Prep: A Novel (28 page)

As my parents spoke to the boys’ parents—the boys’ names were Cordy and Hans, and one of them, though I couldn’t remember which, was a math prodigy—I scanned the dining hall until I located Cross. He and his parents were at a table with his roommate, Devin, Devin’s parents, Reverend Orch, and Dr. Stanchak, who was head of the classics department.

“Psst.” My father was cupping his fingers sideways in front of his mouth. “Is that the senator? Two o’clock.” My father nodded toward a table to our right. “The guy with the alcoholic’s nose.”

“Jesus, Dad.”

He wasn’t whispering, or even talking that quietly.

My father laughed. “Am I right? Looks like a real glad-hander to me.”

“I have no idea who that is,” I said. “But Robin Tunniff isn’t sitting at that table, so I really doubt that’s her dad.”

“Well, where is she?”

I glanced at the tables in front of us—the Sugarmans and Reverend Orch were sharing a hearty laugh—then turned around and looked across to the other side of the dining hall. “I don’t know,” I said.

“You swear?”

I looked him in the eye, because this time I could. “Of course I swear.”

But then, when we went up to get dessert from the long table where the salad bar usually was, stocked now with cookies and brownies and a coffee urn on either end, I saw Robin and, next to her, an otherwise nondescript man wearing a tie dotted with little American flags. It was just my father and me—my mother, after eating the pasta off my plate, had declared herself stuffed—and it seemed actively unkind to deny him the sighting. This would be my concession to him for the weekend, the gesture that proved I was not a rotten daughter after all.

“Dad,” I murmured, and I nudged him.

He’d been pouring cream into his coffee, and some of it dripped over the lip of the cup onto the saucer. “Hey, there,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Quick. The thing we were talking about—alcoholic nose. But this time the real thing.” I looked back at Robin Tunniff’s father, and I sensed my father following my gaze. “The tie,” I said.

“Gotcha.”

We stood quietly in the hubbub, staring at Senator Tunniff, and I could feel my love for my father. This was one of the best things about family, how you knew each other’s shorthand.

And then he’d set down his cup and saucer and was striding around the end of the table. He was quickly beyond the point where I could have grabbed his blazer, though I probably wouldn’t have anyway. “Oh God,” I said, and a mother standing next to me looked over, and our eyes met, but she did not say anything. I started walking, then stopped again a few feet behind him.

“. . . a great admirer of yours,” I heard him saying, and they were shaking hands, the senator and my father.

My father’s back was to me. I could see only the senator’s face, and Robin looking blankly between them. The senator appeared utterly genial. They spoke for perhaps thirty seconds, then they were shaking hands again, and my father set his left palm against the senator’s upper arm. The senator laughed, and I wished that I had never come to Ault, or that I’d been born a different person, or that at the very least I could lose consciousness immediately but not in a way that would be disruptive, not, say, by fainting and collapsing to the ground—more like by simply vanishing.

When he turned away from the senator, my father almost bumped into me. His expression was one of distracted exuberance, and I wondered if it had actually meant something to him to meet this man, if he had not simply been trying to anger or embarrass me. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Good guy.”

I was speechless. Or at least in this context I was. It was better to suspend my fury until we were out of the crowd.

“I’m going back to the table,” I said.

“Let me grab my coffee. And pick up a brownie for your mom, will you?”

“She doesn’t want anything.”

“Trust me, she’ll want a brownie.” He chuckled, and I thought maybe my father did not understand me at all, that if he did he’d be contrite. He’d done it on purpose, but he’d still be contrite.

Back at our table, Cordy’s parents were standing to leave, and Mrs. Hopewell and Hans’s parents were already gone. I couldn’t tell if Cordy’s parents had been waiting for my father and me to return or if they’d have taken off then anyway, leaving my mother at the table by herself, peering around with her wide eyes. I hated them all at this moment, the indifferent students and faculty and the inconsiderate parents and my own family, for being somehow reliant on kindness that wasn’t extended.

While we ate dessert, the dining hall cleared out. My father broke a sugar cookie in two and dipped half into his coffee. “Tell your mother about my new friend.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“Who?” my mother said. “What are you two talking about?”

