by Jancee Dunn
I had been officially “hanging out with” Christian for a few weeks, but I had yet to graduate to girlfriend status and so had never been inside the Somers home. With trembling legs, I made my way between the planters of the front door. The hallway was dark and I blinked, trying to get my bearings. Every house has a scent, and theirs was a mélange of dog, dryer sheets, and traces of dinner from the night before, which smelled vaguely Asian. Was it takeout, or did his mom actually cook ethnic meals? They probably used chopsticks. All the cool families used chopsticks.
His dog, a husky named Rufus, trotted over, tail wagging. Hi, boy! Who’s a good lil’ doggie! If you stick your nose in my privates, so help me I will stomp your head in!
Christian saw my expression and laughed. “I’ll put him in the basement,” he said with a mock sigh.
I looked around greedily. I had always pictured his house as light and airy, but it was comfortingly dank, just like my house. The living room was overwhelmingly brown: leather couches, lifeless plaid curtains, the dog bed in the corner, the pocked coffee table. Family pictures were arrayed on every available surface. Somehow I assumed they would be tastefully housed in matching frames and hung on a pristine eggshell-colored wall.
There was just too much to take in. I picked up a photo of Christian as a laughing toddler holding a red ball and committed it to memory. This is what our child will look like. When Christian came back into the room, I now had something to talk about. I could look up and wryly say, And who is this?
Where was he? Maybe he was feeding the dog? I held the edge of the frame, waiting to pick it up as he walked into the room, and readied my amused expression. The minutes ticked by.
“What are you doing?” he said as he came back in, holding an Echo and the Bunnymen tape and putting it into a player.
“Who’s this?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, that’s Geordie.” I put the photo down.
“How about this?” I said, picking up another.
“Put that back,” he said, mock wrestling with me while he grabbed the frame. We’re having a playful moment! “Come here,” he said, sitting on the very couch upon which the mysterious Somers boys draped themselves as they watched television. If only I had a brother who gulped milk out of the carton in his boxer shorts, I would not be as awed by boys. Instead, I had fastidious Ginny, who once told me she shut the door to go to the bathroom even when she was alone in her house.
Christian reached up and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. Then he leaned in to kiss me. I am on Christian Somers’s couch, and we are making out for the fourth time—four and a half, if you count that day in the parking lot. I may be the only girl who has kissed Christian in his actual home. It can never undo itself. No matter what happens after this, I have officially kissed Christian, on his couch, in his house. He smells like soap, and salt water, and beer.
I didn’t even ask when his parents would be back. What if they burst in? The dog was whining and scratching the basement door. What if it got out? Remember to hold in your stomach, even if your outfit is mercifully loose: a purple T-shirt with the neck hacked, Flashdance-style, a green tank top underneath, and Esprit shorts with a nice, forgiving paper-bag waist. Did I want it to go further? Not if the parents might come home. Okay, then: don’t lie down. Stay sitting up, no matter what.
He pulled back for a moment and gazed at me with a sleepy grin and soft eyes. Was I supposed to say something? Five seconds crawled by. My left knee was jumping crazily, and I shifted to make it stop. I leaned forward and kissed him again to break the spell.
He is an expert kisser, and I am kissing him back in the right way. We are meant to be together! Why do boys always seem to know what they’re doing? Please, please, Christian, tell just one friend that this has happened! Then it will get around the entire school!
He pulled away again. Was he finished? It was too intense when he looked at me like that. Some of his top front teeth were slightly crooked. It didn’t look bad; it gave him character. My hands were trembling slightly, but I don’t think he noticed.
“Hey,” he said softly. What did I say back? The “hey” seemed to have some sort of significance.
Once I had quizzed Ginny on what to say after you’d been kissing someone for a while. She thought for a minute and said, “How about ‘More, please’?” When she said it, it seemed saucy and self-assured.
“More, please,” I said, assuming what I hoped was a devilish expression.
He pulled back, his brow furrowed. “What?”
Did he misunderstand or not think it was funny? Both were horrible options. “Oh, nothing,” I said.
The dog began howling and slamming its body against the basement door, and Christian leapt up, irritated. Thank you, Rufus.
