Hold On Tight (18 page)

“Not that it wasn't on the rise anyway,” Mickey put in.

“You think I should keep living with her?”

“Definitely,” Mickey said.

“You think I should stop feeling bad about this Gabby chick, and go for it with Lara?” Arno asked.

“Totally.”

“You think I should make my name with a naked at dawn in New York City photo series, starring moi?”

“Abso-freaking-lutely.”

“For me it was Athens, 2004—that was when I knew,” said Brendan Lockheart, a second-year Deep Springs student with sandy hair and shoulders still broad from his stint as an Olympic swimmer. Like a lot of the guys sitting around the fire, he was wearing a flannel button-up shirt and corduroys that looked like they got worn in the classroom as well as in the wilderness. “I had just won the gold in the 400 meter butterfly, and it should have been huge. But I realized that I had just been living off insane luck and charm and all this weird adoration. I mean, my life was just empty ambition. I had no idea how to work for something or think anything through. Then someone told me about Deep Springs, so I dropped out of Yale and applied. Best thing I've ever done.”

The other guys nodded. There were about ten of them—they had hiked off the ranch after dinner and walked two hours or so before stopping to build a fire. Everything around them was very dark and very quiet.
Patch poked at the embers of the fire with his walking stick and listened.

“So, Patch,” Dairy Boy said eventually. He was sitting next to Patch on the ground and occasionally plucking at his banjo. “What brought you to Deep Springs?”

Patch was almost surprised to hear his name. The guys had hiked in near silence, and no one had seemed particularly interested in who he was or what he was doing there. Patch had enjoyed the ruminative privacy these guys seemed to exist in, but the question Dairy Boy had put to him didn't feel particularly invasive, either.

“I was thinking about going to all these schools on the East Coast, the same ones my New York guys are considering. But in the city I get all this weird attention. It's like everybody thinks they know who I am, and they want a piece of that. I don't know if I can handle another four years of living with other people's perceptions of me.”

Dairy Boy let out a soft chuckle. Patch thought he was going to tell him to get over himself for a moment. “I've been there, man,” Dairy Boy said. “It's really hard to get into this school, so, you know, don't assume anything. But you're going to hear a lot of similar stories from the other guys here—a lot of us have dealt with
that same situation, and Deep Springs helped us get away from the oppressive attention of the rest of the world. This might be the one place where you could self-actualize, instead of being tugged down by the way everybody else deals with your, like … Patchness.”

The other guys made mumbling agreement sounds.

Patch nodded. That sounded right on to him—it was, in fact, what he had been thinking about for the entire hike. “There's one hitch, though. My girlfriend and I were planning on going to the same school. She's from out west, so this is our chance to be together.”

“Every story needs a girl,” Brendan said philosophically.

Patch nodded. He wondered what Greta was doing right now. The fire snapped, and the stars shown above him. Patch knew that she was sorry, but it didn't really matter anymore, because he knew he wasn't going to choose a college that both of them could go to. He was going to choose Deep Springs.

“Dad?
Daaaad
?” Mickey knocked on the worn metal door to his dad's office. He knew Ricardo was in there because the lights were on and because he could smell cigar smoke wafting under the door. He hadn't felt quite so like a child since he was one. “Dad,” he whined, “I know you're there!”

He was standing in the hall in his dad's old, white terry-cloth robe, and he was holding a box of negatives. Caselli had developed them as soon as Mickey got home from his dawn tour of the city. Now, still exhilarated from the dewy jaunt, as well as from having escaped a citation for indecent exposure, Mickey wanted nothing so much as to show off the results.

“Paaaaa-
piiiii
!” he cried. That must have carried, because Mickey heard the sound of a chair scraping across the floor and a few seconds later Ricardo's face appeared in the crack of the doorjamb.

“Yes, what do you want?” Ricardo said tightly.

