All You Get Is Me (9 page)

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Get me out of here!

Roar,

It’s my turn to take you somewhere now. Let’s go to Berkeley and hunt for music. I found myself singing along with Air Supply at the mini-mart today. Rescue me. We’ll drink coffee and buy stinky incense on Telegraph Avenue. When can you go? The sooner the better.

Forest

I’m so pleased that he didn’t use abbreviations like “U” and “R” for “you” and “are” or, God forbid, sideways smiley faces. Would I have eliminated him as a possible boyfriend if he’d written a bad email? Probably not, but I love that he didn’t disappoint. I write him back immediately. We make a date for tomorrow and I’m definitely washing my hair tonight.

Early this morning I was up working in the darkroom, developing a roll of black-and-white film. The photo of Forest at the farmers’ market was on the roll and I printed off an eight-by-ten. It’s a classic candid. I’ve caught him in midstride, looking over his shoulder in my direction but not at the camera. His eyes are slightly narrowed. It could easily be a moody album cover. I’d forgotten about the one he took of me at Millie’s. It’s possibly the best photo anyone’s ever taken of me even though I’m looking embarrassingly flustered. The color roll I shot at the monastery will have to wait. It has to be processed at the Looking Glass in Berkeley. I’ll drop it off there tomorrow.

Storm is my alibi and she’s been briefed. We’re allegedly going to a movie and her dad is dropping us off. My dad never asks for details so I should be okay. I don’t address the weird feeling this deception is giving me. I’ve never really lied to my dad before. Storm is a willing accessory to the crime. She’s absolutely giddy about the idea that I’m doing something subversive, and she’s interrogated me endlessly about Forest.

“Does he have any tattoos?” she asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know. None that I could see.”

“Piercings?”

“I’m not sure. We had all our clothes on.”

“Do you think he’s circumcised?”

“How could I possibly know that?”

“Is he a good kisser?”

“We didn’t kiss.”

“Did he even touch you?” She became impatient.

“No.” But the real answer is yes. It’s just too abstract for Storm to understand. No, he didn’t grab me around the waist or kiss me or jam his tongue in my mouth but his leg was next to mine when I sat with him on the bench at the monastery and it felt electric, and then, later, his hand brushed against mine when we took my bike out of the trunk and somehow it felt very intimate.

“Does he at least smell nice?”

I assumed she meant cologne of some sort. You can always smell Storm’s boyfriends before you see them. But I did notice that Forest smells a little like apples and a little like licorice. It’s very subtle but I like it. I wonder what I smelled like to him. I hope it wasn’t something farmy.

I also noticed the way his black hair falls across his sea-glass eyes in a chunk and the habit he has of removing it by raking it slowly back with his long fingers, and I noticed that his top lip comes together in two perfect little peaks and that his front teeth overlap ever so slightly. He also does this thing where he looks down shyly after he says something. That has to be my favorite thing about him so far.

Even though I think about Forest almost all the time, one thing I try not to think about is who his mother is. It seems impossible to me that the woman I saw that day on the road could possibly have given birth to someone like Forest, who doesn’t seem at all like her. Maybe he’s more like his dad in L.A., or maybe he’s adopted.

At eleven a.m. the next morning, I’m sitting on a wooden fence near the swimming hole. My bike is locked up next to me already. Just a couple of minutes pass before I hear the roar of Forest’s car. It sounds like something heavy on the spin cycle of a washing machine. He pulls up next to me and grins. I hop off the fence and slide in beside him like we’re Bonnie and Clyde on our way to a heist. He hits the gas and we’re off.

