Pacific Avenue by Anne L. Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

onto the terrazzo floor. The
dishes smashed, coffee and food slopped all over. He grabbed some napkins from
a table to clean his clothes. A light-brown woman in a green uniform hurried to
pick up the shards of his dishes. The man scrubbed at his shirt and walked off
without looking back. The maid fetched a mop and bucket and cleaned the floor.
    Richard watched them. After a moment, I said, “Could I
see your apartment?”
    He turned to me, his face surprised and open. “It’s not
much, Kathy. Even the landlord calls the place ‘the Ghetto.’”
    “I want to see it.”
    We didn’t talk as we walked past the campanile and the
drama building, past the edge of the campus to East Chimes Street. Next door to
a greasy-smelling diner was a long gray apartment building. This was where the
hippies had lived, such hippies as were left in Baton Rouge after the serious ones
hitchhiked to San Francisco.
    Richard had the first-floor place at the back. It was a
one-room apartment, clean but dingy just the same. Stains on the ceiling showed
where the plumbing upstairs had overflowed. He didn’t have much furniture—a
flimsy table with scratched paint, a couple of straight chairs that didn’t
match, and a mattress on the floor, made up taut and perfect with a paisley
bedspread. And a board-and-cement-block shelf stuffed with books.
    His windows looked out onto a huge fig tree. As I glanced
out, I saw a rat eating a fig. Richard must have seen it too. I heard a sharp
intake of breath.
    I hadn’t felt so ashamed since the time Sharon caught
me stealing a pack of gum in the A&P when I was nine. I’m pushing myself
on him, and he probably thinks I want him for a boyfriend until the next white
guy comes along. Or even that I want to get involved with him in some sick way.
    Here I am, invading his privacy—who asked me? He’ll
think I’m so patronizing, insisting on seeing his water-stained paint and his
cheap furniture and his rat.
    “I’m sorry.” Oh, great, now I’m going to cry in
front of him. But I couldn’t help it.
    He offered his upturned white palms to me for comfort. Does
he think he can only touch me in the places where his skin matches mine? I
don’t want it to be that way anymore.
    I pulled him close and laid my face against his. I had
never gone to bed with a man before, never even wanted to. I almost laughed,
there in his arms. How could anyone think we’re different in any way that
matters?
    * * *
    On Thanksgiving Day, I woke to a splash of rain blown
against my window. The banked-in sky told me that it wasn’t going to let up,
but I didn’t mind. Rain was the best we could do in the South to mimic the
crisp-weather holiday coziness that we’d learned from children’s books. Years
when it was hot and sunny, it didn’t seem like Thanksgiving at all.
    In the kitchen, Mom was already fussing. She had the
classical radio station on, playing Charles Ives. Cranberries seethed in a
copper pot, exploding one at a time with soft pops. A bowl of chopped onions
filled the air with tears. I got a cup of coffee and made room for it on the
table between a bunch of celery and a stack of old Gourmet magazines.
    It looked like Thanksgiving dinner was going to be an
even bigger production than usual. I sat at the kitchen table for a few
minutes, but Mom worked around me, first on one side and then the other. She
didn’t make conversation or even ask for help with the preparations, so I took
my coffee back to my room, planning to study. But I couldn’t concentrate. I
kept imagining the dinner that evening.
    Sharon would be bringing her boyfriend Sam Quinn, who
none of us had met. All we knew about him was that he was a doctor at the
hospital where she worked. Uncle Joseph and Aunt Ruth were coming—they had
Thanksgiving dinner with us every year. And I’d invited Richard.
    Impressions of his face came between me and the books.
I smiled as I pictured him, gentle and serious. I thought of him trying to
please his father and