Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (2 page)

Damon smiled nervously and extended a large paw in my direction, but when I clasped it, there didn’t seem to be much life in it.

“Damon is brilliant,” Birdie continued. “Oh my God, every word out of his mouth!”

There didn’t seem to be all that many words
in
his mouth, but he was cute in a blushing, bearish sort of way, so I assumed “is brilliant” was Birdie’s euphemism for “turns me on.”
Whatever.

“Listen, I’m late,” I said. “I already peed the dog, but both animals need to be fed. I should be back around nine tonight.”

“Okay,” Birdie said. “We’ll be here!”

We?
I gave him a questioning look; he knew what I meant.

“You know, Marisol, living in a dorm is
so
hideous. We are really lucky we found this apartment in Somerville.”

“Your mother found the apartment,” I reminded him.

“You just don’t know!” he continued. “I mean, you could get
anybody
for a roommate—it could be an absolute
abomination.
”

I waited impatiently.

“Poor Damon here lost the lottery. I mean
lost
it. He has been put into a room with a creature from the hellmouth; I am not kidding. You can smell him before you open the
door.
”

Damon nodded, then actually spoke. “He’s a pig. He threw up in my shoes last night.”

“That’s too bad, Damon,” I said. “I guess you’ll have to put your shoes in the closet from now on.”

“Well, the thing is,” Birdie said, smiling at his new buddy, “I thought Damon could just move in here. And be
my
roommate!”

“
I’m
your roommate,” I reminded him.

“There’s plenty of room for three of us. Damon has a
futon, and you’re out half the time at your job anyway, and we’ll be in classes . . .”

I glanced at Damon, whose eyes now seemed slightly watery. Birdie sure could pick ’em.

“Damon, why don’t you go make yourself some tea?” I suggested. “The kitchen is right through there, and the kettle is on the stove.”

He nodded and left the room, hunching his shoulders just a little to fit through the kitchen doorway.

“I can tell you didn’t meet
this
one at the gym,” I whispered.

“Abs are not the only thing I look for in a man,” he said, running a hand fondly over his own clothed six-pack.

“No? Pecs too? Biceps?”

“Marisol—”

“Birdie, if I wanted a bunch of roommates,
I’d
be in a dorm. Do you remember why I deferred college?”

“I know, you want to write, but—”

“I want to write
in this apartment
. Which is nice and quiet because there are only two of us in it. Which means, if you’re not talking to me, nobody is.”

He shook his head vigorously. “Damon is very quiet.”

“How do you know? You just met him!”

“He hardly even speaks! Besides, he’ll be in
my
room, not yours.”

“Birdie, I can just barely stand having you and your two neurotic pets as roommates. Now you want to bring in some weird guy you hardly know?”

“He’s not weird; he’s just shy.”

I peeked into the kitchen at Damon. He was backed up
against the refrigerator, staring in terror at Peaches, the pussycat, who was sniffing his flip-flops and fat toes.

“Who ever heard of a shy actor?” I said.

“He’s not an actor. He’s a director.”

“I suppose he’s gay and you like him?”

He tipped his head so his blond forelock fell into his eyes, and he grinned. “I’m not sure yet—of either thing. But I find him intriguing, don’t you?”

“No, Birdie, I find him large and odd. And I don’t want another roommate! This is a very small apartment. You should have asked me before you offered him sanctuary!”

Birdie wrinkled up his face in that stupid pout that has worked on his mother for the past eighteen years. But I am not his mother.

“I’ll be back at nine o’clock. He better be gone,” I said.

There were times I wasn’t sure I’d made the right decision: taking this year off before going to college, moving in with Birdie, trying to write a novel between my tours of duty at the Mug and at my parents’ house, reassuring them that deferring college for a year was not the first step toward receiving my bag lady certification. My high school friends had left for carefully chosen schools all across the country, but I felt like I needed this year off. Stanford University would still be there next year.

