“So, how do you practice?”
“Well, it’s not exactly practicing. It’s really hard to explain. You know how you can ride a bike one day and you don’t know how you do it? It’s like that.”
“Okay, so it’s like riding a bike,” I say.
“Once you get good at it, though, the big thing is actually going down to earth and being among everyone else.”
“What do you mean? Like in the movies where a person walks around and no one sees him?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “It’s so much fun! When you first learn how to do it, you want to spend weeks on earth, just hanging out. I once caught my parents having sex though; ugh, that was awful. I got right out of there. Let me tell you something, you know all those times you thought you were completely alone, sitting on the couch, picking your nose, and wiping it on the other side of the cushion?”
“No, I can’t say that I ever did that.”
“Yeah, sure you didn’t,” she deadpans. “Well, let’s just say that maybe someone was watching.”
“Oh, how awful,” I wince.
“Trust me, when you’re able to go back down to earth, stick to the big things: weddings, bar mitzvahs, presidential inaugurations, ” she says as she turns to the saleswoman. “I’ll take nine pairs of these shoes, all in purple.”
“Because, why not?” the salesperson says as she hands her the bag full of shoes and we all laugh.
“I’ll take these,” I say to the saleswoman, pointing to my Louboutin spike heels. “In fact, I think I’ll wear them out.”
“They feel like sneakers, don’t they?” the saleswoman asks.
“They do. They’re so comfortable!” I smile, jumping up and down in them.
I get home that night and throw my new stuff into my closet. Peaches is back from a long day of fetch, and we’re lying on my bed under the window. You can see every star from my bedroom window.
Just then, my phone rings. Let it be Adam.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Grandmom says. “How was lunch with Alice today?”
“Oh, it was fun. She’s nice. A little strange. She says hi, by the way.”
“She’s a sweet girl. A little odd, if I remember. I’m glad you got out today, Al. It was good for you.”
“Yeah,” I say, lying back in bed. “How was your day?”
“Oh, it was great. I called 411 and got so many numbers. It’s the most incredible thing. Who knew?”
“She’s been on that phone all day!” Grandpop shouts to me.
“Oh, Harry, go listen to one of your baseball games. Your grandfather is getting on my last nerve, Alex. I’ll be glad to see you tomorrow so we can gang up on him. I just conjured up your favorite kasha varnishkas.”
“I can’t wait. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Love you.”
“Okay, darling. Grandpop sends love, too.”
“What?” I hear him ask.
“You send love to Alex,” she tells him.
“I send her all the love in heaven,” he says.
I hang up, but then pick the phone back up and dial another number.
“Hi, Alice. I just wanted to say thanks for today.”
“No problem,” she says. “It was fun. I was actually going to call and see how you’re feeling.
“I’m good. I’m feeling a lot better.”
“Oh good. You know, I know what it’s like to die so young. It can be very lonely and confusing, and especially with everything that’s going on with you right now. Call if you ever just want to talk, okay?”
“I will,” I tell her. “By the way, if you’re not busy tomorrow night, I’m going to my grandparents’ house. I’m sure they’d love to see you.”
“Sure!” she says. “I’d love to. That’ll be fun.”
“Sounds great. See you tomorrow.”
I’m trying to rest my eyes and concentrate, like Alice told me to, but other thoughts crowd into my head
“Should have gotten five more racer-back tanks,” I think to myself.
No, concentrate, concentrate on Mom and Dad.
I keep picturing my parents over and over in my head.
“Are those spike heels too slutty?” I think to myself.
Concentrate.
Concentrate.
Mom.
Dad.
Concentrate.
“Peaches!” I shout angrily, giving her a little shove. “You’re snoring.”
Concentrate.
Concentrate.
In my mind, I’m outside of my parents’ room. They’re sleeping. I see their feet at the bottom of the bed. I try to get into the room, but I can’t seem to break through.
Concentrate.
I’m trying with all my mind. I see my mom’s foot sort of twitch.
Ugh, I can’t get in there.
