Down the Shore (5 page)

“Whoa, it's family night in America,” he said when he saw us. “What can I get you? Shots?”

“No shots,” my mother said.

“I can't hear you,” Eric said. “I think you said, ‘Two shots.
'”

“Am I seventeen?” my mother asked. “I'll have a Bud Light. And he'll have nothing. Hey, Eric, how often does my teenage son come in here?”

“Him? Never. I don't think I know this guy. He's your son?”

“Jesus, are you all comedians? Don't let me catch you serving him.”

Todd was calling to her from the table.

“I got it,” Eric called after her, as she grabbed her beer and walked away without so much as reaching for her wallet.

“I'll have a ginger ale,” I said.

Eric dropped an ice-filled glass below the bar and poured a shot of whiskey into it before unholstering the soda gun.

“Accident,” he said. “My bad.”

I put my name down on the dry-erase board by the pool table and leaned against the wall to watch and wait. Roberto, who owned the bodega on John Street, was on a four-ball run. He shot pool here every weekend, dressed in sweatpants and shower sandals like he was hanging out in his garage. The older guys all dressed like Roberto, like they had given up, but the younger ones slicked their hair and pressed their polo shirts to come down here and play. I wondered what was happening back at Roger's as Roberto sunk the eight ball on a bank shot. Someone handed me a cue.

I never won at the Ivy, and I was down three balls when I noticed Eric talking to my mother. She was sitting by the taps, as far from me as possible, and he was circling back to her between orders, leaning on the bar with his heavy, ropy forearms stacked on top of each other. He had been hitting on her for as long as I had known him, but her complete lack of interest made it less difficult to watch. She looked ten years younger in jeans and a T-shirt, even with the grandma clogs she wore on jobs. People sometimes mistook her for my much older sister, and I lived in fear of some waiter mistaking one of our dinners out for a date, but we probably looked too much alike for that. I missed a short, straight shot, and looked up to find my mother standing on the foot rail of the bar. She was arm wrestling with Eric, pushing down on his left hand with both of hers, laughing as he forced a yawn and closed his eyes.

“You gonna shoot?” Roberto asked. “It's you.”

I tried to focus on the game. Eric had a thing with steroids and probably with speed, and the idea of him alone with her in his shitty condo by the airport made me want shells for the shotgun that my mother kept unloaded in the closet. Part of me wished I was already overseas so she could live her life, part of me wanted to stay here forever. Roberto sank the eight ball; we shook hands. Mark, our bartender, reached for my cue.

“You suck at pool.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought I saw you fall in love with that desperate housewife.”

“Jesus, did you see that? She scared off that hot blond chick.”

“Did that girl ask you for weed?”

“Yeah, maybe. How'd you know that? Did your mom say something?”

“No,” I said. “Wild guess.”

“She asked you too?”

“She asked me first.”

“Fuck 'em,” Mark said. “So you're at Lawrenceville and your mom's still working you like this?”

“Not that often.”

“Well, good for you. It's a pain in the ass to do two things at once.”

Eric had talked my mother into taking a shot with him, and I watched her wince into the back of her hand as she held the empty glass out to him. I shouldered through the crowd as Eric moved down the bar.

“Hey, can we go?”

“Hey!” she said. “Did you clean up at pool?”

“Not really. I'm ready to get out of here.”

“Already?” Eric asked, pulling a beer from the tap.

“I have school tomorrow.”

“At least come up with a better story. Tomorrow's Saturday. You can tell me you're too fancy for my bar now. It won't hurt my feelings.”

“He does have school,” my mother said, grabbing a handful of my hair and tugging my head back and forth. “That's how people get ahead in life, Eric. They go to school on weekends.”

She seemed genuinely glad to see me, as if we had just run into each other here.

“Well, it's not a school night for Mrs. Alison,” Eric said, winking at her. “He's a big boy. You don't need to tuck him in, right?”

For a second I was afraid that she would stick around, and I would have to go home by myself and lie awake waiting to hear her car in the driveway like I was five years old again. Instead, my mother stiffened, and blinked as if she had just remembered something.

“You know what?” she said to me. “Let's get out of here. I'm wrecked.”

“Hey, I'll call you this week,” Eric said.

She gave him a tight smile, and dropped one of Roger's crisp hundred-dollar bills on the bar.

“That's for them,” she said, pointing to Todd's table as she shouldered her purse.

•   •   •

My ears were still ringing from the band at Roger's when we got back to our empty house. My mother disappeared into her room and turned off her light without saying goodnight to me, which was strange because she always said goodnight, even if it meant waking me where I had fallen asleep reading by a night-light to save on electricity, which I was about to do. I was nodding off midsentence when my door swung open.

“Can I ask you something?”

I sat up, squinting in the light.

