Joe College

  “Go on,” she said, propelling me out of the kitchen with a gentle, two-handed shove. “You can do it.”

  The living room didn’t look like a chamber of inquisition. Dan Fogelberg was playing at low volume on the stereo and the lights were dimmed as if to set the mood for a romantic encounter. Without rising from the couch, Cindy’s mother introduced herself in a soft, halting voice as Nicki. She was a plump woman in plaid pants and a dark turtleneck sweater, her eyes hidden behind gigantic brown-tinted glasses that made her resemble some kind of mutant insect creature in a science fiction movie. A heart-shaped throw pillow was resting in her lap.

  “Have we met?” she whispered, mechanically stroking the pillow.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I was pretty sure I’d never seen her before in my life—not once, not at the supermarket, not at church, not at any school or municipal function, not even just passing on the sidewalk—a circumstance that seemed pretty close to amazing, considering that I’d lived about a half mile away from her for the past twenty years and was on more or less intimate terms with her daughter.

  “I don’t get out much,” she admitted, speaking in a loud whisper for no apparent reason. “I go to my class and that’s about it.”

  “Your class? What are you studying?”

  “This term it’s Freud and Literature. I’m trying to finish up my Bachelor’s.”

  “Where?”

  “Kean,” she said, still whispering as though a baby were sleeping nearby.

  “Wow. I can’t believe you and Cindy go to the same college. She never mentioned it.”

  “Our paths don’t cross much,” Nicki explained. “Cynthia takes all those boring business classes. I prefer the liberal arts.”

  “Me too,” I said, starting to relax a little. Whatever Nicki’s agenda was, grilling me about my place in Cindy’s life hardly seemed to be at the top of it. On the other hand, it was a bit disconcerting to discover that I might have more in common with the mother than with the daughter I’d gotten pregnant. “So what do you think of the Freud class?”

  “The profs okay,” she said, somewhat distractedly. “But I think Freud needs to see a psychiatrist.”

  I started to laugh, but stopped myself when I realized that she wasn’t joking.

  “Why’s that?” I inquired. I had taken a seminar on “Freud and Philosophy” in the fall, and considered myself something of an expert on the subject.

  She leaned forward. I got the feeling she was studying me a little more closely, but those impenetrable glasses made it hard to tell for sure.

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Danny.”

  “Danny what?”

  I told her. Her attention seemed to wander for a few seconds, but then it came back.

  “Is your mother Linda?”

  I nodded. “Do you know her?”

  Nicki ignored the question. “She’s big in the PTA, right?”

  “No,” I said, momentarily thrown by her verb tense. “I mean, she used to be, back when I was in grade school.”

  Nicki leaned forward even further. She cupped one hand around her mouth, as if to frustrate eavesdroppers.

  “They’re not fooling anyone,” she told me.

  “Who’s not fooling anyone?”

  “The PTA.”

  I tried to look interested rather than confused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who do they think they’re kidding?” she asked, in a tone that mixed pity with contempt for the poor saps who thought they were putting something over on the rest of us. “So high and mighty.”

  “My mom was an officer for a couple of years,” I went on, hoping to get the conversation back on track. “She said the politics got pretty exhausting after a while.”

  “What do they want from me?” Nicki’s voice was louder now; there was a vehemence to it that was hard to connect with the subject at hand.

  “Excuse me?” I said, unable to suppress a nervous chuckle.

  Just then the light went on in the dining room. I was startled by the sudden flash of brightness, the unaccountably surreal sight of Cindy with a carving knife in one hand and a serving fork in the other.

  “I know they’re tapping my phone,” Nicki stated matter-of- factly. “I can hear the little click when I pick it up.”

  “Okay, you two,” Cindy called out, grinning the way people do when there’s nothing to grin about. “Enough chitchat. Time to eat.”

  I looked down at the pale feast on my plate—the moist slices of white meat, the mound of mashed potatoes awash with beige gravy, the golden-brown dinner rolls still smoking from the oven—and wondered how long Cindy had been taking care of her mother. Her parents had divorced when she was in second or third grade, but I couldn’t imagine that the judge would have given custody of a small child to a woman who believed her phones were being tapped by the PTA. I wished I understood more about the onset of mental illness, if it built up gradually over the years until a person was irrevocably changed, or if something just snapped one day. My only direct experience was with Seth freshman year, and I’d been too busy trying to keep my own head above water to devote a lot of attention to the sequence of events leading up to his breakdown.

  When I looked up, Cindy was smiling at me, as if to ask if something was wrong. I smiled back, feeling like an idiot. She had frequently referred to her mother as “crazy” in my company, but I’d understood the word not as a clinical diagnosis but in its colloquial sense. After all, what person our age didn’t think his or her parents were crazy? I used the word to describe my father’s habit of eating head cheese every Sunday, and used even stronger terms than that—“sociopathic” was one of my favorites—to characterize my mother’s insistence on buying perfumed toilet paper.

  “Mom?” said Cindy. “Did I tell you Danny goes to Yale?”

