The Expectations Read online

  * * *

  Coming back from Seated, Ben felt pulled down into a trance of fatigue, and he was almost on top of a person sitting on the Hawley stoop.

  “Whoa, slow down there, pard.” Alice was sitting at the bottom of the entry steps in the late dusk wearing this time a green fleece jacket over a lemon-yellow dress from Seated Meal. They looked at each other, and Ben wanted so badly to step close enough to smell her. She really was so close to being pretty, especially here in the departing light, but some balance in her face just wasn’t there. She was hugging her knees again.

  “What’s up, not-Teddy?”

  “Ha, right. Um, not a lot. What are you up to?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Ah, okay.”

  “You seem perturbed, Ben.”

  He laughed. “I guess I’m a little perturbed.”

  “What about?”

  A few kids were walking behind them across the little stretch of grass, and Ben tried to come up with something that could unspecifically sketch what was going on. Again he saw the silhouette of the Dragon there across the slope. “My dad’s just being a pain in the ass.”

  “How so?”

  He hadn’t planned on her caring to the point that he would have to make up anything significant. “Well, he doesn’t know if he wants me to stay here.”

  “Really. Lucky you.”

  “He says he thinks it’s a bad influence.”

  “A bad influence how?”

  “Um, I guess things were a lot more strict when he was here? He thinks it’s too far away from being like a Spartan training ground for young men.” He wondered if his dad had read “Decision-Making.”

  “Oh, right, girls will corrupt the boys.”

  “I’m not agreeing with him.”

  She laughed. “Oh, no, I’m sure you’re not.”

  “It’s just, you know, the Spartan part.” Ben didn’t know if he could keep this going. “He wishes we all showered in cold water or something.”

  “How much does he know about Sparta?”

  “He was a classics major…”

  Alice shifted around on the step as though to face Ben even though they were already facing, and the breast closest to him pulled against the jacket for a moment. “I heard this story about a Spartan warrior.”

  Ben nodded.

  “So there’s this young soldier in training, right? He catches a wolverine for food, but the trainees aren’t allowed to have any food other than the rations they’re given. So he catches the wolverine right before roll call one day, and he doesn’t have time to kill it before he has to line up, and he’s standing there as the sergeant or whoever is yelling at them and giving them orders.”

  She was suddenly very excited about the story. “And he’s holding this wolverine and the wolverine is like thrashing around and biting the soldier in the stomach. And rather than scream and drop the wolverine and expose what he did, he tries to endure the pain, and just before the end of roll call he falls over dead without having made a sound.” She paused as though waiting for him to react with some gesture of wonder. “That is serious discipline.”

  “Rations must have been grim to want to eat a wolverine.”

  She laughed again. “Yes. But I guess I don’t really see your dad’s point. Life doesn’t seem soft to me here at all.”

  “No?”

  “Just the work. And I mean, my family has this guy I’m already supposed to be doing college applications with.”

  “A guy?”

  “Yeah, like a consultant. I had to sit down with him before coming back and like review the classes I was going to take, the sports, the extracurrics, to see if it all ‘presented a coherent narrative.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That’s exactly what I said. He said I had to think like a college admissions officer. What kind of profile would I want to see come across my desk, what kind of student would stand out, how would this person fill out a freshman class?”

  “You’re already applying to college? Aren’t you in fourth form?”

  “‘College applications start the first day,’ says Dale. And my father went to community college, my grandfather didn’t go at all, so they’ve been trying to get me into Princeton since I ate my first Cheerio.”

  Ben decided not to mention that his dad had gone to Princeton, and they seemed to be at an impasse.

  “Anything else your dad objects to?” she asked.

  Ben tried to think of things that dads usually objected to. “He doesn’t like the fact that kids drink and do drugs here. I actually think he’d be fine with the drinking part, it’s just the drugs he can’t deal with.”

  “Why, do you do a lot of drugs?”

  Ben laughed. “I’d be cooler if I did.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, come on. Kids who do drugs are all mysterious and dangerous and are having all kinds of amazing mental experiences while all the rest of us are having our regular everyday experiences.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, I suppose.”

  “Do you do any drugs?” he asked, hoping she would say no, definitely not.

  “I dabble.” She looked at him more intently. “Are you being a nice person to your roommate?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Just then Ian Richardson, a broody upper-former from newb boxing, came out the back door, and Ben moved to make room for him to pass.

  “Hey,” Ian said to Ben. He turned to Alice. “You ready?”

  “Yup, just shootin’ the breeze. You ready?”

  “Yup.”

  Alice got up and gave Ben a little two-finger salute.

  “Viva Sparta,” she said.

  “All for one and one for all,” Ben said. He watched the two of them walk across the Two-Laner, Ian’s shoulders pulled up slightly toward his ears. The streetlamps pushed back the new darkness, and they walked past the gym into the cover of the woods.

  * * *

  An orange molded-plastic chair on chrome legs was set next to the pay phone in the basement laundry room, and Ben sat there, trying to move himself to call home. This was adjacent to the storage area where newb boxing had happened, and Ben tried to smell throw-up but didn’t think he could make out anything other than fabric softener and dust and the massive foundation. Ben felt again in the late-late summer the foundation’s coolness.

