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COMING JUNE 26!
A short story by Robyn Schneider
John never asked her what it was like. All this time she waited for the question, ready to cram
the answer down his throat, smile, and inquire if the aftertaste really was like Drakkar Noir like
everyone said. But he never asked. And the truth was that she never thought he would. But she
was ready, nonetheless.
They grew up together, John and Anne. Not quite next door, or even across the street, but in
the same suburban school district, bike riding distance. Past the Montessori with its blue and
red wood handball courts, beyond the man-made lake where no one took boats out from the
rental shed, left at the mansions and look for the gold BMW parked in the circular drive. From
Anne’s house to John’s. They were so sure of the way, by the time they turned ten, that they
could ride to each other’s houses blindfolded, eyes closed, hair undulating in the Santa Ana
winds. But they were next door neighbors once, and they still felt it, the tin cans knotted with
kite string that kept them together. Back before John’s father started his own real estate
company and neither family belonged to the Back Bay Country Club.
When Anne turned five, John’s family traded a two car garage for a circular drive, a rec room
for a second guest bedroom, a tin can for a walkie talkie, and later a cell phone.
As children, they looked like twins.
“Which of you is older?” ladies in the Gelsons would ask.
“He is.” Anne would blush. “By three months.”
Those chestnut curls, thin faces, vanilla ice cream skin that would not tan. His eyes green, her
eyes hazel.
When Anne and John were ten, their parents, old friends, joined Back Bay. The two of them
spent a whole summer watching their mothers play tennis in Prince all whites, their fathers
play rounds of golf in Callaway shirts and caps.
On the day Anne’s mother told John’s mother about her nose job, Anne and John sat in the
grass by the clubhouse pulling up blades of manicured grass and making them vibrate
between their lips like harmonica combs.
“Do you ever wonder what its like in the snow?” Anne asked.
“Not hot.” John smiled and threw a handful of grass at her. “Cold, maybe?”
“Shut up, Gats. I mean it.”
“No, you mean do I ever wonder what its like on the East Coast?”
“That too. Because I went to visit my cousins in Florida and the grocery stores all had different
names. The drug stores too. Even the gas stations.”
“That’s crazy, Daisy.”
They had names for each other, Gatsby and Daisy, from a movie they watched in black and
white during a rainy day the year before. The film was sad, and they didn’t understand it all,
but the names meant something exotic to them. More exotic than John and Anne.
“I suppose,” John said slowly, “that the children there are like us. That they watch old movies
and know how to set a table and like to read old books.”
“I want to move there,” Anne pouted. “I can’t stand it here any longer.”
John scooted up across from her on the grass, Indian-style, his knees brushing hers.
“Me neither. Well go together, huh? One day well ride our bikes and we won’t stop until we
reach the Atlantic.”
“But how will we find our way home again?”
“Daisy, that’s the point. To go East and never come back to California.”
Jorge the gardener took his secondhand Datsun across the border from Baja every day to mow
lawns in the town where Anne and John lived. He saw the town as pristine rows of matching
houses, manicured center dividers with jacaranda blossoms in the spring, and more churches
than a town could ever need. The churches ran coupons in the town paper, advertising
discounts to choose their pew, specials to step right up and receive the body of Christ.
Shalom havereeeeeeem shalom havereeeeeeeeeem shalooooooom shalooooom, Jorge
would hear every Sunday as he mowed the lawn outside Anne’s bedroom window. He thought
this was a battle cry, a mournful sound, a keening wail, but it was really two tone-deaf children
trying out a song they’d heard in a black and white movie, while all the other houses emptied
out for church.
Anne and John never went to church. Their families were not religious, were no religion, and
in that town, where church was the social clique that dictated social niceties, the two children
were left out. They belonged to their own sect of Romanticism.
When Anne and John started middle school together, they did not think anything would be
different. They could wander out back by the ranch poplar trees in the schoolyard and read
books to each other out loud, whispering in silly accents, daring each other to laugh. But
things changed.
The girls noticed John, his curls a deep copper brown, his smile dimpled and sly. He was
sensitive. Anne, with her non-blonde locks, her backpack full of musty old books, was branded
odd. He was popular, and she sat at a table with the quiet Asian girls who spoke no English
and brought hand-rolled sushi and sweet exotic candies in Hello Kitty pink sacks.
“Why dont you ever talk to me in school?”
“You know how it is, Daisy.”
“But you dont mean it, right?”
“Do we hafta talk about this now? Im meeting some people at the movies.”
“What are you seeing?”
“I dunno. Adam Sandler something.”
She stopped biking over to his house. An entire year, and she read every book on her parents
shelves, even the travel guide to Hawaii and her mothers Lladro coffee table book.
Eighth grade, Anne convinced her father, whose salary tripled when the company he
managed went public, to buy her the clothing that would make the other kids like her. She
wore her hair blow dried sleek, a swishy ponytail tied with pastel ribbons. Bought her jeans and
tops at Armani, her belts and shoes at Ferragamo. Put on the $15 lip gloss from Sephora,
carried it to school in a purse from Bloomingdales.
