Riding In Cars With Boys (17 page)

It was still morning when we started unloading. My mother took command. “Your brother will help your father with the heavy stuff. I don’t want you hurting your back…. Better put the bed there, away from the window or you’ll get a draft…. If you put your canned foods closer to the stove, it’ll be more efficient… . I always put the glasses above the sink…. What? Aren’t you going to put paper on your shelves? …” She was out of hand. I was letting her get away with murder. What did she think, I was still that pregnant teenager she moved into the other apartment?

Everything had been moved in. My brother’s friend had picked him up, and my father was walking around the hockey rink with Jason. My mother had cleaned the refrigerator, and was finishing the stove, when I sat on my bed, dropped my head into my hands, and thought how it was almost dusk and there might be a beautiful sunset, but how would I know? If I’d moved in with friends, we might be sitting on the porch, ordering pizza, buying beers, having arguments about anchovies or no anchovies. Why’d I let my parents assume they’d do the moving?

This was my frame of mind when I stepped out of my bedroom and into the kitchen and spotted my mother moving the kitchen table to a different wall from the one I’d placed it against. “What the fuck do you think gives you the right to move that table?” I yelled.

“You’ll get too much sun. I just thought …”

“You just thought you knew better. You just thought I was an imbecile. Get it straight. This is
my house.”

“Well.” She puffed herself up.

I wasn’t giving her a chance to talk. As far as I was concerned, she had no defense. “Ma, I know this is hard for you to take, but I’m different from you and I’m going to live a different life. Starting right here and now—with where I put the fucking Campbell’s soup.” I took a can and moved it from next to the stove to above the sink.

“Then I guess you don’t need me anymore. We’d better go.”

Now I felt like shit. “Well, we’re moved in. You must be tired.”

“Sonny,” she called outside. She unclasped her cigarette case, took out a Kent, and lit it with a lighter. My father followed Jason in. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, crossed his ankles, and leaned against the stove. “All done?” he said.

“Come here,” she said to Jason.

“You going already?” Jason said.

“You’re going to miss your Mim, I know,” she said.

Jason hugged her hips. She’d be a toll call away now. No way she’d stop by on her way to anywhere ever again. I felt like I was one of those Nazi death camp people shoving Jase into one line and her and my father into another.

She kissed Jase on the cheek, then pressed her pocketbook against her stomach and looked like she might cry as my father put his hand on the middle of her back and guided her out the door. “Don’t be strangers now,” she said through the car window as they pulled away.

 

The next morning at nine o‘clock, Jase and I were standing in line at the Science Center, the modem building on campus, for registration. I’d been afraid people would stare at me because I’d be the only older person (twenty-five in a few days) and I’d be the only one with a kid. I was the oldest person there and the only one with a kid all right, but I was also the only one who noticed. Since I might as well be invisible, it was safe to take a look around, and what I saw were people cut from a different mold. The guys had overdeveloped heads and underdeveloped bodies and the girls had frizzy hair, backpacks, and frozen-faced expressions. I felt like the Student from Another Planet.

Jase had put on his
Night of the Living Dead
face and said, “How long do we have to stay here?”

“Until we get to the head of the line.”

The line was the length of a football field. “Oh brother,” he said, making like he might start crying. I was nervous enough, specifically, that once I got to the head of the line, they’d say, “Beverly Who? I’m sorry. You’re not on the list.”

“Jason! I don’t need it,” I said in a yell disguised as a whisper, then a tall lanky guy touched my shoulder and said, “Excuse me, is this the line for registration?”

“I guess,” I said. What else would it be?

“Excuse me,” he said, turning to the girl behind me. “Is this the line for registration?”

“Quite,” she said.

Quite? Who in the world said
quite
? Was this what I’d have to choose from for friends? Why had I been in such a hurry to transfer from community college when I could’ve stayed there another year before I made this flying leap into whitebreadsville. A chubby guy butted in line in front of me. “Marcy!” he effused. “I can’t believe you’re going here too.”

“Josh! My God. This is so cool,” she said.

“I just got here,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I miss my baby grand already.”