  “Yale?” Nicki frowned, as if the name didn’t ring a bell.

  “It’s a college,” I added helpfully.

  “I know what it is,” she informed me. “My brother-in-law’s a groundskeeper at Princeton.”

  “Oh yeah? How’s he like it?”

  “Fine,” said Nicki. “He’s only got a year to go before retirement.”

  “Mom?” Cindy seemed upset. “Uncle Al’s dead, remember? We went to his funeral last year.” She looked at me. “He had a heart attack on the golf course.”

  “Did he like to golf?” I asked, thinking that it was at least a blessing to die like that, doing something you enjoyed.

  “He wasn’t playing,” she explained. “He was cutting the grass.”

  “So what’s it like?” Nicki inquired, unfazed by the news about Uncle Al. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, uncomfortable as usual discussing my college life at home, though I was generally quite happy to talk about Darwin in New Haven. “I’m just about done with my junior year. How close are you to getting your degree?”

  “Three more classes to go,” Nicki said proudly.

  I smiled at Cindy. “Your mom was telling me about her Freud and Literature class.”

  “Mom.” Cindy spoke sternly, like a parent addressing a misbehaving child.

  Nicki ignored her, calmly cutting up her chicken.

  “That’s my class,” Cindy told me. “My mother hasn’t taken a class in five years.”

  Cindy washed and I dried. It felt good, this momentary domesticity, even oddly natural, and blessedly free of all the baggage that usually cluttered up the space we shared, making it hard for either of us to actually see the other: tension about our different stations in life, worries about sex or new cars or who had or hadn’t read which books, or what my friends at school might think about her feathered hair or the fact that she typed a hundred words a minute. None of the free-floating nervousness that made her babble and me smile stiffly. Just the two of us standing side by side. the sound of running water.

  “I really pigged out,” she said, squirting what I tho
ught was a shocking amount of dishwashing liquid onto her sponge. “I’m hungry all the time these days.”

  I was about to say I’d been like that for years when it dawned on me what she was talking about.

  “Do you get sick?” I asked. “In the morning?”

  “I used to. Everything’s a lot better now, knock on wood.”

  Being the kind of person who took her superstitions literally, Cindy handed me a rinsed plate, set her sponge on the edge of the sink, and turned around to knock three times on the table before returning to her post. I rubbed the plate with my soggy dish towel till it squeaked and shined.

  “What’s it feel like?” I asked.

  We were alone by then; Nicki had begun nodding off midway through dessert, and had excused herself as soon as the table was cleared. Cindy. blamed her mother’s fatigue on a new medication, and predicted that she would sleep at least until noon. Still, she said, it was better than the alternative. In the old days, Nicki had suffered from some sort of nervous disturbance that left her wide awake in the middle of the night. A couple of times she’d slipped outside for epic nocturnal walks that didn’t end until the police found her wandering around at daybreak, exhausted and incoherent, a long way from home.

  “What’s it feel like?” Cindy touched her stomach and made a skeptical face, as if this were a question she hadn’t considered until this very moment.

  “Inside, I mean. Is it any different than usual?”

  “Are you kidding?” She laughed out loud. “I feel like there’s a factory in there and this baby’s working three shifts.”

  I don’t know what it was about this image, but all at once I could see it—the fetus, I mean. Until then, I’d only thought of the pregnancy as a disaster for me, a clot of bad luck gathering like a storm cloud inside Cindy’s stomach. But now I could visualize the baby too—my baby. A boy, I thought. A little curly-headed boy nestled inside the cloud, wearing safety glasses and a hard hat, working overtime to get himself born.

  I didn’t ask permission. I reached out and pressed my palm against her flat stomach. A few seconds later Cindy placed her damp hand over mine, pressing down harder.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  In a firm voice, she told me not to worry about it. She said I’d done her a big favor by treating her so badly, not giving her any excuses to fall under the spell of wishful thinking.

  “I do that sometimes.” She bit her bottom lip and shook her head, as if ashamed of herself. “It’s a bad habit of mine.”

  “It’s not you,” I assured her, though she probably knew as well as I did that this wasn’t precisely true. “I’m just not ready to be a father. It’s not even funny how not ready I am.”

  She accepted this explanation without protest or visible disappointment, nodding emphatically as though I were articulating her thoughts rather than my own.

  “I’m just glad you were honest. The worst thing you can do is pretend to somebody that you’re going to be there and then back out. That’s what my father did. It’s much better to be up front with them to begin with.”

  “My schoolwork’s really demanding,” I said, glancing uneasily at the faucet. The water was running full blast while we talked, and it was starting to seem wasteful. “I just can’t afford to concentrate on anything else right now.”

  As if she’d read my mind, Cindy stepped back to the sink and reached for a wineglass on the counter. She swabbed it out with her soapy sponge, then held it under the faucet, letting the clean water overflow the rim for way longer than necessary.

  “You’re lucky to be going to a school like that. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  “I know.”

  “It was interesting to finally see it,” she said. “I liked your roommates.”

  “They liked you too.”

  “Really?” She seemed genuinely pleased by this information. “What did they say?”

