A shrug: “Okay.”
“Okay, then.” Mabel turned toward me and held out a hand. “It was real pleasure having you over for dinner, young man. I hope you’ll visit us again. Often as you’d like.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, shaking her hand-the first time I’d ever done so with an adult. “You’re a real good cook.”
“Aren’t you sweet.” Then she bent down and kissed the top of my head. A car horn sounded out front and Mabel waved to us on her way out the door.
“God!” said Beth with a sudden rush of air. “I swear she must think I’m retarded or something, the way she treats me.”
“Where does she work?”
“Huh? Oh-at the nursing home. She’s one of the night nurses. She also cooks breakfast sometimes.”
I remembered the home from visiting my grandfather there when I was seven, how lonely, exhausted, and used up everyone seemed to be. No wonder Mabel was so sad.
I wasn’t sure how to ask this next question, so I just let fly: “Where’s your uncle?”
“I’ve got a couple of them, why?”
“I mean…your aunt’s husband?”
A quick shake of her head. “Mabel isn’t married, she never was. I don’t think men interest her much.”
“Whatta you mean?”
She mussed my hair. “It’s a little hard to explain, sweetie pie. She has friends who stay over sometimes. I don’t think she gets lonely. She’s got me to talk to and all of the Its for company. Speaking of the Its, want to help me clean up a little? I do this every night after she leaves for work.”
“Is it safe? Mabel seemed awful worried about-”
“Mabel worries about everything. We’ve had some trouble in this neighborhood-some break-ins, a couple of shootings a few blocks over, you know-so she thinks every time she leaves me alone that all these monsters are going to knock down the door and attack me. She even has a gun in one of her dresser drawers-like she’s Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harriet or something. There’s not going to be any trouble. C’mon, give me a hand.”
We spent the next hour picking up-and scraping out-all the poop from the carpeting, then Beth let the dogs out in the backyard by twos and threes so they could relieve themselves as nature intended. (During all the years I knew Beth and spent time over there, that house was always filled with dogs; if one died or got sick and had to be put to sleep, it was quickly replaced by another. Beth and I eventually began to refer to her house as “Doggyship Down.”)
I sprayed the pee stains with this foamy stuff Beth took out of the bathroom; she told me to let it set until it dried, then we sprinkled baking soda all around and Beth ran the vacuum cleaner.
Once finished, the carpeting looked a little better and the stench wasn’t as strong as it had been.
“That’s only because you’re getting used to the smell,” Beth said. “Live with it long enough, and it doesn’t seem that bad.”
I wondered how she kept the smell off her clothes; not once during her visits to me did I ever smell the dogs on her, so I asked her how she managed to do that.
“Every week I take five outfits from my closet, wash them at the coin laundry or have them drycleaned, then hang ’em up in my locker at school. I get there about a half-hour before school starts and change in the girls’ restroom. In the mornings, after my shower, I can usually get out of here before the smell sinks into me.” Another shrug. “No biggie, really. I like to look and smell clean when I’m at school or going to the movies or something. If I go out, I do it after school on Friday so I don’t have to come back here first. Don’t worry yourself, the system’s worked fine for a while now.”
I nodded as if I were mature enough to understand. She was a wonderful mystery to me.
“Why do you have so many dogs, anyway?”
“Because nobody else wants them. A couple we adopted from the Humane Society, but most of them are strays Mabel or I have found. Just can’t turn away a animal in need, I guess. It doesn’t seem right that nobody wants to keep them, care for them, have ’em there in the middle of the night to snuggle with when you wake up and feel lonely… .”
I thought she was going to say something else but she didn’t. We had a couple of brownies, talked a little more about nothing terribly important, and then it was time for me to go.
We were a few blocks from my house when Beth pulled the U-boat over to the curb and put it in park. “Listen, I want to tell you something, okay? Something that’s just between us, right?” She was a long way past serious; she seemed almost scared. “Right?”
I nodded my head.
“This is gonna sound weird, okay, but…I never had any friends when I was your age, I never got to do any of those things that kids your age get to do, right? I always felt mad about that, about missing out on things. Hell, I’m not even sure if I know what kids your age like doing ’cause I never did it.”
“Could you please not…not say that?”
“Say what?”
“‘Kids your age.’ ”
She shook her head and smiled. “But you are still a kid; you’re not even ten yet.”
“I know, but…” I looked down at my hands, which I couldn’t feel.
“Okay, I guess you deserve that. If I live to be twice the age I am now I doubt that I’m ever gonna know what it feels like to get shot, so you ought to be entitled to age points for that. Deal-I don’t call or refer to you as ‘kid’ anymore.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I wanna know what it is you like to do, I guess. Will you show me that? Will you teach me how to have fun like a person of your age has fun?”
“You might think it’s stupid.”
She put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. “Bet’cha I don’t.”
And she didn’t.