Miss his
baby grand?
These kids were
rich.
Going to a school where a year’s tuition could clothe, feed, and put a roof over a family of six’s heads had been an expectation, like toilet paper in the bathroom, for most of these people. How could I ever relate? A drop of perspiration dripped from my temple. When the line moved forward, I stepped on the back of the fat kid’s shoe.

He turned around.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He smiled and turned back to Marcy.

“Ma, you did that on purpose,” Jase whispered.

“So?”

“Why?”

“It makes me mad he’s so rich.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not, I guess.”

“We’re not poor, though?”

“No. And it’s not even important to be rich. It’s probably better to be poor. It’s just that some people take it for granted and never think about people who aren’t.”

“I’m going to be rich,” Jason said. “If I stepped on his shoe, you’d yell at me.”

“What are you, my conscience?”

“What’s that?”

“The voice inside your head that tells you when you’re wrong.”

“No.”

“Just remember. You’re the kid and I’m the mother.”

“Yes, little girl,” Jason said.

When I thought about this later, I wondered if I wasn’t being as bad as my own mother by not allowing other people to be different—the way she wouldn’t allow another place for the Campbell’s soup.

Still, I was paralyzed by Fear of the Different and did nothing but study, which I expected would pay off. So when my professor asked me to come see him after I’d worked four days on, then handed in, my first English paper, I thought that maybe, like one of the professors at Middlesex had, he was going to invite me to contribute to the school magazine. Still, I was a bundle of nerves when I entered his office. Professors at Middlesex were regular people, while this professor had a goatee like a devil, an accent like Katharine Hep-burn‘s, and did stuff like turn red in the face and burst forth lines by Wordsworth: “’Great God! I’d rather be a Pagan suckled on a creed outworn …‘” This he said after storming into class and railing about a gas station attendant who’d just called him Bub. What if I used incorrect grammar? What if he asked me a question using a word I didn’t know?

He sat in a leather chair across from me instead of behind his desk and smiled kindly. “You have trouble writing,” he said.

I forgot to breathe. “I come from community college,” I said by way of explanation.

“Yes,” he said by way of saying he could tell.

Then he recommended I take a
remedial
writing course, for
no credit.
I could barely control my trembling lip in his office. I went into the bathroom and cried, sitting on the toilet. I could not flunk out, I simply couldn’t. I knew I was the poor relation being let in through the back door of this place, but I’d thought—maybe academically, at least—I’d do all right. The humiliation was even more intense because I’d fantasized that when I graduated from college, I’d move to New York and be a writer. I took a handful of toilet paper and blew my nose. There was another roll of paper still wrapped up. That’s Wesleyan for you, I thought as I walked out, extra paper in every stall. Not a speck of dirt or mess anywhere, every window in every ancient building opened with a lift of a finger, every lawn was manicured perfect, and there wasn’t a dead branch on a single tree.

I’d only be depressed if I went home, so I wandered through the arts complex, which was a group of square limestone buildings scattered here and there under pine trees. The place was unreal. It looked like a moon- scape. I passed a student reading a poem out loud under a tree. They were all over the place—skipping, singing, playing the flute. A woman stood under an arch and played the
bagpipes.
This, I thought, is a far cry from Susan Gerace playing “Taps” in the project.

Susan Gerace, who I’d heard had joined the marines, probably had no idea a place like Wesleyan existed. In Wallingford, if you crossed the street in the middle instead of on a corner, people would beep and you might get arrested. God forbid you should talk to yourself; they might lock you in an attic. One moonless night last week, I’d run as fast as I could with my arms outstretched across the athletic field, leaping across a puddle and splattering myself with mud, and I’d thought one day I’d follow it up with skipping on a sidewalk. I never wanted to forget where I came from or what it was like there, because places like that were where most of the rest of the world lived—and as far as I could tell, they were populated by much more interesting people—but I didn’t want to live there anymore, either.

I headed home finally, and thought of my neighborhood. The first week, the parents on my road had a meeting (three professors, their working wives, another single-mother student, and me) to organize communal day care. This meant I only had to be home one day a week at three o‘clock, when our nine kids got out of school. Every other day, I was free until six. Jason had other parents to talk to and their houses to hang out in. He had friends who gave back rubs instead of boxing matches, painted rocks instead of throwing them, and were vegetarians instead of pickers of cigarette butts. They wrote a play and invited us parents. In it, the woman worked, came home exhausted, and then when her husband plopped a grilled-cheese sandwich in front of her for dinner, she said, “What about a vegetable?”

