Fearful Symmetries (12 page)

“Wednesday,” Joyce corrected me.

“Now it’s Friday, because you can’t count.” That made Tom laugh even harder.

All at once, Jack was pulling a chair out for me, saying, “I hope this is all right with everyone.”

“It’s perfect,” Joyce said as Tom did the same for her.

“Perfect,” he echoed, sitting on her left.

Instead of making another joke, I heard myself say, “Perfect.” Because it was.

Each table seated eight and it was early enough that we had this one all to ourselves. We took the seats by the window, which looked out on the garden. It was gorgeous but my attention was divided between it and the other four chairs.
Please, God, don’t let any of the real assholes sit there
, I prayed silently.
Please let all the really
big
shitheads get here while there are plenty of other places to sit.

I wasn’t sure what was sillier—begging the Deity to deliver me from assholes and shitheads or reverting to prayer, period. Apparently, my inner skeptic had taken the evening off.

My gaze fell on Tom Clement. He was smiling at me, a small, private smile, like we shared a secret. Like he’d caught something of what I was thinking.

Which had to be my stupidest idea ever. Maybe my brain was out for the night, too.

Things kept not going wrong. The Deity or dumb luck had decided to give me a break and steered Linda O’Shea and Jane Vaccha our way. Linda and Jane were nice but even better, their dates both went to college with Jack. It wasn’t long before we were all chatting away, like this was what we always did on Saturday night.

There was a finger-food buffet; I managed not to wear any of it. The eight elegantly dressed chaperones were country club members; they called themselves hosts when they stopped at each table to say hello. As the buffet was being disassembled, someone dropped one of the steel trays; there was no jeering, no sarcastic applause. Two of the chaperones rushed to help. Nice people, I thought. By the time we got up to dance, I’d practically forgotten I’d ever been worried about anything.

The music was a little on the syrupy side and the singer really wanted to be Sinatra. The MACC house band—or house bland, I thought;
music you won’t remember for a night you’ll never forget
. I was about to share my brilliant wit with Jack in the middle of another slow one but the expression on his face stopped me.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Huh?” He looked startled, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Nothing, everything’s great. Well, the band kinda bites. Other than that, everything’s fine.” He smiled and all at once I felt wistful. My whole life was about to change and while that was what I’d always wanted, it wouldn’t be easy. I wasn’t in love with Jack but the thought of breaking up was sad. If only I could sleep through it, or just skip over it, like in a movie:
Jack and Ruth dance, smiling at each other, fade out; fade in six months later as Ruth exits dormitory at UMass, where a light snow is falling.

Oh, sure. When a light snow was falling in hell, maybe.

Something else occurred to me. “Where’s Tom?” I asked, looking around.

Jack tilted his head to my right; Tom and Joyce were dancing about ten feet away. None of the couples around them gave them a second look.

“I think he’ll be all right,” Jack said.

If only I could believe that, I thought, looking at the tables to see if any of the guys sitting this one out were paying too much attention to Tom and Joyce, or whispering as if they were up to something.

“
Ruth
.” Jack didn’t quite make two syllables out of it. “You’re so tense, it’s like dancing with a board. Take it easy, already. You’re
my
date, not
his
babysitter.” Pause. “Unless you’d rather be
his
date.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” But I felt my face get warm all of a sudden, which made me even more embarrassed. “I don’t want to be here with anyone but you,” I said, lowering my voice.

For answer, Jack ushered me off the dance floor and out the now-open patio doors at the far end of the room. The sun was down and the glow in the west was almost gone. Other couples were taking a stroll in the garden, in the cool and the dark and the quiet.
Very
quiet—despite the open doors, the music was barely audible. As we moved onto one of the pathways, Jack put his arm around me and I felt some of the tension go out of my shoulders.

“I just did it to make you happy,” he said. “Having that guy stay over with me. You’ve been telling me about Tom Clement since we started going out and to be honest, I thought you were exaggerating at first. But I’ve got classes with a couple of guys who graduated from your school last year and now I know you weren’t.” He shook his head. “Nothing like that ever happened where I went to school. It’s not like I really wanted to be his self-appointed bodyguard but I figured what the hell. Guy deserves a break and it would make you happy.”

