The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (4 page)

Anders shook his head. “You don’t understand. This is exactly what he’s been waiting for. I’m never coming back here.”

“Anders. How would you know if you haven’t
spoken
with him?”

“I need you to take me to the bus station.”

She shook her head. “Your dad’s already on his way.”

“How could you
do
this to me?” Anders said and erupted into a fit of coughing. She kept her arms crossed until he caught his breath.

“Where did you think you were going for the holidays?” she said.

“Nowhere.”

She stared at him.

“The YMCA in Bath.”

“Oh, Anders.”

“I have to work.”

She shook her head. “This is a much better plan.”

Within hours his duffel was packed and his hair was combed and his father was standing in the middle of his roommate’s girlfriend’s room, which suddenly seemed cluttered with candles and cheap, unswept rugs. Judge Hill wore the same thing year-round—a cotton sweater between his tie and jacket—and his face remained slack regardless of circumstances, so the only indication of his mood was in the angle of his flocculent eyebrows. He kept cedar blocks in his drawers, so he smelled of wool and wood and a sharp lotion Anders could never identify but that smelled as though his father went to the wet bar each morning in his undershirt and slapped some whiskey on his jaw. He had arrived without a hat or a coat, the toes of his wing tips stained by snow, and, even after a flight, with a crease so firmly ironed in his slacks it seemed sharp enough to cut you.

“These all your things?” his father said.

“Yes, sir.”

Judge Hill looked at the duffel and then seemed to take in the rest of the room.

“Can I get you anything?” said Helene. “Some tea, maybe?”

She gestured to a bookshelf, where two mugs she had borrowed from the dining hall sat, discolored from a semester of instant coffee. Beside them were a collection of ceramic animals, squirrels and chipmunks and the like, that she collected and rearranged in different familial scenes that seemed to please her immensely.

Judge Hill stared at the shelf. “Thank you, but I believe we’d better be on our way.”

“It’s too bad it’s such a dreary night,” she said. “It’s really a beautiful campus.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“You’ll have to come back in the fall. It’s spectacular. Have you told him about the lobster bake?”

Anders stared at her.

“It’s amazing. The whole school sits at these long tables and everyone has one of those plastic bibs on, even the president, and there’s a band—what’s it called? The music with the trumpet and the bow ties?”

“Tin pan,” said Anders.

“Yeah, it’s a school tradition—they have a
tin-pan
band playing this happy oompah music with banjos and—”

“I know what it is,” said Judge Hill.

“Right,” said Helene. “Well, it’s a nice place.”

“I’m sure,” said his father and looked at her for a long moment. “Thank you for your help,” he said, and he turned and left.

When he was gone she gave Anders a shove on the shoulder. “He’s so southern!”

Anders rolled his eyes. “He isn’t known for his conversation.”

“He misses you. You can tell by the way he looks at you.”

“Okay.”

“
You
can’t see it, but it’s plain as day.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Your father loves you,” Helene said and Anders kissed her fully on the mouth.

In retrospect, especially that which is afforded by forty years, everything was clear. It would have seemed, through the next two days he and his father spent on I-95, with Anders in a heap in the backseat of the rental car, listening to the insistent rhythm of the road, that he’d completely blown it. He’d misread all the cues—she was an only child with parents who were still married to each other, destined already for one of the helping professions. He thought of the way she spoke to those guys with the stains on their shirts and the bits of toilet paper still stuck to their necks from shaving. It was the same way she spoke to her ceramic squirrel when she thought no one was listening: her attention had nothing to do with the person. He thought again and again about her look of panic and confusion after he’d kissed her, the firmness of her push on his belly as she stepped away. Donny was a six-four defenseman on the hockey squad who, surprisingly, could talk your ear off about the Battle of the Bulge, and what was Anders? Another lonely guy confusing her kindness with interest.

They stopped at a diner in New Jersey, Anders’s face hot from sleep and imprinted with the rented Pontiac’s upholstery.

“Tell me something,” his father said from behind his menu. It was the first time either of them had spoken in hours. “How do you pay for that school?”

“Why?”

“I looked it up. It’s expensive.”

“I rob banks, Dad.”