The popular girls noticed. Little blonde Lutheran soccer players said hi to her in the halls,
invited her to lunch.
“Do you know John?” Popular Sara (not Sarah L, who was B list on a good hair day) asked
Anne.
“Yeah, I do,” Anne said, sitting down next to her best friend, her only friend at the coveted A
list table, her Ferragamo belt rubbing against his Gucci one. They were back like they had
never been apart. Called each other Franny and Zooey now, traded paperbacks like playing
cards, talked about their childhood like they weren’t only thirteen.
Each year, their middle school sent two students to the district competition for History Day, a
historically-based performance competition that John convinced Annie would get them into
Brown. She did Japanese internment and he did Andrew Carnegie. They worked side by side
in the town library for weeks, sharing sticky bags of Sour Punch Kids. Then another boy
entered the competition, sat beside them with books about Tammany Hall. The school sent
him and Anne to district.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said.
“Forget it.”
“You’re the one who wanted to do it anyway. It isn’t fair. I’m not going without you.”
“We can’t always go everywhere together, Anne. We’re not Mary Kate and freaking Ashley.”
Anne won district and went to state. When she came back with a third place trophy to put in
the school case, John didn’t congratulate her.
“Do you remember when we wanted to bike to the Atlantic?” she asked him one day after
school, as they wheeled their bikes past the lake and someone had a paddle boat out there, in
the middle of the water, floating.
“We were ten, Anne. Hey, lookit. The old man and the sea.”
“But do you remember?”
“I wouldn’t have said that we were ten if I didn’t remember.”
“So are we going to?”
“I dont know. Hey, can I borrow your copy of Animal Farm?”
“I dont know.”
Anne jumped on her bike and pedaled away, her butt hovering above the seat, her hair
straight as a bookend. She wished she had rearview mirrors so she could watch John get
smaller and smaller, farther and farther away, standing there by the lake that was nothing like
the old man and the sea.
Popular Sara’s brother came home from college on Spring Break, came home because he
couldn’t afford the trip to Puerto Vallarta with his frat buddies. He drove the eighth grade A-list
to the beach one day, piled in the back of his pickup truck.
Anne took off her denim shorts and tank top, and for the first time John noticed what it meant
when a girl was fourteen, when her shoulders curved into tiny breasts and her hips were fluted
like a champagne glass, when her wet bathing suit bottom outlined the trench between her
buttocks. As her hair dried full of salt water, it curled wildly and John wondered when this had
happened, when Anne had become beautiful.
They kissed by the tidepools, as she held a tiny crab cupped in her hands and laughed,
chasing John barefoot over the sharp, wet rocks, pretending she was going to stick it down his
Prada swim trunks. She dropped the crab in surprise as his lips met hers, brushed them softly,
then pushed harder, his tongue peeking out from between his lips and pressing against her
closed smile, and both of them thought it was a French kiss even though she never opened her
mouth because she didn’t know she was supposed to.
John pulled away and cursed loudly, kicking the tiny crab off his big toe, where it was clinging
to him. They watched a bead of blood form on the side of his nail, and he limped away and
Anne spent the rest of the weekend smiling like she had just read the best book of her life.
At school, on Monday, he came up behind her and said, “I’m moving.”
“But your parents never said you were going anywhere.”
“They aren’t. I am.”
“You’re fourteen. You can’t just move away.”
“I’m going to boarding school.”
“Why?”
“Think of it, Anne! Living with hundreds of other kids, no parents, everyone’s smart like us.
When we get to Brown, well go with half our classmates, and we can see snow fall down and
go to those crazy grocery stores you used to talk about.”
“I’ll ask my parents.”
But she knew what they would say, could read them like she’d read all those books on their
shelves.
“I’m sorry, Annie, but you’re too young to go away from home.”
“But John will be there.”
“And John will be here during his breaks.”
Break. The word echoed in Anne’s head until school let out for the summer. John was breaking
what the two of them had, shattering their lives all because he had to go east and leave
California behind before he was old enough to drive. High school loomed, a menacing
shadow at the end of a hot, sticky summer, whose cool shade would be sat in alone, for four
years.
John knew what he wanted, and he also knew California was holding him back. He wasn’t
going to find bluebloods and regattas in a world of surfers and Berkeley hippies. East. Only the
Dharma Bums went west. Only the revolutionaries and Oregon trailblazers. John would go
East, where New England spires gleamed, where Rockefellers and Carnegies and Vanderbilts
werent just names in History Day presentations, but classmates and their parents.
How could Anne not see? How could she leave him to make this journey on his own? How
could she make him choose between the future he had always wanted, and the girl he had
never known he could want?
At first, when Anne would call, John was glad, and he would tell her about his school friends,
his roommate who was a De Carte, of the De Carte diamond family.