I’d gotten the idea when I went down to New York City after graduation to stay with June and her friends for a week. I’d met them in the spring at a zine convention in Provincetown on Cape Cod, that I’d gone to with my friend Gio. I liked June and Sarah and B. J., so when they invited
me to go back to New York with them, I didn’t hesitate. I was also trying to prove a point to Gio, which must have been successful, because I hadn’t seen or heard from him in the four months since. I stayed in New York for a week and then went back for another week later in the summer. But it was a little problematic, because I knew June had a crush on me, and I didn’t feel that way about her. By the end of the second week I figured I should just leave for good.

In the meantime, though, I’d met some of their New York friends, one of whom was Katherine, an editor for a large publishing house. June had showed her copies of my zines, and she seemed to actually like them. She gave me her card and said, “If you ever write a novel, send it to me.”

A novel? Just like that the idea lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away. Suddenly the idea of starting college and taking Freshman Composition, Literature in Translation, and Existential Philosophy seemed like the most stultifying way I could imagine to spend the next year. It’s not as if Katherine had made me any promises or anything. I wasn’t doing it because I thought I’d get published. It just became the thing I most wanted to do. Just to be able to say, “I’m writing a novel.”
I’m writing a novel!
Oh, my God. I wanted to be able to say that! I wanted to
do
it!

So I deferred my entrance to Stanford and moved from my parents’ house into an apartment with Birdie. My father said that if I wanted to stand on my own two feet, I should see what that really meant, so I got a job pouring coffee and hustling cheeseburgers at the Mug in Harvard Square. As it turned out, waitressing at the Mug only allowed me to stand
on one of my two feet, since rents in the whole Boston-Cambridge metropolitan area are higher than the Hubble Telescope. My mother, always a pushover, helped me to remain upright by stealthily contributing an extra couple hundred bucks a month to my survival fund.

And then it was September, and all the schools and colleges started up again. The Square was full of students buying books and meeting new friends. Actually, the whole city was full of students buying books and meeting new friends. Even Birdie wasn’t immune to the excitement of it. I, however, was living with my best friend since sixth grade, twenty minutes away from the home I grew up in; I wasn’t feeling the thrill.

Not that I didn’t want to meet new people. In fact what I wanted more than anything—though I wouldn’t have admitted it to anybody—was to meet a woman I could fall in love with. I’d been out and proud for almost two years, and the only love interest I’d had (if you don’t count Gio, and I don’t) was a girl who kissed me for a couple of weeks and then took off with the first guy who gave her a second look. That did a job on me—I got scared about trusting people, letting anybody know I liked them.

But I knew I had to get over that if I was ever going to have a girlfriend. My mother had this line about how “you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” Or princess, in my case. I was eighteen years old, for God’s sake. I had to put myself out there and start kissing frogs unless I wanted to be alone for the rest of my life.

So, I had two goals for the year: fall in love and write a novel. How hard could that be?

H
EY, YOU’RE LATE,
M
ISS
M
ARY
-S
OUL,”
Doug, the manager, said when I hurried in the door of the Mug. “I’m bussing tables here instead of counting up my morning receipts.”

Or jawing with the customers. “Sorry,” I said, grabbing a clean black apron from under the counter.

“I guess it took longer than you thought to put on all that makeup, huh?” I don’t wear makeup. He chuckled at his own stupid joke.

“Roommate troubles,” I said.

He held out his hand like a crossing guard. “Don’t tell me about it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Everybody tells me their sob stories.”

“Not me, Doug. I couldn’t bear to see you sob.”

“My roommate this, my landlord that, my husband, my wife—everybody’s got a story.” Doug shook his head.

“Yeah,” I said, sticking change in my apron pocket. “People with lives are so inconsiderate.”

Doug guffawed. “You kill me, kid; you kill me.” Which was why I’d gotten the job. He appreciated somebody
who could take his guff and give it right back.

