And Now You Can Go (16 page)

I want so badly for my mother to see it. I keep trying to explain its location to her, but the seal is slick and elusive. "There, there's the head," I say.

My mother squints. "I wish we had the Hawk's binoculars," she says. We keep walking. When we stop again, we're on top of the next cliff.

"I can see the seal," my mother says. "Look, there are a whole bunch of them. One, two … four. There are four of them just jumping and having fun." My mothers laughing— her mouth falling far open—and Freddie's bouncing in her red sneakers.

I stare at my mom, at my sister—it's too much love to handle at once. I get a pain above my nose, between my eyes, like someone's just thrown a marble at me.

"El, you're not even looking at them," my mother says as she turns me around by the shoulders to face the ocean.

That night in the tent, Freddie and my mother fall asleep first. The wind is loud and slapping. I inhale my mother's natural cucumber smell. I wait for Freddie to snore, but she and my mother are both sleeping quietly while I read my book about worlds fairs; I still haven't finished it.

"Some fairs, like the second one in Chicago, in 1933, sought to divert attention from the Great Depression by reminding Americans of past accomplishments; others, like the New York World's Fair in 1939, looked to the future by promising a better world of tomorrow …"

Before I switch off my flashlight, I hold my hand over its beam and point it toward the floor at my mothers side. I put my face near hers and taste her breath. I wonder what she's dreaming. I don't have a clue.

Freddie laughs in her sleep—not her new, darker laugh, but her old one. The mischievous childhood laugh she'd burst out with when she'd cut my hair without me knowing. Or when she'd write down the number to the San Francisco zoo, and hand my father the number and a message: "
Mr. Lyon called
."

My mother makes one trip to the airport with both of us. We are quick with good-byes. I hug my mother, hug Freddie. Freddie says she'll e-mail, my mother says she'll call. These are lies we tell each other. After we've spent time together like this, we run fast, with long strides, struggling to increase the distance. We don't look back until we have news to report. News to report means our lives are separate and distinct, that something can happen to one of us and not all three.

IV

Counting Infinity

On the flight from San Francisco to JFK I'm seated next to a young man who scares me. I was behind him in line for the security check, and he set off the alarm three times. I watched as he was escorted into an office for questioning.

"I want you to know what happened back there," he says to me with a hint of an accent. He is slightly older than I am, and is wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt.

I feign ignorance. "Back where?"

What sets off the alarms, he explains, is a bullet lodged in his upper thigh. From the war in Eritrea. He went to West Point, returned home to fight in the war in his country, and now, after being honorably discharged, he's going to Cornell.

"What was the war about?" I ask. "Same old, same old."

I ask if he had to fight, if he was drafted.

"No," he tells me. "I went on my own. I flew home."

He gets up to go to the bathroom and I watch him limp down the aisle. I think of the gun barrel to my head, the bullet in his leg. Does the injured thigh area pulse or is it numb? Does he wake up feeling brave or weak?

When he returns to his seat, I'll ask him if, when we land, he wants to get dinner in the city. I imagine him coming up to my apartment and me giving him the frozen peas to soothe the pain in his leg. I imagine visiting him at Cornell the following weekend, him giving me a tour. "This is the science lab," he'd say.

When he sits back down next to me, I offer him my headphones instead.

I get into JFK at 10 p.m. and dare myself to take the hour-and-a-half subway ride home instead of a thirty-seven-dollar cab. Sitting across from me in the subway car is a tall young couple speaking German. "Excuse me," the man says, and asks if I can recommend where they should go. "No tourist stuff," he says. "Fun bars."

"And discos," his girlfriend adds. They're both wearing black jeans, black leather jackets, and boots.

The man hands me an impeccably folded map. I open it carefully, as though something might fall from its rectangles. He says something to the woman in German. She unzips her backpack, takes out a pen from inside the pages of her diary, and hands it to me. She has rings on every finger.

