by Harry Mazer
And I’d remember when Julie and I had broken up, how she had insisted we couldn’t see each other. At the time I thought she was just being hard. But now I saw that when there were hard things to do, it was better to do them clean, once and for all.
“Telephone, George,” Lydia said.
“Thanks,” I said. It took a moment to strip off the rubber gloves.
“Hi, George.”
“Julie?” We hadn’t talked since the day I’d jumped out of her car.
“I’d like to talk to you. Can we meet?”
Was it the apartment house again? “What’s it about, Julie? Something we can talk about over the phone?” Would you believe I’d ever say that to Julie?
“I’d rather see you in person,” she said, and we agreed she’d meet me at Lydia’s after work.
I was cleaning up when Julie walked in. I took a few minutes to show her around, show off a little, and maybe put off our talk. Her father’s car was in the parking lot, but we walked over to a playground not far from Lydia’s. It had been a warm day, but it was cooling off now. I zipped up my jacket. We sat on the swings and I waited for her to speak.
“I’m getting nervous about school,” she said. “Am I really going to medical school? Sometimes I’m not even sure I’m interested in science.”
“Decisions are hard,” I said.
“You seem to have worked things out for yourself.”
“For now,” I said. I started talking about what I was doing and how someday I’d like to make fine furniture. I began to feel as if it were the old days when we talked about everything and never took a step without one another. And the thought crept in that she was here because she wanted to start again.
She swung and I swung along with her, going up and coming down, looking over at her, looking at the way her hair ran out behind as she rode forward and wrapped around her face as she went back. The swing, the two of us side by side, the hair in her face.… I imagined her reaching over and taking my hand.
George. Do you know what I’m thinking?
I have an idea, Julie, but why don’t you tell me?
I want to get back together with you, George.
Had I been waiting for Julie all these months? Was Rosemary just an interlude? Couldn’t waiting be a kind of doing? The way you waited when you wrestled. You always had the choice. Go after your opponent, take risks, and maybe get pinned fast, or wait for an opening, choose the moment—your moment.
I want to get back together with you, George.
When she said it, I’d be smiling. Everything I’d once dreamed of being handed to me. And then what? Would it be just the smile and no words? And not saying it, would I say everything? No, Julie. Not you. Not anymore.
“George.…” Julie brought the swing to a standstill. “I want to tell you something. I know what I said that day in the car was unfair, and I’m sorry. I was angry at your father. I shouldn’t have blamed you.”
“Is that what you came to tell me?”
“Yes. It’s been bothering me. And then I heard you moved out of your parents’ house and I started to think—was it because of what I said to you? You were always so close to your parents. I envied you your family. You never fought with them the way I did with mine. I hate to think I was the cause.…”
“Well, don’t think it.”
“My parents talk about you all the time.” She looked at me with those gray, quiet eyes, then she touched me lightly on the shoulder. “Are we still friends?”
I reached over and kissed her cheek. That was my answer.
Chapter 29
One Saturday night in April, I had my first visitors in a while. Lydia had left at five. I was eating the crusts of the pizza we had shared for lunch when there was a rap on the door. Not just a knock. Bang! Like someone trying to break in. I went for the baseball bat. “Who’s there?”
“George? It’s us.”
I flipped on the light. It was Troy and Chris. “I was just going to brain you guys with this bat.”
“I told you not to fool around,” Chris said to Troy. “You’re always barging into places.” She was wearing a leotard and sweatpants. They’d just come from a gymnastic meet in Englewood where Chris had competed.
“So where’s the food?” Troy said. He threw himself into a chair.
“Take it easy,” I said. “You’re going to break that.… I thought we’d buy food when we pick up Rosemary.” The four of us had gotten together in the city the week before and gone to a movie. Chris and Rosemary had liked each other right away. Troy and Rosemary, I wasn’t so sure about. They weren’t quite at swords’ point, but they did a lot of fencing.
Troy made do with a box of stale popcorn. “I knew you’d try to starve us.” When Rosemary called from the bus stop, we all went out to get her, and on the way back we bought chili beans, tacos, ice cream, and a Robert Redford pie. Really just chocolate pudding with whipped cream on a graham cracker crust. Then, at Lydia’s, we put the food out on a worktable. We had bought paper plates and cups, but we’d forgotten spoons and forks. I had one of each. Rosemary and I shared the fork and Chris and Troy shared the spoon.
Afterward, we sat around and talked about this and that, summer and college and where we were going. Chris was sitting on Troy’s lap. She had been offered a basketball scholarship at Maryland, and Miami was interested in her, too. “He,” she said, bouncing on Troy, “wants me to go to Cortland State, so we’ll be close.”
“Close to what?” I said.
“Binghamton,” Troy said. “I’m going up there after we graduate, and work with my father in his restaurant. I want to see what the restaurant business is like. I might move there permanently.”
“Binghamton?” I said. “Seriously?”
“It’s not the end of the world.”
“I thought the way you did, too, George,” Chris said. “Now I like it.”
“If things work out for my father and me,” Troy said, “we’ll enlarge the place, work a piano lounge into it.”
