Not Exactly a Love Story (4 page)

Mom called Dad and told him she’d made up her mind. She was
getting married and Mr. B was moving us out of the city as soon as they closed on a house. On
the
house. So if Dad wanted to get out of that fleabag hotel he lived in, he could have the apartment.

Hotel? Dad didn’t have an apartment? Roommates?

As I listened wide-eyed, I saw the moment for pushing Mom’s guilt buttons had been and gone. With the same speed and agility she displayed on a shopping trip, Mom rearranged all our lives with that single phone call.

I went to the library and got about a dozen books on self-defense. Since I wasn’t likely to be carrying a cane or an umbrella most days, I leaned toward the books on karate and jujitsu. I watched a class, where it seemed people mainly
learned how to be knocked to the floor. I went back to reading the books.

Mom and Mr. B set a date for the wedding, the day after the proposed closing date on the house they bought. Mom started working longer hours to pad her checking account. As a result, for three and four days at a stretch, I hardly saw her.

The plan: a weekend wedding at a nice B&B, and then we’d move into the new house too, just the three of us, the average little family. Very cozy.

As it worked out, the deal on the house fell through. Mom and Mr. B couldn’t change their wedding date, but house-hunting began again, now with a kind of frenetic energy. I was drafted into looking at houses with Mr. B during the week, while Mom was at work.

It was kind of natural to expect me to go along with him, I guess, because we were both in the gym at the close of summer school every morning. But if Mr. B and I weren’t enemies in gym class, we weren’t buddies either. He had the class doing laps between volleyball games on ninety-degree days to build endurance. This was exactly what made him a target for unattractive nicknames. For the house-hunting project, Mr. B and I understood that we both had my mother’s best interests at heart.

Mom took me shopping for the Long Island move. “Mom, I can do this on my own. What makes you think I need help?”

“The Island has a different look. You want to get it right.”

“
You
want to get it right,” I pointed out.

So we got basics, classic. Except for one sale item I couldn’t resist. A pair of thin leather pants, glossy black. They looked good. They looked cool.

School started right after Labor Day, and we settled on three houses most likely to appeal to Mom. When he took her to look at them on the weekend before the wedding, she said yes to the one we liked best.

It would be a couple of months before we could move in. From the looks of things, I’d be starting at a new school around Thanksgiving, but I halfway hoped this deal would fall through too.

Nothing went wrong.

Mom looked happy at her wedding, pretty, and Mr. B looked like he’d won a really important game. The guest list was short. Mom’s parents, Mr. B’s mother, and me. Mr. B’s mother was a shorter version of Mr. B, with only a little more hair, and I withheld the fact that she reminded me of a garden gnome.

Mr. B had started the job on Long Island. Between practices and evening games, he couldn’t handle a commute, so he stayed in a room he rented near the school. Mom and I remained in the apartment.

He and Mom kept in touch with each other through chummy evening phone calls. They continued to “date.”
But they had this comfortable way of being together, like an old married couple, the kind I saw on TV. They bickered as much as they shared stories and jokes, and it was a friendly bicker. A debate. They didn’t have a mushy quality that would’ve embarrassed me.

I hated to admit it, but Mom seemed happier with Mr. B. She didn’t hold herself so tightly, she had softened.

I had to accept defeat.

We moved into the house on November 19, a date Mom’s
horoscope reported was a good day for a move. It was also a date that used to be my parents’ anniversary. If Mom thought about the irony of it, if she noticed it at all, she didn’t mention it to me.

As Mom had gone around the apartment taking watercolors off the walls, I learned they were hers. Hers, as in, she chose them, she paid for them, she got to keep them. It was surprising to me, I’d never thought of anything we had as other than “ours.” The day was full of little revelations like that, and it left me feeling washed out.

At eight p.m. we ate tuna salad sandwiches, the three of us perched on boxes in the kitchen so Mom could admire the harvest-gold appliances. Personally, I couldn’t get into
the same light mood, but I got it that she was excited to be in the house.

Me, I missed Dad. More than when I was in Queens and he was only a short subway ride away. I wondered who would sympathize if I pinched my finger in a car door.

Mom exhausted the subject of the kitchen pretty quickly. She went on to say she’d change to her long-awaited part-time schedule this coming week so she could get us settled in. I could see she was also eager to settle into her part-time stay-at-home schedule. After the last few months of extra-long hours, I couldn’t hold it against her.

Mr. B talked at length about a kid who had also moved here within the last couple of weeks, coming from a really good high school football team in Buffalo. He considered the kid to be some find.

When Mom admitted she was dating Mr. B, I could not understand how she could have outgrown Dad and then gravitated toward my gym teacher. After all, I’d figured Mr. B for one of those sports-brained guys who had season tickets to the games. But I knew him better now. He was a nice guy. Probably he pictured his football player and me being odd men out together until we found other friends.

“I think we ought to turn in early,” Mr. B said. “Leave this unpacking for tomorrow. The boy’s tired.”

Somewhere along the line, I had become “the boy.” At first this seemed to differentiate me from Mr. B’s other students, but lately it was said with a degree of affection that I
couldn’t ignore. Mr. B was letting me and my mother know he saw us as a family. And yet he wasn’t stepping on Dad’s toes. This needed a delicate balance, and I was less and less surprised to find he knew it.