I star the street where the ROTC boy jumped through the traffic. "There's a good club here," I say. I star the street corner with the restaurant where they put generic ketchup in Heinz bottles. I circle Astor Place because I've seen many Germans around there, buying videotapes of the Jackson Five and eating at Polish restaurants. I turn the map over and see the area where I sat with the man with the gun. On the map, it just looks green.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I can't remember anything else. I've been away for a long time."

"How long?" the German man asks. He seems disappointed. "Years," I say.

In the lobby, Danny the doorman is on the phone. I press the elevator button and he puts his palm out, a signal for me to wait.

I hear his side of the conversation: "Yeah, I'm working on another one, actually … Yeah … John Wayne. It's about John Wayne … Yup. Well, give my best to Jane and Daphne when you talk to them … And Catherine … Okay, then … Sure thing. I will. I'll certainly do my best. And you keep going on that Internet … Goodnight, sir."

Danny puts the phone down.

"Hey there. Welcome back, Ms. Ellis." "Just Ellis," I say.

"How was Frisco?"

"Fine," I say. "And you? Did you have a good holiday?"

"Could have been better," he says, "if my wife and daughter had joined me."

I nod. He's been drinking. The top of the coffee thermos is off and has fallen on the floor. "They left me," he explains.

"I'm sorry." He nods.

"How long has it been?" I say.

"Ten years." The floor of the lobby is made up of black and white tiles, like a chessboard. I'm standing on a black square. "That," Danny says, and points to the phone, "was Jane's father. He knows where they are, but he won't tell me anything. I want to know where Daphne's in college, and he won't even tell me that."

"I'm sorry," I say again. I feel awful. "Can I take you for lunch sometime next week?" "That sounds great," Danny says.

I wonder if he has other friends. I wish I knew someone to set him up with.

"So, anything happen?" I ask. "Pardon?"

"I thought maybe you had some news."

"About the man with the red hair? Louis hasn't seen him, or he hasn't told me if he has." "Oh," I say. I'm more relieved than I thought I'd be.

"But the other one came by looking for you." "The other one?"

"The fellow with blond hair, glasses. The one who came to get the lamp."

"Oh," I say.
Tom
. "Thank you." I look down at my suitcase as though it's a dog anxious to go for a walk. "I'm going to get unpacked."

"Welcome back," Danny says.

My roommate is still up. She's fiddling with something on the round coffee table in the living room.

"Antique pipes," Susan says. "Aren't they great?"

"Yeah." I have no idea why anyone would want them. She's carefully arranging them, like a fresh bouquet, inside a washed jam jar. The pipes' heads face up and outward. They look like submarine periscopes.

"I thought they'd be a good conversation starter," she says. I nod. "How was your break?"

"Fine," she says.

I wait for her to ask about my vacation, or how I'm feeling, but she doesn't. She's still tending to the pipes.

I yawn, tell her I'm tired, and go into my room. After unpacking my clothes, I fit the pieces of the ostrich sculpture back together. I place the animal on the ledge that extends from the windowsill and turn it so it faces out: its view of Riverside Park.

"That's where you came from," I say to the ostrich.

I check my e-mail. I delete the messages from Tom without reading them. I open drawers and close them. I've forgotten what I own.

. . .

I go into the bookstore, the one where I was planning on taking the man with the gun. I half expect to see him. I weave through each aisle, back and forth, until I'm convinced he's not there.

I make my way to the back of the store, where the course books are. Required reading for nineteenth-century English Literature includes
Middlemarch
and
Vanity Fair
. I clear some shelf space. From the self-help section I grab several copies of
Women Who Love Too Much
, and I insert them among the nineteenth-century novels. This makes me laugh.

I go to the shelves where the art history course books are organized. I pick out a book on Géricault and take it to the front to pay.

"Good choice," the cashier says.

I learn the office hours of the professor whose French Romanticism class I want to take. He's short, with white hair and bangs; his wife teaches psychology. I know from the classifieds in the campus paper that they're looking for a baby-sitter. They offer a decent salary, but require each applicant to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The ad runs every week.

His office is long and narrow, with no art on the walls. I tell him I know I'm late in registering but I'd like to take his class. For five minutes, he grills me. He asks what appeals to me about the period.

