A Soft Place to Land (25 page)

He had a chipped front tooth. He did not look like someone who would have a large amount of cash on hand to bail out a teenage runaway arrested for buying drugs. Not that I knew exactly how much cash I was going to need.

I introduced myself, told him I needed help. He took me to the back of the store, and we stood in the corner, surrounded by stacks of old books that had yet to be processed. He said he knew Logan, that Logan was a sweet kid. Told me to make sure Logan knew it was Saint Joe who put up the money. Told me Logan could pay him back later, just make sure he knew who was owed. I tried not to think about what payback would mean. I was relieved he did not try to touch me. He pulled out his wallet and took out five one-hundred-dollar bills. Told me to take it to the precinct by Golden Gate Park.

“They won’t press charges,” he said. “They just like to round up kids every now and then, just to shake them up.”

It was late by the time I got there. As soon as I walked in the station I realized I did not even know Logan’s last name and hadn’t
thought to ask Sunny or Joe if they knew. Hoping that the name Logan was unusual enough to identify him, I walked to the front desk and, affecting my sweetest southern drawl, asked about my friend. Just at that moment, a door from some back room opened and the arresting officer walked through it. Stopping halfway through the lobby, he turned to look at me. Looked me up and down, from my recently acquired jet-black hair to my bare feet.

“I told you not to let me catch you without shoes on,” he said.

He didn’t actually arrest me. Just gripped my upper arm tightly with his fingers and led me to the back, where he sat me in his office and demanded the number of my “parent or guardian.” There was a photo on his desk of him with a little towheaded boy, riding on his shoulders. I complimented him on the photo and he grimaced. Told me all he needed from me was the number of my parent or guardian, no other comments necessary. When my aunt came and picked me up from the station, my bags were already packed and in the back of her car. She took me straight to the airport, told me that as per my dad’s instructions, she had booked me on a red-eye back home.

Her last words to me at the terminal gate, where she waited until I boarded the plane, were, “I don’t know what to say, Julia. I really don’t.”

I knew I would be landing in some serious shit. I knew my stepmother was mortified, would see my having run away as some personal attack on her. (It was through such a lens that she viewed all of my actions.) She hadn’t wanted to let me go out to San Francisco in the first place, felt my aunt and uncle were too lax, felt San Francisco too corrupting a place. These were the same reasons she cited a year before, when I had begged my father and stepmother to let me move to San Francisco with my sister, to live with our uncle and aunt.

I expected to be grounded. I expected to have my car taken away. I even knew there had been some talk of getting me on Antabuse.
But somehow, the fact that I would not be taken home . . . that took me by surprise, though I suppose it should not have.

During the three-hour car ride home, everyone was silent. About thirty minutes into the drive, I dug my Discman out of my backpack and tried to play a CD before realizing that the batteries had died. I kept the earphones in. It felt better to pretend I was overriding their silence with music, even if nothing was being played. After another couple of hours we passed our exit, kept driving south on 81.

“Weren’t we supposed to get off?” I asked.

Peggy turned around in the front seat, looked at me coolly. “Your father and I thought The Roanoker might be a good place to talk.”

The Roanoker, an old-fashioned restaurant housed in a sprawling brick ranch, was famous for its country ham and biscuits. As its name implied, it was in Roanoke. It was true my father loved their country ham, but it seemed odd to drive an extra thirty miles south after having driven all the way from D.C. But I didn’t say anything. Tried to be a good little lamb. And then Dad exited, miles before the exit for the restaurant, driving us past a couple of gas stations and a McDonald’s before turning on a residential street I had never been on. I didn’t even know what town we were in, though it didn’t look all that different from Virden. Muted, with those beautiful mountains in the background. We passed brick ranch after brick ranch.

I must have known at that point that they were taking me somewhere, but I remained calm, quiet. We made two more turns, driving deeper and deeper into this unfamiliar territory. On our right was an undeveloped woods, the trees growing densely together, their trunks tall but slim. Dad slowed down, turning into a long drive marked with two signs, one saying
PRIVATE
, the other
THE CENTER
, the “t” in “Center” made to look like the Christian cross. And here is what I remember even as I was becoming fully aware that we were not stopping for ham and biscuits and I was not going home: the high morning sun slicing through the trees,
casting shadows on the wooded acreage we were entering. The way the dust in the air sparkled when caught in a shaft of light. The calm of the woods.