“Where would you go?” she said. “Let's say you could go anywhere.”

“Fiji.”

“Really?”

I nodded and waited for her to ask me why.

“I wouldn't go anywhere,” she said. “I was thinking about that tonight when I was watching you. I was wondering where you were in your head. I used to think about all the places I'd go, but I just don't anymore.”

“Maybe it's an age thing.”

“Are you saying I'm old?”

“No,” I said. “You're not old.”

“Right,” she said, “of course I'm not.”

She shut my door.

•   •   •

Smacking the steering wheel to stay awake at red lights on my way to school. My short Saturday schedule meant English and then econ before I could go home and back to sleep. I cut through the glassy modernist dining hall to get a cup of coffee before giving my Modernist Literature reading one more shot. The cover on my copy of
The Waste Land
was badly creased where I had rolled on it after losing consciousness halfway through a section titled “What the Thunder Said.” I had no idea what the thunder said, and I needed caffeine and Advil and a place to read in the twenty-five minutes before an hour of small-group discussion. Lawrenceville used the Harkness teaching method, in which twelve students and one teacher sit around an oval oak table to talk about the Ottoman Empire or the impact of privatization on capital market growth. It aims to foster engaged and egalitarian discussion, which makes it hard to sleep in class. I took my coffee for the road.

The sprawling campus was deserted except for a few distant figures speed walking awkwardly under the weight of their books. I shouldered through the door of Memorial Hall and moved down the cool hallway of the old building as quickly as my coffee would allow. The stairs were solid blocks of stone, each bearing an indentation deep enough to hold water thanks to two centuries of climbing and descending students. I was headed for the second-story teachers' lounge, which was usually empty on weekends. The door was closed, and when I opened it, the head of the English Department looked up from an interview with a woman in a navy business suit. Mr. McCarthy had been on the disciplinary board convened to hear my case, and while he had voted against expulsion, it was clear that I had used up whatever currency or empathy I had with him. Most of the faculty I had been close to kept their distance now, there being no time for redemption between my arrest and the end of the year.

“Mr. Alison,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Can I help you? We're in a meeting here.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, backing away, closing the door. “My fault.”

I crossed the grassy circle that's the focal point of campus, designed by the same architect who did Central Park, and ringed by the boys' Circle Houses, where the boarders lived for their sophomore and junior years. Day students were also assigned to a house and I had been in Hamill, where the administration put everyone they weren't sure what to do with: the son of a cotton magnate who hung a Confederate flag in his window, Canadians, a clique of kids from Taiwan.

In the library, I took the wide stairs down to the basement and a windowless science reading room with plush couches that no one really used. The motion-sensing lights had already been tripped when I opened the door, and it was Clare who turned his head to see who was invading his solitude. We hadn't really spoken since we'd put two hundred miles on my car and decided to spend the next four years at the same school in another country. There was a pause after I sat down, a conversational game of chicken.

“Hey,” Clare said, “did you get a housing assignment yet?”

“I'm in Andrew Melville.”

“That's the hotel, right? I was gonna request that one. Is that OK?”

“Yeah, why not?”

The only thing we had to talk about was our future shared living arrangements, which was almost funny to me. I settled into the couch and waited for Clare to say something else. And then I realized that he had no book in his hands, that his bag was closed, that he had just been sitting there, staring out across the room. I took out my book and tried to find my place.

T
he WXPN weatherman reported a record high on the heat index as I drove my mother to my high school graduation. She did her makeup in the vanity mirror; I spun my tie into a four-in-hand at a long red light. We jogged across the parking lot together, and she split off toward the seated crowd while I joined my class behind the chapel, where they'd been marshaled in an alphabetical and single-file line. The girls wore short white dresses for the ceremony while the boys sweated in blue blazers and long pants. I could see the families gathered around the sunken bowl of grass in the middle of campus where our chairs sat empty in the sun—parents and grandparents and godparents squinting at the long formation in the distance, wondering which upright streak of navy blue or white was theirs. I spotted Clare, separated from me by the letters
A
through S, hands in his pockets, sunglasses hiding his eyes. I wondered where his parents were this afternoon.

The crowd dispersed as soon as the ceremony ended, seeking shade. I saw my mother making her way through clots of family members toward the empty chair I was leaning on. She stopped in front of me and spread her arms.

“I'm so proud of you,” she whispered in my ear, before pulling back and looking me in the face. “Look at you. You're done. You're leaving.”

Her eyes were wet, full of pride and something that looked, to me, like fear. Was she afraid for me or afraid to be alone? I couldn't tell, and couldn't ask. It was just the two of us, and I had spent all morning waiting to feel embarrassed and to hate myself for feeling that way, but that wasn't happening now. And then Clare was standing at my mother's shoulder, his hands in his pockets again.

