Be Mine (14 page)

He looked at my legs, then at my face.

Those eyes.

He said nothing, needed to say nothing. After a second or two I said, "Let me buy that for you," nodding at his cup.

Bram looked at the cup himself, as if he hadn't realized he still had it, and shrugged, and said, "Okay." He leaned toward me as I reached over to take the coffeepot from him. I could feel his breath on my neck when he said, "So. Tonight?"

"Yes," I said, in a whisper, before I even knew I'd opened my mouth to speak.

He took a step back. I poured the coffee into my cup, but only halfway because my hand was shaking and I was afraid I would spill it.

Bram waited at the end of the line as I paid for the coffee, and when I joined him there he said, "I can't sit down this morning, I'm afraid. I'm meeting a student in my office. See you later?"

"Okay," I said.

This time, my tone was businesslike, although I'd felt disappointed. The word
jilted
flew quickly through my mind—a dragonfly on fire—before he smiled at me. That dimple. And he looked, again, at my legs, and my blood seemed to surge at my wrists, behind my ears. When he looked back into my eyes, I had to look away, over his shoulder, where I glimpsed Garrett standing in a crowd of students, talking to a boy who looked like Chad, but wasn't Chad—just the jawline, the hair, had reminded me of Chad, who would never have worn that boy's nylon Red Sox jacket.

Bram turned. As he walked away, I stood still with my coffee shivering blackly in the Styrofoam cup in my hand—a bit of light sparking in ribbons across it, like the sun over a very deep but narrow lake.

Saunter,
I thought, looking up from the coffee to Bram's back.

The man
sauntered

His walk was so casually sexy (such a long gait—even slowly, it could get him quickly to wherever he needed to go) that it made him look like a man who'd never once in his life been in a hurry. As he passed Garrett, he must have said something to him, because Garrett turned, and they high-fived, and the boy who looked like Chad gave Bram a thumbs-up, and for a horrible moment I imagined that thumbs-up had something to do with me, and the bad moment caused the coffee in my cup—even half hall—to spill over, and one burning drop landed on my ankle.

Was it possible?

Could Bram have told anyone?

Could this all somehow be some kind of—plot? Joke? Game?

No.

I took a sip of the coffee. It burned my lips.

No.

This was just a bit of terror left over from high school, where such games had been invented, perpetrated, and then abandoned. It was just the cold bad memory of a January morning in homeroom after a weekend during which I'd let Tony Houseman touch my breasts, under my shirt, inside my bra, in the backseat of his brother's car.

Up front, his brother was driving.

He'd dropped us off at the movie we'd gone to see
(The Way We Were),
then picked us up afterward.

All along, it had been that brother I'd been in love with. Bobby. A senior, when I was a freshman. Bobby was quiet and brooding, while Tony, his little brother, was a class clown—a boy who never shut up, who cracked so many jokes that, by default, a few of them were unforgettably funny, but mostly were lame, tiresome, crude.

Bobby, to my knowledge, had never had a serious girlfriend, and he ran with a group of boys who seemed to be the same—indifferent to girls, but radiantly handsome, athletic boys who occasionally shook one another's hands in the hallway, a gesture so adult and masculine it made everyone else passing in the hallway appear moronic and childlike, as if we were cartoon characters who'd stumbled into the real world.

Tony and I made out through most of the movie in the back of the theater, which was mostly empty anyway. He'd invited me to the movie, then paid for the movie, bought me popcorn and an enormous 7 UP. I felt obligated—and he was attractive enough. I let him run his hands up and down my side, put his tongue so deeply into my mouth I felt I might gag, and then he'd pulled away with his hand an inch or so from my breast and said, "Can I touch it?"

"No," I said, moving my arm into my torso to trap his hand. "Not now."

"When?"

I didn't want, I suppose, to appear stingy. I said, "Not in the theater. Later, in the car."

We hadn't been in the backseat of Bobby Houseman's car two seconds before Tony began the tongue explorations again. It was dark in the car, eleven o'clock at night, and we were on the freeway when he pulled away and whispered, "
Now?
"

"Okay," I whispered back.

