Good Kids: A Novel (7 page)

Alexis shook her head. She drew close, her foot scraping the earth. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine. We can call this whole thing off.”

“Oh God,” said my father. “Fuck me, man.”

“If you don’t want to take it,” said Steven, “we can go our separate ways right now.”

My father closed his eyes. It occurred to me he might need money, more urgently than I’d realized. He was going to New York City, not just to write essays but to do something called consulting. What did this mean?

“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, twisting the hairs of one sideburn between his fingers. “It’s cool.” He took the money order—I could see that was what it was—folded it, and slid it into the pocket of his checked blue shirt.

The four of us emptied the cabin, to make way for the couple’s things. We carried out our two couches, our dining room table, our foam mattresses, a record player, Candy Land, Chinese checkers. Framed posters from political theory conferences my father had organized when I was a small boy: Helsinki, Stockholm, Budapest. We unhooked the pans from the wall and threw them in a garbage bag. After we packed the fans, we learned each other’s scents. The weather had turned suddenly warm, and the windows opened only four or five inches, hinging outward on cranks. The water and electricity had been turned off for the
winter, and wouldn’t come back on until the lease began. We made trips to the woods and returned with our hands smelling like pee.

While Steven and my father wrestled the couches into the bed of the pickup, Alexis and I did women’s work, bubble-wrapping the breakables. I dropped a framed letter, and the glass shattered. She picked up the letter to see if it was important.

“That’s from the United Nations,” I said casually. “Before my dad was a professor he was one of the executives in a pacifist organization. They won international praise during the Cold War.”

I felt some wincing awe would have been appropriate. She only brushed the shards off the frame.

“He met Gorbachev,” I said. “Pretty fucking cool.”

She looked down at the letter and back up at me.

“The leader of Russia.” I jabbed my forehead. “With the thing.”

“You think I’m stupid,” she said. “I think you should tell your dad you broke the glass. He wouldn’t want this letter to get messed up.”

“He won’t care,” I explained. “That’s not the point of these things, everything being just so, or whatever.” I folded a Guatemalan tapestry over the framed letter, hiding the broken glass. I put it back in the box.

Alexis carried the box of breakables to the truck and wedged it between the backs of two armchairs.

“Everything intact?” my father asked.

“Double-checked, sir.” She threw me a wink.

The furniture fit in the truck bed. Steven crossed bungee cords over the dome of wood and upholstery.

“I’ll be damned, partner,” said my father, slapping Steven on the back. “This shit ain’t going nowhere, that’s for damned sure.”

Steven smacked his soft red hand into my father’s. “You ready to hit the road, my man?”

After the handclasp, my father glowed. “Never be a snob, Son,” he said as we rolled backward down the driveway. “You’ll find yourself isolated from the people in this world who will remind
you what really matters. These people don’t have shit, they don’t know shit, but they know they don’t know shit. They go about their day and they don’t expect otherwise, and there’s a great wisdom in that. I always planned to raise you working-class until puberty.” He shook his head. “Somehow, it didn’t happen. But you’re a really good guy.”

The sun tore a hole in a dissolving cloud. Light split on the windshield. My father spun out into the wide gravel road, and we flew down the hill. He stuck his hand out the window and thumped a four-four allegro on the door. I did the same thing on my side, but there was something disgusting about our being synchronized, and he withdrew his hand.

With his hands at 10:00 and 2:00, we gained speed. As the tree canopy fell, we could see the other hills, plush lumps against a hard blue sky.

“Did you know working-class people growing up?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I caddied. That was a way of creating my own diverse environment.”

“Were you already a socialist back then?”

“Let me put it this way: Your grandmother’s cocktail party world? I wanted to blow it up. But hold on a minute,” he said, “we’re losing Steven.” He slowed down, waiting for the truck to catch up. “Got a little carried away here. There’s a dumb-ass ecstasy in driving downhill, you know.”

Steven’s large, red, shaggy head popped Muppet-like from the cab. His hand made a stop sign. My father pulled the Subaru over and set the parking brake. In the rearview mirror, I could see the truck shudder to a halt, the furniture still in the bed, the bungees still in place.