An hour and a half later we’re sitting at a table in the window of Caffe Med on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley—a street famous for its tolerance of extreme weirdness—drinking hot lattes from enormous heavy mugs. We watch a steady stream of people walk by the window: Cal summer students; homeless people dressed in all the clothes they own, trying to outweird one another for spare change; and regular people, here to shop for books and music. From where we sit we can see a wide variety of customers coming and going from the tattoo parlor next door. A suburban woman pushing a baby carriage through the door illustrates the point that you no longer have to be an ex-con or a sailor or a gang member or even interesting to get a tattoo. The Med (short for Mediterranean) is famous for attracting an eclectic crowd. It’s one of those places where you might run into a famous poet but you’d never use the bathroom. I’m happy to be sitting here with Forest. He seems comfortable in this place even though he says he’s only been here a couple of times. I ask him about his life back in L.A. I’m eager to fill in the missing pieces.

“My dad’s a psychiatrist. He married my mom when they were both pretty young. A few years ago, my dad got involved with one of his patients and everything changed.”

“What happened?”

“Well, my dad believes in being honest about everything even if he knows it’s going to hurt, so he told my mom and they separated. It practically killed my mom. She completely fell apart; she started self-medicating.”

I’m all too familiar with the term.

“She started drinking and taking painkillers and talking about suicide. It was like everyone checked out of our family at once. I started doing a little self-medicating myself.”

“With what?”

“I wasn’t picky, whatever was laying around. Beer, Valium, pot, and then I started working my way through some of the finest Pinot Noirs of the Burgundy region that my dad kept in his wine cellar.”

“Didn’t your dad notice?”

“No, actually”—he looks down into his coffee cup—“not until the letters from school started arriving. School had become optional at that point.”

“So, what happened?”

“I went to kiddie rehab.”

“What was that like?”

“Stupid. A bunch of whiny, spoiled L.A. brats talking about their so-called problems. I was out in three weeks.” Forest looks up and grins. “With a new outlook.”

“What about your mom?”

“My mom eventually pulled herself out of it, got some help. She joined AA, got into the whole twelve-step thing, but I don’t think she ever recovered completely.”

“What about the patient your dad was seeing?”

“My dad divorced my mom and married her.”

“So now you live with her when you’re at home in L.A.?”

“Yeah. It’s weird. I keep pretty much to myself when I’m there. My dad and I get along okay but his new wife is a lot younger than he is and she’s not that keen on the idea of a teenage son hanging around. I was never part of her plan. She and my dad have a daughter, a wretched little girl named Felicity. She rules the household under a strict fascist regime.”

“What about your stepdad? Do you get along with him?”

“Yeah, Jerry’s a real prince. He and I stay out of each other’s way. He was the first guy who paid any attention to my mom after my dad left her and they were married within a year. Jerry’s a Realtor, in the worst possible sense of the word. That’s how they ended up out here. He didn’t do that great in L.A. Too much competition and he’s got that creepy vibe. Out here he does okay.”

I take a sip of my coffee. A man dressed in a jumpsuit made entirely of duct tape pounds on the window. He looks like a low-rent astronaut. He slowly licks the window with his brownish tongue and when we don’t react he moves on, leaving a big smear on the glass.

“So,” I ask carefully, not sure I want an answer, “how are things since . . . ?” I pause.

“Since the accident? Not so good.” He looks away.

“I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about this.”

“No, it’s okay. I think we should.”

I wait for him to continue. He takes a deep breath.

“Look, I’m sure that you’ve noticed that my mom’s desperately trying to look like a cast member from
Baywatch
.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Well, she wasn’t always like that. It’s like she’s trying to compete with my dad’s new wife even though they’re twenty years apart, and then, to add insult to injury, Jerry had a fling with the receptionist at his real estate office and my mom found out about it. The accident happened the next morning. There’s no excuse for what she did. She just lost it, I guess, but she’s a wreck now. Most days she turns the phone off and sleeps all day.”

“But I saw her at the farmers’ market.”

“That was back when she thought she should get out there and face it. I don’t think she feels that way anymore. I think most of the time she just lies there and thinks about how, if only she hadn’t passed your dad’s truck that day, if only she hadn’t been in such a hurry, everything would be different.”

