The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (7 page)

Kelly Aimes was his favorite that year, as she had been the year before. She was a year ahead of me, brilliant, becoming attractive in a rose and auburn way. I envied her. Yet she was desperately lonely. Her parents were divorced, her mother bitter and mistrustful and madly possessive. More than a helicopter parent, she wrapped herself around her daughter like a net. If Kelly told her mother she was stopping after school at my house, Mrs. Aimes would call her to check. Mrs. Aimes would harass her with questions if an errand took longer than expected. Her senior year, her mother put a GPS on her cell that showed where Kelly was at all times. Yet she did not complain as I did. I would hear Mr. Danelli’s deep voice, intimate and mocking by turns, and her quick passionate soprano. A pal of his who taught algebra would drop by between classes. Mr. Danelli would lean back in his chair grinning in easy camaraderie while Kelly sat tense and impatient, ignoring the intruder.

“How goes it, Dan?”

“Performing the seven life functions. How was the meeting?”

“Another cop in the school. The scandal of a few butts in the urinals. How’s Pat?”

Pat was the wife. A couple of times when he had me over on a Sunday, I met her. Kelly went oftener. Somehow Mr. Danelli had charmed Mrs. Aimes into believing he was a good influence on her daughter, so Kelly could visit without an armed escort.

Pat was plump and full-bodied, with straw-blond hair and wide brown eyes. We had grudgingly to admit that for a woman her age, she was not bad although she should lose twenty pounds. Brandon was ten, Ethan, five, and Emily, two. They were harder to swallow than Pat: the tricycle on the lawn, the litter of toys, the bathtub rimmed with rubber ducks, a potty you had to pick off the toilet. I was a little shocked that the kids spent much of Sunday watching TV in what he called The Animal Room.

The house itself surprised me. It was way out in a suburb I’d never heard of where streets were called lanes and named for revolutionary war battles. Although the houses were newish, the trees had not all been chopped down. There was a wall of windows giving on to the rather straggly garden with a basketball hoop and a gas grill. The whole first floor was one huge room except for the kitchen, which seemed weird to me because the stove was in a granite island in the middle of the floor. The chairs were high stools like I’d seen when I passed the dim bar The Cozy Corner although it wasn’t on a corner and reeked of beer and stale smoke on my way from the bus to our house. This ceiling was high but sloped and a tiled fireplace stuck up all the way. He told me his father had built it for them and I was naïve enough to think he meant by hand.

Supper included the first artichokes I had ever tried to eat, then shrimp and spaghetti, which they called pasta. I helped scrape dishes for the dishwasher. Then we sat before the fireplace while jazz played. His wife served sherry that he let me taste but not drink, then occupied herself putting the children to bed before it was time for him to drive me all the way back home. Kelly said Pat was omnipresent but seldom in the room. I didn’t like her either. Kelly said they had married while he was still in graduate school. We fancied that they had to get married. She said his father was a wealthy contractor Dan detested. The father had tried to force Dan
into his business, where Pat’s two brothers functioned and grew fat and powerful.

We knew he was bored with high school. He taught a couple of night courses at the community college. “Why don’t you teach full-time there? Or at the city college?” I asked him. We felt he was too good to be wasted here—once we were gone, of course.

“You know how many applicants there are for every position? Grad schools turn out ten PhDs for every available job. I get paid almost nothing for those courses—not enough to keep one of my kids in clothes for half a year. We’re too used to living beyond our means, anyhow.”

You have to put writing first, he’d tell us, or music or art or dancing. Art was a discipline of mind and body. If one of us produced an artifact that pleased him, he’d flood her with praise and confidence. I remember prancing home filled with a sense of expectation so intense I felt the streets should ring with music.

Other times he would be abrupt, leering. Once Kelly and I came in to ask him about colleges. He listened wearily. Then he looked at us with intense disgust. “What does it matter where you go? You’ll get married, put your husband through and then the five D’s will take over.”

I let Kelly ask him what they were. “Dishes, daddy, diapers, discontent and then, finally, divorce.”

“Think that’s clever? Better than eraser dust, Eliot and exhibitionism. Up your ego!” She walked out.

