“Your what?”
“You know—when a gay guy has a female friend hanging from his arm so people will think he’s straight, the woman is called his beard.”
“Ah. So you want me to hang from your arm so your family won’t realize you’re gay.”
“Will you do it, Josh? Will you be my favorite person in the whole world and go to the barbecue with me?”
“Only if you promise they won’t serve pickled pigs’ feet.” He ruminated for a moment. “When did you say this was? Sunday?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to mow my mother’s lawn first.”
“Why?”
“Because I always mow my mother’s lawn on Sunday. The world would come to an end if a Sunday passed without me mowing her lawn. But I could get myself to your parents’ house afterward, I guess. I’d be out on the island anyway.”
“Oh, God, I love you,” she blurted out. She meant it, too. She loved Josh for being the kind of friend who would rescue her from her family’s matchmaking attempts. “I owe you big-time, Josh.”
“Yeah. Maybe you should mow my mother’s lawn for me.”
“Okay! I mean it. It’s been years since I mowed a lawn.” Actually, the closest she’d ever come to mowing a lawn was when she pushed her father’s mower into the garage after he was done mowing. Nicky and Al used to mow the lawn, a chore for which they got paid decent money, she recalled. Her chores—emptying the dishwasher, stuffing ricotta into manicotti shells, lugging the laundry baskets to the corner of the basement where the washing machine stood—never earned her a dime. When Al left for college and she was the only D’Angelo child left at home, she’d begged to mow the lawn so she could pocket some extra cash. Her father had told her that mowing the lawn was hard work requiring brute male strength. She couldn’t believe it required any more strength than hauling tons of her brothers’ smelly socks and wet towels down the stairs to the washing machine.
“No, you won’t mow my mother’s lawn,” Josh said. “But here’s an idea—we can rent a car, drive out to my mother’s, I’ll mow the lawn and then we can drive on to your parents’ house and convince them you don’t need to get set up with any dentists, and then we can drive home.”
“No Long Island Railroad? What a luxury.”
“Then let’s do it. I’ll be your beard, and you can be my mustache.”
“It’s a deal,” Loretta said, deciding that Josh was indeed her favorite person in the whole world.
Chapter Twenty-One
Josh paid no attention to the voice inside him nattering that this was not a good idea. What was bad about it? Friends did stuff together. They went to each other’s houses, met each other’s parents, mowed lawns and ate grilled burgers. The whole plan was so unremarkable, he didn’t even bother mentioning it to Melanie when he emailed her about the developments with Solly, Phyllis, and Dora Lee.
Of course she was interested in that little soap opera. She knew the cast of characters from her time working at the West Side Senior Center, and she’d emailed him several long paragraphs on sexuality in older people. “In this age of Viagra and hormone patches, people’s libidos don’t fade away,” she’d written. “It’s certainly an issue I’ve been dealing with down here in Florida, where there are four widows for every widower. They often become very possessive partners. No one wants to die alone.”
Josh had never thought about it that way. Solly, Phyllis, and Dora Lee all seemed so vital, he couldn’t contemplate their deaths in any but the most abstract terms. But he could understand their need for companionship. Loneliness didn’t confine itself only to certain age groups.
Amazing, but he hadn’t suffered a moment’s loneliness since he and Loretta had transitioned to friendship. That first week, when he wasn’t sure what he wanted with her, he’d been acutely aware of his solitude. He’d reflected obsessively on her legs, her mouth, her hair, the elegant angle of her jaw. He’d reflected even more obsessively on the emptiness of his bed. But once he’d gotten past that, once he’d relaxed into the relationship, he hardly saw her anymore. She was laughter, words, energy, crazy ideas, huge favors. She wasn’t a beautiful woman.
Well, she was a beautiful woman. He’d have to tear out his eyes to ignore that fact. But he didn’t think of her that way.
