If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  Claire was small and very curvy with bowed-out hips. Her hair was cut short and curled naturally, which she hated. “I have Mom hair,” she said sometimes, pulling at the flat results in her rearview mirror. “You don’t,” I’d say, fiddling with things in her glove box, looking for a mixed tape I made her. But it was true, her haircut was the same as both of our mothers. She looked older than she was, like she was a mom of somebody, though she was only one year ahead of me in school. I looked younger than I was, like the effeminate prepubescent kid of somebody, although I was a sophomore.

  Then one night there was a dance at her church; it had a celestial theme. Tall caged windows were covered with stiff blue paper and rubbed all over with glue and glitter. Moons and stars, comets and constellations dotted out in shiny silver marker. A slow song started when I was dancing with Angie, but I was switched and then dancing with Claire. This had all been planned, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. The song was “I Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon and I hated it. Except I had to love it because it was now our song—Claire’s and mine. We were close, Claire’s cheek pressed to my shivering chest. She wore a thick sweater and under my hands I could tell she was sweating. The room was dark, crowded, loud, glittering, and blue. We danced, sort of waddling in a vague circle. Left, pause, right, pause, left, pause, right, slowly rotating over some invisible point on the floor like an orbit. She knew she loved me right then, but she wouldn’t tell me until later.

  After that, our notes changed. She would write every day and tell me how rapturously in love she was with me, and I wrote the same back to her. I described my strong feelings and made many fantastical promises about moonlit walks, sunrises, New York weekends, and European summers. Strangely, it was easy to write about these things but hard to talk about them. In those years, love wasn’t any deeper than friendship. I knew what came along with love (sex) so I tried to avoid the topic altogether. To me, writing those feelings for her on paper was the way I could pretend that I was a boy with a girlfriend just like all the other boys—overlooking that other boys didn’t write at least six page-long love notes every day at school.

  Angie and I pack up our food and tape player, it’s time to drive around. We love driving around. Her car is a Volkswagen Quantum; her dad bought it at a police auction for $200 after it was confiscated in a drug investigation. You can start it without the key by turning the ignition switch and the stereo works when the car isn’t running. Driving around means more singing and it means seeing who’s home. We zoom past our friends’ houses, and if their cars aren’t there, we make guesses, practice conjecture. “Did he have to work today?” It’s Saturday, we have nothing better to do. Angie drives too fast, not slowing at corners, whipping us to the sides of the car on purpose.

  We have to sing this song, she says, and reaches under my legs for her shoebox of tapes. It’s Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here.” She knows all the words. I’m still learning, but I know the chorus. Her car doesn’t have air-conditioning, the upholstery sticks to the backs of my legs. My bare feet are up on the dashboard so I sit slouched in the seat, one hand out of the car, buoyed by the breeze. She turns up the radio. “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.” She stabs her finger at me in the hot air, one point for every note. This song means us.

  We start talking about Claire again, how she’s trying to get with Kevin.

  “She’s always had a thing for him,” Angie says, and then she turns down her stereo. “No offense.”

  “Whatever.” My hand is still riding the air. We want to do something to Kevin, want him to know we know what’s going on. Because it’s the middle of the afternoon, TP-ing his house or finding a bunch of For Sale signs and sticking them in his front yard are out. Angie suggests his car, we could cover it in shaving cream or dish soap? “The Cherry Bars!” I shout. We love it. Smear them on his car, a mess across the windshield. He won’t know it’s us but he’ll know it’s us.

  Claire once tied a silk scarf over my eyes and led me carefully down her basement steps. We’d been dating almost a year by then. She whispered Ssh! because her parents were already in bed. When her parents were home, her house was like a library—you had to be quiet because that was the rule. My socks slid the slightest bit on each painted step. At the bottom, we stood on the cement floor of her unfinished basement. “Here, this way,” she said, and I was pulled over there. A crinkling of plastic and she let go of my hand. “Hold on,” she said. I stood frozen and blind, heard the flick of a lighter, then the tiny hiss of flame. It was so quiet. She grabbed my hand again, pulled me forward, then down, my knees crushing a pile of pillows. “Okay,” she said.

  I slipped the scarf off my head and I wanted to check my hair because it felt messed up. But we were sitting on the floor wrapped in a shimmering bubble. Plastic painter’s drop cloths hung from the ceiling, enclosing us, and strings of glowing white Christmas lights were wound up inside. Paper streamers and more drop cloths—shredded into long strips—hung down, moving and waving as we breathed. It was beautiful. She sat on a pillow too, a low table between us held dozens of candles, the little flames wiggled under our breath. There was no air. She reached behind her pillows and brought out a bottle of sparkling grape juice, the bottle that looked just like wine, and poured it into plastic cups.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, pretending to hide a coy smile that she wanted me to see. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  I hadn’t noticed before but music was playing from somewhere in the corner, a low soft song. “I’m surprised, I guess,” I shrugged because I couldn’t think of what else to say. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

  At this time, Claire and I were comfortable hand-holders, but going any further made me nervous. Just staying Claire’s best friend would have been my plan, if I were the one doing the planning, but she and Angie took care of that. In fact, nothing really changed for me between being Claire’s friend and her boyfriend, except we held hands during movies, attended prom, spent Friday nights together, just us, and at the end of phone conversations and dates, we paused and said with purpose, “I love you.” Beyond those three words, I never willingly talked about my feelings of our relationship—I only wrote about them. And if Claire noticed I could only write that I loved her, she didn’t talk about it either.

