Other Words for Love (3 page)

“Of course she did,” I said, but Mom looked skeptical. She toasted a bagel, slathered it with cream cheese, and watched while I ate it.

I went upstairs afterward, where I closed the door and opened the window in my studio. It was a sunny day, and our next-door neighbors—the annoying ones who constantly blocked our driveway—were having a party. Balloons bounced from their mailbox at the curb and guests were double-parking their cars, carrying cases of beer to the front porch. I watched for a while, and then I sat at my easel, sketching a tree across the street. The leaves, the bark, the rays of sunlight peeking through the branches. It wasn’t the best thing to draw, not as interesting as faces, but my art teacher had said that I should practice drawing everything.

An hour passed before I heard Mom’s voice. I saw her standing on our lawn, talking to the lady next door. Mom was calm at first, saying “I would appreciate it” and something about our driveway and when I looked at the driveway, I saw a Trans Am parked there with a dented Buick behind it. Our neighbor raised her voice and shouted something rude and so did Mom.

“Get those fucking cars off my property or I’ll call the cops,” Mom said. “My husband’s on the force—I can get someone over here in five minutes.”

Then I heard our front door slam and pots banging around in the kitchen. None of this was unusual, because Mom was feisty. That was the word Dad always used to describe her.

I wouldn’t have survived in my family otherwise
, I heard her tell him once, but I didn’t know exactly what she meant. Mom had only mentioned her parents a few times in my presence, using a tone typically reserved for talking about something distasteful, like diarrhea or Evelyn’s eczema. Her parents were both gone now, dead for years, although her brothers were still around. One of them had called our house a while back and Mom had hung up on him. She’d told Dad that her brother was a drunk looking for a handout and she didn’t believe in handouts. She was proud that she’d done everything on her own. Even her degrees had been financed by loans that had taken twenty years to repay.

“Ariadne,” Mom said, startling me. “Didn’t you hear the phone?”

I hadn’t heard. Now I looked away from my drawing and toward Mom, who was standing in the doorway, smiling and speaking in a gentle voice. She could flip the switch so easily, just like Evelyn. One minute Mom was screaming the F-word at somebody who cut her off in traffic, and the next minute she sounded as demure as a librarian.

I shook my head and she walked into the room, stopping behind me to examine my tree. “That’s extraordinary,” she said. “I’m glad you took your teacher’s advice about drawing everything. He knows what it takes to make it as an artist.”

“Or as a teacher,” I said, and Mom rolled her eyes because she didn’t want me to be a teacher. She wanted me to have an exciting career, better than what she had, even though that idea made me nervous.

But the thought of teaching didn’t make me nervous. I imagined teaching art as fun and quiet and far from judgmental eyes. If I tried to be a real artist, people might say I had no talent, and that would ruin everything. There would be no point in drawing anymore, and life would be pointless without drawing. I’d have no reason to memorize people’s faces on the subway.

“Summer called,” Mom went on, adding that Tina was catering a party tonight and she could use my help with the cooking if I was interested, which I wasn’t. I wanted to stay in my room and draw another tree, but Mom thought I had practiced enough for today.

She drove me to Summer’s house, where she talked to Tina on the front steps and I went inside. Summer was sitting at the dining room table, cutting strips of dough with a pastry wheel. There was flour on her face, and she blew her bangs out of her eyes.

“How’s your stud brother-in-law?” she asked.

Gorgeous as always, I thought. I love it when he walks around the house without a shirt. That weight lifting he does in the basement must really work, because his shoulders are huge. But of course I can’t tell you that, Summer. He’s married to my only sister and it’s sinful for me to think these things.

“He’s fine,” I said.

Summer handed me a rolling pin and a bag of walnuts. I sat down and crushed the nuts, noticing that she wasn’t wearing any makeup and thinking she looked much younger this way, more like she did before she blossomed and cast a spell over everyone. Back then—before puberty and highlights and operations to fix her lazy left eye and to straighten her nose—she used to just blend in. Except during the holidays, when some kids picked on her because she had a Christmas wreath on her door and a Hanukkah menorah in her window.
Make up your mind
, they used to say, and I told them they were ignorant. I said that Summer’s mother was Episcopalian and her father was Jewish, and Summer was going to pick her religion someday but for now she was both.

