Blue Plate Special (16 page)

In the spring of my sophomore year, I discovered alcohol myself. I was in Mexico with the Mingus Spanish club on our yearly trip to Mazatlán, a trip intended to allow us to try out our supposed language skills in a natural setting but which in reality allowed us to do whatever we wanted in a country without a minimum drinking age. Alec, our chaperone, was the father of one of Susan’s classmates and also some sort of pillar of the community. Alec was thirty-six, handsome in a lean, wolfish, nervous way. He was recently divorced, although I didn’t know it at the time. I had met him on last year’s Spanish club trip, when he had also been the chaperone. We were pals then, but he’d been married, and I had been very much a kid still.

And so, on our second evening in Mazatlán, when Alec asked me to come to his room for a drink, I went without a second thought.

He mixed two drinks, told me they were Tom Collinses, and handed me one. I took a sip and loved it instantly and took a bigger gulp and felt my chest get warm. While we drank out on his little balcony, we gossiped, as we usually did, analyzing all the other students on the trip together—who had a crush on whom, who was making out with whom, and were they doing it or just fooling around.

The theme of sex well and truly established, Alec mixed us another round.

“So tell me, Katie, have you done a lot of things with boys before?” he asked me.

Drunk and naive, I answered honestly: “Not a thing.”

This was true basically. I’d gone on several first dates with various boys, cute ones I had crushes on, all of which involved some minor league French-kissing, but that didn’t count. After each date, I hadn’t been able to talk to the boy anymore or look him in the eye. I was rendered paralyzingly shy at even the whiff of potential romance with someone I liked. So nothing had ever proceeded beyond that.

It was time to go to dinner. We all climbed into the van, about twelve of us altogether, ten students along with Alec and our Spanish teacher, Mr. Fallon. I sat in the back of the van by the window and looked dreamily out at the nighttime Mexican resort city sliding by. I loved being drunk. At dinner, we sat at a long table and ate enchiladas and tacos. I made obscure, urbane jokes I thought were witty but that no one got, and I flirted brazenly with Hector, a senior I’d never really noticed before but who suddenly seemed irresistibly cute.

After dinner, we all went to a big, glitzy disco near the beach. It was the era of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer; all the girls wore sundresses and wedge sandals. On the dance floor, Alec took my hand and put his arms around me and nestled me against him and kissed my neck. Startled out of my intoxicated dreaminess, I looked him in the eye but didn’t say anything. At the end of the song, I went back to the group of girls I’d been hanging out with. I didn’t dance with him again.

Later, I watched him dance with Jody. She was only one year older than I was, but to me she looked fully grown-up. She was a sexy, plump blond girl with a wide, rapacious mouth, a smutty laugh, and a gap between her front teeth. She danced
with her arms around Alec’s neck, laughing up at him, her body pliant and curvy against his.

For the rest of the trip, Alec always seemed to be right nearby. We hung out by the hotel pool together, sat together at meals. The sudden sexual feeling between us was strange and confusing to me. I had thought we were friends; everything had tilted and shifted. The alcohol had made my brain cloudy. For days afterward, I had a hangover.

Just across the border, on the way home, when we stopped to eat at the same A&W in Ajo that I’d loved as a kid, Alec asked me if he could drive me home when we got back to the high school. I agreed: I had some things to say to him. About an hour later, in the van, one of the other girls offered me a ride. Embarrassed to admit that Alec was driving me, not wanting to cause gossip, I kept my mouth shut. After a tense second, Alec said blandly, “I’m driving her home.” I sensed a few people exchanging glances. Still, I didn’t say a word or look at anyone. I knew they’d talk, but there was nothing going on: there was nothing I could say in my own defense.

When the bus parked in the high school lot in Cottonwood, I went with Alec to his little green TR7 (a midlife-crisis car, I realize now). Without a word, we got in. We were silent on highway 89A, through the Verde Valley to the switchbacks up to Jerome. The sexual tension had come with us from Mexico like a souvenir.

In Jerome, just before we got to the old high school, I said dramatically, like a soap opera character, “Can you please pull over? I have to say something to you.”

Alec pulled the car onto the shoulder and turned off the engine.

I said in a heated voice, “You know, Alec, nothing can happen between us. It’s inappropriate. I’m too young.”

No doubt I had learned the word “inappropriate” from my mother, who had no doubt picked it up in her feminist
consciousness-raising group in grad school. Wherever she’d found it, it was useful to me now.

“I wish you were five years older,” he said, as if it were my fault that I wasn’t.

Then he drove me home. We said good-bye.

All through the spring of my sophomore year, as I rehearsed the part of Julie Jordan in
Carousel
, wrote lengthy essays for my gifted-program independent study on the American short story with the school vice principal, and educated my regular English teacher (to his very obvious irritation) on the subjunctive mood and proper usage of “lie” and “lay,” I sent away for brochures from expensive, arty, faraway boarding schools, Putney and Interlochen. I was dying to get out of the Verde Valley. I felt as if I’d never get anywhere in life unless I could get a “real” education. I pored over these brochures and application forms with desperate concentration, but I could see no way to go to any of them. We were broke and had no connections.

When my grandmother finagled me a summer job waiting tables at the Threefold guesthouse in her Rudolf Steiner community in Rockland County, New York, I took it. Here, at least, was a chance to be near New York City for a summer, which was the place I most wanted to be, the place I intended to live someday. My mother scraped together the money for a plane ticket, and I was all set.

