Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [93]
“So,” I said, “where’re you from?”
“Where did I grow up?”
“Yeah.”
“Manhattan.”
“Where’s that?”
“Manhattan?”
“Yeah, where is that?”
“You’re joking, right? New York.”
“New York City?”
“Yes, New York City.” She laughed gracefully, as if to spare my feelings.
“Okay, so you’re from New York City?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I know where that is.”
She glanced at Pop and rested her hand on his knee. He was smiling, but the ride got quiet as we rode over the Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack River. I downshifted and gave the truck some gas. If I’d ever heard of Manhattan I couldn’t remember the word, and it was like walking through the student union, three or four rich girls pointing me out, Dubus’s son, the townie.
I was tired of being a townie. I was tired of this town.
FOR MONTHS I thought about becoming a long-haul truck driver, getting paid to roam the land in a thundering rig. I sent away for a brochure to the Andover Tractor Trailer Driving School, but the long sections on safety and maintenance left me cold, the same way I had felt pumping gas down on Winter Street, bored and far away from myself. Besides, when and where would I work out?
I began studying other brochures too. Glossy ones from the student services office in Academy Hall. Somewhere I heard you could transfer from one college to another, and I applied to five schools west of the Mississippi River. I’d be as far from everything I knew as I could get and once I got there, it’d be too late to change my mind and come back. These were state universities in Montana, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, and Texas. I made out the applications, sent along my B-average transcripts, and was accepted into all five.
That fall and winter I was working as a night manager in a fast food restaurant just off Monument Square, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. It was owned by a Greek man named Nikos. He was short and stocky and wore thick bifocals, and he always looked distracted and concerned about money. There was Marie, too, a Greek girl who had warm brown eyes and hair as long and dark as Marjan’s. Throughout our shift, we flirted, and she’d smile and ask if she could squeeze my bicep or touch my chest muscles through the polyester uniform we both had to wear. Sometimes I’d let her and feel I was betraying Marjan, but she and I rarely saw each other anymore. She was in study groups with the Iranians and Turks now, and on weekends they’d go to discos together. I was certain she was in love with somebody and it wasn’t me, and I enjoyed this Greek girl’s attention while I was saving the money I needed to get out of town.
Those years you could buy a two-week train pass on Amtrak and go wherever the train went, which included every state I needed to visit. Within a few months I had enough money for that ticket and then enough to move me to wherever I was going, too. One night late, when Nikos and I were closing out the register, I turned to him and said I was giving him my notice. He squinted up at me from behind his bifocals. He shook his head.
“Why do you need to do this? You’re smart boy. You can make a lot of money with this business. You don’t need college. I never went for college.”
I nodded and listened. Then I thanked him for making me night manager and walked home. It was a damp spring night, and college kept sifting through my brain, Nikos’s Greek accent wrapped around that word. I had to remind myself that that’s where I was going, to some college far away, though I was only thinking about being far away from here, far from the stinking Merrimack River and its abandoned mills and overflowing barrooms and endless opportunities to fight. That, and what kind of gym I’d be working out in.
My last shift was a warm night in late May. Marie was wearing more makeup than she usually did, her cheeks rosy with