On the Road to Find Out (8 page)

12.  Every night when we called home to talk to Dad and I asked him how Walter was doing, he'd say, “Fine.” And I'd say, “What? Why did you say fine? Is something wrong?” And he'd say, “No, nothing's wrong. He's fine.” “Then why didn't you say he's good?” “He's good, Alice.” “Are you playing with him enough?” “Can I talk to your mother?”

At the end of the trip, I was more convinced than ever I wanted to go to Yale. I was a bit worried—though clearly not worried enough—about getting in. My test scores and grades were fine. But each of the colleges stressed the fact that their students had all done amazing, astonishing, unbelievable things before they turned eighteen. And the kids I met on the trip—you wouldn't believe how many familiar faces turned up on the campuses; we could have hired a bus and all traveled together—were quick to tell anyone who would listen just how amazing they were.

And if they didn't tell you, their parents did. You could see the parents sizing up the other kids and saying things like, “Oh, you're so lucky you don't come from New Jersey. There's practically affirmative action for people from less populous states.” Or, “I heard it's much harder for girls to get in than for boys.”

I think seeing these crazed, hypercompetitive parents was good for my mother. She backed off and said, “You'll end up at the right place for you, Al.”

 

13

Saturday afternoon Mom and I went to the running store.

Even though I'd gone past it a zillion times, I'd never really noticed it. I could not believe there was a whole store devoted to running.

Are there also swimming stores?

And badminton stores?

As soon as we walked in the door, a tiny woman with a white-blond ponytail leaped up from a stool behind the counter and ran over to us. She said, “Dr. Davis! So great to see you!”

“Hello, Joan,” Mom said, and hugged her. “This is my daughter, Alice.”

The woman had a smile as big as the ocean and grabbed me by the shoulders to look at me, which struck me as quite odd since we were complete strangers.

She said, “Alice! I've heard so much about you. Still getting straight A's?”

I looked at Mom, trying to figure out who this person was, and when Mom gave me the look that said,
Don't ask because I can't tell you
, I knew the woman had been a patient. Doctors are not allowed to discuss their patients and my mom takes that seriously. Sometimes she'll slip up and mention talking to someone, like a news anchor or some local celebrity, and I'll say, “How do you know that person?” and she'll get quiet and say, “I can't say,” and then I'll know exactly how she knows the person.

“How are you?” Mom asked, in a way that sounded too serious for the answer to be good.

“Good,” Joan said. “Things are good.”

Mom patted her arm and said she was glad to hear it. Then she told her we needed to get me outfitted with running gear.

“I didn't know you were a runner!” Joan said, her voice all bubbly again, as if she'd just found out I'd won a Nobel Prize. Her hair was pulled straight back from her face and when she turned to look at me, I could see she had lots of lines around her eyes, and freckles, so she clearly wasn't one of my mom's Botox chicks. She wore a stretchy long-sleeved shirt that fit so snug against her you could see the muscles in her stomach, a very muscular stomach. She sported loose yoga-y pants. The woman didn't have a butter pat's worth of fat on her. As hard as her body was, her voice was soft and girlish.

“I'm not a runner,” I said. “I'm trying. Just started.”

“If you're running, you're a runner!” she said. “Now, let's have a look at your feet.”

Joan made me take off my shoes and socks and spent a long time examining my bare feet, which made me uncomfortable because my feet are ugly.

I mean, everyone's feet are ugly—except for Jenni's—but mine are the worst.

She watched me walk, made me stand, and finally sent me out the door to run down the block in a variety of shoes.

I couldn't tell much difference between them, but Joan said I was a “slight overpronator,” which seemed like it could be insulting. She explained that most people either pronated or supinated, and that this had to do with how your foot rolled in or out after you landed.

The shoes she picked for me were hideous: yellow slabs, with pink and blue stripes, two down, two across. I didn't mind so much that they were unattractive, but they made my feet look gigantic. There was a nicer, more streamlined purple pair with gray highlights I liked better, but Joan said those weren't right for me.

And besides, she said, real runners don't care what their shoes look like.

