“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll tutor you.”
I did, too. I tutored the hell out of her, all that spring and summer and fall and well into the winter. And the only times that were better than the times when we were walking around the Park and talking, or staying up late to watch Jon Stewart on the “Daily Show” and talking, or lingering over a Japanese or Greek or Indian meal—always pretty cheap places, but places where they didn’t mind if we stayed a while, holding hands—the only times that were better than those when we were out of bed, I’m saying, were the times when we were in. That was better than I’d ever had it and, bless her heart, Sheila said it was for her, too.
And then it was Christmas, and we went out to the Island to meet her parents.
That was a little scary. The Carringtons seemed to be happy enough about Sheila and me, though. The only problem I could detect anywhere in the world was still the fact that she made so much more money than I did.
Then it was New Year’s. Not just your average New Year’s, remember, because this was Happy New Millennium time. The year that was coming up was 2001, and everything was going to be different.
I hoped so, anyway. So when the ball dropped and we had done that first formal New Year’s kiss I said, “I wish it could stay this way forever.” And Sheila rubbed her cheek against mine and didn’t say anything, and I said, “I love you, hon.”
She said, “I know.”
I said, “I can’t imagine a life without you in it.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she sat up, wearing the face she always wore when she could see I was stalling about something, and said, “Oh, shut the fuck up, Steve. If you want to ask me something for Christ’s sake go ahead and ask it.”
So I did. I said, “Sheila, will you marry me?”
“Damn straight I will,” she said. “My mom would kill me if I didn’t, anyway.”
So then we kissed some more, and then she sat back, looking almost as pleased with herself as I was with me. “Actually,” she said, patting her hair back into some kind of shape, “it’s probably a good idea for us to get married, because I kind of think I’m pregnant.”
Silvie Avedon Khoshaba
My Dad never wanted me to become a physicist because there wasn’t any money in it. So I didn’t do it. I married one, though, and I never regretted it. I didn’t marry Ron because he was a scientist, or at least I don’t think that was the reason. I married Ron because he was a hunk, and because I liked the guy a lot, and maybe mostly because he was a hell of a fine folk dancer.
That’s where we met, in the little park by the river where our group danced on Tuesday nights in the summer—where my father let me go because there isn’t anything very sexy about folk dancing and where I didn’t mind going without having a date to bring me, because most of the other girls didn’t have one either. Ron and I were both regulars, so I danced with him pretty often. I did my best, trying to be inconspicuous about it, to get next to him when we did the Hora or the Miserlou. I liked the way he spun me around when we were doing that kind of dance. I especially liked the way he did those falling-down-drunk kinds of Greek dances that are for men only, and those of us who weren’t men could have a pretty good time sitting on the grass and checking out the beefcake.
I didn’t take him seriously, though. How could I?
It wasn’t really the fact that he was an Arab, even if an American-born Arab, that worried me, but I couldn’t help noticing that he was getting along in years. He must have been at least thirty-five or thirty-six. To me that was Methuselah. I was seventeen. I hadn’t even been drafted yet, and he was a lieutenant-colonel, which I knew because sometimes that winter, when we were doing our dancing in the basement of the Y and the skinheads were cruising the streets, he’d show up in uniform so the skinheads wouldn’t start something he’d have to finish.
Anyway, what happened was that at one of the Tuesdays toward the end of the summer it rained.
The rain had let up a little after dinner. Most of us hopefuls showed up at eight anyway on the chance the rain wouldn’t start up again. We hadn’t even finished the first Israeli Hora when it began to come down again. The most hopeful of us didn’t give up. We retreated to our cars to wait the rain out, and as I didn’t have a car I joined Ron in his. We talked for a while. Then we began to kiss and, hey, like they say, the rest is history.
We didn’t rush into anything. We sneaked around for a year and a bit before I decided I wanted something more permanent than an occasional afternoon in the bed in Ron’s BOQ at the fort. So I told Dad I wanted to marry this Iraqi-American leaf colonel.
Dad stopped eating when I said that. I’d waited for dinner to tell him, and I’d had our part-time cook make his favorite sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato pancakes, just the way he liked it. He sat for a while rubbing his forehead and looking into space, but not at me. I knew what he was doing—that is, he was rehearsing all the mistakes he’d made bringing me up as a single parent. Lately he’d been doing that a lot. (He hadn’t really done that bad a job, you know. When my mother got killed and left him stuck with a two-month-old squalling baby he took a year off and changed my diapers himself. Fortunately there was plenty of money from the indemnities, so he could easily afford a full-time nursemaid, and it all worked out all right. I wasn’t wild, you know. I didn’t do drugs or anything, but on the other hand I hadn’t been a virgin since my sixteenth birthday, and Dad kind of suspected that was the case.)
Finally he said, “I thought you hated Arabs. Because of your mom, I mean.”
“Ron was born in Duluth, Minnesota,” I told him. “You don’t get much more American than Ron Khoshaba.”
“He’s in the weapons-analysis corps,” Dad said. “He could be sent to a combat area any time.”
“So could I,” I said. “After I was inducted, I mean. So could you, even.”
That wasn’t very likely. Dad was way deep down in the reserve-activation list on account of being a teacher. He didn’t argue about it, though. He just sighed. “I wish you hadn’t lost your mom so early,” he said meditatively, and then, “Oh, hell, I guess you probably know what you’re doing. All right. You’ve got my blessing. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until you were, say, nineteen, though.”
We did wait. Ron wouldn’t have it any other way, because he still had that old-world reverence for fathers. Anyway, we were still getting it on a couple of times a week in Ron’s BOQ suite.
There was some disputation about the wedding. Dad and I would have been happy with a justice of the peace. Ron put his foot down. “When my parents came to America they became Lutherans. They had me baptized as a Christian and I guess I still am one. Anyway, you’ve got a minister right across the road, don’t you?”
We did. We had Billy de Blount’s father and Dr. de Blount was definitely a minister—Presbyterian instead of Lutheran, sure, but, once we gave in on the church wedding, Ron didn’t make a fuss about denominations. Rev. de Blount was an old friend, well, sort-of friend. He had talked my dad into sending me to his Sunday school when I was ten, and sometimes he took Billy and me to some G-rated Disney movie or for a soda at Friendly’s Ice Cream. I finally put a stop to that. Although Billy was two years younger than I he had a serious crush on me, and it got annoying.
I think Dad was a little worried that Ron would pull rank on him, since Ron was doing real physics research and Dad was only a high-school teacher getting ready to retire. That didn’t happen. Ron wasn’t like that. I wouldn’t have married him if he was, and anyway the kind of research Ron was doing wasn’t anything like the kind Dad had always wished he could be doing himself. The War took care of that. Ron was pretty anal about security, so he never exactly told me what he was doing, but some of his assistants weren’t as cautious. So I knew. Basically he was sniffing around captured Islamic positions for traces of radionuclides that didn’t belong there. Their checking for isotopes was done down to the parts per trillion level, in the hope that they could keep track of what the Arabs had up their sleeves. And what made Ron go into physics in the first place was exactly the same thing that had done it for Dad. They both had wanted to know what rules the universe ran by. They still did. They spent a lot of after-dinner hours talking about what the Australians and the Scandinavians were doing.