His father turned a big plastic page.

“Scholarships, mostly.”

“They pay for it.”

“Yes, sir. Most of it.”

“And how did you convince them to do a thing like that?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because I had a conversation recently with Douglas Knight.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“He’s the president of Duke University and he says he’ll take your northern credits.”

Anders took a deep breath and shook his head. “Not interested.”

His father dropped his menu. “Tell me, what is it about Bowdoin that’s worth working yourself until you’re infirm?”

“It’s pronounced ‘Boh-din.’ ”

“Let me explain something to you,” his father said abruptly. “You can run around and pretend to be whoever you want. I don’t care—you can change your whole name. But one of these days the thing you’re going to need more than anything else is a sense of being. A home. And you can’t invent that out of thin air. It’s already been given to you. It’s where you were born, and like it or not, it’s who you are.”

Anders stared at him. Judge Hill settled back into reading the menu.

“Your appointment with President Knight is in the second week of January.”

Anders walked out of the restaurant.

He spent that break sitting with Miss Rose by her ironing station in the basement of his house in North Carolina, watching her make astonishingly swift work of a basket of fitted sheets. She was in her sixties, at least a decade older than either of his parents, and nearly six feet tall, solid, with arthritic knuckles and a stare from behind her bifocals that could stop Anders cold. She would never let him help with any of her work but he enjoyed being around it, as he had as a kid—the hiss and smell of the iron, her radio mumbling—though this time, he did most of the talking, telling Miss Rose about all of his jobs up north and the air that smelled like pine and how they had lobster even at the drive-ins and how his friend Helene had taught him to ski. She listened intently and when he was done, she clicked off her radio.

“It sounds to me like you’re headed back there,” she said, spraying one of his father’s shirts.

“Of course I am.”

She peered over the top of her glasses.

“Does your father know that?”

“He will soon. And you’re not going to tell him.”

She shook her head. “You bet I’m not.”

“Oh, come on. He’ll live.”

Miss Rose opened the collar, sprayed some starch.

“Not him I’m worried about.”

She’d been there for the eruption over the exams, when his father had called him a parasite and roared that in his day they’d killed kids for less, that if Anders had been alive then he’d already be dead and buried out back like a mule, and she’d been there for the long years of silence that followed. She knew more about his family than anyone in the world, so she knew what was coming. A few weeks later, his father drove him to Durham, and he found his way out of the back of the admissions building and to the bus station while his father was still idling out front in his Cadillac.

He made it up to Brunswick, still in his rumpled interview suit. The campus was white and quiet, freezer-burned with the sort of air that punched the breath from you and seemed to muffle every sound other than the squeaking of footsteps. He had no coat so he ran to his dorm and when he opened the door, his lips blue and the tips of his ears burning, he saw the room was bathed in candlelight. Donny and Helene had covered a cardboard box with a white sheet and were eating lamb chops on Chinet plates.

“Sorry,” Anders said, turning to leave.

“Don’t be retarded,” said Donny. “Come back. Where would you even go?”

Anders blew into his hands. “I don’t know. The union?”

“Jesus, you’re shivering,” said Donny. “What the hell’re you wearing?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Sit down. Take some food.”

“I’m good.”

“Jesus, just take some. You look like a bum.”

Donny handed him a plate and a plastic cup filled with cabernet from a jug. He and Helene made room for him at their table. After two days of eating from vending machines in bus depots, Anders could feel himself coming back to life.

“Look at him go,” said Donny. “Sure doesn’t seem like he’s dying.”

Anders looked at Helene. If she’d told Donny anything, it seemed he’d taken it well.

“So what’s up with the suit? You in court or something?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of!” Donny glanced at Helene. “This kid. What does that mean, ‘sort of’?”

“I had an appointment with the president of Duke.”

Donny was grinning, waiting for it.

“But I blew it off and got on the bus to come here.”

“Yes!” he said, clapping his hands. “I love it.” Helene wasn’t smiling. “You know his dad’s a big shot?”

She made a gesture that was neither a yes nor a no.

“Well, he is, and, man—that takes balls.” He put his arm around Anders and pulled him in tight. “You made the right decision, buddy. No question. He made the
right
decision, didn’t he?”

