Other Words for Love

by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

  I’d never asked for a phone, and that was a mistake. If I had one, I could get some privacy from Mom and Dad, who were watching 60 Minutes in the living room while I leaned against the kitchen counter, surprised at what came out of my mouth—girlish giggles and a flirty voice that made me wonder if I’d been possessed by Summer.

  “What are you so cheery about?” Summer asked the next day as we strolled by Frederick Smith Hollister. You have a very handsome grandson, I thought, giving the plaque a puckish sideways glance.

  “I went out with Leigh’s cousin,” I said.

  Summer stopped walking. She made a noise like she’d just found a hair in her soup—blech and ick and ugh all rolled into one. “You mean that hideous Indian-looking guy with the messed-up lip?”

  That was mean. She seemed to have forgotten that she hadn’t always been flawless. Besides, Del wasn’t hideous, and he couldn’t do anything about his lip. I didn’t want to talk about Blake anymore, but Summer said “Tell me tell me tell me” until I gave in.

  “Leigh has another cousin you haven’t met. He’s Del’s brother and he’s adorable,” I said.

  She laughed. “Sounds like you’ve got quite a little crush brewing there, Ari.”

  I’d suffered through so many crushes. There was Patrick, and boys at school, but none of them had amounted to anything except a painful ache. They’d never resulted in what happened the next Saturday night—a handsome guy at my front door who willingly came inside and gave Dad a firm handshake and chatted politely with Mom before taking me to another movie and a dinner that he paid for with an American Express card.

  Later that night, Blake and I sat in the Corvette, which he’d parked a block from my house, this time next to a vacant lot where another house used to be. The owners had torn it down with plans to build a bigger place because they’d won Lotto or risen in the ranks of the Mafia. Our neighbors were gossiping, but nobody was sure of the truth.

  “Why did you park here?” I asked.

  “Because,” Blake said, “I can’t go on kissing you in front of your house. That isn’t nice, and I was brought up to be a gentleman. I want your parents to like me.”

  I like you, Blake, I thought when his mouth was on mine and his arms hugged my waist and our fingers laced together as perfectly as the ones on my sketch pad.

  “Ari,” Blake said, and I glanced at the clock on his dashboard, shocked at how late it suddenly was. “I should take you home now.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it wouldn’t be nice if I didn’t,” he said.

  Nice. It wasn’t nice to kiss in front of my house and it wasn’t nice to kiss for too long. I wondered where all this niceness came from. It definitely didn’t exist in Brooklyn guys or Connecticut boys who vacationed in the Catskills. I finally decided that it came from somewhere else—a faraway place where people ate collard greens and lived beneath pre–Civil War trees.

  The next afternoon, a meteorologist on TV said the temperature was record-breaking. It was so warm that our obnoxious neighbors were sunbathing in their driveway and everybody else on the block was washing cars or mowing lawns.

  I drew the lady next door as I watched her from the open window in my studio. She was spread out on a lounge chair, shiny from Coppertone, holding a foil collar beneath her double chin. Then I turned to a blank page in my sketch pad, but I wasn’t motivated. I didn’t even want to be here, with my pencils and my paper and my oil paints in their squashed tubes. I wanted to be outside soaking up the sunshine and the cut-grass smell, or on my driveway packing the car with Dad for a visit to Queens. But mostly I wanted Blake, who told me last night that he had an Intro to Business Law exam on Monday and planned to study for hours today.

  “Ariadne,” Mom said after I dragged myself to the kitchen. “What are you going to do while we’re gone?”

  I flopped into a chair, thinking that it was hot in here and why didn’t this house have central air? All we had were noisy old window units that Dad hadn’t taken out of the garage yet.

  “Nothing,” I said, watching as she put a tray of cupcakes in a cardboard box. They had homemade icing and multicolored sprinkles, and I knew Patrick would enjoy them because he was a big fan of jimmies.

  “You can study for the SAT,” she suggested.

  I rolled my eyes. Studying for the SAT and sketching in my studio seemed like death compared to keeping my eyes shut while Blake’s tongue wandered inside my mouth.

