“I’m sorry,” I said again. She flung my hand off and turned her face toward the wall.
Andy was still in the doorway. I looked at him, and he looked down, his face expressionless. Without a word, he put the heart back on my dresser, then turned and walked away. The three of us were silent until the door had closed behind him.
“Good work, Bethie,” said Marissa. “Way to ruin other people’s love lives.”
Bethie didn’t answer, didn’t even turn her head to look at us.
Slowly, feeling stunned and embarrassed and completely miserable, I took off my cute outfit and put on my pajamas. Without a word to Marissa, without even brushing my teeth, I climbed into my sleeping bag and turned toward the wall. I was shivering, with an ache in the pit of my stomach, too sad to cry. Whatever Andy and I had had, whatever had started between us, it was dead now. I wasn’t the girl he wanted . . . and I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself.
•••
I got to breakfast early the next morning and left my duffel bag by the door in the pile labeled “Beth Am.” Rabbi Silver had told us we needed to get everything out by nine, to make room for the incoming volleyball players. In the dining hall, Andy was sitting with his classmates, with his eyes on his plate, not looking at me, not looking at anyone. I sat between Marissa and Sarah Ackerman, not eating a bite, not saying a word. I’d put my hair up into a bun, the way I did around the house when no one I cared about would see me. My face was scrubbed, and I was wearing cuffed jeans and my single remaining clean T-shirt, a plain white one. That morning, when Bethie was in the bathroom, I’d taken my Walkman and my tapes and left them on her bed with a note that said, “I’m sorry.” I had no idea if she liked the kind of music I did, but they were all I had, and it was all that I could think to do.
When breakfast was over, we filed into the auditorium for the farewell session. There were speeches from various rabbis and priests and teachers about how we’d done great work, how giving back was important, and how we’d formed friendships that could last a lifetime. After the final “goodbye and Godspeed,” Andy was one of the first people to leave the auditorium. I jumped out of my seat, stepped over a few of my friends, and ran to catch him.
“Hey!”
He was walking toward the buses, moving fast, with his hands in his pockets and his head down. “Andy!” I reached for his hand, and he let me take it, but his fingers were cool and limp, and when I squeezed, he didn’t squeeze back.
“Can I . . .” I swallowed hard. “Will you talk to me?”
He let go of my hand and picked up the pace. “We’re supposed to be on our buses.”
“Please.” He kept walking. “Andy.” I grabbed his sleeve, like a little kid.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Marni Marmelstein singsonged as she walked by. I pulled Andy around a corner where no one could see us.
His face was serious; his dark eyes were sad. “I should get on my bus.”
“I need to say something.” I was desperate to defend myself, to not have him look at me that way, with disappointment, with disdain, like he didn’t want to know me anymore. “You don’t know Bethie. She’s awful. She walks around with that dumb smile on her face, and she smells bad, and she’s mean. She’s rude if you try to talk to her. It’s not like people haven’t tried to be nice to her, to be her friend. I’ve tried,” I said, which was technically true, even if the real truth was that the last time I’d extended any kindness to Bethie had been at my bat mitzvah, when my parents had insisted I invite her.
“What happened to her? What happened to make her that way?”
“I don’t know.” The truth was, I’d barely spared Bethie Botts much thought in all the years I’d known her, except to wonder how she could care so little about the things that worried me so much—how to look pretty, how to smell good, how to wear the right clothes, be friends with the right girls, never say anything or do anything that would mark you as different.
“She’s poor,” said Andy. His voice was low and toneless. “She doesn’t dress like you and your snotty friends because she can’t afford it.”
“I’m not snotty!” The words burst out of me. After all the years of pretending that I was the same as my classmates, here I was, desperate to claim my status as different. “You don’t know what I’m like!”
