In algebra, Ginny daydreams that the boy she prayed with also has detention. In her daydream, she shyly sits next to him, and they whisper to one another, and he is amazed by her, and after detention he walks her to the subway. It’s not exciting, but it’s what she wants.
Unfortunately, the only other student to have detention is a boy whom Ginny has known since she was four. This boy has a rage problem. He throws chairs. Worse, he wears gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt every day, and he tucks the gray sweatshirt into the gray sweatpants. He looks like an anemic boxer from the seventies. He’s sitting at a desk, ankles wiggling, and when he hears Ginny come into the room, he swings his head to look at her. His eyes open too wide. He looks like he wants to throw a chair.
Ginny decides no. Can’t. Won’t. She runs from detention, down the stairs, and to the front hall. The hall master reminds her not to run, and she’s outside, breathing hard, reveling in the glory of her wrongdoing and escape. Her father’s twenties are in the front pocket of her jeans, and she checks to make sure they haven’t gone missing. She walks on and passes the CVS where her mother left her; it does not bother her as she thought it might. It’s hard to attach meaning to a CVS. She continues up Montague. The neighborhood changes from commercial to residential (more trees, fewer banks). Ginny’s back at the Greek diner. She’s swinging the glass door open. She’s feeling short.
The man at the counter doesn’t notice her at first. Ginny must be brave to speak to him. He has a thick mustache and an accent and seems to take it personally when he cannot hear someone over the noise of the diner: clanking silverware, dishes being scraped and stacked, the hiss of meat on a gas griddle.
“Yes? Yes?” the man says.
“Me and my mother.”
“Yes? What do you want?”
“My mother and me and my sister were here.”
“Did you forget something?”
“Something, yeah, well.”
And the man is looking at her; he is recalling her and her family, Ginny can tell. He has taken his hands off the cash register and now they rest on his slender hips. He is peering down at her.
“Your mother—she’s the one who didn’t pay.”
Ginny feels her cheeks flush. She blinks away the urge to cry.
“I think she forgot.”
Ginny takes the twenties out of her pocket and holds them up to the man. He looks at the money suspiciously and takes it from Ginny. He turns the money upside down and right side up again, as if he is not absolutely sure that this is money. He acts like it is something other than money. He eventually gives it back to Ginny, after he’s looked at it and maybe figured out what it is.
“No, your mother paid, I forgot. This is yours. She paid.”
“But she did not pay,” Ginny says. “I’m trying to pay.”
“She came back, it’s settled. It’s fine.”
Ginny’s hope soars, and briefly this seems like a big understandable misunderstanding. But the cashier’s explanation doesn’t make sense.
“I don’t think so. She was getting on a train.”
The man with the mustache leans forward.
“Listen! Don’t worry about it. We’re not calling the police. Go home.” The word police stands out, and Ginny must look more worried than ever. “Oh shit,” the cashier says. “Shit shit. Sit at the counter. Put your backpack here. We’ll make you a burger.”
The cashier calls his mother over to man the cash register, and he sits down next to the teen. He sighs and runs his hand over his hair, which is slick and large. Although he appears very old to Ginny, he is only twenty-one. There’s a lot that happens in those years between, but also not that much. The cashier is out of his depth but returns to his hair for comfort, confidence, and guidance. After this moment, he tells Ginny the truth.
“Your mother did not pay. Usually we call the police. We run them down. It is a big deal because we are a small restaurant. A small business. But your mother—it seems she was acting a little strange. So I paid for her out of my tips. It’s no big deal. But do not say anything to her. And do not say anything to her.” The second her refers to the cashier’s mother. “Sometimes mothers, they go a little crazy. Don’t worry about it.”
“She left,” Ginny says. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”
“Would you like a milkshake?” the cashier asks.
“I’m full.”
“Okay. Well, thanks for the offer and everything, to pay, but don’t worry about it. Just stay cool.”
Ginny is now in love with both the cashier and his hair, and blushes again.
Judgment
Nathan paws through his wife’s closet. He’s left Denise in the basement. She said she was interested in the negative space. Nathan rolled his eyes at her and left her in the cat-piss-smelling basement.
Nothing is unexpected, except, considered all at once as a wardrobe, it’s depressing. Skirts with the elastic waistband worn out. Dingy bras and underpants. One blazer from JCPenney. Marion was not a stylish dresser, but Nathan never grasped how collectively cheerless her clothes were. His wife’s clothes seem calculatedly unfashionable, a kind of self-punishment. Once again he’s sorry for her, and sorry for himself. She’s left behind her jewelry. His mother’s tennis bracelet is still in the leather case.
He once wrote a poem about her that she disliked intensely. She found a draft on his desk when she was turning out the lights on the third floor. He had written about her at thirty-four as a mother of two. She’d put on weight then, and walked slower, as if the health of her two girls accelerated her unhealth, her lack of health. It soon became his responsibility to take them to the park or the zoo. Marion didn’t want to be seen around active people or her active daughters. He wrote a poem about his wife standing still as his children grew more epic and tremendous every day. This healthy growth depressed Marion. It weighed her down even more.
Of course he had been angry that she hadn’t liked the poem. She should have liked it. She should have been honored by the poem and its honesty.
“You wrote a poem about me getting fat” was what she said, and there was nothing left for him to say. What she said was also true.
Marion once read him a quote, not to him but at him. She did this sometimes. She found quotes about writing to lob at him like a tennis serve.
“Get this, here’s what Ibsen says,” she’d said in the present tense, as if Ibsen had a weekly column in the Post. “?‘To live is to war with trolls in the holds of the heart and mind. To write: that is to sit in judgment over one’s self.’?”