“I never stopped—”
“You did. It was after Stephanie saw us together. You got scared. And you know, I didn’t blame you. I understood. I think you sensed that I had broken up with Tim because of you. Because I had feelings for you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“On some level you did. That’s what I mean when I say people aren’t crazy. They do things for some kind of reason even if they don’t understand it.”
“Did you think I was going to leave my wife for you?”
“Just the opposite. I thought you backed off because you realized how I felt and you were trying to protect your marriage.”
“And now what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never expected this. And I don’t want to analyze it, I just want to live it. I realize that makes me a hypocrite. But therapists are always the most fucked-up people.”
She was getting upset, and he saw how precarious their situation was. They couldn’t talk about the things that really mattered to them without untangling the past.
“God, I have to have dinner with Tim’s family tonight.” Laura stood up, twisting her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. “I need to take a shower.”
He stood up with her, slipping his arm inside her robe and around her bare waist. Her skin felt soft and cool. Outside, the sun was low in the sky, the shadows long.
Chapter 9
A tray came meandering down the conveyor belt with a message — HI GABE! — spelled in Froot Loops, the cereal glued into place by a small pond of syrup.
“I think this is for you.” Stephanie pushed the tray toward her fellow dishwasher, Gabriel Hahn. She was on dumping duty, while Gabe had the relatively cleaner job of loading the dishes into plastic crates before sending them on their way toward the industrial dishwasher. They had agreed to switch off every other morning.
Gabe came over to admire his friend’s handiwork. “Must be Evan, he’s the only one I know who’d be up this early.”
“Do you get a better choice of shifts after a couple semesters?” Stephanie asked.
“Yeah, sure.” Gabe expertly rinsed the syrup-sticky tray, the Froot Loops message briefly spelling I BE before being washed away into the drain. “But I love breakfast. Nobody eats breakfast. Dinner is hell, it’s carnage. If anyone asks you to take their dinner shift, you tell them no. That’s my advice to you, young grasshopper.”
“Okay, got it.” Stephanie turned her attention to the half-finished bowl of cream of wheat coming her way. There was no way she was going to continue working in the dish room as a junior, like Gabe. She’d already put in applications everywhere else: the admissions office, the faculty day care, the library, the museum, and even the gym. But she’d been told that, with the exception of day care, these positions were usually given to upperclassmen. First-years had to start in the cafeteria.
“How about some music?” Gabe said, switching on the portable radio that was perched on the dish room’s one windowsill. He tuned it to the college’s station, explaining that his friend deejayed the morning show. Gabe had a lot of friends. He had an exuberant, babyish appeal, with blond curls that seemed to be constantly springing from his head; round, flushed cheeks; and large, light eyes made even more innocent by blond eyelashes. Combined with his angelic name, it was almost too much.
“I love this song!” Gabe said, turning the music up. BjÖrk’s “Hyperballad” blasted through the dish room, competing with the sound of industrial-weight china and silverware clanking together.
Stephanie had only just been introduced to BjÖrk — by Raquel, of course. She told Stephanie that “Hyperballad” was about the sacrifices made for love, but Stephanie felt certain it was a song about suicidal depression. Drunkenly, she had argued that everyone had a sliver of suicide in their hearts, that it was the other side of the self-deceiving behaviors humans had evolved in order to deal with the crushing weight of consciousness. Knowledge of death was the apple Eve bit into from the Tree of Knowledge. Stephanie was getting everything she was learning mixed up in her mind, her classes were blending together in a way that was exhilarating and also muddying. She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, that everything kept bending back to her mother, to the past, her fears, her loneliness. She was learning how alcohol could lift her up, but also how it could throw her back onto herself. The mornings were the worst. She had hoped this cafeteria job would help her get through them, the way the Red Byrd had helped her over the summer. But the dish room was too chaotic, and the reek of bleach got to her, as did the ugly lumpiness of the leftover uneaten foods, the sickening smell of it. The waste.
“Oh shit!” She dropped a plate. It broke neatly into four pieces.
“Don’t worry about it,” Gabe said. He picked up the pieces and tossed them into the trash can so quickly it was like it didn’t happen. “I did that all the time my first few weeks. They’re slippery.”
Stephanie nodded, grateful and also a little embarrassed by his kindness. Maybe it was just work-study camaraderie. As far as Stephanie could tell, only a small percentage of the student body had to work; everyone else spent their savings or had allowances from their parents. Stephanie had plenty of cash from her summer of waitressing, but if the past couple of weeks were any indication of her spending habits, she was going to go through it well before the end of the semester. She and Raquel bought things every day, usually just food and coffee and occasionally booze, but there had also been another weekend jaunt to Philadelphia, where they had dropped quite a bit of cash in a used-CD store, a Goodwill, and a makeup boutique that carried beautifully iridescent eye shadows. Not to mention the cost of lunch and train tickets. It was clear to Stephanie that Raquel thought nothing of their expenditures, which bothered Stephanie only because she wished Raquel could share in her own sense of financial abandon. Stephanie’s favorite euphemism for drunk was wasted because that was how she felt and how she wanted to feel. Like she was wasting something good.
The trays were coming intermittently. It was just the slow eaters now, the students who lingered over coffees with reading assignments. A big group of trays came all at once, which meant the cafeteria had been cleared out, finally.
“We can start stacking,” Gabe said. Stephanie followed him to the other side of the dishwashing apparatus where there were metal shelves for storing the clean dishes, trays, and silverware. Some of the dishes were almost too hot to touch and she passed them off to Gabe as quickly as she could, getting into a rhythm. What was it about physical labor that she found so satisfying? Was this how her father felt about athletics? Maybe she should drop out of school and be a waitress. Or she could work outdoors. Somebody was going to have to run her uncle’s farm one day. Her little cousin Jenny would probably take it over; she took after her father. Stephanie hated how her thoughts kept returning to Willowboro and to her family.
Downstairs, in the basement, she and Gabe took off their rubber gloves, put their aprons in a bin for the laundry, and punched out. When they finally got outside, it was surprisingly warm and students were lounging on the quad, sitting on their jackets, heads bent over books or in discussion.
“Look at this postcard for the liberal arts!” Gabe crowed.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Stephanie said, repulsed by her own banality. But as she looked at the scene in front of her, all she could think was that she deserved none of it.
“Hey, do you want to get a cup of coffee?” Gabe asked. His blond curls shone in the sun.