“I know what I see,” said Andy. I hung my head. I knew what he saw when he looked at me. A girl with designer jeans and fancy sneakers, a big house with a pool out back. A girl with her own bedroom, her own car and phone and phone number, a girl whose parents had told her they’d send her to whatever college she wanted to attend and whose grandmother had promised her a graduation trip to wherever she wanted to go. How did that look to a guy who’d gotten free lunch and wore secondhand clothes?
“I was awful last night. I know I was. But I’ve never done anything like that before. I just wanted my heart . . .” My voice caught.
Andy’s voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear it. “I thought you were different.”
I looked up at him, fist clenched, waiting until he met my eyes. “I am different. I’m the girl who missed six weeks of school for three years in a row because I was in the hospital, and when I came back I had to carry an oxygen tank around. I’m the girl who’s had so many operations that the anesthesiologist sends me a birthday card, and I still wake up with my mom standing over my bed and crying because she thinks . . . she thinks . . .” Words were spilling out of my mouth, unplanned and unstoppable. I’d never told anyone this, never talked about it, hardly even to myself. “I had a friend in the hospital once, her name was Alice, she was the only one who ever told me the truth about stuff, about what it’s like to be that sick, to get that close to dying, and then she died, she died, she died when I was eight, the time in the hospital when I met you, and she was the only one who understood and I never even got to say goodbye to her, so I know, I know what it’s like to feel . . .” I stopped, gasping, trying to catch my breath. Tears were sliding down my face, my nose was running, I was sure that I looked awful, but I didn’t care and I couldn’t stop. I wiped my eyes and lifted my head. “To feel like you’re the only one.”
He made a noise then, a sort of angry sigh, and closed his eyes. I saw his lashes resting on his cheeks, and his scalp peeking through his cropped curls. His hands were balled into fists, hanging at his sides, but he didn’t push me away when I hugged him.
“Andy,” I whispered. It was like his whole body was a fist, hard and unyielding. I pressed against him, pushing my chest against his chest, fitting my head beneath his chin, until I heard that same angry sigh, like he didn’t want to be near me but he couldn’t make me leave.
I kissed the spot underneath his ear, kissed the hollow at the base of his neck, kissed his cheek, and pressed my cheek against his. “Please,” I whispered, and he made a sound like a nail being pulled out of wood, and bent his head down and kissed me. His lips were cool at first, but I cradled the back of his head, holding him close, opening my mouth to let his tongue touch mine. He groaned again, this time more softly, squeezing me hard, pulling me up against him until my feet left the ground. “I wish,” he whispered in my ear, and I knew what he was wishing for—to turn back time, to have it be last night, to be in a room by ourselves, a room with a bed and a door that locked.
“I’ll come see you,” I promised. “I’ll write.”
I felt him nod as he held me.
“You have to write back,” I said. I was crying again, as overwhelmed with happiness and hope as I’d been with sorrow. “Real letters, okay? With your tiny little handwriting.”
He set me down on my feet. “You know that bear you gave me?” When I nodded, he said, “I’ve still got it. I kept it, every time we moved, everywhere we went.”
My heart felt like it was overflowing, like it would burst out of my chest.
“I love you,” I said, not caring that I’d said it first
. He kissed my lips, kissed my cheek, and then, so low that I could barely hear it, said, “I love you too.”
PART II
* * *
Somebody’s Baby
Rachel
1995
Even barefoot in her kitchen, in the loose-fitting clothes that she never wore out of the house, Nana looked stylish. Her fingernails were polished, her loose linen pants were crisp, and around her left wrist she wore a silver bracelet with a black pearl set in the center, a souvenir from a long-ago trip to Tahiti.
“I’m not saying no,” she told me from her perch on the step stool. “I’m saying that it’s a big decision. Your first love is important. It’s part of your story. The story you’ll tell yourself, the one you’ll tell about yourself, for the rest of your life.” Nana had just returned from her latest trip, a three-week sojourn on a slow-moving barge that took her from Bruges to Paris, with stops at castles and vineyards, tulip fields and the formal Keukenhof garden. She’d come back with painted wooden clogs and a snow-filled glass globe with a miniature windmill inside. I had a snow globe from every place she’d been, from every trip she’d taken since I was born.
