Tell It to Naomi

by Daniel Ehrenhaft

  I glared at her.”I thought you said you didn’t know her name.”

  “I knew you’d never tell me the truth,” she said. “So I was testing you via telepathic polygraph.”

  “Well, you better not say anything,” I warned.

  Naomi opened her eyes and smiled again. “Come on, Dave. How can I say anything? I don’t even know her. Joel told me her name. Anyway, she’s a kid. She goes to high school.”

  She said kid as if it were synonymous with insect.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Just don’t say anything.”

  “Hey, man, I’m not the one who’s stalking her.”

  “I’m serious. I know you’ll talk to your butt-grabbing friend Joel, and he’ll say something. Just try not to be a blabbermouth about this one thing, okay? Can you do that?”

  Naomi sighed. “Joel hasn’t grabbed my butt in over four years,” she said. “And now that he’s a teacher, he’s Mr. Newbury to you. And who says blabbermouth?”

  Before Naomi could go any further, the phone rang.

  She dove for it. Her hip slammed into the table.

  “Ow!” she yelped.

  Normally I would have laughed. Not anymore. Now I felt bad. These phone freak-outs had become far too common. In the past two weeks alone, she had stubbed her toe, bruised her elbow, and banged her knee—all when racing to answer incoming calls. She still hadn’t heard back from the New Yorker about her latest story idea: an investigation of organized crime in the recycling industry. She was pretty good about pretending to be optimistic (“Oh, I’m sure I’ll get the gig any day now”), and even better at assuaging Mom and Aunt Ruth’s doubts (“Everything takes time, you guys”)—but her facade inevitably fell to pieces whenever the phone rang.

  “Hello?” she gasped.

  There was a brief pause. I looked at her, and then I looked at the floor. I didn’t want to make her self-conscious.

  She groaned.

  “It’s for you,” she mumbled, thrusting the phone toward me. “Cheese.”

  * * *

  My very first memory—I mean ever, as in all time—is of Greg “Cheese” Harrison standing in the foyer of our building refusing to wipe his nose.

  It was winter. We were both four. His family had just moved into apartment 2F. Mom, Aunt Ruth, and I were on our way outside to play in the snow, and he was on his way in. He stood next to his father, bundled tightly in a hat, scarf, and mittens. All I recall seeing of his face were two red nostrils. One was completely crusted and stopped up, like the toilets at Yankee Stadium. The other ran as freely as a waterfall.

  “Oh, you must be Mr. Harrison!” my aunt cried. “It’s so nice to meet you!”

  “So nice!” Mom added for good measure:

  “Hello,” said Mr. Harrison cautiously. He frowned at his son and shoved a tissue in his face. “Greg, wipe your nose,” he commanded.

  The kid didn’t respond. He started twirling in circles. His hands remained at his sides.

  As I hung shyly behind Mom and Aunt Ruth, bundled in my own bulky winter gear, I couldn’t help feeling jealous. For one thing, this kid had a dad. Also, Mr. Harrison immediately started talking about how Greg was an only child. That meant he never got wedgies or waited for the bathroom, or had a door slammed in his face. In other words, he lived in paradise. He was probably a huge brat. I remember hoping that I would never see him again. I also remember knowing that this wasn’t going to be an option. He lived two floors below us.

  Sure enough, after that first brief encounter Mom and Aunt Ruth kept up a nonstop rant about how nice it was going to be for me to have “a little buddy” in the building. We would probably end up being best friends forever, and wouldn’t that just be wonderful!

  They obviously didn’t believe this. They were just looking for an excuse to get me out of the apartment for a few hours a week. But much to my surprise (and their eventual horror), they were right.

  It started slowly at first: forced playtime in the park, awkward snack hours, that kind of thing. I learned that nobody called him Greg except his parents. He wouldn’t even answer to Greg. He answered only to Cheese—the nickname his uncle had given him after he’d downed twenty-four slices of Swiss in one sitting and then proceeded to vomit for two straight days. I learned that be melted action figures in the microwave to create grotesque deformities, men with feet for heads or arms growing out of their chests. He tossed water balloons out his window. He built huge towers by gluing all his crayons together, and he encouraged me to do the same. He wanted a dog. He rarely sat still.

