Desire Lines Read online

  Margaret had stopped teaching gymnastics, but she still knew the names of Kathryn’s friends. “How’s Jennifer?” she’d ask, taking a long drag on a cigarette as they sat sunning by the pool. “Still practicing on the parallel bars?”

  “She’s okay,” Kathryn said. “How come you smoke so much, if you’re so into vitamins and stuff?”

  Margaret would look at her over the rim of her mirrored sunglasses. “It’s an addiction, Katy. I’m trying to stop.”

  “Don’t call me Katy, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Doesn’t your father call you that?”

  “Yeah, but no one else.”

  “Well, okay, Kathryn,” Margaret said, stubbing the butt into an ashtray. “Anyway, smoking keeps me thin. Your father likes me that way.” She smiled conspiratorially.

  Kathryn frowned. “Huh. He’s really going to like you in twenty years, with a tube sticking out of your throat so you can talk.”

  “God,” Margaret said, settling back into her chair, “you’re a load of fun to have around.”

  When Kathryn returned home after these visits, her mother would circle her warily, sniffing for clues. Kathryn tried to ignore her, answering her probing questions with simple, vague responses: Yes, urn hmm, I don’t think so, I don’t know. More and more often, she found herself retreating into a world where her parents couldn’t go. She didn’t want to be complicit in their small digs and jabs; she hated feeling as if she had to explain or defend one to the other when they were both so invested in their own versions of what happened. If she let herself, she could be swallowed up in her mother’s unhappiness or lulled by her father’s denial. She didn’t want to be bitter, but she also didn’t want to pretend that everything was all right. It was safer to keep her distance.

  Later, Josh would corner her in her bedroom to get the dirt. “Did Margaret look like a bimbo? Was Dad a total lech?”

  “There was douche in the bathroom under the sink. All kinds of it,” she reported.

  “What’s douche?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, find out for yourself,” she said. “I’m not going to explain it to you.”

  “What’s this about douche under the sink?” their mother asked Kathryn a few days later as they sat in the kitchen doing homework.

  Josh winced, and Kathryn looked at him with disgust. “Moron.”

  “I still don’t know what it means,” he shouted.

  “It’s a feminine wash,” their mother said. “That’s all you need to know right now.”

  “A feminine what?”

  “I was snooping,” Kathryn said.

  “What else did you find?”

  “Nothing really. Fancy underwear. That’s about it.”

  “Umm. So—does your father seem happy?”

  “I don’t know.” She danced as far away from the question as she could. “It seems like it. But …”

  “But what?”

  Kathryn looked into her mother’s steady, anxious eyes, knowing that the truth was too diffuse to convey. Her father seemed to think he was happy; he held up his acquisitions like trophies; he acted as if his life now was all he’d ever wanted, all he’d ever wished for. “I don’t think he knows what it means to be happy,” she said suddenly, and she realized that it was true.

  AFTER PARKING HER mother’s car in the driveway beside the Miata, Kathryn crunches up the fine gravel walkway to the front door. She rings the bell and hears chimes echoing in the cavernous house, but no one answers. She turns the knob; the door is locked. Finally she ventures around to the back, where she finds her father and Margaret, wearing shorts and T-shirts, trimming hedges.

  They look at her as if she’s an apparition.

  “Katy!” her father says, and carefully lays down his shears. “I’m all sweaty, but …” He reaches out and circles her shoulders in a stiff mime of intimacy. “Did we know you were coming?”

  “No, sorry,” she says. “I just got in a couple of days ago. Hi, Margaret.”

  Margaret stands holding the Weed Whacker as if she isn’t sure what to do. “Well, this is a surprise.”

  “I can leave and come back another time.”

  “No, no,” she says, without much conviction.

  “You’re looking good. Isn’t she looking good, Maggie?” her father says, a little too heartily.

  Kathryn can feel Margaret’s appraising eyes. “Sure,” she says.

