Riding In Cars With Boys (21 page)

My mother woke me up at seven-thirty Christmas morning. I sat in the kitchen with her and my father and spread some cream cheese on a slice of date-nut bread. My mother poured me a cup of coffee and said, “You have a heart of gold.” I was used to her saying I had a big head. This heart-of-gold stuff was new to me and it put me on guard. She was saying it because the night before, I’d given my sister Rose one of my gifts. I’d given it to her because I didn’t like it.

“No I don‘t,” I said.

“You’d give anybody the shirt off your back,” she insisted.

“No I wouldn‘t,” I insisted back.

“Then you’ve changed,” she said. I could’ve said, No I haven‘t, but decided to end the game.

My father got up and started putting on his shoes. I told him I didn’t need a ride to the station. I’d rather walk.

“You sure? It’s cold out,” he said.

“I’m sure,” I said, looking forward to the solitude.

I kissed Jase on the forehead without waking him, then I left. At the station, I sat on the bench and smoked a roach I’d found in my pocket. A train flew by in the wrong direction. Then there was no other. It was freezing out and I was beginning to get worried. I sat on my hands and jiggled my body. I moved my feet in circles to get them circulating. I looked up. My father was walking toward me.

The first thing I thought was, Good thing I finished the roach, and the next thing I thought was, Why’s he spying on me?

“Thought I’d check to see you got off all right,” he said when he got closer.

I knew it was the truth. He hadn’t been spying, just concerned. He was a father looking after his daughter. That was the other side of the story. The story of the man worried about the teenage daughter he’d just spotted ducking in the backseat of a passing vehicle full of drunk teenagers. So simple. But to me it was a revelation. Maybe he loved me after all.

He pulled a schedule from his jacket. There wasn’t a train for two hours. He offered to drive me to New Haven. We’d have just enough time to make the next one. On the ride to the station, I wanted to talk. To let him know in some way I knew how he felt. To let him know how I felt. But never past the age of four had we talked. How could I start now, on Christmas, during a twenty-minute car ride? He turned on the radio. “Silent Night” came on. I sang. He sang the harmony.

 

 

When Jason and I say goodbye to my parents, there are tears in my mother’s eyes and I know they’re for me, because definitely, by the weekend my father will drive her to Jason’s dorm room. She’ll give him a banana bread wrapped in tin foil, remark on what a mess his room is, and start picking up his laundry to take home.

In the car heading for Wesleyan, I say, “What do you remember most about living there?”

“The kids,” he said. “They taught me to ride a two-wheeler, remember?”

“Uh-huh. Are you nervous now? Afraid it won’t be the same as it was?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I think I should’ve stayed in New York. Gone to Columbia.”

“No.” I insist, thinking that he’d live in our apartment for four more years, when it was time to make the break. Time to grow up. For both of us. “It’ll be good for you to experience the country. Smell the seasons. Live a different life from subways and bars and traffic fumes for a while.”

“But people in Connecticut are stupid.”

“What?”

“They are.”

“You’re saying that if we never moved to New York and we stayed in Connecticut we’d be stupid?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God. I never in my life ever dreamed I’d raise a snob. People in New York are maybe more sarcastic and quick, but it doesn’t make them smarter. Don’t kid yourself.” I looked at him then. Black jeans, black T-shirt, sneakers, sunglasses. I wondered if he looked like a city slicker. I wondered how he’d get on. If he’d be expecting it to be one way, the way he remembered, and when he found it different, which he surely would, if he’d hate it. Maybe it had been a mistake to try to go back to utopia, but we’d never questioned it, not for a second. I’d promised him from the day we left for New York, and he’d wanted to stay at Wesleyan, that he could go to school there himself, provided he got all A’s in high school. So he got a ninety-two-point-something average, and then came running home the fall of his senior year in a panic. “Ma!” he said. “The lowest average Wesleyan accepted from Stuyvesant last year was ninety-four. They’ll never give me a scholarship.”

