Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“I’m not flailing.”

“All right, but you’re not thinking clearly, either, and you’re too far away for me to figure it out for you. So come home tomorrow the way you planned and then we’ll see.”

“No,” said simply again, without anger but also without equivocation. Her refusal hangs in the empty air between them. Then: “If it’s too much trouble to send my clothes, forget it.”

Her mother’s voice is low and hard-edged. “I want to see you get off that plane at JFK tomorrow afternoon, Isabelle, do you hear me? And if you don’t, don’t bother to come home later.”

“Ruth!” Eli is frankly shocked. “Your mother doesn’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean or don’t mean.”

“It sounds like you’re telling your daughter she’s not welcome to come home.”

“She can come home tomorrow the way she’s supposed to.”

“But you’re threatening her.”

“Your poor choice of words, Eli, not mine.”

And Isabelle has disappeared off the radar screen again. Eli and Ruth are at it, and Isabelle knows the trajectory of this fight will be like all the others. Quietly — she’s not sure they’ve heard her — she says, “I’ll be in touch.” And she hangs up.

Her hands are shaking, but she is proud of herself. She didn’t give in — a victory! Now the harder call: Nate.

She’s ashamed of herself; that’s what makes the call to Nate so much more difficult. Ashamed that she let this relationship continue on well past the time she wanted to be in it. Ashamed that it became a habit, a sort of annoying habit which was more trouble to stop than to continue. In that thoughtlessness, she understands now, she gave false hope. And the time has come: she’s going to have to pay the price of her own cowardice.

Nate is disbelieving. Her precipitous move across the country is so unlike the Isabelle he’s known since high school that he feels like he’s talking to a stranger.

“You’re doing what?” is the first thing he says after she tells him she’s staying in Berkeley.

“Staying here. Not coming home — well, not coming back to Long Island.”

“But you said you were coming down to D.C.”

“No, Nate, you said I should come down. I never said I would.”

There’s silence on the line.

“You do that a lot. You assume what you want is what I want.”

More silence. She can almost hear his brain twisting itself into knots trying to figure out what she is telling him.

“You’re where you should be — in law school. And I’m where I should be — the Bay Area. And we should be separate.”

She waits. He doesn’t say anything.

“It’s better.”

“How is that better?” comes out of a strangled voice. “It’s not better, Isabelle, it’s not what we planned at all. It’s a curveball thrown into the works and it fucks up everything.”

“Your plans, you mean.”

“Yes, my plans. Our plans.”

“No, Nate, my plan is to stay right here.”

They go round and round with this until finally Nate is screaming at her that the only explanation is that she’s gone nuts! They made plans. They’re practically engaged.

“No, we’re not, Nate. I never said I’d marry you.”

“You never said you wouldn’t!”

“I’m saying it now.”

And there’s an intake of breath, as if suddenly he believes her, as if suddenly his whole world tilts on its axis.

“Why are you doing this to me?” It’s a whine.

“You’ll be better off. I promise you, Nate, in the long run, you will.”

“Don’t you condescend to me!”

“I’m sorry, Nate.” And she is. Sorry for how long it took her. Sorry for letting him think what he wanted to think. Sorry for disrupting his plans. But not sorry for making the call. She puts the receiver gently back onto the phone and stares across the treetops to the bay and the city on the hills. And then it all hits her — a sharp slice of fear that cuts through her happiness. What has she done? Thrown away everything that kept her steady and anchored. And unhappy and dull, she reminds herself, but still her anxiety grows. Can she do this? Does she have the courage to grasp and hold what her heart wants?

Daniel. She’ll e-mail Daniel. He saw her as a person with possibilities. He’ll tell her she has a future. Somehow. Somewhere. Daniel.

Daniel Jablonski gets Isabelle’s e-mail as he’s packing up his campus office. Over the summer the board of trustees ousted John Liggins. The word around campus was that he should have spent as much time fund-raising as he did raising the diversity profile of the school. With Liggins’s departure came Daniel’s notice that the Visiting Scholars’ Program was being terminated. He was out of a job. And, not inconsequentially, a house.

“But where are we going to live?” Stefan’s voice spirals upward into a twirl of anxiety. He has thrown in his lot with his father, and now it looks like they are being tossed out onto the street.

Daniel shrugs. This latest development has come as a complete surprise. Just getting through each day takes all of Daniel’s concentration. Contemplating the future isn’t even on his radar screen.

“You can always go back and live with your mother. All you have to do is get a job.”

“That’s not so easy! Why do you think that’s easy?”

“Millions of people do it every day, Stefan,” Daniel says reasonably, and that only ratchets up his son’s panic.

“And maybe I don’t want to go live with Mom! Maybe that’s like…going back! Maybe I want to live with you!” Stefan spits these words at Daniel as they stand in the kitchen, his angry tone almost managing to eclipse the tender sentiment: It’s you I want.

Daniel is struck once again by evidence of the anger running hard and deep beneath his son’s seemingly benign exterior. Stefan will go weeks barely speaking, hardly interacting, treating Daniel as if he were an annoying impediment, and then suddenly, boom! An explosion of feeling, usually anger. It’s like living in the middle of the siege of Sarajevo.

“You can stay with me,” Daniel says calmly, “wherever I end up.”

“But where?”

“I don’t know right now, Stefan.”

“But you have to! I don’t want to end up in, like, a homeless shelter!”

“Really? My guess is even homeless people don’t want to end up in a homeless shelter.”

“Dad!” is fairly screamed at Daniel.

And then Daniel smiles, a small grin that lets Stefan know he is playing with him just a little, and it defuses the anger instead of escalating it.

“Okay,” Stefan says, “I get it. Calm down.”

“If we’re lucky, I might just be able to find us somewhere to live.”

But first Daniel has to pack up his campus office. He’s been putting it off — that walk to campus — and Maintenance and Housekeeping has been reminding him daily, with less and less civility, of his responsibility to “vacate the premises.”

Because he never put any effort into making his office comfortable or even serviceable, the packing up takes no time. A few books, the handful of acceptable pages of his woeful novel, his computer. It’s as he opens his e-mail that he sees Isabelle’s note, sent the day before.

Daniel,

I’ve done something completely out of character…

A good start, Daniel thinks as he sits down to read the rest. She needs to shake up her life. Maybe she has.

I went to visit my friend Deepti in the Bay Area, and I met a friend of her boyfriend’s and decided to stay here and not go back to Long Island. I’ve known him for a week.

Daniel leans back in his desk chair and contemplates these last two sentences. He doesn’t like them, but he doesn’t know exactly why. Perhaps he’s being parental, he tells himself, not happy that she’s made such a precipitous decision based on a few days. As for the spark of jealousy fueling his disquiet, Daniel doesn’t move in that direction.