I rolled over so that my cheek was pressed against the pillowcase. It still smelled the same here, like fabric softener and fried eggs. The same scuff marks on the wall from when I’d tried to move my bed, the same bashed-in corner of the closet door that I’d kicked in a fit of fury when I was eighteen. “You don’t listen to me!” I cried. “You don’t ever listen to me!”
She stood watching me from the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. “Quite a performance,” she said, when I’d paused to draw a breath. “Are you done, or is there an encore?”
“Screw you!” I yelled. She stared at me impassively. “
Fuck
you!” I said. She gave a tiny pained wince, as if she’d stubbed her toe. “I HATE you!” Nothing. “And you know what? You hate me!” That, finally, made something real happen on her face. She looked, for one brief instant, shocked and desperately sad. Then her features smoothed out into a look of bland expectation, like a theatergoer awaiting the final curtain so she can find her coat and go home. “I’m going to live with Dad!”
“Fine,” she said. “If you think he wants you.” That was when I kicked the closet door in. Three weeks later, I’d gone down to a pawnshop on South Street and sold the diamond-and-gold engagement ring that my great-grandmother had left me when she’d died. Two days after that, I was on my way to California, taking candy from a stranger and talking nonstop, hurtling toward my new face and new name and the future that would lead me, inexorably, to Sam. And, eventually, back here. Back home.
Downstairs, my mother called questions at the television set.
Who is Tab Hunter? What is mercury? Who is Madame Bovary? What is Sydney, Australia?
I closed my eyes.
By and by, by and by, the moon’s a slice of lemon pie
…the bed tilted sharply sideways, and I woke up with a start.
My mother sat on the corner farthest from my body, perched on the tiniest amount of pink quilt and sheet she could manage without sliding to the floor. In the light from the hallway, I could see that her hair had gotten thinner. “Lisa,” she said. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
I closed my eyes and kept my breathing even, and when she reached out her hand—to touch my hair, my cheek, I didn’t know—I rolled away. When I opened my eyes again, it was morning, and the sun was shining on Strawberry Shortcake and on me. I got out of bed, pulled on my L.A. clothes, slid behind the wheel of the rental car with no destination in mind, taking the turns as they came. Two hours later, I was back in the park where I’d sat with my father, shivering in the late-winter chill with an untouched sandwich in my lap. I closed my eyes and tilted my face into the thin sunshine.
Why,
I thought.
Why, why, why?
I waited, but no answers came. Just the woman I’d been watching, one hand on her belly, her curls bouncing as she walked.
“There’s this woman in the park who’s always staring at me,” said Becky.
“Whah?” asked Andrew, who’d fallen asleep with one arm flung over his face. Without opening his eyes, he reached over to the bedside table, picked up the tube of Rolaids, and handed them to his wife.
“I don’t have heartburn,” Becky said. It was two in the morning, the thirty-second week of her pregnancy, and she’d been awake for the last three hours. Andrew sighed and replaced the antacids. “No, actually, you know what? I do.” Andrew sighed again and tossed the Rolaids across the bed. “I can’t sleep. I’m worried,” said Becky. She chewed, rolling from her left side to her right.
“What are you worried about?” Andrew asked, sounding marginally more awake. “The woman in the park?”
“No, no, not her. I’m worried…” In the darkness, Becky bit her lip. “Do you think things are going to be okay with Mimi? I mean, do you think she’ll calm down a little once she’s settled?”
“What do you mean?” Andrew asked. Now he sounded entirely awake and not, Becky noted, entirely happy.
“Well, you know. The phone calls. The e-mails. She seems very lonely.” Becky said carefully, thinking that
needy
would have been a better word. That, and
insane.
“It’s hard to leave a house and move halfway across the country.”
“Yes, but it’s not like Mimi hasn’t done it before.”
Five times.
