I had to accept defeat.
TEN
We moved into the house on November 19, a date Mom’s horoscope reported was a good day for a move. It was also a date that used to be my parents’ anniversary. If Mom thought about the irony of it, if she noticed it at all, she didn’t mention it to me.
As Mom had gone around the apartment taking watercolors off the walls, I learned they were hers. Hers, as in, she chose them, she paid for them, she got to keep them. It was surprising to me, I’d never thought of anything we had as other than “ours.” The day was full of little revelations like that, and it left me feeling washed out.
At eight p.m. we ate tuna salad sandwiches, the three of us perched on boxes in the kitchen so Mom could admire the harvest-gold appliances. Personally, I couldn’t get into the same light mood, but I got it that she was excited to be in the house.
Me, I missed Dad. More than when I was in Queens and he was only a short subway ride away. I wondered who would sympathize if I pinched my finger in a car door.
Mom exhausted the subject of the kitchen pretty quickly. She went on to say she’d change to her long-awaited part-time schedule this coming week so she could get us settled in. I could see she was also eager to settle into her part-time stay-at-home schedule. After the last few months of extra-long hours, I couldn’t hold it against her.
Mr. B talked at length about a kid who had also moved here within the last couple of weeks, coming from a really good high school football team in Buffalo. He considered the kid to be some find.
When Mom admitted she was dating Mr. B, I could not understand how she could have outgrown Dad and then gravitated toward my gym teacher. After all, I’d figured Mr. B for one of those sports-brained guys who had season tickets to the games. But I knew him better now. He was a nice guy. Probably he pictured his football player and me being odd men out together until we found other friends.
“I think we ought to turn in early,” Mr. B said. “Leave this unpacking for tomorrow. The boy’s tired.”
Somewhere along the line, I had become “the boy.” At first this seemed to differentiate me from Mr. B’s other students, but lately it was said with a degree of affection that I couldn’t ignore. Mr. B was letting me and my mother know he saw us as a family. And yet he wasn’t stepping on Dad’s toes. This needed a delicate balance, and I was less and less surprised to find he knew it.
So far as school was concerned, I wasn’t expecting much of a welcoming committee myself. I doubted many teachers were looking over my grades from last year and thinking I was a find. As for making friends, cliques would have formed. Maybe Mr. B was right. The football player and I might find we had something in common.
We might have to.
I went upstairs to my room and shoved a couple of boxes out of my way. I stood for a minute in the dark. The windows were still bare, and plenty of light came in from the street. Enough light anyway to sit down on my desk chair near the window and try to feel like I belonged there.
A telephone sat on my bedside table, one of the perks that came with my new position, stepson of Mr. B. It had an element of strangeness, like the plastic-wrapped sofa that stretched across the living room.
Otherwise, the furniture came from my room in the apartment I grew up in. It looked familiar, and yet changed here. Everything seemed to take up more space. As for me, I needed more space. I could feel an acne attack looming when a light came on in a room in the house next door. The light spilled onto the double-width driveway.
My brain cataloged this fact while at the same time I watched a girl strip a sweater off over her head and throw it aside. She took up a position in front of a mirror and pulled her blond hair back into a ponytail, giving me a clear view of her in her bra.
I knew she was moving in real time, but I took everything in as if it was in slow motion. She appeared to be in a ballet of lifted arms and tossed sweater, her hair swung with a faint rebound, like the punctuation at the end of a sentence, the light reflecting off her skin so that she was almost outlined in a halo.
She might have been a painting done by an Old Master or, at the very least, starring in a shampoo commercial. This girl seared a forever-in-memory film short onto the movie screen of my blissed-out mind.
A woman, I was guessing her mother, came to her bedroom door and said something to her. It seemed, from the curt gestures of the mother, the toss of the ponytailed head, they were arguing. The girl swung open a closet door, grabbed a shirt off a hanger, and pulled it on, all while they continued a lively discussion.
They both left the room abruptly, leaving the light on. I went on sitting in the dark, thinking this girl next door was an excellent development. I wondered what her name was.
I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mom’s quick steps.
“Vinnie, what are you doing, sitting here in the dark?”
“Deciding that I like my new room.”
This wasn’t an answer she expected. “I’m very happy to hear it.” She flipped on the light, making me glad the room across the driveway was empty. “Unpack whatever you’re going to need for tomorrow. I’ll make up your bed.”
“I’ll make my bed.” I flicked the light switch off. “ ’Night, Mom.”
ELEVEN
It would be a short week, with school closed for Thanksgiving.
I decided to wear the leather pants on Monday to make a great first impression. And when school opened after the holiday, the ice would be broken.
At seven-thirty that morning it was an unseasonable seventy degrees. I’d never worn the leather pants before, and I found they worked like rubber sweatpants. I began to sweat, and they stuck to me like a second skin.
Half a dozen kids stood at the bus stop, including the foxy blonde from next door. She was not a disappointment up close. Swingy shoulder-length hair, shaggy bangs that gave huge gray-blue eyes a peekaboo quality as she turned her head. Taller than most girls but shorter than I was, so maybe five foot eight or nine.