Helene had gotten up to clean.

Anders would never know what version of the truth Donny had been told, and after a few days it didn’t seem to matter. When Anders made it home at night, a walking dead man in two sweaters and a huge hunting jacket from Goodwill, there they’d be—Donny and Helene, with beer and leftovers and a dessert with three plastic forks. So they became a kind of family, or at least Anders thought so, with he and Helene huddled together in the bleachers at all of Donny’s games, ringing a cowbell for every goal, and biweekly 1:00 a.m. picnics on the dorm tiles. At first, Anders slept in the second room whenever Helene stayed the night, but it was so often that soon he migrated back to the bedroom, where he became used to the big, still pile of limbs across the room. They had their privacy, he figured, during the many hours he was gone, though he never once opened the door at the wrong time to find them in a full-blown make-out session, or worse, and so a fantasy formed—one that, in retrospect, he supposed he needed—that Donny and Helene were actually as platonic together as children, and so, in this new family, forever separate from the mess he’d escaped down south, everyone was really the same. On Sunday nights they were the only nonsmokers watching the long black-and-white movies that played at the union, and when Helene’s underwear accidentally ended up in his laundry, he’d get it into the machine as fast as he could, without looking. One long weekend, when Donny and Helene could have jumped on a bus to South Station, they decided instead to surprise Anders during his shift at the Longfellow Inn, which was when, as is the nature of threesomes, everything came apart.

It was a gloomy Friday in February, and the only other guest was an elderly lady from Beacon Hill, which meant they had the run of the place if they wanted. Donny and Helene sat with Anders behind the desk for a while, asking politely about all his duties, and when that wore thin, he sent them outside to admire the bay. He folded starched napkins and watched, through the old wavy window, as Donny and Helene strolled to the dock to look at the empty moorings bobbing in the inlet. He was happy for them, proud even. At first this unexpected goodwill had stemmed from guilt—one way to absolve himself was to stay as close as possible to the betrayal without ever crossing the line—but now it seemed to have broken through to something else, an appreciation, really, of his two best friends in love. Or maybe not in
love
—that phrase was a little overused when it came to late adolescents, especially within a dormitory whose air was pollinated with hormones—but companions certainly, a pairing of proximity that had happened, so far, to work out. Donny was lucky, and though he didn’t seem aware of how lucky, Anders was glad Helene had someone to hold her hand as the sun threw a thousand orange sparkles across the water, and to take her upstairs afterward when she had a 
splitting
headache, to be with her in the room till she recovered.

It was inn policy to deliver every guest a silver carafe of decaf in the evening, and since Donny and Helene seemed to have skipped dinner altogether, Anders found what was left of the breakfast scones and teatime cold cuts and prepared a plate for them. No one answered on his first knock so he tried again, harder, and when there was still no answer, he decided to place the tray inside the door so it’d be there if they woke up. Looking back, Anders thought it might have been a subconscious ploy to shame them—for being up here when he was down there; for not having to work, except at breezy campus jobs; for giving him pity rather than admiration for all the work he did and then coming to his place of employment and flaunting their greed for each other—but at the time, the whole spectacle was just embarrassing. A lamp was on, for one, and though the rest was a scramble of skin and sheets, he’d seen enough of their faces to catch not only their panic but also their smiles. They wore grins of embarrassment but probably felt the opposite—the thrill of conspiracy—and what sent him back down the stairs and to the front desk, where he sat with the tray on his lap and the coffee cooling and the cheddar sweating, was the burning subtext of those smiles: that he was excluded from them.

Which made him think. Of course it wasn’t Donny he really cared about; Anders admired him mostly for what he’d endured (a drunk for a father and the task of essentially raising his siblings alone) rather than what he was known for (a punishing presence on the ice whose brutality, frankly, Anders found difficult to ring the cowbell for). Donny was a loyal roommate, but mostly he was a gateway to Helene. She was the magnet that kept the two men together, and without her, neither of them would have much to say to each other. So when she came down the stairs a few minutes later, her hair pinned back and a long cotton robe hanging over her nightgown, Anders found it difficult to even look at her.