Other Words for Love

by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

  We all went upstairs early that night, and Patrick made love to Evelyn at nine o’clock. I heard them when I was on the cot in Shane’s room. But I didn’t want to listen. And I didn’t feel jealous. I bent a pillow around my ears to block out the noise and all I felt was lonely.

  I stayed in Queens for another four nights. Patrick took me home on a windy Friday morning. He was driving away when I noticed a silver Mercedes parked at the curb, and it gave me the urge to clutch the back of Patrick’s truck and spend the day in his fire engine.

  But he was already halfway down the street. I was too tired to run, so I just sat on the front steps with my chin in my hand until the door opened and I smelled cigars. Then I looked up at Jeff Simon and wondered if he was about to handcuff me and haul me kicking and screaming to New York–Presbyterian, where I’d fit in with the rest of the loonies. Are you Evelyn Cagney’s sister? people wearing straitjackets would ask. You sure don’t look like her, but you’re obviously just as nutty as she used to be. Seems like you both inherited the wacko gene.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  I turned my eyes to a brown leaf that somersaulted across our dead lawn, thinking that Jeff had a lot of nerve to inquire about my well-being when it was partially his daughter’s fault that I wasn’t doing well at all.

  “I’m not one of your patients, Dr. Simon … even if my mother wants me to be.”

  I called him Dr. Simon to sound rude and distant. It worked. He stared at me for a moment, scratched his head, and sighed.

  “Don’t be difficult,” he said. “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

  I gave up. “Not good,” I said, and he suggested that I “talk to someone,” which was a lousy suggestion. I didn’t want to talk and I didn’t want a prescription for the kind of pills that Evelyn took. But I said I would think about it so he’d leave me alone.

  “I told Nancy that postponing college until next year is the best thing for you,” he said. “It’s my professional opinion that you need a break, Ari. Don’t you agree?”

  I agreed. I nodded. “Thank you,” I said.

  Jeff got into his car and drove away; then I went inside, where I found Mom sitting on the couch with a cigarette.

  “How are you feeling, Ariadne?” she asked in a delicate way. She acted like I’d explode into bits and pieces if she wasn’t careful.

  “Fine,” I said blandly, and headed for the stairs.

  “If you need your medication,” she called after me, “I’ve got it.”

  I turned around and she was smiling as if she could trick me, as if neither one of us had the slightest inkling that too much butalbital could be fatal or that she’d stolen my pills while I was in Queens. It was probably something else Jeff had advised.

  twenty-three

  I hated March. March was when I worried about my monthly visitor because it hadn’t shown up. It still hadn’t come by my Friday-afternoon appointment at the clinic.

  A young nurse kept saying “Sorry, I’m new at this” as she used my left arm as a pincushion. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her fault and that I had bad veins, but I was too tired to bother. She hit the right spot on the sixth try and handed me a plastic cup.

  “Pee in this,” she said, and I thought she could have been more professional. A nurse should use better terminology than Evelyn’s brainless friends. “The restroom is down the hall. Bring your sample back here when you’re finished.”

  I walked past a waiting room, jammed with knocked-up teenagers, toward a bathroom the size of a broom closet. It had one of those dreary old-person safety rails on the wall, and I was so nervous about blindness and blisters and my late period that I couldn’t fill the cup. I thought of things like waterfalls and rainy days, and that worked until someone banged on the door.

  “Just a minute,” I said, and I felt rushed and sweaty and the minute turned into much longer. Then I finally had my sample and I wondered how I was supposed to get it back down the hall without anyone noticing, but I didn’t have much time to think because the banging started again. So I put the lid on the cup and stuck it in my purse and prayed that it wouldn’t spill.

  “It’s about time,” a girl said when I came out. She was my age and visibly pregnant under a T-shirt printed with the words TOUCH MY BELLY AND LOSE A HAND. There was a baby in her arms and she looked like she wanted to strangle me. “You kept me waiting for fifteen minutes. Nobody around here ever hogs the bathroom for fifteen minutes.”