“Troy’ll play the piano,” Chris said.
“Also wash dishes and sweep the floor,” Troy said. “I’m going to learn the business, from my knees up. What about you, Big Rosie?”
“What about me, Troyless? I promised my mother I’d visit this summer. Other than that, I may be teaching dance in the park this summer.”
“How about school?” I said to Troy. “The restaurant business? You belong in college.”
“You sound like my mother, George. What about you and college? What are you doing here?”
“I’m not brilliant, like you.”
“Oh, cut the crap. I’m too lazy for school. Four more years—I’d shoot myself. Besides, how would I pay for it? And don’t tell me football scholarship. I’m not going to get myself crippled so I can make some big-shot alumni happy.”
The thing with Troy and his father took me by surprise. I thought he hardly knew his father. I’d seen Mr. Bonner only once in all the years I’d known Troy. It had always been Troy and his mother, and now, suddenly, it was Troy and his father. I couldn’t help thinking about my father and me, how close we used to be and how separate we were these days. Ever since I went to work for Lydia, things had gone downhill. It was strange the way things worked out. The things you thought would never change, changed. And things you never thought would happen, happened.
I never thought my father and I would quarrel or Julie and I would break up. I couldn’t imagine a Rosemary. I never dreamed of Troy in business with his father. And I would have laughed six months ago if you’d told me I wasn’t going to college. Maybe I shouldn’t even be too sure about that.
Rosemary stayed after Troy and Chris left. Alone, we stood in the dark and kissed. I reached up and held her face. “Is there a place for me to stay over?” she said.
I nodded. There were blankets in a blanket box and a hired man’s bed where Lydia put her little boy, Dante, down to sleep sometimes when she brought him over. But the hired man’s bed was to
o short for Rosemary and barely big enough for me. “Let’s try the cot together,” I said.
“We’ll never make it.”
“I’ll give it to you, and I’ll sleep on the floor.… Want to borrow a pair of my pajamas?” I gave her the clean pair and she put them on. I was putting mine on, too, and looking at her. We got on the bed together.
Rosemary held my hand. “I like Chris. She’s sweet.”
“Great bod.”
“True.”
“You noticed, too?”
“You think girls don’t? Troy seems obnoxious at first, but I like him. I want to hear him play sometime.”
“He’s good.”
We lay there holding hands and talking. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I kissed her. “I never thought I’d get over Julie.”
“But did you?”
“Didn’t I? I never thought I’d find someone else I’d like as much.”
“And did you?”
“Didn’t I …?” We kissed again. The kiss made me love her.
Later, when Rosemary was asleep, I pulled the mattress out of the hired man’s bed and threw it on the floor next to the cot. It was dark. The light from the front sent long shadows through the door. I lay there and thought about Rosemary and Julie and me, and Rosemary.…
Rosemary, who had come to me like a spirit. A voice, a jumble of words, an idea, a name, strings of words, words strung together across the face of a computer—and now here she was, warm and breathing. I listened for her breath. She was on her side, her lips parted. Mouth breathing, but so quietly that I could hardly hear it. I leaned close. I could feel her heat.
Chapter 30
I turned eighteen in May, May eleventh, to be exact. Eighteen years old. The big One-Eight. The end of high school in sight. We seniors were perched, as the principal told us, on the brink of the real world.
My mother was still talking about me coming home. “Your room is always there for you,” she said. But going home was the wrong way to go. The wrong direction. “I moved out,” I said to Rosemary, “and now I don’t know if I’m ever going to go back.”
The coolness between my father and me still bothered me. We talked, we were polite, but the old closeness was gone. Was this the way it was going to be from now on? Was that what growing up meant? With my mother, it was different. She was always sending me off with food or bringing care packages over to Lydia’s. It was as if she were saying, I’m not so crazy about what you’re doing, either, but you have your own life and I still love you.
From my father, though, I didn’t feel anything but disapproval. He didn’t like anything I was doing. And I couldn’t forget how he’d sold the apartment house. There was a deep rift between us. So it was a surprise when he called and asked me what I wanted for my birthday.
“Probably nothing.”
“You’re only eighteen once. What’s your wish?”
Yes, fairy godfather. What had Julie said? The property went for a million bucks? I’d never asked my father the details. I couldn’t even think about that much money. Or maybe I didn’t want to think about it, because it messed up my idea of myself and our family. We were ordinary people. What we had, we had because my parents had worked hard for it. Wasn’t that what they told me all the time I was growing up?
“What’s the silence mean?” my father said. “You don’t want anything? Okay, I was going to buy you a Ferrari.”
“Oh, God.”
“Don’t get on your high horse, my son. It’s just a little joke. Your mother and I want to do something for your birthday.”
“It’s just another day, Dad.”
“Maybe to you, but not to us.”
He was snappy with me, but I thought I heard disappointment in his voice. I felt I was letting him down again. “If you want to, you can get me some woodworking tools,” I said.
“You’re going to have to tell me what. I don’t know about your tools. I know scissors and combs.”
“A set of wood chisels would be nice.”
