“I can afford it, I just did a dog food commercial,” Dad said when the waitress had gone. He looked a little embarrassed. “It’s not a speaking part, the dog got that part.”
I filled Dad in on the gym problem. He said I’d either have to be good at something athletic or be enthusiastically bad, but I’d pass fourth quarter if I was one of the two.
Feeling companionable in our failures, we both laughed.
Dad looked healthier, like he was enjoying life more. He’d never acted like a man who could make a living in the ordinary way, nine-to-fiving it, nose to the grindstone. So I didn’t see him that way either. In the same way that I was convinced that Mom and I needed Dad’s emotional support, I figured he would always be short of money. But he’d landed on his financial feet in only a few short weeks.
He liked driving the taxi. He worked the rush hour, he worked the airports, he worked the conventions and the trade shows. When he answered his phone, he quipped, “NYTD.” He even got a couple of movie parts, actor-with-taxi. He’d grown into a success story.
When the waitress came back, she had mixed up our order with another table’s. She straightened things out pretty quickly, smiling and apologizing. Who could be upset with her, with those dimples? Not the men at the other table. Not us.
The weeping pustular eruptions took nearly three months to clear up. Most kids won’t say anything about acne to your face, even at the cost of speaking to you. In a group they’ll talk around you, over you, about you. You might as well be dead.
You don’t realize the seriousness of your situation until some girl comes up to you in the hallway. The wrong girl. You don’t look her in the eye. You strike a pose that suggests you’re in a headlong rush to get someplace. This spares her feelings. And anyone passing you in the hall can see that you were moving right along when she buttonholed you.
When that doesn’t work, you look her in the eye, trying not to see a constellation you might be tempted to stare at. But as she’s telling you what an interesting science project you turned in, you notice how pretty she is. Really pretty. You notice her skin is clear.
She had terrible acne. Last year.
And then it hits you. Being approached by her means you’ve been accepted into the leper colony. The only kids who’ve noticed your acne has cleared up are your fellow sufferers. But she’s still looking like she hasn’t seen that you’re poised to run. It doesn’t help that you both know she’s older than you and she’s still interested.
That’s when she mentions the junior dance.
SIX
I went to the dance, even though my heart wasn’t in it. This was another dance I could’ve taken my girl to. If she hadn’t moved away. I know this sounds sappy as hell, but it’s the kind of thing that goes through your head when you’re taking the wrong girl to a dance.
She could dance, though. Because of those ballroom lessons, I’m some dancer myself, so I can tell you she was outstanding. She had probably devoted a lot of extra time to certain social graces in the hope of overcoming the acne lockout. I couldn’t help it that I wasn’t going to fall in love with her, but I knew I ought to like her more than I did.
Even though I spent a lot of time getting her sodas that she didn’t drink—they’re bad for your skin—she didn’t drift away to talk to anyone else.
Once, standing in the soda line, I said to the guy I thought she liked, “I’ll bet she’d like for someone to dance with her. Besides me, I mean.”
“Yeah. But I’d never do that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I hate when somebody comes up to my date and asks her to dance. I don’t need that. Besides,” he said, “she’s too good a dancer.”
It was downhill from there. She must’ve known I wasn’t having such a good time, although I was as nice as I could be. We left maybe twenty minutes or so before the dance was supposed to be over.
“Usually this DJ goes on for an extra half hour or so,” she said as I held her jacket for her.
“My mom asked me to be home a little early,” I said.
I started for the exit, wearing this winning expression that I hoped would encourage her to feel we were both happy to be going. I hoped that would do it, because I didn’t know if I could leave without her. She came along, sort of moving with the music, suggesting she still had a dance or two left in her.
“Hey, I think I knew somebody from your science club,” I said. But she didn’t know my girl very well. I think she was feeling mean when she said someone told her my girl had moved to Alaska.
She lived in one of those new high-rise buildings that boasts about half a dozen elevators. She said none were ever closer than the sixteenth floor. She only lived on the third floor and we’d do better taking the stairs.
On the second-floor landing, she complained about something in her shoe. She slipped it off, leaning against my arm. She shook the shoe pretty good, but nothing fell out. “Do you feel anything?” she asked with a concerned frown, rubbing her finger over the innersole.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t bothered by any of this until I put my finger into her shoe. It was warm to the touch. I know it was only a shoe and of course it would be warm from her foot, but I didn’t expect it. It was very personal in an odd sort of way.
The thing is, she was hoping I’d kiss her while she was leaning against me. It stretches credulity, I know, that she would want me to touch her warm shoe and somehow make the leap to a kiss. But it was in the air.
Only I didn’t want to kiss her. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted a girl to be leaning against me in this silly suggestive way. But she was the wrong girl. I passed her shoe back without any fanfare. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
She looked like she was going to cry.
When we reached her door, I wanted to say something to help. Like, I felt like that at the beginning of the evening. In fact, I still feel that way, but I can’t do a thing to help either one of us. We’re the wrong two people standing here, and we both feel just miserable about it. But I couldn’t say that or anything else. Except that probably the junior class raked in a good penny to spend on the prom. Particularly at the soda line. Some line. And good night. And you’re some dancer yourself.
