“Fine,” I said.
He laughed and said, “Yeah, right.”
I concentrated on him then. He was Chinese, too, taller than my date, all of his features narrower. His hair wasn’t a comb job—there was definitely some spiking going on.
“Do you want to know the truth?” I asked. He said yes, and I told it to him. The whole story.
“Well,” he said when I was through, “all I can say is that right now my date is dancing with her boyfriend.” And he told me his story, about how he’d asked this girl as a friend, and then two weeks ago she’d started dating this guy he didn’t particularly like. She wasn’t going to bail on the prom plans, but of course the minute she got to the dance, she wanted to be with her real boyfriend. So he let her. He’d danced with a few of his friends who’d also wanted to abscond from their dates, and now he was here with me.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked.
And I said yes.
I went to the table and asked Andrew if he minded. He said no. I told him to watch my purse. And then I absconded.
The new guy couldn’t dance to save his life. I mean, he couldn’t move his feet and his arms at the same time. But still, he kept drawing me into the dance, including me. And then when the prom song was played, he asked me with the sweetest expression if I would stay. We didn’t do much more than sway there, his arms around me, my arms around him. But I found myself thinking,
It can’t be this easy.
When the fast dancing started again, I flailed along with him. The flower who fell from the wall.
He couldn’t dance, but he could make me laugh, and he could make me happy.
And he still makes me laugh. And he still makes me happy.
I have no idea what happened to Andrew Chang.
FLIRTING WITH WAITERS
I have always flirted with waiters. I think it was my parents who first encouraged this—when I was a little girl, they loved it when I acted cute for the waitstaff. Winsomeness made them proud. I know most parents do this, and I know that in some girls it wears off well before puberty sets in. But for me it never wore off. For me it’s still a thrill.
I did, however, narrow my scope. First I lost interest in the younger waitresses, the ones who took orders between chews of gum, who wanted the jobs so they could flirt with the boys who came in. They had no use for girls like me. Next to go were the older men—the waiters like butlers, the ones as old as the oldest wine on the wine list. Most were too grandfatherly, and the ones who weren’t grandfatherly were just wolves with flimsy teeth. While I never lost respect for older waitresses—I still love being called
darlin’
and
hon
—I knew I could never be anything more than a sob sister with them, our intimacy limited to knowing looks, pats on the shoulder, and comfort food.
That left the boys, the guys, the young waiters and their marvelous eyes, their hair grown long, their nonchalant way of pleasing, their rebellious asides, their erogenous hands, their clean white shirts and black ties, often a little askew. I knew early on that resistance wouldn’t work. I was destined to flirt with these waiters.
Let me be clear here—it wasn’t sex, or even love, that I was after. Before I was twelve, I didn’t figure there was anything more exciting than a spark of recognition, a moment of reciprocal attention.
Then came the pizza boy.
He was not technically a waiter, at least not at first. He drove a green VW—
his own car
—and when he was working he’d put a little sign on the top that said
LA ROTA PIZZERIA
.
He was, in my twelve-year-old eyes, a dream on legs. Lithe, fair-skinned, with hair that fell in a curtain over his face. His name was Seth and I could think of no better name.
My parents both worked. Sometimes they wouldn’t make it home for dinner, especially once I was old enough to take care of myself. (I am an only child.) That year no words were more beautiful to me than
Take some money from the drawer and call for something.
Seth’s shift ended at eight, so I would run to the phone as early as possible to place my order. Sometimes my friend Bev would come over to watch as Seth walked the fourteen steps up to my door, rang the bell, and talked to me like an adult for the minute or two it took to receive the pizza and pay him for it. I always ordered the same thing: one small pizza, half mushroom and half plain. After a few visits he noticed this, and when he handed over the pizza he would call it
the usual.
I thought this was our own private joke, like the ones couples in high school had.
I did not have the courage to flirt with him yet. Not at twelve, my period year, with my breasts not catching up as much as I thought they should and my body sensitive to every change of wind. It was enough for me to admire. It was enough for me to have Seth come to
my house
in
his own car
and say “the usual” with a smile. (Dimples!) I always tipped really well, and would have done so even if it had been my own money.
Then one day I called and a girl came. She didn’t know my usual, and since she was a girl—a
high school girl
—I didn’t dare ask about Seth. What if she was somehow responsible for his absence? It was Bev who broke the news to me two nights later: she and her dad had gone to La Rota to eat in, and there was Seth…doing table service. I knew I had to take action. If he would not come to me, I would go to him.
