After work Greg stopped at Wendy’s. He did the drive-thru, sat in his car in the parking lot. He had the windows down and the air-conditioner on. The steering wheel was warm against his forearms. It felt good. He had a Spicy Chicken Sandwich. He also had a Dr. Pepper with ice in it. Everything was okay, Greg thought. Everything was fine. He squished some mayonnaise onto his sandwich. Forty or fifty years would pass and then it would be over; maybe something nice would happen in those fifty years, but if not, that was okay. Just sitting here in his car, eating, this was enough. Things weren’t that bad. The Spicy Chicken Sandwich tasted good, and it would always taste good. He would talk to Rachel every once in a while. Be friendly with her. That would be nice. With her 75 hours of community service, then, she would go off to college. New girls would come for their own community service. They too would go to college. They’d meet their boyfriends. Marry and live their lives.
Greg began to feel that things weren’t okay. A numbed sort of restlessness started in his chest, a lame and disfigured yearning, some mangled need to do something drastic, to get out of himself — to change; but how, and to what? Greg didn’t know. He finished his sandwich and drove home, the sun glaring blade-y and white through the windshield. He watched some TV, took extra-strength nighttime Tylenol cold, and lay on his bed. He tried to sleep, then began thinking about an uncle of his. Uncle Larry. At family gatherings, Uncle Larry would always stand to the side, at an oblique. Sometimes he’d say something and in saying it he’d start looking away, and by the time he was finished saying his little thing — an amusing observation, usually — he’d be looking almost vertically down at the ground. He would very rarely laugh, but when he did, his face would look so kind and meek and sentimental — all crinkled and papery — that Greg, watching, would get an overwhelming urge to go somewhere alone to cry. Usually, though, Uncle Larry’s expression would be one of bewildered disappointment — a kind of continual, half-hearted acceptance that things had gone wrong. It was a face that said, “Fuck the world,” but said it reluctantly, and tonelessly, and then apologized, said “Sorry,” but said all of this so shyly that no one heard, anyway, except for himself. A year ago, Uncle Larry went to the hospital with the flu, somehow fell into a coma, and, a few days later, died. Greg thought about this and wept, and went to sleep.
The next evening, Greg drove to the bowling alley and sat in his car. He was thinking about how to stop himself from worrying when he thought suddenly and lucidly that if he were seven years old he would now — proportionately, or whatever — be hanging out with one-year-olds. A seven-year-old going bowling with babies!
Rachel knocked on his window and he put it down.
“Hey, new plans,” she said. “We’re going to roll this kid’s house. No more bowling. Want to come?”
Greg’s heart leapt a bit, left a balloonish impression in his throat. He had done some rolling in high school — unfurling toilet paper in people’s yards, in their trees and bushes. It was fun. Except once when his own house had been rolled, it was embarrassing. It was bad. He tried to clean it before his mother saw, but then she came outside and saw. She didn’t say anything; just went back inside. Then the neighbor came over, angry — some toilet paper had blown into his yard.
“Who’s going?” Greg said.
“Steve, Dan, Liz, everyone.” Rachel was smiling. She leaned her forearms on Greg’s door, moved half her head inside the car, and started messing around with the levers for the windshield wipers. She smelled good. Greg noticed that from up close her face was very pretty. It startled him a little. He leaned back into his seat and became conscious of his own head, the watermelon-y heave of it.
“So you want to go?” Rachel said. “You do. You drive and I’ll ride with you.” She pulled on a lever and water squirted out onto the windshield. Her head was now entirely in the car. Greg thought of grabbing it and kissing it, clutching it like a football and taking it home, sleeping nightly with the looted person of it, like some kind of illegal but straightforward substitute for companionship.
“Okay,” Greg said.
Rachel went around the front of the car and opened the passenger door, got in. “We’re meeting at Wal-Mart,” she said. “You know where Wal-Mart is?” She started turning knobs, pressing things. The glove compartment popped open and a map fell out.
At Wal-Mart, Rachel’s friends were standing around in the parking lot. They were tan, like surfers. They wore Abercrombie shirts and khaki shorts, ankle socks and shell necklaces. There seemed to be dozens of them.
“Come on,” Rachel said. She got out, opened Greg’s door. “Come. Greg. Let me introduce.”
“Wait,” Greg said. He realized again that he should not be doing this. “I have to do something … with my car.” Things would be said. Why didn’t Greg have friends his own age? Where were his peers? Why wasn’t he in college or something? Was he a pervert? If not, what was he? Greg rattled the keys in the ignition, as if there were something irregular and needy about his car that required this rattling — to appease the engine, maybe, which might otherwise refuse to work. He turned the ignition on. Then he turned it off. What was he doing? He had the somewhat comforting thought that he could go home now. Go home, eat bacon, watch The History Channel.
“Okay.” Rachel was squinting at him and grinning. “Wait here then. I’ll be right back.” She walked away.
Greg focused outward — something a book had told him to do, a calming technique: you pretended you didn’t exist; if something didn’t exist it couldn’t be worried about. In the parking lot, entire families were exiting their minivans and moving in clusters toward Wal-Mart. They all looked pasty and hopeless, and somehow squandered, or else in the process of squandering. They looked obese. Even the skinny ones looked obese. Greg thought about this. Then Rachel was back, with a friend, who stuck his hand through Greg’s open window.
“I’m Steve,” he said. They shook hands and Steve said, “Looks like we’ll be working together tonight, eh?”
Greg nodded.
Steve stooped and looked past Greg, at Rachel, who had sat down in the passenger seat. He gave Rachel double thumbs up and a wink so unnatural that it momentarily paralyzed Greg, then sat in back.
“Let’s go,” Rachel said. “Make a left at the light. Then another left. I’ll tell you what to do. I’ll directionalize you.”
“Why don’t I just let you drive?” Greg said. He thought it might sound carefree, slacken things up or something. But he didn’t get the inflection right. It sounded like, “Why don’t you drive then, since you know everything and are an asshole.”
Rachel looked at Greg a moment. She smiled. Greg felt his neck stiffen up. He stared outside at an overturned shopping cart. A ratty-haired girl kicked at it, then ran away.
Steve leaned forward between the front seats. “You don’t want Rachel driving,” he said. “How about I drive?” He looked at Greg, at Rachel, back at Greg. He had a buzz cut and a head like a horse, though handsome. A handsome horse.
Steve got out and so did Greg. They bumped into each other as they went to switch seats. Steve patted Greg’s shoulder and told him not to worry. Greg sat in back, feeling dazed and centerless.