Getting Over Jack Wagner (5 page)

On our final morning, I waited with Hannah and my duffel on the grassy, buggy hill by the dance shack, listening for our names to be called through a bullhorn when our parents arrived. Most Hawkers were milling around, hushed and weepy, like graduating seniors. My sister was one of these. I watched her swapping phone numbers, addresses, and long shuddering group hugs with girls she barely knew. Camilla always had this innate girlishness about her, a keen ability to hug and chat and gossip for hours on the phone. Years later, it would translate into a talent for baking the perfect pineapple ring and fitting into a wedding dress with no alterations.

Hannah's name was called before mine. “Hannah Devine, come on down!” yelled the not-at-all-funny Flo.

Hannah stood and shouldered her duffel, as our bunk gathered around to say good-bye. I watched her circle the crowd, returning the hugs people gave her. When she stopped in front of me, we didn't hug. We didn't have to.

“Call me tonight.” She flashed me the peace sign, and came on down the hill.

It was nearly three hours later that my mother arrived. By that time, all the other Hawkers were long gone. Flo had retired the bullhorn and sat on the porch of the camp office, fanning herself with a
Cosmo,
and glancing at us now and then with irritation. Camilla sat next to me, subdued. Gnats circled our heads. Mosquitoes sucked our ankles. Our proximity required that we fight, but we were too hot and too tired to manage more than a few handfuls of burnt grass tossed in the other's direction.

When Mom appeared at the bottom of the hill, she was alone. And I don't just mean alone in the literal sense. She had a quality of aloneness about her, the look of a woman cut off and wafting, lacking a point of reference. She wore a big, untucked T-shirt and old khaki shorts that made her look wide and bloated. Her blond hair looked flat, dull, its natural brown beginning to creep in at the roots.

My heart thudded in my chest, in the hollow of my throat. Our mother never looked like this. She was always in place, always presentable, always kempt. Her outside never revealed any traces of what was going on underneath. As she got closer, I saw her eyes were red and swollen.

“Where's Dad?” I asked, scrambling to my feet. I needed to locate him, to pin him down in the world, to know that he was in the ugly green chair sagging prophetically in the corner of our living room. But I already knew that he wasn't. “Is he at home? In the car? Where is he, Mom?”

Mom focused at a spot somewhere over our heads, the dance shack or the tennis court or the thin, hot, drifting clouds. It didn't matter. Camp Mohawk was another world, a place we'd left behind us years ago.

“Mom?” Camilla said, and I heard fear in her voice, too.

“Come on, girls. Let's go.”

Looking back, I believe it was on the ride home from Camp Mohawk, while my mother told us how our father hadn't come home from work on Friday, how he'd left no forwarding address, and how all of his jazz albums had disappeared with him, that the three of us began to solidify into the women we have become. My mother seemed to shrink inward, voice fading, knuckles whitening on the wheel. My sister appeared to grow a head taller, shoulders squaring, chin rising, voice taking on the crisp, purposeful ring of a business memo. I huddled in the backseat, knees drawn to my chin, watching the world from the other side of the window.

 

Within a week, my sister had found her Dad-substitute: her new boyfriend, Ivan. Ivan was long and shy, dressed in button-down browns and greens. He was running for student council president. Really, Ivan wasn't presidential material. He was a little too gangly, a little too bucktoothed, a little too eager to please. He never seemed convinced of anything, even the easy things—whether to sit or to stand, whether to kiss Camilla on the cheek or the lips (I was spying, naturally)—much less the issues plaguing the student body of York High.

But for Camilla, Ivan's campaign was a project she could throw herself into. It was something to occupy her hands and her mind, like a patchwork quilt or a suffering vegetable garden. Camilla and Ivan spent long hours making posters at our kitchen table:

Who Can? Ivan Can!

I've An Idea: How 'Bout Ivan?