I remained mute as we drove up the long road. I was looking around, trying to figure out where we were. Finally my father stopped the car in front of what appeared to be a series of trailers, the kind that overcrowded schools use for classrooms. In front of the middle trailer was a wooden cross, large enough to hang someone from.

“Now, honey,” he said, turning to look at me. His lower lip was trembling like a child’s. His eyes were glassy with tears.

And then I heard a click, the sound of the doors being locked, a sound I would hear again and again in different forms, in different volumes, but that first click came from Peggy, who was savvier than my dad, who realized that before you sentence a prisoner you had first better make sure she can’t escape.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” I asked, trying to pretend Peggy was not there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two jubilant-looking white men walking toward the car. Men in crew cuts wearing blue jeans and white T-shirts that showed off their muscular arms. Buddies, I would soon learn they were called.

My father began to cry without making noise, the tears collecting in the straight lines around his mouth. To this day I believe that had Peggy not spoken, or had I not answered the way I did, I could have convinced him to back out of the long driveway, past the trees with the light shining through, past the undeveloped woods, the streets dotted with brick ranches, the gas stations, and the McDonald’s, and back onto 81 North, which would take us home. Dad wouldn’t have been able to leave me there, I believe, if I hadn’t provoked him into doing so.

“Believe it or not, we are doing this because we love you,” Peggy said.

“Believe it or not, you are a fucking bitch.”

(My god. What was I thinking? I was not thinking. One thing I have learned since then is diplomacy.)

Calling Peggy a fucking bitch was, of course, the coup de grâce. Was worse than having run away with a Haight Street kid, worse than having been involved in a drug deal with an undercover cop. My saying those words strengthened my father’s resolve, allowed him to click open the lock for the “Buddies,” who led me, twisting my head to babble desperate apologies at Peggy and my father before becoming subdued by their tight grips, into the front hall of the Center. My home for the next five months, until my father’s money ran out and the Bobs declared me in recovery, if not yet saved.

Fall
2001

On the first day of the fall semester, Gabriel Schwartz, wearing a white T-shirt inside out, walked into the senior seminar on Flannery O’Connor that Ruthie had been waiting three years to take. It took Ruthie a moment to figure out where she knew him from, but then she remembered. Remembered him from all of those years back in Atlanta—a lifetime ago!—when they were fifth graders together at St. Catherine’s School and he was the classroom pariah. Every day he was teased, for his long hair, his sissy name, and the strange foods his mom packed for his lunch: leftover fried rice still in its Chinese take-out box, onion and cream cheese sandwiches on rye, an unidentifiable square lump in a Tupperware container, which, when asked, he said was vegetarian lasagna. And for dessert, perforated raisin bars. Ruthie still remembers John King snatching a raisin bar off Gabriel’s desk and asking, “What’s in there, Schwartz Wart, your ground-up boogers?”

The adult Gabriel Schwartz didn’t look all that different than he had as a boy. He was still skinny, still had hair so dark it was nearly black, still had blue eyes framed with thick lashes. Only now he was tall, his curly hair cut short, and on his right arm Ruthie could make out the lower half of a tattoo, its design obscured by the sleeve of his inside-out T-shirt.

Their seminar professor, Dr. Finney, started the class by having them all introduce themselves. Ruthie glanced at Gabriel when she said her name, but he showed no recognition upon hearing it. Good. Let him not remember her from St. Catherine’s. Let him not associate her with a place where he had been so incessantly teased. When it was his turn, he introduced himself as Gabe Schwartz. It had to be Gabriel. He must have just shortened his name. She wondered what he was doing at UC Berkeley. St. Catherine’s kids, who often went on to be Coventry kids, typically didn’t end up going to college in Northern California. And the rare ones who did went to Stanford, not Cal.

