Prep: A Novel (26 page)

My father accelerated and we rode through the gates of Ault. It had been more than two years since my father had driven me there to start my freshman year. He began to turn left, as he’d done that other time, and I said, “Go right, Dad. There’s a parking lot behind the dining hall.” In fact, there was another parking lot to the left, behind the schoolhouse. But that one got more pedestrian traffic, more students who might catch sight of my parents’ shitty car. My self-consciousness about the Datsun was something I’d anticipated, something I had to live with but could not acknowledge—a bride descending the aisle with an itchy nose.

“Honey, which one is your dorm?” my mother asked.

“You can’t see it from here. It’s through that arch.”

“This is all just beautiful.” She looked back and smiled, and I could tell she intended the remark as a compliment to me, as if I deserved credit for Ault’s appearance.

“Now go right again,” I said.

This early in the day, a lot of parking spaces were still open. My father pulled into one and turned off the ignition. He looked at my mother, then at me. “Should we just stay in the car and see if our asses get permanently attached to the seat?”

Normally, I’d have laughed—in general, my father made me laugh a lot—but instead I hastily said, “Thank you guys for coming. For driving so far.”

“Honey, we wanted to,” my mother said as we all climbed out. “Ignore Dad. Now what I need first is a bathroom and then we want you to show us everything.”

We entered the dining hall through the back, and I led them toward the bathrooms. Just outside the women’s room, I again had that sense of unease about leaving either of them alone, even briefly. It was probably smarter to stay with my father in the hall because he was the one who could get into more trouble—he could provoke it somehow, whereas my mother would only bumble into it—but I had to go to the bathroom myself. And, really, wasn’t I being ridiculous? I followed my mother, and pushed into the stall next to hers. As I was setting toilet paper on the seat, she released a long, sighing fart and began to pee. “Lee, do we get to meet Martha?” she asked from her stall.

“I was thinking I could give you a tour of the campus, and then we can swing by the dorm. And then at noon, there’s the lunch, and my soccer game is at two.”

“Tell me again who you’re playing.”

“Gardiner.”

“
Gardener,
did you say? Like flower garden?”

“It’s pronounced the same, but it’s spelled differently.”

“Now why is it called that?”

“Mom, I have no idea. It’s just a school in New Hampshire.” She did not respond and, feeling mean, I added, “It was probably someone’s last name.”

She flushed the toilet—conversing with her required so much attention that I had not yet started to pee—and then I went myself. I heard her wash her hands, and then she called, “Honey, I’m going to find Dad.” Maybe she, too, felt concerned about him being on his own.

When I emerged from the bathroom, they were looking at the framed pastel drawings on the wall. “Are any of these by you?” my mother asked. “Did you wash your hands, honey?”

“Of course.”

“Your mother’s afraid you’ll get WASP germs,” my father said.

This was a familiar joke—at home, after we returned from church and my mother told my brothers and me to wash our hands, my father would say, “Your mother’s afraid you’ll get Catholic germs”—but this version of it surprised me; it surprised me that my father knew what a WASP was.

“Oh, stop it, Terry,” my mother said.

I wondered if she knew, too.

“None of the drawings are mine,” I said. “I’m not taking art this semester.” (My parents were not the kind—like Conchita Maxwell’s mother—who knew every class I took, every way I spent my time.)

“You can see where we eat,” I said. “It’s this way.” They followed me into the dining hall proper. The windows there reached almost to the ceiling—nearly fifty feet—and sunlight was streaming through all the panes on the east side of the room. On the south side, two steps led to a dais on which was set an extralong table—this was where the headmaster sat during formal dinners and where seniors sat the rest of the time—and behind the table hung a school crest the size of a rowboat. Covering most of the rest of the wall were white marble panels with the names of all the senior prefects from 1882 on. In the main hall of the schoolhouse were wooden panels with the names of everyone from every class, but these were more special; there were fewer names, and they’d been engraved and then painted gold. All the tables in the room had already been set in preparation for lunch, and the kitchen staff was setting out napkins bunched up to resemble fans. I turned around. “I’ll show you the chapel.”

