The UnAmericans: Stories (18 page)

And then the question that’s been knocking around inside me for years comes tumbling out: “Do you ever think it isn’t worth it?”

“What?”

We’ve been talking so openly, but suddenly even saying the question feels too risky, as if someone might really be listening. “You know,” I say. “Have you ever thought, for just a second, of giving all this up and being—like everybody else?”

“We
are
like everybody else,” my father says quickly. “Everyone who matters.”

For a moment he doesn’t say anything. “You have to understand,” he says. “The Party was our life, your mother’s and mine. And after she died, the idea of getting out of bed and making coffee and going on with my day seemed . . . impossible. But everyone, they stepped in. The Party women caring for you, Lou and Alan coming by every single day, taking you to school, to the park on weekends. Everybody, all of them, they helped you with your homework, they taught you to read. I couldn’t do any of that myself.” He takes a slow sip of beer. “You can’t question the Party,” he says. “The moment you do—you fall apart.”

He’s sitting there, his feet tapping the floor to a sharp, even beat and his head squished against the cushions. I have this eerie and comforting feeling of seeing him at ten, twenty, thirty, shifting nervously on all the sofas in every apartment he’s lived in. All at once I feel his pain, his life, lean against my heart.

He clears his throat. “It’s probably past your bedtime.”

“Pop,” I say. “I don’t
have
a bedtime.”

But we both stand up and he puts his hands on my shoulders, steering me down the hall. “Let’s you and me pretend, just for tonight,” he says, “that I remembered to give you one. Okay?”

“Okay,” I whisper. And there’s a moment before I go into my room that his hands stay on my shoulders, just resting there: the heaviest, warmest coat.

I’
M WIPING
down tables the next morning when my father and Lou saunter through the restaurant doors. They seem all business, snagging their booth in the back without stopping to chat with the guys at the counter. “Hey,” I say.

My father doesn’t look up. So I walk over and say, “The usual?”

“Sure,” he says. “Whatever.”

And then he waves me away and turns back to Lou. They’re so focused on each other that it’s like I really am just a waitress to him, some flimsy, forgettable girl in a grease-stained apron with a too-hot pot of coffee. They just keep leaning in and whispering, and suddenly I’m so hurt I can taste it. I’m standing there, feeling like a bigger fool by the second for believing one real talk with my father means another will follow—and then I set the pot down right on their table, untie my apron and push through the glass doors.

“Running out again?” Alan’s behind me on the street, so close I can see a rim of sweat above his lip. In the sunlight he looks athletic, like the sweat came from a tennis match rather than working in a restaurant with a broken fan. But I’m already walking down the avenue too fast to answer, past the hardware store and the druggist and the bakery, my sandals loud on the pocked sidewalk. I know the last thing my father will do is tie on that apron, and yes, I
know
it’s wrong to make Alan take over my shift, but I keep walking. I turn up one block and the next, smelling everything at once: charcoal and hamburgers, eucalyptus trees, exhaust wafting out from the mechanic’s. I cross a boulevard, toward the larger houses set away from the road. Then down a side street, up another and past an intersection, until I’m standing in front of his door.

“Hey,” Hal says, opening it after my first knock. His face is pink, like he just scrubbed it. Behind him there’s a television flashing and a brown plaid recliner. I can’t make out the person in it, just a man’s arm, Hal’s father’s arm, reaching for a sandwich on the tray beside him. There’s a western on the screen, and beyond that, lemon-colored walls and thick carpet and the distant sound of a vacuum, humming away in a room I can’t see.

Then Hal steps toward me and closes the door on everything. “It’s good to see you,” he says, leading me out back. “You’ve got to see what we’ve done.” He lights the lantern and we climb inside.

The rest of the cinderblocks have been set along the sides of the shelter and the boards have been hammered down to create a floor. Canned food, candles and jugs of water rest against the wall. “We did a lot in a day, didn’t we?” Hal says, a hint of pride in his voice. “It’ll be finished by the weekend.”

“What’s the rush?” I say. “You’re really that worried?”

He pokes a finger through the buttonhole in his shirt. “My mom wants it done. She and my dad have been fighting and I heard him say he’d prefer to sleep in here. That was what he said,
prefer.
Like he was throwing her words right back at her.”

He looks up, and I’m afraid he might cry. He’s still going on about his parents, about their fights carrying all the way down the hall to his bedroom and how lately he’s been wanting to store his dishes in there so he can eat under the covers rather than facing the two of them together in the kitchen, and suddenly it’s like everything once fuzzy and glorious is coming glaringly into focus and there Hal is: some regular kid with regular problems, a goofy boy with a peeling nose and mayonnaise on his breath and half-moons of dirt beneath his nails. Even the shelter’s losing its luster, and I can see now what shoddy work they’ve been doing, the floorboards raised and uneven, the paint his mother chose a harsh and terrible green, like overripe avocados. I know that if I let him keep talking, this whole fantasy will topple over before it’s even had a chance to rise. So I rest a hand on his knee and feel the thick fabric of his shorts. “I’m glad I stopped by,” I say.

And then we’re kissing, hands snaking up his polo and my blouse, roaming across shoulders and backs and hip bones. Our shirts peel off effortlessly, as if more experienced people have entered the shelter and are doing all the work. Hal is bony and muscled, with faint freckles scattered across his chest. The lantern goes off and darkness fills the shelter. When the lights come back on again, his lips are even closer to mine.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”

“Oh God,” he says. “Neither have I.”

