Out of Love, page 4
“Do you want to hear some music?” Maya asked, but nobody answered, so I made believe she was talking to me.
“Fine,” I said. “Why don’t you put Stevie Wonder on?”
“Oh?” Maya said. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“Yes,” I said.
She put the record on at the wrong speed and it sounded more like Alvin the Chipmunk. The boys laughed and punched one another. A couple of M&M’s fell between the cushions of the sofa. Maya fixed the speed and Stevie Wonder sang “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing.” We all sat and listened quietly, the way my mother and father used to during concerts at Lincoln Center. I was having a terrible time. I cleared my throat. “Do you want to do anything?” I asked.
Everybody looked at me. “Like what?” Maya asked.
“I don’t know. Do you want to play Monopoly or something?” I didn’t even know why I said that. I like Monopoly, but it takes about three days to play.
The boys looked at each other. “Mo-nop-o-ly is mo-not-o-nous,” Bruce said, rolling his famous eyes.
“I’ll show you a card trick,” Steve offered, “if you’ll get me some cards.”
I jumped up and began to look through the drawers of the hutch cabinet. What a lot of junk! Old shoelaces and rubber bands, dried-up ball-point pens, bills. Where were those cards? I thought for a moment of Shelley’s neat and perfumed drawers and I felt sad. “Just a minute,” I said, and I ran down the hallway to the bedroom. Those dopey kids had a bedsheet attached to a curtain rod on one side and to the mirror frame on the other. Karen and the girl with the earmuffs were sitting on my bed behind the sheet. “Do you know where the cards are?” I asked.
“You’re ruining my play,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I have to find the cards.”
“Are you going to play cards with those boys?”
“Never mind,” I said, trying not to scream. “Where are they?”
We had only one deck of cards, pretty old ones with a picture of collie puppies on the back. “Just a minute,” she said, and she opened the drawer of her dresser. She finally came up with them and they looked even worse than I remembered. I tried straightening them out and wiping them against my blouse, but that didn’t help much.
When I came back into the living room, everyone was still sitting in the same place, but Stevie Wonder was into his next song.
“It’s a mathematical trick,” Steve said. “That is, it isn’t really a trick. It just works out by itself.” He sat on the floor in front of the coffee table and began to lay the cards out in several little piles. A few cards stuck together, but he managed to pull them apart. When he was all done he asked me to select three piles and then point to them. “Any ones at all,” he said.
I pointed.
“Very good.” He picked up all the other cards and counted some of them off. Then he asked me to point to one of the piles of cards left on the table. I did. Then he turned the top cards of the other two remaining piles over and counted off still more cards. Bruce was looking out the window and making a funny noise in his throat like a frog. I guessed he had seen this trick before and it certainly was taking a long time.
“Now this conclusion is mathematical,” Steve said. “It works automatically every time.” He paused dramatically and Maya and I waited. “The top card in the remaining pile is ...” His hand rested lightly on the cards. “... is ... a ... king!” He flipped the card over with a grand gesture. It was the ten of hearts.
Bruce hooted and jumped up and down.
“It’s not my fault,” Steve said.
“Some trick,” Bruce said.
“It always worked before,” Steve said angrily. “You’ve seen me do it a hundred times. Doesn’t it always work?”
“Maybe it’s because—” I began.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with your cards! Is it a full deck?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t looked at those cards since February, when I was in bed with a sore throat and my mother played Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle with me.
Steve began to count them furiously. “... thirty-eight ... -nine ... forty-five ... -six ... -seven, -eight, -nine. Forty-nine! That’s the trouble. It’s not a full deck. It’s a mathematical solution that depends on a full deck. It’s not my fault.”
I thought he was making an awful fuss about a stupid card trick and Bruce was looking out the window again. “Do you want to go outside?” he said.
Before I could answer, Maya rolled her eyes at me and asked if she could see me for a minute, in private.
We went into the kitchen together. “I can’t,” she whispered. “If my father ever calls—”
“Call him up and tell him you’re going out for a few minutes with me.”
“Maybe he’s ‘bird-watching.’ What if he sees me with them?”
The whole thing was impossible. I wished everybody would go home. I wished it was the end of the day and that I was under the covers in my own bed. “Well, what are we going to do?” I asked.
“What do you want to do?”
“Well, it wasn’t my idea in the first place. I didn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, stamping her foot. “What difference does it make whose idea it was?”
We finally went back into the living room and found the boys sitting next to each other on the couch again. They weren’t having such a good time either, and I wondered why they didn’t get up and go home. They just sat there like a couple of statues, except every once in a while Bruce ate another M&M, until they were all gone. Stevie Wonder finished his last song on the other side of the record and then we all sat in the silent room.
“Do you want to watch TV?” Maya asked in a tiny voice.
Bruce clutched his stomach as if he were in pain. “There’s nothing good on the boob tube in the afternoon,” he said.
Silence again. I wondered what Marc Singer and his friends did after school. I tried to remember what Maya and I always did when we were alone. “Do you want to watch a play?” I asked. I was surprised. I didn’t know that I was going to say that.
“A what?”
