In the car, she said, “I’m so happy to have you safely home. Dad called to say there was weather on the East Coast, and I’m sure glad you weren’t delayed.” The highway and my parents’ Datsun and my mother herself all looked exactly as they had in early September, when I’d left. This was both reassuring and disorienting‑the sameness seemed at times to cancel out Ault, or make it seem like something I had dreamed. “How did things end up with math?” my mother asked.
“I didn’t know everything on the final, but I’ll probably get a B minus for the term.”
“Honey, that’s fantastic.”
“Or maybe a C plus.”
“I know you’re working so hard.”
The observation felt untrue, but I didn’t correct her.
“Last night I made cookies for Tim and Joe to take to their teachers, and I tripled the recipe and just made a mess of things. I thought, well, that’s where Lee gets it. It wouldn’t be fair to expect you to have a head for numbers when I don’t.”
“I assume we’re going to the Pauleczks’ for Christmas Eve.”
“Lee, we are and I know you don’t like to, but‑”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Well, honey, Mr. Pauleczk has been such a supporter of Dad’s, and I just think it’s important‑”
“Mom, I said it’s fine.” The Pauleczks were in their sixties, and Mr. Pauleczk owned a bunch of motels between South Bend and Gary and had always bought the mattresses for them from my father. For years, we’d gone to their house before midnight mass, for dessert and hot drinks, but neither Joseph nor I had eaten or drunk anything since my sophomore year, when I’d found a long gray hair in a slice of chocolate cherry cake. (Joseph was fourteen, just three years younger than I was, but Tim still ate at the Pauleczks’ because he was only seven and didn’t know better.) After that, just the smell of the Pauleczks’ house made me feel like gagging. Mrs. Pauleczk always asked if Ault was a Catholic school, and when I told her it wasn’t, she’d say, “Episcopal?” then turn to my mother. “Lee’s school is Episcopal, Linda?” Her tone would imply that perhaps I’d concealed this dirty secret from my parents until Janice Pauleczk herself had set things straight. My mother in her mild, laughing way always said something like “They have Lee going to church six days a week up there. You can’t do much better than that!”
But this year‑really, who cared what Janice Pauleczk thought? And how big a deal would it be to sit for a few hours in their living room? Now I had happiness somewhere else. Cross kissed me at night, and that made tolerable all the parts of my life that had nothing to do with him. It occurred to me that I’d probably been a lot crankier before Cross, I’d been so much more dissatisfied. If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you. And wanting less, you were more generous‑definitely, this Christmas, I planned to be more generous with everyone I saw in South Bend and especially with my family.
We were passing the Kroger near our house, the dry cleaner’s and movie rental place. This, also, always happened in South Bend‑I was struck by how homely it was, how accustomed I’d become to Ault’s bricks and flagstones and Gothic tower, its marble mantels and blond‑haired girls. Outside of Ault, people were fat, or wore brown ties, or seemed to be in bad moods.
We pulled into the driveway, and I saw from the car that my mother had attached a sign to the storm door, the sign partly blocking the wreath that hung on the real door: Welcome home for Xmas, Lee! In the corners of the sign, she’d drawn sprigs of holly. “That’s so cute,” I said.
“You know I’m not much of an artist. I asked Joe to make one for you, but he went over to Danny’s so that’s what yours truly came up with.”
“You’re the next Leonardo da Vinci.”
“More like the next Leonardo da Nobody.”
And I felt it then, in the ordinariness of our words‑a kind of rising pressure that would, surely, result in an explosion if we did not open the car doors. She knew I’d had sex. She also knew: It had been with someone who didn’t love me. My mother wasn’t mad, but she thought that I deserved better. Oh, sure, Ault was a fancy place and I’d always been impressed by it, but didn’t I understand that I was special, too? I’m not that special, Mom, I said, and she said, Yes, you are, Lee. You might not see it, but I do. We weren’t actually speaking, we weren’t even looking at each other as we climbed from the car and I retrieved my suitcase from the back seat, and then we were speaking, but it was to debate whether I needed help carrying the suitcase into the house, and the debate lasted several seconds longer than the time it would have taken to walk from the car to the front door. “I don’t want you hurting yourself,” she said, and I replied, “I’m strong.”
