“That’ll be good,” Maria said. “Get off campus.”
“Do you want to come?” I asked. I blurted it out before I’d really thought about it, because it seemed like maybe it was what Maria was hinting at. Also because-surely this was offensive, but it was true-a Chinese restaurant would probably seem nice to her as well.
“Sure,” she said. “And Rufina, too?” Rufina was playing halfback then, her long ponytail bouncing behind her as she jogged up the field.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
“Hey, look,” Maria said. “They’re waving at you.”
It was true-both my parents were. They would like Maria and Rufina, I thought, and they would like that I’d invited along friends, and it would make my father feel generous to take us all out; at home, my parents had always encouraged me to have other kids over to our house. I lifted my hand and waved back.
In the afternoon, I rode with my parents to the motel. We had lost the game seven to two, and it had occurred to me by the end that the Gardiner coach had told her team to stop scoring. That would have been decorous and boarding-school-like, given that all the parents were watching.
My mother and I sat in the car while my father checked in. They were staying at the Raymond TraveLodge, which I had found for them by looking in the yellow pages several weeks before; the room, which the motel could not guarantee as nonsmoking, would cost thirty-nine dollars. “You played wonderfully,” my mother said.
From the back seat, I laughed. I was still wearing my uniform, my hair still pulled back.
“What?” my mother said. “You did.” Then she laughed, too. “You did!”
“Which goal that Gardiner scored while I was in did you like better? The first or the second?”
“Those were big girls on the other team,” my mother said. “What was my dainty Lee supposed to do?”
We were both quiet, and it was a calm, unawkward silence; with lunch and the game behind us, it felt like things might be okay.
“Oh, look.” My mother knocked on her window, which was rolled up. “Aren’t they pretty?” Twenty feet away, on top of a shed, two robins were perching and turning. “It looks like they’re having a party and waiting for everyone to arrive.”
“But they’re worried that nobody is going to come,” I said.
“Oh, but now-” A sparrow alighted on the roof. “The first guest,” my mother said. Something about animals always pleased my mother-whenever we were on the highway and passed cows or horses, she’d tap my brothers or me and say, “Look.” She did the same when we were passing bodies of water, or driving over bridges, especially if I was reading as we did so.
“Lee, Daddy and I are so excited to see Ault,” she said.
At this moment, my father emerged from the entrance. From the way his lips were set, it looked like he was whistling.
“Me too,” I said.
Maria and Rufina, when I knocked on the door of their dorm room, were both dressed up. Rufina had on a skirt and sweater, and Maria was wearing black pants and a button-down shirt. A few minutes before, without showering, I had finally changed out of my soccer uniform into jeans. In my room, I’d found a note from Martha: My parents want to meet yours! Where are you? Call me at Sheraton tonight!! My parents were waiting in the car, and I crumpled the note and threw it away.
“You guys look nice,” I said to Maria and Rufina. “But, I mean, we’re not going-” Maybe they’d imagined I was inviting them to the Red Barn Inn. “We’re just going to the Golden Wok,” I said. “Is that okay?”
They looked at each other, then back at me. “Sure,” Maria said. “That sounds great.” They definitely had thought we were going to the Red Barn Inn.
In the car, my mother asked where they were from and whether they liked Ault. Rufina said, “Not really,” and laughed.
“Why not?” my mother asked.
“It’s just snobby,” Rufina said. “A lot of snobs.”
How could she get away with making the most predictable complaint, and how could she do so having become beautiful? (And she’d go on to Dartmouth, and Maria to Brown. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I had it would only have increased my bewilderment. If you were beautiful and went to an Ivy League college, then really, who cared about everything else?)
“I have to agree,” my father said. “One fellow I saw today, I thought, poor guy, he has a neck injury. Then I realized, nope, he’s just got his nose in the air.”
“No joke,” Rufina said. “And the kids are worse than the parents.”
“Nothing like inheriting a whole lot of money to make you think you must really deserve it,” said my father.
I stiffened. The actual word money made my skin crawl. Besides which, my father’s remark was probably something the priest at their church had said in a sermon, or something my father had picked up from Reader’s Digest.
But Rufina just said, “You got it.”
“And, Maria, what about you?” my mother said. “Have you liked Ault?”
“Some good, some bad,” Maria said. “Depends what day you ask me.”
“Were you girls at the lunch?” my father asked. “What a ratfuck, huh?”
They roared with laughter, and I looked out the window. Why did he have to try so hard? No one expected that much from parents.
“What’s a ratfuck?” Maria said.
“Tell her, Flea.” In the rearview mirror, I could see my father grinning.
“It’s just a big, crowded event,” I said.
“That’s hilarious,” Rufina said. “I gotta remember that one.”
At dinner, Rufina ordered shrimp in lobster sauce and to compensate, though I doubted my father would know I was compensating, I ordered mixed vegetables. Rufina and Maria both ordered soda, which was not something we did in our family-at restaurants we always had water-but it probably wasn’t fair to hold that against them; most people in the world ordered soda at restaurants. When our fortune cookies came, we went around the table reading them: You love sports, horses and gambling but not to excess; Your winsome smile will be your sure protection; You will be the best! The dinner hadn’t been a disaster, really, everyone had liked one another, but it still had been a mistake to invite them. I’d had to remain on high alert, waiting.
Back on campus, when we were letting them off before I got out myself, Maria stepped out of the car but Rufina remained in the seat. “That was a good dinner,” she said, and she patted her flat belly.
“We really enjoyed meeting you,” my mother said.
Rufina looked at me, then my father, my mother, me again. “Are you-you guys are staying at the Sheraton, right?”
“The what?” my father said.
“I thought-” Rufina paused. “See, I told Nick I’d meet him there.”
Nick? I thought. Nick Chafee? Then, because it has always been in moments of genuine surprise that I try hardest to act at ease, I said, “We can take you there. It’s not where my parents are staying, but it’s no problem.”
“Does someone want to clue me in to what’s going on here?” my father said.
“Rufina needs a ride to a hotel,” I said. I turned back to her. “It’s fine. We can take you.”
“Hold on just a second,” my father said. “What hotel are we talking about and just who is this Nick fellow?”
Rufina started to speak, but I interrupted her. “She needs to go to the Sheraton, which is where a lot of the parents stay. And Nick is in our class, and it’s not like you’re staying in a room with him, right, Rufina?”
Rufina nodded. Of course she was staying in a room with Nick.
Both my parents were twisted around to look at us, my father’s right elbow hanging over the seat. Maria had disappeared into the darkness.
“And I’m supposed to believe that?” my father said. He seemed not angry but slightly amused.
“It’s true,” Rufina said. “I’m staying with a bunch of me and Lee’s girlfriends.”
“Don’t you need permission to be away from campus?”