PRAISE FOR
LOVE AND OTHER FOUR-LETTER WORDS
An ALA Quick Pick
A YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers
“This debut novel is both funny and sad. [It] will resonate with younger teens who are themselves standing on the edge of adulthood.”
—Voice of Youth Advocates, Starred
“Mackler gets the contemporary scene with humor and realism.”
—Booklist
“Teens will relate to the common themes of divorce and awakening sexuality and will enjoy this Birkenstock-wearing heroine.”
—School Library Journal
“Mackler has much of the offbeat humor that Blume and Danziger use in their fiction.”
—KLIATT
“This is a well-crafted novel with a personable heroine.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
“I love Carolyn Mackler and welcome her lively debut novel! Love and Other Four-Letter Words will grab the reader from the first page.”
—Judy Blume
“Carolyn Mackler is a wonderful new talent. Love and Other Four-Letter Words is a terrific first novel.” —Paula Danziger “Carolyn Mackler's offbeat humor and direct heartfelt observations will touch anyone who's longed to look in the mirror and conclude ‘not so bad.’
—Rachel Vail
To my parents, Anne Dalton and Ian Mackler,
for believing in me
MANY THANKS to Amy Berkower and Jodi Reamer at Writers House and Beverly Horowitz at Random House Children's Books; my editor, Françoise Bui, always with a keen eye and a pencil in hand; Judy Blume and Paula Danziger, for inspiring me and then becoming real people.
Also, to my extended clan of family and friends, for reading, rereading, listening and discussing. Special thanks to Alison and Michelle, my beloved stepsisters and ever-ready teen focus group.
Let's say someone had waltzed up to me six months ago and asked for my definition of love. I wasn't so naïve at fifteen and a half to presume that love, or luv— as my best friend, Kitty, always ends her e-mails—only applies to sex-crazed teenagers, pressed against lockers, feverishly grinding groins in between classes. I'd probably have rambled on about the bond between mothers and fathers, parents and children. No doubt I would have sprinkled in choice phrases like “unconditional support,” “mutual respect,” and “considering the other person's feelings.”
Pull me aside now and quiz me about those same four letters, and I'd blankly stare at you, my jaw ajar, like those guys who sat behind me in biology all year. Kitty would say I'm jaded. I would say that's a major understatement, seeing how my entire life has been blown to smithereens. Unconditional support has gone the way of the pterodactyl. Mutual respect? Only exists in the pages of the self-help books on Mom's bedside table. And my feelings definitely weren't being considered when Dad dropped the bombshell on that Sunday afternoon in early May.
I'd just returned from sleeping over at Kitty's, where we pulled an all-nighter because her boyfriend, Jack, called from his cell phone at three A.M. to report that he and two friends were on her back porch. Kitty had answered on the second ring, before her parents woke up, so we slipped into sweats and sneaked out the sliding glass doors. They were all wasted; I could smell it on their breath. And moments after Kitty and Jack disappeared into the pool shed, both guys conked out on reclining chairs, a gesture I tried not to take personally. I almost crept back to Kitty's room, but then I remembered an article I once read about an inebriated frat boy choking to death on his own puke. So I held a vigil until pinkish light accented the sky and the luv ers reappeared on the deck: Jack's T-shirt inside out, three nickel-sized hickeys dotting Kitty's neck.
By the time I got home the next afternoon, my eyelids were drooping and my throat felt scratchy and dry. All I wanted to do was take a hot shower and burrow under my covers, but an eerie stillness permeated the house.
“Mom's in bed with a migraine,” Dad reported in a hushed tone, pressing his outstretched pointer finger against his lips, steering me into the family room for A Discussion.
As I perched on the edge of our leather recliner, I tugged at the frayed strings on my cutoff jean shorts. Upon retrieving them from a bottom drawer on Friday afternoon, I'd discovered to my displeasure that they were snugger than last summer.
