Brother/Sister (3 page)

I’m telling you, I was a mess.

Somehow, I got myself down off the podium though.

What I wanted was to find someplace to hide for five minutes, a secret room, someplace dark and cool and hard to find where I could breathe into a paper bag a few times, clear my head, try to at least remember my own name.

I headed up the pebbly white path that led to the clubhouse, nonchalant. Or trying to be, anyway. Reminding myself the whole way not to run.

People kept coming at me, though. Congratulating me. Grabbing at my hand and cranking down on my fingers. Pounding me on the back so hard you’d think they were trying to dislodge some chunk of food that had gotten caught in my windpipe. All these guys with pastel polo shirts tucked into their clown pants.

Every pro from every country club in like a hundred mile radius had shown up. They were old, like in their thirties, at least. And they had these wistful expressions on their faces—every single one of them, the same Yoda look—like they were remembering back to when they were the hotshot and wondering if they should encourage me to emulate their paltry lives or let me know now that it all ends in heartbreak, becoming a washed-up also-ran, adjusting the strokes of doctors and their ungrateful children.

And then there were the paunchy, even older guys with their fifty-dollar haircuts and brightly colored ties. These were businessmen. They wanted to talk, to butter me up. Me! Like, who in their right mind would think I could be an important contact for them. They were talking about sponsorships, how if I gave a good showing in L.A., they were sure, I’d be hearing from Ping and Oakley and Adidas. One guy in particular, a sweaty, weedy guy with a salt-and-pepper crew cut who owned a coffee franchise I’d never heard of way up in San Francisco, kept nosing around about how I should attend Hunter Mahan’s Teen Challenge Camp and asking if I’d thought about it, and if I could afford it and all sorts of questions like this. I figured out afterward that he was fumbling around trying to offer to pay, but by then it was too late, I’d blown him off in my desperation to get away from the crowd.

Finally, I was able to scramble inside. I ran to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall and sat there closed off behind those orange metal walls, staring in amazement at my new trophy. Imagining how great it was going to look when the nameplate had been affixed, and I had it sitting on top of the bookshelf in my bedroom.

That’s when I was finally able to admit to myself this was real. I really had won.

I stayed in there for a long time. I could hear people shuffling in and out, flushing the urinals, turning the taps on and off. The blow-dryers. The clack of dress shoes on the tiles. That was fine though. I was isolated in my stall. I had room to think.

I’m not the kind of guy who wins things. I’m the guy bad things happen to. The guy who, even when he’s trying to do something nice, ends up making a big mess of everything.

Like, say, the time I tried to let Rose Lee bud in line in the lunch room because she wouldn’t stop hissing at her friends about how they were running out of Rice Krispy Treats and she had to have one, it was the only thing that day that even looked edible. I said, “Rose, you can go in front of me if you want.” And what did she do? She dropped her head down into her shoulders and gave me this revolted look like I was a sea creature, one of those giant squids they discovered a few years ago, and she was dumbfounded to learn I was capable of speech.

She turned to her friends. “Did he just speak to me?” There were three of them, Rose and her two friends, all of them clutching their flute cases to their chests a little tighter—as though I’d have any reason to try and yank them away.

“No, really,” I said. “I’m letting you bud.”

“No,” she said, “That’s okay.” Then she went right back to complaining and whining about the Rice Krispy Treats and how she was going to “just kill myself if I don’t get one.”

Five more minutes of this and I tried again. I turned around. I half got out of line. I said, “Rose, really, just go in front of me. I don’t care. I don’t like Rice Krispy Treats.” She pretended to not even hear me. “If you go in front of me, I’m sure you’ll be far enough ahead in line to get one,” I said. But no, she was too good to bother speaking to me. Rose Lee! With her plastic braces that are supposed be transparent but end up making it look like she hasn’t brushed her teeth in ten years! I just lost it. “Or else shut the fuck up, Rose,” I said. “Shut your fucking mouth about the Rice Krispy Treats if you’re not going to let me help you get one.” She was scared, I could tell. People were backing away from us. The line had disintegrated. It was all so stupid, but now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop myself. “I could rip your throat out!” I said. “God damn it!” And when I couldn’t think of anything more to say, I just opened my mouth and screamed as loud and long as I could.

