I Think I Love You

ALSO BY ALLISON PEARSON

I Don’t Know How She Does It

It panics him. He always keeps the drapes drawn
.
“
They are out there, Mother, they’re out there.
”

—
EVELYN CASSIDY
,
on her son David’s reaction to his fans

T
he wardrobe was double fronted, with a full-length mirror. Inside was her mother’s tweed suit with the mink collar. There were tailored skirts and blouses on hangers. There were sweaters in soft colors, carefully folded, with layers of tissue paper in between. At the bottom were racks of shoes.

It was there that she found it, behind the racks. She wasn’t looking for it. She wasn’t looking for anything. She was reaching for a pair of black patent heels, the shine still on them after thirty years, when her fingers brushed against something colder than leather. She took it out. A tin with a lake and mountains on the lid. A Christmas gift from Austria. Inside, she found cards and photographs, and a sheaf of letters tied together with a red ribbon.

The pink envelope was out of place. It had smiley faces and a rainbow on the front. It was addressed to her, but there was something strange about the handwriting. It took her a moment to recognize it as her own. Not her own now, but the way she used to write, a long time ago, with flowery loops. The envelope had been opened and it was easy to slide out the letter inside. She read it for the first time in her life. Then she read it again to make sure.

She got up and walked across the landing and pushed the door into her old bedroom. The brown coverlet was still on the bed, soft and slightly damp to the touch. She knelt down, reached under the bed and pulled out a gray transistor radio. She flicked the switch.

H
is favorite color was brown. Brown was such a sophisticated color, a quiet and modest sort of color. Not like purple, which was Donny’s favorite. I wouldn’t be seen dead in purple. Or in a Donny cap. How much would you have to like a boy before you went out wearing a stupid purple peaked cap?

Honest, it’s amazing the things you can know about someone you don’t know. I knew the date of his birth—April 12, 1950. He was a typical Aries, but without the Arian’s stubbornness. I knew his height and his weight and his favorite drink, 7Up. I knew the names of his parents and his stepmother, the Broadway musical star. I knew all about his love of horses, which made perfect sense to me because when you’re that famous it must be comforting to be around someone who doesn’t know or care what famous is. I knew the instrument he learned to play when he was lonely. Drums. I knew the name of the dog he left behind when he had to move away from New Jersey. I knew that when he was a boy he was small for his age and he had a squint and had to wear an eye patch and corrective glasses, which must have been hard.
Harder than for a girl even. I didn’t wear my glasses if I could help it. Only in class for the blackboard, though I couldn’t see well without them and it got me into trouble a few times when I smiled in the street at total strangers I mistook for members of my family. A few years later, when I got contact lenses, I was stunned by the trees. They had leaves, millions of leaves, with edges so sharp and defined they looked like God had made each one with a pastry cutter.

Basically, before I was sixteen, the world was one big Impressionist painting, unless I screwed up my eyes really tight to bring it into focus. Some things, as I would discover, were best left a blur.

Back then, I wasn’t interested in the real world. Not really. I answered my parents’ questions, I gave the appearance of doing homework, I lugged my cello into school on my back, I went downtown on Saturday afternoons with girls who sometimes felt like friends and sometimes didn’t, but I was living for Him. Each night, I spread my long dark hair out on the pillow and made sure to sleep on my back so my face was ready to receive a kiss in case he came in the night. It wasn’t that likely, obviously, because I lived in South Wales and he lived in California, which was five thousand miles away, and he didn’t even have my address, although I had once sent a poem for him to a magazine. Choosing the right color paper took longer than writing the actual poem. I settled on yellow, because it seemed more mature than pink. I thought all the other girls would choose pink and part of loving him was finding better ways to please him so he would know how much more I cared. They didn’t sell brown writing paper or I would have used brown, because that was his favorite color. Sometime later—three weeks and four days if you’re counting, and I definitely was—a reply came in the post. It was seventeen words long, including my name. It didn’t matter that the letter said they were sorry they couldn’t publish my poem. In some crucial way, I felt as though I had made contact with him at long last. Someone important in London, someone who had been in the same room as him, had touched the yellow paper I had touched and then typed my name on an envelope and licked the stamp. No rejection slip has ever been more treasured. It took pride of place in my scrapbook.

I knew exactly where he lived in California. In a canyon. A canyon
was like one of our valleys, only much bigger. We said much bigger. David said way. Way bigger.
Way
was American for
much
. America was so big that Americans would drive one hundred miles just to have dinner with someone and they didn’t think that was a long way to go. In America,
way to go
means you’ve done something well. Way to go, baby! And they have gas instead of petrol.

Other words I had learned were
cool, mad
and
bathroom
. You have to be careful because a bathroom is not a bathroom in America, it’s a toilet.

“The Americans are a most polite people who are not standing for vulgarity,” said my mother, who was German and beautiful and disapproved of many things. You might say that my mother’s whole life was a battle to keep the vulgar and the ugly at bay. In our town, she had found the perfect enemy. I just liked knowing American words because they brought me closer to Him. When we met, it would be important to retain my individuality, which was one of the top things David looked for in a girl.