Right after I dropped the big news that we’d be riding commuter buses instead of school buses on our field trip, I quickly asked, “Can I be excused?”
In answer, my mother said, “He really is a startling boy.”
Startling could not have been the word she meant to use; I knew that. Still, it startled me into temporary submission. If she’d said nice or intelligent, I probably would have found the strength to get up from the table and leave.
“We would like you to meet him,” my father said. “The Friday after next.”
“I can’t,” I told him.
“Why not?” my mother asked.
“I’m busy,” I said, sure that I could find a way to be busy with a week and a half’s notice.
My mother stood up and walked to the refrigerator door, where she kept a calendar of her two children’s activities.
“With what?” she asked. “I checked. You are free.”
“Fine,” I said. “Fine.” It took too much strength to argue, and I needed some pluses in my column for future minus situations.
Both of my parents smiled—and, believe me, that was something very rare for my father.
I clung to the hope that it was just a friend thing.
Until, of course, I realized my brother hadn’t been invited along.
I didn’t think much about it. My mother fussed over me in a nicer way than she usually did, and I figured I could definitely use a week and a half of that. When I told my friends about it, I told the story like it was a joke that was waiting for its punch line. I’d already dated a guy named Andrew, so whenever I talked about my date-to-be, I called him Andrew Chang or, sometimes, Mr. Chang’s Son.
Two days before I was supposed to meet him, my mother appeared in my doorway with a garment bag. Since my parents had an open-door policy regarding my room—it was only closed when I was asleep—she didn’t knock or even clear her voice to let me know she was there. She just stood in the doorway for a minute until I looked up from my homework and saw her.
“I have something for you to wear,” she said.
I can’t think of another time that my mother went out and bought me clothes. No, it was important to her to drag me along whenever my clothing was purchased, so she could show me the correct way to shop for and purchase it. It wasn’t fashion she was after, but education. Even at that moment, she couldn’t hand the garment bag over and let me open it as if it were a gift. No, instead she unzipped it herself, pulling out an astonishing blue dress and holding it out in front of me without a word of presentation.
It looked like an ocean—it was that kind of blue. And although the neckline was bordering on a turtle’s, it was sleeveless—something I couldn’t have imagined my mother buying for me before. It was a party dress, a fancy dress. My first thought was that my father had won some kind of award, and that there was going to be a dinner in his honor. I in no way related it to my upcoming encounter with Mr. Chang’s Son until my mother said, “I am sure Andrew will like it.”
“What kind of date is this?” I asked her.
She smiled knowingly. “A special one.”
I was going to protest, but here’s the thing: I really liked the dress. So I kept my mouth shut. I figured I’d already said I was going. I might as well get a dress out of it. And this dress wasn’t cheap.
Later that night my brother came into my room and saw it hanging from the top of my closet door.
“I can’t believe you’re letting them arrange your marriage,” he said.
“Don’t you have business school applications to fill out?” I replied.
He looked at me for a moment like I was the stupidest girl in the world, then said, “Have it your way.”
What I wouldn’t admit to him—what I would’ve never admitted to my parents—was that there was a small part of me that actually wanted it to work out. I was already burning out on high school dating, on making poorly educated guesses and committing myself to other people’s commitment issues. Perhaps, I figured, this was the way to do it: no anxiety, no flirting, no friends involved, no falling. Just a simple agreement. It didn’t even occur to me to call or IM or e-mail Andrew Chang and communicate with him before our date. It didn’t even occur to me to ask my parents more about him. I was playing by a certain set of rules, and I obeyed because the rules didn’t ask me to do anything. I simply had to wait. And then, when the day came, I had to make it work.
My mother told me to come straight home after school on Friday. The minute I walked through the door, she pointed me to the shower. When I got out, towel-wrapped and a little tired, she did something she hadn’t done in ages. She sat me down at her makeup mirror and she brushed out my hair. It hurt—there were knots in there that had been tangled for semesters. But she was persistent, and before I knew it the brush was running smoothly through my hair.
At the end, my mother put down the brush, looked at my reflection in the mirror, and said, satisfied, “There.”
I put on the dress. It made me feel grown up, like my own older sister.
As I was finishing up, I heard the garage door open. I figured it was my brother, but instead my father came up from the basement. I heard him ask my mother, “Is she ready?” I did not hear my mother’s reply.
I figured Mr. Chang’s Son was taking me to a nice restaurant, trying to impress my parents. And I figured my mother had gone a little overboard dressing me up, trying to impress his parents. But when Andrew Chang arrived at five-thirty in a limousine, I started to think that maybe things were going a little too far.
“What does Mr. Chang do?” I asked my mother after peeking out the window at the black stretch Cadillac. “Is that his car?”
The back door opened and nobody got out. I suddenly imagined a three-hundred-pound boy in the backseat, waiting for me. About thirty seconds passed before Andrew Chang realized he had to come out and get me. He emerged from the back door wearing a tuxedo, looking much cuter than I had any right to expect. He got to our front door and rang the doorbell.
My mother went to get it, me trailing behind. My father took out his camera.
