Best Friends (9 page)

“He's moving the run,” Sally said when she got back, her cheeks red with triumph. “This weekend.”

And he did, although it was rainy and cold, and the job involved a dump truck, several other men, and a flat platform on wheels to move the kennel, which was the size of a small garage. I felt a rueful compassion for Mr. Morgan, running from side to side of his house, pointing, shouting, glancing over his shoulder to our windows. Sally had gone to the library to study. That night I didn't notice much difference. The barking was slightly more distant but still there.

“Well?” Sally said the next morning.

I told her my opinion.

“You don't think it's better?” She looked incredulous. “It's definitely better. I went right to sleep. It's not perfect, I admit—but it's certainly better.”

“Boy.” I shook my head. “Remind me never to cross you.”

“Oh, you won't,” Sally said cheerfully, slicing her banana. By then she was certain she was going to law school. She dreamed of becoming a judge.

At the beginning of the year, we biked to campus, but that became difficult as the weather got colder. In the snow it was impossible. As rich as Sally was, she didn't have a car at Oberlin; no student had a car at Oberlin. During the week, when I had classes, I would have liked to study at home during the day, but home was too far away, and I ended up staying on campus in the big new library, taking occasional breaks to visit the snack shop. Sally and I studied in different places in the library. Sally really studied, at a carrrel with her head down and her books out, and I flopped on one beanbag chair and then another, getting up and walking around every ten pages or so, or closing my eyes and imagining molecules, or imagining Dan and trying to work up an orgasm. I thought Dan and I were meant to be together. I thought that, when we were having sex, our bodies dissolved and flowed into each other so that we were truly one. I knew this was not molecular, but still. His marriage was of no consequence. Divorce now, divorce later, it didn't matter. Ultimately, we would be together.

We'd move to California and I'd get a California driver's license and register to vote, two requisites to meeting residency requirements for a California med school, and Dan would get a job at one of the gazillion universities there. We'd have an apartment with a view of the sea and a shared car, maybe a secondhand Saab. No reason not to go to med school: I had the grades, I had the interest. Freddy Finkelstein's house amazed me. If this was what a career as a dermatologist could offer, what about a career as an eye doctor or surgeon? Any other jobs seemed boring. Dan's job seemed unbearable—not the research, which he liked, but the teaching, all those bored kids sitting in rows in front of him thinking about sex. At least that's what I thought about.

“I worry about you sometimes,” Sally said one evening.

“Why?” I shot back, my question antagonistic enough to warn her.

She looked at me regretfully, as if I shouldn't be making her say it. “Because he's married, Clare. I don't think married men tend to leave their wives.”

“Oh, plenty of them do. And if it's an empty marriage—”

“Does he mention leaving?”

“We don't need to talk about it. It's a nonissue. We're fine. Listen, Sally, you know the way you were sure you and Timbo were going to work out”—this was a little mean, but I had to defend myself—“that's the way I'm sure Dan and I are going to work out.”

Sally's lips, slightly parted, closed. “You know you can't—” she started.

“Be sure of anything,” I finished, recklessly. “Of course not, I know that. Who knows what's going to happen to anyone?” I waved my hands, dismissing all arguments. “Dan and I are fine, I feel it. The universe wants us to be together.” I felt a little silly saying this, but who else could I say it to?

Sally raised her eyebrows, but she changed the subject. She started talking about her next paper, a critique of
The Sun Also Rises,
which she thought had a wobbly view of women.

“Listen to you!” I said. “Talk about a born opponent.”

Sally went home with me again for Thanksgiving. Things seemed better for my folks. My mother had a Pendleton suit and set out a tray of shrimp for appetizers, not the tiny shrimp she usually bought but shrimp that required more than one bite to eat. The whole atmosphere at home was better, the way a little extra money makes it—freer, looser, more fun. No one was agonizing. Everyone was there for Thanksgiving dinner, Sally, my brothers, their wives, my little nieces and nephew. We had three kinds of pie, including a pecan pie with nut halves instead of chips. I had suspected my parents had been surreptitiously sending money to Eric, whose wife had just had a baby and who had until recently been out of work. The funds from Mom and Dad must have stopped, I thought, and now Eric was acting proud. He bought flowers for the table and kept lifting his baby in the air and kissing her, showing off how lovey-dovey he was. Well, good. He was married, he was twenty-seven. I was glad my parents were free from the onus of Eric. He wasn't my favorite brother. The one time I'd ever had an accident with my mother's car, Eric had rushed right home and told my parents. When we were kids, he liked to get me in the tree house and run off with the ladder.

“I think they quit sending Eric money,” I told Sally.

“Really? I think your dad got a raise.” Sally grinned. She was always happy to see my family doing well. We were very open with each other about the generalities, if not the specifics, of money.

I was going to California again over Christmas our senior year. I'd been planning to do what I'd done the year before for the accommodating Mr. Guardino, drive another car west, but Dad pulled me aside at Thanksgiving and said he'd have a round-trip airplane ticket for me this year. “Could you go after Christmas?” he said. “Your mother and I would love to have you at home for Christmas.”

“Sure,” I said. I'd save five or six days by not driving. I would have all of January in Los Angeles, hanging out with Sally, visiting med schools, maybe driving down to Mexico or up the coast to Half Moon Bay. We had no college projects to do this winter term. And why not spend Christmas with my family? This would be my last year in Ohio.

