Ace brought me a beer, which he opened for me. “I had to go to the fridge to get this. The ones in the coolers were all hot. Having a nice time?”
I smiled and nodded and watched him walk away.
But I wasn’t having a nice time, and looking around the place, I wondered if anyone there was. Because everyone looked a little miserable just below the surface, even Ace with his inexplicable game.
I’m pretty sure the doctors had mentioned something about avoiding alcohol and it turned out to be very good advice. Another one of the “fun” side effects of my injury was that I couldn’t hold liquor at all. Halfway through my first beer, I was starting to feel ever so slightly smashed. I decided to go look for a place to lie down. I made my way to a bedroom on the second floor, but it was occupied by other partygoers.
I wanted Ace to drive me home, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. It was probably just as well. The last I’d seen him, he’d been pretty wasted and not in the greatest vehicle-operating condition.
I made my way out to the front lawn. I really wanted to get home. Unfortunately, the party was about twenty miles from Dad’s house, so I couldn’t walk. As I stood there puzzling it out, I started to have that déjà vu feeling. Had I been to this house before? Had I been in this situation? Might my memory be coming back? It wasn’t any of those things, of course. The only reason it felt like déjà vu was because it was the most clichéd situation in the world—I was the star of a driver’s ed video on designated drivers.
I called Will on my cell phone to see if he would pick me up, but he wasn’t answering. I left him an incoherent, rambling, probably embarrassing message. I was too drunk to worry that my English teacher might be the recipient.
Reluctantly I called Dad at home, though I knew he wasn’t likely to be there. He’d gone out with Cheryl and Morty Byrnes, travel writers who used to be Dad’s and Mom’s friends, but now were just Dad’s. I had commented that it was strange, because Cheryl Byrnes had really been Mom’s friend in the first place. Dad’s response was that “In situations of infidelity, the cheated-on always gets all the mutual friends.”
Dad didn’t pick up the home phone so I dialed his cell. I cleared my throat and tried to make myself sound less drunk.
“Naomi,” Dad answered, worried.
“Daddy,” I said, and then I completely ruined my plan to sound less intoxicated by starting to cry.
“How much did you drink?”
“Just the one, I swear. I thought one would be okay.”
I managed to explain to Dad where I was and he said he’d come and get me.
While I was waiting for Dad to pick me up, Will called me back.
Will also offered to drive me home, but I told him it was too late, I’d already called Dad.
“Where was Ace in all of this?” Will asked icily.
“The game,” I answered.
“What game?”
“The rules to the game were unclear.”
“Chief?”
“Oh, Will,” I said. “Silly, silly Will. I have to wait for my daddy now.”
“Honestly, Naomi. You aren’t supposed to drink after a head trau—”
I hung up on him. The phone rang again, but I ignored it. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I lay down on the sidewalk and concentrated on not throwing up. I set my purse on top of my stomach, like a flag so that Dad could locate me, or a grave marker, if he didn’t.
I must have passed out because the next thing I knew Dad was helping me into the backseat of his car.
While I waited for him to get back in, I noticed that the car smelled like flowers. I was wondering what the scent was when I became aware that a red rose was floating just below the passenger-seat headrest. I wondered if I was having a vision. After some woozy contemplation, I figured out that the rose was attached to a dark-haired woman’s bun.
“You’re not Cheryl and Morty,” I said, pointing my finger at her.
The woman shook her head. “No. I am not Cheryl-Ann Morty.” She had a Spanish accent of some kind, and she sounded amused. “Who is this Cheryl-Ann Morty?”
“Do I know you?” I asked her, but by then my dad was in the car. “Naomi, this is my friend, Rosa Rivera,” he said.
“You were supposed to be out with Cheryl and Morty,” I said, wagging my finger at him. “Why aren’t you out with Cheryl and Morty?”
“Yeah, and you’re not supposed to drink until you’re twenty-one,” Dad replied. “And especially not in your condition.”
“One beer! Barely one. Oh, that’s…” But I didn’t complete the thought, because I passed out in Dad’s car.
I don’t remember when we dropped Rosa Rivera off or how I got into the house. I do remember throwing up on Dad’s beige floors.
“I’m never drinking again,” I said to Dad as he held my hair back while I threw up in the bathroom.
“Well, I’d say that’s probably wise. At least for the time being.”
“Who was that woman?”
“Like I said, her name is Rosa Rivera. She’s a tango dancer.”
I didn’t find any of that particularly illuminating, but I was too screwed up to make him elaborate.
“She smelled like roses,” I said about ten minutes later when we were back in the kitchen, where Dad was making me take two aspirins. “I don’t have any friends who smell like roses. I don’t have any friends at all.”
“That’s not true, kid.”
The home phone rang. Dad answered it. Still standing, I set my pounding head on the kitchen counter. The porcelain tiles felt refreshing.
“That was Ace. He was really worried about you. He said you disappeared,” Dad reported.
“True,” I said. “True, true.”
“I read him the riot act anyway.”
“Daddy, I need to go to bed now.”