  “You look like you’ve lost weight. Have you lost weight?” her father says.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Hey, I just remembered, Katy,” he says. “I’ve got something for you inside. I was going to send it to you, but now that you’re here … Where’s that article I cut out of the paper, Maggie?”

  “You stuck it on the fridge. I’ll get it.” She puts down the apparatus and takes off her gloves.

  “Why don’t we all just go inside for a moment, get something to drink?” he says. “Come on, Katy. How are things going?”

  “Fine,” she says. “How about you?”

  “Fine, just fine,” he says as they follow Margaret to the sliding doors and go inside. “How was the flight?”

  “It was fine, Dad.”

  Margaret goes into the kitchen and comes back with a flimsy piece of newspaper and hands it to him. He passes it to Kathryn. She glances it over. It’s a classified ad: Upward Bound instructors needed to teach disadvantaged kids during summer term at the university. She looks up. “Thanks, Dad, but I’m not really interested in teaching right now.”

  “I thought you might be interested in earning some money.”

  “I don’t even know how long I’m staying here.”

  “Haven’t you gotten rid of that apartment in Virginia?”

  “Yeah, but I could still move back there—or anywhere. I don’t know what my plans are yet.”

  “I see.” He taps his fingers on the table. “Is Paul still in Charlottesville?”

  She nods.

  “Still working on that dissertation?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “I’m just wondering what you’re doing for money these days. It’s not coming from Paul, I assume.”

  “No. I didn’t take any money from him. There wasn’t all that much, anyway. I have a little saved up, which should last me a while. A little while, at least.”

  “Who wants a Poland Spring?” Margaret asks, clasping her hands together.

  “I’ll have one,” he says. “Katy?” She shakes her head. “Listen, honey,” he says to her, “you need to be thinking about your future. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I have thought about it,” she says stubbornly. She feels like a child.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. And you know, I’m not going to bail you out. I just don’t believe in it. I don’t want you to expect it.”

  “Have I ever?” She looks at him for a moment, standing there in his Nike shorts and buttercup-yellow tennis shirt, tanned and fit, a band of white skin around his wrist where his Rolex belongs. “I think maybe I should be going.”

  “Aw, Katy,” he says, reaching forward awkwardly and clasping her shoulders. “I just want what’s best for you. You know that, don’t you? And I want you to feel good about yourself. Can you blame me for that?”

  “Of course not. But I just got divorced, Dad. I need some time to work it through.”

  He shakes his head emphatically. “I can tell you right now, time is the last thing you need. You need to get busy.”

  Margaret, appearing with a tray of bottled water and ice in a bucket, wrinkles her nose at Kathryn and smiles. “Listen to your father, Katy,” she says. “He’s always right on the mark about stuff like this.”

  ON THE WAY home, Kathryn pulls off the highway and puts the car in park on a wide gravel shoulder. She closes her eyes and leans back against the headrest, breathing deeply and rubbing her temples with her fingers. Her father, she has to admit, is right to be concerned. Most people her age do seem to be more settled. Sh
e hears about their buying houses, having children, and holding down jobs, and she wonders if she will ever feel that she is capable of a normal life. How do people avoid getting mired in indecision, considering the potential for disaster, the probability that things will go wrong? Or is doubt a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do the people who proceed with optimism and good faith create their own reality? Does shutting out fear keep disaster at bay?

  To enjoy your life, she thinks, you must ignore so much, discount the possibility of tragedy, deny the evil that shadows hope. That seems impossible to her. But it is sobering to contemplate that this bleak awareness might define her future—that she can’t trust others, so she won’t make herself vulnerable, so she is destined to move through a random series of superficial relationships. There may be less to lose that way, but it is, she knows, a lesser life.

  She has forgotten so much. She has willed herself to forget. She has forgotten what it is like to feel, and she isn’t sure she wants to remember. Like water from a well that takes a while to run clear, pain would come first, and she’s not sure she has the faith to wait for something better.

  A car honks, and she opens her eyes. Looking around, she realizes that car after car is slowing beside her, trying to determine if she needs help.