“I mean, we have a plasma screen TV in the room.”
“So what?”
“Whaddaya mean, so what? I just thought you’d care.”
“Sorry, Zooey, I do care. I’m really tired, that’s all. I had to stay up late last night writing a
paper.”
I always stay up late, but not to do homework.”
He spit that word across three thousand miles, that dirty bum of a word, traveling west to hit
Anne’s ear at just the right speed and intonation to make tears form in her eyes. But you cant
hear tears over the phone.
Why did they bother to talk anymore? After two months, Anne couldn’t remember. She didn’t
want to dial Jonathan, as he now asked to be called, to speak with a stranger who only
sometimes reminded her of the little boy who played at being Gatsby on the grass of their
parents country club. She was bookish again, letting her hair curl like the waterlogged edges
of a favorite paperback. So much time to do homework, even at lunch, where she snuck a
sandwich into the library and sat with the Asian girls from seventh grade, who now spoke
English.
Anne was not there when Jonathan lit up his first bong in the bathroom of a Dalton, using
matches from a hip restaurant in the Hamptons. She did not see his first F on an assignment,
his first restricted free time, the first girl who kissed him like a Frenchwoman in Australia: down
under.
Jonathan’s parents hardly came to the club any more. Once, when Anne’s mother saw
Jonathan’s mother in Gelsons market, Jonathan’s mother quickly maneuvered her cart in the
other direction.
From that unintentional snub—Jonathan’s mother had forgotten to buy pecans--the two
families broke apart, each wife telling each husband a different outrageous story as to why it
was no longer permissible to be seen in public with those people.
Anne did not kid herself that John would leave Jonathan behind at boarding school and come
west, put on a pair of flip-flops, fold down his collar, and watch Casablanca with her in his
parents bed, splitting a bag of Sour Punch Kids. She was not unhappy, just alone, in that
peculiarly uncomfortable state of solitude where someone else is not simply absent, but
missing. No, not missing, lost. John, her Gatsby and Zooey, her unidentical twin, was gone.
Jonathan could not believe he had ever been so childish. All those years spent with a hot
chick like Anne and no action, no bragging rights for him to have in the dorm. Holidays were
the worst, coming home to his parents big, empty house, a new maid’s name to forget every
time, another careless ding in the door of Mom’s BMW. He went home with Kip De Carte, of
the Greenwich De Cartes, after the first few vacations from hell.
As Anne applied to college, she thought about going east, and what she would do once she
got there. It was time, she knew, to leave California, to put away her copy of Gatsby and save
her graduation tassel on the mirror of her Jetta, crank down the windows and let her hand glide
out the window of her car on the 405, a sine wave, waving goodbye to the Santa Ana winds.
She was not afraid to merge, afraid of freeways or Los Angeles, but she was afraid of driving
herself from the small town where she grew up and awakening one morning as someone else,
some other girl.
Wasn’t that what John had done? Or had he simply grown up? Would he have become
Jonathan without boarding school, or boating, or vineyards?
The day the envelope came for Anne, Jonathan got one, too. Triumphantly, he held that
heavy, glossy package in his hands, wondering what Brown would be like in the Fall, and
briefly wondering if a girl he used to know would be waiting for him.
Three hours later, Anne clutched her own flimsy, light envelope and tried not to cry. She
wondered what NYU would be like in the fall, and if a boy she used to know would be waiting
and wondering why he couldnt find her in Providence.
The city gleamed and leered at her, beckoning with fingers crooked into outer burroughs.
Anne lost herself to the movement, the hustle, and hurried along with the rest of them. She felt
the downtown vibe deep within her, the pulse of street life and Metrocards and karaoke at St.
Marks. Between lectures, she thrifted for new clothes, haunted Alphabet City, learned to love
Gray’s Papaya and scorn street vendors. But was she happy?
There were friends who thought so. Hipster boys in low-slung jeans, ironically detached from
the uptown culture and fully comfortable in their homosexuality. Pink haired girls who smoked
Djarums on bar stools, the lights catching their noserings. Anne was a lot of things to these
people, but mostly she was a sweet kid, and it infuriated her. She had spent her entire life
feeling older and more mature than her classmates, and now she was a virgin who didn’t toke
up.
When had the shift happened? And where were those people she’d waited so long to meet?
Those kids who knew how to set a formal dinner table and preferred black and white movies
over blockbusters, secondhand paperbacks to The Da Vinci Code? She had not found them
after all. But the one thing she had not found, that she had been expecting to have returned
to her, like an overdue library book, was John.
Certainly he liked college--what kind of a question was that? Sometimes he didn't bother
sobering up for class, just boozed until 5AM, smoked cigarettes with his old boarding school
buddies, and cruised into the lecture hall so bombed that he couldn't have answered a
question if his scholarship depended on it.
His scholarship. Sometimes Jonathan worried he was on the edge of something big, about to
be pushed from behind, and he was powerless to stop himself from wanting to be pushed.