They penned slogans on four hundred oversize buttons with permanent Magic Marker. If Ivan was being sloppy, Camilla grabbed the marker from his hand as he fumbled: “Is there anything
I
can do? Is there
anything
I can do?” Sometimes I could tell she was downstairs in the middle of the night by the squeak of a dying marker.

Ivan was a good person, which is probably why, had he won, he would have made a bad president. Every night when he arrived at our house, he came into the living room first to say hello to Mom.

“Good to see you, Mrs. Simon,” said Ivan, tall and awkward as a hat rack.

Invariably, Mom was glued to her own Dad-substitute: prime-time television. She peered up at Ivan for a long, slow moment, squinting under her matted bangs as if trying to figure out where she knew him from. It was at moments like these when I worried, briefly, that we would soon end up either pan-handlers or circus freaks.

Then Mom's face would crack a tentative smile. “Good to see you, too,” she would say, and turn back to the screen.

In general, Mom didn't have much contact with the public in the year after Dad/Lou left. But she hadn't completely lost her senses. Camilla and I were still fed and heated and laundered and bought the occasional pair of underwear or socks. Mom upped her hours to full-time at the doctor's office where she typed and filed and made pots of coffee. As soon as she got home the sweatpants and tube came on, a spasm of light and sound in the dim living room.

I have to admit, I understood Mom's TV attraction. The burst of energy, the endless menu of channels, the sensation that your life is not empty or lonely or repetitious when in fact it is all of those things. Mom favored the shows with happy endings: happy couples disembarking cruise ships, happy families frolicking in prairies. Preprime time, she was partial to the game shows, with their promise of sudden fortune or, at the very least, parting gifts.

In the afternoons, before she got home, I still watched
General Hospital.
Naturally, since my father disappeared my crush on Jack Wagner had grown only more intense. At the supermarket, I grabbed up every soap opera mag that had his face on the cover. I wrote out every lyric to “All I Need” in varying fonts and sizes. And on Saturday afternoons, as always, I headed to Hannah's.

“Going to Hannah's,” I informed Mom. “For the Club.”

No response.

“Probably staying for dinner.”

Still nothing.

“Might even sleep over.”

Finally, Mom looked at me. “Are you sure you're not imposing?” she would say, forehead knotting up. After all those years of criticizing us, her hard shell had collapsed like a tarp, exposing a mush of nerves underneath. Both parts of her personality derived from the same impulse—the need to look right, to act right, to not stray too far from the norm—but after my father left, what was once snapping and nitpicking was reduced to its embryonic state: worry.

I, however, had no patience for whatever my mother was going through. As far as I was concerned, my dad had gone away because she'd driven him away. “Yes, I'm sure. They
like
having me there,” I said, with an emphasis that seemed to miss her completely.

“Well, okay…” she drifted, hands restless in her lap. “When will you…” she began, but didn't finish, distracted by something on the TV screen. It appeared that, caught between husbands, my mother was unable to finish anything.

At Hannah's, interest in the ORSFC was rapidly fading. The others were getting more and more interested in real boys, less and less enthusiastic about the intimate details of Wang Chung. Cecilia stopped attending, giving us some bull-crap story about piano lessons. Katie came but brought her own agendas, which included teaching us how to give hickeys to our forearms. Even Hannah was getting preoccupied. She officially “like-liked” Eric Sommes, her partner in science lab, who had staged a one-man sit-in to protest dissecting earthworms (“Hell, no, they won't regrow!”).

Some weeks, I would get stubborn and try to keep our meetings focused, like they used to be. I reported the most revealing rock-star details I could dig up. Hannah and Katie waited politely until I was finished, but I could tell neither of them was really listening. They knew my father was gone, my mom was getting weird, my sister was dating that Ivan guy, and they should be really nice to me.

