Driving With Dead People (18 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Why?” JoAnn asked. I was thrown by this. If she didn’t want to tell me, I wasn’t going to “out” her.

“You sound sad,” I said.

“I’m tired. I gotta go.” JoAnn hung up.

Two months later I saw pictures of JoAnn wearing a lacy peach bridesmaid dress and a forced smile, walking down the aisle toward a pregnant Stacy, who was marrying her high school boyfriend.

For the next four months JoAnn slumped into a bad depression. Becky saw her in Columbus and told Mom that she was sleeping a lot, not eating, and barely making it to classes.

I called JoAnn.

“Listen, I just want you to know I don’t care if you’re gay,” I blurted out. She laughed. I waited for a reply.

“When I get up off the floor, I’ll be able to actually say something,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re gay. It only matters that you’re happy. You have to pull yourself out of this depression,” I told her.

“I’d like to,” she said.

“I’m coming down this weekend and we’ll see what we can do,” I told her. My hands were shaky as I hung up the phone. I thought about Bill Lawrence and their prom picture. I thought about Keith Phillips and our prom picture.

Things were never the way they seemed, and it was happening more and more.

What would being gay mean for JoAnn’s life? What would people say and how would they treat her? Whatever it brought, I’d be there to help. JoAnn had become the sister I’d always wanted, and I wanted more than anything to be a good sister too.

On Saturday, I drove to Columbus. JoAnn had her shoulder-length hair cut to less than two inches all over. Her head looked like a baby chick’s.

“You’re not just coming out of the closet. You’re standing on the porch waving a flag,” I told her.

“To hell with it,” she said. “I’m tired of being someone I’m not.”

“Fucking right,” I said. “You’ve hidden it long enough.” But inside I wasn’t sure. The idea of someone being gay didn’t bother me; it was just that I wanted JoAnn and me to be alike. Now, standing next to her with my long permed hair and painted fingernails, I knew just how different we were. I hoped that wouldn’t keep us from being close as she began a new life.

When I got home, it was senior week.

Julie and I went to a party at our friend Dawn’s house. Her mother and about one hundred and fifty high school kids were there. A makeshift bar was set up on a picnic table in the backyard, and it seemed like the same joint was being passed from eight till midnight without a time-out. We smoked, drank, danced, and saw Dawn’s mom making out with our class president, Richard Hastings.

I graduated on an eighty-degree afternoon in May, and Dad was there, waiting for me outside the gym. He gave me a card with two hundred-dollar bills inside. I hugged and thanked him. I wanted to invite him out to the house, but Mom would have killed me.

Mom and Jim gave me a huge party. They invited my friends, teachers, neighbors—everyone I’d ever known came. There was ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, green beans, rolls, sodas, iced tea, and a huge cake that said
CONGRATULATIONS MONICA
on top. Mom surrounded the cake with all the trophies I’d won throughout high school, at the White Creek Players, and on the speech team. It was the best party I’d ever had.

Ironically, I was sad about leaving home, mostly because I was terrified of the future. I never trusted that things would get better. I believed in treading water, staying in the lousy, lonely, crappy place where everything was familiar. Change scared me more than a thousand Adams or Dads or empty houses.

Later that month I stopped by Dad’s store to see how he was doing. I was heading up to Columbus to see JoAnn and his store was on the way.

I didn’t think twice about stopping in at Dad’s nowadays. If I had a few minutes to kill, instead of driving the eight miles to Galesburg I’d stop in at Dad’s and use the bathroom or make a call. Sometimes he and I would lean against the counter watching the cars drive by or stand in his front window checking out the western sky for any approaching weather. We hardly ever talked; we just hung out. If he heard a siren, he ran out the door without so much as a good-bye. I understood.

The other kids didn’t see much of Dad. Becky didn’t see him at all.

The year before, when Jamie, JoAnn, and I were already waiting in the car to go down to Dad’s for Christmas dinner, Becky walked out to the driveway and announced, “I’m not going down there ever again.” And she didn’t. She hadn’t seen him since.

“Does it bother you that you don’t see Dad?” I asked one day.

“Why would it bother me?” she asked. “After all he’s done, he’s nothing to me.”

