Other Words for Love

by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

“What if I can’t keep up with the work?” I asked, sighing and loosening the phone cord.

  “Ari,” she said calmly, the way she often did when I was nervous. “You’ll do well, as usual. I know you’ll be fine.”

  If Summer knew I’d be fine, I supposed I shouldn’t worry so much. I relaxed a little, but the next morning I still wished she was around. On top of everything else I needed from her, I also wanted her fashion advice, because I couldn’t count on Mom to validate my outfit. Mom said the teal shell looked fine under the black blazer and of course it was okay to wear white pants because it was still almost ninety degrees outside, but that didn’t help because what Mom knew about fashion couldn’t fill a thimble. And Hollister had a strict dress code. According to the student handbook, there were to be no sneakers and no jeans, not even a denim jacket. Violators will be penalized, I read. I didn’t want to be penalized, especially not on the first day.

  “Your ride is here,” Mom said, and I saw a silver Mercedes parked outside our house. It belonged to Jeff Simon, who drove Summer to school every day because his office was just a few blocks from Hollister. Now he was my chauffeur too, even without Summer.

  Jeff’s car smelled of cigars. He was a tall fiftyish man with hair a mix of blond and gray and eyes the color of weak tea. He always spoke to me and Summer like we were his intellectual equals.

  “How’s Evelyn?” he asked as I sat beside him.

  “She’s okay,” I said, although I wasn’t really sure. Some days she seemed fine and other days my parents talked about spending some of Uncle Eddie’s money to send her back to New York–Presbyterian Hospital.

  Jeff nodded. “She’s not symptomatic?”

  Symptomatic. He had used that word five years earlier. Is Evelyn symptomatic, is she displaying a flat affect? I shrugged and he tuned the radio to a classical music station. Then we were on the bridge and I saw the skyline in the distance, below a smear of purple and orange across the early-morning sky.

  “A new environment is always unsettling,” Jeff said after we reached Hollister Prep and I was wringing my hands while watching a swarm of smartly dressed students file into the building. “Your mood will level out after you get used to it.”

  I was hoping Jeff was right when I reached homeroom, which was crowded, noisy, jammed with people who knew everyone but me. I sat in a chair against the wall, taking everybody in, sure that I wouldn’t talk to anyone but that I’d definitely draw them later. The guy with his arm in a cast, a girl whose sunburned skin was peeling from her cheeks.

  I leaned my head back and squeezed my eyes shut. I hadn’t slept much the night before; the only thing that had helped was Patrick’s shirt. I kept it hidden in my closet beneath a stack of winter scarves, where Mom wouldn’t dust or snoop. I told myself that I hadn’t stolen it—I had just borrowed it for a while, and nobody would notice because Patrick owned so many of those shirts. I needed it more than he did, anyway. I wore it in bed whenever I had a headache or trouble sleeping, and the smell of it relaxed me like a long hot bath.

  “Damn,” I heard somebody say, and I turned around to find a redhead searching through a handbag. She looked up and I saw hazel eyes, a small nose, lots of freckles, and no makeup. “Do you have any tampons?” she asked in a raspy voice. “Or some Stayfree? I’m a week early.”

  There were some Stayfree in my purse from last month, but now the teacher was here and she was taking attendance and I couldn’t pull out a maxi pad in full view of the three guys sitting next to me. So I passed her my purse and said she could bring it to the bathroom, she would find what she needed in the left pocket.

  She was Leigh Ellis. I found this out when she came back and the teacher called her name. Then the teacher said my full first name in a loud voice and I waited for stares, laughter, all the things I was used to, but nothing happened. There was just silence until I spoke up.

  “It’s Ari,” I said.

  “Why do you shorten it?” Leigh whispered in my ear, and I wondered if she had a sore throat. She sounded like she was on the verge of laryngitis.

  I twisted around. She was leaning forward, resting her face on her hand. I noticed a widow’s peak, a pointy chin, and tiny gold flecks in her irises.

  “Why do you shorten your name? It’s very pretty,” she said, smiling with straight teeth, and I decided that I liked her. There was no way I couldn’t. She was the first person besides Mom to say anything positive about my name in all my sixteen years. “It’s the title of a book, you know. By Chekhov.”