At night, when I couldn't sleep, I wrote letters to Jack. I propped a flashlight against my pillow (an unnecessary move, since Mom had stopped checking lights-out) but which made the letters feel more illicit, impassioned:

I scribbled until the pen hurt my hand, then drifted off to sleep with the flashlight glowing under my Garfield blanket, dreaming of my life at eighteen: a life of “careless whispers,” “first real six-strings,” and a boyfriend who would immortalize me in song—“Oh Sherrie” or “Sister Christian” or “Jessie's Girl”—then bust out of town with me on the back of his “broken wings.”

 

In retrospect, that Thursday night had a quality of doom about it. Maybe it was the fact that Halloween was in two weeks and I didn't have even a costume idea. Maybe it was the fact that Hannah had officially kissed Eric Sommes (who she described only as “kind of mushy”) and I officially had not. Maybe it was the fact that the student council election was the next day and Ivan was in our kitchen fumbling through his campaign speech while Camilla yelled things like “Enunciate!” and “Where's the eye contact?” and “Convince me, Ivan! Convince me!”

Whatever the reason, that night Mom agreed to let me watch
Entertainment Tonight.
It wasn't her first choice—she would have preferred
Wheel of Fortune,
with bubbly Vanna and good-natured Pat and ceramic wildlife for three hundred dollars—but tell me, what was not to love?
ET
had mansions. Fashions. Tropical vacations. California stars with California cars. It was a different world from the one we lived in, and that was why I liked it. Maybe it was something like the world my dad lived in, which I pictured revolving around a new chair, a better chair, maybe a bright chaise longue complete with a) umbrellas, b) tequilas, c) mystery women with d) mystery cats, or e) all of the above.

EXCLUSIVE BEHIND THE SCENES PHOTOS! the headline flashed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his face appear, then disappear, next to a smiling, pretty blond woman. My heart started pumping wildly. A NEW BEAUTY IN PORT CHARLES! NEXT…ON ET!

Cut to a coffee commercial. My stomach dipped and spun as coffee plinked happily from an automatic drip. Had it been him? Definitely not. It couldn't have been. It was another headline, a different headline, an exclusive-behind-the-scenes-something-else. I didn't breathe until
ET
was back on screen.

“On TV's hit daytime soap
General Hospital,
some guys can have
any
woman they want,” said the female voice-over, smooth as whipped cream. “And hunky Frisco Jones—played by
real
-life hunk Jack Wagner—is no exception. But when a blond beauty joins the gang in Port Charles this season, Frisco will see that one special lady is
all he needs…”

It was the kiss of death: the lyrical reference.

The next sixty seconds of my life felt like someone banging my head against a wall. A painful, mocking burst of a photo montage: blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, big white smiles, a quick pan of the
GH
set. And then—poof!—it all disappeared.

It happened so fast I wasn't sure it had happened at all.

But it had, of course. Jack Wagner had a new woman in his life. She was blond and pretty and perfect, of course. She would one day become his wife, of course. Of course, of course. It was a moment of raw, bare truth, the first in a lifetime of raw, bare truths about rock stars I'd wish I had never known. And for every one of them, from that moment on, there would be that same “of course” at the end of the sentence: a mixture of shock and expectation, disappointment and inevitability.

Within minutes, I was sobbing so hard I couldn't catch my breath. I felt Camilla hold a glass of juice to my lips, but I was crying too hard to drink it. Ivan kept repeating, “Is there anything
I
can do? Is there
anything
I can do?” When I felt my mother touch my shoulder, I shook her hand away. I ran upstairs, locked my door, ripped the posters from my walls, threw myself facedown on my bed and cried because I'd lost him.

A
fter deserting Karl and his lasagna, I feel too bad about what happened between us to sit down and start writing about it. Instead, I wander the one-room heat trap I call my apartment. I read CD titles. I pick through old mail and coupon flyers. I stare at the mess of magnetic words on the fridge: “Sublime dawn.” “Chocolate feather.” “Hard anarchy” (from Karl). I skim the scrawled lists I've hung beside them—“Movies to Rent,” “CDs to Buy,” “People to Get Back in Touch With”—and inventory my cabinets: boxes of carbohydrates, jar of tartar-control cat treats.

