Other Words for Love

by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

  I could go to any college I wanted and they were sending me to Hollister Prep in September. I wasn’t sure how to tell Mom that I didn’t want to go to Hollister. I knew I couldn’t measure up to the girls there—girls like Summer who got sparkling report cards without opening a book and didn’t leave the house if their shoes didn’t match their purse. My current school wasn’t great—my classmates seemed to think I was completely unremarkable—but it was nearby and at least the teachers liked me. So I hoped my parents would forget about Hollister.

  I tried not to think about it when Mom and Dad were gone, when they were asleep in their bedroom down the hall and I couldn’t possibly sleep. So I sat next to my window, studying the stars in the clear summer sky, shifting my thoughts to Uncle Eddie. I thought about him and his entire savings and the fact that he had nobody to leave it to except us.

  two

  There were more people at Uncle Eddie’s wake than I expected, so that was good. Other than me and my parents, and Patrick and Evelyn and Kieran, there were a few neighbors from Uncle Eddie’s building and an attractive older lady who whispered to Dad that she and Uncle Eddie used to be special friends.

  Summer was there too. She came with her mother, who had stringy brown hair and always looked tired. She probably was tired, because she owned and operated a business called Catering by Tina. She made the food herself and loaded it into a white van that she drove to people’s homes in all five boroughs. Sometimes Summer and I helped with the cooking and went with Tina to the parties, where we stayed in the kitchen and arranged stuffed mushrooms on fancy silver trays.

  Now Summer sat next to me in a stylishly appropriate dress. I glanced at my own dress, which I’d hastily chosen from a clearance rack at Loehmann’s. It was baggy and dull, but I hadn’t been thinking about style when I bought it. I’d been thinking about Uncle Eddie, about the fact that he would be buried alone, not next to a wife or children or anyone that mattered. I wanted him to know that someone cared, so I wrote a note telling him how much I appreciated the hundred thousand dollars. I also mentioned that because of him I could afford to go to college at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, which had been my dream since I was twelve.

  The note was in an envelope that I clutched between my sweaty fingers. I wanted to give it to Uncle Eddie, who was lying inside that box at the front of the room, but I couldn’t. The idea of being near a dead person made my knees shake.

  “What’s that?” Summer asked, nodding toward the envelope.

  I folded it in my lap and glanced at Uncle Eddie. “He left my family some money. I know I can’t really thank him, but I wanted to, so I wrote this letter.…” I turned back to Summer. She was sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles, her dark eyes fixed on my face. “I’m being stupid. It’s not like he can read it.”

  She gave me a smile. “You’re not being stupid. I think you’re being nice.”

  I smiled back. “I still can’t go up there, though.”

  Summer uncrossed her ankles. “Why not?”

  “Because he’s dead. It scares me.”

  She threw her hair behind her shoulders. “Don’t be afraid of the dead, Ari. They can’t hurt you. It’s the living you should worry about.”

  She had a good point. Uncle Eddie couldn’t do anything to me. But I stayed where I was, bending the envelope until it was wrinkled and damp.

  Summer took it out of my clammy hands. She squeezed my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “Do you want me to do it? I’m not afraid.”

  That didn’t surprise me. Summer wasn’t afraid to do anything. “I should do it,” I said. But I stayed where I was, wishing I wasn’t so cowardly.

  Summer stood up and extended her hand. I remembered all the times she’d done that before. She’d done it at her sweet sixteen, when I’d hidden in her bathroom because I didn’t have the guts to mingle with the crowd of Hollister students in the living room. Summer coaxed me out and stuck with me the whole night, telling everybody, This is my best friend, Ari. That had made me think I might not be so unremarkable.

  “Come on,” Summer said, looking from me to Uncle Eddie. “We’ll do it together.”

  I didn’t go home with Mom and Dad after the wake. Instead I climbed into the back of Patrick’s black Ford truck. Mom thought I had spent too much time in my room over the last few days and needed a change of scenery.

