He wondered what it meant that people were so busy reminding him where to be and when. Was he unreliable? Flaky? Hostile to commitment? Negativo, as Turo liked to say.
Vertebrates started in half an hour. He spun his chair around. “Cla-rah,” he whispered. “Rah-rah-raaah.”
Clara looked across the horizon of her tome. She wore a drab, almost colorless dress, yet it was amazingly hot: so flimsy that Robert could see her navel through the fabric across her belly. Between the top of one long black stocking and her rucked-up hem, he could see two inches of thigh.
Robert began to crawl across the bedroom rug on all fours.
Clara rolled her eyes, but she was into it. She closed the book gracefully, marking her place with the highlighter pen, then swept back her fine yellow hair, exposing her delicate collar bones. “Purr,” she commanded. She gazed imperiously at Robert, over the edge of the bed. She inched her body down just enough so that she could reach the door with one foot. She closed it.
Robert purred. Clara laughed her Tinkerbell laugh.
“Now, bobcat,” she said, pointing a finger at him, “behave yourself.”
Robert counted: twenty-three people, and the meeting was supposed to have started fifteen minutes ago. Twenty-three wasn’t so bad, though two and possibly three of these people were clearly crazies, the straight-up, non-PC term for the rootless if not homeless townies who showed up anywhere they could hope for a free snack or cheap vino. (They’d be disappointed tonight.) Or even just a chance to spend time under a ceiling. It didn’t have to be too cold or hot outside. These early October nights were perfect still, the air like bathwater, soothing and romantic if you were comfortably off, had a home and bed waiting at the end of your day. During his time in Costa Rica, sleeping in tents and hammocks in the great tropical outdoors, Robert had learned this: no matter how beautiful or temperate your surroundings, if you’ve grown up mostly indoors, you begin to miss that sensation of being enclosed. Four solid walls and a ceiling kind of define the space you consider “normal.” Pathetic but true. So some of the crashers at the meeting were, whether they knew it or not, just clocking free indoor time.
Turo stood at the table in front of the chalkboard, chatting with the speaker he’d invited, a woman named Tamara ForTheEarth. She was a freegan, one of these new extremists who tried to live their lives without consuming anything new: everything tangible, including food, was scavenged. According to Turo, Tamara had even rejected her surname as opportunistic (her dad was some well-known judge in Boston).
Turo kept checking the clock on the wall. Robert knew he was disappointed by the turnout; he’d put posters up all over campus, and he claimed that the new Web site was getting a lot of traffic. He had support from the Environmental Action Committee and even (weirdly) the antiwar coalition. Little more than halfway through their freshman year, Arturo Cabrera had been profiled as a Difference Maker on Harvard’s TV station. Robert met him just after that, volunteering to post Reuse Awareness flyers beyond the fringes of campus. He’d quit his job in the student laundry to join Turo’s campus recycling project.
“Hey, everybody,” Turo said at last, waving at the small audience. “Thanks for showing up tonight. Two quick points of business before I turn it over to our visitor. First, let me remind you that donations are always welcome.” With mock affection, Turo leaned sideways to put his arm around a supersize mayo jar sitting on the table. “Our intradorm recycling project is up and running again, for the third year, and we need funds to keep renting our storage pod and the van. I’d also love to draft more troops. Not to align myself with the powers that be—or should I say betray—but it doesn’t hurt to see our undertaking as a war against complacence.”
He turned back and smiled at the guest. Tamara ForTheEarth was suspiciously gorgeous. That is, and Robert would never have confessed this to anyone, not even Clara (especially not Clara), she was so picture-perfect, with her red hair and her long legs (shapely ankles in mismatched socks), that a certain unappealingly caveman reflex told him she had to be about surface much more than substance. (But oh the substance of that surface.)
While Turo introduced her, Robert sized up her breasts. Those were no hand-me-downs. He wondered if she’d be in Turo’s bed that night, on the other side of the wall. Ah, well, Clara was no consolation prize.
“… and I haven’t set foot in a retail outlet of any kind for at least two weeks. Here’s a tip. Carry a counter in your pocket”—she held up a small metal object, like a stopwatch, which she clicked a few times—“and register every time you make a monetary transaction, plastic included. You will be shocked at the level of your dependence on money. My housemates and I have given up credit cards altogether. We do pool some necessary cash for mega containers of aspirin and baking soda and things like that,” she said. “Baking soda’s what we use for toothpaste. Food staples—bread and butter and crackers and things like that—we get from restaurants that toss them out for frivolous Health Department code restrictions, some of them completely random. They’re designed to beef up the profits of the food suppliers, not protect the health of consumers. If you send an articulate rep to these places, they’ll set food aside for you on a daily basis.”
She described how she and her housemates had found their furnishings on the sidewalk, how they had a whole library of nothing but tossed-aside books. (Tamara ForTheEarth shared an abandoned house in Everett with nine other people, all of whom had adopted the same surname.) Another tip: college campuses, especially in May, were a gold mine. “Outside the dorms, you’ve got these Dumpsters filled with treasures. I mean, here at Harvard? I don’t want to get insulting, but you guys are major waste-rels, throwing away perfectly functional TVs, microwaves, hairdryers, things like that. Even laptops!”
