Girlfriend Material

by Melissa Kantor

  “Okay,” I said, even though I’d been too distracted by his touching me to listen to what he was saying. I lifted the club and felt a weird tension in my lower back, like I was moving a muscle in a way it was never meant to move. Then I looked up at the horizon and swung with all my might.

  “That was good, that was good,” said Jenna enthusiastically.

  I looked around to see how far I’d hit the ball. It was nowhere in sight. I felt a surge of warmth and excitement. Maybe I was some kind of golf natural—could I have gotten a hole in one on my first try?

  Lawrence nodded his approval. “Good swing,” he said. “Good form.” I got the sense he took the game of golf pretty seriously; when Jenna had suggested that I try one of his clubs since they were the lightest set, he responded as if she’d offered me a pair of his underwear—more specifically the pair he was currently wearing.

  Adam knelt down and picked my ball up from the tee it had never left. “Practice makes perfect,” he said, handing it to me.

  I looked at him, truly amazed. “You mean I didn’t even hit it? All that and I didn’t even hit the ball?!”

  “It’s a really hard game,” said Jenna. “I’ve been playing for years and I’m always making lame shots.”

  “That’s true,” said Adam.

  “You have no idea,” said Lawrence.

  “It’s practically taking your life in your hands to play with Jenna,” said Adam.

  “Sometimes they actually clear the course when she’s coming through.”

  “Hey,” said Jenna, “I believe the point has been made.”

  Lawrence bent down and put his ball on the tee, then chose a club from his bag and got ready to make his shot. I looked down at the ball in my hand.

  “I didn’t even hit the ball,” I said.

  Jenna put her hand on mine and squeezed it gently. “Don’t overthink it,” she said. “You’ll just choke on the next hole.”

  “How many holes are there again?”

  “Eighteen,” said Jenna. When she saw the look on my face, she added, “But you’ll be amazed at how fast it goes.”

  “So,” I said, “how do you guys all know each other?” Jenna and I were looking for a ball I’d actually managed to hit, unfortunately in the exact opposite direction of where it was supposed to go. As we searched for it in the high grass that edged the green near the fifth hole, I silenced my fear of Lyme disease by focusing on the brilliant opening for a romantic interlude the universe had had the good grace to offer me. Hey, Adam, when the game’s over, would you mind if I asked you to check my body for ticks?

  “You mean besides all of us being in school together?” Jenna surveyed the grass around her as I did the same. “Well, Sarah and I have been friends for like, ever, so that’s how I know her. And my boyfriend and Adam are really good friends, so I guess I started hanging out with Adam when I started going out with Biff.”

  Biff? She knew an actual person with the name Biff? I managed to hide my laugh with a cough. “And we started hanging out with Lawrence last summer when he and Sarah were going out.”

  “Sarah and Lawrence went out?” Now I really was choking. Though, was it so surprising that the most gorgeous guy I’d ever seen outside of a magazine would have gone out with Sarah?

  I just hoped his dumping of her had been brutal.

  “Yeah,” said Jenna, shaking her head (whether at what she was thinking or the ball she was [not] finding, I didn’t know). “He was really psyched when they got together. But she just wasn’t into it. They still fool around sometimes, but I don’t think she’ll ever be his girlfriend again.”

  “But I thought …” I stopped.

  “What?” Jenna looked at me.

  Was it weird that I’d been listening to their conversation that first day? I mean, they had been talking right in front of me. “I thought Lawrence got with a lot of girls. He seemed like—”

  “A slut?” offered Jenna.

  Slut is a word I always associate with girls. “Can a guy be a slut?” I asked.

  “They can, and Lawrence is,” said Jenna, and we both laughed. “But it’s kind of tragic. I think he’s still into Sarah.” Suddenly she let out a scream of triumph. “Found it!”

  “Oh, you totally rock!” I said. As we high-fived, I felt psyched about way more than the ball we’d just found. She’d told me about her, Sarah’s, and Lawrence’s love lives.

  But she hadn’t said a word about Adam’s.