  “I talked to Sang the other night. He thinks you’re cute. I got the feeling the Friedlins liked you too.”

  “They were great. I’m just sorry Max wasn’t there.”

  “He’s been having some problems with his parents.”

  “I know.” She gave me a funny look. “He told me all about it. Five or six times at least.”

  “He did?”

  “We talk a lot on the phone,” she said. “You didn’t know that?”

  I should have known, of course. The evidence had been right there in front of me for weeks. Why else would Max have been so pissed at me? Why else would he have treated my private business as though it were his private business too? Even so, the possibility that he and Cindy might have struck up an independent friendship had never occurred to me. They belonged to different worlds, separated by borders only I was allowed to cross, or so I liked to pretend. Objectively speaking, I understood that it was the height of arrogance to think this way, but it was hard for me to be objective about my own life and harder still not to feel like they’d betrayed me in some way, sneaking around behind my back.

  “I know you talked,” I lied. “I just didn’t know you talked about his parents.”

  “Are you kidding?” She laughed, scraping a piece of something off a fork with her thumbnail. “That’s all he talks about. That and Taxi Driver.”

  “And what an asshole I am.”

  “That too,” she agreed, without smiling to soften the blow.

  All that was left to wash was the roasting pan. She transferred it from the counter to the sink and squirted some detergent onto the greasy bottom. When it had filled up with hot sudsy water, she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on her jeans, leaving sharp imprints on the denim.

  “I have such a sweet tooth these days,” she said, wandering over to a cabinet by the refrigerator and pulling out a bag of gumdrops. She ripped open the bag and dumped the candies into a bowl. “His parents were a lot nicer than I expected. The way he talks about them, you’d think they were these horrible rich people dripping with diamonds and furs.”

  “That’s what he can’t forgive,” I explained. “They’re not-so-horrible rich people with good taste who love him.”

  She rolled her eyes, as if to suggest that everyone should have such problems, and popped a yellow gumdrop into her mouth.

  “I can’t believe they’re in Paris.” She shook her head in what appeared to be genuine wonderment that anyone could actually be in Paris. “Can you imagine?”

  “They travel all the time. Anywhere you can think of, they’ve probably been there.”

  “I can’t wait to go to Hawaii.” She glanced at the clock over the sink as if her flight were departing in a matter of minutes. “I hear it’s incredible.”

  “There’s a girl from Hawaii in my entryway,” I said, unable to stop myself. I recognized this habit as a bad one, my need to establish a personal connection with any subject under discussion. I hadn’t been this way before college, I was almost sure of it. “She says that after you’ve lived there for a while you don’t even notice how beautiful it is. You might as well be in New Jersey.”

  “Kevin’s taking me,” she said.

  “Kevin?”

  “My old boyfriend. We’re going there for our honeymoon.”

  I held up one hand, trying to get her to slow down. The moment of truth had apparently arrived, much sooner than I’d expected, and already I was stumped. I couldn’t remember her ever mentioning an old boyfriend named Kevin. In fact, there was only one old boyfriend of hers that I knew of.

  “Your boss from Medi-Mart? I thought he was married.”

  “It’s sort of a pre-honeymoon,” she admitted. “The divorce won’t be final for about a year.”

  “Doesn’t he have kids of his own?”

  She looked at me. For the first time all night, I thought I detected signs of hostility in her face. After a few seconds, her gaze traveled slowly downward to the soggy dish towel in my hand, which I’d unconsciously twisted int
o a tight rope, as if I’d been trying to wring it dry.

  The gumdrops were stale and chewy, with more than enough adhesive power to make you fear for your fillings. Nonetheless, I kept reaching for the next one and the next one and the one after that, matching Cindy drop for drop as she tried her best to fill me in on the strange turn her life had taken.

  “I made the decision on the way home from New Haven. The next day I went down to the store and told him I would marry him.”

  “You told him?”

  “Yup.”

  “And he said yes? just like that?”

  She nodded, clearly gratified by the amazement in my voice.

  “He never really got over me. After I broke up with him he kept calling and writing these crazy letters. He said he’d leave his wife, run away with me to California, anything I wanted.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “You know. That you’re pregnant … with—”

  “With what?”

  My voice faltered. “Someone else’s kid.”

  “What do you think?” There was something almost playful in her smile, and I could see she enjoyed having the upper hand for once. “He’s not stupid, you know.”

  “And he didn’t mind?”

  “I don’t hear him complaining.”

  I still felt lost, like I’d wandered into the theater when the movie was halfway over. I needed to backtrack a little, to start somewhere a little closer to the beginning.

  “So why did you guys break up in the first place? I don’t think you ever told me.”

  “You never seemed very interested.”

  “I’m interested now.”

  She made a face. The mischievous pleasure of a moment ago had faded; she seemed a lot more like herself or at least the version of herself I was familiar with.

  “I got pregnant.” She glanced up at the clock again. “The fall after we graduated.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s not something I advertise.”

  “So what happened?”

  She examined her fingernails. Her voice was soft.