She gave a little laugh. “He seemed to think I was pretty good at what I did.”
“Gross,” Tina said, but laughed. “That mustache needs to go.”
“Do you even like him?” I asked Candace.
In the dark, I could see her scrunch up her face in annoyance. “If he asks me to homecoming, I’d like that,” she said.
Tina pointed to Candace’s blouse, which was buttoned up wrong. Candace giggled and started fixing it, saying, “I’d better say some Hail Marys tomorrow.” She was serious. The Trillos were Catholic, but Candace made up her own penance because she worried an official confession would get back to her mom somehow.
“I’m sure Mary gave Joseph a few hand jobs and she still got picked to make Jesus,” I said.
Candace’s eyes widened. “Susan!”
“Okay, okay,” I said as Tina snickered. And then, because I wanted to know, “Did he make you feel good?”
“Jesus?” Candace said.
“No! Reggie. It seems unfair if he got off and you didn’t.” I may not have had Candace’s experience with actual boys, but I definitely had some authority on getting off.
Candace sighed. “God, Susan, at least I’ve done more than a couple sloppy kisses,” she said, and I knew the answer was no. I hated that Candace acted like I was a complete idiot about guys, when it wasn’t like she chose them so well. But after the scene with Michael, I worried she had a point.
We turned onto the sidewalk to make our way to Tina’s car.
“I’ve had more than a couple sloppy kisses,” I said, leaning across Tina to put the words right up in Candace’s face. “I have experience.” The beer must have gotten to me a little, because not only was this an exaggeration, but I was also talking too loud.
“You guys—” Tina put up her hands in front of us, as if to hold us back.
“Hey, it’s my hero,” someone said in the dark, shocking me sober.
We crossed under a street lamp and there was Pointy Hair Guy, leaning against a beat-up Chevy Nova, his cup still in hand. He smiled in the dark. For someone with such a messy haircut, his teeth were the whitest ones I’d ever seen. He had high cheekbones on a thin face, giving him a sharp look, but his eyes twinkled like everything was a joke. Or at least like I was a joke.
“I’m not in the mood,” I said. The last thing I needed was some scrawny jerk teasing me about getting rejected by some not-scrawny jerk.
He lit a cigarette and held out the pack to us. We all shook our heads.
“What? I mean it,” he said. “I thought the way you told off Webster kicked ass. I mean, ‘the Webs’? He’s practically begging for the verbal abuse.”
I laughed, even though I didn’t want to.
“I’m Joe, by the way. Joe Gianelli.” He stepped away from the car and held out his hand for me to shake. I took it. It was cool and dry and refreshing after Dan’s hot, sweaty basement. “I used to go by Joey, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was copying Joey Ramone.”
I’d heard of the Ramones, but there were so many of them, I didn’t know who was who. “This is Candace, and Tina,” I said, wondering if Joe had heard me arguing with Candace. “I’m Susan. I used to go by Susie, but that was because I was five and my parents didn’t give me a choice.”
He laughed. That was twice tonight I’d said something funny right in the moment, instead of thinking of it two days later.
“Well, I’ll let you and your friends be on your way, Susan,” he said, still holding on to my hand. “For real, that was impressive, the way you shut down Webster. Being witness to it was a quite an experience.”
The way he said “experience,” I knew he’d heard me telling Candace I had it.
“Thanks,” I muttered, now flustered. I dropped his hand and hurried toward Tina’s car, almost tripping when the toe of my sneaker got caught on a square of the sidewalk where a massive tree root had buckled the concrete.
“I’ll see you around,” he called after us as we walked away.
“I think he likes you,” Candace said, when we were—I hoped—out of earshot.
“You’re just trying to make up for being a bitch,” I told her. “And I doubt it. Just a weirdo in the dark, messing with me.”
He probably called out to every girl walking past his car. He seemed like the type, with his permanently amused face.
The whole way home, as Tina and Candace sang along to ABBA, it wasn’t Joe I imagined watching me tell off Michael, but Bobby. Maybe he would have been impressed, too.