“Sammie.” He paused. “Mom and I have been talking a lot these past few weeks. …”
Dad's voice trailed off. I noticed that the creases that have been cutting into his cheeks all spring were obscured by a weekend's buildup of stubble.
“… And we've decided to get a trial separation.” Trial separation. The term hung in the air between us, like humidity before a thunderstorm. I began wrapping a thread from my shorts around my finger.
“What about our plan to go to California next year?” I asked. Dad is an English professor at Cornell, and Mom and I were joining him on his sabbatical to Stanford at the end of June. Aunt Jayne, Dad's younger sister, just sent a photo of the half-of-a-house she'd found for us in Palo Alto.
Dad began gnawing his fingernails, a habit he kicked five years ago, in solidarity with Mom, who was becoming a vegetarian because of her high cholesterol.
After a long silence, Dad somberly replied, “I'm going out there alone after all.”
My face froze. Alone? Maybe he means alone, as in alone without Mom, as in alone with me. That had to be it. It's no secret that Dad and I are close, much closer than I am to Mom.
If the trial separation announcement was an atomic bomb, an obliteration of the belief that Mom and Dad were the 7th Heaven, we-have-problems-yet-we-gleefullywork-them-through type of parents, what was about to come was nuclear devastation. Armageddon. To quote that REM song, “the end of the world as we know it.”
Dad got up from the couch, affixed his arm around my shoulders and delivered the final blow: “I'm sorry … it's just something I have to do.”
I was stunned. Utterly, completely stunned. So stunned I couldn't speak, even though I was aching to scream, to rant, to demand an explanation for how he could desert me like this. All I could do was repeat, over and over in my head: Don't feel a thing. Don't feel a thing. Don't feel a thing.
It was only as I wriggled away from Dad's arm that I noticed my finger was red and bulging. I'd twisted the thread so tightly it had cut off the circulation. Yet still, as I unwound the tourniquet to discover purplish grooves in my skin, I didn't feel a thing.
There was this time last summer when Kitty and I rode our bikes all over Ithaca, ending up at Stewart Park. As we unlaced our sneakers and waded into Cayuga Lake, a motorboat whipped by, towing a small boy on an oversized yellow inner tube. The kid, both hands gripping the plastic handles, had a frantic expression on his face as his pleas to stop were swallowed by the rumble of the horsepower. The spotter was consumed with smearing on sunblock, the driver consumed with two bikini-clad women capsizing a Sunfish. Which left the boy two options: to catapult himself into murky waters, or to get dragged along, completely out of his control, until the powers-that-be decided to terminate his joyride. He chose the latter.
I kept revisiting that image over the next few weeks, as I watched my life being disassembled, one familiarity at a time. I avoided Dad assiduously until his lateMay departure, as soon as Cornell let out. And I only talked to Mom when absolutely necessary. Like when the conversation swung to the looming question at hand: next year.
Mom had already taken a leave of absence from her job as an art teacher at the middle school. And in a matter of weeks, a faceless family who'd agreed to sublet from us back in February would be pulling into the driveway, stocking the cupboards, peeing in the toilets of the home I've lived in
since I was two years old. This is all I know about them, from the realtor's letter that lay open on Mom's dresser:
The man's name is Dr. Oscar Mueller.
He's going to teach statistics at Cornell and his wife will work at the vet school.
They're from Cincinnati.
They have one teenager.
Because of the father's name, I call them the Oscar Mayer Wieners. The worst part is knowing that the kid is going to curl up in my bed. Especially if it happens to be a boy, in light of what I recently read on this “let'sget-teens-to-chat-about-sex” Web site:
I'm a fifteen-year old guy, joeshmoe wrote, and I spank the monkey once a day, my morning ritual.
That's it? responded pistol99. I jerk off more frequently than dentists brush their teeth.
Whenever I think about Oscar Mayer Wienerboy whacking away on my mattress, I feel a pulsing between my legs. I didn't tell anyone that, but I did describe to Kitty how, probably because he's from Ohio, I picture him to have moppy golden hair, freckles, and a blade of grass in the corner of his mouth. Which Kitty said was preposterous, because, to the best of her knowledge, there are no farms in Cincinnati.