For a moment, I see the apartment the way an outsider would: lonely, neurotic, vitamin deficient. A litany of beige foods. A cat substituting for a child. A kitchen that stays clean (but not too clean) in fear of becoming its mother.

My apartment is on the second floor of a gray three-story row house in the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia. Most of Manayunk is made up of old skinny row houses squashed together on steep, winding, one-way, dead-end streets. Drink too much, then walk too fast, and the neighborhood can make you dizzy. The residents are a mix of big, thick-skinned families who haven't moved for ten generations sitting on their front stoops, chewing on cheesesteaks and cigarettes, and a new wave of twenty-somethings who rent group houses and flood the bars, coffee shops and art galleries on the newly revived Main Street.

My downstairs neighbor is your classic old-time Yunker: a sixtyish chain-smoker named Margaret with a raspy voice and a chihuahua who yaps at the sound of a light breeze. Her windows are crowded with garish suncatchers, angel statuettes, and this ominous pair of stickers: WELCOME JESUS and BEWARE OF DOG. By now, I've grown immune to the sounds and smells of Salem Ultras and
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire
seeping through my floorboards.

Until recently, my upstairs neighbors were a young couple: Chloe, a vegetarian sculptor, and Mark, an investment banker. Shockingly, they broke up. (“Fundamental differences,” Chloe spat, when I ran into her outside by the trash cans throwing away pottery shards.) My new neighbor I haven't met or even seen yet. I've heard him, though: pianist. Typical, new-wave Manayunk. Probably a closet case with no phone or friends or overhead lights.

I open a cabinet, rip open a pouch of chicken-flavored ramen and wander to the east corner/living room, crunching it raw. Outside it's drizzly and depressing, but that doesn't stop some neighborhood kids from playing stickball in the street. For bases, they've grabbed up some of the arrogant orange cones and frayed lawn chairs people line by the sidewalk to hold their parking spots.

I flick on the plastic fan in the window, pick up the phone, and dial Hannah. “I'm here,” I tell her machine. “Karl isn't. Call me.” To Andrew's machine I say only, “Hey, call me back,” trying to distill any desperation from my voice in case Kimberley happens to hear it. I wonder where my two best friends could possibly be on a rainy Sunday afternoon at 4:27. Everyone is home on Sunday afternoons at 4:27. That's the time when people watch sports and eat roast beef. The streets are empty, except for kids and orange cones, on Sunday afternoons at 4:27.

I put down the phone and roam my bookshelves, open
Ulysses
for the hundredth time, read one line, close it. I consider paying a few bills, just so I haven't completely lied to Karl about my plans for the afternoon (since it's pretty clear I'm not unwinding) but in the end, I don't pay or do anything. In the end, I reach for Leroy, my mean gray ball of a cat who on the rare occasion will sense my distress and show me affection, and flop down on my bed. Ramen and Leroy. Love's last resort.

I hate this part. The part between the middle and the end, between the conversation where you need to “unwind” (i.e., get him out of your sight for a while) and the conversation where you need to “take time” (i.e., probably never speak to him again). Between the moment when you know you will break up with him and the moment when you finally do break up with him. Because there is always that initial moment—the instant when your rock star does that one small but critical, spontaneous, no-going-back, split-second-of-a-thing that reveals, instantly but definitely, that you will not be spending the rest of your life with him. For example:

• a) the moment in bed when he asks you to “stroke his feet” (a direct quote)
  
• b) the moment on the beach when he's wearing a bikini bathing suit and/or tossing one of those obnoxious whistling beach toys
  
• c) the moment over dinner when he utters the phrase “crazy-ass chick” and
  
• d) is referring to you when he says it.
  