I’m back in heaven. Peaches has shifted over to the other side of the bed.
I try it again.
Concentrate.
Concentrate.
It’s no use. I’ll try it again tomorrow, I think to myself as I roll over to try and get some sleep.
I lie there for a good half hour. My mind is still racing.
Darn it.
I’m sure I must have done something to change the world.
4
When I was fifteen, I asked my dad, "How do you know when you’re in love?”
He said, real angry too, "Is someone pressuring you to do something you don’t want to?”
“In what way?” I asked him.
“You tell me if some boy is bothering you,” he instructed sternly.
Truth was, I only wished some boy was bothering me.
See, when I was a teenager, I couldn’t get a guy if I drugged him (not that I would have, mind you, but I’m sure if I’d slipped a guy a roofie he still would have found the strength to kick me off of him).
Penelope got her first boyfriend when we were fifteen. She was still heavy, but she’d grown these enormous breasts and loved her body even more as a result of it. Every guy took notice. She ditched her wire frames for contacts. Her hair, usually stringy and unkempt, was still stringy and unkempt, but now that it was the eighties it somehow looked cool teased out with the strands she dyed pink and purple. For all the curves and cuteness that Pen gained from puberty, I lost both. Cookies and Pop-Tarts somehow found their way to my thighs. French fry grease seeped from my pores, creating a lunar landscape of zits and blackheads on my face. I made the tremendous mistake of getting a perm. Dana Stanbury and I both went to get perms together and hers was fantastic. I think the hairdresser kept my tonic in too long or something because the lustrous curls I’d begged for turned into nothing less than an Afro. While the other girls were out with their boyfriends, I was busy pouring conditioner into my hair or popping and mopping up zits (okay, mopping is an exaggeration, but it’s darn near the truth). In other words, puberty had turned me into a genuine American tragedy.
So when my father asked me if some boy was bothering me, I chose not to tell him that the only way they were bothering me was when they called me “pizza face.”
The girls felt sad for me, especially Pen.
“You don’t look that bad,” she lied as she helped me comb mayonnaise into my hair, a tip we’d picked up from some magazine. It was supposed to soften and define curls, but all it did was make me crave an egg salad sandwich.
“It’s kind of cool in a way,” Kerry Collins said, looking at my hair up close.
“You’re just not used to the look,” Olivia Wilson added. “Maybe you don’t look as bad as you think you do.”
“You know I do,” I cried.
“Okay, you do,” Pen said, “but you’re still my best friend no matter how bad you look.”
That’s Pen. She was always the best at giving backhanded compliments.
Somehow my mother couldn’t see it. “You’re gorgeous,” she told me. “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
But Dad saw me clearly. “She’s beginning to look like one o
f those sumo wrestlers, Maxine,” he said right in front of me one night as I grabbed a tub of chocolate ice cream out of the freezer.
That pissed me off. My father has never been a svelte man. He actually has the body for it though. My dad has the kind of body that looks like it’s built to be thin, but he’s had too many big lunches, so his stomach protrudes over his belt. Everything else is kind of thin, though, you know how that is? Anyway, I just looked fat. I took the ice cream and ate half the tub. That would show him.
Now, in addition to my body being bent out of shape, so were my hormones.
I would have gone out with any boy who asked me. I had this urge to make out and be kissed and hugged and be felt up and get to third base like you would not believe. I had never even touched a penis. The closest I’d come to seeing one was the pictures in my health class book all with herpes lesions on them. I had reached the stage parents call “boy crazy.” Unfortunately, there was not a boy in that world who wanted to be Alex crazy.
Now, as I said, along with the other girls, Pen got her first boyfriend, Andrew McAuliffe, when we were in the ninth grade. Andrew didn’t go to our school. He went to the Haverford School, an all-boys school (dream come true). He was about a foot shorter and about fifty pounds lighter than Pen, but that didn’t stop either one of them from falling in love. By the way she’d drag her arm over his shoulder and he’d set his hand on her large derriere, you could tell they didn’t care about their physical differences.
