The Year We Left Home (5 page)

“You’re shittin’ me,” she said happily, intent on having as much fun as possible with him.

“Please. Pretend you’re a nice, normal girl.”

And now he’d gone too far, and the fun went out of her. “What’s that supposed to mean, a nice girl?”

“I don’t know. A Lutheran.”

A lucky thing to say. So often with girls it felt like there was an entirely different language being spoken, words that inflamed or soothed, except you never knew which ones they were. Janine considered him for a long moment, then rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m your affianced, or anything.”

“My what?”

“Like we’re getting married.”

Even the thought of it was enough to unnerve him. “Yeah. I mean, no. Jiminy Cricket.”

“God, relax. I don’t ever want to get married.”

“Sure.” He didn’t believe it when girls said things like that.

“Marriage subjugates women. It’s another one of those paternalistic things.”

“You might want to keep that opinion to yourself.”

“What did you tell them about me? You better let me know.”

“Nothing. Just that you were a friend.”

“Oh, that’s great.” She shook her head. She wore Gypsy hoop earrings that went along with the bracelets. “
Friend,
that’s only about the weakest shit you can say.”

“I don’t tell them stuff, OK?”

“Am I at least your girlfriend? Can you hang that name on it?”

“How about, ‘If it ain’t love, it’ll have to do until the real thing comes along.’”

He thought it was kind of funny and was expecting her to make some joke, but she just looked at him, coldly now, then at the little
town unspooling itself, the car slowing, the bland expanse of Main Street under the sparkling sky.

The Red and White Mart, the dry cleaners, the bank that never looked like it had any money inside. Row of false-front buildings, a painted ad for a fifty-year-old livery business sinking into a brick wall. Incongruous shiny new video-game parlor. The Grand Opera House block, a place everyone agreed was history. He waited for Janine to pronounce judgment, how small and fusty it was, or worse, how darling and quaint.

But she’d gone quiet. He’d said the wrong thing again, blundered into the trap he’d been trying so hard to avoid. It was only a few blocks to his parents’ house and there was no time to make it right. They had fallen into a familiar trough of silence and distance. Something they couldn’t help and couldn’t predict, something false, unhappy, constrained, lost. Sometimes one of them fell in first and pulled the other one in after. Neither of them knew how to do anything except suffer through it. It wasn’t exactly fighting, but a substitute for fighting.

And after such distance, how strange to make love, frightening, almost, as if everything between them, both good and bad, had been a kind of lie.

Here was the street, the block, the pinkish brick of his parents’ ranch house—already he had ceased to think of it as his own house—and Janine stretching her legs beneath her too short dress and shaking her hair out, his smart-ass, hippie-slut girlfriend who really should have worn something else, because he wouldn’t be the only one looking at the shadowy territory of her thighs. He hated that he was embarrassed, because hadn’t he chosen her for just such reasons?

Ryan parked the Nova behind his mother’s station wagon. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The house was pretty and trim and sun-bright. His dad had been after the lawn already, he could tell, everything raked and clipped. The front door was closed, the sheer curtains in the living room drawn. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people hung out of windows or left shoes or bicycles strewn about, nor were his family that kind.

“Ready?” he said to Janine, and she said she was, not looking at him, still distant from him, and they got out and walked around back to the kitchen, where he knew they would be waiting for him.

His mother was first, pushing the door open and hugging and hugging him, and his sister right behind her, and back in the kitchen his lurking, beanpole brother. His father off somewhere, keeping out of the way. Janine was behind him and he turned to draw her in. She dodged his hand and stepped forward. “Mom, Torrie, this is Janine Pasqua. My brother Blake.”

He watched them take each other in. It went about as well as he’d imagined, everybody keeping their smiling game faces on. Janine’s alarming dress was a red-and-black print fabric with dramatic trailing sleeves. His family took in the silver jewelry and the ankle beads too. They were trying to figure out just who she was, and from just what dusky origin. His brother blushed dull red with embarrassed lust.

