Other Words for Love

by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

  Mr. Ellis sat at the head of the table. He was digging into a slab of beef and he sounded annoyed. “I have to go out soon, Rachel. I’m meeting with a client.”

  Idalis laughed. “A client, sure. I think you’ve got a few lady friends stashed around Manhattan. And you should listen to your sister. You don’t want another heart attack.”

  “That was three years ago,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  He still seemed annoyed and so did Blake, between dinner and dessert. I was in the bathroom upstairs when I heard his voice and Del’s in the hallway. They were arguing, and I pressed my ear to the door.

  “Tell your girlfriend to watch her mouth,” Blake said.

  Del laughed. “Why? You know she’s right. Daddy keeps that apartment downtown for whoever he happens to be screwing at the moment. He can pretend he’s faithful to Mama’s memory all he wants, but that’s just his usual hypocritical bullshit.”

  Daddy and Mama. That reminded me again of Elvis, even though Del and Blake both spoke like native New Yorkers. I listened while Blake said Del had no respect for their father and Del said their father led Blake around on a leash, and then Del started talking about some girl in Georgia.

  “You’ve got nerve to criticize Idalis,” Del said. “She’s better than that little bleached-blond piece of trailer trash you banged for two years.”

  How scandalous. And interesting. The polite part of me wanted to turn on the faucet to drown out the conversation, but the nosy part was dying to hear what would happen next. So I stayed where I was while Blake got angry and Del got angry.

  “Don’t talk about her,” Blake said.

  “Why?” Del asked. “She drops you with no explanation—she disappears without so much as a phone call—and you still defend her? It’s pathetic, Blake. Get on with your life and stop moping about that chick. Be a fucking man, for Christ’s sake.”

  And that was it. I heard footsteps on the stairs and I washed my hands and joined everybody in the dining room, where one maid was filling coffee cups and the other was lighting crème brûlée with a mini butane torch.

  Blake didn’t eat anything. Del devoured his dessert and swallowed two cups of coffee while I compared him to his brother. They were identical in height, and they both had dark hair and the exact same hands. Del was outgoing and a slick dresser, while Blake was quiet and wore casual clothes. His face wasn’t quite as handsome as his father’s, but it was much better than Del’s. Blake’s nose didn’t hook down at the tip and there was no scar on his mouth. There was no way Summer could accuse him of having a birth defect.

  “What’s the matter?” Leigh asked Blake when she and Rachel and I were in the foyer with him, slipping into our coats. He shook his head and she patted his cheek, told him to cheer up, and suggested that they go skating at Rockefeller Center tomorrow.

  “I love Rockefeller Center,” I said, surprised at my boldness. I was fishing for an invitation, even though I shouldn’t have because I had a chemistry test on Monday. Chemistry made my mind go numb. I had to work extra hard in that class to stay on the honor roll, so I’d been planning to study tomorrow, but Blake needed cheering up and this was a good excuse to see him again.

  Leigh looked between me and Blake. “Oh,” she said. “Do you want to come too, Ari?”

  More than anything. I nodded, and Leigh told Blake we would meet him at noon. Then I was in the back of a sedan with Leigh and Rachel, and Rachel pointed at me.

  “Blake would be perfect for this one,” she said, and I was embarrassed to have been so transparent. But Rachel seemed to think the idea was her own.

  Leigh glanced at me and back at Rachel. “Ari doesn’t want your dating advice.”

  “Now, Leigh,” Rachel said calmly, smoothing Leigh’s hair. Leigh had a perturbed look on her face and her lips were puckered. “All three of you can be friends. I’m sure Ari wants to be friends with you and Blake.”

  That’s right, I thought. I want to be friends with both of you. All three of us can be friends and I do want Rachel’s dating advice, so shut up, Leigh.

  Rachel turned toward me and started talking like a gossipy matchmaker. “Blake’s a good boy, Ari. He doesn’t prowl around the way Del does. And he’s smart, too. He’s a sophomore at NYU.”

  “He’s nineteen, then?” I asked.

