Crazy in Love (10 page)

“Sallie, you know I’m not a snob. It’s just that ...To
tell you the truth, it’s my parents I’m worried about. My
mother and father would freak out if they knew I was going
out with someone who’s not only not Jewish, but who’s
Puerto Rican!”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this! What about the fact
that Saul happens to be a fantastic guy? And you and I both
know how hard those are to come by.”

Rachel shook her head slowly. “You should have warned
me.”

I turned away and stared back at Queens and the river.
The view was actually starting to look good to me, which I
took as a bad sign.

“Well, then, Rachel, I guess at this point, you have two alternatives. You can either ignore the fact that Saul is Puerto Rican and remember the night you
thanked
me for
introducing him to you, or you can refuse to see him
anymore, and we can forget that the whole thing ever
happened.”

There were tears in her eyes as she looked over at me and
said, “I’m afraid I can’t see him again, Sallie.”

“Is that really what you want?” I could hardly believe
what I was hearing.

“What I really want has nothing to do with it. It’s my
parents. Not only them, but also everything they’ve ever
taught me. It’s centuries of history, it’s a whole tradition
...
Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”

“I guess maybe I wouldn’t.” I glanced at her coldly.
“Rachel, what exactly happened last night, anyway?”

She started to look uncomfortable at that point, and she
shuffled around awkwardly. “Let me see. We started out by
having a nice time. He came over and then we went to a movie, right here on Eighty-sixth Street. It wasn’t until afterward that we started talking about . . . you know, our
backgrounds.”

“Go on.”

“For heaven’s sake, Sallie. His name is
Saul.
Saul is
generally a Jewish name, so I just assumed he was Jewish.

“Anyway, we went out for something to eat. We were
sitting in the coffee shop on the corner of First Avenue, and
all of a sudden I realized that I didn’t even know the guy’s
last name. So I asked him.”

“And?”

“And he told me.”

“And?”

“Well, I didn’t insult him or anything! What do you think
I am? Do you think I would just get up and run out or
something childish like that?”

“At this point I have no idea.” I looked at her with as
piercing a look as I could manage.

“Thanks a lot.” If looks could kill, I’d be floating around
the East River right now, probably bobbing along some
where near the 59
th
Street Bridge. “We left soon
afterward. He walked me home, and that was it.”

“Did he kiss you good-night?”

“No, I ran inside before that could come up.”

“Did he say he’d call you again?”

“Yes.” She studied the back of her hand as if it had the
key to the mysteries of life engraved on it. “I figured that if
and when he calls me, I’ll explain.”

“Explain what? That he’s not good enough for you?” My
voice was positively dripping with sarcasm.

“Oh, Sallie! Can’t you at least
try
to see things from my
point of view?”

But I was beyond trying to be understanding. “I’ll tell you something, Rachel Glass!” I practically screamed at
her. “Right now, I think that
you’re
not good enough for
him
!”

“Sallie,” she returned in an equally loud and enthusiastic
voice, “you have no idea what being Jewish is all about!”

“If it means cutting yourself off from other people—
especially nice, good people like Saul—I’m completely
turned off to it.”

“Well, I don’t think you’re being very reasonable or very
understanding. And I’ll tell
you
something: I hold you fully
responsible for getting me into this.”

“Into what?”

“I already told you. You should have warned me. You
owed me that much.”

“Wait a minute,” I said slowly, my eyes narrowing. It was as if, all of a sudden, I’d had a vision. The
truth of what was actually going on hit me like the
proverbial ton of bricks.

“The reason you’re so upset about all this is that you
really
like
Saul, don’t you?”

“You don’t have to sound so accusing,” Rachel pouted.

“Oh,
I
see. If he had turned out to be some jerk, like Dan or Fred, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. But
you’re in real conflict over this one, aren’t you?”

Rachel looked at me, her eyes flashing. “As I said
before, Sallie Spooner, if you’d had the sense to warn me
of what was going on here, all this never would have
happened. And if that’s all you think of our friendship, then we might as well throw it into the East River, along with all
the other garbage!”

She stormed off, her entire body tense with anger. I
watched her stalk away, and I could feel myself growing
mildly nauseated. Ten minutes before, I’d been feeling
bad because I’d just lost a terrific guy. And now, on top of
that, I’d just lost my best friend.

Both walking and eating seemed useless at that point. I
left the park, dragging my feet as though my sneakers had been cast in bronze. I felt as if all I wanted was to be alone— possibly for the rest of my entire life—but when I reached my block and saw Jenny in front of our apartment building
putting on her roller skates, I was overjoyed. At last, a
friendly face!

“Hi, Jen. Got a minute?” I sauntered over to the curb,
where she was spinning her wheels to see if they needed oiling.

“For you, kid, anytime. By the way, Rachel was here a while ago, looking for you. Mom told her you were at the
park. Did you two ever meet up with each other?” She
glanced up at me, then gasped, “What happened to you? You look terrible!”

“Do I look as if I just lost my best friend? Because I
did.”

“Oh, Sallie, what happened?” she asked again.

I told her our whole conversation, word for word. When I was through, she shook her head sympathet
ically. “Gee, that’s really tough, Sallie. But you’ve
got to keep this in perspective. You haven’t done anything
wrong. You’re not to blame for anything.”

