The Trouble with Lexie Read online

  “It’s a lot more than the starter, and he’s not even sure he’ll be able to find the parts.” There it was. That irrational anger over the car again.

  “Take the van. I’ve got all the materials I need. If I have to go somewhere I’ll bike.”

  “I hate the van.” Lexie gave a strained smile. She was such an asshole. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t appreciate that she had transportation and didn’t have to take a bus—not that there were any buses this far in the mountains.

  As a kid, Lexie took the bus everywhere—she had spent hours of her life sitting at bus stops waiting. Around the time she was fourteen she began pick-and-choose hitchhiking, sticking out her thumb only if someone safe-looking was driving by. A couple times she’d stepped into a car only to find it wasn’t as safe as she’d thought. There was the guy with the bottle of whiskey tucked between his legs who offered her a drink by sliding the bottle between Lexie’s legs. And there was the French couple who pulled out a packet of naked photos of the wife, handed them to Lexie, and asked her what she thought. Lexie had told them that she thought she should get out at the next stoplight.

  “I could drop you off and pick you up if you hate the van so much.” Peter wasn’t insulted. He was wise enough to take nothing personally. Lexie thought it was one of his better traits.

  “But I have to meet Ethan’s dad at the Inn at the Lake for coffee.” Lexie looked back at the clock on the oven. She had to leave within the next five minutes.

  “Call him and tell him to pick you up.” Peter went back to reading the iPad.

  Lexie imagined herself in the passenger seat of Daniel Waite’s car. It would be a leather seat, she knew. Warm. Supple. Like sitting on a lap.

  “I’ll drive the van. I’m ridiculous.” Lexie reminded herself that she shouldn’t be coveting expensive leather laps.

  Peter shrugged.

  LEXIE HURRIED OUT OF THE ROOM WHERE SHE TAUGHT HEALTH and Human Sexuality. The semester had only started, so they weren’t into the good stuff yet. For now it was simply anatomy. It was amazing how these kids, who could take the SAT in ninth grade and score in the top third, didn’t know the difference between a vagina and labia. Well, they’d know it by the end of the semester.

  In her office, Lexie brushed her hair, put on lipstick, and checked her face in the wall mirror. She’d worn a black wrap dress that dipped down a little too low for teaching and so she’d pinned it shut in the morning to avoid flashing her students. Lexie took the pin and readjusted it one inch lower in an effort to feel a little less schoolmarmish and a little more Californian. She turned off her cell phone, dropped it into her purse, and hurried to the van.

  Her stomach churned on the drive to Inn on the Lake. “It’s only a cup of coffee,” she said aloud.

  Lexie parked the van in the far end of the lot where she hoped Daniel Waite wouldn’t see her getting out. She circled the van, hand-locking all the doors. It was a pointless exercise in a town where nobody locked their car, and half of the residents didn’t lock their houses. But even after three years in Ruxton, Lexie never left a car, her office, or the house without revving up her lifelong Did I lock the door? OCD. Once the van was secured, Lexie walked—head high, shoulders back—into the café.

  Daniel Waite was already there, sitting at a corner table, reading the Wall Street Journal. He put down the paper and stood. Lexie’s stomach tumbled. She often got a little nervous before talking to parents, but this was unusually forceful.

  “It’s great to see you again.” Daniel Waite pulled out a chair for Lexie.

  “Oh, yeah, thanks.” Lexie’s hands shook as she laid her napkin on her lap. Her fingers jumped—two leaping crickets—to the spot where she’d pinned her dress shut. Was it too low? Would Daniel Waite think a woman in a V-wrap dress wasn’t professional enough to be counseling his son? This would be so much easier if she had taken a Klonopin.

  “Did you pin that dress shut?” Daniel’s mouth was open, a loose, toothy smile.

  “What?” Lexie dropped her hands. She felt her face flash with color, like a peacock’s suddenly fanned tail.

  “I can see that little stick of silver, like you pinned it shut from the inside.” He was pointing at her, his finger only inches from Lexie’s chest.

