Swim Back to Me Page 2

  “Well …” I said.

  “Stand up to her.” Joanie had high cheekbones and a long, straight nose, and when she stood like this, slightly affronted, her dark hair falling down her back, she looked a little like an Indian noblewoman. “It would do her some good,” she added. “Shake her up.”

  I was about to take the cookies when the front door opened, and Dan stormed in, shouting, “Motherfuckers!” Then he saw me and stopped. “Richard Appleby. A pleasure as always. Please forgive the inexcusable language.”

  I shrugged. I’d heard him swear before, in a jokey, Dan-like way, but the look on his face now—mouth down-turned, cheeks flushed—suggested he was seriously angry.

  “What?” Joanie said, rounding the end of the counter that divided the kitchen from the dining area. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” He smiled a false smile. “I had a hard day at the office, dear.”

  This was his way of being funny, but I thought I should get out of there. I left them and made my way down the dark hallway. Sasha was where I’d left her, a Fig Newton an inch away from her mouth.

  “What the hell?”

  “I just found it,” she said. “It was on the floor, I swear.”

  “Your dad’s home. But I’m not sure he’s going to want to drive us anywhere.”

  She shoved the cookie into her mouth and got off the bed. I followed her back to the front hall. Dan and Joanie were still standing where I’d left them, and now Joanie had her hand on Dan’s upper arm. I wondered what had happened. My father sometimes came home from History Department meetings in a bad mood, though for him this meant only that he was particularly quiet and distracted. My mother, when she was still with us, had been unsympathetic to the occasional stories he told.

  “Give us a minute,” Joanie said when she saw us, but Sasha ignored her.

  “Daddy, will you drive us?”

  “Ah, the Walk,” Dan said. “Noblest of causes.” He ran his hand through his bushy red hair. “Do you kids know what a cretin is?”

  Sasha put a finger to her chin. “Someone who has a different opinion from you?”

  Dan barked out a single, loud laugh. His briefcase was standing on the floor next to him, and he lifted one foot and knocked it over, then kicked it several feet along the floor. He didn’t look at Joanie as he faced us again and said, “I’m ready when you are.”

  “We’ll get our shoes,” Sasha said, but when we were out of her parents’ sight, she stopped and held a finger to her lips.

  “What?” I whispered, but she shook her head and then cocked an ear in the direction of the main room. I tried to listen, but I couldn’t hear much—Dan’s voice going up and down with occasional moments of sudden emphasis; Joanie’s low, slow, soothing.

  “Oh, never mind,” Sasha muttered, and she continued down the hall. In her parents’ room she perched on the padded leather frame of the water bed and wiggled her bare feet into her tennis shoes. “Now you’re really a Horowitz,” she said. “You’ve seen Daddy have a fit.”

  “What was the matter?”

  “He gets into arguments with people.”

  “About …”

  “Henry James! T. S. Eliot! He’s an English professor, remember?” She grabbed the empty Fig Newtons box and headed out of the room. “Come on—before he gets even more wound up.”

  But when we got back out there, Dan seemed to have calmed down: he was standing in the kitchen with his hand in the cookie box. He saw us and grinned. “Caught in the act,” he said. “Caught red-handed. Richard, may I offer you a chocolate mint creme sandwich cookie? I love how they spell it c-r-e-m-e instead of c-r-e-a-m. But I think we should pronounce it correctly from now on. It’s a chocolate mint krem sandwich cookie, isn’t it? Krem. Merveilleux!”

  The last weekend before the Walk, I had to go visit my mother in Oakland. This happened every month or so, my father driving me across the bay on a Friday evening. When we arrived he’d pull to the curb in front of her building and we’d sit silently in the car for a minute or two, until at last one of us said, “See you Sunday,” and the other said, “See you Sunday,” and I’d get out of the car and go into the narrow vestibule of my mother’s apartment building, where I’d have to wait for her to buzz me into the lobby.