Five
On Sunday morning, part of me regretted not drinking more at the party on Saturday. Like, enough to be so messed up that I passed out in a drainage ditch like Renee Ozlowski had after prom last year. Because spending early Sunday only semiconscious and covered in mud on the side of Roberts Road would have been preferable to what I had to do: go visit with my dad and his girlfriend Polly.
Polly wasn’t the first of my dad’s post-divorce girlfriends, but she was the most serious. I knew because I hadn’t met the others, just overheard my mom and Jacqueline, at times over the past year and a half, discussing “Albert’s latest catch.” My dad had started dating pretty soon after the divorce papers were signed, but he’d seemed to only go out with women for a couple of dates, maybe a few weeks at the most. I only knew this because sometimes my weekend visit would be pushed back by an hour or two, and that was when my mom got mad and accidentally badmouthed my dad. “He’s not even serious with this . . . dancer . . . and he’s rearranging your visit.” Or “He’s acting like a sex-crazed fifteen-year-old instead of a grown man with responsibilities.”
But Polly was serious: she’d lasted for six months already. My dad had met her at Jeffries Auto, a used-car lot Polly’s dad owned in Elm Ridge, where Polly answered phones and made coffee. He’d traded in his Oldsmobile for a white Chevelle Laguna and she’d gotten him a coffee, one sugar. Now they lived together. “From Mommy’s bosom to a divorcé’s condominium,” Jacqueline had said when Mom told her the news. But Polly was thirty-five, not nearly as young as some of the women Dad had dated. And when Mom heard they’d moved in together, it was one of the few times since the divorce that she’d seemed a little sad about the whole thing, which she otherwise regarded rationally, like a business arrangement with agreed-upon terms that, when not honored, irritated her. When she told me, “Your father’s seeing someone, and it’s serious,” she was drinking his favorite whiskey and staring at the ice cubes melting in the glass a little too long for me to believe she was entirely okay.
It was bizarre, my dad living with someone else. The last time I was at his condo—at the start of summer, a month before Polly moved in—there’d already been signs of Polly. A long blond hair on the brown couch, a second toothbrush in the cup with his. But what was even weirder were the things like the glass bowl of seashells next to the bathroom sink, the fake flowers on the kitchen table, and the pitcher of fresh orange juice in the fridge when my dad had only ever bought the store brand in the carton. If I hadn’t known he had a girlfriend, I’d have thought he’d been replaced by some kind of homemaking impostor.
My mom drove me to his condo and rolled to a stop at the curb. “What, you’re not coming in?” I asked her. I half wanted her to because she looked pretty today. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and curled to frame her face, and she had on an old Chicago Bears V-neck. She was going to a how-to seminar at the library, something about computing, and was excited, so her eyes looked bright, too. Kind of interested and ready, not the eyes of someone who’d grown tired of her life, which was how they’d looked when she was married to my dad.
It wasn’t that I wanted my parents to get back together. I’d never looked at my mom and dad and thought they were some amazing love story that needed to be saved. They were just people who talked to the same kids every day and shared a television. But I did think my dad’s leap into a new relationship was sort of his mild revenge on my mom and that my mom deserved some equally light retributi
on on my dad, in the form of looking good on a Sunday afternoon.
“Ha, ha,” Mom said. “Just because I don’t hate your father doesn’t mean I want to pal around with him. But they invited you, and I don’t want you pulling anything like not going inside. You owe him that.”
“Well, I don’t owe Polly anything,” I said.
“She’s obviously trying,” Mom said. “She was very pleasant at our dinner.” That was one of the divorce contingencies: that before either of my parents introduced me and my sister, Tonia—who had only had to hear about Polly over the phone since she calls herself Chartreuse now and lives with some guy in Venice Beach, California—to a new love interest, the other one be present. I had no idea how they’d come up with that rule, but based on the really awkward meal we’d all shared at a steakhouse in downtown Chicago, I’d thought it would be better if my parents could hate each other a little more post-split.
