Not Exactly a Love Story (5 page)

“If she didn’t give it to you,” the other kid said, “what makes you think she’s going to be so thrilled to hear from you?”

I was only watching from the corner of my eye, but I could see the monster was acting super casual. “I’m a hunk,” he said with an expressive spread of his overdeveloped arms. “And I’m gonna be a football star.”

I stopped idly spinning the dial on my combination lock.

It had just hit me—this was Mr. B’s
find
.

They passed me as they left. I must’ve looked like Gumby next to them. Especially the one who claimed to be a hunk.
He was a wall. A walking wall. I was grateful I didn’t play football.

It was after they left that I spotted the piece of folded paper under the bench. The phone number was scribbled in pencil. It must have fallen out of his locker unnoticed while he was busy looking cool.

I could have put it through the vents in his locker, but I pocketed it. I imagined calling her. I thought about the dimple in her cheek, and about hearing that smile in her voice. I could say I was new in town. We could talk a little, discover we had a few things in common. Then I would say I’d seen her at the bus stop. I’d describe myself, she would remember me.

“You’re that dork in the leather pants,” Patsy would say.

And that would be that.

I didn’t plan to ask her out. What would be the point? I didn’t expect to use the number at all.

It was enough just to have it.

Mr. B took it personally that I didn’t go to gym class.

An emotional reaction, pure and simple. “How do you think that looks in the office?” he asked me.

By then I wished I’d talked to him before I went on to my next class, but I hadn’t. That morning it hadn’t seemed like such a big deal to cut a class, compared to the alternative. Especially Mr. B’s class, because I thought I could count on him to understand.

Sitting at the dinner table with him and Mom, I got embarrassed. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what the problem had been. I should have been able to, but I just couldn’t.

“You cut a class, it reflects on me,” he said.

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You think no one will notice it’s my class and you’re my wife’s son? You think that doesn’t hurt me?”

He pushed back his dinner of fish sticks, defrosted French fries, and canned corn. He went on and on about being the new teacher in school, and I could see his point.

I was the new kid in my classes, facing teachers who hadn’t heard my name being bandied about the teachers’ lounge over the last several years as an all-around good kid, bright, et cetera. If all these teachers had to go on for the first few months were my last semester’s grades, and now Mr. B’s reaction when someone mentioned my name, I was going to need the strength of a salmon swimming upstream.

“You think I don’t want the people I work with to come around and say, ‘Hey, Dom, the boy’s all right’? That I want to start off telling
them
this isn’t your usual behavior? Because I know that. I do.”

The thing is, I never knew he worried so much about what people thought of him. “I’m sorry,” I said for the third time. “It won’t happen again.”

Mom reached across the table and patted his hand. I didn’t think it was a hand-pat of
Okay, settle down now
. She was more like,
I feel terrible it’s my son who treated you this way
. It cut me to the quick.

I didn’t think this qualified as a stab of jealousy, really, it’s just that I was no less disappointed in the situation than Mr. B, and there was no one I could turn to who might squeeze my hand in sympathy.

Mom saw the cut class as an act of rebellion, not especially pure and not at all simple. “You won’t forgive me, will you?” she said as she got up to clear the table.

Huh?

“Your father wasn’t the one to say we’d grown apart and so he’s the underdog, is that it?” I knew better than to suggest this was an overreaction. “I will always be in the wrong, I will always be the one you blame.”

The dining room was set at a right angle to the kitchen, so Mr. B and I could hear everything she had to say from our seats at the table. And she had plenty to say.

“You have no right to treat me this way,” Mom shouted back over her shoulder as something broke in the sink. “I’ve made sure you lacked for nothing and what do I get when I try to better our lives? The back of your hand, that’s what!”

I disagreed. I thought I’d been about as cooperative as she could hope for. And it was about time she got around to noticing. I could tell her what really happened—there was that possibility—but where I was embarrassed before, now I got stubborn.

Mr. B tried to say a few soothing words. “Donna, the boy made a mis—”

“Take, take, take,” Mom yelled as she came back into the dining room for the rest of the dishes. “That’s all kids know. A little happiness is all I’m asking for, but do you think he’ll allow me to have it?”

Mr. B glanced uncertainly in my direction as my mother ranted over the scrape of dishes and the racket of the
silverware. “My own son, looking for ways to undermine my marriage—”

“Cripes,” I said under my breath.

Mom tore into the dining room to wipe the table with broad swipes of the sponge that scattered crumbs to every corner of the room. But she didn’t say anything—the silent treatment had begun. I knew the drill. I could get up and go to my room now. If Mom had anything she wanted to yell in my ear, she knew where to find me.