Her mother-in-law had been married to more men than Becky had ever seriously dated. In the wake of her failed fifth marriage to a real estate magnate in Dallas, she’d packed up her things, collected her alimony, and purchased what she invariably referred to as her “li’l patch of Paradise” in Merion. “You’re the one man who’ll never let me down,” she’d said, flinging her arms dramatically around Andrew’s neck after she’d told them about the move.
But he’s my man,
Becky had thought, as Andrew patted his mother’s back.
Not yours.
“She’s just high strung,” Andrew said. “She’ll settle down. We just need to be patient with her.”
“Promise?”
He rolled over and kissed her cheek and wrapped his arm around her belly. “Promise,” he said. He rolled over again and was instantly asleep, leaving Becky wide awake and uncomfortable.
The baby kicked. “Oh, don’t you start, too,” Becky whispered and rolled over again. She rested her hand on Andrew’s shoulder and nudged him until he held it.
She’d met Andrew eight years ago. She was twenty-five and living in Hartwick, New Hampshire, where she’d gone to college. A bad choice but a lucky one, she’d think, looking back. She chose Hartwick after being dazzled by the gorgeous pictures of New England fall that came with its admissions packet, thinking that a change from Florida’s endless summer might suit her. Hartwick, whose unofficial motto was Not the Ivy League, but At Least We’re Nearby, hadn’t been the perfect fit. The oh-so-pretty campus turned out to be peopled with oh-so-pretty blond girls, many of them equipped with the BMWs Daddy had bought them for graduation. Becky had always felt a little out of place.
Oh, Florida!,
the whippet-thin girls would say as Becky, dressed in slenderizing black, tried not to feel enormous or inadequate.
We go on vacation there every year!
Plus, she wasn’t a big drinker, and that was pretty much the only thing that Hartwick students did on the weekends…and the weekends started on Thursday and didn’t end until the wee hours of Monday morning.
She’d walked past Poire, the only nice restaurant in town, at least a dozen times before she’d worked up the courage to go in and ask about the
HELP WANTED
sign in the window. From the day she’d been hired as a busgirl on probation, the restaurant’s polished hardwood floors and starched white tablecloths and its cramped kitchen and gleaming fumed-oak bar had felt more like home to her than any place on campus ever did. And Sarah, who was a part-time grad student and Poire’s bartender, became her first New Hampshire friend.
Becky went from bussing to hostessing and waitressing. When she graduated, Darren the manager had hired her full-time. She’d been learning to cook for a year when she met Andrew. It had been the spring of the diet pills, which marked Becky’s first, last, and only attempt at organized dieting. “They’re a miracle!” Edith Rothstein had claimed, showing off her own sixteen-pound loss when Becky went home for Chanukah. “Now, I made you an appointment with Dr. Janklow…”
Becky rolled her eyes. Her mother rolled her eyes right back.
“If you don’t want it, you’ll cancel. It’s not a big deal.”
Becky dragged her feet, but in the end she allowed her mother to drive her to Dr. Janklow’s office the next morning, and Dr. Janklow had written her a prescription and wished her good luck. A year later, Dr. Janklow had taken a hasty early retirement in the wake of a rumored malpractice suit brought by the family of a woman who’d wanted to drop a quick twenty pounds before her wedding and wound up dropping dead in the middle of her rehearsal dinner instead. “Before dessert or after?” Becky wondered, and her mother had glared at her, hissing, “Who asks these things?”
The pills made her heart race. They made the inside of her mouth feel as though she was sucking on a wad of cotton. They quintupled her energy level, making her feel twitchy and jittery. She lost twenty pounds in twelve weeks. For the first time since junior high, she could buy clothes at the Gap. True, she could barely squeeze herself into the largest size they carried, but still! She bought a denim miniskirt that she’d wear to work at Poire, and after work she’d leave it inside-out on the floor of her apartment just for the pleasure of walking by and seeing the label.