These are not big things, not like political preferences or religious beliefs or really bad haircuts. They are not as premeditated as all that. These are the moments that happen by instinct, not designed to score or convince or impress, and that's what makes them more alarming.

In my current situation, Karl's mother ferreting all over his face was “the moment,” although it's not really about what
she
did. It's the way
he
just accepted her doing it—didn't even seem to notice, in fact—as if being ferreted over by your mother is any twenty-seven-year-old male's natural state. My mind spirals into the future until I am suddenly a wife/mother and Karl is a husband/father and has a lapful of kids yanking at his big red beard while I remind them all to wash behind their ears. And, oh yeah, we have Hummels.

Now that “the moment” has occurred, of course, the question that poses itself next is: why keep dating him? Hannah would say these are the moments you have to talk about, to work through, to peel back the layers and take your relationship to the “next level.” (Wherever that is. South Jersey?) I say, once you've had “the moment,” there is no going back. The moment has been said, yelled, eaten, spit, stroked, whatever. It's out there.

Suddenly, from the apartment above, the thump of a piano chord reverbs through the ceiling. Leroy panics, gouges my thighs with his claws, hurls himself from my lap, and hunches on the floor like a lion on the alert.

“Leroy, chill.”

I sometimes talk to my animal. So?

“It's just our neighbor. Stay cool.”

Leroy doesn't unclench. His eyes dart around, paranoid, as if the music might manifest itself into a giant mouse at any moment. Unfortunately, my cat has inherited some of my lesser qualities: edginess and intimacy issues and a reluctance to exercise. I myself was jumping at The Piano Man the day he moved in, when Leroy and I sat clutching at each other on the couch, listening to the clumps and bangs and stricken tinkles as the movers hauled his piano through the narrow stairwell to the apartment upstairs.

Thankfully, The Piano Man isn't a bad musician. Today I recognize Chopin's “Minute Waltz” from my brief career as a music major at Wissahickon. I close my eyes and listen, trying to relax, trying to let the music put me to sleep and wash away my cares. I wonder briefly (and not for the first time) what The Piano Man looks like, then decide (not for the first time either) that he has ragged fingernails and hair growing out his ears.

When I've tried so hard to relax I've induced a headache, it's time to admit there's only one option left. I pick up the remote. I press the bright orange ON button. I let myself succumb to
Beverly Hills, 90210.

Ah, yes. Everything is as expected in Beverly Hills. Steve is cheating on a test. Valerie is cheating on a boyfriend. Dylan is brooding and Brandon is saving the world and Donna is touting her virginity while wearing skirts as big as Post-it notes. As if picking up the vibe of mass media that's swallowing me whole, Hannah returns my call.

“You're upset.”

“Yes.”

“It's Karl.”

“Yes.”

“You're watching TV.”

“So?”

“Stand up. Grab an umbrella. Meet me at the Garden.”

 

Generous Garden is an herbal tea shop in Center City. Hannah loves the Garden because it is serene and quiet and herbal. The Garden makes me self-conscious and tense, for the same reasons. I agree to meet her there because I am the needy and she is the needed. Only at 4
A.M.
can the needy choose the meeting place because a) few things are open at that hour besides Denny's, and b) the needed is too tired to care.

I take a near-empty train to 15th Street, then walk the last few blocks to the Garden. The streets of Philadelphia are pretty deserted on a drizzly summer Sunday; basically, it's me and the handful of other poor bastards who aren't at the Jersey Shore for the weekend. A guy and girl with pierced lips are arguing in front of Lo's Oriental Rugs. A grizzled guy in a Phillies cap is sitting on the curb, chomping a meatball sandwich that probably came from the cart on the corner: one of those mysterious metal boxes no bigger than my closet, yet capable of producing anything from scrambled eggs to pork roll within seconds from its suspicious, sizzling depths.