I was amazed and impressed by her ability to cut someone off like that. At the time, I didn’t realize that a person could walk away from a parent. It seemed like an impossible thing to do, and something that would send you straight to hell when you died.

Jamie still wanted Dad’s approval and saw him on every visit, but Dad was silent and mean when Jamie was around. JoAnn put up with Dad. But he and I had found our footing.

Before heading to Columbus, I sat at the counter and drank a Coke with Dad.

“I’m going to see JoAnn,” I told him.

“Here,” he said, banging open the cash register. “Give her this. Maybe you could take her to dinner or something.” He handed me a hundred-dollar bill.

“Why?” I asked, taking the money.

“I got a call from Mitch Nolan. He said JoAnn’s dating her roommate, if you know what I mean.” I was in shock. Besides being narcissistic, Mitch was homophobic. Becky’s boyfriends were almost as bad as mine. She must have told Mitch, who had then taken it upon himself to call Dad. What an asshole!

“Mitch is a jerk,” I said.

“Yeah, but he might be right about this one,” Dad concluded. He looked almost happy—and Dad hated homosexuals, made fun of them all the time with jokes and slurs. It didn’t make sense.

“Okay, I’ll give her the money,” I said. “I’m sure she could use it.”

“She’s still family, and we have to love her just like we always did.” He’d never told any of us he loved us. What was going on?

I left the store thinking JoAnn was going to crap her pants, but when I handed her the hundred-dollar bill and told her what Dad had said, she replied, “Wow, a hundred bucks. That’s pretty cheap for my sexuality.”

I was eighteen when I walked into the theater at Kenyon College for my freshman audition. My hands were sweaty and my shoulder-length feathered hair was sprayed stiff with Aqua Net Extra Super Hold hair spray—this was the moment I’d prove myself ready for college theatre. My monologue was from Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale
, and my sheet music from
Chicago
was tucked under my arm. Nothing could break my concentration—except that boy standing right over there. He was as relaxed as I was nervous. I watched him leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette, and reading the
Kenyon Review
. He looked up as his name was called over the PA system: “Patrick Romano, please report to the stage.” He was next.

After taking one last drag off his cigarette, he stubbed it out in the ashtray and sauntered onstage. I watched from the wings as he cursed his way through a tense monologue from David Mamet’s
American Buffalo
and then, in a soft and clear tenor voice, sang “Metaphor” from
The Fantasticks
.

He ended his perfect song with a smile, did a quick bow of his curly brown head, and thanked the director. He meandered offstage looking directly at me. I was terrified of the audition and titillated by Patrick. “Hey, don’t worry. It’s a walk in the park out there,” he said, giving my arm a little pinch.

“Monica Peterson, please report to the stage.”

Luckily, my audition was not hindered by nerves and, afterward, as I happily ran offstage, Patrick was standing there clapping. “You and I are going to rock this department, Monica Peterson,” he said. “You and I.” He turned and walked toward the door. My breath was coming in short spurts. He wore blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a gray T-shirt. He looked delicious.

I had just moved into Bradford Hall, the only coed dorm on campus, but Patrick was renting a house. This immediately set him apart as cool and mature.

I saw his funky run-down place for the first time after the annual theatre department football game the following week. He had a party after the game, and invited me by tucking a small piece of paper with his address on it into the back pocket of my Jordache jeans.

Arriving at his house, I smelled marijuana wafting across the lawn. Everyone was hanging out on his creaky front porch, playing guitars and wearing moccasins. We had missed the sixties and seventies hippie scene, but it was being reenacted there on Romano’s front porch.

Patrick walked up behind me and whispered, “Hello, there” in my ear. I spun around and smiled. Patrick was sexy in a Robert Downey Jr. sort of way. Drugged up sometimes, playing his guitar and singing Neil Young sometimes, and bathed sometimes. He was tall and thin with thick black eyelashes and smooth olive skin.

I didn’t know who Neil Young was, nor did I own a pair of moccasins. Still, this guy intrigued me.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Monica?” he asked.

“No,” I said, wanting to kiss him.

“I have an awesome girlfriend. Her name is Isabelle.” (I wouldn’t be kissing him.) “She’s amazingly beautiful, but she’s three hundred miles away. You can read her soul just by looking into her eyes.” (I tried to picture that.) “I transferred here from American University. I’m actually a sophomore. Isabelle is still back at school.” His eyes misted over. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say. “It’s rough, you know?” he added, prompting a response.

