“In other words,” I said, “he didn’t want me to begin with. I was an inconvenience. I got in the way of his plans.”
“Oh, no, honey! No! Never say that! Your dad loves children. And more important, he loves you!”
“Then why don’t you have more children?”
Mom wasn’t even forty yet. Whereas Eliza’s mother was forty-one when she’d had Eliza, and as far as I could tell, Becka’s mother was already close to fifty.
But all she said was: “Oh, honey! It’s complicated.” When I didn’t reply, she said: “So it’s all set, then? We’ll go shopping tomorrow?”
The next day, Mom and I pulled on nearly identical oversized-sweaters-over-jeans-with-boots outfits, like a couple of shapeless, dreary twins in the throes of gender blending, and set off for New York. I would have preferred to step out in something more funktabulous, but it was so cold and so slushy that instead I went for warm, and even so, I shivered in Mom’s hideously ugly old parka. On the train, as I watched the New Jersey suburbs slide by in shades of brown and gray and smoke, I got this awful feeling that I was dressed like such a loser that something bad was going to happen to me. Like my hideous coat was going to attract nasty, Becka-like commentary. It was a stupid thought, though, and by the time we were at Bloomingdale’s, I’d pushed it away. Mom had headed straight to the Menswear department.
“Honestly,” she said, inspecting stacks of men’s sweaters, “what do you get for someone who has everything?”
“Beats me,” I said, feeling something squeeze my forehead and fill my mind with sawdust. Something about the combined smells of wool, tissue paper, perfume, and heat made me feel a little dizzy. Not to mention that my hideous white parka seemed to be growing, tumorlike, in all directions.
“Do you like this pale-blue color?” Mom said. “It would match Daddy’s eyes, don’t you think?”
“I think I need a little air,” I said.
“Honey?”
“I’ll be right back.”
As I headed across the vast first floor, I looked over, and thought I saw my father. Except that Dad was in Montreal, on business — and not bent over a glass case in Fine Jewelry. Maybe he had an identical twin that he’d never mentioned, because this guy, whoever he was, was an exact replica.
“Dad?” I said, approaching, but the man kept on looking at whatever it was he was looking at. Maybe it wasn’t my father after all. Except it was. I took a step closer.
“Dad.”
This time he looked up, a blush the color of overripe eggplant spreading from his neck up through the tips of his ears. A moment later, he was giggling, and the moment after that, he pulled me to his chest in the fakest hug I’ve ever received — and that’s saying a lot — and saying: “Pooky! What a wonderful surprise to run into you here! What are you doing?”
“Er. Shopping? With Mom. I thought you were in Montreal.”
He let go of me so quickly you would have thought I was covered with stinging needles. Glancing down, I noticed that Dad was looking at a heart-shaped necklace. An expensive heart-shaped necklace, studded with sparkling stones the color of the San Francisco Bay.
“Nice necklace,” I said.
“It’s a surprise,” he stammered out. “For your mother. You think she’ll like it?”
Yeah, right.
“She’s probably wondering where I am.”
“Oh! Your mother’s here, too! That’s right! You said so, didn’t you?”
I just looked at him — the same old ignore-me father that I’ve always had: tall and slim, thick black hair streaked with gray, a cleft chin that my girlfriends told me was “cute,” and those beautiful light-blue eyes that Mom had always said was the first thing she’d noticed about him. To me, though, they looked as cheap and hard as a pair of blue marbles.
“She’s in Menswear,” I said, gesturing at the other side of the store with my head.
“Oh!” he said, more brightly than ever. “Then this will be our little secret, right?” I felt sick. He put his hand to his mouth and made coughing sounds.
I must have gone bright red or something, because he quickly elaborated. “Don’t tell her about the necklace, okay? I thought I’d get her something special this year. What do you think?”
“Nice.”
“Do you think she’d like it?” he said again.