I pass the meatball guy, not caring how I look. Philly is a good city for people like me. People who like to feel inconspicuous. Who eat red meat. Who prefer to wear sweatpants with no makeup when they run to the drugstore. It's not a place that's overly fashion-conscious, health-conscious, PC-conscious, or even polite. It's a city where food is unabashedly bad for you. A city where people are what they are. If you don't like what they are, at least you're not kept guessing.

“Hey, sexy,” says the Meatball Man.

And another thing: compliments are not hard to come by. Granted, they don't come from the kind of men you want to meet, date, or even make direct eye contact with, but when your love life is a mess it's sometimes nice to get that moment (however quick and sort of creepy) of affirmation.

I veer gingerly away from Meatball, and two blocks later, arrive at Generous Garden. Hannah is waiting under the dripping awning. She's wearing a gauzy purple dress and an old-fashioned yellow slicker, even has the hood pulled up with no trace of embarrassment whatsoever. Hannah is fearless like that. I am wearing my standard comfort outfit: battered baseball cap, battered jeans, battered back-of-the-package “I Love Fig Newtons” T-shirt complete with Leroy's claw marks, and battered, thick-soled clogs. Clogs, I've found, are good for sadness; they are loud, heavy, sure of themselves. Clogs give sadness the impression of being anchored down.

Hannah gives me a hug and we duck inside out of the rain.

Like I said, the Garden is serene. Hidden behind the tapestries and African violets, the speakers tinkle Indian music or Arabian music or Enya or those simulation-rainforest tapes. Today, it's Gregorian chant (Music Theory again). At the front of the store, a glass counter is filled with what appear to be fatty pastries, but are actually lumps of honey, carob, and various grains and seeds and wheats. It's a rare bastion of health in a city whose claims to fame include cheesesteaks, cream cheese, and scrapple, a meat product that is literally gray. “Our food is non-violent,” smiles a cartoon cow by the register.

“A raspberry hibiscus tea,” Hannah says to the cashier. “Please.”

The cashier smiles. She is a waif. Pale, fat-free, lost in some kind of waistless frock. She's probably very in-touch-with-her-body. I've noticed that people who are in-touch-with-their-bodies often look like she does. Maybe they're so in-touch that they can't ever be fully well, always honing in on some ache or cramp or ailment. Maybe all the herbs are depriving them of some essential junk, and they'll soon discover Tastykakes's Krimpets really are the forgotten food group.

“Coffee,” I tell the waif, then add “black” for dramatic effect. She looks at me as if I've just asked her to go out back and slaughter a deer.

Hannah and I pay and make our way to a tiny, glass-topped table in a corner. Everyone in here is steeping tea leaves or reading books or writing in journals. No one speaks above a whisper. My clogs sound like gunshots.

Hannah sits down and spreads her equipment before her: pot, pump, cup, spoon, mash of tea leaves. She shrugs off the hood of her raincoat and her orange hair explodes, damper and frizzier than usual. I notice people notice her. This is not unusual. Hannah is the kind of person people stop to look at: thin, bright as a flag, with hair that flies out in all directions, pale skin with a smattering of freckles, cheeks in a perpetual blush. She is beautiful, but unaware that she's beautiful, which makes her all the more beautiful. In her presence, my rock-star boyfriends tend to clam up; they get rattled just being near someone so unrehearsed.

Hannah takes off her raincoat and drops her bag on the floor, a giant tapestry sack covered with patches of quilt and tiny mirrors. Then she begins the process of steeping her tea. She's not speaking, but I know her silence isn't lack of attention. She is waiting for me to start.

“God. I don't know,” I begin. This is my standard beginning. I take a gulp of coffee, scalding the roof of my mouth. It tastes awful. I hate black coffee. “It's just not working out, I guess.”

“Why?” Hannah says. “What did he do?”

“He didn't
do
anything.” This is my standard initially defensive response. Then I fall silent, brooding while Hannah pours her tea. It's childish, I know, but at this point it's not about maturity. It's about tradition.