This news threw me into a panic too. I’d just finished graduate school myself the year before. I’d been proofreading and copyediting, mostly at my kitchen table. We had no money, as usual. The only schools he could “afford” to go to were extraordinarily expensive schools like Wesleyan, because they were the ones with big endowments. If he had to go to a state school, I didn’t know how we’d swing it. But I acted cool. I said, “Well, then we should consider an alternative. Part of the state university system, Cornell, plus another elite school, Yale or Amherst or someplace.”

“You promised I could go to Wesleyan. If I don’t get in, I’m joining the air force.”

“What?”

“We wouldn’t have to pay. Plus, I could wear a uniform. I’d fly a fighter jet. I’d carry a gun.”

Now I knew what my mother had meant when she said I was killing my father. I felt like three bullets went straight to my heart. So this is what kids of hippies grow up to be: future four-star generals. The next day I was copyediting at a magazine and had to run into the bathroom for a half-hour weep when I started thinking that maybe this was GI Joe residue. Maybe this air force bullshit was all about his father who, after all, had been in the 101st Airborne Division.

When Jason was eleven, he began asking questions. “What does my father look like? Where do you think he lives? Do you think we could find him if we wanted?” At the time, I thought maybe Jason needed his father because of the approach of puberty. I suggested he make a search. He called the one phone number I had, which was his great-grandmother‘s, in Bangor, Maine. She gave us the number of his grandmother, who refused to give Jase his father’s number, probably because she was afraid we were after back alimony and child support. But she did say she’d give our number to Raymond. Raymond called that same afternoon. Jason talked to his father for a minute, saying, “Fine. Sixth grade. Okay. New York. Good.” Then he handed the phone to me.

I’d recognize the voice anywhere.

“I hear you been to college. That’s good. You always were smart. I been married again. Fucked that up too. Met her after Nam. We got two girls. Then I left. Don’t see them neither. You know what they say: Once a fuck-up … I got a job. Loading stuff on trucks. Same old shit. I’m living with a lady. She got a baby. It’s not bad. So, how’s Jason? He a good kid?”

“Yeah,” I said, not elaborating, because I wanted off the phone in the worst way.

“I was wondering. What if Jason came for a visit? We live up at Greenwood Lake. It’s only two hours by bus. They got one from the Port Authority.”

I took Jason to the bus the next weekend. As we stood on line, he said, “How will I know him?”

I’d shown him a picture. “You saw what he looks like.”

“What if he doesn’t look like that anymore?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll recognize each other. I know it.”

When he came home, he brought a bag of chocolate-chip cookies baked by Raymond’s girlfriend. He didn’t say much, except that his father lived with a woman who was nice and had a daughter named Juice because she liked it. He said his father was a little fat and they went to bars, where Jason played pinball and Raymond watched television.

His father had given him twenty dollars and a promise to get in touch.

A year later, Jason said, “How much is Social Security?”

“What do you mean?”

“If my father was dead and I got Social Security, how much would it be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe two hundred a month.”

“How would we know if he died? We should find out. I could get money.”

“Jason,” I said. “Which would you rather get, a birthday card or Social Security?”

“A birthday card,” he said, diverting his eyes to look out the window.

I blew my nose in the bathroom stall at work. I put on fresh lipstick and went back to my desk to take advantage of the WATS line. I called up the air force academy and asked them to send an application. I asked them questions, then called Jason up and used reverse psychology, like in the old days. I said, “They’re sending a catalog. They said we’ll have to get a senator from this state to recommend you. Did you know they give you physcial training, like in boot camp? It might be good for you….”

“Ma. I was only saying that. You better get me into Wesleyan.”

“I better get you in?”

“You promised. You said if I got A’s I could go there.”

The subtext was that he’d done his part by being a good student and now it was my part as his parent to provide him with college. Hadn’t I been furious at my parents for not being able to afford to send me to college? Wasn’t this another skip in the record, another generational repeat? He was right. It was partly my responsibility to get my kid to college, but it still pissed me off. I’d just finished getting myself through college, and then graduate school, with no help from parents. And now, to have my kid threaten me with “you betters” and enlistment in the armed forces was too much.

