Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

It’s beyond unbearable, but she has to stay in his office as he reads the pages, so she begins to walk around it. Her back to him, she pretends interest in the books in his bookshelves, the view outside his window.

It’s only twelve pages, but he takes forever to read them. Maybe he’s reading them more than once. Isabelle doesn’t know, because she’s consciously not looking at him. Finally, her curiosity gets intolerable and she finds herself turning around.

The pages are on his desk. As he finishes one, he carefully picks it up, turns it over, and places it in another pile. His concentration is total. She could disrobe and he wouldn’t even see her. Now why did I even think about that? Isabelle asks herself, mortified and already blushing at her own thoughts.

She sits on the couch, in her place at the corner nearest his desk, hunched over her drawn-up knees as she was the first day, and watches him read her work. She can’t help it. She watches. It’s excruciating.

Daniel is focused so intently on the pages that he doesn’t even feel her eyes on him. At long last, he takes the last page, picks it up and lays it on the pile of read pages, and looks up at her.

“I like what she says to the hitchhiker when he gets into her car.” And here Daniel picks up page 4, which he’s dog-eared, and reads from it: “ ‘You talk to me while I’m driving, I’ll stop the fucking car. Middle of traffic. On the highway. I don’t care.’ ”

And Isabelle finds she can breathe again. “It’s Melanie being tough.”

“I see that, but it’s just over the top enough for me to understand she’s working herself up to it. She’s talking like some stiff from New Jersey, so she’s probably scared of this kid.”

“Yes, she is! You got that?”

“And she wants to set the dynamic—‘You better watch your ass with me.’ ”

“She behaves the opposite of what she’s feeling.”

Daniel nods. He knows something about that. “You let us see that. That’s good.”

That’s good, he said. What I wrote is good. Isabelle smiles and leans back, puts the soles of her feet on the floor, unclenches her hands and lays one on the armrest of the sofa. Something has loosened within her. He’s validated her instincts — how amazing is that!

Daniel pushes away from his desk, opens a lower drawer with his foot, and props both feet on it. They look at each other. There’s a lull, but the tension has drained from the room and each can take a deeper breath. This is going to work. They’ve both decided at the same time without a word being spoken about it.

After watching her in silence, Daniel finally speaks. “No boots today?”

Isabelle looks down at her Nike sneakers and says the first thing that pops into her head. “Today I was beyond help. Even my boots wouldn’t have made me feel like an equal.” And then she looks directly at him. “Today I was throwing myself on your mercy.”

“And how did I do?”

“You surprised me,” Isabelle says with a smile, and Daniel grins back at her, appreciating this tall, lanky girl who has filled his office with something like a sensation of pleasure long missing from his life.

—

“TELL ME MORE ABOUT MELANIE,” Daniel says when Isabelle walks into his office the next Tuesday. He doesn’t read the pages she hands him, the rest of Chapter One. He lays them on his surprisingly neat desk, pushes back in his rolling desk chair, thumps his feet onto his opened drawer, laces his fingers behind his head, and waits.

“Aren’t you going to read the pages?”

“Not right now. Now I want you to talk.”

Isabelle wasn’t prepared for this. Is that the point? she wonders. Has he calculated a way to catch her off guard?

“She grew up with a lot of expectations.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the usual.”

“I don’t know ‘the usual.’ My expectations, I guarantee you, weren’t yours.”

Isabelle finds her spot on the couch, moves a basketball out of the way so she can sit down. She wants to ask him what his expectations were, but she’s not sure that’s allowed. In a rush of courage she does it anyway. “What were yours?”

And he answers without hesitation. “That I follow my father and older brother into the trades. They were ironworkers. Do you know what that is?”

Isabelle shakes her head.

“Every bridge you see, every skyscraper, the skeleton was forged by ironworkers. Men who don’t need to be especially smart, but they sure have to have a strong back and be built like an ox.” Daniel looks at his own large body, now gone to flab, and shakes his head. “Once I fit the bill.”

“And so you did that?”

“Anything but. I loaded cargo onto and off the ships on Lake Erie. I painted houses. I hung drywall. None of that much better than being an ironworker, but at least I could say it was my choice.” Daniel shakes his head at his own youthful naïveté. “Even though it wasn’t, of course. No skills, no choices.”

“Sometimes you can have skills and it can still seem like there are no choices.”

“We’re back to the expectations again.”

“Yes. The expectations Melanie had laid on her made her rob houses.”

Daniel laughs out loud, a big whooping laugh. He’s delighted at her complete lapse in logic. “You’d better explain yourself.”

“That doesn’t make sense to you?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Isabelle pushes herself off the couch and begins to walk around Daniel’s office. Sometimes she needs to move to think. Daniel watches her, silent. He knows how to do that. The student gossip on that score was right — sometimes he lets an entire hour go by without speaking.

Today Isabelle is wearing a Chandler College hoodie zipped up over a T-shirt. The school colors are orange and black, and Daniel has never been able to get over the perception that the whole campus is perpetually celebrating Halloween. She pulls the hood over her head, encasing herself in black cotton knit and hiding her face. She needs to shut him out to be able to organize her thoughts.

“It’s different being female,” she begins. “You’ve got society’s expectations of you, which are really rigid, and your parents’ expectations, which can be idiosyncratic, but still, and sometimes the only way to break through those two straitjackets is to burst out of them, do something so dramatic that there’s no going back. That’s what Melanie does. She doesn’t want to become the person everyone else sees.”

“Which is?”

“Oh, I don’t know — good, kind, responsible, predictable…boring.”

“Nothing worse than boring.” Is he teasing her gently? She thinks so but doesn’t know him well enough to be sure.

She stops her pacing and faces him. “Melanie wants to shock everyone into backing off.”

“So that she can be…what?”

“Free,” jumps out of Isabelle’s mouth.

“Being an outlaw makes her free?”

“She chooses it.”

“No,” Daniel says slowly, “she is acting in reaction to, just the way I ended up loading ships. It’s not a free choice, a choice that comes from the core of a person.”

“Like?”

“Like writing.”

“Oh.”

He watches her face as she attempts to sort through what they’ve just said. Such an easy read, all the emotions flitting across her face in rapid succession. He’s sure she has no idea.

“Writing is a sort of freedom?” she asks finally, tentatively.

“At its best, it can be.”

And there’s silence. What they’ve just said feels so intimate that Isabelle doesn’t know how to proceed. How do you get there? she longs to ask but can’t. How do you get to be free?

“Melanie robs houses for the same reason some people join the Peace Corps.” She expects Daniel to laugh again at her logic, but he doesn’t.