  “Twenty,” Leigh said, and I wondered if Blake hadn’t started college right after high school, if he was one of those people who bummed around Europe for a year to find themselves. But she explained that he’d broken his leg when he was eight and was out of school for a while, and he’d had to repeat the third grade because he went to a school where the Ellis family hadn’t donated any money. I was surprised that such a place existed.

  “Del broke Blake’s leg,” Rachel said.

  Leigh gave her a shove. “Don’t say that, Mama.”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” Rachel asked, then looked at me. “It was after their mother died. They got into a fight and Del pushed Blake down the stairs. That’s the kind of temper he has.”

  Leigh told the driver to turn on the radio and we all got quiet. He dropped Leigh and Rachel off at their building, then drove me home, where Mom was waiting in the living room. There were sandwiches and warm milk on the coffee table and she wanted me to tell her everything. So we sat on the couch and I described the crème brûlée and the four courses, and asked if she’d ever eaten a leek.

  “Once,” she said. “At a swanky anniversary party.”

  Then I brought up my new plans. I talked about teaching college and becoming a career woman who could also have a husband and children and a house in Brooklyn with a flower garden and a hammock tied between two shady trees in the backyard, and I kept closing my eyes to see all of it. But when I opened them, Mom had a blank expression on her face, and that was so disappointing.

  “Why would you want to live in Brooklyn?” she asked. “And being a college professor isn’t what you think. Positions are hard to find, and nobody makes any money until they get tenure, which doesn’t always happen.” She stood up and brushed crumbs from her bathrobe. “Don’t be in a rush to have children, either, Ariadne. Just look at Evelyn. She isn’t exactly the portrait of fulfillment.”

  Mom went to bed and so did I, but I was too miserable to sleep. I switched between staring at the ceiling and through my window, wishing I could be what Mom wanted. I wished I could be like Summer, who wasn’t afraid to go to UCLA or to put a note in a dead man’s hand. She’d probably do all sorts of adventurous things that scared me, like move out of Brooklyn forever and travel solo around the globe. She’d probably become one of those independent women who didn’t care about adorable children and flower gardens and hammocks.

  There was an old pair of ice skates in our basement. I searched for them the next morning, remembering that they’d been a fourteenth-birthday gift from Mom and Dad to Evelyn, and Dad had said they were a goddamned waste because Evelyn had only worn them once.

  They had to be here somewhere, lurking inside a cardboard box or buried in one of the plastic bins stacked against the wall. I was looking through a box marked EVELYN when I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked.

  The skates weren’t in the box. I saw a macramé purse, a container filled with seashells, and a pair of Jordache jeans that made me sad. But my mood was lousy anyway because Mom had crushed my dreams last night, and now I didn’t want to look at her. I mumbled that I needed to find Evelyn’s ice skates, and she started searching with me.

  “Is it just going to be you and Leigh today?” she asked, pulling a hideous paisley dress from a box. “You didn’t invite Summer?”

  “Summer’s always busy with her boyfriend,” I said, watching as she held the dress against herself. It was a size eight, and I thought Mom should face reality and donate it to Goodwill. “You know that.”

  She must have read my mind. She tossed the dress onto an exercise bike that nobody ever used. “And al
l your homework is done?”

  “Yes,” I said impatiently, and Mom put her hands on her hips. I wasn’t looking in her direction—I was bent over, digging through a box filled with musty old clothes—but I saw her from the corner of my eye and I wished she’d just go and eat something.

  “Don’t be so snippy, Ariadne. You want to get into Parsons, don’t you?”

  I straightened up. “Leigh told me her uncle has connections there.”

  Mom found the skates. There wasn’t a scratch on them, but they weren’t exactly what I remembered. I thought they were white or tan, or something less ridiculous than silver with rainbow shoelaces and purple lightning bolts stitched into the leather.

  She pushed them at me. “What do you mean, her uncle has connections?”

  No wonder Evelyn only wore those skates once. They couldn’t have been stylish even in 1976, when teenagers walked around in bell bottoms with combs sticking out of their back pockets. So I jammed the skates into a box and turned to Mom. “Leigh’s uncle knows people at Parsons. He can get me in. My grades probably don’t even matter.”