  The more I learned, the more I liked.

  A short time later we started going to the same school—PS 19, right down the block. We journeyed as a two-man unit from first grade to eighth grade. Along the way we discovered (among other things) pro wrestling, Sour Patch Kids, meatball heroes at Famous Ray’s, the VH1 Classics network, those hole-in-the-wall CD shops on Mott Street, irony, The Simpsons, the Strokes, sneaking out of our building, girls, and that pro wrestling actually kind of sucked.

  Then, without warning, Cheese’s parents decided to send him to a private school in Greenwich Village.

  We were both infuriated.

  Everybody from PS 19 switched to Roosevelt in the ninth grade. Everybody. But there was nothing we could do. So three weeks before the beginning of freshman year, Cheese and I made a pact: we would treat high school like a job, the way adults treat work. You don’t have friends at work. (Mom and Aunt Ruth certainly never socialize with the other people at Weber’s.) You have colleagues, associates. You make polite chitchat with them during the day, you joke with them at the watercooler, and then you come home at night and hang out with your friends.

  We shook on it.

  All in all, the pact worked out pretty well—for me, at least. I found that it helped starting Roosevelt with a certain attitude, a philosophy. School was work. Fun was fun. I felt less lonely, even though I pretty much kept to myself.

  Mom and Aunt Ruth must have been worried about me, though, because they bought me an electric guitar and amp for Hanukkah last year. There was no explanation. I hadn’t asked for a guitar. I hadn’t even hinted for one. The combo probably cost more than what they had spent on me for every previous Hanukkah combined. But, hey, maybe I actually could be the next Jimi Hendrix. They even gave me the exact same kind of guitar he played at Woodstock, a white Fender Stratocaster.

  Unfortunately, in order to be a musician, I had to practice. I hated practicing. It hurt my fingers. But I did like hanging out with Cheese and trying to come up with band names. Cheese claimed that the Hanukkah gift was a sign: we needed to be rock stars. He was going to be the sexy, mercurial lead singer—like Julian Casablancas from the Strokes—and I was going to be the sullen, mysterious lead guitarist— like Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, before he got old and fat. Among our best names, or at least my favorites: Cajun Pimp Gumbo, House Of Stank, the Mighty Tighty Whities, Fart Simpson, the Breath Penalty, and the Beatles: Part Deux.

  We never had a rehearsal. And we never would. That’s what made it so perfect. We were a band in names only.

  True, not everything was perfect. A few things began to get on my nerves after Cheese switched to private school. Four, actually:

  1. He started to say “dude.”

  2. He, too, would occasionally accuse me of not talking the way other guys talked.

  3. He was making new friends, and I wasn’t.

  4. I was pretty sure he had the hots for my sister.

  In the end, though, none of that stuff really mattered all that much. You don’t stop shopping at your favorite bodega just because they move the candy dispensers to the rear. You simply make the extra effort to go get the Sour Patch Kids. But you always come back.

  * * *

  “Dude!” Cheese’s voice boomed out of the earpiece. “So how was your second day of sophomore year?”

  “Same old, same old,” I said.

  Naomi kept standing there after she handed me the phone, stari
ng right at me. I grimaced. She rolled her eyes and marched out of the kitchen.

  “Come on,” Cheese prodded. “I want details.”

  I waited until I heard the sound of Naomi’s bedroom door closing.

  “There aren’t any details,” I said. I sat down at the kitchen table. “It’s the same endless parade of baggy pants. The same aspiring wannabes, headed straight for the middle.”

  Cheese responded with an exaggerated sigh. “Jesus, Dave. You still sound like a weirdo. Why don’t you try talking like your fellow man? Just for once?”

  “I don’t think it would do any good.”

  There was a click. Somebody had picked up on another extension.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Look, I’m expecting a call. Can you two wrap this up?”

  It was Naomi, of course.