  That night she was working on dinner when I arrived, and once she’d hugged me she returned to the stove. I parked my backpack near the couch and sat at the table, thinking that the weekend was really just three units—Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday—and reminding myself that in a few hours I’d go to bed, and already the first unit would be finished.

  The apartment was tiny and so was everything in it, including the table: so tiny that my glass of milk nearly touched her glass of wine as we ate. “Tell me,” she said, chewing quickly and smiling at me. “How are you? How was your week?”

  “Fine,” I said, and because it was best when I told a long story, I described the Walk for Mankind, how this friend and I were raising money like crazy, how we had it all planned, down to the refreshments we were going to bring.

  “Which friend?” she said. “Tony?” And I said no, not Tony, someone new. I’d finished my meal by then—a hamburger patty and carrot coins, little-kid food—and I stood to clear my plate.

  There was a TV in the living room, and we settled in front of it once she was finished eating. She seemed antsy. She got up for a glass of water and then, just a few minutes later, a cup of coffee. She had slender arms, and when she came back with the coffee, the cuff of her blue work shirt had unrolled, making it look as if the cup were being held not by a hand but by an empty blue sleeve. I watched her sit down, watched her tuck her longish hair behind her ear. The way she wore her hair, hanging to her shoulders, made her look like a teenager from the back. She had wrinkles, though, framing her mouth and in deep grooves across her forehead.

  At last it was time for bed. We unfolded the couch, and I waited for her to close her bedroom door and then undressed quickly, climbing between the sheets before she could crack the door again: “Just in case you need me in the middle of the night,” she always said, which annoyed me even more than the silly dinner. I understand it now, of course, her babying me: parental tenderness is a night-blooming emotion, perhaps most robust when it’s been kept under wraps.

  I had a hard time falling asleep that night. I could hear the clock ticking on the stove and, in a little while, my mother’s faint snores from the bedroom. Unit 1 of the weekend was over, or would be once I was sleeping. I pictured a map of the Bay Area, and I imagined a line drawn from our house in Stanford to my mother’s apartment in Oakland, cutting right through the bay. That line was hundreds of times longer than the line from our house to the Horowitzes’, but it was the second line—the shorter one—that mattered.

  Saturday morning, my mother woke me early, saying she had something she wanted to show me. “Get up,” she said. “We’ll go as soon as you’ve had breakfast.”

  She drove a different car now, having left behind the family station wagon and bought an old white VW Bug. She kept it in an empty lot around the corner from her apartment building, and as we got into the car I saw on the opposite side of the lot a tall black woman in a low-cut dress and shiny gold high heels. She leaned against the hood of a rusty sedan, drawing every now and then on a cigarette.

  “She’s mankind, too,” my mother muttered, and I began to feel nervous, wondering what she had in store for me.

  And in fact our destination was the Oakland ghetto, a place I had heard about but never seen. We drove up and down the streets, past stores crammed close together and wrecked cars parked with their windows open. I’d never seen so many black people—walking up and down the sidewalks, sitting on the hoods of cars, crossing the street in clusters or alone. I was scared, but I knew I shouldn’t say so.

  “It’s time you saw this,” my mother said. “I realized last night.”

  Out my window, an old man hobbled along the sidewalk, shaking his finger as if he were sco
lding someone.

  I said, “OK, but can we go soon?”

  My mother frowned. “Yes, but don’t you see? We can go. Do you think the people who live here can go? That’s what poverty is, a place you can’t leave. Honey, I’m thrilled you’re doing the Walk for Mankind, but if you want to help, there’s plenty to do right here.” She held her palm up, extended toward the windshield. “In your own backyard.”

  I watched as a woman crossed the street in front of us, a large blue suitcase forcing her to walk lopsided, one shoulder lower than the other. I leaned against the door and rested my head on the closed window.

  “Richard,” my mother said gently, “I needed to do something useful with my life. Do you understand?”

  These were the words she’d used when she decided to leave. She wanted to help the poor, to correct the wrongs our country seemed so content to live with. She’d come to Oakland to work in a social services agency that helped underprivileged and undereducated women learn the skills they needed to get decent jobs. That there were underprivileged and undereducated women over on our side of the bay, too, was something we never mentioned.