  Now I liked her even better. Soon the bell rang and she was off, gliding solo down the hallway past rows of lockers. I walked past girls dressed in tailored pants, crisp blouses, antique earrings made of rubies and sapphires and pearls. Their eyelashes had only a little mascara; their lips, just a touch of gloss. There was nothing reminiscent of my school in Brooklyn—couples kissing against walls, big hair sprayed high and stiff with Aqua Net, Madonna wannabes. No fingerless gloves, no lace ribbon. Not one bustier.

  I glanced down at my clothes as I walked into my next class. It was English literature, and I fit in. My light makeup, my straight hair—I was one of them, and that almost made me cry. I had never belonged at my other school, where I was ignored and dismissed as a dull, quiet girl who sat in the back of class and sketched faces in notebooks.

  But I couldn’t transform into one of those confident types that easily. So on my first day at Hollister Prep, I sat in the rear of each class. I ate my salami sandwich in a bathroom stall while everyone else socialized in the cafeteria. In art class I watched from five seats behind Leigh Ellis as her colored pencils moved across a sketch pad. She was drawing something abstract. It wasn’t what the teacher had ordered us to do, but it was good, and more interesting than the bowl of fruit the rest of the class was copying.

  I watched Leigh’s freckled fingers clutch her pencils, her silver bracelet skim the paper, her thick red hair swish across her collar whenever she shifted her head. She caught me looking at her and I pretended that I wasn’t, but I didn’t have to pretend. She smiled, waved, pointed to herself and mouthed the word homeroom, as if there was any way she could be forgotten.

  Jeff was a one-way chauffeur. He drove Summer to school and then she took the subway home, which I did that first day. It wasn’t very crowded at four in the afternoon, but the station was warm and so was I. My skin was clammy underneath my blazer after I reached Brooklyn and walked up the steps into the sunshine and sticky air. There were people everywhere, going in and coming out of Asian food markets and Indian restaurants, speeding around on bicycles and honking horns at anyone who got in their way.

  “Ariadne,” I heard Mom say.

  She was standing in front of me. Her hair frizzed as badly as Evelyn’s in this weather, and there were dots of perspiration above her lip. She said something about waiting for me, she’d called my name three times, hadn’t I heard her, and was I getting delirious from this hot weather?

  I hadn’t heard her. I’d been thinking that I’d chosen the right outfit that morning and my hair wasn’t wrong, and nobody at Hollister had said a single thing that made me want to lock myself in my bedroom and spend the rest of my life there.

  “So how was it?” Mom asked, holding her breath. She was probably hoping for something good but expecting something bad. She was more familiar with something bad, like when Summer was voted Prettiest Girl in junior high and I wasn’t voted anything.

  I heard Mom exhale as we were walking home and I finished telling her about Hollister. I mentioned how much I liked the fancy iron gates outside the school and the girl from my homeroom with artistic ability and knowledge of Chekhov.

  Mom was happy. She smiled, put her arm around me, and gave me a squeeze as we stood at the curb and waited for a traffic light to change. She was wearing a tank top, but she shouldn’t have been because her upper arms were heavy.

  She and Evelyn had the same build. Now I imagined my sister at thirty, aged beyond her years, her beautiful face
distorted by too many no-bake cheesecakes the way Mom’s face was puffy from Hostess cupcakes. I saw Evelyn wearing a sleeveless housedress, flabby arms swaying as she washed dishes over her kitchen sink, but I didn’t mention that. My first day at Hollister had gone well and Mom was taking me out for Chinese food to celebrate. I didn’t need any gloomy thoughts banging around inside my head; they haunted me enough as it was. This time I refused to listen.

  Leigh wasn’t in homeroom the next morning. I worried that she’d never come back, that she’d moved away or transferred to a different school, which would be just my luck.

  And I wished Summer hadn’t stepped on that nail. I wished she’d come to school on crutches and sit with me in the cafeteria. Because if she did, I wouldn’t have to eat lunch in the bathroom while thinking that Hollister wasn’t so great after all. It seemed big and scary. Maybe I should have stayed in Brooklyn, where I’d spent my lunch breaks in the art room. The teacher had let me organize her supplies, and I wanted to be there, alone with brushes and paint, eating at a clean desk. Now I was eating on a dirty toilet. So I trudged through the rest of the day and barely noticed when a swish of red hair flew past at the beginning of art class.