“I
am
happy,” I said. “But if you really don’t feel well, say so and we’ll leave. I won’t get mad—”

He gave me a squeeze. “What about Joyce and Tom?”

“They’ll understand—”

“Then they’re nicer than me.” He gave me another squeeze. “Maybe they are. I’m afraid I’m not the great guy I want you to think I am. Or that
I
want to think I am.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, baffled.

“One hour of Tom Clement in my apartment and I wanted to pound his head in.”

I drew back, shocked. There was just enough light from the country club windows to let me see his pained expression. “What did he do?”

“Absolutely nothing. He’s a nice guy—not queer, by the way. He likes girls. This is his first ever date. He said now that he has some idea of what he’s giving up, it’ll be even harder. But that’s good, because the greater the sacrifice, ‘the more pleasing it is unto the Lord.’” He sighed. “In case you’re wondering, that’s
not
why I wanted to punch him.”

“So what is?” I asked.

“Damned if I know.” Jack sighed again. “He’s a nice kid who never got a chance at life. He’s poor, his family—shit, I don’t know why they aren’t in
jail
. Your church is always collecting for starving people overseas, but there’s a kid right here in town whose parents lock him out all night. They could do more than just give him used jockey shorts.”

I thought of what I’d said to my mother earlier. Just before she had almost hit me. “How do you feel now?”

Jack’s shoulders rose and fell heavily. “I’m fine out here,” he said unhappily, “but when I go back inside, I still won’t like him and I still won’t know why.”

“When we were all talking at the table, I didn’t think anything was bothering you.”

“There were six other people, I didn’t have to pay attention only to him.”

We strolled along in silence for a little bit. “What about tomorrow?” I asked finally. “We’re supposed to go to Crazyland so Joyce and I can ride the roller coaster till we puke.”

Jack didn’t quite groan. “I’ll manage.”

“You could say you don’t feel well and stay home, the three of us’ll go.”

Jack gave a short laugh. “Over my dead body. Crazyland isn’t the prom—people don’t
have
to behave themselves. And I don’t just mean the bad boys in your class. They’re actually pretty tame next to the guys from Tri-County, even the ones that actually graduate. You know what
their
parents give them for graduation? Bail.”

“That was my guess after tattoos,” I said. We laughed together and for a few moments, everything was how it used to be. Then we were walking back toward the ballroom and a sudden, profound melancholy went through me.

Sensing something, Jack put his arms around me like he thought I might fall. “You okay?”

“Yeah, it’s just getting pretty dark out here.”

The MACC employees from the check-in table stood on either side of the doorway, sans smiles. Apparently we were the last couple to come back in and they’d been waiting to close the doors, which they did rather noisily.

I turned to say something to Jack but he was staring past me, his face grimmer than ever. “Oh, shit. Stay here.” He waved me back as he strode toward our table. I started to follow him anyway but Linda O’Shea and Jane Vaccha materialized on either side of me and held my arms.

“Don’t,” said Linda. She barely cleared my shoulder even in heels but she was stronger than she looked. “The cops are coming.”

“The
cops
?” I looked from her to Jane who was holding my left arm even more tightly. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing good,” Jane said. “That poor kid.”

A couple of chaperones were trying to usher kids out to the lobby but most of them just stood on the dance floor, probably right where they’d been when the band had stopped playing, staring at the scene unfolding at our table.

The table itself had been shoved out of position and some chairs overturned, no doubt by the large man looming over Tom Clement. He had Tom backed up against the wall in such a way that he was bent sideways over a corner of the table. It was an extremely awkward position; Tom would have fallen except the man was holding him up by his throat. His other hand was clamped on Joyce’s forearm and she was crying in pain or fear or both. Jack was nowhere to be seen.

“I can’t believe Clement’s drunken father would actually bust in and ruin everything like this,” Linda said. “Why is he even here? Who let him in?”

“He works in the kitchen,” Jane said.