My cell phone rang. It was Will. I handed it to Dad. “Tell him I’m okay, wouldja?”
“Hello, Will…Yes, Naomi’s fine. Except for being grounded for the next week, she’s fine.”
“I’m punished?” I asked after he’d hung up.
“Well, mainly you’re punishing yourself, but I thought I ought to add a little something. So you’ve got to stay in for the next week. Seems parental, don’t you think?”
My head was pounding. “Could you start by sending me to my room?”
“Good idea, kid. Let’s go.”
Around three a.m., there were three rapid taps on my window. It was Ace. He asked me if it was okay if he came in; I flipped on the light, wincing at the brightness, and got out of bed to unlock the window.
This time when he vaulted himself over my shelf, he knocked my dictionary off. It hit the floor with a booming thwack. “Oops,” he said.
I hoped the noise hadn’t woken Dad.
“Where’d you go?” he asked. “I was worried.”
“Where’d you go?” I asked.
“We were just out back in the pool. All you had to do was look.”
“You abandoned me.” I had a headache and I was in no mood to be questioned by Ace. “I was totally alone. Did I seem like I was having a good time to you?”
“But, Naomi!” Ace protested. “You said that you were.”
I had said that. It was true. I had observed Ace to be a very literal person, so arguing with him was probably pointless. Instead, I told him that I didn’t feel well, which was also true.
“Go back to bed,” Ace whispered. “I don’t want to disturb you.”
I did, and I thought Ace might leave, but instead he sat in my desk chair. “Can we, maybe talk? Just for a little bit?” he asked.
I wasn’t really up for more conversation with Ace, but I guess I felt sorry for the guy. I turned onto my side and asked him what he wanted to talk about.
“Do you remember that time we were at my cousin Jim Tuttle’s house in Scarsdale?”
“No,” I replied. I stifled a yawn and prepared myself for another one of Ace’s fascinating drinking stories.
“We were coming back from sectionals. You still had on your tennis whites. Your hair was in a ponytail. I love your hair that way. You reached up and took my face in your hands and you kissed me. I was totally blown away. We weren’t going out then. I didn’t even know you liked me. You were the first brainy girl who’d ever shown any interest.”
“Brainy girl?”
“One who reads and stuff, not just for school. I liked that about you. We never had classes together or anything. But I’d seen you around, and I always thought a smarty like you’d go for a guy like Landsman.” Ace paused to look at me.
“He’s just my friend.”
“When you kissed me that first time, you were still wearing your tennis wristbands. I took them off of you and set them on Jim’s couch. We forgot all about them. That’s why I got you another pair. I, uh, realized my gift must have looked pretty lame to you if you didn’t know the context.”
I nodded. Something about his story had put a lump in my throat. It might have been the way he told it more than the story itself, or I might have been weakened by my emerging hangover. In any case, I was somehow granted a solitary moment of X-ray vision and what I saw was this: Ace was probably as frustrated with me as I was with him, and the only thing stopping him from breaking up with me was that he was, when it came down to it, pretty decent.
He knelt down beside my bed. His breath was bittersweet with alcohol. For a second, I worried I might throw up again, but the feeling subsided.
I took his face in my hands, the way he had described, and I kissed him.
Ace started stroking my hair (which was pleasant, but not romantic—it made me feel like a well-behaved lapdog), and he whispered so low I could barely hear him. “I don’t want to pressure you. I don’t want to be, you know, that guy who pressures you. Do you think we might have sex again someday?”
Without even thinking about it, I sat up in bed and pushed his hand away. “No.”
He replied, “I didn’t mean tonight necessarily.”
I hadn’t meant just tonight either, but I didn’t say that. I told him that I’d gone off the pill, which I had.
Ace smiled all dopey and drunk. “Maybe we could do it at homecoming?”
“Homecoming?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s in three weeks. We’re still going, right?” Ace explained that we had planned to before my accident.
I said yes. I mean, why not? I didn’t remember ever having been to a homecoming dance.
Ace fell asleep on my bedroom floor. I couldn’t, so I just lay in bed staring at him. He reminded me of a six-foot-four baby—he had long downy eyelashes and was drooling. It was more than just physically, though. Sleeping on my floor, he seemed somehow undefined and vulnerable. I even felt a certain tenderness for him. I wondered if that was the same as love.
When I awoke the next morning, Ace was gone. Actually, I should say afternoon. Dad had let me sleep in until around two before knocking on my door. “I’m making eggs.”
I informed him that I couldn’t eat anything, but Dad insisted it would make me feel better.
“Last night, I don’t know if you remember, my little lush, but I was kind of out with someone…” Dad blurted out in the middle of pouring me orange juice.
“The woman with the flower in her hair?” I asked.
Dad nodded. “It was a date.”
“Yeah. I figured that out on my own,” I said.
“Smart girl.” Dad started fussing with the eggs. They had started out as a goat cheese omelet but had ended up scrambled.
“If you play with them too much, they won’t turn out,” I pointed out to him.