  “Hey,” Leigh said, taking a seat behind me. She was in violation of the rules, dressed in jeans, Converse high-tops, and a maroon T-shirt with the words SUNY OSWEGO printed across the front. “Did I miss anything in homeroom?”

  I shook my head, noticing a silver chain and matching arrowhead charm around her neck.

  “Colossal waste of time,” she said. “I never go.”

  I didn’t know how she got away with breaking so many rules, but I couldn’t have asked if I wanted to. The teacher started talking, telling us that this was a free drawing period and we could do whatever we wanted, as long as it wasn’t potentially offensive.

  “Censorship,” Leigh muttered. “Nothing in art is offensive.”

  I agreed and she got inquisitive about where I was from and where I used to go to school. I answered her questions, adding that I was a friend of Summer Simon, and she gave me a blank stare.

  “Never heard of her,” Leigh said, and I was sure that she was just confused, because everyone knew Summer. Leigh sounded like she was still nursing a cold, so I decided that her head was congested and it was clogging her memory. I also decided not to mention her when I called Summer that night. The idea that someone was oblivious to Summer’s existence would crush her, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

  five

  I packed my overnight bag on Sunday morning. Pajamas, underwear, my migraine pills just in case. I was going to spend the day with Evelyn because Patrick was on duty again.

  This was Mom and Patrick’s idea. But they pressured me to pretend that I had thought of it myself, because Evelyn would get suspicious otherwise. She needed my help, and they knew what was best for her.

  They’d been talking about what was best for Evelyn since Shane was born. The two of them were constantly on the phone, which didn’t seem ironic to anyone but me. Everybody else seemed to have forgotten that Mom once despised Patrick and that she’d made a huge scene after Evelyn got in trouble. Mom had picked me up from school the day after she found out Evelyn was pregnant. She drove to Patrick’s firehouse and screamed and swore at him on the sidewalk. I watched from her car as she called him a lowlife and a scumbag, and I shrank down in my seat when she asked him if he’d ever heard of a condom. You should think with your brain, she had said. It’s in your head, Patrick. Not in your pants.

  Now they were allies. A few times Dad mumbled something about how Mom shouldn’t get involved, it wasn’t right to meddle, but Mom didn’t listen. She said that Evelyn had two children, her nasty attitude might drive Patrick away, and a divorce would be catastrophic because Evelyn had no education or job skills.

  “You have nothing to worry about, Nancy,” Dad told her as he drove us to Queens in Mom’s car that afternoon. The windows were open because it was warm for the second week of September, and Mom’s hair floated around her head in a frizzy swirl. “I think Patrick is very much in love with her.”

  I thought so too. He had to be in love to put up with everything she dished out.

  Mom didn’t seem convinced, because she made a disgusted face and breathed a stream of Pall Mall smoke through her nose like a bull. “Listen, Tom. I’ve never said anything about the weight she’s put on. I could stand to drop a few myself. But between that and Evelyn’s mood swings …” She shook her head, inhaled on her cigarette, and blew a gray cloud out the window. “My point is that she’s giving Patrick plenty of reasons to screw around.”

  Dad glanced over at Mom, who was lifting her face to the breeze and enjoying her cigarette. I thought he might argue with her, but he didn’t. He never did. He just tuned the radio to the Yankee game. That was the only sound I heard until we rang Evelyn’s doorbell.

  It was one of her good days. She stood in the foyer, wearing a sundress that minimized what was wrong and exaggerated what was right. The skirt elongated her legs, the belt slimmed her waist. A beaded necklace got lost in her cleavage. Her hair had been blow-dried smooth, and it framed her refined features and the rare color of her eyes.

  She made lunch for us. Chips and dip in the living room, stuffed shells covered with Ragu baked in the oven, Mrs. Fields cookies served with Neapolitan ice cream on paper plates.

  “I know you like all three flavors, Dad,” Evelyn said, running a scooper across the vanilla and the chocolate and the strawberry. She dropped a tricolored blob on his plate and sat down with Shane on her lap, and I wondered why Mom was so worried, because Evelyn seemed fine. She looked across the table at me and asked how school was going. “Any cute boys?” she said.