When had his father's real estate business started doing poorly? He couldn't remember. God,
had he ever been a child? It seemed to Jonathan that he had always been an outsider trying
to fit in on the East Coast, wanting to be a member of an elite little club that didn't exist, but
sometimes he could convince himself it did. After all, wasn’t he a prep school boy? Part of the
old boy network? Friends with Daltons and De Cartes, a St. Anthony Hall man, a member of
the Ivy League?
Or was all of it just smoke and mirrors, and when the smoke cleared and the fog machine was
unplugged, would he be standing there with an entire transcript of Pass/Fails and two Porsche
Carreras worth of student loans?
He wanted to ignore it all, but how could he? Women, the slutty Connecticut heiresses with
Frette sheets on their dorm bunk beds, traced him with their eyes until all that was between
them was a thousand dollar sheet as thin as tracing paper.
We must cultivate our garden, Voltaire said, and Jonathan almost believed it. But he knew
that what he really needed to cultivate was himself.
Anne worked in library services because she liked the quiet of the reading room, a concentric
circle of calm on the frantic island of Manhattan. She did not bother turning over her papers
anymore, or opening her blue books the class after the midterm. There was a reason her name
started with an A. But, God, was she bored with herself. The other day she pulled on a pair of
jeans and a T-shirt, and it struck her how she’d bought that particular shirt when she was in the
eighth grade, and how John might have seen her wearing it.
That same day, Anne decided to end her silent war with Facebook.com, to give in to peer
pressure and create an account. She uploaded a photo of herself, the funny one where she’s
dressed as a hobo for a Halloween party, carrying a cardboard sign scrawled with “Why lie? I’ll
buy a term paper.” And then, hands trembling, she typed in John’s name and searched for his
profile.
He was at Brown, she saw. In the photo, he lounged against a brick building, lighting a
cigarette in the wind, his hand a cupped fortification. It was the sort of picture, Anne thought,
that your girlfriend took of you so she could have it in a silver frame on her desk.
Jonathan almost didn't check his email that morning. He’d been out to dinner the night
before, in a clam baked Corvette, five guys in polo shirts, to a nice restaurant in town. His
roommate, still Kip De Carte, forgot his credit card, and had asked Jonathan to be a buddyroo
and get the damn check for once. Twenty-six bucks in his debit card, Jonathan hadn’t been
able to pay. Someone else covered it, but Jonathan knew the moment the waiter had
declined his Citibank card that it was over. He was exhausted from trying to be something he
didn’t even care about anymore.
Jonathan walked home from the restaurant, and when he stopped in a CVS for cigarettes, he
thought of a conversation hed had ten years ago, when he had tried to convince his
childhood friend that they’d ride their bikes straight across the country to the Atlantic and
never go back. Sitting on the grass at Back Bay, he hadn’t considered that hed ever want to go
home. But still in yesterday’s polo shirt, Jonathan logged into his email account and saw a
Facebook friends request from Anne at NYU. He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled through
the address book, and yes, her number was still in there.
Anne was sitting in Washington Square Park, a street vendor coffee flushing her hands pink as
she took small sips and watched the fluidity of the street traffic, the hum of a million different
conversations trapped between the six-floor walk ups and the rumble of taxi tires, meters
ticking, racing to midtown full of corporate types listening to their iPods.
She answered her phone without looking at the caller ID.
“Anne’s hot secretary,” she joked, expecting Tex to bitch about his latest failed audition for
Broadway.
“Daisy?” She hadn’t been called that name for such a long time that it sounded unfamiliar. A
wrong number call.
“Who is this?”
“Its John.”
“Gatsby? How are you?”
“I’m,” he trailed off and sighed.
“How’s Brown?”
“They changed the name, didn’t you hear? It’s called Blue now, because you can’t get in
unless you pass a blood test.”
He was more bitter than her unsweetened coffee, and this displeased Anne. She felt all those
years between them, between this, sagging, a heavy load of untold stories, unshared moments.
“I’m so glad you called,” she ventured, but she was surprised to discover that she didn’t really
mean it.
“You know what? I am, too. God, Daisy. I was so wrong to leave when I did.”
“It’s all right. Nevermind that.” Another lie.
“Daisy? Can you do me a favor? Can you just talk? About anything. I don’t care what. I just
really need to hear your voice.”
But she couldn’t just talk to him, seven years later. She didn’t even know who she was talking
to. All those years hurt. All those undialed phone calls, unsent birthday cards, unwritten
emails. She wanted him to ask her what it had been like to go through high school without her
best friend, but he didn’t want to know the answer. He just wanted to hear a voice from his past,
and she just wanted to have the guts to tell him he had been wrong, and wasn’t forgiven.