Still, Pen and Andrew were in love and their destiny seemed eternal. Andrew knew, though, that if he were dating Pen, he would have to deal with the fat, pimply third wheel that insisted on rolling behind them wherever they went. He was actually okay about it; sweet in fact. He might have felt sorry for me though; I don’t know. Either that or Pen might have really given it to him and told him that wherever she went, I went too.
I tagged along with them a lot on the weekends. Andrew was two years older, so he had a car. Hours were spent in the back of his Volkswagen Rabbit watching them hold hands in the front seat as Andrew drove. There was always some Saturday-night kegger, some kid on the Main Line who was throwing a party while his parents were out of town.
I hated keg parties. Everyone was crazy drunk, and since every kid was rich, these huge mansions were always trashed. Some ass kid would say in a grumbly cartoon voice, “Hey hey hey, it’s Fat Alex,” alluding to my new and what seemed permanent weight gain.
Still, there was nothing else to do on the weekends except go to these parties. To tell you the truth, I would have rather been at home, but I couldn’t shake that carpe-diem feeling that maybe this would be the night I’d get felt up, or at least kissed. It never was. Pen and Andrew and myself had the same MO every time. They would find some vacant bedroom and have sex, and I’d drift around the house, rolling from couple to couple, leaving a trail of mayo hair in my wake. Olivia Wilson, Dana Stanbury, and Kerry Collins (who all of course developed perfect postpubescent figures) were usually there, and I checked out who they were dating or trying to date at the time. The twins, Seth and Tom Rosso, and Greg Rice, in their Friends School varsity soccer jackets, would be doing bong hits in some corner of the house. Zach Mason and Joshua Roberts and Joshua’s little brother, Mike, sat playing quarters and drinking themselves into stupors until one of them finally threw up or passed out. And then there was fat, pimply, Afroed me who would end up (and very uncomfortably I might add, as that’s when I started wearing girdles) watching it all and hoping that some guy (not from my school, of course) would take me to one of the vacant rooms. I wasn’t ready for sex yet, but I wouldn’t have said no to third base.
I never had a curfew at this point. It didn’t matter anyway. I was always home at a reasonable hour because there was nothing else to do.
“We trust you,” Mom would say as she dabbed on some Chanel No. 5 before her own night out.
“Just don’t let any of those boys touch you,” Dad would warn, fastening his cuff link.
Plus, all my girlfriends had to be in by midnight on Saturday nights, so it wasn’t like I was dying to stay at the party after they all had to leave.
Then my parents told me they were going to New York for the whole weekend. This was not something uncommon per se. See, by this point my parents were always flying someplace or going somewhere and our housekeeper, Matilda, came and stayed. This time, though, they were leaving me alone.
“We trust you, Al,” my dad said. “You’re fifteen and you can take care of yourself.”
“We’re only a phone call away,” mom said.
“Can’t I go with you to New York?” I asked them.
“Now, what are you going to do when we’re at the gala? You’re going to sit alone in a hotel room all night? Go out with your friends, have fun,” Dad soothed. “You can take care of yourself here.”
“Penelope can stay over if you want,” Mom offered.
Any other kid would have been doing cartwheels to be left alone, but, for me, it had been forever since my parents and I had done something together. I wouldn’t have said that to them though. It would have sounded too sappy. Like the time I asked if we could go to Bookbinder’s on a Friday night, just the three of us.
“Come on, Alex, you know we have to go to this benefit tonight. A lot of important people are going to be there. Don’t you have any friends who want to do something with you? Where’s that Penelope?”
So, I held my tongue and called Pen, and I told her that the ’rents were going away and she was staying over. What did she say?
“Andrew and I call your parents’ room!”
Great. Now I was going to sit on my own couch, in my own living room, while I heard my parents’ bed creak.