She was looking particularly beautiful—all right, so he noticed—as she emerged from her building to join him in the car, which he’d rented a few blocks down on Madison Avenue. He’d had to double-park in front of the building because no spaces had been available; he’d abandoned the car only to dash into the vestibule and signal her on the intercom, and then bolted back out to the car before it could be ticketed and towed. Watching her smile, stride to the car, and let herself in, he admitted that she was indisputably beautiful in her tan shorts and sleeveless black shirt, a purse slung over her shoulder and her hair slightly frizzy from the July heat. As usual, she wore little make-up—a touch of something that made her eyelashes look darker, and a layer of tawny lipstick not far removed from the natural color of her lips. She’d hooked a pair of sunglasses over the neckline of her shirt, and when she folded her long legs into the car, he caught a whiff of a tangy shampoo.
“This car is so bourgeois,” she murmured, adjusting the side vent to blow air conditioning directly into her face.
“It’s a Buick,” he said, starting the engine.
“I know. My father drives Buicks.” She evidently didn’t see this as a positive thing.
“It was what the rental place had. I could have chosen this or a Ford.”
“This’ll do,” she assured him, stretching her legs under the glove compartment. “It’s not a Porsche, but what the hell.”
“It’s better than the Ford, at least.”
“In what way?”
He steered to the corner and waited for the light. He rarely drove in Manhattan, but he relished the challenge of it. Sharing the roads with so many other crazy drivers was like solving a puzzle or winning a tricky negotiation with a recalcitrant landlord. Every block he drove without getting cut off or honked at or flipped the bird represented a small victory.
“Jews don’t drive Fords,” he said.
“They don’t?” She eyed him curiously. “Why not?”
“Because Henry Ford was an anti-Semite.”
Her eyes grew round and she let out a laugh. “Henry Ford? Like from a hundred years ago?”
“Jews have long memories. I was raised to understand that Jews didn’t drive Fords, period.”
“So, there are no old Nazis in Buick’s closet, huh.”
“None that I know of.” Another couple of blocks. The Buick cruised smoothly, silently, very much the sort of car someone’s father would drive.
“Okay, so I shouldn’t sing the praises of Henry Ford in front of your mother. Anything else I need to know?”
“She’s a kvetch.”
“A kvetch.” Loretta struggled over the word, lending it an extra syllable.
“She complains. Behind every silver lining she sees a cloud.” Josh steered onto the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. It was probably the ugliest bridge in the city, which was part of its charm. Heavy, rusty-looking girders slanted on either side of the roadway, and the upper deck closed off the sky above them. But once they crossed the East River to the other side, the world opened up around the shorter, sparser buildings of Queens. The sun glared through the windshield, and he reached for his own sunglasses, which he’d tucked into the pocket of his T-shirt. He had dressed in his usual lawn-mowing apparel but had packed some fresh clothes in a knapsack, so he could shower and change before heading over to Loretta’s house and pretending to be her boyfriend.
He was actually looking forward to the charade. Of all the adventures Loretta had talked him into, this one struck him as potentially the most fun. Because they were just friends, he could pretend affection and devotion without getting into trouble. He could wrap his arm around her shoulder or kiss h
er cheek or maybe even nuzzle her hair, and she wouldn’t misinterpret his moves. She’d welcome them. They would be part of the show.
It would be exactly what he’d hoped for when they’d gone on their fake blind date: a hint of sex without any expectations or emotional repercussions. He wasn’t betraying Melanie, because this outing was meaningless play-acting, nothing more than a favor for a friend. Like the blind date, only with touching.
The Long Island Expressway wasn’t a huge improvement over the Long Island Railroad, which moved slowly but at least moved. The expressway presented long stretches of stagnation, too many cars squeezed onto too little asphalt, too many frayed tempers confined within too many vehicles. Loretta noodled with the radio until she found an alt-rock station. As long as she didn’t choose opera, he had no complaints.
“You do this every week?” she asked. “You’re such a good son.”
“Racking up points for heaven,” he told her.