It was so hard, trying to become what they once were. Their particular brand of friendship had
ended with a first and last kiss, in the splendor of childhood. There was no place for a Gatsby
and Daisy in modern day Manhattan, or present day Providence. And even if there were, Anne
wouldn't have wanted to try anymore.
the answer down his throat, smile, and inquire if the aftertaste really was like Drakkar Noir like
everyone said. But he never asked. And the truth was that she never thought he would. But she
was ready, nonetheless.
They grew up together, John and Anne. Not quite next door, or even across the street, but in
the same suburban school district, bike riding distance. Past the Montessori with its blue and
red wood handball courts, beyond the man-made lake where no one took boats out from the
rental shed, left at the mansions and look for the gold BMW parked in the circular drive. From
Anne’s house to John’s. They were so sure of the way, by the time they turned ten, that they
could ride to each other’s houses blindfolded, eyes closed, hair undulating in the Santa Ana
winds. But they were next door neighbors once, and they still felt it, the tin cans knotted with
kite string that kept them together. Back before John’s father started his own real estate
company and neither family belonged to the Back Bay Country Club.
When Anne turned five, John’s family traded a two car garage for a circular drive, a rec room
for a second guest bedroom, a tin can for a walkie talkie, and later a cell phone.
As children, they looked like twins.
“Which of you is older?” ladies in the Gelsons would ask.
“He is.” Anne would blush. “By three months.”
Those chestnut curls, thin faces, vanilla ice cream skin that would not tan. His eyes green, her
eyes hazel.
When Anne and John were ten, their parents, old friends, joined Back Bay. The two of them
spent a whole summer watching their mothers play tennis in Prince all whites, their fathers
play rounds of golf in Callaway shirts and caps.
On the day Anne’s mother told John’s mother about her nose job, Anne and John sat in the
grass by the clubhouse pulling up blades of manicured grass and making them vibrate
between their lips like harmonica combs.
“Do you ever wonder what its like in the snow?” Anne asked.
“Not hot.” John smiled and threw a handful of grass at her. “Cold, maybe?”
“Shut up, Gats. I mean it.”
“No, you mean do I ever wonder what its like on the East Coast?”
“That too. Because I went to visit my cousins in Florida and the grocery stores all had different
names. The drug stores too. Even the gas stations.”
“That’s crazy, Daisy.”
They had names for each other, Gatsby and Daisy, from a movie they watched in black and
white during a rainy day the year before. The film was sad, and they didn’t understand it all,
but the names meant something exotic to them. More exotic than John and Anne.
“I suppose,” John said slowly, “that the children there are like us. That they watch old movies
and know how to set a table and like to read old books.”
“I want to move there,” Anne pouted. “I can’t stand it here any longer.”
John scooted up across from her on the grass, Indian-style, his knees brushing hers.
“Me neither. Well go together, huh? One day well ride our bikes and we won’t stop until we
reach the Atlantic.”
“But how will we find our way home again?”
“Daisy, that’s the point. To go East and never come back to California.”
Jorge the gardener took his secondhand Datsun across the border from Baja every day to mow
lawns in the town where Anne and John lived. He saw the town as pristine rows of matching
houses, manicured center dividers with jacaranda blossoms in the spring, and more churches
than a town could ever need. The churches ran coupons in the town paper, advertising
discounts to choose their pew, specials to step right up and receive the body of Christ.
Shalom havereeeeeeem shalom havereeeeeeeeeem shalooooooom shalooooom, Jorge
would hear every Sunday as he mowed the lawn outside Anne’s bedroom window. He thought
this was a battle cry, a mournful sound, a keening wail, but it was really two tone-deaf children
trying out a song they’d heard in a black and white movie, while all the other houses emptied
out for church.
Anne and John never went to church. Their families were not religious, were no religion, and
in that town, where church was the social clique that dictated social niceties, the two children
were left out. They belonged to their own sect of Romanticism.
When Anne and John started middle school together, they did not think anything would be
different. They could wander out back by the ranch poplar trees in the schoolyard and read
books to each other out loud, whispering in silly accents, daring each other to laugh. But
things changed.
The girls noticed John, his curls a deep copper brown, his smile dimpled and sly. He was
sensitive. Anne, with her non-blonde locks, her backpack full of musty old books, was branded
odd. He was popular, and she sat at a table with the quiet Asian girls who spoke no English
and brought hand-rolled sushi and sweet exotic candies in Hello Kitty pink sacks.
“Why dont you ever talk to me in school?”
“You know how it is, Daisy.”
“But you dont mean it, right?”
“Do we hafta talk about this now? Im meeting some people at the movies.”
“What are you seeing?”
“I dunno. Adam Sandler something.”
She stopped biking over to his house. An entire year, and she read every book on her parents
shelves, even the travel guide to Hawaii and her mothers Lladro coffee table book.
Eighth grade, Anne convinced her father, whose salary tripled when the company he
managed went public, to buy her the clothing that would make the other kids like her. She
wore her hair blow dried sleek, a swishy ponytail tied with pastel ribbons. Bought her jeans and
tops at Armani, her belts and shoes at Ferragamo. Put on the $15 lip gloss from Sephora,
carried it to school in a purse from Bloomingdales.