Every other week they spatted. Only two days after that I overheard him telling her, “Never mind these idiots. Someday you’ll meet a man who can appreciate you, your mind as well as your looks.”

I remembered that conversation the next spring when Kelly came back to see us during spring break from the state college. “You’re looking fit,” he told her. “I like your hair long.”

She was boiling with news. She loved college. Her
English professor thought her poetry showed talent. The dormitory was so noisy she bought herself earplugs. She sat on the edge of his desk, swinging her ankle. Her old tense defensive posture was gone. “I met this music student. He’s twenty. We’re sharing a dorm room but I think we’ll move out to an apartment next fall …”

He waved me out of the room. The rest of the conversation I heard from Kelly, sputtering over coffee. “He implied I was being an idiot. That I’d fallen for the first guy who ever paid me any attention. That all Mason wants is sex—somebody he’s never met. That I’d get pregnant and have to drop out of college. That I was throwing my life away … and on and on. He sounded like my mother.”

“Does she know?”

“Are you kidding? The two times she drove up to visit me, we moved his stuff out and my girlfriend Chloe pretended to be my roommate. Mason and I, we’re both thinking of going to summer school so we can stay together.”

“Will your mother let you?” After all, she was paying most of the bills the scholarship didn’t cover.

“I’ll sell it to her as a way to graduate faster and save money. She’s afraid of taking out a loan. She has a terror of owing money, from when my father dumped her and left her with a mortgage.” She shook her head. “I just can’t believe how absolutely uncool Mr. Danelli turned out to be. He kept berating me like I’d done something terribly wrong. I mean, I was a virgin till Mason. Half our class were fucking their boyfriends by junior year—or sucking them off, anyhow. It isn’t like I’m screwing the football team! He’s a major disappointment. Don’t trust him with your secrets anymore, believe me.”

I wondered if he were jealous. After all, Kelly had been his favorite. I was just one of his chaste harem of nerdy girls. I even wondered if perhaps he knew something about Mason that Kelly didn’t. After she returned to college, he lectured
all of us about what a mistake Kelly had made, “None of you will ever do anything but breed like your mothers. Is that what you want, to end up in a decaying tract house in a decaying neighborhood in a dying city?” I said I didn’t think she’d done anything tragic, or even unusual. He roared and lectured for two weeks and then he stopped. We were all grateful that the crisis had passed and he was restored to good humor and an interest in our individual troubles and attempts at creation.

That Saturday Kelly called me. “How’s college?” I asked her.

“How would I know? My mother made me come home. She cancelled her last check and she called the dean of students and said I was needed here.”

“What happened? Did somebody die?”

“She found out I was living with Mason.”

“Did she come up without warning?”

“She was told. Guess who.”

“He couldn’t!” But I knew immediately that she had to be right.

Kelly’s mother was determined to separate the couple. She would not lose her daughter, she kept saying.

“Don’t send her away to another college,” Mr. Danelli warned Mrs. Aimes. “She’s only get in the same mess. Send her to the community college where I can keep an eye on her—and it will save you a bundle anyhow.”

So Mason quit school too and they went off to Chicago, where he tried to get gigs playing someplace, anyplace and they both went to night school. Mason got a job in a 7-Eleven and Kelly waitressed. They lived in a one-room apartment near the L. When I took the bus to visit them, they were fighting a lot.

The first week in May Mr. Danelli came up to me as I was walking out of the school library and took hold of my arm just above the elbow. “Why don’t you come up and see
me some time.? You haven’t been in the office. I want to see what you’ve been producing.”

I told him I was really busy, it being the end of my senior year, and I wouldn’t have time for the
Signpost.
I suppose he understood, because he stopped saying hello in the hall.

The girls continue to come and go in the
Signpost
office and he still has enthusiasm for his favorites. I see him differently now, good for another ten years of sending us out to do the things he didn’t and break the rules he can’t and fight off his temptations. He finds himself equally betrayed in our successes as by our failures. But I worry about that daughter of his.

