Loose Screws

by Karen Templeton

  It’s Greg—of course—who not only clearly didn’t get my message, but is early.

  I check my watch.

  Okay, not that early.

  Well, it would seem we’re dressing down tonight, since he’s in Dockers and a maroon polo shirt, open at the collar, loafers with no socks. Some of us, however, are doing the straight-from-work crumpled look.

  “Ready?” he says, and I want to say, “Are you blind?” except the elevator doors open again, spitting out Mark, a pair of small, unruly children, and a Big Brown Bag full of God-knows-what.

  “God, thank you so much for doing this at the last minute like this,” Mark says, leaning way out to hand me the bag in order to keep one hand on the elevator door so it won’t close. He’s so intent on dumping kids and getting out of there he’s totally missed that there’s somebody else standing in the hallway. Let alone who the somebody else is. “Everything you could possibly need is in that bag,” he says, stepping back inside and punching the button five or six times. “We should be back to pick them up by eleven at—”

  We don’t hear that last bit because the elevator has swallowed him alive.

  Both children begin to sob. Huge, drooling, heartbreaking sobs, punctuated by off-sync “Daaaadddeeeees” every half second or so. So here I stand, a wailing two-year-old in my arms, whiny four-year-old at my knees, and a clueless ex-fiancé in front of me.

  I hike Hayley up higher on my hip, trying not to wince as her high-pitched screams drill straight through my brain. “Plans have changed,” I shout.

  “So we’ll take them with us.”

  This from a man who has obviously never spent any length of time in a restaurant with two children under the age of four. I almost laugh, but he really means it.

  “That’s very brave of you,” I shout over the din, “but I’ve also got a twelve-year-old camping out, a sick mother—” no need to go into details on that one “—a depressed friend who I haven’t even talked to yet, since I got home maybe ten minutes ago, and a grandmother who’s definitely not up to handling two young children.”

  Greg shrugs, then bends down to Corey, who clutches my skirt even more tightly. Have to give the guy credit, he doesn’t even flinch at the amount of snot glistening on the kid’s upper lip. “Hey, guy. My name’s Greg. What’s yours?”

  He looks up at me. “It’s okay, honey,” I say. “He’sa…friend.”

  “Corey.”

  “You like Chinese food, Corey?”

  “Y-yeah, I g-guess. Egg rolls.”

  “So,” Greg says, straightening up, “Who’s good for delivery around here?”

  “Greg, really, you don’t have to do this—”

  “Yeah. I do,” he says, then herds us all inside.

  Seventeen

  ’Twas a night to do Fellini proud.

  Once my little cousins realized that a) the histrionics were pointless since Mommy and Daddy weren’t around to hear it, b) Auntie Ginger had a dog, the noise level diminished considerably. For, oh, five minutes or so. Because then, see, they discovered that tearing up and down Auntie Ginger’s forty-foot-long hallway would make Geoff chase them. And what, pray tell, could be more fun than that?

  Of course, this made me a nervous wreck, because of my mother and all, and consequently I kept doing that trying-not-to-yell tense thing with my voice to get them to stop. Which worked about as well as ordering a fish to get out of the water. Eventually, my mother stuck her head out of her bedroom door to tell me I was making five times more noise than the kids, for God’s sake, at which time she caught a glimpse of Greg, turned an even worse shade of green than she had been, and ducked back inside her room, slamming shut the doors behind her.

  In fact, everyone in the apartment over the age of thirteen—except me—was giving Greg a wide berth, which was really beginning to annoy me because not only was he trying his damnedest to be nice, but he was about to spend a fortune buying all of us dinner. Which I pointed out to Terrie when she followed me down the hall to my room to change Hayley’s fragrant diaper. Everyone else would just have to cope for five minutes without my running interference.

  Man, this apartment hadn’t seen this much activity since 1982.

  We duck into my room, I plop the baby on my bed, rummaging around in the shopping bag for Huggies and wipes.

  “What the hell is Greg doing here?” Terrie says.