Sally was planning to attend law school in California. She wanted me to go to med school there. She and I could share a rented house and continue our Oberlin life in a fresh venue. At times I resented her dreams for us: Would she still be paying more rent than me? Did she think I'd always be happy with a bicycle for transportation? In my dreams, I shared an apartment with Dan, with Sally across the street or down the beach, somewhere close but not oppressive. Dan and I would have a queen-size bed. We'd have Sally over for dinner and I'd cook delicious food, even if I hardly ever cooked now. Sally and I always ate together at a co-op, where we were bread bakers together on Thursday afternoons. There wasn't a night we didn't eat dinner together, then ride our bikes or walk back home.

One night in the shower, I had a revelation. I went over it in my head a while until I could phrase it properly, then popped out to deliver it to Sally. She was in our living room, watching
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
on TV.

“I've been thinking about college,” I said, perching on a chair, toweling my wet hair, “and I think the first year I learned about independence, the second year I learned about religion, the third year I learned about Los Angeles, and this year I'm learning about sex.”

“What a progression.”

“Isn't it?” I grinned, pleased with myself.

Sally considered a moment. “I think the first year I learned to be away from home, the second year I learned about friendship and love, the third year I learned about death, and this year I'm learning about justice.”

“Wow,” I said. I went whole days forgetting about Timbo. “You certainly sound more serious than me.” I reviewed my own list in my mind. Independence, religion, Los Angeles, sex. Not everyone would call it progress.

“Well,” Sally said, “I'm more linear.”

“Right.” I nodded and padded away, the towel wrapped around my head.

 

 

 

MY FATHER DROVE to Oberlin to pick me up after each semester, and always in the evening, after work. But in December, Dad arrived by one in the afternoon.

“What happened?” I cried, distressed. “You're so early. I'm not even packed. They didn't say the weather would be bad, did they?”

“Oh no, no,” my father said. “Just thought I'd get here early.”

I was expecting Dan any minute.

“Can I help you pack anything?” my father said. His eyes landed on a table next to a chair. “Is that our table?”

“Yes, Dad, but I'm not taking furniture home now,” I said, surprised that the end of my college days should already be looming for my father. “I'll be back in seven weeks. All I'm taking home now is clothes.”

“Where's Sally?”

I glanced out the front window: no turquoise Volvo, thank God, no Dan. “She's on campus,” I answered. “She had to turn in a paper.” That was partly true: Sally was actually on campus so Dan and I could have time to ourselves.

I fixed my father a cup of coffee with lots of milk and sugar, the way he liked it, and then switched on the TV because my father liked game shows, but there was nothing on but soaps. “Everybody still coming New Year's?” I asked, and my father's eyes seemed to cloud. He took a second to answer, and I realized something was wrong.

“What's up, Dad?” I said—but at that moment I saw a flash of turquoise out the window and heard a car door slam.

“What's up, pussycat?” Dan said when I got outside. (This was the sort of thing he said.)

“My dad's here.”

It startled me to see Dan straighten up, tuck in his shirt, tuck back his chin. “Onward and upward,” he said, taking a deep breath.

“This is my friend Dan,” I told my father at the front door. My father was aware I had a “friend,” although he never asked specific questions. I always suspected my father thought not asking about men kept me from noticing them.

“Mr. Mann,” Dan said in his deepest voice, holding out his right hand, and it must have been at the same millisecond that Dan, my father, and I all noticed the wedding ring on his other hand.

“Are you a student here, Dan?” my father asked, and Dan, slipping his hands in his jacket pockets, said no, actually he taught chemistry at Case in Cleveland, but he lived in Oberlin because, because . . . Dan faltered. Another minute and he left.

I turned from shutting the door after Dan to my father fiddling with the TV dial, and it was only an instant before I realized I was safe. My father wouldn't say a word. I loved my father. “I'll hurry and pack,” I said.

“Fine, fine,” my father said, settling himself in a plaid armchair to watch a rerun of
Gilligan's Island.

I never saw Dan again. I wasn't sure how to write him, whether a letter addressed to him at Case Western would reach his hands. The secretaries there might open his mail. I finally did write him in March. A neutral letter, something a former student might write: Hi, how was he, I was doing this, I thought of him whenever I saw a . . . He didn't write back. Sally saw him twice in downtown Oberlin during her final spring semester, once looking in the Army-Navy store window and once coming out of the bookstore. He ignored her both times, and so completely it was clear he was pretending he hadn't seen her. Neither time was he accompanied by his wife. “I bet they get a divorce,” I told Sally. “You wait.” I was almost as sure as I'd been in November that Dan and I would end up together. Some things took years; I could wait.

But now, in the car heading off the state route below Oberlin and onto the freeway, my father cleared his throat. Gray, gray, that horrible Ohio gray, and although it wasn't yet five o'clock, the sun was setting. Patches of ice shimmered on the road. “I lost my job,” my father said.

I looked at his profile, the landscape slipping behind it. “You're serious.”

A pause. My father cleared his throat again. “I was fired.”

“Fired! You're kidding! But you do everything for them, how could they—?” But then I stopped, thinking how he'd said nothing to me about Dan, how the kindest thing I could do was to say nothing, to let him reveal what he wanted in his own way.

He didn't reveal much. We made it home without talking about his job again, and I ended up entertaining him with the story of Sally and Mr. Morgan, the doggy neighbor, recasting the story not as a morality play—the way Sally presented it—but as a comedy, with a big emphasis on Mr. Morgan's “They're dogs, I tell you, dogs! Dogs bark!” Mr. Morgan was a silly and distant enough figure that we could laugh at him: his defeat was not at all like my father's. My father, that kind and enormously ethical man.