That was me trying to do something nice. I got a week of detention for that one.

But look at me now.

I’d won! Me! Will Baird. Weird Willy Wanker. Even the guys on the golf team used to call me that.

This was some kind of vindication.

And locked in the bathroom stall, thinking about all this, I sort of broke down. I didn’t cry. I was better than that. But I was scared for a moment there that I was going to, until there was a clatter and the stall suddenly started shaking and rattling and I was surrounded by the sound of my teammates’ voices hooting and hollering in falsetto, trying to make themselves sound like little girls, saying things like, “Oh, Will, can I touch your trophy? Please? Pretty please? If I get it dirty, I promise I’ll lick it off.” And “How many strokes up are you now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me in here. You caught me. Leave me alone now so I can finish in peace?”

They quieted down for a second, then Lewis, who thinks he’s hilarious, said, “Well, hurry the fuck up. You’ve been in there forever and we’ve got celebratory beer to imbibe.” He used his real voice. This wasn’t a joke. They wanted me to go binge drinking with them. That was new.

“I might be a while,” I said. “Where you guys going?”

“Ricardo’s house. His pop’s out of town.”

“Where’s that?”

“Up on Gilmartin. The house with the totem pole out front.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you there.”

The muscles in my shoulders and neck were tense. They didn’t seem to be leaving.

“Hey, what did you do in there, Wanker? It smells like something died.”

Then they slapped at the door again and raced off.

No way was I going to head up to Ricardo’s. I didn’t need their camaraderie. I didn’t need their congratulations.

If I wanted that sort of thing, I would have joined the basketball team. It’s the opposite of what makes golf so great. Golf is all about you and the elements. Other people have nothing to do with it. It’s you and your weapons and your knowledge of physics and geometry and yourself. That’s how I like it. And when I’m out there, choosing my clubs and planning my shots, lining up and taking my swings, I achieve a level of being in the world that transcends the complications and emotions and problems of my self. I’m me and I’m not me. I’m concentrating harder than ever, but at the same time, I’m not thinking at all. Thinking. Thinking and feeling. That’s what’s always getting me in trouble. When I’m golfing, there’s none of that. When I’m shooting well, I enter a place where I’m in perfect balance with the world.

This was the real achievement of that day. Every single one of the eighteen holes I’d shot had burrowed me deeper into this perfect balanced place. If I was going to celebrate my win, the only way to do it was to find a way to stay in that place a little longer.

There’s only one place in the world where I can achieve this feeling without a club in my hand, and once enough time had passed for me to be sure that the guys were long gone, I snuck away from the country club and headed there.

The team was going
to Shakey’s, for pizza and unlimited salad bar. That’s where they always went after a game. I usually skipped out, took off to hang out with Craig, even if that meant just watching him play Xbox.

Not today, though. No way.

I texted him. I was feeling playful.
Gotta bag. We won! Feeling startacular! Going to celebrate with the girls.

Then it occurred to me, why not invite him along. If this was going to be my big coming out party, the beginning of the wild summer I’d envisioned, I should get things going on the right note, with everyone being crazy together. I shot him another text to say
Meet us at Shakey’s. Free refills on Diet Coke!

Shakey’s is set up like a cafeteria, except it’s a lot darker, with beer lights and hanging circular dome lights and framed pictures of sports stars on the walls. Instead of normal-sized benches and tables, it’s got long shellacked wooden picnic tables, with twenty years’ worth of graffiti gouged into them, and it’s insanely popular, so if you go there with your family, you usually end up wedged in with four or five other groups.

The team is so big we took up an entire bench by ourselves, though.

When we arrived, there was a mad rush for seats, scrambling and elbowing, shouting and pointing. Everybody trying to make sure they got the spot they wanted next to the right people. Naomi did some juju to situate herself near the end of the bench and then she held the chair at the head of the table for me.

