent cellophane bags filled
with New York bagels studded with garlic and poppy seeds. It takes them a while to find a store that will let them use its White Pages. The hotel is in the East Nineties between Madison and Park. They walk there, forgoing a cab, saving their cash for food and the bus to the airport.
The lobby is large, tan, a little shabby. It surprises Aviva that her parents would have stayed here, a place not just so. Perhaps it was in better shape years ago.
Seung removes Aviva’s wet boots and puts her foot in his lap. She is aware of the puddles they are making on the whorled carpet. She is wearing hand-knitted socks she bought herself as a holiday present. They were in a window on Nut Street. You hardly ever saw anything pretty in those utilitarian windows filled with envelopes, bandage boxes, crew-necked sweaters, lacrosse sticks. Auburn has yet to shed its mill town dourness, its willful lack of style.
The desk clerk, a gaunt man with a mustache and not much to do, watches Seung’s hands cup Aviva’s toes, press into the pad beneath the joints. Seung knuckles the arch, chafes the heel. The indifferent, skeptical gaze of the city has worn Aviva down; she feels tiny, like a child calling out to be heard at a parade. She is aware of the eyes of the man at the desk and looks up. He smiles encouragingly, malevolently.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she tells Seung.
They wait until the clerk wanders into the back and then take the stairs to the third floor, where they call for the elevator. They study the floor buttons: one through nineteen. “You choose,” Aviva says. She is happy again.