My Education (45 page)

“Why, that's your old babysitter!” I said.

Joachim cocked his head. “I guess so. I guess she does watch me sometimes, when I go in the summers. She's cleaned house for my dad since forever. Since he moved to New York. And she cooks stuff, to keep him from starving. He says she's his excuse why he never remarried. Isn't that awful? As if people get married to get a house cleaner! But I think it's a joke.”

I agreed that it was. “What's your mother's excuse?”

“
She
doesn't need excuses.” We laughed like conspirators. Then Joachim reconsidered. “But maybe it's me.”

“You're all she needs,” I told him.

“Isn't that
eerie
? That's just what she says!”

Not until we'd walked out of the house did I glimpse her, far away up a steep bumpy waste of brown grass, baseball cap on her head with her silver-gold rope of hair pulled through the vent, sunk to the knees in her boots, at the head of a shuffling file of obedient bundles of wool. Joachim and I waved hugely over our heads, were not seen, and returned to my tour of the precincts. “The Districts of Fowl,” Joachim announced, loping beside me. “The Armory: tools for plant Killing and plant Cultivation. Oh, this thing is crazy. This thing”—the structure with the onion-domes on it—“was built by the owners before, for their mules. Yes! The Mule Winter Palace! The people who owned this before had all kinds of great stuff. They had a nineteen-sixty-three four-door Mercedes sedan that ran on used cooking oil. Except it mostly didn't run, so they left it as part of ‘as is' when they sold us the farm, and Mom tried to make it run for, like, years and she finally sold it for scrap. Mom always aspires to get rid of stuff. Anything that does not have Clear Use.”

“All this stuff has clear use?”

“Most of these items are still being Processed,” he admitted.

“You like it here, don't you?”

“You mean, as compared to New York? I like New York but I'm probably not fit to live there anymore. When I go in the summer I can't sleep the first couple of days from the noise. I get twitchy and weird. But then, here, I'm lonely,” he said, with such simplicity I turned to gaze at him. I'd never had a younger Friend—not a substitute child, but a Friend. I was so pleased to identify him thus, that I Capitalized him.

“Joachim,” I said, as we returned down a crooked fence line toward the house, where soon Martha would join us for coffee, “I'm hatching a Plan and I want to Enlist you.”

“Oh, joy,” he said. “You really are a Grand Visitation.”

“I'm meeting a friend in San Francisco for dinner tonight and I want you and your mother to come.”

“What kind of dinner?” he asked shrewdly.

“Sushi. Apparently really great sushi.”

“That's promising. You might talk her into it. We don't get much sushi up here.”

“Will I have to talk her into it?”

“She never wants to do that kind of thing anymore. No Clear Use. But I think she's just out of the habit.”

“But you'd want to?”

“Yes yes!”

“We'll have to leave around four.”

“Then I'll do my chores early,” he said, in his eagerness bringing my tour to an end.

•   •   •

Waking that morning to the cool sheets, the cool, undisturbed air, the deep silence filling the rooms that told me Martha had long since gone out to her work, I had dressed without haste but without leisure also, had carefully gathered up all of my things, fouled underpants and linty balled socks fallen into the cuffs of her bed, my necklace and watch, the ring that had not left my finger, the feather from Lion, and closed the door on her room which I knew I would not see again. I had used to dream, when I'd loved her from such desperate disadvantage, of one day catching up, being not the naïve, needy girl she'd too fully ensnared but a woman, like her, with my own gravity. I'd caught up. Successful or failed, paired or alone, we were equal. It was hard not to wonder how things would have gone if we'd met at this time of our lives, and yet equally hard to pursue the thought far. It was too phantasmic. I could not even guess what her face would be like.

In the kitchen we drank mugs of coffee, the table between us. Finalities never occur, even after a fourteen-year wait, that aren't felt right away by all persons concerned. It was easy drinking coffee, immediate. The coffee was not a pretext or a symbol. After a while I said, “You remember Dutra.”

Her face allowed itself full retrospection. “Sure. Daniel Dutra. He hated me. With good reason.”

“He never hated you.”

“He should have.” It was possible to tip our hats to this and let it pass. “What's he been up to these past many years?”

I told her, not sparing details, and as I did, and as she exclaimed and protested and laughed—as I, frankly, enthralled her with the story of him—I was reminded how pleasant the game of seduction can be, even when one is technically on the sidelines. “We're meeting for dinner tonight down in San Francisco. Come with me. I think you might like to see Dutra, and I think he might like to see you. Besides that, Joachim's already counting on it.”

“You're a very surprising minx, Miss,” Martha chided, but laughing. I took note of the flush in her face, beneath which the fine lines of her decades of previous laughter and worry and scorn, all etched permanently, momentarily seemed to dissolve. She was in arm's reach of fifty years old now, so beautiful one might have called this her ideal age, but she'd probably look just the same when she turned eighty-five. I told her, “He still carries a torch for you,” knowing she'd laugh at the old-fashioned phrase, as she did, but it didn't prevent her from blushing.

“In another life,” she said, setting our cups in the sink.

“Then just come and have sushi. You don't get much sushi up here.”

“That's true, but I can't say I find it a hardship.” She considered. “Joachim thinks you're the bomb.”

“Then just come for him. He'll have fun. It'll give us more time.”

“Are you leaving tomorrow?”

“Tonight on the red-eye.” Another decision I'd found I had made, on awaking that morning.