Neither of my parents moved. “It’s like on our glasses.” My mother was pointing to the wall behind the headmaster’s table.

“Yeah, the school crest.” The first Christmas after I’d started at Ault, I’d given my parents a set of four highball glasses from the school store. My mother put them out for dinner when I was home—because there were five of us, one person always got a different glass—but I doubted they used them when I wasn’t there.

“And what are the other things on the wall?”

“They’re lists of who the”—my mother wouldn’t know what a prefect was—“kind of like class presidents,” I said. “All the people who were class presidents their senior year here.”

“Can we look at them?”

I squinted at her. “You won’t know any of the names.”

“So?” my father said.

He and I eyed each other. “I’m not saying you can’t,” I said. “I just don’t understand why you want to.” My father continued to watch me. “Fine,” I said. I crossed the dining room, and I heard them following me.

But—of course this was true and of course I’d forgotten it—they did recognize some of the names. They recognized three of them: a graduate from the thirties who’d gone on to be a U.S. vice president, one from the fifties who’d become head of the CIA, and, from the late seventies, a movie actor. I had told them before about these alumni, and about other alumni, not necessarily senior prefects, who’d gone on to acclaim; to people outside the school, it was the existence of famous graduates—and not, say, current students’ median SAT scores—that seemed to most validate Ault. At home, if my parents’ friends knew one thing about the place I went to school, it wasn’t where it was or even what it was called; it was the names of the celebrities who’d graduated before me.

The three of us stood by the headmaster’s table, our necks craned. “There’s a girl here now whose dad is a senator,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was revealing this—maybe because they’d be interested and because I knew that I hadn’t been acting very pleasant.

“What’s the name?” my father asked.

“Tunniff. She’s from Oregon.”

“I wouldn’t mind meeting a senator this weekend.”

I turned my head sharply to look at him, but he was still gazing up at the wall. Though he could probably feel my stare, his expression remained placid. It was impossible to tell if he was kidding—whether he was saying this because he knew it would bother me or because he had no idea. “Let’s keep going if you want to see the whole campus,” I said.

We walked to the chapel, which was empty except for someone practicing the organ. In the nave, we stood looking at the vaulted ceiling a hundred feet above us—a hundred and three, actually—and my father said, “I’ll be damned.” As they peered up, it struck me that my parents were less like characters from a fairy tale than like tourists in Europe. (Not that I had ever been to Europe myself, but Ault made you familiar with the cheesiness surrounding certain phenomena, even if you weren’t familiar with the phenomena themselves—European tourists and a cappella singing groups and middle-aged Jewish women with hoarse voices and shiny sweatsuits and long painted fingernails.)

My father said, “This is where you pray for your sins, Flea?”

“Where I pray for yours,” I said. “I don’t sin.”

He grinned, and I felt a smile come onto my own face.

“What about Mom’s?” he asked.

At the same time, I said, “She doesn’t sin, either,” and my mother said, “I don’t sin.”

“See?” I said. “If we both think so, it must be true.”

“Au contraire,” my father said. “If what happened this morning between your mother and Burger King wasn’t gluttony, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

“Terry, I didn’t even eat the last hotcake,” my mother said.

“Guess what, Dad?” I said. “It looks like you’re a monkey’s uncle.”

“What do you think that makes you?”

“I’m fully human.” Dropping my voice, I added, “Because we all know my real father is Mr. Tonelli.”

“Oh!” my mother said. “The two of you are disgusting.” Mr. Tonelli, who was in his early eighties, lived in the house behind my parents’; his wife had died a few years before, but even when she was living, we had all been convinced that he was in love with my mother.

“Have you heard the latest?” my father said.

I shook my head.

“They went on a date.”

“That’s nonsense.” My mother had walked several feet away from us, picked up a hymnal, and begun leafing through it.

“Where?”

“Ask her.”

“Where, Mom?”

“Mr. Tonelli isn’t driving these days because of his glaucoma, and he asked if I could take him to get some dinner from Szechwan Garden. That’s all.”

“That is most definitely not all.” My father was still grinning.

