“Buying pot, I guess.”
“Davey doesn’t buy pot,” I said.
“Then I guess someone gives it to him because he was H-I-G-H high just then. My sisters get high all the time. I know what it looks like.”
“Davey’s an athlete,” I said. “And a good student. You can’t do those things if you get high.”
“Ah, who cares? Let’s play something new. You know I have to go home by dark and that’s getting earlier and earlier. Next week is Thanksgiving already.”
“I know. Four whole days without school.”
“Yeah.”
“You sound like you don’t like days off.” Even this year, when I finally had a friend and a teacher who seemed to like me, I was happy to have two extra days off. I would watch the parades on Thursday morning, then watch my father and brother watch football in the afternoon. Our dinner wouldn’t be anything much-Teensy made most of the sides a day ahead, and they weren’t very good reheated. My dad roasted the smallest turkey that Butterball sold. But he couldn’t make gravy, and he never remembered to put the Parker House rolls in the oven. There was a part of me that felt as if I should take over in the kitchen, learn how to do some things. Certainly, Teensy was pushing me in that direction. But there was also a part of me that never wanted to be that person, someone I thought of, dismissively, as the girl. No cooking, no sewing, especially not after the crocheted vest debacle. Once, when I was particularly unhappy at school, my father asked if I wanted to go to a private one. It turned out he had in mind some all-female place up near Baltimore, which horrified me. I’d have rather gone to an all-boy school. And not because I disliked females. I’m not one of those women. But if you weren’t competing with boys, it seemed to me, the bar had been lowered. I ran against boys, played their games on their terms, ceded no ground to them in schoolwork. I don’t think it’s an accident that I married the smartest person I’ve ever known, the only person who was unequivocally smarter than I am. Except for my father, of course. My father and AJ.
“We don’t really do Thanksgiving at my house,” Randy said. “My dad almost always has to work, and my sisters just want to eat Chef Boyardee out of the can.”
“Maybe you could come to our house,” I said. “I can ask.”
I think he had been hinting for just this invitation, but he kept his reaction simple: “Okay, you ask, and if your dad says okay, I’ll ask my dad. It would be better if your dad called my dad, though. I don’t think my dad can say no to your dad.”
The sun was down, the light fading rapidly. It was time for us to part, but it was hard to say good-bye for some reason. The days were growing shorter, and our time outside would be coming to an end soon. Where would we go, as the days grew dark and cold? It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that we felt a little like Adam and Eve, about to be thrust out of Eden.
Maybe Randy felt this, too, judging by what he said next.
“Should we kiss?” Randy asked me.
The question threw me.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’m just not-a kisser. I’m not a girl who goes around kissing.”
“Have you tried it?”
“Have you?”
“No, but my sisters sure do seem to like it. Their boyfriends come over, after dinner, when my dad has left for work. I think that’s all they do. I stay in my room. If I didn’t stay in my room, one of them would take it and do her kissing in there and I don’t want anyone kissing in my bed. Except me, I guess. They’re mad that they have to share a room; they think I should sleep with my dad if there are only three bedrooms. It’s not my fault I’m the only boy. Amanda, that’s the next one up-she tells me I wasn’t planned, that I’m not supposed to even be here and that’s why our mom left. She said I was the last straw. What does that even mean?”
“Your mom left?” I knew moms died. I had no idea they left.
“Yeah. She got a job in Ohio or something. Don’t forget to ask your dad about Thanksgiving, okay?”
He insisted on walking me back to my street, as far as the communal mailboxes. That was another Columbia concept-the mail didn’t come to your house, it was delivered to a locked compartment in a large box that served the entire cul-de-sac. This was supposed to foster community spirit. In my house, it meant that AJ or I had to get the mail because the last thing my father wanted at the end of a long day of serving the community was to talk to actual members of the community.
I watched Randy walk away. He walked like a grown-up, an old one, his narrow shoulders rounded, his feet shuffling like the characters in the animated Peanuts cartoons. He walked as if he hoped he never got to where he was going. Why had he brought that thing up about kissing? Was it because of what the other kids said, planting the idea in his head that we should be kissing? I wanted none of that. Now I was going to have to watch him all the time, make sure he didn’t try it on the sly. Kissing ruined everything.
FEBRUARY 11
Lu looks at her plate. She has seen this plate of food many times. It is the meal inevitably served at such luncheons, luncheons that make up too much of her life. There is a salad with iceberg lettuce, two slices of cucumber, edges crimped, carrot shavings, and one-always one-cherry tomato. The salad is always served with a choice of ranch or raspberry vinaigrette dressing, both of which she declines. Always. The salad will be followed by string beans and one’s choice of beef, salmon, or chicken. Lu has learned over the years that the salmon, counterintuitively, is always the safest choice. Dessert, which looks fantastic-a fudgy brownie with ice cream on top-is served at the exact moment she is called to the podium. She knows the harried waitstaff will have cleared her brownie before she returns.
Today’s luncheon is for a professional women’s group in Howard County and Lu is the keynote speaker. More insultingly, she is the fill-in speaker. They wanted the state’s attorney of Baltimore City. She is younger, an African American woman whose election last fall was considered big news, overshadowing Lu’s election as the first female state’s attorney in the history of Howard County. (Baltimore has not only had a female state’s attorney before, but she was African American, too, so the only notable thing about the new attorney’s election was that she defeated a well-financed incumbent. But Lu did that, too.) Now, listening to her introduction, she has a sinking feeling that it may not have been updated, that the woman at the lectern might be describing the originally scheduled speaker. No, wait, there it is, the telltale phrase-
“And, not incidentally, the daughter of one of the most beloved men in Howard County, the former state’s attorney Andrew J. Brant.”
Former state’s attorney. Why did he stop there? Strangely, Lu has never reopened that topic with her father, not since 1986 when he stepped down, amid speculation that he would run for Congress. Yet he never did. He said, at the time, that he felt he was out of step with the county and the country. Reagan was still president. Lu suspects her father’s real problem is that he preferred the Senate to the Congress; her father’s temperament was better suited to that more sedate, formal body. But Barbara Mikulski was elected to the Senate that year and it was believed it would be a long time before there would be a vacancy in the Maryland seats. The belief was true. Sarbanes, elected in ’76, didn’t leave until the 2007; Mikulski is still in office, although speculation is rife that she might announce this is her last term. Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn’t seem to like you that much.