by Don Zolidis
“If I were you.”
“What?”
“It’s ‘if I were you.’”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s the subjective mood. You can’t say ‘if I was you.’”
Kaitlyn blinked thirty or forty times. “Holy shit.”
“Okay, fine, sorry, what would you do?”
“I think you know.”
It was time for the Grand Gesture.
In romantic comedies, the Grand Gesture is the moment near the end of the movie where the hero or heroine, who is just about to lose the love of their life forever, must do something outrageous to ensure the happily-ever-after all the audience has come for. It’s the moment in Say Anything… when Lloyd Dobler lifts the boom box over the top of his head. It’s the moment when someone is running through the airport to catch someone at that instant before the person gets on the plane. When someone is running down the street in his or her underwear, or bicycling, or driving, or racing, that’s it. There’s usually a lot of running.
And get this: the Grand Gesture always works. Always. And then it’s roll credits.
I snatched the keys to Mom’s car off the island, and I grabbed my coat.
“Where the hell are you going?” asked Kaitlyn.
“I’m gonna make history,” I said.
“That’s not what I was suggesting,” she called out. “I was going to say give up!” But I didn’t hear her because I was already out the door.
It was nearly two thirty in the morning when I reached Amy’s house. A light mist had crept up from the cornfields and the roads were a little slick. But I drove like a madman because I needed to make this a big moment. I couldn’t lose her. Not like this. There had to be a way to win her back. On the way there, my mind was racing. What possible gesture could I make?
POSSIBLE GRAND GESTURES
Boom box over head. Already been done. I also had no boom box. Plus, it was two thirty in the morning. I had to be quiet.
Show up in a Winnie-the-Pooh costume. This idea was terrible. But I was brainstorming, trying not to throw anything out.
Break into her house? This seemed the most plausible, but what would I do when I succeeded at that?
Compose a poem on the way to her house. I tried this. But I am no good at poems, and it sucked.
Wing it.
I ended up choosing method number five because I was already in her driveway. Then I thought better of parking in her driveway, so I put my car in reverse and parked three houses down. Then I got out, dashed over the grass, crispy with frost, and found myself staring up at her window on the second floor. Her light was off.
The whole house was dark and silent. The bare branches of the trees in her backyard loomed overhead. My breath escaped in puffs of steam.
I danced around for a bit, trying to keep my brain alive and think of something. When I failed at that, I picked up a small stone, held it in my hand for a moment, then tossed it at her window. I missed. I missed the whole house actually.
I should’ve tried harder in gym class.
Luckily, there were more stones nearby, and my aim gradually improved. The hard part was calibrating the right amount of force. I started out way too light; I wouldn’t have woken up anybody. But then again there was also a large terrifying German shepherd named Bear in the house. Bear could probably break through a window, chase me down, and eat me on the front lawn before I could scream. So I didn’t want to wake him up. Her parents were another issue, although they were old. The other issue was her little brother, whose bedroom was right next to hers.
Whap. Whap. Whap. Nothing. Whap! Whap! Whap! Then I missed the house again. I really sucked at throwing rocks.
WHACK!
I waited.
WHACK!
The light came on.
I raised my arms in a gesture of love or surrender or, even more likely, Don’t shoot me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as loud as I could after she had opened the window to see what the hell was going on.
“What do you want?” said Amy, her voice still choked with tears.
I spread my arms out wide.
Think of something. Think of something now.
You are not thinking of anything. You have serious problems.
Amy waited.
Then an idea occurred to me. I dropped my coat to the ground. Then I pulled my sweater off. I had a little trouble with that, actually, ’cause I was trying to maintain eye contact with her while I did it, so one arm got caught, and, okay…I flung my sweater to the cold grass. Then I took a deep breath and pulled my shirt up over my head.
“What are you doing?” hissed Amy as I grabbed my belt.
“I really don’t know!” I hissed back. I unloosened my belt and dropped my pants.
At this point I had forgotten to take off my shoes so my pants basically ended up around my calves.
So I stood there, in my jungle-scene boxer shorts with little cartoon animals on them. The air was biting my skin and goose pimples were popping up all over me, but I took hold of my waistband.
“Okay,” I said, huffing. “I just wanted to let you know that I am really sorry and I am really vulnerable right now and—”
“Would you put your damn clothes on?” She laughed.