It’s hard for me to feel any sympathy for Forest’s mom. I don’t think that there could be anything that he could tell me that would help me understand why she did what she did, but I feel like she may not really be the person I saw that day. The woman I saw was so angry. After the accident, I’d imagined her going to her Pilates class, lunch with the girls, shopping, and just carrying on with her life like nothing happened. Now I know it wasn’t like that.

I watch a young man with long dreadlocks roll by the window in a wheelchair. The back of his chair is plastered with Bob Marley stickers.

“So, what about you?” Forest asks.

“What do you mean?”

“C’mon, I know it’s not
Little House on the Prairie
over there on the farm. Tell me everything.”

“You sure? It’ll take a minute.”

“I’ve got a thousand.” He leans back in his chair and looks at me expectantly.

I’m really glad he went first. Hearing Forest’s story makes it so much easier to tell mine. I tell him about my former life in the city, my mom, and all the crap that’s happened since she disappeared. I start with broad strokes but then I find myself filling in the small details. He listens to me, nodding with empathy at the right moments, but he never interrupts. When I’m finished he looks at me for a long time.

“Wow. I think you won that round.”

“Nah, I think we’re tied.”

An elderly man with long, matted gray hair and wearing a threadbare overcoat sits down at the table next to us. The overcoat seems expensive. It’s seventy degrees outside. He studies the two of us carefully for a minute as he stirs his coffee.

“Are you guys brother and sister?” he asks, interrupting our moment, and displaying his lack of dental care.

We both say no and it seems to hit us both at the same time that we may actually look alike: same hair color, complexion, pretty close on the eyes, although Forest’s are greener and slightly tilted down at the edges. Forest’s nose is long and straight and narrow. Mine has a bump right in the middle, like my mom’s.

“Ya look just like each other,” says the man. “Like Hansel and Gretel.”

My version of Hansel and Gretel featured ultrablond Scandinavian kids, but still, it’s funny and Forest grins at me.

“Maybe we were separated at the orphanage, huh?”

God, I hope not, based on what I’ve imagined doing with him.

The man busies himself with his sugar packets and Forest and I go back to our conversation.

“Do you ever hear from your mom?”

“Nope. Not so far.”

“Do you want to?”

“I’d really like to talk to her. I mean, I don’t hate her or anything. I think about her every day.”

“You must really miss her.”

“I miss the mom she was before she changed.”

“And your dad too. He must miss her a lot.”

“I don’t know. It’s become our elephant in the room. We don’t really talk about it but he seems to have lost all interest in women since my mom. I think his heart is broken. The farm is sort of like an island he exiled himself to.”

I tell Forest about Tomás coming to work for us and he visibly winces. I know he must have heard rumblings about my dad trying to rally a civil suit against his mom but I don’t think we should talk about that. At least not right now. Why ruin a perfectly good afternoon? Besides, I can hardly believe how much I’ve told him already.

We walk down the avenue, stopping to browse the street vendors who sell jewelry, candles, tie-dye T-shirts, bumper stickers, incense, and pottery. I take some photos of the street people but they all want to be paid and I run out of dollar bills quickly. Forest buys me a brightly colored woven Guatemalan bracelet and ties it on my wrist. His gentle touch sends an electric current all the way down to my toes. Our last stop on the avenue is the record store, where we stock up on CDs. I get the Shins, the Decemberists, the National, and Feist. Forest buys Elvis Costello, Belle and Sebastian, Elmore James, Jimmy Rogers, Cassandra Wilson, and a Frank Sinatra album, which he tries to hide from me, but the cashier makes a big deal about it, causing Forest to blush deeply. I tease him endlessly.

“Hey, what can I say?” He smirks. “Frank moves me in mysterious ways.”

We eat a late lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant on College Avenue and head back home after I drop my color film off at the Looking Glass. In the car, I pull the Frank Sinatra out of the bag and grin at Forest mischievously as I remove the cellophane.

“Put that down, Gretel, you’re not old enough.”