Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  As I was pondering my father’s narrow-minded belief that any boyfriend I had could be commendable only if he was fluent in Lenin, I vigorously bit into a cherry tomato, which spurted all over Bucky’s white shirt.

  I watched the seeds arrange themselves around the grinning alligator at his heart while the textured cotton absorbed the juice as thirstily as any “after” picture in one of those paper-towel commercials. I thought I would fall down dead right there. Thank God Jerry was at boarding school, where he had been sent after earning extracurricular honors as the best botanist in the neighborhood, specializing in marijuana. If he had seen this, I would never have lived it down.

  I looked at Bucky, aghast.

  “It’s okay, Sandy,” he said easily. “Nothing that won’t come out in the wash.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I sputtered, looking desperately at my mother for help. Trying not to laugh, she brought over a wet dish towel and we both dabbed at Bucky’s shirt. She made some reference to all his muscles, another topic that didn’t sit well with my father. Not even German Jews were known for their muscles. I hurried the whole thing along as best I could until Bucky and I were finally outside and safely in his car.

  “Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “I think your mother likes me,” he said, taking my hand. “But I think your father hates me. Is it because I’m not Jewish?”

  I nodded. “And because you have no idea what Goebbels was doing at four-twenty p.m. on August tenth, 1941.”

  He put his arms around me. “Was he kissing the prettiest girl in Green Hills?” he asked tenderly, and I started to bury my face in his neck but pulled back too late and cried, “My lipstick!” And we both surveyed the Cover Girl Passion Fruit on his white collar.

  “The only thing left to do is go to Baskin-Robbins and get some cherry-vanilla,” he said. “Then it will be complete.” We did, and he purposely dropped some right near the tomato stain. I dropped some on my shirt, too. It was like being blood brothers, I thought. We were in it all, together.

  The night of the prom, everything went perfectly. I floated down the stairs in an ivory gown and managed not to trip. Standing near the front door, Bucky watched me descend, and his mouth dropped open a little while my mother beamed. My father, reading the CA volume of the encyclopedia in the den, roused himself to see what all the fuss was about. Then our neighbor Mr. Schwarz came over, too, vodka in hand, and offered to take some pictures of us posed outside.

  “She’s got a nice set of knockers,” he confided to Bucky, who blushed and nodded furtively in agreement.

  Before the prom, we went for dinner with a group of friends to a fancy restaurant in nearby Greenwich, Connecticut, right on the water. During the second round of sloe gin fizzes, someone made a joke, and while Bucky was laughing he somehow put down his drink on the edge of his bread plate, from which it tipped, soaking the tablecloth and, I noted with horror, the hem of my dress as well. I shrieked.

  “I’m sorry, Sandy,” he said, stricken, rising from his chair. He had gone completely white. “I’m really, really—”

  I never found out what he really, really was because I cut him off with a loud “Goddammit, I can’t believe you!” and rushed to the ladies’ room with a bottle of club soda and three friends. Scrubbing the stain out, I felt a little ashamed at how harsh I had been, especially since he had been so forgiving about the whole tomato incident. I was always impatient with him, I realized. Maybe it was the way Jerry and I had been brought up. There was no more dreaded question in our house than “How many times do I have to tell you?”—which implied that we children had been in receipt of some defective gene, a clear indication that we had arrived in the home of such smart parents purely by accident.

  The lesson I had learned was clear: The worst thing you could do in life was make a mistake. Large or small, public or private, mistakes in our house were all created equal. So, while spilling a sloe gin fizz on a white tablecloth in a fancy restaurant may not have been murder, it was manslaughter at the very least.

  The red spot, in fact, mostly came out. The other girls returned to the table, and as I put on more lipstick and started to relax, the door flew open and Bucky walked in.

  “What are you doing?” I cried, searching to see if any legs were visible under the toilet-stall doors.