  Ahmed had come back that night from the Dish and said that the news of his father donating the pool had become known, and at lunch a group of kids had brought him bowl after bowl of Jell-O, bowing and asking him if they could be of any further service, until he had dishes of Jell-O stacked all over his tray. Ahmed had asked Ben what that meant, and Ben had told him it was just a prank.

  Now in the basement, the phone resting in his lap, Ben looked across the room at the wall. It was built of irregular chunks of limestone bonded together with ashy mortar. Ben fixated on the shapes, seeing them as individual rocks and then again as parts of the wall.

  At last he put the pleasurably heavy receiver against his ear and dialed the long calling card number. He imagined calling Alice, being able to tell her things without having to worry about the way she would see him looking at her.

  “Hi, Mom!”

  “Little bird!” Genuine excitement and unmistakable tiredness. “Tell me everything. So, you got there…” Ben forgot to be resentful that he was the one calling them. He relayed an edited version of events since his dad had dropped him off.

  She laughed, and Ben almost curled up with the pleasure of hearing her laugh. Eventually he came up to the present day. “Is Dad there too?”

  “He’s out getting stuff for dinner.”

  Her voice knew. Ben outlined what Markson had told him. When he was done there was quiet between them.

  “What’s happening, Mom?”

  “I’m sort of finding out now.” This was the tone she used with adults; Ben had wanted her to talk this way, but it had come so quickly.

  “And?”

 
“It’s been happening for a little while.”

  Ben waited.

  “Some investments he made started to go bad—the parking garages, and there was some mining, I think. And so he tried to bail a couple things out with inheritance money, hoping they would turn around? But that didn’t work, I guess. And now I’m learning we’ve been living on the rest of the inheritance, sort of putting things off, hoping some real estate investments were going to get going. So he’s been…sort of stuck for the last little while.”

  Ben flushed with the pleasure of these adult confidences. But the information also demanded that he know what to do with it, and he had utterly no idea.

  “He’s still working, though?”

  “He works in his office at home, but the partnership dissolved a few years ago.”

  “A few years?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Are you going to have to drop out of the program?”

  “At this point in a PhD it’s mostly grants. But I’m not exactly a help. And anthropology isn’t the most lucrative field to have chosen.”

  “Fuck.”

  She didn’t reprimand him.

  “And the squash courts?”

  “He contributed some, but almost all of it he raised from other squash alumni.” She stopped, and they each heard the hum of the connected phone line.

  “But he’s been talking about this new opportunity on the West Coast. He’s invested in a piece of property out there and waiting for the right time to sell it. Which would be soon. It’s a big investment, a fairly big risk, but he’s excited about it. So let’s let him concentrate on that. He’s worrying about all this, he’s trying to plan. But he’s embarrassed, too, obviously.”

  Ben tried to hear where her patience with his dad ended, that closing off that always seemed available to her. Ben remembered a long drive to Cape Cod when his father had the flu, had to stop every few minutes and dry heave with his head out the back door, and even though no one could blame him for being sick, Ben’s mom seethed nevertheless and drove with ruthless consistency. But Ben didn’t know if he could sense it now; maybe that impatience had become a luxury.

  Ben stayed quiet for a few moments, and he wondered whether his dad was telling his mom the truth about whatever it was on the West Coast. He had never considered the possibility that his dad could lie. Dads in movies who acted slippery seemed as fictional as cat burglars.

  Now it occurred to Ben that he had hardly ever even been embarrassed with his dad, let alone suspicious. When he was young the two of them showered together every morning before school. Ben tried to remember any strangeness about being naked with his dad in the shower and simply could not. It had been simple. Sometimes Ben had stood under the stream of water with his head tilted forward, letting the water hit the top of his head, letting it fill his hair and then flow down and gather above his forehead and stream down. Ben would often hold an empty shampoo bottle and direct the stream of water from his forehead into the bottle, filling it with water and pouring it out and filling it with water again.

  What was his father thinking as he saw his son do this strange thing? Didn’t he have to get to work? Ben remembered no sense that he was being watched, but now it seemed impossible that his father hadn’t been looking down at him, baffled that this little boy who hadn’t existed a few years before was caught in this purposeless ritual.

  After one shower, as they were toweling off, Ben had asked his dad about his pubic hair.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How doesn’t it get in the way?”

  “How?”

  “Where does it go under your underpants?”

  “It just stays flat.”

  “Flat?”

  “Yeah, you don’t feel it. It’s just under your underpants and you don’t feel it at all.”

  “It’s not itchy?”

  “No, you get completely used to it. It comes in a little at a time and you don’t notice it at all.”

  Ben was confused, almost disappointed that this utterly foreign thing really didn’t make any difference.

  “So let’s let him concentrate on that, okay?” his mother repeated on the phone.

  She was surprised the school had said something to Ben; Harry said he had talked to them about more time. She wanted to be up there with Ben, to lean their bodies together in an easy hug, but she also wanted to convey enough bright, brisk indifference that he wouldn’t worry. She wanted to convey that to herself.