Really.
’Night.
SEVEN
If I had washed up on the shore after the dance, if the water had slowly receded, I could have dried my feet and gone on, maybe only a little the worse for wear. But unlike the dance, the gym problem went on and on, rising like a tide.
Mom’s mood was excellent. Her horoscopes looked good lately. And she’d met another man. If he worked on Wall Street, I’d have understood it. But Mom and my gym teacher went to dinner one evening to discuss the possible reasons for my failure in gym class. Mr. B seemed sympathetic to our recent upheaval and open to discussion about my grade.
I worked harder at mastering gymnastics. They met again to discuss my sudden interest in gym class participation and yet again to celebrate my newfound powers on the parallel bars.
I’d had enough. Not only did I not understand why they needed to get together so often, I just didn’t like it. Then Mom dropped the cover of talking about my grades. She was dating him. I stopped going to class.
Frankly, it was a matter of some embarrassment to me. Not that Mr. B told any of the students, and I certainly didn’t. But I didn’t like the twinkle in my guidance counselor’s eye when she asked me if I had anything new to report.
All through May and June, I shored myself up with the idea that I was only a few weeks from the end of the school year. Mom and Mr. B would forget about each other over the summer. Better yet, they could be over this little crush before then. I still didn’t like it.
I liked it less when, on the last day of school, he proposed marriage. My whole body went clammy cold and goose-bumped when Mom told me. “You’re kidding, right?”
A little smile turned up the corners of Mom’s mouth. “He’s a nice man, Vinnie.”
; “You haven’t known him long enough to know how nice he is.” They’d been dating for three and a half months, tops.
“I think I have,” she said, almost coy. Definitely amused. “Really very nice. I think you’re overreacting.”
I’d had him for gym for four semesters.
“The man obsesses. He’s compulsively neat, he watches football games from behind a chewed-up cigar, he’s a coach!” Just so we get things straight here, he didn’t smoke the cigar, he chewed it. Clearly, he’d never looked at one of those anti–chewing tobacco posters in the bio lab down the hall from the gym. The post-surgery victim of facial cancer before reconstructive work is begun. Very attractive.
Mom said, “He’s more up-to-date than you’d guess. His mother meditates. She wears Earth shoes.”
“You’ve met his mother?”
“Just for lunch.”
Mom always said she made her biggest business decisions over lunch. She had me worried.
She didn’t leap at Mr. B’s proposal, but she said she would give it serious consideration. She’d divorced Dad because she didn’t get to be a stay-at-home wife. Of course, now she was no longer a wife. One for Mr. B.
Dad called. I said, “Mom got a marriage proposal, Dad.”
Silence. Tense silence. Then, “I guess she must be feeling pretty good about that.”
Were they both reading manuals?
“I think it’s pretty fast, myself.”
“We’re divorced, Vinnie.”
“She still has a tan line where her wedding band used to be.” An exaggeration, but still.
“You can’t expect her not to see other men, Vinnie.”
“I can expect her not to be engaged before a decent period of mourning is over, can’t I?”
There was a telling silence. Then, “So, listen, how are your grades?”
“I flunked gym again.”
* * *
Mom continued to consider Mr. B’s proposal through a few more candlelit dinner dates that she bragged about to her divorced girlfriends. I reminded Mom that she’d promised the divorce would not infringe on my way of life. I pointed to my grades as an indicator of my vulnerability.
Then Mr. B got a job offer from a high school on Long Island. He told Mom he’d spent five years in Forest Hills trying and failing to start a football team and, as luck would have it, this school boasted a fine team that now needed a coach.
He told me the school also boasted a swim team.
Okay, I swim. Just passably, not at all well. I don’t really like swimming much. But what I said was, I’m not exactly team material. I’m a loner. It ticked Mom off that I said this, like I should want to pass the all-around good kid test or something.
She hadn’t accepted his proposal. At least, she hadn’t told me.
I think she let Mr. B take her house-hunting just to punish me. The trouble was, everything they looked at created in Mom a deep dissatisfaction with apartment living.
EIGHT
I got mugged on the way home from the dermatologist. I was in the subway station, one of those underground mazes that run entrances over a three- or four-block span. At eight-thirty on a Monday evening, the nearest token window was unmanned and the station was all but deserted.
It wasn’t a friendly give-me-everything-but-one-subway-token-that-you’re-gonna-need mugging. He was too thin, like he hadn’t had enough to eat for years. And shaky. Not like he was afraid of getting caught, but like he suffered from a debilitating disease.
He had eyes of that icy transparent blue, hardly any color at all. He looked weirded out. He gestured with the knife. “This all you got?”
“Yes.” I knew I might be about to die. I felt a surge of anger. I was a good eight or ten inches taller than the mugger. If it weren’t for the knife, I could’ve taken his money from him.
He stared at the money. “Twelve dollars and forty-six cents?”