  “You are not going to ruin this night because of a spill,” he announced with an authority I wasn’t used to. “You’re always so worried about looking wrong or being wrong, and I’m not going to let this happen. You’ve got to start giving yourself more credit. You’re so smart, but you always treat yourself like you’re dumb and worthless. I know I’m not as smart as you, but I can tell you I’m smarter about you. You have no confidence about looks and all of that, and I’m telling you that even with the tiniest stain on the hem of your dress you are so much better-looking and just better in every way than any girl out there. Don’t you see that?”

  “Oh,” I managed, leaning back against the counter.

  At the prom, we never left the dance floor. As “Stairway to Heaven” came on, Bucky took me in his arms again.

  “Do you know what I wished for last winter when I was recovering from my operation?” he asked.

  “What?” I asked, pressing my cheek against his shoulder, good as new.

  “That I would be here tonight, dancing with you,” he said.

  I pulled him close to me and looked out through a silvery wash onto the room, where everyone was my friend and looked particularly beautiful and I was certain that after we all went away to college we would still know one another forever.

  When we left for the midnight breakfast, sitting in his car, Bucky gave me a bracelet—a graduation gift, he said—of gold links with tiger’s-eye beads. I would die for him, I thought.

  The breakfast, sponsored by the parents of the senior class, was held at the Green Hills municipal pool in a tent whose walls had been decorated with baby pictures of all the graduates. My mom was there and so was Bucky’s; everyone ate scrambled eggs and jumped into the pool, some in bathing suits, some in their dresses and tuxes. Bucky and I left just before the second round of eggs came out. His neighbors were gone for the weekend and had given Bucky their keys so that he could walk their dog. Our secret plan all along had been to go there while his mother was still at the breakfast. (His father was at the cottage with Bucky’s older brothers, back from college.)

  We ran giggling though the dark upstairs hallway to an empty guest bedroom, where we had sex for the first time. After we’d got into the single bed and he was inside me, he pulled his head back, and in the half-light from the window I could see a childlike surprise on his face.

  “It’s warm!” he said, and I knew then that, for all his talk, this was the first time he had ever done this. (Not that I could say the same, thank you Bobby Levine.) The hour seemed to pass in one ecstatic minute until the alarm clock he’d brought went off, and after hurriedly putting our clothes back on, we returned to the pool, which was quiet by then, both our mothers having gone. Perfect timing! We lay on the grass, which smelled clean and good, quite pleased with ourselves, with our dangerous escapade undertaken while both our mommies were a few blocks away pouring juice and buttering toast. We fancied ourselves wild sexual adventurers. And we looked up at the stars, drunk with the certainty that every night of our lives would feel like this, protected and victorious, that we were bound together by a secret that made us more special than anyone we knew.

  It was this cocoon we shared throughout our college years. We were free and independent; we were homebound and family-tied. Sometimes he was my family, sometimes my liberty; and I was his; we slid between the two points like mercury, all nestled within a world bounded by Green Hills, the campuses of Smith and Amherst, the coziness of the cottage and periodic jaunts to the theater and the Philharmonic in Manhattan. Wherever we went was home, with living rooms, dens, and bedrooms at our disposal, friends and friendly acquaintances, windows that overlooked only l
eafy trees and thick lawns. And to top it all off, sex with Bucky had quickly developed into one of the world’s wonders, sometimes as often as four or five times a day, a pattern I was confident would continue well into our old age.

  Granted, our lives weren’t always idyllic. Bucky’s father drank, and he could get nasty when he did. He once punched Bucky in the face for coming home too late. And when Mr. Ross’s favorite Irish setter, Baxter, died, he locked himself in his bedroom and cried for two days. I think Bucky was more upset about that than about getting punched. At times like those, Bucky would leave his house to seek shelter at mine, where the conflicts were more subterranean, cloaked as they were in scientific or historical debate.

