Chapter 49: Autumn, Senior Year

I dragged myself out of bed when the alarm went off and took a shower and shaved. I was feeling almost human. I grabbed my bags, dropped off the keys at the reception desk, and found a taxi to the train station. I was early enough that I was able to find coffee and a prune Danish — no donuts, alas.

The train trip was uneventful, about ninety minutes, and I read for a bit before I dozed off. This was the last school I’d visit on this trip, and to tell the truth I was tired and a little colleged-out. I know I should visit all of the ones on my prospective list, but I’d about had my fill of the same tours, the same questions, the same answers.

But I did it, I got through the last tour, and met with department representatives for most of my major interests. And I left feeling as if I liked this one the best. I don’t know if that feeling came from a sense of relief that it was over, or because it genuinely did feel like a good fit.

Regardless, I mentally moved this one to the top of the list. It was probably a futile gesture, because 1) it was Ivy-league and very selective, 2) there were a huge number of students applying every year and only a small percentage selected for admittance, and 3) it was really expensive. But nice to have a dream.

The day was interesting, but at the end I was dragging. I stopped off on the way back to the motel for fast food, because I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have the energy to go out again. No surprise, I didn’t, so I ate the food in my room and collapsed. Later in the evening, I called home to tell them I was finishing up and should be back late tomorrow.

They asked all kinds of questions about what it had been like, which ones were my favorites, and so on, but I told them I’d answer their questions later, I was too tired.

I’ll spare you the details of the trip back to Cleveland. Not much happened, and I got in about six in the evening. I knew the local bus system, so I took a bus home, with only a block left to walk at the end.

I got a big hug from my mother when I walked into the kitchen, and my dad came in from the den. They wanted to hear everything, right now. I was feeling tired and wanted to take a nap, but it had been their money that financed it, so they had a right to hear about it. Well, I edited certain parts out, but they heard most of it.

At some point during my tale, Mindy wandered in and stood listening in the kitchen doorway. I think she was beginning to realize that there was life beyond high school.

The final question was my father’s. Which one did I like the best? I told them it was -------, the Ivy-league school. He didn’t say anything, but I caught a quick glance between him and my mother. Even I could read it. It said, ‘How are we going to pay for that?’

Dinner was about ready so I stayed awake for it and fielded a bunch of new questions that had occurred to them. After dinner, I pulled out my soiled clothes and dropped them in the laundry hamper, and went upstairs. I lay on my bed for a while, thinking, then got up and called Karen.

“So you’re back. And how many offers have come in already?”

“Don’t even joke about it, Karen. The more of these schools I visited, the more hopeless it appears. Maybe I can get in to some of them, but the chances of paying for it are minuscule. It was actually kind of depressing in the end.”

“Carter, you are such a pessimist. You’ll see, things will work out. What were your favorites?”

I went over the top two or three with her, giving my impressions of each.

“Y’know, we haven’t really spoken since you got back from your tour with your mom. I never asked you how your trip went.”

She listed the ones she liked best, but she was really excited about -------, a larger school in California. She’d had some long discussions with various department representatives and, typical Karen, had some hard questions for them and wouldn’t let them slide on anything, keeping their feet to the fire. She left there with some strong interest from the departments, especially given her academic record.

So it looked like, regardless of which schools we eventually committed to, we would be apart for at least four years, except for vacations. I was getting sad just thinking about it.

Just before we hung up she said, “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow, and we can talk about college ... and us.”

I suppose I should have taken the last remark as positive, but she was right, I was a pessimist, and I read that as ‘Let’s be friends instead,’ and I went to bed feeling sorry for myself.

The next morning, while having my coffee, Jeff came over to ask me about my trip so we sat out in the backyard and I gave him the rundown. I left out the evening with Cindy, since he didn’t need to know, and I felt it was private anyway.

To hear him tell it, he and Kate were working their way through the Kama Sutra, page by page. I took that with a grain of salt, but she did seem to have an adventurous and creative streak. I wondered where they found the privacy and the time to carry out these investigations.

I read some Italian for a while. I wondered if my ‘visiting scholar’ card was still good at the language lab, but I was too worn out to go try it. Tomorrow would be another excursion with Mr. Esposito and the squadra di bowling, so I could embarrass myself with my attempts at speaking Italian. Yet another thing to boost my morale.

I watched a video, but couldn’t keep my attention on it and even the amusing parts went by without a smile from me. Finally I gave up and went out and napped in the lawn chair under the tree. At least then I wouldn’t be thinking about all the things that were wrong with my life.

I went over to Karen’s around five, and we sat in the backyard and talked about college and college visits and the various towns and cities where we might wind up. She was still psyched from her trip, relentlessly arguing with herself the pros and cons of one school over another.

