Frenemy of the People

by Nora Olsen

“Let’s go out on a date,” Clarissa said.

  I laughed. “Now?”

  “No, I’m asking you out on a future date.”

  “Okay,” I said. Ramone had never taken me out on an official date. I told myself to stop thinking about Ramone. I supposed it was only natural, but it had to stop. I wondered if Clarissa was comparing me to Slobberin’ Robert.

  “I can’t go out Friday night because I’m volunteering at this disco thing Desi goes to. You could come, but I don’t think that would be a great date. Let’s go to brunch on Saturday morning. You want to go to Cracker Barrel? The one in Fishkill? Their breakfast is amazing.”

  “Cracker Barrel? Are you joking?” I asked.

  “No. Why? What’s wrong with Cracker Barrel?”

  “They’re totally famous for discriminating against gays and lesbians. They used to officially fire people for being gay. Like, it said on the pink slip, Reason fired: she is gay.”

  “No way! I never heard that.”

  “They don’t do it anymore, not in the last few years. But they’re still one of the worst places for gay people to work. There’s a group that rates all the big companies, and Cracker Barrel comes in almost dead last.”

  “I had no idea.” She snuggled closer to me. “I feel bad. I have breakfast with my parents there all the time.”

  I kissed her on her nose. “You weren’t to know.” Clarissa seemed like such an alien creature to me. Why would anyone want to have breakfast at some hokey franchise anyway?

  “How about the Red Line Diner?” Clarissa suggested. “That’s right next to Cracker Barrel. We go there sometimes when Cracker Barrel is too crowded.”

  “It’s called the Red Line Diner? What the hell?”

  “And now what’s wrong with that?” Clarissa asked.

  “Redlining is when banks deny mortgages to black people based on race. Why would they call a restaurant that?”

  “I don’t want to think about mortgages anymore,” Clarissa said and kissed me again. “Turn off that part of your brain, please. This morning my dad told me he got a letter that said we had been accepted into a new payment program. So I think we’re okay. Which is good because my dad didn’t want to do any of the things you said, like go see a lawyer. Can you think of a restaurant you don’t object to where we can go on a date?”

  I wanted to pick a place Clarissa would like, similar to the places she had mentioned. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of left-wing ogre who hated everything. “Friendly’s?” I suggested, and she nodded.

  Being with Clarissa was like dating a Martian, because she was so different from me. But a beautiful Martian, who made me feel sparkly on the inside. It was amazing that I could actually communicate with Clarissa, connect with her even though we were so unlike each other. I had never felt this connected to Ramone, not even when we had been going out for months. First love had seemed like the best thing in the world, but maybe really second love was better.

  I wanted to kiss Clarissa more and really go at it, but I was worried about how she thought of me. I didn’t want to seem like a sex maniac. When I had been with Ramone, she had been the experienced one who took the lead, and I had been the enthusiastic go-along girl. Was I going to have to be the one who took the lead here?

  This feeling, though. Maybe I was in love with Clarissa. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about it. It would be foolhardy to say Maybe I’m in love with you. But I wanted to do something to commemorate this.

  I twisted off my evil-eye ring. It had a fat, glittering yellow stone in the center of the eye.

  “Here,” I said, handing it to Clarissa. “I want you to have this.”

  Clarissa laughed. “What? Are you proposing?” A flush was rising to her cheeks.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “This is an I-really-like-you ring. A we’ve-been-together-for-half-an-hour ring.”

  “Thank you,” Clarissa said, taking it. She slid it on her ring finger but it was a bit loose. I hadn’t realized until now what long, slender fingers Clarissa had. The ring looked warm against Clarissa’s tanned skin. I have a corpse-like pallor, which is hard to accessorize.

  “Maybe I should put it on a chain and wear it as a necklace,” Clarissa said.

  I knew necklaces were the kiss of death. “Just wear it, if you want,” I told her.

  Then I heard the front door slam.