  Later, as the four of us were sitting by the pool drinking lemonade, I started to get a little nervous about Sarah. I had no idea what time she had to work until. What if she stopped by for a late-afternoon swim and found me hanging out with her friends? It wasn’t like I thought she’d stand there, hands on her hips, going, Okay guys, it’s 89

  Kate or me. Choose. Still, wouldn’t her arrival make things a little … chilly for me? Nobody had said anything for a few minutes when Lawrence asked, “So what’s the plan?”

  “I’m thinking your house, I’m thinking movie, I’m thinking clam strips, and I’m thinking seven thirty,” said Adam.

  “Done, done, done, and done,” said Lawrence. “But we pick the movie. I’m not watching another crap chick flick.”

  “Oh, please,” said Jenna. “You’ll watch one and you’ll like it.”

  “Adam, I need you to back me up on this.”

  “You’re man enough to handle a chick flick,” said Adam, his eyes closed against the afternoon sun. I didn’t want to be caught looking at him if he opened his eyes, so I forced myself to refill my lemonade from the pitcher.

  “I want to watch an old movie,” said Jenna. “Hitchcock or something.”

  “Oh, you should rent Notorious,” I said. It was practically the first sentence I’d uttered all day that I hadn’t played over in my head first. Talking without planning felt surprisingly good.

  “Excellent call,” said Adam. “We’re watching that.” Right at that second I remembered the list Laura and I had come up with—things we liked that girls who had boyfriends didn’t. Playing tennis. Reading and talking about books. Watching old movies.

  I couldn’t help noticing how many of those things Adam and I had in common.

  “It’s almost five,” said Lawrence to Adam. “We’ve got that court.” He stood up, and so did Adam.

  “I should get going too,” said Jenna, checking the time on her cell phone. “The tide is high.” She sang a few bars of the Blondie song, which was apparently meant as an explanation of her destination; but what exactly the song was supposed to explain remained opaque to me.

  “What happens when the tide is high?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m doing this internship at the Audubon center,” said Jenna. “We’re charting the salinity of tide pools.”

  “I can never understand how you’re so interested in something that doesn’t involve people,” said Adam.

  Even though I thought it was cool that Jenna had such an unusual-sounding internship, I had to agree with Adam. If I had a summer job studying something, I’d want it to be people.

  “I’m interested in people too,” said Jenna. “For example, I’m going to call Biff before I go.”

  “Aah,” said Lawrence, “monogamy. It’s so beautiful.” His tone indicated he found it anything but, and I wondered if Jenna was wrong about his having a thing for Sarah.

  Jenna reached over and hit him on the side of the head. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” She looked around to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, then took a step away from the table.

  “So we’ll see you guys around seven thirty?” she said.

  For the second time that day it took me a minute to realize she was talking to me.

  “Ah, yeah,” I said. “I’ll, um, tell Sarah.”

  Now there was a conversation I was looking forward to. Hey, Sarah, Jenna said we’re supposed to be at Lawrence’s at seven thirty. And by “we’re,” I mean you and me, honey.

  “Great.”

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nbsp; “See you tonight,” said Lawrence. He put down his drink and stood up.

  “See you tonight,” said Adam, grabbing the lemon wedge from his glass and standing up too.

  “Yeah,” I said. “See you tonight.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Adam.

  It wasn’t a full-body tick check, but it was a start.

  MAYBE MY DAD HAD BEEN WRONG about my having to wait for college to have a guy like me. Maybe there were guys who I could be into and who could be into me, only they all lived in a different zip code. It was kind of an exciting prospect, and the whole time I was riding my (well, Tina’s) bike home from Larkspur, I kept thinking about seeing Adam at Lawrence’s house later.

  As I stepped into the cool of the shadowy living room, I saw Sarah lying on the sofa reading The New Yorker.

  She looked up as the screen door slammed shut. “Hey,” she said, lazily turning the page.