  An hour later, I was helping Evelyn unload the dishwasher in her dingy kitchen. The outdated appliances were bile green and the wallpaper could make you dizzy if you stared at it for too long. It was covered with orange flowers, big leaves, and metallic swirls that weaved between the petals. Patrick had started to remove the wallpaper once, but he never found the time to finish. He was always working, either at the firehouse or doing odd jobs on his days off for extra money. Installing tiles, landscaping, anything to pay the mortgage.

  “Look what I got for you,” Evelyn said.

  She stuck a Mrs. Fields bag in my face. It was filled with my favorite chocolate chip cookies, so I knew that Evelyn was in one of her good moods today. I liked her much better this way, when she was sweet and thoughtful the way she used to be, and not cranky and mean like she’d become over the past few years. Dirty diapers and a husband with a dangerous job can make anyone grouchy, Mom said. I warned her.

  The worst was after Kieran was born. Evelyn broke out in a nasty case of eczema, and she cried every day and yelled at Patrick constantly. Mom had to call Summer’s father for advice—he was a psychiatrist. He’d said he believed Evelyn had postpartum depression, and he recommended we send her to New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. We did, and she had stayed for two months.

  Her treatment hadn’t been covered by Patrick’s health insurance. My parents had cashed some savings bonds to pay for the whole thing, and they’d agreed when Evelyn’s doctors recommended that she stop having children. But Evelyn didn’t listen to anyone, especially Mom and Dad. She used to fight with them all the time. They fought about her failing grades, her trampy clothes, and the bag of marijuana that Mom once found in Evelyn’s room. And there was always the issue of her revolving-door boyfriends and the fact that she’d gone alone to a clinic at the age of fifteen to get a prescription for birth control pills.

  The biggest fight came when she was seventeen and announced that she was pregnant. Dad’s mouth shrank into a thin white line and Mom yelled loud enough for our neighbors to hear. She said that Patrick was uneducated and ignorant and low class, she couldn’t stand his South Boston accent, and he was lucky that she didn’t hire someone to break his legs.

  I had feared for his safety, worrying that some barbarous thugs would bind him and gag him and leave him bleeding somewhere in Bed-Stuy. But Mom chose not to solicit any criminal activity, and she changed her tune after Patrick and Evelyn left for their Florida honeymoon. Mom and Dad whispered in the car as we drove home from LaGuardia Airport, talking about how they’d done everything they could and they’d given Evelyn a nice wedding, and then Mom laughed and said, She’s Patrick’s problem now.

  I shot Mom a stern look when she said that, because I didn’t think it was right for a mother to refer to her daughter as a problem. And I wasn’t shocked when Evelyn told us about the second baby. Being a mother seemed to make her feel like she wasn’t just a girl who got married too young and worked part-time as a cashier at Pathmark. Now she was a playgroup organizer, a soccer coach, the woman who’d written a scathing letter to Hasbro after Kieran almost choked on a plastic game piece. Of course there were also the incessant comments from every direction about how handsome Kieran was, how he was blessed with Patrick’s coloring and Evelyn’s exquisite features.

  She was striking, even with the extra weight. I sat across from her on the patio that night, admiring the way the fading sunshine accented the copper highlights in her long wavy hair. She was happy now, and she smiled with straight white teeth, let out throaty laughs that jiggled her cleavage.

  I heard her laughing again
after the sun was gone and I was alone in the guest bedroom, which would soon become a nursery. Patrick was laughing too, and then their voices lowered and changed into murmurs and moans and their headboard smacked the wall. I hadn’t been expecting that sort of thing tonight because Evelyn was more than seven months pregnant, but I’d been wrong. And it was impossible not to listen. They were so loud and Patrick’s noises made my heart race. He sounded like those professional tennis players who grunt whenever they hit the ball really hard.

  Maybe it was the noise that gave me a headache. Either that or it was punishment for enjoying the sound of my brother-in-law having what my classmates jokingly called an organism, but I was in too much pain to decide. I was at the start of a migraine that blurred the vision in my left eye and made me see freaky things. Auras, that was what my doctor said they were called. They came around whenever I was stressed or upset or exposed to loud noises. Don’t bottle up your emotions, the doctor said. They’ll manifest themselves physically and turn into headaches.

