Chapter 1 #2
Finally, it was morning, and time to get ready to go.
I trudged through the motions, everything taking longer than I’d planned, and I was upstairs in my mom’s kitchen, still eating breakfast, when my pocket buzzed.
I fumbled the phone out of my pocket and saw to my dismay that Ricky had arrived and was waiting outside.
“Oh, shoot,” I said, Cheerios and milk dribbling from my mouth back into the bowl. “I have to go.”
“Nonsense,” my mom said, springing up from the table in her fuzzy pink robe. “I’ll invite him in.”
Before I could protest, she had flown from the kitchen, and in a second I heard the front door unlatch and my mom call out, “Yoohoo! Ricky! Come on up!” I halfheartedly considered abandoning my breakfast and trying to make a break for my apartment out the back door, but decided I was too tired.
Soon I heard Ricky making his way up the front steps, and my mom greeted him warmly, ushering him through to the kitchen. “Ricky, it’s so nice to meet you! I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Oliver’s mom, Robin. Oliver’s still eating breakfast—would you like anything?”
“No, thank you, I’m fine.” He smiled as he came through the door, lighting up the kitchen.
His shorts and crisp, white, short-sleeve, button-down shirt, the top two buttons left undone to expose a tantalizing suggestion of chest hair, indicated that he had been expecting more of a Southern California June than our customary Bay Area gloom, but I didn’t mind the amount of golden brown skin they left on display.
“I heard quite a bit about you, too, when Oliver was in Washington,” he continued, a note of deference in his voice clearly intended to charm my mom’s socks off. “I’m very glad to have the chance to meet you.”
My mother, successfully de-socksed, beamed as she poured herself more coffee, then waggled the carafe at Ricky to be sure he didn’t want any. He declined with a graceful wave and sat down next to me at the table.
“So, Ricky,” my mom asked, “where have you been staying while you’ve been in the area?”
“In San Francisco. At Drea’s, actually,” he said.
“That tiny little place? And aren’t she and Josh … trying? That seems like it might be a little uncomfortable.”
“Trying what?” I wanted to know between bites of cereal.
“Trying to get pregnant,” my mother said, an eyebrow raised. She and Drea were Facebook friends, and I didn’t really use social media, so there always seemed to be a side of Drea’s life that my mom knew more about than me.
“Indeed they are,” Ricky said. “I think they think they’re being discreet about it, but you’re right, their place is very small. We’ve all been a bit on top of each other—uh, so to speak.”
“Will you be staying in the area after you get back from this trip?” my mother asked, a glint in her eye.
“I might stick around for a while,” Ricky nodded. “We’ll see. I don’t have anything pressing waiting for me back home, and it’s a long drive, so I’d like to make the most of my time away.”
“Oliver,” my mother said, unconvincingly pretending that something had just occurred to her. “When you get back, you should have Ricky stay with you!”
I was trying to finish my orange juice, but choked a little at this pronouncement. Ricky whacked me on the back with a bemused grin, and a bit of juice dripped out my nose.
“What,” I managed to choke out.
“Well, I’m sure it would be much more comfortable for him, and you’ve got the whole downstairs to yourself.” She stared at me defiantly.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t want to impose,” Ricky said, his hand still resting lightly on my back.
It was the first time he’d touched me since I’d seen him again, and I was relieved to feel the old familiar thrill of it from the last time we’d been together, rather than my usual recoil from physical contact.
“Well, uh,” I said, rising from my chair to put my breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and trying to figure out how to gracefully get out of the corner my mother had backed me into. “We’ll have plenty of time to figure that out, I guess. I should go grab my stuff from downstairs.”
“I’ll meet you at the car,” Ricky said as he, too, rose from the table. He extended a hand to my mother. “Robin, it was so lovely to meet you. I promise I’ll get Oliver back to you in one piece.”
For a second they seemed to share a peculiar look, but then she smiled. “See that you do. You boys have fun—take good care of each other.”
As I tried to follow Ricky out of the room, she grabbed my arm and pulled me back, wrapping me into a hug. “I mean it,” she whispered into my ear. “I want you back in one piece this time.”
I wondered what my mom had meant by this time as I settled into Ricky’s car and we headed toward the freeway. Had I been that obvious?
“I can’t believe you drove all the way here from DC in this car,” I commented, trying to recenter myself by taking in the familiar copper-colored vinyl environs of Ricky’s ’66 Corvair sport coupe, feeling a little like they were those of an old friend.
He grinned a little, his hand on the shifter as we merged onto the first of several highways we would navigate in short order as we made our way north and across the bay, until we made it to US 101, our route for the rest of the way.
“I’ll be honest—take this as a warning—it’s not the most comfortable car for long distances, but it eats up the miles like a champ.
I had no problems at all on the trip out. ”
Uncomfortable, and reliability was a surprise.
This boded well. Now that Ricky mentioned it, I became acutely aware of the lack of a headrest, and of how little support the marshmallow-soft bucket seat afforded my back and rear end.
I squirmed a little, realizing with dismay that as the adrenaline of our departure wore off and my wakeful night caught up with me, I was growing steadily sleepier in an environment that was not at all conducive to sleep, other than being quite warm and smelling faintly of gas.
Fighting to keep my eyes open, I gazed absently out the window as the car droned up the high, undulating bridge over the bay from Richmond to San Rafael.
My mind was busy rehashing all of the repetitive thoughts that had kept me up the night before, and I realized I’d need to do something proactive to change course.
I shifted my gaze to Ricky, and tried to come up with a topic of conversation.
“So, this hook of Drea’s,” I finally started, then realized I didn’t know how I planned to finish.