  “We’ve only been on the phone for four seconds,” I pointed out. “And we have call waiting, remember? My vocal cords do work. So if someone calls, I can just—”

  “What’s up, Naomi?” Cheese interrupted.

  “Nothing. Did Dave tell you about the hot new senior chick he wants to bang?”

  Cheese started cracking up.

  “That’s funny, Naomi,” I growled. My face was suddenly on fire.

  “Oh, please, Dave,” she said. “If you want to bang Celeste Macaroni, you shouldn’t stalk her. You should find out what her interests are. And if you discover that you share them, pursue them vigorously. Then talk to her.”

  “Aren’t you expecting a call right now?” I asked.

  Cheese snorted.”Dude, I can’t believe you’re stalking some senior chick,” he said. “This is a new low.”

  “I’d say that stalking is a nice word for it, Cheese,” Naomi stated gravely. Sarcasm dripped from her voice in great globs, like the snot from Cheese’s nose that day we first met. “Frankly, I’m a little concerned. I’m telling you this because as Dave’s friend, you have an obligation to help him. The massive shrine he built in Celeste Spaghetti’s honor is particularly troubling. And last night I found him sleeping next to a mannequin-sized voodoo doll. It looked just like her.”

  “Well, what do you expect?” Cheese replied, as if they’d already had this same conversation dozens of times. “He has to do the whole shrine-and-voodoo-doll thing. What else can he do? Win her over with his charm and rugged good looks?”

  “Bye, guys,” I said.

  “Wait!” Cheese yelled.

  Naomi hung up first.

  “Hello? Dave? You still there?”

  “Yes, Cheese, I’m still here.”

  “Your sister’s funny.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “She looks cool with her hair dyed black, too. I saw her the other day at—”

  “Goodbye, Cheese.” I hung up. If he wanted to continue the conversation, he could walk upstairs.

  I sat there for a moment at the kitchen table. Something my sister had said stuck in my brain, even though I knew she hadn’t been serious: “You should find out what her interests are. And If you discover that you share them, pursue them vigorously. Then talk to her.”

  Despite her brutal yet flowery language, the suggestion wasn’t all that ridiculous. Why shouldn’t I have some of the same interests as Celeste Fanucci? Maybe she liked Sour Patch Kids, too. Or coming up with silly band names. Or ragging on pro wrestling. The possibilities were infinite.

  But how to find out these interests—that was the question.

  I frowned. I already knew the answer. I would have to stalk her.

  I ended up stalking Celeste Fanucci for exactly two seconds.

  On some level it was a relief because I felt creepy even thinking about it. As I walked to school the next morning I kept trying to come up with more pleasant ways of expressing the verb stalk. There was spy, but that was pretty creepy. too. Eavesdrop didn’t do it for me, either. By the time I pushed through the heavy double doors of Roosevelt, I’d settled on lurk—as in, “to lurk near her, like that guy with the feather boa who used to lurk near our apartment building until the cops hauled him away.” It wasn’t much of an improvement.

  My plan was to spend as much time as possible in the vicinity of my locker, with the hopes of maybe spotting her again randomly, as I had the day before. Her locker was only about twenty feet down the hall from mine. It was just close enough to catch a couple of snippets of conversation that might clue me in to her elusive “interests.”

  It wouldn’t happen immediately; I knew that. I also knew that my plan was pathetic, if not criminal. But I tried not to dwell on the negatives. I tried to think about how patient I would be.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to be patient at all.

  The moment I rounded the corner, I practically ran into her. My feet screeched on the linoleum. I froze. I didn’t know what to do.

  She was wearing a frayed green dress with white polka dots. It had a homemade vibe. I imagined that her grandmother had stitched it. On Olga Romanoff it would have looked like a shower curtain. On Celeste it looked like a ball gown.

  She wasn’t alone. She was talking to—of all people—Joel Newbury.

  Joel’s back was turned to me. I had no problem recognizing him, though, even from behind. He still had the same messy brown curls (a bigger, fluffier version of the hair on his chin) and the same slumped posture. He wore the same lame tweed jacket, too.

