At the Bottom of Everything(19)

“I know I’ve been kind of the baddy,” Thomas said one night. “One of my regimen goals this summer is to be more fun. I feel like I’ve let myself be cornered into being anti-fun. I feel like the reverend in Footloose.”

My baseball friends were spending those same nights, we both knew, in a handful of guys’ houses, drinking beer they’d bought with laughable fake IDs, smoking pot out of glass pipes, calling around to their cluster of girlfriends to find out where the party had happened to coalesce. So I—and this must have been what Thomas was responding to—had a slight feeling of babysitting as we walked soberly along together, using all our old phrases, making all our old jokes, not quite feeling all our old fondness.

The mischief we got up to at first, in the hopes of proving to both of us that we were still capable of fun, was fairly tame; we were like a long-married couple venturing nervously into a sex shop. We rang the doorbell at what was supposed to be Bob Woodward’s house and then shouted, “We are Deep Throat!” as we sprinted off up the hill. We drank the red wine that his parents had left on the table and then pretended, him with much more excitement than me, not to be able to walk a straight line. We called the head of Dupont, Charles Gallant, and after planning to tell him we were from the IRS and that we knew how he’d really raised the money for the new gym, we hung up at the first sound of his Brahmin voice. I don’t think either Thomas or I enjoyed any of these hijinks completely, but they were gestures, as I say; they were little ceremonies undertaken on behalf of something larger, like sullen Friday nights at temple.

I think now, although I’ve tried at various points to remember it otherwise, that I was the one who first proposed our taking the Pells’ car out. We called this “committing grand theft auto,” even though of course it entailed nothing more daring than waiting for Richard and Sally to fall asleep, then taking the keys from the basket by the front door. We knew, when we were doing it, that this was the most serious mischief we’d gotten up to—I could see Thomas getting nervous, and I could see him seeing that I was actually excited about this in a way I hadn’t been about the prank calls or the doorbell-rings. This was when we’d just turned fifteen, so driving and everything to do with it, learner’s permits and driver’s ed and practice tests, had a kind of close-enough-to-touch electricity for us, or at least for me. My stepdad had, in the parking lot of his club, let me drive slow circles in his Lexus a few afternoons, so I didn’t think of myself entirely as a beginner.

The Pells had an old black Volvo that they called “the Beast.” We agreed that if we were caught taking it out, or if his parents somehow found out what we’d done, we’d say that I’d had a terrible headache and that I’d been in too much pain to walk so Thomas had thought he’d drive me just to the bottom of the hill, where we’d buy Advil. A ridiculous, nonsensical story, but one we figured no one could definitively disprove, and if his parents were the ones who caught us, we knew, although we wouldn’t have said it, that the trouble we’d get in would probably only be of the you’ve-really-disappointed-me variety. It was hard to picture Sally and Richard much angrier than that; at worst Thomas and I could become like peers they disapproved of.

And anyway all we did, at first, was back the car out of the driveway with the headlights off, and then, once we’d pulled out into the road, drive a few houses down the hill toward Connecticut until we came to the yellow house with the perfect driveway for turning around. Then we’d go back up and pull in just the way we’d come (Thomas’s nervousness about what we were doing came across mainly in how obsessive he was when it came to leaving the car in precisely the same place where we’d found it; he would lay out pebbles as markers for the tires).

I was, especially at first, usually the one who drove. We pretended we were a couple headed home from the office (“How was your day, sweetie?”) or beatniks on the highway (“Unlock my window so I can get the breath of America in my hair!”). Of course everything to do with the car takes a much more prominent place in my memory now, but we probably did this a total of five or ten times over the course of the summer, always at around midnight, and with an increasing feeling of knowing what we were doing. Thomas once surprised me by stepping hard on the gas, so we seemed to lift off the road for about twenty feet, before he stomped on the brake and sent us straining against our seat belts. I experimented with slowly swerving, with driving up the street backward, with driving with my elbows on the steering wheel instead of my hands. His street turned out to be almost as dependably, boringly suburban as mine, despite being a few hundred feet from Connecticut: all the neighbors’ houses were dark, and only once did we see anyone (a hurrying man with a cigarette) pass by on the sidewalk.