A Ticket to Ride (10 page)

“Hi. So this is where you live? It’s nice.”

“No it’s not.” I grimaced.

“I just meant,” he said, trying to recover, “that it’s nice to see
you.
” He paused, looking for courage, it seemed, in the scuffed tops of his sneakers. “I feel really bad about the other day. I shouldn’t have said, you know, what I said.”

“I’m sorry too. I was just in a really bad mood, I guess.”

“Good, then,” he said. “Great. Do you want to come over to my house? I could give you another piano lesson?”

I felt ill, knowing what had to be done. “That’s really nice of you,” I said, my voice hardening with each syllable, growing a shell. “But I don’t think so.”

I meant to be kind. I meant to explain things as gently and clearly as possible, but instead, I was an iceberg, my eyes hard and focused as I told Collin I didn’t like him, had never liked him, and didn’t want to see him again after that day.

As I saw it, I didn’t have a choice. Fawn would never accept Collin as boyfriend material, but even if he was completely cool and had had Fawn’s stamp of approval, I’d still be breaking up with him. Fawn was single now, and we’d be spending all our time together again, alone. I didn’t have time for a boyfriend.

Collin shriveled as I delivered the verdict. He hung his head and listed on the curb, kicking one shoe toe against the cement. It was a version of the kicked-puppy routine I had seen him enact over and over again with Tom, and I had a sudden flash of insight. Did Tom kick Collin because Tom was an asshole,
or because Collin was begging to be kicked? Similarly, if Fawn didn’t exactly treat me like a queen, as Collin had said, maybe it was because she didn’t have to. I would go on catering to Fawn regardless, stroking her ego, attentive to her every whim. Fawn ordered me around, yes, but wasn’t I sort of asking for it?

Collin continued to kick the curb in an even rhythm. He wouldn’t look up. I felt a little bad for him, but also knew that if I gave in now, I would be condemned forever—that Collin and I would be puppies together, timid and loyal and stuck. I didn’t want to be a sweet boy’s sweet girlfriend. I wanted to be Fawn’s equal, the kind of girl who stood up for herself and took care of business, who cut guys loose when it was required.

“Look,” I said. “It’s not going to happen. Why don’t you just get out of here?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back again. But there was no going back.

And if Fawn was watching us, as she most certainly was. If Skinny Man peered at us from a hairline crack in his venetian blinds, or Timmy Romelin from the dusty window of his attic bedroom next door, or the crow, black and glassy, on the maypole clothesline. If the cicadas were watching through jeweled eyes from their billion and one adjacent stations on the maples above, they would have seen a boy standing as if his feet were hardening in cement. He had his right arm crossed behind his back, cradling his left elbow. The girl shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her cutoff denim shorts as if she might find something there, among the sand kernels and lint, to help her make sense of what she was doing, who she had become.

“I gotta go,” I finally said, and left Collin on the curb. He stayed rooted there, even after I went back in the house; after I’d huddled behind the door, allowing myself half a minute of crying, and then went down the hall to rinse my face. He was still there when I opened the door to the screened porch and began to tell Fawn an acceptable version of what had happened.
And later that evening, as I looked out the front screen at a red-tinged and sinking sun, I thought I could still see Collin there by the mailbox, like a statue. Like something that didn’t belong in the yard, in my summer, my world even, but was there nonetheless, tender and solid. Perfectly, magically still.

R
aymond liked to drive at night. DJs had different voices then, less falsely chipper, more sultry and remote, seeming not to care if he or anyone at all was listening, and Raymond felt this as a kind of grace. The songs they played at night seemed to have very little to do with his life. Perry Como sang “Dream On, Little Dreamer.” Jonathan King sang “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” Mick Jagger wanted someone to get off his cloud, but there were no hidden messages for Raymond, no moments where the lyrics unpinned themselves and lodged in his thoughts as either questions or answers. He could just drive, drink cold coffee, and pop the Dexedrine he’d begged from Suzette for the trip. He felt his eyes glowing in the dark like discrete pieces of neon, and after checking his mirrors for lurking highway patrolmen, he decided he could risk another ten miles per hour.