“Okay, Gandhi,” I said and hopped out of the car to head up the walkway. The newish condo complex was called the Elm Tropics, which I found hilarious. There was nothing remotely tropical about Elm Ridge, or Powell Park, or any city in Illinois as far as I knew. But someone had put flimsy effort into the “tropical” vibe by placing potted palms—that would surely die by November—on each side of the glass door.
I pressed the buzzer for Klintock/Jeffries (Polly’s last name) in 3A, and Polly’s voice lilted over the staticky crackles of the intercom: “Susan, is that you?”
“Me” was all I said, and she let me into the vestibule, where I trudged up the stairs.
Polly already had the door open and had come to the landing, where she watched my progress. She had her arms out for a hug before I had even cleared the steps. “Oh, we’re so happy you’re here! We have NEWS!” She sprang at me for the waited-for hug and then pulled me into the condo by the arm. Her perfume was floral and not obnoxious. I would have liked it to be obnoxious, but I can’t lie, it was nice.
Nice, like Polly. Polly, who put a dish of seashells in the bathroom. Polly, who squeezed orange juice. Polly, who probably never masturbated and would be appalled by the wave of feeling in my fulcrum when I thought about Coach McMann. Bobby.
The living room was the first thing you saw when you entered. Dad was there, sitting on the couch, watching a football game. “Hi, Dad,” I said. He didn’t get up, which was kind of annoying, but at least it made him feel like the same old dad.
“Hi, Susie,” he said, tipping his beer can to his mouth and then yelling, “Come on!” at the screen.
Polly looked from him to me and back at him. “Albert? Can you take a break so we can share the news with Susan?”
“Share the news” sounded vaguely like they were now in a cult and were going to ask me to join.
“Yeah, okay,” Dad said. He stood up, following Polly as she led us through the kitchen, where something in the oven smelled delicious. He was looking back at the TV the whole way.
The dining room had been empty last time I was here, but now it was filled by a new table that was ever so slightly too big for the space. Its surface was covered in vases of different flowers in varying shades of orange.
“Did someone . . . die?” I asked.
Polly’s smile flickered then returned, like when the TV goes out for a split second and the picture comes back without you even having to mess with the antenna.
“Your dad and I are getting married!” she squealed and then clapped at her own announcement.
My dad sort of shrugged his shoulders like, What can you do?
I stared at them in shock. Couldn’t they have suggested I sit down for this? They had enough chairs for it, even if you couldn’t pull one out from the table without hitting the wall. “Does Mom know?” I asked Dad.
“Yeah, I told her that we wanted to tell you here. In person.” Dad shifted his weight and smiled without his teeth.
“We wanted to tell you over dinner but I couldn’t wait,” Polly said. “The roast has another two hours.”
She took my hands in hers as Dad continued to smile and nod, like this had all gone very well. Then he ambled back to the football game, the life-changing news taking less time to deliver than a first down. He was just leaving me there, clutching hands with his future wife, like this happened every day. Part of me was glad he left—I hated the look on his face, like he was confused by the whole thing. But the way Polly was looking at me was worse, like a desperate animal who’d followed me home and wanted me to keep her.
“I just want you to know that I am going to think of you as a daughter, even though I will never try to take the place of your mom, and I don’t expect you to think of me as anything more than a stepmom,” Polly said in a rush, as if she’d practiced the words in the mirror. A vision of Polly trying to read present-day me the Betsy-Tacy books my mom had read me as a kid flashed before my eyes.
Oh my God, I had to sit.
I pulled out a chair a smidge and then crammed my body between the seat and the table. Polly was my stepmom. Or was going to be. Did I want her for my stepmom? Did I want anyone for my stepmom? Before I had time to consider the answer, Polly turned as much as she could in a room mostly taken up by a hulking piece of furniture and plucked a leather album off the sideboard, then sat down next to me.
She opened the book to a page of drawings that a kid must have done. “This is my bridal wish book,” she said, smoothing her hand over the pages. So she’d done the drawings. “I’ve been keeping ideas for my wedding in here since I was a little girl. Do you have a bridal wish book?” She blinked her blue eyes at me expectantly.