“A play. My sister and her friends ...” I waved my arms helplessly in the direction of the bedroom.
“Oh, her plays never make any sense,” Maya said.
“Well, if you can think of anything better ...”
“Okay, okay,” she said, as if she were doing me a great favor.
I went inside and I told Karen and her friends that they were going to have an audience. They jumped up and down and shrieked, and the bedsheet slipped down from the curtain rod, covering them so that they looked like a bunch of ghosts. I lifted the end of the bedsheet. “I’ll give you five minutes to get ready,” I warned. “And be sure it makes sense this time.” I went back into the living room, and pretty soon Karen called out “Ready!” and we all filed into the bedroom.
At least they had set up a few chairs, dragged in from the kitchen and my mother’s room. They had taken the shade off my blue lamp and one of the girls held it tilted so that the bulb acted as a spotlight. When we sat down, another girl gave us all tickets on which the words FREE SHOW ADMIT ONE had been printed with a Magic Marker.
“We’re here already,” Maya said. “We’re sitting down. Why are they giving us tickets?”
“Shhh,” I said. “Let them get started.”
The bedsheet-curtain was pulled aside, revealing Karen and another girl lying in bed together. The other girl had a mustache painted above her lip.
Bruce whistled and then the boys whispered together and giggled.
“Shhhh!” I said again, more severely this time.
The play started out all right. It was about a couple who lived in the woods somewhere and they had always wanted to have a child and couldn’t have one. So the husband went out into the woods and met a fairy who granted him three wishes. Then the girl who was holding the lamp dropped it, and when Karen hissed at her from the “stage,” she said, “Well, it got hot. You can hold it yourself, if you’re so smart.”
Then the husband couldn’t remember the three wishes he was supposed to ask for, and Bruce and Steve began to suggest ideas from the audience. “Ask for a million bucks,” Steve said.
“Make it two million and I’ll split it with you,” Bruce said, holding his hands up to form a megaphone.
“Ask for a new deck of cards,” Steve said.
“Shut up,” Karen told both of them.
Then two of Karen’s friends began to argue about what came next. “I’m supposed to come in with the magic stone,” one girl insisted.
“No no,” said the other. “First she has to drink that sleeping stuff.”
“I have to go home,” the girl wearing the earmuffs announced. “We eat supper at five-fifteen sharp.”
“Oh, fine!” Karen shouted. “Then who’s supposed to be the prince?”
I had a headache by then and I wished again that everybody would go home, and this time my wish came true. Mother came in from work and tried not to look surprised. But the boys fell all over each other trying to get out, as if she had caught them doing something terrible. “So long,” they called out, before I could even tell her who they were.
One by one, Karen’s friends left too.
I leaned against the wall feeling very, very tired. Was this the way it was, the whole business between boys and girls? It didn’t seem worth it to me.
“What was that all about?” Mother asked.
But Maya was leaving too and I followed her to the door. “Did you have a good time?” she asked.
I looked at her as if she were crazy, but I was afraid to say anything. Maybe it was me. Maybe there was something wrong with me. Maya’s eyes were sparkling, as if she’d just had lots of fun.
“They’re not too bad, are they?” she asked. “Doesn’t Bruce have nice eyes?”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering. “Yeah,” I said again, as I heard her father’s voice calling her name in the halls.
9
AT FIRST I THOUGHT it was those fish cakes we had for lunch in the school cafeteria. I forgot the sandwich I had packed in the morning and I had to buy the school lunch. By the time I got to French I really felt bad.
Maya noticed. “What’s the matter?” she whispered, when Miss Gruber was writing on the blackboard. “You look funny.”
I pointed to my stomach and made a face. “Fish cakes,” I said.
“What?”
“I think I ate rotten fish cakes.”
Then Miss Gruber turned around and began the lesson.
It was awfully hot in the classroom and I felt very restless. When I tried to pay attention and follow the lesson in my textbook, my head ached. I raised my hand, but Miss Gruber was looking the other way and didn’t notice. She was busy describing Madame Bruin’s visit to the market. I couldn’t stand all that talk about food, even if it was in French. I kept waving my hand back and forth. Finally Miss Gruber asked, “What did Madame Bruin decide to serve for dessert at her party?” This time she looked around and caught me waving my hand. “Ah, Thérèse,” she said, calling me by my French name.
I stood up shakily and then I felt myself swaying as if I were on a boat. I had to hold on to my desk for support. Everyone was looking at me.
“Alors, Thérèse?” Miss Gruber said.
“Fish cakes!” I answered, and then I don’t remember anything else.
I had never fainted before. In fact, I had never even seen anyone faint, except on television or in the movies. Maya told me later that it made me pretty famous in school. She said she met Steve in the study hall that afternoon and he asked her what happened to me. The news had traveled fast.
Of course they called my mother at the bank and she took me home in a taxicab and put me right to bed. Then I must have slept for a long time, because I only remember little bits of things: the telephone ringing, voices fading in and out, Dr. Schneider’s big moon face suddenly there, and the cold, cold stethoscope on my chest. Dr. Schneider decided that it had nothing to do with the fish cakes. It was some strange bug, he said, and I had to stay in bed and drink plenty of fluids, and then he would see.