  “Hey,” I said. I’d already decided to make my announcement quickly—just rip off that Band-Aid. “Um, I ran into Jenna and those guys today,” I said, hoping my rabid joy in their company didn’t show.

  “Yeah, Jenna told me,” she said, not looking up from her magazine. “I just talked to her. She said you played golf with them.”

  “I did,” I said. I almost added It was fun, but a second before I did, I wisely reminded myself that Sarah was not my parent. “They, ah, said …” I couldn’t bring myself to utter the word we, as in, we are invited, in case Sarah looked me straight in the face and said, Who’s “we,” exactly? so I just finished, “ … they’re meeting tonight at Lawrence’s at seven thirty.”

  “Yeah, she told me,” said Sarah.

  Was I going to have to ask her permission to go? Was I going to have to ask her for a ride? Was I going to have to get a ride from someone else? It occurred to me that I not only didn’t know where Lawrence lived, I didn’t have any of their phone numbers, so it wasn’t like I could call and ask.

  Why was Sarah making this so difficult? “So I …” I wanted to scream. I wanted to yank her perfect blond hair out of her head by the roots. I wanted to grab the magazine from her hands and force her to eat it, column by column.

  Finally Sarah looked up at me. “My uncle’s coming up from New York, so my parents are cooking this big dinner. I already told them about it.”

  Of course. Uncle Jamie! How could I have forgotten about Uncle Jamie? Whom I suddenly wanted to murder. For a split second I had the crazy idea that I’d go to Lawrence’s house anyway. After all, my uncle wasn’t coming up from New York. But just as I was imagining showing up at Lawrence’s (wherever that was) solo, having biked over, Tina came out of the kitchen.

  “Hey, Katie, did you have a good day?” she asked. She was holding her hands in front of her at an odd angle, but before I could ask why or answer her question, she said, “I’m dripping scallop. Are you two ladies ready to lend your youthful energies to this fabulous family feast?”

  Sarah groaned, and in the midst of my despair, I actually felt a tiny sliver of solidarity with her in her irritation.

  “Sure, Mom,” she said. “We’re ready.”

  I was halfway to the kitchen when I realized that, ironically, Sarah had just used a word I’d been unable to utter only a few minutes earlier.

  We.

  Maybe it was because Sarah kept referring to him as Uncle Jamie, but I’d gotten some idea that Jamie was Tina’s older brother and that he was actually elderly or at least oldish. When the car pulled into the driveway, I expected Henry to walk in the door with a gray-haired man in a suit.

  But Jamie turned out to be Tina’s younger brother, and he was wearing a pair of ripped, faded jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of hip-looking sneakers. I’m not into older guys, but if I were, I would definitely have thought Jamie, with his shoulder-length brown hair and light blue eyes, was cute. He came and gave everyone, me included, a huge hug, and when he got to my mom, he made a big deal out of lifting her slightly off her feet and swinging her around.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. “It’s so great to see you again.” He was still hugging her, which bugged me. I mean, the woman did have a husband who just happened to be my father.

  “You too, Jamie,” said my mom, and I was glad she extricated herself from his hug as she said it. “It’s just great seeing you.”

  Tina hadn’t been exaggerating—dinner really was a feast. In addition to ceviche, Henry and Tina had prepared salad and grilled vegetables and cooked up a ginormous pot of linguine with clam sauce. They’d even made their own bread. I was so stuffed by the time Tina put a second serving of pasta on my plate, I felt like the tick from the poster.

  I’d anticipated spending the entire night being pissed about not getting to hang out with Adam, but for a while it was actually fun being with Sarah’s family. It was even okay being with Sarah. Maybe it was because we were the only people under thirty sitting at the table, but at one point when her mom referred to “rap music,” Sarah said, “Mom, it’s rap, not rap music. You’re, like, the poster child for lame.” She rolled her eyes and made a face in my direction that indicated I’d understand what she meant, and we both laughed.

  By the time Henry uncorked a third bottle of wine, I couldn’t help noticing that my mom and Jamie seemed happy to see each other. Really happy. My mom kept calling Jamie “Coop,” which apparently had been his nickname in high school, which is where he was when she had first gone home with Tina for a vacation and met him.

