by M. E. Kerr
“Maybe you shouldn’t pounce on her first thing.”
“When am I going to pounce on her? Tonight? With you guys right in the next room?”
“Maybe you just shouldn’t pounce.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
On the wall over Jack’s head was Pete’s old framed drawing of Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Spock was glancing wistfully at a woman, with the caption underneath:
BUT LOVE? LOVE IS ILLOGICAL.
I was thinking that if Jack really loved her, he’d have a little more finesse. He wouldn’t try to pin her to the mat first chance.
“Everyone she’s ever been with has pounced,” I said.
“That’s just why I should. She’s going to think something’s wrong with me.”
“She’s not going to think that.” I didn’t know why it should bother me.
“I’m going to think it, too,” Jack said. “I’m not you, Erick. I’m not into waiting now that I’ve met someone I’m crazy about! I’m eighteen now, for God’s sake!”
Then he gave my arm a punch and said, “Wish me luck!”
Chapter Seven
ONE THING I COULD never say to anyone was I love you, not even to Dill. I’d say “Love ya!” I’d sign notes “Lots of love,” and send Hallmark cards with mushy verses, but I could never get those three words out.
Pete said not to worry about it—even Dad managed to choke them out when he met Mom. You’ll say them in time, Pete said, maybe not to Dill but when you’re ready. I’d tell him I’m ready now, and not being able to say them makes me come off a wimp. The other thing, I told Pete, is that I hate watching TV or going to the movies with Dill when some character says I love you, because I always think Dill’s wondering why I don’t. She does, but I don’t.
I was thinking about all of that while Dill and I were in Washington Heights, visiting her Aunt Lana.
It was a fantastic early-fall afternoon, the kind of Saturday that makes you think of football games, that smells like leaves burning even when leaves aren’t burning anywhere, cool enough for sweaters, but not cold enough for gloves or coats.
We rode the bus up Madison Avenue, and when we passed 90th Street, I told her that was where Southworth School was, where Pete taught.
“Sometimes I look at Pete, and think that’s what you’re going to look like and be like when we’re married,” Dill said. “It’s like seeing into the future.”
“The last thing I’d do is teach, though. It’s the last thing anyone’d let me do, too.”
“You could teach if you wanted to. You can do anything Pete can do.”
“When I was a kid, I used to worry that I could never be as good as Pete at anything.”
“All kid brothers think that,” Dill said. “But you’re already like Pete. You have his sense of humor, and you have his high moral character, and you have his hard buns.” She gave me a pinch. She said, “Now for my side of the family, and our black sheep. She’s the only Dilberto who ever eloped!”
The last thing you’d think when you looked at Dill’s Aunt Lana was that once she’d run off with a Spanish guitarist from the Bronx, named Gustavo Quintero.
She was this little, bespectacled music teacher with blue eyes like Dill’s, and wiry gray hair, cut short and on the frizzy side. The only clue to her infamous past was all the little guitar-shaped bric-a-brac strewn about her small apartment: guitar-shaped napkin rings, ashtrays, bookends, and pencil holders.
She looked a lot younger than Mr. Dilberto, and the thing I liked best about her was the fact she didn’t like him any more than I did. She called him Bertie, and said that if you kicked him in the heart, you’d break your toe.
“Oh, Aunt Lana!” Dill said. “You really love Daddy deep down!”
“If you mean my love for him is buried in the debris of bygone years, you’re right, Dill I can just imagine what you’re going through. Bertie doesn’t think God is good enough to date a Dilberto. And who are we? Just some offspring of Venetian cobblers who got off the boat like everyone else in the dear old U.S. of A. … What fault does he find with you, Erick?”
We were eating chicken salad in her small foyer.
“He thinks I ought to be applying to Harvard or Yale.”
“Or Princeton or blah blah,” she said. “That’s Bertie.”
“Erick?” Dill said. “You’re exaggerating.”
“Bertie’s bite is worse than his bark, too,” said Aunt Lana. “The man I fell in love with couldn’t read or write. You can imagine what Bertie made of that.”
