Commitment

1.

Walter arranged for a ride up to Berkeley with a girl he barely knew. He promised to bring only his stereo, his albums, and one suitcase. She reminded him that he was moving for the whole rest of his life. He didn’t think so. He was already planning to return.

He had to go to college; he understood that. All his life his mother had spoken of her nursing degree in a reverent tone, sometimes fingering the coin around her neck, proud to be the first person in her family to graduate. But he thought of himself as a slender pin that kept the machinery of his family ticking.

The morning he was leaving forever, according to the girl, his family piled into the Chevrolet and his mom drove to her address. It belonged to a house with a wide, deep lawn in the Palisades, where a woman carried a picnic basket, followed by a compact man in slippers pushing a miniature refrigerator on a dolly. Two middle school boys—one on each side of an ice chest—stumbled out of the front door. The street was high above the ocean, but Walter could see the sharp-cut dark blue waves.

A wood-paneled Ford Country Squire waited in the driveway, with all its doors open.

In an upstairs window, the girl waved extravagantly when Walter stood up out of the car. Susan, her name was. She and Walter had attended four years of high school together. He had never actually thought about her before. He had a faint recollection of her at a table trying to sell him a ticket to a dance.

The red front door hung open to reveal a room with white walls and an old wooden statue. The arrangement was balanced, quiet-feeling, like in a museum. Music trickled out; something with flutes and violins. Vivaldi? Not quite Bach. Walter unloaded his stereo from the trunk.

His sister and brother crouched in the back seat, their heads close together. He wondered for the millionth time what they talked about.

His mom stood out of the car, too. “Thank you for taking Walter,” she called to the other mother.

The other mother took her time to answer, dedicating herself to fitting the small refrigerator into the station wagon. “You’re not driving up? I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Her certainty alarmed Walter. Women with that tone intimidated his mom, who abruptly sat back inside the car and stationed her hands at nine o’clock and three o’clock on the steering wheel.

Susan stood in the doorway now, short with short dark hair. This whole family was short and dark-haired. Walter, still holding his stereo, climbed back into the car.

“We can just drive up,” his mother said.

“We don’t have to. It’s fine.”

By then, the small, well-built father had jogged over in his slippers. He had on glasses and would probably have rather been sitting with the paper. But he had a conciliating smile, and Walter’s mom did better with men. She rolled down the window, pushing the hair off her forehead. An hour later, they were driving up Highway 5, following the station wagon, where the compact man was keeping them, he’d promised, in his rearview mirror.

“This is it?” his mom asked, six hours later. She bent close to the steering wheel, inching down Telegraph Avenue. “It’s not what I expected.” Walter could imagine what she expected: doming gold-edged clouds. “It looks a little dumpy.”

Walter saw what she meant. He’d read about hippies in Time and seen them on the evening news—Cronkite talking to a long-haired girl with violet granny glasses—but the people at Indian-print-covered tables on the sidewalk looked old. It had never occurred to him that hippies could be old. Now they passed a park, with shaggy trees looming in the distance.

“Look at him, poor thing,” his mom said, gazing at a man carrying an ancient army backpack. “That’s probably everything he owns.”

Where his mom picked out a homeless pilgrim, Walter noticed a low, beautiful church, half-covered in wisteria. As usual with his mom, he saw it both ways, a kind of double bookkeeping. The station wagon stopped in front of dormitories, where students and parents pushed rough-looking orange wheelbarrows filled with suitcases. Hurrying. No one looked happy. “Do you want to get out?” his mom said.

She wasn’t a confident parallel parker in the best of circumstances. His brother hauled Walter’s suitcase from the trunk, leaving him only the light turntable and box of records. They met Susan in the courtyard, where girls with index card boxes looked up your name and gave you a key. They were both assigned to the seventh floor. Walter hoped her compact father would invite his family to join them for dinner. His mom needed something before the long drive home. Susan’s mother had shamed her into this.

Music leaked from under doors. Gasping at glimpses of gentle true spirit, he runs. Walter had that album. The lifting melody made him a little excited to be here.