Steven climbed out. My father revived his allegro on the door.

“Hola,” my father said. “How’s that old machine getting along?”

Steven hustled to the open window, bent, and caught his breath.

“Dude, I have got your furniture back there, and you are driving one hundred fucking miles per hour down this motherfucking hill. This may never have occurred to you, but when you’ve got a payload on a truck, when you’re driving and carrying something,
you drive a little slower than if you’re in a Subaru, taking a family vacation.”

My father stared straight ahead.

“Slow down,” suggested Steven, his hands on his knees. “Slow . . . the . . . fuck . . . down.”

Crickets. My father took the blue money order from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. In two precise and deliberate motions, he ripped it into four pieces. He threw the quadrants in Steven’s face. The Subaru spit gravel through the air. My father yanked down the parking brake as Steven kicked at the rear door.

I stuck my head out the window, my hair blowing into a veil around my face. I saw Alexis slip down from the truck and scrape after us.

“Hey, buddy!” She coned her hands in front of her mouth. “We’ve got your furniture back here!” She toppled over to one knee, and her hand landed hard on the gravel road. Steven circled back to the place where she had fallen. The two of them shrank into action figures.

I stared at my father.

“I don’t need it,” he said. “Furniture’s old, not worth much.”

Clearly, this was a lapse in understanding. I worked up the courage to open my mouth. “They’re poor people.”

“If he’s telling me to fuck off already, Son, that’s not the beginning of a good business relationship. I’d lose money.”

My father was not alive to the implications of his behavior. My duty was clear.

“We’re privileged,” I said. “We should lose money.”

He ran a hand through his beard. “Dear Saint Josh. This is your close friend God. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

I made a cry of righteous anguish. “The least we can do is help them with our stuff.”

“Too late now.”

I listened to the wind rush through the windows. I remembered Khadijah in her anarchist ensemble and got an instant, nearly painful erection, coupled with a lovelier, heart-based
yearning, thinking of her chipped black nail polish, her unponytailed hair thick against the back of her gray sweatshirt, and immediately knew what I would do. I would continue to transgress as she had shown me how. I would be worthy of her, so that someday we would have sex many times, married in our apartment with cacti in the windows near downtown Northampton. “Let me out,” I said.

“You going
Dances with Wolves
on me, Son?”

“I’m utterly serious.”

He thumped the wheel with the palm of his hand. “Right away, young massah.” The brakes squealed. He jerked the wheel to the right and the car slid halfway onto the blowing grass. We didn’t look at each other.

“Another thing,” he said. “You think working-class kids like people who say ‘fuck’ to their fathers?”

“As far as you know,” I said, performing for my memory of Khadijah, as if she were sitting in the backseat, listening, “maybe they do.” I got out of the car and slammed the door.

I started up the hill. The engine growled. I turned and watched the Subaru sink away. When it finally slipped out of sight, I chased it. I swam with my arms, lifted my knees high. An insect flew into my mouth, and I ran even as I coughed and wiped my tongue. I wanted to throw my arms around my father’s neck and smell the sweat on him, fall asleep in the passenger seat as a crackly oldies station read the weather. I went full-sprint downhill. Soon I doubled over in pain. As mosquitoes swarmed, I paced on the grass.

I renewed my resolve to fight my father by summoning Khadijah to mind again. Khadijah would have been able to see the truth: My father, an unfeeling person, had made a handicapped woman drag herself after his car. He had made her plant her hand in the road. He had left her with an important piece of paper torn in four, and a truckload of hippie furniture.

On the other hand, could I expect to find Steven and Alexis in the spot where we’d left them, meditating on their circumstances, waiting for my help? If we did cross paths, what would happen? I imagined Steven’s red truck bearing down on me, Steven
leaping from the driver’s seat and chasing me into the woods. Was it possible he might carry a rifle in his truck, like the rednecks who took out Peter Fonda at the end of
Easy Rider
? There was nothing to do but make for the dacha. My father would have to look for me there, eventually. I began to walk uphill.