“Wood chisels!” my mother said. She was on the extension. “Is that a celebration? You can get tools anytime. I think we should have a party.”
“A birthday party, Mom? I stopped having birthday parties when I was fourteen.”
“Just a party in the family.”
“Does that mean my girlfriend can’t come?”
“You mean the one from New York?” my father said.
“Yes, Rosemary.”
“Of course, you should bring her,” my mother said.
There were six of us for the party. Joanne had invited her friend Ernie Paik. I got to choose where we ate, and Joanne and Ernie weren’t too thrilled about my choice. It was an Indian restaurant where I’d eaten lunch once with Lydia. It had just opened. It was a little place, a storefront restaurant, with a few tables and chairs, and plants in the window. I thought it would be a nice place to go, and also give the family that ran it a few customers.
My parents only went to Angelo’s or the Country Kitchen. At the Country Kitchen, they met their golfing pals. At Angelo’s, it was the mayor and all the village big shots. From the outside Angelo’s could have been a funeral home the way it was bricked up, with a solid door that didn’t invite you in. Inside, though, it was like a private club, all plush and quiet, and white tablecloths and pink carnations, and Mrs. Angelo was always there to say something pleasant.
When we got to the Indian restaurant the family that ran the place was sitting in back, and they all jumped up when we came in. One of them pushed two tables together for us by the window. Someone else brought us water and extra chairs, and they were ready to serve us.
My father looked around as if I’d brought him to a lemonade stand. He treated his chair like it was an orange crate, and then he put a folded napkin under the leg of the table to stop it from rocking. “George took us on a picnic,” he said to Rosemary.
The menu was a novelty for everyone but Rosemary, who’d been to Indian restaurants with her father. Joanne was polite and didn’t say anything, but Ernie kept asking which word meant hamburger and fries. He knew he was being funny, but still, I was relieved when the fried chicken came and they liked it. Everybody thought the puffy bread, the poori, was great.
All through the dinner, I was aware of my father at the other end of the table sitting between Rosemary and my mother. I’d catch my father looking at me sometimes, giving me a cool look, as if he was trying to figure out who I was exactly. If our eyes met, he’d turn to Rosemary or my mother. I had the sense that he was nervous, too, but not as much as I was. I could hardly eat.
You shouldn’t have left home. That’s what my father sitting at the other end of the table seemed to be saying to me. And in my head I fought back. Dad, did you stay home with your family? No, you told me yourself, you left when you were seventeen and went into the Navy. Your father didn’t want you to do that. Do you always do what’s right? You sit there above everyone else, making judgments, but you make mistakes. If that house belonged to me I wouldn’t have sold it. Not for a million bucks. Not in a million years.
Over dessert my mother raised her water glass and toasted my birthday. “To my son, George.” Everybody drank their water and she came around behind me and put her arms around me. “Say something, Leonard,” she said to my father. “Your son is eighteen years old.”
My father had a stingy little smile on his face as he looked around the table. “This is really nice,” he said, and then he paused, as if he didn’t know what to say next. “To my son, George, who is in charge of his life now.”
The same thing I’d been thinking, but it had a different quality coming from my father. Was he being sarcastic? Was he telling me that I was cut off from my family? That this was the way it was going to be from now on? I got so upset it was hard for me to even look at him.
“Happy birthday, brother.” Joanne reached over and smacked me on the back.
“Eighteen,” Ernie said, shaking his head. “I’m not looking forwa
rd to eighteen. Maybe if you could stay eighteen forever.”
“God forbid,” my father said. Everyone laughed, and then my father called for the check.
Outside, Joanne said, “Who wants ice cream?” The spicy food had made everyone thirsty, and they all went across the street. I lagged behind, waiting for my father.
I felt I had to say something to him. Thanks for the birthday party. Dad, you did the right thing, you gave me the party, you toasted me, you smiled. But you still don’t like what I’m doing. And you still haven’t said one real thing to me.
And then we’d have a fight.
My father came out of the restaurant. He looked tired. “Where’s everybody?”
“They went over for ice cream. You want some? I’ll get it for you.”
He patted his belly. “I don’t need it. How about you? You need some money?” He started pulling out his wallet. “I remember you always liked mint chip ice cream the best, the stuff that tastes like chewing gum.”
“Dad.…” He had money in his hand. “Dad.…”
Dad, let’s talk. It’s not money I want from you. You did something I don’t like and never will, but you’re still my father. And I did something you didn’t want me to do, but I’m still your son.
“Dad, is there anything you want to tell me?”
“You mean words of wisdom?” He buttoned his jacket, then brushed a piece of lint off the sleeve. “What could I tell you?”
The others were beginning to come back. And I thought, he’s too stiff to say anything real and I’m too dumb. It was too late, anyway. I couldn’t talk in front of everyone. I saw Rosemary and started across the street to meet her.
“George …” my father said. I turned. He was standing there, holding out the money. “You forgot this.”
I was in the middle of the street. There was no traffic, and I could have walked a long way in either direction. And I thought, if I just start walking, I might never see him again.
“Buy yourself something,” he said. “It’s your birthday money. You’ll never be eighteen again.”