London Is the Best City in America (4 page)

“I’m coming with you,” he said slowly. “Just show me where it is you want to go.”

By the time Josh and I made it out of the front parking lot—past the Welcome to the Municipal Pool sign—it was almost a half hour later. All the happy energy of the fireworks was left somewhere behind: everyone honking at each other and squeezing each other in. One SUV that was holding about seven kids broke down in the parking lot’s main intersection, all of them crying hysterically as the people yelled at them to get out of the way.

Josh was driving my car. When he finally took the left out of the parking lot, we were less than ten minutes from my parents’ house—Mamaroneck Road opening up all around us: the soccer fields on our right, houses banking up on the left, long silvery driveways locked down behind bushes and gates.

Things looked so different to me, being back there. They
seemed
so different than they’d been in the years since I’d left—everything brighter, shinier. More gates. It definitely seemed closer to the Scarsdale that you hear about on television or in the movies than the Scarsdale that I remembered. When I was growing up here, there seemed to be more money problems, more people dressing down. Maybe that wasn’t accurate, or I just wasn’t paying attention then in the way I could now that I lived on the other side of it. And still, I didn’t like seeing the newly minted cars, fluorescent mailboxes. I didn’t remember the professional dog walkers. Like anywhere, I guess, there were so many great things about growing up in my hometown, and some less than great things. I wasn’t a great athlete, to put it mildly, and a lot of the childhood wars in Scarsdale seemed to be fought and won on soccer fields and basketball courts. Even though I participated, I couldn’t get too revved up about it. I couldn’t, for a long time, get too revved up about anything, convinced as I was that my life, in whatever capacity it would one day exist, wouldn’t truly start until sometime after Scarsdale was behind me.

Maybe what I could say about my hometown, without much hesitation, was that it was more chock-full of signs than any other place I’d ever seen. Don’t walk, Dangerous Curve, Duck Crossing, No Parking Around Corner, Stop Sign Ahead, Yield 100 ft. Every block, every half a block. More instructions on how you are—and aren’t—allowed to live.

Josh took a left onto our parents’ street, not pulling the wheel tightly enough so that the left blinker stopped its persistent blinking. It was still making its loud clucking noises, happily flashing away.

“Have you noticed,” he said, “that this place has gotten flashier in the last few years? All these families, do you think they got together and decided that putting terra-cotta sculptures in their front yards was a good idea?”

“I can’t believe you just said terra-cotta,” I said.

“Like today in the village,” he continued, ignoring me. “As an example. This very loud redheaded woman was screaming at her friend from across the street about what kind of scooped-out bagel she wanted. Cinnamon raisin. Doesn’t that scoop out all the raisins?”

“That could be anywhere, Josh,” I said.

“But it wasn’t,” he said. “It was here.”

My parents’ house was coming up on the right. It looked exactly the same to me as it always had—a two-story white Victorian with green shutters, a balcony, screened-in wraparound porch with large plants. I could see the edge of the backyard, which was rocky and curved upward into a small hill. When I was little, I’d thought it was a mountain.

The blinker was still going. “Hey, you have to flip the wheel harder than that, or it’s never going to stop,” I said, pointing at the dashboard.

He looked down, pulling the wheel as tight as it would go, the clicking shutting down.

“You shouldn’t be driving around like this. You can’t have a broken blinker. Let’s go over to Billy’s and see if he’ll take a look at it. Isn’t he open until midnight on weekends?”

I looked at the dashboard clock. It said 10:48. Josh was supposed to be at the Heathcote Tavern a half hour ago. He was supposed to be having drinks with his friends and telling stories and being a little too happy for himself. Now, considering the knowledge I’d recently acquired, I wasn’t sure if he should even try to pull that off.

“You can pretend to be sick tonight, you know,” I said.

“Why would I do that?”

“No reason,” I said, though I could think of twelve right off the top of my head, high on the list being that he didn’t seem particularly certain that a wedding was even going to take place.

