A Ticket to Ride (11 page)

When Raymond had handed over the baby in Bakersfield, he told himself it was the best option for everyone—a short-term solution, a way to get past the tough times. But who was he kidding? He was simply doing what Suzette had asked him to, no matter how wrong it felt to him deep down, because he couldn’t stand to see her unhappy. He wanted to fix it, fix everything—but he’d made things worse in a way. Sending Jamie to Berna had given Suzette a kind of permission to duck out and forget her responsibilities. Although she swore it was only going to be for a while, that “while” kept growing. It was just going to be four more months or six, or when she got a good enough job, felt more settled, got her head on straight. But the right circumstances in the right order seemed always just out of Suzette’s reach. And if it pained Raymond that he never heard Suzette talk about her daughter, never saw her longing for Jamie or even missing her, wasn’t it his fault as much as Suzette’s? Hadn’t he been the one to spirit her away, to make the problem of the baby disappear?

Raymond wanted to be thinking of something else, or better yet, nothing at all, but as he drove through Bakersfield in the early light, he found himself ticking through the names of the boys and men Suzette had driven herself crazy over through the years. Her romantic history was a kind of landscape he could pass through the way he did his hometown, into the sad heart of it and out again, recognizing every farm, barn, and silo, every listing fence line. Bakersfield, like Suzette herself, didn’t change much—and it made Raymond feel sore, tired at bone level, imposed upon.

Now, while Suzette slept like a baby, he drove all the way up to the mouth of Berna and Nelson’s long drive and let the car idle. It was nearly dawn. Berna and Nelson would be awake soon if they weren’t already. He could pull in and wait out front of the house. If the first thing Suzette saw when she opened her eyes
was her daughter, maybe she’d be happy she was there; maybe she’d even forgive Raymond for going against her wishes. But it was just as likely she’d be pissed enough to spit nails, that they’d have a tense breakfast, his mother and sister glaring across the kitchen table at each other while little Jamie grew more and more confused. That they’d leave without anyone feeling good about the visit.

With an insinuating whisper, a sigh, Gerry & The Pacemakers began to sing “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” and it was too mournful, too loaded. Suzette in the backseat, wrapped in his jacket, was suddenly too much cargo. He couldn’t carry her to safer waters. He couldn’t make decisions for her, couldn’t live her life or protect her from anything or anyone, least of all herself.

When Raymond turned the car around and headed back to town, he turned the radio off altogether. The windshield was littered with a night’s worth of dead bugs the wipers only smeared. In fifteen minutes, he was pulled over to one side of the Safeway parking lot, watching skewers of light breach the roofline where a congregation of fat pigeons slept with their heads nestled down into ruffs of feathers. This was how Suzette slept, too, her shoulders up to her ears in a sustained flinch. What or who was filling her head in sleep? Maybe he’d never know. Maybe he was lucky not to.

Raymond went inside for juice and powdered doughnuts and a newspaper, and when he returned, Suzette was sitting up, her eyes pink and raw as new skin.

“Where are we?”

“Home sweet home, babe. Don’t you recognize it?” He twisted the juice cap off, offered the bottle to her.

“I’m starting to think this was a bad idea,” she said.

“I could have told you that.”

“I’m serious. I had an awful dream last night. Benny was already dead and talking to me. As if he didn’t
know
he was dead yet, you know?”

Raymond didn’t respond to her half-question because it was clear, as she continued telling her dream, looking out the window, that she wasn’t talking to him, but to herself or to no one at all.

“He was standing in a closet with the door open and there was a clothes hanger that went right through his ears, but no blood. And he was telling me that I’m going to die soon. Me, like he was sent to give me the message. ‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ that’s what he kept saying, like he didn’t want me to worry about anything.” Raymond looked into the window Suzette faced, at the fragments of her rumpled face reflected in the unclean glass. She didn’t look or sound like she thought
anything
was going to be okay.

“Suzy, sweetie,” he said, trying to call her back. “You’re not going to die. No one’s going to die. We can go over there right now and you can talk to Benny himself. How about that?”

“No. What I’m telling you is he’s dead. I know he is.”

“What do you want to do then? We came all this way and you don’t even want to go over there?”

“Why don’t you go?” she said, pinching at the fabric of Raymond’s jacket, which still lay in her lap, with her fingertips. “I’ll wait here.”

