By late June I knew the ropes well enough for my father to start
taking Fridays off, leaving my parents free to spend long weekends relaxing at their campground near the Delaware River. (They loved it there, though Camp Leisure-Tyme always struck me as a grim parody of the suburban life they were supposedly getting away from, trailers lined up one after the other like dominoes, all these middle-aged couples watching portable TVs inside their little screen houses.)
My first day in charge, hustling from one stop to the next, singlehandedly taking care of the customers we usually split between us, I carried in my mind a comforting image of my father crashed out on his hammock in the shade of a tall tree, empty beer cans littering the grass below. The following Monday, though, he confessed that he’d been a nervous wreck the whole day, unable to do anything but deal out one hand of solitaire after another, mechanically flipping the cards as he tormented himself with elaborate disaster scenarios involving me and his precious truck.
Cindy asked me out on a Friday morning in early August, the third day of what turned out to be the worst heat wave of the summer. It was only ten o’clock, but already the thermometer was well into the nineties. I felt wilted and cranky, having awakened at four in the morning in a puddle of my own sweat. She worked in an air-conditioned office, and I could almost feel the coolness radiating off her skin.
“Poor guy,” she said. “Looks like you could use a cold one.”
“A cold two or three sounds more like it.”
“Why don’t you come to the Stock Exchange tonight? A bunch of us hang out there after work on Fridays.”
“I just might take you up on that.”
“Great.” She smiled as though she had a question for me, but then decided to keep it to herself. “I’ll keep an eye out for you. Come anytime after six.”
I drove through the day in a miserable heat daze, stopping every now and then to soak my head in the spray from someone’s lawn sprinkler. When it was finally over, I took a shower and fell asleep on the living room couch for a couple of hours. It was close to eight
by the time I finally made it to the restaurant, and Cindy was alone at the bar.
“I thought you stood me up,” she said, not even bothering with hello.
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a bunch of you?”
“They left about an hour ago. Jill’s brother invited us to a party down the shore.”
“You could have gone. It wasn’t like we had a date or anything.”
She nodded slowly, trying to look thoughtful instead of hurt.
“I see them all the time. I thought it might be nice to be with someone different for a change.”
I climbed onto the stool next to hers and played a little drumroll on the bar, feeling unexpectedly calm and in control.
“It is nice. How come we didn’t think of this a month ago?”
She reached down and squeezed my leg just above the knee. It was a ticklish spot, and I jumped in my seat.
“I’ve been waiting for this all summer,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
I wouldn’t have
predicted it, but Cindy turned out to be a talker. She drank three glasses of rose with dinner and held forth on whatever popped into her head—her indecision about buying a car, her crush on Bruce Springsteen, a bad experience she once had eating a lobster. She had so many opinions my head got tired from nodding in real or feigned agreement with them. She believed it was better to die in a hospice than a hospital and thought tollbooths should be abolished on the parkway. She disapproved of abortion, loved trashy novels, and was angered by the possibility that rich people might be able to freeze their bodies immediately after death, remaining in a state of suspended animation until a cure was found for whatever had killed them.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “When you’re dead you should just be dead.”
“That’s right. It should be available to everyone or not at all.”
“I want to travel,” she blurted out. “I don’t just want to rot around here for the rest of my life.”
I looked up from my Mexi-burger, startled by the pleading in her voice. She smiled sheepishly.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m not usually such a chatterbox. I hope I’m not boring you to death.”
“Not at all. I’m happy to listen.”
And I was, too, at least most of the time. Even when she recounted in minute detail a complex dispute her mother had had with the cable company, or tried to convince me that I needed to read
The Late, Great Planet Earth
, I still found myself diverted by the unexpectedness of Cindy and touched by her need for my approval. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as someone other people needed to impress. Until quite recently, in fact, I had generally felt the obligation moving in the opposite direction.
“Do I sound stupid to you?” she asked.
“What makes you think that?”
“I’m just going on and on. I’m not even sure if I’m making sense.”
“It’s nice,” I said. “I’m having a good time.”
She stuck one finger into her wineglass, stirring the pink liquid into a lazy whirlpool. Then she transferred her finger from the glass to her mouth, sucking contemplatively for a few seconds.
“You’re sweet,” she said finally, as if pronouncing a verdict. “You’re sweet to even put up with me.”
She decided she
was too tipsy to drive and happily accepted my offer of a ride home. We maneuvered our way through the crowded parking lot, bodies brushing together accidentally on purpose as we walked. It was still muggy, but the night had cooled down just enough to be merciful. I reached into my pocket and fished around for the keys.
“Oh my God,” she said, grabbing me roughly by the wrist. “You’re driving me home in this?”
I had spent so much of my summer in and around the Roach Coach I didn’t really notice it anymore. But her startled laughter made me look at it as if for the first time: the gleaming silver storage compartment with its odd, quilted texture, the old-fashioned cab, the grinning cockroach on the passenger door, emblem of my father’s rapidly fading dream. The roach was a friendly-looking, spindly-legged fellow, as much person as bug, walking more or less upright, with white gloves on his hands and white high-top sneakers on his feet. He seemed to be in a big hurry to get wherever it was he was going. DANTE’S ROACH COACH, said the bold yellow letters arching over his head. Beneath his feet, a caption read, COMIN’ ATCHA!