“There was some miscommunication,” my mother said. “I thought he wanted to pick up the food, but it turned out he wanted to stay there. And, really, I had no choice but to join him, and then he insisted I order—”

“He
insisted,
” my father repeated. “Here, her husband and sons are at home holding dinner for her, but when Mr. Tonelli
insists
—”

“Lee, I had a shrimp and black bean dish that was fabulous,” my mother said. “You know I’m not a big fan of seafood, but Mr. Tonelli suggested it, and it was just delicious.”

“Look at her trying to change the subject,” my father said.

“Did he kiss you good night?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re revolting,” my mother said. “You’re worse than Dad.” My father and I smirked at each other. These were the best times with my family, when we were teasing one another or being gross. We talked about diarrhea at the dinner table; after we ate a meal with garlic, my brothers would bring their faces near mine and try to breathe into my mouth; and when Joseph got kicked off the bus once for singing a song about the scrotum, my father was so tickled he made Joseph write down the lyrics. (It was sung to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March”—
Scrotum: It’s just a sac of skin/ Scrotum: It holds your testes in . . .
) And then at Ault I never mentioned such things, certainly not to anyone other than Martha. And Martha’s own family, apparently, never mentioned such things to one another. She once told me she had never even heard her mother burp. The way my family behaved felt both truthful and indecorous—another version of my real self, perhaps the realest of all, but one I took pains to conceal. Just a few months before, when Martha and I had eaten lunch at a table of boys, they’d been speculating about why a classmate always missed breakfast, and one of them formed a circle with his thumb and other fingers and jiggled his hand back and forth. Another of them, a guy named Elliot, turned to me and said in a not-unfriendly way, “You know what that means, Lee?” Did I know what that meant? Was he serious? I had been raised in a house where my father shouted up the stairs to my six- and thirteen-year-old brothers, “Quit whacking off and come down for dinner!” But when Elliot asked me, I actually blushed, as if even my physiology were conspiring in the lie of my seemliness.

My father snapped his fingers. “What say we blow this pop stand?”

My mother replaced the hymnal in the little space on the back of the seat, and we went out the front door, and as we did so, we collided with Nancy Daley, a willowy senior, captain of the squash and tennis teams, who had her parents in tow. The six of us stood in a kind of benign face-off, and then I said, “Hi. These are my parents.” I glanced back at them. “Mom and Dad, this is Nancy Daley.”

My mother extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Nancy.” My father shook her hand, too.

My heart was pounding—the thing was, I had never talked to Nancy before. Literally. And I had introduced her only because I hadn’t known what else to do, because suddenly, with parents present, the protocol of Ault seemed absurd: that you could live for years in the same small community with people, that you could know their names and their secrets (as a sophomore, Nancy had hooked up in the music wing with Henry Thorpe, then a senior, and while they were hooking up, Henry had opened the classroom window, reached out, gathered snow in his hands, brought it back inside, and smeared it on her breasts), and that even with such knowledge, you could when passing on campus—you were supposed to, if you’d never really met—not speak or smile; possibly you would not even make eye contact. Surely neither Nancy nor I would have uttered a word had our parents not been there. And it wasn’t that this absurdity offended me philosophically—it was just that I knew it would strike my parents as strange, and knowing that had made me panic. (But really, who cared what my parents thought was strange? What did I need to convince them of? It was Ault people I wanted to convince.)

My mother was shaking Nancy’s parents’ hands—“I’m Linda Fiora,” I heard her say, and Nancy’s mother said, “I’m Birdie Daley”—and my father was following suit. “Where are you folks from?” my father asked.

“Princeton,” said Nancy’s mother. She was wearing a silky maroon skirt with a swirling paisley pattern and a maroon sweater set, and Mr. Daley was wearing a suit. My own parents were dressed more nicely than they usually were on a Saturday, my father in khaki pants and a khaki blazer (surely, since they were not part of the same suit, that was some sort of faux pas) and my mother in a red turtleneck and a gray corduroy jumper. Over the phone, I had haltingly explained to my mother that most parents dressed up; I had felt unable to request that they should, but she had understood.