  “I know seeing this might be … strange,” she said. “Upsetting. But I needed to bring you. I needed you to understand.”

  “I already did,” I said. And I looked at the clock on the dashboard, figuring I was at least 10 percent through Unit 2.

  The Walk was on a Saturday. On the Friday evening beforehand, Sasha and I sat on the curb in front of her house and totaled up our pledges. Weekends with my mother often left me feeling weird, and I’d been distracted all week, unable to concentrate in class, burdened by a feeling that time had changed, slowed down: that it was getting slower each day and soon I’d find myself in Social Studies or somewhere staring at a clock with hands that didn’t move. Sitting on the curb next to Sasha, I added a column of numbers, whispered the total to myself, and then forgot it halfway through the next column.

  Sasha’s lips moved as she flipped through the pages on her clipboard. She looked up. “I’m going to have more than you.”

  “What do you mean? We went to the exact same houses.” We’d gone so far as to ask people to split their pledges between the two of us, to make sure we stayed even.

  “I did some other ones,” she said, eyes still on her pledge sheet.

  “When?”

  “When you were with your mom last weekend. My dad drove me to Redwood City and I did some there. You don’t have to freak out, Richard—it’s good, it’s more money for mankind.” She turned to her last page, and I saw her eyes fly down the length of it. “Twenty-eight dollars and seventy cents a mile,” she said. “That’s, let’s see, five hundred and seventy-four dollars I’ll earn tomorrow. How much do you have?”

  I was still reeling from the news she’d just delivered. Why hadn’t she said something earlier? I missed everything when I was with my mother.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I lost count.”

  She reached for my clipboard and within a minute she was on the final page, her head nodding a little with the increasing sum. “Twenty-one even,” she said. “That’s good, that’s four hundred and twenty dollars you’ll earn.” She handed me the clipboard. Then she pounded her thigh. “Shit, put that with mine and it’s just six dollars less than a thousand dollars! We need thirty more cents a mile. We’ve got to get thirty more cents a mile.”

  It was the evening before the Walk, and there wasn’t a house we hadn’t hit in all of Stanford. I said, “Maybe we should just put it in ourselves.”

  “No way. We’re walking, we’re not going to pay, too.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?” Her parents were out—they’d gone to dinner in the city, taking Peter with them—and I knew my father wouldn’t drive us. He was a creature of habit, and it was his habit to spend Friday evenings preparing his lectures for the following week, so he’d have the weekend clear for writing.

  “I know,” she said. “SCRA. Some old person’ll be swimming laps and we’ll hit ’em up and be done with it.”

  SCRA was the Stanford Campus Recreation Association, a little swim and tennis club a few blocks away. When I was younger I’d lived there in the summertime, going from pool to Ping-Pong to tennis for hours at a stretch. At the end of the afternoon I’d ride home with the latest layer of sunburn tightening my face and a damp towel hanging from my shoulders.

  Sasha and I walked down the hill together, the scent of jasmine faint in the evening air. Through the falling light I looked at her, at her unruly hair and long nose. She wore a Mexican blouse, gauzy and decorated at the neckline with tiny blue birds. Look at me, I thought, but she didn’t.

  The SCRA parking lot came into view, and there were a couple of cars in it, an old blue Mercedes and a black Volvo. I recognized the Mercedes and my heart sank a little: it belonged to Harvey Bergman, my father’s closest friend. I didn’t feel like running into him.

  Beyond the parking lot, right up against the back fence, some older teenage boys were gathered at an abandoned bike rack, some of them on the ground, others leaning against the rack or straddling it, their hair long and lank. “Great,” I said, because they were a group I mostly recognized, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who attended the high school we’d go to year after next. They were known in the neighborhood to smoke pot, and I had a feeling they were smoking it now.

  “What do you mean, ‘great’?” Sasha said. “It is great, we can ask them.”

  “Ask them?”

  “To sponsor us.”