Janine said, “Wow, you all look exactly alike.”

Hard to tell if she meant it as any kind of a compliment. But it was true enough; him, his brother and his sister, each some gradation of blond, long-boned Nordic-ness. There was a beat of silence, then his mother said, “Oh, wait till Anita gets here and you see all four of them together. It’ll make you rub your eyes. Of course they get the height from their dad. I always say, they look like me, but stretched out.”

“Anita’s coming?” Ryan asked. His sister lived in Ames now, with her banker husband, and was often busy with the responsibilities and demands of her married state.

“She’ll be here for dinner. Jeff too, if he can make it.” Ryan’s mother led them all back into the kitchen, ever the anxious hostess. “Would you like something to drink, Janine? Coke? Iced tea?”

“Iced tea would be great, thank you.” Ryan’s mother told them to go ahead and sit down and they did, Janine still not looking at him, and he guessed he was in for more of the same treatment until she got over it. His sister was out in the hall calling, “Dad? Dad? Ry’s here,”
and then his father was standing at the kitchen door, looking down at everyone through his glasses like some big serious bird.

“Hey Dad.” Ryan stood up and shook hands, watched his father register his shaggy hair and begin to say something, stop, and settle instead for a narrowing of his mouth. Then his eyes found Janine. “Dad, this is Janine Pasqua. Janine, my dad, Mr. Erickson.”

Janine smiled and said Nice to meet you and his father said You too. Ryan saw little thought balloons appear over everyone’s head, like a cartoon. His father’s said,
Oh mercy mercy me.
His mother’s said something like
Everybody settle down.
His sister’s was
Now what?
, and his brother’s was full of the kind of confused noise and word scraps used to ward away hard-ons.

And Janine’s was blank. He couldn’t read her and he didn’t trust her. She was capable of saying anything, and if she’d decided to give him a hard time for whatever pissed-off reason, there wouldn’t be much he could do except take it.

Ryan’s father sat down at the kitchen table. His mother set out glasses of iced tea and a bowl of pretzel sticks, his sister was keeping herself busy looking into the refrigerator. He hadn’t thought how weird it would be to have Janine sitting at the same table where he’d eaten cereal when he was a kid. The oak-veneer cupboards were marked with years of fingerprints, scrubbed down and reappearing again and again with the persistence of ghosts. Here were the same yellow-striped plates and cloudy-glass salt and pepper shakers, the same slant of afternoon light making the air in the room turn slow and brown. Everything here was familiar, a comfort to him, but at the same time he wondered how long he’d have to sit and endure it.

His mother asked them if they were hungry and Janine said no thank you, and his mother said are you sure, and Janine said she was positive, recrossing her legs in a careless way. His sister poured herself one of the Tabs she lived on. They seemed to be waiting for some other conversation to finish. “Camping,” his father pronounced. “I never knew you to go in for that.”

“I borrowed the tent and the rest of the stuff, so all we’re paying for is food and gas.” He could usually get off the hook with his father by claiming economy.

His sister leaned against the refrigerator. Thirteen years old and full of sass. “It is supercold up in the mountains. You guys are gonna freeze your heinies off.”

“We’ll manage,” Ryan said, and because this seemed to conjure images of the two of them, him and Janine, burrowing into the same sleeping bag, everyone began talking at once.

“How high is—”

“I thought for supper—”

“Where are you going to—”

They all stopped themselves, then his mother said, “I thought for supper tonight we could grill burgers out back.”

Janine said, “Oh, that sounds great.” She gave Ryan a flicker of a sideways glance, as if to show him how
nice
and
normal
she was being. His stomach roiled.

His mother looked relieved. Ryan knew she’d already planned out the supper, written out lists, filled the refrigerator with her preparations. He knew that the hamburgers would be accompanied by potato rounds and three-bean salad and corn on the cob, with strawberry pie for dessert. Maybe they would get through everything with no real surprises. He began to relax a little.