Ricky sensed my pause. “‘Find romance on the Oregon coast,’” he filled in with a soft smile, giving the words about as much ridiculous exaggeration as they deserved.
I fidgeted a little, looking at my hands, then blurted out, “So, do you want to? Or … are we …” I trailed off again.
He chuckled a little, then furrowed his brow and thought hard for a moment. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said softly. “I gotta be honest, Oliver, I’m a little confused about where we stand.”
“You are?” I said meekly, then admitted, “So am I.”
“Well,” he said slowly, staring steadily ahead out the windshield to avoid making eye contact with me, or maybe to relieve me from having to make eye contact with him. “It won’t do for us both to be confused. Maybe we should see if we can figure it out. What’s confusing you?”
“I—uh—” I hadn’t been ready for this, and I definitely wasn’t awake enough for this. I swallowed hard, trying not to let myself get overwhelmed. “It doesn’t feel the same? And I’m worried that’s because I’ve totally messed it up.” Without warning, I burst into tears.
“Oh, jeez,” Ricky said in dismay, craning his neck to check behind him as he hustled over to catch a last-minute exit off the freeway. He turned from the off-ramp into a gas station, brought the car to a stop, and pulled me over into his arms.
“Don’t cry, Oliver,” he said into my hair, sounding worryingly close to tears himself. “What makes you think you messed up?”
I sniffled into his chest. “I didn’t know how to do it,” I mumbled. “I didn’t know how to be your friend or keep the conversation going or keep you interested.”
“I kind of got the impression that you weren’t interested,” he said gently after a pause. “You didn’t seem to want to talk to me. You never called me back.”
“I was scared,” I said, sobbing a little. He rubbed my back.
“Why were you scared? We didn’t have any problems talking to each other when we were together before.”
“Yeah, but we were together. And I thought when we weren’t together, you’d think I was less interesting or less fun—I am less fun when I’m on my own.” I let out a half laugh, half hiccup.
“Hmm,” was all he said. He held me for a minute longer, but finally I sat up, wiping my nose on my wrist.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We can keep going.”
Ricky looked over to me as he turned the engine back over. “We’re back together now. We don’t have to commit to finding romance, but I’m willing to be interesting and fun together with you, if you’re willing to be interesting and fun together with me.”
“Sounds okay to me,” I said with an only slightly watery smile. “And, you know, if the other thing happens, that might be … okay. Right?”
“I think so,” he said with a lopsided half smile. “Now, let me know when you’re ready to start being fun,” he said, his face turning mock serious, as he pulled onto the on-ramp back to the highway.
Laughing, I gave him a weak shot to the ribs.
As we resumed our northward route through the affluent suburbs of Marin County, I slumped against my door, looking out my window and trying to collect myself.
I hadn’t totally realized how tired I was, and how thrown I had been by not being ready to go when Ricky arrived.
And then my mom had stuck her nose in and made things awkward, and then I’d brought out the ultimate weapon in my arsenal of embarrassing reactions to stress and burst out crying.
But Ricky had been nothing but kind, and he had held me, and we had even gotten back a hint of our old banter. So maybe the day could recover.
Ricky had clicked on the AM radio and was fiddling with the dial to see what he could pull in, finally landing on a station playing old big band standards.
He adjusted the volume down so that the music settled into a soft background, his fingers occasionally tapping time on the steering wheel.
My mind wandered back to the bigger picture of our assignment, and after a while I turned back to Ricky.
“What even is romance, anyway?” I demanded.
“What is it we’re supposed to be telling people how to find here? ”
He glanced at me, his eyebrows raised. “That’s what you’ve been thinking about over there? What do you mean, what is romance? You know what romance is. Everybody does.”
I thought about this. “I know what romance is as, like, a genre of books I don’t read or movies I don’t watch. But that’s fiction. What does romance look like in the real world?”
He screwed his face up for a minute. “Huh. Now that you mention it, it is kind of a vague concept to me, too. I mean, it’s mostly a state of mind, right?
And that might look different to different people.
But I think if you asked most people what made a place, for example, feel romantic, they might also describe it as intimate.
You’re put in close physical proximity, the lighting might be low, music, candles, that kind of stuff. ”
We drove in silence but for the lush strings of a ballad coming from the radio, the cabin of the car heavy with contemplation.
Eventually, Ricky seemed to reach a conclusion.
“I guess if you want to find romance with someone, you might find ways to be so close to them that, even if you’re not, you feel like you’re alone with each other.
And you’d find ways to shut out distractions, so you’re focused on each other and the things you like about each other and about being together, and you can find ways to treat each other well. ”
I looked around the cabin of the car. We were definitely in close quarters.
Other cars rolled by outside our windows, but they were mere background noise; we were very much alone in our own little vinyl-lined cocoon.
There was soft music—romantic music, even—coming from the radio.
And as I looked at him, I was once again smacked in the face, as I was at least once a day every time we were together, by how stunningly beautiful Ricky was.
He caught me looking from the corner of his eye. “You look awful, Oliver,” he said.
“Gee, thanks.” So much for those romantic vibes I had been trying to summon.
“No, I didn’t mean that—you look exhausted,” he said.
Keeping his left hand on the wheel, he reached down behind my seat and came back up with a small pillow.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me. “I brought this with me in case I had to stay at a motel that seemed too questionable. If you put it between your head and your window, you might be able to get comfortable enough to sleep a bit.” He lowered the radio volume even further, until the music was little more than the hint of a lullaby.
I did as he suggested, wriggling a little to get my position just right, then quickly drifting off with a delirious feeling that producing this pillow for me at this moment was perhaps the most romantic thing Ricky could possibly have done.