“Yo, dad.” Mickey took a deep breath. “Listen, I know you weren't crazy about my last big splash in the art world. But I'm giving another lecture tomorrow night, and I thought I'd do something new.”

Ricardo turned down both ends of his mouth, and nodded. “Impressive. The great Mickey Pardo thinks he actually needs to do something new.”

Mickey watched his dad snarl a little as he said the word “new,” and tried not to let it bother him. “Yup. I was hoping you would take a look at the new project? They're photos. I took them this morning. Maybe you could, you know, tell me what you think?”

Ricardo lowered his voice, keeping his evident fury close to his chest. “Get out of here
mijo
. Stop riling everybody up. Now you just do everything for show. Come back and talk to me about art when you've learned a little craft, eh?”

Then he slammed the heavy metal door in Mickey's face. Mickey turned and saw that Caselli was there waiting for him. “Come on, man,” Caselli said. “Let me help you mount those slides for your lecture, okay?”

“Okay,” Mickey said, walking back toward the photo studio with Caselli. He was trying hard to feel more pissed than hurt. “I don't see why he couldn't have just looked.”

“Don't take it so hard, kiddo. I've been trying to get Ricardo to look at my stuff for years.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. And for what it's worth, I think your pictures are really sweet.”

“Really?” Mickey said as they sat down at Caselli's worktable.

“Yeah. I especially like the one of you running through Battery Park with all the sailboats and, you know, New Jersey in the background. And going on a subway car was a really inspired move, too. There's something really brilliant and disturbed about that one.”

“Thanks, man” Mickey said. He watched Caselli carefully cut the film and put each picture into little white slide mountings. He tried to remind himself of Arno and David's enthusiasm about the photos, and thought
to hell with you, Dad
. He stood up and paced a little circle around the center of the room.

“I'm Mickey Pardo,” he muttered to himself, “and I'm doing it my way.”

I hardly slept because of all the unanswered questions marching around in my head. Marching like the adorable little penguins in the film I'd stayed up most of the night watching after I got back from the penguin event. The most important question marching through my head, of course, was still whether or not I would be able to actually get down and put my hands in dirt. But I focused on another, also important question, instead.

What does a guy wear to his first community garden “work party”?

I decided—once I was actually awake, the sun was up and all of that, and I knew I was going to have to face my fate—that the best thing to do would be to dress just like Patch for my first community garden work party. I located my one pair of khakis, rolled them to the ankles, and put on these vintage Jack Purcell sneakers. Then I found
an old T-shirt of my brother's, a green one, and put that on. I felt greener already.

I made myself a bowl of cereal and poured myself the rest of the pot of coffee that the housekeeper must have made that morning. I flipped through the paper just to remind myself that there's a lot of pain and suffering out there. And then, when I couldn't avoid it anymore, I grabbed a white canvas blazer off the rack by the door and headed for the far West Side.

There was already a lot of activity when I got to the site. I could see the other volunteers through the big open doors of the chain-link fence, pushing around wheelbarrows full of dirt and bending over to pat various green things. There were kids in there, too. I could hear them squealing. Somebody had brought a stereo, and it was currently playing that Modest Mouse song that got used in a car commercial.

I went up to the entrance and stood there surveying the scene. I felt like I was on the border of a magical realm or something, because everything beyond the chain-link fence was very green and despite all the activity, kind of calm. There was also a lot—I mean a
lof
—of dirt.

I stood there for a moment, looking at all the
people in their practical outfits working in very concentrated ways. Just when I was starting to worry that I might be a community garden work party wallflower, a girl walked up to me, looking pretty serious for a Friday at noon.

“Can I help you?” she asked. She had pale skin, but the brown freckles on her nose and cheeks made it a few shades darker, and she had really light-blue eyes. She was tall, almost as tall as I was, and thin, but not like I-don't-eat thin. She was wearing a navy-and-white striped polo T-shirt and beige capri pants, and she looked very Connecticut. But down-to-earth Connecticut.