Over the next year and a half I taught her (in no particular order): how to build a fort from boxes, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas; how to climb a tree; the fine art of thumb wrestling; how to make a kite from scratch; how to tell if Godzilla was going to be a good monster or bad monster before he even made his first appearance in the movie (not as easy as it sounds); the proper way to build and paint the Aurora monster models; why Steppenwolf kicked Three Dog Night’s ass; how Mr. Terrific was just as cool as Captain Nice but The Green Hornet was by far the coolest of them all; why the Bazooka Joe comics sucked monkeys but the bubble gum could be rechewed at least three times before it lost its flavor; and, probably the most valuable tidbit of wisdom I tossed her way, how, if you sat or stood in the proper position and had the right muscle control, you could make a fart last up to thirty seconds and not dump in your pants (eating popcorn at least twenty minutes before attempting this difficult stratagem is immensely beneficial to a successful outcome).
Whenever we were together, which was often, Beth had a childhood, and I had the woman against whom all others would be measured and come up lacking.
But for that night, it was her kiss lingering on my cheek as I walked toward my front door and my father’s putting his hand on my shoulder for the first time in an eternity (“How you holding up there, son? Ever tell you about when I got shot during the war?”) that made me feel that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t such a worthless little kid, after all.
I spent the next seven years becoming an honorary member of Beth’s and Mabel’s family. By the time Beth turned twenty-four she had grown into her shopworn beauty and grace with all the poise I’d come to expect from her. In the years since the hospital we had shared every secret, every dream, every sadness, pettiness, fear, hope, want, triumph, and failure of both childhood and adolescence; I knew her better than anyone, and she, in turn knew more about me than any person ever had or ever would. There had been so much between us, so many shared moments and experiences: our first trip (the first of many) to King’s Island where she took me on my very first roller coaster ride, then didn’t laugh her head off or make fun of me when I threw up as
soon as we climbed out of the car; a terrible afternoon a few weeks after I’d gotten my driver’s license when I drove her over to Columbus to get an abortion because her boyfriend at the time (all her boyfriends were so physically interchangeable to me they became faceless over the years) had dumped her and quickly skipped town after she told him she was pregnant; the day she picked me up at four in the afternoon on my fifteenth birthday and drove all the way to Cincinnati so I could see my first circus; an Emerson, Lake amp; Palmer concert where we were nearly trampled to death after the crowd-who’d been standing in near-blizzard conditions for over three hours-rushed the doors when they were finally opened; all the times I helped her to take one of the dogs to the vet, times when I stood beside her after the animal had been given the Last Injection and she needed to say good-bye-then, later, her infectious near-giddiness when the dead pet was replaced by a new one; and, most of all, a certain picnic in Moundbuilders Park on my seventeenth birthday when Beth asked me if I had a girlfriend. When I said no, she leaned in and gave me the sweetest, longest, most tender kiss against which all others would forever be compared and come up lacking, then shyly handed me a birthday card inscribed: Just wait until you’re legal!
I read the inscription twice before clearing my throat and saying, “Um, I, uh…is this a joke?”
She put her thumb and index finger under my chin, lifting my head so she could look straight into my eyes. Whenever she did this, it meant Something Serious was about to happen or be said. “Can I ask you something?”
“You mean besides that?”
“Don’t try to be funny, you’re not all that good at it.”
“Okay.”
She kept her thumb and finger under my chin, making small, maddening circles against my skin with the tips of each. “Do you love me?”
I blanked out for a second-what was happening here?-then shook myself back to the Right-Now and said, “Yes, of course I do. We’ve known each other for-what is it now?- eight years?”
“Almost nine now.”
I reached up and held her wrist. “You are the best friend I have ever had, Beth. Hell-you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had.”
She cupped my face in both her hands and kissed me again. “And you’re my best friend. You’ve never judged me, or lied to me, you’ve never been cruel or thoughtless to me, you’ve appreciated everything I’ve ever done for you and you’ve done so many sweet things for me, even when I was acting like a real bitch on wheels-”
“Your words, not mine. Go on, I’ll speak up when I disagree.”
She smiled, moving closer to me. “You know that in high school I was kind of… oh, what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Popular?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Well, I suppose that’s one word for it.”
“Friendly?”
She bit her lower lip and shook her head.
“Available? ‘Open twenty-four Hours’?” I began to laugh. “ ‘One Mattress, No Waiting’?”
“You’re dangerously close to losing one of your nuts.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“You do know what I’m trying to tell you, right?”
“That you were kind of easy in high school?”
“Don’t sugar-coat it, kiddo-Oh, shit! I didn’t mean-”
“Too late.” I held out my hand. “You owe me a buck.”
“But we were having a moment-”
“-that will continue once you pony up the dough.” Ever since the day she’d taken me home from the hospital, Beth and I’d had an agreement: any time she slipped up and called me “kid” or “kiddo” or any other variation thereof, it would cost her a dollar. She had promised never to call me anything like that again, and my charging her for her digressions seemed a solid way to remind her of the importance of keeping her word.
She dug into her pocket and produced a crumpled dollar bill, which she slapped into my hand with a lot more force than was called for, in my opinion.
Shoving the buck into my pocket so the lint would have some company, I smiled at her and said: “You were telling me something about your being easy in high school?”