“I know.”

“And Rachel’s the one who’s acting ridiculous. If she wants to act all screwy over this thing with Saul, it has
nothing to do with you.”

“But she’s my best friend! At least she
was.
Now she hates
me.”

“She doesn’t hate you. You wait and see. She’ll
come around. She’ll end up missing you as much as you
miss her. Separating you guys would be like tearing Siamese twins apart.” I gave Jenny my hand and helped her stand up.

“I don’t know. She’s really upset about this.”

“Trust
me, Sallie. I know you, and I know Rachel. This
will pass. In no time at all, you two will be spending hours
on the phone giggling every night, just like old times.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said doubtfully. I wanted to
believe Jenny, but at that point the future was looking very
bleak.

“Look, I’ve got to run. I mean I’ve got to roll. I’m
meeting a couple of my friends over in front of the school.
We’re taking a skating tour of the neighborhood.”

Unlike her older sister, Jenny Spooner is a terrific skater. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, then glided away. I
stood there on the sidewalk in front of my building,
watching her until she turned the corner and disappeared. It
was silly, I knew, but as I watched her take off, I felt as if
my very last resource in the whole world, my last and only
friend, was rolling out of my life.

To say that I was depressed as I rode up in the elevator of
my apartment building would be an understatement. Actual
ly, I was trying to convince myself that I was merely in a
recession,
not a full-blown depression. “All things must
pass,” I told myself, calling up George Harrison’s lyrics
from my favorite golden-oldies station, for a glimmer of hope. “The darkest hour is just before dawn,” I then tried,
thinking of The Mamas and The Papas. I even found myself
resorting to, “It’s up to you to do the ha-cha-cha.”

I was trying to cheer myself up, but all I was doing was
reminding myself that it was music that was responsible for
this whole mess in the first place. If I hadn’t struck up a
friendship with Saul because of my goal of writing a
song for the WROX contest, he and Rachel never would
have met. Then, I’d be flitting through a beautiful autumn Saturday morning—minus a broken heart and still aligned with my best friend—instead of drooping like an unwatered plant.

My sad mood was making me philosophical. I started
thinking about the inevitable conflict between art and real life. Now I don’t generally go in much for this sort of deep thinking, especially while riding in elevators, but all of a sudden I could see nothing but complications. I’d always expected to keep the two completely separate: I would have my creative work, and I would have my friends. And now
things didn’t seem quite as clear-cut. One was interfering
with the other. As I let myself into the living room, I sighed
so deeply and so loudly that my mother wandered in from
her bedroom to see what was up.

“What’s the matter, Sallie?” she said, her voice cheerful
but her face taut with concern. “You sound as if you’re
carrying all the world’s burdens on your shoulders.”

“I feel that way. Why is it that everything always happens at once?”

“Maybe you’d like to talk about it.”

I shook my head. “Thanks, but I think I’d just like to be alone for a while.” I started for my bedroom, then realized
that shutting myself up within those four white walls would
drive me crazy. I paused in the living room for a second,
then said, “On second thought, Mom, I’m going out for a
couple of hours.”

“Will you be back for lunch?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m going to the Museum of
Natural History. Maybe staring at the dinosaur bones will
make me realize how insignificant my problems are in the
course of the world’s history. Looking at something that’s millions of years old always helps me put things back into
perspective.”

The American Museum of Natural History is one of my favorite places in the world. Once, when I was just a little
kid, like five or six, my family came down to New York
from Boston for the weekend. I remember that Jenny was
still so tiny that my father had to carry her the whole time.
Anyway, we went to that museum, and there were two
things there that I never forgot. One was this huge whale,
hanging from the ceiling. It’s a real whale, too, or at least it
used to be before it became an exhibit. It was so big that I
spent years wondering how they ever got it inside the
museum. I still haven’t figured it out.

The other thing that left a lasting impression was the
dinosaur bones. They have all these cavernous rooms at the
museum, filled with the reconstructed skeletons of a
tyrannosaur and a stegosaur and a couple of other kinds of
dinosaurs. When I first saw them, I was awed by their size.
You’ve got to remember that I was also a lot smaller then, too. But since then, the thing that really kills me about those
guys is how old they are. I mean, we’re talking millions and
millions of years old here.

You stand in front of these dinosaurs, and you just think about what the world was like back then, when these things were tromping around New York City and France and
everywhere else you can imagine, and you try to com
prehend the idea of many millions of years. Doing that
never fails to have this incredible effect on me. I start
feeling really insignificant, but in an eerie kind of way.
Stupid things like chemistry tests and freckles and fights
with your best friend don’t seem so overwhelming anymore.

So I hopped onto the 79
th
Street crosstown bus, and within half an hour, I was standing in front of my old friends. In their usual manner, they proved quite helpful in banishing my awful mood. I stood there, just thinking about
time and the world and life in general. I also watched the
other people who filed through that room: couples holding
hands, college students clutching spiral notebooks and
looking serious, families with little kids.

There was one little girl who reminded me of myself. She was about five or six, and she really freaked out over my dinosaurs. In fact, she put up such a fight when her parents tried to drag her away from them that her mother had to
promise to get her a book with pictures of dinosaurs from
the museum store before she would agree to leave without
screaming. I smiled at the little girl when they finally left.
After all, she was one of us.