Circa 1960

Oily night pads in. The city reeks. But it is chilly in the room under the eaves of the townhouse, where they pitch in bed. To her, Edmund feels all spines. He penetrates her like a question and she responds with her hips nervously, shallowly.

“I don’t know if I love you.” Edmund, whom nobody calls Ed, is sitting on the bed’s edge, thinner than ever.

She shivers with sweat. “Should I leave? Go back to New York?”

“Of course not.” Politely. “Don’t be melodramatic.”

“It’s worse since we started sleeping together.”

“Worse?” He shoots to his feet, reaching for his briefs. “What’s worse? It’s enough to make anyone nervous, tiptoeing around my parents’ house.”

“Why do we stay here then? Let’s go someplace else.”

“You said you liked them.”

“I do. Especially your father. He’s a dear.”

He winces, misbuttoning his shirt. Waits for her to help him. In his angular face the grey eyes are set wide. They look past her, anticipating his flight down to the second floor.

Tossing on the cot after he has left, she hears dry voices, the ticking of glib excuses of the men who have borrowed and used her. Her fingers scrape the sheets. She is twenty-three
and he is twenty-eight, an instructor who was her section man in philosophy when she was in college, but she is his instructor in bed. She shares herself with him as a winning argument. But he takes her gingerly, and afterward, it is as if sex were something he had stepped in.

After she graduated, they had run into each other in the coffee house she still frequented. They went out from time to time last winter and spring, evenings he had taken more seriously than she had. People said she was pretty; she danced well; there were always men. She had been astonished when he proposed she spend the summer with him in his parents’ home. He said they would learn a great deal about each other without being committed to anything, that she would like Boston and find their home comfortable. He was thinking about marriage: that amazed her. Therefore she did not say No, but Maybe. She took him home with her by way of testing, but learned little except that he settled easily into a placid boredom.

Her photographer boyfriend dumped her for a moneyed girlfriend with a loft in SoHo. She stayed with friends, then other friends, sleeping on lumpy couches. She had imagined being an editor, making the delicate literary decisions she had been taught in college, but she was asked if she could type. She found a job so boring she would sometimes think she would die at her desk in the long mornings and longer afternoons. They started to talk at her about dressing differently. She called Edmund in Boston.

Now the house encloses her like an elbow. The house is as busy with a hundred concealed pursuits and escapes as a forest. His father talks to his mother; his mother talks to the Black maid. She and the mother give each other little electric shocks. The father is okay—scotch-and-water, the Maine woods in hunting season, the local
Globe
and the
New York Times,
and a blown wistfulness in his thick face. The mother is tall and dry. She seems to move with the sound of tissue paper.

Coming into Edmund’s territory, she finds that whether they are to marry, whether he wants to, grows every day bigger and bigger. She rests in his hands like something inert.

Edmund lies in his ivory bedroom. He turns his cheek against his special firm pillow, drifting through his melancholy love for his married cousin Isabel—roses in waxy green paper, Limoges china. Soothing as his mother’s hands in childhood fevers.

He feels her in her attic room pressing down on his head. Why did he bring her here? Often he cannot remember. Sometimes she resembles his dreams of the girl who will belong to him, but sometimes she grates. He is amused to think she was born in a Western where names are jokes, the town of Dogleg Bend where dust shimmies in the streets under a sky of mercury.

Once he went there with her. Her waitress mother, fat and messy, greeted her without surprise. Her younger sister seized her and they remained closeted for hours. She spoke to no one on the streets. She took him around a maze of overgrown fields and swaybacked houses, playing guide as if there were anything to be seen: that’s where we lived the year I was ten. That’s where my sister Jeannie and I used to fish on the sandbar. There’s where the Massey boys caught me when I was coming from the diner, and when I yelled, they jumped up and down on my stomach. That’s where I saw a wounded goose, in fall when they come over.

He has brought her to his family as a well-trained retriever will bring something puzzling to lay at his man’s feet and wait, expectant. Is it good? Do we eat it?

By breakfast-time the heat has begun to rise, seeping into the shuttered windows. Her face, cool from sleep across the English marmalade and muffins and yesterday’s flowers, seems young again, closed into itself. He wants to touch her.