All We Know of Love

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Now Sarah nudged me and I began to read the list from the beginning.

  “Number one: He must think you are the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.

  “Number two: He must say so, constantly.

  “Number three: He must be smart (at least in advanced reading or higher math).

  “Number four: He must . . .”

  I didn’t stop until I had read all that we had so far. Eleven rules for the boy we were to love, and it wasn’t until I had finished all eleven that Sarah revealed her latest.

  “He won’t hug you; he will embrace you,” Sarah said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  Sarah sighed as if I were the most naive girl in the whole wide world. But she was my best friend, and best friends help each other out with this sort of thing.

  “A hug is what your dad or mom gives you. And you give them,” she tried to explain. “But an embrace . . .” Sarah suddenly stood up on her futon. She turned her back and wrapped her arms tightly around herself.

  “An embrace is like all the world disappears and all there is, is you and him.” She spoke into the air as if announcing a proclamation to the world. “Love will be the most wonderful thing. We will know it the minute we see him.”

  I jumped up beside her. “But we won’t let on. . . .”

  “Not right at first,” Sarah added.

  My face felt flushed with excitement. We stood on the futon with our arms wrapped around our shoulders, our imaginary love inhabiting our own bodies.

  “No, first,” I said, “we will make him . . . wait.”

  Sarah pretended to kiss her embracing lover, and the sight of her lips pursed into the air dropped me into a fit of giggles.

  But in the end, and a mere five years later, in tenth grade, Adam matched one, maybe two, of the twenty rules Sarah and I had eventually laid out.

  All that hard work. Poof. Gone in about five seconds, in about as long as it took Adam to call me “baby” for the first time, like I was something to be nurtured and taken care of. It took only for Adam to whisper that he had always thought I was beautiful and smart.

  And, oh, so special.

  Poof.

  Because it didn’t mean what I thought it would mean. None of it.

  All that hard work for nothing.

  Sarah doesn’t know where I am. She doesn’t even know about the package that came in the mail a couple of months ago.

  My dad had a funny look on his face when he handed it to me. I knew even before I saw the address, the handwriting, the inside-out brown-paper-bag wrapping, the stamps, or the masking tape holding the whole thing together. I knew it was from my mother. My dad and I didn’t talk about it then. Maybe we were both too much in shock, although I knew my dad had spoken with her a few times over the years. I knew my dad knew where she was, that she was OK.

  But that she wasn’t coming back.

  At least not for the time being.

  But this was the first time she was contacting me.

  She had sent me a present, which I quickly stashed away in a drawer in my room. I didn’t open it for a long time. It was the wrapper I was more interested in, because from it, I learned that when my mother ran away, she went to Florida.

  1711 Fernando Street

  St. Augustine, Florida 32084

  Sarah doesn’t know about any of this, but I guess it kind of fits that she doesn’t. When I stopped telling Sarah everything, I stopped telling her anything. I didn’t tell her about Adam. And then suddenly there were way too many things I hadn’t told her, to tell her about the package.

  Besides, sometimes I think Sarah was madder about what my mom did than I was.

  So, what would Sarah think now, if she could see me sitting on this bus?

  “He ain’t worth it, honey.”

  “Huh?”

  I open my eyes when I realize the lady next to me is talking to me. It was like she had been reading my mind, clicking away with her knitting needles, divining my thoughts.

  “You’ve been crying,” she says. “You’re too pretty to be worried about your looks, and you’re too young to be worried about money. So that leaves only one thing.”

  I don’t say anything, but I look at her.

  “Boy trouble,” she says. She clicks away, metal against metal. Their sound is lost in the noise of the bus, the hum of the engine, and the thumping of the tires, and the voices of the passengers. Everyone on this bus seems to know somebody else. Or they are just more friendly than I am.

  “It helps to talk about it,” the lady is saying, her knitting needles clicking in a rhythmic pair.

  “No, it won’t,” I answer, and I am looking out the window again.

  “Oh, yes. It will. It always does. Sometimes, you know it’s just the sound of your own voice. Just hearing it out loud. Sometimes you sound so crazy, you’ve just got to start laughing at yourself.”

  Maybe she thinks she will trick me into talking to her by doing all the talking herself.

  “And sometimes, it makes you cry. But you know, I worked with this Jewish lady lawyer for a couple of years. I was a paralegal. And you know what she used to say?”

  Usually my skin prickles when I hear someone talk like that: Jewish lady. But for some reason, this time I don’t mind. It doesn’t seem to mean anything. And I know she is waiting for me to ask, so I say, “What?”

  “Well, she used to say, ‘You laugh too hard, you cry.’ It was some old Yiddish expression of her grandmother’s. I think she meant that she didn’t want her kids running around, getting all wild and laughing, ’cause one of them was bound to bump into something and get hurt. And start crying. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But lately I’m starting to think it means something altogether different.”

  “Like what?” At least she is taking my mind off of things.