  “Well—”

  “It’s those boys, isn’t it! Damn those horny little buggers staring at Miss James so much she has to track down a safety pin and secure her dress shut!” He was laughing.

  Lexie laughed with relief. “I was trying to be proper.”

  “I know, I know. You got Don McClear walking around with a broomstick up his ass and Janet Irwin the sheriff’s deputy—”

  “I thought she was a hunting dog, sniffing you out.” Lexie felt her body easing into this. Daniel Waite wasn’t so hard after all.

  “Hunting dog, Deputy Dog, Colonel Klink, Barney Rubble to Don’s Fred Flintstone, Barney Fife to Don’s Andy Taylor . . . wait, how old are you? Do you get any of my references?”

  “I know who Barney Rubble is!”

  “Do you know who Barney Fife is? Please don’t tell me that you’re closer to my son’s age than mine. I’m having a real hard time with this old man stuff.” Daniel scratched his fingers along his jaw as if he were rubbing a hoary beard.

  “You don’t look that old.”

  “I’m ancient. Methuselah.”

  “Well, how old are you?” Fifty, she said in her head.

  “Fifty-three,” Daniel said. “And you’re . . . twenty-six?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “So you are closer to Ethan’s age than mine.”

  “Well, but—”

  “But I can catch you up on late sixties and early seventies cartoons and sitcoms so quickly, you’ll soon feel as old as me.”

  Lexie had chatted with many Ruxton parents in her three years at the school and not one of them ever was relaxed enough to talk about nothing. About TV. About ageing. It was always The Child. What he or she had done or what he or she should be doing. Sometimes the parents’ interest in their kids bordered on pathological—as if the child were being sent out in the world as their parents’ do-over. And most of the parents were oblivious to the idea that although Lexie loved her job and felt great respect and affection for the students, there were few things less interesting to her than listening to a list of any particular kid’s accomplishments. Certainly, Lexie’s childhood was an unhealthy opposite of that. She was ignored mostly, and mocked for her achievements (“Now don’t you get a swollen head over all that and start thinking you’re too good for us,” Mitzy had said, when eight-year-old Lexie’s fawn haiku was chosen for inclusion in the elementary school newspaper).

  Daniel Waite was a parent unlike any of the others. He was playful. Fun. Lexie didn’t sense that he was as focused on the status markers as the other parents. If there was a Christmas letter being issued from the Waite house, would it even mention that Ethan was a senior at Ruxton or that he’d done an internship in Washington, DC, last summer? And Daniel was the first lawyer Lexie had ever met who didn’t talk about his practice. At all.

  “. . . the best thing about daytime TV was the ads—” Daniel said.

  “Oh, yeah. I used to crave Rice-A-Roni when I was home sick ’cause that ad came on every fifteen minutes.”

  “The San Francisco Treat,” Daniel sang, perfectly on tune.

  “Exactly! And San Francisco was so close to where I lived but seemed so, so, far away, it could have been another country.”

  “When the commercials for TDI, Truck Driver Institute, came on I’d think that as soon as I graduated from Ruxton, I was going to book out to Arizona and get my trucking license.”

  TWO HOURS LATER LEXIE FELT LIKE HER HEAD WAS AN INFLATED helium balloon. She was bobbing with lightness. And everything around her looked different than when she’d walked in. There was a yellow flashbulb clarity that gave Lexie the feeling she was seeing through helium as well. They had finished the snack Daniel had ordered: Frito pi
e, essentially nachos made with Frito chips. Comfort food, Daniel had said. Happy food, Lexie had thought. She was supremely happy and miraculously unfettered by the blurriness of real life. Often, since she’d arrived at Ruxton, Lexie felt like she was two people at once: her childhood self, a member of her original family—a group that sat far outside the dimensions of anyone’s ideal. And her current self, a person Lexie hoped would never suggest her origins. But with Daniel, for the last two hours, Lexie had been so open and true that it felt as if she was one complete person. Her past and her present were now perfectly lined up like a foggy-edged camera shot pulled into crystalline focus.

  When Lexie said she had to get back to Ruxton for her eleven thirty appointment Daniel finally brought up Ethan.

