Now You Know

"What's this for?" asked Mayson as the waiter set down the tall stainless steel cup next to his shake. He actually had to look inside to see. "Ohhhh wowwwww," he said rather breathlessly. "This is full of shake, too." He looked up to gauge our reactions. Our lips were tight and turning white. It had been like this for the whole trip--all 450 miles and seven days. "Whoaaaa. Look at those lights. They're just hanging from the ceiling by the cord. What if one of those hit you in the head. Wouldn't that be funny?" He smiled and giggled earnestly. "What if there was, like an earthquake, and it fell down? That would be awful."

Mayson was fourteen. He was an eighth grader and he was six feet tall. He had blond bedroom hair and malamute-blue eyes. His eyes were fierce blue, but his face was always placid and expressionless. He was starting to get the pimples that frequently accompany his sort of pubescent gigantism. He always spoke in hushed tones, always listened to Edward's parents, always wanted to help. He was making it awfully hard to be apologetic.

Edward was Tabitha's younger brother, also fourteen, also in eighth grade. He looked unnervingly like Tabitha, which made both of them feel bad. But however many times she lamented, "I look just like a fourteen-year-old boy," the truth was that it would be Edward's cross to bear that he looked just like a nineteen-year-old girl. High school was right around the corner for the intrepid Edward.

We were at the Denny's in Santa Cruz, at the end of a week-long vacation. Mayson and I were the guests of Tabitha's and Edward's family. We had been corrupting Mayson, a Mormon, all week long--Edward's constant flow of frappuchinos, his father's gleefully warped politics, and our rock & roll music--Mayson must have been positively brimming with indulgence. It was eleven-thirty AM, and we had been waiting about forty-five minutes for our food. The geriatrics who had been seated after us were now paying their check and getting up to leave. Our waiter was a chunky twentysomething with a soul patch and Puma sneakers. He did not come near the table after he took our orders.

Nobody said much. We were holding onto our composure for the final four hours, but we could see it stretching out to five. And it was getting harder to say things that didn't remember Cat in shameful nostalgia.

* * *

We met Cat not intentionally and somewhat regretfully at a clothing boutique downtown. Tabitha's parents were responsible. When it was time to head back to the beach house, we met them on the main drag at the prescribed time, thinking we were going to pick up the boys from the Boardwalk. Her mother, however, remained interested in a dress at a nearby shop.

We followed them into the store reluctantly. They examined the dress while one of the two clerks strangled sobs into the telephone. I stood in the doorway with my plastic bag full of records and my completely ruined sandals and felt foreign. Until I heard the voice of the other clerk, that is. I looked up and through my purple sunglasses I saw a blond girl in a tight blouse with a rosy round face. I knew as I made eye contact and she mouthed "oh my God" that it was Cat. I wanted to run. That she lived there, this we knew. That she was attending UC Santa Cruz, this we knew. This was all we knew, and we never expected to see her again, not since she graduated high school and moved out, leaving a swirl of drama and brokenhearted boys behind her. She was shocked and delighted to see us. ("How in the hell are you? Oh my GOD!") We nodded, and she gave us her number, insisting we all do something that night.

We agreed to meet at Capitola Mall at 6. When she arrived her hair had been cut and dyed a copper red. Her lipstick was thick as usual, but well chosen. The slightest passionate hints of acne and the down on her cheeks were still there. She embraced us individually. All of a sudden I was seventeen again. Who has something to prove here?

She hugged us, and it took Tabitha and me a minute or so before we realized there was something peeking out of her Big Leather Purse. It was a brown Chihuahua dog.

"It's not mine," she explained. "It's my boyfriend's. But he's too spoiled to be left alone at home. He threw a tantrum, so I picked him up. He was so excited he wet himself."
"Aren't you worried that he'll do that in your purse?" I asked.
"No, Yoda would never do anything like that. He's a good doggie."
"Yoda?"
"Well, I wanted to name him Chen-Chio, after the Zen Buddhist word for great enlightenment."

We all got into Cat's Hyundai, NOR CAL sticker across the hatchback, and drove back to her boyfriend's place, a gigantic house-type structure with a lawn and a yard. Inside were lots upon lots of speakers, a home entertainment system with lots of DVDs and a stained couch. Her boyfriend was in a band. They had lots of parties. They had lots of pets besides Yoda: a bunch of cats and a kitten; another dog and an iguana. Three of these were named Willy. Willy 1 and Willy 2 were pointy-nosed Siamese cats. Willy 3, as logic would have it, was an iguana.