Walter’s mom called “Thanks for keeping us in your mirror” down the corridor to Susan’s family, who stood in a cluster with all her luggage. His mom envied wives. Even if she did derive satisfaction from her job, she had a long commute and came home every night tired. She sympathized with husbands and thought that wives had the better deal.

Walter learned, later, that Susan’s mother also worked. She didn’t have the graceful life his mom probably imagined. She turned out to be unhappy, too.

When Walter opened the door, his roommate bolted up in bed, quickly pulling a T‑shirt over his head. He stuck out a hand, saying “Ken,” but didn’t get up, Walter assumed, because of his mother and sister. He probably didn’t have on pants. As Walter looked around the bare room, he stopped at a horn in the corner, mostly hidden by a brown cover but showing one patch of gold.

His family stood uselessly, trapping his new roommate under the covers. Walter wished they would leave; the feeling of these two eras of his life overlapping was unbearable.

Lina went down the hall to find a bathroom and Donnie began to hook up Walter’s stereo.

“Should we all go grab a bite?” his mom asked, trying to be the way a mother should be.

“The cafeteria opens in an hour,” Ken said.

“Walter, come here a minute.” In the hallway, his mom lifted an envelope from her purse. “Put this somewhere safe.” She was watching him, eyes wide in concentration, as he opened the envelope, thick with cash. “It took me a long time to save that.”

Lina returned from the bathroom and whispered, “There were boys in there.”

Donnie was underneath Walter’s bed to plug in the extension cord for the stereo. Then the three of them left. Walter felt winded. He suddenly had an overwhelming desire to sleep.

Twice, Ken got up (he was wearing only boxers and a T‑shirt) and looked out the window. “People in the cafeteria.” Walter could see shapes moving through the glass walls.

“You hungry?” Walter asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t feel like meeting new people. Having to talk.”

He’d said exactly what Walter felt. They stayed in their room.

“Are you Chinese?” Walter asked an hour later.

“Yup. What are you?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“You look like something. Mexican or something. And your name.”

“My dad’s from Afghanistan but I don’t really know him. Now I am hungry,” Walter said, but by then the cafeteria was dark and the hall had quieted.

“I have walnuts,” Ken said, and pulled out a burlap sack from under his bed.

Long after midnight, the phone rang, vibrating the plywood desk, and Walter leapt and caught it. What if something happened on their drive home? But it was her; he heard them moving in the kitchen. A sob skipped up his throat. He was afraid his roommate heard. For a minute, he couldn’t make words.

“We just walked in. Talk to you on Sunday,” she said, because long distance was expensive, charged by the minute. Sundays, the national telephone company lowered its rates.

He and Ken never talked about that first night. Walter didn’t know if Ken had slept through or heard him cry. But afterwards, it was as if they had always been close.

2.

Walter hadn’t had a real friend before. He’d walked with certain guys through the halls of Pali High; he’d called them friends, but not one of them had ever seen his house, because he and his sister attended their high school illegally. Years ago, their mom had driven to Pacific Palisades from the Valley to do their wash Sunday mornings in a high-ceilinged, mostly empty Laundromat that played orchestra music. The Korean owners liked the three children who folded their own clothes and told Walter’s mom about the lottery system that had allowed their own kids, now both UCLA graduates, into the Palisades district. She tried the lottery, failed twice, and, finally, smuggled them in using the address of a woman she’d met at an exercise class, who eventually stopped returning her calls. That woman must have still received mail from the high school; she could have turned them in. They’d had to lie low. Walter had complained about never being able to accept a ride home and his mom admitted the difficulty, calling it a trade-off. But Walter was legitimate now. He’d come to Berkeley the usual way, with better grades than the others from Pali.

Every Sunday, Ken wrote a letter to his parents that began Dear Father and Mother. Walter wasn’t in the habit of writing letters, but he tried one.

I made a friend, he wrote. We eat together every meal. She would be glad to know. He scribbled a PS for his sister. Carrie Appel—remember her, the Goddess? Guess who she rooms with?