  “Watch your language and we had a date.” I smile for the baby, who giggles and tries her damnedest to knock out my teeth with her feet. Aren’t kids supposed to be potty trained by two?

  “You’re nuts, girl, you know that?”

  I decide to ignore that. I finish up with Hayley, then wrap up the stinky diaper, stuff it in a little plastic poopoo bag. The baby flips over onto her tummy, shimmies backward off my bed and takes off, yelling, “Doggy! Doggy!” as she pounds down the hall. “And you’re here why?” I say to Terrie, replacing everything in the shopping bag.

  She silently fiddles with one of the six rings on her right hand, looking stricken.

  I gasp, leaping to a conclusion with a single bound. “Ohmigod, Terrie—are you pregnant?”

  “What? Christ, Ginger! Of course not! Why would I be pregnant?”

  “Sorry. It just seems to be the crisis of choice these days.”

  “Well, it’s not mine.” She perches on the end of my bed. She’s wearing tight hip-hugger bell bottoms, one of those little tops like Nonna was looking at. On her, it works. And damn well. And she’s ditched the braids, her hair now framing her head and shoulders like a glistening chocolate cloud.

  Since we’ve quickly eliminated my first choice, I grab for the second one. “You still going out with Davis?”

  Her chin begins to wobble.

  I figure while I’m in here, I might as well change, so I yank open a dresser drawer, pull out a T-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts. Clean, neat, totally unsexy. “Okay,” I say, shrugging off my wrinkled dress and tossing it…somewhere, “let me guess. You’ve been seeing Davis every day, sleeping with him for a week—which is, like, the most incredible sex you’ve ever had—” off go panty hose and slip, on go shorts “—you think you’re in love with him but you’re so scared, you can’t sleep, can’t eat, and your work has gone straight to hell.”

  “Damn, you’re good,” I hear as I wriggle into the T-shirt.

  Well, gee, it’s not as if we haven’t had the conversation once or twice in the past fifteen years.

  “So what should I do?”

  Now what you’ve got to remember is, this is the woman who saved Shelby’s and my butts on a daily basis when we were kids, who aced all her classes in school, who handles other people’s money for a living—extremely well—and who I’ve watched singlehandedly talk down a gang of, shall we say, miscreants when we took the wrong bus one night when we were fifteen and ended up in a part of town we shouldn’t have. But when it comes to her love life, she’s a total and complete wuss.

  And under normal circumstances, I’d let her talk it out, weep on my shoulder, indulge her insecurities. But right now, I’ve got a sick, preggo mama in one room, three kids to take care of in another, and an ex-fiancé in the kitchen who’s simultaneously creeping me out and turning me on. And the doorbell just rang, which means the Chinese food is here and it’s nearly eight o’clock and there’s a container of shrimp in garlic sauce with my name on it out there. So we really need to fast forward this scenario a bit.

  “I can’t tell you what to do. Hell, I can’t figure out what to do with my own love life, such as it is, let alone figure out anyone else’s. But you know something? I really think you need to get over this fear you have about getting involved with someone because, well, golly gee, he might be flawed.”

  I can’t tell from her expression whether she’s stunned or pissed. I decide I don’t care.

  “I mean, honestly, Terrie, so you decide to go for broke with the guy? What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “Hey, that’s easy.” Her arms c
ross over her ribs. “I’ll get screwed again.”

  “Or maybe not. But think about this for a minute—could you live with yourself if you let this go just because there’s no guarantee? What if Davis is It, but you’re just too damn scared to take that chance?”

  She stares at me for a long moment, then gets up, goes to the bedroom door, only to turn when she gets there. My guess is that she hasn’t exactly derived a lot of comfort from my words.

  “I just got one question.”

  “Which is?”

  “Who are you and where did you put my girlfriend?”

  It’s ten o’clock. Terrie left pretty much right after our conversation. Both the little Bernsteins have conked out and been tucked into my bed, Nonna and Alyssa are watching TV in my grandmother’s room, and my mother is feeling well enough that she’s come out of her room several times to glare at Greg.

