Usually I can get someone to drive me to the Metro in College Park, and then I get off at Silver Spring, where Dad or Sylvia picks me up. But I had a lot of things to carry this time, including laundry, so Dad drove over to College Park and waited for me outside my dorm. We’d talked about getting me a used car, but the Metro was so handy, and student parking so iffy, that I’d decided to wait.
I threw my stuff in the backseat and slid in up front, leaning over to give Dad a kiss. I love the way his face lights up when he sees me.
“Four whole days!” I said. “And I got most of my assignments done, so I can just hang out. Is Les home yet?”
Dad edged the car into traffic on Route 1. “Coming in this evening. And a friend of his is driving in from West Virginia tomorrow.”
“Male or female?” I asked.
“A young lady, actually.”
The older my dad gets, the more he sounds as if he were born in the 1800s. Any female under forty is always a “young lady.”
“Have you met her?” I asked.
“No. Les just said it’s someone he wants us to meet. Her name is Stacy.”
I looked at Dad. “Where’s she going to sleep?”
He broke into laughter. “Now, where have I heard that before? You haven’t changed a bit.”
I laughed too. I used to ask that about Sylvia all the time when she and Dad went anywhere overnight before they were married, but this time I was simply protecting my room. “I just want to know if I’m supposed to give up my bed or if she’ll be shacking up with Les.”
Dad grimaced. He hates that term. “I haven’t the faintest idea, and I’m not about to ask. Lester will have to work that out himself,” he said.
I was impatient with the way traffic was creeping along, so I turned on the radio but kept it low. “How are things at the Melody Inn?” I asked.
“It’s been a busy fall, and business is picking up, I’m glad to say.”
I asked about various employees and music instructors, and then the big green exit sign for Silver Spring loomed up ahead, and once we were off the beltway, it wasn’t long before we were home. Dad pulled into the drive, and we each carried some bags inside.
Sylvia hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek.
“I smell something baking already,” I told her. “The whole house smells wonderful.”
“I’m so glad both you and Les could come for Thanksgiving,” she said, and accented the last word with an extra squeeze before she let me go. I figured that, much as she and Dad liked having the house to themselves, they also enjoyed sharing it again, especially around the holidays.
* * *
I loved being back in my room. A whole double bed to myself, recently painted walls, old treasures. . . . Sylvia had faithfully watered my huge rubber plant, which now reached the top of the windows. I lay down on my bed and smiled happily up at the ceiling. So many dramas and traumas had passed through this room. The night Sylvia slept with me, for example, before she and Dad married, when a blizzard kept her here at Christmas; the time I hid Pamela here when she ran away from home; the way I cried after Patrick and I broke up back in ninth grade. . . . Right now it was great remembering all of that, because—happy or sad—each experience was a part of this room.
My cell phone started ringing almost immediately. Everyone was checking on everyone else to see who would be around this weekend. We had the decency not to plan to get together till after Thanksgiving—to spend Wednesday night and Thursday with our families—but we all looked forward to the next day.
Jill and Justin were settling into life as new parents to a baby boy, but almost everyone else except Patrick—and Mark, of course—would be back. There was particular sadness in that, because if it weren’t for the accident that took Mark, we’d all be meeting at his place. But everyone promised to show up here on Friday.
“I’ve really missed Nathan,” Elizabeth told me when I returned her call. “He’s so cute, Alice! He calls me ‘Mommy Two.’ Would you believe he’s five years old already?”
While I had been home several times since September, Liz—way up in Vermont at Bennington—hadn’t been home until now.
“I can’t wait to see him,” I told her. “I can’t wait to see everyone!”
When I heard Lester come in, I rushed downstairs and almost knocked him over as I threw my arms around his neck.
“Hey! What do they feed you on campus? Stimulants?” he said, grinning.
I gave him a big sloppy kiss on the cheek and hugged him again. Then I let out a shriek. “You’re growing a beard!”
“You noticed.”
“You’re all prickly!”