  Then my parents were gone. I watched television on the couch, listened to a group of kids play stickball on the street, and ignored my SAT book. Mom had left two cupcakes on a plate in the refrigerator, and as I bit into one, the phone rang. Blake was on the line.

  “Leigh and my aunt Rachel convinced me to blow off studying today,” he said. “We’re driving out to the Hamptons.… I’m renting a car since we can’t all fit in the Corvette. We’ll pick you up in an hour if you want to come.”

  Of course I did. I wanted to go to the Hamptons more than anything in the world, even though I’d never been there before. So I ran upstairs and showered and shaved my legs. Next I stood beside my dresser drawer and pulled out a bikini the color of a plum, which would have to be covered with a T-shirt because if Blake saw my uneven breasts, he might stop calling. The thought of that was too dismal for words.

  He showed up right on time. Rachel jumped out of a black Toyota in a bikini top that wasn’t covered by anything and a sheer sarong that was wrapped around her hips. A big pair of sunglasses—the same kind that Jackie O wore around Manhattan—rested on the bridge of her nose. She ushered me into the front seat next to Blake.

  A couple of hours later, we arrived at a massive white house that resembled something out of Miami Vice. The walls inside were white, and there were endless windows and a balcony over the first floor. The furniture was modern, and Leigh showed me the indirect lighting in the five bedrooms and four bathrooms before whispering in my ear that the house belonged to her uncle.

  “He has parties here during the summer,” she said. “With his clients and stuff.”

  I nodded and followed her outside to the pool. It was four feet deep at one end and nine at the other, and was covered on the inside with sea green tiles except at the bottom, where black and yellow tiles formed the image of a scorpion.

  I teetered at the edge of the pool to see a curvy tail, and then Leigh was next to me.

  “I guess my mother was right about me and you and Blake. We can all be friends. We can do stuff like this for the next few months until I go to California,” she said, glancing at the pool and the patio and the house. “I like to draw, but I can’t stand another spring alone in my apartment with my colored pencils.”

  I knew what she meant—I couldn’t survive another spring locked in my studio, either.

  “Sure, Leigh,” I said. “We’ll hang out together for the rest of the spring.”

  She smiled, crouched down, and moved her hand back and forth in the water to check the temperature. “Del and Idalis will be here soon. I’d like some ice cream before then.”

  So we went for a walk. Rachel sauntered down the road, waving at admiring male neighbors while Blake and Leigh and I trailed behind like baby chicks. We stopped at a quaint ice cream parlor near the beach that had a striped awning and smelled of roasted peanuts. Rachel ordered a cup of frozen yogurt, Leigh asked for vanilla ice cream in a waffle cone, and Blake and I both got a scoop of lemon sherbet. He paid for everything even though I took out my wallet. It didn’t seem right that Blake should pay every single time we were together; it was 1986—the whole equality thing was supposed to have been settled years ago.

  “Put that away, honey,” Rachel said, jamming my wallet into my purse before Blake saw it. “A Southern man never lets a woman pay for anything. He wouldn’t be a gentleman otherwise.”

  “But Blake isn’t really a Southern man,” I said.

  She lifted a black eyebrow. “He was raised as one, and that’s what matters.”
/>   Del and Idalis were at the house when we got back. She floated around the pool on an inflatable raft with a piña colada in her hand, and she talked to Del in a mixture of Spanish and English while he sat at a table on the patio with his adding machine and a stack of receipts.

  “Hey, latoso,” she shouted. “You planning to sit there all day?”

  He didn’t answer and she yelled the question again. “I’m working, goddamn it,” he said without looking up, and she got huffy and said a few things in Spanish that I didn’t understand and something in English that I did.

  “You can just lick me, then,” she said, sticking out her tongue.

  “Don’t you wish,” Del muttered over his receipts.

  I laughed to myself. I knew they were talking about the thing that a lot of Catholic girls did instead of having sex because it was just bending the rules, not breaking them. It wouldn’t give them a fatal disease or get them knocked up; they wouldn’t become a disgrace to their rosary-carrying mothers. I didn’t blame them, but it seemed to me that skirting the rules was a dirty trick and possibly more sinful than everything else.

