Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (14 page)

Oh for the love of,
Mathilde said, but wouldn't say who the love was of. -
You watch where you're spending Daddy's money, -
she thought.

How can I explain this?
Claudio had asked himself out loud.
By giving money away to somebody I don't like, I'm showing that I'm the better person.

He's fifty dollars richer, and we have the wrong appetizer.
It was only after she'd met Claudio that Mathilde realized she barely thought about money while growing up. She wondered if this meant that her parents did a responsible or foolish job of raising her.

Claudio tried to think of another way to justify his expenditures to his wife, but this would lead him to his hopelessly dark place. Las Vegas. Jane's eyes. How Claudio wanted more than anything to give that creepy man a free flight back to wherever he came from, first-class. Claudio and Jane would laugh, feel sorry for him.
Enjoy your flight.
Then they'd fly off in their private jet. Somehow the wheels in Claudio's brain told him that giving to people also degraded them. Sponsoring somebody was the dirtiest thing he believed he could do.

(And was this not exactly what he'd done for Jane?)

N
atasha was a French kiss for her first Halloween party. She wore a beret with a piece of crepe paper labeled
HERSHEY'S KISSES
on it, and a black leotard with layers of aluminum foil curled over it. It wasn't like her, but it was Halloween! Her best friend, Molly, came over and they got into costume together. Molly, dressed as Swiss Miss, had braids and carried a mug of hot chocolate.

Her sisters, twelve and eleven, were sure they were too old to go trick-or-treating, but nobody their age threw Halloween parties. Lucy and Carly planned on watching
Hocus Pocus
and eating Reese's Pieces bought from CVS.
Somebody cute is going to kiss you,
predicted Lucy.

In the opening hour, Natasha played her first game of seven minutes in heaven.
Heaven
was the backyard. Ben Greenstein went fourth, and picked Natasha.

Natasha had barely even noticed Ben in school. Ben joked about everyone else's mother and made obscene gestures with his mouth and fingers during class pictures. He was a chore to be near. Once he'd gotten suspended for threatening his PSAT prep class teacher,
eat my ass,
and then had the chutzpah to contest to the principal:
I didn't say
ass.
I said
shorts. But the way Natasha's mind worked was that she typically noticed quiet people
more than those who relished attention. It was like training yourself to hear quiet more loudly than noise.

By that point, Natasha's aluminum foil had plummeted off in angel-hair-thin layers. She was left flimsily in her dance leotard as Ben grabbed her hand by the wrist. His thumb and pointer finger overlapped. He was almost a head shorter than she.

The party got weirder. He called her
babe
. Natasha thought -
me? -
He kissed her with his blubbery, polyps-y lips. The logic didn't hold up: this first kiss felt like nothing, like bumping into somebody while taking public transportation. Any setting when touching would make her feel neither pleased nor violated.

Take off your shirt.

Pardon?

You heard me.

I'm not comfortable. And plus, I'm wearing a leotard, not a shirt.
Natasha had been taught that in a situation where she wasn't comfortable, she should let people know. Though how could Ben not know? Natasha was blinking twice the amount she usually blinked. She kept brushing her sleeves, as though invisible beetles creeped on her.

Come on,
said Ben.
You want to.

Not really,
Natasha said, chilly and ticklish. How could heaven be the backyard? Why was heaven so cold in October? She knew she was a bright girl, but she still had so much to understand. She wanted to learn how to enjoy winter and how to be fine with people like Ben.

Come on!

I don't feel good.
Natasha always had a stomachache. At least this was what she was used to telling her parents when she was blue or humiliated.
I can't go to school today. I can't play with Lucy and Carly. My tummy hurts.
Natasha could never admit that she didn't want to do anything, just that she was physically incapable of doing it. In reality, Natasha's stomach worked quite well. She had a fabulous metabolism and digestion.

I have a stomachache.

Don't be a dyke.
Ben would go back to his group of guys and hyperbolize that he'd gotten to first and a half base with Natasha, and Johnny Rivecchi would say
who?
and Ben would repeat, like her name was an exposed pipe,
Natasha Simone,
and Jake O'Malley would say
Natasha Simone? That girl always seems sad.

Oh please.
She went back inside through the sliding doors of the basement.

Molly put an arm around her best friend.
How was it?
She was wearing perfume that made her smell like a burning-down cookie factory. Underneath the sweetness, she smelled mealy-sweaty, like Band-Aids.

It was all right,
said Natasha, in a grimy moment. She didn't want anyone to think she was a prude or a dyke. But what was so wrong with being gay? Uncle Sawyer and Uncle Noah were gay.
- Maybe it's different for girls, -
she thought. But the more she thought about it, the more she knew that it wasn't.

-
Am I gay? -
She'd thought she liked boys, but couldn't really picture liking anybody. Maybe she was asexual like the fungi and plants they studied in science class. Something she didn't have inside of her, the way some people didn't have internal compasses.

While the rest of her grade took turns going to heaven, Natasha watched
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
upstairs in the living room with a boy in her class named Raj, who'd moved last year from Sri Lanka, who hadn't wanted to play any kissing games either. Natasha sat mutely with him, waiting for her father to pick her up at eleven.

Nobody ever asked Raj about his life before America. It seemed to be about identity: Natasha's whole class, tepid with foolhardiness, convinced themselves they had nothing in common with Raj. In their eyes, they were American, and he hadn't been, so he'd never be. Even sitting next to him on the cornflake-stubbly couch, Natasha didn't expect amity.

