Swim Back to Me Read online

  “Did I ever tell you about the job I had picking strawberries?” she asked a little later, once we were at the table. She had, but I shook my head, and she went on. “This was ’forty-eight, maybe ’forty-nine. Usually in the summer I worked at the library, shelving books—my mother had worked there during the war, so the director knew us. But that summer your aunt Alice needed a job, so I had to find something else. I saw a notice in the drugstore downtown, advertising for strawberry pickers, and for some reason I thought it sounded like fun. A hundred degrees out in the sun every day—I don’t know where I got that idea. But my father said they’d never take me, so I took it as a challenge.”

  I was cutting minute steak into pieces and chewing them slowly, half listening to her and half thinking of what Sasha’d told me about the party in the Santa Cruz mountains, how she’d eaten a hash brownie and gotten higher than she’d ever been before. I was worried about what they might be doing this weekend—maybe going to another party where she’d try mushrooms or even LSD.

  “Are you listening?” my mother said.

  I looked up at her. She had a thin face, thinner now than before. Perhaps because of this, her lips seemed swollen, overfull. The lipstick had worn off; most of it was on her glass now.

  “Yes,” I said. “You saw an ad.”

  “So I went out to this farm,” she said, “about three miles outside town, and there were already crews in the fields, but I rang the doorbell on the farmhouse, and a grizzly old lady came to the door—I swear, she had whiskers. And I told her what I wanted, and she pointed to the barn, and I went out there and found Mr. Fisher.”

  Mr. Fisher was the farmer. He had a hundred acres, strawberries and lettuce and artichokes. This was outside Salinas. When I was younger my parents sometimes took me for a drive down there, to where my mother had grown up, and inevitably we would pass what my mother called “Mr. Fisher’s”—never “Mr. Fisher’s farm” or “Mr. Fisher’s land,” just “Mr. Fisher’s.” At some point I learned that Mr. Fisher was a man she’d worked for, the summer she was eighteen, but for a brief period in my very young childhood I’d heard “Mr. Fisher’s” as “mist or fishers,” and when we drove by I looked hard to see if I could figure out which it was.

  The next part of the story was that my mother joined a crew of migrant workers—Mexican—whom Mr. Fisher hired for the season and housed in a long bunkhouse with a corrugated roof. The story was about how my mother worked hard to prove herself, and how by the end of her six- or seven-week stint working with them, the Mexican women all doted on her.

  “They cried on my last day,” my mother was saying. “They’d embroidered a tablecloth for me, sitting up late after work—I can’t imagine what it did to their eyes. And they gave it to me just before I got in my car for the last time and drove off. And do you know what I felt?”

  I knew what she felt. I hated this part of the story.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I felt nothing. Not gratitude, not shame. Nothing at all.”

  We’d both finished eating, and I pushed back my chair and cleared our plates, hoping we could move to the TV now.

  “Would you like dessert?” she said.

  I was surprised by this; she never served dessert. “What is it?”

  “Cake.” She went to a paper bag on the counter and took out a small pink box, fastened with tape that she cut with a knife. She lifted out a cake, only four or five inches in diameter, iced in white and decorated with yellow swirls.

  It was her birthday; I’d forgotten entirely. I was furious at my father for not reminding me. “It’s your birthday,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get you a present.”

  She came close and put her arms around me, pulling my head to her neck and holding it there until I began to get a cramp and moved away.

  I turned and looked at the flowers on the coffee table. That it was her birthday explained them, but I didn’t know if the explanation was that someone had given them to her for her birthday or that she’d bought them herself.

  “They’re from Patrice,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “My friend Patrice. I met her at work.”

  “Is she another social worker?”

  “No,” my mother said. “She comes in at night and cleans.” She opened a drawer for forks, reached for plates, and set them on the counter with a clank. When we sat down again, slices of cake in front of us, she looked upset.

  I leaned my nose close to the cake. “This smells good.”