  “Hello, Mrs. Ganz,” I heard Mrs. Álvaz saying loudly. My mom actually kept her maiden name but Mrs. Álvaz always called her Mrs. Ganz—perhaps Mrs. Álvaz called people by the wrong names purposely. Was Mrs. Álvaz trying to warn me that Mom was here?

  “Good thing we’re dressed,” I told Clarissa. “Come meet my mom.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, clattering down the stairs. My mom was wearing one of her usual impeccable outfits, but she looked slightly disheveled from air travel. “How was your trip? This is Clarissa.” I shouldn’t say girlfriend. We had only been together for half an hour. We hadn’t even been on our date yet.

  “Why aren’t you in school? Who is this girl?”

  “I just told you, her name is Clarissa.”

  “I have to go, anyway,” Clarissa said, edging for the door. “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Ganz.”

  “If that is your bicycle locked to my antique fencing, remove it immediately and never do that again,” my mom said. “If there are scratches on it, I’m going to call your parents and make them pay for the damage.”

  “You’ll have to get in line for that,” Clarissa said. “Sorry, though. I didn’t realize. I’ll call you later, Lexie.” She disappeared out the door faster than a magic trick. My mom can have that effect.

  “Lexie, this house is not a love shack,” my mom said. “You’re supposed to be in school. Your father and I have never given you a hard time about your lesbian lifestyle, but you cannot be doing that kind of thing in this house.”

  “We left school because we were upset about this boy being in a car accident,” I said. “He’s kind of a friend—”

  “Spare me your baloney,” my mom said.

  “This is the first day I’ve cut,” I protested. I tried not to sound whiny or defensive. My mom hated that. Just the facts, ma’am.

  “You want a medal for that? It’s still September. I’ve really been trying to work with you, Lexie. You claim you’re ready to go to college, and yet you pull this kind of garbage. I thought we were finally bonding when you expressed an interest in horseback riding. I just bought you a horse. And this is the thanks I get.”

  “You just bought me a horse?” I asked in disbelief. “While you were in Bermuda?” This was like the bedspread times a hundred.

  “My PA took care of it. But I see now you don’t really deserve it. You are such a disappointment to me.”

  My eyes filled with tears. I thought of my mom’s essay. Not every girl has Lexie’s exuberance, love of books, tenderheartedness toward animals, and sense of justice. Even though our values are different at times, we are able to bridge that gap through my pride in her unique gifts.

  I wanted to believe that Mom bought me lavish, inappropriate gifts to express the love she seemed unable to show any other way. But then my mom said stuff like this, and it was hard to keep up that fantasy. Maybe the problem really was me. I knew my mom would have been happier with me if I were more feminine, a better student, not a lesbian, more of a preppy girl. I felt fundamentally unlovable.

  I couldn’t be completely unlovable, though. Clarissa seemed to like me pretty well. Thinking about Clarissa took a little of the sting away from my mother’s comments.

  Mrs. Álvaz was still working somewhere in the house. She probably heard the whole argument. It was seriously embarrassing. I turned and fled to my room.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Clarissa

  The antique fence—who knew?—was not scratched. I wasn’t used to being treated like that. Did she talk to me like that because I was her daughter’s queer-as-a-three-dollar-bill girlfriend? In that case it was
prejudice. Or did she talk to everyone that way? In that case it was a bad personality. I understood Lexie so much better now that I had met her mom—why Lexie had such a chip on her shoulder and was obsessed with injustice.

  The front wheel of my bike had to go back on again. Luckily I still had Lexie’s little wrench. I got my bike back together and rode to the corner before I remembered the many calls to my phone. I checked it and turned the ringer back on. Seven missed calls from Mom, one from Dad. Two texts from each. The last one, from Mom, said, Where are you?

  “Oh crumbs,” I said. I pulled my bike over to the side of the street and called Mom.

  “Clarissa, where are you?” Mom said. “We came to school to get you but you’re not here.”

  “What’s going on?” I started to panic. I didn’t think I could take any more bad news.

