He glanced up at me and smiled. “It’s the second time I’m mailing this stuff to this guy Or-chid,” he said, pronouncing it with a soft ch. “He seems really incompetent. By now I have to FedEx it. I need the ticket soon, to get the Japanese visa.”
I looked at the name on the invoice: Orchid Jones. “I think it’s a she,” I said.
“Really? Is Or-chid a girl’s name?”
“Orchid, it’s a flower.”
“Oh, orchids? Those obscene flowers? Then I agree with you that Orchid Jones is probably a woman.”
I watched him write a check for $689.92. He wrote in all capital letters, and the I arched back like an inverted C. He took out a credit card and started copying the number.
“I bought a return ticket directly from Tokyo to San Francisco,” he said. “I’m not coming back here. I shipped my stuff to the math department in Berkeley. It’s all sitting there, in some office. They’re stuck with it all summer.” The thought seemed to cheer him.
I tried to laugh, too. I picked up his wallet and looked at his school ID and driver’s license. He wasn’t smiling in either picture.
“Does it look like me?” he asked.
“What?” I said.
“Does it look like me? The picture?”
I said it did. I said that if I hadn’t known better, I would have been completely taken in.
“What?” he said.
“If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was you.”
“You would have thought it was me, in my own photograph?”
“Right.”
He frowned. “So who do you think it is now?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, proceeding to drop his credit card. I let him pick it up himself.
? ? ?
In the cafeteria line I took a knife and fork. Ivan handed me another knife and another fork. I stared at the two knives and two forks. At the salad bar, Ivan put lettuce and tomatoes in a bowl and topped them with dressing. I also put some things in a bowl but at the end it wasn’t a salad, it was just a lot of random things in a bowl. At the soda fountain, Diet Coke seethed over my wrist.
We found two empty seats at the opposite end of a table from four football players. The football players’ trays resembled futuristic cities, with glasses of milk and Gatorade shooting out like white and fluorescent skyscrapers.
The cut corn on my plate reminded me of teeth. I kept thinking about the story by Poe about monomania, where the woman has monomania, and it turns out to be about teeth.
“What are you thinking about?” Ivan asked.
“Teeth,” I said.
He looked at my untouched tray. “Are your teeth bothering you?”
Ivan ate a hot meal, and then a bowl of Jell-O. He used a fork to eat the Jell-O. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who lost her appetite over some guy, so I ate a few chickpeas. Then I thought, why should I be the kind of person who eats when she isn’t hungry, just to prove some kind of point? I put down my fork.
“Where’s all your stuff?” Ivan asked.
“My stuff?”
“For example, your bathing suit. I assume you were planning on wearing a bathing suit.”
“I am wearing a bathing suit.”
“Oh, under your clothes? Aha. But how about a towel?”
I had forgotten about a towel. He said I should go to my room and get one; he would get the bike and meet me at the gate.
Back in my room, I emptied out my backpack and threw in a beach towel and a plaid shirt. I looked around, wondering what else to bring. I saw Einstein. This reminded me to bring a hairbrush. I couldn’t think of anything else, after the towel and the shirt and the brush.
As I approached the gate, I heard footsteps pounding behind me. I stepped aside. Something jumped and landed beside me.
“You walked right past me,” Ivan said, out of breath. “I was yelling, I was calling your name.”
I thought of how Eunice hadn’t heard him, either. It wasn’t his day for catching girls’ attention.
? ? ?
The motorcycle was bright yellow. Ivan handed me a bike helmet. When I fumbled with the buckle, he took the helmet from my hands, tightened the strap, put it back on my head, and snapped the buckle under my chin. He put on his own helmet, which had a clear screen over the front, and showed me where to sit. He told me that I should hold on to him, that if we tilted to one side I shouldn’t get worried or try to lean the other way, I should just do whatever he did.
“My main piece of advice,” he repeated, “is to hold on to me really tightly. Then you won’t fall off.” I nodded. It hadn’t occurred to me that one could fall off. I climbed up behind him, looking at the ground and hoping not to see anyone I knew.
The engine started and we pulled away from the curb. It was amazing to cover the same ground one usually traversed on foot, but with no effort, and so much faster.
“You should hold on to me tighter,” Ivan said over his shoulder, picking up speed.
He was wearing a floppy dark orange shirt that I had often seen, without ever having thought that I might someday touch it. I placed my arms lightly around his waist, trying to minimize actual contact. The idea of holding on to him felt unthinkable and wrong, like picking up a wild animal.
After a while, though, the feeling of embarrassment was lost in the pure, primitive joy I felt at the sensation of so much speed. When Ivan merged onto the highway, accelerating into a higher gear, I couldn’t help laughing. The wind was unbelievably strong and made me worry about my contact lenses, so I mostly looked down, watching the asphalt rush away beneath us, occasionally looking up to steal a glimpse of a hotel or a gas station. Whenever Ivan leaned back, our helmets clicked.
? ? ?
The first thing you saw at Walden Pond was a replica of the cabin Thoreau had lived in. Neither fully life-sized nor miniature, it was just a few degrees smaller than usual, like the petites section of a department store. Through the window, we looked at a petite pan sitting on a petite woodstove, a petite fishing pole, a petite chair at a petite table and, on the table, a petite lamp and a petite manuscript—presumably Walden, but a little bit smaller. “Thoreau was pretty short,” Ivan said.
“Either that or he was too cheap to build a full-sized house.”
The water was clear green, surrounded by wooded hills. On a sandy beach, small children were wading around in yellow inflatable wings while their mothers sunbathed. It was weird to think this scene was part of their childhoods. Ivan said he thought we could find somewhere less crowded. I followed him over a fence, where a sign said not to walk on the bank because it caused erosion. We climbed this bank into the woods and began to walk along a shelflike path cut in the hill.
“Hey, wait, you’re American,” Ivan said suddenly. “You must have read his book! So what’s his story, this Thoreau?”
“I read it in high school. I don’t remember it so well.”
He laughed. “Because high school was such a long time ago for you.”
“It was sophomore year of high school. That was three years ago!”