“You got us into this, sweets. It’s your party. I can’t do this for you.”

“Well then, just call or something. You don’t even have to tell Benny we’re here. Just say you wanted to know how things were going. A social call.”

“At six in the morning?”

“We’ll go get something to eat, call in an hour or so. How about that?”

And so they drove to the café, where Raymond stared into his eggs and the eggs stared back. At seven, he went to the back where there was a pay phone wedged next to the bathroom and
flipped through the book until he found the number. He waited a long minute before dialing, thinking it should be Suzette who was making the call or no one. But Benny’s parents, the Garabedians, had never cared for her, that much had been obvious from the beginning. Even after Jamie Lynn came to live at Berna and Nelson’s, Benny’s parents acted as though she didn’t exist. Berna said she’d run into Mrs. Garabedian at the grocery store in town a number of times, and that the woman had pointedly steered her cart into another checkout line. Raymond didn’t even think Berna and Nelson had told Jamie who her father was, and why would they? She already had one clear strike against her with Suzette leaving her for others to bring up, without knowing that her father was right across town, jobless and living in his parents’ house, with no intention of seeing her or taking any responsibility for her well-being.

Raymond had met the Garabedians only once, when Suzette had convinced him to pay them a visit when he was in town, to see if she could get some money from them or Benny for Jamie’s care. Thinking back, he couldn’t believe he actually went and sat in their kitchen and begged for Suzette, humiliating himself in the process—but she had kept at him and kept at him, the way she did, making him feel it was his duty to do this for her. It was crazy and useless in the end. Benny had let him in and given him a cup of coffee. It was the middle of the afternoon, but Benny was in his bathrobe, unshaven, with what appeared to be women’s slippers on his feet. He wouldn’t meet Raymond’s eyes, and stuttered, unable to finish a sentence, but what he was trying to say was that he didn’t think Jamie was his baby.

Raymond wanted to hit him, but Benny’s parents were in the room, sitting pleasantly enough at the table, stirring half-cold cups of coffee, corroborating. It wouldn’t have been very satisfying anyway, he guessed. There wasn’t anything for his fist to connect with. Benny was like an empty sock puppet. There
was no identifiable human expression on his face. His movements and reactions, the way he held his cup, stroked the belt of his bathrobe, cleared his throat, seemed hollow and delayed. Behind his eyes, there was an unanchored vastness Raymond could barely stand to think about, let alone look into. And
this
was the guy Suzette had fallen so in love with that when he left her, a few months after Jamie was sent to live with Berna, she was almost catatonic for the better part of a year? Raymond couldn’t count the number of times she had called him, sobbing over Benny. “No one knows me like Benny does, Ray. How can I live without him?”

Raymond sighed with disgust at the memory, then dropped a dime in the slot on the pay phone, waiting through four metallically guttural rings before Benny’s dad answered. His voice was grizzled and full of phlegm as he said, “Who is this?” instead of hello.

Raymond nearly hung up but pushed through. “Ray Pearson,” he said. “I’m sorry to call so early. But I’ve been wondering about your boy, and just wanted to know how he was doing.”

“Is this a joke? Are you a prank caller? I can have this call traced, you know. I can send the cops out right now.”

“No, no. It’s Raymond Pearson.” He was nearly shouting. “We’ve met before. I went to school with Benny.”

Silence.

“I’m Suzette’s brother,” he added finally.

“I know who you are. What do you people want with us now? I should think you’ve about done enough.”

“I’m not trying to cause you any trouble, it’s just my sister. She’s been worried about Benny.”

“The worst thing Benny ever did was get involved with that girl, and you can’t convince me she cared a lick for him at all. She’s worried about him you say? Well you can tell her she needn’t. Benny took his own life a little over two weeks ago. If
she wanted to worry, she should have worried when it would have done him some good.” The line went dead.

Raymond hung up the receiver, feeling like a heel for troubling the obviously grieving man. And what would he do with this new information that he didn’t want to know? He didn’t want to head back to the booth where Suzette waited for him, but where else was there to go? What else could he do?

“Well?” Suzette said, when he made it back to their table. She had her feet tucked under her, and chewed at the sides of her thumbnail with all the seriousness of an excavation.

“Everything’s fine,” Ray said, sliding behind his side of the table. His breakfast was cold now, but he picked at it anyway, forcing himself to chew a forkful of jellied fried egg, cardboard toast.