Bev was a more-than-willing accomplice. (Luckily I had announced my crush first, so I had dibs.) After school—that station between Seth sightings—we would head over to the pizzeria. We had to take a little time, since Seth wouldn’t come to work until his lacrosse practice was over. If there was a game, we’d dare to hit the stands and watch, careful to sit in the family rows, safe from the girlfriends. I wondered which girlfriend was Seth’s (I was jaded enough to know he was bound to have one). To my extreme distress, it ended up being the delivery girl—I knew her name was Sheryl because she had it stitched on her varsity soccer jacket.
At first it was strange—almost a shock—to see Seth in his red-vested uniform at the restaurant. Then I adapted it into my admiration: If he could look hot in a red-and-white striped shirt—an ironed barbershop pole—he could look hot in just about anything.
If you asked me now what the high point of my childhood was, it wouldn’t be my Bat Mitzvah or my time at summer camp or any cherished moment I spent with my grandmother or a horse. No, it would be the first time I slid into a seat at La Rota and Seth came over, order pad in hand. Smiling at me, he asked, “The usual?”
I used up most of my allowance on small pizzas and Diet Cokes. I no longer dressed for school—I dressed for
after
school. My parents worried that I had an eating disorder because I ate so little at dinner. I couldn’t tell them that I’d just had a pizza a couple of hours before, so instead I told them I was a vegetarian, ate lighter dinners, and sacrificed lunch when I felt I could.
Second highlight of my childhood: When Seth asked my name. Granted, he asked Bev’s name, too (I still couldn’t go to the pizza place alone; that was too weird). But Bev couldn’t look up when he talked to her, and I could. This, to me, was the beginning of flirting.
It would have been paradise if Sheryl hadn’t been around, coming in after each delivery, waiting for a noisy welcome-back kiss. (She was the only one making a noise, I noted.) She stopped wearing her varsity jacket and starting wearing his. I couldn’t see what she gave him in return.
After a couple of months passed, he would sometimes sit down with us, ask us which teachers we had, give us some advice on making it through junior high. (Sheryl was never around for this.) One time he asked me (
not
Bev) if I had a boyfriend, and I thought I was going to die right there. It had never, ever occurred to me that he would ask this question. I was dumbstruck. If I said no, I’d sound like a loser who couldn’t even manage to have a boyfriend in eighth grade. If I said yes, I’d be…unavailable. So I did the stupidest thing imaginable. I said
maybe.
And it worked. Seth smiled and said, “How
mysterious.
”
Something inside me—the woman I would one day become—knew to smile back. Mysteriously.
The true hardships came in March. Sheryl started wearing a pretty necklace that could’ve possibly been given to her by Seth. Bev had play practice three times a week after school. Hal, the owner of La Rota, starting hassling Seth about which college he’d choose. And my mother got off work early one Thursday, looked into La Rota’s window on her way to a manicure, and saw Bev and me eating a greasy slice an hour before I was supposed to be home for dinner.
My mother’s discovery was the most pressing problem—burgeoning flirt though I was, I knew I didn’t have the courage to rebel if my parents forbade me to get pizza in the afternoon. Under no circumstances could I tell my mother what Bev and I had really been doing there, so I searched for the easiest available lie and blamed it all on Bev’s parents’ divorce. Bev, I said, was having a hard time. She was feeling very vulnerable and didn’t want to eat alone. Her mother and father meant well, but sometimes they would have to work late (I knew to tread carefully here) and Bev had been skipping dinner instead of eating in her empty house. So the afternoon pizza was my mission of mercy. My mother, who knew enough about her divorced friends to know this was plausible, told me I had done the right thing, and paid me back for that Thursday’s excursion.
Sheryl decided to go to Florida State and then Seth decided to go to Northwestern, which really (it was so clear) pissed her off. He was free now—into college, second-semester senior (which, from what I could tell, was like being in kindergarten all over again, for all the responsibility he had). But he didn’t look happy. And he didn’t look
I’m-going-to-miss-Sheryl-so-much
sad. Something sadder than that.
He didn’t stop sitting at my table, even on those days when Bev was busy and it was just him and me and a slowly sipped soda. By May he was asking me which teachers I’d have next year, even though I didn’t know yet. With other customers, he always seemed to be searching for something to say. Sheryl would still come in and they’d still kiss, but like me with my half-mushroom, half-plain pizza—
the usual
—Seth seemed to have grown tired of it.