The Mug was a Harvard Square institution, and Doug had been managing it since sometime soon after the Revolutionary War. It was apparently owned by a guy named Gus who was too old to even come in and drink coffee in a back booth anymore like he used to. It was a tiny place, only eight booths and half a dozen counter seats in all, but during peak hours there were often people standing in line in the doorway. Different kinds of people, but you knew they all had two things in common—you knew because they
told
you, over and over. They all missed the old Harvard Square, the way it used to be before the big record stores and clothing chains took it over, when there were lots of funky little places like the Mug. And they all loved Sophie Schifferdecker’s pies.

Sophie had also worked at the Mug for a few centuries now, turning out hamburgers and tuna melts by the bucketload. In fact, as Doug liked to tell me, I was the first employee to be hired in the new millennium, even though we were now well into it.

“I don’t hire young people anymore,” Doug had said during my interview. “Too flighty. They work a few weeks, it’s not as much fun as it looks like, and they take off on me.”

Not as much fun as it looks like?
That was really bad news.

“I promise to work for you for one year,” I told him. “But then I’m going to college. And not around here.”

“What’s wrong with around here?” Doug had eyed me suspiciously.

“My parents live around here,” I said. That was the first time I’d killed him.

Since the colleges had just started up again, the Square
was even busier than usual. Students weren’t behind in their classes yet, so they had plenty of time to sit around and drink coffee while they got to know their new pals. One of the Harvard guidebooks mentioned the Mug as “the place T. S. Eliot probably spent his afternoons writing poetry and warming his hands on a hot cup of Earl Grey tea.” Which you would think anyone would know was a load of crap, but every once in a while a few freshmen would come in, all wide-eyed, and order Earl Grey and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I knew from the way they looked reverently at the peeling wallpaper that they were impressed to have their hindquarters plopped in a booth where Great Literature may just possibly have been born.

Anyway, I ran back and forth between the kitchen and the booths for about two hours until the lunch rush was over. There was a short lull after I topped off everybody’s coffee, rang up a few bills, and stuffed the tips in my pocket. I poured myself a cup of coffee and tried to decide whether to ask Sophie for a turkey sandwich or just go for a piece of pie. I was cutting myself a nice wedge of apple-blueberry when the bell over the door tinkled again.

I was not surprised, when I looked up, to see that it was her. A Harvard student—that was my guess—who’d come in alone every afternoon that week and burrowed into the corner booth, ordering tea and barely looking up from her book. Day after day she wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt, as if that were her uniform. She looked like she’d been raised in a convent, and not just because of her porcelain-pale skin either. There was also something so innocent about her, so
born-yesterday, it made me feel like I shouldn’t look at her too closely. As if she wasn’t fully formed yet, a chick just out of the egg, still damp and wobbly.

Except for ordering the tea, she didn’t speak, which offended me slightly. The Mug was the kind of place where people yakked at you constantly, and even though that got on my nerves, this girl’s I-am-so-smart-I-can’t-be-bothered attitude was annoying me too. Where did she think she was? Au Bon Pain? I picked up my order pad and stalked over to her booth. If I had to put down my coffee, I was going to make it worth my while.

“So,” I said, “you want some T. S. tea, and what else?”

She looked startled, her pale blue eyes open wide. “TST?” she asked. I guess she thought I was offering her drugs.

“Tea. You want tea, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. I guess so.”

“I mean, that’s what you usually order, so I just assumed. How about a piece of pie with that?” I gave her my pushy-waitress smile.

She turned her book face down on the tabletop with a shaky hand. Grace Paley.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
A book I’d always meant to read.

“Pie?” she whispered.

“Yeah, pie. It’s a round pastry thing with fruit in the middle.” I kept my pencil poised over the pad, waiting to write.

She blushed. “Okay, well, what kind do you have?”

“Today we have apple, blueberry, apple-blueberry, and pecan.”

“I guess I’ll have . . .” She seemed to be stumped.
Obviously she needed that Harvard education badly.

“Or, I could have Sophie make you a sandwich. Turkey, tuna, salami, grilled cheese—”

“I don’t think—”

“Or maybe both, huh? Turkey sandwich? Blueberry pie?” I put the pad down on the table. She was going to order
something.