“It’s good advice. I’m the one who always says that.” Dad beat the half-cooked eggs furiously. “Maybe I ought to start over?”
“Taste the same either way,” I said. “This woman…is she someone Cheryl and Morty set you up with?”
“No,” Dad said.
“Were you even out with Cheryl and Morty last night?”
“Not exactly.”
I raised my eyebrow at him. “Jesus, Dad, were you lying to me?”
I thought about Dad saying he was getting coffee and his strange, secret phone calls. In other words, it wasn’t his first date with the flower woman. He obviously had been seeing her since before my accident. “You’ve been hiding this from me since I got out of the hospital, haven’t you? Why would you do that?”
“It looks bad. I know how it looks, but in my defense, I wanted to break things to you slowly. You had so much to take in with your mom, the divorce, having a sister and everything. I didn’t want to add to your load.”
“But you lied to me! What makes you think I’d even care if you had a girlfriend?”
“She’s not just my girlfriend.”
“What do you mean?”
For the longest time, Dad wouldn’t answer me or look at me. The only sound in the kitchen was the hissing eggs, which were getting good and burned. I hadn’t had much of an appetite for them to begin with.
“I’m getting married, kid,” Dad said. He looked up at me guiltily.
Dad was getting married.
“She’s a dancer. How ’bout that?”
Aside from the flower, I hadn’t gotten much of a look at her in the car. In my head, I pictured the exotic kind. You know, a stripper, probably my age, with DDD breast implants and a fake tan, so I insisted he clarify. “What kind of dancer?”
When he said tango, I was slightly relieved. “She’s traveled the world. She’s won just about every award a professional tango dancer can win.” He sounded the way he did when I’d brought home a particularly good report card. Proud, I guess. “Now she mainly teaches here and in the city.”
He told me they’d met a year ago. He’d had to take dance lessons for an article he had been writing for a men’s magazine. When everyone partnered up, he’d been the odd man out. “She had to take pity on your old man,” he said.
“Do I like her?” I asked.
Dad cleared his throat. “It’s been difficult for you. With Mom. And everything.”
That meant I didn’t like her.
“But maybe your injury could be an inadvertently fortuitous event?” Dad said. “A good thing. A new start.”
A new start? That kind of talk didn’t sound like my dad at all. There was nothing good about what had happened to me. Except maybe meeting James, and that had turned out to be a pleasant but anomalous event that had momentarily distracted me from how much everything else sucked.
“There’s nothing good about this,” I yelled. I grabbed Dad’s keys off the kitchen island and ran out the door and straight into his car, which was parked in the driveway. I didn’t necessarily plan to try driving again; I just wanted to be alone. I couldn’t be in the same physical space with Dad.
Sitting in the driveway, I really wished I could go somewhere. Anywhere.
Dad came out about a minute later. He must have tended to the incinerated eggs first. I pressed the button that locked all the doors, so he couldn’t get in the car.
“Naomi.” His voice was muted through the window. “Please let me in.”
I put my brain-damaged head on the steering wheel. It made the horn beep, but I didn’t mind. I just let it blare. The horn was screaming for me and saying all the curse words that were running through my head. It was so satisfying that I sat like that for a few minutes. I would have let it go on even longer except my head started to throb from the racket.
“Naomi,” Dad said after the noise had stopped.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I yelled.
“This has gone badly. It was a stupid way for me to tell you about my getting married,” Dad’s voice was still tinny and distant through the glass. “And that crap I said about your head injury being a good thing. Of course I don’t think that.”
“Just go away!”
“Please let me in, kid. I feel like an asshole standing out here like this. At least roll down the window a little.”
&nbs
p; Dad was trying. He always tried.
Every year for my birthday, my dad gave me a single book. He always put a lot of thought into the selection. It was a big deal to him, because books in general are a very big deal to him. When Dad says he’s going to church, he actually means that he’s going to a library or a bookstore. For my third birthday, he gave me Harold and the Purple Crayon; for my tenth, Holes; for my twelfth, the last birthday I could remember, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He would inscribe the books, too. The messages were long and detailed, sometimes sentimental and usually funny. This was how he talked to me. This was how he told me the important things.
I didn’t unlock the door, but I pressed the button that lowered the window.
“What book did you get me for my sixteenth birthday?” I asked.
“Why are you thinking about that?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“Possession by A. S. Byatt.”
I couldn’t remember having read it, which of course didn’t mean that I hadn’t. I asked him why he had chosen that one.
“It’s about a lot of things, but mainly it’s a love story. I was worried that you had gotten a bit, well, cynical with everything that had happened between your mother and me. I wanted to remind you about romance. It was probably a stupid notion. A sixteen-year-old who’s not an expert on romance ought to be brought to a lab and dissected.” Dad laughed. “I was considering Jane Eyre, but I know how you feel about orphan stories.”
“What’s her name again?” I asked finally. Something to do with flowers, or had she just smelled like them?
“Rosa Rivera,” he said.
“Do I call her Rosa?” I asked.
“No, you call her Rosa Rivera. Everyone does.”
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac Page 8