  Del wasn’t dressed for the pool, he was dressed for work, and I got the impression that an afternoon in the Hamptons hadn’t been his idea. Rachel became a mother hen and said things like “Oh, now, now” and “Mind your manners,” and Leigh tried to help by dragging a volleyball net out of a shed and suggesting that we all play. Del ignored her and Rachel didn’t want to wreck her nails, so the game turned into Leigh and Idalis against me and Blake.

  “Are you keeping that shirt on?” Leigh asked. “I’m wearing mine. I burn easily, in case you couldn’t tell from my gazillion freckles.”

  “Same here,” I said, grateful that she’d come up with an excuse before I had to. Then we sat at the edge of the pool while Blake installed the net and Idalis smashed a ball across the water in a way that told me she was one of those competitive girls I avoided in gym class.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “Ari can get on Blake’s shoulders and Leigh can get on mine and we’ll play that way. It’s more challenging.”

  Leigh and Blake agreed, and I just nodded to go along. I waited while Blake finished setting up the net. His shirt was already off, and I saw that the silver chain I’d seen during Easter dinner had the same arrowhead charm that Leigh wore. The mysterious dark thing I’d seen was a tattoo on his left shoulder blade—a circle with a cross in the middle and three feathers dangling from the bottom.

  “Hop on,” he said a few minutes later.

  He was crouching in four feet of water. I slid my calves over his shoulders, and I was glad I hadn’t forgotten to shave my legs that morning. He gripped my ankles and I held on to his neck. His skin rubbed against my skin, and it was going to be hard to concentrate on this volleyball nonsense.

  Leigh hit the ball with her fist and it came barreling toward my head. I ducked and Blake laughed, but Idalis didn’t seem happy because she was probably expecting a real game. I stayed on Blake’s shoulders while he retrieved the ball. That was the best part—just being close to him, clutching his strong shoulders with my bare thighs.

  He gave me the ball and I tossed it back, but I had to do that four times before it cleared the net. Idalis was frustrated and she switched positions with Leigh, which made me nervous. She was just about to hit the ball when Blake called a time-out because his father was standing on the patio.

  “What are you doing here?” Rachel asked.

  She was on a lounge chair. There was a blazer draped over Mr. Ellis’s arm, and he loosened his tie. “I came to make sure the people I hired to clean this place were doing their job. I didn’t know there was a party going on.” He shaded his eyes and turned toward the pool. “Isn’t there a test tomorrow, Blake? You should have your nose in a book instead of a girl on your shoulders.”

  “Come on, Daddy,” Del said. “Let him have some fun for once.”

  “Nobody asked you,” Mr. Ellis said sharply before directing a suave smile and a goodbye wave at the pool. I watched through a wall of windows as he went into the house, and then I heard a car start up and fade away in the distance.

  “Pendejo,” Idalis called to Del. “Get some shorts on. Let’s do boys against girls.”

  I wasn’t sure what pendejo meant, but it couldn’t have been a compliment because Del’s face was darker than that scorpion in the pool. He kept punching numbers into his adding machine. Then Blake jokingly tossed the volleyball across the patio. It was wet and it landed on Del’s receipts. Del grabbed the ball and shot it in Blake’s direction, but it hit me right in the mouth.

  Thick red droplets fell on Blake’s chest. Next I was on the patio, surrounded by frantic people. I kept insisting that I was fine and I heard Del apologizing. Blake sneered at him.

  “Fucking moron,” he said.

  He shouldn’t have broken his Watch your language around a lady rule. It was just an accident; I could see that Del was sorry. Blake led me into the house, and I watched Del over my shoulder as Rachel wagged her finger and Leigh shook her head and Idalis screeched in Spanish.

  I didn’t hear her anymore after Blake took me to a bathroom and closed the door. It was completely white inside, with a granite countertop and towels emblazoned with the letter E. Blake ruined one of the towels by pressing it against my bloody lip.