“Women love it,” Les teased. He turned to Sylvia and hugged her next, then Dad. “It’s sure good to be back,” he said.
“And Alice isn’t even going to see her friends till Friday,” Sylvia told him. “Such restraint!” She had held dinner till Les got here, so we sat down almost immediately to eat.
Our dinner that evening must have lasted two hours. We just sat around and talked over coffee and Sylvia’s lemon sponge cake—helping ourselves to second and third slices.
“So what’s our coed doing these days?” Les asked me. “How’s the roommate?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said, but I told him anyway.
“Could have been worse,” he said. “Amber and Jerry could have been having sex in your bed with you in it. Now you’ve got the best of all possible worlds—a private bedroom for half the price.”
“Tell me about you and Stacy,” I said, and then was embarrassed that my thoughts had gone from beds to Les and Stacy.
“What about her? You’ll get to meet her tomorrow. Her family’s in Arlington, but she’s going to have dinner here and then drive home tomorrow night.”
I could swear I saw relief pass over Dad’s face. Sylvia’s, too.
I loved being home that night. I felt so special, somehow. Both Les and I coming back to the old homestead—both of us in new locations, with new lives.
“You miss me?” I asked him at one point.
“Not a bit,” he answered, but his smile said it all.
* * *
I don’t know what I expected when Stacy Houghton arrived—a model, maybe. The real Stacy was only an inch or so taller than me. She wasn’t what you’d call beautiful, but she was definitely attractive, with short, semi-curly hair and a small button nose between the lenses of her stylish glasses. Her lips were delicately shaped, like twin peaks. I just hoped I wouldn’t goof up and call her Tracy, a woman Les proposed to once.
“Hello, Alice. Hello, everyone. Sylvia . . . Ben . . . ,” she said, looking us over.
“Welcome!” said Dad, smiling and taking her coat. “We’re so glad to have you!”
She was wearing a white sweater, with tiny pearl earrings, and if she used makeup at all, it wasn’t noticeable. She and Les exchanged a quick kiss, and I saw his hand linger on her waist. And then we were all moving to the kitchen for a glass of cider and to help Sylvia with the finishing touches, so by the time we were ready to eat, we didn’t feel like such strangers with Stacy.
Dinner was everything you’d want it to be on Thanksgiving. Dad carved the turkey, and we all carried food to the dining room table in a happy parade.
I studied Les and Stacy throughout dinner. She was in her last year at the university in Morgantown, she told us, working on a degree in phys ed, but had a job on weekends as a swim instructor at the Basswood Lodge and Convention Center, where Les worked.
“And she’s a state swimming champion,” Les said proudly, then added, with a grin, “She hasn’t entered any swimsuit contests, but she could win some.”
Stacy just laughed. “Not my line,” she said.
A bundle of energy, that’s what she was—the quick way she moved, responded. The more I watched her and Les, in fact, the more they seemed exact opposites of each other. Where Lester was laid-back, Stacy was intense. Where Les was careless—his napkin, his knife,
and his fork strewn every which way over his plate—Stacy was precise. And yet, when I saw their eyes meet, the warmth of those glances told me they liked each other very, very much.
It’s funny the way you grow up with one idea about a person and don’t really start noticing other things till you’re older. I’d always thought of Lester as sort of a playboy, but sometimes when I’d hear him discuss world problems with Dad, I’d think, I didn’t know he cared anything about that! So I guess it wasn’t too surprising that Lester was in love with a woman who was intelligent and energetic, yet different from any other woman he’d ever dated.
And Dad . . . I turned my attention to him next. When you’re a kid, you believe your parents’ main occupation in life should be taking care of you, as though they should be thinking about your feelings twenty-four hours a day. And then you grow up and realize that your dad has needs and interests that have nothing to do with you at all.
The other thing I was feeling as we sat around over dessert, laughing at my roommate stories (a lot funnier now that they were in the past), was that it was the first time I felt like an adult with my family. I was more than just the kid sister now. And I liked that feeling. Liked it a lot.