“It’s all I have,” I said. “My parents took the station wagon to the campground. We can take your car if you want.”
“That’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “How often does a girl get to ride in a lunch truck?”
I opened the door and helped her up into the cab. Then I circled around to the driver’s side, climbing in beside her. An open box of Snickers bars rested on the seat between us, along with a parking ticket and a stack of coffee cups decorated with a Greek-column motif. Cindy helped herself to a candy bar. I started the truck.
“Kinda melted,” she informed me, struggling with the taffy-like strand of caramel produced by her first bite. “You should keep these things out of the sun.”
Five minutes later
we pulled up in front of her house. I shut off the ignition and headlights, turning to her with one of those dopey what-now shrugs that was the best I could muster in the way of a suave opening gambit. She nodded yes, sliding toward me on the seat. I moved the candy bars and coffee cups on top of the dashboard, out of harm’s way.
I hadn’t been kissed all summer, and the first touch of her tongue on mine released me from a prison I hadn’t even known I was in. All at once, the boundary between myself and the rest of the world disappeared; a sudden weightlessness took hold of me, as though I were no longer a body, just a mouth filled with tastes and sensations. For some unidentifiable period of time, I lost track of who and where I was.
When I could think again, my first thought was,
This is
amazing!
My second was,
She’s
a secretary!
The thought was so jarring, so ridiculous and uncalled-for, it made me pull away in confusion. We sat there in the humid cab, separated by a distance of maybe a foot, breathing so hard we might as well have just delivered a refrigerator. She ran one hand through her formerly neat hair and looked at me as if I’d said something peculiar.
“What do you want?” she asked, her voice low and urgent.
“Want?” I said.
“Why are you even with me?”
Instead of answering—or maybe by way of answering—I kissed her again. This time it felt more like real life, two bodies, two separate agendas. I put my hand on her breast. She removed it. I groaned with disappointment and tried again, with the same result. Instead of backing off, though, she kissed me even harder, as if to reward my persistence. I wrenched my mouth away from hers.
“My parents are away for the weekend,” I whispered. “We’d have the whole house to ourselves.”
She ignored the invitation. Her face tightened into a squint of pained concentration.
“Tell me what it’s like,” she said.
I didn’t bother to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. In some strange way, we’d been talking about it all night.
“It’s just college,” I told her, leaning back against the door, trying to calm my breathing.
“How’d you get in?”
“I applied.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I did really good on the SATs. Much better than I expected.”
This was my standard answer whenever anyone at home asked me how I’d gotten into Yale. It was easier to write it off as a fluke than to go into all the other stuff, the AP classes I’d taken, the papers I’d written for extra credit, the stupid clubs I’d joined just so I could list them on my application, all the nights I’d stayed up late reading books like
Moby Dick
and
The Manic Mountain
with a dictionary beside me, the endless lists of vocabulary words I’d memorized, the feeling I’d had ever since I was a little kid that I was headed out of town, on to bigger and better things.
“But it’s hard, right? They give you a lot of homework?”
The word “homework” seemed jarring to me; it had dropped out of my vocabulary the day I graduated from high school.
“I didn’t know what homework was,” I admitted. “High school’s a joke in comparison.”
“It must be fun, though. Living in a dorm and everything.”
“It’s okay. The food’s a little scary.”
“I did really bad in high school,” she said. “My mother was sick a lot. Then I got involved with this older guy. Before I knew it, the four years were gone and I hadn’t really learned anything. Now I feel so stupid all the time.”
“An older guy?” Just the phrase made me a little queasy.
“I was a cashier at Medi-Mart. He was one of the supervisors.”
I remembered seeing her a lot at Medi-Mart back when we were in high school, thinking she seemed more at home behind the register than she did walking the halls of Harding.
“How long’d you go out?”
“Two years.” She looked away; all the life seemed to have drained out of her. “He was married and everything. You must think I’m horrible.”
I reached for her face, gently steering it my direction. She was teary-eyed, but happy to be kissed again. This time I tried some new strategies, nibbling on her lips and licking up and down the salty length of her neck. Within minutes she was breathing in
quick, trembly gasps, murmuring encouragement. When she seemed ready, I tried maneuvering her onto her back, but she went rigid, not resisting exactly, but certainly not cooperating.
“What’s the matter?”
She gave me a glassy-eyed smile of incomprehension.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I love this,” she said, running her tongue around her chapped and swollen-looking lips. “I could kiss you forever.”
Three weeks later,
I was starting to believe her. All we ever did was kiss. Nearly a month of heavy making out, and I hadn’t even succeeded in getting my hand up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
Other than that, we had a pretty good time together. Sometimes we went to the movies or out to dinner, but mainly we just shopped for cars. It was the consuming quest of her life. We read the stickers, quizzed the salesmen, took demos out for drives—Civics and Corollas, Escorts and Omnis, K-cars and Firebirds, Mustangs and Rabbits. But despite all our work, she seemed no closer to making a decision. New or used? Automatic or stick? Foreign or American? Hatchback or sedan? Every night we started from scratch. There was always another dealership, new variables to ponder. I started to wonder if she saw car shopping and kissing as ends in themselves—wholly satisfying, self-contained events—rather than starting points on the road to bigger things.