The goddess from Pali, who’d once come to school in a see-through gauze dress, a pile of hair pinned on top of her head, now shared a room with the average eighteen-year-old who’d worked on the decorations committee for dances Walter didn’t attend. Susan.

Lina would know them both. She studied girls at Pali the way some guys watched the field during a game in play. While they’d followed the station wagon up the length of the state, she’d said she couldn’t imagine Walter dating Susan, which was a preposterous thing to say. Walter didn’t plan to date anyone. Date was a ridiculous word, more suitable for the edible sugary fruit. The Goddess was a goddess. He was a virgin, but that didn’t top his list of concerns. Ken was too. Walter could tell.

At night in their beds, the two young men talked. Ken had grown up in the Central Valley. His parents were immigrants, both doctors but not rich, not like American doctors here, he said. They thought he should become a doctor, too.

“I want to be a doctor,” Walter said. “We can be doctors together.”

Ken’s father had made him join ROTC. He signed up for the marching band, but for that he had to play tuba instead of French horn. Ken’s father had been an army medic and still marched as a reserve in the Fourth of July parade. Ken’s birthday was February 24, the number picked first in the original lottery. Since President Nixon abolished deferments, students were classified 1-A, available for service, just like the rest of the American male population. They couldn’t draft you, though, until you were twenty. And by then, it would be 1974 and Nixon had promised a completely volunteer army in 1973. Ken’s father believed him, but Ken thought a year was too close for comfort.

Walter had never worried about being drafted. No one he knew in high school worried personally either, though the fairness of abolishing student deferment had been a topic in his civics class. Once, his mom had talked to someone from where she’d grown up and, afterwards, shook her head. “Another boy went overseas,” she said. “I did the right thing getting you here.” She believed the world worked differently for the rich, keeping them safe. Now, listening to Ken, Walter questioned her assumption that graduating among the rich would extend him protections. Safety might require more direct payment. Otherwise, why would Ken be vulnerable? His parents were doctors, even if not as rich as the American ones.

“Does it matter much to you, being Chinese?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never not been.” Ken didn’t speak any Chinese language, but he’d gone to China school Saturday mornings and understood a little Mandarin. “Does it matter to you not being anything?”

“I guess, like you, I’ve always been.” When he was new at Pali, people had asked what he was. “They meant were we Christian or Jewish. I was nothing there, too.” Then he told Ken his secret, about going to a school he didn’t belong in.

He often paused at Susan and Carrie’s doorway. He loved their room. Each of the dorm rooms had come with metal bed frames, metal wastebaskets, and plywood desks. Walter and Ken’s remained exactly as they’d found it. But these two had set their beds at a ninety-degree angle so their heads nearly touched while they slept. They’d folded neat quilts over bedspreads. Their desks were side by side, with matching orange lamps. They had a small portable television, with an antenna. Walter hadn’t been friends with them at Pali; friendship was his great discovery in college, more important than classes and than the job he’d found manning a food cart.

When they say coed dorm, he wrote, they mean it, even the bathrooms. I never see girls in there. They must shower at dawn.

He avoided the coed bathrooms, too. When he could, he used restrooms on campus, which were still labeled men and women.

As Walter stood, watching Nixon announce his electoral victory, Susan shook her head. “It’s not right.” Walter assumed she meant Nixon. “Nine days late.”

“My allowance,” Carrie explained. “My dad forgot to send the check.”

Allowance. Wow.

“That money should be here on the first,” Susan said. “Like clockwork.”

“You need some dough?” Walter had money from his job. But the young women began a chorus of no-thank-yous, and it suddenly occurred to him that his offer felt dishonest. He didn’t want to appear, as he must have at Pali, richer than he was. His mom was ashamed of their relative poverty. At Berkeley, he was awakening to the possibility of being unashamed. Clarity, he thought, made friendship possible. “I don’t get allowance, but I work for the food service, so I’ve got some dough.” He tossed two twenties onto Carrie’s bed. Carrie, the Goddess, looked at him wet-eyed as she handed it back. She was the kind of person you felt you knew way better than you did, for all the times you’d imagined having sex with her.