T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Siobhan

Her mother was going to keep a tight leash on her — that’s what she’d said, what she’d been saying all week, as the house swelled with relatives, and the Fongs, Dylan’s family, kept coming and going and the presents mounted and the flowers filled every vase in the living room and the family room and spilled out onto the patio too. Siobhan was in the sixth grade and she didn’t need any sort of leash, tight or loose, because she was dutiful and good and did what she was told, or mostly anyway. It was her mother. Her mother was in a state, yelling into her cell phone at the caterers, the florist, even the Unitarian minister she’d picked out to perform the ceremony, and if anybody needed a leash it was her.

Siobhan tried not to let it bother her. What she focused on, dwelled on, called up as if in some secret fantasy of glamour and excitement no one could begin to enter but her, was the fact that in less than an hour she would be leading the bridesmaids down the aisle at her sister’s wedding, dressed in a mint-green taffeta gown she’d picked out herself. Plus, it was New Year’s Eve, there would be fireworks at the pier and her mother had promised her she could stay up till midnight. Even better — and this had been the subject of a stream of breathless texts to her friends in Mrs. Lindelof’s class for the past month — was where the wedding was being held. It wasn’t going to be in a church or some cheesy reception hall or somebody’s backyard, but in the outdoor pavilion at the San Francisco Zoo, where you’d be able to hear the animals cooing and trumpeting and roaring just as if you were in the jungle. It was the coolest thing she’d ever heard of.

The limo came, a white one, longer than two cars put together, and she and her mother and father and Aunt Katie had it all to themselves. There was a bar in it, with Coke and 7UP and liquor and little packages of pretzel sticks, M&M’s and macadamia nuts. “Don’t,” her mother warned, snatching at her hand as she reached for the M&M’s. “The last thing I need is to have you with chocolate smears all over your dress.”

The last thing. Everything was the last thing, everything she did. But her mother was distracted, holding three conversations at once, with Aunt Katie and her father on either side of her and with Megan on the cell because Megan was in the other limo with her bridesmaids, and before they’d gone two blocks Siobhan had managed to stuff three crinkling packages of M&M’s into her purse. Very carefully, watching for her moment, she snuck a handful of the candy-coated pellets into her mouth, the dark rich savor of the chocolate melting away on her tongue because she didn’t dare chew. Her mother’s eyes, framed in eyeliner like an actress’s, were huge, twice the size of normal, and they flared from one thing to another, out the window, to the back of the driver’s head, to Aunt Katie, her father, but not to her, not then, not while the chocolate lay secretly on her tongue and the excitement built in her like a beating drum.

“You damn well better,” her mother said into the phone and then ended the call. “I don’t know, Tom,” her mother said, her voice jerking at the words as if each one was attached to a string that went all the way down her throat. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Aunt Katie — young, blond, pretty, with a face just like Siobhan’s mother’s, only without all the lines — said, “It’s all right. Everything’s fine. Relax, Janie, just relax.”

Her father let out a curse. “Christ,” he said. “What is it now?”

“I just can’t get used to it.”

“What? Oh, shit, don’t tell me—”

“Dylan’s father, with those teeth. And the mother — she’s the nicest person, it’s not that, but she’s so pushy and now we have to sit around and eat, I don’t know, sea cucumber and squid at our own daughter’s reception—”

“Just say it — they’re Chinese, right? Well, I’ve got news for you — they’ve been Chinese since the kids started dating. Can’t you give it a rest? Or are you just going to go ahead and spoil it for everybody?”

“I know, I know: you’re right. But she’s so dark. And short. Even in heels. I mean, really, have you looked at her?”

“What are you talking about? Who?”

But her mother, her eyes bugging like those cue-ball eyes the boys always brought to class on the last day of school, just jerked her head to stare out the window, both her feet in their ivory patent-leather heels tapping so furiously it sounded as if the limo was falling apart.

Vijay

A week earlier, on Christmas Day, he’d awakened feeling rinsed out and headachy, just maybe half a beat away from getting up and being sick in the toilet. He’d made the rounds of the parties the night before with his older brother Vikram, who was twenty-one and already had his associate’s degree in pharmacology, and his best friend, Manny, who was his classmate at Lincoln High. There’d been pot and plenty of booze, tequila and vodka mostly. And beer, of course — beer was like water to him now. He could drink with the best of them — had been drinking since his sophomore year — and he didn’t get silly or weepy like some of the retards in his class and he didn’t let it affect his grades either. He’d applied to Berkeley, Davis and San Diego State as his first-choice schools and six backup schools too, and he intended to get into at least one of the top three and win a scholarship while he was at it. But right now everything was a little hazy and the smell of his mother’s cooking seeping in under the door didn’t make things any better.

Curry. The eternal curry. But then why should she cook anything special today, which meant nothing to them, after all. If Jesus had gone and gotten born on some day approximating this one two thousand years ago and then went on to get nailed to a cross, sacrificed like a lamb or some Hazuri goat, what did it matter? His parents were Sikhs, both of them born in Punjab, and he and Vikram were American, pure and simple, and all the hocus-pocus of priests and incense and kneeling and chanting that Manny’s family bought into as if it were the biggest thing in the world was beyond irrelevant. He knew firsthand. Because he’d gone to the big drafty church on Ashton Avenue for Manny’s confirmation when he was fourteen, and while the whole thing was interesting in a kind of anthropological way — Manny in a suit, Manny mumbling back at the priest, Spanish and Latin and English all leaching into one another, people dipping their fingers in a trough of water that was no different from what came out of the tap except that it had been blessed by the priest — it was the party afterward that had lit him up. There was a piñata. Tamales. And Manny’s father — because this was an initiation and they were grown up now — allowed them each a glass of thin red wine that tasted like the wax of the white candles blazing over the shrine in the living room.

The sheets felt stiff. And there was a smell, a vague nameless funk that seemed to rise around him every time he shifted position. Were they stained? Had he come home and masturbated last night? He couldn’t remember. He lay there a moment longer, then pushed himself up and went into the bathroom across the hall and drank down two glasses of water. Vikram’s door was closed. What time was it? It felt late, past breakfast anyway. He padded back into his bedroom and pulled his cell from the front pocket of his jeans and checked the time: 12:30. Then he thought of his mother downstairs cooking and his father, on this universal day off, sitting there in front of the TV, watching soccer on the Spanish-language channel, though he didn’t understand a word of the language— What do I care, Vijay? I see the ball, I see the referee, I see the ball go into the net —and then, on an impulse, he hit Manny’s number.