I shrugged. By now I was desperate to grab Mom and head for the hills. Also, my dizziness had returned.
“Gotta go,” I said.
As I turned from him, he caught my hand and, squeezing it, said, “Keep my secret, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”
The only surprise, however, was that I got to the sidewalk and fresh air in time to not throw up. It had begun to snow again, and as I looked up to let the snowflakes fall on my face, I knew I was going to cry. Standing there in front of Bloomingdale’s as hordes of shoppers passed me going in and out, I was going to start bawling — and if there was one thing I refused to do, it was to cry.
Don’t you dare, I told myself, or she’s going to win.
Who’s going to win?
Becka, that’s who.
As my mind cleared, I had an idea. And not just any idea — the idea. Suddenly, standing there in the snow, I knew exactly what the first blog that Ann wanted me to help her with should be about: Becka’s raincoat. As I thought about what I wanted to say, I began to feel better. So much better that by the time I found Mom (she was still looking at sweaters), the sawdust had completely left my head. At last, I thought, someone would show Becka that she couldn’t get away with it.
It wasn’t until after Mom had bought a couple of sweaters, a book, and a heavy glass paperweight for Dad that I saw it: a blue-gray coat, very retro, with a wide blue velvet collar, blue velvet cuffs, and oversized velvet-covered buttons. By now we were in a downtown neighborhood where, one summer once upon a time, Mom had taken dance classes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to try that on.”
“In those days,” Mom said, ignoring me completely, “I was so athletic that I could leap five feet into the air.”
“The coat, Mom! The coat!” I was staring into the shop’s large front window now, practically panting with covetousness.
“What coat?”
“That coat!” Grabbing my mother’s hand, I dragged her behind me into the store. A minute later, I was buttoning it up before an old-fashioned freestanding framed mirror.
It had a light-blue lining, perfectly intact, fell just below my knees, and fit me as if it had been tailored to my exact proportions. Not a stitch was out of place. Not a button was loose.
“Mother,” I said, “I need this coat.”
But she flat-out refused to buy it for me. “Let me buy you something that we’ll both love,” she said. “Something classic, something will last.”
“This is classic,” I pointed out. “Classic midcentury.”
“No,” Mom said. “Not in a million years.”
“I don’t think you understand,” I said. “This coat and I: It’s like we were meant to meet. We were meant to be together! We’re soul mates, Mom!”
Which is when, you guessed it, my mother began to cry. “That’s what your father used to say to me,” she sniffled into a pre-wadded-up Kleenex. “He called me his soul mate.”
Talk about a slam dunk. After her tears, all I could say was: “Maybe it’s time to go home, Mom.”
Could it get any worse? Yes, it could. Because when I got home, there was an email waiting for me from my father. “Pooky poo,” he wrote. “Remember to keep my promise, okay? I want your mom to be surprised.”
Turns out, though, that Dad didn’t give Mom the heart-shaped necklace. He didn’t give her any necklace. What he gave her was two books and a pair of turquoise earrings. “Oh, honey!” she said. “Thank you! What wonderful gifts.” Dad grinned sheepishly. Then Mom gave Dad her several dozen presents, and Skizz, who apparently was as grossed out by the scene as I was, threw up a couple of hair balls. W
hen Mom handed me my present — a big box wrapped in gold and tied with a red ribbon — I didn’t even want to open it. “From me and Dad,” she said, even though it wasn’t from Dad at all. Chances were, in fact, that he had no more idea what was inside it than I did.
“Open it, honey,” Mom said.
I couldn’t believe it. Inside was the coat. The one from New York that Mom had refused to buy. The blue-gray midcentury sizzler with the blue velvet cuffs and collar.
“Do you like it?” Mom asked anxiously.
“Oh, Mom!” I said. “I love it!”
I did, too. I loved it so much that it hurt.