“Hey MVP,” she said, “right here! The dad seat.”

We ordered eight pizzas, and got some of them as half-and-halfs so the vegetarians wouldn’t complain. Then, while we were waiting, we hit the salad bar. It’s all you can eat, and that’s the danger. When you can take as much as you want, how do you resist those extra four or five artichoke hearts or that extra half a pound of vanilla pudding? If you’re not careful, you might put on fifteen pounds by the time you leave.

As we plowed into our salads and chugged at our massive forty-four-ounce cups of Diet Coke, Naomi ignored her usual crew. I could see, over her shoulder, the other girls playing musical chairs, zipping around to be closer to this or that more interesting conversation, but Naomi angled herself so that the two of us were cutoff.

It felt almost like she was interrogating me, but in a nice way, more like she was checking off items on a list than like she was leading me toward incriminating myself. She kept asking me question after question about my life: what my summer job was going to be, if I had any pets, what my favorite TV show was. I told her: I’ll be a scooper at Milky Moo’s. No, no pets—Will’s allergic.
The Daily Show
, absolutely, but I like
The Biggest Loser
too in a sick voyeuristic way.

“Besides Will and Craig,” she asked, “who do you hang out with? I never see you around.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve heard—it’s no secret, everybody knows—my mom’s got some serious problems. She spends half her life down at Tuna Stewies, throwing back vodka tonics by the truckload.”

Naomi didn’t flinch as I told her this. Of course, it was true, everybody knew about my mother. She was the town drunk. There was no way to hide it. They’d seen her stumbling around by the docks and getting into fights with lamp posts. But still, Naomi held my gaze with her clear green eyes and listened like she really cared.

“I’ve only got so much time to deal with anything else besides her,” I said. “And I guess, I’d rather have a few good friends who matter than run around crazy with a pack of people I don’t really care about.”

“How is she now?”

“She’s been sober for four months. I think she might finally be moving toward okay.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, I can hardly believe it either.”

Naomi looked up at the wooden crossbeams in the ceiling, really taking in how big a deal this was to me. We each grabbed a slice of the pizza that had finally come. Then she tapped my hand with her finger and said, “You’re lucky. My family’s not doing so great right now. They’re getting divorced. It looks like it anyway.” She went on to tell me about how her father was always traveling for work, conferences and things, and all the ways this had caused massive problems for her mother. Now her mom had started thinking he was having an affair. He wasn’t—Naomi was pretty sure about that—but with all the accusations and arguments this was causing, things were getting pretty horrible pretty much all the time.

Until that day, Naomi had never said more than two words to me. She’d never been unfriendly. I’d just figured I didn’t rank. I’d never been shiny or sparkly or interesting enough for her to bother trying to get to know me—her friends had always seemed so obsessed with status, with success. They were constantly building up their extracurriculars and padding their applications to Stanford and Yale and Columbia and striver schools like that. I mean, Naomi had a freak God-given talent, but the rest of them were just Joiners. That’s what Will and I called them behind their back. The Joiners.

It was a nice shock to the system to realize that Naomi had some depth to her, too.

And I was excited, flattered, that she’d opened up to me like this.

“So, but, you’re definitely coming to the party, right?” she said, changing the subject.

“It’s a deal,” I said.

“Good. Pinky swear!” We did the pinky flick thing again. Then she fished an ice cube out of her glass and leapt up on her knees to throw it at Becca.

“You did not just do that!” Becca said. She threw a cube back.

And Naomi threw two more, one a direct hit and the other whizzing off to land smack in the middle of Ruth’s mushroom slice. This started a war. Ice was flying everywhere, everyone shrieking and shouting and cackling. I even worked up the courage to throw a few cubes of my own. It was all very silly, just stupid fun.

But thrilling.

Then all of a sudden, someone clamped their hands tight over my eyes. A boy, I could tell from the rough feel of his skin. Craig. Of course. Who else could it have been? He’d finally made it. And you have to believe me, I was glad he’d come.