  She edged a bite onto her fork and ate it, chewing and then reaching for her wineglass. She set it down without drinking any. “She shouldn’t have spent the money,” she said. “She doesn’t have an extra cent.” She let out a deep sigh and pushed her plate away.

  I busied myself with my cake, eating it in one, two, three huge bites. The only milk in her fridge had gone sour, so I was drinking water, and I had the last gulp and carried my dishes to the sink. There wasn’t a dishwasher in the apartment, and usually we just left the dishes while we watched TV, but tonight I turned on the water and let it get hot, and I washed our dinner plates, and then the pan she’d fried the steak in, and then the rice pot, a layer of rice hardened to its bottom. She had her chin in her hand, and I took my time, picking at the rice with my fingernails. Sometimes, when she was in a low mood, she would start asking me questions—about how I was doing, how I was really doing—and I thought that if I took long enough with the rice pot, if I made sure I got every single grain, maybe I could keep her questions at bay.

  That Sunday, my father came for me straight from the airport, where his plane had landed a little after two p.m. There was traffic as we drove by the Oakland Coliseum, but even so we got home before five, a good hour and a half earlier than usual.

  We’d stopped for milk and cereal and some pork chops for dinner, and so we used the kitchen door—which is how we managed to avoid disturbing Sasha and Cal, who were in my father’s bed, in a room at the opposite end of the house.

  My father found them. He left me in the kitchen eating an apple, and I heard his steps as he headed away, and then I heard them again, quick, as he returned.

  “Your friend,” he said, standing in the doorway, fumbling with the buttons on his sport coat. “Ah, your friend is here. In my room. I’m afraid you’ll have to …”

  Somehow I understood immediately. I set the half-eaten apple on the counter and edged past him.

  They were mostly dressed when I got there. Cal sat on the edge of the bed putting on his shoes, his disheveled hair hanging to his shoulders, while Sasha stood with her back to the door and buttoned her blouse. She wore shorts, and I noticed a blue vein running up the back of one knee.

  “Richard,” Cal said.

  She turned, and when she saw me a look of dread came over her face. She bent for her sandals and brushed past me, muttering, “Don’t say anything,” under her breath and continuing down the hall.

  Cal stared at me. “Bad scene,” he said, and he gave me an indifferent shrug and strolled out after her.

  I was terrified to return to the kitchen. My father looked up when I got there and then returned his attention to the box of instant mashed potato flakes on the counter in front of him. He poured some potato flakes into a measuring cup and leaned over to read the markings on the glass. At last he straightened up and said, “That was wrong.”

  “I know,” I said right away. “I’m sorry.”

  He pulled his lips into his mouth, and his chin took on the square, immobile look of wood—the ventriloquist’s dummy. He let go of them. “Coming into the house without permission,” he added.

  “I know.”

  He turned to the stove, and for a while he focused on dinner, starting water for the potatoes, taking carrots from the fridge and peeling them over the sink. I went to the silverware drawer and began setting the table, making a separate trip for each utensil to stretch out the task.

  “It was wrong,” he said again.

  I turned and saw t
hat he’d set the peeled carrots down. He had a dazed look on his face, and I thought this was the moment when he’d decide to call Sasha’s parents.

  “But in point of fact,” he went on, “they didn’t do any harm.”

  I waited. The idea seemed to get traction in his face; his features settled, and he looked calmer.

  “If you could tell her,” he said. “If you could let her know I’d prefer that it not happen again …”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Good, that settles it.”

  He got back to work, and I turned to the table and fidgeted the silverware, unable to believe that this was it, the sum of his reaction. Had he not noticed that Cal was an adult? I wanted to laugh, but at the same time I had an urge to say something about it, to make him understand. I became so scared I’d do this that I left the kitchen, and I stayed in my room until dinner was ready.

  Sasha’s face looked pinched when we met the next morning, her hair drawn back so tightly that the skin at her temples seemed stretched. “Don’t say anything,” she said right away again, but then her eyes filled with tears and she told me her parents would kill her—kill her—if they found out.