Mom said it was important I not get injured, and it wasn't a fashion show.

I pointed out that was easy for her to say, in her Italian leather boots. She rolled her eyes.

My mother and Joan stood in front of the store and watched me while I ran down the street in different shoes. The best pair felt a whole lot springier than the ones I'd been wearing. I felt like I ran faster than I ever had and that I could keep going for a long time.

Joan said, “Whoa, there, doggie! Come on back.” She asked if that was my normal pace, and I got embarrassed. “It's okay,” she said. “It's good to be excited about running. I am!”

I knew this.

I could hear it in her voice and see it on her face. Everything about her said she loved running and loved to talk about it.

We found me a pair of black tights, a long-sleeved shirt with a zipper, a vest that blocked the wind, and some socks. “Never, ever wear cotton socks,” Joan said, “unless you want to end up with blisters. Believe me, I know a thing or two about blisters.”

She measured my chest, which would have been embarrassing except Joan was easy to be around and nothing seemed like a big deal to her, and fitted me for a sports bra for which I practically had to do yoga to get over my shoulders.

The back wall of the store was entirely covered with square pieces of paper with numbers on them. Some had names, and some had writing. The word
START
was painted below the ceiling in big black block letters.

“What are all those numbers on the wall?” I asked.

She smiled. “Ah,” she said. And instead of answering, she went over to a rack of brochures and flyers, pulled one out, and handed it to me.

“Are you busy a week from tomorrow?”

I was never busy on Sundays.

I shook my head.

“Can you get up early?”

“If I have to,” I said. For a teenager, I was an early riser. Jenni didn't make it out of bed before noon on the weekends, and so I could never count on her to do anything before midday.

“I'm putting on a race—a 10K.” She must have seen that I was confused and said, “That's 6.2 miles. One of my volunteers just bailed and I need someone to be on the course to help direct runners.” She reached under the counter and pulled a red shirt out of a box with tons of red shirts just like it. It said
Red Dress Run
on it and had a drawing of a bunch of men and women running, all wearing red dresses. She waved it in front of me and explained that many runners would be wearing red dresses.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it's fun and funny. And it's Valentine's Day,” Joan said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I said, “Oh.”

“Would you be willing to work for a shirt?”

“Do I have to wear a dress?”

“Not unless you want to.”

I thought about it for a minute and said yes, I would. Volunteer. Not wear a red dress.

Joan rang up our purchases and the total amount was a very high number.

Mom handed me the bag and said what she always says when she buys me something: “Wear it well.” That's what her mother used to say to her. I never met my grandmother—she died before I was born—but my mother talks about her, especially when shopping. Shopping was one of the things they loved to do together.

Joan said she looked forward to seeing me at the race, and I said it sounded like fun, which maybe it would be.

Mom thanked her and smiled at me in a way that made me tell her she had lipstick on her teeth even though she didn't.

 

14

The next day I put on my new clothes and, get this: I felt different, like I was a real runner. When I headed out the door I ran stronger and faster than ever. My new shoes might have had wings attached to them, like the sandals that belong to the god the Greeks called Hermes and the Romans renamed Mercury.

I made it to the boulevard and could not believe how easy it was. I zoomed along and passed people right and left, all forward motion. I thought about what I'd learned in physics and how I had not only speed, the equation for which is distance divided by time, but also velocity, which is change in position over time.

I was a vector; I had magnitude and direction.

Then it all fell apart.

Somehow I had managed to run into what Jenni calls the Drop Zone or the DZ. She'll come over, won't say a word to me except, “I'm in the DZ,” and head straight to the bathroom. I don't know where she came up with Drop Zone, except it probably has something to do with spending so much time with jocks. There's also the PZ, the Pee Zone. They work the same way. I'm sure I don't have to explain.

Every step I took made the feeling in my gut worse. I had to stop, walk, and waddle home. I thought I might not make it in time. That I did well in physics and understood Newton's three laws of motion didn't change the fact I barely made it to the downstairs bathroom. I'd never felt so relieved—or so much like a loser.