  I might as well have told her that I was “in trouble.” That was how horrified she looked. “We,” she said, pronouncing the word in a virtuous tone, as if she was about to say We Kennedys or We Vanderbilts, “don’t need anyone’s connections. We stand on our own two feet in this family and you know that.”

  I did know that. I felt like a shallow sloth who wanted an escape from those brain-frying SAT practice tests, and that just wasn’t who I was raised to be. So I nodded. I was about to go upstairs when Mom grabbed the skates and held them in the air.

  “Forget something?” she asked, and I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t wear those ghastly things, because my parents had bought them with their hard-earned money and it didn’t make sense to pay for rented skates at Rockefeller Center when these were practically brand-new.

  They were snug, though. Painful, even. I forced them onto my feet an hour later as I sat on a bench at Rockefeller Center with Leigh. She had spotless white skates with matching laces, and she was too nice to say anything critical about mine.

  When Blake showed up, he sat next to me. I slid my feet under the bench, hoping he wouldn’t see my stupid lightning bolts.

  I saw other things. I saw his outrageously blue eyes and the wind sweeping through his hair as he leaned over to tie his skates.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he asked.

  “I have a headache,” I lied. I told him and Leigh to go without me and they disappeared into a swarm of people gliding on the ice, listening to piano music from those Charlie Brown holiday specials.

  I acted fast and unlaced my skates, stuck them in my knapsack, and put on my boots so I wouldn’t be humiliated in front of Blake, although I wasn’t sure why I cared. He was skating laps around the rink without ever stumbling or stopping to tie a wayward shoelace, and I felt like I had as much of a chance with him as I did with Del.

  I watched anyway, as he zoomed by the United States flag and the Japanese flag and other flags I couldn’t name, but I stopped watching when I heard a dull thump.

  There was a boy on the ice just a few feet away from me. He was about ten years old, and he had fallen on his arm. Someone skated over his hat after it fell off.

  “Are you all right?” I said, jumping off the bench. I stood over him, offering him my hand, and hoisted him up, which wasn’t easy because he was a chubby kid. “Did you hurt your arm?”

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing it with a gloved hand.

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  He nodded. “My mom went over to Saks. I promised I’d be careful, but now look at what I’ve done. My arm is probably broken.” He was getting all worked up.

  “Don’t worry. I can check your arm,” I said, remembering the class Evelyn had made me take a few years ago, the one where I learned about CPR and diagnosing broken bones. So I checked for swelling and bruising and asked if he’d heard a snap or a crack when he fell. He was shaking his head when Leigh and Blake came back. “You’re fine,” I said, zipping his jacket to his chin.

  He sat with us until his mother appeared at the side of the rink, looking worried and carrying shopping bags. She thanked me before she and her son left, and Blake smiled after they were gone.

  “You’re good with kids,” he said.

  He was next to me on the bench again. His eyes were on my face and that made me edgy. I worried that my mascara had pooled into my tear ducts or that there was an unbecoming smear of lipstick across my overlapping teeth.

  I shrugged. “My sister has two. I’m just used to them.”

  He raised his eyebrows. He seemed interested. I assumed he was just making conversation and that he’d go back to skating with Leigh, but he didn’t.

  “Don’t you guys want to skate with me?” she asked, standing on the ice, her eyes darting between me and Blake. “Isn’t your headache better yet, Ari?”

  No, Leigh, I thought. My fake headache isn’t better. And I really like you, but I like your cousin more. “Not yet,” I said.

  She chewed on her nail, looking disappointed. “Are you sure? Do you want to find a drugstore and get some aspirin? I can take off my skates and we can run across the street to—”

  I cut her off. “No, I’ll be fine.”

  She nodded and skated away with a sulky look on her face. Then I was alone with Blake, listening to the tinkle of piano keys and the flapping of flags in the wind.

  “Is Leigh okay?” I asked.

