I knew that if they were going to the Weitzmans’ they’d never be back till way after midnight, so I guess I wasn’t that worried about when Joshua would leave. He stayed for dinner and we had linguine with this really good pesto sauce that Mom bought last week at Pasta and Cheese. It’s all green and garlicky, but I figured if we both had it, it wouldn’t matter so much if I reeked of garlic. Then we studied a bit and then we fucked and then we fell asleep. We both just fell sound asleep. Mom and Daddy got home around two. I was still sleeping at that point, but Joshua had gotten up and gone to the bathroom. When he heard Mom and Daddy come home, he figured he’d better stay in there till they were safely asleep. So he waited around half an hour till everything was quiet.
At that point I woke up. I saw that Joshua wasn’t in bed with me and didn’t know what had happened. I went to the bathroom and there he was, poor thing, sitting in the bathtub all wrapped up in a big orange bath towel, reading Lord of the Flies (he has to do a book report on it for school). I got in the bathtub with him and we began to kind of horse around. I suddenly realized I hadn’t even washed my hair, which I usually do Sunday night. Joshua said he’d help me wash it, so we took a shower together. Then we got out and began drying each other off and, well, one thing kind of led to another. We didn’t want to go back to my room because we were a little scared about Mom and Daddy so we did it in the bathtub, which wasn’t that bad. We spread out a lot of towels and turned the portable heater on. It was really quite cozy and comfortable.
Right while we were, like, in the middle of doing it, suddenly the door rattled. “Who is it?” I called out.
“It’s me,” Daddy said. “What are you doing in there, Tati?”
“I’m just washing my hair, Daddy.”
“Do you know what time it is? It’s almost three in the morning! Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said breathlessly. It was a little hard to talk with Joshua lying right on top of me. “I’ll be out soon, I’m almost done.”
Then Joshua got out of me. We figured the mood had been spoiled, sort of, and there’d be other times. I wrapped myself up in a towel and slowly unlocked the bathroom door. Joshua was still in the bathtub, huddled up in the towels, but the shower curtain was all around him like a tent. Daddy was standing in the hallway in his pajamas, looking angry.
“It was crucial that you wash your hair at three in the morning?” Daddy said.
“It just felt kind of itchy,” I said. “You know. It was bothering me. I couldn’t sleep.” I smiled at him, hoping to change the subject. “Did you have a good time at your party?” I said cheerfully.
Just then Joshua sneezed. He’d had a cold about two weeks ago, but was over it mostly. But I guess lying there with all those damp towels must have started it up again. Daddy looked at me sternly. “What was that?”
I shrugged my shoulders like I had no idea and hadn’t even heard anything.
Daddy went into the bathroom and pulled aside the shower curtain. There was poor Joshua, his hair all wet, cringing in the back of the bathtub. “All right,” Daddy said. “This is it. I don’t want to hear one word of explanation. I want you out of here in precisely ten minutes or I’m calling your parents right this minute.”
Joshua rushed naked back into my room and got dressed in about one second. He tried saying, “It wasn’t Rusty’s fault, Mr. Engelberg. See, I had this term paper to do so we—”
“I said out and I mean out,” Daddy said, pointing. “Go!”
“Daddy,” I said after Joshua had gone. “We just fell asleep, that’s all. Joshua had a really bad virus two weeks ago and he just lay down and—”
“As a first step,” Daddy said, “I’m calling his parents tomorrow morning. Don’t they know where their children are at night? Don’t they care?”
“Daddy, please don’t call his parents,” I begged. “It’ll never happen again. Really.”
“Tat,” Daddy said, looking at me gravely, “I’ve always trusted you. As you know I believe in trust between parents and children. I’m just saddened, more than anything else, not so much shocked as saddened, at the way you’ve taken advantage of that trust.”
I looked up at him mournfully. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Really.”
Usually if I look up at Daddy that way and kind of lean against him, he softens, but this time he just said stiffly, “We’ll talk about this in the morning. I don’t think you realize how serious—”
I lay in bed worrying about Daddy calling Joshua’s parents. Would he do such a sick, awful thing? Daddy can be nice. He’s really not a mean person, despite what I might have made him sound like here. I mean, he really wants what’s best for us. It’s just that things have changed so much since he was my age and he can’t understand that. He says he tries to, but he just can’t. Mom’s always saying that Daddy’s views about women are straight out of the 50s when women were supposed to be virgins and men were allowed to screw around and do whatever they wanted. “If those were the good old days, you can have them,” she says. Actually, Joshua’s father is not that different, though I don’t especially think he and Daddy would get along. Joshua’s parents live in this really fancy duplex on Park Avenue. That’s because Joshua’s father, whose name is Patrick Lasker, is a lawyer who makes a lot of money on divorce cases. That’s how he met Joshua’s mother, in fact. She was trying to get a divorce from the person she was married to, John someone, who drank, and she went to Joshua’s father and I guess they liked each other so much, Joshua’s father decided to get divorced too. So they got married and had Joshua and his two brothers.
Joshua hates his father; he calls him Patricia behind his back. He says that he has girl friends and is seedy and gross in all sorts of ways. He’s sort of tall with thick, long grayish hair and glasses and he always wears turtlenecks with this funny pendant around his neck. Joshua thinks he looks like a fag. Joshua’s mother is this little sort of nervous-looking woman who works in charities and is worried because Joshua’s oldest brother took a year off from college and is traveling around Europe, playing the guitar. She’s afraid he’ll never come back.
I know Mom and Daddy would hate Joshua’s parents. Daddy has this thing about people who live on the East Side. He says they’re all decadent and phony and he doesn’t respect people who make a lot of money unless they do it by mistake, doing something worthwhile. Also, I know Mom would hate Joshua’s parents’ apartment. It’s really elegant with lots of antiques and peach-colored carpets. It looks just like the apartments Mom sometimes points to in House & Garden and says, “God, don’t you just want to vomit! How can people live like that?” I guess Mom thinks our apartment is nice and it is in a way. Mom doesn’t “believe” in carpets so we just have bare wood floors and Indian rugs and lots of books. It’s kind of messy. When I was sick in third grade after I had my tonsils out, my teacher came to visit me and she looked around as though she didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “My, this certainly looks very lived in.”
All day at school I worried about Daddy calling Joshua’s parents. What if they decide we can’t see each other anymore? What if they set some horribly strict curfew like nine o’clock? What if Daddy says he thinks we’re too young for sex?
I decided I better do what Daddy said and come straight home from school. So I didn’t even go out for pizza with Shellie like I usually do. Deel has her math tutoring on Monday so she doesn’t get home till six. Her tutor is this friendly old man who has around six cats and a huge tank of tropical fish. Deel likes animals a lot so they spend most of the time talking about animals. Maybe that’s why she’s still failing Math.
When I got home, the house was quiet. At first I thought no one was there. But when I went into the kitchen for a snack, there was