“I haven’t really thought this out past this point, to be honest with you, and I realize this seems kind of stalkerish and I apologize for that,” I called back. “But maybe I could come inside before I freeze to death?” Two minutes later, I was in her room and fully clothed. My Grand Gesture had continued with a rambling, nonsensical monologue in which I was crying quite a bit, but at least I managed to keep my clothes on. I won’t bore you with an entire transcript of what I said, but it was something like this:
“I am so sorry. I was an idiot. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I probably wasn’t raised right, and I never meant to get all jealous like that. That was so stupid, and I realize that I don’t control your past and I can’t judge you for anything you’ve done before, and there’s, like, a horrible double-standard thing and I don’t even want to get into that right now, but it’s okay, and of course it’s okay. You’ve done things and that’s completely fine—it’s great actually, it’s great, and I think the important thing is that I’m madly in love with you. And I know that you might not be in love with me, and I know that you are having a really hard time right now, in life, and I never, never want to make things harder on you. But I figure I don’t want to hide my feelings toward you because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to my life, and I realize that’s problematic because even then I’m thinking about you in relation to me, which is not cool, because I know that you are an amazing, amazing person and going out with you has been even better than that time I went to Disney World. Way better than Disney World. Disney World actually kind of sucked because I threw up on Space Mountain and the puke got on these people behind me and they were screaming, and I thought they were going to kill me. So as soon as the ride was over, I ran away from the ride and got lost, and I ended up in the Hall of Presidents, which is basically horrible.”
And so on.
Finally, in order to stop my mouth, she kissed me. “Okay,” she said. “Apology accepted.”
And, about twenty minutes later, my jungle boxers with cartoon tigers were flung across the room and we made love. That’s right. You heard me. We did it.
So, afterward, it was probably three thirty in the morning, and we had managed not to wake her parents, her brother, or the demon dog. The lights were off in her room, and we were lying on her futon, in her room that was so much better decorated than mine.
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah. Yessir. That’s right,” I said.
I was feeling what we refer to as the afterglow.
“So I guess I got that right, yeah?” I said.
“What?”
“I got that right?”
“Um…yeah, yeah, it was good.”
“
Great.” I could accept that. A solid B. “But pretty good for my first time, right?”
I could hear her furrowing her brow a bit.
“Sure…” She sucked in a breath like she wanted to say something else but stopped herself. “Hurm.”
“What?”
“I guess I…You were a virgin, right?”
Were a virgin. As in past tense. Subjunctive.
No it’s not, dumbass, it’s a mood, not a tense, and the subjunctive mood is about a conditional—
Shut the hell up, brain.
My brain stopped to do little celebratory high fives with my other body parts.
“I figured you probably knew,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I mean I told you that you were my first girlfriend.”
“Right.”
“So who else would I have had sex with?”
“Hookers, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Do I look like the kind of guy who would go to hookers?” Had she met other guys who had gone to hookers? Were other people losing their virginity to them? Were there hookers in Janesville, Wisconsin; and if so, was there a particular street corner they hung on, or did you have to find them in the Yellow Pages or something? Also, who the hell did she think I was?
“I’m kidding. No, I mean it’s stupid. I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I didn’t want to do this right now, you know? I didn’t want to…um…you know, your first time should be special.”
“It was plenty special.”
“You know what I mean? Like, I feel like this was kind of…um…I don’t want you to be let down. I mean I was…I had a whole plan.”
I turned to look at her lying next to me. Her blond hair was tangled and spread out over the pillow. Her ceiling was covered with those little glow-in-the-dark stars, and the futon was like a sea of cream-covered pillows and blankets.
“You had a plan?”
“Well, yeah—I mean it wasn’t gonna be tonight. We were gonna go out to dinner, and then I was gonna make this whole Dungeons & Dragons theme—that’s why I came to the game tonight, I wanted to learn about it. It was gonna be like an adventure. We were gonna roll dice.”
At that moment, I felt like Amy was probably the greatest girl who had ever lived.
When the light came in through her windows in the morning, I was pretty sure my life was over. Amy’s arm was over my neck; my back was hurting; and something terrible had died in my mouth during the night. I heard a dog barking and dimly recalled that there wasn’t a dog alive at my house because all the pets at my house were dead.
Because I wasn’t at my house.
Oh, shit. Shit.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit.”
Amy woke up, her eyes cloudy with sleep and then bright with terror. “Shit!” Then she put her hand over my mouth and said, “Shh!” I stopped struggling for a second and tried to send my ears out like Superman’s super hearing.
There was a knocking sound. Someone was knocking on her door.
“Sweetheart?” It was her mom. I recognized the musical blend of Swedish and the thickest Wisconsin accent imaginable.
Amy grabbed my head, shoved me under the blankets, and leaped out of the bed.
“Hold on one second!” she cried, dashing to her closet.
Her mom kept knocking. “Oh, someone’s a sleepyhead this morning. Can I come in?”
Amy made a little noise that was somewhere between a shriek and the sound a cat makes when you step on its tail. She had snatched a bathrobe from her closet (which was very impressive in that she had a bathrobe; she was so mature). All this I’m telling you I learned later because at that moment I was buried in the cream-colored universe of Amy’s comforter. Something heavy and soft landed on me; I later learned that it was the four-foot-tall teddy bear that Amy had hurled across the room with superhuman strength just as her mother plowed into the room.
From where I lay beneath the stuffed animal, I could barely make out what was happening.
“I wanted to let you know that there are muffins if you are interested.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, and you’re giving me a ride to the clinic this afternoon. Your father is busy; he’s looking for a new snowblower. I don’t know why he needs to go today, but you know how he is.”