  “No, where are you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I skipped out of school. Because of Slobberin’ Robert’s accident. I was really upset, and everyone at school was just making it worse.”

  “How many times do I have to ask you? Where are you?”

  I gave her my approximate coordinates.

  “Who are you with?”

  “I’m by myself now, but I was with Lexie before.”

  “And who is this Lexie?”

  “She’s, ah, my new girlfriend.”

  I couldn’t help feeling proud. I had a girlfriend! After less than three weeks of being bisexual, I was dating a beautiful and intelligent girl.

  A long silence.

  “We’re coming to pick you up. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “What’s going on?”

  But my mom had hung up.

  I took the wheel off my bike again. I waited and waited, just one block from Lexie’s, until my mom pulled up in the Beemer, with Desi in the shotgun seat. My mom popped the trunk and I loaded my bike into it.

  “They locked us out of our house,” Desi blurted out as soon as I got into the backseat. She sounded half-terrified, half-gleeful, the way she did when something awful but exciting had happened. She had once greeted me with Guess what? Aunt Patty died! in that same cheerful-seeming voice. But then later she had cried and cried. I did too, but not as much.

  “For real?” So my fantasy of coming home from school one day and living in a cardboard box wasn’t so crazy after all.

  “You weren’t at school, so I get the shotgun seat,” Desi said smugly.

  “Uh-huh. What happened, Mom?”

  “I went to Stop and Shop to pick up some stuff on sale,” Mom said. “And I stopped at the tack shop in Lagrangeville to see if they would buy any of your old riding gear. But they wouldn’t. Then I went home. And when I got there, the locks had been changed.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I guess a locksmith did it. There was a little box right next to the front door, the kind where you have to enter in a combination, and inside the box is a key.”

  “But there are, like, four entrances to our house.”

  “All changed,” my mom said. “You think I didn’t try? And at the front door, where the box was, there was a note saying the locks had been changed because the house was foreclosed.”

  “But it wasn’t,” I said. “You got that letter about the new payment plan.”

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on.” My mom sighed. “We’re going to stay at a hotel on Route 9 tonight while we figure this out.”

  I was momentarily overpowered by panic. The thought of spending money, any money, seemed insane when we were in so much debt, losing everything. Even buying Hostess Fruit Pies for lunch had been a struggle for me. I had been hoping Lexie would offer to pay for hers, but it hadn’t occurred to her. I didn’t have any faith my parents would do the sensible thing. And the banks were scamming us in the sneakiest, lowest possible way. It reminded me of an excerpt from my English book a few years ago, about a guy who was on trial but he didn’t even know what for and nothing made sense.

  “Couldn’t we just stay with a friend?” I said. “I’m sure one of Dad’s poker buddies would let us stay over. Or Mrs. Honeycutt from church. She’s always saying If you ever need anything, Sister Kirchendorfer, just call on me.”

  “Sometimes at church people say things they don’t really mean, Clarissa,” my mother said. Just the way her hands sat on the steering wheel had a dignity that was so timeworn and patient, I felt ashamed for doubting her. I felt a little calmer. No matter what happened, my mother’s personal integrity was something we could cling to, a lifeboat to buoy us up on a raging river.

  “I’d prefer to keep our troubles to ourselves for the time being,” my mom said. “Although it’s okay you told your friend. You should have someone to talk to. I know she meant well, with her recommendations. I’m just glad I was able to find you before you went home and, you know, saw for yourself. That we got locked out.” Her voice got wobbly. “It’s embarrassing enough the neighbors know what’s going on. When I was trying to get into the house, Mrs. Martinez came over and said she saw them changing the locks.”

  “Mom, what about Skippy?” I pictured him locked in the house or at the pound.

  “Skippy is staying at Doggy Day Care. I called them and they said they can keep him overnight.”

  More money. I pictured it all hemorrhaging away.

  “Do they know he eats phones and shoes?” I asked anxiously.

  “Of course they know,” she said. “Try to calm down.”