  For the most part, though, we were pampered by the suburban peace that was all our parents’ birthright, and so, by the laws of inheritance, it was our own. It didn’t matter if the parents were descendants of American royalty or the spawn of horse thieves; they had all signed up for the promise of the electric can opener back in the 1950s, and through the fruits of their labors their children could ski in Vermont, sun in Puerto Rico, and see the doctor every fall for checkups that were always normal. Yes, there were rules to be followed and chores to be done, but as long as we were good children and did the right thing, we would all be safe.

  When Bucky started work at Klein Chapin & Woodruff, he moved back to his parents’ house in Green Hills until he received his first bonus, with which he bought an apartment nearby. The city was too dirty, too noisy and expensive, he said. It was a much better value to buy in Green Hills, he insisted, because you could get so much more space. And his place was huge—at least by New York City standards. He would take the train home from the office every day, and run on the track at Green Hills High with other guys from our class who had also found themselves so rudely thrust into the working world. They, too, had been lulled by their upbringings and shunned the city, finding a way to still go to school every day, the way they used to. They would slap one another’s hands in greeting, swaddled by memories of athletic triumphs past. They ran with their heads thrown back, as if relieved to find the trees all in the same place they had left them just a few months earlier, before the mail started coming with bills and tax returns addressed to them instead of to their parents.

  Mrs. Ross immediately set herself to work furnishing her son’s apartment, which meant that matched sets of brown plaid couches began appearing, covered in all manner of crocheted doilies and knitted afghans. Once we were married, I knew, I would burn them all.

  But after a year of living in Green Hills, Bucky started having second thoughts. I wasn’t there, for one thing; at best I turned up for the occasional weekend. Plus, he often had to go out with his co-workers, and the idea of getting on a late train every night when they all stayed in the city was becoming more and more impractical. He brought some of them to his apartment once, and they were stunned by his refrigerator, bare but for a quart of milk. They dubbed the place the Bobby Sands Hilton, in honor of the Irish hunger striker.

  So before I could even graduate and snuggle into Suburban Living, Part One, Bucky sold the apartment—at a tidy profit, as he had predicted—and moved to the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, to a brownstone where he could walk to his midtown office. I liked the place, a duplex, and started making lists of things I would need to buy as a newlywed—a lasagna pan, for instance. I had never actually made lasagna, but I was sure I would soon.

  #17 The Tale of the Gravy Train

  by Sandra Berlin

  Once upon a time there lived a Prince who was the apple of his mother’s eye. Her husband, the King, had been thrown from his horse at the segregated riding club and killed, so the Queen raised the Prince herself. Because he was a sickly child, she took extra-special care of him, and made sure that he never left the castle.

  But as the Prince grew to be a young man and the Queen’s advisers wondered when he would finally ascend to the throne and become King, the Queen knew that she would have to improve her son’s health. For starters, the Prince had a terrible appetite, eating almost nothing but cherry-vanilla ice cream. So the Queen sponsored a contest for all the maidens in the land: Every Sunday night she would open the doors to the castle, and whoever made the dish that enticed the Prince to eat and grow strong would become his new Princess.

  A long line formed outside the palace door, of maidens wielding baked hams, scalloped potatoes, and steamship rounds of beef. The Prince sat in his chair, his lap covered by the brown afghan his mother had made him, and although he was exceedingly polite, he ate nothing at all.

  Then one Sunday a maiden appeared with an aromatic lasagna, bubbling in its pan, and as she set it upon the table, the Queen rang furiously for her servant. “I said olives, not onions,” she huffed, holding up her martini glass.

  “But, Your Majesty, we are out of olives,” the servant said.

  “Nonsense,” the Queen yelled. “Why must I do everything myself?”

  As she stomped to the pantry to find the olives, the maiden smiled at the Prince and said, “You know, it’s really hot in here. Why don’t you lose the afghan?”

  And before he could say a word, she had slipped it from his lap. Almost instantaneously, the Prince grew larger, great, and strong. He reached across the table and took a huge helping of lasagna.

  “Why, this is the most delicious dish I have ever eaten!” he proclaimed.