“I know,” I said. My face felt hot and my throat was constricted. After two years of phone calls and letters, I couldn’t believe that there was a chance that Andy and I would finally see each other . . . and I was pretty sure of what would happen when we did. “He’s wonderful. I’ll introduce you. You’ll like him. I know you will.”
“Whether I like him isn’t what matters.” Her feet were bare, her toenails, as always, neatly shaped and painted. She was vain about her tiny, narrow feet with their high arches.
“His name is Andy,” I began.
“I know his name,” said Nana as she stretched to hang one of the densely patterned blue-and-white Delft plates on the wall above her stove. While she was barging, she’d had her kitchen redone. The floors were squares of creamy white marble, with matching marble countertops and a stainless-steel stove and refrigerator. It had sounded sterile and chilly when she’d described it—the white paint on the cabinets, all that gleaming metal—but there were touches of color that warmed the space. A seaglass-green vase on the table held a bunch of bright daffodils. Hanging on the walls were plates from her travels to Portugal and Italy and Greece, inlaid ceramics and glazed pottery.
“And you know where I met him, and you know we’ve been talking for two years.” Nana also knew that I had begged my parents to let me see him. I’d told them I would take a plane or a train, or even a bus, that I would pay for the trip with my own money, that if I stayed with Andy his mother would be there and nothing bad would happen. Finally, in utter desperation, I’d told them that they could take me to Philly themselves and chaperone us around the city, watching as we dutifully inspected the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall. They’d turned me down every time, no matter how insistently I’d asked, no matter how good I’d been. No matter how hard I’d worked to bring my math grade from a B to an A-minus, or that I was volunteering at the Playtime Project, where homeless children came to the JCC once a week to swim and play.
Senior year, I’d started campaigning for Andy to be my prom date. He had enough money to come down by bus and even stay in a hotel, but my parents refused that, too.
“There are plenty of nice boys right here in Clearview,” my mother would say from her seat at the dinner table, and my father, from his place at the head, would nod and say, “Helen’s right,” before reaching for the platter of chicken or grilled fish. Nana was my last chance, my only hope. Graduation was a month away and she was taking me on what she called the Grand Tour—Rome and Florence, Paris and London. It had been Andy’s suggestion that I ask if we could stop in Philadelphia first. It’s a big airport, he’d told me. Lots of international flights leave from here.
“He’s very mature,” I told Nana. “He’s got two jobs—a paper route in the morning, and then he works in a bowling alley three nights a week. He’s going to Oregon on a full athletic scholarship.” None of which impressed my parents. They cared about grades and SAT scores, not about sports. When I’d asked if I could apply to Oregon, they’d told me absolutely not on that front, too. “There are plenty of good schools on this side of the country,” said my mother, without adding that not only did she want me close to home, she also wanted me close to the doctors who’d been caring for me all my life. “Helen’s right,” my father would echo, from his spot at the card table in the corner, where he did crossword puzzles and Sudoku.
Just after my eighteenth birthday, I’d threatened to go to Philadelphia on my own. I had money, all of those birthday and bat mitzvah checks adding up to more than enough for plane tickets. I was legally an adult and there was nothing they could do to stop me.
My father had called my bluff. It was the first time I could ever remember him being angry at me, truly angry, not just annoyed. Annoyance made him raise his voice. Anger, I learned, made him speak quietly and deliberately. If you want to be independent and make your own choices, he had told me, then you can pay your way through college, too. Had he meant it? I wasn’t sure. But after our talk, I’d overheard him with my mother in the kitchen. She’d asked him something—I couldn’t hear the words, just her voice rising at the end of the sentence—and he’d said, in a maddeningly indulgent tone, puppy love. I’d been so angry that I’d had to dig my nails into the flesh of my palms.