I suggested to Mom that we rent a town house in Fairview Heights for the year, until the Oscar Mayer Wieners clear out. When I was in fifth grade, my friend Shelly and her mother moved there after her father ran off with an undergrad. It doesn't take a psychotherapist to recognize that after the trauma of a separation, the best thing we could do was to keep everything else in our lives as stable as possible.
But that's when Mom started up about New York City, where she lived two decades ago, when she met Dad. And then, a few weeks later, she signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side.
“That translates to uptown and west of Central Park,” she chirped as she popped a strawberry in her mouth. She'd just returned from the five-hour drive and was sitting at the kitchen table, thumbing through Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
“Whatever that means.” I shrugged.
Mom peered at me over the rim of her reading glasses. I was tempted to add that the title of her book should be changed to Ignore Your Daughter and Do It Anyway. But I didn't. Instead I grabbed a strawberry out of the pint, rinsed it in the sink and started upstairs, my throat tightening, making it difficult to catch my breath.
That's been happening a lot in the past month, these breathing attacks, like a fist strangling my neck, transforming a simple inhale into a task as huge as scaling Mount Kilimanjaro. No matter how much I yawn or stretch my arms in front of me, all I get are shallow gasps that make my chest ache.
It happens whenever I think about Dad. How I barely say anything when he calls, just fine this and fine that and do you want me to put Mom on now? How I locked myself in my room and blasted my CDs that morning Mom drove him to the Syracuse airport. How I gnawed the inside of my cheeks until they were raw as he pounded on my door and eventually called to Mom: I don't know what to do, Roz … I'm going to miss my plane. I couldn't make out Mom's response, but the knocking stopped soon after.
“Life's a car ride,” Kitty said when I described my decaying home life. Ever since she got her license everything is a driving metaphor. “Sometimes it's cruise control down smooth highways … other times it's potholes on rural roads.”
“Yeah, well, I forgot to pack my motion sickness bag,” I snorted.
I know just how Mom would react if she heard that. You're being melodramatic, she would say, swatting the air with her palm. Well, Mom's one to talk, seeing how she's a regular emotional roller coaster. Typical for an artist or a Cancer, of which she is both. Mom thrives on change, constantly seeking new tastes, new landscapes, new routes to the grocery store. When Mom is on a peak, I wish she came equipped with a volume knob, so I could turn her down. But land her in a valley and it's tears, headaches, hives, you name it. When she was little, her older brother nicknamed her Onion because she cried so much.
I'm exactly the opposite, like Dad. We're much more even-keeled. We'd opt for our favorite pasta place rather than the Thai-Cuban-Scandinavian restaurant that just opened downtown. And Dad used to joke that Mom emoted enough for the three of us. I guess that's one way to put the fact that we keep a lot to ourselves. We don't let the entire population see every emotion we're feeling every second that we're feeling it.
I didn't even cry when Mom returned from the airport and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom with the tub running. Or when she emerged, eyes bloodshot, and asked what I wanted for my birthday, which was three days later. All I said was: For none of this to be happening.
It's not like I expected turning sixteen to be Hollywood-esque, with a shiny new car in the driveway and a boyfriend at my side. I haven't even gotten my learner's permit yet, and the closest I've come to romance is a guy I kissed at sailing camp last summer. I didn't even like him that much, but Kitty thought I should do it, for the experience. After all, more than one hand had groped inside her bra, and a goalie from the soccer camp across the road was hinting around her shorts.
Just open your mouth and pretend you're writing the alphabet with your tongue, Kitty coached.
Well, I barely got to E before he began pressing the hard bulge in his swimsuit against my right thigh. And the kiss was so slobbery, the first thing I did when I got back to the bunk was chug a gallon of Scope.