Her boyfriend was coming with us to dinner, somewhere where pints of beer were only a dollar that night. He wasn't home, though. He was out playing golf, she explained, which he did nearly every day. She called him on her cell phone, which looked like a flea disco. She got his voice mail. Evidently he knew he was late.

"Hi, Jamie. Um, it's 6:30, and you said you'd be here by 5:45. Um, I'm not real happy with you right now, so I hope you get here soon. Goodbye."

We sat on the zebra print couch, surrounded by plastic vines and fake African masks, trying not to make eye contact with her until she was done talking. I hoped she would smile and host, smile and host.

"See, I've had a fairly lousy day," she said to us in a half whisper. "Everybody has quit or been fired except for Mary and me. I've been working 60 hours a week for the past three weeks. I have had no days off at all. Even when I was sick I didn't call in, I got up and went even when I had a fever of a hundred and two. We can't deal with it any longer," she giggled and smiled. For as long as I had known her, that subdued giggle had been a warning, a perfect signal to indicate that there was broken glass in her guts.

And there was, too. There were pills and scars and a dark, abiding love that produced a thousand folded letters in purple ink. These were all consistent factors back then. There was a keen pang in everything in her that was off-kilter, her oddly failing physiology and her cycles of verbose depression, her fixation on dragonflies.

She took us into the kitchen and offered us a drink. We declined. She noticed a photograph stuck on the fridge and looked directly at us. Two girls, blonds, in full name-brand snowboarding regalia, smiling against a backdrop of white snow.

"That's Sarah and Erin," she explained. "Sarah lives here, which is pretty much why we can afford this place. She's Sarah Schneider."
We stared at her. She paused only for a second.
"You've heard of Barry Schneider, right? You know--'Schneider RVs: The Best Deals in the Northstate?' Yeah. Her father gives her a $7,000 monthly allowance. This is why Jamie and Dawn and Mike can always go out golfing." And why they lived in a house with a yard and a lawn and a menagerie.
One of Jamie's roommates, perhaps even bandmates, loped into the kitchen, muscular, tattooed, shirtless, and shaking off sleep. He grunted a hello and looked at the stove.
"Who the fuck boils water in a frying pan?" he asked, pointing.
"Oh, that must be Charlie," Cat replied. He nodded, got himself a Pepsi Twist from the fridge, and walked back into the living room. "Charlie went out with Erin for about three months," explained Cat. "She started going to all these study groups and staying away for a long time, and we all knew there was a boy somewhere. She was really happy all of a sudden, and she wasn't home on Saturdays anymore. So we started trying to include him. You know, double date and such.

"Charlie was born and raised in Hawaii. In the jungle. No, I mean it--his whole family lived in the jungle. He lived in a tent for seventeen years. The first time we all got together on a Saturday night he was in a tree. I mean, when I got there, he had climbed all the way up this huge poplar, or whatever, that was outside the restaurant. I thought he was drunk and was afraid he'd hurt himself, but Erin said that he'd been doing this all his life."

I pictured a young man with a tan, standing on a branch in khakis, brown Oxfords, and a Hawaiian shirt, like a blurred flash photograph from a wild night; a monkey man who was allowed to boil water for tea in their house.

Erin was related to Sarah, a cousin, or a half sister, or something else. There were complex genealogies within this circle--lots of exes nearby, always the preliminary threat of incest. We nodded and looked at the picture. They looked very happy in their name-brand snowboard gear. And Charlie didn't want one of them anymore. I wondered why not. They both looked perfectly blonde. Maybe he wanted the other one.

Cat stopped talking and walked back into the living room to start up a conversation with Sleepy Guy. All the momentum had left us, had ebbed and stranded us in a strange kitchen with the yellow sunlight filtering dusty in through the plastic green vines. It was never comfortable to stay where Cat stayed. It was always alien and treacherous, even in high school. In high school there had been a tiny Japanese pebble pond in her house, surrounded on all sides by stucco walls. You could watch it through the windows. They used it to stifle and starve frogs they found. It was a lonely, stark space of dark rocks and an odd mildewing ceramic sculpture. They were always surprised when the frogs died.

Back in the living room Cat was coaxing the Chihuahua into doing his trick. Great Enlightenment crawled on his belly across the carpeted living room and into her arms.