Once the moment was over, I might have decided that I’d been making up our exchange except that that night, after I’d already said good night to her‑my brothers and I kissed our parents on the cheek every night before bed‑she returned to my room. She was wearing her red terrycloth robe over her nightshirt (for as long as I could remember, she’d worn a gray Notre Dame nightshirt that came down to her shins; unlike my father, she had no particular fondness for sports, so either he’d given it to her or she’d found it on sale at the mall) and she was carrying a single roll of toilet paper, I think to take to the downstairs bathroom. She stood in the door to my room and said, “Did you bring home your nice shoes?”
“Yeah, of course.”
She continued to stand there. “You would know how to use a rubber, wouldn’t you, Lee?”
“What are you talking about?”
“A condom‑I guess that’s what everyone calls it now.”
“My God, Mom.”
“They’ve taught you is all I’m asking.”
“Yes,” I said. By they, she must have meant Ault, did Ault teach sex ed? Which they did, in a series of four nighttime meetings that occurred in the winter of your sophomore year. The meetings were called Human Health, or H.H., which most people pronounced in two heavy breaths. I had gone out of my way never to pronounce it at all, so as not to embarrass myself either by panting in front of other people or by looking like a spoilsport for not panting in front of other people. Neither of my parents, meanwhile, had ever provided any real sex education except that once, when I was ten and they’d had friends over for dinner‑perhaps the friends had remarked on how boys would soon be after me‑my father had roared, “She’s staying a virgin until she’s thirty! No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And, Lee, don’t let anyone tell you oral sex isn’t sex.”
“Terry!” my mother had said, but I think she’d felt constricted on behalf of the guests more than on my behalf. Neither of my parents had seemed to imagine that I knew what either virgins or oral sex were.
Standing in the doorway of my room, clutching the toilet paper, my mother said, “You know I’m not accusing you of anything.”
I just wanted her to leave. Her talking about it in her ratty robe‑it made sex seem, frankly, disgusting. And not even intriguingly disgusting, just disgusting in a daily way, the way of the household. It was like the smell of someone else’s shit lingering in the bathroom while you brushed your teeth.
“I trust you, Lee,” my mother said.
“Mom, I get the point.”
“But I’m not stupid. I know things are different than when I was your age.”
If I spoke, I would say something like, Good for you.
“Just be careful,” she said, then paused, then added, “if you decide to share yourself.” (My mother was so awkward! How had it taken me until this moment to realize just how awkward she was?) “That’s all I’m trying to say, honey.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Let me tell you good night again,” my mother said, and she stepped into the room to kiss me.
When she was gone, I could breathe, I could think a thought wit
hout trying to insulate her from it, and I also knew that it had been unfair of me to have acted like what she was saying was strange and off‑target. And that she was a mother who would go along with such a charade, instead of calling me on it‑that made my own behavior worse. Or maybe she’d wanted to pretend, too. Maybe she didn’t want to know, she’d have been as horrified as I would have if suddenly I’d started describing Cross. Really, we did not share a vocabulary that would allow for such a conversation; it was far too late to tell her anything.
When I went down to the kitchen on the morning of the twenty‑fourth, Joseph said, as I poured my cereal, “Remember to save room for Chez Hairball tonight,” and my mother said, “That was years ago.”
“Hey, Linda,” my father said.
She looked at him. “What?”
“Have yourself a hairy, hairy Christmas,” my father said.
At midnight mass, because it was midnight, because the church smelled like incense and the carols reminded me of being younger, because outside it was cold and dark, I wished that Cross were in the pew next to me so we could hold hands or I could lean against him. I wouldn’t have grabbed him in an obvious way anyone else might notice; I just wanted him to be there, so I could feel sure of him. I pictured Cross with his brother and sister and parents in Manhattan‑his family was probably the kind that had a tree with only white lights and glass ornaments‑and how all of them probably drank scotch together and gave one another not tube socks and plastic key chains but leather wallets and silk ties.
