“That would be fine.”
It became an almost everyday occurrence after that. At closing time, I would shutter
the gate and jog across the grass. In case anyone was watching, I’d get in my car and pull out
of the neighborhood, only to park on a side street in the adjoining neighborhood and then cut
through a path in the woods that spilled out to her backyard. There, I would sneak across the
lawn, yellowed with summer heat and drought, and descend to her basement door, which she
left unlocked for me.
The ten minutes of our first session stretched to twenty and then thirty and then more
than an hour. Eventually I knew how to control myself. I enjoyed it, though I’m not certain I
considered it fun. More like an educational opportunity. My dad had urged me to get an
internship that sum mer and not laze around a pool all day. “You should be learning
something,” he said. “Something you can take with you, something that will help you later in
life.” I figured I was mostly doing that.
Just seeing her in her house, watching how she lived — a person settled, a person no
longer striving for anything, no longer envisioning a future with questions about what it held.
Apart from my parents, she was the only person I ever interacted with who lived this way. And
because of that, I never had to wrestle with the idea that what I was doing might have been
wrong in any way. We got things from each other, a mutually beneficial arrangement with a
very real and looming expiration date. And so we continued seeing each other and ignored
everything else, playing dumb at the pool by day, waiting for after.
At one point, mid-July or so, we got the idea to make mix tapes for each other (or, in
our case, mix burned CDs). She would teach me what real music was, “not the crap kids listen
to today.” And I would give her an education, too, show her that there were some great
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