In the Drink (8 page)

I was afraid of Billy, but I also admired him. His resistance was as outward as mine was covert. He lived with his father in a
dismal house with a boarded-up window that Billy himself had broken and no one had fixed. In the lower grades his infractions were minor: poking girls, throwing spitballs at the blackboard. As the years progressed, so did his crimes, from setting trash can fires and stealing lunch money to ripping a toilet out of a boys’ room stall and, in eighth grade as a sort of pièce de rèsistance, hot-wiring a teacher’s Mustang during school hours and taking it into the desert for a joyride. He was always being sent to the principal’s office. The teachers suspended him, threatened to expel him permanently, swatted him, sent notes home to his father, but nothing they did affected him in any way that I could see. His father beat him, everyone knew about it; he’d show up limping one morning, and squirm around in his chair as if he couldn’t get comfortable, but not even that could quell him. He destroyed anything that got in his way, and anyone who teased or provoked him was sorry: he leapt at them, arms windmilling, trying to tear their eyes out. Most people left him alone.

In the second-grade Christmas pageant, Billy was cast as Joseph and I played Mary. As we trudged side by side from stage right to stage left and back to stage right, getting turned away by various innkeepers in doorways, Billy, as directed by the teacher, supported me with one hand around my waist and the other under my elbow, guiding me as if I were an extremely pregnant woman instead of a seven-year-old girl. I had until that moment thought of him as someone whose attention it was unwise to attract, but now he enfolded me like a precious, fragile thing and gave me a look of such pure and spellbinding tenderness that I was shocked out of my concentration on my role; I looked gratefully back at him, oblivious of the audience and the pageant, of anything but this compassion that had been visited on me from out of nowhere. When the pageant was over, Billy turned back into the same unpredictable psychopath
he’d always been, with no interest in me or anyone else, but I felt secretly allied with him, whether he knew it or not, from that moment on.

The other person I admired, but not so secretly, was Lauren McDevitt, who lived next door. On those wonderful days when she had nothing better to do than to play with me, I jumped up from my book when I heard the doorbell ring and ran downstairs as fast as I could without disturbing the figurines. When I opened the front door, she seized my arm and compelled me outside to serve as the supporting cast for the various games she devised—explorers, travelers, foreign spies—whose general plot and parameters she would establish, and whose literary details I would then attempt to supply. My tastes tended very much toward the romantic and improbable and hers not at all, so these make-believe sessions always involved a lot of running and shouting and very little internal drama.

Just beyond our backyards was a rusted-out old sedan, half-buried. We climbed through a hole in her fence to sit in it and drive to faraway destinations; Lauren allowed me to keep up a running narrative while she occupied herself with shifting gears and gunning the engine through the scenery I was feverishly, joyfully describing: a bridge arched over a deep river that led to the outskirts of a city, into whose heart we rocketed. On we went, past a jumble of theaters, skyscrapers, apartment buildings, department stores. Finally Lauren had to remind me, “I’m driving, Claudia.”

“I know,” I said.

“So quit telling where we’re going.”

“Okay,” I said, overpowered suddenly with a rapt adoration. “You’re so beautiful,” I sighed. “You have princess hair.”

“Get off me, you lezzie,” she said gruffly, pushing my hand away, shoving my head.

Throughout these long afternoons outside with her, I was
always conscious of being a speck at the bottom of a vast, ragged bowl of rock under the empty sky, buried in the silence and heat, surrounded by blank sand. The foothills, with their gray-green mesquite fur, rolled away to faraway mountains that sat sharp-spined on the horizon, unconnected to the valley floor, as if they’d been set down ready-made. The buttes and mesas to the west glowed deep red; veins of magenta and green spidered along rock formations shaped like tablets or giant hands, stacked in layers of cinnabar, crimson, brick. Masses of clouds echoed the rock shapes in their charcoal or ocher strata, wind-shaped crags so dense they looked mineral. The air was thick with the breath of sage and hot dust. At sunset the air hung low, striated like a weird plowed field of pigmented earth, backlighting the mountains with shirred, neon clouds, leaching all the color from the rocks, abstracting the bushes to dark cutouts. The wind moved like a huge hand through the valley, filling me with a restless, empty impatience I later identified as loneliness.

There was a factory just outside Evandale; I could see it from our yard. During the day trucks drove to and from its gates in a blur of smoke and dust, but at night it became a scaffolding of glowing white tubes and gold lights. There was a moment during sundown every evening when the factory lights came on but the sky was still wild with clouds and color; the factory’s sudden illumination had no more effect than a flashbulb going off in a bright room, but as the sky darkened, its lights intensified until it floated on the sand floor of the valley like the fantasy city I dreamed of. When the factory lights got so bright they made haloes on our eyelashes, my mother appeared in the back doorway, stocky and imperious, yodeling “Hoo-oo!” out into the darkness, a sound that made Lauren laugh and me cringe inwardly with embarrassed irritation at my odd, foreign-born,
hopelessly uncool, self-righteously backward mother. It was time to go in for dinner.

Through the years, my mother hired a succession of women to cook and clean for us. I didn’t know any of them well, since they came during the day while I was at school. By the time I came home they were gone, and our laundry was clean and folded, the breakfast dishes were washed, our beds were made, the floors were swept. They also left pots of stew or chili on the stove, pans of enchiladas in the oven. The food they made was oddly repellent to me; a stranger’s hands had cubed the meat, chopped the onions, wrapped the tortillas. My mother loved this food and ate it with tremendous enjoyment. It annoyed her that I wouldn’t eat it: “Stop being so picky-picky,” she commanded. “If you don’t eat it you’ll have to starve, there isn’t anything else.”