But what hurt even more was when, on the last day of Christmas vacation, Dad knocked on my door, came into my room, sat on my bed, and said: “Thanks for keeping my secret, Pooky.” I was doing the final finishing touches on the blog — Ann and I had finally figured out how to do it. “What’s that you’re doing?” he then said.
“Nothing. A blog.”
“A blog?”
“Just this thing. For high school. You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Of course I’m interested,” he said. “I’m interested in everything you do. You know that, don’t you, Pooky?”
“Can you please not call me that?”
“That’s another thing I like about you. You’re straightforward. Always have been. Which is another reason why I always know I can count on you to come through. And that necklace, by the way? The one I was looking at that day in Bloomingdale’s? It was way too expensive. But I think Mom liked the earrings. Don’t you?”
Yeah. Right.
“Keep up the good work,” he said.
About a week before State, I looked up and noticed that Bella wasn’t in the stands. She wasn’t in the stands the next day, or the next day after that, either.
“Where’s Bella?” I finally asked Coach one afternoon after regular practice, when everyone else had gone into the locker rooms to change and I was paddling around the shallow end. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”
Coach Fruit, smiling a sad smile, said: “I know.”
“What do you know?” I continued, in our bantering way.
“We broke up,” he said.
I gulped air, wondering whether it was possible that they’d broken up, at least in part, because of all the extra time he’d been spending on coaching me. Confused, I said: “Oh, no. I’m really sorry, Coach. Really.”
“The only thing you have to be sorry for,” he answered, “is if you don’t work on your flip turns.”
I worked on my flip turns — and my rotation and recovery — but had a hard time getting into it. I had a hard time concentrating on my homework that night, too, and it took me forever to fall asleep. In the morning Mom asked me if anything was wrong. Wrong? Even though I knew that Coach Fruit wasn’t interested in me, not that way, I’d never felt happier. I felt so happy that I pulled on my white birthday jeans and a white turtleneck sweater without giving my backside a second thought, tied my hair back into a high-up ponytail, and stuffed my feet into the imitation Uggs that Mom had given me a year ago for Christmas.
“Coach Fruit and his girlfriend broke up,” I said as I scooted onto my stool next to Justine in chemistry.
“OMG, I just love Coach Fruit. He’s just, like, OMG, so cute!” John the Weird mimicked. He was wearing his usual grunge outfit of black and black, with black Converse, his black hair sticking up as if it had hair spray in it, which it did, which I knew because he kept a can in his backpack to spray us with whenever he decided we were what he called “annoying.” His black eyes looked blacker than usual, too, and shone, as if he were using illegal substances, except that as far as I knew, he wasn’t. The dude never hung out with the stoners or even the hipsters. But I must admit that his recent habit of wearing bright-green sparkly eye shadow gave him an unusual look.
“What?” he said.
“Why are you like that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging, and a second later, he flipped open his notebook and started scrawling in it as usual. Which meant what it always meant: Justine and I would do the work, and John would sign his name to our final product so he’d get credit, too.
“Seriously,” Justine said. “You have such a crush on him.”
“Well, maybe. Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“You have to admit, he’s pretty hot.”
“Coach Fruit?” Justine said, her right eyebrow arching into a semi–question mark above her eye. “Coach Fruit is not hot. He looks like Big Bird.”
“But you don’t think anyone’s hot.”
“I do, too,” she said. “I think Weird John’s hot.”
“Shut up,” he said. “And, Mizz Frizz?”
“Yes, Poop Head?”
“I think you suck, too.”
“I thought you wanted to marry me.”
“Joke,” he said. “Get it? Ha ha.”
“Anyway,” Justine said. “Even if he has broken up with his girlfriend, he’s still your coach, and you’re still a kid. He’ll never like you back.”
“I know. That’s the problem. But do you think that maybe . . .”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
Class dragged on for forever. But when, at last, the bell rang, instead of slinking out as fast as he could, like usual, John came over and, opening his notebook, showed me a sketch — more like a cartoon, actually — of me kissing Coach Fruit. I knew because he’d written our names underneath, along with the words true love in heavy black ink.