On the nights she wasn’t cooking, she’d top the miniskirt with a low-cut blouse of wine-red velvet, dangling silver earrings, and high-heeled black boots. She wore pink lipstick and lots of mascara and let her curls tumble free. Guys made passes at her. Not just drunk ones, either. But from the first time she saw him, she only had eyes for Andrew.
He came into Poire on a busy Thursday, the obligatory skinny girl on his arm, on a night when two servers had called in sick—because, Sarah would later decree, you couldn’t call in
hooked up, hung over, and deeply ashamed.
The servers were overwhelmed, and Becky, who was hostessing that night, had been happy to take over Table Seven.
“Hello, and welcome to Poire,” Becky said, handing the couple their menus. “May I tell you about our specials?”
“Sure,” said the guy.
Oh,
she thought, looking at him.
Oh, yum.
He was handsome, with his close-cropped curls and wide-set eyes and broad shoulders, but it was more than that. There was something about him, the way he ducked his head, smiling, as she described the osso bucco over polenta, or the way he watched her as she spoke, that made Becky wonder what his hands would feel like, how that voice would sound first thing in the morning. Or maybe it was just that she was so damn hungry all the time, and thinking about the sex she most likely wouldn’t be having had become a substitute for dwelling on the food she was trying not to eat.
“Oh, God,” moaned the girl. “Osso bucco. Five million calories!”
“Six million, actually,” Becky said. “But it’s worth it.”
“I’ll give it a try,” he said. “What do you recommend to start with?”
Me,
Becky thought.
All through the meal, she felt him watching her as she served and cleared, uncorking the wine, offering fresh silverware, more bread, more butter, a new napkin when he dropped his. By the time they’d gotten around to dessert (espresso for the date, a quivering square of chocolate-walnut bread pudding floating in crème anglaise for the love of Becky’s life, who’d taken a spoonful, sighed, and said there was nothing even close in the hospital cafeteria), she had married him, chosen their china pattern, and named their babies Ava and Jake. When their meal was over, she did something she’d never done before—she wrote her name and phone number on the check before setting it in the center of the table and walking away with her heart pounding harder than usual, praying that Miss Espresso-for-dessert wouldn’t try to pay.
Luckily, Andrew picked up the check. He looked it over, smiled, tucked his credit card inside…and by the time he’d left, Becky had a note with “I’ll call you…Andrew Rabinowitz” written on it and a thirty-percent tip, too.
Andrew Rabinowitz! Andrew. Andy. Drew. Mr. and Mrs.—no, Dr. and Mrs.!—Andrew Rabinowitz. “Rebecca Rothstein-Rabinowitz,” she said, trying it out. Sarah raised an eyebrow and said, “But how will anyone know you’re Jewish?” Becky gave her a loopy smile and floated into the parking lot, heading to her little apartment, where, sure enough, there was a message from Andrew on her answering machine.
They dated for six weeks—cups of coffee; lunches and dinners; movies where they’d hold hands, then kiss, then grope; the obligatory long walks by the river that would quickly turn into long make-out sessions on the picnic blanket Becky had brought, along with the herb-roasted chicken and crusty French bread. But they’d never been to bed until the night of Sarah’s twenty-fifth birthday.
The party had started after Poire shut down. There were shots of vodka with Budweiser chasers. Shots of tequila with more tequila chasing that. Finally, when there were only six people left, Darren, Poire’s owner, broke out a bottle of twenty-five-year-old, single-malt Scotch, and they toasted Sarah. Becky and Andrew staggered out onto the street and ended up at Hartwick’s only diner. It was an unseasonably balmy April night. All of the diner’s windows were wide open, along with the front door. Becky could feel the spring breeze against her flushed cheeks. “I like you,” she told him and took a big, dreamy bite of griddle-crisped sticky bun. “I really, really like you.”
Andrew had reached across the table and twined one of her curls around his finger. “I like you, too,” he said.
“I know,” she said, beaming at him. “So. Your place or mine?”