  He doted on me. He kept the towel on my mouth until the bleeding stopped, he soaked a cotton ball in iodine to clean what turned out to be just a minor cut, and he scoured the entire house for a Band-Aid. The one he found was the kiddy kind with a picture of Snoopy on it, but that was okay. Everything was okay because this was the best I’d ever felt.

  Kindergarten. That was what was in my mind after Rachel and Leigh caught a ride home with Del and Idalis and I sat next to Blake as we sped down the parkway. The car windows were open, the sun was setting, and I thought that kindergarten was the last time the sun had looked so golden and the air had smelled so fresh. Little things had made me happy back then—little humdrum trivial nothing things, like polish on my toenails and strawberry shampoo and a crisp new dollar that I could spend on the Good Humor man. As I got older I’d noticed that nail polish chipped, and shampoo burned if it got in your eyes, and the Good Humor man’s ice cream was no different from the stuff in the freezer case at Pathmark. The color slowly drained from everything and it was all just boring and pointless or both.

  But tonight, when I got out of the car in front of my house, I could have sworn that Saint Anne was smiling. My neighborhood trees looked leafier than usual, the whole block smelled of a barbecue, Blake’s face was more handsome than any I’d imagined while I was kissing my hand, and I felt like I was in kindergarten again.

  It was getting dark and the air turned cool. Blake leaned against his car, draping his arms around my waist.

  “Listen,” he said. “Can we just say we’re a steady thing?”

  The lady next door was lugging her trash can to the curb. Crickets chirped and kids played stickball and I nodded. Then I saw Blake’s Colgate smile. He held my face in his hands and kissed my forehead, and I was sure it meant something. A guy who didn’t care about you just wanted to feel you up and feel you down, and Blake hadn’t tried any of that. Only a guy who really cared would give a girl something as sweet and innocent as a forehead kiss on a dreamy April night.

  My parents weren’t home yet. I closed the front door after Blake was gone and walked around the house smiling and aimless, like I was giddy on champagne. I touched my Band-Aid, inventing a reason why it was there, because nobody needed to know about my amazing day in the Hamptons.

  “You were fortunate, Ariadne,” Mom said later that night, after I pretended that I’d tripped on a stair and bashed my mouth against the railing. I also pretended that the Snoopy Band-Aid had been in my dresser drawer for years and I didn’t want it to go to waste. “You could’ve lost some teeth.”

  I was more fortunate than she knew—Del was good at making people lose their teeth
. I held in a laugh and followed her to the kitchen, where we sat at the table and she handed me a Polaroid. It was a picture of Evelyn, but I thought it was an old one because her cheekbones were showing, and she was wearing a short skirt and there weren’t any dimples above her knees. Her legs were thin and her hair wasn’t frizzy, and she was leaning against Patrick with a seductive smile.

  The Polaroid wasn’t old. It had been taken just a few hours earlier. Mom told me that Evelyn had dropped twenty pounds since my birthday, her new medication was working, and I was invited to Queens next month for a Memorial Day barbecue. Then she lit a Pall Mall.

  “Did you have a good time on your date last night?” she asked, to which I nodded and said that I really should do some SAT studying, but she wouldn’t let me leave. She gripped my wrist and stared at me. “Look,” she began, and stopped when Dad strolled in to raid the refrigerator. She kept quiet until he left with a sandwich to eat in front of the TV in the living room. “Blake seems very nice,” she said. “But they all seem nice at first. You have to be careful.”

  Shut up, I thought. Please don’t ruin this. “Careful?” I said.

  She blew a smoke ring into the air. “You’re sensitive. Men can be cruel. I don’t want you getting upset or distracted from the important things.”

  The important things. I was sensitive. She wanted to lock me in my studio because a delicate flower is prone to wither. “We’re going steady now,” I said.

  There was a flash of displeasure in her eyes that she smothered with a blink. “Steady,” she said. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  I thought so. I thought it meant that a guy actually liked me. “Sure, Mom. It means we’re only seeing each other.”

  She laughed as if I was stupid. “It means he’s looking for a regular screw and you could end up pregnant just like somebody else we know.”