I gagged it down in spiteful silence, not that she noticed: she was too involved in her rehashes of squabbles with a few of her more contentious colleagues, in this case Mark Wickers and Susan Fletcher: “They asked permission to teach together a verkshop on the techniques of Skinner. Too bad for them, because Fletcher is not coming beck next year and Vickers is dem lucky he got that contract. I cannot bear these idiot people! They drife me crazy vith their stupid ideas!” She glared at me as if I might be in secret cahoots with them. I fled upstairs the moment I’d dried my hands on the dish towel.

At eight-thirty, I went down in my pajamas to poke my head into her study to say good night. In books, mothers kissed their children, told them stories, sang them lullabies. I stood in the doorway, shy with dread, filled with hopeless longing, picking at a sliver of wood in the door frame, gazing at my mother. At the slightest hint of encouragement from her, I would have flung myself into her arms, buried my face in her neck and held
on to her so tightly she would have had to peel me off her, one limb at a time, to rid herself of me.

After a moment, she looked up from her book, placing a finger on the page to mark her place. “You brushed your teeth?”

“Yeah.”

“Face clean? You finished your homework?”

“Just about,” I lied.

“All right then, up with you. Sleep tight, liebchen.”

I waited just a moment. No dice. “Good night, Ma,” I said then, and went upstairs.

After breakfast, a hurried bowl of cold cereal I forced down my throat to keep my mother from getting out the rectal thermometer, I waited as usual in front of Lauren’s house until she came out. We walked the eight or nine blocks to school together. She was nice enough to me until we set foot on the playground, but then a formidable junta of girls coalesced around her, popular girls, secretive and snide, and she forgot all about me, as well she should have, since my political value to her was nil. I wandered off to the shady breezeway, where I sat until the bell rang, leaning against the cool cinder-block wall with a book propped against my knees.

The Saturday morning after my fourteenth birthday, which is to say, when I had reached what my mother considered to be the age of “sexual maturity” (I’d had my period for over a year already but hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell her), she marched upstairs and knocked on my bedroom door, then strode into my room brandishing a thick white orthopedic-looking garment she’d bought especially for me. It bore so little resemblance to the lacy pink castoffs Lauren had been handing down to me for two or three years that I might not have figured out what it was if my mother hadn’t demonstrated its purpose for me. Her means of doing so was typically blunt: “Claudia,” she said, holding the Ace-bandage-like contraption to her own
chest, “this is a brassiere for you, and you wear it so you don’t flop all over the place.” She had also brought along a box of maxi pads. Lauren had taught me to use a tampon already, but I watched in horrified, spellbound fascination as my mother held the pad to her crotch with the blasé practicality of a stewardess demonstrating a seat-belt fastener.

At some point early in our freshman year of high school, Billy Snow must have woken up one day and realized that no one was going to help him escape, so he’d better do it himself. He skulked through the halls with his books tucked under one big hand, the other shoved deep in the pocket of his pants so it wouldn’t punch anyone. He never had a girlfriend, never went to a dance; his clothes were wrinkled and not quite clean, as if he’d worn them to bed, and he smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and unwashed hair. But he made every honor roll, and was a National Merit Scholar. He got into the University of Arizona on full scholarship.

I got into Swarthmore with enough financial aid so my mother didn’t have to empty her savings account to send me there. During my sophomore year, when my mother joined the faculty of the New York State University at Albany, she turned her institute over to several of her staff, among them the treacherous, Skinner-reading Mark Wickers, who had managed to wriggle back into her good graces. She bought herself a Victorian house on a treelined street near the campus and started a private practice in addition to her teaching load. She’d been there, on the whole happily, ever since.

Five years after I’d graduated from college and moved to New York, I was at the farmers’ market in Union Square one Wednesday evening, and there, standing over a table of apple cider, was Billy Snow. My first reaction, almost before I’d even recognized him, was a pang of relief at the restoration of a loss I
hadn’t known I’d sustained. The slope of his brow, his expression, the way he stood looked as familiar and poignant as if our long separation had been that of estranged spouses. “Billy,” I said abruptly. He turned and saw me, and for an instant looked blank. “Claudia Steiner,” he said then in disbelief, and his face came to life, smiling, glad to see me. We stood talking until we agreed that we were thirsty, and went to the Old Town Bar for the first of countless drinking bouts together.

He had graduated the year before from Columbia Law School and had recently become a junior associate with a firm whose name was a string of
Mayflower
-sounding patronyms, which explained why he was wearing a suit, and why he occasionally and only half ironically used corporate jargon like “no-brainer” and “comfort zone.” But he still had that same edginess, the old restless balking at having to do what anyone told him. He was still trying to tame himself so he could get what he wanted.

“I haven’t been back to Arizona in years,” I said over a pint of ale. “I hated it there, Billy. I didn’t even know it was beautiful until I left.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “I’m William now, by the way.”

I turned over in bed and listened to the traffic in the rain. A few cold, clear truths rose one by one through my consciousness like a flock of birds: I wasn’t even remotely worthy of William and I wasn’t ever going to have him; I’d asked my mother to lend me money and she’d said no; I’d given all the change to the cabdriver; no one was going to pay off my debts; no one would save me from myself. I fell asleep to the soft beating of wings in my head.

I awoke the next morning at eight o’clock, cheerful and oddly refreshed, with only the vaguest memory of the events of the night before. I lay in bed for a while, afloat on a buoyant and illusory sense of well-being, then arose by degrees, first sitting on the edge of my bed and scratching my head to clear the fog, then standing erect, then walking with gingerly steps toward the bathroom. Everything looked too small and far away, and my limbs felt relaxed and heavy, uncoordinated, as if I’d grown much taller during the night.