“And just in case you’re curious,” he said, “I’m going to post this on my Facebook page tonight.”
I didn’t even stop to think that, just maybe, John didn’t have Facebook, and even if he did, he was kidding. Instead I lunged for the notebook, screeching, “Give me that thing!”
“I don’t think so,” he sang, backing away from my reach.
But I was at least as big as he was, strong — and quick, too. It didn’t take much for me to bound over, jump up, and snatch the notebook from his hands.
“Give it back!” he said, but I’d already climbed up onto a table — well out of his reach!
“Please?” He was almost begging now.
But it was too good an opportunity to torture him. Tearing out the drawing of me and Coach, I ripped it into tiny pieces. Then, to make sure he didn’t have any other nasty tricks up his sleeve, I began to turn the pages of the notebook while he wailed, “No! No! It was only a joke! I wasn’t going to post it on Facebook! Would you stop?”
I didn’t get it. The kid was practically turning the same shade of green as his eye shadow. I mean, what was the big deal? But then I saw: Weird John’s entire notebook was filled with drawings of Justine. Justine in profile, with her hair fanning out, like lace, behind her. Justine with her head thrown back, laughing. Justine’s hands. (I recognized them from one of the big silver rings she wore.) Her eyes. No wonder the kid had a hard time keeping up in class. Beneath me, the dude had turned from green to pink. “Please don’t tell anyone,” he whimpered.
“Are you going to keep your mouth shut about Coach Fruit?”
“I guess.”
“Then I guess we have a deal.”
I should have been relieved; after all, for once I’d gotten the better of John, and not the other way around. But I didn’t. Instead, I felt like a bully. Could it even be possible that all this time the kid had been obsessing about Justine? And she couldn’t stand him! I almost felt sorry for the dude.
Both John and I kept our mouths shut, like we’d agreed, but that didn’t mean that my mind stopped talking. And all it said was: “Coach Fruit! Coach Fruit!” The only problem was — well, everything. Plus, with the State championships coming up, he didn’t seem to think of me in any way at all — except as he always had, as a strong swimmer.
I practically lived in that pool. All of us did. No matter what shampoo I used, I couldn’t get the chlorine smell out of my hair. When I fell asleep
, I dreamed about swimming. Either that, or about Coach Fruit! I was so obsessed that I even thought that maybe I’d get my mom to invite him over for dinner — after State, that is.
“Wait a sec, Polly,” he said one afternoon after practice when everyone else had gone. “I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh, let me guess,” I teased. “A brand-new bottle of water?”
“No.”
“A rubber band?”
“Even better.”
A minute later, he’d ducked into his office and was returning with something tucked under his arm. “I’d actually given it to Bella,” he started to explain, “but when we broke up, she gave it back to me. And I sure as hell can’t wear it anymore. So here” — he handed it to me — “you take it.”
I couldn’t believe it. It was a beat-up high school letter jacket with a large white S on it.
“Springlakes High School.” He whistled. “I practically lived in that jacket.”
I finally managed to stammer out a thank-you. It was the best present I’d ever gotten. Ever. I couldn’t even believe it. His letter jacket? From when he himself had been the reigning champ? And why, of all people, would he give it to me?
“Good luck tomorrow,” he then said, squeezing my arm just below the shoulder. “And remember to get a good night’s sleep!”
“He gave me his letter jacket from when he was a champion at Springlakes High School,” I nearly screamed into the phone.
“Never heard of the place,” Justine said.
“That’s not the point, and you know it! He gave me his letter jacket. Don’t you understand what that means?”
“Can’t say I do,” she said. “I mean, other than that you’re his best swimmer. For real, you are. He believes in you, Polly. And that’s great. But so what? Like he told you, he can’t wear it anymore. He’s, like, old.”
Tales From My Closet Page 16