  “I think it means that in everything funny there’s something sad and the other way around, too. Like you can’t know one without knowing the other. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Think about it. And talk to me when you’re good and ready. We got a long trip. My backside is hurting already.”

  I smile. I have to.

  “See, baby?” she says. “I told you.”

  Adam was three years older than me. Is three years older, I suppose. He always will be three years older. He was in eleventh grade when I was a freshman. Now he’s a senior, but he was always different. Before I had ever even seen Adam, I had heard this about him.

  I heard that Adam Fishman is unique.

  And in our high school, this is not so easy to achieve.

  Redding Ridge High School prides itself on being different. Our school profile even states it. Redding Ridge: A different kind of education. But don’t let that fool you; there really wasn’t any more room to be yourself than anywhere else. In fact, being a unique individual is as much of a farce as trying to be like everyone else. Maybe more.

  For some reason, a lot of famous people had moved to Redding Ridge, Connecticut, in the late eighties and early nineties. To hide, I guess. To be able to buy a pint of half-and-half in the local market without getting their picture taken. They bought big huge houses, tucked back behind big huge hills, and built big huge pools and even bigger pool houses behind those. Most of the people living in town at that time were older, retired couples who did not recognize this particular handful of famous people, not the punk-rock star with the tattoos, not the teenage movie star who had already been married twice, not the independent filmmaker who no one would have recognized anyway. Then after the famous people, the rich people started moving in.

  Then they all started having kids. They all thought their kids were special and different.

  And their kids all felt special and different.

  Maybe they are. Everybody in my grade does something — plays an instrument, excels at some sport, sings, makes movies, writes poetry, draws, or, just as likely, all of the above. You can look any way
you like, sound any way, act any way. Just so long as you don’t hurt anyone, or so they say.

  And still, in this eclectic mix, Adam Fishman stuck out.

  And he knew it.

  You got the feeling Adam was just waiting for the one person, the right girl, to match his originality, to match his spirit and honor his individuality. He certainly had a reputation for holding private auditions for the spot.

  To tell the truth, until that very first time I came in contact with him, he kind of frightened me. Then that one morning, everything changed.

  My dad had just dropped me off in the high-school parking lot. It was the third time I had missed my bus, and it was only my second week as a sophomore at Redding Ridge High School.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, shutting the passenger side door. I bent down and kind of waved into the window. I mouthed sorry, but I knew my dad never got mad at me. Never stayed mad at me.

  “Don’t worry. It’s an adjustment,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the earlier time that the high-school bus arrived this year or our very lives.

  We were the walking wounded, now four years and counting. My dad was late for work, and he drove away, leaving me in the parking lot.

  Adam’s car pulled up right behind me and swerved into a spot. I could hear his radio playing; his windows were all the way down. He had this weird car, an old square-style BMW that at one time might have been forest green but had faded to light pistachio, all except the right passenger door, which was a dull orange and must have once belonged to another vehicle entirely. There wasn’t anything on that car that shined or reflected any light at all. And it idled loudly, like it was missing a muffler.

  But it was unique.

  “Who are you?” he said, getting out but not turning off his car engine. He said this as if he owned the school, the parking lot. Maybe the world. The radio in his car sang on. The music played into the air like a movie sound track.

  He’s tall, I remember thinking. Other than passing in the halls, I hadn’t been this close to a senior since I got to high school. There was such a difference between the freshman and sophomore boys and the upperclassmen. Height and facial hair and voices and something else. Something about their confidence, the space they took up, the air they altered, as if they had one foot that much closer to being out the door and into the real world.

  And I knew who this particular senior was. He was Adam Fishman.

  “Natalie,” I answered, because I figured I had to, and then added, “Gordon.”

  “Na-ta-lie,” Adam said. He whispered it as if it were part of the song playing on his car radio. He took my hand without asking and held it high in the air. With his other hand he took the small of my back and whirled me around in time to the music. “Do you like to dance, Natalie Gordon?”

  My first instinct was to pull away, to look around. To see if anyone was watching. Should I be embarrassed? Or scared? Or flattered? But there was no one around. It was late; first period must have already started. We were dancing in the parking lot, all alone. I could feel his body close to mine, so close I could smell his scent: a mixture of sweet smoke, laundry detergent, and something else, something like damp woods and cold air.

  Here Adam Fishman was dancing with me and not for anyone else’s benefit or joke or entertainment.

  Just his.

  And mine.

  Her name, I find out, is Charlene. The big lady sitting next to me on the bus knitting, her name is Charlene. She’s been married thirty years to the same man, a man she met at the office. She is fifty-five years old, mother of five, grandmother of eight. She’s from Queens, New York, and she’s on her way to visit her newest granddaughter in some town right near Newark, Delaware.

  Lakeshia. That’s her new granddaughter’s name, not the town. Lakeshia.

  With a stretch of her arm, Charlene pulls another long string from her ball of yarn. It spins a blur of purple inside her bag as it unwinds.

  “So, Natalie, where did you say you were headed?”