* * *
I got a call from Patrick later and ran upstairs to take it in my room.
“I was hoping you’d pick up,” he said.
“Where are you?” I asked, curling up on my bed, the phone tucked under my ear.
“Well, at the moment I’m sitting on a bench near the entrance of the Plaza de Cataluña in the early evening, wishing you were here.”
“There in Barcelona?”
“Yeah. And I’m looking up at a statue of a guy on a . . . Wait a minute, correction: a woman on a horse—a naked woman on a horse—holding a small sailing ship above her head.”
“I don’t get it. Why is she on a horse?”
“I don’t get it either, but a bunch of us are exploring the city, and the others have gone in search of a restroom. You home?”
“Yes. And it’s so great. The whole gang’s getting together tomorrow. I really miss you, Patrick. Seven more months till you’re home again.”
“Where are you going to meet tomorrow? It would have been at the Stedmeisters’ . . .”
“I know. That’s on everyone’s mind. So I’ve invited everybody here. Les is home too, and he has a new girlfriend.”
“That’s a surprise?”
I laughed. “She is. And they’re obviously crazy about each other.”
“Uh-oh,” Patrick said. “I see the gang moving off . . . they didn’t know I was over here. Gotta hustle.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Patrick,” I said, “even though you’re not celebrating it.” I didn’t want to carry on about how much I longed for him, because it was depressing, for one thing, and because, technically, we weren’t in an exclusive relationship. We usually kept our remarks to the I-miss-you variety. This time, though, I said, “I love you.”
He could still make me laugh, even four thousand miles away.
“I’m sending you a kiss by proxy,” he said.
I was smiling already. “And how does that work?”
“Well, there’s a mail truck parked at the corner . . . and I’m walking over”—I could tell he was moving because his words were fading in and out—“and I’m putting my arms around the back of the truck, which is a little hard to do because I’m still trying to talk into the cell phone . . .”
“I’m not as wide as a truck, Patrick.”
“I know, but partway will have to do. And now I’m pressing my lips against the door, a long, slow kiss . . .”
“Mmmmm,” I said, pretending to moan with pleasure.
“. . . and a pedestrian is looking at me like I’m loco and is probably going to call the policia right this minute,” Patrick finished. “Adios, querido!”
The local language of Barcelona, Patrick had told me, was Catalan, not Spanish, and I was bummed because I’d wanted to practice my high school Spanish with him. But the tourists all came with their Spanish dictionaries, Patrick said, and the locals humored them, so he occasionally threw in a Spanish phrase when he called.
I was glad that his last words to me were funny and affectionate, the way I wanted him to remember me. Then I looked up querido in my Spanish dictionary and was pleased that it meant “sweetheart.”
* * *
Liz, Pam, Gwen, and I agreed to spend the night at Elizabeth’s after our other friends had left. It was fun seeing everyone again. Tim, Pamela’s ex, had that movie-star unshaven look, while Keeno—now at the Naval Academy in Annapolis—had just the opposite: a buzz cut. Karen was home from Penn State; Lori and Leslie were still together, we heard, but had decided to move west and were headed to Washington State. Penny and her folks had moved to Delaware, and no one knew where Brian was at the moment. We’d just lost touch.
All we did was talk. It sounded like a zoo, everyone trading YouTube favorites and gossip. To tell the truth, it was a relief when everybody else had gone and just us girls headed over to Liz’s house, closing her bedroom door behind us.
“Whew!” she said, hugging us all over again. “Oh, man, I have missed you guys!” Texting, we all agreed, could never compete with this.
She looked great too. Pamela was the scrawny one now, but she didn’t deprive herself of any of the snacks Mrs. Price had made for us. We sprawled across the beds in Elizabeth’s room just like we used to, the twin beds with their same ruffled white bedspreads, and talked about our lives—classes, subjects, grades, professors, fun. . . .
Gwen told us about going to a sign-language poetry festival I’d seen advertised on campus but hadn’t attended, where deaf students expressed themselves visually, and for the millionth time I thought, This is another cool thing we didn’t see back in high school.