Nimbly, Nana climbed off the stool, folded it up, put it away, then sat at the table, studying me. I held my breath, enduring her scrutiny, until she gave a single, brisk nod. “We can fly through Philadelphia.”
“Oh my God, thank you,” I said, and skipped around the table to hug her, excited and a little scared that, after all this time and all this trying, it was finally going to happen, and I was finally going to see him again.
•••
On the morning of our flight, I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m., so that I’d have an hour to do my hair and makeup before the car Nana had booked pulled into our driveway. The skies were a clear, cloudless blue, my suitcase was already waiting by the front door; all that was left was for me to pile my makeup and hot rollers and the Judy Blume novel that I’d bought for the plane—Smart Women, not one of her kids’ books—into my carry-on, the purple backpack I used for school. We were booked on an early-morning flight out of Miami International, which was full of people, mothers comforting crying babies, businessmen and flight attendants towing wheeled suitcases, and the slow-moving elderly, making their way tentatively through the security check. Dressed again in linen, black pants and a black jacket with a white top underneath, Nana moved through the airport with confidence, knowing exactly where to take our bags and who to tip, and how much. She had platinum and preferred status on all of the airlines, thanks to all the frequent-flier miles she’d amassed, so we’d be flying first class to Philadephia, then business class to London. In our seats at the front of the plane, Nana requested water and tomato juice, declined the flight attendant’s offer of a cheese omelette or fruit plate, but asked if we could both have napkins, silverware, and a plate. I watched as she unzipped her carry-on tote and removed a baguette, a small jar of honey, a chunk of soft cheese, and a bunch of green grapes.
“Never trust airline food,” she said, dividing the cheese and the bread. We ate, then Nana closed her eyes while I reread the last letter I’d received from Andy, the one I’d already folded and unfolded so many times that the paper had softened to the consistency of cotton.
Dear Rachel,
I can’t believe that I’m going to get to see you, after all this time. There’s so much I want you to see. I hope my neighborhood doesn’t scare you. I hope you get to meet my friend, Mr. Sills, who has heard so much about you that he says he feels like he knows you already.
I have missed you so much, for so long. All I want to do is hold you, but I think I should show you the city, too.
I will see you s
oon.
Andy.
I always signed my letters love. He usually just wrote his name. He was as stinting with that word as he was with the rest of them. My letters were long and detailed, almost like diary entries. I’d tell him what I did all day, and who had said what in English or chemistry or calculus, about the fight my brother was having with my parents over the car that he wanted that they refused to buy, and how I knew he was sneaking girls into the house when they were out and I was at school. I’d learned to expect just a handful of sentences from Andy, but I trusted that he loved me; that every Friday night he’d be on the phone to talk and to listen.
After we’d landed and collected our luggage, Nana led me to the cab line and directed the driver to the Rittenhouse Hotel, which overlooked a lush green park full of manicured shrubs and thickly leafed trees, fountains and sculptures and beds of flowers. The park was crisscrossed with stone paths, and the paths were lined with benches. Businessmen sat eating drippy sandwiches, with their ties tossed over their shoulders, and young mothers supervised their children as they dipped their hands in the water of a long, rectangular reflecting pool.
After we’d freshened up, Nana gave me a map of the city and told me her plans. She was meeting old friends for a late lunch, then accompanying them to see the Barnes collection, out on the Main Line. Then she’d return to the room for her afternoon siesta—a custom she strongly believed Americans should adopt—and at eight o’clock we’d have dinner in the hotel.
“I want you to be careful,” she told me, winding a scarf around her neck. “You’re a beautiful young lady, and you’re old enough to know your own mind, but you haven’t seen this boy in years. You might find that you don’t feel the same way about him that you did two summers ago.”
“I do,” I said . . . but the truth was, I’d wondered about that myself. What if he didn’t look good or smell good, the way he had in Atlanta? What if I looked at him and just saw an ordinary guy?
Who Do You Love Page 13