The popular girls noticed. Little blonde Lutheran soccer players said hi to her in the halls,
invited her to lunch.
“Do you know John?” Popular Sara (not Sarah L, who was B list on a good hair day) asked
Anne.
“Yeah, I do,” Anne said, sitting down next to her best friend, her only friend at the coveted A
list table, her Ferragamo belt rubbing against his Gucci one. They were back like they had
never been apart. Called each other Franny and Zooey now, traded paperbacks like playing
cards, talked about their childhood like they weren’t only thirteen.
Each year, their middle school sent two students to the district competition for History Day, a
historically-based performance competition that John convinced Annie would get them into
Brown. She did Japanese internment and he did Andrew Carnegie. They worked side by side
in the town library for weeks, sharing sticky bags of Sour Punch Kids. Then another boy
entered the competition, sat beside them with books about Tammany Hall. The school sent
him and Anne to district.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said.
“Forget it.”
“You’re the one who wanted to do it anyway. It isn’t fair. I’m not going without you.”
“We can’t always go everywhere together, Anne. We’re not Mary Kate and freaking Ashley.”
Anne won district and went to state. When she came back with a third place trophy to put in
the school case, John didn’t congratulate her.
“Do you remember when we wanted to bike to the Atlantic?” she asked him one day after
school, as they wheeled their bikes past the lake and someone had a paddle boat out there, in
the middle of the water, floating.
“We were ten, Anne. Hey, lookit. The old man and the sea.”
“But do you remember?”
“I wouldn’t have said that we were ten if I didn’t remember.”
“So are we going to?”
“I dont know. Hey, can I borrow your copy of Animal Farm?”
“I dont know.”
Anne jumped on her bike and pedaled away, her butt hovering above the seat, her hair
straight as a bookend. She wished she had rearview mirrors so she could watch John get
smaller and smaller, farther and farther away, standing there by the lake that was nothing like
the old man and the sea.
Popular Sara’s brother came home from college on Spring Break, came home because he
couldn’t afford the trip to Puerto Vallarta with his frat buddies. He drove the eighth grade A-list
to the beach one day, piled in the back of his pickup truck.
Anne took off her denim shorts and tank top, and for the first time John noticed what it meant
when a girl was fourteen, when her shoulders curved into tiny breasts and her hips were fluted
like a champagne glass, when her wet bathing suit bottom outlined the trench between her
buttocks. As her hair dried full of salt water, it curled wildly and John wondered when this had
happened, when Anne had become beautiful.
They kissed by the tidepools, as she held a tiny crab cupped in her hands and laughed,
chasing John barefoot over the sharp, wet rocks, pretending she was going to stick it down his
Prada swim trunks. She dropped the crab in surprise as his lips met hers, brushed them softly,
then pushed harder, his tongue peeking out from between his lips and pressing against her
closed smile, and both of them thought it was a French kiss even though she never opened her
mouth because she didn’t know she was supposed to.
John pulled away and cursed loudly, kicking the tiny crab off his big toe, where it was clinging
to him. They watched a bead of blood form on the side of his nail, and he limped away and
Anne spent the rest of the weekend smiling like she had just read the best book of her life.
At school, on Monday, he came up behind her and said, “I’m moving.”
“But your parents never said you were going anywhere.”
“They aren’t. I am.”
“You’re fourteen. You can’t just move away.”
“I’m going to boarding school.”
“Why?”
“Think of it, Anne! Living with hundreds of other kids, no parents, everyone’s smart like us.
When we get to Brown, well go with half our classmates, and we can see snow fall down and
go to those crazy grocery stores you used to talk about.”
“I’ll ask my parents.”
But she knew what they would say, could read them like she’d read all those books on their
shelves.
“I’m sorry, Annie, but you’re too young to go away from home.”
“But John will be there.”
“And John will be here during his breaks.”
Break. The word echoed in Anne’s head until school let out for the summer. John was breaking
what the two of them had, shattering their lives all because he had to go east and leave
California behind before he was old enough to drive. High school loomed, a menacing
shadow at the end of a hot, sticky summer, whose cool shade would be sat in alone, for four
years.
John knew what he wanted, and he also knew California was holding him back. He wasn’t
going to find bluebloods and regattas in a world of surfers and Berkeley hippies. East. Only the
Dharma Bums went west. Only the revolutionaries and Oregon trailblazers. John would go
East, where New England spires gleamed, where Rockefellers and Carnegies and Vanderbilts
werent just names in History Day presentations, but classmates and their parents.
How could Anne not see? How could she leave him to make this journey on his own? How
could she make him choose between the future he had always wanted, and the girl he had
never known he could want?
At first, when Anne would call, John was glad, and he would tell her about his school friends,
his roommate who was a De Carte, of the De Carte diamond family.
“I mean, we have a plasma screen TV in the room.”
“So what?”