“Mom, this is Clare.”

“Hi, Mrs. Alison,” Clare said. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Diane,” my mother said. “I've heard so much about you.”

When I saw Clare stiffen, I tugged on my right earlobe—a gesture my mother and I used at parties to communicate that it was time to shut up or change the subject.

“What happens now?” she asked. “What's next?”

“We go to some parties,” I said.

“Can we give you a ride, sweetheart?” my mother asked Clare. “We've got plenty of room.”

•   •   •

“Some of those people are unreal,” my mother said, as I drove us to a party near the university. “The woman next to me kept going on about how she just went back to work after twenty years, and now she's got her real estate license, and just
adores
showing properties. It barely feels like work, apparently. She asked me if I'd gone back to work and I said, ‘Honey, I've been working this whole time.'”

“They're not all like that,” Clare said. “Most of them would never think of working.”

My mother laughed. I plucked the cigarette from her lips, took a drag, and tossed it out the window.

“Stop smoking,” I said.

•   •   •

I wondered what had happened to Clare's Saab as we crisscrossed Mercer County, driving from party to party, encountering faculty members with more and more white wine on their breath as the day wore on. My mother took the wheel after she caught me swigging from a flask of bourbon with a classmate and his uncle, who had asked me if my dad would like to join us for some twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, to which I shook my head. Our last stop was out in Ringoes, Central Jersey horse country, where the split-level ranch homes of the people who tend to the animals alternate with the estates of their owners. My mother took the long driveway very slowly, ducking her head as the house came into view over the hedge that surrounded it. Everyone was gathered on a bluestone patio by the pool, and I lost Clare in the crowd while my mother let herself into the house to find a bathroom. Feeling lightheaded from the whiskey and the heat, I decided to watch the party from a hammock in the shade. My mother seemed to be enjoying herself, chatting up the varsity soccer coach, a square-jawed ex-National team goalie from Croatia. In a simple navy dress and modest string of pearls, she was indistinguishable from the women around her. She had seen dozens of graduation parties in her day. She knew what people wore to them.

I wondered if she liked being a guest here instead of running things behind the scenes, work she actually enjoyed. And then she refused two consecutive hors d'oeuvres plates proffered by college kids in dinner jackets. We had skipped breakfast and the only time my mother doesn't eat is when she's working or nervous. Then the soccer coach was gone, dragged off for a photo op with someone's family, and she was left alone in the crowd. I watched her shield her eyes and scan the faces gathered by the pool before she reached into the outside pocket of her purse for a cigarette. Don't, I thought. She stopped midreach, as if I had shouted to her, and looked around to see if anybody else was smoking, which they weren't. I swore at myself for leaving her alone, and stood up too quickly for my low blood pressure to handle. My vision collapsed to a pinpoint, and everything outside of that went white as the blood drained from my head. I staggered toward the pool, wondering how my mother would feel if my adult life looked like the jagged party scene in front of me, full of gold-buttoned navy blazers, horses, and big lawns. I searched for her as the crowd came into focus, but she was not where she had been.

I went looking for a girl named Ashleigh who had been close with Courtney since our freshman year. I found her in the buffet line and asked what she knew about Courtney's cousin, Kelsey, which, as it turned out, was not much. Kelsey's father had been a contractor in Spring Lake, and had built enough big houses to build one of his own. The family had risen on the wave of new money down the shore. Ashleigh was saying that Kelsey might be seeing someone when we were interrupted.

“Hi, excuse me,” my mother said, placing her hand on Ashleigh's arm. “Can I borrow my son for a second?”

I followed her through the crowd to the corner of a fence where two chestnut horses stood grazing.

“I've had all the fun I can stand,” she said.

“What happened?”

She had been talking to the man who owned the house when he spotted Clare at the buffet, and wondered aloud who had brought him. My mother said that she had, and our host told her emphatically that Clare's family hadn't been invited.

“Not that they would have been able to make it,” she said, scoffing, imitating him, exaggerating his disgust and pomposity. He had asked my mother if she knew what Clare's father had done with the money people had entrusted to him. My mother runs a business that requires her to come prepared, especially to parties. She told the man that she had no idea what Clare's father had done, or how anyone could blame a child for it.

“The fucking nerve on this guy,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

“Did he tell you what happened?”

“No, Tom, that's not the point. And don't repeat that story.”

In the car, she adjusted the rearview mirror to find Clare's face.

“Is there anywhere you'd like to go, sweetheart? Anywhere else we can take you?”

“That's OK,” Clare said. “My things are at school.”

My mother turned to face him.

“Where are you going when they close down campus?”

I hadn't thought about that. Clare didn't answer.

“Why don't you stay with us?” my mother said.