From hearing her talk, it sounded like she already assumed that she would be admitted to all the schools she applied to. Given her scholastic record and SAT scores, it may not have been an unreasonable assumption, but still, I would have appreciated even a little self-doubt on her part. It might have made me feel better.

“You know we drove, right?” she said. “There was actually a lot of driving, but it made more sense than constantly taking cabs to airports and renting cars and all that stuff, so my mom drove our car. Sometimes we’d talk, mostly about college and after-college, sometimes about random stuff, but there were a lot of periods of silence where she’d drive and maybe listen to the radio.

“And I’d sit there and look out the window at the scenery and think. A lot of it was college-related, but I kept coming back to us.”

I looked up now, waiting for the ax to fall.

“And the more I thought,” she said, “the more I kept coming around to my decision that I’d give my parents’ request a fair trial, I mean to go out with other guys than you. It’s been more than a year now, and I’ve been out with other guys, sometimes even more than once. And most of them have been okay people, and we had fun. None of them were as smart or as insightful as you, but there were some intelligent ones.

“And to make the trial fair, I even pretended that I’d never met you or anyone I liked, and maybe this would be the one, this date would be the guy I really liked. But it never was. They were pleasant and polite and sometimes good looking, but they never made my heart beat faster, and they never made me tingle. Even when they kissed me. I know you don’t want to hear that, but it was part of the experiment. I never got the buzz, the tingle, when I got kissed.

“Tom, we’re going off to college in a year, and we’re going to be apart. And the more I thought about it while I was driving with my mom, the more I hated the idea. I don’t think we can do anything about us being at different schools and apart for ten months of the year, but we can make the best use of the time we have remaining.”

“I don’t know where you’re going with this, Karen.”

“I’m saying I’m going to tell my folks that the experiment is over, that I want to spend more time with you. Thinking about being at different schools I suddenly realized how much I was going to miss you, and that made me decide to end the experiment. I won’t say, either to you or to them, that you and I will be exclusive, but you’re the one I like being with and talking to. You’re the one who listens to me and understands me. You’re the one who makes me laugh. You’re the one who makes me happy. You’re the one I’m in love with.”

I stared at her so long that she reached out and put her hand on my arm, perhaps to make sure I was still breathing.

“All the time we’ve known each other, Karen, and that is the first time you’ve said that. Did you just come to this decision?”

“No, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’ve told you I’m self-analytical, that I debate decisions internally, back and forth, incessantly. I’ve been trying to understand what it means to love someone, because I hate to use words imprecisely. I needed to separate infatuation and fondness from love. And I finally realized that it was love. And it made me really happy to admit that to myself.”

“You have not the slightest idea how overjoyed that makes me to hear you say it. All those things you said that I do for you? You do that for me, too. Times ten.”

And all of a sudden, I didn’t care about anything else, didn’t care if I got into my first choice college, didn’t care that I couldn’t pay for college anyway, everything else was insignificant, as long as Karen loved me.

She looked at me and said, “What you you grinning about?”

“Do you really need to ask?” At least she smiled back.

We were called in to dinner. For once we were not eating outside, served by the Barbecue King Of Cleveland. Apparently he had had to stay late for a meeting, so her mother was cooking tonight. I said to Karen on the way in that she probably ought to have that conversation with her parents about exclusivity without me present so as not to confuse the issue. She agreed.

So dinner table conversation was light and friendly, much of it about colleges, hers and mine, and other things going on in our lives. Karen’s dad asked about my meeting with Evan Kenton, the scout for his alma mater. I gave him my observations and told him the school was high on my list.

“I’m not revealing any secrets by telling you he was impressed with you, Tom. He liked you a lot. So when you do apply, let him know with a phone call or a note and he’ll contact the admissions people with his assessment.”

I nodded assent. He asked how my meetup with Tommy Esposito had gone. I told him the first meeting left me feeling like a fish out of water, but I was going back to try again tomorrow night. On the positive side, I said, I now know much more about bowling. That made both Karen and her mother laugh.

I helped them clear the table, and she brought out cheesecake for dessert along with the coffee. I decided that I really liked cheesecake, and it may push pie out of first place. The jury is still out.

I said goodnight after dessert, and Karen walked me out.

“You looked a little down when you got here, Tom. You okay?”

“I am now. I was feeling a little depressed about college and how I’m going to pay for it, but I decided that I can’t control the situation, so it does little good to worry about it. And hearing you say you loved me put it all into proper perspective, so I’m fine.”

“Glad to help. I’ll let you know how the talk with my parents goes.” She kissed me goodnight, a long and deep kiss that made me think about college not at all.

I rode home with a smile on my face, and lay on my bed. I tried to read, but my thoughts kept drifting away to Karen. Eventually I gave up, went to bed and dropped off to sleep almost immediately.

I can’t recall what I did the next day. I know I reviewed some Italian grammar, but I kept going back to listen to Karen’s words in my head, especially the part where she said she loved me.