“Whaddaya mean, so what? I just thought you’d care.”
“Sorry, Zooey, I do care. I’m really tired, that’s all. I had to stay up late last night writing a
paper.”
I always stay up late, but not to do homework.”
He spit that word across three thousand miles, that dirty bum of a word, traveling west to hit
Anne’s ear at just the right speed and intonation to make tears form in her eyes. But you cant
hear tears over the phone.
Why did they bother to talk anymore? After two months, Anne couldn’t remember. She didn’t
want to dial Jonathan, as he now asked to be called, to speak with a stranger who only
sometimes reminded her of the little boy who played at being Gatsby on the grass of their
parents country club. She was bookish again, letting her hair curl like the waterlogged edges
of a favorite paperback. So much time to do homework, even at lunch, where she snuck a
sandwich into the library and sat with the Asian girls from seventh grade, who now spoke
English.
Anne was not there when Jonathan lit up his first bong in the bathroom of a Dalton, using
matches from a hip restaurant in the Hamptons. She did not see his first F on an assignment,
his first restricted free time, the first girl who kissed him like a Frenchwoman in Australia: down
under.
Jonathan’s parents hardly came to the club any more. Once, when Anne’s mother saw
Jonathan’s mother in Gelsons market, Jonathan’s mother quickly maneuvered her cart in the
other direction.
From that unintentional snub—Jonathan’s mother had forgotten to buy pecans--the two
families broke apart, each wife telling each husband a different outrageous story as to why it
was no longer permissible to be seen in public with those people.
Anne did not kid herself that John would leave Jonathan behind at boarding school and come
west, put on a pair of flip-flops, fold down his collar, and watch Casablanca with her in his
parents bed, splitting a bag of Sour Punch Kids. She was not unhappy, just alone, in that
peculiarly uncomfortable state of solitude where someone else is not simply absent, but
missing. No, not missing, lost. John, her Gatsby and Zooey, her unidentical twin, was gone.
Jonathan could not believe he had ever been so childish. All those years spent with a hot
chick like Anne and no action, no bragging rights for him to have in the dorm. Holidays were
the worst, coming home to his parents big, empty house, a new maid’s name to forget every
time, another careless ding in the door of Mom’s BMW. He went home with Kip De Carte, of
the Greenwich De Cartes, after the first few vacations from hell.
As Anne applied to college, she thought about going east, and what she would do once she
got there. It was time, she knew, to leave California, to put away her copy of Gatsby and save
her graduation tassel on the mirror of her Jetta, crank down the windows and let her hand glide
out the window of her car on the 405, a sine wave, waving goodbye to the Santa Ana winds.
She was not afraid to merge, afraid of freeways or Los Angeles, but she was afraid of driving
herself from the small town where she grew up and awakening one morning as someone else,
some other girl.
Wasn’t that what John had done? Or had he simply grown up? Would he have become
Jonathan without boarding school, or boating, or vineyards?
The day the envelope came for Anne, Jonathan got one, too. Triumphantly, he held that
heavy, glossy package in his hands, wondering what Brown would be like in the Fall, and
briefly wondering if a girl he used to know would be waiting for him.
Three hours later, Anne clutched her own flimsy, light envelope and tried not to cry. She
wondered what NYU would be like in the fall, and if a boy she used to know would be waiting
and wondering why he couldnt find her in Providence.
The city gleamed and leered at her, beckoning with fingers crooked into outer burroughs.
Anne lost herself to the movement, the hustle, and hurried along with the rest of them. She felt
the downtown vibe deep within her, the pulse of street life and Metrocards and karaoke at St.
Marks. Between lectures, she thrifted for new clothes, haunted Alphabet City, learned to love
Gray’s Papaya and scorn street vendors. But was she happy?
There were friends who thought so. Hipster boys in low-slung jeans, ironically detached from
the uptown culture and fully comfortable in their homosexuality. Pink haired girls who smoked
Djarums on bar stools, the lights catching their noserings. Anne was a lot of things to these
people, but mostly she was a sweet kid, and it infuriated her. She had spent her entire life
feeling older and more mature than her classmates, and now she was a virgin who didn’t toke
up.
When had the shift happened? And where were those people she’d waited so long to meet?
Those kids who knew how to set a formal dinner table and preferred black and white movies
over blockbusters, secondhand paperbacks to The Da Vinci Code? She had not found them
after all. But the one thing she had not found, that she had been expecting to have returned
to her, like an overdue library book, was John.
Certainly he liked college--what kind of a question was that? Sometimes he didn't bother
sobering up for class, just boozed until 5AM, smoked cigarettes with his old boarding school
buddies, and cruised into the lecture hall so bombed that he couldn't have answered a
question if his scholarship depended on it.
His scholarship. Sometimes Jonathan worried he was on the edge of something big, about to
be pushed from behind, and he was powerless to stop himself from wanting to be pushed.
