One or Two Things I Learned About Love

by Dyan Sheldon

  For B.T.D.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  One or Two Things I Learned About Love

  More Titles from Dyan Sheldon

  Copyright

  All year you look forward to the summer, and when it finally comes what happens? Not much. There’s no school and it’s so hot already you sweat standing still, but that’s about it. Nothing special. Life goes on like normal here at Casa D’Angelo. This morning, the human alarm that is my little sister – shrieking as if she was being yanked through the roof by a giant Pterosaur – went off at approximately 6.31. (If my bedroom wasn’t right off the kitchen I’d avoid this, but if I didn’t sleep in the old pantry I’d have to share with her. Which is worse. I’d rather sleep in a tree.) Anyway, 6.31 was an improvement on yesterday. Yesterday, Zelda woke me up at 6.17 because the cat was on her chair. Today, it wasn’t anything that exciting. She was having a meltdown because a cornflake missed her bowl and landed on the table. (NIGHTMARE ON LEBANON ROAD! Everybody head for the hills!) So then she got mad because I laughed at her. My mother pretended to bang her head on the fridge. (I think she was pretending. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.) A start like that and you have a pretty good idea what the rest of the day’s going to be like. If I didn’t have to go to work and lived in a house with air conditioning, I would’ve gone back to bed.

  The farm stand doesn’t have AC either, naturally, but the traffic creates a breeze. We had the usual beach trade, but otherwise it was a quiet day. Which gave me and Ely a chance to practise our juggling without the risk of hitting someone. The major drama was when the big black cat that lives up the road caught another seagull. There were so many feathers it looked like it was snowing. And there was enough shrieking for a horror movie (most of it mine). This is the third one that cat’s caught so far and we’re still in June. Ely’s calling the cat Monsanto.

  The lanes have AC, of course, so the whole Lebanon Road Mob went bowling tonight – Nomi, Jax, Sara, Kruger, Cristina, Maggie and Grady, the guy Maggie’s been seeing the last few weeks. Even Louie, since Mr Kitosky’s fishing in Canada. Normally, of course, Louie’s banned because he videoed Mr Kitosky pushing Mr Ledbetter down the lane and into the pins at last year’s tournament and put it on YouTube. (I’ve never seen anybody turn that shade of red before. It was truly awe-inspiring! I thought Mr K was going to have a heart attack.) Louie says that it isn’t unusual to have to suffer for your art. Mr Kitosky said if he ever catches Louie with a camera in his hands again, he’ll teach him what suffering really is.

  Back home to sweat and reacquaint myself with hysteria. My family can make a blood-and-tears tragedy out of losing a key. Tonight’s big drama was because when Gus’s date came to pick her up, Dad called him Elroy. As in, “Hi, there, Elroy. Nice to see you again.” Elroy was last week. This one’s called Zak. Gus laughed at the time, but she went ballistic when she got home. She said sometimes she thinks Dad embarrasses her on purpose. (He doesn’t.) Dad said it’s not his fault that Gus is a serial dater, and if she wants him to remember the names of all the boys she goes out with she should either make them wear name tags or date boys who don’t look so much like each other. She said maybe she should start dating girls. (It wouldn’t make any difference. He still wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.) I said to Dad it must be a great relief to him that his middle daughter only ever had two and a half dates in her whole life. He said when were they? I can’t blame him for forgetting. They weren’t exactly worth remembering. (Only I probably will because it’s starting to look like they’re the only dates I’ll ever have.)

  I was hoping something wonderful would happen this summer. Now I just hope I don’t melt.