  “So, about my son . . .” Daniel lifted his hands, face up, as if to ask for an offering.

  “Can we talk on the phone or something?” Lexie gathered up her purse, pulled the napkin off her lap, and stood.

  “I’ll call you.” Daniel Waite stood, stuck out his hand and held hers more than shaking it, a move that Lexie didn’t quite know how to read. She didn’t mind, though. Daniel felt like a real friend.

  3

  ETHAN WAITE WAS DIFFERENT. HIS BODY—LONG AND LEAN, WIDE at the shoulders like his father—held a new kind of power now that Lexie could see its future. Its potential.

  It was Wednesday, and they were in Lexie’s office, the louvered shutters tilted up, giving the room the hazy, muted light of an early-morning bedroom. Lexie liked this light when she saw her student patients. It dimmed everything enough to relax them—no one was under a spotlight. And she kept the heat up, too—seventy-four degrees—so that the students would melt into the old, leather couch, while Lexie sat upright in the tapestry wing chair facing them. This womb-like climate allowed the students to open up and trust Lexie. She wasn’t their friend, but they could tell her everything they told their friends. And she wasn’t their mother; they could tell her everything they wouldn’t tell their mothers. And unlike an essay turned in to an English teacher or a presentation on colonial Africa, nothing that went on in Lexie’s office was public. Students could admit the stuff they’d never before dared say aloud.

  Even so, it was rare to be surprised. Teenagers were remarkably alike in their anxieties and obsessions, and predictably aligned in their desires by gender. Even the gay and lesbian students—the few of them bold enough to come out in a school where the preppy athlete was regarded as the ideal—fell in line with the masses. The only people who ever surprised Lexie were the Asperger’s kids with their obsessions (Lexie’s favorite had been the kid who collected ants, froze them, and then arranged them on paper, glued into words and phrases he repeated over and over again: crispy critters, crispy critters, crispy critters). These kids were often the smartest, too, and Lexie would find herself taking notes of things to google and research once they had left her office.

  What did surprise Lexie, however, was how disinterested many kids were in their own families, and their parents, in particular. Even James Blue, whose mother had recently been killed in a car crash, had little to say about this matter. Like acne, or herpes, or shingles after chicken pox, Lexie knew the horrors of his mother’s death would eventually resurface—popping out when he least expected it. But for now all she could get out of him was how much he hated Tori Spector because she didn’t love him the way he loved her, and had chosen not to lose her virginity with him. Instead, she lost it with the boyfriend who followed James, the loudmouth, Human Garbage Disposal, sex-obsessed (according to James) Swede, Magnus Skaarsgard.

  Ethan Waite drifted above the others as if he were made of a different material—something more buoyant, flexible; something that sought the light rather than surfing with the weedy, tangled undercurrents of the crowd. Ethan seemed, simply, better than the rest of them.

  “It’s hot.” Ethan loosened his tie and undid the collar button of his dress shirt. This was the required uniform: For the boys—blue blazer, white button-down and tie, khakis, and loafers or Sperry’s or some other shoe that did not in any way resemble a tennis shoe or a sandal. For the girls it was the same, but without the tie and with khaki skirts if they preferred them over pants. Naturally, the girls shortened their skirts as high as they could, as if their life depended on getting oxygen to the flesh above their knees, light on their thighs, wind on the backs of their legs.

  Ethan rolled up his sleeves. Lexie could see the grapefruit bulge of muscle pushing through the thin, cotton shirt.

  “I’m wondering about the value of it all,” Ethan said.

  “The value of what?”

  “Going to one of the schools my parents want me to go to. I’m thinking of hucking all the applications in the trash, telling them I didn’t get in, and then secretly applying to the schools I really want to go to.”

  “Hmm.” Lexie wrote down the word hucking so she could look up the exact definition once Ethan had left. “So you want to huck all the apps to the schools your parents picked and apply to the places where you really want to go. Where do you really want to go?”

  “Berkeley, Stanford, or UCLA. But my parents say it’s Ivies or nothing. I’m their only child.”

  Funny, Daniel hadn’t acted like the kind of father who would demand Ivies or nothing. Maybe this was his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s doing. “You’re still applying to Middlebury, right?”