“Don’t go stirring the pot, Emmy. I love Meryl. You know I do. I don’t want to do anything to ruin this weekend for her.”

“I know, but, Josh, if you’re thinking about not getting married . . .”

He turned the ignition off. “Who said anything about not getting married? I never said that. Who do you think I am, you?”

I let that go.

“And don’t go saying anything to Mom either,” he said. “She has enough to worry about with the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night. She has enough going on. You know what I’m saying?”

I actually had no idea what he was saying. And I really didn’t know how we were getting lost in wedding logistics again, on the tail end of what he had told me under an hour ago.

Only there didn’t seem to be much for me to do about it now. Josh was already out of the car, and heading up to the house. I closed my own door quickly, hurrying to catch up to him anyway.

“I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place,” he said, as I fell into step with him. “Just please don’t say her name again.”

“Which one?” I said.

He gave me a dirty look, and I looked down at the ground, at our feet, mine so small next to his, barely half their size. Josh had always been the one who had taken care of me,
always,
even when he hadn’t wanted to: the one who had to walk me to the bus stop everyday, the first one to babysit me, the one to teach me how to play kickball, how to lie to our parents (poorly, but still), how to drive. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, for the first time, maybe, he was the one who needed the taking care of. And that, somehow, he needed me to do it.

“I just don’t believe you would tell me what you told me if you wanted to pretend it didn’t matter,” I said.

He stopped walking, reaching for my arm. “Why are you pushing this? Don’t you want me to marry Meryl? Wouldn’t that be the happy ending here?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want, Josh,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m just trying to understand what’s going on with you.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and put that on my list of things to figure out, okay?”

Then he gave me a small, sad smile and started walking again toward the dim light of our front porch.

It seems important to mention that this was only the third time I had been to my parents’ home since moving to Narragansett—and both of the previous visits had lasted for less than twelve hours. No sleepovers, no late-night talks that would end with me explaining again why I refused to leave my small fishing town. They couldn’t hear me. Just like I couldn’t hear them when they’d plead their case to move back to New York, to reapply to film school, to reapply to a different school, to get my life back on track. On track was a very big thing for them—almost as big as leaving Rhode Island in the first place.

And leaving Rhode Island in the first place was something I certainly wasn’t intending to do anytime soon. I felt too safe there. No one expected anything of me, no one expected me to take any chances. Which was a good thing, as I felt ill-equipped to take any.

It seemed like the norm in Narragansett to put your life on hold—so many of the wives always talking to me about what they would do if (and only if) they could get out of town, how differently they would live
then.
Like Sue #2, for example—she’d always wanted to move to Montana; Nicole #4—Michigan; Theresa #1—Nevada; Beth #3—Arizona. But always somewhere landlocked, always somewhere opposite, as if the opposite held the answer.

Still, my lack of return trips home bordered on unmanageable for my parents, especially for my mother, even with her daily phone calls to me. And they were, always, daily. But she too slowly began acquiescing to our biweekly dinners somewhere in the middle, usually Hartford or Westport. It was just smarter that way. It made it easier for all of us that way to pretend our real lives weren’t so far apart.

I would never admit it out loud, but I did miss coming home. As hard as Scarsdale sometimes was for me, growing up, I’d always loved everything about my family’s actual house: my bedroom exactly as it had been since my twelfth birthday—a grown-up room for back then—no flowery wallpaper or purple carpet. Just soft yellow walls, wide-circle throw rugs and picture frames, long gold silk on the windowsills. The windows themselves were a stainless glass that looked out over the backyard, the hilly enterprise of it, separate from the rest of the house.

The first floor was just one large window-filled room, everything swimming into everything else: living area, dining room, kitchen. Sun area nook.

Then there was the wraparound porch. It was the first thing you’d see when you walked up the front walkway: the large evergreens and small potted flowers, the long pillowed bench running the length of the porch. As Josh and I headed toward it, I saw that someone was lying on it—the bench—a familiar someone. Jaime Daniel Berringer. Josh’s best friend since before I was born. Long and lanky, with a pile of blond floppy hair on his head. Little-boy good-looking in a way that stops you until you know him. Then it stops stopping you.