Then Christmas passed, New Year’s passed. I had no friends left in South Bend and stayed at home with Tim eating pizza and watching movies he’d selected. Joseph was going out with his friends, and my parents went every year to a party across the street. Before they left, my mother exclaimed festively, “Get pepperoni on it!” which was one of her comments that sort of seemed funny and sort of made me want to cry‑my mother’s sense of what was extravagant and celebratory, her attention to whether I was celebrating, her kindness to me. Then, finally, it was the night before I was supposed to go back to Ault; to me, that had been the real countdown.
It was a Saturday and a girl in Joseph’s class was having a fifteenth‑birthday party at a roller‑skating rink. At ten o’clock I went with my father to get Joseph, because my father had asked if I wanted to and though normally I’d have said no, I was leaving in less than twenty‑four hours. And besides, hadn’t I planned to be more generous this vacation?
The rink was twenty minutes from our house. My father pulled up to the entrance of the wide, low building. The parking lot was enormous and half‑empty, and a few boys loitered in front of the glass doors, wearing hats but not coats.
“You see him?” my father asked. Before I could answer, he said, “Dammit,” and stuck the car into park without either moving it from in front of the entrance or turning off the engine. “I told him to be waiting.”
“I’ll get him,” I said. If our father went to retrieve Joseph, the mortifying part would be our father’s tone more than what he said, his grumpiness, and how you’d sense that other kids felt sorry for you because you had a father who sounded mean; how could they understand that what he really was, was a father who didn’t care how he sounded? Which was a form of meanness, but far from the most extreme kind.
Inside, it was dark, with a disco ball flickering over the rink proper. I stood at the edge, watching people sail past, and at first I didn’t see Joseph. Then I turned and spotted him on a bench tying up his regular shoes, another boy next to him. I walked over. “Hurry up. Dad’s waiting.”
“He said ten‑fifteen.”
“It is ten‑fifteen. It’s after ten‑fifteen.”
“And what does it look like I’m doing? Don’t be such a bitch.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and when the other boy’s eyes widened, I wondered if I seemed like our father. But Joseph and I were peers, it wasn’t like I was bullying him‑this was just standard bickering.
Joseph turned to his friend. “You need a ride?”
“Nah, I’m going to Matt’s.”
“All right. See you later, man.”
When we were out of earshot of the other boy, I said, “You definitely wouldn’t have offered him a ride if you knew what a bad mood Dad is in. Where does that kid live?”
“In Larkwood.”
“That’s twenty minutes from our house.”
“First of all, it’s ten minutes, which I’m not surprised you don’t know because you don’t even live here. And second, the Petrashes drive me everywhere. We owe their family big‑time.”
“We owe their family big‑time?” I repeated. “Have you been watching Mafia movies?”
We were outside, and I was a stride behind him, which was why he reached the car first, and how he opened the door to the front seat.
“You’re not sitting there,” I said.
“Oh, really?” He slid in. “Hi, Dad,” I heard him say. “Sorry I’m running late.”
I knocked on his window, and he glared at me and mouthed, Get in back.
I shook my head.
He unrolled the window. “Dad says get in back,” he said. “You’re acting like an idiot.”
Briefly, I considered the feasibility of walking away, calling a taxi, and asking the driver to go directly to the airport. But it actually wasn’t feasible at all. I didn’t have my wallet, or my plane ticket, or the clothes and books I needed to take back to Ault. I opened the back door and got in, and I was stiff with fury.
“Trouble with the lock back there?” my father said. His tone was cheerfully sarcastic, his bad mood apparently having vanished.
“Joseph should not be sitting in front,” I said.
“It’s fair this way,” Joseph said without turning around. “You were in front on the way out.”
“Yeah, exactly. The way out to get you, you dickhead.”
“Oh, did Dad need help steering? I bet you helped him a lot. You’re a really good driver from what I hear.” He laughed‑the joke being that though I’d turned seventeen the previous June, I still didn’t have my license‑and my father laughed, too.
“Tell you what, Flea,” my father said. “When we get home, I’ll park, Joseph and I will go inside, and you can sit in front for as long as you like.”
