In a taxi in New York City, I was with Cassandra, the girl I liked. Our friend Christy was with us on what had become a shopping trip to the city. We were tenth graders and I had been following them in and out of stores along Broadway while they tried to look like freshman at NYU, blinking at the glare on the grown-up streets. In an effort to be a fun boy to shop with, I had held a pair of tiny pink girls shorts with a monster’s open mouth on them over my jeans in the back of Yellow Rat Bastard and asked “Is this right for me?”
“You’re funny,” Cassandra said, brushing my arm with a half-open hand. I was getting exhausted from trying to be funny all the time, and seeing her face bent intently down at a rack of sale jeans, I knew that I was just a shadow moving around the outer rings of her consciousness. I was always disappointing her, and she me. We hadn’t gone ice-skating at Rockefeller Center like I had wanted and now we were late, which made me nervous. We had driven down to New Jersey the day before with Cassandra’s parents, who showed us around Cassandra’s father’s old hometown on the shore. He brought us out to the water and said, “When I was young, I would grab onto this railing and do a flip down into the sand.”
I always felt comfortable around parents, and stayed with them, while the girls walked along the railing. “Try it now,” I said.
“No, I’m too old,” he answered, but he was thinking about it, surrounded by the sites of his teenage years. After a moment of thinking and staring out to sea, he attacked the railing with a yell, clamped his hands down around it and went over. He didn’t rotate quite far enough though, and landed hard on his lower back. I was afraid something bad had happened. He got up slowly, swearing at me somewhat seriously. I began to get a sense for how unreachable those years must have seemed to him then.
Later, his wife showed us the little upstairs apartment they shared when they first got together, pointing to curtained windows behind a balcony.
“His parents were not happy,” she said.
“But we lived there anyway,” he said, a low laugh emerging through his beard.
That night I stayed up late in the living room with the girls. Cassandra sat lounging in the big grey easy chair in her pajamas, one leg thrown over the armrest, staring at me with boredom and anticipation, and a bit of antipathy. I think she knew I would be too shy to do anything, especially with Christy watching. “Well, goodnight,” I said. She looked hard at me, saying nothing, and then her face broke into warmth, and in a sing-song voice she said, “Good night sweatheart.” I went up to bed and slept in her uncle’s room, whose name I shared, and who, her father told me, was still chasing girls around my age.
The plan had been to drive into the city the next day, spend the morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then go down to Rockefeller Center to ice skate. That was the part I was waiting for. I imagined Cassandra spinning away from me on the ice and turning to look at me, her cheeks rosy and her whole face brightening. Surrounded by the lights of Rockefeller Center, she would skate to me across the ice and then I would kiss her, and her lips would be thin and soft and I would feel the warmth of her breath. I wouldn’t care then if anyone saw, and among all those people we wouldn’t be on display; they would just be a bright noise all around us.
But that’s not what happened. After the Met, we went down to SoHo instead, because the girls wanted to go shopping.
“We’ll be really quick,” Cassandra said to me, holding my forearm and looking up at me, “then we can go ice skating.”
“Sure, yeah, I was actually hoping to get a new thong.”
She smiled tolerantly.
“Just take a cab back to the Museum,” her father said. “It’s the easiest way not to get lost. Be back at five.”
Now we were in the cab, coming back from SoHo, and it was already five thirty.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go ice skating,” Cassandra said.
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling, looking into her eyes to show her I meant it.
“Hey, how old are you back there,” the cab driver asked us.
“We’re sixteen and she’s fifteen,” Cassandra said, pointing to Christy.
“Do you want to know what I think?” The cab driver asked.
“No,” Cassandra whispered to me.
“Yes, we would like to know,” I said, not looking at her.
“Very well. I think you should all start training. Don’t wait till you’re eighteen and are old enough to go into the army. Start now. Start training now. Get physically fit. Learn martial arts. The weapons they can teach you in the army, once you’re eighteen. Do you want to know why I say this?”
“Yes,” I said. The girls were politely listening.
“Because very soon, and remember I told you this, remember I warned you, very soon the Chinese will invade this country, and you will have to fight. There will be fighting in the streets. They’re already getting ready now. So I am warning you. Start right away. Will you do it?”
“Maybe,” I said. I could feel the girls were about to start laughing.
“Maybe is not good enough. You think I am joking? You think I am wrong? You will see. Where do you think I am from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just guess. Listen to my voice.”
I remembered Cassandra’s father telling a story once, at thanksgiving, where a man had asked him to guess where he was from. Her father had guessed Afghanistan and been right. We had all laughed. “A lucky guess, totally lucky,” he'd said, “I had no idea.”
I searched and could think of nothing.
“Afghanistan,” I said, some part of me believing it would be right, hoping I could pretend to know about things like this.
“Afghanistan! No, I am not from Afghanistan. Can you not hear it in my voice, I am from Russia!”
I sat back against the seat, staring at the side of the man’s large jaw. I could sense I had said something completely wrong, though I knew none of the history between the two countries. I became aware that it had taken Cassandra’s father an educated guess to get it right, not a shot in the dark.
When we got back to the Met, Cassandra’s father was pacing back and forth along the giant steps in front.
“Why were you so late?” He asked Cassandra.
“I’m sorry, it took us forever to find a cab.”
“And you didn’t get to go ice skating,” her mother said, looking at me sympathetically.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Boys don’t really like ice skating anyway.”
“That’s right,” Cassandra said. “They love shopping!”
Her mother looked at her, perplexed. I tried to laugh, but turned quickly into the van and moved to the darkness in the back seat. We rode home on the Taconic Parkway in the dark. Cassandra’s father checked the rearview mirror periodically, his face scanning the darkness of the van behind him, remembering what it would be like to be back there with a girl. ‘He’s got nothing to worry about from me,’ I thought, sitting straight and stiff in a capsule of frustration and disappointment, aware of Cassandra’s hand placed out on the seat, pale in the darkness. I took it limply, and waited for her to move up to the next bench to sit with Christy.
Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and Upstate New York. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and teaches at his local Community College. His work has appeared in Used Furniture Review, RED OCHRE LiT, Literary Bohemian, LITSNACK, Halfway Down the Stairs, Boston Literary Magazine, and numerous other magazines and journals. To learn more about his writing, please visit: www.matthewzanonimuller.com.