I like to think I would have smiled at her. But I’d just become aware of one more disastrous side effect of the leather pants. I guess it had to do with the heat, the clinging, the rubbing as I walked. I couldn’t do anything but cross my hands over the notebook I held in front of myself, down low.
I like to think she would’ve smiled back when I smiled at her. I do think she gave me a sort of once-over, the corner of her mouth pulled up to expose the dimple she had in one cheek. I hadn’t seen that from across the driveway, and I had a thing for dimples.
When she offered up her slow-motion smile, an invitation to say hi, she offered it to someone else, a guy who came up to the group from the opposite direction. He was about my height, but with massive width and depth to his body. He was nearly as wide as he was tall.
As for me, there was an almost forgotten pull at my heart when I looked at her, and when I pointedly didn’t, a kind of longing. I don’t know if that’s love. It’s almost sad, that feeling. Excited and interested and hopeful and fearful.
I didn’t speak to anyone that day.
I also missed gym class. With Mr. B. I’d left my shorts at home. I didn’t do so much walking around between classes that I had a problem, and I was comfortable in the leather pants after that first experience. But I couldn’t show up and run around the gym, shooting baskets.
I figured I’d explain all that to Mr. B later.
I hung out in the locker room. That was where I overheard two huge guys—huge, as in not just tall but wide and deep as steers raised for beefsteak—talking about the blonde as they dressed for their next class. It didn’t seem to bother them that they were running late.
One of them was the monster she smiled at at the bus stop that morning. I’d seen the ripple of expression pass across his low brow—he didn’t want to look too eager. He smiled but let himself be distracted by someone else, and almost instantly, so did she. I didn’t catch his name but in my mind it had one syllable, something with punch. Biff.
He put a textbook into the
locker he’d chosen. “I got it from Melanie,” he said with a moronic chuckle as he tossed a piece of paper into his locker. “It’s Patsy’s unlisted number.”
Patsy. What a sweet name. It suited her slow smile. I couldn’t picture her charging through a department store like a hunting dog.
“If she didn’t give it to you,” the other kid said, “what makes you think she’s going to be so thrilled to hear from you?”
I was only watching from the corner of my eye, but I could see the monster was acting super casual. “I’m a hunk,” he said with an expressive spread of his overdeveloped arms. “And I’m gonna be a football star.”
I stopped idly spinning the dial on my combination lock.
It had just hit me—this was Mr. B’s find.
They passed me as they left. I must’ve looked like Gumby next to them. Especially the one who claimed to be a hunk. He was a wall. A walking wall. I was grateful I didn’t play football.
It was after they left that I spotted the piece of folded paper under the bench. The phone number was scribbled in pencil. It must have fallen out of his locker unnoticed while he was busy looking cool.
I could have put it through the vents in his locker, but I pocketed it. I imagined calling her. I thought about the dimple in her cheek, and about hearing that smile in her voice. I could say I was new in town. We could talk a little, discover we had a few things in common. Then I would say I’d seen her at the bus stop. I’d describe myself, she would remember me.
“You’re that dork in the leather pants,” Patsy would say.
And that would be that.
I didn’t plan to ask her out. What would be the point? I didn’t expect to use the number at all.
It was enough just to have it.
TWELVE
Mr. B took it personally that I didn’t go to gym class.
An emotional reaction, pure and simple. “How do you think that looks in the office?” he asked me.
By then I wished I’d talked to him before I went on to my next class, but I hadn’t. That morning it hadn’t seemed like such a big deal to cut a class, compared to the alternative. Especially Mr. B’s class, because I thought I could count on him to understand.
Sitting at the dinner table with him and Mom, I got embarrassed. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what the problem had been. I should have been able to, but I just couldn’t.
“You cut a class, it reflects on me,” he said.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You think no one will notice it’s my class and you’re my wife’s son? You think that doesn’t hurt me?”
He pushed back his dinner of fish sticks, defrosted French fries, and canned corn. He went on and on about being the new teacher in school, and I could see his point.
I was the new kid in my classes, facing teachers who hadn’t heard my name being bandied about the teachers’ lounge over the last several years as an all-around good kid, bright, et cetera. If all these teachers had to go on for the first few months were my last semester’s grades, and now Mr. B’s reaction when someone mentioned my name, I was going to need the strength of a salmon swimming upstream.
“You think I don’t want the people I work with to come around and say, ‘Hey, Dom, the boy’s all right’? That I want to start off telling them this isn’t your usual behavior? Because I know that. I do.”
The thing is, I never knew he worried so much about what people thought of him. “I’m sorry,” I said for the third time. “It won’t happen again.”
Mom reached across the table and patted his hand. I didn’t think it was a hand-pat of Okay, settle down now. She was more like, I feel terrible it’s my son who treated you this way. It cut me to the quick.
I didn’t think this qualified as a stab of jealousy, really, it’s just that I was no less disappointed in the situation than Mr. B, and there was no one I could turn to who might squeeze my hand in sympathy.
Mom saw the cut class as an act of rebellion, not especially pure and not at all simple. “You won’t forgive me, will you?” she said as she got up to clear the table.