I looked back over my shoulder to see Mr. B hunched in his chair, and my heart went out to him. He had no way of knowing the mood was set for the whole evening now. And the way he looked right then, I didn’t believe he would appreciate hearing it from me.

The holidays were fractured.

I met Dad the Sunday after Thanksgiving and we went for a walk through Central Park. A movie was being made. The area was roped off and policed, so we mainly saw a lot of parked trucks and trailers.

For lunch, we ate turkey sandwiches with all the trimmings at the Stage Deli. Then he put me on the train for the Island and headed over to pick up a taxi. Ends of holidays mean big tips taking weekenders from the hotel to the airport.

In the middle of December, Mom put up a tree with different ornaments than we’d been using for years, and none of them were the ones I’d made. Dad kept those ornaments, but he hadn’t put up the Hanukkah bush.

Dad asked some friends in to light the menorah, the
ones at loose ends because they hadn’t flown back to families in other states for one reason or another. And on Christmas Day he held a potluck supper. Mom and Mr. B drove me into Queens in the afternoon.

I was lucky enough to get there in time to help with food. That had always been our tradition, me in the kitchen with Dad. With a stream of people coming in, we looked like one big happy family.

As we gathered around the dining table to fill plates, I noticed the apartment walls were surprisingly drab and dirty-looking. Dad hadn’t done anything about the faint square patches where Mom took down her watercolors.

When I settled in a corner of the living room with a healthy stack of star-shaped cookies for dessert, Mona came over to me with cups of eggnog with brandy. “What is it, Vinnie?”

Mona was an actress and an old friend of both Mom and Dad. Also an acknowledged meddler, so I believed she’d agree with me when I said, “I just wish Dad would fix up the place a little bit. Maybe I ought to come in on a weekend, give him a hand hanging some posters.”

“What for?” she said. “It isn’t like his life is here anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s either driving or running all over the city to auditions. He’s got a new agent, one who actually finds work for him. Sooner or later, he’ll move on.”

She was right. Dad was alone here, and he could do things that were all about what
he
needed now. “Great. Good for Dad.” I wished I could sound a little more enthusiastic.

“Don’t say anything about posters today,” she said so that only we could hear. “He’s making such an effort.”

I agreed. Underneath the smiles and camaraderie, we’d all been making an effort. It was hard on the nerves.

I studied like a maniac over the rest of winter vacation. Partly it was that I didn’t care to fall behind. But it also took my mind off things. Only Mr. B had failed to be impressed with my work ethic.

Mr. B being Mr. B, he encouraged me to go out for a team. Of course, he’d been encouraging me about twice weekly. When it snowed, he’d gotten all excited about cross-country skiing. I made a joke about taking up ballroom dancing again, but I felt bad right after. It made the man look sick and dizzy.

I kind of dragged around on New Year’s Day, burned out on textbooks. I was thinking about how much life had changed in one short year. Actually, I said something like that to Mom and she laughed, saying I sounded like an old man.

She was charting her astrology, and pointed out that my sixteenth birthday was coming up. I said I was in the mood
to do the kind of thing my grandparents did, where no one takes any particular notice as the day goes by.

What I wouldn’t do, was not even tempted to do, was take Mom up on the offer to do a horoscope for me.

What I did, a few days after my birthday, was unfold that piece of paper and dial Patsy’s number.

I stood at my window and watched the snow fall. This was the
third snowstorm we’d had since New Year’s, fast storms that dumped a foot of snow that melted over the next couple of days.

I’d been trying to make the phone call since eight-thirty in the evening. Well, seven-thirty, but I spent an hour thinking it was too early to call. Stupid, because at eight-thirty I still had no idea what to say. I mean, I knew the words,
Do you want to go to a movie?
No—
Can I take you to a movie?

Maybe I ought to ease into it, talk for a few minutes about something we both liked. Only we hadn’t had any conversations at all, ever. I had no idea what she liked.

By ten o’clock I had planned twenty-three intros to asking Patsy to a movie. Sixteen were variations on
I have a
question about the homework
, but we didn’t have any classes together. The others were more
I’m calling because you interest me
, and I knew I couldn’t carry that off.

The problem I’d been having, every morning for nearly two months now, we were both at the bus stop and she’d never looked the slightest bit interested in me. Which maybe didn’t mean anything. She was always flanked by her intimidating girlfriends. What I kept in mind, her eyes were kind, I liked her, and I believed I’d like her even better once I got to know her. Now that I’d gotten this far, I had to call her. Even though it had somehow become nearly midnight. Or I’d never respect myself in the morning.

I reached for the phone. I didn’t let myself think as I flattened the folded bit of paper with her number on it. And dialed. Put the receiver to my ear. One ring.

This was crazy. She was probably asleep already. I pushed the edge of my curtain aside for a peek. Her whole house was dark.