Somehow the day passed, and after dinner I went to the bowling alley. This time I got to borrow the car, which was an improvement over riding my bike at night.

When I walked in, Tommy Esposito saw me coming and called, “Ciao, Carter, ” and some of the others called out “Ciao”, too.

“Pensavo di averti fatta andar via per la paura”, he said.

No, he didn’t scare me off. “Dovrò continuare a farlo finché non lo farò bene.” Basically I told him I was going to keep at it. Tommy grinned, happy to see he had a convert to the cause.

To save time, I hooked into his epicenter now, while I had his attention, so I could watch how he formed his sentences and pronunciation. This would also allow me to learn vocabulary quickly, because I seemed to “know” the word as soon as Tommy put it into a sentence. But I had my dictionary open in case anyone should wonder how I was learning these words so quickly.

They settled in for their weekly game. They were pretty good bowlers, based on the tallies being written down on the scoring pad. As last time, there was some good-natured needling and friendly insults going on. I learned some idioms that would probably get me a punch on the jaw if I were to use them in Italy, but better to know them than not know them.

I thought it would be the best use of my time to just “watch” Tommy speak, see how he put together the sentences, figure out why he used one construct over another. I was realizing that there were a lot, a lot of different ways of saying something in Italian.

We never think about that in our native language, it just seems obvious which one to use, but when we learn another language it is not at all obvious. So I was trying to pay attention to what he was saying, and how he chose to formulate the statement, which constructs he employed.

I let my mind shut out everything except what was going on in his language center. Naturally, he wasn’t speaking all the time, but watching and listening and thinking about his game, so there were periods where his language center was inactive.

Then he would think of a question for someone, or come up with a jibe for the person at the foul line, and the language center would leap into motion. At one point he turned to me and said “Capisce tutto?” Do I understand what’s being said?

“Si, ho capito quasi tutto.” I’ve got most of it, I told him.

I was understanding it, but as with Marco and colloquial Spanish, speaking was much harder than understanding. I could form sentences awkwardly, but I would have to think about what I wanted to say and how to express it, choosing words and verb forms and remembering sentence structure.

That’s not how we speak our own language; it happens in the language center automatically, and I wasn’t at that point yet. But it would come.

By the end of the evening, I felt I had a sense of the rhythm of the language, and I was feeling better about the pronunciation and the accents. If this happened like it did with Spanish and French, at some point I would suddenly internalize everything I had learned and the sentence construction would feel natural and I wouldn’t have to think about it.

As they packed up to leave, Tommy said, “Tornerai la prossima settimana?” Am I going to show up next time?

“Si, io ci sarò.” Yep, I’ll be here. “Grazie, Signor Esposito.”

“Chiamarmi Tommy.”

“Grazie, Tommy.”

I drove home, thinking about Italian and Spanish, and thinking of Karen.

The next morning, I slept till ten, had breakfast, then went and got a haircut. Well, that killed the morning. I thought I ought to return Grigio’s textbook to him, but I would need to finish studying it first, so I spent several hours doing that. I made a mental note that I should pick up a copy of a similar book at the used bookstore.

Late in the afternoon I biked to the college and went by Grigio’s office, but he was out and the door locked so I dropped the book off with the secretary in the Sociology office, along with a note thanking him. I wrote it in Italian as a kind of in-joke.

While I was there I stopped by Payroll and picked up my last paycheck. This would be the last money coming in that was my own this summer.

Since I was on that side of town, I detoured to the mall and rummaged through the used bookstore until I found an Italian textbook that looked pretty good, so I bought that and headed home.

I took a quick shower and finished just in time for dinner. As I helped clear the table afterwards I suddenly realized how close the start of school was. Labor Day was almost upon us, and school followed immediately afterwards. The start of my final year. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or sad.

The phone rang, followed by a thunder of feet. It reminded me of Barney running to the door for his walk. But no, it was Mindy, who would give Barney a run for his money, provided there was a phone at the end of it. She talked for a minute, then shouted, “Tom, it’s for you.”

Huh? For me? Who would she talk to that I ... Oh.

“Hi, Karen.”

“Hello, Tom. I didn’t interrupt dinner, did I?”

“Nah, we’re all finished and cleaned up.”

“So I had that talk with my parents. It went ... okay.”

“There was a little hesitation there. What part didn’t go okay?”

“It was actually fine at the end. I told them that I thought I’d given their ‘experiment’ better than a fair trial, but enough was enough. I told them that we really got along well and that, this final year we could be together, I wanted to spend more time with you. They still had their reservations about exclusivity. The clincher was when I told them that I’d made it clear we wouldn’t be exclusive, that I might still go out with other guys if I liked them well enough, but you were my main interest.”

“And they accepted that?”