I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “Are you Lily Maynard's friend Ava?” I hadn't really expected Ava to be this pretty.

“No, I mean yes, well, I know her, you see what I mean?” The girl laughed and shook her head. “Man, I'm a geek. Yes. Yes! We're friends, and she's done a lot of work for the garden. She had all these great ideas about fundraisers so that we could buy equipment and bulbs and things. Pretty incredible, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” I said. We both looked around to confirm-slash-emphasize the “incredible” part.

“Don't take this the wrong way,” the girl said,
“but you seem a little out of place.” And then she laughed one of those too-loud, uncomfortable laughs that shows you how pretty a person's smile can be.

“It's my first time,” I said. “I mean, I've never gardened before.”

“Wow, really? Why don't you come with me then? I'm planting tomatoes over there.” She pointed and I followed her as we walked through little rows of recently planted flowers and stalks. “What's your name, by the way,” she said as she knelt down in the dirt.

“Jonathan,” I said, hesitating. I hovered above her for a moment. I could smell that loamy garden smell, even from here. Ava looked up at me, shielding her eyes from the sun with a hand.

“I'll be there in a sec,” I said, and then I was. I was kneeling in front of a little patch of soil, and I was ready to put a plant into the ground. “Okay. What do I do?”

Ava laughed. “Well, this is my little plot, and I'm planting heirloom tomatoes.”

“Really? I love heirloom tomato salad.”

“I know, aren't tomatoes wonderful? There's nothing as delicious as a homegrown tomato, don't you think? Hopefully, by the time fall rolls
around, we'll be eating heirloom tomatoes all the time.” Then she laughed that laugh again. “Man, that would be pretty boring if I really thought tomatoes were the most exciting thing in the world, huh?”

“I knew what you meant,” I said, noticing that she had really full, healthy gums. “So, what do I do?”

“See these?” she pointed at a row of little cardboard planters. “These are seedlings that I planted a couple of weeks ago. They've just been growing by the window in my kitchen. Anyway, what you do is …” And then she showed me how to dig a little hole, water it, remove the seedling from its box, and reposition it the ground. “Go ahead and try one,” she said when she was done.

We worked for a while, quietly putting the seedlings into rows in Ava's plot. Pretty soon there were two neat rows of heirloom tomatoes. It was actually really meditative, and for a while I lost myself in moving these delicate little living things from one home to another.

I was almost jolted when I heard Ava's voice saying, “That one's Brandywine.”

“Huh?” I looked down at the seedling, with its couple of small leaves, in my hands.

“They all have these funny names. You know, like Kentucky Beefsteak and Green Zebra.”

“Really? And I thought all there was to an heirloom tomato was eating.”

She laughed at my not-very-funny joke. “So, where do you go to school?”

“Gissing. How about you?”

“Sutter-Gable. But I just started there junior year because my family moved from Boston. So, why was today the day you wanted to learn about gardening, Jonathan?” she asked, brushing her straight, healthy-looking hair behind her ear.

“Um,” I stalled. Ava seemed like a person I could be honest with, but I figured half honesty was the way to go for the moment. “Well, I thought I should start caring about more diverse things.”

“Oh really? What did you care about before?”

“Penguins, mostly. Did you know that there are nineteen species of penguins, and that eleven of them are endangered?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the knees of my pants, which were muddy from the dirt. Just then, a cloud went over the sun, and I saw Ava shiver. “Here,” I said, grabbing the canvas blazer from where I'd left it on the ground. “Put this on.”

She smiled. “Thanks, Jonathan. And thanks for helping me with my tomatoes.”

“I'm really glad I did,” I said. And then I realized that this was one of those moments when you have to make something happen. I knew I was supposed to be going to Sarah Lawrence with Mickey that night, but I felt like I really had to seize the moment. “Hey, do you want to do something tonight? There's this documentary playing at Film Forum that I kind of wanted to see, or …”