His father said, “So where are you from, Janine? We didn’t hear.”

He stopped relaxing. They hadn’t heard because he hadn’t told them. And he knew that his father’s question was designed to try and figure out Janine’s parentage, which was an unlikely mix of Italian and Russian Jew. Janine said, “Chicago. The North Side. You know, where the Cubs are.”

“You’re a baseball fan?”

“Not really. It just gives people an image. A kind of cultural marker.”

Another silence. Ryan’s mother said, in her making-conversation voice, “So what made you come all the way to Iowa for school?”

“The Writers’ Workshop. I’m a poet.” It was about the same as saying you were an astronaut. Janine ought to know that by now. “University of Iowa has the best creative writing program in the country.”

“Now I did not realize that,” his mother said. “Iowa, famous for poetry.” She seemed taken by the notion, as if those maps that illustrated the state’s agricultural products—ears of corn, sheaves of wheat, and smiling pinky pigs—would add little pictographs of parchment scrolls. “What kinds of poems do you write?”

“Free verse, mostly. Just poems.”

Janine didn’t like such questions, Ryan knew. She thought they were uninformed. He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like
nipple.

But it seemed they’d killed off poetry as a topic. His brother Blake, who had said nothing since they’d got here, spoke up. “I’m going to buy Ted’s brother’s ’65 Impala and get it running.”

His mother said, “Blake, we haven’t said yes to that. It’s going to depend on your grades.”

“Hey, my grades are good enough to work on some car.”

“Blake.” His mother’s warning tone.

Blake sat back in his chair with a hopeless expression. “This college thing is all your fault,” he told Ryan.

“Yeah, right.” He was aware of Janine watching. He didn’t want to have to explain about his brother, how he’d never taken to school or books or anything that required sitting down and concentrating. Or that his sister Anita had spent a year at a community college, killing time until her wedding, and that college, in his family, wasn’t anything taken for granted, since it cost good money. Then all of a sudden he was tired of his own caution. He said, “I changed majors. From business to poli sci.”

“To what?”

“Political science. The study of government. Comparative politics, American and international political theory. Stuff like that.”

“Heavy duty,” his sister remarked, then left the room.

Blake got up from the table. “I gotta call Ted,” he said, and he was gone also.

His father said, “Now let me get this straight. You’re not in the business school anymore.”

“That’s right.” With Janine sitting there, nobody was going to say anything too ugly.

“Political science, what’s that, they teach you how to tear down the government? I bet they don’t have that at St. Olaf’s.”

It was still a sore point that he hadn’t gone to St. Olaf’s.

“No, Dad. It’s different ideas and theories about government.” His father’s face tightened at the word
theories,
which was likely to dredge up another whole speech about college not being an excuse to play around, but something you undertook to benefit yourself in tangible, vocational ways. “People get all kinds of jobs. You can work for state or local governments, or even at the national level. You can do research, develop policies.”

His mother said, “You mean, you could end up working in Des Moines. That would be nice.” His mother was also practical about higher education, but in a different way; she thought it would help her children “get ahead,” by which was meant something that could be showcased in a Christmas newsletter.

Janine said, “It’s a good major if you want to go to law school, or into politics. Or do community work, or labor organizing.”

The thought balloons above his parents’ heads now said
Outside Agitator
and
Communist.
Both of them were considering Janine warily. It was all right for a girl to be a poet, or any other fool thing she wanted. But boys had to make their way in the world, support families. The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences, and bawdy women.

Ryan wasn’t going to tell them that Janine’s father was an orthopedic surgeon and that when she said they lived on the North Side
of Chicago, she really meant one of the lakeside suburbs. It wouldn’t change their minds and would be just another example of somebody’s kid turning out wrong.

His father got up from the table. “What time’s supper?”

“Anita’s coming at five thirty.”

His father said he’d check and see if there was enough charcoal. He went out the back door and they heard him out in the garage, something heavy being dragged around.