Mr. Ellison had said, “Make a picture for each word—this is how we remember what we read.” As Dave chewed string beans and watched his father slice into a steak—his father’s eyes dark under heavy eyelids and speckled brows, hair a peppered gray—his brain struggled to conjure pictures for the Hundred Most Commons. But all he saw was Mr. Ellison’s bald spot as he pounded nonsense on the whiteboard, Abigail Cress’s foot tapping in her track shoe because it was all so easy for her, and Elisabeth Avarine glowing, silent, in the sun at the back of the room.
“You are distracted again,” his father said. “Why?” The knife in his hand jabbed toward Dave. An exclamation point.
Dave shrugged. “Tired, I guess.”
His father’s eyebrows narrowed. “You are not yourself.”
His mother, in her chair between them, laid her fork on the glass table with a deliberateness that seemed rehearsed. She turned to Dave. “David Alexander, have you been doing ecstasy and raves?” she asked, pushing her black swoop of hair out of her eyes. “Your parents are not stupid. We’ve heard what goes on at that school.”
Dave laughed. He had never even touched a cigarette or tried a sip of beer. When had he ever had time for such things?
His parents took this laughter as proof there was something wrong with him. His father said, “What are these teachers teaching you? This disrespect.”
His mother said, “This is not the boy I raised.”
“I don’t know what we’re paying these teachers to do,” his father said. “Has Mr. Ellison graded your practice SAT yet?”
Dave shook his head.
“You must score over 2100 if you expect Berkeley to consider you.”
“I am aware of this,” Dave said.
“What is this attitude?” his mother said. “UC Berkeley is a very fine school.”
“For some people,” Dave said. He didn’t know why. He opened his mouth to insert another string bean, and the words fell out. He knew nothing about Berkeley, really. It was as if he’d suddenly decided to have a vehement opinion about artichokes, which he had never eaten, and now he’d have to explain the opinion and defend it.
“What does that mean?” his father said.
“I went to Berkeley,” his mother said. “Your father went to Berkeley.”
“It was a privilege,” his father said. “Our parents didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Our parents had nothing. And when they gave us something, we appreciated it.”
“I do appreciate it,” Dave said. But he sounded unconvincing even to himself.
His father clattered his fork on the glass. He leaned over his plate. “It’s not easy to go to college when your parents work in factories,” he said, stabbing the knife toward Dave’s mother. “It’s not easy to become a doctor when your parents are strangers in this country, when your only path is hard work and scholarships and loans.” This time he stabbed toward himself.
“I know,” Dave said.
“You do not know. You do not know anything, because we have given you everything. You don’t know that you are exceptional—we tell you and tell you and yet you refuse to see it. When are you going to see it?”
Dave cut a cube of steak and chewed. The meat was salty and rare. His brain groped for the Most Commons to describe the reddish flesh that quivered on his plate. It was florid, querulous. It extenuated. These words sounded right to him although he sensed that their meanings were wrong. He swallowed, raised his head. He knew that already he had gone too far, yet he couldn’t stop. He said, “I do want to go to a good college. It’s just, I was thinking, maybe I should take a gap year first.”
“What is this, a gap year?” his mother asked.
“It’s like…I don’t know. Time off after graduation. To, like, think, travel, whatever. Like a vacation, I guess.” Dave immediately regretted the word. It was not what he meant. In those dinner table conversations he never said the right thing; it was like trying to remember the Hundred Most Commons when the proctor started the timer in the fourth hour of the SAT. Hopeless.
But Dave’s father did not yell. Instead his face brightened and relaxed. He laughed. “Your whole life is a vacation.”
—
Dave was aware that the only thing holding him back was himself. His father was a vascular surgeon at UCSF Medical Center. His mother, who had stayed home to raise him, had been prelaw at Berkeley. Dave was their only child. He was everything.
Dave’s parents believed he took after his father. It was true that they looked alike. Both were tall and slim with skin that showed the webs of blue-green veins at their temples and wrists. Dave had his father’s heavy-lidded, almond eyes, sparse brows, and nose whose broadness made him a little less than beautiful. The long neck. There was even a small mole, flat and black, above his lip that exactly resembled the mole on the ridge of his father’s cheek. But this was where the similarities ended. He was not like either of his parents, really.