"To be quite honest, I only like one painting," I explain. "I found a postcard of it on the plane."

"A postcard?"

"The
Raft of the Medusa
."

"I see," he says. To my surprise, he grants me permission to join the class, and gives me reading assignments to make up for the lessons I've already missed. I turn to leave.

"Is it true that you tried to talk sense into a crazy man with poetry?" He says this to my profile.

I turn to face him. "I didn't have much choice. He had a gun."

"He had a gun?" The professor's bangs look like exclamation marks. "I didn't hear that part of the story."

"But that's the only part," I say. "I see that now," he says.

I close the office door behind me and, in the hallway, flatten my back against the wall to keep standing. A student with an orange messenger bag strapped over her shoulder stops in front of me. "Is this where I go for the baby-sitting interview?" she asks.

In the mail I get two letters in one day from Tom. They're both thick, one thicker than the other. I slide them under the pot of my plant. Then I pull them out and instead lay them flat inside the freezer, on top of a bag of peas and some old frozen bagels. My feet hurt all over again when I see the peas. I take the letters and ball them up and toss them in the garbage underneath the sink. Then I unfurl them and almost open the thinner of the two. Instead, I fold both in half and stuff one inside each back pocket of a pair of black jeans in my laundry basket. I take off everything I'm wearing and throw it all on top of the jeans. Then I put on a pair of sweats and a shirt I bought in Portugal.

The girl who works on the Lifestyle condoms account calls to wish me a happy New Year. She asks how things are going with Tom. I tell her that things are over, that he won't leave me alone.

"Well, if you want, I'll call him," she says. "I'm PMS-ing and have all this extra energy." I decline, but thank her profusely.

"There's one more thing," she says.

I'm sitting on the floor braiding the fringes of the rug. "What?" She tells me that someone's been defacing the wanted signs. "What wanted signs?" I ask.

"The ones describing what happened to you in the park." I tie a chunk of the rug's fringes in a knot.

"I've seen at least three of them that have been written on or scratched over." "Scratched over?"

"Yeah, one had some corrections to the description of the guy. And the two others said: 'I'm sorry.'"

"'I'm sorry'?"

We hang up. I'm still sitting on the floor.
Who's sorry
? I picture the representative of the world holding his fingers interlocked in front of him, telling me he's sorry. I imagine someone drawing moustaches on the police sketch.

I go into the bathroom, unsure of what to do. Susan has purchased a home waxing kit. I place the little vat of wax on the closed toilet seat, plug it in, and wait for it to heat. I decide to wax my knees—a small, manageable area.

While sitting on the floor and rolling up the legs of my sweatpants, I accidentally elbow the wax cauldron over. Hot wax spills onto the toilet seat. I try to wipe it up with toilet paper, which sticks to the wax in clumps. I place a towel over the waxed area and run an iron over the towel—a technique my mother taught me for getting candle wax out of tablecloths. I'm on the floor when Susan comes home.

"You're ironing the toilet seat," she observes, and then goes into her room and turns up the radio. She likes to listen to the news in French.

That night when I do my laundry I forget about the letters from Tom. My clothes come out of the dryer with hundreds of flecks of paper dandruffed to them. In the jean pockets are two oval wads of white paper, the size of eggs.

I go to my job at the tutoring center. The star basketball player is my first pupil of the day. She's wearing a hat that says "Whatever."

"Happy New Year," I say. "Sorry I wasn't here last week."

She asks if we can work on something non-school-related, and I say sure.

She takes off her hat and smoothes down her hair. "I want to write a letter to my dad telling him what's what."

I say okay.

Over Christmas, she tells me, she found out he'd had an affair, that he has another family. She was working in his office, filing papers, when she came across an envelope that said "Dad." She opened it, thinking it was a souvenir from her childhood. "I don't have any siblings," she explains.

She gives me a few more details and I start to draft a letter:

"How dare you treat me and my mother that way! Everyone knows, everyone talks about your affairs. When people commit to a family, don't you think that means something? Don't you think that at some point you have to come back and take responsibility for your actions? Did you really think you could get away with that? With no apology, with nothing?"