  We did some comparison shopping at the strip of hotels on Route 9. “Is that your best rate? Do you have any special offers?” Mom kept asking. At the Marriott Courtyard, they did. We got a double. Desi seemed happy, like we were on a vacation, but I thought underneath she was very anxious. Or maybe I was just projecting. Maybe I had enough anxiety for us both.

  Around six forty-five, Dad’s mechanic buddy dropped him off at the hotel. Desi was absorbed in an episode of Jessie while the rest of us sat on the other bed and talked. I was flattered and relieved they included me in their powwow. I was afraid I would have to pretend to watch Jessie and eavesdrop, or that my mom would send me out on an errand, or that my parents would just go talk secretly in the car.

  “Okay, here’s what happened,” Dad said without preamble. “I’ve been on the phone all day. I didn’t get a lick of work done for anyone. The locks were changed by an inspector who was hired by the bank. The inspector works for a company that does this, changes the locks on foreclosed houses, called De Spinola Incorporated. He thought the house was empty.”

  “What do you mean, empty? All our stuff is there,” I said.

  “Okay, unoccupied.”

  “Again I say, all our stuff is in there,” I said.

  “Apparently a lot of people leave their belongings behind when their house is foreclosed.”

  Mom sniffed. “Do they leave their house spotless with a chicken defrosting on the counter?”

  “Obviously, this inspector is a screwup and he made a bad call,” Dad said. “Not that I ever got the bank to admit to that. But when I talked to the repo department, they did say that we should have been served an actual eviction notice before this happened, and there’s no way they can change the locks if there’s people still living there. The people have to be evicted first.”

  It seemed like the people at the bank had no idea what was going on. You expect the bad guys to be really smart, but this seemed more like fighting a big invincible machine. Not just that the bank had no heart, but it was also irrational.

  “So then we talked about the letter we got about how we are now in a new payment program,” my father said. “The repo department said they had no knowledge of such a letter, and the imminent default department said they had no knowledge of us being locked out. They stonewalled me for a while, but I kept talking about calling my lawyer, and after a while they started to play ball.”

  “We have a lawyer?” I asked. Maybe I could talk to the lawyer and tell her what Lexie had said about fraud.

  “We do
n’t, but they don’t know that.”

  So clever, I thought. Why don’t we just hire an actual lawyer?

  “The upshot was this. They finally called and said locking us out had been an error.”

  “Yay!” I said, and Mom hugged me.

  He sighed heavily. “But they also said that enrolling us in the new payment program had also been an error.”

  “What?” my mom said. I had read in books about people going pale, and now I saw it in real life. My mom went white to the lips. I clutched my mom’s arm with an icy hand.

  “So we’re back in foreclosure, and the house can be placed for auction at an unspecified future time. The bank did say we can send them a package outlining our position.”

  I glanced over at Desi. She was rapt, although the program had given way from Jessie to Good Luck Charlie. Her lips were slightly parted in bliss as she stared at the screen. I was glad she wasn’t hearing this. But she had to know sometime. She should get some warning if our parents were going to take her away to live on an ostrich farm. She was imagining being crowned homecoming queen this fall, for Christ’s sake.

  “When are they letting us back in?” Mom asked.

  Her dad sighed. “Friday at the latest,” he said.

  “Friday! What’s the earliest?”

  “These people are very cagey. It’s hard to pin them down. I hope they’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “What are you going to tell Desi?” I asked, mouthing the name Desi so it wouldn’t alert her. “What does she know? When are you going to break it to her?”

  “That’s for your mother and me to worry about,” Dad said forcefully. “Now, young lady, I hear you gave your mother a second heart attack on top of her first heart attack when she found out you had played hooky from school.”

  “I wasn’t really playing hooky,” I said. “I attended the first half of the day. So actually I just cut a few classes.”

  “Oh, what am I, talking to Rhonda at imminent default again? Such a technicality. You left school grounds when you should have been in class. Have you ever done this before?”

  “No,” I said.