Then again, Gabriel Schwartz had not been a typical St. Catherine’s kid. For one thing, he was Jewish, which put him in a tiny minority. Ruthie remembered his mother visiting their class to teach them about Hanukkah. Wearing some sort of flowing purple ensemble, her tight curls forming a thick halo around her head, she casually flipped potato pancakes on the electric griddle while trying to get the students to pronounce “latke.” She was unlike any mother Ruthie had ever met. She made Naomi look normal by comparison. A hand on one hip, the spatula in the other, she leaned conspiratorially toward the students, telling them, “Officially my name is Norma. But Norma—yikes, right? My middle name is Rose, but I’m not really a Rose kind of a girl. So people just call me Schwartzy. Does that work for you guys?”

The good little southerners at St. Catherine’s School had responded, “Yes, Mrs. Schwartzy.”

To which she replied, “Mrs.? Ha. Just ‘Schwartzy’ will do.”

Dr. Finney was a compact man, impeccably groomed, who spoke with an Irish brogue. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he told the class he was Catholic, which Ruthie already knew. Which anyone who was an English major already knew. Dr. Finney’s Catholicism, which he referred to often, was part of his lore. It made him an oddity at Berkeley, whose faculty tended to be secular to the extreme. He explained to the twelve students in
the seminar that in order to understand what O’Connor was “up to” in her stories, they must have a working knowledge of Catholicism. He would be their tour guide through her faith.

“Grace enters through the ragged hole left by the destructive yet redemptive power of the Holy Spirit,” began Dr. Finney, and while Ruthie normally took umbrage at any sort of religious maxim, she found herself scribbling down every word her professor said, lulled by his beautiful accent.

She was walking out of class when Gabriel—Gabe—sidled up to her.

“Should we file a complaint?” he asked.

“Hmm?” she said, not wanting to seem too excited that he was talking to her. His jeans rode low on his hips. His arm muscles were ropey, and he smelled of burnt sage.

“I thought it was a requirement that professors be atheist, or at least agnostic,” he said.

“He’s a corrupter of youth, all right,” she said, joining the joke.

They were outside now, passing under Sather Gate. It was a warm day, no hint of fall, though it would soon be September. The leaves on the old trees, their trunks patterned and knobby, were still dark green. Ruthie had a moment of self-consciousness, a moment of watching herself walk toward Sproul Plaza with this boy. It was as if they were in a movie about a college couple, the meet-cute scene.

“By the way,” she said to him. “Your shirt is on inside out.”

“I ran out of clean clothes,” he said.

“Gross,” said Ruthie, though in truth she didn’t find Gabe gross at all. She found him alluring. She found herself wondering what kind of a kisser he might be.

“Basically, I’m a disgusting human being,” he said. “Rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.”

“Mrs. Strokes’s famous words,” she said.

She hadn’t meant to reveal their shared history. But he had just
quoted their fifth-grade history teacher, a woman who had never liked Ruthie, who once asked Ruthie if she was “deaf, dumb, or just disobedient.”

“How do you know Mrs. Strokes?” he asked. He turned his head, studied her with those dark blue eyes. She felt a little dizzy being watched so closely by him.

“Wait, you said your name is Ruthie?”

“Yep.”

“You didn’t go to St. Catherine’s in Atlanta, did you?”

“Guilty as charged,” she said.

“Oh wow. That’s bizarre. I never thought I’d ever run into anyone from there. It wasn’t exactly my scene. But Schwartzy—that’s my mom—was going through a stage where she felt I didn’t have enough structure in my life. Enrolled me at St. Catherine’s in the fourth grade. She got over it fast, though, and I transferred to White Oaks in the middle of fifth.”

It made sense that he would leave for White Oaks, which had the reputation of being sort of a hippie school.

“I remember your mom. I remember her making us potato pancakes for Hanukkah.”

Gabe laughed. “That was one of maybe four times in my childhood that she actually cooked. Schwartzy was a big fan of Stouffer’s frozen dinners.”

He glanced at his watch, which was black and utilitarian looking. “Damn. I’d like to talk more, but I’m actually running late for something. But I’ll see you in class, right?”

Ruthie watched him walk away, not hurrying really but taking long strides. She wasn’t ready for him to go. She wanted to keep talking. She wanted to find out more about him, about his life in Atlanta after St. Catherine’s. She wanted to know where he lived, what his major was, whether or not he liked Berkeley. She wanted to see his full tattoo, not hidden by the sleeve of his T-shirt.