  By the night of the bubble in the basement, Claire thought it was a pretty big deal that we’d dated more than a year and never kissed or reached a hand up under a shirt or squeezed anything of each other’s yet. My latest explanation for not kissing her—when it was demanded of me—was I imagined the moment of our first kiss so perfectly and it had to be just like my vision that the pressure was too much to live up to. Which worked. The truth was when I tried to picture Our First Kiss, I couldn’t see anything. Not our faces or hands and certainly not what I was feeling.

  After thirty minutes in the fragile quivering bubble, she had to drive me home to meet my curfew. “We better go,” I said, and I hugged her, thanked her for my surprise.

  Angie called the next morning. “You’re so stupid,” she said. “She was trying to set the mood for you. You were supposed to kiss her!”

  Kevin is watching our friend Jon’s dogs while his whole family is on vacation. If Kevin’s car isn’t at his own house, then he must be over there. We know he’s not at work because his car isn’t where he usually parks it at the mall. We already checked. The houses in Kevin’s subdivision are small and shoved closely together. His dad is gone, divorced from his mom years ago and his sister is away at college. Kevin lives with just his mom and their two dogs that they both talk to in high voices.

  It’s been two months since Claire and I broke up and we haven’t seen much of each other. Kevin and Angie broke up just two weeks ago, and they still talk on the phone because they are trying to be friends. They want to get back together, I think but don’t say to Angie. “I’m so glad to be done with him,” she s
ays, at the corner when we turn onto his street.

  His car isn’t there. We decide to drive by our vacationing friend’s house. “We’re going to give Kevin his ‘just desserts.’” I chuckle at how clever I am. Angie nods but I don’t think she’s listening. I actually can’t believe she is going along with this cherry bars thing, because she still loves Kevin or thinks she does, though she’d never admit it. I don’t hate Kevin or anything, though I am quietly jealous of him, and how he gets Angie all to himself when they’re dating. The image of these bars spread on his car—gooey, red, and mean—is secretly thrilling because it will be real proof to Kevin of my connection with Angie.

  “We have to get there right now! Before he leaves,” she says, pressing down on the gas pedal. Now that we have this idea, neither one of us can imagine not going through with it. We’re actually already looking forward to this memory, how we’ll laugh later about what we’re about to do, and we haven’t even gotten around to doing it. Quick curves, darting sprints, rushed stops at surprise red lights. There’s a long slow trail of cars heading west to the hill on busy Elm Street where there is a steep drop on the other side. “We have to go,” she says, and the engine works furiously under us as she pulls over the solid yellow line to pass them all.

  We’re on the wrong side of the street, speeding up the hill that we can’t see over—a car coming at us or not, a kid chasing a lost softball or not, an anything or not. I suck in a breath like I’m leaping into a pool and I don’t know how cold the water will be. My fingers squeeze tighter around the handle hanging from the Quantum’s ceiling. Angie’s arms are locked straight on the wheel, she’s pressed back into the seat. No singing or laughing and I don’t know what song is playing. We dive over the top of the hill and the road underneath us is empty. We speed down the slope, pass the slow cars; drivers’ heads turn to see who could be so stupid. Nothing happens though because we’re invincible. Our bodies and also our friendship. We have to live on past this ordinary afternoon or else we’d never know what a time it was, it was. I wave to the glancing drivers, Angie pulls the car back into the right lane. We both scream.

  “We almost died this afternoon.” I say it monotone like I’m bored though my neck is sweating. A minute goes by and so does a mile.

  “The safternoon,” she says.

  We have a lot to talk about. That’s what Claire’s note said. She tucked it under my windshield wiper, in the parking lot of the YMCA where I worked as a Latchkey supervisor, my summer job. The facility was off the highway, off the service road, past several pastures of dry, leaning corn and empty barns—a long way from Claire’s house. So this was serious. It was raining, but the note was folded up and zipped inside a plastic sandwich bag. She’d drawn goofy faces on the note, big round eyes, tiny two-dot noses and open-mouthed grins. She didn’t draw the shape of the heads around them, just the parts of faces, so they didn’t look whole. One of them was crying, probably knowing it was over.

  When I drove up, she was sitting on her porch. This was six months after the night I was supposed to kiss her when I didn’t kiss her. Her parents’ cars weren’t in the driveway but I still parked in the street because her mom thought my car leaked oil. Claire was sitting on a bench, her giant knitted sweater pulled over her feet, reading a paperback romance novel.

