The Smart One (17 page)

“Relax, babe,” he’d said.

They sat like that for a while, and Claire drank a beer, wishing to be drunk so she wouldn’t have to track every movement that she made, be aware of every single breath. They didn’t talk much, although she kept bringing up different topics, like where Brad’s parents were, and how he’d moved all the breakable things upstairs. Fran seemed bored, she remembered, just watching everyone at the party like he was waiting for something good to happen. That was the main difference between them, really. Claire was always excited to be at a party, and if it turned out to be fun, that was just a bonus. There was always the promise of a great night, always the chance that something good could happen, and so she was often visibly enthusiastic. Fran, on the other hand, looked like he’d done this a million times before, like high school was so boring to him he couldn’t even stand it, and like he had very little hope that anything truly exciting would happen.

Finally that night, Fran had squeezed her leg and said, “Come on.” They stood up and he led her out of the room and up the stairs, like he knew just where to go. Claire let herself follow behind him, holding his hand, and thinking,
This is really happening right now
.

His mouth tasted like cinnamon gum and tobacco, and she kept rubbing her hands on his face and through his hair. They basically just kissed—well, and she took her shirt off, which she confessed only to Lainie—and when the whole thing was over, Claire wondered if it had really happened.

The events of that night just made her crush grow, and for the rest of high school, she liked him so much that she found it nearly impossible to talk to him or be around him without losing her breath or having her heart beat so loudly that she thought people could see it through her shirt. He also made her sweat, which was the most unfortunate part, although it didn’t really matter, because he never seemed interested in her again.

Claire waited all through high school for something more to happen, or at least for someone to mention it to her. She thought maybe Brian would tease her about it, but he didn’t, which seemed like a bad sign since she figured that maybe Fran had said something bad about her and Brian didn’t want to get involved. Claire would have almost thought she’d made the whole thing up, until the end of senior year, when Brad told her that Fran had made a list of every girl he hooked up with in high school and had given them all grades. “You got a B-minus,” he told her. And Claire felt relieved, of all things, so happy that she was above average, that she hadn’t failed or done anything ridiculous that would have earned her a bad grade.

Claire washed her hands in the bathroom and talked to herself in her head. It was ridiculous, all of it. First of all, where did he get off grading girls? And second, how disgusting was it that she was happy about the grade? She dried her hands on the towel and walked back downstairs and into the kitchen, where Lainie was peeking in the oven.

“Fran Angelo is here,” Claire said. She said it quietly and looked around to make sure no one could hear her.

“Oh, good,” Lainie said. She leaned down and pulled out a tray of mini hot dogs wrapped in dough. “Brian thought it was dumb to make pigs in a blanket, since we have hot dogs for the grill too, but I told him he was crazy.”

“You never told me he was coming,” Claire said. She watched Lainie poke at the little hot dogs and start taking them off the cookie sheet with a spatula.

“So? What’s the big deal?”

“Nothing. I just haven’t seen him in forever.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, Brian’s been seeing a lot of him lately.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And anyway, I thought you’d be happy to see him. You were the one that was obsessed with him.”

“Lainie, shhh. I wasn’t obsessed with him. I just, you know.”

“Yes, I do know. You were obsessed with him.” Lainie smiled and popped a hot dog in her mouth.

“Shut up. Anyway, he was such a jerk.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Yes, he was. Remember he graded me? He graded everyone?”

“Oh my God, Claire. That was like a million years ago.”

“Still.”

Claire found it fascinating how Lainie could distance herself so much from high school when she was married to her high school boyfriend. Did she really not care about any of that stuff? Because Claire felt each memory freshly, like it had happened just the week before, like it was still happening twelve years later.

“You know …,” Lainie said. Now she was the one to look around and lower her voice. “He was engaged to this girl, Liz. She broke it off a couple of months ago and now he’s living back at his parents’ house.”