A chaperone in floaty pink chiffon started pulling at us, saying everyone had to get out of the room but I wasn’t about to leave my best friend. I dug in my heels; so did Jane and Linda. The chaperone insisted; we wouldn’t budge. She was fluttering around us in a pink chiffon cloud, alternately pleading and demanding when Joyce bent over the hand on her arm and sank her teeth into it.

The man bellowed so loudly I thought I heard the crystals in the chandelier rattle. He let go of both Joyce and Tom, who immediately fled in opposite directions. Suddenly Linda and Jane were telling me we had to
go
, right
now
, come
on
, but the man had finally turned around so I could see him clearly. He sat down heavily on a nearby chair, holding his arm and sobbing with drunken heartbreak. I knew that sound.

I also knew the drunken father making it wasn’t Tom Clement’s. And before long, everyone else knew it, too.

Decades later, I still can’t tell you what pissed me off more: my father’s crashingly bad timing or his mistaking Joyce for me. Like I said, Joyce was pretty—okay, pretti
er
, but I wasn’t a dog by comparison, even with my less-than-perfect complexion. And while we both had dark brown hair and brown eyes, we didn’t look like we were related.

But I could remember my father saying I looked just like his youngest sister when she was small. Maybe I grew up to look completely different; maybe he picked the prettiest girl who fit my general description. Or maybe he was just so trashed by then he didn’t know the difference.

Anyway, that was it for the prom. The chaperones kept telling everyone to go home but no one wanted to miss this freak show. We waited in the lobby for the police, listening to the wails of despair coming through the closed doors from the ballroom. Sometime after cops arrived but before they escorted my still-weeping drunken father out to their patrol car, Jack reappeared with Joyce and Tom. Jack had wrapped his coat around Joyce; she was shivering so much her teeth were chattering. When she pulled the coat tighter around herself, I saw a hand-shaped bruise was already coming up on her arm. Tom looked like he’d just taken a blow to the head and was too stunned to know it. I could see a perfect imprint of my drunken father’s thumb right under his jawline.

The MACC employees wanted to call an ambulance for Joyce but she insisted she just wanted to go home. If she’d said yes, everyone would have stayed to watch that, too, and she knew it. No one suggested Tom Clement might need medical attention.

Jack said he’d take Joyce home and then, without a word even to me, drove straight to the hospital emergency room. I thought Joyce would have a fit but she never made a sound, not even when Jack picked her up and carried her inside. While they treated her, he called her parents.

I sat for half an hour with Tom Clement before he was examined. The nurse who came to get him did a double-take and said, “Oh, Christ, Tom, not
again
.”

“Not exactly,” he coughed, following her to an examination room. He was back five minutes later with a box of Sucrets, free to go.

When Joyce’s parents arrived, they didn’t speak to any of us. They didn’t even look at us. They just gathered Joyce up and left.

My mother met me at the door with a big mug of hot chocolate and a blanket. Jack had phoned her, too. I made a mental note to thank him for calling her before she got some wild, third-hand story. But that didn’t make it any easier to tell her he’d gotten the most important detail wrong.

That Sunday my mother drifted around the apartment like a zombie. She didn’t talk to me and I didn’t try to talk to her. But at least she had stopped crying although her eyes were still puffy and bloodshot. I stayed in my room and tried to lose myself in a book. I put on
Rubber Soul
, thinking my favorite Beatles album might make me feel better. It didn’t. Songs that had once had a beautiful, haunting quality to me now had an ominous edge. And when it got to “Run for Your Life,” with John Lennon singing he’d rather see me dead than with someone else. I turned it off and stuffed the record in the back of my closet.

Towards evening, my mother began to perk up. She made hot dogs and beans and we ate in front of the TV. In the middle of the national news, she suddenly turned to me and said, “What do you want to do about school tomorrow? Do you want to go or would you rather stay home?”

I hesitated. All day long, I’d been refusing to think about school, blanking it out like it didn’t exist. What didn’t exist couldn’t hurt me. Saturday night was the worst thing that had ever happened to me here so that was the end. No more.