“Ari,” she said. “I’m sorry for drooling over Patrick, but I’m dying without a boyfriend.”

“
You’re
dying?” I said.

She knew what I meant—that I’d never had a boyfriend in my entire life. She reached over and squeezed my arm, leaving a smear of flour on my skin. “You’ll get one. Then you’ll see how nice it is to make love.”

She smiled dreamily and I kept hearing those last two words even when she was quiet and cutting dough. She didn’t say
screwing
or
banging
, and she called a guy’s you-know-what a
magic wand
instead of the four-letter words that everybody tossed around at school. But Summer was mature and smart, and she’d read most of her father’s medical books in his library down the hall.

She wanted to be a psychiatrist too, and she already acted the part. She’d explained to me years ago that schizophrenics hear voices and that kidnapping victims can develop Stockholm syndrome, and she once had a talk with a boy in our seventh-grade class who had a crush on her. He used to call her house just to hear her answer the phone, he wrote sappy poems, and we actually found him collecting strands of her hair from her jacket in the coatroom. So Summer sat him down and explained that he wasn’t in love with her, that he only thought he was in love because he was suffering from something else—a psychological word that I quickly forgot. Whatever it was, she said it was similar to lust but much worse because it could get you so stuck on somebody that you’d simply lose your mind.

He didn’t bother her anymore after that. Summer considered him her first cured patient and started talking about UCLA, her father’s alma mater. But I didn’t want her to talk about any colleges that weren’t in New York. Summer had been my best friend since first grade, and the possibility that she would go so far away was depressing.

“Ari,” Tina said later on, when Summer and I were chopping raw steak into cubes. She gave me a piece of paper with a name and telephone number on it and ran her hand across her forehead. Her hair was limp and she looked exhausted as usual. “Please give that to your mother. She needs the name of someone to contact at Hollister.”

“Thanks, Tina,” I said, and I wasn’t being disrespectful. Summer’s parents didn’t want me to address them as Mrs. Simon and Dr. Simon. They’d told me years ago to call them Tina and Jeff. Mom rolled her eyes when she found out about it and mumbled that Tina and Jeff were
progressive
.

I folded the paper and stuck it in my pocket. I felt Summer staring at me. I’d told her about our inheritance and the Parsons School of Design, but I had never mentioned Hollister Prep.

“Are you going to Hollister?” Summer asked.

She looked nervous. I guessed she was worried that I might accidentally mention embarrassing things to her Hollister friends, things like her eye surgery and her nose job. They must have believed that she was born perfect.

“My mother wants me to,” I said. I was still secretly hoping that Mom would forget the whole thing and let me finish my last two years in Brooklyn. But I rarely got what I wanted.

A month later, my parents and I went to Queens for a Saturday-afternoon lunch. Patrick was on duty and I was sleeping over, because Evelyn’s due date was getting close and he didn’t want her to be alone.

I sat on the couch as Evelyn bent solicitously over Dad, offering him one of those mini hot dog things wrapped in a flaky biscuit. She was wearing a summery maternity dress with a neck that was too low and a hem that was too high. More weight had crept onto her recently and I could see the dimples above her knees.

“Evelyn,” Mom said from her seat next to me. “Did Ariadne tell you that she’s going to Hollister Prep in September?”

By this point, Mom and I had talked about Hollister Prep. Yesterday I’d admitted that I was afraid. I was afraid of new surroundings and new people, and I was sure I wouldn’t make any friends because I hardly had any friends now, but Mom insisted that this was completely irrelevant. In her opinion, I was an interesting, intelligent, fabulous person, and if people didn’t recognize that, then they could just go and screw themselves. Besides, it was only for two years, and I had to agree when she said that Hollister would help my college chances. So I was going.