  He shrugged, watching her drag her feet at the other side of the rink. “She’s been through a lot lately … and she’s by herself too much. It’s good she has you to hang out with. She needs a friend, especially someone who’s got so much in common with her … I mean the art and everything,” he said, and I suddenly felt bad that Leigh was skating alone. Then Blake changed the subject. “You mentioned your sister … how old is she?”

  “Twenty-three. She has a five-year-old and a baby,” I said without thinking. Twenty-three minus five—now he’d know that she was a teen mother. But Rachel was too, and he didn’t seem to be subtracting. He was smiling and looking at the cloudy sky.

  “Nice,” he said wistfully. “It’s good to have your kids when you’re young.”

  Not that young, I thought. Then he said Leigh had mentioned that I had a brother-in-law who worked for the FDNY. Blake said that he’d always wanted to be a fireman, which was very ironic, in my opinion. People who lived on the Upper East Side didn’t usually become firefighters.

  “Firemen don’t go to NYU,” I told him.

  “No,” he said. “Lawyers do.”

  “So you want to be a lawyer like your father?”

  He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It was a wry smile that lifted just one corner of his mouth. “Not exactly. My father wants me to be a lawyer like my father.”

  I got it. And I was right about the two of us having something in common. I realized, as we sat on the bench and talked while Leigh did laps and figure eights around the rink, that Blake had to compensate for Del the way I had to compensate for Evelyn. Mr. Ellis and Mom were cut from the same cloth. They wanted what was best for us, but they never asked what we wanted.

  “My mother expects me to become an artist,” I said after Blake told me that he was supposed to take over Ellis & Hummel someday. “As if that’s a practical goal.”

  He smiled. This time he used both corners of his mouth. “Well, maybe it is. You should show me your work sometime.”

  I nodded at the same time the sun peeked out from behind a cloud. A ray struck Blake’s right eye, and I decided that my lost marble finally had a match.

  thirteen

  We were in the last days of March. The temperature was rising, and pea soup–colored grass burst through the melting snow, reminding me of prickly stubble on a bald man’s head. The winter had eroded most of Saint Anne’s nose. It was all so depressing that I never looked at our lawn anymore.

  “Wh
at do you think?” Summer asked.

  Dad was downstairs watching the Sunday-afternoon Knicks game. Mom was at Evelyn’s house, helping to take care of Shane because he had the chicken pox. Or at least, that was what I thought she was doing. The flow of information had fizzled to a trickle since I’d been barred from Queens.

  Now I looked at Summer, who had opened my curtain. I’d been keeping it closed lately to block out the gloom on the lawn. But she had the gall to open it so she could show off the red rose that had been tattooed on her ankle while she was in Key West with Casey for spring break.

  “Pretty,” I said, because it was. But I felt so blah and my voice came out that way.

  “Our initials are on the petals,” she said, pointing to an S and a C written in calligraphy. “Isn’t it romantic?”

  Casey was still in Florida. He was staying there for a few extra days, and I knew Summer was here because she was bored without him. The only contact we had lately was in Jeff’s Mercedes every weekday morning, and romance wasn’t a good topic for me right now. Weeks had passed since Rockefeller Center, and Blake had never asked to see my drawings or anything else.

  “Sure,” I made myself say.

  “And the C will be easy to change when we break up.”

  I blinked. “Why would you get the tattoo if you’re planning to break up?”

  “Ari,” she said in a sensible, psychiatrist-type voice. “The chances that Casey and I are going to live happily ever after are slim, don’t you think? Besides, I’m not about to settle for the first guy who comes along. I need experience. And getting the rose was an experience too.”

  I studied the tattoo, imagining a sharp needle injecting the red ink and the black ink and the green ink beneath her skin. “It must’ve hurt,” I said.

  “So does sex the first time you do it, but I didn’t let that stop me.”

  I sighed. This was such old news. “I know. You’ve told me fifty times already.”

  She sat on my bedspread. “Well, I’m just warning you in case you ever get a boyfriend.”

  I pulled the chair out from my desk and sat down, feeling limp and despondent and in the mood to denigrate myself. “Yeah … hopefully I’ll get one before I turn all wrinkled and hunchbacked.”