While Raymond drove, Suzette snored lightly in the back, curled on her side on the bench seat, Raymond’s jacket pulled up to her chin. She slept through LA and the winding section of highway called the Grapevine and beyond; slept while Raymond
guided the car past the city limits into downtown Bakersfield. He passed the high school with its gymnasium looking small and withered in predawn light, and the empty granary, and the hospital and the Foster’s Freeze and the Rodeo Café. He took a detour to drive by The Blackboard, where as a teenager he’d gone to see Bill Woods and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, pioneers of
that Bakersfield sound
, which didn’t yet have a name or a reputation in Nashville, just a particular feeling, raw and twangy, that tugged at parts of you when you heard the songs. When he was eighteen and Suzette was just twelve, she’d wear him down until he’d promise to take her. Knowing Berna would object, he snuck her out. They walked up the dirt road in the dark and waited for his best friend, Billy Buell, to drive by in his truck and collect them.

At twelve, Suzette was leggy and bold. She’d say anything to anyone, and flirted openly with Raymond’s friends who thought it was funny until some line got crossed and it wasn’t anymore. He guessed they felt surprised—hijacked, even—by the way they could be attracted to her. She was just a kid, after all, and pretty, but not in the expected way, with big dark eyes that spooked you if you looked too long, and very fine dark hair she wore in a low ponytail with sideswept bangs. He remembered clearly the night he came out of the club to filch a cigarette, and found Billy and Suzette standing way too close out by the truck. When he walked up they separated, and he didn’t know until later that he’d just missed Suzette’s first kiss. That she’d been crying a moment before because Billy had pulled away the next moment, apologizing, ruining everything.

Maybe that was the beginning of Suzette’s trouble with boys—or maybe it had been brewing well before. Boys were on her radar long before Raymond could be prepared for it, mattering too much to her, doing damage, leaving scars. In the fifth grade, David Tilden accidentally, with his foot, sent a rubber kickball
flying into Suzette’s face. The blow had thrown her backward into a chain-link fence and given her a bruise she wore with pride for a week. Unfortunately, the crush she had on David after that day was slower to fade. She made it a point to sidle near him in the lunch line, at recess. When they’d take a test, she’d wait until David was finished to walk her paper to the teacher; that way, their answers and even their penciled names would rub together, creating, what, a kind of voodoo that would carry over to more satisfying contact? But David had ignored her. The more desperate Suzette grew, the more he retreated, passing her unopened love notes on to his friends, who’d howl with laughter. Raymond heard all about this on bus rides home from school, at the kitchen table where she’d tear crusts off her bread and push green beans around with her fork, too miserable to eat.

“Can’t you just talk to him?” Suzette wanted to know.

“What would I say?”

“I don’t know, that I’m really nice?”

“It doesn’t work that way, Suzy. I can’t make him like you if he doesn’t.”

Suzette had left the table crying. Up in her room, she cried some more and then wrote a long letter to David that she had no choice but to rip into pieces. At bedtime, she showed up at Raymond’s door wanting to be let in.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for this?” he asked. “You should sleep in your own bed.”

Raymond was worried that they were
both
getting a little too old to sleep together, but looking into her small, tearstained face dissolved any willpower he had. He couldn’t make David like her, it was true, but he could pet her hair and rock her back and forth with his body until she fell asleep. He could go to sleep himself to the smell of her shampoo, and her low, regular breathing, feeling awful for her and necessary too. Feeling like a brother loved without question, loved all the way through.

This particular drama had been revised and revisited more times than Raymond could count, accumulating with force until Suzette found Benny. He had never known what to make of Benny, even in high school when they’d wrestled together. They’d been in the same class, though the two had run in different circles. At the time, Benny had been a clean enough kid from an Armenian family that ran a grocery in town, but Raymond felt there was something about him that wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was the overbite that gave him an anxious, rabbity look when he opened his mouth, or the way he gnawed his fingernails down to the quick, drawing blood. Or maybe it wasn’t anything he did, just something that was in the eyes or
not
there—something important missing from the equation.

