Page 102 of Playworld
My father turned to me and smiled. “Both of these are bridges,” he said as he drove. He ran a fingernail over his top and bottom incisors.
“But what happened to her?” I asked.
“Millie?” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?’
“I mean she was gone. Disappeared.”
“You never heard from her again?”
“Not a peep.”
I waited for more, but nothing came. “And that was it?”
“That was it.”
We were banking left now, toward Central Park South, our third loop around—past the near side of Columbus Circle, where Dad first saw Millie again. How many times in his life had he walked it, hoping to see her once more? And although his story shouldn’t have been a comfort to me, it was, for I realized I wasn’t alone in my misery. And although I didn’t consider what it meant at the time or whether he should have told me in the first place or what my mother might have thought of the telling, I believed he’d imparted a great secret, and for this I felt overwhelming gratitude. The Metropolitan Museum of Art appeared on our right-hand side. Even at this hour, the Sackler Wing remained lit, so that its glass was rendered invisible, the Temple of Dendur within, moated by its reflecting pool and aglow. Dad continued to watch the road, nodding several times to himself, and then he reached over to place his hand on my knee and patted it. He turned to smile at me, weakly this time, though I couldn’t help it: I looked at his teeth.
“You never marry the great love of your life,” he said.
Charles and Diana
Before school was out and summer arrived there was the endless week of finals.
Freshmen took these three-hour exams in the wrestling gym. The mats had been rolled up to reveal the polished maple beneath, which made the space seem bigger and feel colder. Desks had been moved in and arranged in rows. My preparation for every subject began in hope and then drifted into confusion. Maybe it was because of where I took these tests, but they reminded me of most of my matches that past year—I engaged them with what little ability I had. I might even gain, at their outset, some tiny bit of traction, but they soon exposed my weaknesses and finally overwhelmed me. So that during each, and always at some point past halfway, I had an abundance of the very thing all my hunched and scribbling classmates seemed to lack, which was time. English was the exception. Verbals still baffled me (how was “to wrestle” a noun?); Mom had tried to explain. Still, I nailed the vocabulary section, felt great about the quote matching, and wrote so frantically to finish the essay on time that the smoothed callus on my middle finger’s top knuckle pinkly shined from my pencil’s pressure. Miss Sullens stood over me as I wrote the last sentence—I being the last student in the gym—and after she collected my blue book, I sat there for a while, reveling in the familiarfeeling of being spent, considering, once again, the lights above in their cages, contemplating the time and all that had happened in between these two moments, marveling at whom I’d met and who had departed, at what had surprised me and what had not changed, at what I’d accomplished and how I’d come up short, convinced that this emptiness I now experienced—this satisfaction of having entirely poured myself into something—was proof of a way that promised great rewards but whose path I’d yet to find. Which I now see was simply sublimation for the fact that this room that was once Kepplemen’s, and within whose prison we were enclosed like the lights above, had been replaced by another I did not recognize, at a time when a year was ending while so much else remained unclear.
At the conclusion of exam week, Miss Sullens found me kneeling before my locker while I cleaned it out. She was in sneakers and jeans and a sleeveless blouse that showed off her impressive shoulders. She was thrilled by my reaction as I read my grade: the circled A-minus andBrilliant essay!double-underlined on the inside flap. “I amsoproud of you,” she said, and mussed my hair, and before standing “to leave”—an adverb, I realized too late to make an A, modifying “standing” by answering the question why—added, “Have a great summer.” I watched her walk away, disappointed in myself for not thanking her. Though the noise all around was familiar—lockers slamming, students whoop-whooping as they celebrated the end of the academic year or, in some cases, of high school—it was also alien to me, did not align with internal displeasure. My locker was adjacent the tech booth’s door. Music played from within, and when it opened, Marc Mason appeared in an MIT sweatshirt, singing, “People can change, they always do / Haven’t they noticed the changes in you?” He spotted me and pointed, and then said, “Keep the campaign going, my man.” He slung his book bag over his shoulder and said to the nearly empty halls, “Marc Mason…is officially…leaving the building.”
