Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (18 page)

Liz pointed to the receiver in my hand. “Look, I’m going to go brush my teeth, and after that I want to go to bed. You call him. Get this over with, you hear?” Then she left me alone to make the call.

I dialed the rotary pad, praying his mother would not answer the phone because surely she would think, like my mother:
desperate girl
. Instead, a boy answered.

He sounded like James but more formal. “Hello, this is the Cabreras. May I ask who is calling, please?” I almost hung up. If this was James on the line, he was already putting me off. At our house we said, “Hello?” and then screamed for the requested party. That was our way of welcoming a caller, and it was an inviting reception. What
was
all this polite talk? Could he
be
any more cruel?

“James?” I blurted out.

“Are you sure?” said the voice. “You don’t sound like a James.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. The fact that he was playing with me went right over my head, which meant that we were getting somewhere. The bedroom door creaked open, and Liz crept back inside. Where was I? “Hello, may I speak with James?”

The voice grew impatient. “
May
I ask who is calling,
ple
ase
?”

Liz stood over me, mouthing the words, “Just say it.”

“Um. This is Eileen Cronin.”

“Uhleen,” he said. “Hello! This is James.”

Already I loved the way he said my name. He left out the incriminating “I” before the “lean.” And I forgot what I was going to say next. Why wouldn’t he talk? “Well, um. I was going to ask you to go to our dance ...” Nothing came back from his end. “Hello?”

“You were going to say?” he asked.

Liz sat down on the opposite bed. She was in a terrycloth robe, white with toothpaste-blue flowers on it, completely plain, but every girl in the family had inhabited that robe in high school. Its shared history was the whole point. That robe had put in a lot of phone time with boys. Liz crossed her arms and legs and gave me her implacable face.

“Uh, well, I heard about the mix-up. The other girl called you, right?” I stopped and tried so hard to wait him out, but he only said, “Yes.”

“Oooh. Sorry about that. Did she ask you to the dance?”

“Yes.”

“And you told her I should call myself, right?”

Another pause. Then he said, “Wait. Which girl?”

“Oh,” I said faintly. I’d waited too long. Someone else had asked him to the dance. “Oh,” I said again. “So, you’re already going.”

“Going where?”

Now he was dragging it out. “Look,” I said. “I was going to ask you to our sophomore dance. I’m sorry about what happened, but if someone already asked you ...” Liz’s face scrunched up like a fist. She looked ready to belt someone, either James or me.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“With me?”

“Sure.”

I sank into the pillow, relieved. I wanted to hang up immediately, but he cleared his throat, and something about the way he did that made me worry that he was about to set some conditions. His tone sounded tentative when he said, “We should probably get to know each other better. Maybe we should go out this weekend. You want to go out?”

T
he following Saturday night, James came to my back door, passing Frank and his friends on the basketball court. From my bedroom I heard the boys acknowledge each other tersely. Why had he come through the back? There was always a three-ring circus out there: a pack of children might be chasing each other, one with a bat, someone else might be digging up mud with a soup ladle. Who could say? After all, our idea of a joke, briefly, was to chase one another with an axe, until someone nicked up the walls in our newly renovated basement. And then there were Frankie’s friends.

Frank and I had been arguing lately. “You’re changing,” he said, pointing at me.

“And you are not.”

Frank pushed out his lips to think. “No,” he said, waving a finger authoritatively. “I am not changing.” He tried to make it sound like a commendable goal, and I laughed at him mockingly. After that, his eyes misted over and he went silent.

Now I heard Chief Taylor yell up from the basketball court, “Loooooney! Your
date
is here.” I crashed onto my bed and moaned, fighting nausea. Around our house, Rosa had been referring to James as Chi-Chi Rodriguez, and now I heard Mom greeting James in the kitchen. “Come on in,” she said. “What’s your name? Dick! Come and meet the Rodriguez boy. He’s here for Eileen.”

“Cabrera!” I wanted to scream from upstairs. Instead I hurried to finish getting ready because I heard Dad clear his throat. “Oh, God,” I said to Nina, who had just come in to watch me. “He’ll give James the mole face. He’s going to peer over his glasses from his newspaper like a chubby rat poking out from his hole.”