So that Friday night came. I ordered two pizzas, one for Pen and Andrew and one for myself with extra cheese (because I was already corpulent and repulsive, how could it get any worse?). I rented Sixteen Candles on video for my own enjoyment. I had just combed a bottle of conditioner through my hair and put it in a shower cap when my phone rang.
“Hi,” Pen said, sounding worse than I’d ever heard her sound. “I think I got food poisoning from the steak sandwich at school today . . . Hold on, I have to throw up again.”
When she finally finished hacking, she said, “I can’t leave the toilet. Andrew said he would come over to keep you company.”
“I don’t want Andrew coming here alone,” I yelled at her.
“What else can I do?” she said. “You know you get scared of the uncle Morris death room when no one else is there.”
She had a point.
“I’ve never been alone with Andrew,” I complained. “What are we going to talk about?”
“Rent a movie or something.”
“I rented Sixteen Candles. Is he going to want to watch that?”
“He loves Sixteen Candles. He thinks he’s Jake Ryan.”
Twenty minutes later, Andrew was at my door. I didn’t care that I had the shower cap full of conditioner on my head and was in my flannel pajamas. As if I wasn’t beautiful enough, I had just popped a zit that was growing on the side of my nose.
“You’re bleeding,” he said when I opened the door.
I shrugged it off and let him in. What did it matter if I spruced myself up? Even if Andrew wasn’t Pen’s boyfriend, I wouldn’t be attracted to him.
First of all, Andrew was like my height. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, and maybe there’s a reason for it—you’ll have to let me know—but almost every guy on the Main Line is less than six feet. I analyzed this through the years whenever I was out of state, and it’s something I never saw anyplace else. I don’t mean to put anyone down when I say this. It’s just something I’ve noticed.
Anyway, Andrew was short. He had dirty blond hair; it was very thin even back then, so you knew he would lose it all someday. I ran into him years later when we were like twenty-eight and he was totally bald except for some hair on the sides.
He was a nice kid, tho
ugh, and he really liked Pen so I liked him. It was a real menschy thing he did, coming over to keep me company like he did.
Right when he got there, he called Pen. She was still hacking it up in the bathroom.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her,” I heard him say as I blotted some toothpaste onto my bleeding zit. “You just make sure you’re okay.”
Like I said, a really nice kid.
Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking: Andrew comes over and he sees through the plastic shower cap and the toothpaste on my face and the thirty extra pounds and we make out, right?
Sorry, that’s not what happened. You think I’m the kind of person who makes out with her best friend’s boyfriend? I’m trying to stay in seventh heaven, for crying out loud, not get sent to first!
What happened was, about twenty minutes after Andrew came over, we were still waiting for the pizzas and we were just starting to watch Sixteen Candles when my phone rang.
“Can Andrew go over to Babis Pharmacy and get me some Pepto?” Pen barely got out before hacking it up again.
I gave the phone to Andrew and tried to listen to his conversation as the sounds of Molly Ringwald’s cry, “Grandparents forgetting a birthday? They live for that shit,” blared on the television.
“Okay, I will. I’ll see you in a bit,” he said, hanging up the phone.
“I gotta go over to Babis to get Pen the Pepto, but she doesn’t want me to leave you here all alone. You can come with, or my brother is home from college and he could come over.”
I had never actually met Andrew’s brother, Bobby, before. Andrew had mentioned once or twice that he had a brother at Princeton, but that was it. I honestly don’t know why I said it was okay for Bobby to come over. Thing was, I didn’t feel like going over to Babis, and it was time to get the conditioner out of my hair. I hated being in my house alone. The place was so big. Every time the house made any kind of a sound I thought it was uncle Morris from beyond the grave. Actually, I just asked uncle Morris yesterday if it was him spooking the house and he said, “You think I had nothing better to do than spook my teenage niece?”
Anyway, I told Andrew to call his brother. Why Bobby was sitting at home waiting for his little brother to ask him to watch his girlfriend’s fat, pimply friend was beyond me, but when Andrew called him and asked if it was all right, Bobby said he’d be over in a half hour.
The Ten Best Days of My Life Page 10