“Well,” I say, not having a clue, “I think we’re supposed to start like this.” I pull him onto the floorboards and reach for his zipper. Hal rolls on top of me, pushes up my skirt. I stare at the food stacked beside me: tomato soup, tuna fish, cans and cans of Spam. I know what I’m about to do could taint me forever, and yes, I know I’m supposed to wait until I’m married and much, much older, but I can’t think of a single real reason to stop.

He touches my face, looks at me. “We don’t have to do this if it’s going to hurt so much.”

“I don’t feel anything,” I say. “I don’t even think you’re in there.” I tell myself to focus entirely on the Spam. “Try again,” I whisper.

He does, but before he even gets the smallest bit inside, his whole body shudders. He closes his eyes, and a second later he opens them so wide I can’t help but think of Alan Mandlebaum. “Oh,” he says, the word rolling off his tongue in three long syllables. And then I guess we’re done.

“Jeez,” he says, leaning back on the boards. He reaches for my hand, and for a minute we lie there silently. Then he sits up. “My dad could come out here any second,” he says. “Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere. My treat.”

I look around the shelter, taking in the wood floor, the lantern and piles of food. I’m thinking I could stay here a very long time, hidden and protected from the world. I could help Hal and his father repaint the walls an orange so bright and beautiful they’d forget about the dark. Hal and I could play board games and flip through the photographs in
Life
magazine, and when his father went into the house for more jugs of water, we could take off our clothes and try again so maybe the next time I’d feel something. But Hal has already zipped up his pants and is wiping the wet spot off my skirt with his hankie, and I think of my father inside Menick’s and know what I have to do.

“Alright,” I say. “I know a nice place.”

H
AL’S MESMERIZED
the moment we step inside, the way I must have looked the first time I saw television. Everything seems to fascinate him: the regulars at the counter, still talking about baseball; jar after jar of olives; even the glass dish of mints on the counter, chalky and dry as detergent.

“It’s just the two of us,” I tell Alan at the counter. “And I want a booth.” Alan leads us to one in the back. He slaps down two menus, avoiding my gaze. But I notice his hands are quivering. “Two Coke floats,” I say as he shuffles off.

From my father’s booth I hear Gladys’ deep laugh, the clink of ice in an empty glass. I wait for my father to look up and see me with Hal. He’ll pause for a moment: forkful of pie held midair, newspaper lowered and eyebrows raised. Then he’ll walk over to my booth, rest his hands on the table and before he can say a word he’ll take one look at me and know it’s too late: the doors of my life have already swung wide open, and there’s nothing he can do to kick them closed.

My father stands up and makes his way down the row of tables and booths in my direction. He’s walking swiftly, shoes squeaking against the linoleum, his shoulders erect and proud. In his fist is his crumpled napkin. When he reaches my booth, he moves right past, not even shooting me a sideways look. He stops at Lou Mandlebaum’s table, where he whispers something into Lou’s ear. Lou mumbles something back as they walk outside, and it’s then I see the cops waiting under the blinking Menick’s sign.

Right away the two officers approach my father and Lou. I can’t hear a word anyone’s saying, but it’s obvious my father’s yelling the loudest. He’s waving his hands in the air as if he’s capable of pushing things around in the sky, while the cops keep their hands at their sides. At first glance the officers look alike, but then I notice one is almost handsome with a black crew cut; the other less handsome but kinder-looking, with a mustache and shiny pink lips like a woman’s. I wonder if either man has a daughter and a duplex and a restaurant they eat at every afternoon. The man with the crew cut walks over to a squad car parked out front. He fishes for keys inside his pants pockets and unlocks the backseat. The man with the nice lips takes my father and Lou by the elbow and leads them to the car, but they whip their arms out of his grip. The man leans so close to them that his breath must be hot on their faces, and whatever he says makes my father stop talking altogether. The cop handcuffs them both and pushes them into the backseat.

The car pulls away from the curb, and here I am, same girl as always, except for the boy I barely know beside me. Hal is fiddling with the saltshaker, asking me what in the world is happening outside, as if I have any control. There is the squad car, making its way down the wide gray avenue. I try to picture my father in the back but it’s impossible: all I know for certain is that the last thing on his mind is what I’ve been doing with the boy in my booth. The car stops, makes a right at the light and then it is gone. There is Gladys, rallying everyone around the booth that is now hers. There is Alan, setting the half-made Coke floats on the counter. He’s walking toward Gladys, motioning for me to join him so we can make a plan for what to do next. It occurs to me that Alan’s the only other person who understands exactly how it feels to watch his father get cuffed and thrown into the back of a squad car, the only other person who will be waiting for a call from jail tonight. I know I have no choice but to leave Hal in the booth and join Alan: some choices are made for you and that’s that. I wish I could say Alan looks different to me at this moment, but he looks the way I’ve always seen him, the way I know I always will: nervous and sweaty, bewildered and pale. There is the glass case of Jell-O, going around in circles, like not a thing has changed. There is the radio, turned up for news hour. The Eisenhowers had the White House staff up to their country house today, and Fantastique, a tricot fabric made of DuPont polyester yarn, has just hit department stores nationwide. It’s fast-drying and wrinkle-resistant, the radio announcer says, so forget about the laundry and enjoy your day outside.