Up front, Bobby Houseman seemed to be nodding to the music on the radio, watching the road ahead of him, but as soon as Tony started to push my shirt and bra up, exposing my breast in a way I hadn't anticipated at all, Bobby Houseman glanced in the rearview mirror—and I could see him looking directly into it, then directly into my eyes, and then to my naked breast. "Squeeze it, Tony," he said. "Bite it, buddy."

My whole body flushed with shame, but it was too late. I was here, I'd allowed this, I'd agreed to this, it would do no good now to struggle away, to pull my shirt down fast. I let Tony do it. I let him squeeze my breast, and then put his face down to my chest and feel around there with his mouth until he found my nipple, which he clamped down on hard, while his brother watched, and then said, when Tony resurfaced and looked toward Bobby for approval, "Good work, Tone. Good job, little brother. Next time get into her panties. Stick your finger up her." We'd finally pulled up in front of my house by then and, heart pounding, I pulled my shirt down and hurried from the car, straight to my room, and got in bed with my clothes on.

The next day, Sunday, I spent convincing myself that it had never happened. Bobby Houseman couldn't have seen into the backseat. He didn't see my breast. He didn't watch as Tony bit my nipple. He wasn't really talking about me. He was talking to Tony about something else. It was some brotherly conversation they'd had that had nothing to do with me. Because it was impossible that Bobby Houseman had watched his brother feel and bite my breasts. Or if he'd watched, he hadn't
seen.

But, after homeroom, during which one of Tony Houseman's pals licked his lips at my chest when I walked in, and then in the hallway—those boys, passing me in a masculine wall, starting to laugh—when one of Bobby Houseman's friends turned around and said to Bobby, "So you say they're nice little tits? Little brown nipples?" and Bobby Houseman answered loudly, "Yeah, but you have to ask my brother what they taste like," it was as if veil after veil were being ripped off of me in quick succession, exposing me to myself so quickly I could hardly keep walking.

No.

That was high school. I'm a grown woman now.
And Bram Smith is no high school boy—although he isn't thirty, as I'd thought he was, but twenty-eight. (Perhaps I was on that date, or one like it, the day he was born.) But, when I'd said to him, "I know you know that nobody can know—" he'd looked at me with grave sincerity, the wisdom of a man who'd had many secret lovers, who'd been one, and said, "Discretion? You bet. Of course. You have nothing to fear from me, sweetheart. I'm the soul of discretion."

Still, when Garrett looked from Bram to me, then caught my eye and waved, I flinched. I wanted to turn, walk away as if I hadn't seen him, but then he called out, "Mrs. Seymour!" and nodded good-bye to his friend in the red nylon jacket, sprinting over to me.

"Garrett," I said when he was at my side.

"Just wondered how Chad's doing," he said. "I e-mailed him a couple times, and got nothing."

"Chad's fine," I said, trying to smile more naturally than I was smiling. "Chad's probably just busy with school."

"Yeah, well, if you talk to him, tell him I said hi. Are you walking over to your office? If you are, I'll go with you."

"Yes," I said. "But I'm stopping in the women's room first. I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Garrett said. "I'm just glad to see you."

This puppylike joy. Where, I wondered, did it come from? Both of Garrett's parents had struck me as somber, if not morose, back when they were alive. And the tragedies of their deaths—how had Garrett come out of that nest with this personality?

This optimism?

I thought of Chad. Jon, at least, if not I, was
made
of optimism—and yet Chad,
our
son, would never have stood in a cafeteria speaking so happily and without pretense to the mother of one of his friends. He would never have worn this simple plaid shirt. A pocket with two pencils in it. The buzz cut. All this unabashed plainness, this pure spirit of it. If, somehow, Chad had found himself here instead of Berkeley, he would have been like some of the students I'd had in my classes, scowling in the back, too bright to bother shining. He would have nodded politely to the mother of his friend, certainly, but he would not have waved to her, smiling. He would not have jogged across the cafeteria on a Monday morning to ask her a question about her son.

But, I couldn't walk to my office with Garrett. My hands were trembling. If I had to speak to him, more than a few words, I wasn't sure I could keep the sound of it, of
Bram,
out of my voice.