I gulped, thinking that I could fill a wish book with my masturbation fantasies. “Not . . . really,” I said. Candace had an old issue of Brides under her bed, but even she didn’t have something like this. I wanted to ask Polly if when she’d thought about her wedding as a little girl, she’d ever imagined it being to a fifty-two-year-old divorced dad with abundant ear hair and two adult (or practically adult, in my case) daughters.
“I guess I’m just silly that way,” she said, and blushed. In her lilac blouse with its tied neck, smoothly tucked into her purple pants, she was so pretty and neat, just like everything in the book was so pretty and neat, and yet she didn’t seem proud necessarily, or like she thought it was off-putting that I wasn’t pretty and neat, sitting there in my fake Jordache jeans with the patch on the knee and my ratty Sunkist T-shirt. She flipped past pages of pictures, cut from magazines, of crystal and cakes and couples kissing on beaches and the whole thing seemed so lonely. Not marriage itself so much as spending all your time dreaming up a wedding with a cake that probably wasn’t even chocolate on the inside and the kind of fancy wineglasses that never looked as sparkly after you’d used them one time. I decided to be nice to her, at least right now.
“It’s not silly,” I said.
“I’m so glad you said that. I don’t have sisters, or even any great girlfriends, and . . . I was hoping you might be my maid of honor?” She put her thumbnail near her mouth like she was about to bite it and then stopped herself. She was nervous. I didn’t know how someone so pretty and neat could be nervous.
“Um . . . suuuuuurrre,” I heard myself say.
“I’m so happy!” Polly hugged me, again, and clapped, again. “I have my wish book, so you won’t need to do any of the usual maid of honor duties.”
I had no idea what maids of honor usually did, besides stand there, so I said, “Okay, thanks.”
She squeezed my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, taking in me and my Sunkist shirt. “And if you look that good in orange, wait until you try on the bridesmaid’s gown. It will be dusty peach!”
“What’s a dusty peach?”
She pointed to the flowers. “Our colors. We’re doing this quickly, so imagine this. Fall nuptials with a harvest theme.” She grinned as if the word “harvest” would mean something to me, but all I could imagine were those cornucopias we had to make every year in grammar school. “Pale peach is too su
mmer. But dusty makes it autumn . . . al. I can never say that word! Autumn-al. Al. Autumn. Never mind. You’ll see when I show you the fabric swatches.”
As she continued, I made polite noises and thought about the gown I’d wear, imagining something off the shoulder, even though I wasn’t sure that was autumnal. My hair would be curled like Jaclyn Smith’s, and to go along with the impossibility of achieving that hair, my eyes were also bigger and darker and, for some reason, looking into Bobby’s, as he held out a hand and asked me to dance. He’d hold my waist tight and say, “You’re cold, come closer.”
“Wow,” I said, out loud by accident, and the dining room became even smaller.
“I know, I think it’s gorgeous, too,” she said, gazing at the flowers, which she’d been rearranging while I daydreamed. “I’ve always had a knack with flowers. I’m going to take a Polaroid and show the florist.”
“Mmm,” I said, willing the stirred sensation between my legs to leave, which was easier than at school because I noticed a baby picture of me on the sideboard. You couldn’t be weaving impure scenarios in your imagination while looking into your own baby eyes.
“Thank you so much for being so great! I’m absolutely thrilled,” Polly said, and squeezed my shoulder as she left the room. “I need to check on the roast!”
I sat there for a minute, unsure what to do. If I went to my room now—it was the condo’s guest room, with a bed shoved against the wall and no other furniture—I’d seem like a sullen, angry teen who didn’t want her dad to remarry. That wasn’t really true. I could have happily gone without ever knowing what dusty peach was, but whereas the divorce had shed light on my mom and who she was, I hadn’t learned anything new about my dad. He’d gone from Albert, guy left by his first wife, to Albert, guy about to get a second wife. I loved him, of course, but he could have been anybody. If my mom was one of the detailed pages in my old Barbie coloring books that made me excited to color in the intricate accessories, my dad was the page with Ken standing against a stark background that I skipped over.
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