Huh?
“Your father wasn’t the one to say we’d grown apart and so he’s the underdog, is that it?” I knew better than to suggest this was an overreaction. “I will always be in the wrong, I will always be the one you blame.”
The dining room was set at a right angle to the kitchen, so Mr. B and I could hear everything she had to say from our seats at the table. And she had plenty to say.
“You have no right to treat me this way,” Mom shouted back over her shoulder as something broke in the sink. “I’ve made sure you lacked for nothing and what do I get when I try to better our lives? The back of your hand, that’s what!”
I disagreed. I thought I’d been about as cooperative as she could hope for. And it was about time she got around to noticing. I could tell her what really happened—there was that possibility—but where I was embarrassed before, now I got stubborn.
Mr. B tried to say a few soothing words. “Donna, the boy made a mis—”
“Take, take, take,” Mom yelled as she came back into the dining room for the rest of the dishes. “That’s all kids know. A little happiness is all I’m asking for, but do you think he’ll allow me to have it?”
Mr. B glanced uncertainly in my direction as my mother ranted over the scrape of dishes and the racket of the silverware. “My own son, looking for ways to undermine my marriage—”
“Cripes,” I said under my breath.
Mom tore into the dining room to wipe the table with broad swipes of the sponge that scattered crumbs to every corner of the room. But she didn’t say anything—the silent treatment had begun. I knew the drill. I could get up and go to my room now. If Mom had anything she wanted to yell in my ear, she knew where to find me.
I looked back over my shoulder to see Mr. B hunched in his chair, and my heart went out to him. He had no way of knowing the mood was set for the whole evening now. And the way he looked right then, I didn’t believe he would appreciate hearing it from me.
THIRTEEN
The holidays were fractured.
I met Dad the Sunday after Thanksgiving and we went for a walk through Central Park. A movie was being made. The area was roped off and policed, so we mainly saw a lot of parked trucks and trailers.
For lunch, we ate turkey sandwiches with all the trimmings at the Stage Deli. Then he put me on the train for the Island and headed over to pick up a taxi. Ends of holidays mean big tips taking weekenders from the hotel to the airport.
In the middle of December, Mom put up a tree with different ornaments than we’d been using for years, and none of them were the ones I’d made. Dad kept those ornaments, but he hadn’t put up the Hanukkah bush.
Dad asked some friends in to light the menorah, the ones at loose ends because they hadn’t flown back to families in other states for one reason or another. And on Christmas Day he held a potluck supper. Mom and Mr. B drove me into Queens in the afternoon.
I was lucky enough to get there in time to help with food. That had always been our tradition, me in the kitchen with Dad. With a stream of people coming in, we looked like one big happy family.
As we gathered around the dining table to fill plates, I noticed the apartment walls were surprisingly drab and dirty-looking. Dad hadn’t done anything about the faint square patches where Mom took down her watercolors.
When I settled in a corner of the living room with a healthy stack of star-shaped cookies for dessert, Mona came over to me with cups of eggnog with brandy. “What is it, Vinnie?”
Mona was an actress and an old friend of both Mom and Dad. Also an acknowledged meddler, so I believed she’d agree with me when I said, “I just wish Dad would fix up the place a little bit. Maybe I ought to come in on a weekend, give him a hand hanging some posters.”
“What for?” she said. “It isn’t like his life is here anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
&n
bsp; “He’s either driving or running all over the city to auditions. He’s got a new agent, one who actually finds work for him. Sooner or later, he’ll move on.”
She was right. Dad was alone here, and he could do things that were all about what he needed now. “Great. Good for Dad.” I wished I could sound a little more enthusiastic.
“Don’t say anything about posters today,” she said so that only we could hear. “He’s making such an effort.”
I agreed. Underneath the smiles and camaraderie, we’d all been making an effort. It was hard on the nerves.
I studied like a maniac over the rest of winter vacation. Partly it was that I didn’t care to fall behind. But it also took my mind off things. Only Mr. B had failed to be impressed with my work ethic.
Mr. B being Mr. B, he encouraged me to go out for a team. Of course, he’d been encouraging me about twice weekly. When it snowed, he’d gotten all excited about cross-country skiing. I made a joke about taking up ballroom dancing again, but I felt bad right after. It made the man look sick and dizzy.
I kind of dragged around on New Year’s Day, burned out on textbooks. I was thinking about how much life had changed in one short year. Actually, I said something like that to Mom and she laughed, saying I sounded like an old man.
She was charting her astrology, and pointed out that my sixteenth birthday was coming up. I said I was in the mood to do the kind of thing my grandparents did, where no one takes any particular notice as the day goes by.
What I wouldn’t do, was not even tempted to do, was take Mom up on the offer to do a horoscope for me.
What I did, a few days after my birthday, was unfold that piece of paper and dial Patsy’s number.
FOURTEEN
I stood at my window and watched the snow fall. This was the third snowstorm we’d had since New Year’s, fast storms that dumped a foot of snow that melted over the next couple of days.
Not Exactly a Love Story Page 3