Early that summer, before I left, Jody asked me out for lunch. She drove up to Jerome in her yellow Toyota Corolla and picked me up at the Talley House and drove me over to a restaurant in the Schoolhouse, a new arts-and-crafts cluster of shops in the old elementary school building. The café she had chosen was chichi and touristy, the kind of place middle-aged women went for lunch. We weren’t friends; I barely knew her. She seemed decades older than me; I was a goofy kid without a driver’s license who daydreamed all day and wore cutoffs, and she was dressed like a grown woman with an imitation Chanel
scarf, sophisticated perfume, and a pearl necklace. It seemed surreal to be sitting there picking at our salads and sipping our iced teas. Why had she invited me?

“I want to talk about Alec Wood,” said Jody finally.

“Okay,” I said, suddenly understanding. “What about him?”

“Well, I figured we should,” she said. “Since we’re both involved with him.”

I realized that she had slept with him in Mexico, that night after the disco, and again after that. I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Right?” she said, watching me closely. “I thought maybe we should talk it over.”

So she was in love with him.

“Oh,” I said, trying to figure out how to tell her the truth. I had developed a fantasy crush on Alec inspired entirely by my flattery at his frank and ongoing interest in me, but nothing had ever happened with him, or would ever happen, even though we had gone running alone together a few times that spring.

In my fantasies, though, I was Alec, molesting some idealized version of myself. It was too freaky to actually imagine my fifteen-year-old self having sex with a grown man, so I did what I’d always been so good at doing: I took an upsetting situation and transposed my identity to the person who had the power, like a version of Stockholm syndrome in my own head.

Anyway, I happened to know that he was sleeping with Lisa Hatch, a teacher at Mingus. She was twenty-five, of perfectly legal age. He’d brought Lisa running with me the last two times we’d gone, and it had been obvious to me that they were a couple.

“No, he’s sleeping with Lisa. Miss Hatch,” I said.

Jody’s expression was complex; I was still too immature to have had any experience in parsing out the nuances of female competitiveness over men. But her face told me a few things at once: she was relieved that I wasn’t sleeping with Alec, that I wasn’t her rival; she was grateful to know the truth about Lisa;
but most of all, she was devastated to know for sure that Alec was in fact with someone else. She might also have felt foolish for asking me to lunch, now that she saw how naive and insignificant I was in this story.

Of course, she said none of these things aloud, maybe because I didn’t invite her to, and I didn’t tell her my own feelings about Alec or cozily initiate an exchange of lovelorn confidences. She seemed miles ahead of me—she had actually had the guts to sleep with him, while all I’d done was fantasize about him and hold him self-protectively at bay. I felt gauche and reserved; we made small talk for the rest of the lunch. When we were finished eating, Jody paid the bill and drove me home.

Two weeks after my awkward lunch with Jody, I left the Verde Valley to spend the summer in Spring Valley, New York, among my grandmother’s fellow Rudolf Steiner disciples. The Threefold Community included a Waldorf school (where my grandmother was the librarian) as well as an anthroposophical center, a eurythmy school, an enormous mystery drama auditorium, a Weleda store where they sold anthroposophical medical and beauty products, a small but productive biodynamic farm, and the Fellowship, an old-age community up the hill from the community proper. It was a suburban-rural enclave nestled into a valley and a hillside between two thoroughfares, thirty miles from New York City. There was a pond; there were woods. When I arrived, I was shocked at how lush and green and humid it was there. I loved the East Coast instantly; being in the trees felt cozy and enfolding and safe after the stark, dizzyingly open desert, which had always made me feel exposed and minuscule. I never wanted to go back out west again.

That summer, I lived in a room above the old summer kitchen, which was behind the main house of the Threefold Farm guesthouse. I waited tables every day for the main meal at midday and for the simpler evening supper. The long tables in the dining room were filled with spiritual types, followers of Rudolf Steiner, eurythmists and philosophers and seekers
of truth, who accepted their plates of food as if the notion of eating were simply a necessary function to sustain their investigations into Ahriman and Lucifer, the astral and etheric bodies, and the threefold nature of man. There were grandiose, batty old ladies with hectic rouge on their cheeks and alarmingly loud clear voices; willowy, ardent men in sandals with Adam’s apples bobbing in their slender necks; robust Germanic women in corduroy jumpers, with loose gray buns and faint mustaches; twinkly-eyed white-haired old gents in corduroy trousers who smelled of lavender soap and tobacco; and wispy young women who swanned around in flowing sundresses looking like exalted poetesses.

I was fascinated and repelled by these people, and wrote letters to my mother filled with laughing, satirical descriptions of them. She had of course grown up among similar types, had been forcibly inculcated since birth in all this hogwash, and had fled the instant she got the chance. For years, my grandmother had been dying to bring a granddaughter into the fold; I was a sort of pawn between the two of them, but I had my own agenda, having nothing to do with theirs.

When I wasn’t waiting on and observing the local fauna, I fell in with the community teenagers, all of whom went to Green Meadow, the Waldorf school just up Hungry Hollow Road off Route 45. With these kids, I smoked Marlboros, ate meatball heroes up at the Barn (the local deli) and drank beer at the Silo (the local bar), went to Shakespeare in the Park in “the city,” swam in the local pond, and got drunk at parties. I made out with a boy named Christopher one drunken night and instantly fell in love with him, but he left the next day and wouldn’t be coming back again until school started at the end of the summer, so I figured I’d never see him again. I made fast friends with a red-haired, hilarious girl who was a year younger than I was and who waited tables with me. The older kids, the seniors and recent graduates, all rightly thought I was
provincial and full of myself, but they accepted me enough to encourage me to apply to their school.