  Inside the house we were alone but the silence felt like a presence, like someone was in the room with us, hiding. She sat down in the living room, I sat beside her on the sofa, and she started talking.

  It was the usual thing: Our relationship didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Yes, we got along really well, she related to me better than anyone else in her whole life, but it had been that way for so long and it didn’t seem to be changing. She felt alone. She felt lonely. She felt like I didn’t really love her because I didn’t ever want to touch her, or kiss her, or have sex with her or whatever. She was sorry, she didn’t mean that. But, yes, she did mean that. Was it her? Was she ugly? Or crazy? Why was she the only one who ever wanted to talk about this? She knew I thought about it too, but didn’t think I really thought about it, not the way she did.

  A long breath pushed out of her like something had been lifted or something had been taken away, I couldn’t decide. She waited for me to talk.

  I said maybe we shouldn’t be in this relationship anymore.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “I am,” I said. “I think I am.”

  She began to cry and I reached out my hand to touch her sweater, but she hopped off the sofa and ran upstairs. I heard scraping and bumping noises, the hollow sound of a closet door, then the heavy bumps of her heels hammered back down to me.

  She handed me a big cardboard box. I recognized the markered goofy faces drawn all over the sides, the same goggly eyes and curled smiles. Dark capital letters warned PRIVATE PERSONAL MESSY OUTPOURINGS OF A NAKED SOUL! KEEP OUT!! I knew inside was every note I’d written her, probably every single one. Hundreds of them, sliding over each other as the box tilted in my hands. I never knew she was saving them all. It wasn’t as heavy as I would have guessed.

  “You have to take this,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You have to.” She sniffled.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to. I can’t have these anymore.”

  “I wrote them to you. These are for you.” We sat on the couch again, side by side. I set the box between my feet, opened the lid and saw all the notes. I noticed for the first time everything in Claire’s house was white. The carpet, the sectional sofa, the vertical blinds, the rugs, the coffee table, the frames on the walls, and then the note in my hand, the whole box of notes on the floor. She couldn’t look at me. I couldn’t stop looking at the carpet.

  After a few silent minutes, I leaned over and awkwardly hugged her because I wanted to leave. The sooner I was out of that quiet white house, the better. I stood and she picked up the box again and I told her I wasn’t taking the notes. She slumped down as I yanked the front door open. On the long sofa, she somehow looked smaller than she was. Her sweater was pulled down over her knees and she gripped a crumpled tissue. I wanted to go but I also didn’t want to leave her alone. If we drove around and listened to Solitude maybe she’d feel better. I told her I’d call her but she didn’t say anything back.

  On the passenger seat in my car was her note in the plastic bag, the one asking me to come here, the last one she’d ever write to me. Her words were so important, she couldn’t take her chances with the storm rolling around above us. Like she protected every note I wrote in her big box with the goofy faces standing guard. Every note was a different hour of the day when I loved her, or wrote to her that I did.

  Part of the reason I couldn’t take that box from her was taking the notes would mean I’d finally have to take responsibility for them. I knew all along I wasn’t being honest with Claire when I wrote to her I loved her or suggested names for the quadruplets she was convinced we’d have. Taking back the notes would be like taking back the feelings depicted on them, and they were always already hers. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel anything for Claire—I loved her very much—as my friend. Because I had such a hard time talking about my feelings, the notes were her only evidence of our relationship. She collected them all hoping the accumulation would equal the physical affection she desired from her thin, high-voiced boyfriend who borrowed her Phantom of the Opera soundtrack and memorized all the words.

  With her last note in my hand, I stared back at her front door and thought about her sitting there. I wished she didn’t have to be in that sad white house where everything looked perfect but nothing was. I remembered how one morning before school started, she and I sat together in a quiet hallway and she said, “I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have you.” I asked her what she meant. She opened her mouth almost immediately to answer but didn’t say anything. We sat mute until the bell rang a minute later, and I always wondered what her answer might have been.

  “Col
d cuts will take the paint off a car, if the sun is hot enough.” I’ve heard this somewhere, and just knowing it makes me sound as if I am capable of such a thing. The car windows are rolled down, Angie’s hair is flying all around her face like she’s underwater. Houses, cars, and lawns blur past us. We drive to Jon’s house where we hope Kevin will be, around a narrow curve, up a slow hill. We’re chanting “BE THERE! BE THERE!” with tight red faces. I’m bouncing the container of cherry bars on my lap, wet residue streaking the inside of the lid in sugary ridges. One more turn right, one left, and there’s the house, at the mouth of a dead-end court. Kevin’s car is there, as if we summoned it, as if we screamed, willed, and commanded it there. This is perfect. We can almost see his face when he trots out to his car after piling up the family’s mail in the kitchen and calling the dogs back inside, and there, across his windshield is the weirdest mess he’s ever seen. My grandma’s homemade cherry bars as vandalism. The stereo plays the fast chorus of The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” because it’s true.