by Paloma Meir
We had lost a lot of our L.A. crew by adding Arturo and his friends but the competition was worth it. We weren’t in the AYSO anymore. The L.A. kids could toughen up or leave. Most of them left.
We sat quietly, exhausted from running and tackling for the previous two hours. My body felt fit, strong like I could sprint to Canada. My mind was tired, burnt out. All the years of focus and working to the next step, the next question, balancing budgets and all the timetables.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and thought about how my Professors had warned me about pushing myself. They had wanted me to take a break before starting the PhD program. Days, months, five more years, the time blending away in my head as I counted the number of hours before I had my doctorate.
I turned to Danny to try to put words to my scrambled thoughts. I gave up and held the cold plastic cup to my head and wondered with a panic if the doctorate would be enough in the end or would I want more. Many of my Professors had multiple Masters Degrees. When did the studying end and the pure research begin?
“Danny.” A chill went through me with the thought that I really didn’t care about “the lights” or calculations or theorems involved with the birth of the Universe. “I think I’m going to head down to Peru with Arturo after graduation.”
I relaxed and released the tension of my insane thoughts about having lost interest in the driving force in my life. I needed a vacation that was all. I couldn’t remember ever really taking a break. I made time for my friends and sports but always as part of a schedule. Even over the Winter Break, I had worked at the SAT prep center, squeezing in Marianne every free moment when all I wanted to do was spend my days with her doing nothing at all.
“How long are you going for? Brendan is coming back for all of June. The three of us, good times buddy.” I held the cool cup against my sweaty forehead, and he followed my lead by putting his cup against his eye that looked to be bruised. “Firm hit, but I took him down in the end,” he laughed. “Merciless game dude.”
“I don’t know maybe two weeks.” I stopped myself from scheduling the time in my head and smiled feeling good. “Then two weeks with you and Brendan. What’s Zelda going to do when we’re out? Because no chicks allowed dude.” I said the last part in a pure bro speak accent.
“First fight. I haven’t talked to her in two weeks. I gave up and called her yesterday. Nothing.” He took the cup off of his eye and placed it on the table. “What? She’s home? That’s why she didn’t call me back.” He smiled and nodded his head up and down.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Laurel,” he gestured towards the counter. “Why is she wearing all of Zelda’s clothes? Where is she? She’s fucking home. I didn’t think I was going to make it dude.” He took his phone out of his pocket and yelled out to Laurel with one of his big face stretching smiles.
“I shouldn’t even talk to you after what you did to her.” She giggled as she practically ran to our table in Zelda’s yellow plaid skirt and twinset sweater. Zelda at 5.10 was a good four inches taller than Laurel. The outfit looked too long and a little tight on her. I hated that she was wearing Zelda’s pretend glasses. I hated how happy she was about spreading whatever bad news was going to come out of her mouth.
I watched as Danny’s genuine smile turned into a tight line across his face. I wanted to set Laurel straight. Danny was incapable of doing anything other than caring for Zelda.
“What? Where is she?” he asked.
“She didn’t tell you? That’s what you get for being so mean,” she giggled again and took a beeping phone out of Zelda’s black crocodile handbag. “Oh it’s you again.” she looked back up at him. “She gave us all of her things. I’m going over to AT&T to switch it over to me after lunch. The sound is broken on mine. I just got back an hour ago.”
“Where is she?” he asked again.
“Madrid. I had to come back early. My family’s going on safari in Tanzania. She was going to come back with me, but...” She put her hand on his because she was a horrible person. No friend of Zelda’s. “I’m sorry she didn’t tell you. She moved in with Professor Ortiz two days ago. It was such a surprise. She had the worst time, and now she’s staying.”
“What do you mean “the worst time” “Professor Ortiz”?” I asked because Danny had frozen up. Zelda hadn’t written me any letters, but she texted occasionally. She seemed really wrapped up in her program, no mention of any problems.
“You’re Serge aren’t you? She always talks about you, 'Serge goes to MIT'.” She mocked Zelda’s clear voice, which was also my sister’s and partially my mother’s. I managed to smile in a friendly way in spite of wanting to let her know about the basic humanity she lacked.
“Yes Serge, that’s me. Do you have her new number in Madrid?”
“Don’t Serge,” Danny mumbled.
“No. She disappeared a couple of days ago and came back dressed up like a flamenco dancer, gave us most of her things and left.”
For some reason that made Danny laugh.
“Flamenco dancer? Could you start from the beginning?” I put my hand on Danny’s shoulder and left it there.
“Well...” She glanced at Danny and seemed suddenly aware of how awful she was being. “It started the day we arrived. She was really happy, and then she had this idea... I wish we hadn’t done it now... She made up a contest for going out to the club. She gave us one hour to make our own dresses out of whatever we could find or already had. We all went back to our rooms. We had a four-bedroom suite. It was more like four small bedrooms with a common room. We shared a bathroom too. I guess that’s why Fawn and Tara started to hate her so much. She took the longest showers.”