Is there a greater high in the world than being seventeen and kissing someone you have loved from afar? In college, it just wasn’t the same. There may have been a thousand people to choose from, but their history was a blank; there was none of that sweet buildup from longingly studying a boy for months or years and compulsively archiving everything he did. In high school, you catalogued a boy’s full wardrobe: He purchased a new shirt; it was noted and banked.
In high school, I saw the boys in class, and at parties, but then they vanished into their homes for the more mundane activities of video games and dinner. In dorms, that crucial distance disappeared. Everyone ate together in the cafeterias, and I knew the color of my crush’s bedspread because there it was in his dorm room (a predictably “masculine” navy or dark green). When he returned from the shower in flip-flops, holding his bucket of shampoo and soap with a rank towel wrapped around his waist and a livid red pimple on his back, I knew what brand of antiperspirant he used because there it was, sitting on the television in his room with the cap off and a thick underarm hair clinging to the applicator. And why was there a box of tissues by his bed?
Even when I met Adam in senior year and was so infatuated with him that I couldn’t sleep for weeks, when we finally kissed, standing on the steps of my dorm on a snowy night, I was able to coolly assess his skill (solid) and capacity for sensitivity (points for rubbing my shoulders). I was charmed that he was stuttering slightly as he talked to me between kisses, and that he wrapped his scarf around me “in case, you know, we wouldn’t, wouldn’t want you to get cold.” But my hands were steady and my smile was calm.
In some way, I had probably been chasing that high school make-out feeling for the past two decades. Nothing, but nothing matched it. Some of my friends told me that having a baby reproduced the sensation, that it was like having a constant crush, but I had never felt a maternal tug stronger than a mild curiosity to see my physical traits reproduced in another. Adam had always wanted a boisterous houseful, having grown up with four siblings. “We’re only twenty-three,” he had said soothingly after we were married. “Of course you don’t want kids now. But trust me, you will. My sisters say that, boom, all of a sudden it happens.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
He kissed me on the forehead. “I’m willing to gamble,” he said grandly.
For the first few years, we didn’t even discuss children, but by the time I reached thirty, Adam had begun a gentle but never-ending campaign. I kept waiting for my magical transformation, but my resistance increased when friends with babies would say, I never really knew how selfish I was until I had kids and I haven’t left the house in a year, but I’ve never been happier. Our hurried socializing was confined to endless first-birthday parties, as I stood around awkwardly, holding a paper plate with a cupcake on it while other people’s children played.
After Adam left, I wondered many times if I had gotten so caught up in passionately taking a stand and proving Adam wrong that I hadn’t actually examined in any great depth how I actually felt about the issue.
No husband. No house. No kids. No car. No career plan. I had barely ever been on a date. Some nights, I woke with a crawling fear that it was entirely possible I would neve
r be kissed again. Ginny suggested online dating, but who, exactly, would jump at my profile? Even if people say that they seek someone unusual, I suspected that they do not. No one wants an eccentric.
Let’s see: Shy television producer; irritable, set in ways. Interests include bird-watching, office-supply stores, and the films of Joan Crawford. Just wants people to “behave themselves.” Bursts into sentimental tears upon hearing Kate Smith’s version of “God Bless America.” What liver-spotted swain would reply to that ad? Then again, older men might be my only alternative.
I flashed to Adam, red-faced and shouting, “Lillian, how could you not see that I was bored out of my fucking mind? Sitting around in the living room like my parents did, like we were embalmed. What is wrong with you? Don’t you want more out of life?” I gaped at him, dumbfounded, because the answer had been no.
My shock seemed to enrage him—Adam, who never raised his voice. “I needed oxygen; your world is as narrow as a closet, you and that old lady, collecting stuff together—”
“You always said that it was charming, all of my quirks,” I said.
The wildness drained a little from his eyes, and his shoulders dropped. “Look, I’m sorry,” he muttered, seeing my face. He moved to hug me. As his arms encircled me, I could feel the pads of his fingers on my back. He was cupping his hands so he didn’t have to fully touch me. For months, he hadn’t been able to stand me, and I had not seen it.
Surely you knew it was coming, Ginny ventured gently when I told her. You must have seen the signs.