“Dad just accosted Robin’s father.”

My mother looked confused.

“You know how there’s a girl here whose dad is a senator?” I said. “Well, Dad just went up and started talking to him.”

“You were the one who pointed him out to me,” my father said. His tone was still merry.

“I wouldn’t have if I’d known you were going to bother him.”

“Bother him? Lee, for Christ’s sake, he’s a public figure. He likes meeting people.”

“You have no idea what he likes!” I cried. “You’ve never seen him before. You’ve never even heard of him. And here he is, trying to have a normal weekend with his family, and you go up and pretend to—”

“You need to relax.” My father’s tone was no longer cheerful. He turned to my mother and said, as if I wasn’t there, “He was a real stand-up guy. Not a phony.”

My mother nodded, and I watched them both, my entire body tensed.

“You’re insane.” I made sure to say it calmly.

My father looked at me. “Beg your pardon?”

“You’re totally insane. You talk to this guy for two seconds, then you act like you’re old friends. Why do you even care? Do you think it proves something that you talked to him?”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” my father said. He dipped the other half of the cookie into his coffee cup.

I had already taken a breath before continuing to speak, but as I watched him, I felt a sudden draining of momentum, a pull from this instant that we were hovering in. He was looking at me expectantly, holding his cookie a few inches above the cup, and the bottom third of the cookie, which was stained a darker tan from the coffee, was beginning to decompose, threatening to fall off into the liquid below. It seemed heartbreaking, it seemed unbearable, that I was aware of this and he was not. It seemed heartbreaking that he liked the taste of a sugar cookie dipped in coffee, that it was a treat to him. The small rewards we give ourselves—I think maybe there is nothing sadder.

And it wasn’t as if I actually thought he was insane. But as long as I felt the impulse to convince him that he was acting like it, weren’t our roles reassuringly entrenched? The worst thing would be to recognize him as a thirty-nine-year-old man possessing certain virtues and certain foibles, making his way as he knew how.

“I just think—” But what was it that I just thought? “It’s like asking for someone’s autograph,” I said, and I knew the indignance was gone from my voice. “Just like, what’s the point? I don’t understand why people do it.”

“Maybe not,” my father said. “But you have to admit that a lot of folks disagree with you.”

“The Orschmidts’ son has a whole big collection of autographs,” my mother said. “Sharon was telling me that last summer when they went out to Los Angeles he got one from, Lee, you would know who this is, he’s a real big star. Oh, I’m terrible with names, but Sharon said the actor was just like talking to you or me.”

The three of us were quiet.

“So,” I finally said, “does Mr. Orschmidt still wear a wig?” There. I had given in.

“Lee, I don’t think that’s nice to say,” my mother said. “Mr. Orschmidt is such a pleasant man.”

“The fact that he wears a wig doesn’t mean he’s not pleasant,” I said.

“Honey, on a man, it’s called a toupee, but I really don’t think he’d appreciate that kind of talk. In our day, people didn’t used to discuss private business.”

“Back when your mother was a girl and dinosaurs roamed the earth,” my father said. “Right, Linda?” It was always like this: We rode over the moment, like a roiling river, on my mother’s back.

“Oh, stop it,” my mother said. But we were fine, we were fine, we’d made it to the other side.

Four minutes before the end of the first half, Ms. Barrett put me in for Norie Cleehan—I was a fullback—and then took me out again four minutes after the start of the second half. During my time in, Gardiner had scored two goals.

I took a seat next to Maria on the bench. “Where’s your parents?” she said.

I pointed across the field. A few parents had brought blankets or folding canvas chairs, but mine were just sitting on the ground. My father, probably, was ripping out blades of grass and blowing on them to make a whistling sound. It was another of his tricks that had once deeply impressed me.

“Aww,” Maria said. “Mama and Papa Fiora. I bet they’re happy right now.”

“Maybe.”