So I knew better than to expect sixteen to be the time of my life, but I never imagined it would be like this. Whoever coined “sweet sixteen” must have had some Norman Rockwell delusion of poodle-skirted girls rocking around the clock with boys who used words like swell. All before their nine o'clock curfew, of course.
So that's why, barely seven hours after I finished my biology Regents, when I should have been celebrating the end of tenth grade, I was dividing my worldly possessions into piles to bring, piles to store in the garage and piles of maybes, unfortunately the biggest pile of all.
It's not like I forfeited these fantastic plans to stay home tonight. Kitty and I usually spend the last day of school renting movies and bingeing on frozen yogurt, but she and Jack were headed to some party. Even if I didn't have to pack, I doubt I would have joined them. Jack, who's a forward on the varsity basketball team, runs with the Beautiful People. It's not as if Jack himself is that beautiful—his face is sort of mashed in, like he smacked into a brick wall at a high speed—but being a Beautiful Person is not so much about looks as attitude. I should know. During the handful of parties Jack has taken us to, I've had an abundance of time to record mental notes because, other than minor details, they all went exactly like this:
We arrive. I suddenly remember that after the last party, I vowed never to attend another as long as I live.
Jack gets swept up in a flurry of high fives and back slaps. Kitty, surgically attached to his J. Crew shirt, disappears into a cloud of cigarette smoke.
I scan for familiar faces, maybe receive a limp wave from the girl who scammed answers off me in geometry last week. Someone hands me a warm beer in an oversized plastic cup. I sip slowly, hating the taste of beer but wondering if a slight buzz could transform me into the life of the party. Very doubtful. Search for a dark corner.
Eventually found by Kitty, who is distraught and in desperate need of counsel because: a. some bitch is flirting with Jack, and while he's not reciprocating he's also not ignoring.
OR
b. Jack is flirting with some bitch. Well, not flirting exactly, but he just asked her if she was on the cover of last month's Cosmo.
Once Kitty flits off to find Jack again, I consider why no one of the male gender is entering my dark corner of the world. Wonder if I'm:
a. sexually repulsive.
b. in deficiency of pheromones, which is this scent that animals emit to attract a mate.
c. invisible.
We leave by midnight. I vow never to attend another party as long as I live.
By ten P.M., the radio was tuned to WICB, the Station for Innovation, and I was load
ing my books into a cardboard box. Mom had said it would be fine to stack them on the top shelves, but the last thing I wanted was to have the Oscar Mayer Wieners snooping through my personal belongings. Especially if they came across the racy Harlequin Romances that Kitty gave me in seventh grade, key sections highlighted.
I must have been in my own world because the next thing I knew, Mom was standing in the doorway, wearing paint-splattered overalls with a lacy black camisole underneath. A paisley bandanna was holding back her long blackish hair.
“Thanks for knocking.” My door had been closed, but not locked, because it's an iron rule in our house to do the standard three-rap before you enter a room.
“I was … for about ten minutes. You've got to turn down that music, Sammie. I can barely hear myself think.”
My full name is Samantha Leigh Davis, but ever since I was a baby everyone has called me Sammie. Several times, I've asked my parents if it was their idea of a joke to give their only child the same name as Sammy Davis, Jr., one of the ensemble of 1950s entertainers called the Rat Pack.
We named you after Mom's father, Samuel, who died when she was thirteen, Dad usually says.
And, frankly, Mom always adds, Sammy Davis, Jr., didn't dawn on us when we started calling you Sammie.
Didn't dawn on her! Just like it's not dawning on her now to give me more than a millisecond to get to my stereo? Before I'd been able to set down my armful of paperbacks, Mom tromped across the room and lowered the volume to a barely audible pitch.
“You could've let me turn it down myself,” I said. “Don't use that tone of voice with me.”
Tone of voice is a biggie in Mom's lexicon. I admit, I wouldn't have won any Pollyanna awards recently. But these last few weeks, Mom's been so sensitive that if I allow the faintest hint of emotion to enter my voice, she careens across the room.
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