Chapter 4 Platitudes
Platitudes
There is little I find more annoying than when narrators in novels offer platitudes, as if the novelists giving those characters voice believe they themselves are Jane Austen:
There’s no Advil for emotional pain.
You can’t feel the sun at the summit without starting from the shade in the valley.
You can’t teach experience.
The banalities belong on inspirational posters or get-well cards.
I’m a novelist, so I know. But along with some small renown as a writer, my other claim to fame is that I’m the girl who killed that kid at a country club in Westchester.
It’s often trotted out as the reason why I do what I do.
As if the death of Kenny Foster is the reason why I write books. It’s not.
And you can trust me on that. I am a very reliable narrator.
I don’t want anyone in book groups to suggest I’m not, arguing with this hardcover or paperback in one hand and a glass of Merlot in the other that I’m one of those “unreliable narrators” who’re going to perform a little cause-and-effect sleight of hand in the last act or upend the narrative with obfuscation.
Nope. You can trust me. If I were decades younger, if I were my seventeen- or eighteen-year-old self, I would put it to you like this: I am reliable as fuck.
I can also tell you this with authority, and I offer it not as a platitude but as a reality: when you kill someone, it breaks you. It changes you. You’ve shattered the water glass—your soul is something different and new—and the shards can never be glued back together.
Earlier I suggested my thoughts of suicide were theatrical, the implication being that it was an adolescent melodrama to compare my despair with (for instance) Anna Karenina’s.
Perhaps. But suicide is a seductive muse. She draws you to her with exquisite little gestures and come-hither lipstick. A flash of cleavage. Eyes that are deep and dewy and beckon you a step closer each time.
You tell yourself you will not be sucked in, but the attraction grows more pronounced each time you ponder who she is and who you are.
What you have done. Your myriad failings. The mistakes you have made for which you can never, ever atone.
My last conversation with Kenny Foster came back to me after I had left his family’s home that Saturday afternoon.
It was a week or so before I killed him.
He was watching me on the practice putting green, and we were joking about the Bee Gees. As a Florida kid, he revered them. I was ambivalent because they were disco, which was never going to be cool in Tallmadge.
“You know, don’t you, that Barry Gibb is an honest-to-God castrato,” I teased him, using the word we’d learned in AP European history for how boys with great voices were sometimes castrated in the Renaissance so they could continue as sopranos.
“One of his brothers is, too. They had their balls cut off at twelve.”
“Nope,” said Kenny. “Just great falsettos. Also, Maurice was married to Lulu. And I’m pretty sure they all have kids. I saw a photo in People magazine last week of Barry Gibb walking one of his kids to school.”
Maybe it was the word walking. But something suddenly clicked. I always drove the mile or so to the country club. I had never thought about how Kenny got there.
“Tell me something,” I said. “You drive here, right?”
“Uh, no. I walk.”
I picked up the balls I had plunked into the cup and tossed them randomly a dozen or so feet away. “And then you caddy thirty-six holes?”
“Sure.”
I was so oblivious to who I was and what I was, it had never crossed my mind that he—probably a lot of the caddies—walked to the club, and then hoped to walk the course twice in a day with bags on their shoulders.
“If you ever want a ride, let me know. Okay?”
He shook his head. “That’s never going to work. I get here before you do and leave after you do.”
I took this in.
“Well, if you ever change your mind…just call the night before,” I suggested. This munificence was easy because I suspected he’d never take me up on the offer—and, in the brief week between this conversation and his death, he never did.
I didn’t go home when I left the Fosters’ that afternoon.
I was shaken by the whole experience, my headfirst dive into a houseful of grief, but I was also unsettled by the idea that Mr. Foster had seen me with Theo.
And so I drove to my friend Marie Morris’s imposing Tudor with its half circle of a driveway and asked her to come with me to the McDonald’s in Yonkers so we could talk.
Marie was as rooted in Tallmadge as I was, the sort of girl who played field hockey at the school with abandon in the autumn and tennis at the club with ferocity in the spring, grunting on her serves in a manner that appalled her mother but thrilled the club’s tennis pro.
She had no plans to play either sport at Vassar, her destination in September, but the sports had given her the sort of pleasure that golf gave me.
She was the only one of my friends who knew about Theo.
She was the only one of my friends who understood why I’d go only so far with the boys in our class, stopping them when they’d try to unzip my jeans while we were parked in a car after a movie, or tell them not to even bother to try to unzip theirs.
When I had smashed in the window of Frank Pendleton’s Ford Maverick, she’d joked, “God, you’d be a legend if you ever did that to Mr. Catton’s Cadillac. ” I’d assured her I never would.
“You have to tell Theo about what Mr. Foster saw,” she said as I drove.
We were in my mother’s orange Camaro, a pretty sporty car for a suburban mom, but wheels she loved because she always fought the good fight against middle age.
The body shop had done brilliant work repairing the grille and passenger-side fender after I’d toppled that stop sign.
The ashtray, once more, was overflowing with her cigarette butts. “It feels like this is bad.”
You may think it’s astonishing that relatively little of our conversation that afternoon was about Kenny Foster.
Oh, some was. But we had spoken on the phone earlier that day, and I’d told her then of my moonlit walk past her house around two in the morning.
And, of course, let us not forget the narcissism of the adolescent brain, let us not forget all that I have already shared with you about the frontal lobe.
“But Mr. Foster might not say anything. I mean, he’s got other things on his mind. And it’s not like they’re friends,” I argued, largely because this was just one more thing pulling me beneath the waves like an undertow.
“What did you say to him when he said he saw you at the hotel?”
“He didn’t finish the sentence, which is good, right?”
“But he said enough that you knew. And that means his wife knows.”
“If she heard it. If she was focused on it. I honestly don’t know if Mrs. Foster picked up on it,” I said, slamming on the brakes as a traffic light turned red just before me.
I have never been a great driver, but I was especially distracted that day.
Only in that era would a mother have given her teenage daughter the keys to the car in the days after the girl had killed a kid with a golf ball.
“He’ll tell her, won’t he?” said Marie. “Don’t husbands tell their wives things like that? Don’t they tell their wives most everything—and vice versa?”
“Theo doesn’t.” I could have added my own mother didn’t.
“Well, obviously.”
“I mean,” I continued, expressing a hope that I wasn’t at all sure was warranted, “maybe he won’t want to upset her any more than she already is. Or make her hate me any more than she already does.”
“Maybe.”
“I think I’m mostly afraid he’ll tell my parents.”
“And they’ll do what? Ground you? I don’t think so. They already know you’re upset about…about other things.”
“I’m just so worried about Theo.”
Yes, I said that: I’m just so worried about Theo.
Nothing like fearing for—rather than being fearful of—Humbert Humbert.
I took a year off, what we now call a gap year, though it was not a gap between high school and Yale.
Most of the year I worked at a travel magazine, slept twice with that bartender I mentioned, and then with another man twice my age for much of the following winter, though this one was single.
I never made the married man mistake again.
But that August my parents assumed I would still go to Yale, either in weeks or, worst case, just twelve months later than originally planned.
I made some noises about perhaps applying to Smith College instead, my mother’s alma mater and what had been my second choice, but it was mostly to mollify them.
If I chose to go to Smith, the main reason would be simple: the college didn’t have a golf team.
It didn’t even have a club for students who wanted to play purely for fun.