Liz was into contact improv and demonstrated with Pamela on the rug. She put on a CD of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, and as each of them began moving her limbs in slow, rhythmic motion to the music, they gradually touched, curved together, rolled, separated. . . .
“What’s it supposed to be? Modern dance? Wrestling? Orgiastic? What?” asked Gwen.
“Just bodily expression,” Liz explained after their brief demonstration. Pamela had already been introduced to it earlier in the fall at her school, but it was new and wonderful to Elizabeth.
“I could sure use some dancing,” I said. “I’ve gained six pounds.”
“Awwk, tell me about it! The Attack of the Freshman Fifteen! I’ve gained seven,” said Gwen, who still had eleven years of school ahead of her.
“So what do premed students do for fun, Gwen?” Pamela asked.
Gwen stretched out full on the bed and propped more pillows behind her.
“Well,” she said, “the first day I walked into our residence house, some of the freshmen had gathered there in the living room. There was a huge box of LEGOs on a coffee table, and while we were talking, one of the older students put one in her mouth and started chewing. There was a loud crunch, but it didn’t seem to faze her. I was like, Whoa! And then I realized they were edible LEGOs.”
We laughed. And she said, “It’s like we’re always starving! And get this—every year, they tell me, one of the upperclassmen is selected to be our scout, and he has to keep track of every reception being held on campus—a promotion, a secretary’s birthday, parents of incoming freshmen, retirement party, whatever. And then he assigns one of us to sign up as a server if possible, or simply be a drop-in, and to come back with pockets loaded. And birthdays . . . We’ve got a cupboard full of cake mixes, and whenever someone’s hungry, we think of a birthday to celebrate if we’re not having one ourselves. A couple weeks ago we had a birthday celebration for Trotsky—”
“Trotsky?” asked Pamela.
“Yeah. Born on November 7, 1879. We had a red cake, and someone made a pin-the-axe-on-the-Trotsky game out of cardboard. The month before that, we even had a celebration for Donald Duck.”
> “Oh, man. I’m in the wrong dorm!” I said. “Maybe I’ll change my major to podiatry. That’s feet, isn’t it? I think I could handle feet.”
“You ought to visit me next Halloween,” Pamela chimed in. She was sitting cross-legged now on the other bed, a long turquoise scarf wrapped twice around her neck, a royal-blue streak in her blond hair that now almost reached her shoulders. “Practically the entire school joins the Halloween parade in the Village.”
“How did you dress?” Liz asked.
“The pope,” said Pamela.
“The pope?” I cried. “You?”
“And I was escorted by two nuns, both guys,” she said. We screamed with laughter. “You should have seen us. One of my friends was a grasshopper. We drew our characters’ names from a hat, and had to judge each other on how well we did. We were doing great until about one o’clock, when we ended the night in a bar and the pope was wasted so the nuns had to drag him outside.” She reached for another Dorito. “I’m crazy about one of my instructors, though. Wish we could date faculty.” She looked at Gwen and me. “How are the guys at Maryland?”
Gwen shrugged. “Like guys everywhere, I guess. Some nice, some jerks. Bigger selection to choose from, though.” She turned to Liz. “What’s it like up there at the North Pole?”
“Sleepy,” Elizabeth told her. “Definitely sleepy. Except on weekends. Then everybody’s out to hook up with someone.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” said Pamela. “Have any of you met someone special?”
“No. Still seeing Austin occasionally. But he’ll be a senior at Howard next year, and I don’t know where he’ll take a job after that,” Gwen said. She looked at me. Guess I was next.
“It’s hard to compare guys with Patrick, but there’s one guy, Dave—Dave Larson. We hang out sometimes.”
“Yeah?” said Pamela, waiting.
“Just the ‘nice friend’ category,” I said. “Come on, tell us about the guys in New York. There’s got to be someone other than your professor.”
“Well, there’s Jake. He wants to do repertory theater. Weird and passionate. Passionately weird or weirdly passionate, I’m not sure which.”