Soon, I passed the spot where we’d left Steven and Alexis. I could make out the loop where they’d turned around. In another half hour, I reached our driveway, and found the cabin half obscured by a Berkshire of furniture. Our couches and chairs had been dumped off the truck, onto the grass. The big red couch and the blue love seat with the polka dots were on the bottom, supporting the chairs, which made a latticework with their legs that stretched half as high as the cabin itself. Between the chair legs, the upper reaches glinted with glass squares; the framed conference posters reflected the sun. Steven and Alexis could have dumped it all in a ditch. But they’d given it back.

I sat on the grass and waited. In ten minutes, the Subaru rolled up the driveway. My father slammed the door behind him and helped me up. I beamed involuntarily as I grasped his hand.

“I must say I’m relieved,” he said. “I was worried you were going to return to find them burning it down.”

“Where were you?” I asked, clapping him on the shoulder, to make sure he didn’t leave my side.

“Got a seltzer and a coffee at a great old train-car diner down the road,” he said. “
New England Monthly
used to rave about it.” He put his hand on mine. “I’m glad we’re doing this together, Son.”

As it grew dark, we dragged the furniture inside, so it wouldn’t molder in the dew and rain.

“Don’t worry about making it pretty,” he said. He tossed a chair bouncer-style through the door. “Your mother’s never going to see the inside of this place again. And Nancy’s different from her, she doesn’t want me sweating the small shit while I make a life for myself as a creative person. I can’t tell you how important that is to me. It feels like I have access to oxygen for the first time since I started a family. It’s been a hard thing for me to be a parent, I’ve put so much aside, waiting for you and your
sister to grow older. I’ve often thought that as soon as you’re both in college I’m going to get on a plane to the South of France, write in a stone cottage, come back every now and again to hang out in New York, be around Jews and black people.” He caught a moth in his hand and cast it out the window. “It’s for the best, Son. You’ll be fine seeing me on weekends for the next two years, won’t you? I hate to say ‘when I was your age,’ but when I was your age I was in boarding school, I saw my father less than that.”

“As long as I have the amp,” I said, “I’m cool.”

When we were done, the living room wasn’t the way it’d been before. The posters were stacked in a corner, but the UN letter was restored to its place next to the photo of the shirtless Havana street trombonist.

My father stepped back and looked at the letter. “I like it battle-scarred,” he said. “We’re lucky glass is the only thing that got broken, buddy.”

We coasted back down the hill. Salamanders fled before us, neon orange in our headlights.

“I bet you’re hungry, young man.”

I was. I had never labored before; I could feel an unfamiliar hardening in my shoulders.

We pulled into the lot behind the train-car diner after dinner rush. We took a booth in the back with a view of the waitress’s circuit: down the counter, back up the tables along the wall.

She looked about five years older than I was, maybe a few more. The corners of moist dollar bills peeked from the pockets of her tight black jeans. Waves of dark brown hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. But her work was mostly over; the diner was empty. She leaned against the side of our booth as she flipped open her pad and took us in.

“Give my boy here a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake, please,” my father said. He punched my arm and gave his head a solicitous tilt. “Am I right?”

I nodded. I blushed and tucked my smile into my neck.

The waitress laughed. “It’s your lucky day, young man.” She said it to me, but I knew her face was for him.

“The kid did good,” my father said. “Moved the biggest pile of furniture I’ve ever seen.”

“I bet he got some help from his pops.”

“I’m used to it. For him it was a big first, doing a day’s work.”

“Just how big was this pile of furniture?”

“Let me see that pen for a second, will you?” She drew it slowly from the pocket of her apron and held it out like she was going to knight him with it. “Thank you,” he said, “you’re a peach.”

She pressed her lower lip against the edge of her teeth. He took a napkin from the dispenser and drew an Egyptian pyramid. He drew a tiny stick figure next to it. “For a sense of the size of this thing,” he said.

She looked around. “Let me see that.” She slid onto the vinyl seat beside him. “That’s a pretty significant pile of furniture, but I’d say the pile of dishes I brought out to people here about an hour ago was like this.” She snatched the napkin from him and drew a second pyramid, twice as large as his.