AFTER MY FOURTH SWIMMING LESSON, DANTE INVITED me
to go over to his house. He lived less than a block from the swimming pool in a big old house across the street from the park.
He introduced me to his father, the English professor. I’d never met a Mexican-American man who was an English professor. I didn’t know they existed. And really, he didn’t look like a professor. He was young and handsome and easygoing and it seemed like a part of him was still a boy. He seemed like a man who was in love with being alive. So different from my father, who had always kept his distance from the world. There was a darkness in my father that I didn’t understand. Dante’s father didn’t have any darkness in him. Even his black eyes seemed to be full of light.
That afternoon, when I met Dante’s father, he was wearing jeans and a T- shirt and he was sitting on a leather chair in his office, reading a book. I’d never known anyone who actually had an office in his own house.
Dante walked up to his father and kissed him on the cheek. I would have never done that. Not ever.
“You didn’t shave this morning, Dad.” “It’s summer,” his dad said.
“That means you don’t have to work.”
“That means I have to finish writing my book.” “Writing a book isn’t work.”
Dante’s father laughed really hard when he said that. “You have a lot to learn about work.”
“It’s summer, Dad. I don’t want to hear about work.” “You never want to hear about work.”
Dante didn’t like where the conversation was going so he tried to change the subject. “Are you going to grow a beard?”
“No.” He laughed. “It’s too hot. And besides, your mother won’t kiss me if I go more than a day without shaving.”
“Wow, she’s strict.” “Yup.”
“And what would you do without her kisses?”
He grinned, then looked up at me. “How do you put up with this guy?
You must be Ari.”
“Yes, sir.” I was nervous. I wasn’t used to meeting anybody’s parents. Most of the parents I’d met in my life weren’t all that interested in talking to me.
He got up from his chair and put his book down. He walked up to me and shook my hand. “I’m Sam,” he said. “Sam Quintana.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Quintana.”
I’d heard that phrase, nice to meet you, a thousand times. When Dante had said it to me, he’d sounded real. But when I said it, I felt stupid and unoriginal. I wanted to hide somewhere.
“You can call me Sam,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said. God, I wanted to hide.
He nodded. “That’s sweet,” he said. “And respectful.” The word “sweet” had never passed my father’s lips.
He gave Dante a look. “The young man has some respect. Maybe you can learn something from him, Dante.”
“You mean you want me to call you Mr. Quintana?”
They both kept themselves from laughing. He turned his attention back to me. “How’s the swimming?”
“Dante’s a good teacher,” I said.
“Dante’s good at a lot of things. But he’s not very good at cleaning his room. Cleaning a room is too closely related to the word work.”
Dante shot him a look. “Is that a hint?”
“You’re quick, Dante. You must get that from your mother.” “Don’t be a wiseass, Dad.”
“What was that word you just used?” “Does that word offend you?’
“It’s not the word. Maybe it’s the attitude.”
Dante rolled his eyes and sat on his father’s chair. He took off his tennis shoes.
“Don’t get too comfortable.” He pointed up. “There’s a pig sty up there that has your name on it.”
It made me smile, the way they got along, the easy and affectionate way they talked to each other as if love between a father and a son was simple and uncomplicated. My mom and I, sometimes the thing we had between us was easy and uncomplicated. Sometimes. But me and my dad, we didn’t
have that. I wondered what that would be like, to walk into a room and kiss my father.
We went upstairs and Dante showed me his room. It was a big room with a high ceiling and wood floors and lots of old windows to let in the light. There was stuff everywhere. Clothes spread all over the floor, a pile of old albums, books scattered around, legal pads with stuff written on them, Polaroid photographs, a couple of cameras, a guitar without any strings, sheet music, and a bulletin board cluttered with notes and pictures.
He put on some music. He had a record player. A real record player from the sixties. “It was my mom’s,” he said. “She was going to throw it away. Can you believe that?” He put on Abbey Road, his favorite album. “Vinyl,” he said. “Real vinyl. None of this cassette crap.”
“What’s wrong with cassettes?” “I don’t trust them.”
I thought that was a really weird thing to say. Funny and weird. “Records scratch easily.”
“Not if you take care of them.”
I looked around his messy room. “I can see that you really like to take care of things.”