  I didn’t answer. I just walked away because I didn’t know the rules and I didn’t belong here with tough-faced girls who were probably headed toward a life of food stamps and black eyes from worthless men.

  “When should I call for the results?” I asked the nurse after I gave her my sample.

  “We can’t do it over the phone,” she said. “You’ll have to speak with the doctor in person.”

  “Why?” I said, but I knew. It was because the clinic didn’t want to be responsible for what people might do while they were alone if their test results came back positive. They might get crazy ideas in their heads, ideas like swallowing a bottle of migraine pills.

  “It’s our policy. You can make an appointment at the front desk.”

  I went to the desk, where I found that I couldn’t catch a break. Nothing was easy, not even scheduling my appointment. The receptionist flipped through her book and told me to come back in three weeks, which might as well have been three years.

  I was helpless to do anything about it, so I just nodded. Then I trudged through the waiting room, where phrases like “my baby’s daddy” and “my overdue child support” were being tossed around. They stuck with me even after I was outside in the dusky afternoon, listening to the morbid sound of church bells that reminded me of a funeral. I ignored them and kept going, feeling numb and trying to figure out how I’d gotten here.

  On a Monday morning I noticed that the snow on our lawn was melting and the grass was growing in sparse clusters around Saint Anne’s feet. Early spring was hideous. I couldn’t stand the sight of it, so I decided to keep my bedroom curtains permanently shut. Then I gathered my books as Mom smiled at me from my doorway and used her delicate voice.

  “Would you like a ride today, Ariadne?” she said.

  She’d been asking that question every day since I’d gone back to Hollister, and I shook my head like I always did. I didn’t think it would be fair to make her drive to Manhattan—I was enough trouble already.

  I left the house and stared straight ahead. I didn’t want to see her standing at the living room window, clutching the curtain and watching me walk down the street. She was as worried about my future as she used to be about Evelyn’s, and that made me want to cry.

  So I didn’t look back. I kept going even though my walk to the train station seemed to have expanded several miles and the ride to Manhattan was endless and claustrophobic. The subway car was warm and I spotted a Safe Sex pamphlet on an empty seat, and knowing that I had to wait another ten days for my test results made me panic. Everything felt small and cramped and I had to get out at a station that wasn’t mine just to catch my breath.

  That made me late for school. A pimply hall monitor stopped me at the front door; I considered wrestling him to the ground and threatening to snap his neck because he was shorter than I was and only a sophomore. But he’d probably accuse me of assault, and that might give Mom a legitimate reason to commit me to New York–Presbyterian, so I just let him fill out his stupid tardy slip, which led me to the principal.

  I’d never even seen this woman before. I’d never been on academic probation and had never violated the dress code, so there had been no reason to see her.

  “I hope you have a good explanation for being late,” she said.

  She was much younger than I expected, and she was using Mom’s teacher voice, which annoyed me. I belonged in the principal’s office as much as I belonged at the clinic. Why was everything so upside-down? A few wrong turns had changed me into so
mething I had never wanted to be. I felt like waving my second-place ribbon and my old report cards in her face and saying “See? This is who I really am.”

  “The subway stalled,” I said, and the words fell right off my tongue because I was used to being a liar. “I was stuck in the tunnel for an hour.”

  She eyed me skeptically and dismissed me as if I was a total write-off. This put me in a crabbier mood and I couldn’t pay attention in my classes because I was fed up with everything. It got worse later, when I was in the bathroom and heard some girls gushing about the senior prom and what kind of flowers they wanted in their corsages. They also talked about going away to college in the fall, to New England and to Midwest campuses with old stone buildings and football games where they planned to sit on bleachers while they were wrapped in blankets made of wool.

  I didn’t want to be reminded of wool blankets. I didn’t want to hear about the prom and corsages and everything else that was passing me by. Those were once-in-a-lifetime things, things as special and fleeting as Halley’s comet. And if you missed them, you could never get them back.