  “We didn’t fuck, anyway,” she said as we mounted our bicycles and pushed off. “Is your father going to tell them? Can you talk to him for me?”

  “Why not?”

  “Thank you so—” She looked over at me and saw what I was really saying. “Because we couldn’t. God. It’s none of your business.”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “Richard.”

  “My father was pretty freaked out. I don’t know if I can stop him. But your parents won’t be upset, what are you worried about? Your parents are cool.”

  She stared straight ahead, hands clenched around her handlebars.

  “Why weren’t you at his apartment?”

  “You are so nosy.”

  “Sasha, you were in my house.”

  She broke ahead of me, leaning forward, her calf muscles bulging as she pedaled harder. In a little while she was the length of a football field away, and then she was out of sight.

  I didn’t see her at school all day, but once the bell had rung and it was time to go home, I hid behind a hedge and then followed her on my bike, staying back so she wouldn’t see me. At one point she stopped suddenly, and I made a quick turn onto a side street and stood next to my bicycle, panting. I had no idea what I’d say if she spotted me. I counted to thirty, and when I ventured back to the main road she was moving again, sitting up straight and riding no-handed.

  Just then a German shepherd lunged at her from behind a chain-link fence. It barked and barked, leaping at the fence, and Sasha wobbled and grabbed the handlebars and righted herself and then wobbled again and was suddenly on the ground.

  I stopped again, and from the shelter of a manzanita tree I watched her stand and brush herself off and right her bicycle, with glances every few seconds at the barking dog. She got on her bike and took off, pedaling hard. “Dogs and vomiting,” she had said once, when we were playing Truth or Dare and I’d asked her what she was most afraid of. I’d forgotten about it until this moment.

  Getting back on my bike, I rode after her, flipping off the German shepherd when it barked at me. In a little while Sasha came to El Camino, the wide, commercial roadway that ran up and down the Peninsula, and I hung back while she waited for the light to change. I let an entire light cycle go by before following after her, but I had seen her turn onto a side street and knew where to go.

  Once I was across, I got off my bicycle and walked it, not sure I wouldn’t suddenly need to dodge backward. At the corner where she’d turned, I put my kickstand down and crept forward.

  On one side of the street was a row of shabby little houses, on the other were four or five small apartment buildings, each with its own carport. The apartments were on the second story, in a line facing the street; they reminded me of a motel. Sasha was halfway up a flight of stairs, and I jerked back and stood just out of sight.

  What to do now? I’d had an image of myself in a heated confrontation with her and Cal—an image of prevailing somehow in this conversation and then riding home with a chastened but grateful Sasha just behind me. I sat on the curb and reached into my backpack for the Oreos I hadn’t eaten at lunch. I’d passed the Old Barrel, the huge, cavernous liquor store where my father bought the special Scotch he liked, and once I’d eaten the cookies I rode back, went inside, and found myself a Coke. After I’d paid for it I wandered around the dark store, breathing in the strong alcohol smell, looking at the hard liquors and thinking it made sense that the brown ones could knock you out but wondering how something that looked exactly like water might make you happy and then drunk and then sick.

  Outside again, I drank my soda and then rode my bike past Cal’s street, continuing on until I’d reached the railroad crossing. The light was green, and I raced across the tracks and then across the busy road running parallel. It ran alongside the tracks all the way through Palo Alto, and I headed north, pedaling fast, hugging the side of the road.

  The next morning, she was already at our meeting place when I got there, but this time there was a contrite look on her face. She began talking before my bike wheels had stopped moving.

  “Richard, I’m sorry about yesterday. And Sunday. I really am. Let’s do something this afternoon, OK? Like old times? Go to the Union after school?”

  “Maybe I’m busy.”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, what about Cal?”

  “I’ll see him tomorrow,” she said. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I want to student-watch, we haven’t in so long.”