  “I didn’t,” I answer, but that doesn’t sound nice. I have no reason to be mean. Some people just make you feel comfortable talking and listening. Charlene is one of those. I want to answer, but I don’t want to tell her the truth, my story. It’s too long. Too complicated. Besides, she might get worried. Call my dad or tell the driver. Or talk me out of it.

  “I’m on my way to softball camp,” I say. “In Florida.” Good God, where did that come from?

  “You play baseball?”

  I sure as hell hope she doesn’t know anything about sports.

  “Softball,” I correct her, if that’s even possible.

  “You’re going by yourself?”

  “Yes,” I can honestly say.

  Sarah wasn’t hot for the whole Adam idea from the start. We were eating lunch in the cafeteria, at our favorite table, the little round one by the window. In reality we were sitting in one of the four tables relegated for underclassmen. So it was our favorite of those four, if we could get it. That day we had.

  “He’s a senior, Natty,” she told me.

  “So?” was my clever reply. “He’s cool. I really like him.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  I knew as much as I needed to. He had chosen me.

  But looking back, it is hard for me to understand what really happened. Did I like Adam, or was it simply that he liked me, which is a kind of scary thought, kind of an out-of-control idea. Because what I remember is that I suddenly felt so powerful, so in control, that a guy like Adam Fishman, a lacrosse-playing, hat-wearing, weird-car-driving, tall-dark-handsome (hadn’t I argued against that definition once upon a time?) upperclassman, had paid attention to me, danced with me in an empty parking lot, touched my hand, the small of my back. Had looked in my eyes and called me by my name.

  Na-ta-lie.

  He had talked to me three times in the hall now. He even told me he had noticed me last spring at high-school orientation. He had noticed me.

  That’s all it took?

  But yup. That’s all it took.

  The very last thing Sarah and I had added to our list, before we lost interest in it and eventually lost the list somewhere between her house and mine, wasn’t about boys at all. It was about girls. It was about us. And that day in the cafeteria when Sarah and I were talking, I was about to violate it, our most sacred rule of all.

  Number Twenty: We will never betray each other for a boy.

  “I don’t know, Natty. I don’t really like him,” Sarah said. “He thinks he’s all that.”

  I didn’t say anything to Sarah one way or the other. I didn’t agree or disagree, but in my mind, I left her. In my mind I had made a choice, right then and there. Without really realizing it, I quietly stepped over an invisible line.

  I simply wouldn’t tell her everything anymore.

  I would no longer give my whole self up and let her in on every secret, every tiny feeling, every moment and action and observation.

  We had been friends since forever, but now I was deliberately and calculatingly inching away.

  And I justified the whole thing by just not paying attention, much like the cranky lunch lady who swipes somebody’s lunch card without checking the name and noticing it is stolen.

  From now on there would be a new place between us that only I knew about, that I controlled and from which I derived my own power, a power I was only just beginning to taste and was not willing to risk losing. I was drunk on it and I wanted to stay that way.

  The first time I ever got drunk, I was with Sarah, the summer following eighth grade, right before high school, and it happened by accident. It was at Sarah’s house, after one of her parents’ big dinner parties. Her mother asked if Sarah and I would be willing to work, to help set up, waitress, and clean afterward.

  “She’ll pay us,” Sarah told me. “It will be fun.”

  “Like playing restaurant,” I added. “Remember when we used to do that?”

  We we
re excited. Instead of being banned from the living room, dining room, and kitchen when grown-ups in their stylish clothes were around, we were invited in. We got to walk around with the guests, clear plates, fill glasses. Listen to their laughter and watch their body language, and imagine our lives as grown-ups, free and flirty, loud and liberated.

  When all the guests had left, Sarah’s mother let us taste the leftover champagne. Some of the people had preferred wine and left their tall, sparkling, ridiculously skinny crystal glasses full. Since Sarah and I had served and cleared, we knew exactly which ones were untouched.

  We tasted quite a bit.

  Being drunk is the oddest sensation. It comes on very quickly, like a tingling warmth that starts in the center of your body and moves outward. It drifts to the mind without warning, and soon I was swimming. I was lying on the floor in Sarah’s bedroom, pressed against the furry whiteness of her shaggy carpet, but I was also swimming, weightless, as if in water, moving my arms and legs around to stay afloat. There was a certain understanding that I was making a fool of myself, that my words were nonsensical and my body movements ridiculous. But there was another awareness that I was invincible, that I was powerful and special. That I was having oh, so much fun.

  In those early days with Adam, that is exactly how I felt. Powerful and drunk with it. I was special. I was high.

  By definition, being high means you are too far from the ground, balancing on a tightrope, hoping not to fall. Simple logic tells you no one can remain aloft forever.

  High.

  I became addicted to the feeling, no matter how low the crash promised to be. And the crash came pretty quickly. It came when Adam didn’t return my calls quickly enough or didn’t initiate a call. Or didn’t phone me immediately after he left my house, left my room, left my body.