“I know,” said Nina with a thumbs-up to our father. She worshipped Dad, and he tried not to play favorites. But Nina was everyone’s favorite. I scrambled to finish my hair, burning my hand on the curling iron. I peeled off my cardigan and snuck into Liz’s room where she kept a trunk full of sweaters. I stole her beloved cashmere one and doused myself with her Chanel perfume.

Downstairs I found James’s sinewy figure draping the kitchen wall as if he were trying to camouflage himself in the swell of traffic. Mom stood at the stove in a nightgown, petroleum jelly smeared on her black eyebrows. She looked like Bette Davis in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Dad was eating a bologna sandwich at the kitchen table, completely ignoring James, whose expression was a mixture of horror and amusement.

“Oh, hey,” I said to Dad. “You met James.” I rushed to James and toward the door, but my barefoot mother leapt into my path. She mouthed the words, “Are you wearing that girdle I gave you?” Then she shook her head with dismay. “I didn’t think so,” she said under her breath.

“Excuse me?” said James.

“Naaaw,” I said. “No. Don’t need a heavier coat. Let’s go.”

I rushed him out and he looked eager to flee, especially when we hit the porch and the dribbling stopped. Eight boys stared us down from the basketball court. “Where you headed?” asked Chief. “Hyde P-p-p-park?”

I saw Frank shoot him a look and Chief nodded, as if to say he would handle this.

“Sump’n like that,” said James, adopting the lingo of my neighborhood, although he kept moving. We made it past the dogwoods, a relief until we came to a van in the driveway. “Ohhhh, who left
that
there?” I asked.

“It’s mine,” said James, opening the passenger door for me.

I could practically feel my leg falling off as I considered how I might hoist myself up there, but James came up behind me and gave me a hearty shove from behind. A jolting motion like that might have broken the suction on my right leg, which would have made a prolonged farting noise, but I was spared. Having navigated the awkward situation, we both sighed as I settled into my seat.

By the time he came around to the driver’s seat, a shroud of maturity had engulfed him. He took the wheel with a sobering sense of duty. We were going on a double date, he said.

“Really?” I said, relieved. “Who’s coming?” This was good thinking on his part. Otherwise, he’d have to deal with my nervous palaver or panicked silence.

“Will,” he said. I liked Will; that was another good choice. But then he added, “And Dodi.”

“Dodi?” I said, rubbing my chin. Oddly enough, there were two Dodis in my class. The main Dodi was Phoebe’s cousin, her polar opposite. Whereas Phoebe was sensual, Dodi was prissy. Phoebe took herself out of the college track in less than one semester of high school, while Dodi aspired to make National Honor Society. Phoebe preferred to go shoeless, and Dodi probably slept in Papagallo flats. The two girls even looked opposite: Phoebe’s dark features and voluptuous figure made Dodi seem a borderline anorexic blonde. Girls were intimidated by Dodi—everyone except for Phoebe, who found Dodi’s concerns laughable—so this news made me want to giggle. I pressed my good hand to my lips. James kept his eyes on the road. At the stoplight he said, “What?” But a smile crept over his face.

“It’s Dodi, right?” We both cracked up.

I waved it off. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to,” he said. He tossed his kinky hair back dramatically to imitate the way Dodi tossed her silky hair, which sent me into gales of laughter. It was not James’s nature to join in that laughter. He was more of a repressed performer, all about setup and execution, though there was a nurturing aspect to his delight in my laughter.

After everyone had been picked up the boys took us to a sexy comedy, where James laughed at all the subtle innuendo, most of which I didn’t get, but then I was completely focused on his arm bent so perfectly around my shoulder. I wanted to lean my head against his chest, though that might be interpreted as scandalous by Dodi. I did it anyway.

Afterward, James led me by the hand into a party, where we separated for a while. Each time I glanced around, I found him watching out for me from close by. Later he ushered me to my back door, where the porch light was on but there were no longer boys dribbling basketballs.

“Thanks,” I said.