  “I had such a crush on you,” said Jamie, and it took me a minute to realize he was talking about my mother. “You walked in the door with that green suitcase—”

  “Oh God,” she said, “I’d completely forgotten about that suitcase.”

  Jamie reached across the table and poured her some more wine. We were sitting out on the deck, and Tina had put several candles in glass holders on the table. I wished the setting didn’t feel quite so … romantic. “Okay,” said Jamie, “how much does it prove my eternal devotion that I remember the suitcase?”

  “Utterly,” said my mom, laughing. “Utterly.”

  “And then you ran off to Utah. To Utah, for Christ’s sake.” He shook his head as if it was beyond his ability to fathom the absurdity of my home state.

  My mom’s cheeks were flushed. She doesn’t normally drink very much, but she took a sip of the new glass Jamie had poured her. “I never stopped missing the East Coast,” she said. She looked out over the water. “My God, how did I end up there? I’m a New Yorker.”

  This was news to me. In all of my sixteen years of life, my mom had never so much as once uttered a word to indicate she felt at home anywhere but where she lived: i.e., Utah.

  “Do you ever think about coming back East?” asked Jamie.

  Suddenly there was something truly insidious about this conversation. I mean, who was Jamie to ask my mom if she thought about moving East? How about asking her if she and her husband ever thought about moving East?

  I waited for Tina or Henry to say something to him. Maybe, Okay, Jamie, that’s enough. I think you’ve had a little too much to drink, and it’s fueling a trip down memory lane that nobody but you wants to take.

  But neither of them said anything. They were just watching my mom and Jamie smile at each other as if they didn’t know my mother was a happily married woman.

  “I’m stuffed,” I said abruptly.

  You would have thought the sound of her daughter’s voice might have made my mom a little embarrassed to be flirting like a teenager, but she didn’t even look my way.

  “I think I’ll turn in, actually,” I said a bit more loudly than I’d announced the state of my stomach. “Sure, honey,” said my mom, finally looking at me. I tried to make my eyes say, You’re freaking me out, but my mom was apparently unable to read eye-speak.

  “Good night, sweetheart,” said my mom.

  “Good night,” said everyone else.

  The last thing I wanted to do was leave my mom alone (i.e.
, unsupervised by me) with Jamie, but now that I’d announced to the table my intention of going to bed, it would have seemed a little weird to suddenly go, Actually, I’m staying right here. The real problem was that what I wanted was not to go to bed myself but for my mother to go to bed.

  Alone.

  Since I wasn’t in the least bit tired, I walked away from Tina and Henry’s and just sat in the dark on the deck of the guesthouse. Then I called my dad.

  “Hello?” he said. I could hear people talking in the background; it sounded like he might be at a party or a restaurant.

  I cut right to the chase. “Dad, you have to make up with Mom. She’s, like, flirting with Tina’s brother.”

  I hardly expected my dad to hang up immediately in his mad dash to get to the airport, but I definitely didn’t expect him to just laugh and go, “Oh, Katie,” like I was eight and had just told him I wanted a pony for my birthday.

  “Don’t ‘Oh, Katie’ me,” I said. “Did you hear me? She’s flirting. With another man.”

  “Well, a little attention from the opposite sex never killed anyone,” said my dad. Then he said, “So, how’re the lessons going? That girl’s father still a problem?”

  It wasn’t that I wanted to be my parents’ marriage counselor or anything, but did my dad really not care at all that his wife was almost three thousand miles away from him, listening to some guy recite an ode to her college suitcase?

  “Dad, I hate to sound like a broken record, but Mom’s—”

  “Honey, I told you to drop it, and I was serious, okay?” His voice was sharp.

  “Sorry,” I said. I thought he’d say he was sorry too, but he didn’t. Then he asked me how everything was going, and I just said, “Okay.” I really didn’t feel like talking to him anymore, so I told him I had to go, and we said good-bye.