“That was awful,” Dill agreed. “I heard that story. Daddy pretended he’d left his reading glasses home, and passed a menu to Gustavo and asked Gustavo what the day’s specials were.”
Aunt Lana said, “I was suspicious when he asked us out to dinner, said, C’mon, Lana, let your big brother treat you and your new beau. I knew right then Bertie was up to something … I’ll tell you kids something: People are small sometimes. Puny. They say they’re doing things for your own good, but all they’re doing is reinforcing the pettiness in their own natures. They can’t seem to just thank the Lord they’re doing okay in life. They’ve got to try and make everything in your life the way they think it should be. If it isn’t, if it can’t be, if you don’t want it to be, that never stops them … Bertie always started every sentence ‘If I were you, Lana …’ And I’d say, ‘But you’re not! No one can be me but me!’ … If Bertie was God, everyone’s fingerprints would be exactly the same.”
Dill tried to change the subject a few times. I don’t think she’d counted on the tirade against her father. I felt a little sorry for her, too. Even though I had no love for Mr. Dilberto, I knew what it was like to feel no better than one of Hitler’s relatives, suddenly. After my mother’s grand Bill Ball for Liz Gaelen I felt that way, too, when I read all the letters of outrage in The Seaville Star.
By the time we were ready to leave, I realized Aunt Lana had the idea Dill and I were these endless-love type star-crossed lovers, right up there with Romeo and Juliet.
As she was seeing us out the door, she said, “If Bertie calls here tonight, I’ll say you’re out if it’s early, and you’re in the shower if it’s late. Then I’ll call you so you can call him.” Behind her there was a sampler on the wall, in the shape of a guitar, with these words inside it:
She said, Give fate a good fight, anyway,
Give chance an argument for us.
She said, Give fate a good fight, anyway—
What have we got but us, Gus?
—FROM A SONG BY GUSTAVO QUINTERO.
When we left, Dill told me she used to write down all the songs he made up—“Daddy said she’d sit there nights taking them down like he was another Billy Joel, always in these awful road-houses where he’d play.”
“What became of him?”
“After they were married about six years, Daddy decided to welcome Gustavo into the family and stop all his criticizing of him. Daddy missed seeing Lana was why … About a year after that Gustavo went out for a pack of cigarettes one day and never came back. I’m glad you don’t smoke.”
“She had her big romance, anyway.”
“Sometimes I think Daddy made it possible. Daddy says nothing fans the flames of love like someone forbidding it.” Dill bumped against me and smiled. “Are we having our big romance?”
“I am,” I said. “Are you?”
“I am if you are.”
But the easy little games Dill and I played together came harder somehow. I’d suggested we walk up to the Cloisters, we were so near there. As we went up the dirt path through Fort Tryon Park, I kept thinking that Dill and I weren’t even close to being what her aunt thought we were. Dill and I were just kids playing around.
I kept thinking about Jack and Nicki, too, and what was going on back at Pete’s place.
The first time I’d ever gone to the Cloisters, Mom had taken me. It was a museum of medieval art, overlooking the Hudson River. The grounds were beautiful, but
I never got turned on by old paintings and tapestries, as Mom did, as Pete did, too. Mom said someday I would, the same thing Pete said about saying I love you. While Dill raved over everything we saw, and I pretended to be just as fascinated, I began to wish I’d grow up.
Later we sat on a stone bench, with a light breeze blowing off the river, and Dill said, “Why do you keep looking at your watch?”
“Do I keep looking at my watch?”
“Oh, I get it. We’re not supposed to be back to Eighteenth Street until a certain hour. What hour?”
“Four o’clock. We can get started. The bus takes a while.”
We got up and began walking along slowly.
“I feel like I should apologize,” Dill said.
“For what?”
“For not being a little slut like Nicki Marr.”
“I guess you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” I said … “How come it’s okay for Jack to make out, but she’s a little slut?”
Dill let that one go by.
Dill said, “What were you laughing so hard at when I came out of the kitchen this morning?”
“Something her mother said once.”
“You should have seen your face.”