  I rode home on the subway later that day, feeling irritable and disgusted and thinking about Blake. I was usually sad when he crept into my mind, but now I was angry about what he’d done and what I’d done and the big disaster it had all turned out to be. Then I shifted my anger to Mr. Ellis, because this mess was his fault. I wouldn’t have had any problems if it wasn’t for him. If he’d kept out of Blake’s business, I would have been as happy and carefree as those girls in the bathroom whose biggest concern was whether they got lilies or roses.

  The three weeks were finally over. Now I sat in the doctor’s office at the clinic, sweating and biting my nails even though I never bit my nails. Then the doctor came in and I watched as she sat at her desk and skimmed through a folder filled with charts and notes. The suspense was killing me. I was about to leap across the desk and look at that folder myself.

  “You’re not pregnant,” she said.

  I didn’t believe her. “But I’m late. My period is weeks late.”

  “Stress interferes with your system … it can make you skip a month.” Her eyes rose over her bifocals. “You also tested negative for HIV and everything else.”

  “Negative?” I said with a smile that felt weird because I hadn’t used it for so long.

  “That’s right. But you should come back in three months for another blood test, because HIV and some other STDs don’t show up immediately.”

  “Oh,” I said as my smile disappeared.

  She looked at her folder. “I wouldn’t be overly concerned, Miss Mitchell. From what I see here, you’ve only had two sexual partners … and one of them used protection every time. So AIDS, while not impossible, is unlikely.”

  Unlikely sounded good. Two sexual partners didn’t. The thought of Del made me wring my hands, and the doctor got suspicious.

  “The second man,” she said. “The relationship was consensual, wasn’t it?”

  I sort of wished I could say that it wasn’t, that Del had forced me by holding a switchblade against my throat, but he hadn’t. His only weapon had been a shoulder for me to cry on.

  I nodded at the doctor, who started offering me diaphragms and sponges, and I almost laughed because she seemed to think I needed those things. She didn’t know that I couldn’t let anybody touch me except Blake, and he was never going to touch me again.

  “No thanks,” I said, and left the clinic, breathing a huge sigh of relief.

  March was almost over, the snow was gone, and daffodils were popping through the dirt around a tree that I passed on my way home. They were pretty and hopeful, and the church bells ringing a mile away didn’t remind me of a funeral. This was the closest to normal I had felt since Christmas.

  At home, I sat on my bed, opened my calculus book and tried hard to remember the method of integration by parts, because failing out of high school would be almost as bad as everything else that had happened recently. I didn’t want to end up working at Pathmark or getting locked in a padded room at New York–Presbyterian, so I had to try to heal on my own.

  The rusty wheels in my brain were slowly turning when I glanced away from the book and saw my teddy bear. It was facedown on the carpet, exactly where it had fallen after I’d slammed my door in February. I picked it up and brushed dust from its ears. I felt angry with Blake again, and I thought that I should move it, maybe hide it in one of those boxes in the basement, but I couldn’t. It reminded me of things like soft kisses on the back of my neck and the idea that somebody loved me once. So I put it on my dresser because that was where I still thought it should be.

  In June I decided to skip my graduation ceremony. Dressing up in a dopey gown and marching down an aisle past gawking strangers would be overwhelming; I didn’t need to go through all that to get my diploma. Hollister could just send it in the mail. This was another letdown for Mom, even though she didn’t say so.

  “You still want a party, don’t you?” she asked.

  I didn’t. But she’d been so considerate and patient over the past few months that I couldn’t deprive her of everything. “A small one,” I said. “Just family.”

  That was good enough for her. So on a sunny day at the end of the month, she cooked a big dinner and bought a chocolate cake with words written in pink icing: CONGRATULATIONS, ARIADNE, CLASS OF 1987.