“Are you sure? That dream felt pretty real.”

“I’m sure. Benny’s just fine.” His eyes took in her face, the wash of relief there, and felt little or no satisfaction. He was utterly spent. He hadn’t slept at all the night before, but more than this, he felt the weight of terrible news he couldn’t share, the weight of a sister carried over impossible waters, through minefields, blind, down long and jagged and endless roads—all with absolute futility. “You can stop worrying now,” he said. “But I for one am sick of this town. What do you say we get out of here?”

C
laudia Fletcher turned sweet sixteen on August first. Her party began like a child’s, with a bakery cake, too-sweet frosting roses, rocky road ice cream melting on paper plates. Besides Fawn and myself there were four other guests, all girls, plus the parents. (Tom had been judiciously shuttled off to a friend’s for the evening.) While the blue flashcube on Mr. Fletcher’s Instamatic popped and spun, Mrs. Fletcher played hostess, right down to managing Claudia’s responses to her gifts. At nine, we were driven to the roller rink for “late skate,” where the whole session, even the hokey pokey and twenty minutes of limboing under a fake bamboo pole, was lit by strobe lights and by the giant glitter ball. During the couples’ skate, we all met out by the Dumpster at the back of the building and shared a joint, which, once we were back inside, worked to turn the light into ripped flower petals on the polished wooden floor and our own sweaty, wobbling bodies.

At eleven fifteen, Mr. Fletcher collected us, taking us back
to the house, where the slumber portion of the party was to ostensibly begin. We dutifully changed into our nightclothes and brushed our teeth. When Mrs. Fletcher came in to say goodnight, we were all sitting quietly on our sleeping bags on the floor. Claudia waited the standard twenty minutes, tiptoed down the hall to check for snoring, then came back to declare the real party officially begun. It was midnight. By one thirty, everyone in the room knew absolutely everything about everybody else, only we were too drunk to know it.

“I never” was the drinking game we played, a combination of truth-or-dare and liar’s poker. Whoever’s turn it was would confess something about herself in the negative. That statement could be either a lie or the truth, but it had to be personal. For instance, a girl might say, “I’ve never shoplifted dirty magazines.” If she was telling the truth, she could simply sit there, basking in her virtue. If she was lying, she had to drink deeply from a concoction that Claudia had cooked up (one part peach schnapps, one part peppermint schnapps, one part instant iced tea, sweet enough and foul enough to curl your toes), as did anyone else in the circle who couldn’t truthfully say she had never stolen pornography.

When we first started playing, I thought it was going to be pretty tame. There was no penalty of any kind for playing it safe and narrow, and some of the girls opted for this route at first. “I’ve never cheated on a test,” said Diane Yost, who volunteered to go first. Patty Clabber, a pretty but timid-looking brunette sitting to Diane’s right, was clearly flummoxed for something to confess and blurted, “I’ve never stolen thread from my mother’s sewing basket.”

“Give me a break,” groaned Claudia. She took up her glass of “tea,” said, “I’ve never roller-skated naked,” and emptied her drink in three theatrical gulps. That she was alone in her odd confession didn’t seem to matter. Everyone howled with laugh
ter, including Claudia herself. And the game grew more interesting suddenly, escalating quickly.

“I’ve never had sex with two guys in one day,” said Amber Noonan. “Not at the same
time
,” she clarified before emptying her glass, “that would be slutty.” Fawn drank on that round too, and although a few of the girls’ eyebrows lifted, no one asked questions. That was the beauty of “I never.” Details weren’t part of the game.

Next in the circle was Tessa Dodd, who confessed she’d spent a night in jail for “borrowing” a neighbor woman’s pearl necklace (out of her underwear drawer, no less), and then it was Fawn’s turn. “I’ve never sucked a total stranger’s dick,” she said proudly.

I had no idea what she was referring to or who. She hadn’t told me this story, and either she was making it up for effect, or it was simply something she had kept to herself. Just how much did I know about Fawn? I wondered, as she downed her drink and pressed Claudia for a refill.