“What was wrong with my face?”
“Nothing. You looked wildly happy.”
On the bus Dill said, “Did you ever hear how Annabel Poe Marr died?”
“No, I don’t know much about Nicki.”
“It’s a sad story. I could feel sorry for her if she’d ever let anyone female feel anything for her.”
“What happened to her mother?”
“Jeannie Gaelen’s mother was selling Mrs. Marr some of her wardrobe. It was right around the time Jeannie’s father got into that trouble. Only no one in Seaville knew it yet. They needed money desperately. A lot of women get money selling their clothes to Annabel’s Resale Shop. They don’t admit it, but I could name you names.”
“And?”
“And Mrs. Marr always went to the estates to buy the clothes. No one ever wants to be seen in that shop. It’s a dead giveaway that you’re hard up. Annabel Poe was this sickly type, anyway, among other things. Sickly, psychic: She used to conduct séances on the dunes at Kingdom By The Sea … She had a bad heart. She had a heart attack while she was at the Gaelens’… Instead of calling an ambulance for her, Jeannie’s mother called Cap. You know why she didn’t call an ambulance? She didn’t want it to get around that she was doing business with Mrs. Marr. That’s the only reason Mrs. Marr would have been out at the Gaelen estate.”
“Pretty,” I said.
“I know. Jeannie feels terrible about it. … Nobody could find Cap right away. He got there about an hour and a half later. Annabel Poe died on the way to the hospital, in the Kingdom pickup truck.”
“Really pretty.”
“Jeannie was going to vote Nicki into pom-pom just because of that.”
“Well, why not? I would have, too.”
“You can’t vote someone into pom-pom just because you’re sorry for her.”
“What would have been so bad about Nicki being a pom-pom girl?”
“She’s not pom-pom material. She doesn’t have the right school spirit.”
“What difference does all that crap make?”
“The difference between a good pom-pom team and a bad one,” Dill said … “I don’t think she’s all that crazy about Jack, either. I’m picking up something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like the way she watches you. Like the way she raved over the picture of you and Pete, on Pete’s desk, and said there was something about redheaded men that could open up her soul and let out the demon. Did you hear that one?”
“That’s just something she got from an old R.E.O. Speedwagon song. She was singing it for Jack and me last Saturday.”
“I don’t care where it was from, she wasn’t saying it about Jack. And what about Oh! Cyndi Lauper’s a Gemini,” Dill tried imitating Nicki, “like Erick and me?”
I just shut up.
“If she likes ‘She Bop’ so much, she must play with herself, too.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said. “At least she isn’t limited to that.”
“Oh, thanks, Rudd!” Dill said.
After we got off the bus at Eighteenth Street and started walking toward Pete’s brownstone, Dill said, “Shall we knock first or just barge in?”
“Jack knows we’re coming back at four. It’s ten after.”
But we both made a lot of noise going up the stairs.
I punched the bell a few times, put my key in the lock, and opened the door.
Dill was right behind me. I heard her suck in her breath when we got inside, and whisper, “Oh, no!”
The three of them were sitting in the living room: Jack, Nicki, and my father.
Dad said, “It’s all right, Erick.”
It didn’t look all right. Jack’s face was down to his shoes, and Nicki sat staring at her hands folded in her lap.
Dad got up. It was the first time I’d ever seen him wearing old pants and a sweater in New York City.
I said, “Is Mom okay?” It was the only reason I could think of for his being there, that something had happened to Mom.
“She’s fine. Mom’s fine,” Dad said. “But Pete’s little virus landed him in St. Vincent’s hospital last night. I think they’ll let him come home later. So why don’t you kids come to my place?”
Dad had known that Jack and I were staying at Pete’s, but I’d told him Dill and Nicki were staying at Dill’s aunt’s.
I think Dad had figured things out for himself, because as we were all getting our stuff together, he never once asked the girls if they had anything to get from Washington Heights.
Dill babbled away guiltily about how lucky we were to get to stay in his beautiful apartment, as we taxied there.