He didn’t get mad. He laughed.
He handed me a book. “Here,” he said. “You can read this while I clean my room.”
“Maybe I should just, you know, leave you—” I stopped. My eyes searched the messy room. “It’s a little scary in here.”
He smiled. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t leave. I hate cleaning my room.” “Maybe if you didn’t have so many things.”
“It’s just stuff,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have stuff. “If you stay, it won’t be so bad.”
Somehow, I felt out of place—but—“Okay,” I said. “Should I help?” “No. It’s my job.” He said that with a kind of resignation. “As my mom
would say, ‘It’s your responsibility, Dante.’ Responsibility is my mother’s favorite word. She doesn’t think my father pushes me hard enough. Of course he doesn’t. I mean, what does she expect? Dad’s not a pusher. She married the guy. Doesn’t she know what kind of guy he is?”
“Do you always analyze your parents?” “They analyze us, don’t they?”
“That’s their job, Dante.”
“Tell me you don’t analyze your mom and dad.”
“Guess I do. Doesn’t do me any good. I haven’t figured them out yet.”
“Well, me, I figured my dad out—not my mom. My mom is the biggest mystery in the world. I mean, she’s predictable when it comes to parenting. But really, she’s inscrutable.”
“Inscrutable.” I knew when I went home, I would have to look up the word.
Dante looked at me like it was my turn to say something.
“I figured my mom out, mostly,” I said. “My dad. He’s inscrutable too.” I felt like such a fraud, using that word. Maybe that was the thing about me. I wasn’t a real boy. I was a fraud.
He handed me a book of poetry. “Read this,” he said. I’d never read a book of poems before and wasn’t even sure I knew how to read a book of poems. I looked at him blankly.
“Poetry,” he said. “It won’t kill you.”
“What if it does? Boy Dies of Boredom While Reading Poetry.”
He tried not to laugh, but he wasn’t good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him. He shook his head and started gathering all the clothes on the floor.
He pointed at his chair. “Just throw that stuff on the floor and have a seat.”
I picked up a pile of art books and a sketch pad and set it on the floor. “What’s this?”
“A sketch pad.” “Can I see?”
He shook his head. “I don’t like to show it to anyone.” That was interesting—that he had secrets.
He pointed to the poetry book. “Really, it won’t kill you.”
All afternoon, Dante cleaned. And I read that book of poems by a poet named William Carlos Williams. I’d never heard of him, but I’d never heard of anybody. And I actually understood some of it. Not all of it—but some. And I didn’t hate it. That surprised me. It was interesting, not stupid or silly or sappy or overly intellectual—not any of those things that I thought poetry was. Some poems were easier than others. Some were inscrutable. I was thinking that maybe I did know the meaning of that word.
I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get—and never would get.
I was impressed by the fact that Dante could be so systematic in the way he organized everything in his room. When we’d walked in, the place had been all chaos. But when he finished, everything was in its place.
Dante’s world had order.
He’d organized all his books on a shelf and on his desk. “I keep the books I’m going to read next on my desk,” he said. A desk. A real desk. When I had to write something, I used the kitchen table.
He grabbed the book of poems away from me and went looking for a poem. The poem was titled “Death.” He was so perfect in his newly organized room, the western sun streaming in, his face in the light and the book in his hand as if it was meant to be there, in his hands, and only in his hands. I liked his voice as he read the poem as if he had written it:
He’s dead
the dog won’t have to sleep on the potatoes anymore to keep them from freezing
he’s dead
the old bastard—
When Dante read the word “bastard” he smiled. I knew he loved saying it because it was a word he was not allowed not use, a word that was banned. But here in his room, he could read that word and make it his.
All afternoon, I sat in that large comfortable chair in Dante’s room and he lay down on his newly made bed. And he read poems.
I didn’t worry about understanding them. I didn’t care about what they meant. I didn’t care because what mattered is that Dante’s voice felt real. And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me. But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren’t.
I went home and looked up the word “inscrutable.” It meant something that could not easily be understood. I wrote down all the synonyms in my journal. “Obscure.” “Unfathomable.” “Enigmatic.” “Mysterious.”
That afternoon, I learned two new words. “Inscrutable.” And “friend.”
Words were different when they lived inside of you.
