Pineapple Street(16)
They got together the summer before junior year. There was a reservoir someone had discovered in the next town at the end of a long dirt road just before the highway. The gate was locked, but if you parked, then hiked ten minutes along shady paths, you came to a breathtaking lake with a stone tower at the center. Sasha and her friends spent the whole summer with a big gang of kids, drinking beer and smoking pot on the edge of the water, skinny-dipping and jumping off the tower. She didn’t know exactly how it started, but over the course of two hot months she became increasingly aware of when he was swimming, when he was stretched out on a rock in the sun, and she wanted to be wherever he was. Their first kiss was out by the tower as they were treading water. When he pulled away, he laughed and said, “I’m probably going to drown if we don’t move this to the shore.”
After that they were never apart. Her brothers and cousins loved Mullin. He had a landscaping job and had saved up some money for a boat, a Boston Whaler. He took them out whenever they wanted, picking up a case of Coors Light and bags of chips so they could spend entire days anchored out by the sandbar drinking and swimming. Whatever that darkness was that had kept Sasha at bay when they were younger had dissipated, and they were inseparable during their junior and senior years, her parents even allowing him to sleep over at her house. It was unspoken among them that Mullin sometimes needed to get away from his own family. His father drank and his brother was a cokehead. Mullin shared a bedroom with his brother and would sometimes arrive at school looking exhausted and strained.
Mullin had less than she did but was generous to a fault. He always insisted on paying for things, sandwiches or drinks or gas when she stopped to fill the car. When he came for dinner at her house, he brought her mother gifts: three pounds of steak from the butcher shop, a paper sack full of corn, a white bag of apples. Sasha knew it was unusual that her parents let her boyfriend sleep over, so she tried to honor that kindness—they never had sex under their roof, instead sticking to the back of her car, the boat, the beach at night.
When Sasha got into art school, he took her to dinner to celebrate. They went to the nicer of the two pizza places in town, and since Mullin’s dad was friends with the waitress, she quietly slipped them two glasses of sticky red wine in heavy goblets. Sasha would be going to Cooper Union in New York, the best art school in the country, famous for having no tuition. Mullin hadn’t applied to art school. He wasn’t interested in drawing or painting; it was just something he did when he was bored. Instead, he would be going to the University of Rhode Island in the fall. He would live at home and commute, keeping his job at the landscaping company. He hadn’t applied anywhere else.
As the summer arrived and Sasha’s move to New York loomed, Mullin became increasingly irritable with her. They went to the movies one night, and Sasha ran into a guy from her French class who was working the concessions. She ordered popcorn and he replied in French that the popcorn was disgusting and sat in the glass case for weeks. She laughed and took it anyway. Mullin was silent for the whole movie, and when it was over, he marched back to her car without a word. As they drove home, he wouldn’t speak to her until, five miles from her house, he demanded she pull over. He screamed at her for flirting with someone in front of him, slamming his hand against the glove compartment. He got out and started walking home. Sasha drove alongside him for a while but finally gave up and left him to walk. Two days later he came by late at night, crying, and she forgave him.
He did the same thing when he came to visit her freshman fall. A guy on her hall dropped by to say hello, and Mullin freaked out that she was cheating on him. He punched the wall in her bathroom, breaking a tile and getting blood all over the floor. He left and then a couple days later started calling her to apologize. He called her over and over and over until she had to turn off her ringer. He went to her house and talked to her younger brother, Olly, who called her sobbing the next day. Her family was all on Mullin’s side. “You know he had a fucked-up home life,” they said. “He just loves you and you left him.”
He showed up at her dorm the next weekend, and she broke up with him, but he wouldn’t take it. He was intent on winning her back. He mailed her gifts, he had flowers delivered, he bought her a diamond promise ring that she knew he couldn’t afford. Sasha wanted to be done with him, wanted some space to move on and make friends and start a new life, but she couldn’t. She loved Mullin in spite of everything, and she also knew that she was all he had. When she pictured him sleeping in his bedroom, his brother awake and blasting music, his father trashed and knocking into the furniture, her heart broke. She had left and he had nowhere to go. They spent that winter fighting and making up, Mullin going into jealous rages and then wallowing in remorse. Sasha’s friends grew to hate him, her mother thought it best she end things, her brothers and cousins still even more committed than she was to making it work. When Mullin hit a guy for talking to Sasha at a party and she was caught in the scuffle, she was taken before the Cooper Union disciplinary committee and Mullin was barred from campus. For her that was the final straw. She was doing something she loved, she was set to graduate free of debt, and Mullin was fucking it up for her. She hardened her heart against him. It was over.
Her family couldn’t forgive her. They still saw Mullin all the time, still went out on his boat, still joined him for beers at the reservoir and the sandbar. When she was home for holidays, her brothers made a point of letting her know they were going out to meet him at Bluffview for dinner, at the Cap Club for drinks. When she brought home a new boyfriend two years later, they gave the guy the cold shoulder and, because he had hair past his ears, referred to him as “the hippie” to his face. When the guy broke up with her a few weeks later, she could hardly blame him. Who would want to get involved with a family like hers?