Danny sat up straight and jerked my hand off of his shoulder.
“The three of us made idiotic dresses of garbage bags tied together with plastic wrap anything we could find lying around the dorm. Zelda came out of her room in a real dress. She had cut up her pink sweaters and sewn them together with gold thread.” She reached into her purse and took out a different phone. “Beautiful. I have it now. Look here’s the picture.”
Danny grabbed the phone out of her hand, and I leaned over his shoulder to see a picture of the four of them standing together in their dresses. Zelda’s was candy pink, strapless and very short, like a towel wrapped around her with gold thread holding it together almost like a bra; a goddess is what she looked like standing in her pink metallic stilettos. I didn’t think that it was the long showers that made the other two girls hate her.
“We went to the club.” She took the phone back from Danny, “I don’t know... They don’t have a lot of tall blondes in Spain... That must have been it...I don’t know how it started, but all of these men on the dance floor... They were drunk... They kept grabbing her, she pushed them off, and we helped her... Then the bouncers came and put her in a cab.”
“Good idea sending her to Madrid alone,” I muttered to Danny.
“Nobody hurt her, it was just chaotic, and a little frightening. She wouldn’t go out with us at night anymore.” She took a deep breath and released it, shaking her head, “She only went to her classes, and she was really obsessed with boiling and stretching cashmere. Fawn and Tara didn’t talk to her anymore. I still did... until she met Silviana. Silviana didn’t speak English, and Zelda doesn’t speak Spanish so they spoke French together. She was very aloof. I didn’t talk to her much either anymore.” She seemed embarrassed, which was good because I had really started to hate her.
“Then you called and broke up with her...”
“I didn’t call and break-up with her.”
“Didn’t you tell her not to call you anymore? That’s what she said.”
I took my phone out of my pocket and texted my sister asking for Zelda’s new number because nothing Laurel said made sense.
“I told her to call me when she got home.” His voiced cracked though his smile remained the same.
“I don’t see the difference,” she shrugge
d. “I tried to comfort her, but she kept crying. One of her friends called her, and she went to Paris...”
“Theodora,” he said.
“She didn’t say. She came back a week later, and told me she wanted to go back with me.” She paused, and I knew she wanted to hurt Danny. This was her way of being a friend to Zelda, of making amends. She was wrong, but she wasn’t the evilness I thought she was before.
“A few days ago, we were in our Spanish Literature class. We never paid attention. She would draw in her notebook. Fawn and I were whispering about how cute Professor Ortiz was even though he was old, at least forty. When the class was over Zelda looked up at him, and said she thought so too.” She smiled, a little cruelly, “She took off her glasses, put them on her desk, and walked across the classroom to him. I don’t know what she said, and I would really like to know because he was a mean teacher, but he held his hand out to her, and they left together. She came back two days later, packed up one of her bags, and told us we could have all of her other things because she was moving in with Professor Ortiz. I guess I can call him Paolo now that I’m home.” She stood up and smoothed down Zelda’s ill-fitting skirt. “Off to the AT&T store. Bye,” and she was gone.
“Let’s go get your car. I’ll drive you to the airport.”
“No. This is good. I don’t like it. It hurts.” He hit his chest with his fist, “but it’s good. I knew something like this would happen one day. We talked about it. She said I was wrong, but I never am.”
“You can go be “right” on the airplane to get her.” I stood up, “Come on, let’s go.”
“Sit down, I’m not done with my juice.” He held up the cup that unless you were going to go to a microscopic level was in fact empty. “When we were kids I used to worry and I don’t worry about anything buddy, that you had an edge over me, with her always at your house. Home court advantage, you know?"
I sat back down annoyed by his soul searching.
“No, I don’t know. I do know that while you’re wasting time talking, she’s with some old pervert who’s taking advantage of her.”
“Relax. If I can do it, you can do it. The way it is to us, isn’t the way it is to her. Look at her parents. Her dad’s twenty-two years older than her mom. The same with Theodora and Veronica’s families. There might even be thirty years difference with Theodora’s parents.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? You don’t know this professor. You don’t know anything about him. It’s unethical. In America you would lose your tenure if you pulled something like that. You would be fired, out of the profession.” I stood up again ready to hop in a cab, and go get her by myself. “I don’t care if you’re done with her. You owe her this. Go get her now.” I said “now” a little too loudly, causing the other diners to look over at us. “This is on you. She didn’t want to go. You bullied her. Fuck it. I’ll go get her.” I turned to walk away.