  Who is lying on the living room floor on his stomach, actually looking as if he’s having a good time playing tug-of-war with Geoff, whose eyes are bugged out with the effort to hang on to the knotted rope toy Greg brought him.

  Is this man kissing up or what?

  And I’m sitting on the old, lumpy couch, my feet tucked under me, my fist propping up my cheek, not sure what to think about any of this. Correction: not what to think about this New and Improved Greg Munson. Not that I hadn’t liked the old version just fine, but…

  But…

  But I don’t know.

  He rolls onto his back; the dog flops by his side, smacking him in the face with the chew toy. With a laugh, he looks up at me. “You look pretty tired.”

  “It’s been a day and a half.”

  He sits up, laughing again when the dog’s head becomes a blur in his zeal to break the toy’s neck. “Kill it, boy! That’s it! Kill it!”

  Geoff drops the toy, his tongue lolling out the side of his grinning mouth. Greg pats his lap and the dog trots over to flop onto his back to get his tummy rubbed.

  “Wish it were this easy to win over your mother,” he says.

  “I don’t think she’s much for having her belly rubbed.”

  Then again, what do I know?

  “She really hates me for what I did to you, doesn’t she?”

  “Greg, I hate to break this to you, but she didn’t much like you before.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, this might be a reach, but my guess is it has something to do with the fact that your family represents everything she’s spent the past thirty years working against.”

  He glances over at me, adjusts his glasses on his nose. He’s let his hair grow out a little, just enough to affect that endearing tousled look. “In other words, she’s never going to call me ‘son’?”

  “Greg, I—”

  “Sorry. That was presumptuous.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  After a moment Greg says, “Your life used to be like this a lot, didn’t it? When you were a kid?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Only now it doesn’t seem to bother me so much.

  Huh.

  Greg watches me for a couple of seconds, then gracefully gets to his feet. “I should go, let you get to sleep before you pass out.”

  I’m much too tired to point out that sleep is not in my immediate future, at least not until somebody comes and removes the two tiny humans from my bed. And I have to run Geoff out for his final whiz of the night. But I force myself upright, following Greg down the hall.

  I open the door, lean against the door frame. He seems reluctant to leave, which, if I’d been more awake, I might have found more flattering. Or frightening. I wonder if he’s going to kiss me.

  I wonder if I want him to.

  I smile, thinking how long it’s been since I’ve stood outside this apartment door, wondering if I was going to get as lucky as I ever got as a teenager, prolonging the inevitable moment when I had to finally go into the apartment. The number of times a neighbor’s sudden appearance would interrupt the course of lips zeroing in on mine.

  Now I’m the kind of woman who has sex on rooftops.

  Or who can at least list it on her résumé.

  Greg touches my jaw, almost tentatively. I mean, after this afternoon’s liplock, why the reticence? And the anticipation that he might kiss me again is not wholly unpleasant, it’s not that. I wasn’t making up that stuff about how good he was—is?—in bed.

  You know, for someone who didn’t let a boy even touch her breast until she was seventeen, I’ve turned into a major slut.

  “I think we need to get you out of here,” he says.

  I blink away the mental fog. “Huh?”

  “This can’t be good for you, living here again.”

  I laugh. “Tonight was exceptional, even for this family.”

  “But remember what we had, how you used to say how comfortable, how sane things felt when we were together?”

  There is no urgency in his voice, his touch. Just a mesmerizing, calming levelness. Then I remember how Greg used to coax me into bed, seducing me with a subtlety that was frankly refreshing after some of the guys I’d known.

  “Did I?”

  “Mmm-hmm. This craziness…this isn’t you.”

  I feel the muscles in my forehead pull tight, that something isn’t fitting together, but I can’t figure out what. “You didn’t have to offer to stay, you know. And I could have sworn you seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

  “Oh, I did.” He laughs, skimming his hands down my arms, just the way he used to, with a gentle pressure guaranteed to arouse. “Your little cousins are adorable. And I think maybe I began to win over your grandmother, at least, don’t you think?”