“I didn’t see it coming,” I said aloud. “I didn’t see it coming at all.” Tears rose in my throat, and I pulled the car over. “Why didn’t I see? Why didn’t you tell me, or warn me, or…” I searched clumsily for tissues in the glove compartment. I unearthed a spare hanky that my dad had stashed in there, and it made me cry harder. My father always had a crisp white handkerchief in his pocket, which had dried both of his daughters’ tears many times. Soon the generation of men who carried handkerchiefs would die out completely. I put my face in my hands and sobbed.
A maroon minivan passed me and slowed. A plump blond woman on a cell phone gawped at me, concerned, and I waved her on with a weak smile. After a few minutes, I heaved a long, shaky sigh and dabbed my face with my father’s soaked hanky. Then I rolled down the windows and slowly pulled away from the curb. Rick Springfield would cheer me up. I looked at the clock. Almost nine. My parents would be home by now.
I’ll drive for one more hour, I thought. It was a little too soon to return to the present. I wiped the last of my tears with the back of my hand and drove away.
chapter nine
I decided I would establish a routine by running in the park in the morning. It was the same place I had spent countless Saturdays as a kid, so flashbacks would ambush me as I rounded each corner of the paved path: a grove of picnic tables where we had family birthday parties, a patch of grass that was the site of my first Old Milwaukee beer after the Bethel Rams lost a football game.
Exercise is so much easier when you’ve been dumped. You’re so preoccupied that it barely registers if your legs are moving. An hour and a half whizzes by, and suddenly you find that you’re sitting on a kid’s swing in the playground area, panting and sweating, without the faintest recollection of how you got there.
Adam had gone on a date. A friend of mine had seen him with a woman at a Mexican restaurant we used to frequent. She reported that she was a brunette about twenty-five years old, smiled a lot, and wore a clingy brown wrap dress with high-heeled boots. Then I didn’t want to hear any more.
Absently, I pushed myself forward on the swing with one foot. I had to assume that Adam had not been cheating on me, that he had probably met someone at his new job. And what did it matter? He had moved on. I disinterestedly examined the wood shavings under the swing and hummed an old tune by Nat King Cole that Vi thought was upbeat and I found unbearably sad. Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue. It isn’t very hard to do….
My thoughts were broken by a grinning boy with leaves in his hair and a goatee of chocolate who was streaking toward me. “Mommy!” he hollered, panting. “Mommy, look at me. Look at me, Mommy!” He hurled himself into an adjoining swing. “Mommy look at me, look at me!”
I threw him a freezing glance before it could register with Mommy. Six swings and he picked the one right next to me. Didn’t you ever hear about “stranger danger”? How about some boundaries?
“Coming, Kade!” called a voice. “Hang on, buddy.”
Kade. I jumped up, feeling in my pockets for my car keys.
“Is he bugging you?” asked the mother apologetically. She had a blond bob and a sunny, open face with a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. Her outfit was Moneyed Suburbanite: yoga pants and sneakers for errands, designer purse, and assertive but not vulgar diamond studs.
“No, no, I was just heading—”
She looked at me brightly, her nose crinkling. “Lillian?”
I froze.
She beamed. “It’s me, Dawn.”
I squinted at her. It was my old classmate, Dawn Shulman, unrecognizable at first with a blond dye job and twenty extra pounds.
“How are you?” she squealed, enveloping me in a tight hug. “You look amazing! God, you haven’t changed at all.” She pulled away and looked me over appreciatively. “Look at your little tiny waist!”
I beamed back at her as two emotions wrestled within me for dominance: genuine pleasure in seeing her and the enduring guilt that arose whenever I remembered my earlier treatment of her.
In middle school, Dawn and I had the sort of hysterically intense friendship peculiar to prehormonal ten-year-old girls. We spent every afternoon together, broke briefly for dinner, and directly afterward resumed our conversation on the phone, gossiping and planning our matching outfits down to the Bermuda bags. Weekends were for sleepovers and their strict rituals: Every Friday was spent at the Twin Theater for repeated viewings of favorite movies (we saw The Breakfast Club a record eight weeks in a row, each time spending the rest of the night trying to replicate the way that Molly Ringwald’s character, Clare, danced in the library). Every Saturday found us at Friendly’s in front of a Reese’s Pieces sundae (chocolate ice cream for me, vanilla, in a rare show of independence, for her). Ceremony was extremely important, especially at the onset of puberty when we lost any semblance of control over our awakening glands.