  This morning the screaming that woke me up was Gus, not Zelda. Gus couldn’t find her new sandals. Obviously, I must have taken them to bed with me. Other people take the stuffed rabbit they had when they were little. I take my sister’s shoes. I told her to get real and leave me alone. She wouldn’t budge. (If there’s one way my sisters are alike it’s that they’re both as stubborn as bloodstains.) Gus said she’d looked EVERYWHERE. She couldn’t go to work until she found them. I suggested (reasonably) that she wear something else. It’s not like she only has one pair of shoes. (She could open a store. No, she could open a chain.) Gus said she didn’t want to wear something else. Of course. If you ask me, it’s not just Zelda who has issues. Gus is clinically irrational. She wouldn’t stop screaming. “I mean it, Hildy! You’d better give me back my shoes!” When she tries, Gus can yell loud enough to be heard in Alaska. I pictured all these Inuits looking puzzled and trying to figure out who Hildy was. That made me laugh. Which made her even madder. The sandals were under the porch swing. Mom found them. I’m glad I’m staying at Nomi’s tonight. Mr and Mrs Slevka went to some big antiques fair to sell old jars and won’t be back till tomorrow. Nomi may be well known for her feistiness and her big mouth (my gran says that not only would Nomi argue with the Devil himself, she’d win), but she’s terrified of being home alone. Even with the new alarm Mr Slevka put in. Which is fine with me. The Slevkas don’t have AC either (because Nomi’s father has principles about air conditioning, not because he’s cheap), but next to Casa D’Angelo it’s like going from a war zone to a twenty-star holiday resort.

  Went to my pottery class this morning, but it was too hot for our usual Saturday tennis match. We all agreed we’d rather walk to Canada on stilts. So Nomi and I decided to go into town. The stores are all air-conditioned of course. Mom said “Why don’t you take Zelda with you?” (She has to ask?) Zelda wanted to know if we were going to talk about boys all afternoon. I said no, we were going to be discussing the international monetary crisis. She threw a purple plastic Astrodon at me and put on her sandals.

  The gift store’s selling fans! Not the kind you plug in. The old-fashioned kind you flap back and forth in front of your face. Mrs Gorrie bought a case when the first Zorro movie came out. She thought the movie would start a trend. Only it didn’t. It’s not exactly like having AC or even an electric fan, but you can carry it around with you and at least it moves the air around. So psychologically it makes you feel better. Mrs Gorrie says it just proves there really is a good side to everything, even global warming, because now the fans are selling faster than water in a drought. Nomi and I both got one. I would’ve bought one for Zelda, but she tried mine and right away hit herself in the eye with it, so I didn’t bother.

  Went to Maggie’s tonight for a barbecue. Her mother says it’s too hot to cook in the house. (Maggie says Mrs Pryce is afraid the heat’s going to make the microwave explode.) Sara and Kruger had a band rehearsal, so it was the rest of the Mob, including Grady. Mr Pryce was in charge as usual, even though he always manages to set something on fire (besides the food). It’s mostly an oven glove or a deckchair or the grass – some ordinary thing you find around your average backyard. But this time he set himself on fire. He was flipping chicken and his Licensed to Grill apron suddenly went up in flames. Grady said that you’d think they’d at least make them flame-retardant, wouldn’t you? Mr Pryce was only saved from a fate worse than death by quick thinking from me and Jax. We threw the dog’s wading pool on him. Louie, of course, filmed the whole thing. Mr Pryce said he hoped Louie wasn’t going to make one of his funny videos out of it, hahahaha. Louie said, “Mr Pryce, would I put you on YouTube soaking wet, covered in dog hair and holding a chicken wing in the air?” Mr Pryce thought that meant “No.”

  Nomi and I had our new fans with us. Jax said that if they didn’t do much to cool us off at least you could swat flies with them. Entertained everybody for approximately 59 seconds by juggling lemons. One of them landed in Mr Pryce�
�s drink. He said it might be a while before any circus calls me. Louie said I might consider a career as a bombardier.

  The new alarm was going off when we got back to Nomi’s. Mr Janofski next door was sitting on his front porch in his bathrobe and pyjamas, looking like a really long sleepless night. (Mr J’s a big man who probably would’ve been a bull if he wasn’t a human, but his pyjamas are pink!) We started running to the house as soon as we saw him. Nomi unlocked the door and turned off the alarm. Mr Janofski said next time it happens he’s breaking in and ripping it out with his bare hands. Nomi thinks he means it. He used to be in the Marines.

  Woken up by the alarm. And Mr Janofski roaring, “That does it!” Nomi figures the vibration of the newspaper hitting the porch must’ve set it off. She leapt out of bed like a gazelle being chased by a lion and turned it off before Mr Janofski got out of his front door. Left it off and escaped to the tranquility and calm that is Sunia Kreple’s yoga class, even though Sunia doesn’t have so much as a fan in the new studio because she says the sound would break the transcendental flow of energy (and AC would shatter it completely). But like Nomi said, it’s always hot in India where they’ve been doing yoga for hundreds of years and it hasn’t killed them, so what the heck. Watched sweat drip off me in Downward Dog but at least it was tranquil.