“You know they both like you, so that wasn’t the issue. It was always that they didn’t want me to limit my choices. But I pointed out that after this year, we’d spend almost no time together because in all likelihood we’d be at schools at opposite ends of the country, and I’d have four years of looking at other guys.”

“That makes me feel so much better, Karen.”

“Tom, you know I don’t like that idea any more than you do, but you’ve always known I’d be at a school that’s best for my future. Just as you’ll choose yours the same way. We talked about this. I don’t know how we’ll deal with the separation. But at least for the next year we can spend more time together.”

“I know. It’s the pessimist in me looking further down the road and knowing we’ll be far apart. Y’know what? You’re right. We can only worry about what we can deal with now. We’ll have this year and we’ll make the most of it.”

We talked for a few minutes more, then said goodnight. I had mixed feelings. We would have a whole year spending as much time as we could together, though given Karen’s commitment to academics I suspected that the available time would be curtailed by study.

But I couldn’t help thinking about what would happen after this school year. I would have a hard time coping with her absence, not having her around to talk to and spend time with. Better not to dwell on it.

The looming presence of the new school year suddenly seemed to be lurking everywhere. Television and radio ads were frantically urging parents to rush out and shop for back-to-school clothes and supplies before it was too late. Half the displays in the mall were school-this and school-that.

I had previously arranged, because Mr. Fremont, my guidance counselor, hectored me until I signed up for it, to retake the SAT exam. I had done quite well, I thought, the first time, in the 90th percentile, but his take was that you usually do a little better the second time and schools always use the highest score. I had picked a date before school started so I wouldn’t have to worry about it along with everything else.

It didn’t feel much different this time, in fact felt pretty easy. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. At any rate, it would be some time before I got the results.

Labor Day weekend, I talked Karen into going to the big county fair that was held every year. It was several miles out of town, where the city gave way to farmland, so I borrowed the car and drove. She wasn’t sure about this, and said it seemed a little silly and childish, but I had a suspicion that she’d like it if she’d just turn off her analytical faculties for a few hours.

It was massive, it went for blocks in every direction. You couldn’t possibly see everything in one day, which was the point — they wanted you to come back again and again. So we saw what we could. And sure enough, it turns out she has a hidden craving for certain fair foods. Cotton candy? I kicked myself for not bringing a camera so I could hold that over her. It was one of her favorite things when she was six or seven and went to a ball game or the circus.

And corn on the cob. And onion rings. We had hot dogs, which I thought weren’t very good but she liked them, though she rarely ate meat. Apparently the rules are different at fairs and circuses.

And she found out she loved the animal displays, the horses and cows, sheep and ducks. She spent a lot of time with the many different varieties of rabbits. I guess it brought back some childhood memories. We went on a bunch of rides, which she liked a lot more than she would admit. And we tried a few of the sideshow games, like throwing a ping-pong ball into a goldfish bowl. I won her a big pink teddy bear by breaking a certain number of balloons with darts. She decided to name him Pierre, after the mathematician Fermat.

She admitted on the ride home that she’d had a good time after all.

And before we knew it, it was the first day of school. I ran into Mr. Fremont in the hall, who said, “Oh, Carter, glad I caught you. I’ve set up your calculus test for Friday afternoon. I’ll give you a note to get you out of your normal afternoon classes. I’ll get you the details later. You retook the SATs, right?”

I told him I had.

“Okay, good. So assuming you pass the calc qualifying test, you wanted to do a math self-study course for credit this semester. You’ll need to present a study plan to the math chairman and get it approved. They’ll assign a mentor and go over how you’ll be graded. Try to do that by the beginning of next week, okay? Gotta run.”

In fact, I hadn’t given any thought to what I wanted to do in the self-study course. I would need to do a little reading to figure this out, and soon. In the meantime I was off to my “other” math course, AP Statistics. Turns out this was a fairly small class, no more than about fifteen of us, juniors and seniors. Thirty minutes in I decided this wasn’t going to be too difficult, something of a relief.

In fact, senior year was going to be kind of an odd duck, curriculum-wise. I was taking a fair number of self-study or special classes which would keep me out of the mainstream classes.

I had taken all the usual French courses, and there was nothing at the local colleges that I could qualify for due to certain prerequisites the schools had. So I was taking a one-off course the French department had in their back pocket for just such occasions, a self-directed course in classic French literature. Basically, I would read a bunch of French-language books, histories and biographies, and be tested on them.

I was also taking another AP class in macroeconomics, nothing that really rang my chimes but Mr. Fremont thought it would look really good on my transcript.

And the one I was looking forward to, a psychology class offered by the local community college (not the same school where I worked this past summer), which I was taking for college credit. It was an ‘Introduction To Psychology’ class, so I didn’t expect it to offer any profound insights to the questions I was interested in, but it was a start. I would have to take a bus there two afternoons a week.