“Your mother shouldn’t be…what was it? A ka-fetch?”
“Kvetch. You’re right. She shouldn’t be. But she can’t help herself. It’s programmed into her genes.”
“Am I going to have to know Yiddish to talk to her? As of now, kvetch is about the limit of my knowledge. Kvetch and tsuris.”
He laughed. “She speaks English. Am I going to have to know Italian to converse with your parents?”
“Nope. They were both born in America. And they’re going to love you.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“You’re a man.” She shrugged. Her shirt revealed the strong curves of her shoulders. Did her brothers have shoulders like that? Would they beat him up if they found out his intentions toward their sister didn’t incline toward the matrimonial?
It was just one afternoon, just one performance. Then he’d never see them again—except, perhaps, at Loretta’s wedding. He would like to think he and she would remain friends even if she met her ideal partner and got married. He would like to think that if that ever happened, he wouldn’t become even the slightest bit jealous when that ideal partner wrapped an arm around her, kissed her cheek and nuzzled her hair the way he was planning to as he performed the role of her boyfriend today.
Of course he wouldn’t be jealous if she got married. He’d be happy for her. Friends were happy for their friends. No problem.
Still, he couldn’t help stealing glimpses of her as he wove through the stop-and-start traffic of the highway, and admiring her smooth cheeks and the pugnacious tilt of her chin, and imagining how much fun pretending was going to be. He couldn’t help thinking he was going to be a method actor today, throwing himself into the part, living it…letting her parents believe, for a few precious hours, that their spinster daughter had snared herself one hell of a guy.
***
“That wasn’t so bad,” Loretta said three hours later, as Josh helped her into the car. Freshly showered, he smelled of a lime-tinged soap, and he wore a lightweight cotton shirt in a quasi-Hawaiian print and clean jeans faded to a soft blue. His hair was still damp, but the late-afternoon heat would dry it quickly enough. It looked darker wet, but she could see a few sun-bleached highlights glinting through the waves.
“It was ghastly,” he refuted her.
“Your mother was interesting.”
“She spent the entire afternoon filling you in on every bonehead thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Loretta grinned. “I liked that story about the time you brought your ant farm to school and it broke and the cafeteria was overrun with ants.”
“That was an accident,” Josh muttered.
“And the time you took out a chunk of the garage door, a week after you got your license.”
“I did all the repairs and painted the whole damned door. She didn’t have to mention it.”
“But I’m so glad she did.” Loretta gave him a sweet smile. “And I never would have guessed you’d be the type to get suspended for writing an editorial in the high school newspaper.”
“I stand by that editorial. The principal was a honking dweeb.”
“And all those bar mitzvah pictures! Christ, she must have showed me a million bar mitzvah pictures of you. Two whole albums, plus the framed enlargements. You hardly had any nose when you were thirteen.”
“Amazing that I was able to breathe.” He slid his sunglasses onto his adult-size nose and backed the Buick down the driveway, then steered to the corner of the tidy suburban cul-de-sac on which his mother’s brick ranch house stood. Her lawn was quite possibly the greenest and most neatly groomed on the block. Obviously, Josh took good care of it.
“You looked so cute in that navy blue suit. Actually, you looked like you were outgrowing it. Your wrists stuck out.”
“I grew three inches in the month before my bar mitzvah. One month after my bar mitzvah,” he added, “my nose grew three inches.”
“It did not. It’s a very nice nose.” Loretta studied his profile and nodded in approval. “Just the right size for your face. I don’t think your mother liked me.” She wasn’t sure exactly what the pinched, thin woman with the perpetually downturned mouth had thought of her. She hoped Josh would enlighten her. Not that it mattered, not that she’d ever see Mrs. Kaplan again, but she was curious.
“My mother liked you fine.”
“She kept talking about the importance of Jewish traditions. During that marathon tour of your bar mitzvah photo albums, she went on and on about how the world was running out of Jews and it was essential to create more Jewish babies.”