Neither of them had any business driving, but after another half hour and three cups of black coffee, they made it to Andrew’s car. Becky imagined that she could feel the road wavering underneath them as he drove, undulating like a warm, slow-moving river. She wandered through his apartment, taking in the hideous brown-and-orange shag carpeting, the walls that looked bruised from furniture being hauled in and out, the obligatory plywood and cinder-block bookcases freighted with medical textbooks and magazines, and a state-of-the-art computer on a desk in the corner.
And the futon, his only piece of furniture. She circled it slowly, as if it were a dog that might bite. “I don’t like futons,” she said. “They can’t commit. I’m a bed! I’m a couch! I’m a bed! I’m a couch!”
“I’m a starving med student,” Andrew said, handing her a bottle of chilled white wine and his keychain, which had a bottle opener attached. Eight ninety-nine, the price tag on the wine announced.
Hey, big spender,
Becky thought, uncorking the bottle, pouring them each a glass, and swallowing half of hers in one gulp.
He took her hand and led her to the futon, which was still in its couch position, and they leaned into each other until her velvet-clad shoulder was pressing against the Oxford cloth of his shirt. Up close, the skin of his neck looked scraped, like he’d been shaving with a blunt razor, and she could see that his front teeth overlapped ever so slightly. These flaws only made her feel more tender toward him.
She breathed in his ear and felt him shudder. Emboldened, she kissed him there. Then licked. Then sucked at the lobe, gently, then harder. He sighed.
“Oh, God…”
She hummed in his ear and thought of things she hadn’t eaten since the diet-pill diet had begun. Chocolate pudding, chocolate mousse, coconut ice cream served with dollops of real whipped cream. Mandarin oranges.
“Mandarin oranges,” she whispered. “I’d like to feed you mandarin oranges and let you suck the juice off my fingers.”
“Oh, wow,” he breathed. She smiled at him sweetly, grabbed his right hand, and licked the palm as delicately as a cat skimming cream.
“Becky,” he said, pressing her shoulders against the futon.
Now,
she thought, making sure to arch her back so that her breasts were displayed at their best advantage. She could feel the length of him rubbing against her thigh, dispelling her fears that she was revolting him instead of arousing him. “Becky,” he said again, sounding more like a schoolteacher than a man who’d just had his palm licked. He sighed. It wasn’t a passionate exhalation. It sounded more like the noise her father had made when he discovered Becky’s brother finger-painting on the hood of his sports car.
“Becky,” Andrew said, “I don’t think we should do this.”
She sat up, her breasts dangerously close to tumbling out of her top. “Why not?”
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat and sitting back, his hands pressed tightly together. “Um. It’s just that…” Another pause. “I’ve never really had a girlfriend.”
“Oh,” she said.
Huh?
she thought. He was twenty-eight. Who hadn’t had a girlfriend at that age? “Are you saving yourself for marriage?”
He closed his eyes. “Not really. It’s just that…”
She was beginning to have a sinking feeling in her somewhat-diminished stomach. In her experience, sentences that started with
It’s just that
rarely led anywhere good. Particularly if they were being uttered by a man whose palm you’d just licked.
I don’t want to hear this,
she thought. But she couldn’t stop herself from asking. “Just that what?”
Andrew sighed and stared at his lap. His face was drawn and unhappy. “I want a girlfriend. But. Um.” He bit his lip. “I guess it’s that you’re not exactly what I had in mind.”
“Because I’m fat,” she said.
He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no, either.
“Well,” she managed, straightening her top, “good luck with Cindy Crawford.” Her legs felt wobbly as she found her purse, but somehow Becky made it to the door and managed to give it a very satisfactory slam before remembering that she had no way of making it five miles back to her apartment. Then she remembered that she still had his car keys in her pocket. She could take his car, but then how would he get to campus? She decided, slipping behind the wheel of his car, that she didn’t much care.