Then he got a pen from the bartender and wrote his number on a napkin.
“You should know,” he said as he handed the napkin to Zoe, “that your Aunt Cassandra will kill you if you ever, under any circumstances, call this number before three in the afternoon. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Zoe said. “I understand.”
Miss Cinnamon said, “There is nothing more evil than a drag queen getting woken up before she's ready. Believe me, baby, you don't want to mess with that.”
1972/ Will and Inez and Charlotte dropped acid together one last time, declared their devotion, and all went back to their parents' houses for the summer. When Will's parents picked him up at the train station in Garden City and took him home, he was surprised to see that the town looked both ridiculous and deeply familiar, familiar in an almost otherworldly sense. He might have been a hypnotist's subject on the verge of remembering a past life. He might have been traveling in another country where he knew supernaturally that the driver would take the next left turn, and that a gabled yellow house would appear from behind the scrubby blackness of a mulberry tree. He'd been prepared for his feeling of bored irritation at the sight of the unaltered lawns and the prim, prosperous houses. He'd imagined exactly his own sense of weighdessness as his father drove with both hands on the wheel and his mother talked about the new swimming trunks she'd bought for him on sale. What he hadn't expected was the sense of comfort, of almost surreal location. He'd never expected to feel, as his father's Buick turned the familiar corner, that he had in any sense come home. When he got out of the car he stood on the lawn staring at the house his father's money had built, grand in its suburban way, a big rambling folly with mansard roofs and bay windows, clean as bone in the summer light. There were no books inside, except the paperback bestsellers his mother read on summer vacations. There was no object, no dish or furnishing, older than Will. But there was familiar food. There was sanctuary. His father commanded the house from a position of profound and eternal ownership, and Will remained his father's servant in some way that was all the more powerful for being nameless.
“Penny for your thoughts,” his mother said.
“Huh? Oh, sorry.”
“I made chicken salad. Are you hungry?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Come on in, then. It's so good to have you home.”
He stayed less than two days. His flight was decided the first night. His father asked over dinner, “So, what do you think about a major?”
“I think I want to teach,” Will said.
It was a lie. He was surprised to hear himself telling it. He didn't want to teach. Teaching was monotonous, thankless, underpaid. He wanted to study architecture. He wanted to build.
His mother, thinner and more prone to smiling silences than he remembered, ran her fingernail along the rim of her plate. Iridescent flecks, hard little rainbows of electric light, flashed and faded in the prismed chandelier.
“Teach,” his father said. He pronounced the word with disdainful neutrality. He made a little brick of sound. Will's father had grown larger. His flesh had the puffed, padded quality of fat loaded onto a man born to be thin. Will suspected his father had gained precisely the amount of weight his mother had lost.
“Yeah. Teach.”
Zoe sat across from Will in her carnival colors, her patchy hobo-girl clothes and her tinkling gypsy jewelry. She smiled helplessly at him.
“Teach what?” his father asked.
“Kids,” Will said. Everything he said surprised him. He'd declared English literature originally, then switched to linguistics, and had now more or less settled on taking the courses he would need to apply to architecture schools after he graduated. He'd signed up to study Palladio and Frank Lloyd Wright in the fall. He'd be learning about the conduction of electricity through a room. But he needed a different life to show his father. He needed a self that didn't touch him.
He said, “I think I'd like to teach the kids everybody's written off. Like, maybe work with Head Start.”
“I think you'd be very good with children,” his mother said. “You'd be a wonderful teacher.”
“You need to go to Harvard for that?” his father said. “You could teach pickaninnies with two years of junior college.”
“Don't use a word like that when I'm here,” Will told him.
“Sorry. Nee-groes. Colored children. I don't get it. Where