  Mom was swallowing a spoonful of chocolate ice cream. “Boys are irrelevant,” she answered before I could open my mouth. “Ariadne is at Hollister so she can get into a good college and make something of her life.”

  There was a clock over the sink and I heard it ticking. Mom went back to her ice cream and didn’t notice how much Evelyn’s face had changed—her jaw was stiff, her mouth tight. How could Mom be so clueless? College, making something of my life, everything Mom thought her firstborn daughter hadn’t done. Boys are irrelevant—that had been Mom’s favorite phrase when Evelyn was a teenager, and I knew what Mom was thinking: You didn’t listen to me, Evelyn. And look at where that got you. You’re an overweight twenty-three-year-old with a GED and two kids, sitting in an ugly kitchen that your husband can’t afford to remodel.

  “I love your dress, Evelyn,” I blurted out, hoping a compliment would help, but it didn’t. She smiled dully, mumbled something about changing Shane’s diaper, and disappeared upstairs until it was time for Mom and Dad to leave.

  “Don’t be a sourpuss,” Mom told her on the front steps. “Patrick will get sick of you.”

  Then she and Dad were gone. Evelyn slammed the door, went to the refrigerator, and plopped on the couch with a beer bottle.

  “Fucking unbelievable,” she said, prying off the cap. She took a swig and rested her feet on the coffee table. I just watched from the foyer. Sweet Evelyn had vanished as quickly as she’d appeared, and now I was afraid to go near my sister. “Don’t listen to what our dear mother tells you about boys, Ari,” she said, raising her middle finger to a photograph of Mom on the wall. It was a framed picture from Evelyn and Patrick’s wedding, and everyone was smiling. “She’d keep you in a cage if she could. Make you do everything her way.”

  I stared at the picture. I remembered that it had been a sunny day. Mom had hemmed Evelyn’s dress the night before, and she had invited Patrick’s parents to sleep at our house because they couldn’t afford a hotel. She’d driven Evelyn to ten different florists to find the prettiest bouquet, and she’d relinquished a strand of pearls Dad had given her, so that Evelyn would have something old.

  “Mom means well,” I said.

  Evelyn laughed. “Are you aware that she wanted me to have an abortion
when I was pregnant with Kieran?”

  I was, but I shook my head anyway. I didn’t want Evelyn to know that I heard the conversation almost six years ago through the wall that separated my room from hers. She and Mom were yelling and Evelyn was crying, and Mom said that an abortion would be the best way to solve this mess. Then Evelyn could finish high school and go to college—even if it was just Kingsborough Community College or Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School—anything would be better than having a baby before she turned eighteen.

  “What a Catholic,” Evelyn said. “Only goes to church on holidays and tells her daughter to kill a baby. She’s a hypocrite, you know.”

  I didn’t agree with that. Mom wanted what was best for Evelyn. I remembered her voice behind my lilac wallpaper, saying that Evelyn was throwing her future away, she was so young and so beautiful and Mom didn’t want her to end up as a dependent housewife who had to ask her husband’s permission every time she wanted to buy a new pair of socks.

  “I don’t think that’s true, Evelyn,” I started, but it was all I got to say.

  “It is so,” she said.

  She turned on the television and finished her beer while I went upstairs to the bathroom and swallowed two migraine pills. I was glad I hadn’t forgotten them this time, because a fluorescent purple web was crawling into my left eye.

  Later that night, I fell asleep in the living room because I had to. The guest bedroom didn’t exist anymore. I woke up on the couch on Monday morning and heard Evelyn in the kitchen, asking Kieran what kind of cereal he wanted—Frosted Flakes, Apple Jacks, or Cap’n Crunch? Next there were Shane’s babbling noises and Patrick slamming barbells against the basement floor, and soon Evelyn rushed past me with the kids, saying that Kieran was late for kindergarten and I should remind Patrick that he had to drive me to school. I didn’t mind going to school, because I wouldn’t have to eat lunch in the bathroom. Summer was coming back today.

  The front door shut and I watched from the window as Evelyn sped away in her minivan. It was warm outside. A filmy haze covered the block, and everything was quiet except for the neighbor’s Doberman barking and Patrick exercising downstairs. I went into the kitchen to eat breakfast and he came in a few minutes later, sweating, naked from the waist up.