  I stood by the open refrigerator and stared at the cake. Mom was getting dressed upstairs, Dad was buying beer at Pathmark, and I felt awful. I didn’t deserve a party. I hadn’t gotten into college and I’d been moping for months, and Mom must have been out of her mind with worry because she still kept my migraine pills locked up. Then she was in the kitchen, wearing a cheerful flower-print dress and pearl earrings, and I thought I might cry but I didn’t. I was completely cried out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my eyes on the cake.

  “For what?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “For everything.”

  “Ariadne,” she said. “It’s fixable. You can reapply to Parsons. You aren’t in trouble and you didn’t catch anything. Isn’t that right?”

  She sounded a little worried. “Right,” I said, even though I was only positive about the pregnant part.

  “So everything is fine. You’ve been going through a bad time, that’s all. It’s just a bump in the road. Someday it won’t matter.”

  I couldn’t imagine that day. “Then I’m sorry for not being what you wanted.”

  She took me by the shoulders and spoke in a serious voice. “You’re exactly what I wanted,” she said, her eyes firmly set on mine, and I was so surprised. Mom didn’t think I was a disappointment … and I wasn’t completely cried out after all.

  “I think I’m getting a headache,” I said, grabbing a tissue to dry my eyes.

  She left the kitchen and came back carrying my migraine pills. “Here,” she said, sticking the bottle in my hand. “You can keep these now, can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I can. You don’t have to worry anymore, Mom.”

  “I’ll always worry,” she said, and I knew she was talking about normal things, like worrying about me getting mugged on the subway. The possibility of her daughter overdosing on butalbital wasn’t something she had to worry about anymore.

  A few days later, I got a call from Julian at Creative Colors. He said he’d love to have me back this summer and so would Adam, who never stopped asking if he would see me again.

  The idea of working was tiring, but I couldn’t let Adam go on wondering if he was ever going to see me again. So I promised Julian I would be there next week, and that I’d work until September.

  I hung up the phone and told Mom I was going for a walk, even though that wasn’t true. I was actually heading to the clinic for another blood test to make sure I hadn’t caught anything from Del.

  The nurse at the clinic was getting better at finding veins—she only stabbed me twice. I went back a week later and the doctor show
ed me a chart—a list of diseases and the word negative typed beside every one. It was relief, but the chart was like the one Blake had shown me last year. The thought of him made me sink into my chair.

  “What’s wrong?” the doctor asked as we sat in her office. “It’s good news.”

  I stared at diplomas on the wall behind her. “I know. I’m just thinking about someone.”

  She leaned forward at her desk. “Who are you thinking about?”

  I moved my eyes to a credenza across the room. It was covered with framed pictures of what looked like children and grandchildren. “My ex-boyfriend,” I said, turning back to her. Saying it made me sink even lower.

  “Well,” she said. “You’ve been through a difficult situation … waiting to find out whether you were pregnant, worrying about lab results. Have you confided in anyone?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t do that. I don’t want anybody to know.”

  The doctor nodded and reached into her desk. Then she handed me a business card with the name of the clinic’s psychiatrist, and she said that I should make an appointment, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t lie on a couch or sit in a chair and talk about Blake for hours. In my opinion, it was better not to talk about him at all.

  Adam wanted me to draw all the same old things, but I didn’t mind. My pictures made him smile a big smile that broke out two deep dimples, which made me happy and sad at the same time. I was happy that I could give him a little joy, and sad because he was even better-looking than last year. He was growing into a handsome man with a brain that would never keep up.

  “You’re a good artist, Snow White,” he said at the beginning of July.

  I smiled weakly. “I’m not an artist, Adam.”

  “Sure you are,” he said, lifting one of my drawings by its edge as proof.

  Maybe his brain wasn’t all that damaged. Maybe he knew more than I did. And his was the first face that had interested me in a very long time. So that night, I went into my studio and sat down at my easel. My pencils were dusty and my paper was discolored from being left alone by the window for so long, but it didn’t matter. I still knew how to draw. Maybe I actually was an artist, because before I knew it, Adam’s face was staring back at me from my sketch pad.