  On the way home, Nomi and I went over to Gran’s since we were nearby. Everybody jokes about old ladies needing help to open the ketchup and change a light bulb, but my gran’s not that kind of old lady. She’s the kind who wants you to help her put up shelves or paint the living room. She can open her own ketchup. She’d just finished fixing that wonky step by the back door when we got there. Gran loved the fans. She wants one. She said it was about time we got something you don’t have to plug in or charge. Gran hates cell phones and computers and all that stuff. She won’t even have an answering machine. She doesn’t want to be in touch with people 24/7. She likes alone time. She says imagine if Romeo and Juliet had had cell phones. No more tragic love story. Just, “Don’t do it. I’m on my way.”

  The parents were arguing when I got home. Because the washing machine broke again. My mother wants to buy a new one. My father says he can fix the one we have. But the fight wasn’t about that. The fight was about all the other things my father’s going to fix. “You’re still fixing Zelda’s stroller and she’s almost ten!” shouted my mother. “Exactly!” Dad shouted back. “She doesn’t need it any more!” Left them to it and went next door to help Louie edit his video of the barbecue before my mom remembered about the deck. Dad’s been building that for almost as long as he’s been fixing Zelda’s stroller.

  Dreamed I was sleeping in Hell. I kept begging the Devil to turn on the AC. I would have cried, but I’d used up all the water in my body on sweat. The Devil wasn’t moved by my pleas. (He sounded a lot like Gus when he laughed.) He said AC was bad for the environment. “If God wanted you to have air conditioning, you’d have a unit attached to the top of your head,” said the Devil. (He sounded just like my dad.) Woke up to screaming and shouting. If I ever wake up and the house is quiet, I won’t know where I am. Dragged my limp, wet body into the kitchen to see what was going on. My parents were having an argument about how to boil water. Got a glass of juice and went to sit on the patio. Texted Nomi to see if she wanted to go to the beach. Then Cristina called to see what we were doing. I said Nomi and I figured the only way we could avoid heatstroke was to spend the day in the supermarket or on the beach, so we were going to the beach because we couldn’t wear our new swimsuits in the supermarket. Cristina said she’d come, too. I said she must be nuts. Not only does her house have AC, it has a real swimming pool. Cristina said it would be nuts not to come to the beach. Her sister and her friends have taken over the pool like foot fungus. She’d much rather hang out with Nomi and me. And who wouldn’t? There’s been no official policy statement, but the Mob avoids the Palacios’ place if Lenora’s around. I know Gus can be a bigger pain in the butt than being injected with a horse needle, but next to Lenora Palacio she’s God’s Gift to Sisterhood. You have to try to imagine what that means. It’s like saying Gus is a very small snowflake and Lenora is Alaska. But I still bet Cristina would’ve stayed in the chill cabinet that is Casa Palacio if her boyfriend wasn’t 200 miles away teaching six-year-olds how to toast marshmallows.

  Zelda refused to go to camp today, so my mother made me take her with us to the beach. (In this family, Gus got the looks, Zelda got the personality disorder and I get taken advantage of.) Zelda, naturally, decided to be invisible. Which meant she wore a white robe that reaches her feet (it used to be Gus’s, but she disowned it after Louie videoed her climbing in the kitchen window in it) and the enormous sombrero with Mexico across the front that Gran brought back from her cruise to Cancún. Which meant Zelda was about as invisible as a herd of elephants with bells and lights on. It was excruciating being seen with her. (Heads turned like windmills in a gale.) So, of course, the beach was really packed. (There are obviously a lot more people who don’t have AC or pools than I thought.) A couple of people wanted to know what was up with the sombrero and the fans. They thought we were in some kind of ad or something. Nomi told them we were in the video for a new band called Keep Cool, and they started looking around for the film crew. We left Zelda on the blanket and went for a swim (she’s afraid of water unless it’s in a container). We figured she wasn’t going anywhere since the only thing she could see was her feet. When we got back to the blanket she was gone. Her robe was in the sand like a puddle and the sombrero was on top of it. Nomi said it was like when the wicked witch melts in The Wizard of Oz. Melting is the one thing I don’t worry about with Zelda. Cristina was afraid someone had taken her. I’d like to see them try. Let’s not forget the time she nearly got Mom arrested at the mall because she didn’t want to leave and Mom had to drag her to the car, screaming like she was being murdered. And then she told the security guards that she’d never seen my mother before in her life. Anyway we finally found her at the snack bar getting an ice pop. Jax’s dad had given him the afternoon off, so he showed up with a cool bag full of soda and a fresh outlook. He and Zelda built a sand space station while Nomi, Cristina and I sat under the umbrella playing cards. Zelda let Jax wear the sombrero. With her in the white robe and Jax in the hat, it was like Star Wars meets Viva Zapata!