  “It’s my safety. It’s where my mother went.”

  “I guess they’re pretty confident in you.” So confident, Lexie thought, there was no need to boast.

  “They’re confident in my dad’s connections. It’s not who you know and who you meet, but who you fuck and who you eat.” Ethan grinned. The therapy session was the only place where Lexie would allow a student to use expletives. If they were going to fully be themselves during their session, she reasoned, she had to allow them to speak the way they did when there wasn’t a teacher around.

  Lexie smiled back at Ethan. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “My dad.”

  A silver string darted up Lexie’s spine as she connected the word fuck with the idea of Daniel Waite.

  The remainder of the hour didn’t feel like work. Ethan riffed about the comically bad pot-brownie trip he’d had with his two best pals. Ethan had thought he was going deaf—everything sounded like it was coming to him through bulletproof glass. Lexie gave him her standard talk on marijuana being stronger and longer lasting in edibles. She cautioned him against using it in any form and offered the list of contraindications, none of which were too serious. Still, Lexie herself had never tried pot. She’d seen too much of it at the kitchen table as a kid to think that anything worthwhile could ever come of it.

  From the pot story, Ethan jumped to naked swimming in the pond at night. For that one, Lexie sat back in her chair and laughed. The truth was, she didn’t believe Ethan was in crisis, that he even needed to see her professionally. As far as Lexie could tell, Ethan simply wanted the time to sit in her office and decompress.

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE SHE AND PETER LOUNGED ON THE COUCH, LEXIE’S bare feet resting in his lap, her computer resting on her own lap, Lexie got a text from Daniel Waite. She stared at the gray-bubbled words on her cell phone screen.

  Frito Pie Friday. It’s official. Must have Frito pie.

  Enjoy! Eat one for me, too, Lexie typed.

  But you are the Lady President of the Frito Club, you must attend.

  “Should we do a guitar lesson?” Peter stared at the TV as he spoke. He was watching a science show, something with dolphins and sonar and fishermen lost at sea.

  “Uh . . . maybe later, okay?” Lexie typed, Hahaha!

  “Who’re you texting?” Peter clicked up the volume on the TV.

  “It’s that Ruxton dad I had coffee with the other day.” I’m free at three on Friday. “Ethan’s dad.”

  Meet you Friday at the Frito Club, 3pm sharp, Daniel replied before she even looked away from the screen.

  “Look at the s
ize of that dolphin compared to the diver. Freaky, huh?” Peter had one long, slim finger pointed at the TV set. Lexie looked, but she couldn’t see anything but Daniel Waite.

  “Did you find the chairs?” Peter asked when Lexie didn’t respond.

  “Yes.” Lexie clicked back through her history, past the three pages of articles she had read about Daniel and Jen Waite, past the How to Make Your Stomach Flatter in Three Days article she had read, past the diagrams of Yoga Facelift, Start Today!, to the first place she had been when she had opened the computer that night: a chair rental place in Northampton. She had briefly looked at the posh, gold chairs that were carved to look like they were made of bamboo. They were too delicate for the wholesome country look she and Peter were going for. But they were good enough. And at this point, good enough was good enough.

  “These.” Lexie turned the screen to face Peter.

  “How much?”

  “Two eighty-five.”

  “A little more than we wanted to pay, but who cares? You only get married once.” Peter pulled a Visa card from his pocket. He held the credit card out with one hand while aiming the remote, like a sword, toward the TV. The stations clicked by so quickly Lexie didn’t believe Peter could even see what he was zooming past.

  PETER SNORED THAT NIGHT. MAYBE IT WAS THE THREE BEERS HE’D had while watching TV; maybe it was fall allergies. But he snored. And it was intolerable. This wasn’t the sweet purring of other snorey nights, when Lexie had wanted to roll into him and push against his back like a cat. It was a full-on snore. An old-man snore. A drill-in-her-head snore. A leaf-blower-in-the-bedroom snore. Lexie wanted to take the pillow from beneath her own head and Cuckoo’s Nest the life out of Peter.