•   •   •

Joachim rode down with me—“I need him to operate the cup holder,” I explained to Martha, “and make sure that I don't wind up lost”—and this time I did take the coastal highway, after dutifully seeming to listen to Martha's instructions for her locals' shortcut back to 101. Martha never looked back when she drove. At the opportune moment I slipped unperceived from the frame of her rearview and turned our course west. A river appeared to reward me and slid alongside. “Now we'll never get lost,” I declared. “Keep the river on your right to the ocean. At ocean, turn left.”

“We'll be late,” Joachim said, unworried. “Where this river comes out at the ocean there's usually sea lions.”

“Sea lions!” I cried.

“With their pups!” Joachim realized. “Is it summer? It is! They'll have pups!”

The sea lions, then, their lengths flung on the sand like so many superfluous sandbags, and sunning their lichenlike splotches, and at long intervals, as if hoping to shame you for prompting the effort, dismissively waving their flippers. And the busload of Japanese tourists dangling over the guardrail with cameras, in their effusions very like Joachim, who, delighted in turn, photographed them and thanked them and bobbed in response to their bows. Then we drove on again, the amusement-park road scalloped out of the bluffs like a practical joke. “This is the sort of road that would never be built nowadays,” Joachim observed with satisfaction. “It's so dangerous. And erode-y.”

“This is a road that was built when American arrogance hadn't yet found its limits.”

“It's great that there's so much stuff like that for us to still use, even now that we're so conscientious. Like, the whole highway system.”

“I know, there it is, you can't waste it.”

“You can't. Wasting it's worse than having made it in the first place. Ooh! Barbecued Oysters. Have you ever had a barbecued oyster?”

“Is it good?”

“Scary actually, I wouldn't eat one, but I don't think it's something you'd find in the East.”

Point Reyes now glimpsed through the trees to the west like a taunt, that the westernmost place had slipped out of our grasp. The sinking sun flashing a last telegraph, interrupted by fog. The fog dusk reminded us what we were doing, if we had forgotten. “Wow,” Joachim said, “we're going to be
really
late.”

“It's okay,” I told him. “It's just dinner with friends. Your mom gets to catch up with a friend while they're waiting for us, which is what we were coming to do, anyway.”

“That sounds nice. My mom doesn't actually have many friends.” After a moment, as I was pondering this, he said, “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Of course.”

“I'm moving back to New York for the rest of high school. At the end of the summer.”

I thought of Nicholas's beautiful, ordered apartment, of which I'd seen only a handful of rooms. Down a quiet hallway, I now knew, was a room full of light, for his son. Herodotus and Shakespeare lined up on the shelves, their faded cloth spines harmonizing somehow with the top-of-the-line computer still off-gassing its scents of the future from the seams of its platinum case. In his father's world Joachim would be no less himself, but illumined by that world's lights in a quite different way. I asked, superfluously, “Your mom doesn't know yet?”

“No. I told Dad I wanted to tell her myself, but I'm chicken.”

“Because you're afraid she'll be angry?”

“Because she'll be sad.”

I glanced at him, gazing out the window. She was going to be many times sadder than she'd ever allow him to know. I thought how strange it was, that a child can seem such an intrusion on life, until the day that the child becomes life itself. “She'll be okay,” I told him. “She'll miss you, but she'll also be proud and excited. That'll outweigh her sadness. I'm her friend and I'm also a mom, so I know what I'm saying.”

I could see that he liked what I'd said even if he could not quite believe it. “I could visit you in Brooklyn,” he realized. “Would you mind?”

“I'd be mortally offended if you didn't!”

Dutra called me at eight, while we were waiting in line at the Golden Gate tollbooth, but the fog had been torn into pieces and vanquished, and the heavy gold light filled the car, and I knew, because it was a summer evening out there in the West, we had so much more time than the clock might have said. “We're almost there,” I told Dutra, truncating his squawks of distress. “We're in town. We just hit the traffic.”

“Who's
we
,” Dutra cried.

“Joachim. Martha's kid.”

“Martha's
here
, Gin,” he said, and his voice, in its labors, suggested he'd worn a starched collar and a far-too-tight tie, though he'd never, to my knowledge, put on such clothes in his life.

“I know she is, Dutra. I brought her. She wanted to see you.”

“Since when are you back in touch with her?”

“Since whenever. Is she sitting inside all alone?”

“We got sake.”

“Well, go back in and drink it with her. Don't be rude. I've got to go now, I'm paying my toll.”

Dutra emitted an odd, smothered sound, as if not being rude might be too much to ask. “Just get here.”

“We'll be there in a flash.”

But we weren't there for almost an hour. By that time, night had fallen. The restaurant glowed like a lantern, the center of which was their little square table. Across it they leaned toward each other, submerged deep in talk, neither laughing nor grave but as if they'd been talking for years. “There they are,” Joachim said, Dutra seeming like someone he already knew.

“You go on,” I said, kissing his cheek. “I don't think I'll come in. I'll be late to the airport.” When he looked at me wonderingly I replied with that calm steady light of adulthood: he need not understand me, just trust me.

Taller than me as he was, he still felt like a child in my arms.

“See you in September,” he said, shyly stepping away with one hand on the door.

I lingered a moment to watch their glad faces, as they caught sight of him.

In the course of writing this book I received invaluable assistance and support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, PowderKeg, Molly Stern, Paul Slovak, Lynn Nesbit, Kenna Lee, and Pete Wells. Thanks to you all. In particular, two of the writers I most admire and cherish as peers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Egan, set aside their own work to read my drafts and offer crucial advice and encouragement without which this book would not exist. All my love and gratitude to you both.