  KATHRYN DOESN’T WANT to go home, but she doesn’t know what else to do. She passes the Broadway exit and then, instead of continuing north indefinitely, gets off at the Bangor Mall. When she was growing up here, the mall was a shopping oasis in acres of farmland, but now it’s surrounded by complexes and megastores. The farmland is virtually gone.

  Heading down the long entrance road to the mall, Kathryn approaches the loop that surrounds it. She’s always been confused by the array of tributaries and side exits that intersect the loop, and at the fork she hesitates. She’s not sure what she’s doing here or what she wants to find, so she doesn’t know which way to go. Like a homing pigeon she veers left with the traffic, past the back entrance of Sears, and turns into the parking lot at Porteous, the place she always used to park in high school—the only store for a hundred miles where you could find Clinique cosmetics.

  The mall was a second home to her then. On gray winter days when there was nothing to do, she and Jennifer would drive to the mall and roam around aimlessly, in and out of the Gap and Spencer Gifts, getting a Blizzard from the Dairy Queen booth, stopping at the pet store to see the hyperactive puppies in their stacked cages. They knew the mall as well as they knew the high school—where the cool kids hung out, where the hidden bathrooms were, which days certain stores got their shipments. They went to the mall to lose themselves, but also they went there to be found. Everyone ended up there eventually; it was the unifying center of a centerless town.

  Thinking back now, Kathryn realizes that these were some of the best times she and Jennifer had together—giggling, sharing secret jokes, sitting at the fountain near the entrance and assessing the high school guys who sauntered past grinning at them, affecting nonchalance. She felt closer to Jennifer then than she’d ever been with anyone. “It’s like having another twin, being friends with you,” Jennifer told her. “God forbid,” Kathryn said, but she was secretly thrilled to have a sister, a twin, to no longer feel separate and alone.

  Now, walking past the jewelry shops screaming “50% off” and the empty shoe stores, Kathyrn can see that the mall is no longer the center of Bangor’s shopping universe. There are too many new establishments out there on the periphery, too many superstores offering cheaper prices and a better selection. Years ago her parents and their friends lamented the coming of the mall and the slow death of the downtown, but they had no idea how things would evolve—that one day the mall itself would come to seem quaint and old-fashioned, a modest relic of a simpler time.

  At Cosmos Pizza Kathryn gets a Diet Coke with lots of ice in a giant paper cup and sips it slowly through a straw as she makes her way down the promenade, stopping every now and then to look in a store window. She pretends to be checking out the merchandise, but she’s actually watching the salesclerks, most of them high-school kids who, through bad luck or bad planning, got stuck in Bangor for the summer. As she watches them snap their gum, surreptitiously yanking on their clothing as they check their reflections in the mirrored columns, she is struck by how young they seem, how unsure and self-conscious. Was she that way? When she was in high school she had felt so old.

  Thinking back, the elements of her life were so simple then. She got up early on cold mornings, showered quickly in a steam-filled bathroom, layered herself with warm clothing, shoveled something sugary into her mouth on her way out the door, and headed off to school with an L. L. Bean backpack full of books, half-finished papers, and notebooks covered with doodles. For a long time it seemed that there were infinite amounts of time to spend. After an hour or two of some after-school activity and an hour or two of homework (which could always be finished secretly in the bathroom late at night, or in the early-morning hours before school, or even, in a pinch, in the cafeteria at lunch), the rest of the day stretched ahead like a long, flat road. There were usually some household chores to do, and then dinner, and then the freedom of the evening, unasked for and unappreciated, would be frittered away.

  There was a time when Kathryn would spend whole evenings on the phone with Jennifer, methodically removing the shell-colored nail polish from her toes and repainting them, each one a different color, as they went over the day’s minute details, obsessing over a glance, a close call, a mortifying moment at her locker. She spent entire afternoons in her bedroom doing nothing, as she explained when her mother asked what she was up to: “Nothing, Mom.” “Don’t be evasive with me, Kathryn,” her mother said. But it wasn’t evasion, it was the truth; she was doing no one thing—not reading, not cleaning, not using her time efficiently, not planning ahead.

