Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“Presbyterian.”

“Religious?”

“Hardly.”

“We’d make a fine pair,” Barbara said and smiled.

After breakfast on Monday morning, they took a bus across the Mission to Castro Street. Barbara was wearing the same brightly colored caftan she’d been wearing the night before, her hair loose now, falling in a black cascade to the middle of her back. The fog had burned off, but the day was gray and chilly.

“The reason I’m going to Europe is I’m fed up with all the bullshit in this country,” she said. “You know, like your father giving you all that stuff on the phone last night.”

“That was unusual,” Lissie said.

“But representative of an attitude. In this country, it’s a crime to be young right now. It pisses them off, our being young. The great contradiction, of course, is that they spend half their time trying to look young, dieting or sunbathing or exercising or having their faces lifted or whatever. But they resent us because we are young, that’s what we really are, and that’s what they can’t ever be again. Every time I come face to face with one of them, in the street, on a cable car, wherever, every time one of them approaches me from the opposite direction, I see it in their eyes. How dare you dress this way, how dare you smile your fucking flower-child smile, how dare you run around without a bra, how dare you wear your hair so long, how dare you be so young? A constant challenge. I remember once when I was in L.A., I went to meet this guy in MacArthur Park, he had an ounce of good pot I wanted to buy. And this pregnant lady was walking toward me in the park, giving me that same look, you know, and I remember thinking, ‘Excuse me for being alive, lady, but this is the way I am. Young. So go fuck yourself.’ Don’t you ever feel that way? You must feel that way.”

“Yes, sometimes,” Lissie said, and thought again of the conversation with her father the night before, and began feeling rotten about it all over again. The thing was, you had to keep fighting them all the time, you had to keep reminding them you weren’t a kid in pigtails anymore, you were eighteen now! Well, she supposed she should have told them about Judd the minute she’d moved in with him. Instead, because of Steinberg and his dumb mother, she’d found herself in a defensive position, trying to explain, and having to apologize for — what? For doing what every other girl in the world — with the possible exception of Steinberg’s Irish sweetheart — was doing? Had her father really thought she was still a virgin? At eighteen? Who on earth would even want a daughter like that?

“... in Europe,” Barbara was saying. “They’ve had more practice there, they know how to deal with anything that comes along. Hippies are nothing compared to invading Turks. C’est la vie, ma cherie,” she said, and gave what was supposed to be a Gallic shrug. “I can’t wait to get there. Only thing that bothers me is I’m going alone.”

They ate lunch in a Japanese restaurant, bought ice cream cones afterward, and walked toward the park on Dolores and Eighteenth. Behind them were the Twin Peaks. Ahead, the Mission spread below them, the sky above it dull and threatening.

“Have you ever been to Europe?” Barbara asked.

“Once,” Lissie said. “With my parents.”

“Where?” Barbara asked.

“France.”

“Paris?”

“Just for a few days. Mostly the Dordogne.”

“But you do know Paris.”

“I was just a kid.”

“’Cause I’d sure like somebody with me who knew Paris,” Barbara said. “I’ll be flying straight to London, but I’ll be going from there to Paris.”

“When are you leaving?” Lissie asked.

“Soon as I can sell the rest of the junk in the apartment. You think anybody’ll want a calendar with nine months left on it?”

“When do you suppose that’ll be?”

“I’m planning on the seventeenth. That’s a Friday.” Barbara paused. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said. “Just like that.”

The rain drummed against the soot-stained windows. Up the street, they could hear the factory machinery thrumming through the steady beat of the storm. The room was thick with marijuana smoke. The boys had bought three bottles of wine, but only one of them had any left in it.

“Why don’t I go with you?” Michael said.

“You don’t know Paris,” Barbara said.

“I’ll learn Paris. I’ll learn every fucking sewer in Paris. Take me with you, Barb.”

“Ho-ho,” Barbara said.

“Listen to that fucking rain,” Jerry said.

“Paris in the Spring!” Barbara said. “Think of it! Café filtre on the Champs Élysées! Broiled fish for lunch on the Left Bank! All those cute adorable Frenchmen with their funny mustaches and their...”

“Lissie can do without all those cute adorable Frenchmen,” Judd said.

“Anyway, I couldn’t possibly,” Lissie said, but she was thinking, Why not?

“She has to stay home so she can take shit from her father,” Jerry said.

“That was some phone call, all right,” Lissie said, shaking her head.

“Your father’s very good at long-distance shit,” Jerry said.

“You wouldn’t have to stay any longer than you wanted to,” Barbara said. “I’ll be there till my money runs out, but you can come back whenever you like. A week, two weeks, whatever you like.”

“It wouldn’t be worth going all the way to Europe for just a few weeks,” Jerry said. “The fare alone would kill her.”

“You’d be better off taking me,” Michael said. “I’ve already memorized the entire fifth arrondissement. ”

“How much is the fare?” Lissie asked.

“One-way to London is a hun’ ninety-eight dollars and ten cents,” Barbara said. “I’m flying Icelandic.”

“You could always ask Daddy for the bread,” Jerry said, grinning.

“Oh, sure.”

“It wouldn’t cost much, Liss, really,” Barbara said. “I’ve got three thousand bucks and I expect that to last a long time, believe me.”

“Well, even if I did go, it wouldn’t be for more than a few weeks. Just to get away for a while, you know.”

“Sure.”

“That wouldn’t bother you, would it, Judd?” Lissie asked.

“There’s this redhead I’ve got my eye on anyway.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Two, three weeks, something like that,” Barbara said. “Maybe a month. Something like that.”

“Well, not a month.”

“However long you felt like. We’d play it loose , Lissie, that’s the whole idea.”

“It sounds terrific,” Lissie said. “But I couldn’t possibly.”

She knew she wasn’t going to Europe; she hardly even knew Barbara and besides she wasn’t sure she could manage the financial end of it, even if she did decide to go, which of course she wouldn’t. And yet, the concept of absolute freedom for even just a little while — freedom from her parents, freedom from the grind of school work, freedom (yes, she admitted this to herself) from Judd as well — was enormously appealing. She had close to $500 in her savings account in Boston, the end result of Grandmother Croft’s yearly birthday gifts of $50 U.S. Savings Bonds, held in trust for her by her father, but which he’d turned over to her when she’d reached eighteen. She also had some jewelry she could sell, Grandmother Harding’s legacy over the years, and she supposed that if push came to shove she could sell her stereo equipment which was still in very good condition and which maybe would bring half what her father had paid for it. So she figured she could raise maybe $1,500 tops, which was just half of what Barbara planned to take with her, but of course Barbara planned to stay much longer. And anyway, if she decided to go, she’d have to sell all her stuff in a hell of a hurry, go back to Boston, put up some signs at school, she didn’t know quite how she’d be able to manage it all before April 17. All she could count on, actually, was the $500 in cash, from which she’d have to buy a plane ticket — no, it was impossible.