I was sick for about a week and I slept most of the time. Mother took a leave of absence from the bank and everybody kept calling to find out how I was. I would wake suddenly and hear her talking on the telephone to Aunt Marsha or the Terrible G.’s, and once I heard her say, “Yes, Dan, she is.” I came awake very quickly, as if cold water had been splashed on my face. She was talking to my father! They hardly talked to each other any more. He never came inside on Sundays when he picked us up or took us home, and Karen and I always made our own arrangements with him over the telephone. But now she was talking to him and it was because of me! I propped myself on one shaky elbow so that I wouldn’t miss a word.
“A hundred and one and a half this morning,” my mother said. Then she was quiet, listening. “Of course, Dan,” she said finally. “I’m sure she would love it. Poor kid, she’s really knocked out. Eight o’clock? Fine. Fine. Okay. I’ll tell her when she wakes up.”
Wakes up! I felt as if I would never sleep again. I was shivering and I couldn’t tell if it was from the fever or the excitement. She didn’t have to tell me anything. Daddy was coming to the apartment to see me! He was going to be there at eight o’clock. I imagined the whole thing—my mother opening the door and then some falling-in-love music in the background at their first sight of each other. Pianos and lots of harps. Maybe they would only shake hands at first, but a kind of electricity would go through them, and Daddy would look around the apartment at all the old familiar furniture and remember everything. Then, after he visited me, he and Mother would go into the kitchen together and share a pot of tea the way they used to, and then ... and then ... I slept in spite of myself, and my daydreams drifted into real dreams. When I woke, he was in the apartment already! I could hear a murmur of voices, his and then Mother’s. I sat up so I could listen better. Had I missed anything? Maybe it had already started, their falling back in love.
But then I heard another voice, high-pitched and louder than theirs. Karen! How could I have forgotten about her? She would spoil everything. I had wanted them to be alone, at least for a while. Karen was talking very fast, the way she did when she was nervous or excited. Maybe she felt just as happy and hopeful as I did. And maybe it was good that she was there. We were all together in our apartment for the first time in a long while, as if we were still a family.
Then Daddy came in and bent over me and kissed my forehead. There was a big bouquet of flowers in his hand, but they were for me. “How’s my girl?” he whispered, and I inhaled all the familiar smells of his skin and his jacket, and I felt miserable. I could only nod at him while my mother took the flowers and put them in a vase of water.
I looked past her and Daddy, and saw Karen leaning in the doorway. She wasn’t allowed in the room because of my germs. While I was sick, she slept with Mother in the big bed. Now she seemed lonely and sad, and I wondered again if she felt the way I did about Daddy, and just as helpless to change things. I lifted my arm and waved to her, and she waved back and smiled.
But nothing important had happened between Mother and Daddy. “Dan,” she said, “I’m going to take advantage of you and run downstairs, if you don’t mind. I have to pick up a few things.”
“Of course,” my father said.
They sounded awful, as stiff as those people in the soap operas on television. My mother hated to go out by herself at night. I knew she didn’t want to stay there and be with Daddy. So all my plans and dreams didn’t do any good at all.
Daddy sat next to me until Mother came back. He spoke softly about different things, told me a funny story about the people at the agency, asked if I wanted anything, water or juice or another pillow.
And I couldn’t say what I really wanted more than anything else. Only babies blurted out their feelings like that. But I wished I could tell him that a divorce was the saddest thing I know, that what I wanted was him, there in the morning when I woke up, there in the evening hanging his coat in the hall closet. That he had no business divorcing Karen and me, as well as Mother. My throat ached with all the things I didn’t say to him, all the magic wishes I always made when I got the long end of the wishbone, or before I blew out the candles on my birthday cake, and even just before I went to sleep at night. But I wasn’t a baby, that was the thing, and I knew that magic wishes, no matter how hard you wished them, don’t come true.
Then Mother was there again and they said things to each other. Stupid things like “Take care of yourself, Jean,” “Thanks, Dan, I will,” “I’ll call tomorrow, but let me know if there’s any change,” “Of course. Thanks for coming,” “Good night,” “Good night.”
Didn’t they remember anything? I thought of that sex-education film and of all the new fathers rapping on the nursery window. It wasn’t fair. And Karen hadn’t really changed, either. Even before Daddy left, I heard her opening and closing the refrigerator door, and then I heard the television playing in the living room. It was one of those dumb family shows that Karen always watches, and the volume was up so high it gave me a headache.
For a few minutes I had imagined we were a family again, the way we used to be. But it was all in my imagination.
When Mother came back into the room later, I pretended to be asleep. She turned off the bedside lamp and tiptoed out.
10
MOTHER LOST A POUND and a half that week, taking care of me. Of course she still had a long way to go, and she hadn’t been doing her exercises at all.
“I give up,” I told Aunt Marsha when she came to visit. I told her about Mrs. Marlene G. and the Venus de Milo Figure Salon. I told her about the Avon lady and the way Mother didn’t care about self-improvement at all.
