Why We Broke Up (12 page)

The benches were too wet, even after you did this loopy, chivalrous thing, sitting down and a ridiculous shimmy-slide all the way down, trying to dry it off with your cute butt in jeans, the caffeine from your first real coffee jolting through your body and making me laugh like a baby at bubbles. But even then I wouldn’t sit down, it was still too damp, so we soaked our shoes down the slope to the long curve of a weeping willow. I had a feeling. I parted our way through like you do—
did
—with my hair sometimes, and there we were, in a small green space dry and shielded from the rain. We slipped inside and knelt on the ground, all dried leaves and brown grass because nothing got through, just the sun shading down through the branches to keep us safe and hidden.

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” you said.

“This is the perfect place,” I said, “and the perfect thing. It’s
perfect
, Ed.”

You looked up at the light all around and then at me, very long, until I felt blushy. “It is,” you said. “Now tell me why.”

“You don’t know—? But you just—we just spent fifty-five dollars on this book.”

“I know,” you said. “It’s OK.”

“But you don’t know why?”

You were still looking at me, your hands trembling around the coffee. “To make you happy,” you said simply, and my breath was suddenly gone, Ed, with what you said. My hands stayed on the book, which I’d been jumping to open, now frozen with the joy of hearing you and not wanting you to stop. “Min, you know what I’m usually doing now?”

“What?”

“On weekends, I mean.”

“This time Saturdays I bet you’re usually asleep.”

“Min.”

“I don’t know.”

You gave a tremendous shrug, slow, like you were showing me how confusion works. “I don’t really, either,” you said. “A movie maybe, hanging out somewhere. Somebody’s porch with a keg at night. And games, bonfires. It’s nothing.”

“I like movies.”

But you shook your head. “Not these kind, but it’s not that. I’m not, I don’t know how to say it. When Annette says, she says to me,
So how is this girl different?
, the answer is always long, because it’s a long story.”

“I’m a long story.”

“Not like in English. I was trying to say it in the car, before. It’s just—look where I am. I’ve never been anything, anywhere like this with Jillian, or Amy, or Brianna, Robin—”

“Don’t say the whole parade of blondes and whatnot.”

“Whatnot.” You looked up through the tree, the last couple raindrops tiny stars on the way to evaporating and disappearing. “It’s different,” you said. “You’ve made, Min, everything different for me. Everything’s like coffee you made me try, better than I ever—or the places I didn’t even know were right on the street, you know? I’m like this thing I saw when I was little, where a kid hears a noise under his bed and there’s a ladder there that’s never been there before, and he climbs down and, it’s for kids I know, but this song starts playing….” Your eyes were traveling in the treey light.

“Martin Garner directed that,” I said quietly.

“Min, I’d spend fifty-five dollars on anything for you.”

I kissed you.

“And ask Trevor, that’s like a very big thing, for me, to say
anything
like that.”

Again, again.

“So tell me, Min, what did I spend the money on?”

I scooted over to open the book,
Real Recipes from Tinseltown
. “Remember the lobby card you gave me?”

“I don’t know what a lobby card is.”

I put my hand on your knee,
jiggle jiggle jiggle
.

“Sorry, it’s the coffee.”

“I know. Lobby cards are, the picture of Lottie Carson you took from the theater.”

“That picture I swiped?”

“They’re not just pictures. On the back is stuff about the star sometimes, all their movies, awards they won if they won any. And, this is what I’m trying to say,
date of birth
.”

You put your hand on mine, and we moved together to my leg, jittery too. “I don’t get it.”

“Ed, I want to have a party.”

“What?”

“On December fifth, Lottie Carson is turning eighty-nine.”

You didn’t say anything.

“I want to have a party for it. For
her
. We can invite her, we followed her to where she lives, we know her address, to send the invitation.”

“Invitation,” you said.

“Yes,” I said, “you know, to invite people.”

“I’ve never had a party like that,” you said.

“Don’t say it’s gay.”

“OK, but I don’t think I can—”

“We’re doing it
together
, Ed. First off we’ll have to figure out where to have it. My mom hates me to have parties, plus it should be somewhere glittery, you know, glamorous. Music is easy, Al and I have some thirties music.”

“Joan, too,” you offered.

“We could do all jazz, that way it will all feel glamorous, even if it’s not accurate. Champagne if we can get it.”

“Trevor can get anything.”

“Trevor would do it for something like this?”

“If I tell him to.”

“And you’d tell him to?”

“For you?”

“For the party.”

“For this party of yours, yes, OK. And then what’s the book for?”

“The fifty-five-dollar book?”

“The fifty-five-dollar book, yes.”

I touched you. “The fifty-five-dollar book you bought for me?”

“Min, I’m happy to buy you things, but stop with the fifty-five-dollar part, it’s giving me a heart attack.”

“OK, well, I was looking through it while you were silly futzing with that samurai sword—”

“Which was
cool
.”

“—and it’s
perfect
. I mean, look at the typeface they use here.
Appetizers
.”

“I don’t know what typeface is.”

“Font.”

“OK.”

“OK, so the whole book has recipes from movie stars. And look what I opened to, first thing.”

“It looks like an igloo.”

“It
is
an igloo. It’s Will Ringer’s recipe, Greta’s Cubed-Egg Igloo, inspired by
Greta in the Wild
!”

“That’s—”

“—our first date, right. The movie we saw.”