  I didn’t follow his advice. And my migraines always started out the same way, with a web of fluorescent purple light that pulsated and grew until my medication kicked in. Tonight my medication wasn’t here. I had been so preoccupied with Uncle Eddie that I’d forgotten to pack it in my overnight bag.

  So I went across the hall to the only bathroom in the house, where I searched through a cabinet for Tylenol. But all I found was Patrick’s Drakkar Noir and the bottle of ipecac that Evelyn had bought when Kieran was younger. She’d shown me where it was just in case he swallowed something dangerous while I was babysitting. She also made me go with her to a class where I learned to perform CPR and to diagnose broken bones.

  I could see clearly through only one eye, and the pain in my head was so bad that I kneeled beside the toilet, ready to throw up. When I was down there, I spotted a book on the floor called Name Your Baby. I flipped through it and noticed that Evelyn had circled some names, but only girls’ names. She’d refused a sonogram but was positive that she had a daughter on the way.

  The names, the letters, Evelyn’s scribbles in bright blue ink, made me feel worse, and I left the book on the tiles before I stood up. There was no reason to stay down there because nothing was happening, not even one lousy gag. I headed into the kitchen to search for Tylenol.

  “What’s wrong?” Patrick said.

  I turned around. Patrick stood in the kitchen doorway, shirtless, his pajama pants resting low on his waist, a gold Celtic cross dangling from a chain around his neck.

  “I’m trying to find some aspirin,” I said.

  He raked his hair back with his fingers but it was useless. Patrick’s hair was very straight and it always fell over his forehead in a silky flaxen wave. “You got one of those headaches again?” he asked, and I nodded. Then he told me to sit down, he would find the aspirin, the bottle was hidden on a top shelf where Kieran couldn’t get into it.

  I didn’t sit down. I stood on the linoleum watching Patrick rummage through the cabinets. I watched because he had a broad chest. A six-pack stomach. I hoped he wouldn’t catch me staring at him and he didn’t. He found a bottle of Tylenol and pointed to the table.

  “I told you to sit down,” he said, which was typical. Patrick was bossy, and words like please and thanks rarely came out of his mouth. Mom said it was because Patrick came from a family of eight kids with parents who were probably too frazzled to teach their children any manners. But I always followed his orders because I knew he meant well. So I took a seat and he sat opposite me, pushing two pills and a glass of water across the table. Then he reached over and pressed his palm against my forehead. “Are you sure it’s only a headache? You ain’t got no fever?”

  Fev-ah, he said. No, Patrick, I thought, shaking my head. I don’t have a fever. You could use a few lessons in Mom’s class, but I won’t tell you that. I can’t hurt your feelings because you’re so gorgeous and your hand feels nice on my face, hard and soft at the same time.

  “So what brought this on? Are you still devastated about the corpse?” he asked, and I gave him a disapproving look that made him laugh. “Oh, come on, Ari. The man was almost ninety years old.”

  I shrugged, studying the ice in my glass. Then I told him what I’d been thinking, about how sad it was that Uncle Eddie had died in that gloomy apartment, that he didn’t have a wife or children and his neighbors in the cemetery were strangers.

  “I’m afraid of that,” I said. “Dying alone.”

  He laughed again. “How do you come up with this morbid shit? You shouldn’t worry about dying. You’re a young kid.”

  But I do worry about it, I thought. I’m not Evelyn. Boys don’t ring the doorbell for me and they don’t call on the phone. I might never have a husband like you or a son like Kieran, and it’s really confusing because I’m not even sure if I’d want to be like Evelyn. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble and disappoint Mom so much that she’d laugh when I was gone.

  “Come on,” Patrick said, standing up. “You need some sleep.”

  I stayed where I was, watching the ice melt. I didn’t want to sleep. I just wanted to sit there and think. Then he clamped his hand around my elbow and marched me to the guest bedroom. I wouldn’t have let anyone except Patrick do that. I was sure he meant well.

  Dad picked me up two days later. It was a humid morning and my legs stuck to the leather seats in his car.

  “How was your weekend?” I asked, and repeated myself when he didn’t answer. Some sports program was on the radio and he lowered the volume.

  “I worked,” he said, and turned it up again.