  I think he’s a bit optimistic about that, but I say, “Sure” because I don’t feel like going into this just now.

  “But I know you, honey. You can’t deal with that kind of chaos on a steady basis. You told me so yourself.”

  “No, but…” Why am I feeling defensive? And what am I feeling defensive about? “Hey, these people are my family. My friends. They don’t pick when they need me, you know?”

  “And I understand that. In fact, that’s one of the things I most admire about you, that you’re always ‘there’ for the people you’re close to.”

  Am I? Well, shoot, I guess I am at that.

  “But…?”

  “But admit it. You’re fried. Right?”

  “Okay, so I’m a little beat—”

  “And when I leave, you still have all that to face by yourself.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose—”

  “Then all I’m saying is, remember what it was like before, when we were together. What it could be again. Just the two of us, going to dinner, going for walks, reading the Times together in bed on Sunday mornings…among other things,” he adds with a soft smile. “I didn’t realize how much I missed that, that simple, uncomplicated existence that was ‘us,’ until I didn’t have it anymore.”

  No comments from the peanut gallery.

  But I have to say, at the moment, the whole idea of refuge from…everything is a very seductive one. I mean, it really does seem that the more I try to get my life squared away, the more it seems to go bonkers on me.

  I open my mouth to say something, although I have no idea what; Greg silences me with a finger to my lips. “You don’t have to say anything. Not yet. I won’t pressure you, I promise. Except…I certainly wouldn’t mind another date?”

  Would another date up the ante? Do I even want the ante upped? Do I not want the ante upped? Do I have a single reasoning brain cell left?

  “Okay,” I say. “Dinner? Seven o’clock, Friday night?”

  He presses the button for the elevator, then turns back to kiss me lightly on the lips. Not enough to get anything boiling, but enough to generate a sigh.

  “Dress up,” he says. Then, with a wink, he disappears inside the elevator.

  I slink back inside the apartment, leaning heavily on the wall to keep from falling over. However, as I have a bed to yet m
ake up for a certain young lady, I must keep going. I must, I must.

  There’s a futon in the unused bedroom; I struggle with the stupid thing for several minutes, yelping when it suddenly splays apart as if shot. Alyssa wanders in—my grandmother has nodded off—and asks if she can help. I say sure. Being a smart little cookie, she notices my befuddled state.

  “Are you mad because I’m staying over?”

  Startled, I look up from tucking in sheets. “No! I’m thrilled to have you, you know that.”

  Her mouth hints at a smile. “Really?”

  “Really. Hey—you wanna come into work with me tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got camp.”

  “Oh, right. What time you have to be there?”

  “Nine.”

  I nod, we continue making the bed. Except Alyssa gets bored and wanders over to poke inside the closet. She spots some of the canvases, pulls one out before I realize what she’s doing.

  “Wow. Who painted this?”

  I look over, wiping sweat off my forehead. It’s one I somehow missed during my own explorations, an early one of my father. He’s bent over his desk grading papers, the stark light from the desk lamp sharply delineating his strong, carved features. “I did. About a million years ago.” I walk over, hold it up to the light from the floor lamp, which isn’t wonderful. But good enough to see I was a lot better then than I give myself credit for. I’ve never been a realistic painter—more van Gogh than Rembrandt—but I caught something in that painting I hadn’t even realized at the time: my father’s essence. His calm strength, his gentleness, even, somehow, his sense of humor.

  And I think of the times he took me to Tom’s on 112th Street and Broadway, all by myself, to get one of their incredible chocolate shakes. Or how he’d read the same book over and over to me without ever complaining or trying to skip pages, how he always made time to listen to whatever I had to say, no matter how silly.

  How could I have ever thought myself neglected?

  “It’s my father.” I gently stand it up on the edge of the futon, back away from it. “He died when I was thirteen.”

  “You painted this when you were like, my age?”