I could hardly control my own bowels, much less my destiny.

Walter-the-Man was parked in front of the TV in the Walter-the-Man-shaped dent in the couch watching a Duke basketball game. My parents were nowhere to be found.

“Yo,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, and came in and sat beside him.

He screamed, “GET IT TOGETHER! Did you see that? That was a foul. Are these refs blind? THAT WAS A FOUL, YOU DICKWEEDS!”

When he watched basketball games, Walter-the-Man tended to scream a lot. I used to find it amusing.

“Help a fellow out? Fetch a fellow a beer?”

Instead of arguing like I normally do, I went into the kitchen and got one for him. He held out his hand for the bottle.

“Still sulking, I see.”

“I'm not sulking.”

“NOT ANOTHER THREE! COME ON, GUYS, STOP TRYING FOR THE THREES.”

And then, “Looks like sulking to me.”

“I suck,” I said.

“And why is that?”

“You know why.”

“Tell me.” He screamed, “YES, OH YES! YES!!” and put his hands together as if he was praying, and clapped them like a lunatic as the ball went through the net.

“Vaseline! VASELINE!”

Maybe he said, “Gasoline.” Or maybe “Maybelline.” I had no idea what he was saying because he wasn't talking to me anymore. He cheered for the team as if he was the sixth man, as if they could hear him, as if his coaching advice—“OUTSIDE! GOOD GOLLY, MISS MOLLY! WATCH THE OUTSIDE MAN!”
—
was going to be heeded by these five guys on the court miles away and visible only on TV.

He looked hard at me and said, “Okay, Alice, tell me why you wanted to go to Yale.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“You know all I ever wanted was to go to Yale.”

“And now?”

“Now my life is pretty much over.”

He thought about it for a minute, rubbed his head with his hand as if he was shining his scalp, looked back at the TV, and said, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? ARE YOU GODDAMN FREAKING KIDDING ME?”

I slumped down farther in the couch and after two more baskets, Walter-the-Man started in again. “You're probably right. If you don't go to Yale, you are never going to amount to anything. I'll make you an offer. How about if I give you seed money and you can start a meth lab—put all those math and science skills you worked so hard to acquire to use.”

“It's not funny.”

“No, it's not. You're driving your mother crazy. She's worried about you. Everyone's worried about you. Plus, you're messing with my ability to enjoy watching young people chase each other around the court. So tell me, why did you want so badly to go to Yale?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, Alice, for once I'm not. Tell me.”

I let out a big sigh. And then I had to wait for another outburst to end.

Walter-the-Man said,
“Good look.”

Walter-the-Man said, “REBOUND! REBOUND! YES, HE GETS FOULED. ANOTHER SHOT. TAKE YOUR TIME, TAKE YOUR TIME. YES! YES! YES!”

Walter-the-Man said, “Tell me. Why Yale?”

“Because—I mean, it's obvious. It's one of the top schools in the world—the third oldest in North America after Harvard and William & Mary. Three of the nine Supreme Court justices are Yalies. Take a look at the biographies of the poets in
The Norton Anthology
. Tons of them went to Yale. They have secret societies, like Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key. The Frisbee was invented when Yale students tossed pie tins at each other, and pizza and hamburgers both originated in New Haven.”

Walter-the-Man watched me as I talked. He no longer seemed interested in the game.

So I continued, “Yale has a copy of the Gutenberg Bible—it's in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which is made of translucent marble. A building with no windows but whose walls let light come in. The Payne Whitney gymnasium is known as the Cathedral of Sweat. The Yale Center for British Art has the most comprehensive collection of British Art outside the United Kingdom, housed in a building designed by the architect Louis I. Kahn, who also designed the Yale University Art Gallery, which also has an impressive collection. In one of the freshman dorms there's a room reserved for any Vanderbilt descendant who attends. The last one was Anderson Cooper. Yes, that Anderson Cooper, class of 1989. Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, Hillary Clinton (and her husband) are also alumni. Cole Porter wrote the fight song, ‘Bulldog.'” I was winded by the time I finished.