He nodded. His smile had changed from what I had first thought of as a partial sneer to one like someone squinting into the sun, head tilted and one eye barely visible. He kissed me as if taking a small bite of some new fruit, first with concentration, then abandon. His teeth brushed against mine, and his hand at the back of my neck clasped a handful of my hair. I wanted to reach up and touch his curls but remembered that Will and Dodi were out there beyond the dogwoods. “I really had fun,” I said, hurrying to break away because if I gave in and touched his hair I might not let go.

“N
ights in White Satin”: that was the make-out song at my dance, and it pretty much summed up the 1975 school year, during which we went to concerts by Santana, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, and the Allman Brothers. Throughout all of it I chatted away nervously, never having gotten over that first sensation of ascending the crest of a rollercoaster every time I encountered him. James was a man of few words, perhaps choosing instead to let his music express what he could not. We needed distractions: movies, dances, parties, games of any kind, because we fell into that youthful pattern of making out as soon as we came up short. We ran out of distractions often. What we never ran out of was a novel make-out session. Like everyone else, we made out under changing leaves, in the snow, and under moonlight. But we also made out once after I threw up in a parking lot.

In the spring we went to a Reds game. He’d come straight from a golf match, and he was wearing yellow pants. I winced and said, “You can’t be serious.”

James never did buy into an insult. I’d seen kids shrink away after provoking him with names such as “spic.” The venomous stare James shot them struck the offender speechless. Within seconds James would be humming a tune to let it be known that he wasn’t giving it a second thought. Now he said to me, “They’re
golf
pants,” as if I were too simple-minded to know golf clothes when I saw them.

“If you say so,” I said.

We were sitting in Dad’s seats on the third base line, just a few rows from the opposing team’s dugout, so you could see exactly what was up inside the Reds’ dugout. Here Johnny Bench was always robbing us fans of foul balls, snatching them from over the rail with that huge bearlike mitt. Now, while we watched from behind the Pirates’ dugout, the lights coming on mid-game, the smell of popcorn, peanuts, and beer embracing us, James pointed up to the corporate box where his father was partying. My father’s seats included four season tickets, but no one had wanted the other seats so they were empty. In the seventh-inning stretch, a man with natty black hair in a red linen blazer came down and took the seat next to mine.

As if the jacket weren’t enough to catch my attention, he played a Charlie Chaplin routine, turning his back to me when I turned to him. I cleared my throat, and he popped his head up as if he’d been napping. Who was this guy? Finally, I looked at James as if to ask, “What’ll I do?” James bit his bottom lip and shrugged. The man whipped around and pretended to be startled, throwing his hands up theatrically.

Instantly I saw that he had James’s face and hair in a darker complexion. His eyes made me think of Albert Einstein, or maybe I just imagined him as a quirky scientist.

“And who is this young lady?” Dr. Cabrera asked in an elegant voice, while offering his hand.

I glanced back at James, who introduced me in his formal voice. Although the prank was over, James maintained what seemed to me an odd sense of formality with his father. But what did I know? When Dad saw a child running past the window wielding a golf club like a weapon, he only called through the screen, “Settle down. That’s my nine iron.” In our house, irreverence might be tolerated but a failed joke was reprehensible. James’s father might have been strict, but it pleased me to see that he had a sense of humor, too.

A
s soon as James asked me to go to his prom, I got to work on my tan. At school Claire and I concocted a plan to break something fixable on my leg so we could skip biology class and instead “lay out” by the creek. On the smoking patio, we tried to bend a clasp on my below-knee leg by holding a lighter to the metal. Unfortunately, the metal snapped. “Uh, oh,” we said, then Claire ran into the classroom and told Sister Theresa that “I-lean” was in “desperate straits” and needed help with her broken leg. I came hobbling in after her. “For Heaven’s sake, girl, get her to the nurse. It looks painful,” said Sister Theresa. We hobbled away before veering off to a side door and heading down to the creek, where we sunbathed.

That evening on the phone, I bragged to James that I had skipped class. When I described the scheme, he said, “You broke your leg on purpose?”

“Yep.”

As soon as I heard a curt sniff, I understood that I’d done something wrong. “You better get that fixed before my prom,” he said.

The prom was only days away. Who would I get to drive me to the leg man? “Uh-oh,” I said.

“This is not funny.”