“Sure,” I managed to say, feeling confident he wasn’t reading my soul in my eyes.

I left the party deflated but relieved. Patrick and I did not belong together. He seemed silly and overly dramatic but sexy. It was best that he had a serious girlfriend. After my sexy but insane boyfriend, Adam, I needed someone “normal,” preppy even.

Unfortunately, Patrick’s dating status and our obvious differences did not stop my physical response to him. Monday morning I saw him walking by the library and wanted to jump his lanky body right there in the quad. Even in theatre history class while listening to Dean O’Malley’s lecture on the Roman theatre and taking copious notes, my body kept distracting me, reminding me that it desperately wanted Patrick Romano, two rows over.

A month into school, Patrick, knowing I lived near Cincinnati, offered to drop me off at home for the weekend since he was driving down to see his brother and to “score some pot.”

“You could ride along and I could get to know you better,” he offered.

I agreed. It was a five-hour drive.

He picked me up at my dorm around seven p.m. and I threw my small duffel bag into his trunk. By the time we hit Highway 56 south, he had his hands down the front of my khaki shorts. His girlfriend with the soulful eyes didn’t matter, religion didn’t matter, and the fact that I had to straddle a console between the seats didn’t matter. I was obsessed with this boy.

Patrick pulled the car off onto a small side road and threw it into park. By now the windows were completely steamed up, and I had on white Reebok tennis shoes and that’s about it. We bungled our way into the backseat. I stopped.

“Do you have a condom?” I asked, panting.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t either. We can’t have sex without a condom, but we can do something else,” I said, attacking him again.

“We don’t need condoms,” he responded.

“I’m not on the pill,” I said.

“No, what I mean is, I don’t carry them because I’m sterile. I had radiation two years ago and it made me sterile.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “How do you know you’re sterile?”

The sex skidded to a stop. He took a deep, dramatic breath.

“I had a rare kind of bladder cancer and needed radiation. The effects of it left me sterile. Now I’ll never see the faces of my children.” Long pause. “That was taken from me.” Tears started rolling down his cheeks. I was embarrassed to be witnessing this.

“Wow, I’m really sorry,” I said. “We shouldn’t be doing this anyway. You have a girlfriend, and I’m not usually like this.”

“Oh, I hope you usually are,” he teased, his tears vanishing.

“No, this is new to me. I don’t usually attack boys I hardly know who are involved with other people,” I said. “Hey, no harm done.” I was climbing over the front seat to grab my clothes. I felt really naked all of a sudden.

“I hope what I said didn’t freak you out,” he said.

“It did not freak me out,” I said.

“Please don’t tell anyone. Okay?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said, trying to imagine any conversation where it would be appropriate to interject, “Romano’s sterile.”

He joined me in the front seat and lit a cigarette. He turned on the car. “I love you in just your white tennis shoes.” He smiled.

“Thanks. It’s my new look.” We laughed and drove the rest of the way with the radio blaring and his hand on my knee.

That weekend I saw a Judy Collins concert with JoAnn, who had just started dating a new girl, Jenny. When I saw them together at Union Hall on the campus of the University of Cincinnati, they looked adorable, and JoAnn seemed to be doing much better.

“How’s college?” JoAnn asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’m still getting used to it,” I said.

We went inside and watched the concert, JoAnn holding Jenny’s hand. I was impressed she would do that on such a conservative campus. She was able to be herself.

Patrick’s emotional display in the car along with Judy Collins singing, “You can live the life you dream,” and songs about “Women who are strong and free” had cooled my jets over him anyway.

When Patrick picked me up to head back to Kenyon, I was dressed in sloppy sweatpants and a white T-shirt. For the entire five hours back I stayed in my seat with my hands in my lap. I felt no urges.

Instead of taking me to my dorm, he pulled into the driveway of his house. He looked over. “Would you like to join me on the porch?” he asked.

“We said we weren’t going to do this,” I said.

“I didn’t hear anyone say we weren’t going to do this. And we don’t have to do anything. Come on, I’ll get some wine.” He got out of the car and headed into the house. He had on those great jeans again.