“Yes,” said Dad, “but you’re going to have to put up with me … I’ll give you girls the bedroom, though.”
I was sitting up front with the driver. I didn’t dare turn around to see the expression on Dill’s face, Jack’s, or Nicki’s.
Chapter Eight
I NEVER WATCHED ANYONE perform without seeing myself doing the same thing. I suppose if I’d been watching Boy George that night, I’d be picturing myself wearing a wig, or red eyeglasses and lipstick, doing those loopy steps he did. But I was seeing myself as Bruce Springsteen. I was imagining myself after a few months without shaving, a red-and-white bandana wrapped around my forehead, my hair longer, and an old T-shirt with the short sleeves rolled, stained with sweat, sticking to my back.
By the time he got around to doing his old hit “Born in the U.S.A.,” the sweat was pouring off him and he looked supermacho, punching the air with his fists, flexing his muscles…. I was already planning to work out.
Most of the time we stood on our seats. Half of me was as high as anyone there wired on coke or pot or ’faced on booze, but the other half of me was thinking the same thoughts I’d had all day: that there was something lacking in me, that I ought to change. I couldn’t seem to leave myself behind, even for Springsteen.
I couldn’t seem to leave Nicki behind, either.
I’d done a double take the second she’d stepped out of Dad’s bedroom. She had on these black fishnet tights with an orange dress over them. Tipped forward on her head was one of these porkpie jobs in black leather. But it was the black-leather fringe jacket that got to me. There was a picture of a white Corvette slamming into a red Porsche, with other sleek sports cars rammed into each other behind it, white stars shooting out above it. Under that in yellow were the words: TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.
She’d said Ski’d found it for her.
“What’s it supposed to mean?” I asked her.
“It’s just a traffic accident, see?”
I kept watching her all through the concert.
If anyone knew how to enjoy a rock concert, Nicki did. She stood on her seat mesmerized when Bruce Springsteen s
ang songs like “I’m on Fire,” then jumped down and danced in the aisles to numbers like “Thunder Road,” and “Dancing in the Dark.” She sang, whistled, shouted, squealed, and clapped.
Jack was trying hard to whip himself up, sneaking sips of Long Island Tea he’d brought along in a flask, wearing a Sting T-shirt Nicki’d given him for his birthday. Dill was excited, but Dill excited was Dill grinning broadly and grabbing my hand—nothing ever completely totaled Dill.
The three of us seemed like grown-ups who’d brought a kid along to the circus, only Nicki wasn’t a kid—one whiff of her perfume told you that, one glimpse of her long legs moving to the beat, a rhinestone bracelet flashing at one ankle.
We were all really pooped after, and in the taxi on the way back to Dad’s, I asked Jack what was in that tea, anyway. He was sitting there singing Elvis Presley’s old torcher “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Springsteen’s first encore. Jack was doing sort of a slow, dopey version of it, keeping time with his hands.
“Have some and see.” He offered me the flask.
“Erick?” Dill said. “It isn’t tea. I was there this morning when Jack made it.”
“I know it isn’t tea, but what’s in it? Is it strong?”
“Is it strong!” Nicki said, but she’d had only a taste. None of us were drinkers.
“It’s got tequila, rum, vodka, gin, Triple Sec, and lemon juice in it,” Dill said.
“And Coca-Cola,” Jack said. “You just sip a little of it. Have some!”
I passed. We all did but Jack. Dad had put the kibosh on that part of the celebration. Even though he’d said he was going to stay out late so we could have the apartment to ourselves for a while, I didn’t dare get wrecked anywhere around him … I didn’t know how to figure Dad’s mood. He didn’t seem at all teed off at the fact the girls’ luggage was at Pete’s. All he wanted was our promise not to hang out after the concert. Pick up a pizza on the corner of Eighty-second and Second, he’d said. I’ll see you tomorrow, or if you’re up very late, later.
We stopped for the pizza. (We’d left the meat loaf in Pete’s refrigerator.)
While Jack and I were paying for the pizza at the counter, I said, “When did my old man show up?” We hadn’t had a chance to talk since that morning.