You held my face instead of a kiss. It was so still in there, except for your breath, sour and coffee-quick. “So we’re going to make that crazy thing?”

“Not just that,” I said, and flipped pages. “Look at this.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, wow, right? Lottie Carson’s Stolen-Sugar Pensieri Sweets. These delectables, says America’s Cinematic Lovely, were born from necessity, growing up as she did with not two dimes to rub together. ‘My mother, bless her heart, would do anything to keep the nine of us fed and happy, and when times were tight, she’d snitch sugar from Mrs. Gunderson’s bridge club. The old bat hired her to clean up after their get-togethers, and my mother would empty the sugar bowl into her purse, go to Saint Boniface’s and confess, and then whip up a batch of these, waiting piping hot when we got home from school. The icing is made with Pensieri, a liqueur Poppa allowed himself every Friday. Father, forgive me—these just don’t taste as snappy if the sugar’s not stolen!’ ”

Your grin was wicked and cute. “So we’re going to steal sugar,” you said.

“Will you? Can we?”

“Sure, there’s that diner near here. Lopsided’s. But it’s in those big things.”

I looked us over. “Thrifty Thrift should have a coat, like an overcoat for five dollars. I’ll buy
that
for you, with nice deep pockets. You need another coat anyway, Ed. You can’t dress up like a basketball player every day in that jacket.”

“I
am
a basketball player.”

“But today you’re a sugar thief.”

“We steal the sugar to make the cookies,” counting on your fingers in your arithmetic voice, “and get Trevor to get champagne, and you and Joan and Al for music.”

“The igloo,” I said.

“The igloo,” you said, “and figure out where to have it, and send invitations to this movie star we followed.”

“December fifth. Tell me,
please
tell me that it’s not a game day.”

You brushed hair from my face. I kissed you and stopped to look at your mouth. It was little, it was not sure of itself, but it was a smile. “You do know,” you said, “that we don’t know for sure it’s her, so it’s crazy to—”

“But we think so, right?”

“Yes,” you said.

“Yes,” I said, “and even if it isn’t—”

“Even if it isn’t?”

“Maybe that date’s familiar to you. December fifth.”

You bit your lip strange and blew down at the leafy ground. “Min, you told me your birthday, I swear to God I hope I’m remembering, isn’t until—”

“It’s our two-month anniversary.”

“What?”

“It will be, that’s all. Two months from
Greta in
—”

“You think about things like that already?”

“Yes.”

“All the time?”

“Ed, no.”

“But sometimes?”

“Sometimes.”

You sighed very deeply.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” I said quickly. “Are you—you’re freaking out.”

“I’m freaking out,” you said, if you remember, because something tells me that you might have decided to remember it differently, “I’m freaking out that I’m not freaking out.”

“Really?”

I lost my breath again, with how you smiled. “Yes.”

“Should we go?”

“OK, to steal sugar. Oh, wait, to the coat place.”

“Shit, Thrifty Thrift doesn’t open until ten. I learned the hard way. We need to wait.”

Now, you kissed me in this great place with a confidence, a joy, with no shrug, hungrily, eager. “Gosh,” you said, your eyes blinky with pretend wonder, putting down your coffee as far from us as you could reach, “I wonder what me
and my girlfriend can do for an hour or so in a hidden part of the park?”

Clark Baker couldn’t have said it better. This was the first time we were both naked, our clothes in separate piles and us sitting together, so close that in a shot from above, the light basking and trickling down to us through the goosepimply breeze, you might not know, not see, whose hand was whose was where. You looked so gorgeous naked in the lovely lilty green light, like some creature not quite from Earth, even with a few smudges of mud on your legs, particularly afterward, your chest heaving slower and slower with a little sweat, or maybe just damp from my mouth, on the small of your back, your hands cupped together bashful between your legs until I made you move them so I could see and start all over again. And me, I never felt so beautiful, in the light and in your arms almost crying. Two last sips of your cold coffee and we got dressed to go, trying to brush off what we could, socks reluctant to unroll, my bra cold at the underwire, my shirt, my coat. But I was warmer now, from the brightening sun and from everything, so I just wadded up my cardigan and held it under my arm as we left Boris Vian Park with the guy with the stroller wondering where we’d come from, and left it in your sister’s car the rest of the day, so not until I was home stomping upstairs, yelling back bored at my mother, did I toss it onto the bed and see this bounce from someplace onto my floor, and I picked
it up and flushed thinking of how it got mixed in with my things. I put it in my drawer, whatever it is, and then in the box, and now it’s for you to flush and regret about. Who knows, a seed of some kind, a fruit, a pod, a unicorn loping through the underbrush where we lay together. Put it in water, I could have done, taken care of it and who knows what might have grown, what might have happened with this thing from the park where I loved you, Ed, so much.

And here’s the coat I bought you,
so happy to spend the eight dollars. “Let’s see what we can hide in it,” you said, and pulled me to you, and we giggled as you buttoned up around us both, kissing me cocooned against you, and you tried to walk that way to the cash register, a stride like a vaudeville hobo, with me kissing you and leaning my head back until I thought the buttons would burst, and I unpeeled away to open my purse and look at you, look at you, Ed.

So—fucking—beautiful.

“Will you wear it to school?”

“Not a chance,” you laughed.

“
Please
. Look at the pattern. You can tell people I made you do it.”

“After the sugar caper I never want to see it again.”

Here it is, Ed. Nor I, you.