Guilty about taking the bus. About taking the bus. Listen, the really terrible thing about being young is the triviality.
The reason I felt guilty about taking the bus is this. It was five days since my birthday, right? For my birthday my father had given me a present. A really fantastic present. It was unbelievable. He must have planned it and saved for it for years, literally. He had it there waiting when I got home from school. It was parked in front of the house, but I didn’t even notice it. He kept hinting, but I didn’t get the hints. Finally he had to take me out and show it to me. When he gave me the keys, his face got all twisted up as if he felt like crying with pride and pleasure.
It was a car, of course. I won’t say the brand name because I think there’s enough advertising around already. It was a new car. Clock, radio, all the extras. It took him an hour to show me all the extras.
I had learned to drive, and got my license in October. It seemed useful, if there was an emergency; and I could do some errands for my mother and get off by myself that way. She had a car, my father had a car, now I had a car. Three people, three cars. Only the thing was, I didn’t want a car.
What did the thing cost? I didn’t ask, but it was at least three thousand dollars. My father is a CPA, and we don’t have that kind of money for unnecessary things. For that kind of money I could have lived for a year or more at MIT, if I got a tuition scholarship. That’s what came into my head right away, before he’d even opened the shiny little door. He could have put the money into savings. Of course, I could sell the car and not take too bad a loss on it if I did it soon. That came into my head too, and that was when he put the keys in my hand and said, “She’s all yours, son!” and his face twisted up that way.
And I smiled. I guess.
I don’t know if I fooled him. If so, it was probably the first time I ever succeeded in fooling anybody; but I think so, because he wanted so badly to be fooled, to believe that I was struck dumb with joy and gratitude. That sounds as if I was scornful of him. I don’t mean it that way.
We took the car out for a ride right away, of course. I drove up into the park, and he drove it back—he was itching to get his hands on the wheel—and all that was fine. The trouble came when he found out on Monday that I hadn’t driven my new car to school. Why not?
I couldn’t tell him why not. I only half understood it myself. If I drove the thing to school and parked it in the school lot, I’d given in. I owned it. It owned me. I was the owner of a new car with all the extras. People at school would say, “Hey how about that. Hey wow. How about Fastback Griffiths!” Some of them would sneer, but some of them would honestly admire it, and maybe me for being lucky enough to own it. And that’s what I couldn’t take. I didn’t know who I was, but I knew one thing: I wasn’t the seat-fixture of an automobile. What I was was the type who walks to school (it’s 2.7 miles by the shortest route) because walking is the kind of exercise I like, and I really like the streets of the city. The sidewalks, the buildings, the people you pass. Not the brake lights on the back of the car in front of yours.
Well, anyhow, that was where I drew the line. I’d already tried very ingeniously to hide the line, by driving errands for Mother on Saturday, and volunteering to take both my parents for a drive in the country on Sunday in “my new car.” But Monday evening he found the line. Didn’t you take the car to school? Why not?
So there I was on Tuesday riding the bus and feeling guilty. I wasn’t even walking, after all my explanations of how I liked to walk and doctors say the exercise of walking is the best of all for the human body. I was riding the bus. For twenty-five cents. And three thousand dollars’ worth of car was sitting on its white sidewall steel-belted radials in front of our house, right where I’d get off the bus.
I looked out the window of the bus to make sure it really was raining hard enough to be an excuse for not walking. It was coming down so hard that the bus windows looked like pebble glass; but mere facts don’t seem to help guilt much. I wondered how my father would say, “Didn’t you take the car to school? Why not?” tonight. The thought made me twitch, and while twitching I noticed that the person in the window seat was somebody from school. I said, “Oh, hi,” and she said, “Hi,” and I wished it was somebody I didn’t know so I could ignore her.
The Fields had lived in a house two blocks up our street a couple of years, and Natalie had been in some classes with me in sophomore and junior years. She had long dark hair and was quiet and you never saw her around and she did something with music, and that was one hundred percent of what I knew about Natalie Field. She was good-looking, but I find almost all girls good-looking, so I am no judge. People wouldn’t call her beautiful, because she was stocky and had a severe expression; but I think she was good-looking, only you didn’t notice it, because she wasn’t noticing you. However, this time I did notice it, because she was noticing me. She had to. My knapsack flap had gotten wet through and was dripping onto her knee. I moved it so it would soak into my thigh instead and said, “Sorry. It’s only a severed artery, it’ll stop soon.”
Now that is really strange, that I said that. Normally I would have said “Sorry” in a mumble and moved the knapsack and left it at that. I think that I was so sick of myself, of being guilty about the car, and being angry, and being lonely, and wondering what good it was being seventeen when it was just as bad as or a little worse than being sixteen, and all the rest of it, that I drove myself out of myself. Anything to escape! Even being funny with some girl I didn’t know. Or maybe there was something about her that made me speak, that made it possible for me to speak. Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it. I don’t know.
She gave a laugh, a real laugh, surprised and tickled. So I went on, “It’s either seven seconds or fifteen seconds, from the femoral artery, I can’t remember which.”
“What is?”
“Death by exsanguination. Ggggghhh.” I slumped down in the bus seat and died quietly.
Then I sat up and said, “Yechh, my collar’s wet, it’s like an ice pack.”
“Your hair’s all wet; it’s dripping on your collar.”
“I’m a drip,” I said with real feeling.
“Say,” she said, “are you taking Mr. Senotti’s history? Is he all right?”
“He’s all right. Tough. Bad temper. Comes of being called Mr. Snotty, maybe; you can’t blame him.”
“I have one more requirement in social sciences, and I need a really easy teacher.”
“Don’t take Snotty then. Take Vrebek, all she does is show movies.”
“I had her. That’s why I quit. Oh, I don’t know. Bah!” She really said “Bah!”—exactly as spelt—but savagely. “I hate gut courses, and I haven’t got time to work hard for good teachers,” she said. Talking to herself more than to me. But my ears were really standing up on end. In twelve years of school, counting kindergarten, I had never heard any human being say they hated gut courses.
“How come you got no time?” I said. “Femoral artery severed? Remember, don’t panic, you may have all of fifteen seconds.”
She laughed again, and she looked at me. Just for a moment. But she looked, she saw. She wasn’t looking at me to see what she looked like, she was looking at me to see what I looked like. That is unusual, in my experience.
I got the impression, even then, that people didn’t often say funny things to this girl, that she wasn’t used to clowning, but she liked it. The peculiar thing was that I wasn’t much used to clowning, either. With people I didn’t know well—which was the entire human species except for my parents and Mike Reinhard and Jason Thoer—I was either completely speechless, or said extremely serious things that instantly prevented any further conversation. But still, I am male, and it seems to me that at our age acting funny is almost an instinctive form of behavior in men. The girls laugh at things, but they seem basically serious. Whereas the fellows horse around and clown and make everything into a joke. My only real relationship with Mike and Jason, who were the nearest thing I had to friends, was a joking relationship. The point was never to be serious about anything. Except maybe sports scores. One of the main subjects to talk about was sex, but we kept unserious about sex, either by telling dirty jokes, or by being gross—using the special technical vocabulary of the sexual engineer, as if women were machines with interchangeable parts. I was pretty good at the dirty jokes, but my engineering vocabulary was unconvincing.