Benny and Raymond had both graduated before Suzette entered high school, and as far as Raymond knew, Benny and Suzette had never said a word to each other before she ran into him randomly at a dog track in Reno in 1957. She was nineteen then and had been living on her own for a few years, or with various boyfriends she followed around the state. That was how she got to Reno. When she found Benny, she latched onto him immediately, forgetting about the guy who’d been supporting her for six months, and Benny seemed to latch right back, believing it was fate that had drawn them together, two Bakersfield kids that had grown up just a few miles from each other. It probably
was
fate, Raymond thought later, but not the good kind.

When Suzette hooked up with him, Benny was working the kennels—shoveling pens, feeding the dogs, bathing them as he chattered away in a soft and dreamy voice that must have reminded Suzette of the way Earl was with animals. It did Raymond, but instead of reassuring him, the similarity set the hairs on the back of his neck quivering. True to form, Suzette wasn’t in touch with Raymond for the first few months after she and Benny had found one another. By the time she did call and agree
to Raymond’s suggestion that he drive out to visit them for a day or two, Suzette was already nearly five months pregnant. She greeted him at the door of the apartment she shared with Benny, dressed for work in a white blouse and short black skirt. A black half-apron was tied snugly over the knuckle of her belly.

“Well?” she said. He’d been standing there with his mouth open. “Are you coming in or what?”

He was shocked to find her pregnant, of course, but more than this, she just didn’t look good. Her skin was sallow, her hair pulled into a brittle ponytail that looked like it might come off in her hands. And she was so thin that the curve of the baby she carried looked hard and unforgiving, like a bowling ball or an enormous unripe apple. “Oh, honey. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What good would it have done? Besides, you know now.”

They went inside and sat in the kitchen, where Suzette still had half a cigarette burning in an ashtray next to an open window. “I’ve got twenty minutes, but Benny should be home soon. He’ll keep you company.”

“Are you taking care of yourself? How are you feeling?”

“Tired.” She ran a hand over her blunt bangs, smoothing them. “Fat. I’m worried they’re going to fire me soon. The club likes their girls sexy, and I’m definitely not
that
these days. Although my boobs are bigger.” She plucked an invisible filament of tobacco off her tongue. “That’s one plus, I guess.”

“Did you guys plan this?” Raymond asked. “I mean, I don’t remember you saying you wanted kids anytime soon.”

“Do you
plan
everything that happens to you, Ray? Maybe you do,” she said, stabbing her spent butt into the nearly full ashtray. “But surprises aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Are you trying to say you don’t think I can do this, that I shouldn’t be a mother?”

“Of course not,” he said, lying outright, hoping she wouldn’t see it in his face—but maybe she already had. Maybe it had been obvious when she opened the door, the disappointment and
misgiving he felt—the certainty that nothing good could surface at the end of this particular story. Suzette was only nineteen and could barely take care of herself, let alone a baby. And the idea of Benny as a father was nothing short of ridiculous. What had they been thinking?

Suzette rose from the table and went to the fridge, standing for several moments with the door open. She didn’t even look pregnant from the back. She looked like a stick figure in a half-finished drawing. When she came back she was carrying a bowl of cherry tomatoes and a beer, which she offered to Raymond. “Anyway, I figure I can’t do any worse than Berna did raising us.”

Raymond simply nodded, focused on the steady lip of the can.

“I’ve gotta go to work,” Suzette said, snapping the stem off a cherry tomato and putting it into her mouth. “Will you still be here when I get home?”

“Of course. Where else would I be?”

She shrugged and stood, and suddenly seemed to age ten years. “I don’t know. I guess I keep thinking that one of these days you’re going to give up on me. Everyone else has. Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I love you. You know that.” He said the words, trying to fill them absolutely, wanting her to trust him, to lean on him, to feel him as a net that would never, ever fail her.