  In high school Kathryn and her friends had existed in a netherworld between the bad kids and the good kids, the ones who skipped school and got in serious trouble and the ones who became class monitor and teacher’s pet. They were courteous but irreverent, skeptical about ritual but usually game enough to participate in school-related functions like pep rallies and fund-raising drives. As class president, Will was the one most involved in activities; his presence at various events actually mattered. The others were happy to go along, as long as it was generally understood and agreed that none of it had to be taken too seriously. There were things that mattered, to be sure; it was just that few of these things were part of their lives at Bangor High.

  Like most of her friends, Kathryn felt that the adults in her life existed around her, setting limits, asking questions, prying. Kathryn moved through each day as if around an obstacle course, ducking inopportune questions, ignoring unwanted advice, sliding in just under curfew. She couldn’t imagine how she might communicate with these people, even if she wanted to. Her parents talked about responsibility and limits and planning for the future. They wanted her to save time, to be aware of time, to use her time wisely. This concept was meaningless to her. Why worry about time when there was so much of it, when it was as plentiful as air? She wanted to squander time, to use up great gobs of it. As far as she was concerned, everything happened too slowly.

  High school always seemed to Kathryn like a way station for real life, a place where nothing meaningful could happen and there was no point in even trying. She took school seriously; she fretted over tests and made decent grades, but she never quite believed that anything she learned in high school would spill over into Real Life—that mythical time in the future, after college, when she would be an adult in the world. Of course, she was as terrified of leaving home as she was at the prospect of being left behind. She procrastinated filling out college applications until the last possible week, scrambling to ask for recommendations, dashing off the personal essay. It seemed to her like a school assignment, an exercise; it was impossible to imagine that it might actually be her ticket out.

  Being a teenager was like being a memb
er of a large, disparate tribe with its own language, a patois invented from the necessity of deceit. The kids hid things from teachers and parents and each other, and sometimes, without even knowing it, from themselves. High school was all about deception. Otherwise, how would any of them have survived it? If Kathryn had told her parents the truth about her life, they would never have let her out of the house. As it was, they were suspicious, setting curfews and quizzing her about her friends, extracting meaningless pledges and promises, checking up when possible. Kathryn quickly learned to recite the catechism they wanted to hear: I’m the good girl, the conscience of the group, the one with common sense. I would never do drugs I have sex in someone’s car I sit between two friends, unbelted, in the back of a hatchback that’s passing a truck at ninety miles an hour up a hill on a two-lane road. I would never take the kinds of chances that could get me killed, because I know how precious my life is to you, how shattered you would be to lose me.

  She let them believe this, and they let themselves trust her—and as long as nothing terrible happened, they could all convince themselves that Kathryn deserved that trust.

  WALKING AROUND THE mall now, Kathryn’s feet are beginning to drag. The mall always makes her tired; she wonders if there’s something in the air-conditioning that zaps people’s energy and keeps them there longer, like drugged captives. Finally she summons her energy and makes her way to the car, then drives the five hundred yards to the cineplex across the street. Scanning a list of titles and playing times, she finds an action-adventure movie starring Mel Gibson that’s starting in eight minutes. She buys popcorn and another Diet Coke and settles into a seat in the empty theater. When the previews begin, she leans back, soaking up the bright images and sounds in front of her like a sun-worshipper at the beach.

  The movie is fast-moving and visceral, and for two hours she thinks of nothing but the drama onscreen. When the lights come up, it takes her a moment to orient herself, and then she does: she’s in a deserted movie theater at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday. In her hometown, living with her mother. With nine hundred dollars to her name, a student loan to repay, and no job to speak of, driving her mother’s car. On the way out of the theater she slips into another movie that’s just starting, but it’s about a guy who loses his wife and his job and decides to drink himself to death, and she’s pretty sure she’s not in the frame of mind to see it.