“Sure. Um…”
“Why is your room always a disaster area?” I saw Amy’s mom bend down, pick up my jeans, and absently fold them.
“I gotta clean the room. Mom, can I get dressed?”
“Oh, sure, don’t mind me, I’m just harassing you, I guess,” she said, dropping my jeans on the foot of the bed just as something large and breathing like a tornado padded into the room. A giant black nose obscured my vision.
“Bear, get out!”
Bear did not get out. Amy’s mom did not get out.
“Hon,” said her dad, now also at the door, “there’s a sale on snowblowers this afternoon and I need your advice.”
“Guys, can I get dressed?”
Bear’s nose started sucking air like a vacuum cleaner. He began thrusting his muzzle under the edge of the blankets.
“Bear!” shouted Amy, trying to pull the German shepherd back.
“Oh, isn’t he cute?” said her mom. “Bear loves you.”
I would like to comment here that a close-up look at the teeth of a German shepherd is not a pleasant experience. Especially when you are naked and you can easily imagine those teeth tearing off sensitive body parts. If you compared human teeth to dog teeth, you would come to the conclusion that the reason we walked behind them and picked up their poop is that we were terrified. Which I was.
“Okay, then,” said her dad. “So the snowblower I’m thinking of is one of those Japanese ones.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” said her mom.
“They’re good. I’d buy American, but the Japanese are making great snowblowers these days.”
“Oh, jeez, they are not,” said her mom.
“I think I know my snowblowers, sweetheart.”
“I keep telling him to wait till the fall—”
“The sales are now. This is the time. If we don’t act now we’re lost.”
Amy had got hold of Bear by the neck and was struggling to force him away from the bed while keeping her robe closed, which was not exactly easy to do.
“Guys,” Amy said. “Please, let me get dressed!”
“You’re off your rocker, Dan. Off your rocker.”
And then her parents were gone, and Amy slammed the door shut. Forgetting that I was butt-naked, I leaped out of the bed.
“Get dressed!” she hissed.
I found my boxers majestically splayed out on her desk, where a certain picture in a heart-shaped frame used to be. I took a moment.
“Come on!” she said.
I snatched them, grabbed my crisply folded pants (really nice work by her mom), and tried to put on all my clothes simultaneously, which resulted in me getting my neck in the arm hole of my sweater and two legs in the same pant leg.
Amy got dressed in her closet, which was not a walk-in, but at least she managed it.
“Okay,” she said, holding me by the shoulders and flipping into ultracompetent mode. “We’re getting you out of here, and we’re getting you out of here now. Listen to me carefully.”
The plan was for Amy to beg for doughnuts, thus sending her father on a run to Dunkin’ Donuts, and for her to distract her mom with advice about all her life problems while I crept down the hallway, snuck out through the garage, and ran like hell. It worked about as well as you might expect.
Amy managed to distract her parents for just a minute—no one was going to get doughnuts because oh jeez it was an extravagance but they were happy to talk about life problems—and I was halfway down the hallway before her mom broke past Amy’s defenses. I had no time to make it back to her room, so I opened the nearest door, which I figured was to the bathroom.
It was Glenn’s room.
Glenn was sitting th
ere, at his computer, deeply involved in a game of Tetris. The sound track to Cabaret was playing on his boom box.
He was thirteen years old, had an impressive Afro, and was so skinny that I seemed husky in comparison. He was also about six foot two and almost entirely legs. The basketball coach of the high school was already salivating at the prospect of having him on the team, which was a shame, since Glenn was the clumsiest person I’d ever met and was really only interested in musical theater and computer programming.
“He-ey,” I stammered, closing the door behind me.
He gave me a look like I was an alien who had just crash-landed in his bedroom and was mostly on fire.
“What’s up, Glenn? How’s it hanging?”
“What?” he said nervously.
“I feel like we never get to hang out anymore.”
“What?”
“Right. Man. Life is too short. That’s all I’m saying. Tetris, am I right? It’s pretty sweet. All those shapes. Are you kidding me? Shapes are awesome.”
“What are you doing here?”
There was only one way out of this, and it wasn’t the window, since I had already thought of that, and then realized that yes, I was on the second floor.
“I need your help. We’re gonna walk out into the living room and you’re gonna follow my lead, okay?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Man, you’re crazy.”
“You owe me,” I said, meeting his gaze. “Remember Christmas dinner?”
Amy looked like she had swallowed a frog when I walked into the living room, holding Glenn by the arm like a hostage. Amy’s dad had already taken up his customary position on the La-Z-Boy, and was somewhat surprised to see us.
“Well, young man, I hope you’ve learned a lot about the project we’ve been working on,” I said very loudly, staring Glenn in the eyes.
“Yes…” he said, utterly confused.
“Oh jeez,” Amy’s dad said. “I didn’t see you come in.”
“Glenn suggested we get an early start of it.”
“Yup,” he said. “Craig needed some help with his homework.” He stared at me. “Craig needs lots of help.”
“Yes. Yes I do,” I said slowly.