I became a little more forthcoming. I complimented him on his shirts, which were now branching out from the red and white stripes. I even went so far as to say one of them really brought out the green of his eyes. He said thank you but didn’t take the compliment with him when he left. I could tell. I congratulated him when a lacrosse game went well, and he seemed genuinely touched that I’d been in the stands. He started slipping me free Diet Cokes. I left him drawings folded in napkins.
My mood about the whole thing swung wildly. Sometimes I’d think I was just this eighth-grade pain in the ass, this little sister, this
pest.
But then I’d be talking to Bev and we’d have it all planned out. We’d get Seth to break up with Sheryl. He’d take all of college to recover from it. If he brought home a girlfriend from Northwestern, we’d break them up, too. After college, when he moved back to our town, his heartbreak would be old enough to have healed. I would be a second-semester senior. He’d see me and realize I’d always been there for him, that I was everything he’d been looking for in all of the others, that I was his true chance at love.
Bev invited him to her play, but he couldn’t make it. I showed him my ninth-grade schedule when it came, and he gave me all the dirt. Lacrosse season was now over. Soon school would be over, too, and we’d be in that magic hour between classes and summer. Hal announced that he was throwing Seth a graduation party, and seemed pleased when Seth invited us. We were happy beyond words. We had no idea what we’d wear, but we both knew it had to be something new.
Then, a week before graduation, there was the big fight. Sheryl screeched into the parking lot, slammed the door, pushed her way into the dining room, and laid right into Seth. If Hal had been around, he would have stopped it with a look. But he was nowhere to be seen—he’d left Seth in charge—and so Sheryl was unopposed, yelling about something small—I think it was prom pictures—and making it really big. With an eye to the customers, Seth told her to quiet down. Big mistake. Now she was raging about how she
would not be quiet
because she knew
what was at stake.
Seth just stood there, helpless. Finally she wore herself out and slammed back to her car. Seth returned to work. I wanted to shoot a look at Bev, but she was out shopping with her mother. I was on my own. I finished my soda and stayed where I was. I looked at Seth until I caught his eye. When everything seemed calm, he came and sat down.
For the first time in my life as a flirt—as something more than just a girl—I found the words. They didn’t simply appear. I reasoned them out. I spoke them. Because they were true, and I didn’t need anything more than that. “She doesn’t deserve you,” I said, and before he could dispute it, I continued. “She takes and takes and takes, but she doesn’t take the right things. And she doesn’t give the right things back. You’re going away now. You don’t need her. You probably never needed her. She’s going to make it hell for you, but it’s over. You know that. Free yourself.”
He looked at me like I was some kind of oracle. In the best of all worlds, it would’ve been a look of love, an understanding that I was the one, I was it. But it wasn’t that. Instead it was something almost as sweet—that mix of recognition and appreciation. That gift of worth.
A party of eight came in the door, the bell ringing their arrival. Seth didn’t say anything. He just stood up and went to seat them. He looked back at me once before he got their menus. Taking me in, or at least my words. I almost waved.
I don’t know what he said to her. I like to think it was
Even Rebecca, the girl at the pizza place, knows you’re not right for me.
Whatever the case, by the time graduation arrived, Seth’s parents and Sheryl’s parents were talking to one another but Sheryl and Seth weren’t. I was lucky—it didn’t rain that year, so graduation was on the football field and I got to be there. When Seth’s name was called, Bev and I cheered at the top of our lungs. We weren’t the only ones, so maybe he heard us and maybe he didn’t. What was important was that he could have.
Bev and I ran home and changed. Our parents didn’t know
what
to make of the situation, but they went along nonetheless. I was wearing a blue dress from Express, the hem just above my knee, the collar a sailor cut. Bev, after buying many runner-up outfits, ended up wearing her favorite pink sweater set and white pants with new flowered sandals. Seth gave us each a hug when we arrived, then went to talk to his relatives. We were stranded—even the pizzeria seemed unfamiliar, decorated with streamers and banners, serving food that
wasn’t all pizza.
We had both chipped in to get Seth a present. When he came back, we asked him to open it. It was an address book for him to take to college. (Bev had wanted to write our addresses in it, but I told her that was way too much.) “Ansel Adams,” he said with excitement. “How did you know he’s my favorite?” Bev (bless her) said it had been my choice, that I had just known. This got us each another hug, and an introduction to some of Seth’s cousins.
Our eighth-grade graduation was the next day. We were going to high school now. But first we were going to camp. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to spend the summer sipping Diet Cokes and snatching Seth’s free moments like fireflies. I argued with my bewildered parents. I even risked a tantrum. They would not give.
But you love camp,
they said. Arrangements had been made. Checks had been sent. I’d be leaving next week.