So far as school was concerned, I wasn’t expecting much of a welcoming committee myself. I doubted many teachers were looking over my grades from last year and thinking
I
was a find. As for making friends, cliques would have formed. Maybe Mr. B was right. The football player and I might find we had something in common.

We might have to.

I went upstairs to my room and shoved a couple of boxes out of my way. I stood for a minute in the dark. The windows were still bare, and plenty of light came in from the street. Enough light anyway to sit down on my desk chair near the window and try to feel like I belonged there.

A telephone sat on my bedside table, one of the perks that came with my new position, stepson of Mr. B. It had an element of strangeness, like the plastic-wrapped sofa that stretched across the living room.

Otherwise, the furniture came from my room in the apartment I grew up in. It looked familiar, and yet changed here. Everything seemed to take up more space. As for me, I
needed
more space. I could feel an acne attack looming when a light came on in a room in the house next door. The light spilled onto the double-width driveway.

My brain cataloged this fact while at the same time I
watched a girl strip a sweater off over her head and throw it aside. She took up a position in front of a mirror and pulled her blond hair back into a ponytail, giving me a clear view of her in her bra.

I knew she was moving in real time, but I took everything in as if it was in slow motion. She appeared to be in a ballet of lifted arms and tossed sweater, her hair swung with a faint rebound, like the punctuation at the end of a sentence, the light reflecting off her skin so that she was almost outlined in a halo.

She might have been a painting done by an Old Master or, at the very least, starring in a shampoo commercial. This girl seared a forever-in-memory film short onto the movie screen of my blissed-out mind.

A woman, I was guessing her mother, came to her bedroom door and said something to her. It seemed, from the curt gestures of the mother, the toss of the ponytailed head, they were arguing. The girl swung open a closet door, grabbed a shirt off a hanger, and pulled it on, all while they continued a lively discussion.

They both left the room abruptly, leaving the light on. I went on sitting in the dark, thinking this girl next door was an excellent development. I wondered what her name was.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mom’s quick steps.

“Vinnie, what are you doing, sitting here in the dark?”

“Deciding that I like my new room.”

This wasn’t an answer she expected. “I’m very happy to
hear it.” She flipped on the light, making me glad the room across the driveway was empty. “Unpack whatever you’re going to need for tomorrow. I’ll make up your bed.”

“I’ll make my bed.” I flicked the light switch off. “ ’Night, Mom.”

It would be a short week, with school closed for Thanksgiving.

I decided to wear the leather pants on Monday to make a great first impression. And when school opened after the holiday, the ice would be broken.

At seven-thirty that morning it was an unseasonable seventy degrees. I’d never worn the leather pants before, and I found they worked like rubber sweatpants. I began to sweat, and they stuck to me like a second skin.

Half a dozen kids stood at the bus stop, including the foxy blonde from next door. She was not a disappointment up close. Swingy shoulder-length hair, shaggy bangs that gave huge gray-blue eyes a peekaboo quality as she turned her head. Taller than most girls but shorter than I was, so maybe five foot eight or nine.

I like to think I would have smiled at her. But I’d just
become aware of one more disastrous side effect of the leather pants. I guess it had to do with the heat, the clinging, the rubbing as I walked. I couldn’t do anything but cross my hands over the notebook I held in front of myself, down low.

I like to think she would’ve smiled back when I smiled at her. I do think she gave me a sort of once-over, the corner of her mouth pulled up to expose the dimple she had in one cheek. I hadn’t seen that from across the driveway, and I had a thing for dimples.

When she offered up her slow-motion smile, an invitation to say hi, she offered it to someone else, a guy who came up to the group from the opposite direction. He was about my height, but with massive width and depth to his body. He was nearly as wide as he was tall.

As for me, there was an almost forgotten pull at my heart when I looked at her, and when I pointedly didn’t, a kind of longing. I don’t know if that’s love. It’s almost sad, that feeling. Excited and interested and hopeful and fearful.

I didn’t speak to anyone that day.

I also missed gym class. With Mr. B. I’d left my shorts at home. I didn’t do so much walking around between classes that I had a problem, and I was comfortable in the leather pants after that first experience. But I couldn’t show up and run around the gym, shooting baskets.

I figured I’d explain all that to Mr. B later.

I hung out in the locker room. That was where I
overheard two huge guys—huge, as in not just tall but wide and deep as steers raised for beefsteak—talking about the blonde as they dressed for their next class. It didn’t seem to bother them that they were running late.

One of them was the monster she smiled at at the bus stop that morning. I’d seen the ripple of expression pass across his low brow—he didn’t want to look too eager. He smiled but let himself be distracted by someone else, and almost instantly, so did she. I didn’t catch his name but in my mind it had one syllable, something with punch. Biff.

He put a textbook into the locker he’d chosen. “I got it from Melanie,” he said with a moronic chuckle as he tossed a piece of paper into his locker. “It’s Patsy’s unlisted number.”

Patsy. What a sweet name. It suited her slow smile. I couldn’t picture
her
charging through a department store like a hunting dog.