Someone in the front row muttered loudly, “Freegans use microwaves and hairdryers?”
“Good question, because, actually, no,” said Tamara. “In my house we do have a toaster—we use electricity, I admit that—but the frivolous stuff, the TVs and microwaves and things like that, we just liberate from the Dumpster so somebody can use them, so they don’t go to a landfill. It’s called waste reclamation.” She wrote on the blackboard DUMPSTER DIVAS and spoke about a group of women who called one another whenever they spotted a Dumpster that could be mined for usable goods. The ones who could drop everything would convene at the Dumpster once it was dark, sort through the contents, and arrange them on a nearby sidewalk, making it easier for passers-by to take these treasures home.
Robert thought of the desperate urban characters who laid such objects on a bedspread on the sidewalk and tried to sell them for the cash that this woman despised so much.
“You have to learn to embrace the random. That’s key.” Eagerly, she turned to the board and made a list of Web sites and activist groups: freecycle.com, freegan.info, Really Really Free Markets, Trash Talk, swaporamarama.org.… Trash Talk, she explained, was a monthly meeting, over a gourmet potluck meal made from grocery-store and restaurant refuse, about how to minimize all interaction with corporate America. “And as should be obvious, the less you spend money on, the less you have to work. Two years ago, I was a paralegal, totally enslaved. Now I’m almost finished with my first novel.”
Robert raised his hand. “Are you going to sell your novel to a publisher?”
Slowly, catlike, she smiled. “Good try. But no. I’ll be printing an on-demand limited edition myself. On the backs of term-paper drafts and classroom handouts, thanks to Turo here.” She turned her sly smile on Turo.
Turo stepped closer to her and said, “All that paper we’re collecting from your rooms? We reuse as much of it as possible. So don’t crumple!”
Murmurs of approval.
Robert had to give it to Turo: he was learning to walk the talk. But he was also getting way too obsessed with preaching the talk. And who came to these meetings? Aside from the crazies, the Birkenstockers, the neo-lefties, the rich kids who wanted to stick it to their Republican parents
… until it was time for the LSATs. Nothing wrong with spreading the word, but Robert had yet to see Turo actually reading for his courses. When Robert mentioned this, Turo admitted he’d “fallen a bit behind.”
“WTF, man! Already?” said Robert. “You cannot ‘use the system’ if you opt out of it.”
“Negativo on the stress,” said Turo. A nicer way of telling Robert to mind his own business, stop acting like a mom.
Robert could already predict that night’s kitchen conversation (unless Tamara FTE wound up in Turo’s bed). Turo would say that his guest speaker proved you could make a difference while opting out. He was prey to that kind of elastic logic. Like “embrace the random.” Couldn’t you argue that was sort of what Bush had done when he’d pulled his Jesse James act on Iraq?
But Robert applauded, along with everyone else. He had to admit this woman was impressive as well as hot. When someone asked if she had handouts with the Web sites and other information she’d written on the board, she shook her head vehemently. “But Turo’s got scrap paper and pencils,” she said. “Be sure you pass it all on. Recycle the politics along with the paper.” With her hands, she made an aggressively enthusiastic circular motion in front of her very fine breasts. It was stagey, ritualistic. Which bugged Robert all over again. Her gesture reminded him of the way football players thrust their arms in the air after making a touchdown. Except even that was more spontaneous.
Robert watched Tamara ForTheEarth as she picked up her child-size backpack (sporting Dora the Explorer, clearly a “find”) and shook Turo’s hand, businesslike. She’d talked about riding her bicycle everywhere—avoiding even public transit unless the weather made it too dangerous to bike—so Robert wondered how ostentatiously “free” that was, too. Maybe she had a Barbie bike, just a little too small, with pink tassels on the handlebars. A Ninja Turtles helmet.
“I can tell, just from your wiseass expression, that you’re overanalyzing again.” Turo had somehow sneaked up on Robert after seeing Ms. FTE out the door. He spread one hand across the top of Robert’s head. “Haya paz, dude.”
Robert laughed. Sometimes he wondered if he should steer toward psychiatry, once he got to med school. If he got to med school. Weirdly, his mother didn’t seem to care one bit whether he became a doctor. She hardly ever talked about it and never gave advice. Maybe she was cleverly steering his course by mostly leaving him alone.
“Hey,” he said to Turo. “So if she’s squatting, how do they power that toaster?”
“They borrow the juice.”
“What?”
“They siphon electricity from a hardware store on the same block.”
“Wow. I get it. No buying, but piracy is cool.”
“It’s a huge chain. Ace or something.”
Robert snorted. “Excess justifies the crime?”
“But it does, you know? Think of it as a rad form of economic sanctions. And Tamara, she is the real deal.” Under Turo’s left arm was the mayo/money jar. It contained five or six bills and about a cup of loose change.
“Maybe so,” said Robert, “but meanwhile, I’m going home to cook up some capitalistically store-bought spaghetti.”