They laughed uproariously then, and I hated them. I hated them because they thought I was someone to mock and insult, because of the way they brought out the worst in me and it felt so familiar, it felt like the truth‑it made my life at Ault seem like pretense. This was what I was, fundamentally: a petty, angry, impotent person. Why did I even care who sat in front?
I didn’t speak for the rest of the ride, and they chatted about the birthday party‑Joseph disclosed far more information to our parents than I ever had‑then the conversation segued into the basketball team at the rival high school to Joseph’s. All the names they mentioned belonged to kids I no longer knew, or hadn’t known to begin with. About halfway through the ride, my father looked in the rearview mirror, made eye contact with me‑I averted my gaze immediately‑and said, “I must say, Joseph, I’ve never found your sister’s contributions to the conversation so fascinating.” They both laughed, Joseph especially.
At home, I stepped out of the car while the engine was still running, slammed the door, and walked into the house. In my room, I removed my coat and climbed into bed with my clothes still on, without brushing my teeth or washing my face, and I cried hot tears of rage that resulted not in that high gulping but in sustained periods of silence marked by thick hissing outbursts. My mother knocked perhaps fifteen minutes later, murmuring my name, and when I pretended to be asleep, she opened the door but did not enter the room. But she said, “Good night, honey,” so maybe she knew I was faking.
Of course I’d turned out like I had‑being part of this family, you were always about to be made fun of, someone’s mood (my father’s mood) was always about to change, and there was no situation you could trust or settle into. T
heir mockery was both casual and slamming, and it could be about anything. So no wonder‑no wonder I never wanted Cross to see me naked.
I hated them because they thought I was the same as they were, because if they were right, it would mean I’d failed myself, and because if they were wrong, it would mean I had betrayed them.
Probably I had started thinking seriously about the Valentine’s flowers months before‑even as a sophomore and junior, I’d wondered each year if there was any chance, if there was the remotest of possibilities, that Cross would send me one, and apparently there never had been‑but after we got back from winter break, I was fixated.
Every year, accompanied by notes, I received one pink carnation (friendship) from Sin‑Jun and one white carnation (secret admirer) from Martha, whose note would say, in her undisguised handwriting, something like, From your red hot mystery man. As a sophomore, I’d also gotten a pink one from Dede, which immediately made me wish I’d sent one to her, and I’d gotten a pink one from my adviser Ms. Prosek, who was one of the few faculty members who participated in the exchange; a lot of them openly disapproved of it. I had never gotten a rose, which stood, of course, for love, and cost three dollars to the carnation’s dollar‑fifty. The exchange was a fund‑raiser, organized by ASC, the Ault Social Committee, a club overseen every year by pretty junior girls who planned the dances and ran spring carnival. And therein existed the flower exchange’s most predictably flawed and titillating aspect: Whoever you sent a flower to, whatever message you wrote on your note, the ASC girls saw it. They processed all the forms, and it was only natural that the closer the giver or receiver of a particular flower was to their social nucleus, the greater the interest that flower held for them. There was, therefore, nothing truly secret about sending a secret admirer carnation.
Around midnight, as February 13 became February 14, ASC members (they had special permission to be out after curfew, they had work to do!) delivered the flowers to each dorm in large brown buckets, the flowers giving off cold air like the food in the refrigerated section of a grocery store, the notes stapled around the stems but never stapled in such a way that someone for whom the note was not intended couldn’t still open it and read a good chunk of the contents. The idea was that you’d have flowers awaiting you in the morning; the reality was that in most dorms, the flowers were pawed through by twelve‑fifteen. Usually, they were pawed through by someone like Dede, a person unsure how many flowers she’d get, and unable to conceal this anxiety. A person like Aspeth, on the other hand, could stroll into the common room just before chapel the next morning to pick up her bounty, and it would be impossible to say whether she’d waited so long because she wanted everyone to see how many she’d received or because it really wasn’t that big a deal to her. My freshman year, Aspeth had received‑I feared these figures would remain with me long after I’d forgotten the date of the Battle of Waterloo or the boiling point of mercury‑six pink carnations, eleven white carnations, and sixteen red roses, twelve of which were from a sophomore named Andy Kreeger, who had never before spoken to Aspeth.