It occurred to me that, in other circles, the point of the game might be to reveal little or nothing, to concoct the perfect “I never” confession that would allow you to stay sober, chaste, virtuous, while drawing others out, forcing them to confess to doing what you’d only dreamed up. In this version, however, the girls seemed hell-bent on spilling every last gritty secret. And just when I wondered what on earth I could possibly contribute without looking like a fool, Fawn cut in. “Why don’t we just skip you, Jamie?” She turned to the group, her voice arching with sarcasm. “You’ll have to forgive our
little
Jamie,” she said. “Nothing’s ever happened to her. Here, honey,” she said. “I’ll go for you.” Crouching so that she looked smaller, shier, she stuttered, “Um, I’ve nnn-ever k-k-k-issed a b-boy,” then took the smallest sip of her tea. That was supposed to be me, I realized with horror. I could feel my face growing hot as I flushed,
but no one seemed to notice. They were all laughing, and then it was Claudia’s turn again. Only I knew it wasn’t meant to be a joke at all. Fawn hadn’t even particularly wanted to embarrass me, it was simply how she saw me: a peon, baby, nun. I was a bug Fawn flicked off her arm without looking or thinking, a bit of hair blown out of her eyes.

I stood up, feeling sick suddenly, and went to find the bathroom. I headed to the right, where I could see a crack of light beneath one door, and realized that I was drunk. For the better part of an hour, I’d been taking recreational hits of my drink without even realizing it. Now the hall was like a collapsing tunnel. I put both hands out, steadying myself, and aimed my body at what little light there was. When I made it to the door, I opened it to find not the bathroom but Tom’s bedroom, and him in it. He sprawled lazily out on his water bed, wearing cutoff shorts and nothing else. I glanced quickly around the room, from the zebra-print bedspread to the pinup poster of Jill St. John, to the chain of beer tabs draped over a hook on the wall and nearly trailing the floor.

“You lost?” His eyes flicked dismissively over my nightgown with its lace collar and cap sleeves.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, backing out of the room.

“No hey, wait up. I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the door, waiting for his question. But he wasn’t in a big hurry. He sloshed his way over to the edge of the bed and then sat there, scratching his bare chest. Finally, he stood and walked over to me, stopping when he was less than a foot away. “What’s the deal with your friend?” he said. “Is she crazy or something?”

“Fawn?”

“Yeah. She’s like stalking me now. You need to tell her to back off, all right? She’s freaking me out.”

My mind reeled. Didn’t Fawn say Tom was the one who’d
gotten too serious? Wasn’t that why she’d decided to cut him loose? “Maybe you should tell Fawn yourself,” I said, not knowing how to respond. Tom made me nervous. He was half-naked, and close enough that I could have reached out and touched him if I wanted. And then there were his yellow-green eyes, staring me down.

“I
have
told her, that’s what I’m saying. She’s not exactly getting the hint.” He walked back over to the bed, and reached under a long blanket that was draped over the edge, to pull out a small bong. The glass bulb was smoke-stained black on the inside, all the way up to the mouthpiece. He cradled it in one hand as he lit the stem, inhaled deeply, and then offered it to me.

“I should probably get back,” I said, shaking my head.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

What am I doing?
I suddenly thought.
I’m in Tom’s room, and I really want to go back to the slumber party where Fawn is being a bitch?
“Maybe just one hit then,” I said, closing the door.

We shared the bong and then Tom put on a Jethro Tull album, blowing on each side before placing it lovingly on the turntable. When he lifted the needle to set it in the groove, it was with the precision of a surgeon. “Aqualung” flared like a match into the room and only then did he seem to remember I was still there.

“So what’s your dilemma?” he said, coming back to the bed where he sat next to me. The water sloshed, slapping the inside plastic mattress with little fishtail sounds.

“My what?”

“You know, your
dilemma
. Your plan, your
propaganda
.”

I squinted at him in the dim room, but seeing his mouth more clearly didn’t make his meaning any plainer.

“Are you going to get all weird on me like your girlfriend?”

“Definitely not,” I said.

“That’s what I like to hear.” He took my shoulders in his hands and steered me that way, down onto the bed. His face blurred,
inches from my own. I could smell tacos and pot on his breath and some kind of sweet liquor, maybe Southern Comfort. I was sure he was about to kiss me, but he didn’t. He wasn’t looking at my face, even, but at the floppy bow at the lace collar of my nightgown. “You do have nice tits,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks,” I said, but immediately felt stupid for saying it. After all, it wasn’t as if he had complimented my shoes.

“So why are you here, anyway?”

“You invited me.” I tried to sit up but couldn’t get a purchase on the rocking bed. “You’re the one who asked me to stay.”