  For the two seconds that I stood there like an idiot with my mouth hanging open, I wondered if he was stalking Celeste. Maybe it was an epidemic.

  Celeste caught my gaze and smiled.

  Joel glanced over his shoulder. “Well, well,” he said, turning to greet me. “If it isn’t young Master Rosen. What a coincidence.”

  Good Lord. He was sporting the air tie. That figured.

  In case you don’t know what the air tie is, it is unquestionably the worst fashion call ever to be made by a human being. And this is coming from somebody who normally doesn’t give a crap about fashion. I have to be provoked. That’s how bad it is.

  The air tie is not an actual article of clothing. It is the phenomenon that occurs when somebody wears a collared dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top—but with no tie. In Cheese’s words, “It is an affront to decent booty-shaking people everywhere.” Generally, you see it on much-too-serious guys who wish they were successful artists, published poets, European, or the former managers of New Wave bands from the eighties. (Or, sadly, all of the above.) In Joel Newbury’s case it made perfect sense.

  “You’ve grown,” Joel said.”To be a well-favored man is a gift of fortune.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” I said. I had no clue what he was talking about. He was probably quoting Shakespeare or something. I tried not to stare at Celeste.

  “Celeste, this is Dave Rosen,” Joel said. “He’s the one I mentioned earlier.”

  My stomach lurched. Naomi, you jerk. I had a sudden, vivid fantasy of strangling my sister. I would wring her scrawny neck until her eyes popped out of her head. This was not cool. No, not cool at all … because the only possible reason Joel could have had for mentioning me earlier was that Naomi had told him to tell Celeste that I had a crush on her.

  “Nice to meet you,” Celeste said. She extended a hand.

  “Uh … nice to meet you, too.” I recovered long enough to shake it.

  Her fingers were tiny and soft. Everything about her was tiny and soft.

  She and I were about the same height, I realized. In my thoughts she’d always towered over me by at least a few inches. And now that we were face to face, I also noticed that her eyes were very pale, sort of a translucent blue—and that if you looked long enough, you could detect a faint hint of gold, like the sky on a hazy fall morning.

  In other words (and yes, I know this sounds horribly clichéd, but it’s the truth), she was even more stunning and inaccessible-looking than I remembered.

  I let go of her hand and looked down at my sneakers.

  “… would be happ
y to answer any questions about journalism,” Joel was saying. Apparently he’d been talking the whole time. I hadn’t noticed.

  “Great!” Celeste exclaimed.

  Joel patted me on the shoulder. “I should be getting to class. Great to see you, Dave.”

  “You, too, Joel,” I lied.

  “I’m afraid that’s Mr. Newbury to you, now,” he said.

  I glanced up at him.

  He smiled, but his eyebrows were raised. He fixed me with a meaningful stare. He wasn’t joking.

  “Right,” I said. I kept my mouth shut after that. Odds were fairly good that if I opened it again, I would blurt out something offensive enough to get me suspended, or even expelled. I watched as be disappeared down the hall and into a classroom.

  “He seems like a pretty cool guy,” Celeste said.

  “You might think differently if he used to knead your sister’s ass in front of you.”

  Celeste giggled.

  Blood rushed to my face. Oops. In my appalled state I’d forgotten where I was—and with whom. My eyes fell back to my sneakers.

  “I guess there’s some history between you two,” she said. Her tone was dry, conspiratorial. She seemed to be hinting that she was already on my side. That didn’t stop me from blushing, though. If anything, it made me blush worse.

  “Well—uh—yeah—I mean not really,” I stammered. “It’s nothing. It’s just that Joel—I mean, Mr… (What? Butt-Squeeze? Air Tie?) … Joel went out with my sister, like, four years ago. For some reason they stayed friends after they broke up. Go figure.”

  Celeste laughed again. “I’ve never been able to figure that out,” she said.

  I tore my gaze away from the floor. “Huh?”

  “I’ve never been able to figure out how two people stay friends after a breakup. I used to get asked that all the time. I always had to make something up.”

  “I’m sorry … I’m not following.” I tried to smile.