Lainie finished arranging the hot dogs on a tray and filled some little dishes with ketchup and mustard. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“I’ll be right out,” Claire said. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it down all at once. So she was in the same position as Fran Angelo. She’d gone to a good college, and he’d gone to some random small state school. She’d moved to New York and gotten a good job, and then what did you know? None of it mattered. She and Fran Angelo were basically living parallel lives, tied in the exact same place in their lives. Well, wasn’t that just a pickle?

CLAIRE WASN’T AT ALL SURPRISED
to learn that Fran Angelo still made her sweat. She walked outside and waved to him from across the lawn, and he smiled and waved back, so she walked over to him. They stood for a while, each of them holding a bottle of beer, and then they moved over to some lawn chairs that were a little bit out of the center of the party, and conveniently located next to the cooler. Claire watched as the table next to them filled up with their empty beer bottles, two at a time.

Maybe it was because she knew Fran’s situation, or maybe it was because she was getting drunk in the afternoon, but Claire felt free to share. It didn’t take long before she was telling Fran about Doug and the apartment and moving home. He’d nodded and then told his story. And before long, the two of them were deep in conversation, cutting each other off to tell the details of their own broken engagement.

“She kept the ring,” Fran told her. When he said this, it almost felt like he was sharing too much, but Claire didn’t care. She was fascinated.

“Did you ask for it back?” Claire asked.

“No,” Fran said. “That would’ve been a dick move. But she should have given it back anyway, you know?”

“I wonder why she wanted it.”

“Because she’s a bitch.” Fran was drunk now, and honest and angry, and Claire didn’t judge him one bit for it. They sat together and drank more beer, watching the party from the sidelines as it got dark outside, their own little angry team.

AFTER EVERYONE LEFT, CLAIRE SAT
on the porch with Lainie and Brian, having a glass of wine and discussing Fran and the whole situation. Brian called Fran’s fiancée a bitch, and Lainie interrupted.

“You can’t just call her that because she broke up with him, like that’s the end of it. There’s a whole other huge part to the story.” Lainie’s teeth and lips were a little purple and she was speaking loudly.

“What am I leaving out?” Brian asked. He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“Well, first of all, you know I love Fran and I’m on his side, but it’s not like he was the best boyfriend. He went out all the time.”

“Going out isn’t a reason to break up with someone.”

“Brian, come on. She told me once that he sometimes didn’t come home, and yeah, maybe he just got drunk somewhere and passed out, but maybe not. Who knows where he was? I’m not so sure he didn’t cheat on her.”

“What makes you think that?” Brian asked.

“Are you serious? Remember last Fourth of July? We were at the
parade and then we went out with them after, and he was with that random girl at the bar?”

“So? Sometimes guys talk to girls in a bar. It doesn’t mean they’re cheating.”

“He was sitting there with his hand on her thigh. I’m just saying, you don’t sit there and put your hand on some other girl’s thigh, do you?”

“No, Lainie. I don’t. And I wouldn’t. But he did, and we don’t know what else happened. Maybe nothing.”

“Claire, wouldn’t that piss you off?” Lainie asked. “Wouldn’t that be totally out of line if someone you were engaged to did that?”

“Yeah,” Claire said. “I mean, I guess so.”

Lainie nodded and sat back in her chair and took a sip of wine. She looked satisfied that she had finally convinced them of something.

THAT NIGHT, CLAIRE HAD TROUBLE
sleeping. She was a little drunk, and had been out in the sun and eaten too many little hot dogs and received too much disturbing information. The hot dogs and stories were swimming around in her head and threatening to make her sick.

The year she was in third grade, she had developed insomnia for no apparent reason. She would just lie awake at night, wondering and worrying why she couldn’t sleep. She’d read sometimes, and made her way through the Baby-Sitters Club books, one right after the other. “Don’t worry about sleeping,” Weezy always used to tell her. “Just lay there. Resting is just as good as sleeping.” The problem went away one day, just as quickly as it had appeared, but whenever Claire couldn’t sleep she always thought of Weezy’s advice: “Resting is just as good as sleeping.” (Which was total bullshit, by the way.)