  Tonight my father decided to work on the deck, but he couldn’t find his spirit level. My mother said it was wherever he’d put it. Like everything else he can’t find. He said it wasn’t. He wanted to know how he’s expected to finish the deck when she’s constantly moving his tools. My mother said she’s not the only person who lives in our house besides him. In case he hadn’t noticed.

  Went back to Louie’s to work on the editing. Who would’ve guessed when Louie’s dad gave him his old camera to fool around with when he was nine that it would become an obsession? Or that he’d be so good at it? Really. There are actually people all over the world who wait for his postings. Now his father says he’s afraid to go for the paper in his pyjamas in case he winds up in one of Louie’s videos looking like an escaped patient. Mr Masiado thinks he created a monster. He won’t be the only one. Wait till Mr Pryce finds out he’s on YouTube.

  Work today. It was really busy, so there was no time for Ely to give me a juggling lesson. All my favourites came by. Broccoli Man. Blue Eyeshadow Lady. Green Pick-up Guy. The Countess. Farmer John thinks we’re so busy because we’re witnessing a cultural revolution. He says nowadays folks want their vegetables to come out of the earth, not out of plastic. Ely says that’s not why we’re busy. We’re busy because we’re on the beach road and folks don’t want to drive all the way to the supermarket if they don’t have to. Especially when they’re sandy, damp and smell like seaweed. All I know is that my fan got a lot of positive comments from the buyers of ground-grown vegetables. Except for Broccoli Man, who wouldn’t get out of his car until I put it away. But all the more normal people said that it was both practical and elegan
t. The Countess said the ladies at court always had fans. Blue Eyeshadow Lady said she’d always wanted a fan but she didn’t know where to get one (so I told her). Even Green Pick-up Guy said he thought it was very elegant. He said I made him think of the movie Gone with the Wind. Ely wanted to know which part: when they burn down Atlanta? He said he figured it’d be a lot more elegant if I was wearing a long, ruffled dress and a hibiscus in my hair. Not shorts, a Lobster Lilly’s T-shirt and a baseball cap.

  Did some more editing with Louie tonight. We’re calling the new video Flame Broiled and the background music’s the really old Burger King “hold the pickles, hold the lettuce” jingle. When we got to the part where Jax and I threw the wading pool over Mr Pryce I finally understood what people mean when they say “I thought I’d die laughing”. We both nearly stopped breathing.

  Maggie showed Grady some of Louie’s videos. Grady already knew the one Louie made of his dogs Hitchcock and Scorsese arguing over who was going to sit in Mr Masiado’s chair (over 900,000 hits on YouTube). He’s watched it five times and he always laughs out loud. He thinks Louie’s a genius. Louie’s smart, but I’m not so sure about the genius part. He can’t even defrost, let alone cook. When his parents went away for that weekend in May, he ate nothing but cereal for three days. And let’s not forget that I’m the one who did Hitchcock’s voice, totally ad-lib (and helped with the editing).

  When I got home, the kitchen looked like we’d been robbed. All the cabinets were open and there was stuff all over the counters. Only it wasn’t burglars. Mom was out and Dad was looking for the iced-tea mix. Zelda was on the floor, wailing like she was being torn apart by tyrannosaurs (she wanted iced tea). Mrs Claws was stuck in a bag of Cheez Doodles – all you could see of her was her butt and her tail, and when I dragged her out she was all dusty and orange. Dad was standing in the middle of the wreckage, looking distraught. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Mom makes iced tea from scratch. Went to my room. Was talking to Nomi when the quiet of the night was shattered by hysterical laughter. My mother was home. I wonder if my parents ever had a romantic relationship. It seems unlikely. Which could explain why Gus has never found anyone she likes for more than a few weeks and I can’t even get a date.