“Lucky for you the world isn’t running out of Catholics,” Josh noted.
“I think your mother was hoping I’d convert to Judaism and create babies for the cause. When I didn’t leap up and volunteer my womb, she put a black mark next to my name.”
“In my mother’s eyes, everybody has a black mark next to their names. You’d better give me directions to your parents’ house, or we’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon cruising Route 110 and getting nowhere.”
“Get back on the L.I.E.,” she instructed him. “Another reason I think your mother didn’t like me was, she wouldn’t give me anything to drink. I was dying of thirst and she didn’t offer me anything. If you hadn’t come in from the garage, looking like a sweatball… What was that word she used?”
“Schvitzed. It means looking like a sweatball.”
“Yeah. Well, if you hadn’t come in all schvitzed—” she labored to wrap her lips around the word “—and asked me if I wanted a glass of water when you got one for yourself, I might have withered away to dust in her kitchen. Which is very yellow, by the way.”
“She likes yellow. No, she doesn’t,” he contradicted himself. “She doesn’t like anything. And she never offers me anything to drink, either. So if that means she doesn’t like you, I guess she doesn’t like me, either.”
“Well. Her lawn is beautiful. I guess she gives it something to drink sometimes.”
“She likes it more than me.” He shot her a look. Even though his eyes were hidden by his sunglasses she could picture them dancing with amusement. She smiled. Three hours in the company of his dreary mother couldn’t diminish the pleasure she felt spending her Sunday with him. He was so easy to talk to, so easy to laugh with.
“Did she like your father?” Loretta asked.
“Hmm?”
“You said she doesn’t like anything. Did she like your father?”
He pondered his answer for a minute. “I think she might have,” he decided.
“Why are you such a good son? Why do you cut her grass for her?”
He shot her another look, then smiled. “I’m a nice Jewish boy. Don’t you know anything about nice Jewish boys?”
“Obviously I don’t know the important stuff.” She combed her memory. “I dated a Jewish guy in high school for a while. He was incredibly smart. He went on to M.I.T. I think he’s a doctor now.”
“Maybe he’s a dentist
,” Josh suggested.
“Nah. He’s probably a brain surgeon. I don’t remember him being a devoted son, though. I don’t think he ever cut his parents’ grass. He was spoiled. His parents didn’t let him do chores, because they wanted him to spend all his free time studying. They didn’t like me much,” Loretta recalled.
“Because you weren’t Jewish?”
“Because I wasn’t smart enough for him.” She reminisced for a minute. Stuart Krupnik had been a dazzling student, but she didn’t recall their conversations centering on heavyweight subjects like calculus or astrophysics or the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Mostly, they’d talked about Phish and Saturday Night Live. “I don’t think he cared one way or another about my brain,” she said.
“You have a wonderful brain,” Josh pointed out. “It’s one of your best features.”
Her smile reflected warmth deep inside her. No one had ever complimented her brain before, not even Gary when he’d asked her to marry him. She knew she was smart, no whiz kid genius but no dummy either. Yet men who dated her never commented on her intelligence. They were turned on by her long legs, or they found her Long Island accent amusing, or they considered dating someone who worked on the Becky Blake Show cool. Her brainpower had never been the stuff of male fantasies.
Maybe Josh liked her for her brain because they were just friends. Friends didn’t have to be a certain height, or have a certain size bosom or a certain color of eyes. Their minds, their attitudes and inclinations took priority.
She wanted to thank Josh, but she couldn’t think of a way that wouldn’t sound mawkish. So she said, “We’ll be taking the next exit.”
Silence settled over them for a minute. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
She’d been thinking about Josh’s affection for her gray matter, and about how he mowed his mother’s lawn and put up with his mother’s negativity Sunday after Sunday. He’d lost his father just as surely as his mother had lost her husband, but unlike his mother, he had vitality, a sense of humor and generosity. As much as Loretta admired his brain, she admired his heart even more.
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