Long Bright River(44)
Ms. Powell had, at the start of the school year, given us all her home phone number, telling us to call her with any questions at all. It seemed to me that, if there was ever a time to use this lifeline, it was now. I had never before phoned her, and I was painfully nervous as I dialed.
It took her a long time to answer. When she did, I could hear a child crying in the background. It was five-thirty or six at night. Dinnertime, I realized too late. Ms. Powell had two children she spoke of fondly, a boy and a girl, both very young.
—Hello? said Ms. Powell, sounding harried.
The child was wailing, now. Mama, Mama.
—Hello? Ms. Powell said again. A pot clinked.
—I don’t know who this is, said Ms. Powell, at last, but I’ve got my hands full over here, and I don’t appreciate the call.
It was the sternest her voice had ever sounded. I hung up slowly. I imagined what my life might have been like if I had been born into a family like Ms. Powell’s.
* * *
—
It was not long after that that I decided to page Simon. I waited for a while by the kitchen phone, my head against the wall. Fifteen minutes later, it rang, and I lifted the receiver off the hook as fast as I could.
—Who is it? called Gee, and I shouted, Sales call.
On the other end, Simon was speaking lowly.
—What is it, he said. I have one minute to talk.
For the first time since I’d met him, he sounded annoyed. Almost angry. I began to cry. After my phone call to Ms. Powell, it was too much. I needed kindness.
—I’m sorry, I whispered. She won’t fill out the forms.
—What forms? Who? said Simon.
—My college forms, I said. My grandmother won’t fill them out. I can’t go without financial aid.
Simon paused for a long time.
—Meet me at the pier, he said finally. I’ll be there in an hour.
* * *
—
It had been autumn the last time we went, and daylight saving time hadn’t set in yet. Now it was February, and brutal outside, and dark already by the time I set out for the pier. I told Gee I was meeting a friend to study. Kacey raised her eyebrows at me as I walked to the door.
It felt good to be outside, away from that house, from the dark moods of Gee, from my perpetual fear that Kacey, one day, simply wouldn’t come home.
I was nervous, though, in a way I hadn’t been the other times Simon and I had met. That summer and fall, we had seen each other any chance we could get, though each outing had been platonic. But winter, and my school year, had slowed down our visits. I was eighteen years old by then, but young for my age. If I was naive, I suppose, to my credit, I was at least self-aware about my naiveté. I knew that other people my age—including my own sister—were having sex, and had been doing so for years. I knew that my romantic life was limited to my imagination, to daydreams about young men on television, to journal entries in which, embarrassingly, I plotted out elaborate trysts between myself and the most current object of my desire—popular boys at my high school, various celebrities, and, most obsessively, Simon. Regarding him and his intentions, I had two dissonant beliefs. The first was that his interest in me wasn’t purely the interest of an intellectual mentor: he laughed often at the remarks that I made, sometimes genuinely, sometimes teasingly, even when they weren’t meant to be funny; and he grinned in response to the reddening of my face, which I thought was maybe the way that people flirted; and there was an intent and focused look he gave me as I spoke to him, scanning all the parts of my face, a small smile on his lips; and sometimes I noticed that his gaze drifted downward, to my hands, to my neck, to my breasts. Whether or not I was and am pretty, I have never been able to say. I have always been tall and skinny and I have never worn makeup. I have always dressed very plainly. I rarely wear jewelry, and I mainly keep my hair in a ponytail that, in those days, I sometimes slicked with water to keep the loose pieces from flying away. If there is anything pleasing about the composition of my face, only a few people have ever seemed to notice. But at that time I wondered, often, if Simon was one of them. The memory of his putting his arms around me produced a small thump in my abdomen, a kick in my gut, the slow warm spread throughout my body of something electric. Then, always, another voice rose up in me to tell me that everything I’d been thinking was entirely invented; that Simon saw me as a child, someone with potential, someone in whom he had simply taken a professional and perhaps an altruistic interest; that I was crazy for thinking anything else.
* * *
—
A stand of trees separated Delaware Ave from the pier that led out over the river. The ground was lined with weeds and refuse. It was so dark now that I kept my hands out in front of me as I walked. Suddenly, I had the notion that this was dangerous. A handful of times, there had been another person on the pier when we met there: usually someone out walking his dog. But once there had been a homeless person there, an older man who was ranting when I arrived. He had looked at me wildly and then grinned. Had made an obscene gesture with his hands. That time, I’d retreated to Delaware Ave to wait there for Simon instead.
Now, I figured it was too dark and cold out for anyone else to be there. When I emerged from the trees, I saw that I was correct. But I wasn’t certain whether my solitude, and the silence of the pier, gave me more comfort or less.