“I know that,” she repeated, sighing. And then she tightened her apron, put on another, prettier face, and went off to deal someone else’s fortune, card by card.

After Jamie was born, Raymond kept in close touch despite Suzette’s resistances, calling to hear the baby cry or coo, sending a check whenever he could. He was there when they brought her home from the hospital, and for her first birthday, bringing a painted wooden caterpillar as a gift. Jamie immediately
picked up the toy and began gumming on the pull string, and he felt a satisfaction that reminded him of that first time he’d put Suzette to sleep. Jamie was a sweet baby, with wide brown eyes and an unmanageable shock of sandy hair fountaining from the top of her head. He watched her patiently mangling a mound of gift paper, gnawing on the ribbon, chasing a half-deflated balloon around the small apartment, and thought about how babies were so open, so easy in a way. They needed a lot from you, but what they needed was simple and straightforward. He didn’t think Suzette would agree. She looked like she was being swallowed up by the demands of motherhood from the inside out. At the birthday party, such as it was, Suzette sat at one end of the table in a housedress, her slip showing, her hair unclean. It was teased up in front and in a little ratted ponytail in back, as if she’d slept on it and couldn’t be bothered to tidy it in the morning. As Jamie scooped a blue rose from the piece of cake on her tray and gleefully smeared it everywhere she could reach, Suzette chain-smoked, unsmiling. In fact, she grew animated only when Benny came home with pizza and a small baggie of Mexican reds. They all got very high that night, Raymond included, while Jamie slept down the hall on a mattress they had set up for her on the floor, pillows all around—but he couldn’t help feeling, as he drove away the next morning, that Suzette was teetering on the edge of a pretty dark place.

He should have done something then, but he didn’t. Within a month, Suzette began calling him frequently, saying she was sure Benny was having an affair. She was worried he was going to leave her, and had started tailing him at night, throwing Jamie in the back of the car, wrapped in a blanket. She insisted he take her to parties, introduce her to his friends, but the more clingy she got, the more cagey and elusive he grew. He’d stay away for days at a time so that she couldn’t go in and work her shifts. When he did come home she’d pick a fight and he’d leave again.

And then came the call when Suzette said it was all just too much for her. Raymond knew it had been coming, and was only a little surprised when Suzette asked him to take the baby to Berna—just for a few months, until she could get herself straight again, put a little money by. Suzette and Berna were barely civil to each other in those days, true, but who else was there? So he made the call and headed to Reno. He did everything she asked, driving most of the night to get there. When he arrived, the baby was still asleep and Benny was on the couch in his underwear and messed up on something. Raymond found he couldn’t look at Benny’s hands—at the stumpy, yellowed nails, bleeding here and there—when he took the note Suzette had left.
I can’t stay and watch you take her,
she’d written.
Tell Berna not to worry. I’m going to send money
. Raymond had turned the note over, looking for more, but there hadn’t been more. There had also been no calls and no money. Not that this surprised Berna. When she had agreed to take the baby, Raymond had heard considerable resignation in her voice, but she had asked surprisingly few questions. It was as if she’d simply been waiting for the moment, knowing Suzette as she did.

It wasn’t yet dawn when Raymond headed out of Reno with Jamie in the backseat. She was tucked into a Chiquita banana box with her bottle and a pink flannelette blanket, a few toys around her. She slept a lot, lulled by the car’s motion and the radio, and Raymond couldn’t help but look in the rearview at her soft bud-face and fantasize about keeping her. Maybe he could do it. For daytime, he’d get a babysitter. Or he’d talk Suzette into moving out to LA, where he was living. They could care for the baby together; they could be a family—hell, they already
were
a family. But as soon as the thought fully materialized, Raymond forced it away. Suzette was a train wreck; she couldn’t help take care of Jamie right now. He would have to do it on his own, and was he really ready to be a father?