“I’m fifteen. What kind of money do you think I carry around?”
“Don’t be a wise guy.” The point of his knife dug into the soft skin under my chin.
I said nothing. A thin warmth trickled down my neck.
When I was little, I had a trick I used for bad times with my parents or teachers—anybody. I pictured them as animals. Mom or Dad as a trumpeting elephant, teachers as bumbling bees, clucking chickens—you get the idea. I tried, but nothing I came up with was derogatory, invalidating, or even harmless. Everything that came to mind either scratched, bit, or squeezed until it held a boneless rag.
“Look, you got all my money.” My voice came out all quavery. “Why don’t you just go before someone comes along?”
Mistake.
“You in a rush, baby face?” He leaned in closer. I couldn’t get away from his breath. Like he’d been chewing crayons. Old, moldy crayons.
“I just think you’re taking an awful chance,” I whispered.
That’s when a cop came down the stairs. He was still half a block away. The mugger was younger and faster, and despite being an unhealthy-looking specimen, he vaulted over the turnstile and ran for the lower level as I slid down the wall, my legs turned to rubber.
A train rumbled into the station, apparently on the other track, because the mugger came back up the stairs and ran down another flight before New York’s Finest had even let himself through the turnstile.
The thing is, all the time I was sitting there, I kept thinking of how I’d handed over my money without a qualm. I’d pleaded with him to leave me alone, I made out I was concerned for his welfare.
I hated myself for being scared. I knew I would spend weeks trying to think of the snappy rejoinders I’d have come up with if I’d known a cop was about to come down the stairs.
By then I was crying. The policeman made me lie down, showing me where to press my thumb beneath my chin to stop the bleeding while he tried to get help with a walkie-talkie. We drew a small crowd, people who’d gotten off the train the mugger boarded.
The weight of this incident tipped the scale to Mr. B.
NINE
Mom called Dad and told him she’d made up her mind. She was getting married and Mr. B was moving us out of the city as soon as they closed on a house. On the house. So if Dad wanted to get out of that fleabag hotel he lived in, he could have the apartment.
Hotel? Dad didn’t have an apartment? Roommates?
As I listened wide-eyed, I saw the moment for pushing Mom’s guilt buttons had been and gone. With the same speed and agility she displayed on a shopping trip, Mom rearranged all our lives with that single phone call.
I went to the library and got about a dozen books on self-defense. Since I wasn’t likely to be carrying a cane or an umbrella most days, I leaned toward the books on karate and jujitsu. I watched a class, where it seemed people mainly learned how to be knocked to the floor. I went back to reading the books.
Mom and Mr. B set a date for the wedding, the day after the proposed closing date on the house they bought. Mom started working longer hours to pad her checking account. As a result, for three and four days at a stretch, I hardly saw her.
The plan: a weekend wedding at a nice B&B, and then we’d move into the new house too, just the three of us, the average little family. Very cozy.
As it worked out, the deal on the house fell through. Mom and Mr. B couldn’t change their wedding date, but house-hunting began again, now with a kind of frenetic energy. I was drafted into looking at houses with Mr. B during the week, while Mom was at work.
It was kind of natural to expect me to go along with him, I guess, because we were both in the gym at the close of summer school every morning. But if Mr. B and I weren’t enemies in gym class, we weren’t buddies either. He had the class doing laps between volleyball games on ninety-degree days to build endurance. This was exactly what made him a target for unattractive nicknames. For the house-hunting project, Mr. B and I understood that we both had my mother’s best interests at heart.
Mom took me shopping for the Long Island mo
ve. “Mom, I can do this on my own. What makes you think I need help?”
“The Island has a different look. You want to get it right.”
“You want to get it right,” I pointed out.
So we got basics, classic. Except for one sale item I couldn’t resist. A pair of thin leather pants, glossy black. They looked good. They looked cool.
School started right after Labor Day, and we settled on three houses most likely to appeal to Mom. When he took her to look at them on the weekend before the wedding, she said yes to the one we liked best.
It would be a couple of months before we could move in. From the looks of things, I’d be starting at a new school around Thanksgiving, but I halfway hoped this deal would fall through too.
Nothing went wrong.
Mom looked happy at her wedding, pretty, and Mr. B looked like he’d won a really important game. The guest list was short. Mom’s parents, Mr. B’s mother, and me. Mr. B’s mother was a shorter version of Mr. B, with only a little more hair, and I withheld the fact that she reminded me of a garden gnome.
Mr. B had started the job on Long Island. Between practices and evening games, he couldn’t handle a commute, so he stayed in a room he rented near the school. Mom and I remained in the apartment.
He and Mom kept in touch with each other through chummy evening phone calls. They continued to “date.” But they had this comfortable way of being together, like an old married couple, the kind I saw on TV. They bickered as much as they shared stories and jokes, and it was a friendly bicker. A debate. They didn’t have a mushy quality that would’ve embarrassed me.
I hated to admit it, but Mom seemed happier with Mr. B. She didn’t hold herself so tightly, she had softened.
Not Exactly a Love Story Page 2