I paged through my exam. I reread my essay. We’d been asked to write on a theme that ran through at least four texts we’d read this year, and I choseRomeo and Juliet,The Catcher in the Rye,A Streetcar Named Desire,and the e.e. cummings poem “Since Feeling Is First.” In each of these works, those who are most suspicious of language are often the most capable of telling the truth. Mercutio reveals to Romeo thelasciviousness beneath his flowery love for Rosalind, Holden Caulfield identifies the phoniness embedded in people’s concerns for him because they wanted him to conform to their values, Stanley Kowalski violently pokes a finger in the “paper lantern” of Blanche DuBois’s nostalgia, and, finally, it is the speaker in the cummings poem who knows the “eyelids’ flutter” of any lover (I thought of Amanda) is more potent than any wisdom (I thought of the conclusion to my father’s story about Millie Van Bourne), that it is holy to be “wholly…a fool,” to trust instinct—what the “blood approves”—before the brain’s “best gesture.” To give oneself over to another is best; to resist playacting is required. What anyone wants, standing before the beloved, is the person wholly themselves—which was close, I concluded, to holiness.
What I felt after reading this was pride, which gave on to uncanniness. I only partly recognized myself in the sentences, in the voice. Mostly, I did not. How was this possible? And as I finished emptying my locker, my bewilderment gave on to regret. As I flipped through loose-leaf binders full of botched quizzes, my textbooks full of already forgotten facts and formulas, I was ashamed by how much I’d missed these past two semesters. Of the opportunities I’d lost. Of how far behind I remained.
Next year could be different, I thought, if I had a better start.
—
By June, everyone was working.
Oren got a job at Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken and regularly conspired to sneak home free buckets of drumsticks and thighs along with sweaty cups of mashed potatoes and slaw. Cliffnotes took shifts at Häagen-Dazs (“The dots are called anumlaut,” he said, holding out his embroidered apron when I asked). On weekends, the Columbus Avenue store had a line out the entrance, and during his shift he was packed in behind the case with four servers and a manager who marched behind them shouting, “Watch your scoops! Watch your scoops!” He got tendinitis in his wrist and wrapped this in an ACE bandage, but the sacrifice was worth it, he said, because there was always extra milkshake left over in the malt cup, which he was sure to slug when the manager wasn’t looking, since he was trying to gain weight for lacrosse season next year. Tanner, who we had seen only once since school got out, returned to his childhood summer camp in Maine to be a counselor.
Mom graduated from NYU. Grandma and Grandpa flew to New York to attend the ceremony, and the first thing Dad asked her at its conclusion was “So now what?” To which she replied, “Is that all you have to say?” followed by, “I’m going to start my own business, if you really want to know.” And in her regalia, she marched off to join a group of her classmates, in response to which Dad grimaced at me and mouthed,Whoops.I turned away so as not to let him off the hook. When Mom first came to New York, she’d been an instruction model for Joseph Pilates. In her bathroom, she kept a framed picture of herself assisting him in his studio. In it, she was hanging bow-bent backward beneath a set of parallel bars while Pilates spotted her. The German’s hair was as white as his turtleneck, his eyes as black as the Speedo he was wearing. She’d continue teaching ballet at Neubert’s in the afternoons, she later told Dad, but during the day would make house calls to women on the Upper East and West Sides—she already had ten clients lined up—putting them through mat work at their apartments, in buildings like the Beresford and the Century and the El Dorado and the Sherry-Netherland and the Pierre. “So there,” she’d said to Dad, when she returned and let him take her in his outstretched arms.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and clasped her neck in the crook of his arm and kissed her hair; and she smiled and wiped a tear from her eye—it was difficult to tell if she was happy or sad—and replied, “You should be.” And then she laughed. Dad had his camera with him and shot pictures of her with Grandma and Grandpa and Oren and me; and later, Mom whispered in my ear, “Remember, better late than never.” I wasn’t sure if she meant getting her master’s degree or apologizing or both.
Amanda was working at Bloomingdale’s as a perfume tester. “Smell,” she said when I visited, and raised her wrist to my nose. “It’s Charlie.” The place was so bright it was like one big dressing room’s vanity mirror. “What do you think?” she asked.
Amanda was wearing a red dress with shoulder pads and white tights. She had on a ton of makeup, like when she went out with Rob.
“It’s kind of young, kind of now…”I sang.
Amanda slowly shook her head.
“…kind of free, kind of wow…”I continued with the jingle.
“Okay, Bobby Short, try this one.” From her woven basket sheremoved a bottle and sprayed the air ahead of her and then walked through its mist.
“Am I supposed to do that?” I asked.