“They’re
so
happy. They’re like, ‘Honey, did you see Lee get up in number twenty’s face? I’m
proud
of Lee.’ ” Coming from someone else, the remark might have seemed mocking, but Maria was worse at soccer than I was. She also was a fullback, and on the field, she moved in a leisurely way; sometimes, when the forward from the other team got too far past her, she’d stop altogether and just watch the forward close in on the goal, as if she, Maria, were not a participant but a spectator. This tendency made Ms. Barrett apoplectic. “Are your parents taking you out for dinner tonight?” Maria asked.

I nodded. When my mother had said, “Daddy and I want you to pick somewhere nice,” I’d mentioned a Chinese restaurant because I knew that by
nice
she did not mean, for example, the Red Barn Inn.

“That’ll be good,” Maria said. “Get off campus.”

“Do you want to come?” I asked. I blurted it out before I’d really thought about it, because it seemed like maybe it was what Maria was hinting at. Also because—surely this was offensive, but it was true—a Chinese restaurant would probably seem nice to her as well.

“Sure,” she said. “And Rufina, too?” Rufina was playing halfback then, her long ponytail bouncing behind her as she jogged up the field.

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

“Hey, look,” Maria said. “They’re waving at you.”

It was true—both my parents were. They would like Maria and Rufina, I thought, and they would like that I’d invited along friends, and it would make my father feel generous to take us all out; at home, my parents had always encouraged me to have other kids over to our house. I lifted my hand and waved back.

In the afternoon, I rode with my parents to the motel. We had lost the game seven to two, and it had occurred to me by the end that the Gardiner coach had told her team to stop scoring. That would have been decorous and boarding-school-like, given that all the parents were watching.

My mother and I sat in the car while my father checked in. They were staying at the Raymond TraveLodge, which I had found for them by looking in the yellow pages several weeks before; the room, which the motel could not guarantee as nonsmoking, would cost thirty-nine dollars. “You played wonderfully,” my mother said.

From the back seat, I laughed. I was still wearing my uniform, my hair still pulled back.

“What?” my mother said. “You did.” Then she laughed, too. “You did!”

“Which goal that Gardiner scored while I was in did you like better? The first or the second?”

“Those were big girls on the other team,” my mother said. “What was my dainty Lee supposed to do?”

We were both quiet, and it was a calm, unawkward silence; with lunch and the game behind us, it felt like things might be okay.

“Oh, look.” My mother knocked on her window, which was rolled up. “Aren’t they pretty?” Twenty feet away, on top of a shed, two robins were perching and turning. “It looks like they’re having a party and waiting for everyone to arrive.”

“But they’re worried that nobody is going to come,” I said.

“Oh, but now—” A sparrow alighted on the roof. “The first guest,” my mother said. Something about animals always pleased my mother—whenever we were on the highway and passed cows or horses, she’d tap my brothers or me and say, “Look.” She did the same when we were passing bodies of water, or driving over bridges, especially if I was reading as we did so.

“Lee, Daddy and I are so excited to see Ault,” she said.

At this moment, my father emerged from the entrance. From the way his lips were set, it looked like he was whistling.

“Me too,” I said.

Maria and Rufina, when I knocked on the door of their dorm room, were both dressed up. Rufina had on a skirt and sweater, and Maria was wearing black pants and a button-down shirt. A few minutes before, without showering, I had finally changed out of my soccer uniform into jeans. In my room, I’d found a note from Martha:
My parents want to meet yours! Where are you? Call me at Sheraton tonight!!
My parents were waiting in the car, and I crumpled the note and threw it away.

“You guys look nice,” I said to Maria and Rufina. “But, I mean, we’re not going—” Maybe they’d imagined I was inviting them to the Red Barn Inn. “We’re just going to the Golden Wok,” I said. “Is that okay?”

They looked at each other, then back at me. “Sure,” Maria said. “That sounds great.” They definitely had thought we were going to the Red Barn Inn.

In the car, my mother asked where they were from and whether they liked Ault. Rufina said, “Not really,” and laughed.

“Why not?” my mother asked.

“It’s just snobby,” Rufina said. “A lot of snobs.”

How could she get away with making the most predictable complaint, and how could she do so having become beautiful? (And she’d go on to Dartmouth, and Maria to Brown. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I had it would only have increased my bewilderment. If you were beautiful and went to an Ivy League college, then really, who cared about everything else?)