We parted at the ladies' room.

"I'll see you around, Mrs. Seymour," Garrett said. "You have a great day."

I
N MY
Introduction to Literature class I was strangely nervous, seized by the kind of stage fright I used to have as a very new teacher.

We were discussing the first act of
Hamlet,
and the students seemed to be both bored and made anxious by it—a kind of confusion that manifested itself in yawning, fidgeting, defensiveness. Derek Heng's arm shot up and he said, "What's the point of reading
Hamlet
if we don't understand it?" to which every other head in the room nodded. Earlier, Bethany Stout had suggested that we find a better translation, because the one we were reading was so old-fashioned—a statement that had struck me as both sadly ignorant and somehow very savvy. I was so surprised by her suggestion that I was only able to stammer out the obvious, that this wasn't a translation, that it was old-fashioned because it was old.

"The point," I said, answering Derek Heng, "of reading
Hamlet
is to
learn
how to understand it."

But, because it seemed obvious, then, that the problem was that I wasn't
teaching
them how to understand it, I felt something like the moat around a sand castle cave in somewhere near my sternum, and I could go no farther, found myself completely unable even, flipping the thin pages of the text on my lap, to find some passage that they might see the beauty and relevance of.

(Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest.)

My body felt cold. I was wearing a skirt that was too short, I was sure of that now. I let them go early and went back to my office.

There, I listened to the messages on my voice mail:

Two messages from students with excuses for missing class. A car wouldn't start. A baby had an ear infection. A message from a textbook saleswoman, a wrong number, and Amanda Stefanski asking if I would have time for a cup of coffee tomorrow or the next day, that we had a problem student in common and she wanted to ask me for some advice. And then, Jon, asking if I'd seen my "boyfriend."

You be a good girl,
he said.
But not too good.

And there was such a lighthearted obliviousness to the statement that it made me, briefly, angry, before I thought,
No.
It wasn't Jon. It was the bad class. I was cold, and tired, and even if I
didn't
yet, I
should
have been feeling guilty.

Still, for the first time, I thought to myself that this fantasy of Jon's was insulting, that it was like the kind of market testing his software firm did when they came up with an idea—shopping it around to see if anyone but themselves would find any value in this particular piece of intellectual property before any more time or energy was invested in it—and I held the phone away from my ear until the end of the message.

Last, the physician's assistant from Summerbrook Nursing Home calling to tell me that my father was being put on a low dose of Zoloft.

He's been so depressed these last few weeks,
she said.
He's completely lost his appetite, and he never wants to leave his room. Give us a call?

I dialed the number to Summerbrook as quickly as I could—my fingers fumbling on the numbers as I punched them. Already, however, the physician's assistant had left for the day, and the nurse's aide I spoke to didn't seem to know who my father was.

I sighed, exasperated. "Can you transfer me to room twenty-seven?" I asked her.

She wasn't sure, she said, but she would try.

There were a long few minutes of dead space in which I could hear what sounded like Lake Michigan roaring in the distance—a fluid undulating rhydim that might have been coming from the phone, or from inside my own ear—and then there was a click. She'd managed it, die transfer.

The phone rang eleven times before an old man (my father?) answered it.

"Dad?" I asked.

"Yes?" he said.

"Dad, it's me. Sherry."

"Yes."

"Are you okay, Dad? I had a message that you've lost your appetite."

"Huh?"

"Dad, are you feeling okay? Are you fine?"

"I'm fine," he said.

"I'm going to come to visit," I said.

"I don't need anything," he said.

"I know, Dad," I said. "But I need to see you. I miss you."

"Do what you need to do," he said.

I said, "I love you, Dad"—although I still didn't feel certain the man on the other end of the line was my father.

How could I know?

What did my father's voice sound like now, and how could I recognize it?

The voice of that younger father was the one I would have known him by, and that voice was gone, and now his voice was interchangeable with the voices of all elderly men—a scratchy, distant voice, like something rising from beneath a boulder, like the voice of a small bird being held too tightly in a child's hands.