“Count me in. And then let’s drive out and sneak a swim in your granddad’s pond.”
“Hey,” said Robert, “some of us plan not to flunk out. Not yet.”
“And some of us like to live on the edge.” As they crossed Mass. Ave., Turo shifted the jar to his other arm. The loose coins rattled against the glass.
The expression chump change lit up in Robert’s brain. God but we’re spoiled, he reminded himself.
They’d been waiting in the front of My Thai for fifteen minutes—Robert, Clara, his parents, and his aunt—when Granddad strolled in. He was grinning blandly, and he was alone. Robert saw his mom flash Granddad a look of frosty panic. But Clover hugged her father tight. “Daddy, we have got to buy you a new watch,” she said.
“Watches are for working people,” he said. “And in any case, I have two excellent reasons for being tardy.” He walked back to the door and held it open.
In walked Filo and Lee, giggling.
Clover nearly flung her kids to the ground, she hugged them so hard. “Oh my darlings!” she cried out, turning heads in the dining room. “This is the best birthday present ever!” Robert saw Lee, in the crush of his mother’s arms, grimace. Lee looked about two feet taller than when Robert had seen him last. It was as if his cousin had aged six years in the space of one. He was twelve now, twelve on the verge of fifteen.
At the table, there was a flurry of contention over who should sit where. Clover insisted that Granddad, not she, take the head, and then there was a kind of Chinese fire drill to get Filo next to her grandfather, Clover between her children. Robert’s parents ended up next to each other, Clara at the foot of the table by default. Granddad hardly acknowledged Clara’s presence. Had he even greeted her? Sometimes Robert had the bizarre sensation that his grandfather was actually jealous of his girlfriend.
Once seated, Clover clamped an arm tightly around each of her children, as if they might otherwise flee. Even when the waitress passed out menus, she did not loosen her grip.
“I’ve heard their pad thai is just out of this world!” Clover turned toward her son. “Lee, I’ll bet they have those spring rolls you love so much at that place in Chelsea. Oh, if I’d known the two of you were coming, I’d have chosen the French place. But I’m just so glad you’re here.” She had tears of elation in her eyes, which made Robert feel happy for his aunt but also a little embarrassed. How awful it must be to know that when half the world looked at you, they couldn’t help wondering how you’d fucked up so hugely that you’d given up custody of your own kids. Robert figured he didn’t know the whole story, but he knew enough to wonder why she wasn’t trying to go back to New York, at least to be near them.
“Order whatever you wish, all of you,” Granddad announced. “It’s my treat. Do you suppose the Siamese people serve anything approximating good champagne?”
“Let’s order a whole bunch of adventuresome things and share all around,” said Clover. “And I need no champagne to feel high on life right now.”
“It’s your day, my dear,” said Granddad, though Robert heard a note of exasperation. Nowhere was Granddad more of a geezer than in a restaurant.
“I love that crispy whole fish. Do they have that here?” said Robert’s mother. “It’s usually sea bass.…” She scanned the menu.
“Is sea bass one of those overfished species we’re supposed to boycott?” said Clover, and then she blushed. “Oh never mind, never mind. Like Daddy says, everyone should have whatever they want most. What about you two?” She pulled her children closer.
“Mom, you’re like totally squishing me,” said Lee.
Robert’s father pulled a small notebook from his pocket, along with a pen. “Why don’t I write it all down, make life easy for the waitstaff?”
“My organizer-in-chief,” teased Robert’s mother.
The waitress was an alarmingly skinny woman who looked about sixteen years old. She arrived at the table with a bottle of Korbel and a pitcher of orange juice. A waiter who looked even younger—surely not much older than Lee—followed her with a tray of those thick, shallow glasses from which, according to Robert’s mother, the “less privileged” drank champagne.
“Just leave them here and I’ll do the honors,” said Granddad, clearing space on the table. “Let’s get our food orders in, shall we?” He turned in his chair to face the waitress. “Well, a proper good evening, young lady. We are here to celebrate my daughter’s birthday.” He nodded toward Clover.
“Oh. Is happy birthday,” the waitress said, bowing slightly, her smooth face crinkling with nervous laughter.
“Thank you,” said Clover. “It is happy. Very happy.”
The waitress pulled out her pad and said, with servile cheer, “Any question?”
“I do have a question,” said Granddad. He pointed at the me
nu. “How does one pronounce the name of this dish, number forty-three?”
The waitress bent to read the menu. “Is shrimp. With lemongrass and basil. You like spicy?”
“Ah. Well that does sound enticing, but to order it, I’d like to be able to pronounce it correctly.”
“Pronounce?” said the waitress.
“Dad, just say you want the lemongrass prawns. Or number forty-three. That’s why they have the numbers,” said Robert’s mother. She looked at the waitress. “He wants the prawns. Not too spicy.”
The waitress said the name of the dish in her native language, giving him the answer to the question he’d asked in the first place.
“That sounds positively melodic. You must be Thai.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a green card?”
“Dad!” barked Robert’s mom.
“Green card—yes.” The waitress wore a terrified smile.