  “No kidding,” the maiden said. “You should taste my kugel.”

  And at just that moment the Queen returned, and when she heard what the maiden said and spied the cast-off afghan, she snatched it up and began to moan. “I’m melting, I’m melting,” she wailed. Soon she lay upon the floor, a puddle of brown gravy, and the royal Irish setters gathered round and lapped her up.

  The Prince promptly married the maiden and said, “Every Sunday from now on, we must have your lasagna for dinner, my dear.”

  “My darling, I love you,” she said. “But in the castle where I grew up, we had Chinese on Sunday nights. And if you think lasagna is great, wait till you try shrimp with lobster sauce.”

  He loved it. And they lived happily ever after.

  The End

  3

  While Bucky made the move to the city, another year passed at the drama school. I was having such a good time that my always vague plan to move to Murray Hill and commute somehow evaporated.

  My good time, of course, was being had with Paul, who continued to instruct me in the art of seeing life as a perpetual first date—which he also seemed to have late every night, after safely depositing me back in my apartment. How many gay men can there be in New Haven?, I would ask, and he would just laugh. Hundreds, apparently.

  But until the clock struck midnight, we were always together. Paul spent hours at my apartment, cooking dishes like fettuccine Alfredo and teaching me to throw a piece of pasta against the wall to see if it was ready—it was if it stuck. We drank wine and invited other people, who brought salad and dessert, and the party went from night to night. Except when it went to the city to take advantage of what seemed to be limitless opera and theater tickets Paul got through Dennis, an older guy he dated. Sometimes, when Dennis was out of town on business, I would accompany Paul.

  Paul also managed to do what no man before or since has dared attempt: surprise me. For my birthday during our final year at Yale, Paul and a few friends took me to dinner at a place I loved called Leon’s: an old-fashioned Italian restaurant where the bottom of my stomach invariably disappeared and I attempted to eat everything the kitchen made in one sitting. That night, Paul seemed incredibly jumpy. Laughing too often and chattering about things that made no sense, he seemed to be drunk.

  He insisted we go back to his apartment for a nightcap, something we never did—he much preferred my place, since I seemed to go to the supermarket daily. And when I walked in the door, I truly thought I would die: Bucky was there, and all of my friends from school, even some friends from Green Hills. I thanked Paul profusely fo
r the planning that had gone into it all, but he seemed more relieved than pleased—he even waited until it was over to go boy-hunting. I’m sure, though, looking back on it, that I didn’t thank him enough. Then again, he wouldn’t let me. Anytime I reached toward him with a warm emotion, he would jam right up.

  “Romano, what is your problem?” I would say. “You cry at the opera, you cry at the theater, and if all I want to do is say thank you or something else equally deep, you go crazy.” He would grimace, and I would invariably add, “This is about Marie.”

  Marie Romano was Paul’s mother, and from what I could gather, she was not a woman given to spontaneous outbursts of emotion. She was, according to Paul, devout and regimented and had raised her only son to be a good Catholic boy, entrusting him and his education to the nuns, who worked overtime to keep him in line. She was counting the days until her prize child would marry his childhood sweetheart, Sally Pozzo. Sally’s father was also incredibly rich, Paul explained, from patenting some gum base used in the mass production of ice cream. The Pozzos of Los Angeles were such a prominent Catholic family that the walls of their home were covered with photographs of them posing with the Pope. Paul had a copy of one that showed Sally, attractive enough, with her black hair pulled into a severe bun, wearing a plain white suit. She looked like an executive nurse.

  “Romano,” I said during one of these tête-à-têtes about Marie, who, from her own pictures, looked as if she must have weighed at least three hundred pounds, “does your mother truly have no idea that you’re out every night boffing boys until the sun comes up?”

  Paul covered his face. “Don’t even mention sex in the same sentence as Marie,” he said. “She’s a holy woman, my mother. She wears those white sandals with the toes cut out to church every Sunday when she prays for me. A lovely person. The best.”