“No, no. You can stay.” He held my shoulders firmly. “But what do you want? This?” he said, grabbing one breast roughly through my nightgown. He grazed my nipple with his thumb and currents of electricity shot out seven ways at once. “Or this, maybe?” He straddled me then, easily pinning my hips down, his knees close to my rib cage. I closed my eyes. I was terrified. Was this it, then? If I said the word, would we have sex? Should I tell Tom I was a virgin or did he already know? “I want
you
,” I whispered.

And just like that, something changed. His eyes snapped shut then open again, and he made a little huffing noise. “Guess I was right,” he said. “You’re all the same.” And then: “You’d better go back to your party.”

I sat up dizzily. My body throbbed in odd places. I could feel my pulse in my forehead, in my fingertips, in a vein that ran along the top of my foot.
He was right?
About what? Had I just failed a test or something? Was I supposed to say no, supposed to turn him down? Then why had he teased me? Was it some kind of game or trick from the beginning? I moved numbly to the door, then turned back to see Tom kneeling reverentially at the turntable. He didn’t look up.

When I made it back to Claudia’s room, almost an hour had passed. Half of the girls were already asleep, sacked out in their
sleeping bags in the middle of the floor. I stepped over them carefully to get to Claudia’s bed, where Claudia and Fawn sat sharing a cigarette.

“Where the hell have you been?” Fawn said.

“I threw up,” I said. “In the bathroom. Then I passed out, I guess.”

“Figures,” said Fawn, rolling her eyes.

“It happens,” Claudia said more gently. “Maybe you should go lie down.”

Claudia seemed genuinely concerned, and it occurred to me that this was what friends were supposed to do—care about you, notice when you were feeling lousy and try to make you feel better. But there was Fawn, my supposed best friend, glaring at me with disgust.

Without saying another word, I crawled over to the sleeping bag I’d borrowed from Raymond and buried myself in it. The outside was a heavy green burlap sort of fabric, the inside was deep red flannel with a Western print, cowboys and lariats, horned bulls standing in pools of kicked-up dust. When I breathed, I could taste the smell of it, something swampy and historical and not entirely pleasant. But the urge to stay hidden was strong. I didn’t want to see anyone or be seen. I didn’t want to listen to anyone or to confess my newly acquired secret, though silence put me in an especially lonely position. Fawn was possibly the only person in the world who could help me translate the humiliating weirdness I’d just experienced with Tom, and also the one person in the world I could never talk to about it. So I lay there alone, my arms crossed over my head to hold the marshmallowy fabric of the bag off my face, and let the moments I spent with Tom in his room spin through my head like images in a viewfinder, as puzzling and coded to me as photographs from someone else’s exotic vacation.

The next morning as we walked home from Claudia’s, Fawn said, “You’re awfully quiet.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“Really? About what? What has our
witto
Jamie got to think about?” she said, slipping right into her baby-talk impression of me from the night before.

“Shut up.”

“Shut up,” Fawn mocked.

“Leave me
alone
!”

“Leave me
alone
!”

I couldn’t bear to hear Fawn’s version of my voice coming back at me, weak and whiney. “Fuck off,” I said, flaring up.

“Fuck off.” Fawn wasn’t about to give up the game. It was working too well.

“
Stop
it, Fawn.”

“
Stop
it, Fawn.”

I couldn’t bear it a moment longer. I trotted ahead, trying to get far enough away from Fawn so that I didn’t have to hear her anymore, but Fawn tagged me easily. “Waah wah, where are you going, little baby?”

“I’m not a baby,” I said, spinning around.

“Really?” Fawn’s left eyebrow arced with perfect precision, like always. “Only babies run away.”

“You want to know where I was last night?” The words rushed, crowding each other to get out of my mouth, and it felt strangely good, that sensation of being out of control, strangely powerful. “I was with Tom. In his
bed
room.”

“Bullshit.”

“I was too.” And then, “I fucked him.” Now I had done it, crossed a line into new territory where I said things like
I fucked him
. I couldn’t take it back; I didn’t want to take it back.

“You fucked him?
You
fucked Tom? You’re such a fat liar.”

“You’re the liar,” I said. “You were all,
‘Tom’s getting too serious,’
but he broke up with you. He told me all about it.”

“What?”
Fawn spit the word as if it were acid. “He told you
what
?”