  I stared at her. “We can’t ask them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … Because …” They’ll laugh at me, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “They’re kids,” I finally managed.

  “We’re talking about six dollars,” she said. “Anyway, SCRA’s probably locked, what choice do we have?”

  “Let’s at least try,” I said, and I veered away from her toward the entrance, a set of double doors flanked by open railwork that allowed you to peer in or call to someone, but not to reach your hand in to unlock the door.

  Which, it turned out, was locked. From inside, I heard the sound of water lapping against the sides of the pool, rhythmically, as from the motions of a swimmer. “Hello?” I called halfheartedly through the rails, but no one replied, and I figured Harvey and the Volvo driver were both in the water, one in each of the two lanes set aside for lap swimmers, both moving with the monumental slowness of the aged.

  “Richard,” Sasha said, and I turned and found her standing where I’d left her with a high-wattage smile on her face that told me the guys at the fence were watching. “Come on,” she said loudly. “I want to ask these guys something.”

  “What?” I said, but after a moment I joined her and we continued through the parking lot and entered the dead field where the bike rack was. On the other side of the fence was the back playground of my old elementary school. The tether balls had been taken down for the weekend, and the poles stood like leafless trees in an even line.

  I knew who two of the guys were: Eric Rumsen, the younger brother of a neighborhood girl who’d babysat me years earlier; and Kevin Cottrell, whose father was a colleague of my father’s in the History Department. Two of the others looked familiar: Stanford kids, too, but college age now or from the older residential neighborhood, or the offspring of faculty in far-flung departments like Physics or Art. The only one I’d never seen before was a tall, lanky guy leaning against the bike rack, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. In place of a shirt he wore a vest of patched-together velvet, the pieces green and burgundy and navy blue, and his arms were muscled and tan.

  “How’s it going?” Sasha said, and a couple of the guys laughed.

  “We’re cool,” Eric Rumsen said. “How about you? A little warm? Kind of hot?”

  Dismayed, I turned to Sasha, but she was smiling. I thought of Eric’s sister: she’d been nice to me, had brought me a book about fishing once, wi
th glossy color pictures of all the fish you could catch in the western United States. She’d taken me by their house one day, to get something she needed, and I remembered her room, the walls covered with billowy cloths from India. I’d walked by Eric’s room, too, could call up the B.O. smell, the unmade bed.

  “Have you guys heard of the Walk for Mankind?” Sasha said. “It’s this fund-raiser, and we’re doing it tomorrow, and we need one more pledge to get to this higher level of earning.”

  Kevin Cottrell was looking everywhere but at me. I remembered a swimming party when I was about six and he was about ten—it was at the house of the then chair of the department, and while the grown-ups stood around on the patio and talked, the five or six kids all played in the pool, except Kevin. He had a book, and he sat reading by himself on a lounge chair the whole time. Now he nudged one of the other guys and turned to Sasha. “How much do you need?”

  “Not much,” she said eagerly. “Thirty cents a mile—just six dollars altogether.”

  “And what do we get?” said the guy Kevin had nudged. He had a pink face and a snub nose, and pale blond hair that reached halfway down his back.

  Sasha glanced at me. “What do you mean?”

  “You get six bucks, what do we get?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “We need something too, here. You want to keep us company, maybe smoke a joint with us?”

  “Just you,” pink-face said. “I think your little friend is too young.”

  I felt my face grow warm. I turned to Sasha and said, “We’ve got the Walk tomorrow.”

  Eric laughed. “Whoa, don’t want to be too tired for that.”

  “Cut it out.” The guy with the vest had pushed away from the bike rack, and suddenly there was something different going on. The other guys all looked at him, and I saw that he was not a teenager after all but in his mid-twenties, maybe older: his hairline receding, the inlets of scalp it had abandoned shinier than his forehead. His mustache drooped over his mouth, and his eyes were hooded and dull, but he was clearly in charge. He sauntered over, his walk somehow telling me he was from somewhere else: he leaned back as he walked, hooked his thumbs in his belt loops.