  Dad’s eyes were blue like mine and his hair used to be just as dark but now it was totally gray. He was tall and he didn’t talk much. Not to me, anyway. He was a distant father, in Mom’s opinion. But she said that he was also a good father because he kept a roof over our heads and food on the table. And he worked hard, all the time; he could have retired a decade ago but he didn’t because retirement would drive him crazy. He wasn’t interested in traveling or golf or anything except solving homicides, so he had to keep working. At least, that was what Mom told me. I never knew what Dad was thinking.

  He sped back to work after I got out of the car in front of our house. Mom was inside, slicing bagels at the kitchen counter. She turned around and rested her hands on her hips.

  “You look very thin, Ariadne. Didn’t Evelyn feed you this weekend?”

  I should have expected that; Mom always said critical things about Evelyn. Didn’t Evelyn feed you? Evelyn lets Kieran eat too much junk. Evelyn’s house is a pigsty. I wished she wouldn’t. Evelyn might not have been perfect, but she wasn’t so bad. Whenever she got cantankerous and snapped at me, I tried to remember the sweet things she did—like choosing me to be the maid of honor at her wedding and letting me tag along with her and her friends to the bowling alley, even though I was only eight at the time and nobody wanted me there.

  “Of course she did,” I said, but Mom looked skeptical. She toasted a bagel, slathered it with cream cheese, and watched while I ate it.

  I went upstairs afterward, where I closed the door and opened the window in my studio. It was a sunny day, and our next-door neighbors—the annoying ones who constantly blocked our driveway—were having a party. Balloons bounced from their mailbox at the curb and guests were double-parking their cars, carrying cases of beer to the front porch. I watched for a while, and then I sat at my easel, sketching a tree across the street. The leaves, the bark, the rays of sunlight peeking through the branches. It wasn’t the best thing to draw, not as interesting as faces, but my art teacher had said that I should practice drawing everything.

  An hour passed before I heard Mom’s voice. I saw her standing on our lawn, talking to the lady next door. Mom was calm at first, saying “I would appreciate it” and something about our driveway and when I looked at the driveway, I saw a Trans Am parked there with a dented Buick behind it. Our neighbor raised her voice and shouted something rude and
so did Mom.

  “Get those fucking cars off my property or I’ll call the cops,” Mom said. “My husband’s on the force—I can get someone over here in five minutes.”

  Then I heard our front door slam and pots banging around in the kitchen. None of this was unusual, because Mom was feisty. That was the word Dad always used to describe her.

  I wouldn’t have survived in my family otherwise, I heard her tell him once, but I didn’t know exactly what she meant. Mom had only mentioned her parents a few times in my presence, using a tone typically reserved for talking about something distasteful, like diarrhea or Evelyn’s eczema. Her parents were both gone now, dead for years, although her brothers were still around. One of them had called our house a while back and Mom had hung up on him. She’d told Dad that her brother was a drunk looking for a handout and she didn’t believe in handouts. She was proud that she’d done everything on her own. Even her degrees had been financed by loans that had taken twenty years to repay.

  “Ariadne,” Mom said, startling me. “Didn’t you hear the phone?”

  I hadn’t heard. Now I looked away from my drawing and toward Mom, who was standing in the doorway, smiling and speaking in a gentle voice. She could flip the switch so easily, just like Evelyn. One minute Mom was screaming the F-word at somebody who cut her off in traffic, and the next minute she sounded as demure as a librarian.

  I shook my head and she walked into the room, stopping behind me to examine my tree. “That’s extraordinary,” she said. “I’m glad you took your teacher’s advice about drawing everything. He knows what it takes to make it as an artist.”

  “Or as a teacher,” I said, and Mom rolled her eyes because she didn’t want me to be a teacher. She wanted me to have an exciting career, better than what she had, even though that idea made me nervous.

  But the thought of teaching didn’t make me nervous. I imagined teaching art as fun and quiet and far from judgmental eyes. If I tried to be a real artist, people might say I had no talent, and that would ruin everything. There would be no point in drawing anymore, and life would be pointless without drawing. I’d have no reason to memorize people’s faces on the subway.