Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

And all Eli can say is, “Be careful.”

And of course that’s the last thing Isabelle wants to be, because it is the one thing she always is.

And then she meets Casey.

When the blistering summer finally cools and the first sharp edge of autumn marks the early mornings, Isabelle faces the fact that she’s still in New York, still without a plan of action, still fending off Nate’s campaign to have her move to Washington, and that she has to do something about it all. But being home has resurrected the vacillating Isabelle.

And then a thought: Deepti! She promised Deepti, didn’t she? It is so much easier to fly to San Francisco and visit Deepti, who’s in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and who has been pleading with Isabelle all summer to come.

On Isabelle’s first morning there, a Sunday, Deepti takes her across the bay to Berkeley for breakfast. They sit at a small square table on Buon Mangia’s tiny front patio, really just a part of the street corner that the restaurant has appropriated for its own use. No one seems to mind that the sidewalk is marked off as an eating area by cement planters filled with lavender and sage and that everyone must walk around them to cross the street.

They’ve landed in the Gourmet Ghetto on the north side of the university campus, and people come here primarily to eat. Chez Panisse, the mother of the American slow food movement, is just down the street.

“Local farmers, local flavors — I guess that’s the best way to describe it,” Deepti explains to Isabelle as they eat their blueberry pancakes and homemade maple syrup and drink their delicious freshly roasted free-trade coffee. “Sort of the antidote to fast food.”

The weather is perfectly sweet — in the high sixties, with a faint breeze carrying the scent of the bay. Somehow Deepti, sitting across the table in her rose-colored sari, fits into the landscape here. In college, in Los Angeles, she always looked a bit exotic, but not in the eclectic mix that is Berkeley.

Isabelle turns to see, up and down Shattuck Avenue, scores of people eating, talking, idling, with nowhere pressing to go. She realizes suddenly, with a deep sigh, that she hasn’t felt this relaxed all summer.

“Yes,” Deepti says, acknowledging the relief in Isabelle’s sigh, “the whole Bay Area, there’s something gentle about it.”

“Do people really live like this?” Isabelle asks, watching parents leisurely stroll the sidewalks with chubby-cheeked children riding high on their shoulders in baby backpacks. On the patio of the café across the street college students are grouped together at a round table, talking, endlessly discussing, and laughing, and ordering more coffee. At the opposite corner barefoot children splash in a shallow fountain as their mothers sit on the tiled edge and gossip. No one seems to have a sense of urgency. “Where are all the unhappy people?”

Deepti smiles. “All around you.”

Isabelle shakes her head. “It doesn’t seem like it.” Then she has to tell Deepti about her summer, even though the telling brings angst into this sanguine day. “My father and I took the train into the city every morning, and there usually wasn’t any air conditioning, even though there was supposed to be, so the train was a sauna, and my father had this campaign going to spend each morning commute unburdening himself about twenty-two years of misspent life. Every morning. All summer. Every day added up to Look how miserable I am .”

“No,” Deepti says, dismayed. She can’t imagine her own father ever complaining, let alone unburdening himself. “Once my father broke his foot tripping on a concrete step and he never said a word about it. Just used a cane and limped around the house until it finally healed.”

“One of his revelations was that he made a mistake marrying my mother.”

Deepti nods. She’s not surprised. She remembers graduation. “And yet they stay together, even though in America it’s so easy to get a divorce.”

“I know. It’s their addiction, I think. Their unhappiness.”

“People expect too much of marriage here.”

“To be happy together?”

“Contentment comes — if your expectations are in the right place.”

“Oh, Deepti, that’s so Indian of you.”

And Deepti laughs. “But I am Indian.”

“Don’t you want love?”

And here Deepti blushes.

Isabelle sees it immediately. “What? What is it?” And then she knows. “You met someone!”

“That’s all. I met someone.”

“And?”

“And we’re going to go watch him play soccer after we finish breakfast.”

“Oh, good.”

“We can walk there. It’s just down Shattuck at Bancroft.”

“See,” Isabelle insists, “we don’t have to cram ourselves into stifling public transportation. We can just stroll like all these other happy people.”

Deepti smiles at her. “He’s a resident in emergency medicine, and his name is Sadhil. It means ‘perfect.’ ” And here Deepti giggles.

Isabelle stares at her openmouthed — Deepti giggling? “I can’t wait.”

But it is Casey Isabelle sees as soon as she and Deepti are seated on the sun-warmed bleachers of Goldman Field, part of the university campus. Casey kicking the ball so hard it is a missile into the net. A goal!

And then he is racing up the field, arms streaming straight out behind him as if he were a 747 about to launch itself airborne. And then he is jumping, screaming in triumph, his fist in the air, his teammates mobbing and embracing him. Years later Isabelle understands the irony in her first sighting of Casey, but at the time all she sees is golden limbs, streaming blond hair, and joy. Unfettered, unquenchable joy! It is thrilling.

“What just happened?” Isabelle asks Deepti without taking her eyes off the field.

“Casey made a goal.”

“You know him?”

“He’s on Sadhil’s team.”

“Casey.” Isabelle tries out the name and that’s all it takes: she is lost.

The rest of the game is a blur to Isabelle, because she doesn’t understand a thing about soccer and because her eyes never leave Casey’s long, tanned body as he runs and runs and attempts another goal, which is blocked, and runs some more. Doesn’t he ever get tired? He doesn’t.

Deepti points out Sadhil, dark and lean, standing in front of the other large net. He’s the goalie for their side, Deepti explains, and his job is to keep the other team’s ball from going into the net. Even from this distance, Isabelle can tell how intense he is, how focused on his task, and she wants none of it. Her eyes won’t stay on him. She wants the speed, the motion, the abandon of Casey as he flies up and down the grass field in endless pursuit of the ball.

When the game is over and the spectators mingle with the players, Deepti leads her to the sidelines to meet the very serious Sadhil. His team has lost, 2–1, and as the goalie, Sadhil holds himself responsible for those two points.

“You mustn’t,” Deepti tells him. “No one, not even a professional soccer player, could have blocked those shots.”

Sadhil tilts his head toward Isabelle and says with a smile, “Your friend is a bit biased, I think.”

And Deepti blushes again and Isabelle feels she should be somewhere else. These two people want to talk only to each other, and then she spots him, Casey, at the end of the field, next to the net. He has an arm around a teammate’s shoulders. They’re laughing, the game over, the loss absorbed, it seems. And then she watches Casey grab his duffel bag, sling it over his shoulder, and begin to walk across the grass toward the Bancroft Avenue exit.

He’s leaving! No! Not yet! And Isabelle acts without even a split second of contemplation. All she knows is that if Casey reaches the street, he is lost for good. And so she sprints across the grass, feeling the spongy thickness beneath her sandals, and then the dry, hard cinder of the running track that rims the field. Oh, no, he’s too far ahead of her. She won’t reach him before he walks through the gate and is gone forever.