And like a million times before, there he was, just lying there on his back, his eyes closed, a bowl of cereal on his chest. Berringer always had a bowl of cereal on his chest—his food of choice for as long as I’d known him—a fact that was particularly bizarre, considering that he was now the chef at a nationally renowned French restaurant right outside of San Francisco.

Josh and I stood in the doorway, staring down at him. “You think that he’s sleeping?” I whispered.

Berringer started to smile, but then tried to hide it, continuing to lie there, pretending to sleep.

Josh put his finger to his lips, motioning for me to play along.

“He must be,” he said, as I tiptoed over to the bench, starting to sit down gently on the bench’s edge. But just as I made my final move—my face right on top of his, my chest above his chest—Berringer sat up a little too quickly, banging into me. Forehead first.

“Ow!” I said.

“Ow yourself,” he said, rubbing his head, laughing. His smile was so big now, it took up his entire face.

Somehow, he had saved his cereal.

This was when he first really looked up at me, his smile gone. “Emmy,” he said, holding his hand to his chest, the one that had just been on his forehead. “Wow.”

I touched my face, wondering if there was ketchup there, grape Popsicle stain. Josh certainly wouldn’t have noticed and told me. “What? Do I have something?” I asked.

He sat back, moving farther from me, pulling his knees toward him. “Not at all. You just . . . you look so different.”

I felt that in my chest. That he meant it. It had been years since we’d seen each other—since before I’d ended up in Rhode Island. I knew I looked different than I had then. I had slimmed down a little, and I let my hair grow out, learning slowly to leave it alone, letting it curl up the way it wanted. I was tanner, too, not quite so breakable-looking. I couldn’t help it—I started to blush. But before I could say thank you, he interrupted me.

“You really look your age,” he said.

“I really look
my age?
”

“Yeah,” he said, touching the lines around my eyes gingerly. Then, as if remembering something, he turned and looked at Josh. “Josh, if your little sister’s looking so ancient, how old does that make us?”

I slapped his hand away. “Thanks, Berringer,” I said. “That’s so nice of you to say.”

Josh started to laugh. He was sitting on the ground across from us, leaning against the window. I looked over at him and then back at Berringer, who was also laughing now, his ear-to-ear smile back in full effect.

“Whatever,” I said, standing up.

“Emmy, c’mon,” Josh said. “He’s just kidding around with you. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Honestly,” Berringer said. “You look good. You know you do. I barely recognized you.”

I guess this was supposed to be nicer. “I really don’t care, Berringer,” I said, even though I did, a little. He must have known it too. I’d had a huge crush on Berringer most of the time that I was growing up, right through my last year of junior high, right until he headed off to college. I remember trying to keep my mouth closed when I saw him, covering my braces, as if they were the problem. I tried to dress the way the older girls dressed. I kept my hair down. I used to daydream that he’d come home from school and see how different I was. Decide I was old enough. Now, I wasn’t even sure he was.

I made my way to the front door, opening it quickly.

“So what’s this I hear about a tackle shop?” he called out, stopping me. “You like fishing now?”

Instead of answering, I looked down at Josh, who wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wanted to say that I wasn’t
only
working at a tackle shop, but who knew what my brother had told him? If Josh had mentioned that I was working on a documentary, which I seriously doubted, I was certain he didn’t explain anything real about it, anything positive, like what I was hoping to learn about the wives, like what I was trying to accomplish. I wasn’t about to get into that all now, especially considering that I hadn’t yet. Learned anything. Accomplished anything.

I turned back to Berringer. “You know,” I said, “this is not an ideal moment to make fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of you,” he said seriously. “I’m curious to hear what you’re up to.”

I stayed fast in my position in the front doorway anyway. “Well, could you be curious a little later, please? I need to go inside and check on my mom.”

“You might want to wait on that,” he said.