“Get yourself in. It’s your life, not mine. You’re acting like an idiot.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Don’t you call me an idiot.”

He hung up on me.

We hated each other for a couple of days, then eventually started acting like nothing had happened, which was one of our routines.

I knew a great college essay would do the trick. The requested subject was: Describe the person who had the greatest influence on you in your life.

Jase thought he should write about me. Then I came up with a brilliant idea. “What if,” I said, “you wrote about the absence of your father.”

“Yeah,” he said, barely nodding his head. “They’d like that. But that’s harder.”

“That’s what makes it so great.”

 

Jason’s dorm room is a single. He has a bed, a bureau, a desk, and a closet. He also has a balcony, which we stand on first thing. “Smell it,” I say, talking about the air.

“Nice,” he says.

“Look at your view.” It’s of a hill with pine trees.

“Um-hm,” Jase says.

“Well? Isn’t it gorgeous?”

“Yes.”

I want him to be more enthusiastic. I want him to set me at ease about leaving him here. When we start unpacking, he opens his suitcase and I see that he’s jammed everything in without folding. On the top there’s a sweater covered with dust and cat hair. I tell him to shake it over the railing and get a guilt pang because I hadn’t helped him pack like a normal mother. Next he begins putting his shirts in a drawer.

“Jase,” I tell him. “You hang shirts in a closet.” The last closet he had was when we lived at Wesleyan. How would he ever fit in? Across the hall, I see a kid unpacking with his parents and his sister. He’s hooking up a complex stereo system. There’s a computer on his desk. An Indian rug on the wall. Jason has a clock radio and a portable typewriter. His bottom and top sheets don’t match.

“Jase,” I say. “Look at that kid’s room.”

“Nice,” he says.

“Do you think you’re going to feel deprived?”

“What do you mean?”

“A lot of kids are going to be rich. Most of them are going to have more than you. Do you think it’ll make you mad or jealous?”

“I don’t care about that stuff, and neither do you.”

I wasn’t talking only about the things. I was talking about the father and sister in addition to the mother. This I don’t tell him.

After his room’s set up, we ride over to the hockey rink parking lot, where he’s supposed to group with two hundred kids to go on a camping trip for a kind of orientation. Our two old houses across the road appear exactly the same. The hockey rink hasn’t changed either except for the parents and students milling around eating cookies and drinking lemonade.

When Jase and I reach for some cookies, he floors me by saying, “I wonder if they think you’re my girlfriend. You look young for your age and I look old.”

It’s not that I hadn’t wondered the same thing about a million times. For the past couple of years, whenever we’d walked together or gone out to eat, people looked at him, then at me, like I was an older woman with a younger man, not a mother with her son. But I’d had no idea Jase had been aware of this too.

“Does it bother you?” I ask him.

“No. I think it’s cool.”

After he says this, I have to admit to myself I do too.

We take our cookies and lemonade and instead of socializing like we’re supposed to, we sit on a hill, our arms touching, watching. In the summer that just passed, Jase and I spent many nights at the Polish bar, sitting on barstools, drinking Cokes or beers, watching. One night, a guy I’d begun seeing surprised me by dropping by. When I introduced him to Jason, Jase stood up and shook his hand, then offered him his stool. When my friend went to the bathroom, Jase said, “He’s a nice guy, Mom. I like him. When he comes back, I’ll stay for a minute, then leave so you can be alone.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t mind.”

Jason was being chivalrous. He was being a friend, and he was giving me permission to have a boyfriend. It made me very happy at the same time it made me want to hug him and keep him near. Our days as a couple were coming to a close.

Kids were beginning to form lines near the buses. “Maybe it’s time for me to go?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says.

When we get to the car he opens the door for me. I hug him for what seems like a long time but is probably short. I say, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says. His eye kind of twitches and I hope with all my heart he doesn’t start crying.