  And so at the end of the school day we rode home together, detouring to leave our backpacks at home before continuing on to the Union. It was late May, and the terrace was packed with students, four or five sitting at each table, dozens more milling around. Circling the area, looking for somewhere to sit, I smelled marijuana and incense. Finally we found a place on a low wall, and we settled there, next to a guy who looked like Jesus. His dark brown beard reached past his collarbones, and I noticed a grain of rice in it before I looked away. He strummed a guitar, his fingernails ragged and lined with dirt.

  At my side, Sasha reached over her shoulder and scratched her back, dipping her hand under her shirt to get at the itch. Lying in bed the last two nights, I’d imagined her and Cal rolling around in my father’s bed, and I’d gotten hard thinking about it. Seeing the two of them in my mind, naked in the twisted sheets, I’d rubbed my hand up and down my dick, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

  I elbowed her and tilted my head toward the guitar player. In a low voice I said, “Maybe you should break up with Cal and go with him.”

  “Richard,” she said. “God.”

  “He’s not so bad.”

  “Don’t be an asshole. And I’m not ‘going’ with Cal.” She looked at me, then quickly looked away. “Come on, I said I was sorry.”

  This was true, but what could I say? Not sorry enough?

  “You have to understand,” she went on. “It’s not really a sexual thing. I mean, we kind of had to try, but that’s not the point. It’s this deep connection. I can’t describe it.”

  I snorted.

  “What?”

  “I can. Ever hear the word ‘pervert’?”

  She rolled her eyes. “He’s twenty-five.”

  “Exactly. Go tell your dad you don’t have to read Lolita, you’re living it.”

  Dan had taught a seminar on Nabokov the previous quarter, and he’d told us that Lolita was the best novel written in English in the last forty years and that we should read it as soon as possible. It was the only time I’d seen Joanie seriously disagree with him. “No, they should not,” she said. “Prude,” he said, and she said, “No, not prude. Parent. There’s a difference.”

  Sasha pushed off the wall and faced me. “So what do you want to do now?”

  “What do you mean? We just got here.�
�

  “It’s boring.”

  “It’s the Union. It’s the same as it always is. You were the one who wanted to come.”

  “I’ll be back in a sec,” she said. “I’m going to buy a Coke.”

  “Fine,” I said, and I watched as she headed for the convenience store and then veered into a phone booth.

  I looked around. More than a month had gone by since the day I almost ran over the pretty girl’s toes, and soon the school year would be over. What then?

  Across the way, two guys at a table caught my eye. They weren’t students, I didn’t think—they were too old, too neat. The one facing me had sandy brown hair and a handlebar mustache, and he kept making hatchet motions with his hand. The guy with his back to me was nodding. He was tall and slender, with short light brown hair and a long, thin neck.

  Suddenly I knew who he was. The guy from the Walk for Mankind—the tall guy whose house we’d barged into. It would be funny, I thought, if Sasha and I were to appear at his table and say hi. I hopped off the wall and casually strolled past him, pretending unawareness. Then, when I was far enough away, I bent down to tie my shoe and from the safety of a crouch stole a look at his face.

  And it wasn’t him. This guy had a beard, for one thing, but beyond that his face was too round, and he had dark, hooded eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.

  I was disappointed. I was more than disappointed, actually: I was crushed.

  Sasha kept up the apologetic behavior, enough so that I wanted to say to her: Look, you don’t have to do this, my father isn’t going to tell. She rode home from school with me every two or three days, and she invited me over so frequently that I was suddenly seeing Dan and Joanie more than I had in weeks.

  But it wasn’t the same. In the fall, when the Horowitzes were new, every day I was there something fun happened. Now the house felt different. Dan annoyed me, lurking on the edges of anything Sasha and I were doing, saying, “What are you reading for English, My Side of the Mountain? You two are smarter than the average Stanford undergraduate—why do they underestimate you with this crap?” Sasha chalked up his mood to the grief he felt over Watergate. “It’s like he’s personally injured,” she told me, rolling her eyes. “It’s like he’s a little kid who found out there’s no Santa Claus.”