Did Raj get homesick? Last year, Natasha went to astronomy camp for two weeks and cried into her pillow every night, making lists of all the things she missed.
Lucy's hair. Sitting on the kitchen counter eating pineapple. The sculpture of Icarus in our bathroom.
This homesickness granted her a self that she'd never grasped before, for leaving home allowed her to understand what she had. Maybe Raj was the most self-actualized person her age, with regards to his personal diaspora. Raj of all people, with his useless mother tongue, who died in a trifling way when he came to America. He may as well have been an adult.

At 10:00 p.m., Raj scratched his lip. He had cheekbones engraved in his face, a handsome nose. Natasha wanted to kiss it. So maybe she wasn't asexual.
What's Sri Lankan food like?

Fuck off,
said Raj. Two months of being ostracized at school had left him hardened and suspicious of anyone who asked him a question with a purpose other than transactional. He yawned noisily.

Why are you people so obsessed with ethnicity?
he asked her.

I don't know,
said Natasha.

It wasn't meant to be answered.

It isn't what you think. My family's not like everyone else's. My sister, she's from China.

I could care less.

- Did he mean to say that he couldn't care less? Maybe he does care a little. -

There wasn't any more conversation. Natasha wanted to like Raj. More important, she wanted him to like her.

Her father rang the doorbell. Natasha didn't know who he was supposed to be. He was wearing a giant furry Russian hat. He wore that hat all the time. It wasn't even a costume! Jesus. Natasha was being punished.
Let's go,
she said urgently. Her father opened her car door. After her, he gestured and walked around to the driver's side. He'd been listening to old Halloween
music loudly in the car ride home—the B-52's. Everything in Natasha's life suddenly felt condescending.

Turn it off, Daddy.

Something wrong?

I hate you.

Why?

Why did you have to pick me up so late?

Isn't this the right time? Did something bad happen?

I had a stomachache.

Claudio reached into his pocket.
Tums?

Natasha paused. She didn't know what could happen if she took medicine on a healthy stomach.
It's gone.

With his eyes on the road, Claudio reached over to disturb Natasha's hair. She ducked.

Don't. Besides, you're going to have an accident.

Peanut, I used to drive a stretch limo all over New York City,
said Claudio.
You don't need to worry about me driving.

Accidents happen all the time,
said Natasha.
That's why they're accidents.

Lucy and Carly ran to Natasha upon her arrival with Yves Klein–blue tongues, wearing ring pops. Carly asked her,
did you kiss a person?

Somebody, but don't ask me about him. I can't remember if he's cute.

What was he dressed as?

The Monopoly man.
Actually, Ben had been dressed as a vampire, but vampires brought to mind sucking and sex and lousy YA literature. She wanted to picture Ben as a fat old man with a monocle and two giant bags of money carried over his shoulder like a tramp and his bindle.

One week after she had her first kiss, Natasha started volunteering at a retirement home, playing checkers with a nonagenarian named Roy Stern. She had to complete ten hours of
community service per semester as a requirement for her middle school's National Junior Honor Society. Every few minutes Roy told Natasha that she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.

You're so sweet!

I love you.

You have pretty hair.

Are you married?

Natasha noticed that he had a wedding ring on.

Samantha,
he told her.
Fifty-two years, we were married. Cancer took her away.

Sorry to hear,
said Natasha.

Cancer schmancer,
said Roy.
It's like jury duty: eventually, you can't escape it. I have it now. They say it's slow-moving, though. By the time it'll get me, I'll be dead from something else.
Sunlight through the window lay in his purling, slumbery hair, as though it could melt the white.

Oh,
said Natasha.
I'm sorry?

Pretty girls help,
said Roy.
A girl as pretty as you, why, just giving me an afternoon here and there is so nice. Ain't nothing wrong with an afternoon here and there. But I'm all done with love.

Natasha was mature for her age. A lot of girls in her grade probably would have laughed at Roy, called him a pervert behind his back or even to his face. Natasha could see in his face that he missed his wife terribly. She pardoned him:
that's really sweet.

Roy smiled. She was close enough to smell him: a tremulous cocktail of mulch and marmalade.

Do you ever get lonely?

Once in a while.
Roy breathed in a crumpled, noisy way.
Then I think about being buried with her. It's not so bad, thinking about that. We never had children. Maybe it would have made this a bit easier. I'm forgetful, and every time I think of her she gets more and more fuzzy.

Memory can be like medicine,
prophesized Natasha, though she didn't have enough of it to really know for certain.

Mine's all I have left.

Of her?
asked Natasha.

Yeah, or of, you know, me.

I see,
said Natasha.

There was a difficult but necessary pause, and then Roy said,
don't worry, my life wasn't bad. Even now, you know, it ain't bad.

T
he year before, in her Health and Politics class, Carly partook in a debate on abortion and when, precisely, does a zygote become a human? At fourteen, Carly considered herself anti-abortion. Her lofty moralizing (and such is the way with most didactics) had been unable to prevent itself, a part of her Heart. Her sisters disagreed, tried to engage her in information about a woman's right over her own body. Carly had no capacity for this. -
Doesn't everybody have the right to exist? -

The dilemma was, when exactly did existing happen?

Mr. Vora wrote on the board,
when does a human being, in the stages of pregnancy, start to live?

You see what that is, folks? That's a free idea. I want you to think about it, because now it's your responsibility.

Carly's voice jumped first.
At conception.
Materializing being as simple as cell meeting cell: this was Carly's conviction. Her idea of life was poetic.

Her classmate, a girl named Betsey, countered,
At birth.

Moderate suggestions were given:
When it starts to look like a baby. After the first trimester. After the second trimester. When he or she is wanted.