When I got home, I still didn’t feel like going into the house and facing my books, so I decided to take a walk to the soccer field at the end of the road. I passed Jase and his friends on a porch rehearsing their new play,
The Martians Invade the White House.
Jason was playing the president. I heard him say, “What’s a Martian?” and Brett say, “A Martian is what’s in front of you,” and I yelled, “Clever line.”

“Hi, Ma,” he said. “Where’re you going?”

“Just for a walk.”

“Oh,” he said, which made me feel lonely, because he didn’t ask if he could come, and envious, because he’d fit right in and I hadn’t.

Once on the soccer field, I looked to my right at the school for juvenile delinquents up on the hill. I was looking for a pregnant girl I’d seen pumping on the swing set, but she wasn’t there. I wondered, like I had so many times since the first day I’d seen her, if this obsession I had with seeing her wasn’t a little unhealthy. Was I hanging on to the past? But her being at a neighboring school and our having so much in common was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Besides, maybe I could help her somehow. Maybe one day I’d get up the courage to talk to her. She had appeared in my dreams once already. She’d been on the hill pumping and pumping, but she was older and she wasn’t pregnant. I wondered if she was me.

I went home finally, opened my
Norton’s Anthology,
and forced myself to read.

 

By the spring, things were different. For one thing, Bub, the professor, had given me an A—, and I’d learned some valuable lessons in my remedial-writing course, such as using connectives like
therefore
and
consequently
in my papers, and never ending them with a firm conclusion, because conclusions were too facile, not to mention fragile. And for another, I hadn’t seen the pregnant girl for some time, and had almost forgotten about her, when I spotted a kid tear-assing down the hill and through the field, escaping. I felt exhilarated. It was all I could do to keep myself from shouting, “Go, man, go.” I prayed he made it. I prayed the pregnant girl did too. Then, a few days later, Cupcake was stolen. I cursed my rotten luck. I admonished myself for being so cavalier about her, for never locking her and leaving the keys on the floor.

My father put an all-points out on Cupcake, and miraculously, a week later, he got a call from a cop in Bridgeport, seventy miles away, who said he’d recovered Cupcake from a ghetto called Hell’s Gate. A key obviously made in metal shop was in her ignition, though her own keys were still on the floor. Then, a couple of weeks later, exactly the same thing happened. Cupcake was stolen, found in Bridgeport, and returned.

I made up a story. Then I believed it. The girl had left the school after she’d had her baby and had been forced by her mean parents to give it up for adoption. But her boyfriend was still locked up. He’d seen Cupcake somehow and had made a key to fit her. Then, when he got his chance, he climbed through the boiler-room window, ran down the hill and across the field, and stole her, driving all the way to Bridgeport, where the girl lived. He got caught, but undaunted, he did the same thing again. This time, Cupcake had been retrieved, but the kid hadn’t been caught. He was with the girl, who thought this was the best thing that had happened to her in her life when really it was the worst. In fact, she was probably getting knocked up again that very moment.

I wondered if just as it was Cupcake’s destiny to be a vehicle of escape it was mine to be linked with pregnancy and prematurely ended childhoods that last forever because they never were complete. It might be true and it might not. Only time would tell, but meanwhile, I had proof things could change. I’d made friends with people who were different. The first was Sally Dummerston, who became my best friend. She had two daughters and was the other single mother on the block. When I’d met her my first week at school, she’d introduced herself by saying, “Hi. I’m a Woman in Transition, too.” Women in Transition was a category the university lumped us dozen or so single mothers into, and at the time I’d thought, anybody who introduces herself as a category is not a person I’m interested in saying two words to. Besides, she had cheerleader written all over her. But then Jason and Sally’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, were best friends and circumstances kept bringing us together, until one night we got drunk and I turned Sally on to pot for the first time in her life and she confessed that she wasn’t only a Woman in Transition but a Daughter of the American Revolution and then we giggled for a good ten minutes.