“Easy? I was a slut. If I’d stayed in college, I’d probably be a real piece-”
“-like you already weren’t?”
“- of work, smartass. I’d be a real piece of work. I spent way too much time in way too many beds trying to convince myself I was worth something. If a guy even hinted that he liked me, I’d pretty much let him do whatever he wanted.”
“I kind of suspected that after you banged the orderly that time in the hospital so he’d take us to the animal lab. Well, that, and when I saw you with that bozo at the gas station the first time you took me home for dinner.”
“I’m not like that anymore. Since the abortion last year, I’ve been very careful about who I… you know… I mean, I haven’t been with a guy in that way since…”
She wasn’t on the verge of tears-Beth almost never cried-but there was a thinness to her voice, a vulnerability that both surprised and scared me.
I touched her face. “You don’t have to explain any of this to me. I understand how things were. It never mattered to me. It still doesn’t.”
She turned her face into my hand, kissing the palm. “That’s just so goddamn typical of you.”
“What? Did I do something untoward? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I let fly with a whopper of a fart and just not notice-what?”
“You accept me for who and what I am. You always have. Whenever one of those dick-for-brains boyfriends of mine would treat me like shit, or embarrass me, or stand me up for a date, you always said or did the right thing to make it better. I could never really hurt when I was with you. Sometimes, just knowing that all I’d have to do-it didn’t matter who I was with or where we were or whatever kind of trouble I getting into-all I had to do was pick up the phone and call you and you’d make everything better.”
“Okay. And…? ”
She stared at me for a moment, then slightly shook her head. “And you have no idea how great a thing that is, do you? You have no idea how wonderful you really are. All you can see are your weaknesses and failures. You don’t see how strong you are already, how strong you’ve always been. Christ, when I first met you in the hospital I thought you were, like, my age. Sure, you were built about the size of a nine-year-old, but when you looked at a person-when you looked at me -you were so much older than you should have been. Even now, looking into your eyes, you seem so much older than I am. Haven’t you ever noticed how people can’t keep eye contact with you during a conversation?”
“Always figured it was because I had something stuck in my teeth-”
“ Shut. Up. You listen now. People can’t keep eye contact with you because you see through all the scrims and bullshit. Whether you mean to or not, you just don’t look at a person, you look right into the middle of who they really are and people can’t handle that.”
“That explains my jam-packed social calendar.”
“See? Just then, that remark-‘My jam-packed social calendar.’ How many seventeen-year-old guys do you know who say things like that? And wasn’t there an ‘untoward’ in there earlier? Don’t answer, it wasn’t really a question.”
“What’s going on here, Beth? I’m confused.”
“No, you’re not. You’re one of the most un- confused people I’ve ever known. I think everything is very clear to you.”
I held up the birthday card. “This isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“That you love me.”
I sighed in exasperation. “ I already said I did! That’s what started this… this…this goddamn dialogue exchange from a Harold Pinter play. You’re my best friend and I love you.”
“But you don’t only love me as a friend, do you?”
(Mayday, Mayday, sonar has malfunctioned, there’s an unexpected obstacle outside the cabin
window and-)
– and there it was.
She’d blindsided me and she knew it. Had it been that obvious all these years and I was just too stupid to know I’d been wearing all my feelings on my sleeve?
Staring into her soft-brown, gold-flecked eyes I was as utterly and deliciously helpless as any teenager in love has ever been. “You’re twenty-four, Beth.”
“You make it sound ancient.”
“How would it look to your friends? Christ, I’m just a baby as far as they’re concerned.”
“Leave them out of it for now, okay? Fuck ’em. Right now, right here, I want to know your feelings for me.”
What surprised me the most was how quickly I answered, and the ease with which the words came out of my mouth: “I’ve been in love with you since that day you brought two of your friends into my room at the hospital and kissed me in front of them. I was in love with you long before you held my hand for the first time, or told me a secret, or took me to your house, or slipped your arm through mine while we wandered around King’s Island. The first time I saw you in your hip-huggers and a halter-top I thought I’d implode from how beautiful you were. Do you have any idea how much I wanted to kill that guy at the gas station because he got to hold you and kiss you and all I could do was sit there and watch him do it? You haven’t dated one guy that I didn’t immediately want to run over with a power mower just to hear him scream. Whenever you hug me, I won’t wash the shirt for a week because the smell of your musk oil lingers in the material. All my life girls have either made fun of me or treated me like I was their brother. My first kiss I got only because I was at a party playing ‘Spin the Bottle’-it pointed at Linda McDonald, who was the new girl at school and didn’t know I was the class joke. The only girl who’s ever kissed me like she meant it is you. I’m never really happy unless you’re around, or I know that I’ll be seeing you soon. When I’m an old man sitting in a nursing home with oatmeal dribbling down my chin, I’m gonna bore the piss out of the nurses because I’ll keep telling them over and over about this girl named Beth who was the great love of my life, but because she was also my best friend I did the noble thing and let her slip away.
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