“Sit down, Serge.” The old Bostonian at the counter looked like she was about to throw us out. “She wouldn’t spend two minutes with someone who didn’t treat her well. You know that.” I stopped and considered his words. “I don’t want to yell this out, sit down.” I sat down and felt ridiculous for crossing my arms.
“As I was fucking saying... Her growing up at your house? She never had a boyfriend before me, nothing, not even a kiss. I never needed that. It surprised me. I used to joke to her that she would be thirty-five and run off with the gardener. I wasn’t joking.”
“So this is my fault for not having sex with... you met her on her fifteenth birthday? I’m not going to apologize for not having sex with a fourteen year old girl.”
“Is that what I said? I’m not talking about you or anyone having sex with her. She never even looked at anyone.” He stared down at his cup, rotating it around, “This is good for her. She’s not going to miss my graduation, worst case? She’s back by the end of summer. Let her get it out of her system.”
“You don’t know that. Do you hear yourself? Why would you even tell her not to call you until she came home? What the fuck is wrong with you? If you were so worried about her having “life experiences” why didn’t you just break up with her after high school like Brendon did with Cara, or see her on the breaks like I do with Marianne. You’re the one who trapped her in this “long term plan”. She would have been fine without it.”
“We’re still in our long term plan.” He looked up and his eyes were wet, but I didn’t care, “She’ll be back. She’s mine. She couldn’t love anyone else, not possible.” I’m sure I rolled my eyes, but he continued, “I wouldn’t have been okay without our plan. I don’t want to do this in here. Let’s go for a walk.” I followed him outside on to the street.
“You don’t know what it was like. Why did I want to live in the dorm? Animal style life. The bed, it’s a single. I lived better with her, than I did back at home with my family. Every night she would take out the oil and rub my back, and it hadn’t hurt in years. Our apartment? It was a home. I had the perfect life, and I knew it.” He looked up at their old apartment building as we crossed the road towards the park.
“My roommate? A nightmare. Why did I want one? I checked into a hotel last weekend to get a good night’s sleep.” He stopped to face me, “She was supposed to fly home for the Spring Break, and she changed it. She wanted me to fly out to her. I wasn’t going to do that. I was angry with her. I told her not to call me until she came home.”
“What does any of this change?”
“Nothing I’m telling you what happened. If I had known what was going on... If she had told me about what happened on their night out...”
“She didn’t want anyone to have to save her.”
“Yeah, I know that Serge. You think she doesn’t talk to me? Up until she went away, she told me everything.” He looked at me in a way that made me feel guilty.
“So you’re not going to get her? Call her?”
“No, and neither are you. It’s between the two of us. I’m going to go home, and find us a house. She’ll be back, and I’ll start UCLA. Everything will be back on track.”
I took a good look at my broken friend, not understanding his very modern idea of letting her go this way. His eyes were red, his strong upright posture tense. He looked like he would shatter from a gust of wind.
“This is how you want to do it? Fine, but don’t think I’m not going to check up on her with my sister, and if she’s not home by the time I get back from Peru, one of us is going to go get her. I’m not letting some old fuck Spaniard...”
“I get it but do me favor. I don’t want to hear about it. It’ll be enough when she gets back. She’s very descriptive, detailed.”
I looked down at my beeping phone and saw Zelda’s phone number my sister texted. I would have to add an international plan to my phone service before calling her. I didn’t see myself not calling her as Danny had wanted.
“You better go then because I’m calling Carolina right now,” I waved him away. “You were supposed to care of her,” I mumbled more as an afterthought.
“She’s not a bike I borrowed from you. She’s mine, always was, always will be.” He turned to walk away.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I said, because I was in fact sorry.
“We’re good, Serge.” He yelled out as he rounded the corner, not heading in the direction that would take him back to his campus or anywhere really.
…
I held my finger above Carolina’s name in the contacts as I walked into the park looking for a comfortable spot to sit down. I saw I was heading towards the frog pond. It reminded me of Veronica. I abruptly turned around and sat down on the walking path and pressed the call icon.
“Hi Serge did you call to talk to me? Did you miss me? Do you want to hear what I’ve been up to?” She could be so bad tempered. I almost hung up on her.
“No.” I was aware that was a rude answer, “I thought we had this covered. No more secrets. Why didn’t you let me know what was going on?”
“It’s not “anyone else”. She’s with a predatory...”
“Predatory? Last I heard he was hand feeding her oranges, reading her Spanish poetry, and having sex with her non-stop. She’s not being held against her will. She’s quite happy.”
“He’s twice her age. He is her professor. The balance of power is not in her court.”
“She’s twenty. He’s thirty-nine. The balance of power is definitely in her court,” she laughed, “Did you tell her that you would fly out and backpack around Europe with her? Why do you say things like that to her? She almost called you last week to do that. I told her you didn’t mean it. “Oh Zelda, what’s more radiant, you or the stars?” You say the stupidest things to her.”