“No,” Evelyn said, lowering herself into a chair. Her stomach was gigantic and her feet were too swollen for shoes. “She didn’t. So how are you paying for that?”

“Oh,” Mom said. “Uncle Eddie left us some money. Didn’t I mention it?”

Mom knew that she hadn’t mentioned it. We all knew that she hadn’t mentioned it. And I could almost hear what my sister was thinking:
Uncle Eddie left you some money, you’re sending Ari to an expensive school, how much will that cost, and where’s mine
?

That wasn’t fair. Mom and Dad had given Evelyn lots of things, like a wedding and a two-month stay at New York–Presbyterian. But she could be very selfish sometimes.

“Well, that’s nice,” she said in the same bland voice she used lately whenever anything good happened to me, like when I entered a boroughwide art contest last year and won a second-place ribbon. I didn’t know why she had to be that way, because I was always happy when good things happened to her. I’d been happy when she married Patrick, even though I’d wished he would marry me.

Evelyn changed the subject by bringing us upstairs to the guest bedroom. It was a nursery now, with walls painted a color called Valentine Rose.

“Sort of loud, isn’t it?” Mom said.

Evelyn shrugged. “It’s pink. Pink is nice for a girl.”

“Yes,” Mom laughed. “But you don’t know if you’re having a girl, sweetheart.”

Evelyn’s skin suddenly matched the walls and her expression was one I’d seen many times when she lived with us in Brooklyn. It was as if she was about to dissolve into tears or commit a fatal stabbing.

“Evelyn,” Dad said. “Is lunch almost ready? I can’t wait to eat your tuna casserole.”

Tuna casserole was one of her specialties—along with meat loaf and sloppy joes.

Evelyn turned toward Dad. “It has potato chips on top,” she said, giving him a faint smile. “Just the way you like it.”

We had her tuna casserole for lunch, with her no-bake cheesecake for dessert, and after my parents went home, I washed dishes in the kitchen. Evelyn fell asleep on the couch, and Kieran asked if he could play in the backyard.

I nodded and changed into shorts and a bikini top. After that I sat on a folding chair while Kieran ran across the grass and dove on his Slip ’n Slide as if it was the most fantastic thing ever. It made me wonder who had come up with that brilliant idea—convincing kids that it was fun to skid across a slimy sheet of plastic on the hard ground.

The sun was fading when Evelyn joined us. She carried a bag of Doritos and dragged a chair next to mine.

“Do you know how much weight I’ve gained from this baby?” she asked, and I shook my head. “Well, I won’t tell you because it’s too embarrassing. I’ve turned into a big fat cow.”

“Don’t say that, Evelyn. You always look beautiful.”

She snorted. “You’re such a fucking liar, Ari. I mean … if you asked what I thought … I’d tell you that you’ve got a good body but your boobs are small and uneven.”

What had happened to the sweet Evelyn? I knew that my breasts were small, but they were uneven, too? I looked down at my bikini top and she nodded toward my right breast.

“
That
one,” she said. “It’s a little smaller than the other side. I can’t see it much in normal clothes, but it’s obvious in a bathing suit. You should stuff your bra with tissues or whatever.”

Later on, when Evelyn and Kieran were asleep, I stood at the bathroom mirror putting Kleenex in and pulling Kleenex out, and after an hour I decided that Evelyn was right. My right breast really was smaller than the left. This was especially upsetting because my list of flaws was long enough already.

There wasn’t anything horribly wrong with me, like a receding chin or an oversized nose. My chin was strong and my nose was small and straight. I didn’t even have any acne problems. But my face was kind of gaunt and pale, and one of my front teeth slightly overlapped the other. I had thick eyebrows that I had to tweeze relentlessly. Standing in front of a mirror, examining my reflection and criticizing myself, was something I spent a lot of time doing. My latest torture session, however, was cut short by Evelyn’s voice outside the door. Her water had broken early and the contractions were starting.