When had his father's real estate business started doing poorly? He couldn't remember. God,
had he ever been a child? It seemed to Jonathan that he had always been an outsider trying
to fit in on the East Coast, wanting to be a member of an elite little club that didn't exist, but
sometimes he could convince himself it did. After all, wasn’t he a prep school boy? Part of the
old boy network? Friends with Daltons and De Cartes, a St. Anthony Hall man, a member of
the Ivy League?
Or was all of it just smoke and mirrors, and when the smoke cleared and the fog machine was
unplugged, would he be standing there with an entire transcript of Pass/Fails and two Porsche
Carreras worth of student loans?
He wanted to ignore it all, but how could he? Women, the slutty Connecticut heiresses with
Frette sheets on their dorm bunk beds, traced him with their eyes until all that was between
them was a thousand dollar sheet as thin as tracing paper.
We must cultivate our garden, Voltaire said, and Jonathan almost believed it. But he knew
that what he really needed to cultivate was himself.
Anne worked in library services because she liked the quiet of the reading room, a concentric
circle of calm on the frantic island of Manhattan. She did not bother turning over her papers
anymore, or opening her blue books the class after the midterm. There was a reason her name
started with an A. But, God, was she bored with herself. The other day she pulled on a pair of
jeans and a T-shirt, and it struck her how she’d bought that particular shirt when she was in the
eighth grade, and how John might have seen her wearing it.
That same day, Anne decided to end her silent war with Facebook.com, to give in to peer
pressure and create an account. She uploaded a photo of herself, the funny one where she’s
dressed as a hobo for a Halloween party, carrying a cardboard sign scrawled with “Why lie? I’ll
buy a term paper.” And then, hands trembling, she typed in John’s name and searched for his
profile.
He was at Brown, she saw. In the photo, he lounged against a brick building, lighting a
cigarette in the wind, his hand a cupped fortification. It was the sort of picture, Anne thought,
that your girlfriend took of you so she could have it in a silver frame on her desk.
Jonathan almost didn't check his email that morning. He’d been out to dinner the night
before, in a clam baked Corvette, five guys in polo shirts, to a nice restaurant in town. His
roommate, still Kip De Carte, forgot his credit card, and had asked Jonathan to be a buddyroo
and get the damn check for once. Twenty-six bucks in his debit card, Jonathan hadn’t been
able to pay. Someone else covered it, but Jonathan knew the moment the waiter had
declined his Citibank card that it was over. He was exhausted from trying to be something he
didn’t even care about anymore.
Jonathan walked home from the restaurant, and when he stopped in a CVS for cigarettes, he
thought of a conversation hed had ten years ago, when he had tried to convince his
childhood friend that they’d ride their bikes straight across the country to the Atlantic and
never go back. Sitting on the grass at Back Bay, he hadn’t considered that hed ever want to go
home. But still in yesterday’s polo shirt, Jonathan logged into his email account and saw a
Facebook friends request from Anne at NYU. He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled through
the address book, and yes, her number was still in there.
Anne was sitting in Washington Square Park, a street vendor coffee flushing her hands pink as
she took small sips and watched the fluidity of the street traffic, the hum of a million different
conversations trapped between the six-floor walk ups and the rumble of taxi tires, meters
ticking, racing to midtown full of corporate types listening to their iPods.
She answered her phone without looking at the caller ID.
“Anne’s hot secretary,” she joked, expecting Tex to bitch about his latest failed audition for
Broadway.
“Daisy?” She hadn’t been called that name for such a long time that it sounded unfamiliar. A
wrong number call.
“Who is this?”
“Its John.”
“Gatsby? How are you?”
“I’m,” he trailed off and sighed.
“How’s Brown?”
“They changed the name, didn’t you hear? It’s called Blue now, because you can’t get in
unless you pass a blood test.”
He was more bitter than her unsweetened coffee, and this displeased Anne. She felt all those
years between them, between this, sagging, a heavy load of untold stories, unshared moments.
“I’m so glad you called,” she ventured, but she was surprised to discover that she didn’t really
mean it.
“You know what? I am, too. God, Daisy. I was so wrong to leave when I did.”
“It’s all right. Nevermind that.” Another lie.
“Daisy? Can you do me a favor? Can you just talk? About anything. I don’t care what. I just
really need to hear your voice.”
But she couldn’t just talk to him, seven years later. She didn’t even know who she was talking
to. All those years hurt. All those undialed phone calls, unsent birthday cards, unwritten
emails. She wanted him to ask her what it had been like to go through high school without her
best friend, but he didn’t want to know the answer. He just wanted to hear a voice from his past,
and she just wanted to have the guts to tell him he had been wrong, and wasn’t forgiven.
It was so hard, trying to become what they once were. Their particular brand of friendship had
ended with a first and last kiss, in the splendor of childhood. There was no place for a Gatsby
and Daisy in modern day Manhattan, or present day Providence. And even if there were, Anne
wouldn't have wanted to try anymore.