Figuring she was less likely to get sick if she was sitting up, Claire finally got up from her bed and started looking through her dresser drawers. They were all still stuffed full of random things—a couple of the old Baby-Sitters Club books, collages made from magazines, notes from Lainie, a couple of games of MASH, and tons of those fortuneteller things, made by folding paper and filling them with predictions from the future.

It was around sixth grade when she and Lainie became obsessed
with telling the future. They played games to find out what their professions would be, used a Magic 8 Ball, a Ouija board, whatever they could find. They never pulled a top off of a Coke can or the stem off an apple without believing that it would tell them the initial of their future husbands. Even now, sometimes, Claire would find herself twisting an apple stem around, silently saying the alphabet, waiting for the letter when it would fall off. It was funny to think of it now, the way they thought these things would just happen to them. You’ll be a Lawyer and Live in a Mansion and marry Michael Kelly! When did they start realizing that there was more to it than that?

Farther down in the drawer, Claire found a couple of mix tapes with titles like
Claire’s Driving Songs
and
Spring Fling Mix
. She wondered briefly what high school kids did these days instead of making mix tapes for each other. Did they trade playlists on their iPods? That seemed so boring and sad. They’d have nothing to show for their years in high school.

Claire sorted through all this stuff, and she thought about Fran and his ex-fiancée’s ring. She’d given her own ring back to Doug when things were final, handed it over to him and said, “Here,” like she was giving him a pen that he’d asked for. He didn’t insist that she keep it, and at the time she wasn’t sorry to see it go.

But now, she kind of wished that she’d kept it, just so she could hold the ugly thing between her fingers and know that she hadn’t made the whole thing up, that it had actually happened. She had all this shit in her room, all these pieces of paper with sixth-grade fortunes written on them, all these tapes in their plastic cases that were proof that her life had happened. But for Doug? For Doug she didn’t really have anything. Not even a stupid, dull ring.

CHAPTER
7

Martha resigned from J.Crew the week she got back from the shore. “I am giving my notice,” she announced to the staff that day. “I want you all to know that this is a personal decision and has nothing to do with my relationships with each of you. I have loved our time together, but it’s time to make a change.”

One girl, who had just started the week before, kept looking around at everyone as though they could explain just what was going on. Martha thought somebody should tell her that it was rude to keep swiveling your head around during a speech.

“I’ll miss you all,” Martha continued. “But not as much as I’m going to miss my discount.” She had practiced that line in front of the mirror the night before, and was expecting a big laugh, but there were just a few chuckles. Her speech was wasted on these people. She wrapped it up and sent them back to work.

“I really am going to miss some things,” Martha said to the other manager, Wally. They were going over the schedule, moving things around so that in two weeks, when Martha was gone, they wouldn’t be shorthanded. “I wasn’t just saying that. I’ll miss when the new shipments come in, the excitement of opening the boxes and seeing the new things. It’s like Christmas, sort of.”

“Sweetheart, I say go and don’t look back. Live a life without these plaid skirts and ruffled tops. You’ll be free!”

Once, Martha had gone out for margaritas with Wally and his boyfriend, Anthony. Anthony had called J.Crew a “preppy hell,” and Martha had been beyond insulted. She’d thought that Wally would be too, but he just laughed and so she tried not to show how hurt she was, since she liked Anthony and he was generally very pleasant.

“You’re right,” Martha said. She deleted her name from the schedule and felt a little thrill. One second it was there and the next it was blank. “You are so right.”

AUNT MAUREEN’S FRIEND LINDA,
who ran the caretaker business, had been thrilled to hear from Martha. “You’re perfect,” she kept saying during the interview. “You’re just the kind of person we look for.”

Martha was flattered. Linda explained how their client base was “wealthy and sometimes high profile.” She whispered this sentence, as though someone were spying on them. These people wanted a higher-level caretaker than was usually offered, and it took the right kind of person to fill that job.

At dinner that night, Martha told her family all about the company. “It sounds pretty amazing,” she said. “Which is good, because it’s going to be a long trek back to nursing.” She sighed and put her fork down.