I had the same feeling then that I had as a child when I wasn’t supposed to ride my bike around the firehouse parking lot but did it anyway. This no longer felt right, but I wasn’t sure how to stop it.

We had sex on the wooden glider on his front porch. It was impersonal and quick; not at all like the passion we’d experienced in the car and not at all what I had been picturing every day since I’d met him. Afterward I asked him about Isabelle. “We’re free to see other people. We’ve moved on,” he said. As he drove me back to my dorm, I wondered what had happened between the two of them.

I would have to give this time and see how it unfolded. I really liked him, but something had shifted and I wasn’t sure what.

The following week I walked into the theatre and saw Patrick with his arm around a beautiful girl with long black hair. They were laughing, and I knew before he even said it: “Monica, this is Isabelle.”

“Oh, nice to meet you,” I managed to choke out.

“Monica is an amazing actress. You’ll
love
her,” he told Isabelle.

“Great,” she said, but they were obviously more wrapped up in each other than in talking to me. My stomach felt as though a cement brick had been thrown at it. It was my own fault; I had known about her and I should have stayed away from him. It made my face flush to think that he probably knew of her visit before having sex with me. It wasn’t as if he owed me anything, but it just wasn’t a decent thing to do.

I decided to forget Romano. I snagged a great part in the fall play. It would be in competition to attend a festival at the prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and I was the lead. Mr. Whitfield, the head of the theatre department, was the director and Patrick was on the crew designing sets.

Isabelle flew back to American University, and within two days Patrick was walking with his arm around Cynthia, another black-haired, blue-eyed beauty. She was hanging on his every word. At rehearsal that night Patrick walked over with his arms out to offer me a hug. “Hey, no thanks,” I said, and walked onstage.

He smiled. “I bet I get a hug out of you by the end of the evening,” he teased.

I looked at him. “I doubt it,” I said dryly, as I began leading the actors through warm-up stretches.

I was glad the sex had been bad. I was glad I hadn’t invested much in Patrick. I concentrated on the play and tried not to notice Cynthia’s disappointed face as she watched him walk down the hall with his arm around the waist of Rebecca. Oh my god, a serial dater. I was glad no one knew about us.

A month into rehearsals I came down with the flu. My hair wasn’t washed, my face was pale, and I couldn’t have cared less. I felt lousy.

Three days later at the theatre, we did a full run of the play. My character was dying of tuberculosis and one of her lines was, “I was so much stronger before I got pregnant. Before the baby, I was strong.” And that night, when I said those words, with Patrick standing in the wings, I knew with absolute certainty that I did not have the flu. I was pregnant.

The next morning I rode my twelve-speed Schwinn to Planned Parenthood over on Fairview Road. I peed in a cup and lay down on the examining table, placing my legs into two stirrups that were covered in tube socks to make them more comfortable. The doctor did a pelvic exam. On the ceiling directly above me was a poster that had a cartoon of a cobra with bugged-out eyes tangled up in the branches of a tree. It read, “Things could be worse; you could be in my position.”

The examination was surprisingly painful. My head was pounding. The nurse walked in with the urine test results, and I said, “I’m pregnant, aren’t I?”

“You most definitely are,” she replied.

The room buckled in on me. I pulled my legs out of the stirrups and sat up. “How far along?” I asked.

“Four or five weeks,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. I was too smart for this. I turned to the nurse. “I can’t keep this pregnancy.” (I could never have said “baby.”)

“I have to stop this from happening. What are my options?” She told me I’d be talking to a counselor as soon as I got dressed.

My mind was racing as I pulled on my black tights and pleated gray skirt. Patrick was definitely not sterile. How could I have been so fucking stupid?

The counselor sat across from me at a small metal table. She laid out three pamphlets: “Having a Healthy Pregnancy,” “Terminating Your Pregnancy,” and “Giving Your Baby Up for Adoption.” I stared at them numbly.

“How was it that you had unprotected sex?” she asked.

“I slept with someone I didn’t know very well and he told me he was sterile,” I said.

She put her hand on top of mine. “That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

Motherfucker. I was going to kill Patrick Romano. What about his tears? What about the faces of his never-to-be-realized children?

I remembered my friend Sandy Webster in high school having three abortions. I could never imagine taking it so lightly. This would never happen to me a second time. I would spend the rest of my life protecting myself.