  “How are you guys handling Kenyon?”

  “He’s working on it.”

  Ben stayed quiet.

  “It’ll be okay, Ben.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “In a year you’ll hardly remember this.”

  They said I love you.

  5. The Tiny Island

  CLASSES WENT BY IN WORRY, HOURS AND HOURS OF READING, soccer practices, Seated Meals in the High Dining Room and cafeteria lunches, and even though Ahmed seemed not to have let the Jell-O incident touch his serene enthusiasm, he didn’t eat Jell-O at the Dish anymore.

  Ahmed loved the rain. He loved the cool greenness. The pool construction was imminent: his father told him they were almost done with the plans.

  Rory told Ben about another captain’s practice, but for some reason Ben had no interest in playing. After seeing the boiler on its block every day when he came and went from Hawley, he wanted to do anything but play squash.

  In bed every night he would watch the glow-in-the-dark stars fade as he tried for sleep. But every morning he looked forward to Chapel. He hadn’t come any closer to believing in God, but he loved singing the sturdy inevitable hymns, he loved inhaling the five-story air, and he loved the light that erased the cames in the colored glass and traversed the room. The light found such traction in that air.

  Ben still hadn’t worn the Marlboro Racing hat. Each time he had thought to put it on, he had envisioned the person wearing that hat blazing with self-regard, and he knew he couldn’t make that bid for coolness unless he was better situated. He felt grateful that the stream of school was there to distract him. He would catch himself getting absorbed in throw-in drills, the Siege of Yorktown, the endless vocab flash cards, the swing of his grade school compass. Twice that week he and Alice happened to pass on the paths while walking alone, and each time she stopped and talked to him for a minute or so as though she were inspecting a strange, lively puzzle. They would laugh and wave goodbye and Ben would be left still strategizing how to lengthen their conversation and get close enough to smell her smell. He had learned how to pick up the scent of other girls: you let your breath out as you passed shoulder to shoulder and then you inhaled in their wake. It was wonderful, and he would leave Alice wishing he could both talk to her and let her pass by.

  But then he’d notice a wrought-iron chandelier with triple-twisted supports for each bulb, an owl carved in wood on top of the banister post to the Rector’s Chapel seat, the rows of computers in the language lab, the tubes and tubes of cerulean blue in the Art Building, and it would occur to him how much each must have cost. He walked into Chapel every morning, nodded to Markson and Dennett, and wondered what all the faculty knew and thought about him, about all of the students. The teachers sat there, not-quite-completely-awake just like everyone else, and their eyes landed on distinct faces as they streamed by. Spoiled, Asperger’s, slut, parents can’t pay, druggie, spoiled, monotone jock…

  By Saturday a month in the air had become tight with coolness even at noon, and at lunch Hutch was excited about dinner in town.

  Ben had $11.90 in his checking account. Already at the table he knew that Tyler, Todd, Mark, and Kyle were in, and inevitably Evan would be going too.

  “Lamplight, for sure,” Ben said, and they all nodded. They’d grab a cab from in front of the gym after everyone had showered after practice. Ahmed was going into town with a couple kids from club soccer and he had asked Ben if he wanted to come, but Ben said he was going in with Hutch and those guys b
ut thank you.

  Ben spent all of soccer practice worrying how he was going to cover the cab there, and the meal, and the cab back. Hutch had said they were going to buy a handle of Jack Daniel’s somewhere, and even though Ben doubted they could pull it off, he had to have the money to contribute if they actually managed it.

  And so Ben walked the slowest back from the field, and he took the longest shower, and after he dried off he waited in the little vestibule between the shower room and the main locker room until he didn’t hear anyone left. He waited there longer, and through the high windows he saw the bottom edge of the sun meet the tree line, and finally he put his face to the window in the gym door and saw no more taxis in the parking lot.

  He walked out of the gym in the early dusk. He knew in the cab they were joking about the driver or someone’s early attempt at scoring a betty, already their togetherness was galvanizing, and his steps were slow as he approached the dorm.

  The lights were off. He sat on the leather couch. What would “Decision-Making” say he should do now? He couldn’t bear to do more work, and so he went back outside. He started walking. Looking into the windows of the Den, he saw that a lot of the black and Hispanic kids were still on campus too. It was strange to see them in full possession of the pool tables and the stereo. They were playing the music that Ben only heard as background noise during the summer, and they looked easy with each other. They had lost the formality that they always seemed to carry.

  What was Alice doing? What if the two of them could just sit alone?

  Without student voices the campus was loud with the friction of the wind through the drying trees. He tried to savor the coming stars and the air and the streetlamps; he knew just what kind of impression this was all supposed to make on him. The carillon began playing, again that version of “Inspector Gadget,” and Ben hated whoever was playing it. He kept finding another route to take from one end of the campus to the other. Out near the hockey rink, fluorescent pink tape marked the trees to be cleared for the pool. The chapel bells rang the quarter hours. He walked around the track twice, feeling the springy give in the red shredded-rubber surface.