I think my mother expected me to wait in the living room, because she seemed surprised to see me in the foyer when she ushered Andrew Chang inside.
“Here she is,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” Andrew Chang replied. “Should we go?”
He was a little taller than I was, but not by much. He looked handsome, but I couldn’t tell whether that was all the tux’s doing. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with the situation, but he didn’t seem to be welcoming it, either.
My parents didn’t notice. They had us pose for some pictures before they let us leave. My mother was all smiles, my father all nods. Mr. Chang called my father to make sure Andrew had made it. In his loud business voice, my father said Andrew was here and that I looked good. I blushed, but Andrew seemed unfazed.
He had left the limo’s back door open, so he didn’t have to open it for me. Again, I was thinking it was all a little too much, but I also enjoyed the idea of telling my friends that a date had picked me up in a limo.
When I got to the backseat, it all started to kick in. There was a corsage waiting for me.
A corsage.
Andrew Chang joined me in the backseat, and as soon as he closed the door, the driver took us away from my house.
“Andrew?” I asked. “What’s that?”
“For you,” he said. “My mother picked it out. Your mother told her what you were wearing.”
“But where are we going?”
“To the prom.”
From his tone, I couldn’t tell whether he expected that I already knew this or whether he was aware that it was news to me.
“Your prom?”
“Yes. Do you like the flowers? My mother picked them out.”
“Andrew,” I said, remembering to keep his last name out of it, “I had no idea we were going to a prom. I thought this was a date. I mean, dinner.
Friendship. That kind of thing.”
“Oh,” he said, looking out the window. “It’s a prom.”
I knew immediately that there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t ask him to pull over the car or turn around. I couldn’t get out of it. If I went to my parents to complain, they’d find a way to turn it back on me—I hadn’t asked them if it was a prom, had I? They’d never said it wasn’t a prom, right? I was too stunned to cry and not detached enough to laugh. I couldn’t even speak, and he showed no inclination to speak. So we sat there in awkward silence until we got to his prom.
I know this will sound strange, but after a short while, Andrew Chang and Mr. Chang started to blend in my head. I don’t even know if I’d ever met Mr. Chang. I just had this idea of him as one of my father’s generic business partners—hair slicked back, comb marks visible; an expensive suit that looked average; no enthusiasm for anything but talk of business; a scowl across his face while he thought of new ways to make money. I’m sure there was more to him than that—more to all of them—but from my daughter perspective, that’s all they were. And Andrew Chang was like that, too. Younger, yes. But younger in body, not in spirit.
We sat at our table. He was polite, getting me a soda, pulling my chair out for me when I sat down, then pushing it in. I tried to make conversation. I asked him how long he’d lived in Fairview. He said three months. I figured that was why he didn’t seem to know anyone else at our table, or in the whole room. The other girls at the table were nice enough, complimenting me on my dress, asking me where I was from. But the guys didn’t seem to have anything to say to Andrew, and he didn’t seem to have anything to say, either. When the table cleared out to go to the dance floor, he stayed seated. I stayed seated next to him. I watched the dance floor. He stared off somewhere.
Finally, he said, “You can dance if you want to. I’ll be here.”
He had no idea how ludicrous this was. There was no way I was going to dance alone with a school of strangers.
I compromised and said I would step out to the ladies’ room for a moment. He nodded. I fled.
I didn’t even have to go, but I ended up in the ladies’ room anyway. I stood in front of the mirror and realized I did in fact look good. And that it really didn’t matter. I washed my hands. I looked at myself again. I tried to stay there as long as I could.
Girls came and went behind me, beside me. One girl, drunk, put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m Andrew Chang’s date,” I said.
She nodded, swerved away, then swerved back.
“Who’s he?” she asked.
“Friend of the family.”
She nodded again. I wanted her to stay, to ask me something else. But she left to be with her friends.
I returned to the prom but hung in the back, against the wall. It was strange to be watching all these people I didn’t know. At first, I felt like an observer. But gradually it didn’t even feel that interesting. I understood for the first time what the term wallflower meant. Because that was what I was. Just hanging there. Nobody noticing. Useless decoration.
I looked at our table and saw Andrew Chang sitting there alone. I didn’t know whether he was simply hiding his misery or if he was somehow able to close himself off from it. He looked like this was work, that this was just something he had to do. I felt sorry for him…but mostly I felt mad that I had been trapped, too.
A guy from our table walked by me, on the way to the men’s room. We’d all exchanged names at the beginning, but I’d already forgotten them. He walked past on the way in, but on the way back he stopped at my spot on the wall and asked me how I was doing.
“Fine,” I said.
He laughed and said, “Yeah, right.”
I concentrated on him then. He was Chinese, too, taller than my date, all of his features narrower. His hair wasn’t a comb job—there was definitely some spiking going on.
“Do you want to know the truth?” I asked. He said yes, and I told it to him. The whole story.