Dawn, with her limp red curls and pudgy frame, was the classic shy child who flowered among people she trusted, becoming boisterous and funny. I was more outgoing, my awkward stage less enduring, and when my braces came off the first month of freshman year in high school, I began to attract the notice of Lynn Casey and Kimmy Marino, two glossy racehorse girls who owned alligator shirts in sugar-almond colors for every day of the week. We people on the pavement looked hungrily at them, with their swinging walk, their clean, tanned limbs, as they chatted in conspiratorial tones on their way to lacrosse practice, cleats slung carelessly over their shoulders. Their white shirts were tucked perfectly in and then pulled out just the right amount in a way that I could never duplicate. Kimmy and Lynn looked just as crisply pulled together at lacrosse practice as they did on a Friday night in full dress. Even their blindingly white scrunch socks were pushed down perfectly on their slim legs.
Lynn was my reluctant science-lab partner, but after a few days, I made her laugh with an imitation of Mrs. Davis’s adenoidal drone. Soon I had parlayed the laughs into an invitation from Kimmy and Lynn to walk to the drugstore to buy a bag of lollipops and then watch the boys’ soccer practice on the bleachers. Somehow, post–middle school, lollipops had lost their innocence, and Kimmy and Lynn knew it.
Dawn drew into herself when I told her. “How could you hang out with those bitches?” she said finally, her eyes on the ground.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s one afternoon.” But it wasn’t, and as the weeks rolled on in a thrilling blur, Kimmy and Lynn made it clear to me th
at Dawn and I were not a package deal. So I avoided Dawn’s phone calls and ducked her entreating looks in the hallway at school.
But Dawn Shulman would not conveniently withdraw. She dared not approach when I was with Lynn and Kimmy but waited until she found me alone one afternoon in the girls’ bathroom.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” she said, her voice unnaturally high and loud. Her round face went red, filling me with both pity and revulsion. How could I tell her the truth? Because I want to ride around with Kimmy in Dr. Marino’s navy blue Mercedes. Because I want to go out with Michael Garrett, or Christian Somers, and it will never happen, despite the plots of John Hughes movies in which a shy girl triumphs, unless I’m in the boys’ sight line next to girls like Lynn. Because behind your back, people call you “Dawn Dyke-man.” Because given the opportunity, you would do the same thing to me. At least I think you would.
I glanced hurriedly toward the bathroom door. “Look, Dawn,” I said. “I can’t be late for class again. Okay? I’ll call you tonight, all right?”
She sniffled. A shiny trail oozed from her left nostril. “Really?” she said timidly.
“Yes. Yes. After dinner. I promise.”
I did not call her after dinner, or the next night, and eventually she stopped looking my way in the halls.
“So, are you visiting your parents?” Dawn asked, jarring me back to the present. “I see them every once in a while around town.” I scanned her face for any sign of animosity, but there was only calm, open friendliness. Did I detect a trace of admiration? She was probably aware that I was a television producer.
“I heard you were living in New York. God. I can’t imagine that kind of pace. I just read the average apartment there is almost a million dollars.”
Kade ran over and tried to climb Dawn like she was a tree. “I’m looking for an apartment now,” I said. “Renting, not buying. I just got divorced.” I waved away her concerned look. “Long story,” I said. There was really no need to share last Tuesday’s little scene, in which I took the train into New York with my mother, holding her hand the whole way, to see Adam in divorce court for “dissolution of marriage with no children and without property.” I wanted the grounds to be “irreconcilable differences” or “incompatibility,” but New York divorce laws didn’t permit the use of any of those benign terms, so we settled on “abandonment.” Then my mother waited in the hallway as Adam and I, flanked by our lawyers, signed the final papers. He and I were both crying, but when it was over, he hugged me and told me to take care. Then he turned and left the room.