“Well,” he said when I was through, “all I can say is that right now my date is dancing with her boyfriend.” And he told me his story, about how he’d asked this girl as a friend, and then two weeks ago she’d started dating this guy he didn’t particularly like. She wasn’t going to bail on the prom plans, but of course the minute she got to the dance, she wanted to be with her real boyfriend. So he let her. He’d danced with a few of his friends who’d also wanted to abscond from their dates, and now he was here with me.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked.
And I said yes.
I went to the table and asked Andrew if he minded. He said no. I told him to watch my purse. And then I absconded.
The new guy couldn’t dance to save his life. I mean, he couldn’t move his feet and his arms at the same time. But still, he kept drawing me into the dance, including me. And then when the prom song was played, he asked me with the sweetest expression if I would stay. We didn’t do much more than sway there, his arms around me, my arms around him. But I found myself thinking, It can’t be this easy.
When the fast dancing started again, I flailed along with him. The flower who fell from the wall.
He couldn’t dance, but he could make me laugh, and he could make me happy.
And he still makes me laugh. And he still makes me happy.
I have no idea what happened to Andrew Chang.
FLIRTING WITH WAITERS
I have always flirted with waiters. I think it was my parents who first encouraged this—when I was a little girl, they loved it when I acted cute for the waitstaff. Winsomeness made them proud. I know most parents do this, and I know that in some girls it wears off well before puberty sets in. But for me it never wore off. For me it’s still a thrill.
I did, however, narrow my scope. First I lost interest in the younger waitresses, the ones who took orders between chews of gum, who wanted the jobs so they could flirt with the boys who came in. They had no use for girls like me. Next to go were the older men—the waiters like butlers, the ones as old as the oldest wine on the wine list. Most were too grandfatherly, and the ones who weren’t grandfatherly were just wolves with flimsy teeth. While I never lost respect for older waitresses—I still love being called darlin’ and hon—I knew I could never be anything more than a sob sister with them, our intimacy limited to knowing looks, pats on the shoulder, and comfort food.
That left the boys, the guys, the young waiters and their marvelous eyes, their hair grown long, their nonchalant way of pleasing, their rebellious asides, their erogenous hands, their clean white shirts and black ties, often a little askew. I knew early on that resistance wouldn’t work. I was destined to flirt with these waiters.
Let me be clear here—it wasn’t sex, or even love, that I was after. Before I was twelve, I didn’t figure there was anything more exciting than a spark of recognition, a moment of reciprocal attention.
Then came the pizza boy.
He was not technically a waiter, at least not at first. He drove a green VW—his own car—and when he was working he’d put a little sign on the top that said LA ROTA PIZZERIA. He was, in my twelve-year-old eyes, a dream on legs. Lithe, fair-skinned, with hair that fell in a curtain over his face. His name was Seth and I could think of no better name.
My parents both worked. Sometimes they wouldn’t make it home for dinner, especially once I was old enough to take care of myself. (I am an only child.) That year no words were more beautiful to me than Take some money from the drawer and call for something. Seth’s shift ended at eight, so I would run to the phone as early as possible to place my order. Sometimes my friend Bev would come over to watch as Seth walked the fourteen steps up to my door, rang the bell, and talked to me like an adult for the minute or two it took to receive the pizza and pay him for it. I always ordered the same thing: one small pizza, half mushroom and half plain. After a few visits he noticed this, and when he handed over the pizza he would call it the usual.
I thought this was our own private joke, like the ones couples in high school had.
I did not have the courage to flirt with him yet. Not at twelve, my period year, with my breasts not catching up as much as I thought they should and my body sensitive to every change of wind. It was enough for me to admire. It was enough for me to have Seth come to my house in his own car and say “the usual” with a smile. (Dimples!) I always tipped really well, and would have done so even if it had been my own money.
Then one day I called and a girl came. She didn’t know my usual, and since she was a girl—a high school girl—I didn’t dare ask about Seth. What if she was somehow responsible for his absence? It was Bev who broke the news to me two nights later: she and her dad had gone to La Rota to eat in, and there was Seth…doing table service. I knew I had to take action. If he would not come to me, I would go to him.
Bev was a more-than-willing accomplice. (Luckily I had announced my crush first, so I had dibs.) After school—that station between Seth sightings—we would head over to the pizzeria. We had to take a little time, since Seth wouldn’t come to work until his lacrosse practice was over. If there was a game, we’d dare to hit the stands and watch, careful to sit in the family rows, safe from the girlfriends. I wondered which girlfriend was Seth’s (I was jaded enough to know he was bound to have one). To my extreme distress, it ended up being the delivery girl—I knew her name was Sheryl because she had it stitched on her varsity soccer jacket.
At first it was strange—almost a shock—to see Seth in his red-vested uniform at the restaurant. Then I adapted it into my admiration: If he could look hot in a red-and-white striped shirt—an ironed barbershop pole—he could look hot in just about anything.
If you asked me now what the high point of my childhood was, it wouldn’t be my Bat Mitzvah or my time at summer camp or any cherished moment I spent with my grandmother or a horse. No, it would be the first time I slid into a seat at La Rota and Seth came over, order pad in hand. Smiling at me, he asked, “The usual?”
How They Met and Other Stories Page 10